The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty Crazy Uncle Eddy stared at the room full of fuming relatives from the portrait. “Screw him and his stupid scarf! I just want my share of the inheritance!” railed John Wentworth. “He used to sit and knit and mutter ‘String literals, or literal strings?’” said John’s brother Tim. And Greg knew. It was […]

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty Some are known to history, Some by neighbors known, Some fall prey to gluttony, Of food and things they own. Youth is spent in pleasure’s chase, While flesh can still support it, And life can feel a treadmill race, By pressure so distorted. Love matures the youthful heart, Binding the sympathizer, Through trials […]

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty The Association was composed of off-the-net greasepits and cars that people could still “work” on. He’d fetch the strongbox cached securely within the engine compartment, extract the optical media, mount it on the creaky old laptop (running some Slackware release that hadn’t been updated or rebooted in a decade–up the network!) and un-tar […]

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty The 34th floor apartment adjacent the utility shaft, so power entering and heat exiting could be masked, waited. At the proper moment, connectivity in the area was gone: the Cthulhu Taking Humanity Under Logical Hostage Ultimatum (CTHULHU) project went live. Overwhelming global DNS servers in NOVA, Amazon us-east-1 region, Azure resources, and government […]

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty “Haven’t been across Grandpa Eddy’s Bridge in 40 years,” I say, looking at young Tim, angry at being peeled off of his iPad for a walk with his grandfather, “I heard they’d renovated it last year.” “This is stupid,” decides Tim with a 7 year old’s vehemence. We make the right turn, head […]

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty Thank Thee for time to pause, Commercial though’t sadly be, To humbly gather for the cause, Forgiving here before the tree. Thugged my girl of Spring even, There before the burger joint, That wretched jerk, my brother Steven, Whom I absolve at this here point. I suppose his Summer days of fun, He […]

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty “Oh no! Bill, its optical sensors are active.” “OK. We’re already frozen in place, Mike. It’s 200 clicks to base. Comms are down. What do we do?” “Do? That EMP was supposed to halt all the droids. How much ammo do you have left?” “None. You?” “Same.” “Bollocks.” “You remember that machete you […]

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty “We’d like to lodge a complaint about this ‘Unplugged Vacation’, right? There’s no Wifi. OK, We have 4G. But you brought us so far out that we haven’t got any bars.” He stared. “And speaking of coffee bars,” continued Biff, “there isn’t a Starbucks in Uber distance. And I’m not sure that the […]

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