Not Happily Ever After

I remember her first making the comment as we lay together, exhausted, in the afterglow of our third date.  I'd propped myself up on one elbow, turning to look over at where she lay on the dew-dampened grass.

"You know," I commented, "I think that this was the best date I've ever had."

She turned her head a little, smiling back at me.  Even in the dim moonlight, I caught the little hint of violet in her sparkling eyes.  "I knew it would be," she murmured back to me.

Her fingers reached out, lazily, their tips dragging across my bare chest.  "Might as well just write the 'happy ever after' ending now, huh?" I said, keeping my tone light.  Just a joke, I told myself.  Don't admit how hard you've already fallen for this girl.

"Happily ever after?" she repeated back, her eyebrows furrowing together slightly.  "No, this isn't happily ever after."

Dark Matter Cretins

The coffee cup felt reassuringly heavy in his hand.  Captain Xavier Holland turned it over in his hand for a moment, admiring its simplistic lines.

Sitting forward, he wound back - and heaved the cup as hard as he could.

A direct hit.  The cup clattered against Ensign Bran's shoulder, making the man jerk and yelp.  "What the hell?" he burst out, spinning around to stare with injured eyes at his captain.

[AGttA] 2.1: Loneliness

Continued from chapter 2.0, here.
Click here to read the entire story from the beginning.

Axiom 2: Gather supplies.

Journal, it's been close to a week now.  I know this, because I found a calendar covered in cute little pictures of kitties, and I've been crossing off the days on it.  Six crossed off days means that it's been almost a week.

I'm not sure what I'll do when I run past the end of December.  I don't think they're printing more calendars any longer.

Also, have I mentioned how much I hate eating beans?

Side Effects May Include Superpowers

The CEO struggled to suppress his yawn as he listened to his Chief Financial Officer drone on.  Sure, the man was a wizard at making numbers jump through hoops - and vanish, when they weren't exactly necessary to keep around - but good God, his presentation skills were terrible.

The CEO surreptitiously glanced down at his watch, a $45,000 Piaget for which he'd spent six months on a waiting list.  Either he paid all that money for a knockoff, or else the Financial Officer was literally making time itself slow down out of sheer boredom.

"Okay, well, it sounds like that's going well," he spoke up, slapping his hand on the conference table and cutting off the Financial Officer mid-sentence.  "Let's hear from someone else, shall we?"

Through the Mirror

I glanced back behind me even as I slowed my pace.  I'd lost them - for now.  I could hear their footsteps, however, not stopping.

They'd keep on searching for me until they found me.  I needed to disappear.

The inside of the clothing shop felt strange with the lights turned off.  Mannequins loomed suddenly out of the darkness, their hands stretched out as though reaching for me.  I dodged around them, forcing my mouth shut and trying not to let any sound escape my lips.

There, in the back!  I hurried towards the doorway leading into the rear of the shop, below the sign that read CHANGING ROOMS.

As I ran past the counter, however, a corner of my jacket caught at a hook, extending out from the edge.  I felt the tug, turned to try and catch the falling item - but my fingers were too slow.

[AGttA] 2.0: Supplies

Continued from chapter 1.2, here.

Axiom 2: Gather supplies.

Well, journal, it's two days later, and I'm feeling a little better about my situation.

Should I be calling you a journal?  What's the difference between a journal and a diary?  Ooh, I know, I'll look it up with my brand new DICTIONARY, right here!

Let's see...

Okay.  A journal is "a daily record of news and events of a personal nature; a diary."  Hmm.

Journal, maybe I'm going a little crazy from lack of human interaction, but at least my situation seems fairly good aside from that little issue.

Near Disaster

"Madam President!  We need to get you into the bunker?"

The large, burly member of the Secret Service detail couldn't help but roll his eyes when Madam Elaine Clifton, the President of the United States - and arguably the most powerful person in the world - finally appeared around the corner.  She looked somewhat out of breath already, and she clutched a large, struggling orange tomcat in her arms.

"Sorry, sorry," President Clifton panted, trying to adjust her grip on the wriggling animal so that he couldn't slip out of her determined grasp.  "Little Georgie-kins here just didn't want to come out from underneath the couch!"

Another eye roll.  Kane, the Secret Service member, offered up a brief but fervent thank-you to whoever decided to include tinted sunglasses in the uniform design for the President's guards.  Were it not for those shades blocking his eyes, he would have been fired long ago.

The Tree in the Cave

Biology is a curious thing.  How does a seed, a tiny little cluster of cells with no eyes or brain or neurons or central control, know which way to grow?

The answer comes down to gravity, and light.

[AGttA] 1.2: Coffee!

Continued from chapter 1.1, here.

Axiom 1: Remain calm.

I'd done it!  That's right, journal readers, whoever you may be - I managed to reach the Starbucks!

And even better?  The place was unlocked!

As I walked in through the front doors, I almost felt normal, at least for a second or two.  There was no Apocalypse, no end of the world happening outside these doors.  No, I was just strolling into my favorite coffee shop chain, here to pick up a boost of caffeine and brewed beans before heading back to work.

And for a moment, as I closed my eyes, I even smelled that classic scent of just slightly too burned coffee beans, the scent reminiscent of Starbucks everywhere.

But then I opened my eyes, and reality came crashing back in.

From the ice

I could spot the thing from the air as the little ship swung overhead, dropping like a stone amid the swirling, blowing snow.  I clutched the armrests of my seat tightly and tried to ignore the flip-flopping of my stomach.

Instead, I kept my eyes glued to the window, trying to assemble the glances of the creature into a coherent picture.  Not the biggest we'd found, but decently sized.  Probably a young male, I guessed,  They tended to push the hardest north, looking for new spawning spots to claim.

This one must have not noticed the falling temperature until the ice closed in, trapping him.

He didn't know why she died.

"Oh... Shit."

I stared at the body, my eyes frantically searching for some sign of movement.  "Come on, come on," I murmured to myself, needing to see some tiny little sign of life.  Was the chest rising and falling?  A little twitch of a leg, I prayed.  That's all I needed.

Behind me, I heard footsteps, the eager, quick little footsteps of a child.  Shit.  Timothy was coming down the stairs.

[AGttA] Chapter 1.1: Shelter

Continued from Chapter 1.0, here.

Axiom 1: Remain calm.

When I next opened my eyes, it took me a moment to remember why I was waking up in the back of an unmarked passenger van.  But as I lay back on the thin, scratchy carpet, I felt the wave of memories come rushing back to me.

The explosion at the mall.  The sound of people dying.  The angel, majestic and deadly, hovering in the center of the destruction.  That Furby's wide eyes before it exploded into shards of half-melted plastic.

I briefly wondered whether I might be able to find a Starbucks that still had some coffee.

Missing Brains: 2016 Edition

New Year's Goals

That's right, it's the new year!  2016, baby!  And there's going to be some changes around Missing Brains (here).

Schedule

First off, scheduling.  Missing Brains, the blog, is sticking with a Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule.  Three posts a week!

However, since I beat the 52 book challenge last year, I'm going to be doing something different with the Monday posts.  Instead of providing a book summary each week along with my thoughts, I'll be keeping to the following schedule:

Monday: I'm going to be telling a serial story, called The Amateur's Guide to the Apocalypse, in segments.  I'll post a new segment, about a thousand words per update, every Monday.  Hopefully, the story will end at exactly 52,000 words.

Wednesday: Wednesday will be a short story, with a theme focusing on real life.

Friday: Friday will also have a short story update, but Friday's theme will focus on the fantastic, science fiction or fantasy themed.

Other improvements

Twitter: Missing Brains is going to have a twitter handle!  Of course, it won't be @MissingBrains, since that's my personal handle - but maybe I'll make @MissingBrainsBlog into a channel.  I'll hopefully attract a larger audience through Twitter.

RSS: I don't really know how RSS works, but I'm going to try and use it.

New Website Design: In the works, probably not coming for a while.

Patreon: This is a new thing - when I'm not writing, I'm a graduate student.  Notably, neither graduate students nor writers make much money.  That's why I'm going to see about setting up a Patreon, so that readers (you) can fund writers (me!), to help me afford to keep on writing!  I've never set one of these up before, so we'll see how it works out.

The future

Can I keep this up?  Will my well of inspiration run dry?  We'll find out - together!

Book 52 of 52(!): "Ready Player One" and "Armada", by Ernest Cline

Finally, the end of my year!  52 books done - one a week!  And to wrap things up, I'm finishing with one of the most critically acclaimed and bestselling novels of last year - and its more recent sequel, just for good measure.

Both of these books, "Ready Player One" and "Armada", are built around a science fiction premise, but mainly are homages to all things eighties, with tons of references to pop culture, video games, movies, television shows, songs, and more.  Here's a brief summary of each:

In "Ready Player One", it's the future, and the world's gone to hell.  Most people escape into the OASIS, a virtual reality where there are almost no limits on what you can do.  The billionaire founder of OASIS died a decade previously, and left his fortune hidden as an "easter egg" somewhere in OASIS.  The protagonist decides to find this easter egg - but he'll have to hurry, since an evil corporation bent on monetizing OASIS is also after the egg!

In "Armada", the main character is amazed to see a spaceship hovering over his school - and not just any spaceship, but one of the ships from his favorite online game! As it turns out, this online game has been created by the government, secretly training people all over the world to fight the oncoming alien hordes!  It's a situation straight out of a bad B-movie - and, in fact, it seems a little too contrived...

Both of the books are great, with one glaring flaw - others have pointed out that, while Cline excels at many aspects of writing, his female characters are flat and exist basically so the male leads can have someone to flirt with.  At some points, it almost feels like a fan fiction for men to indulge in their "damsel in distress" fantasies.

But despite that single weak point, the rest of the story is great, the references are EVERYWHERE, and the books definitely have a solid, strong plotline.  I'm glad I read them!

And now, on to 2016!

Time to read: 2-3 hours each.

"I don't need flesh to be human."

I often wonder how many geniuses really exist.

Look around you, next time you're out in public.  People everywhere, streaming by, bustling about on the worthless minutiae of their everyday lives.  No one challenges them.  There's no dire, life or death need.  Their requirements for survival are filled, they busy themselves with the tiny, unimportant, trivial details.

They possess no roaring storm to transform their tiny flame of genius into a roaring inferno.  So instead, that little flame gutters and eventually extinguishes itself.

I look around at these others with dismay, sadness, because I used to be like them.

Book 51 of 52: "The $64 Tomato" by William Alexander

Author's note: this is the last Monday of the year - shouldn't this be book 52?  Strange.  I'll do one more book this week, then.

Gardening.  No, not gardening, farming.  It always feels like a great hobby, the purest way to give back to Nature, create the freshest and healthiest food, and save money on a grocery bill.  What could be better than growing your own fruits and vegetables, with nothing but sunlight, soil, and water, and eating them all year round?

This, at least, is how William Alexander feels at the beginning of his book, and I have to say that I echo his sentiment.  However, as he soon discovers when he actually purchases some farmland and starts growing, Nature has other plans.

Layover

Slumped back into the sagging bench seat at the airport, I gazed around at the rush of humanity around me as music blared into my ears through my headphones.  I did my best to keep my eyes moving, trying not to linger too much on any one face in case they caught my covert attention.

It certainly was a busy time at the airport, I noted, adding sourly a moment later that this was probably why my flight ended up being delayed as well.  Stuck in this place for another couple of hours, waiting for them to finally call over the half-incomprehensible intercom that the plane had finally arrived and was ready for boarding.

Abducted! - Part 2

Continued from Part 1, here.

Twenty minutes or so, I had to admit that we were thoroughly, hopelessly lost.

When I glanced over at Elena, the language barrier between us didn't prevent me from seeing that she felt the same way.  I could read it in the hunch of her shoulders, the padding of her feet where she'd previously hopped along, excited to be free.

"Pretty dull, isn't it?" I remarked, more just to fill the silence than because she'd understand.

Glancing back at me, she commented something back, although I couldn't understand a word.

No, wait - I caught one of the curse words she'd taught me in there.  I grinned, and she smiled sympathetically back.

Book 50 of 52: "Bad Paper" by Jake Halpern

Debt.  We all know that it's bad, but we only recently saw the impact that it can have on our entire economy in the crash in the most recent decade.  But just how does owing $5,000 for a car loan, or $300 for a payday loan, or $210,000 for a zero-money-down mortgage lead to problems with the entire stock market?

And what actually happens to all the debt?

[AGttA] Chapter 1: The Angel and the Furby

The Amateur's Guide to the Apocalypse

Axiom 1: Remain calm.  

Holy shit.  Oh my god.  Oh my dear, jumping, Jesus Christ of a god.

I'm going to die.

Yep, this is it.  Right now.  Totally going to die, any second now.  Better just close my eyes, accept my fate, and wait for it to be over.

...or not, maybe.

Hmm.