Breakups are hard in the postapocalypse: fish remaining in the sea number in the dozens, plus your ex might get ripped on engine cleaner and set half the compound on fire. Â Amid the frantic sand buckets and wet burlap, Helen catches accusing glares. Everyone liked them together. Couldn’t she have stuck with him? Taken one for the team?
They find him sleeping it off in a spider hole near the burnt-out greenhouse, and comfort him. Helen, exhausted, grabs an MRE and trudges off to eat in dawnlight. Hot sauce packets are liquid gold these days, but, Helen decides, she deserves one.
You don’t need a lamp in here. It’s perfectly well-lit.
> GET ALL
What? Why? It’s not even your stuff!
> S
You’re back in the room with the humming sphere. There is a lever here. There is an empty bottle here, because you dropped it on the floor, like a slob.
> PULL LEVER
Nothing happens. Again.
> GET SPHERE
It’s six feet across. Where would you even… no.
> PULL SPHERE
Oh come on.
> PUT LEVER ON SPHERE
This is stupid! Look, you have to float the sphere by blocking up the drain in 5B/2, is that clear enough?
> HINT
I HATE YOU
“Did they name you that as some sick joke?” asks Mirabelle.
Cassandra bobs peacefully in the enclosure, a faintly luminescent little green girl with a cuttlefish head. “Not in the way you mean. Â Dr. Abernathy understood the truth of Cassandra.”
“Which is?”
“She didn’t need a curse. All that is necessary to be disbelieved and then hated is that one predict with accuracy.”
The station’s lights are dimmed and flickering; water gushes somewhere, and the air thickens with the smell of burning insulation. “We’re going to die down here, aren’t we?” whispers Mirabelle.
“One hates to say one told you so.”
Thursday, November 11, 2010
“What can you tell us about this panel you’ve assembled?” reads the nice reporter, off his hand.
“It’s a group of leading incompetists,” Sychko says, “who, I believe, are the only men fit to demolish this fine institution.”
“Yes, why are they all men?” pipes up somebody clever.
“Well, we’re an equal-opportunity employer, but we haven’t seen any female candidates with the lack of training and experience we demand.”
“And did you in fact say that your tenure would ‘end up driving this place into the shitcan?'”
Sychko laughs. “Please! The toilet will be only the beginning of our journey.”
Friday, November 12, 2010
It’s twenty minutes, walking from Woosterford Manor down to the village, or thirty seconds if you grease the cookie sheets. Lavender and Tilla certainly do, speed being the first consideration on this trip and safety fifth (parasols notwithstanding). The residents are scandalized, but residents will be. Lavender discovers she’s lost a crown to an ill-placed branch but they’re laughing too hard to establish which one.
The marriage goes through anyway. Lavender makes the best of it, and when the children ask if she has a gap smile like the legendary sled girl, she winks and hides teeth under their pillows.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Two days without radio contact, and relations among the Arctic scientists are strained.
“I know at least one of you fuckers is infected,” she says, backing up with the axe. The door’s a foot thick, but the cold still pounds through it.
“Calm down, Jana.” Isolde’s trying to edge around one side. “It’s probably dormant up here–”
“Not in the nice warm lab it’s not!” Jana’s shivering uncontrollably. “Everybody show me your wrists!”
Yarborough goes for the fake-out, but before her eyes snap back he’s leaping. The axe comes down. Jana, like the first scientists, tests her hypothesis in blood.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Dogs aren’t the only ones who can do it. They did this study where they had men sweat for an hour in identical white t-shirts and mixed them up and their girlfriends could each identify their boy by smell, without fail, and that’s how Dahlia is tracking him down three miles of subbasement corridor and through doors as thick as sleep. They do not want her here, the secret-keepers. They are helpless before her. Her gun barks and booms the names of dead giants and she strides on, singleminded, a bitch on the scent with a job to do.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
In his day your name was the city where you were assigned and so on file he’s Brandenburg, last of his kind, long since retired into legend. She wouldn’t have known his face, but he showed up in the safehouse with supernatural ease and gave a one-time passphrase, unused for fifty years.
“Whatever you need,” she says.
“Just one job. Finding an asset for an old friend.” He doesn’t smile, but the corners of his eyes crinkle.
“All right,” she says, waking her laptop, “I assume you got nothing in the database?”
He looks at her steadily. “The what now?”
Friday, November 19, 2010
The annual meeting of the Presidents of Things attracts no protests; it’s held in a Days Inn and anyway, no one understands its importance. Â The President of Grownups makes sure of that.
“We have new business to get through, people, pay attention!” Â The President of Whether You’re Paying Attention raps her gavel and frowns. Â “Can we just do a quick vote? Â Those in favor?” A chorus. “Those opposed?”
“Nay,” says the President of Internet, without raising her voice.
Everybody gets quiet at that. Â The President of Internet is a nice lady and all, but never forget: Â she knows what you did.
Monday, November 22, 2010