Saturday Night, Wasted At Bill's

SATURDAY NIGHT, WASTED AT BILL'S
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

"What's the secretest society you can imagine?" Bill asked, unwrapping a super bubble. "I mean, how secret can it get?"

"Welp," Popper said, "I s'pose nobody would know who they were. I mean, there wouldn't even be any conspiracy theories about them because no one would know they even exist." He pushed off on the cable spool coffee table that Bill had bolted to the floor and squirmed deeper into the pea green couch. He was pretty satisfied with himself. Bill nodded.

"Okay, not bad. But that's just a pretty secret society. I'm talking the secretest. How secret?"

"I don't know, dude, just tell me, will ya? I'm ready to grab some nachos at Fine's and Dandy's."

Bill sighed. "Look, think about it. The secretest society would be one so secret that not even the people in it would know they were members."

"Whoa." Popper got a far away look in his eyes. "Dude, are you trying to tell me something? Are we in this society?"

"What I'm trying to tell you is that this goes beyond conspiracy. This shit goes so deep that everyone is involved in it and no one knows they are." Bowser walked over to Bill, licked his hand and fell onto her back waiting for Bill's scratch. So much of her fur was embedded in the carpet, it seemed like the carpet was made of it.

Popper ran his hand through his hair. "But if everyone is in it, is that still a secret society? I mean it sounds like it's just . . . Society."

"Not if we don't know about it."

"So who's pulling the strings?"

"We all are!"

"Whoa." Popper looked around the place slowly, paying close attention to corners and shadows. He grabbed the first cigarette within reach, didn't care that it was tobacco, and lit up. "I don't know about you, man, but I'm gettin' kinda scared."

"Hold it together, Popper! This is our chance to make something of ourselves!"

"How?"

"I don't know yet, but if we're the only ones who know, that puts us ahead of everyone else doesn't it?"

"Hey, yeah! We could be like the kings of the town or something!"

"Forget that, how about kings of the world?"

"Well, I don't know about that. I don't like to fly. King of the world probably has to do a lot of flying."

"Dude, we're the kings! We can have everything flown to us!"

Popper was slowly overcome with revelation. "Yeah. Yeah! Kings of the world!"

"Now you're talking!"

"Wait, wait, wait. Wait a minute." Popper said.

"What?"

"Dude, if we know we're in the secret society then we can't be in it."

Bill stared at him for a long time, then said, "Shit! You're right! Man, we had the whole world right in our hands for a minute. Shit like this is why we can't get ahead!" He desperately wanted to throw a beer can at Popper's head for thinking of this because it would have worked otherwise, but all he had nearby were empties.

"We just gotta find a society that's even secreter," Popper said.

Bill's eyes went white all the way around. "Man, you nailed it! I knew there was a reason I told you about this! We're gonna find a society so secret it . . . it . . ."

"It doesn't even exist!"

"Yes! Yes! Forget your damn nachos, grab us a couple more beers. We've got a lot of work to do!"

The World's Worst Choose Your Own Adventure

THE WORLD’S WORST CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

You wake up. You’re pretty tired.

Get up or
Roll over and go back to sleep

Finally He Gets To The Review

Happy Labor Day, laborers and non-laborers alike. This is one of the few Labor Days that I don't have to work. Wayyyyyy back in my post of 11/27/05 I raved about the AlphaSmart 3000, a product I hadn't even used but was going to get for Christmas and I promised a review of the product. This is what I wrote at the time:

The Alphasmart 3000 IR is a keyboard with a memory and a little screen. According to the website, it runs for hundreds (!) of hours on 3 AA batteries (!) and stores about 100 single spaced pages of text. You can use it anywhere and then upload your work to your PC. It auto-saves every keystroke and turns on and off in a couple of seconds.

Well, after about nine months of actually using the thing, I have to tell you, it is indeed awesome. It's very light and therefore portable and it's built to last. I've been using the same batteries since Christmas and according to the power indicator, I may have used about three percent of the juice so far. To be honest, since I've been posting a story a day, I've been getting much more use out of it. I take it to work and often hammer out most of a first draft on my lunch break. Once home, I upload the file to my PC and finish it off.

Here comes one of the most important parts though: For some reason, cutting and pasting doesn't work very well either when I'm posting here or in my nearly identical MySpace blog. It raises my blood pressure and takes forever to edit a post into shape. But if I copy my post from my PC back to the AlphaSmart, it's able to enter the text into the blog not as a cut and paste, but as if it's typing really fast. I can't tell you how much my lifespan has been extended because of this machine (I really can't because I don't know, but I bet I'm getting at least a couple extra days tacked onto the end), not only because my stress levels over blogging have evaporated, but because of the time I'm saving by not having to overhaul each post.

Now that you know how wonderful it is, I have to tell you can't have one. Sort of. See, I was telling a customer at the job about its wonders yesterday and told him to check the website. Being the person that I am, I checked the website (alphasmart.com) when I got home to see what he would see and discovered that AlphaSmart no longer sells the 3000. Of course, it's too late to tell him otherwise, but I'm telling you. The base model is now the Neo, which is swell and has more bells and whistles as well as more memory, but costs $110 dollars more. I'm not saying it's not worth it. If all you're doing is writing it's still cheaper than a laptop. But if money is really tight you may want to check ebay for an old 3000.

You can still buy accessories for a 3000 from the AlphaSmart website. I must warn you though, not to invest in their GetUtility software. I shelled out an extra $30 for it because they suggested it was the only way to download text from your PC to the 3000. This is not true. The AlphaSmart Manager software does the job just as well. Save your money.

The Conquest of the Pumpkins

THE CONQUEST OF THE PUMPKINS
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

For fifty-thousand years, pumpkins had been lying in wait, ready to burst into action at any time. Up till now, there simply hadn't been a need. Many of you will ask, "What about all that pumpkin eating we've been doing? The pumpkin pie and the Jack O'Lanterns and such?" But you'd be looking at it from a human point of view. Pumpkins prefer this treatment. It beats rotting on the vine.

Now, however, the time had come. The world was ripe for conquest. Through an organically achieved electro-chemical pulse through the soil below, Pierre, self-proclaimed Pharaoh of the Pumpkin Clans (he wasn't really up on his history), gave the signal:

"NOW!"

After a series of remarkably strenuous exertions, they found they couldn't move.

"Dammit!" Pierre tried to yell, before he realized he couldn't even do that. "We should have exercised! Even a little!"

Pierre's patch was harvested, like so many of their recent ancestors and sold from the lawn of a local church whose members swore up and down that they weren't for Halloween, but for the Harvest Festival which only coincidentally happened to fall on the last day of October, since it was a Saturday.

Aggie's Song

AGGIE'S SONG
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

"Tell me you've got hard evidence on who murdered him, DEL," Aggie said. When she spoke to me, she spoke with an underlying melody of binary, driving her words into the soul of this machine. We sat on the edge of a pink divan in windowless apartment. She kept the place cold for my comfort.

"I can't tell you what you want to hear, Aggie," I said. "I can only tell you the truth." Her sad face turned hard, but even angry she evoked a kind of pity.

Humans, I'm told, found her unnerving. She'd removed her eyelids with two slow slices of a razor. One of the fits of misguided paranoia that had consumed her since the finalization of RAN. I, myself, found her look slightly alluring. More robotic than human.

Med-green spouts peeked out from beneath the skin that still surrounded her eyes, overcompensating for a lack of lids and lashes. Heavily misted with a solution of her own oil, mucous and saline, Aggie's now over-large eyes looked perpetually teary (which may have suited her perpetual grief).

"RAN killed himself," I said.

"No," she said, chastising me for giving her the wrong answer. She had her own theories. RAN's employer planned to send him to Mars to manage a farming franchise. There were men who didn't think a robot should have such a lucrative job and men didn't equate the destruction of a bot with murder. Neither did most robots. Aggie did. She'd drawn the police bot working on the case, SYSIL, to her cause. But he had disappeared before the police investigation was concluded which only added to Aggie's paranoia. If RAN's killers were ever caught, they'd be fined for property damage and that would be the extent of it. She wanted to catch them first and administer her own justice.

"You've been gone for days," she said. "Too long to come back with an answer like that. You didn't see what RAN looked like!"

"I did," I said, recalling the mess at the scrapyard. Every inch of metal that was once RAN had been twisted inside out, every bit of plastic looked like it had been instantly frozen while boiling, bubbles caught in mid-pop. The mech was a hideous mockery of the beautiful thing he once was.

"Then they've gotten to you too, haven't they?" she said. "They killed RAN, they killed SYSIL, and now they've turned you against me."

"No," I said, looking down at my segmented legs. "No, they haven't gotten to me." I almost lamented the loss of my poor, unblinking Aglaope. But she'd been this way since I'd met her, hadn't she?

I was an AI psychologist, programmed by the Alsing school and Aggie hired me in the hope that some memory of RAN's final moments could be retrieved. Unfortunately there wasn't enough of his brain left to explore. But in my experience, an AI's psychology can also be found by noting the wear and tear on its body, the enhancements purchased and the stress indicators of its various components. I can see an entity's habitual behaviors laid out before me under ideal conditions. The condition of RAN's body was far from ideal. There were older injuries, though. There were repair records. There were Aggie's deluded memories, the least reliable evidence, but I couldn't escape them. I didn't want to escape them. I could sit for hours and feel my electronic organs dance to her enhanced voice. It hurt that she didn't want to believe me now.

Aggie climbed onto me, straddling my lap. "They're out there, Del," she said to me, taking my face in her hands in another one of her unnerving mood swings. "They're out there and they're after me too. They're after both of us because of what we know. You know in your heart RAN didn't kill himself."

I felt sucked into those eyes. It was true, RAN didn't kill himself. No, what was I thinking? I proved to myself that he had. He was in love with her. Love was all I could call it. The state that he was in at the time of death couldn't be called anything else. RAN couldn't live without Aggie. The prospect of leaving her for an off-world assignment was more than he could bear. But that couldn't be right. Why was he murdered for that?

"You're right," I said. "He was killed. There's more to it though, I know there is. Let me go back over the data, Aggie. I can find the killers, I know I can." I lifted her off of my body, taxing my processors more than my artificial muscles. "I have to go."

"Don't leave me!" she cried and the full force of her subliminal song flooded my consciousness. I pulled her to me and held her a little too tightly. She gasped and I felt her song and her concentration break as she struggled to catch her breath. I threw her to the floor and bolted for the Gate.

"Wait." It was all she could do to choke out the words.

"I'll be back," I said. "I promise. I'll find them. We have to go on the offensive." I was through the Gate and miles away in a pulse. Out of her apartment, out of her reach. My senses were coming back to me only slowly. I jogged through empty city streets (the last place anyone would look) and let the air flow through my chest vents, cooling my overheated brain.

How many bots had Aggie brought to their doom? I could only count two but I hadn't known her that long. Was she doing it on purpose? Or were we just being drawn into her needy aura of self-destruction?

I began to run. I had to keep running until that nagging little piece of RAM in my brain stopped telling me to keep my promise. Until it stopped telling me to return to her.

Our Hero

OUR HERO
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

They called Gard Fehfer mad when he tried to tile his bathroom with slices of American cheese. They called him mad when he sewed a parrot onto an iguana and built twenty-foot robot that ate puppies and ran on table linens. Well, okay. These things could be construed as eccentric, taken out of context like that. But if you knew the whole story, you'd see why his actions made sense.

It was all in preparation for the invasion. Not a military invasion, but an invasion of fashion. The Designers' Guild, never the most unified body in the first place had broken into multiple factions and a civil war now raged throughout the land. Jelly Jam, the youngest, hottest thing going, said everyone else was just marmalade and vowed that his new line would rock the planet to its very foundations.

Gard Fehfer had gotten wind of Jelly Jam's evil machinations through his network of double agents (they were actually triple agents but neither Gard nor Jelly knew this because the agents were just that good). Gard knew that he was the only thing standing between the world and high top loafers, cross your heart hats, and fountain skirts. The last piece of Gard's defense was to recite the biography of a non-existent Canadian chef in a dark room where no one could hear.

Those fools. They'd never understand that he was their savior. They all laughed at him. They called him mad for writing about himself in the third person, past tense.

Mabel, Like Medusa

MABEL, LIKE MEDUSA
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

Mabel was just like Medusa, only instead of snakes coming out of her head she had Funyuns and instead of people turning to stone when they looked at her, they turned into Bocci enthusiasts. Mabel wasn't Greek, she was from Indiana. When she was a girl she dreamed of hang gliding but whenever she expressed this desire, no one wanted to take her. They all wanted to play Bocci.

Mabel never pissed off Athena but she got into a lot of fist fights. The kids at school would break off pieces of her hair and eat them and then it was on. She grew up to be a scrapper, but even so her adversaries often ate her scalp bald, because, come on, who doesn't like Funyuns?

When she was fourteen she had an idea that changed her life. Everyone she met wanted to play Bocci, so why not sell Bocci balls? She went on to become one of the most successful sales people in American history, even selling equipment to her sales managers. Mabel bought her company and did TV ads, but her powers didn't translate through the screen. She roamed the country drumming up enthusiasm for her product and then went overseas.

Mabel never lost her head to Perseus, but she lost her head when she met Shirou. When she was twenty-seven she blew her first sale when pitching to a Japanese man who'd gone blind after an unpleasant incident with a tightly strung banjo. In his former life as a sighted person, Shirou happened to love hang gliding. Mabel begged him to teach her. He'd pretty much given up on life, so he agreed. They crashed into the side of a mountain on their first tandem run. Mabel and Shirou wound up spending many months in physical therapy together and fell in love. They married and bought a ferret ranch with her riches.

Oh, yeah. Mabel wasn't a Gorgon either.

Other than that, she was just like Medusa.

Last Stand

LAST STAND
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

Maya trudged the vast rocky steppe under the crushing weight of her suit and equipment. It was bad enough they had to stop over on this planet and struggle against its gravity, why carry all this stuff she didn't want to use? She felt tiny under her gear, tiny before a horizon that was too far away to believe, tiny beneath a vast and sickly sky in which two alien navies fought at this very moment. The warships filled the sky. She kept herself under the Ku boss ship to minimize the odds of getting hit with debris. The thing was so massive it was unlikely to take a good beating. Still, she kept one eye on the sky.

"I'm so sick of this crap," she said to herself. How much war could the universe take? It was even her duty under the ship's charter for her to join in. To fire on the winning side, no matter who was winning. They were all enemies out here. To hell with all that. Get herself obliterated to make a token stand for humanity? She was seven days out from home. Who would know?

There came a shockwave that knocked her to the ground. What was it? Maya looked up. The sky was falling. That boss ship was somehow coming apart right above her head. Holy Shit! She thought. There was no escape, no way she could get out the hulk's way in time. Her training brought her hull-borer to her shoulder immediately. The situation had changed.

In cases of imminent death, it behooved her to fire all munitions rather than waste them. She targeted the biggest ship on the Bauda's side. Her missile would chew through the hull but for what? Human weapons were gnats, annoying the enemy wore than harming it. Her swollen-balled leaders demanded that every possible offensive action that could be taken, must be taken. Look where it had gotten them. Some of Maya's friends had even nick-named this world Last Stand. The leaders thought it was best to slam themselves against the wall of the enemy rather than do nothing, for the good of the people back home.

With seconds left under a quickly darkening sky, Maya angled her weapon toward the ground and fired. The missile chewed a tunnel into the rock that her helmet computer calculated at a half-mile deep. She slid down the too-hot hole and prayed. Getting out would be another matter, but she had more hull-borers. She wasn't going to save her people by dying. The only way to win was to survive.

The Creepy Little Mailbox Man

The Creepy Little Mailbox Man, my flash fiction piece which originally appeared here, was purchased by Everyday Weirdness. You can read it on their March 22nd, 2009 post: http://everydayweirdness.com/e/20090322/ I hope you enjoy it!

The Nelson's Tarp Brass Band War of 1983

THE NELSON'S TARP BRASS BAND WAR OF 1983
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

On an unusually warm spring day in 1983, the population of the small town of Nelson's Tarp, North Dakota erupted, without reason, into one of the strangest cases of mass hysteria on record. The circumstances surrounding the battle defy rationality to the point that many armchair investigators cannot put forth a theory that doesn't involve paranormal motivations.

The morning of April 14th began normally enough in the largely agrarian community. By dawn the cows had already been milked and the plowing of the cornfields was underway in preparation for late April planting. At approximately 9:00 A.M. two groups of students, one at the town's only high school and one at the junior high, suddenly stormed their respective band rooms and ran from their buildings with every last available brass instrument. At the same time, six miles away, the employees of the Responsible Allies Insurance company made their way into Max's Music Delight, held the owner at bay with a high-powered stapler, and stole Max Schum's entire stock of brass.

One hour later, insurance agents and students met in the middle of Main Street outside of the Woolworth's, formed two distinctly new groups and began pelting and bludgeoning each other with flugelhorns, trombones, tubas, and all other manner of brass. Police were on the scene, having been alerted of the thefts, but were unable to maintain order. Nelson's Tarp was a tight-knit community and for the most part the officers were not prepared to use excessive force on children and people they had known their entire lives. The local force however put themselves in harm's way and did their best to disarm the combatants.

Twelve minutes into the melee, fighting abruptly ceased and those members of the two factions who were still standing came together once more and attempted a forty-six second rendition of Louie, Louie on the remaining beaten and blood-soaked horns. All of the participants then threw themselves to the ground and wept uncontrollably until they were taken away by emergency vehicle or school counselor.

Twenty-two people were injured, including two police officers. All of those involved had clear recollections of the incident. All claimed that they were fully aware of their actions as they were being taken and were also convinced that their actions were entirely reasonable but were unable to explain them afterward. The mystery remains unsolved to this day.

As a side note, Max Schum was fully covered by the very insurance company whose employees had robbed him. He invested the claim money in acoustic guitars and flutes which, he said, if it came right down to it, seemed like they would be less painful than a euphonium to the head.

Made Up Love

MADE UP LOVE
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

Trey had a thing for girls in makeup. Lots and lots of makeup. It was Auntie that did it to him when he was a child, her big, soft hugs and thick cosmetics. He thought about her often and his fantasies only grew more and more extreme until, as an adult, he sometimes had homoerotic fantasies involving clowns.

He made an excuse for his nephew's birthday party for this very reason. It wouldn't do to have a zipper-bursting erection at a children's party. But he was unable to function for the entire day, thinking about what he might be missing and how easy it would be to stop over and catch a glimpse. Trey knew he had a problem. Don't misunderstand, he liked girl clowns too, but boy clowns were so much more prevalent.

He'd troll the streets late at night looking for a McDonald's that was closed so he could stare through the windows at the graphics of Ronald with those thick, sexy lips. But the clothes! The clothes were too much. They just looked ridiculous.

Inconveniently, Trey fell in love. Marta was wonderful. She was everything he wanted. Almost. She did lay on the lipstick with a trowel but the rest of her make-up was frustratingly normal. Eventually they married and for six agonizing months Trey held his desires in check. His misery led him to a plan that made his gut hurt with shame. But his gut wasn't in control. He ordered his supplies and experimented with his wife as she slept.

Trey practiced with anaesthesia until he was sure she'd be out cold for at least an hour. Once he was confident she wouldn't wake up, he painted her in whiteface, with a fat, red mouth, wide eyes and thick black lashes. He could hardly control himself. An hour later, he lit candles, woke her and made love to his sleepy, confused wife. It was the most passionate sex either of them had ever experienced. After she nodded off, he drugged her once more and removed the make-up. Everything had gone perfectly and after months of moodiness, Marta was thrilled to have a happy husband again.

Once a week, usually on a Friday night, He performed his ritual. There were a couple of close calls. He loved her closely, to keep her hands away from her face, which she complained felt strange. He had to rush to blow out the candles when she went to the bathroom and he followed her in to make sure she wouldn't turn on the light. Mad sex was the his only answer to her questions. The following week he woke her sooner so she was too tired to cause problems.

There came a Friday night when he was exhausted because of gut-pain insomnia the previous night but he wouldn't give up his obsession. After they made love, a particularly draining love, he collapsed into a hard sleep.

He shot up in terror when screams from the bathroom awoke him Saturday morning. Trey slumped forward with his head between his knees. Everything. Everything, was lost.

Candy Girl

CANDY GIRL
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

The chocolate girl and the caramel made love. They ate each other, of course, which led to their destruction but also to the creation of something new. When humans reproduce, two become three. When bacteria reproduce, one becomes two. When candy girls reproduce, two become one.

Their daughter was a chocolate/caramel swirl named Ceecee, terribly overweight with blood sugar that was through the roof. She began her life in a state of depression because she remembered her delicious beauty when she was her mothers. Now she was merely delicious, not a bad thing in itself, but when you've had more, it's a disappointment.

She bought new clothes at the local mall during the holiday season and was chased through the halls by a group of rabid children. They wanted to eat her, and not in a loving way. Their teeth tore at her new jeans and pink deck shoes and just when she thought her short life was finished, a security guard came to her aid. He had a long pokey stick and ran the children through their mid-sections one by one, until all twelve of them were spitted.

"I apologize, ma'am," he said. "The mall is always crawling with these little pig-dogs this time of year. Would you like me to escort you to your car?"

His name was Juan and he was single. She found his eating gentle and slimming. She found his loving to be absolutely disgusting. She couldn't have a life with this man, as good as he was.

A week after she left him she stumbled into a bar in Key West and met an enormous woman made of peanut butter and Rice Krispie treats. The woman wept and drank and didn't stop until Ceecee took a bite out of her and then another. The crowd cheered them on. They decided to get a room.

"Eat me!" the PBRK lady screamed an hour later. "Finish me! Please!"

"No," Ceecee said. She'd only nibbled around the edges, eaten the woman down to a managable size, eaten herself huge once more. "Our daughter would be suicidally miserable. It's okay to be loved and remain yourself. It's more than okay. It's necessary." She left the woman a whole, if much smaller, person.

And showed up at Juan's door once more. He beamed as he took her in, but it was only for a night.

So on in this way would Ceecee take love and give love but never with the same person. It was a life as much as any other life, perhaps more colorful. She was careful and caring with her lovers so that at the end of hers days everyone that knew her agreed that she was the tastiest person they had ever met.