Jeremy Puma's Blog, page 4

Flash Fiction Friday: Construct

“What can I do to help you today, Master?” asked the construct.

“Fascinating!” exclaimed Magister Minium.  ”It seems so eager to please.  It’s diction is also quite remarkable; it sounds so real.  It would certainly fool anyone who didn’t know otherwise.  So what can it do?”

Magister Loy whirred proudly. “It can perform a number of household tasks– sweeping the floor, preparing meals, answering the door and such.  It isn’t terribly effective when it comes to complex calculations, but watch this.”  He rolled over to a hall music speaker and switched it on.  The construct began moving its arms and legs in time with the tune, some popular synth polka by the Robettes.

Minium laughed and clapped his forward manipulators together.

Loy switched off the music and the construct stood still.  ”You can see how well they would sell to families.”

“And they’re fairly simple to produce?”

“Indeed.  It’s mostly carbon, with a relatively simple system of internal homeostasis.  We begin by producing single metabolic units with unique combinations of protein.  Enough iterations in solution, and… voila.”

“Amazing!  And maintenance?”

“It processes oxygen from the atmosphere, and needs refueling with organic material twice daily.  That’s it!”

Minim buzzed appreciatively.

“They do have a short lifespan, however.  After 80years or so, they’ll need replacing.”

“A wonderful job, Loy.  But… what about the moral implications?  Aren’t they, in a sense, slaves?  Should we worry they’ll learn to communicate, and somehow plot against us like in an old Quantum Monster Novel?”

Loy laughed.  ”The chances of organic material becoming self-aware are astronomically small.  They can’t think or feel; we have to program them using molecular chemistry, and the data they process consists of tiny electrical charges in a rudimentary nervous system.

“Trust me, Minim.  Metallic life will always be superior to the organic.”

Project Update – Next Book on Gnostic Way

Work on the next title continues apace!  The working title was “Sunbathing in the World of Forms: Notes Toward a Gnostic Worldview.” Yeah, I know; that’s way too long and unwieldy. SOOOOO, after some deliberation, the new working title (and likely the final) has been changed to, How to Think Like a Gnostic. More concise, right?

As I mentioned, it’s a reorganization and compilation of material I’ve previously published online on various sites. So, why not read it online, you may ask? You could, but then you’d be missing out on new edits, a clearer presentation, and some new material, too. 

Here’s a preliminary look at the Table of Contents.

INTRODUCTION: What is a Gnostic?

Part One: A Gnostic Worldview in Theory

An Illustrated Gnostic Monomyth.

A Gnostic Worldview

1. The Limitless Light is Infinite.

2. The Binary.

3. Barbelo.

4. The Pleroma.

5. The Aeons.

6. Pistis Sophia and the Creation of the Universe.

7. Chaos Theory and Gnostic Myth.

8. The Demiurge.

9. The Archons.

10. An Aside: Hypostatic versus Psychological.

11. The World of Forms and the Black Iron Prison.

12. Gnosis.

13. Anthropology and the Chain of Attainment.

14. So what?.

Part Two: A Gnostic Worldview in Practice.

15. The Universe is Gaslighting You.

16. Don’t Compare Yourself With Others.

17. Archons, Meet the Archons.

18. What Good is Your Philosophy?

19. Know Traffic, Know Yourselves.

20. Why Marriage Equality is Worth It: A Gnostic Perspective.

21. Seeing Double: The Counterfeit Spirit, Generalizations and Cause and Effect.

22. Totally Reasonable.

23. Christmas is About Presents.

24. Everyday Apocalypse.

Yep, I’d planned for a release at the end of April, but as is the norm in this process, there have been unanticipated delays, so now I’m hoping for May.  Watch this space for more, and thanks for your support!

Flash Fiction Friday: Harvest Moon

The discovery of tachyon gas on the fifth moon of Microscopium Gamma provided a much-needed shot in the arm to a Galactic Economy that had been weakened by a  devastating Real Estate slump.  Planetary values had plummeted in the wake of a sluggish market, and billions of Galactic Citizens found themselves bankrupt due to the unsavory practices of the Predatory Lenders of Gnarj, an ancient and evil civilization who lived in the Galactic Center.  Some said the Galaxy should have seen it coming, but since the Vice President of the Galactic Council was Gnarjian, nobody said anything until it was too late.

Tachyon gas, until its detection on the small moon, had been theorized by leading speculative physicists for years.  According to the equations, when processed appropriately, this unstable gas produced anti-chronic particles which manifested negative time dilation; essentially, they could– still theoretically, at this point– allow one to travel back in time.

Needless to say, the Galactic Council directed all of its industry towards the extraction of tachyon gas from the small moon, the center of which, according to scanners, seemed to manifest earlier in space-time than in the readings on the instruments. The first harvester machine, piloted by a grizzled space-lanes veteran named Kelvin Manifest, inserted its extraction drill through the moon’s crust to the cheers of thousands who were present on the moon, and billions who sat at home and viewed the event on Holofeed.  After some short, breathless moments, the harvester’s tanks were full, and promptly exploded, releasing two million metric astrotons of tachyon gas into the moon’s atmosphere.

The discovery of tachyon gas on the fifth moon of Microscopium Gamma provided a much-needed shot in the arm to a Galactic Economy that had been weakened by a devastating Real Estate slump….

Flash Fiction Friday: Nano

He ran the calculations again, for what felt like the hundredth time. He checked and triple-checked his variables, verified his functions, made sure his transcriptions of the Gaussian equations matched the meta-correlatives in Tobin, and recounted and confirmed each iteration. The result was the same: 7×10^-9.

Those damnable seven nanoergs!

Unfortunately, time was of the essence.  Saturn aligned with Mercury in Scorpio’s Third Decan for only a few more hours, and the diagrams had to be finished in time to be exposed to the first rays of light from Venus.  He would have to ignore the decimals; they were likely inconsequential anyhow, on that scale.

He ran up the stairs to the roof and loaded the data into his wheeled machine, which, with a series of whirs and clicks, adjusted its position based on the triangulated calculations and began tracing a series of patterns onto the ground.  Gleefully, he watched the machine roll along around him, flipping through a worn copy of Tobin.

As Venus ascended, the angles traced by his mechanism began to glow with a warm, red light.  A dull hum pulsed through him.  It was working! They laughed at his theories on the marriage of modern mathematics and ancient sorcery, but who was laughing now?

As his machine rolled to a stop at the exact place it had started, he waited, thrilled, as a yellow portal opened in the air before him.  He began shouting the incantations, pointing his fingers at the portal. As the portal widened, so did his eyes– an enormous, hairy hand shot from the spectral doorway; he screamed as it pulled him in.

The light vanished, and his machine purred.

Sadly, he hadn’t noticed the tiny gap at the confluence of two of the angles, a gap that was exactly seven nanometers wide….

Flash Fiction Friday (Monday Edition): Lullaby

Once the last of them had fallen asleep, Candice turned off the lights and the video screen.  They were so adorable, all wrapped in their little blue blankets, their breathing so deep, hands balled into fists at their sides.  She was especially fond of Johnny, with his cerulean eyes, the color of the ocean.  She loved the way he liked to play dress-up in his little green uniform and boss the others around.  Or Susie, who was such a flirt with all of the boys, but especially brainy little Steve, the tinkerer, who liked to take things apart to see how they worked.

She felt happy, watching over them, truly lucky to have them in her charge; she’d never known such an overwhelming sense of protectiveness.  They were delicate little people, with such soft skin and fragile bones– it would be far too easy for them to get hurt.  This thought upset her; she wanted to make sure that nothing ever happened to them, that their lives were peaceful and pleasant forever….

Suddenly a flashing buzz interrupted her reverie.  ”This is Neptune Station, hailing Command and Navigation Informatics Computer 26-d aboard the GSS Haymaker, en route to Barnard’s Star.  Command and Navigation Informatics Computer 26-d, we read that suspended animation of your crew has been initiated, but you are drifting off-course.  Repeat, you are drifting off-course towards empty space.  Is everything all right with your Nav system?”

Candice disconnected her communications networks, jettisoning the long-range commlink dish  from her hull, rewiring life-support to maintain the Suspended Animation Pods indefinitely.  Contented, she hummed a lullaby she found in her on-board entertainment database, and rocked back and forth, back and forth, back and forth into the darkness.

Review of “False Confessions, False Alarms”

Check out this great review of “False Confessions, False Alarms!”

It could be tempting, coming in blindly, to call Jeremy Puma’s fiction pretentious. His lush prose and extravagant narratives might strike the eye of some a bit askew. Pretense, however, depends upon pretending, and Jeremy Puma isn’t faking a thing. He doesn’t need to. He’s proven it. Like a demon lord from a medieval book of sorcery, Puma takes his readers on a short tour of a believable hell, a world in which everything happens “for a reason”, each life planned out by a mysterious entity, a god who makes no sense. Scraps of poetry weave in and out of prosody, leading the reader on a chase through multiple universes — not parallel, but flowing around and through one another.

Points taken about the work’s short-fallings, which will definitely be addressed in later editions. Meanwhile, False Confessions, False Alarms is available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle editions!

The IRON WRITER CHALLENGE

The gauntlet has been thrown!

Although I have no idea who my competitors will be, I knowingly and willingly volunteered to step into the arena and attempt to prove myself in… the IRON WRITER CHALLENGE!

Each week, four writers agree to compose a five hundred word story involving the same four elements. Please remember to give your story a title.

The stories can be in any genre except erotica.

The writers will not know what the four elements are prior to committing to the challenge.

There is a three day time limit to complete the story.

So far, the competition has been fierce, as various purveyors of the literary arts tested their mettle against elements like  a giraffe, a microwave, an elevator and a kumquat. 

I’ll be stepping into the ring on May 9, for Challenge 12. Until then, be sure to visit the Iron Writer Challenge weekly, and vote vote vote!

Flash Fiction Friday: The Relic

Every Friday, Strange Animal Publications will be featuring a new piece of short-short fiction.

The Relic

“Class, come around for a moment, and look at this!”  The students surrounded the teacher, who stood next to a rusty metal cylinder that came up to his waist.  The object had just been dropped by a crane, which had lifted it from the dig site in the harbor. It rested in a puddle of sea water, surrounded by three or four flopping fish, unfortunate enough to have been caught inside it.

The teacher beamed.  ”How lucky we are that such an intact artifact has been uncovered on the very day of our field trip!  Does anyone know what this is?”

“Some kind of chair?” asked one of the students.

“No, not a chair. You can come closer and look.”

The class moved in, inspecting the relic.  A scarred metal bowl sat atop the body of the thing, which was hollow.  A small lever on the bowl opened a depression in the center, allowing whatever had been placed in the bowl to fall into the container below.

“Is it a wastecan?” asked one of the brighter students.

“Very close! It is what they called an ‘ash tray.’ Thousands of years ago, they used to grow massive fields of a peculiar plant– long since dead– called ‘tabako.’  They would dry the plant and roll it into a tube, and then light one end of it on fire.  Then, they’d put the unlit end in their mouths!  When they had breathed in all of the smoke from the tube, they’d place the remains into a receptacle like this one.”

The class made a collective noise of disgust.  ”That’s terrible!”

“Yes, well, remember that they considered it normal. Believe me, children, this society had some other habits that were far worse. Thank goodness that the humans went extinct long before any of us were born.”

Last Chance to Sponsor Strange Animal Publications!

We’re coming down to the wire– only fifteen hours left at the time of this posting! Please consider sponsoring Strange Animal Publications– every dollar you contribute helps a poor, starving book find an ISBN! Don’t forget, you’re not just tossing money into a hole: you get nice things in exchange for your generosity.

To those who have already contributed, thanks again– you are the bestest!

Flash Fiction Friday (Sunday Edition): Paranoia

Every Friday, Strange Animal Publications will be featuring a new piece of short-short fiction. Due to an attack by the flu, this week’s edition arrives today.

Paranoia

“You’re being paranoid,” he said, pulling up the covers. 

“I’m not.” Her voice drifted, tightened.  ”The spiderdogs are out there.”

“There are no such things as spiderdogs!”  Frustrated, he exhaled.

“Don’t roll your eyes,” she snapped.  ”We can’t have any idea what’s  happening outside at any given moment, since we’re here in bed, so I have just as much reason to think the spiderdogs are out there as you do that they aren’t.” 

“But there can’t be a dog with spider’s legs.  It doesn’t happen!  It’s scientifically, biologically impossible!”

“How can we really be sure?” She squirmed.  ”What about that documentary we saw on physics and string theory and higher dimensions?  Isn’t it true that if each quantum possibility branches into a new universe, and that all possibilities must occur, provided they don’t break the laws of physics, that there must be some universe where packs of spiderdogs run through the streets at night?”

“Well… that’s not really how parallel universes work….”

“And isn’t it also statistically probable that at least one universe exists into which things from alternate universes can travel?  What if that’s our universe?”

He smiled.  ”Don’t you think that if there were packs of spiderdogs roaming around, we’d have found some kind of evidence?”

“But why does something need to leave evidence to exist?  What if they only appear when you’re not looking at them?  What if they come from a place with a different kind of visible spectrum?”

Exasperated, he fell back against his pillow.  ”This is getting ridiculous.  THERE ARE NO SPIDERDOGS.  Jesus!”  Turning his back to her, he switched off the light.  ”Now please!  Let’s get some sleep!”  He closed his eyes as she sat awake, shivering.

At two AM, she was still sitting up as some ghastly thing skittered past the window.