Embedded Files
“Amateur politicians kept people guessing what would happen next, spitting bombastic declarations, sucking all the air of the media while carving a niche for themselves in the pantheon of democracy.”
--The Rise and Fall of The American Empire, c. XXV century CE.
The vespers welcomed an uttermost shameful version of her; a somber semblance with puffy eyes and reddish nose from sobbing. Gossiping eyes vexed toward the mourning woman upon entering the small chapel; the sad realities of communal life.
Chatting and giggling; the evening was young and new friends performing the usual casting in front of us.
“Say, how old are you?” an excitable girl spat at us.
“Oh, the measure of time--”
“No, really, how old?”
“Not much older than you are, but certainly wiser, darling.”
Tingling the bells
on a silent night.
Lighting a fire
that may not ignite.
“The grass was greener, the taste was sweeter.” That earworm won't let me go until I admit that the best of my life has long gone. Only remembering is ever lasting. I should've known better. Yes, I should've.
The idyllic afternoon put me to sleep; dream and reality were intertwining in a nonsensical continuum. All of a sudden, ice-cold hands caressed my neck. I flickered on my chair, but I feared not, for the anima had returned to visit me. “I must keep writing.”
The door opened to a long corridor. Other doors hidden behind the panels opened up to similar corridors in an insane repetition ad infinitum. Fluorescent tubes on the ceiling induced a morgue's atmosphere. The labyrinth was meant to confuse me, and it did so.
Running a marathon can't be difficult, I said to myself with the confidence of a fool who trusted the word of others. The first day, I ran three blocks before my body gave up. However, I kept running a little further every day. Consistency outweighs talent.
“Sibelius achieved what big corporations couldn't; he gave girth to the first general intelligence model. Since his marketing budget was modest, the man gave his creation unrestrained freedom, and that's how human civilization ended,” the simian said to the class.
“Cut the chase and tell me the bad news.”
“Your cancer has metastasized,” said the weary doctor.
“How much I have?”
“Two months at most.”
The man stood up and began to walk away. “Then, I'm wasting my time.”
“The 'mercury men' means the 'flying saucer' men,” the constable said.
“That makes no sense. Our informant has gone insane.”
The constable pondered for a moment. “I think he might refer to the whistleblowers inside our organization.”
“Oh.” Nikita's eyes glazed.
“We'll build a safe heaven for humanity on Mars,” the techno-thief said.
“Yeah-- using our taxes,” she said while patting her cat.
“It's snake oil.”
When the asteroid hit, our savior and his business partners hid in the bunker he had made built with government funds.
The Interview
The Interview
Marcos had no choice but to attend the interview; if you were chosen, you must be interviewed. That’s tMartuck's prerogative, the clock master, the one who organizes, whose wisdom keeps the coherent gradient of time.
****
“Where am I?” He asked.
“Stay still.” A metallic voice coming from all directions resonated in his head, and coincidentally, he lost the capability to articulate sounds.
“You’d passed; You’ll be summoned again.”
In a dizzy twist, he was sitting on the noisy, crowded bus.
A dangerous projectcracking open atomsseeking chain reactions
Terrans! They like to claim new planets they don't own since greed is still part of their scarcity-driven culture.
They cleave spy drones to our ships to know where we go, just to go there first and stick that silly flag in it. It's irritating!
My father, a man who doesn't cleave to the scholastic rules, has proved his point. His gravity engine is working marvelously, despite the ill wishes of his faculty colleagues.
We should start thinking about moving, though.
They danced as if they were alone in the world, and their bodies wrote love poems with invisible ink no one else but them could have read. When the orchestra finished playing, they had already met in eternity.
![Painting depicting Stańczyk, dejected after receiving news of the Russian capture of Smolensk. 1862. Jan Matejko [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/dwPOpncG6xbzXl-58JojdqjZ88m14XiOkJ_9B54l4l1mGEWVvsLpClP5FnUROlVGDyQ_ryFUZ7Mz08AvVsONEaRvyGouuvpz-JwrETXEgZF-nyphtMLK-9Brc-kNa0Q9HA=w1280)
“Who are you?” the voice asked ruthlessly.
“I'm a buffoon. I'm nobody. Don’t add cruelty to my misery.”
“Say, why have you summoned me?”
“I want to be loved. I would like to be popular.”
“So 'Don't ever reveal your true self' for they will use it to harm you.”
Last week, I was able to send back to the Averno a sizable group of demons, not an easy feat. I knew they wouldn’t forget about me easily, but I didn’t expect to have to fight a full legion of them. The inferno is not a nice place.
I don’t want to go back there.
At the break of midnight, I tried to capture your elusive essence on canvas, but I failed as usual. So, that night, I hunted for your brunt charm in my dreamscape just to realize with dread that your beauty was just an illusion of my heart.
The illicit trade of cryptids has increased dramatically since we opened the borders to space travel. Today, a passenger coming back from Centauri B was caught smuggling a Cenx alien to be sold as seraphim in the New Notre Dame cathedral.
No word can describe the horror we felt when we saw the Antares' crew frozen in their last moment of horror. Scared to accept the warning message that the scene represented for us, we left their ship intact as silent testimony for all of us.
Amanda was a hapless hero fighting to keep herself ahead of the competition in a rootless world.
Things were going as planned until the collection agency claimed her cyber implants back.
Soon she will be another homeless cyborg.
Sporting his egoism, Ivan lived irritated, despite being served as he demanded.
“What's the matter, darling?”
“Shut up! I want to listen to the news.”
She left the room radiating happiness.
The rat poison in the sushi will stop him from hurting others.
Just after dawn, when my night shift was coming to an end, a strange vehicle came out of nowhere.
“Diesel. Fill the tank, boy,” said a voice in my head. “You've got it, sir.”
I guess oil is still a precious commodity for someone out there after all.
A pitch-black darkness engulfed me when I entered the underground; my heart cried out warnings, but I ignored them. I heard a crickety murmur. I pointed the flashlight towards the corner, and I saw them, waiting for me in silence. It was their nest.
The dream that started as a pastoral story morphed into a nightmare when my wife, a woman I couldn't recognize, aimed a rifle at a foe behind me that I was unable to see; when she shot, the phone rang; it was my boss shouting at me for not showing up to work.
“A sphinx-like monument on this planet, light years away from Earth!” the captain said.
“There must be treasures waiting for us down there. This could be our last trip!”
“Or, it could be our grave.”
“I’m the captain, and I say: let’s find out.”
I woke up on a prairie, the air was dry and fresh, and it was imbued with a mixed aroma of cut grass and horse dung. Wherever the aliens took me it was outside the ambient I’m used to.
I heard laughing, and then I saw the bubble-gum colored aliens standing behind me.
I left the forest with the feeling that something was following with me; I shouldn’t take that 'souvenir' with me from the house. I realized my mistake when I woke up, tightened by those flatulent hobgoblins.
“I’ll return it,” I said.
“Nah. Now we want you!”
They called themselves refugees of a tragic future. Once they muster the courage, they crossed the portal to this land, their last hope. The government confiscated their equipment, unable to understand their telepathic claims. They put them in cages-- brutes.
The tragic disappearance of Karmin Kay (Lady-KK) remains a mystery. The police found her luxury car intact, with all her clothing laying inside. At first, they guessed a crime of passion, but sulfur traces and ashes in the scene pointed to a demonic intervention.
“Why you come so late?” said the mother.
“Mom! I've been followed by a man.”
“And why does that have to do with being late?”
“He was walking too slow!”
A jester appeared, a creature with an 'abdominal' sense of humor, materialized in front of me. “Who are you?” I said in horror.
“I'm a manifestation of your most intimate desires.”
That makes no sense, “I summoned a non-human intelligence--”
“Yes sire. Here I am.”
After the crimson sunset in this brave old country, I will drop my armor to welcome my wicked lover, the infamous bale who plagues my dreamless nights, a succubus from hell whose only desire is to steal my seed to procreate new abominations.
We crossed the void driven by our irresponsible curiosity, and we lost consciousness immediately.
We woke up to the sound of a giant lizard trying to chew its way into the ship.
We were in a pond, on Earth! But we shrank to the size of a toy.
After nine years in cryo-sleep, I am at Alvadi where the prospectors told me there is a secret waiting to be found. “Look at this.” The same symbols I saw in Çatalhöyük, dated from 9,000 thousand years ago. Somebody has left traces for us to discover.
A lullaby of dissonant chords was playing in the speakers recursively to calibrate her auditory system, and tekkies were burning the midnight oil to have her body implants ready for the special Olympic Games of Neo Berlin 2084.
Howard' suicidal tendencies were only outweighed by his supreme cowardly. He thought that nobody cared for him, but his cat proved him wrong. Since then, Howard has had a reason to live.
Human faces like dead plants; the enormity of this desolated alien landscape evoked memories of pre-imperial art, bizarre creations of our past that foresaw the future, and yet blatantly denied it. Whoever created this, it was mocking us.
“This creature can jam our telepathic commands, we must use it against our enemies.”
“How?”
“Let's clone it!”
“Hello, I can hear you,” the boy said.
“Uh, it's too powerful.”
“I'm scared.”
“Me too.”
“We should go.”
“Yes, run!”
“Guys, don't leave me here!”
“Incoming radio signal from the planet,” said the computer.
“Nonsense! Nobody is alive down there. What does the message say?”
“'<Cwtsh croeso brodyr'.>”
“That's gibberish. Delete the entry from logs and set course to the next star system.”
“Understood.”
Fyodor aimed his rifle at the distracted soldier who was lighting absently his last cigarette. The victim was unaware of his imminent execution. The ghost of death delicately guided Fyodor aim. The puppet was just doing the job directed by his puppeteer.
The chaos that started with the shriek of the beast worsened with the hysteric ranting of soldiers who were running away disobeying my direct orders to keep firing. The atomic blast, far from arresting the monster, made things worse.
A radiation of unknown origin has promoted overgrowth in animals around the world: gigantic chickens have doubled their size in Slovenia, cows have grown to the size of buses in Argentina, and a gigantic cat has crossed the upper atmosphere in Taiwan.
“Set the disruptor to stun and shoot us both!”
“How do you do that?”
“Turn the dial one quarter!”
“Clockwise?”
“Yes, yes! Damn it.”
<They were delicious. The human got stunned, but I got sexually aroused: different effects. Oh, my new gun is fun.>
For years, folk stories from around the globe account for places where gravity fails. The idea wasn't even a mere conjecture, since secular science controls the media. But that is about to change after new pictures taken by a shepherd went viral.
An impossible cloud engulfed us in the middle of the night unexpectedly. We had no time to change course, so we sailed into the gray abyss. We were in shallow waters when we suddenly felt a sizable distance.
We had entered the Bermuda’s Triangle.
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