“Yo, Magneto, what’s the word?” asked Manny’s curious neighbor Wyatt in the Lakeland Special Correctional Facility. Manfred Wells, aka Magnes, didn’t appreciate the nickname, but his gimmick, gadgets, and popular culture made it inevitable. He knew when he first started his career as a criminal to expect his fair share of derivative nicknames. Besides, Wyatt wasn’t too bad a fellow, Manny figured. His next door neighbor had taken it upon himself to make sure Manny didn’t get into too much trouble. Continue reading “Liberation” by Psycho Gecko
From “Stone Burners” by Syphax
Olivia hunched over on the couch in Ben’s apartment, threadbare blanket wrapped around her shoulders and wings. The tube TV across from her filled the dim room with flickering light and white noise. Outside, sirens cut through the night air, more than she’d ever heard in the last week since waking up for the first time. She tensed up every time it sounded like they were approaching, though they always turned away or stopped short. Continue reading From “Stone Burners” by Syphax
Guest Post Week
Want to skip the guest posts? Here’s the next one in the story.
I’m on vacation this week. To make sure that there would be a post, I asked people at Web Fiction Guide to see if anybody would mind filling in for the Thursday and Sunday updates so that there would be something to read.
I got a bigger response than I asked for, so much so that I decided to post one a day in the hopes that I’d be able to accomodate everyone.
Starting today, you’ll be seeing a new post around noon EST.
Precision: Part 7
Jillian’s boyfriend straightened up, letting go of Jillian’s arm, and standing in between her and Kid Biohack. Meeting Kid’s eyes, he said, “I told you I wasn’t going to do the hero thing after graduation. The system’s corrupt, and I know you know it. We talked about it back—” and there he blinked, “—in days we can’t talk about.”
Jeremy glanced over at me, and I guessed he’d recognized the same thing I had—the slack-jawed look of a guy whose psychic block had kicked into action.
Haley grabbed Jillian’s arm and whispered into her ear while pulling her backward, and nudging Camille and the guys next to her.
That was the smart play. Getting a ringside seat at what might be a superpowered fight was not. Continue reading Precision: Part 7
Precision: Part 6
When it was clear that the fighting was over, I resigned myself to going back in and picking apart the technical details of the movie version of the Rocket suit. I stepped toward the door only to find Haley stepping out and shutting it behind her.
“What happened?” She asked, keeping her voice low. Continue reading Precision: Part 6
Precision: Part 5
In the background, I heard Courtney continue. “His text said that he was corralling everyone else.”
Jillian stood a little taller than Haley, and she’d braided her hair—which went halfway down her back. Just like the last time I’d seen her, she wore a flannel shirt over a t-shirt.
Courtney backed in as Jillian stepped inside—Jeremy and I didn’t have a particularly large room. We each had a closet on either side of the door, forcing everyone to move into the main area of the room, and stand next to our bunks and the desks. Jeremy’s was covered with a mixture of physics textbooks, science fiction paperbacks, old anime DVD’s, and books about conspiracy theories. Except for my laptop and the textbooks I couldn’t get as ebooks, mine was nearly empty.
Courtney pulled out Jeremy’s chair as Haley sat on my desk. Jillian and I stood in the middle of the room next to the bunk beds.
All of this meant that I couldn’t ask Haley anything about the power juice. The big questions being whether Jillian had some on her or whether she’d already drunk it or what? Continue reading Precision: Part 5
Precision: Part 4
When I opened up the pictures on my laptop, it was the speedster I’d seen first—the one that wasn’t glowing—the guy. He’d run back to his origin point, but there was no sign of the woman.
I stayed up for another ten minutes, waiting to see if she’d show up too, but she didn’t. When I woke up the next morning, there hadn’t been any further alerts. Maybe the north end of the route was where she lived.
Maybe she’d taken a cab back? I had no idea. Continue reading Precision: Part 4
Precision: Part 3
I texted back, “I’m awake.”
It had barely been sent when my phone began to buzz. I took the call.
“Hey, Nick!” Cassie answered with her normal level of energy—high. She didn’t sound like she was faking it.
“Hey,” I said, suddenly more aware that the wooden chair I sat in lacked cushions. “So what’s going on?” Continue reading Precision: Part 3
Precision: Part 2
Despite the new details, we’d collected, there wasn’t much to do in the van, and we all left for our respective rooms—within limits anyway. Vaughn, Courtney, Haley, and I all lived in the biggest dorm on campus, and so we walked together. Haley and I broke off from the rest to talk about next weekend—which wasn’t a Stapledon weekend—planning to spend some time together.
Vaughn and Courtney talked a bit as they walked off, but I doubted that they talked for long. Their rooms were on opposite sides of the dorm.
When I finally walked through my own door, I found Jeremy working through physics homework at his desk, laptop open, his screen lighting his face.
I finished the homework I had left and then used my laptop to review the speedster sightings the bots had detected so far. It was just the two I’d found out about on the way back, but in both cases, they started on the southeast side of the city. More interesting, they came in view of my spybots within half a mile of each other. Continue reading Precision: Part 2
Precision: Part 1
We were back in Grand Lake late Sunday night. I planned to drive about half the Grand Lake University group back to campus. Jody’s parents lived only a few blocks away, so Dayton, Jody and Sean walked over there and to pick up Jody’s car. Julie and Shannon took their own way too.
That left Haley, Travis, Camille, Courtney, and Vaughn riding back to campus in the van with me. It filled all the seats once you included everyone’s luggage. I probably could have adjusted the van to compensate, but I couldn’t show up to the university’s car garage driving any other version of my van than my own.
Arriving in the Cat Mecha would have been funny, though. Continue reading Precision: Part 1