Thought I might try my hand at this Trifecta thing I just found, by way of Fred. The challenge is to write fiction, between 33 and 333 words, using the word of the week and its associated definition. I think I ended up with more of an introduction to something than a complete story, but [...]
Blog Archives
Did you look under the couch?
Earth had been a great home to us. But, the Sun was revving up to devour the inner planets, so we figured it was about time we pack the whole place up and archive it. No danger to the human species: We’d scattered ourselves across the galactic plane. There was no getting rid of us [...]
Biospheric Xenophobia
“Have you ever seen one of them?”
Homebrew Biotech Club
The homebrew club got real interesting last night. Jerry started dating this girl Maddy, and she was something else: purple hair, piercings, and a load of tattoos. And then there’s Jerry: bearded, balding, and been carrying a spare tire for years now. I can see the appeal for him, but she’s out of his league.
Bookshelves
The day they moved in together, he remarked upon how heavy and numerous were all her boxes of books.
Moravec’s Cats
Every ship-morning, I woke up covered in a half-dozen cats. Sometime in the ship-night, they’d wander in from the ducts and find spots to curl up around my sleeping body, virtually pinning me under the sheet and all purring from speaker grilles when I stirred.
Lonely Timeless Flight
He kicks back, alone at a corner table in low-g. He nurses a high gravity beer for the alcoholic irony. It’s his fourth, and the faces around him are blurred. Funny thing, though: with his glasses on, the faces would have been blurred even if he’d been sober.
Don’t Thank the Gnomes
I started the morning by sneaking into a strange house through an unsealed milk door. There was a broken shoe heel on the second floor—its wrongness drew me up the stairs as sure as a cord tied round my ribs. It was done before the lady of the house could sigh.
Famous Last Words
They told me never to talk to it; it was isolated for a reason. But, like I told them, I couldn’t imagine anything a transhuman AI could say to make me let it out of the box. So, after a post-midnight tumbler of Irish whiskey, I opened up a secure terminal and said hello. What [...]
Controlled Monetization
I took the pills. Like everyone else, I took the pills and I sent in the hair and the piss to prove I took the pills. I’d figured something out, though: I could stop taking the pills for the first half of the month, then double up at the end. I still passed the tests; [...]
From Spaceman to Plantsman
The first time the spaceman saw my garden, I thought he was going to strangle me.
About Me
Hi there! My name is Les Orchard. I'm a serial enthusiast, {web,mad,computer} scientist, {tech,scifi} writer, and home{brew,roast}er. I work for the Mozilla Corporation and live near Detroit, MI.
