Michael S. Atkinson's Blog, page 37

Mystery

“So it was you, Lord Covington,” Baxendale cried, “who murdered Daphne Fairservice!”

“Impossible!” he said. “I was vacationing in the Spanish mountains, during that terrible rainstorm!”

She smiled. “You couldn’t have. You see, the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.”

***

This is my response to the weekly Gargleblaster challenge, which was to answer, in exactly 42 words, the question: “Who dunnit?”  This is what my muse gave me. Peculiar creature, my muse.

 

Gone

Without a word, she dropped to the ground. She could’ve said words, and plenty of them. Penny Sybil had been prepared to deliver her opening argument in a landmark system-wide trial about the environmental impact of artificial wormholes. She had spent weeks on that trial. Now the invading Earth fleet in the sky outside the courtroom was issuing some ultimatum she couldn’t quite hear, and it looked like all her preparation had been for naught. She scrambled for shelter under a nearby table, certain that it would prove no shelter at all. Then she glanced back, and gasped.

Her binder lay askew on the floor where she had dropped it. That binder had everything. It had her notes, her deposition transcripts, the telepathic holo-recordings from the Society to Protect Wormhole Aliens! She took one step out from under the table. Her timing was singularly unfortunate. The Seventeenth Earth Fleet chose that moment to open a barrage of turbo-cannon plasma beams.

Penny vaporized. Her neutrons and protons went merrily out into the universe on their own microscopic voyages of discovery. The binder went too, disappearing in a blur of flame and taking lots of evidence with it. The attorneys for the other side would’ve been thrilled to see that, except they were vaporizing too. The Seventeenth Fleet was quite thorough.

In her last seconds of consciousness, Penny didn’t experience the usual thing with her life flashing before her eyes. Her brain fixed on one single memory. She was lightyears away on Verin Prime, resting blissfully in the shade of countless trees. Green light fell all about her. One particular tree, a short distance away, had a wooden cat attached to its side. Penny remembered wondering who had put the cat there, and why they had taken the trouble. She would never find out now. Shame, really. She had hoped-

This story follows on in the same ‘verse as Shades, and Oh, Crime. It’s written for the speakeasy challenge at Yeah Write, which was to write 750 words or less (mine ended up being somewhat less) using “Without a word, she dropped to the ground,” as the first sentence, and include a reference to the photo prompt on their site.Thanks for reading! 

Keeping Lookout

Anderson spun ‘round in his chair. “Captain? Why are we doin’ this? It’s only blank space, yeah?”

“I’m…honestly not sure.”

The captain reported this to her superiors. Project Stargazer closed up the next year. The aliens invaded the year after that.

This is my response to the very first Gargleblaster challenge at Yeah Write, which was to write 42 answers to this question: “What’s so amazing that keeps us stargazing?”  I think an invading alien fleet is pretty amazing. Also, I had to join up with this challenge, being a devoted Douglas Adams fan and all. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is one of my favorite stories ever.

 

Sportsing

So, every once in a while, I thought I should write something on this blog that is not a short story. Not that I don’t mind writing stories, I do; I very much enjoy chronicling the adventures of Catrina, or Rain, or Hadley Baxendale, or Captain Happily Married. But I do like to mix things up once a bit. So here is a post that does not spring from my imagination, no, this is Real Life. And what shall I write about?  SPORTS.

But, you say, why would you write about sports? When it comes to that topic, to quote what’s her face from Game of Thrones, you know nothing, Jon Snow. Ah, I reply, but that is not entirely true. I don’t have the institutional knowledge about it, I don’t know what team holds the record for undefeated games in the NCAA, I don’t know what a wide receiver does or why he does it, and I never read the sports columns in the paper. My friends on Facebook make detailed posts about these things, and to me it sounds like “Well, Dayton should win because the cuckoo bird is in the banana tree, and pi to the 42nd is the inverse of X to the 17th power, and that’s why the Lord made little green apples.”   But, where I’m from, sports is unavoidable.

I live in southern Indiana, right across the river from Louisville, Kentucky. You may have heard of our basketball team. We won the championship last year (and there was great rejoicing). But there is another basketball team a short distance down the interstate, from the University of Kentucky. You might say there is a bit of a friendly rivalry between these two teams. You might also say that the Hatfields and McCoys had a slight disagreement. Or that the story of Noah was about a boat.

Each side has its customs, its references, its Twitter hashtags. Louisville has L1C4, rise and repeat, CardNation. UK has Big Blue Nation, or #BBN. Both sides have a cheer in which they spell their team’s name. Both sides have their revered icons: UK has John Calipari, UofL has Rick Pitino. And both sides will gleefully talk trash about the other side. It’s all in a spirit of good fun, generally; of course, there are people who take it too far. One hears tales of marriages splitting over it, though one also hears tales of people marrying despite these differences, and resolving the crisis by simply watching the game in separate rooms, that sort of thing. At any rate, most of the year things don’t get too dramatic. But then, around every March or so, we have the NCAA basketball tournament.

Last year UK didn’t make the Big Dance, as they call it; rather, UK went off to the NIT and got defeated by Robert Morris, a school named after one of the only two people to sign the Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, and the Declaration of Independence (now you know!)  Meanwhile, Louisville went on to win the national championship. You might say that the citizens of the Big Blue Nation were somewhat upset about this. But then the two teams met again last December, and UK won. So now here we are in the Sweet Sixteen round of the NCAA, and UK and UofL will be playing each other. You know how intense it was in the finale of Avatar: the Last Airbender when Azula and Katara faced off against each other? It’s like that. People are Taking Sides.

I don’t know who’s going to win, naturally. I can name a few members of the teams, and the coaches, and that’s as far as I go. But I suppose you’re wondering who I am rooting for. Well, ordinarily I would go for Indiana, but we don’t have anyone in the thing this year (alas). So I have to pick. And, of course, there is only one choice. I am from what some condescendingly refer to as “Louisville North” (ha ha, we are all highly amused). UK fans may bleed blue (which seems an unusual medical problem: y’all should have that checked), but I am a redshirt all the way. I even know the cheer. C. A. R. D. S. Goooooo Cards. Rah.

Thank you for your consideration, as Jennifer Lawrence’s character would say (she roots for Louisville, too, incidentally. I’m on the right side). I may have more sports posts later, depending on events. Meantime, stay tuned for more random stories involving sentient shades of mauve, and death angels named Rain.

Oh, Crime

Lieutenant Glenshaw expected Hadley to reappear any minute. She was a Chromai. They went invisible quite often, being sentient shades of color and all. So he dismissed her without further thought and moved on to his next case. The crime scene by the tree had been thoroughly secured, and the lab techies were doing their usual data scans. He had another call.

It was just outside one of the city’s more disreputable watering holes. When Glenshaw showed up, his fellow officers had already set up force-field barricades to keep back the crowd of gawkers jostling to get a look at the victim. Glenshaw looked dispassionately over what was left. A tiny scorch mark on the pavement, and the equally tiny remains of an amber-shaded undergarment with a pattern of filled circles. “Well,” Glenshaw said. “Looks like she wore an itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny yellow polka dot bikini.”

“Yes, sir,” his associate said. Wade knew his superior was contractually obligated to deliver those sorts of lines, but honestly. Not for the last time, the robot wished he had gone into a different line of work.

“Right,” Glenshaw said. “Do we know what species she was?”

“Earthling, sir,” Wade reported. “First time off planet, apparently. Witnesses said she looked your standard lost tourist, waving around a holo-map, that sort of thing. Then someone swiped her bag. She started to go after him, or it, we’re not quite sure of species there. People say it looked like a kid. Next thing you know, zap.”

“Zap.”

“Yep. No one saw who fired. Or if they did, they’re not telling.”

“The bag-snatcher turn up?”

“No, sir. Found the bag, though. Holo-map’s gone. New model, apparently, looked like a pen, projected a screen of where you wanted to go. Credits still there, and a teleporter key.”

“So…” Glenshaw mused. “She was killed for her holo-map. I wonder why?”

If Hadley were there, the lieutenant knew, she would probably come up with some incredibly convoluted theory about the holo-map being really a secret treasure map, the location of the Golden Zebu in the Hidden Temple of the Second to Last of the Fairly Average Whangdoodles, or something to that effect. But Glenshaw was far more prosaic. The kid had probably meant to sell the holo-map to a tech dealer, maybe off-world. The laser blast could have been his confederate, or it could have been a stray shot aimed at someone else. Odds were he’d never know. More crimes in the spaceport went unsolved then his superiors liked to admit. Still, he had to make the effort anyway.

“The bag have an ID?”

“No, sir. ID must have been on her when she, er…”

“Right. Okay, get the lab people in here. I want DNA scans, energy signature readings, they know the drill.”

Wade nodded and trundled off. Glenshaw knelt over the scorch mark and the small bit of fabric. He’d never had the chance to visit the old home planet. His ancestors were, best he knew, from some place called Indiana. He had no idea where that was, or even what continent. Had she known? Had she been from there? The lieutenant straightened and walked away, as the lab technicians bustled in to do their work.

Glenshaw waved for his police skimmer, intent on heading back to the office to start on the interminable piles of paperwork resulting from the day’s events. He didn’t have time to reflect on how an advanced society like his still depended so much on paper. The sky suddenly lit with ships. They were beautiful in a way, curved and shining white, like so many giant silver commas, except that they also bristled with enough firepower to reduce the surface of the planet to so much molten slag.

For a moment Glenshaw thought it might be the Flossicans from Beta Four, but then a holo-image formed in the sky. “Attention, citizens of this planet. This is the Seventeenth Fleet, representing the United Community of Earth. You have our President, Hannah Moon, last seen entering your primary spaceport. If you do not surrender her within one hour, we will engage this planet with extreme prejudice. Thank you.”

Glenshaw had an uncomfortable realization that he had just identified his crime victim, and that he wouldn’t be taking that afternoon to go through paperwork. In that moment, through the clarity of retrospect, the obvious conclusion surfaced: things don’t always turn out as planned.

This is my submission for this week’s Speakeasy prompt. It also is related to last week’s story. 

Sneeze Finale

This story is written for the last Trifecta prompt. We were given 33 words to free-write. I decided to go back to where it all began, with my first Trifecta story back in May 2012. So, without further adieu….

Forty-two seconds. Doctor Sheep’s incoming Alfalfa Fire Rockets threatened to vaporize all of Latvia. Fortunately, it was spring. Emmy Cambridge’s allergies were in full bloom. She let loose with a titanic super-sneeze and-

Z is for Zounds

Last time, in the Catrina Chronicles, our heroine had used the power of Mlrning (the Shovel of Thor!) to drive Cthulhu back into the watery depths from whence he came. Now, she prepares to go on an even more thrilling adventure-

“Hold it!” said Catrina, rudely interrupting the opening narration. “I am not adventuring anywhere. I am going on hiatus.”

“But,” said Ermingard, “what about-”

Catrina cut her off. “No. I do not care what it is. I don’t want to hear about Atlanteans, or sea monsters, or Morgana Le Fay and all her wacky nephews. I don’t care if Susan is about to lead her Zambonis of Terror and take over the world. I don’t care if there’s a rogue zebra chasing after a hapless band of traveling musical players and threatening to beat them to death with their own zithers. I’m done.”

“But-” Ermingard tried again.

“Nope,” said Catrina. “Not even if it’s to find the Golden Zebu that’s hidden away in the lost tunnels beneath the Temple of the Second to Last of the Fairly Average Whangdoodles. I am hanging up my questing hat, so to speak. I have twins, Ermie, if you will recall. Newly born twins. I should like to spend some time with them. And also with Perry, now that he’s himself again. More or less.”

Ermingard gave up. And after all, even she with her pessimistic bent had to admit that things seemed to be going well for now. Catrina had saved the world. Everything was right again. Surely the world could stay saved for a few years or so, couldn’t it?

So she, and Catrina, and Perry, and Katrina, and everyone else went happily back to Shmirmingard Castle. And as Catrina popped open a keg of blueberry cordial and began a rousing sing-along, she completely neglected the closing narration of her story arc. Indeed, little did she know that more dire events were lurking just over the horizon.  Cthulhu had not forgotten the yodeling princess with the shovel who had escaped his tentacles twice now. Neither had Susan. Neither had Madrigal, Emperor of Atlantis. And even worse, Catrina in her adventures had attracted the notice of an enemy even worse than she had ever faced before. Little did she know how truly terrifying that enemy would be. *dun dun DUNNNNNNN*.

This has been another exciting episode of the Catrina Chronicles. For previous episodes, go here. For Catrina’s adventures on Amazon, go here. Thanks for reading!

Shades

Looks can be deceiving. For instance, when Hadley Baxendale pulled up in her skimmer and saw the corpse lying on the blue grassy sward beneath the tree, she naturally suspected that a murder had been done. She was right so far. An ordinary detective would then have begun with the usual suspects: a random mugger, an aggrieved lover, or perhaps the Flossicans from Beta Four.  But Hadley Baxendale was not an ordinary detective. She immediately suspected the tree.

“Lieutenant!” she called to one of the officers milling about. “Scan the tree yet?”

The lieutenant, Glenshaw by name, had encountered Hadley before. “No, we haven’t scanned the blasted tree,” he said tiredly. “Why would we scan the tree? It’s not like the tree did him in.”

“Oh, isn’t it?” said Hadley, her left eyebrow quirking.

Lieutenant Glenshaw sighed. “No. It isn’t. Because it’s a stupid tree. What, you think it whacked him over the head with its branch or something out of spite? You think we’re in for a plague of homicidal trees, now do you?”

“Is that so hard to think on? You’re discussing the murder of a sentient dolphin, after all.” She gestured to where the poor creature lay sprawled on its hoverpad.

“Dolphins are one thing.  Trees are something else. You should know; we had this conversation last year, remember? The ambassador from Verin Prime was murdered, and you promptly announced that it was the fault of his rogue eggplant collection.”

“And was I wrong?” Hadley said.

“Yes. Actually, you were. It wasn’t eggplants. It was the Betelguese Syndicate.”

“Who placed the bomb that killed him inside the eggplant!” Hadley exclaimed in triumph. “So you wouldn’t have discovered that if you hadn’t followed up my theory! And that’s exactly why you should really be taking a closer look at this tree-”

She had taken a step towards the tree, to get a closer look herself. But the moment she went under its shadow, Hadley Baxendale vanished. Glenshaw shrugged. She tended to do that.

Hadley blinked. Quite suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, she had found herself standing on a platform of blue metal. A wall curved on her left, dotted here and there with concave impressions. On her right was a long glass window. Hadley barely registered that an immense field of stars shone outside. She hardly needed to know about them. What had happened was clear. She’d been kidnapped, by the same beings who had murdered the dolphin. “It was a setup!” she announced to the air. “They were trying to get me!”

“Very well done, human,” gurgled a voice. “And now we have you.”

Hadley spun round, but the only thing she could see was a puddle of oily liquid in one of the wall impressions. She assumed something had leaked somewhere. “Yes, you have, but you’d better teleport me right back this instant. You’ve made a serious error, you know.”

“We can’t send you back,” the voice said. Hadley couldn’t quite place where it was coming from; it seemed weirdly distorted. Was there a speaker in the wall somewhere? “For such a long way, the portal only has so much energy.”

Hadley rolled her eyes. “Don’t tell me. It’s a wormhole, or some sort of teleportation array, and now I’m in a quadrant thousands of light-years from my home. Wonderful. Well, you still missed up. I’m not human.”  All at once her form rippled, and turned mauve all over. Then the mauve seemed to blossom out, until what remained was only the color itself, pulsing in the center of the room. Hadley’s voice echoed from it, a lot more serious than she had sounded before. “Yeah. I’m not even biological, exactly. I’m a sentient shade of color. You’d better send me back right now, or the Reds will be coming. You don’t want that.”

The voice seemed very much alarmed. “We can’t send you back. The portal only has-”

“So much energy, yeah. But c’mon, it’s only a quadrant hop or two.  What’s the problem?”

No response. Hadley flickered around idly, waiting for the teleporter to engage, or other beings to come in, or something. As she bounced around the room, she happened past the window. She froze. “Oh. That’s the problem.”

The stars should have been red, or yellow, or blinking white. They weren’t. They were no color Hadley knew. That meant only one thing. She wasn’t in a different quadrant. She was in a different universe.

***

This is my response to the Speakeasy’s weekly writing prompt, which is to write a piece in 750 words or less  using “Looks can be deceiving.” as the first sentence, AND (2) make some sort of reference to the media prompt- a painting called Avond (Evening): The Red Tree by the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian.  I was also inspired, I will admit, by offhand references in Doctor Who, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Snack

This post was written for the penultimate Trifecta weekly prompt. Enjoy!



“Satisfy me!” Cthulhu demanded, gurgling in unfathomable horror.

Charlotte stepped unsteadily forward. “I’m sorry, but all I have is a blueberry muffin.”

It turned out that Cthulhu was quite fond of blueberry muffins.

Heroes

“Yo! Banana Boy!”

“I’ve told you, I’m Botany Man. Botany. Man.”

“You throw exploding bananas. You’re Banana Boy. And that name strikes fear in no one’s heart.”

“This from Plastic Bucket Girl?”

“Touché.”

***

This story was written for what, sadly, is one of the last Trifecta prompts. The challenge is closing forever at the end of this month. Thanks to Trifecta, I’ve met many wonderful bloggers and read many delightful stories, and it’s challenged my own writing as well. Without Trifecta, there would be no Volcano Rain, no Constance the Guardian Angel, no Prince Evinrude or Fillmore Streamlet, or many other characters. C’est tragique.