.:ELECTRIC VELOCIPEDE:. Fiction Excerpts

RonTom St. John’s Liberty Prescott Four, President and CEO of InterCore Express, was not, as his CV would otherwise tell you, a graduate of the Las Vegas School of International Business, due to an “incomplete” mark received on a course in Economic Linguistics. There was an issue with a position paper. I knew this because both Prescott’s wayward term paper and a copy of the dean’s letter to Prescott Three (which mentioned the word plagiarism in all-caps quite prominently) had just been automat-delivered to me by one of our own couriers.

“Where did you pick this up?” I asked.

The iDeeBoy beeped at me, and it extended its ICEPane for my Package Receipt Acknowledgement key. As a member of the Security Directorate at ICE, the automats would allow me to open a package without signing for it, but they wouldn’t go away until I had officially tagged the COCT.

I swiped my ICID instead, and the iDeeBoy froze, the image on its v-mon panel caught midway between a happy and a sad face. After a fraction, the look of constipation vanished and was replaced by the automat’s terminal interface. I called up the PDL manifests and discovered the ICEpak on my desk had been in-system less than three windings. A local delivery, picked up from—

My hand retreated from the v-mon panel as it were hot, and I suddenly felt a little constipation of my own.

The package had come from a “B” series station. Depot 12-B4. One of the old stopdrops.

Frayed by Jonathan Brandt

Henry Beech limped to the Central Fountain in Haberdashery Square. He squat in its waters to relieve the stinging welts on his backside. Momentarily soothed, two plain truths rose into focus above the scrum of thoughts quaking his mind: First, it clearly is not wise to break up with one’s fiancée on the eve of her inaugural (and within reach of her security detail); second, there simply is no delicate way to explain to a mother why you have begun reanimating her daughter’s killer.

Another thought quickly eclipsed the first two: Where was Claire? He scanned the Plaza for any sign of her. But there were so many among the crowd, assisting their smartly suited companions. At dusk it was so hard to tell them apart.

A distant commotion caught his attention. A pack of District Police were sniffing their way purposefully through the crowd.

He didn’t think things would heat up so quickly. In fact, he was counting on his ex-fiancée to grieve alone for at least a few hours before publicly sending for his head.

He also hoped that she, the love of his life, would come to understand and to forgive him.

On his feet again, he suddenly became aware of how conspicuous he was—standing in the center of the Festival of Bespoke Tailoring—not only single, but also not wearing any pants.

Darkest Amber by Erin Hoffman

The alley was dark and redolent, old dirt and new steel, rain-swept asphalt and acrid ozone. Kali’s footsteps spread halos of dryness where the ground gave before her. Two streets away something hollow and metallic hit the ground with a clang, and every muscle in Kali’s body screamed sudden tautness, a rush of adrenaline sending a wave of shadow across her vision.

Being out of JH’s range made her twitchy.

She kept walking, pulling air through barely parted lips and holding it in to slow her pounding heart. At last she came upon the slender figure that wavered out of the late evening humidity, a charcoal silhouette in the night. It bent with lazy grace to pull a glass canister from the crate at its feet, then tossed it at Kali.

The weight hit her outstretched hand cool and solid. A liter of liquid destruction, darkest amber, smoother than blood. The tang of it hammered her sinuses and wrapped around her throat, addictive as a new lover, poisonous as addiction unchained.

“How much?” she breathed, but only just, holding the chemical burn inside her as long as she could.
Night mist breathed apart, relinquishing Clio, the local Sixer’s flygirl. “Fifty.”

“That’s twice last week’s,” Kali spat, ire leaping up inside her, the flash of internal combustion.

Clio was trouble, blue steel cybergrunge and sultry eyes lumipainted to a persistent four-alarm come-hither. She took a long drag on her tres chic synthmenth cigarette and blew chartreuse smoke at Kali. “Deal with it.”

Life at the Edge of Nowhere by Kjell Williams

Jim Hespuro sighed as he scanned the map of what used to be Gallatin, Mississippi. He had been searching the remnants of a residential neighborhood since dawn, trying to see the opportunity invoked by his job description, the recovery project supervisor, even the in-flight briefing. Row after row of gutted houses flooded the streets, strewn about like oversized dollhouses. Ragnarök didn’t do this, he reassured himself. This mess came from the two decades of storms and flooding that followed. He stopped at what was supposed to be the edge of town.

“Figures,” he muttered. “Can’t even get good maps of an R&D town when the war’s been over for years.” Entering another subdivision, he pulled down a microphone hanging from his ear. “Gary, you there?”

“It’s ‘Survey Central,’ ” Gary said from what was once ground zero. “We’re supposed to at least pretend we’re professionals.” He sounded half-joking, as though the thought of malfunctioning microbials was absurd. “What’s new?”

“I just stumbled across an uncharted subdivision at the northern edge of town. Maybe a hundred houses or so.”

“Could be the lab,” Gary said. “Check it out. We might get lucky and go beyond the standard ‘Rebuild and Repop’ routine.”

“Already on it.”

The sun went from one side of the subdivision to the other as Jim searched for anything out of the ordinary, which here meant anything not rubble or debris. Jim kicked down what was left of a door as he entered yet another ruined house, turned around coughing and rubbing his eyes. Don’t forget the dust.

The Boy Who Could Bend and Fall by Ken Scholes

They called him Slinky Boy because he could bend and fall from the top of the stairs all the way to the bottom with no serious injury and much to the amusement of others.

“Amazing,” someone said.

“Look at him go,” another added.

“Yee-haw,” Ninja Bob shouted. Then he and Larry Sue and Longhair Eddie hauled their toy back up to the top of the stairs for another go in that small gap between classes at the end of the day.

Slinky Boy’s real name was Focus Jones; it reflected his parents’ most wishful thinking. They were in real estate and had met (and conceived their son) at a Personal Effectiveness conference while they were both married to other people. Focus showed up nine months later. Fourteen years later, his classmates at Thomas Jefferson High School renamed him in honor of his new exploitable skill.

“Wow,” someone said.

“Look at him go,” another added.

A Mouse Ran Up the Clock by A. C. Wise

Simon watched the mouse scale the clock’s side, its whiskers thrumming. The clock struck, and the mouse quivered in time. Its paws lost their hold, and the mouse fell, its legs beating the air as Simon bent to retrieve it.

Carefully he turned the creature on its back. He could feel the flutter-beat of a heart through the skin, and above it the gentle ticking of a different kind of mechanism. He soaked the corner of a cloth in chloroform and held it near the mouse’s mouth and nose until the shivering stopped. Then he picked up a scalpel and tweezers, peering through his glasses, and opened the creature up.

The mouse’s insides whirred, and the same honey-colored light that had lit its ascent winked off golden gears. Simon made a few minute adjustments; tightening here, and re-setting a balance there, and then he righted the mouse. Waking, the mouse blinked and ran its paws over its whiskers before running for a hole in the baseboard.

The bell hanging over the shop door chimed and Simon looked up. Hastily he pulled the watch, which he should have finished that morning, towards him and feigned absorption in his work. Hard boots clicked over the wooden floor, and the man’s shadow filled Simon’s peripheral vision, blocking the light. The man cleared his throat and Simon looked up. His heart went into his throat.

“Herr Shulewitz? Simon Shulewitz?”

Simon could barely swallow. He fought to keep his hands from trembling as he set the watch down and straightened his shoulders, trying to meet the Staatspolizei man in the eye. The officer held his peaked cap under one arm, and the rest of his uniform was in perfect order—pressed and clean with sharp lines and not a speck of dust. The row of medals across his breast would have been blinding if the sun hadn’t been behind him.

“Herr Shulewitz,” here the man attempted something like a smile, but it pulled the deep scars around his mouth into ghastly lines and Simon fought the urge to shudder. “Are you aware that you have a vermin problem?”

Nightlight by Celia Marsh

It was his father’s birthday yesterday, Adrian remembered as he unclipped Jessie’s lead from her collar and let her loose to run. Dirk had left for work even earlier than usual, the sky still dark, the city still asleep, but where Adrian grew up, half a world away, it was late enough that most people already awake and alert. He checked the time again to be sure and called the house, hoping to catch his dad before he had to leave for work.

He watched Jessie while he waited for his father to pick up. She ran back and forth between him and the smells that lined the path as he walked slowly. He could only smell trees and fresh-cut grass, but there were infinitely more interesting smells for Jessie, judging by the amount of time her nose spent on the ground.

His father answered, as though he knew who was calling, and Adrian dragged his attention back to the phone, first apologizing for missing his birthday and then asking all the expected birthday questions. Adrian’s sister called him last week, to tell him how much his share of the present was, so his dad has just thanked him for a present Adrian never saw and had no role in choosing. Adrian assured him it was no problem at all. It must have been nearly time for his father to leave for work, but instead, he continued onto the usual subjects for his weekly calls. Adrian let his mind drift, answering the questions by rote, thinking instead of the day ahead of him.

“Do you remember,” asked his father, deviating from the expected script and surprising Adrian, “when you were very little, how the attic got haunted, and we had to get it blessed, and you cried for days on end?”

“I liked the ghosts,” Adrian said, following Jessie’s plumed tail along the path. “I stopped telling you about them after that since you’d made them go away.” He could see his father shrug as though he was standing next to him.