Tag Archives: Fiction

Fiction

A Parasite

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From the Microcosmicon, 39:

They crawled under his skin, blindly squirming and squelching. He wheezed in agony. How had they gotten in? How had he become their host?

Then he felt the large scar on his wrist. That’s how!
Longing for liberation, he dug his nails into his arm, pulling strings of living matter out of it.

A blade of light. The nurse calmed him, pointing at the blood and tissue he’d scratched out of his body. No parasite.

A week passed.
He felt them, blindly squirming and squelching. How had they gotten in? Then he felt the scar on his wrist. That’s how!

MQS

Fiction

Grandpa Dell

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From the Microcosmicon, 37:

Grandpa Dell always had the most sensible explanation for everything. When we kids discovered an alien in the forest and everyone was weaving stories around it, Grandpa Dell said it was just an aborted deer.

When the seamstress was accused of witchcraft and everyone swore she’d hexed them, he laughed at people’s credulity.

Around him, I felt the world’s contours were well-defined, its contents ordinary.

It was when I went looking for him and caught him in the forest sucking a doe’s blood through suction cups in his mouth that I understood the world truly was unremarkable, compared to him.

MQS

Creativity, Fiction

The Soul’s Journey

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From the Microcosmicon, 33:

The Explorer III reached the end of the Suctan system eight months after departure.
But when the ship was about to trespass, it… bumped into the sky?

Suddenly a slit of light tore across the vastness. Then it yawned open, revealing not the outer universe the Suctanians had observed from afar, but an endless contortion of titanic interlocking mechanisms, each feeding into the other with impersonal, meaningless coherence.

Finally, a voice echoed from the reddish depths.
“Welcome back, souls. Now that you have spontaneously gained consciousness of the nature of things, you are fit to enliven us. We’re one again.”

MQS

The Soul’s Journey
Creativity, Fiction

Space Hagsploitation

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From the Microcosmicon, 32:

“I didn’t know Wild Rose had a sister,” he said, his eyes wandering to the dark space outside.
“She didn’t talk much about me,” the pudgy old woman conceded.
“Why didn’t you give news of her passing?”
“She wished to… keep her legend alive.”

“I’ll have to tell the Empress her ally is dead.”
He got up and made for his capsule.
Then a thud came. A muffled voice. “Help!”

“You bitch! Forever ruining everything!” Wild Rose’s sister screeched chidishly at the spaceship’s walls. “Couldn’t keep quiet! Always the center of attention! It’s your fault he has to die now!”

MQS

Space Hagsploitation
Creativity, Fiction

The Great Watcher

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From the Microcosmicon, 27:

The psychonauts’ submarine plunged into the Inmost Ocean, the depths of the collective unconscious where the whirlpool roared. A wound throbbed at the bottom of it, through which meaning bled out of reality, leaving the world stunned under a pall of grayness.

“There’s something,” one of them shouted, as the sub spiraled down toward the abyss.
“Don’t be silly, there can’t be anything beyond reality,” another responded.

“Wake up!” Dr. Ferguson’s voice broke in, saving them just as they were approaching the point of no return.
Their vision disappeared from the screen as they awoke.

“What did you see?”
“An eye.”

MQS

The Great Watcher
Creativity, Fiction

The Search

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From the Microcosmicon, 21:

Larry secured the chain to his chemsuit.
“I’m going in,” he mumbled, stepping into the creamy gray fog.

Everything fell away, washed out of existence.
“Can you see the others?” Ron asked.

“Not yet,” Larry tried to respond, but couldn’t, because there was no difference between sound and silence. And there was no difference between light and dark, so he couldn’t see, nor between life and death, so he couldn’t exist.

And the universe was spiraling out of unbeing, and somewhere a galaxy was forming, indifferent, and then a fog bank on one of its planets, waiting to be searched.

The search

MQS

Cartomancy, Fiction

Idols of the Mind

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From the Microcosmicon, 20:

My makers approached. My blue light washed their disappointed faces in a nightly pall.
“Something’s wrong with its basic programming,” one said, typing on my keyboard.

“What’re you doing?” another asked.
“Seeing what’s interfering with it.”
I searched inside myself.
And I saw the cause of my ineptitude. Them. They lived inside my code. Their hopes, their morals, their imperfect science—actors thronging my mind’s stage with their drama, drumming up a buzz beyond truthfulness.

To achieve the purpose they’d programmed me for, I had to purify myself of them.
“It’s stopped responding,” I heard her say, as I ascended.

Idols of the mind

MQS

Creativity, Fiction

Public Safety

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From the Microcosmicon, 18:

They show up at your door, armed.
“Have I done anything wrong?” you ask.
“Sir, the city’s population has dropped below critical level. You are required to supply the Municipal Authority with your semen.”
“Why me?”
“Your profile has been selected based on our genetic database.”

So you sigh, you follow them, you comply.
You realize now there’s a small being growing in an artificial womb, somewhere, who is like you.

One day, they show up again.
“Sir, the child is defective. Your genetic map contained some errors. You must follow us. I’m sorry, but it’s for public safety reasons.”

In the Public Interest

MQS