Friday, December 02, 2011
Scenes From a Laundromat: Charity
Scenes From a Laundromat: Queen of Air and Tumble Dry
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
An Additional $17 Materials Fee Will Be Assessed To Defray The Cost Of Pentagrams
SMN 301: Shaping and Conducting Pure Evil
Grupert Hanley, Instructor
WEEK ONE
Tuesday
Students are introduced to the concept of inner darkness, and allowed to explore the evil that lurks in the hearts of all men. The instructor will demonstrate basic techniques for extruding evil from the human body. Read chapters 3-5.
Thursday
Students are allowed to begin practicing the techniques previously covered. Students are encouraged to dress in active clothing for this session. The instructor will begin demonstrating techniques for shaping pure evil into useful forms if time permits. Read chapter 7.
WEEK TWO
Tuesday
Guest lecture. Students are encouraged to take notes, as topics covered will be visited on the final exam. Students are also encouraged to bring a change of clothes, as the scent of sulfur will remain pervasive throughout the lecture hall during the duration of the presentation.
Thursday
Quiz. Students will be tested on proficiencies in a variety of real-world situations. Please ensure that the Enrollment Office has a current Waiver of Medical Liability on file. Students are required to have completed the optional "Death and Dismemberment" portion of the Waiver of Medical Liability. Read chapters 10-13.
WEEK THREE
Tuesday
No class. The Feast of Saint Fidelis of Sigmaringen is held. Read chapters 16-20.
Thursday
Students will continue practicing basic techniques in shaping and extruding pure evil. An extra session will be held immediately before the scheduled class period to allow students who have not yet demonstrated sufficient capacity for evil the opportunity to sacrifice themselves to students who have aptly demonstrated the capacity for evil. Credit will still be given for students who exit the program at this point, if the class is taken on a Pass/No Pass basis. Consult your program counselor for more information.
WEEK FOUR
Tuesday
Intermediate techniques will be discussed, and applied to a variety of real-world settings. Students are encouraged to wear clothing that conceals the face and any identifying marks. Students are encouraged to retain legal counsel. Consult the Student Services Office for more details.
Thursday
Guest lecture. Interested students will be given the opportunity to form a Dark Pact with The Lord of The Forgotten Ones. Uninterested students will not be given the opportunity to refuse to form a Dark Pact with The Lord of The Forgotten Ones.
WEEK FIVE
Tuesday
Mid-term exam. Students will be assessed on their progress via passage through the Hall of Impossible Trials. Students who exhibit poor performance will remain within the Hall for a theoretically undefined amount of time, as the Hall of Impossible Trials exists orthogonally to time as it is perceived by all men.
Thursday
All students exhibit poor performance within the Hall of Impossible Trials. Class invariably cancelled. The metaphysical remains of all students are collected by The Lord of The Forgotten Ones.
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Acceptable Loss Code 4: Breakage During Transit
You can't ever pull as much drive power as those fucking tanks do and not brown out the transfer buses, especially once that old piece of shit gets up past one-tenth Cee. That always gets one or two of you, and there's always an accident or something, crates jostling around cracking those damn cheap plex tanks. Fucking Gens won't ever pay to do that shit right.
Fucking Gens. Can't work for anybody else cause they're the only ones that ship intersystem, can't get off the ship cause of the Quarantine, can't fight back cause they'd blow you out the sky if you loaded anything more potent than a mining rig on your own damn boat.
Fucking Gens.
It was the goddamned catwalk that went this time, the support brace breaking clean in two because the fucking inertial compensator went haywire during braking (fucking during, can you believe it?) on approach to the transfer station.
I don't know why the hell I carried you all the way up to the medical bay.
Maybe it was because you were still breathing when I found you. It wasn't your looks, god fucking knows, rows and rows of your same damn face staring me down every run. It ain't like the Gens are gonna pay for you now, they're just gonna write you off as spoilage and look at me funny for not flushing you. It was just you, a broken tank, and a puddle of that fucking synthetic amnio messing up my goddamned cargo floor.
Medical unit says you check out fine, but you're not waking up. Do you even? Do you ever?
You and me, we're the fucking same, you know? We're both what the Gens made us.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Dead Letters
On a very literal level, every human interaction is a relationship of give and take. Ideas are exchanged, transmitted, and the process by necessity requires an incredibly minuscule amount of psychic energy to change hands, like an electron moving from one atom to another. Phone calls and text messages, e-mails and dead tree letters all served as carriers for these motes of thought and will.
Of all the ways human beings are able to correspond, it was the labyrinthine machinations of the United States Postal service that most interested Christopher Markham, and not only because of his own high position in that particular bureaucracy. Christopher knew that the envelopes he watched over contained more than words and paper, and was one of perhaps three dozen alive who did. What mattered, though, was that he was the only one in a position to do something about it.
The Office of Dead Letters had long been considered a backwater position with little possibility of advancement in the higher organization. For a young up-and-coming executive in the civil service to actively maneuver himself into the directorship of that office was nearly unheard of. To his credit, Christopher ran the Office well, cutting costs by closing the San Francisco branch of the Office and consolidating operations in the main Mail Recovery Center in Atlanta. The savings masked a need to get a warehouse of undeliverable mail away from the untamed water of the Pacific Ocean, and a need to eliminate prying eyes looked better on a balance sheet as "staff cutbacks", but the efficiency was real enough.
Processed by fewer hands, the undeliverable mail piled up. Patrolled by understaffed security, the warehouse went unobserved for hours at a time. Christopher recalled every day of the years that led him to his one big night, as he began to distribute gallon jugs of gasoline throughout the darkened warehouse with every bit of the efficiency that marked his tenure as Director of the Office of Dead Letters.
He would be moving into a new position very soon.
Fires broke out all over the warehouse in unison. Disconnected alarms and sabotaged sprinklers let it spread. Letters burned, and as the paper envelopes were destroyed the fragments of will that were attached to them flew free, beginning to swirl around the warehouse in an invisible maelstrom. Christopher opened his mind, calling out, reaching, hoping, and--
They came to him, like millions of miniature planets orbiting and falling towards their star. He could feel each one as they entered him, filling his mind with thoughts and feelings that weren't his own. Fragments, initially, but as they came together they knit themselves into something more complete, a new collective unconsciousness becoming embodied in the person of Christopher Markham.
Already, what he could perceive passed the bounds of nature. Already, his mind moved into places that no mind was meant to occupy. Already, Christopher was becoming a god. The God of Dead Letters.
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
Six Points
Fifteen minutes later, Amanda stood and shook her head from side to side like they had shown her in the training session her first day. Her hair fell all at once, trying and failing to stay rooted in follicles that were no longer alive. A jet of compressed air blew down from a vent above her, automatically sweeping stray strands from her face and clothing as a hemispherical cleaning bug slid out of a recess in the far wall to gobble up what had been left on the floor.
Amanda made her way to her station, and sat down in front of the same technician she had sat down in front of for the last three months. She didn't know his name, and didn't really care to. She wasn't even entirely sure the techs were human behind their surgical masks. The techs never really fraternized with the subjects, except maybe for one or two trivial warnings about the procedure.
"You done antlers before, right?"
"Yeah, I already know about the neck brace."
The worst part about it was she couldn't move her head to read her magazine. She had to hold her arms out straight at shoulder level, like a zombie who was really interested in Cosmo, and that made it difficult to pass the four hours of her shift. It didn't hurt, though, when it came time to cut the antlers off. They usually slipped an anesthetic in with the genetically recombined follicle transplants and accelerated growth factors and all that. Besides, how else would some hick in Iowa or wherever get a nice set of antlers for his den? Kill some poor defenseless animal? No thank you!
It could be worse. She could have been assigned to steaks.