Christopher B. Wright's Blog, page 44

The Sickness Within: Part Two

Last Wednesday

Martin Forrest shifts in his chair and stares at the young man staring back at him from across the desk. Jason Kline is only a few years older than Jenny—Martin’s sure he’s a few years shy of thirty—but he has the bearing and confidence of someone decades older.

Warm without appearing invested, professional without appearing detached. It’s a hard mask to develop. It’s exactly the kind of mask Martin used when he was a cop interviewing a witness. It doesn’t bother him that Jason K...

The Sickness Within: Part One

Farraday City Sewer

They run across the street, catty-corner, to the cafe where they started the night. They duck around the building, into a side alley.

Jenny doesn’t say anything. CB is worried about that.

The sirens are very loud now. CB hears a squad car stop in front of the cafe. He runs to the end of the alley and stops, scraping about in the dirt and debris until finally, with a grunt, he pulls a manhole cover out of the ground.

“Come on.” CB’s voice is low. “It’s dark, but only for a bit....

Issue 10: The Sickness Within

Story: Christopher Wright
Cover: Garth Graham
Logo: Garth Graham

Yesterday Help Desk turned Seventeen

Not an April Fool's joke (I don't really do those too much). Just an observation that as of yesterday Help Desk has been in publication for seventeen years. I should probably put an asterisk next to '98 but I won't. So there!

Anyway. That's a pretty long run on the Internet and I'm pleased I managed to hang in there. There were definitely moments I considered walking away from it all.

Let's see if I can make to twenty!

First Do No Harm: Part Four

Conflict Resolution

The elevator door dings a second time. CB and Jenny hear the doors slide open, and heavy-booted feet stomping out into the cube farm.

CB lights his cigarette.

“You’re going to smoke now?” Jenny stares at him incredulously.

“Yep,” CB says. “It’s kind of a thing.” He closes his eyes and concentrates. He feels the world spinning around him.

“What are you—”

“Shh.” CB’s cigarette leaves a trail of smoke behind it as he cuts off Jenny’s question with a wave of his hand. “I need a seco...

First Do No Harm: Part Three

TriHealth, 2AM

The one thing they aren’t doing is wearing all black.

CB is wearing his trench coat, old blue jeans, his favorite boots and a black Minor Threat t-shirt that’s unraveling around the collar. Jenny is wearing dark blue slacks, a button-up shirt, tennis shoes, and a light windbreaker with large inside pockets. They don’t look like cat burglars. This is important, CB explains, because people who dress like cat burglars tend to get picked up by the police on the grounds that they look...

First Do No Harm: Part Two

Elmuth Shipping

It’s early evening, but not yet dark, when he finally reaches the Elmuth Shipping compound. CB wonders if it’ll be as heavily guarded as TriHealth. It isn’t. It has security, but prowling around the fence he doesn’t see anything out of the ordinary: chain link fence, barbed wire on top, bored blue-shirts not paying a lot of attention to their jobs. The fence is in lousy condition, and there’s a section on one side that’s come loose from its moorings. It’s trivial to crawl throu...

First Do No Harm: Part One

TriHealth, Uptown

There’s one TriHealth building in Farraday City. It’s uptown, which means it doesn’t cater to riffraff. It also makes the organization look shadier than it already did. Large companies don’t stay large by being naive, and a company that opens an office in Farraday Uptown is doing so because of the advantages the location brings. Some of those advantages look good on a ledger. Other “advantages” never show up on a ledger, or on any official documentation, for that matter. Thos...

Issue Nine: First Do No Harm

Story: Christopher Wright
Cover: Garth Graham
Logo: Garth Graham

New Markets, New Problems, New Prices

Some quick news on the fiction side of things:

Pay Me, Bug! available on iTunes, unexpected price drop

Item One: Pay Me, Bug! is now (rather again, after a long absence) available for sale on iTunes. I pulled PMB! from iTunes shortly after it was put there because people who bought it noted strange formatting errors, and I had no reliable way to fix them. At the time, I was using Smashwords as my distributor, and I found other reports of people noticing the same issues with Smashword-generated...