Thursday, March 31, 2016

Sudden Short Story 108

The girl unexpectedly hugged the boy, who himself pretended to be a girl, and he giggled at the jest. 
"What's this for?" he asked. 
She leaned in close and whispered, "I figured out that you're a boy." 
His first reaction was to jump away, but she held him tight. 
"I can't be a boy," he pleaded.  "Boys are mean, and I'm not mean." 
"I figured it out, though," she said.  "There's something about you that seems different, something that I like....  I realized it after I drank from the fountain of wisdom." 
He struggled with her, but she just held on tight.  "The fountain of wisdom is corrupted and broken," he said, "No one's supposed to drink from it!" 
"And I wanted to know why," she said.  "It all made so much sense afterward, too.  We live forever because we drink from the fountain of youth, but we've forgotten more than we can remember.  Even I don't know where everyone went, and I don't intend to find out.  The grown-ups have been gone for a very long time, and so have the boys.
"But," she whispered again, "now I have a boy of my very own."
And he wondered if she would ever let him go.  

Sudden Short Story 107

The giant's work was almost complete.  His people he carried to their new home, but they did not recognize him as their own.  He was so colossal and so ancient that they had no idea that he was younger than some of their ancestors.  Even he had lost track of their genealogy.  Did any of his friends have descendants here?  Even he did not know, and the internet was long gone.  
He told them to go on ahead, past the first river that they saw, and to stay there until another met them there.  They were reluctant to leave, but they did so, anyway. 
This world was maintained partly by the giant's continuous thoughts, which were so integrated that he could not separate them without also separating part of himself.  He could not stop thinking the thoughts that he had to think to prevent entropy from ruining this place.  He also could not join them as his gigantic self, forever growing.  So, he gave up part of himself.  He petrified his body to protect his nervous system, forming a small mountain with his arched form, his open mouth a cave hidden between his elbows.  He created a body inside of himself from what could be spared of his organic parts.  Then, he reconfigured his nervous system, leaving behind his enthropic thought-patterns and the parts of himself that he could not extricate from them. 
From the mouth-cave emerged a new man, yet the oldest man still alive, and he headed toward the river, to join the rest of humanity. 

Sudden Short Story 106

"So," said one to the other, as they were out on an afternoon stroll, "what made you choose the 1990s planet, anyway?" 
He thought for a moment, to summarize his thoughts, and then said, "I suppose that the main thing was TV.  The broadcast experience adds just the right amount of chaos:  I surf to browse a random subset of what's there, and then pick from that.  If I like a series, I actually have to wait for the next episode, so I can experience boredom, which was a feeling that I'd lost on Earth." 
"That seems fair.  I kind of like the TV, too, though I'm more intrigued by what they do with the effects cap.  That's gotten us some real creativity over the years."