Referenced Sites:
Geek Fu Action Grip
This Day in Alternate History
Blog of the Week:
Ogre Marco’s LiveJournal
(receives Carnal Knowledge by Charles Hodgson)
Meg hadn’t heard from Devon in four months, and she realized that she missed him. So on a whim she tossed her sword and scabbard into the trunk of her car and drove over to campus to visit him.
“Herr Doktor Bohr!” The captain’s cruel smile returned. “What a relief. We’ve been very concerned about you.”
Bohr sighed, looked up at the Gestapo captain with calm resignation, and took his wife’s hand. He started to get up.
“You are mistaken, sir,” Papa said.
I was nineteen years old. I had followed Bohr’s career for half my life, with something bordering on worship. A terrible miracle of circumstance had finally brought me into his presence. But at that moment his life meant nothing next to my own. Niels Bohr was already a prisoner of the Third Reich–nothing could stop that now. Papa’s action could only put us on a boxcar to Theresienstadt.
Referenced Sites:
Steve’s Dragon*Con Report
Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders
One Laptop Per Child
Blog of the Week:
Hares Rock Lots
(receives Carnal Knowledge by Charles Hodgson)
Unable to keep my distance, I walk up to three classmates interacting with one such a BIKO. The pictures are fuzzy, the colours ill-defined and the reaction time tediously slow. However, the letters appearing are large and easily readable, and after all three kids have been asked to introduce themselves the program equally divides its attention to each of them, making them take turns while the other two can effortlessly follow what’s going on. But man, is it slow. The display makes your eyes water and would have any western whizz kid tuning the screen properties like crazy.
Still, the real wonder is that those pell-mell constructions are doing anything at all. Furthermore, those African kids have nothing to compare them with, so are uncritically happy with what they’ve got. As dinner time closes in Liona has to wrestle most kids away from their new toys and promises that first thing tomorrow they will — after school hours — start making new BIKOs, so that eventually every classmate will have one. The whole class cheers and Liona’s smile doesn’t leave her face for the rest of the evening.
Referenced Sites:
Daily Dragon Podcast
Dragon*Con 2007
When I was a little girl, I thought my mother’s name was Yuki, which means snow. That was part of her name, but I didn’t learn the rest of it until the night my father died.
My mother left us on a slate-gray evening when I was five, with her namesake falling from the sky and piled high around the windows and doors. Awakened by raised voices, I watched through a tear in the curtain that shielded my sleeping mat as my mother wrapped her limbs in a shining, white kimono. As far back as I could remember, she had always worn the dark wool shifts that all mountain people wear, spun from the hair of the half-mad goats that give us milk and cheese. In her kimono she looked like a princess, or a queen. Her skin was paler than mine, and I am thought quite fair. Roku, the boy who lived on the northern crest, used to tease me when we were little, calling me “ghost girl” and “milk face.”
Referenced Sites:
UK Terrorism Act 2006
Graydancer.com
Stranger Things
Closing song: “Think For Yourself” by George Hrab
Not long after that, Antonio had an appointment with his curator, Yoshi, at the Department of Human Heritage. Antonio explained his situation in the Tyrranean language.
“So you’re unsatisfied with your role as a beggar,” Yoshi said. “That’s hardly surprising. The unemployed of the early twenty-first century were also unhappy. Your emotions are true to period, that’s all.”
“But it’s all wrong,” Antonio insisted. “I did well in school. I studied to be an engineer. If this was the real Italy, someone like me wouldn’t end up like this.
Yoshi’s mouth curved into the sterile non-smile of a bureaucrat with no time for sympathy.
Genres: Aliens
Blog of the Week:
The Evil Eyebrow
(receives The John W. Campbell Letters, Vol. 1)
Referenced Sites:
Polyamory Weekly
The DrabbleCast
He was a widower, weary of too many years of loneliness. He had decided to travel to someplace distant and exotic, in hopes of finding as a companion someone completely different from his lost love. He had chosen Earth for its very remoteness.
“I want to marry the most wonderful woman on Earth,” he said.
Every female on the planet had just acquired a brand new agenda in life.
Blog of the Week:
The Angriest Rice Cooker in the World
Referenced Sites:
Ecru: The Butcher of Balis
Zojirushi NS-ZCC10 (Steve’s Rice Cooker)
Casio GW-300 (Steve’s Watch)
Seated on a bollard, the man contemplatively removed his pipe, as if to tamp it down or relight it. Instead, he placed it stem down in the top pocket of his shirt, then reached up and pressed his fingers against his cheekbone and forehead. His face came away from his hairline, round behind his ears, down to a point just above his Adam’s apple. The inside of his mouth and much of his sinus were also part of the prosthesis, so only bare eyeballs in the upper jut of his skull remained — the rest being the black spikes and plates of bio-interfaces.
Cheel gaped. From another pocket, the man took some sort of tool and began to probe inside the back of his detached face. He put the prosthesis in his lap, then took up his pipe and placed it in his throat sphincter. Smoke bled from between the interface plates of his cheeks. His bare eyeballs swivelled towards Cheel then back down to the adjustments he was making. She suddenly realised who this must be. Here was the veteran who worked on the ferry. Here was one of the few survivors from a brutal war between factions of dense-tech humans. Not understanding what was impelling her, she walked out on the jetty and approached him.
Referenced Sites:
Knitwitch’s Sci-Fi & Fantasy Zone on Talkshoe
Yarborough led them through the impromptu village of broad white tents, rows of outhouses, sensor towers, and heavy weapons installations that had obliterated the turf of the athletic field. They stopped at the fence on the edge of the hilltop.
“You can get a pretty good look at the swath, here.”
On a day without monsters, it would have been a nice view. You could see most of the town center, and all the way to Pacific Coast Highway the misty ocean beyond. A wide, flat, smoking scar of ruin cut from the water to a shopping center half a mile inland.
Genres: Medical
Blog of the Week:
Three Laws Unsafe
Mia didn’t reply. Her attention was riveted to Esefeb. The girl flung herself up the stairs and sat up in bed, facing the wall. What Mia had see before could hardly be called a smile compared to the light, the sheer joy, that illuminated Esefeb’s face now. Esefeb shuddered in ecstasy, crooning to the empty wall.
“Ej-es. Ej-es. Aaahhhh, Ej-es!”
Mia turned away. She was a medician, but Esefeb’s emotion seemed too private to witness. It was the ecstasy of orgasm, or religious transfiguration, or madness.
“Mia,” her wrister said, “I need an image of that girl’s brain.”
Referenced Sites:
U.S.S. Mariner
Senses Five Press
“I read an interesting forum post last night,” my electric toothbrush told me over its low burr.
“Thiff ouff thew be thood,” I said through my mouth of foam.
“It was!” he replied. “Using readily available components, Monkeymonkey turned his Intellibrush into a milk frother.”
I spit into the sink and set my toothbrush in its white ceramic charger. “What would I do with a milk frother?”
“Make cappucinos,” my toothbrush said, with a hint of resignation, as I rinsed and spit again.
“I don’t drink cappucinos,” I said.
“You could start!”