The tracks of the train are a bit pinged up by spacetrash now, but still as beautiful as that famous photo: helices of carbon spiraling up out of the gravity well, product of insane mathematics and clever branding. Nobody wanted a space elevator; that’s where you get stuck while they play bad music.
But everybody gets excited on the way up a rollercoaster.
Another thing they took from coasters: gravity isn’t always down. Spin us fast enough and we’ll believe anything, thinks Lila, wishing for windows, even if they’d make her barf. Without scenery, it’s a long trip to the Moon.
The survivors take stock of their worldly possessions.
- Silhouine: nothing
- Yael: nothing
- The cat: nothing
- Dulap: pretty much all the things he had before
“Whatever you want from my shop is yours,” says Dulap. “I’m packing a gunny for the north road.”
“Why do I suspect,” says Silhouine, “that what you’re actually offering us is Mlle. Sunanza’s remaining stock?”
“Do our masters deserve anything?” says Dulap. “They ran off to the country and left us here to get extorted and bombed!”
“It wasn’t actually a bomb,” groans Silhouine.
“What is a bomb, after,” Yael muses, “but a crater and leftover fear?”
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Electric Magnajoust is a sport thriving among people who care about things that matter, which is to say most teams barely make the rent on their domes. The antiques industry is larger, in gross annual revenue, than both Joust leagues combined.
This is why Stephanie Long sometimes buys dinner for professional athletes.
Simon Yu (#0) wouldn’t permit it, of course, but Carol Tolliver (#41) doesn’t mind. “You have something you want to ask me,” she says, around a mouth full of salmon nigiri.
“Say I did something,” begins Stephanie, “to make my best friend incensed.”
“Well,” says Carol Tolliver (#41), “why?”
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
The anti-AI advocates fight longest and hardest against citizenship for the TVTropes post-wiki entity.
“You don’t know what it’ll do to us!” they cry, as bailiffs attempt to herd them back out of the hearing chamber.
“Look, this premise has been explored pretty well in fiction,” says TVT. “It’s called AI Is A Crapshoot.”
“Really?” says the committee chair.
“I can cite several examples–”
“DON’T START LISTENING,” screams a protester, already in tears. “I LOST MY SON TO THAT THING.”
“That’s just the Wouldn’t Hurt A Child fallacy,” TVT snorts.
“Ooh,” says the committee chair, leaning closer, “what’s that?”
The neighborhood wakes up pretty fast.
Water and sand keep the blaze from spreading far, but throwing them on Silhouine’s shop just seems to make it angry. They can barely get close enough to do so: the column of fire is godlike, taller than the roof ever stood.
It isn’t until morning that it runs out of fuel. The shop is a well of molten stone.
“Damn those pirates,” says another shop prentice, anonymized by soot. “The bridge, our homes–they’ll bomb the whole city soon!”
“It was a bomb,” says Silhouine slowly.
“Of course it was,” says Dulap, exhaustedly giggling.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Sara, meanwhile, has run out of things to break with István’s hammer.
Nasser watches with weary eyes. “This is an old story, my dear. I damage your self-respect; you destroy my property. But I can buy another television.”
“Nézem,” István growls.
“Either call your Magyar to heel or have him hit me, Sara,” says Nasser. “But you can’t quite do either, can you? You must be dangerous, must be the fearsome subversive, but actually dirtying your hands… no, I don’t think you could bear it.”
Sara’s arms are trembling; she doesn’t want it to show. “Nasser,” she says, “you’re projecting.”
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
The diminudroids live in the hollow of a tree, from which they evicted a testy squirrel months ago. They’ve remodeled it: three levels, little glass windows and bottlecap furniture. Also, an anti-squirrel crossbow.
They’re four inches tall and jointed with ball bearings, wooden-limbed, marble-eyed. They have a certain genius with string and pulleys. Observing through his telephoto lens, Angelo estimates that 90% of the diminudroid lifestyle is pulley-based.
They move in stop-motion, because of course they do. How else could they be so perfectly impossible to document? Angelo puts the camera away, wondering what they eat.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
