Friday Free Fiction Links

It's Friday!










@Author's Site: "Nameless" by Stuart Clark. [Via SF Signal]

And that was the problem with computers. They didn’t see accounts as people, just as streams of data. You broke the rules and you got marked as a problem. And problem data got erased. Now there was nothing left and that’s exactly what Witten was now. Nothing. A nobody.

@Author's Site: "Nameless" by Helen Lowe. [Via SF Signal]

She had seen the sea once, when she was very small, the waters stretching farther than she could have imagined before that moment. And there had been a ship, its masts tall as a forest tree, with white sails breaking the sky—until finally it vanished into that darker line where sky and ocean met.

@Baen: "Pawn to King Four" by Timothy Zahn.

The night patrol had been pretty uneventful, Badger Werle thought as he and Dillon de Portola drove along one of the dirt tracks that passed for roads out here in the upper reaches of DeVegas Province. He and de Portola had cleared out two spine leopard nests, killing five males and scattering the females and young, and had taken out one of the predator way stations that were in many ways more troublesome than the nests themselves.

@Beneath Ceaseless Skies: "Heartless" by Peadar Ó Guilín

“No one asks for death.” This was the proud boast of the city of Kalegwyn. “No one asks for it.” Until Malern did. A bad move for her, as it turned out. She awoke on Castellan Garvinger’s operating table with his favorite surgeon elbow-deep in her chest.

@Beneath Ceaseless Skies: "The God Thieves" by Derek Künsken.

Mateo had converted the west room into a chapel to the emaciated god nailed to the cross. Icons and amulets to other gods, he disposed of with respect. Though the gods who fought were unreasoning, the superstition that he might offend them was ingrained.

@Cosmos: "All The Wrong Places" by Val Nolan.

I'm a Physicist. I study particles and scalars and the tiny little pieces that make up everything. My whole career I've been searching for the Higgs boson, that which gives mass and meaning to existence.

@Daily Science Fiction: "Character is What You Are" by Michael R. Fletcher.

Character is what you are in the dark. My dad told me that. At the time I thought he'd made it up. Later I learned he got it from a strange movie called The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. It was decades before I understood what it meant and even longer before I realized it was me. If you only live one-eighth of each day, you are spending your life in the dark.

@Ray Gun Revival: "Jackson Bluffs" by Alice M. Roelke.

"They sat in the Cricket’s cargo hold on a folding chair and a crate drawn up to a larger crate. Dim lighting — one of the bulbs was out — illuminated the half-filled hold. They played with a deck of well-thumbed cards. The heavy man had a government-issue long rifle leaning against his chair."

Serial Fiction
@Paizo: "Faithful Servants - Chapter Three: The Penitent Man" by James L. Sutter.

"Salim looked quickly to Connell, but the eidolon was already holding his own pendant. Before Salim could say anything, the eidolon’s disguise as an axiomite melted into something less suspicious. The pointed ears were still there, but shorter. Gone was the inhumanly perfect skin, replaced by a moonscape of old pockmarks."

Audio
@Drabblecast: "The Heroics of Interior Design" by Elise R. Hopkins.

I can’t fly faster than a speeding bullet. I can’t lift a car. I can’t climb slick surfaces with my bare hands or breath underwater or stop time. All I can do is change blue things to yellow. I didn’t bother to buy a cape or a spandex suit like the others. I just bought a blouse and some slacks and went into interior design…

@Dunesteef: "Aldo" by Michael C. Thompson.

"In “Aldo,” author Michael C. Thompson tells the story of a sort of love triangle in space. Except one of them is a starship."

@Escape Pod: "Marking Time on the Far Side of Forever" by Mur Lafferty, read by Josh Roseman.

I sit beneath the dark green sky, overlooking the valley that has changed much over the years. What was once a stream has swelled into a river while, to the east, lush vegetation grows where I think there was once a shallow lake. I can’t remember definitely. The information is stored inside me, filed, itemized; I’m merely unsure how to access it. It will come to me. Later, when a random search, an unrelated thought, cracks open the proper conduits and a pulse of electricity resurrects the knowledge, unbidden.

@Pseudopod: "Saint Nicholas" by D.K. Thompson, read by Marie Brennan.

“Saint Nicholas looked just like he did in the picture stories: tall and thin, with a grand white beard that flowed to his waist. He wore a red-fur trimmed coat, a tall bishop’s hat, and clutched a gold staff. He smiled and said something, but Greta wasn’t listening. She hid behind her elder sister Heike and stared at the saint’s demonic assistant, Krampus.

@StarShipSofa: "Watchbird" by Robert Sheckley, read by Jeff Lane.

Serial Audio
@Classic Tales Podcast: "The Snow Queen - part 2 of 3" by Hans Christian Andersen, read by B. J. Harrison.

Gerda continues her quest for Kay and the Snow Queen. Princes, Princesses and reindeer all help her on her quest. But when their gifts are all stolen by a roving band of highway robbers, Gerda must look to the very birds for comfort and guidance. Hans Christian Andersen, today, on The Classic Tales Podcast.