Stupefying Stories: August 2014 Read online

  STUPEFYING STORIES 1.13

  August 2014

  Editor: Bruce Bethke

  Dotar Sojat: Henry Vogel

  Editorial Minion: Katherine M. Karr

  Technical Advisor: M. David Blake

  Cover: "Meat 2.0" by Luke Spooner, CarrionHouse.com

  Published by: Rampant Loon Press, Lake Elmo, Minnesota

  Special Thanks to: The Fearless Slush Pile Reader Corps. Guy, Barbara, Frances, Jason, Karen, Ryan, Arisia, and Alicia: we couldn't have done it without you. Thanks!

  Copyright © 2014 Rampant Loon Media LLC

  Visit StupefyingStories.com

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  August 2014: Vol. 1, No. 13

  ISBN: 978-1-938834-28-8 (ebook edition)

  ISBN: 978-1-938834-29-5 (print edition)

  STUPEFYING STORIES is a production of RAMPANT LOON PRESS and is published in the United States of America by Rampant Loon Press, an imprint of Rampant Loon Media LLC, P.O. Box 111, Lake Elmo, Minnesota 55042.

  www.rampantloonpress.com

  Copyright © 2014 Rampant Loon Media LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photographic, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the publisher.

  The individual works contained herein are copyright © 2014 by their respective authors, unless otherwise indicated. All works contained herein are published by contractual arrangement with the authors. Stupefying Stories, Rampant Loon Press, the Stupefying Stories logo, and the Rampant Loon colophon are trademarks of Rampant Loon Media LLC.

  From the Editor’s Desk

  By Bruce Bethke

  And we’re back!

  Again.

  If you’ve been following us on Facebook, you know that for the crew here at Stupefying Stories, this past year has been one filled with challenges and changes. If you haven’t been following us, never mind: what matters now is that with this issue we begin our fifth year of publication, with new tools, new technologies, some new people in some key positions, but with the same dedication to bringing you the best stories we can find, delivered directly to your e-reader, phone, tablet, mobile device—or rolling out very shortly, to your mailbox, in the form of printed, bound, assemblages of paper!

  (We’ve been told they’re called “books.” How quaint.)

  To those of you who have stuck with us through the “interesting” times, we say: thanks for your understanding and support. And to both longtime fans and those of you who are just discovering us for the first time, we say:

  Welcome aboard, and buckle up! We have an insanely ambitious schedule planned for Year Five and it’s going to be an exciting ride.

  Per ardua ad astra!

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright and Trademark Notices

  From the Editor’s Desk

  Contents

  PERSONAL SPACE

  by Alison Pentecost

  THE GREAT WORK OF MEISTER VANHOCHT

  by Auston Habershaw

  RAINBOW SPORES

  by Jamie Lackey

  END TIMES

  by S. R. Algernon

  HER SYMPHONY AND SONG

  by Sarah Frost

  HAPPY VALLEY

  by Garth Upshaw

  MEMORY MAKES LIARS OF US ALL

  by Eric Dontigney

  MEAT 2.0

  by William Ledbetter

  About STUPEFYING STORIES...

  PERSONAL SPACE

  By Alison Pentecost

  “HERE’S ONE FOR YOU, JEFF,” said Diane, as she uploaded the file to my phone. “A free-runner. Your favorite kind.”

  “Very funny.”

  We both knew these were the worst cases: no fixed address, no close family. No real job either, because if they had one there would have been wages to garnish long before the clients called us. Hunting these people down to recover the property was a long, difficult job that too often ended in failure. It was Friday afternoon. I should have known better than to have announced to her that I’d just wrapped up my last case.

  “I don’t suppose it could wait until Monday?”

  Diane fixed me with a look, so I submissively turned and left her office. The weight of my new case made my feet drag all the way back to my desk.

  Slumping into my chair, I popped my phone into the desktop adapter and glanced at the sparkly pink unicorn perched atop the iScreen hanging from my cubicle wall. I gave its fuzzy head a quick pat for luck; a silly superstition I’d developed. Silvery glitter flaked off onto my desk, so I wasted the next couple of minutes blowing it out of my coffee mug and off the tottering stacks of smart paper files. No one wants to be serving papers to some drunk, tattooed, ex-con with silver glitter all over him. You might as well have the pepper spray can in your hand before you even ring the doorbell.

  I kept the damned thing because it was a Father’s Day gift from Jessica. From back when she still believed her dad was a superhero who hunted down bad people, even after the divorce. We rarely spoke anymore. I suppose it’s normal for a teenage girl to have little in common with her father, but she’s still my daughter, and I was looking forward to our weekend together. Now, it looked as if I’d have something to occupy myself with when she planted herself in my apartment’s spare bedroom and spent the entire visit moaning about me to her friends online.

  Sighing, I opened the file and expanded its contents onto the iScreen. I spread the documents and photos apart with my fingers, sliding them around until I’d arranged them into logical groupings before reading the summary sheet.

  Stacy Ackerman: twenty-four, originally from Dayton, Ohio. We’d been hired by a furniture store to repossess some furniture and electronics, which missy had failed to keep up the payments for. A quick scan of her work history told me that she had graduated with a marketing degree and had worked briefly for a prominent advertising company, but that had been over two years ago. After that she’d apparently found the career of high-class call-girl more lucrative. It wasn’t unusual to see these girls begin part-time to pay for tuition. After they graduate, they find it difficult to give up the easy cash and party lifestyle to settle down in a real nine-to-five job. The accompanying drug addiction forces them to sell their stuff to feed their habit. Stacy was not the first call-girl recovery I’d done.

  Current whereabouts unknown. The most recent address listed was a modest apartment in a middle-class part of town, rent paid in full.

  That was odd. Usually the marks skipped paying rent long before we get to them, leaving a pissed-off landlord behind them. Even if she’d been providing him with sexual favors on the side in return for letting the rent slide, wouldn’t he demand it now that she’d disappeared?

  I scanned quickly through the rest of the report. Alex Hernandez, a junior agent, had already done the standard checklist stuff. He’d visited the last known address, but none of the items where there. Alex had also done the next logical thing, which was to check all the local pawn shops and disreputable online auction houses for the items, but had come up blank.

  I’ll give Miss Ackerman her due. The junior guys usually located something, or at least the remains of something. More than one angry mark had destroyed the goods rather than letting them be repossessed. The loud, protesting kind, always easy to find because they loved the attention. It made them feel important. The free-runners ran because they want
ed to keep the goods no matter what. She’d probably stored the loot somewhere, waiting for the search to die down before she fenced it.

  A calendar pop-up alerted me: three-thirty already. School was out, so Jessica would be heading to my apartment. I decided to give her a call.

  “Jess, honey, it’s Daddy.”

  A drawn-out sigh greeted me. I could hear chatter and giggling in the background. “Did you forget to activate my door code?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “I just wanted to let you know that I’ll be home a bit late. If you tell me what you’d like to eat, I’ll pick it up on the way home.”

  “Pad Thai, extra shrimp.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Please,” she answered sullenly. “Can I go now?”

  “I’ll see you at home. Love you. Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  Reasonably polite, for Jess, so I wasn’t going to start a fuss. To be home in time for supper, I would have to leave work soon. I added a few last-minute notes to the file, packed up, and headed out the door.

  Jessica was there when I arrived, lying upside-down on the sofa, interfacing with her friends in that way that only the young could manage, or tolerate. She must have been tracking me by my phone, because she waved at me from behind her goggles before continuing with the complicated mudras required to keep up with her conversations, or games, or whatever she was doing.

  I waved back even if she couldn’t see it. “Supper’s here,” I said, bending closer so she could hear me through the smart gel. “Time to log out.”

  Jessica pouted at me from behind her gear but obediently closed her sessions before she popped the goggles off and righted herself. She knew my no-phone-at-the-supper-table rule, and I was thankful she chose not to argue with me about it this time. Bad enough I felt guilty for having to work this weekend during what little time my ex permitted me to spend with our daughter. I didn’t want us to be fighting too.

  We settled down to scooping up spicy noodles with wooden chopsticks in silence. The most recent article I’d read on parenting teens said to show interest in their interests. “So,” I said, trying to sound casual. “What kind of music have you been streaming lately?”

  Jessica shoved the three-quarters empty Pad Thai box across the table at me and stood up.

  “Stop pretending you care, because I know you don’t,” she said, before stalking away to her room.

  I bit back a reply and instead buried my impotent anger in my own music files for the rest of supper. It was hard to love someone who resented you for merely existing. Wasn’t it Shakespeare who said something about a daughter’s scorn being sharper than a serpent’s tooth? He wasn’t kidding.

  Jess wasn’t likely to resurface, so I pulled up the news feed on my phone, breaking my own rule since I was sitting here alone. Underneath the latest baseball scores, one of the headlines scrolling by caught my eye. I immediately expanded the news article to full screen.

  “A young woman’s body was dragged from the river this afternoon,” intoned the reporter’s voice, while a crew of recovery specialist worked by the river’s edge in the background. “Police suspect a suicide, but no official cause of death has been determined.” The driver’s license photo of the victim was unmistakably familiar. It was Stacy Ackerman. She was dead.

  ¤

  Case closed. I could send Diane a summary report right now and be a full-time Dad for the weekend. I’d had marks suicide before, thankfully rarely. Strung-out addicts who couldn’t face their problems, and instead chose to end it all. Usually, it was more straightforward: gunshot to the temple, or an overdose of pills. This was different, though I couldn’t put my finger on why.

  I spent the evening listening to music, trying to distract my mind from the case. Jess’s door remained closed, and I dared not intrude. I could have played a game to pass the time, or immersed myself in a film, but each time I reached for my gear, I hesitated. If I immersed, I would open her file. I wouldn’t be in this job if I could just let go and leave a loose end hanging.

  At midnight, I crawled into bed, exhausted. Sleep came quickly, but not quietly. Disturbing dreams had me gasping awake in the wee hours. The images of Stacy’s fish-belly pale skin haunted me in strobing afterimages on my dark bedroom walls.

  Climbing out of bed, I threw on a robe and headed out into the living room, offering myself the lame argument that I would just type up the report and be done with it. I plugged the headgear into my neck jack and pulled the face mask down to seal it. There was always this brief sensation of drowning, which I never got used to, as the smart gel material squirmed its way into my mouth and nose and ears. Filaments in the gear stretched out into the gel before plugging themselves into the tiny jack at my hairline. My home state launched, and I could breathe easily once again. All the documents left open on my iScreen floated in the void before me. I swept them aside to make room before opening a new window to begin my search.

  Stacy’s file indicated that she had a social networking avatar, as well as three gaming characters, listed under her name. The gaming characters had already been repossessed and stored for lack of payment, but her main public avatar was paid up and still out there. I opened a portal to the social network, input her ID, and stepped through.

  Virtual travel is rarely instantaneous, despite the hosting companies’ advertising claims. The environment that I’d created to pass the time in was an old-fashioned New York City subway car, complete with randomly-generated virtual riders for more atmosphere. Just like the ones I’d grown up riding, before the terrorist attack of 2023 made public underground transport too expensive a security risk for the city of New York to rebuild.

  As I sat in my virtual subway seat, watching the stations flash by through streaky windows, I contemplated the case. Other than the total failure on Alex’s part to have found any trace of the goods Stacy had made off with, how unusual was it that someone with her poor credit history and sketchy employment record could convince such an exclusive high-end store to deliver the goods? Either Stacy was a very good actress, or she had some powerful friends.

  And maybe those friends had changed their mind.

  My “subway” pulled into a station, and I squeezed past virtual citizens and out the open doors into Stacy Ackerman’s public home page. Hot pink and mauve dominated in eye-watering patterns. The overall theme was young, hip, feminine; it reminded me too much of Jessica.

  Looking around, I saw only the things that everyone posts publicly: media playlists, favorite links, glib quotes of obvious truisms dripping with sentiment. Advertising banners scrolled around me for bars, hotels, makeup, piercings and implants. None of the banners were hers. Soliciting prostitution was illegal in this state.

  There was nothing for me to learn here, but I hadn’t expected anything useful at the public level. Proper procedure was to contact the service provider for passwords to gain access to the secured levels of someone’s web space, but it can take days or weeks for their legal department to accept. The mark, and the goods, would be long gone by then so you had to bend the rules, else you’d never get anything done. I located the link to the lower levels, where her private and semiprivate data would be, and activated my cracking software. The link doors slid open, and I passed through, like Dante, into the next circle of glossy lipstick purgatory.

  Theme and decor-wise, this level resembled the other one greatly, but with a purpose. There were plenty of personal photos and videos, each more suggestive than the last. I turned my attention away to the discussion boards first. Flashing alerts from plaintive messages long overdue for a reply caught my eye. People, possibly customers, wondering why she wasn’t returning their calls. I scrolled through, but learned nothing new in the messages. I copied their contact data and moved on.

  And it still didn’t make sense. Nowhere in the discussion board messages, or in the photos, did I see any evidence of a Stacy getting in over her head. No threats from jilted johns. I’d expected at least some veiled reference
s to a drug debt.

  “Can I help you?”

  Despite the immersion, I actually felt myself bounce an inch off my sofa. I hadn’t expected anyone in this space at all. I turned to see Stacy Ackerman looking at me with sultry bedroom eyes.

  “Miss Ackerman?” Had the police misidentified the victim? “I represent the company of Garfield and Associates, and we have been contracted to repossess some items in your possession. Namely...”

  “No spam, please,” she replied, and walked away to take up a suggestive pose. I understood now. She was an avatar shell, just a pre-programmed C.V. version of Stacy designed to promote herself to potential employers or mates. I hadn’t noticed her when I’d arrived because she’d been immobile near a grouping of photos, and I had assumed that she belonged to one of them.

  It was better than nothing. “Wait,” I said, following her. “I’m not spam, I’m a real person, and I’d like to hear more about you.”

  The avatar Stacy instantly brightened. “I’d love to show you around. What aspect of me are you interested in? Personal or professional?”

  Professional I already knew about. “Let’s go with personal.”

  “Sounds great,” she purred as she wrapped her arm about mine. “I’m currently single and interested in meeting a male, heterosexual, between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five. My preferences are for tall, medium build, with dark hair and brown eyes. You also must be employed and live in the downtown area. I like to ski and go clubbing, as well as vacation in places where there is surf and sand. You may browse some videos of me enjoying these pursuits. Do you wish to continue?”