Flash Fiction Month #7, Episode 5: Inspecting the Livestock

Hard to believe it’s the end of Flash Fiction month! It always seems to come so quickly. That’s what a cyclical calendar system gets you. You can read the last installment here, and peruse last year’s Flash Fiction Month entries here.

Recently, I’ve been reading Shadows of the Apt by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I’m not super far in, but I think I have enough familiarity to pull off a crackfic.

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“Hey, why can’t we eat bugs?”

Devyn Hammerson’s words hung in the air like an indolent bumblebee. He and his brother Wilmer had set off from Helleron on a trip to the Ant-Kinden city of Sarn in order to sell mass-produced furniture. The caravan was making steady progress, food and water supplies were reliable, and the goods were durable enough to handle the wear and tear of the roads. Devyn, though, was insufferable.

“Wilmer, listen to me! I was thinking about all the food we’ve eaten on the trip. Lots of grain, lots of beans, a little bit of meat, but never any insects. Then I got to thinking – have I ever eaten a bug? Has anyone?”

“The way you drool when you sleep, I’m sure plenty of flies of wandered into your mouth and died,” snapped Wilmer. Five days out of ten, and each seemed to last longer than the previous.

“No, no! I mean intentionally! I don’t know if you’d eat them raw, or if you’d have to cook them first, but surely there are some tasty insects out there. I mean, you like to put honey on your oat cakes, but maybe the bees that make the honey are even sweeter-“

“Are you even a Beetle-Kinden, with your head in the clouds like that? How would eating bugs even work? They’re tiny! You’d have to stuff down hundreds, if not thousands, just to get a meal! And to cook them you’d probably have to work them into a paste or something,” Wilmer shouted. Devyn threw up his hands and flinched away from his brother.

“Brother, please! I never wanted to be a merchant! I always dreamed of sourcing and cooking the finest delicacies for the scholars of Collegium. I can not help it if I wish to introduce a little spice into our routines!” he said, twitching slightly. “And besides, not all bugs are so diminutive…”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” said Wilmer. “Go meditate on your Ancestor Art or something.”

But Devyn had more important things to ponder than his Beetle-Kinden heritage. The Hammerson cart was typically pulled by giant beetles – stodgy and slow, but able to haul vast quantities of good unfathomable distances without tiring. One, however, had recently died – an anticlimactic end to a life of drudgery. Tomorrow, the brothers would have to bury it, but now was Devyn’s chance to advance the culinary arts. While his brother slept, he snuck out to where they planned to bury the giant beetle’s corpse, opened his jaws wide, and bit down.

His scream of pain pierced the night, waking Wilmer.

“Hammer and tongs, Devyn! You can’t just eat the shell!” he shouted, once he’d located the source of the commotion.

“But I thought it would have a satisfying crunch!”

“Perhaps it would, if your jaw was a thousand times stronger! But yours can’t possibly hope to crack open the shell and get at… the meat…”

In the morning, passers by on the road to Sarn were alternatively amused and indifferent to the bonfire on which Devyn and Wilmer were salting and roasting vast quantities of giant beetle flesh.

“I really hope this isn’t poisonous!” shouted Devyn over the roar of the flames.

“Does it matter? If it’s poisonous, we can still sell it to the city’s assassins.”

Only one way to find out.

Flash Fiction Month #7, Episode 4: And Then A Skeleton Popped Out

Take care of your bones, kids! I’ve heard that a diet rich in dairy might not be as effective for maintaining good bone density and avoiding osteoporosis as claimed, but let’s just say the folks in today’s story… haven’t. You can read the last installment here, and check out the previous year’s installments here.

This time, we bring you a tale from the Locked Tomb series. This one should be written in a way that prevents meaningful spoilers, so you should be safer if for some reason you haven’t dropped everything to read the books.

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And so it came to pass that the Emperor, the Necrolord Prime sat within the rings of the Mithraeum, with a glass of milk in one hand and a pair of xylophone mallets in the other.

“We’re really doing this?” said Mercymorn the First, the Saint of Joy and by the least willing to put up with the Emperor’s eccentricities. She rubbed her head in frustration.

“Yes. We are necromancers, and bone magic is one of our most important disciplines,” responded the Emperor. “Let’s get this filmed so we can go back to fighting the Resurrection Beasts, okay?”

“Excellent. We are rolling in three… two… one,” said Augustine the First, the Saint of Patience. Mercymorn was admittedly losing her patience. The whole PSA campaign had been Augustine’s idea; but this was no time to dwell on that. The emperor faced a camera and smiled.

“Hi, everybody,” the Emperor said, with a gravitas befitting of the ruler of an intergalactic empire. “I’d first like to thank everyone who has ever defended the Nine Houses against its enemies, or extended our grasp throughout the galaxy, whether it be my Lyctors, my necromantic adepts, my cavaliers, or even the lowliest, most common skeleton. In fact, it’s the latter I’m here to talk to you about.”

The Emperor paused to sip from his glass of milk.

“Ah! Really hits the spot. Humble dairy milk. Cold, sweet, creamy, and with 30% of your daily nutritional calcium requirements. Calcium is critical for growing bones, you see,” continued the Emperor. “And you know why bones are important, right?”

At this point, he took a small fragment of bone out of his pocket, and threw it on the ground. A fully formed human skeleton popped up next to the Emperor, as if by necromancy. Who would’ve guessed?

“Yes, for bone magic, of course! The strongest bones make the strongest skeletons! Drink plenty of milk, and you can do this!”

The Emperor transferred one of his xylophone mallets to his spare hand and hammered on the new skeleton, producing a jaunty tune. The skeleton grimaced; Mercymorn suspected it would feel the same way even if the Emperor hadn’t used it as a musical instrument.

“And… cut!” shouted Augustine, bowing after he’d stopped filming. “‘Them Bones’ by Alice in Chains. Very nice, my King Undying.”

“I am nothing if not cultured. Say, do you think we should teach every bone adept of ours to play their skeletons as xylophones-” the Emperor began, before a stern look from Mercymorn cut him off.

“…maybe we should revisit this when Cytherea gets back?” he asked.

“Indeed,” responded Augustine.

Flash Fiction Month #7, Episode 3: Fungus Amongus

One hundred and thirteen times a second, nothing answers and it reaches out. We’ll keep Flash Fiction Month going until the month that contains it is discarded. You can read the last installment here, and peruse last year’s more standard approach here.

There’s no getting around it – this story spoils the Teixcalaan series (particularly book 2, A Desolation Called Peace) by Arkady Martine pretty badly. Choose whether or not to read accordingly.

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“Okay, but do you have any good songs?”

Flash Fiction Month #7, Episode 2: A Mile In Those Shoes

It seems I’m committing to making July 2022 into Flash Fanfiction Month. I’m predicting that I’ll emphasize crackfic, though there’s still plenty of time for me to socket in something more serious/respectful if I really wanted to. But where’s the fun in that? You can read the last installment here, and peruse last year’s more standard approach here.

Today’s installment comes from the Battletech universe. Nominally. Rest in peace, Matthew Krehbiel.

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The first sign that the 4th Cavalry Lance (aka the “Balenciaga Battery”) was on the battlefield was a swarm of colorful, even anarchic long range missiles peppering the rather less inspired 2nd Heavy Strikers. By the time that barrage ended, one of the Strikers’ token light BattleMechs was pouring smoke from its cockpit and covered in glitter.

“Oh, hell! Who invited them to the battle?” shouted the commander. We’ll call him “Brick”, because we’re feeling spiteful, and he was about to shit some. Brick had dutifully followed the rest of Alpha-Omega Company down to the surface of Ursa in order to defend armaments factories that manufactured weapons for the Rim Worlds Republic’s fighter planes. Exactly why the Balenciaga Battery was targeting these was up for debate, though he’d heard scattered rumors that it was for “glamour” purposes. Terrorists, perhaps?

Brick’s cockpit suddenly filled with harsh noise – once he’d managed to turn the radio volume down, he recognized the vague outline of a popular dancefloor anthem distorted into a newly abrasive form by some enterprising DJ.

“Work, bitch! Show us your catwalk moves!” someone lilted on the radio, causing the music to cut out briefly. Brick continued to trudge towards the the enemy forces. That’s where he saw it – a tall, even gawkish light BattleMech strutting over the ground as if it was about to ask a bartender for a mimosa. Camouflage paint jobs were rare, but this one was covered in enough iridescent and clashing colors to make the Balenciaga Battery’s missiles look drab. However, Brick’s attention was drawn to the mech’s feet – these were black, except for the bottom, which was lacquered with deep red-

“That’s right! I’d like to see you fight in these Louboutins!” shouted the same person. Brick considered turning off the radio entirely, but he still had 75% of a lance to command.

“What’s it going to be, little man? You think you can handle this queen?” …she continued, haphazardly accenting her taunt with a spray of autocannon fire that bounced harmlessly off Brick’s BattleMech. Brick swore under his breath and pressed a few buttons on his radio.

“You monsters! You’ll corrupt every child in the sector with your blatant display of gender!” he shouted. He didn’t understand why he was so frustrated; he’d been up against far more challenging opponents, right? So much for dignity.

“Wait, so you were okay with kids seeing warfare until we showed up? Hypocrite.” responded the queen in the stiletto mech. “Sounds like someone needs a lapdance!” And with that, the light mech dashed towards Brick at alarming speeds. He exhaled, armed his lasers, fired, and missed. A few blinks later, he heard a horrific crunch – the queen’s mech had collapsed on the ground, and was twitching haphazardly. One of the stilettos had apparently gotten wedged in a small fissure; when the mech fell, the entire heeled foot had torn off at the actuator. The other was, as of yet, unaccounted for.

“What an embarrassing way to go out! Hopefully your lance learns the importance of practical foot units. Or whatever’s going to be left of it,” sneered Brick. He armed every weapon and aimed at the cockpit; a reduction in salvage was a small price to pay for removing an abomination from the galaxy-

Then the other stiletto crashed into Brick’s cockpit from its arc, killing him instantly.

“This is what it means to slay,” said the queen, who then turned to the question of ejecting from her compromised mech.

Flash Fiction Month #7, Episode 1: The Protomolecule Challenge

Seven years. SEVEN YEARS. Flash Fiction Month isn’t especially labor intensive or stressful (in fact, it’s a nice switch from the music focus during the rest of the year), but it’s increasingly traditional as time goes on. That being said, it’s fun to put new spins on traditions. Today, you’re getting fanfiction. Cracky fanfiction, to boot. Maybe too long to really be flash fiction. Will the future also bring fanfiction? …maybe? It’s up to me. In the mean time, you can read last year’s installments here.

I should note that this fanfic is based on The Expanse by James S. A. Corey.

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What did you get when you took a dozen hopefuls from across the solar system, brought them under the same roof, and offered them each a syringe filled with incandescent goo? If you believed the latest ratings reports from Mantis TV, filming throughout the Mariner Valley, you got the latest smash hit reality show to chew up precious light speed limited data – The Protomolecule Challenge! Each one of the twelve souls who’d signed up for this episode came from a different background – a Belter scrapper from Ganymede, a low level Martian bureaucrat, a disaffected farmer on Earth, and so forth. According to the executives at Mantis TV, though, the eponymous “protomolecule challenge” was most compelling as a demonstration of the fundamental unity and similarity of humanity.

According to the main host and master of ceremonies Meg Piroska, though, the main appeal was seeing just what kind of wild transformations the protomolecule’s machinery could create when applied to human flesh. In the back of her mind, she knew that a containment breach would endanger the entire galaxy, but that just made the stakes higher. For now, it was time to interview the contestants.

Flash Fiction Month #6, Episode 5: Protect Bulgogi

I think I need to grab another jar of gochujang. That stuff’s useful! Adds all sorts of spicy, umami, and sweet notes to the right type of food… though I’m told sambal olek is more in vogue these days. Either way, last episode of Flash Fiction Month this year! You can read the previous installment here, and 2020’s installments here.

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The portal sent Ainsley back with little more than the clothes on her back, and a cryptic directive – “protect Bulgogi.”

Her chronometer said she had traveled nearly twelve hundred years back in time, to the city of San Francisco, long before it became the nexus of the Californian Empire, and the last bastion against the hordes of Lord Dayton, the dread tyrant of Ohio and eventually the world if her mission failed. Based on her cultural immersion module, she’d landed in front of a restaurant. Any time period that could host a dedicated restaurant was unimaginably decadent to Ainsley, particularly if said restaurant served food other than Nutripaste™.

“The first and last defense against hunger™,” she recited to herself, before entering the premises. Ainsley had a vague sense that payment was required in order to actually get food to eat, but she didn’t plan to be there long enough for that to matter. For now, she needed to infiltrate, determine the identity of Bulgogi, and neutralize any threat to them. Ainsley requested a table for one, pulled up a menu, and was just about to pull it down and scan the other customers when a word on the menu caught her attention.

Change of plans, she decided – bulgogi wasn’t a person, but a foodstuff. There wasn’t much time left before Ainsley’s presence in the past would destabilize, ripping her back to the present. She had to find someone eating bulgogi (instead of reliable, healthy Nutripaste™), and figure out how to help them. She estimated she had two minutes left. Fortunately, she found someone – an elderly man with a shifty expression on his face, about to bite into a slice of beef that had been absolutely smothered in an unidentified dark red sauce.

This was going to be Ainsley’s finest moment. She tackled the man; he dropped his chopsticks, screamed some ancient obscenity known only to Ainsley by the tone of his voice. Ainsley was back on her feet almost immediately, just in time to hear the man turn his wrath upon her.

“You insane woman! I’m just trying to have dinner and now you lash out at me-” he began, before an unknown voice cut him off.

“Wait, wait. Isn’t that Lloyd Fossdane?” shouted what turned out to be a young woman.

“That’s the guy who got that Indian restaurant we liked shut down!” said someone else.

“On trumped up charges! It’s a wonder the owners didn’t sue him for fraud!”

“Damn it! What’s he doing here?”

Ainsley had wandered into something far more complicated than she’d initially expected.

“Good god, why can’t you eat normal Christian food instead of this oriental poison?” shouted the man who very likely was Lloyd. This was perhaps not the best response. “It’s ____s like you that are causing the downfall of civilization-“

And with that, Ainsley felt herself tilting forwards through time again. Who knew what irrational grudge Lloyd held? The few keywords she’d gleaned did seem to match up with Daytonist rhetoric, but the connection seemed tenuous at best. Within moments, Ainsley landed in the arrival room at headquarters.

“Congratulations! You’ve struck a decisive blow against Ohio; one they’ll not easily be able to reverse with their own time corps,” said Corinth, her commanding officer. Corinth wasn’t entirely sure how Ainsley’s actions had helped, but his confidence in her was ironclad. After he let her go, Ainsley went to the commissary to pick up rations for the next week. It struck her that Nutripaste™ cost about twenty percent less than it had before her latest mission – this was the change she’d wrought in the world! With more accessible nutrition, the Californian Empire would be able to free up farmers to fight against the hordes of Ohio. Still, it’d take a lot more meddling with time if Ainsley was to witness California’s final victory.

Flash Fiction Month #6, Episode 4: Perfect Sound Forever, But An AI Continues It

This one was inspired by a conversation with my brother, but also by how drastically the way we consume music has changed in recent years. I mean, compact cassettes were still mainstream when I was a kid! I had one that could play tapes back at 2x speed for instant hilarity. Anyways, read the last installment here, and read last year’s installments here.

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Have you ever wondered why the VHF bands been full of increasingly alien and bizarre music for the last few decades? To understand, you have to go back to the death spiral of broadcast radio.

It was the mid-2020s. Radio stations had been hemorrhaging listeners to online streaming services for years, and trying to staunch the bleeding by playing ever less music over time. The real problem, though, was that our musical preferences were getting more complex and harder to pin down. I think it was the folks at Maximum Tune (a big conglomerate that controlled a third of the market back in the day) who figured out a better solution – instead of using unreliable, chaotic analytics from listeners, why not just simulate their preferences based on demographic data, and use that to make decisions about what to play?

I guess the only surprising bit about all this was how quickly all the radio stations jumped on the bandwagon. It mean they’d be free of deviant audiences demanding esoteric and commercially nonviable music for good. Licensing costs dropped, advertising revenue increased, and anyone who really cared how homogeneous things had become had abandoned ship a long time ago. It was truly a golden age for radio executives!

With the continued march of computing technology and AI, it was only a matter of time until simulating listeners’ musical preferences was deemed insufficient. The inventive marketers at Maximum Tune were never content to rest on their laurels, and in collaboration with quantum computing companies introduced the world’s first fully simulated radio listener. General AI was still a while off, but the simulated audience was sophisticated enough that it could listen to broadcasts, form preferences, change their preferences slowly over time, and most importantly, communicate those preferences to the executives running their software.

You should know the story from here – Maximum Tune promised perfect realism from their sims, and the industry quickly spun up enough of them to far outnumber legacy humans. After all, even the most dedicated radio fiend had to eat, sleep, and otherwise divide their attention from market research! The music industry took a while longer to account for the musical preferences of sims, but they eventually came around, churning out a series of ever more optimized hits and bangers. But it seems that the sims have a rather different idea of what constitutes good music than you or I. I still try to listen to FM radio sometimes, but all the latest tunes sound like the demented rambling of dying machines…

Now, as a final profit maximizing measure, I’m told Maximum Tune plans to use the latest research in AI to replace all employees with simulated AI, from the lowliest secretary to the CEO herself. I don’t know the specifics, but I would be very surprised if the employee sims didn’t come with out of the box values drift support. If my hypothesis is correct, then who knows where the new leadership at Maximum Tune will take the company over time? I only hope they don’t try to expand into making paperclips…

Flash Fiction Month #6, Episode 3: The One With The Paper-Thin Premise

Don’t be like Nathan – check your calendar before you hit up your local governmental offices for services! If you’ve ended up on a day where the bureaucrats whose services you require are unavailable (and even if you haven’t, of course), you can whittle away the time by reading previous installments, such as the last one, or the Endian Project themed ones from last year.

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After much prodding, Nathan resolved to capstone his mountaineering career by scaling Mount Carta. Legends said that the civil service of the United Republic of Monticello lived and worked upon its summit, and Nathan’s reasons for wanting to talk to them were as good as any – he needed the forms to apply for a small business permit, which he would then use to get his dreams of a music store out of his head and into the world.

Once upon a time, high winds had regularly eroded Mount Carta enough to making scaling it trivial. Over time, though, the lower layers had compacted enough to counteract this, and as such, the mountain was now growing faster than it ever had since its tumultuous founding. You might say it was expanding to meet the needs of Monticello’s growing bureaucracy. Nathan would tell his friends that nothing would shake his resolve, and he was right – until the first paper cut struck. Nathan had traversed the low, rocky outcrops that demarcated Mount Carta proper from its foothills, only to find himself walking on sheet after sheet of paper, whether it was thin crumbly newsprint, or ordinary printer paper, or even fancy stationery… and now it was splattered with stray drops of blood!

The thought of damaging such important documents, even if only inadvertently, was enough to make Nathan panic. His previously measured pace gave way to mad scrabbling, as glossy papers slipped out from under him. Any time he’d spared to read the words printed on these papers was now spent entirely on his desparate attempt to finish his journey. More than once he lost his footing; his wounds, once scarce and superficial, began to pile up. Some hours later, he found himself at the top of the mountain, but with his entire body covered in lacerations. if only he hadn’t prioritized the documents’ well being! He’d have been able to bandage himself and staunch the bleeding.

At this point, Nathan spied the central governmental offices of Monticello – a monumental palace in a Classical Revival style popular two centuries ago. Normally, its courtyard would be bustling with the activity of bureaucrats and senators, but it was eerily silent. He stumbled over to the door, only to find it locked. Someone had taped a note to the doorknob, which read, “CLOSED FOR REMEMBRANCE DAY”.

Nathan had come all this way for nothing.

There was nothing to do now but head home and try again next week.

He resolved to purchase a pair of hiking gloves to protect his aching hands, before turning his thoughts to the descent.

Flash Fiction Month #6, Episode 2: Another Modest Proposal

I recently returned from a short trip to the Berkshire Mountains, where I spent a lot of time in restaurants either eating food or waiting to eat the aforementioned food. Did you know the Berkshire pig is a particularly prestigious breed? Anyways, you can read the last installment here, and 2020’s entries here.

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This is the hardest and most time-consuming part of your job – convincing the food to be food. You work in batches when you can, but your customers are insatiable. Ever more meat, spice and token offertories of collard greens and other ‘sides’ must land on their plates for you to curry their favor (though you assume actual curries would get you excommunicated). There’s no getting around it. It’s time to talk to the pigs again.

Flash Fiction Month #6, Episode 1: Of Souls and Torment

As far as I can tell, Invisible Blog has now had more years featuring a Flash Fiction Month than not. How’s that for institutional? As usual, you can read last year’s installments (which were Endian Project themed!) here. This year, though, we return to the classic anything goes approach of the past. The usual word target is 400-500 words, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s just a suggestion.

You ever get the feeling that some of these are just fishing for controversy? That being said, any resemblance to real world events and organizations are entirely coincidental. (FYI: I changed the title on this one.)

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By the time you read this, it will be too late for me.

I have spent my life studying the Book of YONAH and the other foundational texts of the YONAHite faith. Around me, the world burns. I feel the pulse of Sin and vice coursing through the world. The Proclamation of Revelation indicates to anyone who will read it that the Crucible beckons – the time of troubles where YONAH will personally descend to Orth to test the faithful and cast those She deems unworthy into the Soul Forge, where they shall burn in eternal agony, as they fuel YONAH’s next creation. Revelation also proclaims, most ominously, that when the Crucible arrives, Orth will have so degraded that none will considered worthy. Only those who have already died and passed on to Sanctum will be safe from the Soul Forge.

Through my readings of YONAHite scripture, I am uniquely qualified to divine the truth – that while there is no way to ensure your own salvation, it is entirely possible to rescue the virtuous from an unjust fate. The commandments I cite are as thus:

• A suicide is a mortal Sin. YONAH has no patience for those who buck the wills of the Cycle.
• The Tests of YONAH only consider what the faithful have done of their own will.
• YONAH shall not expel an obedient and faithful soul from Sanctum under any circumstances.

In the name of preventing Sin and suffering, it is my holy duty to convey as many souls as possible to Sanctum. As such, I began to identify candidates amongst the populace – the most virtuous by far of us; saintly exemplars of the Path of YONAH, well suited for Sanctum’s glory. Knowing that informing the candidates of my plan might harm their virtue of humility, I kept my plans for their salvation a secret until such time as I knew I was ready to assist them. Then, without warning, I would appear to them bearing the Hammer of the Redeemer. Legends say this divine instrument was itself forged in Sanctum and brought to Orth as a sign of both YONAH’s charity and Her omnipotence. I wielded it crudely, perhaps, but effectively. Several decisive blows from the Hammer caused the examplars’ bodies to die, freeing their soul to enter YONAH’s Antechamber and, if my judgement was correct, pass on to Sanctum.

Thus far, I have sent twenty three souls to sanctum, preserving them at the height of their virtue. This is a prime number, and therefore particularly sacred to YONAHites. I shall continue my work of redemption for the rest of my life. Make no mistake of it – I know that my actions are in most circles considered murder, and for my supposed crimes I expect I would be executed if caught. Eventually, I will be judged by YONAH. I have no doubt that She will condemn me to the Soul Forge for the blood I have shed. I maintain, though, that my cause is just. YONAH wouldn’t seek to punish my exemplars on account of my noble sacrifice, right? They’ve done nothing wrong.

Tales from Endian Project – Odd Couple

I haven’t posted a short story in a while. This ends now! I’m taking the opportunity to tease some stuff for the much ballyhooed Endian Project book 1.5. Today’s story features everyone’s favorite sociopathic assassin, the one and only Terminal. Needless to say, please don’t imitate him. Our world has suffered enough as is.

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It was a bright, sunny day in Denver. I buzzed my scalp, ate some leftover ribollita (my own recipe, heavy on beans and greens) for lunch, and headed to a nondescript office building on the edge of the downtown. It was time to meet my next client – she lead me into a small conference room, face concealed behind a surgical mask, a scrub cap, and sunglasses. She had chosen well. I was, by far, the world’s most successful assassin, and Y2K was opening up new business opportunities for me left and right.

“Apologies for the getup,” said my client, taking a seat at her desk. “I need to remain anonymous as much as possible given the nature of your work.” She laughed softly, her voice muffled by the mask.

“That being said, I wouldn’t mind an introduction. Mind telling me your name?” she continued. What a foolish girl.

N. K. Jemisin – The Fifth Season (2015)

Like any book worth its years of rice and salt, The Fifth Season begins with the apocalypse. It takes but five words to show its hand. I’ll skip the poker metaphors for now, but needless to say, when a story begins by describing a calamity, I can’t help but wonder – how did things get this bad? That’s how the Broken Earth trilogy got its claws in me.

Massive spoilers follow. Because I can.

Flash Fiction Month #5, Episode 5: Heart of Hellfire

I’m finishing off Flash Fiction Month 5 with a story scrap I’ve wanted to incorporate into Endian Project for some time. It took me a few seconds to get this up to where it needed to be, so I hope you enjoy this conclusion. As usual, you can read the last installment here, and the stories from Flash Fiction Month #4 here.

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People always tell you to follow your heart. Somehow, that’s supposed to lead you to do the right thing in a trying situation. Those people are stupid.

Once I graduated college, I no longer had Tracey keeping me on the narrow path, and I quickly found I’d do anything to learn and practice computer magic. I remember all too clearly what had happened – I had stalled as a programmer, trying to hack together software I didn’t understand into spells that might’ve killed me. Then a mysterious stranger reached out to me. He told me they could make a sorceress out of me, that I could take charge of my life and earn untold glory if I joined his secret society and delved into the occult. I should’ve noticed the red flags – the amber eyes, the occasional twitch, the sense of uneasy, unstable magic emanating from him. But I certainly wasn’t gaining much power or knowledge from my day job as an accountant, so I accepted his offer.

Flash Fiction Month #5, Episode 4: The Price of Glory

What can I say? These stories should make some sense even if you haven’t read Behind the Bitmask, though you might want to spend some time perusing longer form Endian Project content as well. Either way, you can read the last installment here, and view the previous year’s stories here.

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I am drenched in sweat.

Mindy’s kicked up the intensity of my MMA lessons for my upcoming expedition to Mount Amdahl. I’ve run faster, lifted heavier weights, and done more pullups than ever before in my life. I relish every milestone of strength and endurance I’ve achieved, but there’s no denying it – I’ve never worked this hard in my life, not even in my months in the wilderness simply trying to avoid Sigmar the Conqueror’s wrath. It had better be worth it, because right now, I can barely breathe, much less think straight. Suddenly, I’m on the ground. How did that happen?

Flash Fiction Month #5, Episode #3: Beleaguered Hostess

Fun fact – fleshing out Charlotte’s identity was one of the first times I really let myself delve into a woman’s perspective as a writer. This is a less of a milestone for cisgender writers. Oh well. Read the last installment of this month here, and read the last instance of Flash Fiction Month here.

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Agnus was so dedicated to providing a US-styled workplace for his subordinates that he gave us vacation time. If you could navigate the bureaucracy required to accumulate and request time off, you could very well enjoy a few spare moments of leisure. In that spirit, I was awaiting the arrival of a childhood friend in Agnus’s shiny and recently remodelled “transportation center”. Every few minutes, a portal would open, discharging one or two people into the Realm of Vice. It was a start – I guess reliable interdimensional travel was still too difficult for the average person?

My digressions were cut short when, as expected, Emile walked out of a portal and, after a moment of scanning his surroundings, locked eyes with me.

Flash Fiction Month #5, Episode #2: Across the Threshold

I should’ve called it “Metaxas Month“. Alliteration is one hell of a drug! You can read the last installment here, and peruse non-Endian Project themed Flash Fiction Months here.

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“Are you sure you want to be here, Charlotte?” said Edgar, peering at the jagged cliffs the horizon. “This plan of yours is risky.”

I was 22, and barely out of college, yet I was climbing the ranks of the titan Aux’s legions faster than my accounting career was taking off. I don’t know how I would’ve reached my current position without Edgar’s mentorship. He’d lead Aux’s cult for some time; for all practical purposes, I was his second in command. His other lieutenants usually looked at me with suspicion and jealousy (except for Sarah, who seemed content just to help us).

“Honestly? I’d rather be back in my apartment, watching primetime TV and eating chocolate,” I quipped. Edgar slowly nodded.

“Still, Aux wants a new daemon, and we need ambient magic to summon it,” I continued. “That means no Will and Grace reruns for me.”

Flash Fiction Month #5, Episode 1: The Arcane, Ethereal Dream

What began as an attempt to stave off the inevitable day when I run out of music backlog for the reviews that fuel Invisible Blog has taken on a life of its own. Five years of flash fiction! As is tradition, newcomers can start their journey by viewing last year’s work.

This month, we’re doing something a little different, though – an Endian Project themed Flash Fiction Month! I figured I could take a look at everyone’s favorite leading lady, Charlotte Metaxas, and give you an idea of what makes her tick. It’ll stave off the ravenous hordes awaiting Operation Longhorn, right?

---

It keeps happening. Every night, the same dream.

I’m in a nightclub. I am surrounded by throngs of dancers in constant, perhaps even Brownian motion. I am motionless. The time has not yet come for me to join the dance. Its participants care not about my presence, except perhaps as a static obstacle. Something to be routed around, really. A song pulses in my mind, but somehow I know the dancers cannot hear it. Their music comes from without. Mine comes from within. Somewhere, a clock strikes an hour; the exact hour does not matter. What does matter is that my time has come. I stand, I stretch, and I take complete control. It is my dance now. By the time I finish, everyone else is gone. Only blood stains on the walls remain to suggest I wasn’t alone.

Cory Doctrow – Walkaway (2017)

Some spoilers follow after the gap.

When I started reading this, the world had caught fire. Now, though, the world has exploded. Probably a good time to work on reading this book. Walkaway makes a critical assumption about how technology might evolve in the next few decades – in this case, that we’ll end up with the infrastructure to build a post scarcity economy – and runs with it, hypothesizing what a world where people can literally “walk away” from society as we know it and build a new society based on anarchism and mutual aid. Without that atmosphere of post-scarcity? I don’t know if Walkaway could happen as written, but the experience certainly feels like an anarchist praxis.

Tales From Endian Project – Dark Pact, Part II

Merry Seasonmas, folks! May your holiday celebrations (or lack thereof) be glorious and free of strife! Unrelated – I’ve finally got the true second part of Dark Pact going! You definitely want to read the first part before you delve into this one, and you may or may not want to read The Rothbauer Curve as well, though it’s not really related… yet.

(Content warning: Self harm, bloodletting)

---

My name’s Dan Morgenstern, and I babysit a god for a living. It’s better than my last job.

On my 37th birthday (April 5th, 1985), I woke to find that time and raw magic had ravaged my once youthful looks. The beard I’d grown for lack of a razor was shot through with gray, I was developing crows’ feet around my eyes, and my fashion options had degenerated from “office worker” to “medieval hermit”. At least I got to wear a cool Lord of the Rings type cape. This marked my twelfth year as the viceroy of Aux, a titan from a dimension beyond Earth (i.e, “hell”). I’d figured out a few things in my time here. First, Aux was fixated on the computers that had brought me to its realm. Second, Aux was engaged in a constant struggle with its neighbors for territory and followers. By applying the lessons of the former, we’d made nominal progress in expanding Aux’s demesne, only to find new and shrewder titan lords that had no other goals than to crush their neighbors. We needed something fundamentally different.

“Tell me again of these ‘bulletin boards’ you speak of, Morgenstern,” said Aux a few days after I’d nominally celebrated. Some birthday, too – I drank smuggled beer and listened to Aux rant about Pravin Swiftfoot, the chthon who’d harried us and stolen our magical artifacts almost since the day I’d arrived in hell. I’d lasted long enough for Aux to curse Swiftfoot’s stubby figure, hairy feet, and bushy tail before I passed out.

“These are where the most educated and erudite Earth humans congregate now,” I said. “I’m ingratiating myself with the admin at Ancient Secrets of Jotunheim.”

“What use would you have with him, exactly?”

“No, it’s a lady. She’s a major voice in the spellscripting community. Without her approval, we cannot possibly hope to recruit there in any meaningful capacity.”

“It troubles me greatly that we must resort to this,” Aux snarled. “I infused you with daemonic magic, and I brought you this terminal, but where every other titan has fallen, Pravin only ascends! It’s only a matter of time until the impertinent chthon attempts to kill us.”

“Hey, I’m just glad you signed off on this. I haven’t had enough access to Earth in over a decade.” It was only after years of desperate effort that Aux had finally gave in and set up a terminal through which I could phone home and call in reinforcements. I’d gradually learned how to create daemons and weapons with the innate magic Aux had given me, but compared to what my reports from BBSes claimed about the benefits of spellscripting, I was a wizard of chaos, and that looked increasingly weak by comparison. I needed collaborators closer to the pulse of Earth’s technologies.

Something else was bugging me. “I hope we can keep the connection stable,” I ended up saying. “This ‘dimensional drift’ thing you mention ripped our last cable apart.” Threading wires across dimensions wasn’t even slightly out of the ordinary, but it was still a technical challenge.

“Concern yourself not with this, Morgenstern! You will imagine a portal as if it were glue joining our worlds together. If we form enough in the right places, we will stabilize our coordinates-” My terminal abruptly spat out an error about being unable to connect to the internet, as if to spite Aux.

“-which is not yet this day. I will provision a replacement.”

Behind the Bitmask has released!

It’s finally time. Behind the Bitmask is available to audiences around the world! Writing this book has been quite the ordeal, but books usually are.

I started working on Behind the Bitmask in November 2016 for NaNoWriMo. Despite the various stressors in my life, I was able to churn out 50,000 words that month, though it took some pre-NaNo planning, including a quick character sketch that might not be canon at this point. The rest of the book took much longer, though; my life grew substantially more event-dense throughout the the years until I reached my current lifestyle. Even then, Behind the Bitmask is almost twice as long as my first (deadname) stab at self-publishing. Hopefully it’s better written, given how much writing I’ve done since then.

Behind the Bitmask is an urban fantasy/sci-fi novel. It’s the story of Charlotte Metaxas, a mild-mannered accountant turned high priestess of a technology worshiping coven in the middle of mid-2000s Minneapolis. When her master is killed by a cruel warlord who then turns her life into a living hell, she goes on a quest to get revenge that takes her across a magical underworld struggling to adopt to the influx of humans trying to colonize it.

This post, for what it’s worth, is less of a conventional post and more of a list of marketing resources that will hopefully enable you to purchase the book if you’re so inclined. Expect it to evolve over time.

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