Seasonal greetings from Squishy, your Space Squid mascot (TM)! In accordance with guidance from our funny-in-the-head corporate overlords, we are bringing you three tasty low-time-commitment “content pieces” of cultural interest! As part of our “the first hit is free, as is every other hit” money-losing strategy, the creators are ostensibly not AI entities and were or will be fully compensated for their contributions, which we provide to you for your free reading enjoyment. Specifically, we have a delightful bite-sized modern fairytale from Nicholas De Marino, a tale of a gargantuan creative mishap from George Hurst, and a cartoon about a more martial mishap from Don DeBrandt. Now then: our corporate overlords command you —Enjoy!
The better to…
by Nicholas De Marino
— with apologies to Charles Perrault
Once upon a time there lived in a certain village a little country girl, the most enterprising creature who ever worked the ingénue angle. He mother was excessively fond of her; and her grandmother doted on her so much that German psychologists named pathologies after them. This grand woman sewed a little red riding hood for the girl, despite the fact neither household held horses or even had stables. It was an aspirational thing. Like a vision board.
Naturally, this gave the little country girl a poverty complex.
Determined to escape provincial life, the girl leveraged her grandma’s side hustle mending clothes into a full-blown garment empire. They flogged wares as a mom-and-no-pop shop and really leaned into the image of three generations of seamstresses. In point of fact, the manual labor was all done overseas. Little Red Riding Hood — for the girl had rechristened herself after their best-seller — launched a PR campaign revolving around a quaint allegorical tale involving herself and her eponymous garment. She cast the wolf as the story’s bogeyman, the bogeyman himself being already trademarked.
Business boomed. It boomed so loudly, Johnny Law got wind of the sweatshops, and Little Red & Co. were forced to retool the entire operation.
Automation was the clear path forward, however the overhead was prohibitively expensive. That’s when Little Red looked to her Silicon-Valley-boy-toy-of-the-week, edged him out of his own startup, and went all in on robotics.
In one of those “life imitates art” moments, she found herself on stage, trying to fleece a flock of angel investors alongside an unpaid intern inside a mock-up production android.
“GrandmotherBot3000, what strong arms you have!”
“ALL THE BETTER TO LIFT AND COMPRESS MATERIALS WITH ONE THOUSAND KILOGRAMS OF PRESSURE, MY DEAR.”
“GrandmotherBot3000, what efficient legs you have!”
“ALL THE BETTER TO REACH SPEEDS OF THREE POINT SIX METERS PER SECOND, MY CHILD.”
“GrandmotherBot3000, what ultra-sensitive ears you have!”
“ALL THE BETTER TO, UM, HEAR IN THE ONE HUNDRED TO FIVE HUNDRED HERTZ RANGE, MY CHILD.”
“GrandmotherBot3000, what high-resolution eyes you have!”
“ALL THE BETTER TO LIVE STREAM 4K VIDEO TO GENERATE ADDITIONAL REVENUE STREAMS, MY CHILD.”
“GrandmotherBot3000, what big teeth you have got!”
“ALL THE BET —”
And then the intern tripped and fell on Little Red. As she lay there, trapped under the weight of faux android, she had a vision of a lovely horse in a meadow not far from her old house in a certain village. Her final thought was that maybe she just should’ve been a horse thief.
IMPROBABLE And Unfortunate
by Don DeBrandt
Intelligent design
by George Hurst
Ed slumped onto the lab table. The cool metal soothed his forehead and stopped him throwing up. Which he’d done twice this morning. God, he wasn’t looking forward to cleaning up when he got home. But he’d clean up a million roomfuls of sick if it meant he could undo last night. Why? Why had he even taken it to the bar?
He whimpered as he turned his head to look at the coffee machine waiting by the sink. So far away. He squeezed his eyes shut. The sphere. The bloody sphere. Had he really juggled with it? He winced. Why?
No chance of finding it. He massaged his forehead with two shaky fingers. Not a chance in hell. All those people who would be waiting, cameras flashing. All the wasted money. Thousands of hours spent designing every bloody inch of that ball. Now one drunk night and he was going to lose his job. Maybe… fuck, maybe he’d go to prison.
He lolloped round so that he could read the clock above the door. Half an hour. He had half an hour. There it was in his mind again; the ball going up, the ball going down. Arcing into a crowd of screaming drunk people.
He’d give himself one more minute for self-pity and then he’d have to do something. The second hand shuddered round the clock face and clambered up to the top.
Forget-the-hangover-o’clock. He dragged himself up, chair screeching on the resin floor, and staggered to an empty counter. If he could just make something quickly… it would be terrible, but people thinking he was shit at his job was better than prison. He yanked open the storage cupboard. He pulled a shaky hand through his sweaty hair and scrambled around for stuff at the back. He needed something sphere-like, something…
Ha! His fingers scratched something round and smooth. A table tennis ball. The table tennis ball he’d used to bounce against the wall when he was bored, until that time he’d smashed a very expensive metering array. He wrestled it out from behind a bunch of folders and test-tubes and metal implements. A few dents here and there, probably not round enough, definitely not smooth enough. But also — and he tried not to swear out loud — his only choice.
Ok. Water. People need water. He darted to the sink, slapped the tap on, and splashed the ball a bit. Now for a quick flash freeze so it stayed there before the sun melted it later. He yanked the little silver machine open. It dinged and he tossed the ball in. He watched it, fingers clenched around the table edge. This was never going to work.
Bing. He grabbed the ice-crusted ball, yelped at how cold it was, and tossed it back onto his workstation. Now soil. For the sphere he’d carefully found the perfect blend and placed each piece with micro-tweezers. This time… there was a little pink geranium in a pot on the window. It was going a bit brown, which didn’t bode well, but fuck it. He grabbed a few pinches of soil and smeared them on.
Minerals next. He puffed out a sigh of relief. Strewn over one of the counters were bits of smashed-up leftovers. The stuff he’d meant to hoover up. That was a tiny pinch of zinc maybe? A bit of iron? He wasn’t sure and he didn’t have time to check. He swept it all together, then grabbed the superglue he’d used to fix the coat-peg by the door. A few slathers would be enough. Fingers-crossed this stuff would hold at high-velocity. Or that no-one would dig down too far. Fuckity fuck.
What else do people need? Would be nice if he could think straight. They had atmosphere generators. They brought their own plants and animals. He didn’t need to add mountains; the ball was rough enough to do that on its own. There were going to be too many mountains.
He looked at the little ball and sighed. There had to be more. It seemed too simple. Which meant, no doubt — he grabbed the container waiting on the side — it was all going to go terribly wrong. He plonked the ball in and it made a sqwush noise as it was sucked into its protective cocoon.
Ed grabbed it up from the table and went for the door. In a few hours this little ball would be shot up into space. In a few hours more it would be planet-sized. In a few weeks it would have people living on it. Oh god.
***
‘The latest planetary launch, completed early last month, has proved to be particularly successful. Reports suggest that the colonists have established a flourishing settlement, with new equipment to be flown out from Tranquillity, the lunar base, within the next few days. The planet’s design has received high praise for its balance and originality, with Architect Edward Alfson recently nominated for the prestigious Intelligent Design Award.
The colonists have made their homes in the more hospitable mountain regions, while it’s the planet’s deeper valleys that have attracted particular attention. Alfson’s surprising use of the common household product ‘Stik-that’ has meant that certain areas of his planet LAP993 are particularly suited to hydrocarbon-based life, single-cell forms of which have recently been developed.
LAP993 was expected to be a simple colony planet, but Alfson claimed some last-minute inspiration: “My mate Cal [Dr. Calvera of the United Lunar Institute] is one of the scientists working on hydrocarbon life, and I realized last minute that I wanted to try something different. How are we ever going to advance if we play it safe? I also just got very, very lucky.” Don’t be fooled by Alfson’s modesty — a statement released by the Award’s judges praised his exceptional effort and added, “We are reaching the stage now where our own planets will begin to rival Earth in terms of utility and complexity. Exciting times for humanity lie ahead.”’
About the Creators
Nicholas De Marino needs a hug. Poetry in Dreams & Nightmares and Horrific Scribblings, fiction in BULL and Hell Itself, monthly column (fnord) in foofaraw.
If you were to write a ten-volume epic fantasy starring a punctuation mark, which would it be and why? What would the one-sentence plot summary be?
Convinced “less means more,” a blue collar em-dash bootstraps to prominence in the big city only to discover the horrors of a society sans proper syntax — plus gratuitous bare verbs, split infinitives, and dangling participles.
If you had to sing the plea of humanity for continued survival, what would the chorus be and what existing melody would you use?
To the tune of “O Fortuna” by Carl Orff:
“O Great Old Ones,
from distant moon,
let us bake you some Earth bread!
“Insatiable,
lust-fueled, meat binge!
Impacted colons spur madness!
“But our Earth bread,
will set you right!
Noble, insoluble fiber!
“Your space toilets,
will run crimson!
You should’ve told us you were allergic~!”
Don DeBrandt writes in every genre from weird western to paranormal animal cozy, and does it under four different pseudonyms. He has a wikipedia page if you feel inclined to jump down that particular rabbit hole. He’s published 25 novels, numerous short stories and has a one-panel comic gallery called Absurdo! on humortimes.com. You can find more at DDBarant.com, @dondebrandt and https://www.humortimes.com/cartoons/absurdo-don-debrandt/ .
We like to mock Twilight for the sparkly vampires. I mean, have you ever seen a vampire sparkle? What kind of special effect would you want your vampires to emanate? And how did you come to possess vampires, anyway?
Sparkly vampires are bad, but they aren’t as bad as banjo-playing Riverdancing vampires, which are a real thing in the movie Sinners. I have some experience writing vampires in my series THE BLOODHOUND FILES, which deals with a world where vampires, werewolves and golems are the dominant civilization and human beings are a federally-protected endangered species. Due to superior anticlotting technology, you can walk into a Starbucks there and order a hemacchino.
If you were to write a ten-volume epic fantasy starring a punctuation mark, which would it be and why? What would the one-sentence plot summary be?
While some would prefer the obvious choice of an exclamation or question mark, I would use the ellipsis. It creates suspense, can imply anything, and demonstrates that periods lining up is more than just a biological phenomenon. Also, I have a friend named Ellipsis and Elly would be thrilled to be the subject of a ten-volume epic fantasy, especially since she’s the author of a more than ten-volume online epic fantasy comic called GOBLINS. Which is also very funny.
George Hurst is a British sci-fi author who lives and writes in the Dorset countryside with her 4 dogs. She enjoys playing tennis, drinking tea, and has a degree in archaeology. Her stories have appeared in DSF and Pulp Asylum.
Wandering through the streets of Austin, Texas, you discover an inebriated robot in a back alley by the urine-streaked dumpster, surrounded by three empty quart-sized bottles of 10W30 motor oil. In your pockets you have a dirty Kleenex, a ballpoint pen, a twist-tie, a breath mint, and an old promotional AOL floppy disk. What do you do?
We’ve all been there. I’d help the guy up, wipe the oil off with the Kleenex, and get him to the nearest Robo-hotel. But I’m also not above using the ballpoint pen to give him a fancy moustache.
We like to mock Twilight for the sparkly vampires. I mean, have you ever seen a vampire sparkle? What kind of special effect would you want your vampires to emanate? And how did you come to possess vampires, anyway?
I was a teenage girl when Twilight came out, so I’m okay with the sparkly vampires, but if these are my vampires I’d want them to emanate something useful, like a high-pitched squeaking noise that would get my dogs to come back on walks. And I probably picked them up moping around a gothic building somewhere – we have a lot of those in England.
Illustrations sourced from Pixabay artists betidraws and AlexAntropov86. Composited by editor D.R.R. Chang, a designer and game writer from Austin, Texas. His short fiction has appeared in Avast, Ye Airships! and the Cryptopolis science fiction anthology, and he cowrote a free retro JRPG some people raved about.
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