Here is a flash fiction piece I wrote this morning and serialized on Twitter.

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Ever the precocious child, Anton used the teleporter in many ways other than its intended purpose.

Cleaning his room, for example, was a trivial task now that he had a save state for it.

Anton’s meticulously arranged ZOMG!icons vs. Blazaroids diorama could swiftly return to its pristine state after each invasion.

And, with the Doppler circuit he created, Anton no longer had just one Amazium-plated AnnihiLord shock trooper. He had twenty-seven.

Twenty-seven incrementally fragile Amazium-plated AnnihiLord shock troopers, but nevertheless many more than Paige McAllister, who had only three.

Saturday mornings weren’t as fun without his brother Dmitri.

Anton rode the train into the city every afternoon. He inserted the same token each time. Only plebs and precocious children still used the trains.

He sat next to Dmitri’s hospital bed and read his twin the latest manga. He held up the slate so Dmitri could see the explosions.

The hospital staff had seen his father’s movies. They never troubled Anton with questions. They assured him Dmitri would wake up one day.

It would be a few days before they noticed that Anton’s parents had stopped visiting.

His mothers were always in the lab and his father filled the weekends with chute-less skydiving and BASE jumping.

Anton wished they stayed home more often.

Although a bright child for his age, he often lacked common sense, particularly when it came to mass conservation vs. lossy molecular compression algorithms.

The nurse saw Anton showing Dmitri his three new Blazaroid pilot action figures. “How lifelike they are,” she remarked.

Unfortunately, for Anton’s parents, nothing was further from the truth.

The End.

“Poisoned!” cried Lord Sauding, hurling the bowl away. It arced through the room before getting caught in the sagging badminton net and sloshing its contents in orange glops. The net relaxed and the crockery shattered into jagged bits as it hit the floor. Continue reading →

“Boatswain, have you seen my Felix? He was just here.”

Bastian’s hand found some wooden protrusion and steadied himself, and he spat an oily wad of phlegm onto the deck. But he didn’t retch this time. He felt his atrophied skills most profoundly in his limbs, heavy and distant, like a stranger’s. Braced by the brittle sea air, he soon had command of his senses once more. A gull shrieked above him, its wings frozen by memory. Bastian wondered how long it would hang there. Until there is no one left to remember. Or longer.

He turned to face her. Continue reading →