041721c

 

mutant squash 

vines thrash about the test plot

Doc gasps for air

101420c

 
Never should have turned the de-evolution ray on the chicken. It had worked so well on the dog — cutest little thing you ever saw! But the chicken, yeah. First of all, nothing 40 feet tall is going to fit in the lab. So there's the damage, and I was only renting the place. It took off running, guess it was hungry. How am I going to pay for the cows? Not to mention when people start to wonder what became of Farmer Brown. So I've packed up and I'm hitting the road, pulling the machine behind me in a trailer. It just needs a little more testing and I know I can make it perfect.

092720c

 

She worked for years
trying to invent the most complex
musical instrument ever made
only to discover
two days before her death
that someone else had made one
just a tad more Rube Goldbergian
than hers

033019d

The Ghost Eater

The Professor's machine did exactly as promised,

hoovering up ghosts quicker than you could say Jack Rob

but he never did explain what happened to them

before he vanished, machine & all,

in full view of 1,026 citizens of Wichita, Kansas.

Ideas about the captured spectres abounded:

converted to energy and used to heat the Prof.'s home,

squeezed into a superdense ball of trans-uranics,

beamed into outer space,

sent back to the Cambrian,

when Earth was young,

and the landscape dry as dust.

That one was right.

Not much to do in a desert so barren

the sand gets lonely,

Joe, and Bill, Eileen, baby “X”, and all, they

floated around making conversation:

morning Zebu, good to see you Phyl,

day after tiresome day as a disembodied spirit,

unable to interact with matter

no one to frighten except Petra,

and she was only pretending,

being a wight herself.

“Just let me die!” the only joke,

& after 14,000 years it wasn't funny any more.

So they schemed to haunt the Professor,

haunt him somethin' fierce

from the very moment of his birth.

But you know what?

The ghosts dissipated one by one,

not a one even made it

to the conquest of land,

they changed, somehow, learned to let go,

popped like soap bubbles, unobserved.

012719d

The Mad Scientist Tackles Overpopulation

There are just too many of us:

food running short

despite gene-tech out the wazoo,

only a matter of time before starvation

sweeps across the globe like a California wildfire,

and he really just can't stand the thought,

too vivid an imagination, he guesses.

So he works on the problem on and off, in between

tackling the glamorous issues like cloning, time travel,

you know the drill;

he skips a few Nobel Prize ceremonies

to get in the odd experiment,

and it doesn't turn out to be as easy as

he thought it would. You know, some virus

that simply reduced female fertility to about

5% of the natural state

would probably do the trick,

But no, any virus that was reasonably effective,

also seemed to affect racial groups differentially.

well, we can't have that:

too reminiscent of "The White Plague."

male fertility could be precisely altered

without ill effects for some reason,

but that just doesn't do any good. Even if 98% of

males were completely infertile,

the population of any polygamous society

would rise exponentially almost without limit.

(and wouldn't they all become polygamous

under those circumstances?)

In the end, nanobots were the only practical answer:

they could evolve faster than biologic systems,

and even though they were larger than viruses,

the new types were not much larger.

Of course, they got a little out of control

when they spontaneously formed communal groups

that achieved artificial intelligence,

self-organized cells like a miniature al qaeda,

but luckily by then he had perfected

time travel and could go back

and warn himself

to abandon that approach.

And wouldn't you know it: the mega-nanobot

had also developed a working time machine

and sent some units back and tried to kill him,

and what a mess that created!

humanity was expunged from at least

30 million world lines

before all was said and done;

in some the Earth itself had to be destroyed

in order to protect it,

and the Mad Scientist,

in all his incarnations,

was pretty nearly gone.

022718

Wild Fire

I must be very careful around open flames. I read a story once by Roger Zelazny, in which natives of a certain place had blood that burned on contact with the air. How did THAT evolve? Now I find myself hoping that my initial skepticism was misplaced.

It all started with Wally McGolly's latest invention. You know Wally, his exploits were popularized (under another name) by the historian R. A. Lafferty. Anyway, Wally ran into me at the supermarket and told me I simply had to see his new invention.

"It will revolutionize transportation," he told me. As a freelance writer, I'm always looking for things like this and he knew it. Wally lived in a second-floor apartment in a Victorian house downtown. He's looking for a new place now, I hear, though I haven't talked to him lately. I believe that he will not be charged with arson. Anyway, the thing was just like all of his inventions: a hodge-podge of ordinary objects, including a Hobart mixer, some bed springs, radio components, and what looked like several disemboweled hand-held game machines. And it glowed. The center of the thing was a perforate ring of metal.

"You crawl through that," he said. "In the production model it will be large enough to walk through."

"What is it?"

"A spatial translocator of course. Right now I have it set on the fountain in the town square." I had meant the metal ring, but now I recognized it. It was part of the innards of an electric washing machine.

Suffice it to say that he talked me into trying it out. I had misgivings. After all, who can forget the disaster last Thanksgiving when Wally tried out his cephalic enhancer on the entire stock of Jensen's turkey farm? I don't think the EPA will EVER let anyone back in there. But, Wally assured me that he had thoroughly tested the thing. What he didn't tell me was that after each test, including the last, he had had to make minor adjustments to the settings….

I started to crawl through the ring.

"Anything in your pockets?" he asked.

"Sure. My keys, wallet, the usual. Why?"

"Better empty them. The field reacts with metal."

"What about my fillings?" I asked, backing out hastily.

"Don't worry about those."

I emptied my pockets and crawled through. I was on my hands and knees in the fountain in front of the courthouse. That water is COLD! It comes straight from a spring. I leaped to my feet and jumped out of the fountain, almost landing on what appeared to be a charred pigeon corpse. Dodging the disgusting thing, I bumped into a large city policeman.

"What the hell are you doing?" he growled, grabbing my arm.

"I know I shouldn't do it," I said, "but I was tossing my keys in the air and catching them. One time I missed." He scowled and moved off. I hurried to the nearest pay phone, rubbing my arm and intending to call Wally. Then I remembered. I had emptied my pockets! What the hell. I made the call collect. He could afford it.

"Wally," I said. "I made it!"

"Wonderful." he sounded relieved. "Any side effects?"

"None! Everything is just fine. Sound as a dollar." I slapped the side of the phone for emphasis, and I cut my palm. I looked at the cut to see how deep it was. It was really just a scratch, but flames were dancing over it. My hand was on fire! Hurt like crazy. "Whoa!" I shouted, tears streaming down my cheeks.

"No undesirable …. combustion?" Wally asked anxiously.

"You knew," I accused, beating the flames out against my pants leg. I flashed on an image of the charred pigeon. "And your last subject was a pigeon. You bastard!" I heard a dial tone.

Damn that guy! Now I live very quietly. And I stay far away from open flames.

022218

The Problem of Seans

“Mr. Carr. Last year paleontologists recovered human bones from a Jurassic lake deposit in Wyoming. They belong to you. You are now, it seems, five years older than you were at the time of your death.”

How many Sean replicas he had seeded the Earth with, and they'd finally found one!

Sean needed money, so he took a job washing glassware and performing other menial duties “as assigned” for his physics instructor. He'd gotten a C. in the class, but only needed to pass it to fulfill the science requirement for his English degree. Dr. Langford didn't care as long as he showed up on time and did what he was told.

It was all good until Sean discovered, while tidying up some messy piles of paper, what Dr. Langford was working on in his restricted laboratory. That very night, under the influence of controlled substances, Sean spent an increasingly giggly two hours sending sandwiches, pencils, and other small objects back in time. Then he tripped.

Following the subsequent explosion and fire, it was quite a while before Dr. Langford thought to wonder where Sean was.

flash fiction about The Mad Scientist

Egg salad surgery

Ever since being struck by lightning the Mad Scientist had been plagued by the scent of egg salad. “Which wouldn't be so bad,” he muttered to himself, “if I didn't loathe egg salad.” To top it all off, after risking his life in the storm he hadn't been able to revive Igor after all. The hunchback made a really terrible zombie. (He had been kind of clumsy and slow of mind in life, and those things were not improved after death. In fact, it was said that only the sense of smell became more acute for zombies.) All of this made the stench of egg salad that much harder to take.

Do it yourself brain surgery on others was one thing, but the Mad Scientist had never tried it on himself before. His aim was to manipulate the nerves in the olfactory center so that egg salad smelled like, say, an avocado sushi roll. Or pepperoni and sausage pizza. It didn't really matter as long as it was a pleasant aroma. Using a waldo was too crude; he had to culture and then guide the evolution of surgical nanobots that would navigate the fluid surrounding and cushioning the nerves in his brain, snipping some connections and encouraging the growth of others. Fortunately, this was not difficult.

The nano-surgery complete, he unwrapped his nose. All that remained of his tiny army was a drop of milky fluid on a glass dish. He took a hesitant sniff – fried liver. He shuddered and stifled his gag reflex. What were the odds? The food he hated nearly as much as egg salad, and he was stuck with it day and night. Unless he wanted to launch another expedition into his brain.

"Oh man, this stinks!"

"Tell me about it, Master."