(reading time: 1 hour, 9 minutes)
President Digz
“Hey Longjump… it’s looking at me,” Digz said with a smile. He waved his hand back and forth and watched the eyes of the little character on screen follow it. “Hey little guy, can you bring me some Seinfeld? Season seven? S-E-V-E-N.” Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 24 minutes)
E-denta
It took three separate sessions across two days, but E-denta finally succeeded in painting all of Maggie’s toe nails. The idea came to her when Jones asked for everyone to search the surrounding area for plants. The Riches around them were getting so thick that Maggie couldn’t find enough to eat without their help. Oddly enough, Braxton had the most talent for rooting around the money and bringing up the flattened bodies of mostly dead bushes. The elephant didn’t care for them, so Jones had to chuck the limp plants into her mouth and order the beast to chew. Occasionally she would chew three or four times and spray the pulpy mess back out, staining his shirt a rotten green. Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 4 minutes)
Gronix the Spouse Eater
An angry crowd, that was all talk, gathered outside Bee Tower, keeping their distance from the elephant with its head stuck through the door. They grumbled and whined and milled about, too afraid to organize an actual physical strike against Jones for creating a long burrow of destruction through the city with his robot chum. Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 16 minutes)
Jones and Heart
In an almost frightening way, Jones had lightened up. They had traveled for close to two weeks now with a vague destination in mind, stopping here and there when they crossed lush money-free pastures of tall grass and scrub for Maggie to gorge on. After the initial moment of horror and the attempt at forced separation, things had cooled down between the man and robot. The benefits of the connection almost always washed away Jones’s bouts of feeling manipulated. Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 14 minutes)
Jones
After roaming haphazardly for an hour, Jones directed Maggie towards the area where they had found the food store; he still wondered about that glint of robot skin. With no home and no job, the small mystery turned his curiosity into a ravenous school of piranha. It was a ridiculous riddle to waste time on, as if someone died in the middle of a joke and left him no punch line. It was better to investigate that though than pick up where he left off before settling in Brightside. Continue reading
(blurb)
Behold the United States after an economic apocalypse; inflation has run wild. Life is nearly choked out by mountains of coins and dollars in the breeze. Crazed robots, rogues with coin-shooting guns, and many other strange things roam. One man, a rare surviving specimen of optimism, journeys across the wasteland of wealth in search of a place good enough to be his home.
(reading time: 1 hour, 13 minutes) (reading time for entire novel: 7 hours, 20 minutes)
An average of thirty six thousand dollars was crushed under his feet with each step. Technically they weren’t feet, just metal imitations which carried him across wastelands of currency with a speed no real feet could. The patented feet were attached to large square pads that acted like snowshoes, preventing their owner from sinking into stacks of money or getting caught in credit card landslides. His imitation heart ran at full capacity, so sincerely that a real heart would be put to shame. Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 12 minutes)
One Queen to Another
The harvesters seemed to have necks made of clay. Day after day they went out into the blazing sun and picked cherries, counting on nothing but the leaves to shade them. Only the elders ever wore hats, and that was more so they could see than be protected from the extreme heat. This meant Keikogile had no way to conceal the glowing cracks on the side of her neck without drawing stares. Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 34 minutes)
Desperate Splash
The deep crocodile pen was drained and abandoned. Mister Koulsy walked around on the bottom of it, boots squishing the water plants into the shallow puddles and mud left behind. He lifted their stalks with one foot, checking underneath for any stragglers. The animals had ranged in size from only fifteen centimeters long to just over nine meters, yet none had been left behind in their exodus.
He stopped in front of a round tunnel in one of the pen’s concrete sides. It was big enough to pass a truck through. Up until recently it had been covered by a grid of iron bars and thinner mesh on top of that, allowing fresh river water in and out while keeping the animals in. Someone, presumably Delister the missing zookeeper, had taken a welding torch to the boundary and opened it wide for them. Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 28 minutes)
Noblest Intentions
The skull of nutcracker man was on the move for the first time in a long while. His services were needed by the Science Authority, needed by the head of it in fact, so a young scholar had been sent to fetch the ancient cranium from its cozy museum home near the bones of queens. He was wheeled, safe within his glass box, through the corridors and down to the lower levels of the spire. It was in an elevator that the young scholar first spoke to him. Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 26 minutes)
Continued in Part Four
Banished to the Basement
Commander Begumisa returned to the grass-comber at the very edge of the order she’d given Genomon. Just five minutes more and they would’ve returned without her, assuming her death. She came back with her hound stick and no physical clues to Laetoli’s fate. The whole of the expeditionary force watched her slow walk across the barrens. When she got to the grass she sat on the edge of the comber without a word, simply snapping her fingers until someone gave her a canteen. She took two large swigs and then poured a third over the back of her hung head. Eventually they could not wait any longer. Continue reading
Blaine Arcade 