מחוננים – אואטר: זיקית (3), חלק ז’
אואטר ישב על כיסא קשה במשרד מפקד הנוטרים. הוא הספיק להחליף בגדים למשהו יותר נוח למרות שלא היה קל להשיג משהו שמתאים למידות החדשות שלו. הוא לא הספיק להתרחץ או לישון אבל, לפחות, הוא נפטר מנעלי העקב הבלתי אפשריות ההן. לידו עמדו סטטית ומפקד היחידה ושניהם הסתכלו עליו באופן שכבר התחיל להיות מטריד. “ככה זיקית נראית?” המפקד שאל לבסוף. “ככה זיקית נראתה,” סטטית תיקנה אותו. “עכשיו זה אואטר.” המפקד התכופף כדי להסתכל לו בפנים. “אתה בסדר, ילד?” “עד כמה שאפשר, המפקד,” אואטר ענה, עדיין לא מסוגל לקבל את הקול הגבוה. “שיווי המשקל שלי מוזר עכשיו.” “אתה יכול להשתנות לגוף המקורי שלך?” “עוד לא. זה בדרך כלל לוקח קצת זמן להתרגל וללמוד עד שאני מצליח להשתלט על זה.” “אואטר עשה עבודה מצוינת, המפקד,” סטטית הוסיפה. “הוא לקח יוזמה וסיכון על עצמו שמאוד השתלם ו–” המפקד הרים את ידו וסטטית השתתקה. רגע מתוח עבר בחדר כשסטטית ואואטר חיכו שיגיד משהו. “אתה,” הוא הסתכל על אואטר, “לך למגורים. תתרחץ. לך לישון.” הוא הסתכל על שעון היד שלו והחמיץ פרצוף על השעה. “אתה לא חייב לקום לתדריך בוקר. אבל, ברגע שאתה יכול, תתייצב אצל דוקטור ליבנשטיין לבדיקה מלאה. בסדר?” “כן, המפקד,” אואטר אמר חלושות, נעמד ופיהק. “משוחרר. ואת,” אואטר שמע את המפקד פונה לסטטית כשהלך אל הדלת, “אני רוצה סיכום מלא של מה קרה הלילה. ואל תדלגי על שום פרט.” “נו, מה פספסנו?” הדממה שאל כשאואטר הגיע למגורים. הדף עמדה לידו, זרועותיה משולבות, מסתכלת על אואטר. “לא משהו נורא חשוב, אהמ,” איתן כחכח בגרונו, כאילו זה יעזור לו להוריד אוקטבה. “כנראה שסטטית עכשיו מקבלת שטיפה Continue Reading →
Posted in From the Writing Desk, Stories and tagged Avatar, Chameleon, Gifted, Stories by Eran with comments disabled.
Flash Fiction February 16: Mountain
Everyone has their mountain. You don’t find it. It’s not there to begin with. You have to build it. Some people like their mountains small, easy to build, easy to climb. They top it off in some short time and feel satisfied with themselves. But, as they say, it’s the darers and the dreamers who look at the blueprints for all the tiny mountains and then look away. They dig and scramble and find the parts and the scraps. They design their own mountain. They build it from trash, from non-existence, and from hope. They make it tower over the others and change the skyline. When other people see that mountain rise up on the landscape, they ooh and ahh. Some cheer, some deride. But they are all intrigued. Will this one succeed? Is this one even climbable? Who is that person that built this mountain? How will the climb be? Who will they be if and when they reach the top? Who will we all be? Not all of them reach the top. Usually just a scant few do. But, when they do, they change everything.
Posted in From the Writing Desk, No Category, Stories by Eran with comments disabled.
Flash Fiction February 15: Desert
I grew up in a desert. I lived in a desert all my life. Sometimes people came to my desert, mostly to throw sand at me, or show me how cool trees are and that I couldn’t have any. I tried to stay inside my desert, keep away from the edges. A desert isn’t the most comfortable place. I know that. But it’s what I’m familiar with. The outside is more scary. A desert is vast. It’s very hard to see outside of it, when you’re standing in the middle. The sand gets everywhere. It makes everything heavy and coarse and annoying. But if you live in the desert, you stay in the desert. Even though it’s hard, it can be harder to get out. In 2020, a lot more people found their way into their own private desert. I didn’t choose my desert. It found me. But now I’m working my way out. And it’s ok to ask for help.
Posted in From the Writing Desk, No Category, Stories by Eran with comments disabled.
Flash Fiction February 14: City
Cities are not concrete and steel. Cities are not stone and wood. Describing a city like that is like describing juice with the design of the bottle that contains it. Planes can fall on it. Busses could explode in it. Buildings could be razed and neighbourhood could be displaced. But the city remains if the people do. It’s when the populous turns on each other, devalues each other, and demonizes each other, that the city falls. Unfortunately (or fortunately), the same can be said of any sub-part of civilisation.
Posted in From the Writing Desk, No Category, Stories by Eran with comments disabled.
Flash Fiction February 13: New
I’m a scientist. Just so you know where I was starting from. I’m also a little bit anxious. And, by ‘a little bit’, I mean a lot. But it’s not that strange for a bride to be anxious leading up to her wedding day, right? Yes, what I did about it might be construed as strange. You know how a bride is supposed to have ‘something old, something new, something burrowed, and something blue’ for luck. Well, I wanted to be as lucky as I could be. So, I went to my friends for help. Jackie is a sociologist. She studies society’s relationship with things. I knew she was my first stop. I explained my situation to her and she gave me a simple pink handkerchief with stitched flowers. Why a handkerchief? It was involved in a longitudinal study of lending and burrowing. She said it was the item that travelled the most. I asked how much. She pulled up one of her datasheets to make sure and said, ‘16,522 times’. Next, I went to Stuart. He’s a material scientist and an amateur artist. I enquired as to the bluest thing he has. He said he’ll get back to me. He called me about a week later and said he experimented with sapphire dust, lapis lazuli, cordierite, kyanite, and azurite and managed to produce an artificial gem he now calls Deepest Blue and that I’m welcome to the first prototype. My friend Jen is an archeological anthropologist. She also works Continue Reading →
Posted in From the Writing Desk, No Category, Stories by Eran with comments disabled.
Flash Fiction February 12: Old
Why are you interviewing me? Why are you watching this video? Do you really think this is interesting? Yes, I was the first person in the world to get the life extension treatment. But I have no great survival tips for you. It’s all science. Explain it? Do you really think I know exactly how it works. Something about termite division limitation and resetting. What? Tel-o-meres? Exactly. I’m not a bio-geneticist or whatever they’re called. I was guinea pig. I still am a guinea pig. Those are the conditions. 1029 years old. Yes. I’m not even the oldest. I was young when I got the first dose. After me, older people got it. I’m just the longest running test. I guess that counts for something. I come for a check up every year. They track my every move. See that flashing red light in my ankle, just under the skin. That’s how. Anyway, they check up on me, make sure everything is running smoothly, and every 20-30 years give me another dose. How was I selected? Well, I volunteered. It was either this or a shorter life in prison. That ankle monitor is part of the terms of my parole. Yes, there are other parts. But you want your viewers to come back for another one, don’t you?
Posted in From the Writing Desk, No Category, Stories by Eran with comments disabled.
Flash Fiction February 11: Music
Music is just a pleasant sounding noise. Noise is just a disturbance in a medium — in most cases, air. Well, if you consider space itself as the medium, then all objects produce disturbances in that medium. All stellar objects produce music. All you need to do is map the fabric of space in the local sector, map the gravity fields of all stellar objects, measure their movements and gravitic interactions over time and there you go, you have music. Now, the question is, what kind of music? Well, it depends on you frame it, which scale you use, how you transform your telemetry, how much distortion you add. But I found that this arrangement works best: Classic, single G star systems are gentle Baroque. Multi-star system sound more like Beethoven. Pulsars sound like techno-funk. Magnetars are speed metal. Neutron stars sound like Aphex Twin no matter what you do with it. And colliding black holes work best as Norwegian Death Metal.
Posted in From the Writing Desk, No Category, Stories by Eran with comments disabled.
Flash Fiction February 10: Creature
This thing will change everything you thought you knew about life. We found it on X/2152 H3. Yes, that comet. You probably thought that it was all just dead matter, just some rock and ice and nothing spectacular. But apparently, just because we didn’t see the regular traces of biological functions doesn’t mean there isn’t anything alive. Yes, I know it looks like a nanoscopic block of nothing but that’s why we’re using a quantum-tunneling nanoscope. Look closer. Do you see it now? The Planck perturbations? Yes? Isn’t it awesome?! Don’t tell me it can’t be! It’s right there in front of your face! You can see the reactions. That thing interacts with the quantum foam. It eats virtual particles! What is it doing to the fabric of our reality? Well, that’s what we’re going to look into next. No, it’s not making nanoscopic black holes. Don’t be ridiculous. It wouldn’t have survived this long if it would. How long? I don’t know. That comet has an X designation. We’ve only been following it for just over a year now. We haven’t figured out its trajectory yet. Of course, that’s why I was so interested in it. Could these things be affecting the comet’s orbit? Possibly. The Quantum Foam is the basis of our reality. It bubbles and sinks like a lake surface under heavy rain. Virtual particles pop in and out of existence all the time. It’s an even push and pull on the fabric of the universe. If Continue Reading →
Posted in From the Writing Desk, No Category, Stories by Eran with comments disabled.
Flash Fiction February 09: Food
Have you ever heard of food blindness? You probably heard of face blindness, right? Prosopagnosia is a neurological condition meaning a person can’t make out details in faces, can’t distinguish between different face, and/or can’t recognise a face is even a face and not a bacon-cheese omelet. You might be salivating at the that last concept there but I wouldn’t know. I know of the concept. I’ve read stories and seen movies where a character craves a food item so much their mouth starts producing excess drool with no conscious control. But it never happened to me. I have food blindness. What does that mean? Exactly what you think it means. I can’t distinguish between different tastes. Sour, sweet, salty, bitter, umami, nothing. No, it doesn’t mean everything tastes like chicken or ash. I don’t even know how those taste. Have you tried licking not dirty, not freshly cleaned glass? Can you tell me what water tastes like? Exactly. that’s what I mean. It’s nothing. My friends sometimes gush over how this hamburger is so good, how this is the best fruit salad they ever ate, or how I should try real Champagne or real gelato, but it doesn’t make a difference. I wish it would. It seems like I’m missing a big part of life and it always makes me a bit sad when we go out to dinner, to celebrate, just to have fun, to enjoy life… and food. But, you know what? I dominate spicy-eating competitions.
Posted in From the Writing Desk, No Category, Stories by Eran with comments disabled.
Flash Fiction February 08: Weapon
If you collect a large enough group of bored soldiers, PMCs, or operators you’ll eventually get a discussion about gear. They will tell you what each prefer to use out in the field, who makes the best scopes, what gloves are the most breathable yet most grippy, and which sidearm, longarm or assault piece is the best. I don’t like guns. I find them distasteful and uncivilised. Besides, I find that if you reach the need to use guns, you’ve already failed and the only solutions you can reach cost too much and are not worth it. I prefer to use the weapon inside my skull, the one composed of neurons and axions, the most powerful and most complicated, yet most nuanced and subtle weapon we know of in the whole universe, your brain. In every encounter I’ve ever faced, speed beats strength, stealth beats speed, resilience beats stealth, and thought beats everything. Be prepared, be knowledgeable, be experienced, and you have the best weapon of them all.
Posted in From the Writing Desk, No Category, Stories by Eran with comments disabled.