Category: Friday Fiction

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 all he could do to wait a few weeks and come back alone, with a piece of paper.
Right there, in the picture. Yes. The stripes were Morse code for the digits to the safe combination.
The others could get stuffed, he mused, boarding a Caribbean flight.
—
via Darleen

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 that stop & start,
Hopefully leaving us wiser.

Joy is sought above all fame,
By those who wisdom grasp,
More precious than the richest game,
And likelier to last.

Fret’ee not the world’s allures,
And shiny objects proffered:
Pursue instead that which endures,
As though by Heaven offered.
—
via Darleen

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 the files.

He’d rely on a deck of one-time pads for decrypting the instructions.

. . .weeks later. . .

The plan’s masterful dots appeared randomly, yet managed to connect. The altercation was minor, yet DeepFakes gradually turned it into a full-on global economic meltdown.

Their machine learning foresaw naught.
—
via Darleen

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 agencies was trivial. Grabbing the NASDAQ, London, and Hong Kong markets, was just ripple effect for the Evil Metadata Pulse (EMP).
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, young Hezekiah Stoltzfus found his father plowing. “Verily, the English will cease to bedevil us about selling land for a data center, sir.”
—
via Darleen

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 down.
“Stupid? He took me up into the forest where he had a still.”
“A still what?”
“Still haven’t figured out there’s more to life than electronics.”
We go up the hill quite a bit slower than I used to.
The old oak marks the turn.
There it is.
—
via Darleen

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 had, while there at work I toiled,
Should burn more as a blazing sun,
While his savings that tramp spoiled.

She dumped him as a habit bad,
When all of his cash was gone,
How then can I now be sad?
Destiny has its bit of fun.
—
via Darleen

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 were making fun of?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it’s that and the empty pistol. You think you can take this thing with a butt stroke?”
“That’s a very intimate question, don’t you think?”
“Dude! Here it comes”
The thing emitted a very natural grow and came at them.
“It’s real!”
—
via Darleen

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 conceirge understood what I meant when I asked about Uber, because he pointed to an old horse in the field.”
He stared.
“How can you possibly live a prehistoric existence like this? Gwynnethia and I will be lodging a complaint with the Better Business Bureau.”
He stared.
—
via Darleen