The pod sat on the grassy field for the rest of the night, cool and moist with dew when the morning sun came. Nature seemed to accept the outsider in thier midst, the darkly green oval, covered with bright red capillaries pulsed slightly as the day grew on.
“Tomorrow’s friday” she said slowly and softly, letting the words dangle from her lips like a drop of chocolate escaping from an ice cream cone.
I long to taste both… her words fill my ears with a delight, care and warmth that spreads rapidly to my mind and heart…and her lips… her lips. *enthralled sigh*
The night wasn’t unseasonably warm or cold… it was like any other of the last dozen evenings lately. It was clear outside, with a soft spread of cloud cover high in the sky. The observant might note the lack of insect noises against a backdrop of a suburban skyline. A distant thunder and flicker of light in the clouds seemed to hint at a coming rain, but the scent of ozone was lacking… making the coming damp off in a further future. Out of nowhere, a cracking report like a gunshot, or a car backfiring rang out, so loud that the windows rattled… All the neighborhood dogs began barking, and with a sizzling hiss a bright organic oval, glowing cherry red fell to earth, streaking trail of light and smoke behind it before it landed in a field of tall, wet grass. There it sat, slowly cooling, steaming the surrounding ground and plants… the pod’s coloring fading to an orange, then yellow, and slowly stopping at a deep forest green, to blend with the surrounding flora. All was quiet as the night drew on… a soft rain fell, bringing with it a peace and comfort, allowing things to return to a semblance of normalcy.
note to self – write about moving out over thanksgiving, reasons, situation. living with Laura & the twins.
I feel slightly nauseated. mental tracks for a story got too cruel, too mean sprited for me. It needs major reworking, and some poetic justice.
revision – 3:10pm. No, let’s not. focus on cool stuff. 🙂
abandoning life selling idea. too mean, too cruel.
31st-Century English: Let’s get this straight, although I speak English, I’m not its biggest fan. What we have here is a language that began as a bad habit shared by Norman soldiers and Saxon barmaids who discovered that if they shared that habit they could share other things. Then the island empire they populated went all imperial and the bad habit was exported to at least four other continents. Then their colonies compounded the problem by revolting and splintering the language, and then insisting on the right to absorb other cultures ad hoc and ad nauseum (but not ad-free, unless you subscribe.)
Give me your tired, your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
And I will give them a horrible new language to speak,
Which they will then mutate even more. (emphasis added*)
And then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, one of the colonies began exporting soldiers and technology across the face of the planet so that this mutated, awkward tongue became the de facto standard for business.
Needless to say, when Earthmen went to space and joined Galactic civilization, the language of corruption, conquest, and compromise struck the rest of the galaxy like a plague. It was like influenza among the native americans, or that Apple virus uploaded by that one guy during the Independence Day movie. Our galactic neighbors never stood a chance.
The worst part… Earth never apologized, and the descendents of the ancient royal families of the former British Empire (now comprising less than a billionth of a percent of the galaxy’s English-speakers) continued to insist that everyone else was talking funny.
*Emphasis is also indicative of abject corruption of the original poem.
How did Lorne Green know that the new Alpo tasted better?
meat by-products, in a thick savory sauce. ew.
after I eat, isn’t the by-product poop? I’m made of meat.
for that matter –
Why do restaurants advertise having a “drive thru window” when they won’t let us drive through it?
After blathering on in an e-mail list as to why you shouldn’t send HTML to folks back and forth… I figured I’d post it here, too. most writing done in a while.
My sympathies to all e-mailing from company environments where every message gets converted to HTML. Indeed, there is nothing the individual can do as this is almost always corporate policy and will not be changed. The reason is usually to tack on a corporate message of some sort to every outgoing piece of mail, and the editors of these programs to add commercials or corporate disclaimers and disavowals all default to HTML. Since this is the bailiwick of corporate Legal or Human Resources, don’t expect them to look beyond the default setup.
Just to repeat the process in another order to show the sequence:
1) You write message scrupulously formatted in plain text, the format of champions.
2) But squatting on the outbound queue is a software suite for covering corporate asses. It reads everything outbound, and depending on how much
money you spend it can:
a) Virus check. Ha, as if. Even if it costs nothing because the software is on hand and part of a corp license, only the Dalai Lama would be evolved enough to *slow the queue down* just to be civil. OK, I exaggerate… slightly.
b) Check for hot words like ECHELON and quarantine anything doubtful. Remember, as most corps phrase their E-mail Usage Policy “use of the company e-mail system implies consent to the conditions outlined in this Policy”, and that means you said it’s OK for them to read your mail. They promise not to unless they *really* want to.
c) Check for words related to internal projects to prevent company secrets from going out.
3) It adds some advertising or legal boilerplate to distance the company from anything this bozo might say out to the real world.
a) The message was composed in an HTML editor and is in HTML format for that extra something that HTML always adds.
b) It tries to add the HTML coda to the plain text message, only to find that plain text doesn’t support color or graphics.
c) So the plain text message in converted to HTML so the HTML coda can be added. And the world takes another step towards the Endtimes.
HTML is code that is interpreted in order to display the message in the chosen font and color and so on. It has access to the abilities of macro-enabled e-mail clients. It used to be said that e-mail couldn’t infect your system with a virus because it didn’t run anything, it just carried it.
That is no longer true, and I can’t thank Microsoft enough for making that the standard.
These “features” can be turned off, but they default to On.
I can think of plenty of Ad Prac 101 reasons for making e-mail bigger and enabling macro “viruses” that can be written by grade schoolers.
According to Steve Gibson’s page – http://www.grc.com
“Windows XP’s new support of the full raw socket application programming Interface (API) allows for the creation of fraudulent and damaging Internet traffic. This has never been possible under Windows without first modifying the operating system with third-party device drivers – which has never been done by malicious programs.”
and
“For the first time ever, applications running under the Home Edition of Windows XP – whether deliberately executed or running as hidden “Trojan” programs – will be easily able, without modifying the operating system in any way, to generate the most damaging forms of Internet attacks.”
Denial of Service attacks on corporate routers, things like that.
Security software is going to be a hot item, expect weekly updates. Home firewalls for everyone with a cable modem. Net traffic updates on the commute to work. E-mail “going down” on a regular basis due to spam traffic and macro viruses.
Those gosh darn personal computers at home are a clear and present danger to business. They need to be regulated and licensed and restricted and above all controlled. 😉
Author: So, you’ve had a chance to look over the changes I want made to the online article, yes? When can I expect to see them?
Mike: Well, I had a couple of questions about that.
Author: Yes?
Mike: Uh… I’ve been looking at the changes, and it seems… I just wanted to make sure I understood…
Author: Yes?
Mike: …that you want your tables to, uh, look like ass.
Author: Yes. The tables are unsatisfactory as they currently appear.
Mike: So you want us to change them, so that they look like ass.
Author: Correct.
Mike: Total ass.
Author: That’s right.
Mike: You want us to take these perfectly clear and well-formatted tables… and turn them, basically you want us to turn them into an ass-cream sundae.
Author: Exactly.
Mike: With extra ass-sauce on top.
Author: You are exactly right.
Mike: …
Author: …
Mike: …
Author: So when can I expect to see those changes?
Count Vostok tossed his black cape up elegantly, revealing the dusky gray lining as he spun on his heel and faced the mirror. A portion of cracked, chipped skull was all the reflection he had.
“Curses!” he said. Three centuries old and he still couldn’t remember about mirrors. At the dresser he patted some powder on his neck – reflection or not he knew how uninviting a five o’clock shadow could look on an aging face…and tonight he was hungry. His appetite had faded some over the years, often he took a fresh victim just to keep up appearances. “There is no rest for the wicked,” he thought, then he sighed.
As he was pomading his hair he heard a rap at the door. Night was freshly fallen so he strode over without fear. No one was outside the door; brilliant city lights rainbowed in blurry tears. He reached in his cape for his contacts. His eyes adjusted and as he was about to shut the door, he looked down and saw a baby in a basket.
He carried the baby inside, taking note of the blue blanket. Scratching his silvering head he figured that maybe some city agency had mistaken him for a foster parent and delivered him a child. For sure he didn’t want the burping little beast, baby blood was about as tasty as juice from sour crab apples.
The Count finished his toilet by sweeping his hair back dramatically, then he turned to check on the baby. It was sleeping peacefully, sucking on the bottle of warm blood he’d given it. He decided to go out and then ponder the matter later. Spinning on his heels he became a bat in a flash and flew out the window and off toward the gibbous moon.
In the dew-cool quiet of 3am the Count returned, his long shadow moved by the window as he lit up the candelabra. He’d forgotten about the baby and was planning on a little reading in his tiny library.
A yawning Count Vostok turned to cross the room…what he saw froze him in his tracks. Bloody handprints were smeared across the wall. Tables, lamps and ashtrays were knocked over, and a half-eaten body lay on the hardwood floor. It was the body of a mailman – his mouth was open to scream, but his tongue was torn out. A hole of black and blood was all that was left of his belly and one of his arms was gone.
There was no sign of the baby, but the side door was ajar. Spotting the baby bottle, the Count went over to pick it up. Just then a puppy bounded in the door and dropped a mouthful of intestines on his shoes. The puppy sat at his feet and licked the blood off its paws.
“A wolf pup,” the Count said to himself, then he glanced around the gory room. “Werepuppies do the darnedest things,” he said, wondering what to do about the pooch.
The night amplified the footsteps of someone coming up the street; the pup bounded out the door, followed by the Count. “Heel boy! Heel!” the Count hollered, his voice echoing down the street.
It was too late, he thought as the waves twisted and warped, falling downwards even in the middle of the sea. Three centuries and more we had battled the forces of darkness, sometimes winning, sometimes not. But in the end, even when they lost it hadn’t mattered.
People died and nations fell, but humanity had gone on.
But not this time. As he picked himself off the deck, he could see John Kirkman laughing his head off as he stood on the water as if it were land. It wasn’t a pretty laugh, it was the laugh of the villains on the holos. Or rather, what the programmers strived for. A laugh that chilled the bone, that ate the soul. The situation was made even worse by the fact that the setting was beautiful. A warm August day in the middle of the ocean, even though too polluted to swim in the sea reflected the white sun’s rays, unblocked by ozone, magnificently.
The hole in the ocean widened, and from it tentacles rose, in numbers beyond counting.. No, not tentacles. Cilia. Now a real tentacle came out, and it was horrible beyond words. And through it all, the same silence, with only Kirkman breaking it.
“I have done as you asked!” he screamed. “I have freed you, Great Cthulhu. Now, grant me my wish. Make me immortal, make me live forever.”
I WILL GRANT YOUR WISH, YOUR TRUE WISH. YOU WISH TO ESCAPE FEAR OF DEATH, AND SUCH WILL I DO.
A tentacle came down, and crushed the sorcerer where he stood.
There was only one thing left to do. The agent fingered the item in his pocket. It was an unornamented bar made of some material he couldn’t identify, and was his only hope. One of a kind, we had discovered it in 2035 and put it into a stasis field, waiting for the final battle. He threw it into the pit, in the way a dying man on Mars might struggle to suck on a bit of oxygen.
Now there was a scream, one on a million frequencies, one within the mind itself.
NO!! THIS CANNOT BE. THIS ISN’T THE WAY ITS SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN!! The rate of closure began to slow, as Cthulhu fought the power of the item. But it did not stop. Any Mythos creature hated the Elder Sign, and the item he had thrown in was the ultimate Elder Sign. A manufacturing error had created it, produced a material which by pure chance had a unique molecule which repeated the Elder Sign over and over, tens of millions of times. And every one of them was affecting Cthulhu.
The scream did not die away, but was cut off as if with a switch. But the agent knew he would remember that scream for the rest of his life.
Slowly he picked himself up, walked past the bodies of the rest of his unit, went to the quantaphone. He punched a number, and a face came up.
“Since we’re not all dead, I presume you were successful.”
“Yeah. But can I ask a question?”
“Depends on what it is.”
“That item, what were they manufacturing, when they produced it by accident?”
“There’s no harm in telling you. They were trying to produce cheese.”
From under his serape, Clint drew two weapons that could only be described as Hawglegs. He seemed to grow larger, more vivid. He was a streetwise cop, a mountain-climbing assassin, and an American commando. He was a veteran Marine and a bare-knuckle boxer. He had taken a bullet for a president, come back from the dead and burned a town to the ground. He’d killed women and children. He’d killed just about every thing that walks or crawls.
“You’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya punk?”
And Clint cut him down with a storm of bullets.
It was that simple.
Before the body could fade away, Clint caught it in the eye with a well-aimed squirt of tobacco juice. “A man’s got to know his limitations,” he said.
Right turn, Clyde.
Sun shined through my slatted shades, and from above. My eyes drew open and I could see down an infinite hallway. Newton was striding towards me, perspective gone all arbitrary.
“You have been meddling with the primal forces of Nature, and you will atone! Hey, Scotto! What movie is that from?”
His nostrils flared and his eyes glittered with feverish hilarity. Closer now.
I went to sleep late last night, but I set my alarm for 10:30
I had fallen asleep.
I may have dropped discipline, but my training was still on duty. Dreaming 101. Look at your hands.
I looked at my hands.
Just like Don Juan taught Castaneda. People usually don’t see their hands in dreams. Look at your hands and take control of the dream.
I slammed the door shut but knew it wouldn’t hold long.
I was on my feet, with a days growth of beard. Khaki pants, green and white striped shirt, and for shade’s sake, a USS Nautilus ball cap. The sun was a bright yellow beam of heat and light beaming into my room. I turned to Newton and said “So, what’s the plan, little buddy?”
He looked me dead in the eye and said nothing.