“You know, people think that in this age of information and starships, that novels no longer have any importance. I read a paper one of these days saying that ‘we already live in a sci-fi life, why would we need the fiction if we have it all right here in real life?’. I laughed for a solid 15 minutes. Really. We spread ourselves through a whole galaxy, at least three planets overpopulated. we have a massive system linking all that. That means a enormous database of information and a uninterrupted flux of information from trillions of different sources every second. We are devastated by information, overwhelmed by it in ways we couldn’t even have dreamed of just a few years back. And people think that’s fine. That it’s easy to cope with that, that life is too complex and big to waste away with books, specially what the unbelievably consumerist society of ours demands of books. But people forget the values of escapism, specially for people of today. Books are more complex than ever, granted, but they simplify the complexity of our lives. They give us structure, they guide our thoughts that would otherwise be scattered around billions of areas.

But writing today is a nearly impossible feat. Much research is needed to give your story verisimilitude. Which brings us to our present situation. Because you see, I’m writing a book. It tells the tale of a serial killer with a deep message, that sort of thing. He kills one of each species and race, nothing more, nothing less, across the galaxy. Nobody pays any mind to it, of course, until a incorruptible cop starts to become suspicious of the apparently random killings. It’s still fiction, of course. I can write about a incorruptible being, because it’s what we all would like to be or to believe exists. The book brings all kinds of discussions about racism, specism and the impact of non-ordinary events on the lives of a crumbling empire that encompasses a galaxy and far surpasses the lives of a few naturally doomed.

Research, you understand. Hey, hey. Don’t cry. It won’t hurt, I swear. Look at it as you making a sacrifice so that no one else of your kind dies by my hands.

All in the name of art.”

Well, it’s wondrous what a few kind words can do to someone’s confidence. Thanks to the feedback of a few people, I’ve decided to draw a new yet flimsy stop to my silence. This story is part of an universe-building project I started with my cousin (960018) but sadly ended up archiving. I’ll post some of the stories that were generated from that, at least one every week.

Until then, gape at an assortment of sublime imagery.

“So, does that mean you can’t loan me the money?”, the scrawny man said, shaking like a bamboo in the wind. His hands left wet spots in everything he touched and his eyes looked as red as the rest of his face, the humidity making his eyes look like black jellyfishes in puddles of milk.

“I’m truly sorry, but unless we have a reason and comprovation of it, we can’t loan money, man.” The lender had to say this a myriad of times during his long career. It never got any easier, but saying it to a childhood friend was harder. The shadow cast upon Thomas’ face was horrifying, but he didn’t seem to want to explain his predicament, relying on fantasy instead. “If you give me a reasonable explanation, I’m serious. Tell me why you really need that much money, Thomas.”

“So you really don’t believe me? What part don’t you believe, tell me. Please, Dick.”

“Well, honestly, the whole thing…” It was hard to not believe Thomas. He had a honest face and it was him that gave to Richard straight whenever no one else would. To doubt him was to betray him.

“I know that the whole time travel is hard to buy, I had quite the problem accepting it myself and I was looking down a dinosaur’s snout.” He said. He seemed too panicky.

“I realize something is troubling you, I can see you really need the money, but my hands are tied here. You can’t expect me to write ‘Alien Ransom Payment’ in the form and not call the cops or the psychiatrists.” It was a novel idea, the whole story. It made the lender wonder what drug could bend his friend’s perception of reality so badly that he could come up with such a complicated story and believe it so desperately.

“You make it sound as if I’m trying to rescue an alien. That’s not it. I need the money so I can buy our planet back from them.” Richard could already see some of his coworkers casually coming closer to his desk. He felt a bit ashamed for his friend.

“And it was you who sold it to them in the first place?” The lender rationalized that he was humoring Thomas just because he thought that, if he made his friend realize how ridiculous it all sounded, he would stop it. Although, little by little, this situation and its surrealness reminded him of all the times Thomas would go to Dick’s house by mistake, so drunk that he would start talking to the house in the middle of the night, after Richard had phoned his friend’s house to let his mother know he was O.K. He remembered how they used to make fun of each other, how their conversations would become nonsensical and oddly philosophical at the same time. He never laughed so hard like in those days, since they grew apart.

“No! I told you! I lost it in a game of four-dimensional poker! And I think they cheated…”

“Stop it, Thomas. This is unhealthy. I don’t know what happened to you or why you need this money, but I can’t help you in this state.” The change in his friend’s demeanor was tangible, going from the frantic lucidity of before to a crestfallen hunched-over posture. As if collapsing under his own weight. “You’re really committing to this, aren’t you?”

“I… perhaps it didn’t happen, then. Perhaps I imagined the whole thing… being kidnapped, escaping from a spaceship, falling into a wormhole… but it seemed so vivid. But if it was all a lie… who’s waiting for me to get the money out there?”

“No one is, Thomas.” He is relieved now, that this charade can finally end. But looking at his friend still drives a nail into his heart. Thomas looks like a man that just discovered he’s adopted. It’s almost visible, the walls of reality collapsing around him. “Go home, man. Rest. I’ll swing by later and check on you. No more stories about intergalactic loan sharks, alright?”

“Interdimensional, but alright… And if I didn’t just made this all up, those aliens may have helped us escape the whole dinosaur thing, but they’ll have to find another way to pay their debt, I guess… and what can they do having won the planet from me? It’s not like I own it, anyway…” He is grinning now, realizing how ludicrous it all was. He looks up at Dick, his oldest friend, pitiful awkwardness incarnate. There’s a tacit contract here, a “we’ll never talk about this again” kind of deal. Richard meets Thomas’ look with one that could aptly say “I don’t think there will ever be a moment where this whole deal could come up.” After a few seconds of silence, the atmosphere of the bank seems clearer. Richard’s coworkers shuffle almost imperceptibly back to their tasks and exchange astounded glances. Thomas stands up, still looking a bit defeated and says, “I guess it was a pretty bizarre story.”

The banker is almost unable to hold his laughter now. “It was hard to buy it from the get go, man… The very beginning, when you said you were going out with your girlfriend. That made the whole thing unbelievable for me.” As the laughter of everyone echoed and ricocheted off the bank’s walls, tears dropping down from Richard’s tightly closed eyes, Thomas took his leave, no hope left on the sulking carcass walking out of the bank.

Perhaps, if Richard hadn’t been blinded by tears and deaf by laughter, he would have seen the green plasmatic light coming from outside the bank and heard his friend’s scream.

And perhaps the Earth wouldn’t be doomed.

Ok… it took me quite a while, but here is part two of the 100 theme challenge. This one was an idea that I had bouncing inside my head for quite a while but just now decided to commit it to paper (or data, as it were). It didn’t come out as well as I’d hoped… Once again, it might take a while between part two and three, but this wait may be diminished depending on the response this one receives. So let me know what you think.

Walking is hard. With every step, I hear the bone creaking and I am obliged to drag the other foot, already beyond use.

The pain doesn’t affect me, it feels like it has afflicted someone else, long ago. I can feel the degeneration working its way upwards, I can feel the maggots starting to make up for most of my mass. And I can do all but care, that part of my being died a long time ago. Along with the rest of it.

I was one of the first, I can feel a flimsy pride in that. I don’t remember much apart from lab coats, glasses, microscopes and screams. Can’t be sure if they were mine or someone else’s. Since then, our numbers increased exponentially, I faintly remember this being in a white board somewhere… “exponentially”. I saw a lot of difficult words there, they stuck with me for some reason. There are more of us now than there were in the beginning, that’s all I know. I see the living doing everything they can to survive, but they seem to forget that for us, it is even harder. There’s hardly enough food for everyone and our food often becomes more mouths to feed. Top that off with our being every one’s number one target and the degeneration of moral along with our bodies, and you have the worst chances of survival ever. I shamble through a dirty street as my mind races at a fraction of the speed it used to. It is like perpetually having a word at the tip of your tongue and not remembering it nor being able to let it go. It’s maddening.

Something fell… I feel lighter, but I’m afraid that if I look down, my neck will snap. I keep walking, it was probably just my intestines. Ahead of me, I see the sea of us, the legion that we constitute, but there’s no one, really. Mindless masses, I can see why the living are so swift to get rid of us, why they are so quick to kill us. By the curb, I see a pack of us eating away at a young man, the blood washing the broken street. There’s little left of him now, but the urge is too strong. I begin making my way towards the pack, aware that by the time my broken legs get me there, only the crimson drink will have remained. I feel envy, all of a sudden. Not because I’ll have to get by without lunch, but because that food will never have to be like us, never have to scavenge those that we once called coworker, friend, family, lover. Perhaps, if my cognitive functions were better, I could laugh at the irony of thinking that a man who has just been eaten to the point of nonexistence is “lucky”.

But perhaps our kind is not as mindless as we seem to think. Case in point, my current inner monologue seems to hint at a somewhat high cognitive hability. Perhaps we are all like this, oblivious to our past life but intelligent in our own right. Perhaps we just don’t use what the living would recognise as logic or language. After all, when one of us see food, we all know where it is. It’s primitive communication, but it’s there. I think my eye just fell off.

I hear a loud noise. It stands to reason, in a city comprised of slow moving beings without any motor skills, that a noise like that was made by a living. I can already see the masses slowly moving, rising, starting the inexorable march for lunch. Before I can even think about it, my feet are already moving. The urge is stronger than anything. I can hear gunshots and screams, I can see the living, bloody, sweaty, tender and scared living. They are the first I see in a long time. Weeks? I don’t even know what that means anymore. Sleep is a useful way of keeping track of time, once you don’t need it anymore, the days just sort of pile up and become a huge block of time. The living are still a long way away, but I keep walking, my warnings to my fellow dead a hoarse mumbling without meaning. I see some of us fall, some rise again. I see the perpetual cycle of life and death in the blink of my lifeless eye, a mere sham of what once was real, reenacted in the decaying theatre of what remained. A bullet hits my chest and I remain undeterred. The ones that fell begin to form a blockade, but the urge propels us forward, over the corpses of our kind. As I near the living, the urge now larger than myself, my feet finally give in to decay.

I see the blade hurl towards me.

By popular (notausername) demand: a zombie story.

Beginnings are always the hardest. The man could form up his whole introduction in his head, the way he was going to approach the other, the way he was going to ease into the subject of “you’re being hunted and I can help”, the way the other was going to believe wholeheartedly and follow his every lead. The imaginary conversation was going well, so well indeed, that he wasn’t going to discard the idea that they would become best friends sometime after the hunt was done.

But that’s just it, isn’t it? Every thing is easier in his mind. The man deludes himself into thinking that planning is a good idea, that he can plan for every contingency. And when life throws its unexpectedness in his face, he’s surprised and says there’s no reason to keep planning, that he’ll just “live in the moment” from now on. And next time, there he is, spending hours planning the next steps. It isn’t a bad thing, though. Planning gives the man a sense of order, it structures his thoughts, his expectations and, to a certain level, gives him confidence to go through with the plan. As long as he is aware that as soon as he starts the plan, it will have to be discarded, he’ll be alright.

The other is nonchalantly leaning against the wall, its tuxedo several numbers too big, a man obviously out of his element. The smoke draws elaborate patterns and stains the white shirt framed by its coat, the cough hangs in the air above one smoking as if to meet a social demand. The man approaches the other, an all too familiar shadow trailing him. The smoke stings his eyes and he restrains a cough, it could very well tamper with a perfectly laid-out introduction. As he reaches the other, while still trying to manage the synchronism of putting one foot after the other, the man chokes on his own words, no sound comes out. Fortunately, the other seems to not have realized the man’s pretensions, for he was still looking dumbstruck at the patterns of smoke that rose to mingle with the thick legion above.

The man decided to try again, the words were at the tip of his tongue, there didn’t seem to be a reason for nervousness, so what was happening? He formed the words carefully, first impressions and all that jazz. The shadow behind him seemed to be laughing, but he disregarded it. The words were fleeting, the more he thought about them, the worst they sounded. No, he couldn’t begin the conversation with something so bland, it had to be intriguing, make the other want to know the whole story, avoid an indifferent or awkward response. But that was mainly dependent on the other’s personality, wasn’t it? How could he prepare against that?

Say anything, measure his personality based on his response, then shape the rest of your discourse based on that. That could be a good way to do it, but what if his response to your first phrase is one of introspection, what if he goes away? The shadow isn’t even trying to suppress the laughter now, useless prick. The other pulls himself from the wall, does that mean he will leave? No, he can’t. He can’t. If he goes out…

The man is possessed by impulse, the social and volitive parts of his brain clashing and melting everything else down. His mouth expulse the first words of a half-forgotten introduction and, mid-way through it, it dissolves into a cry for help, mingled with a warning for the other’s life. It’s a train wreck. But as the man clutches his face to hide the shame, he opens one eye to see the other stepping purposefully on the ground, the last trail of smoke engulfing his tattered shoe. The other resumes walking, apparently oblivious to the man’s bizarre discourse, and opens the door at the end of the terrace, the way down. After a moment’s hesitation, the man screams for attention. The hasty introduction falls on the other’s deaf and the shadow’s knowing ears. No point in first impressions.

The man is gone.

So, I’ve decided to post short stories here, so as to refrain from using this only to reblog unfunny shit. To kickstart that idea, I’ve decided to get a challenge list of 100 themes for writing. Although I’ll doubtfully respect the list’s order and will probably post a few short stories outside of the challenge, that list will assure that I’ll post with a fleeting semblance of frequency.

I hope I can count on whoever reads them to critic at your leisure, as long as they are constructive remarks. I appreciate any attempts to guide me through the shapeless and contrived dimension that is writing.

”[…]The Library extended to all sides, its farthest reaches completely obscured merely by the distance. 

A long table sat in the middle of it, watching the alleys and the floors above, up to the yonder chandelier-lit roof. The table was filled with books and scattered papers and ink and pens. The only living being in The Library stood up.

The man walked by a large bookshelf, letting his fingers take the dust off of the sides of the books sleeping on the century old shelves, leaving a trail of exposed leather covers in the sea of dust. His eyes traveled purposeful yet absent-mindedly through the names long written down and reached for a thin, black covered notebook, flexible in his hands. He leafed through some of the entries of the trivial journal and ripped off a few of the most useless pages as he returned to his chair at the long table, closing his eyes as he did so as if recollecting his thoughts for the task to come.

Dipping the point of the nearest pen in a bottle of pitch black ink he opened the notebook on the first blank page and, after a few minutes contemplating the scenery, he started writing[…]”