in a (paragraph)

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  mathman265 - Cambridge, MA 1:05 am on March 4, 2010 Permalink
  Tag(s): barnabas fang (4), the pirate (3)   

  “I’m not sure what you think I can offer you,” Dr. Fang said. “But, of course, I don’t want you to feel as if you’ve made this trip for nothing. What were you hoping … ”

  “Relief,” the man interrupted. “From this pain. I didn’t imagine my health would last forever, but I’m too young to have this sort of trouble, aren’t I?”

  “A lifetime’s abuse. What can I say? And now you want more? Pills or some such thing?”

  The men stared at one another for a long moment before Dr. Fang continued, smiling his wicked, sparkling smile

  “Well, the good news is I don’t have anything in this office that will hurt you. The bad news is I don’t have anything that can help you either. But just as you don’t want to feel as if you’ve made the trip in vain, neither do I want to have waisted an appointment. Silver was it? Is that what you brought me?”

  The man handed Fang the pouch.

  “And what would you like, in return, beyond my Tibetan diagnosis that we’re all going to die,” asked Fang mordantly.

  The man pointed weakly to a dusty beaker on the wall that contained some sort of brown root. Fang removed a handful of specimens and, before handing the bunch over, put one stick in his mouth and the other in his patient’s.

  “Chew on these for 48 hours, and at least your breath will smell better. Beyond that, I can prescribe only fatalism.”

  
   
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  Quimby (Admin) - Las Vegas, NV 2:18 am on February 28, 2010 Permalink
  Tag(s): mr. fox   

  “Capitalism,” he said, “is best practiced without compassion. Like war and triage, it’s hell and, as such, suffering can be kept to a minimum only by targeted, urgent, and efficient action. Ventures are best undertaken deliberately, quickly, and with raiding instincts. No matter how brutal the action, if it brings about a swift, money-generating result, one must prefer it above all others. Long-term misery can be alleviated only by short term suffering.

  “There is no happiness, and you must dispense with that fairy tale. This is our system, and these are the rules. You should feel no guilt in playing by them or using them to your advantage since you neither engineered the system nor wrote the rules. As an inevitable player, your choice at birth was victimization or conquest, exploitation or exploiting. And this remains your choice until the day you die and they wrap you like fish in the Stars and Stripes.

  “Like the Phoenicians before us and every pirate since, commerce is every American’s birthright and the lion’s share of our identity. The various mechanisms of trade speak to us like an oracle. And the oracle tells me that survivors and outcasts like you and me make the best capitalists.

  “Street urchin rappers, abuse victims of every variety, psychopaths who scheme their way into Cadillacs and Armani — only the wretched refuse, the the homeless, the tempest-tost truly yearn to breathe free. And capitalism, I’ve come to tell you, is the mother of these exiles, lifting her lamp beside freedom’s golden door.”

  
   
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  Sinjin Jack - San Francisco, CA 9:52 pm on February 27, 2010 Permalink
  Tag(s): in transit   

  Approaching the man, he’d worried about tripping on the aging tarmac. But now that he found himself face to face with his old rival, Josef wished he had tripped. Perhaps in falling, he’d have clipped his tongue and rendered himself unable to speak. As things were, Josef had no excuse for keeping silent, and the infernal, red-rimmed eyes facing him demanded a response.

  “Even now,” the man offered, unable to bear the silence as stoically as Josef, “you think my approach flawed and yours superior. How can you? Here in this moment? With my car and driver nearby? With me about to board my plane? How can you tell me I’ve not succeeded?”

  Josef maintained his silence, shuffling defiantly, moving ever closer to the man opposite him, willing him onto the gaudy machine he pridefully referred to as “my plane.”

  Eventually, Josef’s anger broke his resolve. “You have your things, Signore. But that’s as much as I’ll give you.”

  At that, the man began mocking Josef, taunting him as he walked toward and boarded the plane.

  “Your choice, Josef,” he cried above the engine roar. “If you want to play on, we’ll play on.”

  
   
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  James Dubonet - Los Angeles, CA 3:44 pm on February 26, 2010 Permalink
  Tag(s): mandolin jim   

  He heard abstract murmurs and hums, songs of his faintly sung, whispers of “raconteur,” “troubadour,” and other Provençal appellations that had lain dormant for hundreds of years. And amidst this charged crowd-sound, he wondered, How do they know such terms? How, even, do I?

  He made his way to the stage steadily and without rushing. His instrument (“Bertrand,” by name) was slung heroically across his back like a quiver of arrows, its exquisitely-tuned strings glinting in the dim house lights.

  On tour, he only played these small spaces. “500 people or less. So I can smell the person in the back row as well as the groupies up front” — this was what he told those courtier, remora-like businessfolk who attended his career, paying the bills and watching the contracts, reserving the spaces and negotiating the terms.

  His job was putting foot to stage, and as he did so tonight, the house lights went dark, rising like dawn exactly on queue: only after he’d gathered the band, flipped on the mic, and let loose a simian wail.

  
   
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  mathman265 - Cambridge, MA 2:41 pm on February 17, 2010 Permalink
  Tag(s): terra nova (4), the misanthrope (2)   

  He was a writer, not a grand one, perhaps, but a paid one. And in America, what was the difference anyway?

  Cultivating his bulldozer loads of bullion, he worked in volume, moving literary units like any warehouse joe, franchising his name to brand the novels of lesser-known word-monkeys. So extreme were his tactics, in fact, he’d been accused of operating narrative sweat-shops in the East, of paying semi-fluent Chinamen to crank out logline lists at one cent a page. How else, the press asked, could he produce so much so quickly and maintain that gaudy American castle?

  His agent and publisher went to great lengths to discredit these reports, but today was Wednesday, and he knew he’d receive a box in the mail from Hong Kong. It happened every week even though he had no idea who paid the bill.

  He actually did his share of typing, though, cranking out at least one story a week and a novel every month. And on Valentine’s Day of this year, he’d begun a story about a place he called “Terra Nova”: a reflection on human expansion and the connections between worlds.

  
   
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  Sun Treader 5:53 am on February 17, 2010 Permalink
  Tag(s): terra nova (4)   

  The last message from Earth told of seven white ships in orbit. And then, for the first time, Earth fell silent.

  The chattering receivers fell silent, and the scrolling screens, which replaced letters disappearing on the left with an endless chain entering from the right, displayed a few final, gibberized words and grew dark. In a nearby theatre, audience members watched only the first act of a new action film before the signal stopped and the theatre grew dark.

  Considering the silence, what could the Novans do but stop their own transmissions, turn off their own quantum transceiver, and begin to pour over the last three years of transmissions for any clue as to fate of those mysterious white ships and Earth? The delay in communication was perhaps most frustrating of all. Not only had it been three years since those ships arrived, but for three years, they had been dutifully transmitting their buildings, their families, their plans, and their status, leaving a three year long trail of bread crumbs across the cosmos.

  
   
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  Sun Treader 9:10 am on February 15, 2010 Permalink
  Tag(s): terra nova (4)   

  Earth broadcast a good number of messages, but these didn’t generate much in the way of conversation. As such, Earth’s imminent arrivals represented the first big news in a long time, the first news, really, that nearly everyone took notice of. As such, speculation became a rampant, good-natured pastime across Terra Nova.

  In First Landing, the capital, the Novans even staged a play: To Earth, From Earth. It dealt with great, white colony ships from the future that traveled back from one of Earth’s distant, and now ancient, colonies to see the mother planet in its heyday.

  In Earth’s actual orbit, the visiting ships were due any day, and Earth breathelessly awaited their arrival as it had for three years. Three years in transit, three years for the message to reach Terra Nova, and three years of Terra Nova’s constant transmissions of daily life and reports of their progress — the waiting had been almost impossible to endure.

  
   
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  Quimby (Admin) - Las Vegas, NV 6:28 am on February 15, 2010 Permalink
  Tag(s): barnabas fang (4), the pirate (3)   

  He’d been in exquisite pain for some time before deciding to meet with Dr. Fang. A chiropractor friend recommended Fang in an enigmatic note: “The best strange doctor I know of.” And while his Yale-mind kept editing the note (projecting a comma into the lacuna between “best” and “strange” and adding an “-st”), the man knew the omissions had been intentional.

  On the ride down to Venice, he listened to a report about the effects of money on the human brain. (“Like cocaine,” one researcher said.) The night before, he’d used a butane torch to leech silver dollops off one of his bars, bringing a few ounces of the misshapen slivers to pay Fang. Listening to them jingle on the seat beside him, he thought back to the great businessmen romps of the ’80s, where powder-white blow mixed with currency ink and pheromone-laced woman sweat to create the most intoxicating concoction known to man.

  Fingering the labial slivers beside him, he knew the researcher was right and, for a moment, considered turning the car around and reintegrating the silver into his horde. But when his chest seized again, he decided to continue south toward the astral splendor of Angel City and the “best strange doctor” Barnabas Fang.

  
   
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  Sun Treader 7:23 am on February 14, 2010 Permalink
  Tag(s): terra nova (4)   

  On Terra Nova, things went along as they had for some time. The first human colony had spent two decades in stasis to travel to their new home, and upon arriving, they set right to work. Villages sprang up; families were reared; and human life began anew in the new world.

  The news from Earth was a curiosity, but how much could the colony really share with their old world? At just over sixteen lightyears away, it took even the simplest message three years to travel between Earth and Terra Nova via quantum transmissions. This meant a steady stream of outdated, usually long-winded messages flowed back and forth between the two planets

  Sports scores, new novels, films, designs, and love letters to the colony — these dominated the transmissions:

  “We put up a new storehouse today.”

  “The Tigers won the first all-Novan soccer game.”

  Mixed in with these, though, was news about a series of objects entering the solar system at the usual near-light travel speed. Earth had expected to receive its first visitors for some time, and, for several years, the transmissions had increasingly focused on the approaching ships.

  
   
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  James Dubonet - Los Angeles, CA 11:17 pm on February 8, 2010 Permalink
  Tag(s): the travler   

  He dreamt mostly of France and other faraway places, some of which he’d seen, some of which he would see, others he never would. The past, mostly, was alien to him; the present was even more obscure. But still, he persisted, shuffling along and forcing step after step.

  Cosmopolitan to the core, he wanted to be all places at once, all people in an instant. He wanted complete command of every language spoken since man broke with ape and omniscient fluency in the grand narrative of history. He imagined event piled on event, character interwoven with landscape, Wills limited by economy and circumstance, but he saw no place for himself in the matrix.

  Getting lost in Japan, rambling along random African roadways, hitching in dank German truck stops, and sleeping under leaking American bridges, he found no direction home and, chanting Dylan, wondered where, at any given moment, the mad Minnesotan might be.