Security monitor log:
10183658 local time
Sun-Mars L5 Emergency Notification activated.
begin station sensor scan: …
sensoralert: fabrication.p12.firealert
sensoralert: fabrication.p12.decompressionalert
sensoralert: fabrication.p12.vacuumalert
sensoralert: fabrication.p13.decompressionalert
sensoralert: fabrication.p14.decompressionalert
sensoralert: fabrication.p14.doorseal
…sensor scan complete:
searching for relevant camera footage….
Category Archives: Text
23
Jul
{holographic-synthesis-waltz}
23
Jul
la chevaliere
There was a rumour all throughout the palace that the Chevalier D’Argent was secretly a woman.
23
Jul
The Lavender Menace
The Lavender Menace stood silhouetted against the city, hands on their hips, chest thrust out to show off the improbably deep V-neck.
“Citizen! How may I be of assistance?”
23
Jul
In the Bush
“Only four crates, correct?”
Eryn nodded, then held up the small duffel he had clutched tight in his hands. “And this.”
The customs agent nodded and made a note of it. He had a severe face with bushy brown beard and eyebrows, both of which sprouted several small, downy blue feathers at intervals. Eryn had considered that kind of combination, which would have been both sufficient to the Reserve’s criteria and cheaper, but in the end, he’d decided that he couldn’t have been happy with that kind of halfway. The post-transition therapist had said it was a good sign that he was adjusting to a lack of body hair so quickly. Eryn didn’t miss so much as a follicle of it.
23
Jul
God(dess) Bless you, Ruby Woo
Eris Manzana started to unravel around the edges as soon as she hit the door to her house. I watched, fascinated, as the wig came off, then the falsies. I trailed after her and helped with zippers, seeing Harper start to emerge out of the sequins.
“It’s like a reverse magical girl transformation,” I laughed as he tackled his makeup. He had laid out an arsenal of bottles and makeup wipes before he’d ever left the house, the arrangement meticulous. The way he went about destroying it, not so much.
23
Jul
Unregulated Void
There wasn’t a whole lot you could complain about with a period of general galactic peace. Unless you were someone like Carmine Centauri, who’d spent most of your adult life either training for or being directly involved in a period of general galactic war, and then you were just pretty well out of luck.
Which is why Cen actually took the holovid message from Steele, which turned out to be about a job, which turned out to be a job she couldn’t pass up in her current underemployed state of affairs.
Which was how, stars preserve her, she ended up on a tin bucket of a mining shuttle with two of her exes for a twelfth-cycle straight.
23
Jul
Dinner at Dido’s
The house of Dr. Dido Fell—a name so clangingly theatrical that it has to be a pseudonym, but all her diplomas say the same thing—is a modern thing of wood and glass, set high on a hill on the Massachusetts coast; while the road that leads to it is paved, few cars drive there. The inside is always very clean, and so are the windows, no matter how fierce the storms get. Every room looks out over the forest surrounding the grounds, and it’s possible to see the Atlantic itself from the eastmost set; the house itself is a tiny bastion of civilization amid acres of green. It’s often so still that the sound of the ocean makes it through the trees like a distant, rolling hiss.
23
Jul
Double Shot Red-Eye With Room
I have an expensive coffee habit.
It’s not that I can’t make it at home, or that I think the coffee at that cafe is the best coffee in the world. See, it’s the barista. I have developed a burning crush on this barista, who is the hottest person I have ever laid eyes on.
25
Jun
How Far You’ve Come
I leaned my arm against the bar, right next to the stool he was perched on, and said, “Well, hey there, slick, how about you tell me what it takes to get bought a drink around here and I’ll tell you what the first two I want are.”
He leaned back a little, unhunching his broad shoulders from where he was sort of curled in towards his drink, and gave me a long up and down. “You prove you can fit two shot glasses in that mouth and I’ll buy you whatever you want, sweetheart,” he said. We both lasted about two straight-faced beats before he turned on his stool and held out an arm. “C’mere and give me a hug, you little fucker.”
25
Jun
The Confession
‘Bless me, Father,’ I begin quietly after the screen behind the wooden grid slides aside. The confessional is a large structure with beautiful woodwork inlaid with what looks like ivory. There’s an almost-comfortable prie-dieu style kneeler in my compartment and enough space for a man three times my size. The grid in front of my face is carved into an intricate pattern of little ornamental crosses. There’s silence on the other side of the grid, but I can make out the shape of the head and shoulders of my confessor in the dim. I realize I’ve trailed off.
25
Jun
Moltslawn Industries
Half the board of management was already sleeping. Martin doodled another little man, colored its coat in a boring pencil grey, filled in its necktie with the usual blue stripes and killed this one with an anvil.
25
Jun
My Hawk
What’s Blond Ali up to? Are you trying to run away? Is your ass going to bring me anything but trouble? He didn’t say any of those things.
“Where are you staying?” Rostem asked.
“I booked at a serviced apartment, but I haven’t checked in yet.”
“You thought you’d still get in at this time? Forget it.”
This boy had really been distracted from practical considerations, even from eating a meal. Which was why Rostem was sitting in a café in the middle of the night with this boy who called himself Sohran and looked irritated even while eating chicken pudding under his hospitality.
25
Jun
Second Chances
Tim hadn’t brought his sunglasses with him to the work picnic. His glasses only made the glare worse, so he squinted against the glaring afternoon sun and looked around for a place to take refuge from the noise and excitement for a few minutes.
It was a beautiful Saturday, and his company had organized a lovely picnic to keep up morale and boost cooperation between teams. Tim found it hard to want to tie his leg to a financial manager’s in the name of “cooperation,” but he was a good sport about it and even came in second in the sack race.
25
Jun
A Chain of Beads
So it’s one of them crystal mornings of early summer, and the sunlight coming in through the clerestory like it was poured from a pitcher. And I’m sort of thinking what to do about that one drainpipe on the eastern students’ dormitory that keeps coming loose at the same damn spot, but mostly I’m thinking that Frael is a beautiful country but you’d be hard-pressed the long and the wide of it to find someone don’t make a cup of tea tastes like they waved the leaves over the pot and put them away again for later.
I miss the commotion of him running in, but then there’s Master Caerel breathless at my elbow, saying, Goodman Stone, I don’t mean to interrupt your breakfast, but there is a situation in the entry hall in which we could use the assistance of someone like yourself.
25
Jun
Beyond the Sea
Obed heard the blare of the outboard motor long before he saw the boat itself, and it was all he could do to keep from swimming out to meet it in person. There could be many reasons someone might come out all this way in a small watercraft that had nothing to do with him, after all; sometimes they’d see fishermen hoping to catch sharks, other times photographers wanting to capture the look of the reef. One time it had even been a naturalist who’d wanted to study the screaming beach birds that crowded the north shore and crapped on everything. For a piece of land so small it sometimes wasn’t even a blip on the maps they got a surprising amount of visitors.
