"*That's* a human?" he asked, staring with horror at the chittering piebald ball of flesh with male pattern baldness and a nasty case of acne. "Once all the DNA you share in common with other animals on your planet is stripped out, as requested, yes. We did have to use a base template, since that alone was not enough to sustain life, but I assure ( Read more... )

I have always loved you. In six of the time-streams I kill you--twice because you cheated on me, once because you were dying of cancer, twice because you were leaving me because I cheated on you, and once because I was insane. In eight time-streams we married, but we always divorced. Twice, after fifteen years of marriage. Sometimes we have ( Read more... )

"The cost is prohibitive," the treasurer explained to the irate oldsters gathered around his office, waving signs saying, "Don't take our lucky pennies!" and brandishing the coins in question. "Perhaps you could try lucky nickels, or lucky quarters ( Read more... )

From a scrap of paper buried in a box of misc paperwork:
"The carcasses of their ships will make fine reefs"
(Should they be aliens whose young need reefs?)

I actually remember this idea. I think.

She cried, "More!" and they ran and brought her more food. She ate, and she swelled, and still she cried, "More!" They fed her all the cassava and all the manioc and sweet potatoes that were still too small to harvest and she still screamed, "More!" They pulled down all the coconuts and tossed them to her whole, watching her devour them without ( Read more... )

They tangoed across the room with a dust rag in one hand and a mop in the other, pausing in the middle for a close embrace, and then moving on with the perfectly timed rhythms of professional dancers. They were professional dancers, of course, but not first and foremost. Nor were they cleaners first. No, what they had chosen to set above all other ( Read more... )

The cheat codes were fantastic in this body. She loved them so much, and the things she could do--well! The things she could do made her a little sad that they'd wear the body out so much faster and she'd need to find a new host in ten years instead of the usual thirty. Not that she'd let the host know that, of course. The bodies tended to get ( Read more... )

"Tech support." "Yes, I'm having a problem--I can connect to the internet." "You can't connect to the internet?" "No, you don't understand--I can connect to the internet." "I'm sorry, I don't see what the problem is." "I don't have a computer." "I'm sorry, we only support computers. If you're accessing the internet through your smartphone or the TV ( Read more... )

A sheaf of vellum, a stone to hold it down, and a pen to write with. Oh, and a knife to open the veins and a wad of bandaging for afterward, but that would not have been nearly so picturesque an image, and really, that's something nobody needed to know but herself. The muse did not descend from heaven lightly and with twinkling fairy lights and new ( Read more... )

She was in the park when she noticed the close attention the birds were paying to the man by the fountain. It was odd--she'd walked past the fountain a million times before, and always it seemed that there were people hovering about and looking. This was the first time she'd seen a man sitting by the edge of the fountain and leaning far, far out ( Read more... )