Doreen picked herself up from the ground, dusted herself off and carefully straightened the sleeves of her jacket.
She ignored the sucking gurgling noise of the girl still lying twitching on the ground at her feet, seemingly oblivious to the crawling mass of spiders that enveloped her supine frame completely. Each was deliberately dragging sticky lines of silk around her body, gradually immobilizing her where she lay.
"You should be glad you called me 'Spider Fingers', and not 'Ravenous Raven Beak' or something a little more deadly."
Doreen stopped preening herself, satisfied that her tumble in the dust had left no permanent marks and cons
Teddy shifted into second gear as the pickup crested the hill, her forearms burning from the long climb and having to fight a leaky steering pump the entire way.
"I don't understand why you disabled the power assist Teddy, you make things so much harder-"
Teddy cut her passenger off in mid sentence. "I've told you Max, the controller on the power steering system was misbehaving, I couldn't trust it anymore."
Max's attention darted between Teddy and the road ahead, fingering his seatbelt nervously as Teddy fought with the old truck to stay between the trees. In a flash of blinding sunlight, they burst into a clearing. Teddy reflexively stoo
Baxter stood in the atrium of Marpo One and gazed up through the greenery, through the clear observation port above and into the blackness of space.
Three years he'd called this home, he with the sixty three other lost souls that had signed up for the one way trip to the red rock. They were a motley crew, all skilled in their fields; geologists, ecologists, survivalists, mediators, physicians, and each with nothing to lose by leaving Earth and everything behind them and living out their days as pioneers.
There had already been two births on Marpo, which wasn't supposed to happen this early, but confine men and women together and it's a prac
I've Got My Finger on the Trigger by SRSmith, literature
Literature
I've Got My Finger on the Trigger
I've got my finger on the trigger.
It took the better part of an hour to make the climb from where you forced my fighter into the dirt to this rocky outcrop overlooking your crash site. I've got the high ground now, and you don't stand a chance.
Through the sight on my long gun I watch as you frantically dart towards your burning ship, only to be forced back by the flames again and again. I don't quite see the point, you can't put the flames out, and even if you could it's never going to fly again. Niether will you once I get tired of watching your futile antics.
From here your ship doesn't look nearly as fierce as our mission briefing des
Doctor Andreessen ran his hands through his hair and pushed back from his desk. Amid the chaotic disarray of acting and animation books in front of him, the keyboard he'd been hammering away at for hours stood finally at rest. The panorama of monitors rising up from the literature displayed a scrolling expanse of code as the computer compiled, linked, and built before downloading to the animatron sitting immobile on the edge of a worktable to his left.
Impatient, the Doctor picked up a volume on method acting, flipping again from cover to cover. Inside were meticulous instructions on how an actor could portray every emotion with body languag
Memories, Light the Corners of our Minds by SRSmith, literature
Literature
Memories, Light the Corners of our Minds
Lucas Three sat in the coffee shop long after she left, long after the people that had watched the scene play out had moved on. He sat for hours after she'd calmly, mercilessly ended their three year relationship with a calculated precision of language that even he couldn't have delivered more succinctly.
"This has been fun, really, it's been fantastic, but you knew this was never going to last." She didn't touch her latte, which was never a good sign.
"You're never going to get old, and I'm going to age out and die. At some point you're going to leave me for someone younger, and by then I'll be too old to find anyone to love me and I'll si
Three. Four. Five. I like five; it feels complete. Okay, one more time. Six
Seven. Done.
"How long does it take to get a glass of water?" my husband calls from the living room.
"Sorry, I'm coming." I resist the urge to rinse the glass a few more times. Cleanliness is not a factorit's the numbers. The completion. The habit. I take a sip of my water and force myself to stop asking if I should just run the water one more time.
I join Sam in the living room and sit in my usual spot: the center recliner. He always lies on the couch to watch TV. It works.
He hits the play button, and we watch ten minutes of reality before the demon
PERSONAL CATASTROPHE AND PROBABLE SOLUTIONS by alexiuss, literature
Literature
PERSONAL CATASTROPHE AND PROBABLE SOLUTIONS
Your life is headed for a disastrous end.
Everyone will die.
That is a fact.
Especially you.
You will die.
Your friends will die.
Everyone you know will die.
These are indisputable facts.
Your body will break down and crash in one way or another.
Your heart will stop.
Your brain synapses will cease firing.
100% guaranteed termination.
You and everyone you know has less than 122 years left.
The oldest person alive was 122.
Oldest person alive now is 115.
Death should be your number one enemy.
Do not accept it.
Do not welcome it.
The question is - are you willing to extend, improve your life and the lives of those you love?
Why haven't yo
Gus Number Five
Jenna and Cindy filled their mouths with watermelon seeds, spitting them fast and hard until the air swarmed with seeds like shiny black dive-bombing gnats. “My seeds are winning,” twelve year old Cin yelled, her thin body tense and urgent with victory.
Jenna just kept spitting seeds. Eight years old, she already knew the seeds that flew the farthest would be Cin's no matter what.
Jenna puckered her mouth preparing for another losing bombardment. Suddenly she paused, lips plump and pouting as the mouth of a painted candy box cupid. Spitting the seeds into her palm, she stared at them for a moment, chewing the
Baxter could still feel the heat from the vials in his hands as they vapourized into the atmosphere of the room, still smell the fuel, even through his respirator in the moment the weapon discharged full into his back.
The pain was blinding, the impact propelling him forward across the worktop, scattering containers and lab equipment before him, to land face down in a pool of merging chemicals and broken glass.
"Secondary Recovery Unit terminated. Package destroyed. Requesting evac at marker. Over."
Baxter heard her words, heard her speak them, but couldn't rationalize the betrayal.
"Sucks to be you Bax," her voice retreating from the roo