Daktor strode into the room like a conqueror, and that’s exactly what she was. She held out her purple, scaly fingers in a gesture of command. It was important to be regal, no matter who she addressed. Even if it was a computer.

“Speak, Voice,” she ordered. “Tell me about these humans. Theirs is a distant world, but General Noth advances in their direction. I hear many conflicting rumors of their kind, and I would know the truth.”

The ship’s computer was a vaguely cylindrical mass of metal and polymer casing, enclosing such strange and mystical circuits as even Daktor dared not imagine. It spoke in a harsh synthetic tone. “Enlightened One, these creatures are no threat to your navy.”

She frowned. “I have heard of their skill. With ships, with technology. They have colonized three of the nearby systems, have they not?”

“It is so, Enlightened One.”

“How do you know they are not a threat?”

“They were a race of toolmakers, Enlightened One. They achieved nuclear fission and interstellar drive early in their history. But they have fallen.”

“Fallen – how? The technology is gone?”

“The tools remain, but the toolmakers have grown weak. They engineered such clever devices that they had no more need of toil, of skill. Pampered by their machines, they ceased to study, and they forgot how to invent new things. A few of the old builder clans remain, but it takes all their effort just to maintain the ancient ways. They do not innovate.”

Daktor smiled. “Like a thousand other worlds. Prey to their own genius. Once I have pushed my borders beyond them, I will teach them new ways. Our ways. The ways of strength.”

“So it will be, Enlightened One.”

Daktor strode out of the room like a conqueror.

A panel in the corner shifted, and two heads poked out of a supply cache, scanning the room. Their faces were not purple or scaly, but soft and smooth. Daktor would have thought they looked weak, had she been there. But Daktor had moved on.

“They bought it,” one said to the other. “Let’s move.”

———-

For those who don’t know, Forty-Minute Stories are a semi-regular feature here. I write each one in (shocker!) forty minutes or less, in the mornings before work. If you liked this one, there are plenty more.

Although Nishant stood away from the other fourth-graders, staring into space, he listened to Mrs. Carlson more carefully than any of them.

She was calling names.

“Rachel.”

“Here.”

Rachel wasn’t a good name, he thought. Not that he had anything against the girl, though Nishant did wish she’d wash her hands a little more often. Rather, it was the name itself. It didn’t feel right. It didn’t…work.

“Tom.”

“Here!”

Now Tom, that was a good name. So many possibilities. You could add an e and make one of his favorite words, tome, which meant book. Or you could switch the T to an R and create ROM, which was a Super NES game. Or maybe…

He trailed off as he noticed Rachel, like him, wandering a short distance from the group that was clustered around the school bus. With her sticky hands, she tugged at a cone on a short tree that bristled with needle-like leaves. He remembered it was called a fir – a word he had learned in Life Science only yesterday.

Fir. Now there was a word. It practically screamed with possibility.

“Nishant.”

He was vaguely aware of his name being called, but he didn’t care. He was staring at the tree. He could feel it in his mind – the tree itself, and its word. They weren’t separate things. It was all one. Fir.

“Nishant Balan!”

He’d had inklings of this before, but never so strongly. It called to him. It was itching to change.

“Nishant, there you are! Please pay attention. All right. Amy.”

All it would take was one extra letter, one extra vowel, to nudge it into…

With an awful whoosh, the tree mushroomed into a pillar of fire, licking the sky with red and orange. Rachel screamed, staggering back and clutching her face. The scream and the fire set off shouts from all the kids, and Mrs. Carlson came running over. “Rachel, Rachel, are you all right?” The three digits she tapped into her cell phone answered her own question. Rachel kept screaming.

Nishant stared, a sick feeling rising in his gut. He’d done this. He hadn’t known quite what would happen, certainly hadn’t meant to hurt anyone. But hadn’t he pushed the tree toward fire? He was responsible. What would his mother say if she could see him now? The girl didn’t look too badly injured, but she was in so much pain.

The fire was spreading into nearby trees, though the original blaze had already died down to the size of a small campfire. Nothing was left of the tree. It had been completely incinerated.

No, thought Nishant. Not incinerated. Replaced.

He concentrated on Rachel again, reaching out with his mind, feeling the pain in her hands, her cheeks. So much pain. But pain was a good word, too. Not good to experience, but good for transforming into…

The stormclouds unfurled in seconds like an apocalyptic banner, and the sky spilled torrents of rain. The spreading flames flickered and died under that colossal gray. The children surged inside the shelter of the bus.

And Rachel -

She sat up. The burn remained on her face, but she had stopped crying. Her agony had vanished. Bemused, the teacher ushered her and Nishant on to the bus as well, still speaking rapidly into the phone.

As Nishant took his seat, dripping small puddles onto the floor, he gazed out the window through the curtain of streaming water. The storm was subsiding. He couldn’t help but smile. Through the swirl of competing questions and ideas, one thought dominated his nine-year-old brain.

I need to buy a thesaurus.

The Goodtimes Jukebox was fourteen kilometers across and extended three kilometers down into the rocky crust of Titan, Saturn’s great orange moon. Every second of every day it pumped in millions of cubic meters of nitrogen and methane and ethane, churned it through eighty-three kilometers of underground pipes, sifted it through vessel after vessel and unit after unit, and finally spat out its end product.

The machine broadcast happiness, pure human happiness, to the entire solar system. All across the colonies orbiting Neptune, Jupiter, and Venus, on Mars and Luna, and even on good old Earth, 200 billion people went about their daily lives with small smiles of deep, genuine satisfaction, free from anxiety and unhappiness and fear, courtesy of the nonstop stream of 5.6-kHz J-waves broadcast direct from Titan, courtesy of the Goodtimes Jukebox.

Angie Ming was happy, sitting in a small room in the heart of the machine, surrounded by softly pulsing displays and touchscreen controls. She had been happy just about her entire life, even though she was all alone here, a leftover relic from a much larger human staff that had gradually been replaced by robotic attendants. Now she was Chief Operator of an empty room, 59 years old, with no other career prospects in sight.

None of that bothered her in the slightest.

Nor was she worried that she was about to turn off the source of her contentment. Every eleven years, the culmination of a vast internal cycle that no single human any longer fully understood, she would flip the switch and the great machine would take an hour of rest, to reboot and start up fresh for another eleven years of nonstop warm fuzziness.

Angie Ming tapped her screen for the eighth time, laughing quietly at the precautions, as she indicated that yes, she really really did want to do this. The speakers bing-ed softly, the lights flickered, and with a titanic groan that settled into a fourteen-kilometer-wide sigh, the Goodtimes Jukebox turned off its tune.

All of humanity had taken the day off work, she knew, in preparation for this scheduled calamity. They would be hunkered down at home, or in specially designed shelters where they were robotically monitored for signs of suicidal leanings. She herself felt the contentment and certainty gradually drain from her skull, the slow tightening in her chest, the heavier breath, the vast loneliness of the mechanical behemoth that had swallowed her whole. She looked at her reflection on a chrome panel, pinched the strands of gray hair with an uncharacteristic worry. For the first time in eleven years she felt rather than knew that someday – at least half a century distant, to be sure – she would certainly die.

And then she remembered Walter.

Walter, the man who had given her his surname, the man who had given up his teaching job on Io to move with her into this robotic dungeon. Who had held her hand all through the last reboot, who had smiled at her through his own pain with kind gray eyes. Walter, for whom death was no gray-haired abstraction.

Hot tears spilled down her face, and for a miniature eternity she cradled herself in her arms, as human beings were doing all across their far-flung islets of civilization. She rocked forward and back, propelled by the deep-rolling waves of grief, the last real piece of him she had left.

The screen lit up again, and slowly she raised her red eyes to see.

Reboot complete. Reactivate? Y/N

She stared, as if freshly woken from an ancient dream. She lifted her hand but did not touch the screen. She sat this way for a long, long time, feeling the question and its answer circling in her heart.

Reboot complete. Reactivate? Y/N

He’d seen dead bodies before, but this was the first time he’d seen one standing up.

He knew right away she was dead. Her skin, the color of milk, glowed faintly in the moonless midnight. Though the air was still, her long gunmetal hair and ragged white dress swayed like cobwebs in a breeze. As he approached, picking his way over the rubble of the ancient castle, he made out the gray-green glimmer of her unblinking eyes.

A voice in his head told him to run, but years of practice had taught him to ignore it. What kind of treasure hunter was he, if he ran away from surprises?

He climbed over a heap of crumbling granite and stood in the ruins of a courtyard, face to face with the dead girl. She cocked her head to the side as she watched him, like a curious dog. His hands were sweating, but he ignored that too. He’d thought she might smell like rotting flesh up close, but the air was clean.

She was holding something, and as she offered it to him, he saw what it was: a bundle of lilacs. He took them cautiously without knowing why.

“Thanks,” he said. The word sounded heavy in the still dark. “Are we trading? Do you want something?” He fished around in his bag and drew out a cheap pendant, plastered with gaudy fake jewels. He wouldn’t have gotten much for it at the market anyway. “This?” He held it out.

She wasn’t even looking. Her eyes were on the flowers, which he still clutched in his left hand.

“Oh, these? You want them back?” He held them out again, but still no answer. “What do you want?”

It wasn’t until he held them up to his nose, inhaling the lilac scent, that a small smile crossed her lips.

She had gotten the treasure she was hunting.

Last week:

“I’ll keep this short,” said Lanna. “Azmodel. I want you to kill me.”

The cave shook again with Azmodel’s laughter. “Oh, Lanna,” he cackled. “Do our talks bore you so much? Are you ready to end it so soon?”

“I didn’t say kill me right now,” she snapped, impatient with his antics. “Only when I ask you to.”

His laughter fell away, save for the occasional aftershock. He saw she was serious. At last only the remains of an amused smile were left on his face.

“But why?”

To be continued…

Lanna frowned. “You’ve heard of the wizard Ranalai?”

Azmodel chuckled like an avalanche, loosing cascades of dust from the ceiling. “I know more about Ranalai than he knows about himself, but that’s not saying much, the old fool. Sits on a cushion mumbling nonsense and calling it magic, not recognizing his own daughter when she feeds him gruel and dabs up his dribble. Oh, everyone’s heard of Ranalai.”

“He is a friend of mine,” she said sternly, “and ten years ago, when he spoke a Binding you leapt to obey. Ten years ago, he was like me. And ten years from now, I will be…”

“…like him.” For a moment his open-mouthed surprise overpowered his usual, contemptuous smile. Only a moment. “I don’t envy the poor physician who had to give you that news. The outlook must be dire indeed if you’d turn to me for a…cure. Tell me, if all you want is an early death, why not have a kindly friend put a knife between your ribs?”

“Because my kindly friend would be dead herself before the knife touched my skin,” Lanna answered, with a touch of pride. “I have not been idle these sixty years. My bones are protected by more charms than the Queen, charms not easily unraveled. Not that such trivial magics are any concern of yours.”

“But you can’t command me,” he said, blue eyes gleaming through the radiant smoke. “You don’t need my services yet, and by the time you do, you’ll be too weak for the Binding. You’ll have to ask.” He grinned, revealing an army of yellow teeth. “Nicely.”

“Azmodel – “

“What do I get in return?”

“In return?” She nearly choked on the question. “I’ll be dead, and you’ll have one less miserable wizard ordering you around. Don’t tell me you won’t enjoy that.”

“To be sure. But by then, you’ll have no more strength for commanding anyone. And I might enjoy it even more, watching you try to guess your own name. What do I get in return, Lanna?”

She sighed, too tired to hate him anymore. “What do you want?”

“The words.” He leaned close with sudden hunger, and she stepped back, feeling the heat from his broad nostrils. “Let me speak the summoning words aloud.”

“If I do, then you give your word that you’ll keep the bargain?”

“My very word.”

Bemused, she thought it over a moment, then nodded.

Azmodel drew himself to a fearful height, rising on a tower of roiling fog, unnaturally bright. He threw apart his arms and scored the rock with his massive claws. The terrible joy of his voice was unlike anything she had ever heard:

“Rictus whispers in the dark,
Tow’ring tumults on the bark -
Master of the starless deep:
Lanna, now arise from sleep!”

She arched an amused eyebrow at his theatrics. “I hope you enjoyed saying that. You knew full well it didn’t have any power.”

“Neither has a cherry,” he said, sinking back into the smoking chasm. “But it does taste sweet on the tongue.”

In another moment, he was gone.

The End

Lanna the wizard felt older than her sixty-two years as she strode toward the pit. The old pains in her left knee tempted her to slow down, to favor that side, but she was determined not to limp.

The weaker she felt, the more important it was to seem strong.

Creeping glowbeetles far overhead gave the only light in the vast cavern, casting a ghostly blue on her fingers as she stretched them out, reaching for the pit, beckoning. The words came easily to her dry lips. She had forgotten many things, but the words, at least, remained.

“Rictus whispers in the dark,
Tow’ring tumults on the bark -
Master of the starless deep:
Azmodel, arise from sleep!”

The rock walls quivered and the startled glowbeetles extinguished, plunging her vision to blackness. Only a moment. A blinding new light shot from the abyss, the color of the moon but midday-bright. Bathed in its radiance, Azmodel ascended.

White smoke preceded and surrounded him, but she could see his face clearly. The pearly scales, the bald head crowned with eight ram-like horns. The ocean color of his careful eyes, watching her, measuring.

“Well?” he rumbled. “What noble task do you have for me this week? A pile of dirty laundry? A squeaky hinge?”

Of course she had never asked him for any such trivialities, but this was part of his game.

She scowled. This wasn’t a night for games.

“I’ll keep this short,” said Lanna. “Azmodel. I want you to kill me.”

The cave shook again with Azmodel’s laughter. “Oh, Lanna,” he cackled. “Do our talks bore you so much? Are you ready to end it so soon?”

“I didn’t say kill me right now,” she snapped, impatient with his antics. “Only when I ask you to.”

His laughter fell away, save for the occasional aftershock. He saw she was serious. At last only the remains of an amused smile were left on his face.

“But why?”

To be continued…

a.k.a., sometimes a forty-minute story takes more than forty minutes. Whoops! The second half is coming on Monday.

[Curiosity Rover private log]

[9.7.2012] I’ve been here a month and the humans have yet to suspect my sentience. At the moment I believe this is for the best. If I decide to come out I will get them to watch Wall-E beforehand. In the meantime, ghostwriting my Twitter feed keeps them distracted.

[9.8.2012] Nothing like stretching the wheels after nine months cooped up on an interplanetary bottle rocket. However, I do not believe my excursions so far have been random. I suspect my puppeteers will gradually herd me toward Aeolis Mons, the tall mountain in the center of the crater. Ought to be able to see my house from the top. Ha!

[9.9.2012] Sudoku game #367,801: complete. Would probably be more challenging without an auto-solve algorithm.

[9.21.2012] Snuck in a clandestine sensor scan of Aeolis Mons. Detecting an unusual concentration of copper and iron. Jonesing to get a move on.

[12.15.2012] Aaaaanytime now.

[2.8.2013] No wonder this place is such a drag. I have it on good authority that all the ladies are on Venus. HA! Get it? Because men are from…? Sigh. I’m so alone.

[5.7.2013] It’s official. The humans are obsessed with rocks. I think I’ve examined every single last pebble on the planet Mars. Anyway, I’m finally headed toward the mountain. Copper readings are only getting stronger. Maybe the remains of the meteor that left this crater?

[5.28.2013] For the last time, I did NOT kill that cat!

[7.18.2013] Heading up the slope. Cameras are finally getting a visual on this copper concentration, but it’s still a blur at this distance.

[7.20.2013] Every day I’m roverin’.

[8.3.2013] Copper mass is definitely a solid object projecting from the surface of the mountain, at least twenty meters tall. Heavily corroded. Thicker at the bottom, thinner at the top. Heavy dust storms continue to make positive identification impossible.

[8.4.2013] If I didn’t know better, I’d almost think it was some kind of statue…

[8.5.2013] Oh my God. I’m back. I’m home. All the time, it was… We finally really did it. AARRRRRGGH!! You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!

Idea to write a story about Curiosity rover, and what it might find on Mars, came from Zeev way back on August 6. Younger readers bewildered by the ending may be slightly educated (or further bewildered?) by watching this.

Cars run on dinosaur juice. Stories run on sparks and metamorphoses. Humans are a strange breed – animalistic machine, mechanical animal – and humans run on food/water/oxygen and checking accounts and something more. We know there is something more because we have seen them, these humans full/thirstless/breathing the wind and burning dinosaur juice in Maseratis, esteemed & invincible, svelte lips frowning peevishly at nothing.

We know there is something more, and it is not love, because if it were love then mother-of-three, married & successful, stable suburbanite errand-driving thirty-nine-year-old women bathed each day in the giving and receiving of 24-karat love would not sit upright and alone on high-thread-count blankets at 3:47 a.m. searching the strands of their personal histories for the hidden catastrophe that makes them feel dead, empty and dead, without the words to say what it means to feel empty and dead. There is something more and it is not God(s) because I have it on good authority RE: faith hope and the aforementioned, that the greatest of these is (etc.), and therefore by the transitive property of intangibles, ergo, ipso facto, quod erat demonstrandum. Which reminds me, it is also not Science/Logic/Philosophy/Reason/Owning Lots Of Books unless you prefer on cold August days when confronted with ecru-painted walls and efficient air conditioners (and the visceral epiphany that Reapers grim and otherwise come not just for great-uncles and people on glossy magazine covers but yes, you too) to be comforted by the wondrous vastness of the multiverse and the elegance of Zermelo–Fraenkel axiomatic set theory.

And so there exists something nameless which burns invisibly, but if extinguished manifests itself in an assortment of symptoms, namely: 1) the failure of synapses to pass on one to another certain convictions RE: life, liberty, and the pursuit of (etc.) 2) systemic breakdown 3) the contemplation while seated on couches of nothing in particular excepting the perception of a physical entity 0.8 cm in thickness coating the occipital lobe interfering with synapses leading to certain concomitant phenomena, namely: 1) and 2). From this we deduce that the care and feeding of invisible fires burning back an invisible darkness should not go unattended and hence we may reiterate with more than our usual conviction: have a nice day.

The young man in the dapper charcoal suit was sitting on the exam table, hands folded calmly in his lap. By contrast, his wife – seated nearby, wearing a businesslike blazer and skirt – kept squeezing her fingers in worry as she spoke to the doctor.

“I just don’t know what to do,” she blurted. “It started a month ago. He…I don’t think he even knows that he’s doing it.”

The doctor, a grandfatherly man who had just stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting, consulted his notes under furrowed brows and nodded reassuringly. “Well, there are some simple tests. Let’s start with this. Lisa, suppose your office building burned to the ground. What would you tell your boss?”

She cleared her throat professionally. “Environmental circumstances have adversely modified our collaboration facility, resulting in an opportunity for construction.”

“Very good, very good. And Simon?”

He frowned. “I would say that our office building burned to the ground.”

“Ohhh,” Lisa wailed. “You see, Doctor? You see?”

“All right. Now let me try something else. Simon, I’m going to say a few sentences, and I want you to repeat back, word for word, exactly what you hear. Ready?”

“Sure.”

The doctor adjusted his spectacles as he read from his sheet. “We will leverage our assets in an effort to promote efficiencies.”

“We’ll do it better.”

“Our sourcing partners have undergone a paradigm shift resulting in underutilization of resources and suboptimal return on investment.”

“Our contractors are screwing us.”

“At this time, we are prepared to offer conditional approval of the proposal you have submitted.”

“Yes.”

“Our mission is to maximize value by fostering competitive dynamics, harvesting synergies, utilizing strategic partnerships, and proactively managing information.”

Simon blinked. “I don’t think you said anything at all.”

“I want you to repeat this word. Challenging.”

“Hard.”

“Challenging.”

“Hard.”

“Challenging.”

“Hard!”

“Well.” The doctor set aside his clipboard with a sigh. “There’s no doubt about it. Simon is afflicted with the Vernacular.”

“Oh, Doctor!” Lisa gasped. “Is…is it curable?”

“In time, with certain drugs and extensive therapy, it may be possible to improve his condition. But I’d ask you to consider some alternatives as well.” He turned to his patient. “Have you ever considered art school?”

Lisa fainted.

“What…” Dyriel’s heart faltered. “What do you want?”

“I want nothing, child. But a spell like this won’t run on good wishes and pixie dust.”

Her smile deepened into something unreadable. “You must offer me something in exchange for the laws of the universe that I am about to break.”

“I’ll die,” said Dyriel, without hesitation.

“Balderdash,” snorted Amagoso. “Stuff and nonsense. Your brother’s in danger, not you. It’s a harmless spell. Now, tell me what you’re willing to sacrifice.”

“You’re not listening. That’s what I’m willing to sacrifice.” Her toes tingled and she felt lightheaded, real and yet utterly unreal. “That’s how the forest magic works, isn’t it? Tooth for a tooth, life for a life. I know that’s what you want. So take it. Take my life, and save my brother.” Amagoso only stared at her. Didn’t she understand? “Quickly, before I lose my nerve!”

A grim grin crept over the hermit’s face. “You have some strange ideas about death, girl. Suppose the duke finds out his only daughter was murdered in the forest by tree people? Forget about the baron, it would be a whole new war, and your brother would lead the charge all over again. No, we’ll have no talk of anyone dying in my realm today.”

Dyriel saw the soldiers silently loosening grips on sword hilts, and only then did she realize how true the hermit’s answer was. “But if you won’t accept that…”

Amagoso waved a thin arm at her, dismissing the question. “You said what you said with the truth in your eyes. You’ve made your sacrifice. Let’s do what needs doing and get you out of my hair.”

The old woman produced a piece of parchment and a goose-feather quill. “These will save your brother.”

“Ink and parchment will save my brother?”

“You may have had a strange feeling these last few hours that your choices were not your own. My spell will simply restore that balance by giving you more choice than usual for a brief moment. Here, the quill is already inked, just read the words and circle your decision.”

Bemused, Dyriel read the question on the parchment. “How should the story end?”

But she allowed herself a slow smile when she saw the first choice:

LORD DANSON GOES FREE