scifi

Labor of Ruby and Pearl: Part Four

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

(reading time: 43 minutes)

Labor of Love

A rickety shack of a house buzzed with activity.  Like most dwellings on Mavercree, there wasn’t another one for miles.  Sixteen vehicles were parked all around the home, with two being bigger than the building itself.  People moved in and out of the single door; they had to turn sideways for two to fit.  The wooden cabin shuddered with everyone’s steps and the light rain dripping over the clogged gutters looked like nervous sweat.  The poor building had never seen such a flurry of bodies. Continue reading →

Labor of Ruby and Pearl: Part One

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 3 Comments

(blurb)

A pact struck in the distant future, after mankind has colonized dozens of worlds and diversified into engineered subspecies, saw the death of guns and missiles.  With the new stigma of ‘farcoward’ weapons comes a return of the sword, shield, and bow.

Dana Rudolph is a grumpy travel writer hopping world to world, keeping to himself until date of publishing, when he is pulled into a vast, and surprisingly icky, conspiracy where he must do his best to protect the ‘appearl’, an anomalous learning gem that formed on its own inside a supercomputer.

Follow him and his sword as he teams up with an amazon and a leprechaun to dismantle the supposedly divine, forcing him to confront his traumatic past.

(reading time: 45 minutes) (reading time for entire novel: 6 hours, 11 minutes)

Labor of Ruby and Pearl

by

Blaine Arcade

The Prosecution’s Best Witness

A man, mostly hollowed, took his seat at the witness stand.  It was time to present the blood ruby left to him by his captors so it could be admitted into evidence.  That way justice could prevail. Continue reading →

Moana’s Mosaic

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 2 Comments

(reading time: 22 minutes)

Over two hundred students were ushered into the atrium of the Pascal Higher Institute of Mathematics, which was composed of a huge, blue, glass dome held in place by a latticework of metal bars. Sunlight shone in through a hole at the top, bypassing a spinning frame in order to cast the shadow of a shifting tesseract on the floor below. Continue reading →

The Medal Ghosts

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 4 Comments

You can survive your death, a little bit anyway, as long as you’ve had the treatment.  Then you can enjoy your life-like state as a drifting neural vapor that might do some thinking and probably doesn’t feel pain…

(reading time: 58 minutes)

The Medal Ghosts

The reception area of the cloud cognition research facility was designed to evoke positive feelings much more than the rest of the building.  The couches were burgundy, the front desk was paneled in light shining wood, and the receptionist wore a pale purple sweater.

She wore the smile she was hired for when an eleven year old girl came in through the automatic doors.  She walked up to the desk and placed her elbows on it, but instead of asking any questions she merely looked around.  The receptionist wondered what was going on in that little blond head, but didn’t care enough to actually guess. Continue reading →

Marathon Discovery

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 4 Comments

The law says you can only claim territory on new planets by physically exploring it with your own two feet.  It doesn’t say you can’t wear special equipment, train in oxygen chambers, and store your own blood for later infusion, or compete with representatives of other countries in vicious races for dominance…

(reading time: 52 minutes)

Marathon Discovery

by

Blaine Arcade

A metal-wrapped bubble of oxygen drifted through space like the last deep breath of a time capsule before being buried in the dark. The letters N.A.C. were printed on the bubble’s side as if there was someone to look at them. Within the bubble’s skin, members of a human crew went about their daily business. Continue reading →

Paused Fire

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 4 Comments

The devices changed everything, allowing disasters to be frozen in progress, resulting in countless saved lives.  It takes dedicated people to work as rescue miners, tunneling into the paused time to extract the petrified people.  A bomb has gone off, and there might be something strange going on deep inside the solidified smoke and flame…

(reading time: 54 minutes)

Paused Fire

By

Blaine Arcade

My pager went off. Both our faces forgot what emotions they were supposed to express and sunk. Our perfect moment shattered by that obnoxious beeping. Why did it have to be now? Why did whatever maniac blowing up whichever politician pick now? It’s as if our moment was his countdown. Drop to one knee… 3. Open the blue velvet box with the paused water ring that cost me four months’ pay… 2. Ask her ‘will you marry me?’… 1. Boom. Pause.

50 hours until crystallization Continue reading →

A Long Wait for Meatballs

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 4 Comments

Clarence Under helps police the high altitude areas between the shafts of commercial space elevators.  The one warning they always give is to never attempt light speed within the atmosphere.  If you do, time will distort, and Clarence is left cracking open your vehicle to see just what of you is left…

(reading time: 1 hour, 17 minutes)

A Long Wait for Meatballs

I’ve got a couple short stories to tell you… well not exactly short.  They were short for me, just a few minutes or hours; they were painfully long for everyone else, sometimes days and sometimes years.

You can have the legal details first.  Legally, my name is Clarence Under.  I was born black to white parents, which my father was pretty upset about.  He left for a while but eventually came back.  Legally, I’m married to a fantastic woman named Alberta.  She co-owns a garden supply shop with one of her chatty friends.  (I think all the plants there do well because she’s always talking at them… I heard that makes plants grow) Alberta’s second job is worrying because, legally, I’m a police officer. Continue reading →

Head Chef at Cave Gouch

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 4 Comments

The ship’s crash left the cook stranded on an alien planet as the sole survivor.  A large creature decides to take him in rather than eat him, the industrious varclid known as Gouch.  He would like to use the man’s expertise, and there’s plenty of meat left around from the crash…

(reading time: 1 hour, 7 minutes)

Head Chef at Cave Gouch

Gouch’s territory was quite large for a male his age.  Usually, a varclid’s range shriveled and curled inwards with their body, but Gouch’s body was still as strong as a steam engine, which allowed him to maintain a domain with ten miles of pristine rocky coastline, a wetland of forty square miles, and a patch of dense forest around three square miles.  With all that land to himself, it wasn’t inconceivable that a human might occasionally stumble in. Continue reading →

Pron

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 4 Comments

Mankind has gone digital and set the worst corners of the internet adrift to fend for themselves.  A lone woman descends on one of these cesspools, eyes censored by a black bar, armed with a deadly cursor.  There are other women trapped there, and they need her help…

(reading time: 1 hour, 6 minutes)

Pron

A thousand links rested silently in the gray air.  This world was past dust, so the only sign of the field’s age was its stillness.  A thousand benches in a thousand styles: Victorian, art deco, 1990’s mail order catalogue, ferris wheel car, smooth bubbles meant to evoke the physical future that never happened…  Each one draped in heavy cables with frayed ends, like serpents with heads blasted to smithereens by lightning.  Without the cables the links could go nowhere.  Without the links the nearby town, the nearby pit as the civilized net would call it, was completely isolated.  The town became a pitiful little world that curled in on itself; culture became masturbation and love became a dream with no minds big enough to dream it. Continue reading →

Panic in the Mumgrass

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 5 Comments

Modified animals with human minds roam the jungles and savannas, each kind generally keeping to their own, but the trailcutter of the mighty water buffalo-like brohoov must explore other options when he learns there’s a traitor in their midst, causing fatal stampedes at every turn…

(reading time: 1 hour, 12 minutes)

Panic in the Mumgrass

“Stampede!” a voice shouted.  Hundreds of others joined in calling out the word and took off running.  The herd’s countless hooves pounded the mumgrass they were grazing on moments before into a thick choppy pulp.  Calves called to their mothers in the confusion, unsure where to run.  One of the older beasts tripped and rolled onto its side; a second later it was trampled to death by its distracted kin.

The calls to flee took a moment to reach the back of the herd, since this group of Brohoov was over six hundred strong.  When it did, the herd’s leader, Dodarka, growled to himself, Not again!  He was forced to join in as the horns of those behind him pushed and shoved forward.  It didn’t matter how much authority he carried as TrailCutter, it would take an act of god to stop a stampede before it ran its course.  That meant an hour of running until everyone’s legs burned and their breath came in great gasps of mist that shot from their wide nostrils like jets of volcanic gas.  It meant everyone would need a little more food to recover their strength.  It meant innocent dead, crushed in the storm surge of stupid fear. Continue reading →