The enemy was encoding secret messages in plant DNA, so they “captured” a greenhouse.
The first decoded messages were recipes for various dishes.
It was slow going: the greenhouse only grew savory herbs.
The Leader asked, “Have you found anything good, yet?”
The lab tech said, “Only thyme will tell.”
People visit Luna City all the time.
I arrived, did my business. Then took the shuttle headed back to New York.
The shuttle dematerialized into tachyons, and was shot at the Earth.
The shuttle rematerialized before reaching its destination.
If you get caught between the Moon and New York City…
The miller’s son learned that the best starch to be obtained from grain was the starch that got compacted at the bottom.
That starch commanded a higher price. A stiffer price.
Then, his stock of special starch was stolen.
Thus went the story of the Raiders of the Low Starch.
He had to make a name for himself.
He was strong, but not strong enough to be known for his strength.
Quick, but not quick enough either.
So he invented his signature move: ripping out his enemies’ throats until blood oozed everywhere.
That earned him his name:
The Carotid Kid.
“I hold, in my hand, the entire Internet!”
“What, in this tiny USB key? Impossible. The Internet is ever-changing.”
“This device holds not the data of the Internet, but the fractal algorithm which can iteratively generate all the content that will ever be on the Internet.”
“Cool.”
“I thought so.”
She’d been running all her life.
When she died, she was running. Kept right on running, actually.
People would wonder how she could still be running (being dead and all) but instead of asking that, they would ask,
“Why won’t you stop running?”
“Because I can’t.”
“Why?”
“I’m running late.”
“I’m writing a novel.”
“What’s it about?”
“Everything!”
“Must be pretty long, then.”
“Not particularly, no. Actually, it’s probably going to be very short.”
“Then why aren’t you done yet?”
“It’s hard.”
“Ha! What’s so hard about writing a short novel?”
“Well, you try writing a short novel about Everything!”
“Quick, write something, anything!”
“But I’m tapped-out! I don’t have one original word left in me. My mind’s a total blank, and he knows it.”
“You can do it. You have to. He’s got only five pages left. When he finishes the last page, we’re dead.”
“Better dead than derivative.”
“Ever stop to think that Mario might’ve deserved whatever Donkey Kong threw at him?”
Oh boy, another rant…
“Why?”
“Imagine DK hired Mario to fix his pipes. Then the sewers backed up, and there’s shit everywhere. So DK puts the shit into barrels, throws them at Mario, out of spite.”
This is another sequel to an early story of mine from back in july 2009:
The day after Google went down, civilization collapsed. Even people who’d never heard of Google were affected.
Information stopped flowing.
People lost things and got lost themselves.
Finding things by yourself was just too big a chore.
In the end, people only needed to learn to find one thing:
Themselves.