Burst Fiction » 2008

“So do you have a name, or do I get to call you God from now on?” quipped Dreanna.

“A name…” He replied almost absentmindedly. He had several names, countless names throughout the eons. So which one to choose?

Before he could fully process the request, an answer “Eric. Eric Bamber.” Interesting choice, he mused.

But it did fit the situation, didn’t it? Wasn’t that what this body was called when he was corporeal? Before his species evolved from beings not much different from Dreanna.

“Eric? What kind of name is ‘Eric Bamber’ for a god??” Dreanna started to blurt out, just catching herself in the nick of time. “Nice to meet you Eric” she replied instead.

“So what happened here?”

“Dunno” Eric replied cheerfully.

“What do you mean ‘dunno’ I thought you knew everything!”

“Interestingly enough, so did we.”

While it was the straight answer she’d been looking for, that was little consolation… it had definitely turned into an “oh shit” moment.

By KevMullins

A Night Out

“Yes that’s right.” she said. “In the old days you needed quite a lot of ‘money’ just to survive. ‘Cost of living’ they called it then. It was sort of barbaric, people starving and living on the streets and such.

These days of course you don’t have to do that. You can always feed your body the free food, and it’ll be nutritious and taste terrible but it’ll keep you alive.”

But there was always a catch, wasn’t there? Ethan thought.

“Well yes, there is the peer pressure to not be a drain on the Aether that no one seems to acknowledge nowadays. Stiff upper lip and all that.”

I don’t want to be a Leech, he thought.

“Oh that is a terrible term.” she said, spiky protuberances on her avatar indicating her displeasure. “I wish you wouldn’t say such things.”

Sorry, I don’t mean to offend.

“It’s ok,” she said, savoring the lemon curried paneer. “Just remember, I didn’t always have the kind of credit it takes to eat out at a place like this, myself.”

Ethan filed that bit of knowledge away somewhere safe.

by Cobweb

Toys

Jamie’s new spectral eyes tasted like tamarinds that had been reconstituted by liquid helium. With lead fingertips she touched the new water and was electrified by the gracious pulses of ancient information.

She licked her lips and a million stars were born, burned, and died upon them. When she felt this way time became her favorite toy.

The beats to the songs of hundreds of cultures kept her entranced as she shifted through phases and wrote new creation stories for upcoming civilizations. Most of them would never know what really happened, that they’d been created from moss by the swing her her index finger and that they’d split atoms to destroy themselves by the swing of her thumb.

She shuddered and shook black holes from her skirt. They dropped forever into the ground and she laughed, brushing lakes of stars out of her hair and planets from her eyes.

Alexi’s Lunch

The roof top door crashed open & Alexi burst out, kinetically amped up & ready to fly. He dove through the a gap in the safety barrier, hit a ramp at full speed, the magnetic bumpers of his board detecting the surface, anchoring just enough to pull closer but not physically connect.

He skipped across rails, sparks flying when he caught them almost too late. The glow of his boards grav plates lit the skylights of the office below and caused a draft that kicked up dust and loose leaves from the grey water collecting gardens beneath him. He pushed off a final rail with gusto, triple flipped in the air and landed right in the middle of the office worker’s roof cafe, startling them all and causing several unbreakable dishes to plummet, then bounce off the ergonomic floor coating.

A hatch opened near the cafe’s entrance and a security bot popped out, spread its spidery legs and shouted a warning.

Tempest

“Oh gee, another wave.”, Captain Theurer muttered sarcastically. Swarms of the creatures were coming up towards him from the center of another wormhole.

A few days earlier, Earth’s Defender Squad had sent him to investigate a wormhole that had appeared near Titan. When he had reached it, he saw a swarm of strange creatures starting to come out of it.

The creatures were red and yellow. They appeared to crawl up the edges of the wormhole. Using his thrusters he had navigated around the edge, taking out as many as possible. When he finished battling this first wave, he got sucked down into the wormhole.

He could not pull himself out of the wormhole. At the end of the wormhole he found another. Again, more of the creatures started to rise out it.

By now, he had lost track of how many wormholes he had been through. He was firing and moving as fast as he could. He knew the button for the superzapper was nearby, in case he started to lose the battle.

An e-zine of one-shot short stories around 1000 characters long.

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Archive for May, 2008

The Many Names of the Maker

A Night Out

Toys

Alexi’s Lunch

Tempest