Monument Valley is a 2014 touchscreen indie puzzle game developed by UsTwo. The plot is fairly light, even for a puzzle game, and the main focus is on maneuvering from one door to another door, with a charming and simple graphical apperance.
Optical illusions play a big part in the puzzle system, in that the layouts are reminiscient of an M.C. Escher drawing, where an surface can be a walking surface, and so you need to be able to rotate to see what surface. And also, some pathways are only navigable when they visually align–if they LOOK like they make a continuous path then they can be traversed, even if from a different angle they’re clearly discontinuous.
I played the game for the first time at the Game Changers exhibit at the Science Museum of Minnesota in spring 2019.
Visuals Simple, but cute
Audio I honestly don’t remember
Challenge Not what I thought was particularly challenging, I played through most of the game in less than an hour. But it is sufficiently mind-bending to be an interesting angle.
Story Some story, but it’s not apparent in most of the gameplay.
Session Time Since I played through it in one sitting, I don’t honestly know.
Playability Very simple touch interface. The player movement is simply clicking the destination and the player tries to move to that spot if there is a path open to them at the time. The angle of the screen comes into screen here because you can only move to a surface facing the viewpoint. The other major part of the play control is manipulating the level–which are marked out by having visible grab points to rotate different sections. I think the hardest part about learning to play is understanding that an “apparent” path is a path, that is even if you know two platforms don’t touch each other because they’re too far away, if the perspective makes them look like they connect then they connect.
Replayability Not much in the way of replayability, since the puzzles are all set and the game isn’t very long.
Originality Reminiscient of some other games–most particularly FEZ with the perspective-based level traversal, but has its own feel
Playtime Less than two hours, so pretty short.
Overall A fun and cute puzzle game, but do keep in mind that it is also fairly short. It’s currently $3.99 on Google Play.
Hello! This is one of those posts where I declare what is eligible for speculative fiction awards (such as the Hugo and Nebula and Locus) and in what category from Diabolical Plots offerings. In past years I’ve also included fiction that I wrote that was published elsewhere, but alas, this year I have no original published speculative fiction of my own. The closest thing I have I published right here, titled “The Horowitz Method: A Metrics-Based Approach to Rank-Ordering Musical Groups”, but while it fills me with delight and I would love for you to read it I think it would be a stretch to call it speculative fiction.
Semiprozine
Diabolical Plots itself is eligible for the Hugo Award for the Best Semiprozine.
Editor (Short Form)
David Steffen is eligible for Editor, Short Form for the Hugos, for both Diabolical Plots and The Long List Anthology.
Publisher
Locus has a category for publisher, which would be for Diabolical Plots, LLC, for the Diabolical Plots publication, Long List Anthology (and Submission Grinder?).
Best Reprint Anthology
For the Locus award!
Related Work
Websites that relate somehow to science fiction and fantasy are eligible for related work. So I believe Diabolical Plots as a whole is eligible.
Individual works of nonfiction are definitely eligible so individual pieces on Diabolical Plots, whether reviews or otherwise, are eligible.
And The Submission Grinder may be eligible as well! People ask me every year what they can nominate it for. (I think it would be very unlikely to win since that is a tool for writers and Hugos are voted by broader group but it is probably eligible anyway.
This one might be a bit of a stretch but I have been chronicling progress on The Mighty Samurai cross stitch on the DP Twitter feed which seems to be a favorite of followers.
Professional Artist
Diabolical Plots, LLC published two commissioned illustrations this year.
One was the cover of Diabolical Plots Year Five from Galen Dara. You can find her website here. This individual artwork would be eligible for the Chesney Award. Galen has previously won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Artist but she now qualifies under the Best Professional Artist category (and has been nominated for that category as well).
Fan Artist
The second commissioned illustration this year was the cover of The Long List Anthology Volume Five from Amanda Makepeace (whose award eligibility post you can find here). Amanda won the Chesney Award last year for an original Diabolical Plots commissioned cover art. Her individual pieces are eligible for the Chesney Award, and she as an artist is eligible for the Hugo Award for Best Fan Artist. You can see her own eligibility post here.
Short Stories
All of the original fiction published by Diabolical Plots falls into the “Short Story” category as defined by both the Hugo and Nebula and Locus awards (meaning that each is under 7500 words apiece). All of the eligible stories are listed here with the announcement of Year Five fiction, and can be purchased in one convenient ebook package. Please note that this is a complete list of the eligible fiction published by Diabolical Plots this year–the stories published on the site between January 2019 and March 2019 are not eligible because they were first published as part of the Diabolical Plots Year Four anthology published in 2018.
For the sake of convenience, here is a list of the eligible short stories with links and brief excerpts:
“One Part Per Billion” by Samantha Mills There were already two Irene Boswells onboard and a third in the making. Radiation poured out of the Omaha Device in an endless stream of buttery yellow light, and Irene (the Irene in the containment room) knew they were doomed. But she slapped patch after patch over the ruinous crack in the device’s shell because she hadn’t come twenty billion miles to sit and wait for death.
“What the Sea Reaps, We Must Provide” by Eleanor R. Wood The ball bounces off the tide-packed sand and Bailey leaps to catch it with lithe grace and accuracy. He returns to deposit it at my feet for another go. It’s nearly dusk; the beach is ours on this January evening. It stretches ahead, the rising tide low enough to give us ample time to reach the sea wall.
“Dogwood Stories” by Nicole Givens Kurtz “Late bloomers have the prettiest blooms,” Sadie’s momma said, after she tapped her on the head with the comb. “So, stop squirmin’.” “It’s too tight.” Sadie winced, sucking in air to offset the pain. Her scalp burned like someone had set fire to it. She put her hands in her lap and tried to weather the storm, her hands rubbing each other to soothe the pain. “Tenderheaded. That’s all.” Her momma pinched off a section of hair, and began another braid.
“The Ceiling of the World” by Nicole Crucial This is important. When Margaret moved to the city, you see, the office she worked in was on the top floor, five stories up. The train took twenty-five minutes to travel between Bleek Street—where her office was—and Swallow Avenue—where she lived. She took a room in a basement, and that basement room was ten feet below the ground, and through the eighteen-inch windows at the top of the room, daylight filtered in. The reassuring whisper-hum of the underground trains tickled the soles of her feet every few minutes.
“Bootleg Jesus” by Tonya Liburd Out where rock outcroppings yearn to become mountains, there was a town cursed with no magic. In this town, there was a family. In this family, there was a girl. She was nine, almost ten, Mara. Childhood hadn’t completely lifted its veil. She had an older brother, Ivan, who was fourteen, and whose voice was changing. Elsewhere, puberty would have signaled all sorts of preparations – acceptance into a special group home as much for his safety as for the general public – while his Unique Gift manifested. Watchfulness. Guidance. Training.
“Little Empire of Lakelore” by D.A. Xiaolin Spires All the world followed pretty much the same guidelines for international trade and travel. That’s a very big gloss, but let’s say it was true. And it was, for the most part. There was however, one exception. It was Little Empire of Lakelore. Little Empire of Lakelore had to be qualified by the word little, because simply calling it the Empire of Lakelore would be a misnomer. You see, there was nothing imperial about Lakelore itself, except for its air of superiority, which was manufactured much like the actual air itself. The air had to be manufactured and pumped out, and it wasn’t too costly to do so, given the marginal cost of opening a few more factories for that purpose.
“Lies of the Desert Fathers” by Stewart Moore The Abbot’s eyes stared up at the ceiling. The reflections of blue-robed angels flew across his gray irises. Not much blood had spattered on his face. His chest was another story. The stains had finally stopped spreading from the rents in his brown wool robe. I noticed a smear near the hem of my long skirt where I stood too close.
“The Inspiration Machine” by K.S. Dearsley “I’ve got it!” Barnes leapt out of his chair and knocked hot synth-coffee over his work interface and paunch. Perhaps that was why the idea vanished. By the time he had swabbed away the mess, the brilliant flash of creativity was no more than the memory of something that had almost been within his grasp. He needed a few breaths of bottled fresh sea air–his last multi-million global craze–to boost his brainpower.
“Colonized Bodies, Dessicated Souls” by Nin Harris The PPMS had cordoned off Jalan Mandailing. They had guards posted along the banks of Sungai Chua. But it was not enough. The battles ranged from midnight till the cock’s crow and the call for prayers every dawn while the sun painted delicate fingers of rose across a yellow ombre sky. In the daytime, the blistering heat of the day kept the undead under protective cover. Even in their present state the British could barely handle the heat of the tropics. Penghulu Udin discovered he was exceptionally good at killing the undead. He could spear them, decapitate them, blow them up or use the bamboo blowgun the way his Dayak ancestors had before they had travelled to Selangor to build a new life by marrying into the Javanese community. He learned how to construct bombs from the materials they’d scavenged from the army barracks. He’d trained a small army that grew larger, and larger.
“Empathy Bee” by Forrest Brazeal I’m at the microphone for the first round of the 32nd Annual National Empathy Bee, and I can’t feel a thing.
“Dear Parents, Your Child is Not the Chosen One” by P.G. Galalis Dear Mr. and Mrs. Goodblood, Thank you for expressing your concerns about Rodney’s First Term grade. Please understand that the highest mark of “Chosen One” is exceedingly rare, even among our exceptional student body here at Avalon. Rodney’s grade of “Stalwart” is neither a mistake nor cause for concern, but a performance about which you and he can both be proud.
“Fresh Dates” by D.A. Xiaolin Spires SFX, International Terminal The scuttling of a million feet before him, the collective aspirations to get somewhere resounded in the marble hall, while he stared at his stubby chin in the glass. He rubbed a growing five o’clock shadow with a soft hand. “Paging passenger Carl Rogers. Please come to Gate 48B. Paging passenger Karl Rogers. Please come to Gate 48B.” The near-garbled voice issuing forth from the speakers was far from honeyed, but there was something sweet about the announcement and the cadence of the passenger’s name. At that moment, he would do anything to be Karl Rogers, to have such a short three syllabled name, so he could be rushing about like the many others rushing about. Needing to get somewhere and feeling the inadequacy of bipedalism in hauling body and material possessions to reach that end.
“Tracing an Original Thought” by Novae Caelum It’s like this: if the world has a food shortage, you eliminate hunger by leaving the planet, taking all your animals and plants in your genetic ark, and finding a new planet on which to grow and flourish. It’s also like this: if the world has a distribution of wealth crisis, you eliminate poverty by never having elites in your new society. At least for a little while. At least, that was the plan. And if the world has a gender crisis, an inability for equality, you eliminate gender.
“Save the God Damn Pandas” by Anaea Lay My job? Purity shaming pandas. It’s great. You loom over a living, breathing, talking embodiment of the international fixation on world peace and you shout, “Why won’t you fuck, you lazy motherfucker?” And then you play them some porn. Okay, it’s not actually like that. At all. Really, my job kind of sucks.
“Consider the Monsters” by Beth Cato Jakayla crouched in front of her dark closet. She hadn’t turned on the light because that was an awfully rude thing to do when trying to talk to the monster hidden inside. “You gotta listen to me,” she whispered. “The news is saying really bad things, like rocks are gonna fall out of the sky and a lot of people are gonna die. You can’t stay in my closet. You gotta go to the basement. There’s dark spaces down there for you to hide in. I won’t tell no one you gone there.”
“The Train to Wednesday” by Steven Fischer Charlie Slawson sat alone in the transit station, watching a set of empty train tracks and wondering why the train was late. Truth be told, he hadn’t known until just then that temporal trains even could be late.
“Consequences of a Statistical Approach Towards a Utilitarian Utopia: A Selection of Potential Outcomes” by Matt Dovey Maximised Total Happiness Michelle smiled, exhausted, as her baby’s cry filled the hospital room. The lights above her were harsh and cold, and the sheets beneath her were tangled and scratchy, soaked in her sweat and stinking of iodine, but none of that mattered against such a beautiful sound. She heard it so rarely—just once a year.
“The Problem From Jamaica Plain” by Marie L. Vibbert I was waiting for the teakettle to boil, and the office wasn’t due to open for, oh let’s say three minutes. The phone blinked and I considered not answering, what with those three minutes of leisure ahead of me, but I needed every client I could get. I put on my phone voice and chirped, “Jasmine Alexa, Attorney at law.” The voice on the other end trembled with fear and flat, Bostonian vowels. “I’m not shuh, but Ah think I might have killed someone.”
“This is What the Boogeyman Looks Like” by T.J. Berg This is what the boogeyman looks like. It has white eyes with no pupils and no irises. Just white all the way through. But it can see you. So I must not fall asleep as I wait outside this closet door in an empty room, in an empty house with a derelict For Sale sign in front of it, everything smaller than I remember, baseball bat gripped in my hands.
“Beldame” by Nickolas Furr I never had a driver’s license, you see. Instead I was born blessed with epilepsy. The doctors said it was bad form to put a two-ton vehicle into the hands of a young man who could seize at any time, medication be damned. Grand mal, tonic-clonic—whatever you wanted to call it, it was the big one, and I grew up afraid to be responsible for running off the road and killing someone because of it. I tell you this simply to explain that I was completely at the mercy of the bus line when we stopped at the small town in Kansas where all the houses faced west and I met the whispery old crone who sat at the intersection of two worlds.
“Gorilla in the Streets” by Mari Ness He’s hairy. He grunts a lot. He can be – there’s no kind way to put this – a little clumsy, and even his best friends say his table manners could use a little work. But at barely the age of 30, he’s become Wall Street’s best performing hedge fund manager, with an estimated fortune of $36 billion, and with bankers, CEOs and even – it’s rumored – a United States president and several prime ministers jumping at the mere twitch of his finger. Despite being a – there’s no way to put this politely – a gorilla.
“Invasion of the Water Towers” by R.D. Landau The water towers never showed up on film. That should have been a sign. In the before times, there were water towers on every rooftop. They were highly visible, distinct from the rest of the landscape, cylindrical bodies with conical heads and long spindly legs. Maybe if we hadn’t been so busy whining about work and finding the perfect brand of deodorant and wondering if that cute barista was flirting with us (They weren’t. It is literally their job to smile and draw hearts in foam and have perfect hair. We as a society need to get over ourselves) we would have asked ourselves why the water towers didn’t want us to see them represented in the movies. Maybe if we hadn’t sharpened those not-thinking skills by not thinking about global warming and drone strikes and the asbestos in the ceiling that coated our hair like dandruff, we would have asked the right questions before it was too late.
“The Cliff of Hands” by Joanne Rixon “Lhálali’s bloody viscera,” Eešan cursed. She searched the cliff face for a hold and found nothing. Finally she spotted a thread-thin crack and wedged her wingtip claw in it so she could reach upward with her stubby grasping-hands. “Watch out,” Aušidh said. “If you fall now you’ll get hurt, won’t you?” She dipped in a little swoop less than a winglength away from Eešan in the air. The shadow of her wide membranous wings rippled across the uneven stone and the little burst of wind ruffled the sparse black fur on Eešan’s back.
“The Eat Me Drink Me Challenge” by Chris Kuriata The first YouTube video received over seven million hits before being taken down. A shaky camera held by a giggling friend captured a teenage boy standing in a well-tended backyard. Dressed in cargo shorts, he stared solemnly down the lens before announcing, “I’m Shyam Rangaratnam, and this is the Eat Me Drink Me Challenge.” After taking a deep breath and a dramatic pause—as all on-line daredevils do before embarking on their potentially painful stunt—Shyam broke the seal on the familiar purple vial, and emptied the liquid onto his tongue.
“The Old Ones, Great and Small” by Rajiv Mote School’s out, and everybody wants to see the Great Old Ones: the line into the Miskatonic Zoo doubles back and winds out the gates. The American and Massachusetts flags barely flutter above the gate, and the sun today is merciless in a cloudless sky. I ask my grandchildren, Caleb and Cody, if they wouldn’t rather go to a museum or park, catch a ball game, or go anywhere at all less crowded, but they won’t be swayed. The zoo has been closed for renovations for two years now, and they want to see the Great Old Ones in their new, “natural” habitats.
Suspicious Minds is a fantasy/science fiction thriller prequel novel, the first official Stranger Things novel, written by Gwenda Bond, published in 2019. The book (and this review) may container spoilers for the first two seasons of the TV show.
In the TV show we eventually meet Eleven’s mother, Terry Ives, but she is in a nearly catatonic state, living within her mind in an internal loop a traumatic event. Eleven manages to establish psychic contact with her and find out a little bit of her story, but this novel is the story of a younger Terry Ives.
The year is 1969, Terry is a college student, while the Vietnam war is raging overseas. Strapped for cash, Terry volunteers to be a medical test subject for the local laboratory. She has the sense that the experiment will change the world in some way, but she doesn’t know much details. She makes new friends in the waiting room for the experiment, and soon they all meet Richard Brenner, who is now in charge of the experiment.
Since the book is written with an audience who knows how Terry Ives ended up, much of the ending of the book is already known, so there is a looming sense of dread throughout the book. There are some significant things we know, but there are plenty of other things we don’t, such as the fate of her friends, and what other things Terry is involved in during this time period.
I found this a solid read for fans of the TV show, though I would recommend waiting until watching seasons 1 and 2 before watching this. Even knowing how much of it turns out, there area lot of interesting and compelling characters, high stakes, you get some more insight into characters that you know, including Richard Brenner, Terry Ives, and Kali.
Scramble is a side-scrolling shooter game published as an arcade machine by Konami in 1981.
The controls are very similar to other games of its type (many of which were inspired by this directly or indirectly). A joystick to move, and two fire buttons–one for quick forward shots and another for slower falling bombs. The object is to stay alive by avoiding terrain and destroying or avoiding enemy craft, but you also need to maintain your fuel supply or your ship will fall to its doom, which you do by attacking fuel tanks on the ground.
I played this game for the first time at the Game Changers exhibit at the Minnesota Science Museum.
Visuals Decent for their time
Audio They’re okay.
Challenge Very challenging, especially the fuel aspect of it. Without that you could probably just avoid things entirely much of the time, but many of the fuel tanks are inconveniently placed so that you have to try to bomb them which is difficult to time correctly because the bombs are so slow.
Story No particular story (not that that’s unusual for an arcade game from this era).
Session Time Depends on how good you are. An average player, probably a couple minutes.
Playability Easy to understand, hard to master the timing of the bombs.
Replayability Like most old arcade games, they did get replayed alot, with the goal being to get further and further and get higher scores, but not really replayable in the usual sense I mean this, since the game starts completely from scratch when you start playing.
Originality It is based around a familiar type of game but with rule rewriting system I’ve never seen before, ends up making it a whole new kind of game.
Playtime I haven’t finished yet, so I’m really not sure, if you like this kind of game you could put in many hours trying to perfect it.
Overall This is a fun side-scrolling space shooter game, which even if you haven’t played you might have played other games in the same style that came later like Gradius III (also by Konami), though it’s simpler in some ways than those the added challenge of needing to collect fuel adds an interesting twist to it that I haven’t seen in other games and forces the player to perfect their timing with the bomb attack. There have been some re-releases of this game, including as part of a downloadable Konami collection on Steam for $20, bundled with 7 other Konami games
Michelle smiled, exhausted, as her baby’s cry filled the hospital room. The lights above her were harsh and cold, and the sheets beneath her were tangled and scratchy, soaked in her sweat and stinking of iodine, but none of that mattered against such a beautiful sound. She heard it so rarely—just once a year.
“Congratulations, Mrs Bergeron,” said the midwife. “It’s a girl.”
“Oh, thank you so much! I’m ecstatic!” She looked over at Nathan, cradling baby Danielle face down in his strong arms. A Happiness Moderator stood by them, uniformed with the usual black suit and easy smile; he lined up a large needle at the base of Danielle’s skull and implanted the HappyChip with a swift movement. Danielle’s cries quieted, then turned to a happy giggle.
“You should be very proud,” said the midwife, smiling. “What number is she?”
“My 22nd!”
“Well, congratulations again. I look forward to seeing you next year for number 23.”
Highest Possible Mode
Raj stepped into the kitchen and the welcoming arms of Alejandro. The air was heavy with spice and the sizzle of frying pork, the promise of a celebratory dinner as only Ali could prepare.
“I knew you could do it,” whispered Ali, embracing him. “Team manager!”
This, more than the promotion, was what made Raj happy: that he had made Ali proud. Falling in love with him had made everything click for Raj, and he understood, at last, what it meant to call someone your other half: not just a casual joke, but an honest statement that I am not me without them. Seeing Ali’s pride made him swell. It meant more than anything.
A firm knock sounded at the door, and Raj all but floated down the hallway to open it.
Pain flared in his toes. Raj crumpled, grasping at his right foot. He looked up; a Happiness Moderator stood in the doorway, already filling out his worksheet on a tablet. The Moderator had stamped on Raj’s foot as soon as the door had opened, breaking two, maybe three toes by the feel of it.
“Why?” gasped Raj.
The Moderator didn’t look up from his monitoring tablet. “Your level of happiness had risen to be equal to a large number of other citizens, but was nonetheless lower than the current societal mode. As such, your happiness threatened to establish a lower level as the new mode, undermining government targets.”
“Couldn’t you have given me some flowers or something? Made me even happier and lifted me above the others?”
“Sorry sir,” said the Moderator. “Pain is easier to invoke, and longer lasting. Have a happy day!
Highest Possible Mean
Roger cackled as he switched the traffic lights to red again, having let only three cars through the intersection. He was watching the drivers on an array of video monitors that glowed in the dim control room, displaying an orchestra of impatience rendered in drumming fingers and revving engines.
“Sir,” said a Happiness Moderator, stepping up to the desk. “Please be careful not to cause too much irritation. As soon as their combined frustration outweighs your delight…”
Roger looked up, a manic, almost hysterical grin on his face. He hadn’t had this much fun in years! Lights go green… lights go red! Pedestrians cross now… and again… and again! But not for too long—got to make them run once they’re halfway across! He laughed uproariously.
“Never mind, sir,” said the Moderator, stepping away.
Smallest Possible Standard Deviation
Cecile clicked the plastic lid onto the latte and passed it across the counter with a smile. The businesswoman smiled back with the same easy contentment and stepped away into the chatter of the airport, merging seamlessly into the efficient flow of foot traffic.
A cry went up from the arrivals line: Delphine! Oh Delphine! Two silver-haired women ran towards each other and embraced, clinging to each other with a frantic longing, their shoulders shaking as they sobbed on each other’s shoulder.
Cecile’s eyes welled up. She suddenly missed Nicole desperately, a huge hollow of longing opening up beneath her heart. It had been two months now, and Cecile still had no idea when the Venezuelan dig would be completed and Nicole would be home again, curled up on the sofa with Cecile under blankets and cushions and Henri the cat purring between them, a shared bottle of merlot by candlelight…
Happiness trickled across Cecile’s body like warm water, flowing out from the base of her skull, dampening her sadness and leaving it as an academic awareness of loneliness to be acknowledged with a smile. The two women in arrivals broke apart, arms dropping to their sides and broad grins smoothing down to gentle smiles. The same gentle smile as Cecile. The same gentle smile as everyone. Easily-maintained, easily-controlled, for everyone everywhere, always.
Highest Possible Median
Moderator Laidlow looked up from her monitoring tablet into the crying man’s puffy eyes. He stood in his doorway, dressed in a grey, ratty dressing gown, his hair unkempt and face unshaven. His bottom lip wobbled as he explained.
“Honestly, I’ll be fine again in a couple of hours. It’s just—my cat died overnight, and I might be a little down now, but I’m getting over it, I promise!”
He danced a sad little jig in the sour morning light as if to demonstrate, but he only made it four beats before sagging in defeat.
It wouldn’t have mattered. The tablet had already confirmed his status: he was the saddest person in the local area, with the least chance of improving above the median before the end of the day, judging by his current emotional trajectory.
She nodded at Moderator Rence, who reluctantly drew his HappyTaser. Laidlow had noticed his increasing reticence through their recent duties, though she struggled to understand it. She took great pride and satisfaction in her work; in knowing that she was improving society. Rence’s mood was completely at odds with her own approach to the work.
Without ceremony, he pressed the HappyTaser to the man’s forehead and executed him. He stood for a moment as the body crumpled, jerking slightly with the electric discharge, then slowly lifted the Taser and examined it.
“Do you ever wonder,” he said, “if what we do actually helps? Does it fix anything, or are we just papering over cracks? Does our work merely hide society’s ills behind an artificially inflated number, not only doing nothing to help directly but actively preventing greater self-examination of the true causes of our problems? Does the work not, in fact, burrow under your skin and eat away at you in the cold hours of the night, leaving you filled only with doubts and a raw, jagged uncertainty? Having walked out of the darkness of ignorance and come to find the truth beneath the façade, I do not know as I will ever be truly happy again.”
Laidlow said nothing. She swiped about on her monitoring tablet, looking for the next unhappiest person in the vicinity now that this job had been completed.
Moderator David Rence said the display.
She raised her HappyTaser to his temple and executed him.
Well! she thought, smiling. That was efficient! What an excellent day!
Author’s Note: I can’t recall precisely what triggered the combination of utilitarianism and statistics in my mind—just the general everyday mush that is my brain, one supposes—but I never expected anyone else to find it funny. There’s not much more to be said for it than that, perhaps, except perhaps it shows the absurdity of taking any system to its logical extreme without constraint. I wonder if that will ever occur to the free market adherents selling off all the public infrastructure in Britain. Special thanks must go to Ric Crossman (@SquidFromSpace) for his statistical consultancy, in particular pointing out a far more efficient method for maintaining the optimum median value, an idea that will surely make him a hero come the revolution.
Matt Dovey is very tall, very English, and most likely drinking a cup of tea right now. He once got too happy after finding a packet of Golden Crunch Creams at the back of the cupboard, and has a scar on his arm where the Moderators intervened. He now lives in a quiet market town in rural England with his wife & three children, and despite being a writer he still hasn’t found the right words to fully express the delight he finds in this wonderful arrangement. His surname rhymes with “Dopey” but any other similarities to the dwarf are purely coincidental. He’s an associate editor at PodCastle, a member of Codex and Villa Diodati, and has fiction out and forthcoming all over the place, including all four Escape Artists podcasts, Flash Fiction Online and Daily SF. You can keep up with it all at mattdovey.com, or follow along on Twitter and Facebook both as @mattdoveywriter.
Jetpack Joyride is an endless runner mobile app game published by Halfbrick in 2011. Download it for free from app stores like Google Play.
The game stars Barry, a struggling gramophone salesman who breaks into a high-security laboratory to steal an experimental jetpack prototype and makes his escape with it, dodging electrical traps and missiles along the way.
It’s an endless runner game where you collect gold coins and complete achievements to earn more coins that you can use to buy more gadgets, upgrade your jetpacks, and etc, buying things that will make it possible to go further the next time.
The controls are very simple. With the standard jetpack, if you touch the screen the jetpack turns on and pushes Barry toward the ceiling. If you lift your finger, Barry falls, So, you move up and down to dodge obstacles, and to collect coins and powerups. You can collect other specialty jetpacks which each have their own control scheme, like the crazy teleporter that moves along at the same height with the destination cursor scrolling up and down constantly and touching the screen will move you to the cursor. Each specialty jetpack has its own variation of the simple touch controls, which adds some variation and also allows you to take one extra hit before dying.
The game is heavy on in-game purchases and ads (which you can choose to view at certain points to get extra powerups, but you will see ads either way unless you pay), and although the game is a lot of fun, I found the level of ads and in-game purchase solicitations to be off-putting and enough to put the game down for good. It’s a fun infinite runner game, but I’d rather buy a game on Steam where I don’t have to get constantly solicited after the fact.
I played this game for the first time at the Game Changers exhibit at the Science Museum of Minnesota.
Visuals Fun cartoony graphics, I particularly like the beehive jetpack.
Audio They’re all right.
Challenge Challenging to make it a long distance as you figure out the rules and unlock more powerups. Then again, there’s not much consequence to dying, you just start again, so it’s not very frustrating if you die.
Story Very light on story.
Session Time Even the longer rounds I played have probably been 10 minutes.
Playability Simple, can be played with one finger.
Replayability Certainly some replayability with the unlockable stuff. Many of the unlockables are just reskinning of the jetpack and etc . So unless you’re a hardcore completionist you’ll probably get bored of that before you run out. There are a limited number of achievements and at some point they start again with the simpler ones which also makes it get old.
Originality I’ve played a ton of other endless runner games that were very similar, though I guess I haven’t compared the timelines of their development.
Playtime There’s not really an objective, per se, so hard to say. If you wanted to unlock every unlockable, you could spend a very long time.
Overall This is fun and addictive for a while and easy to play for just a few spare minutes. But for me it wore thin pretty quick between the constant in-game purchase solicitations and ads, and the achievements looping back to easier achievements.
Elevator Action is a 1983 spy action game by Taito published in arcade format. As each level begins the player character grapples to the top of a 30-story building and must make their way down to the ground floor through the building filled with gun-toting guards while collecting secret documents along the way.
The most novel part of the game, as the name suggests, is the elevators used to move from floor to floor which you and the guards can use to shift up or down floors. You do have an advantage over an individual guard: you also have a gun, and both you and the guards will die from a single bullet, and the guards don’t seem inclined to dodge by jumping and ducking as you can, and you can also kill the guards by jump-kicking.
As far as arcade games of the era go, this one is much easier to get pretty good at than most, so was probably an easy “gateway game” for arcade players. despite the relatively simple controls, you have quite a few options between shooting and dodging and jump-kicking and riding elevators to evade or attack the guards.
I played this for the first time at the Game Changers exhibit at the Science Museum of Minnesota.
Visuals Typical for the era.
Audio Typical for the era.
Challenge Lower than most arcade games, much easier entry point.
Story Not much story (typical of the era and format).
Session Time Depends how good you are!
Playability Simple, apart from it not being immediately obvious that you have to collect documents behind the red doors, and if you don’t open those doors reaching the ground floor just sends you back up.
Replayability Not in the usual way I mean, but if you like this kind of game there’s certainly plenty of fun to be had.
Originality It was a new twist at the time.
Playtime I don’t know how long it would take to play all the way through.
Overall This is a fun game and less frustrating than other games of its time. And there have been various recent-ish ports that you might be able to find.
Missile Command is a franticly paced war game published as an arcade console by Atari in 1980. In each level of the game you have three bases that can fire missiles that need to defend themselves and their cities against incoming enemy missiles.
The controls consist of a roller ball for movement and three separate firing buttons, each of which fires a missile from one of the bases. Some of the enemy missiles are simple predictable shots, others can split into multiple pieces that move in different directions, enemy planes can fly through the area. You have to keep your cities alive until the timer for the level runs out, without running out of your own missiles while missiles are raining down from multiple directions.
This game is frantically paced and while simple to understand is very difficult to master and no wonder it was so popular (and inspired by the dominant fear of the times during the Cold War).
While I had been familiar with the game from its reputation, I played this one for the first time at the Game Changers exhibit at the Science Museum of Minnesota.
Visuals Probably good for the era, can certainly handle a large amount of moving objects
Audio Typical for the era.
Challenge Very high.
Story Very basic story (typical of the format).
Session Time Depends how good you are!
Playability Simple to understand, hard to master–one fire button for each base plus a rollerball for moving the targeting reticle (at least in the original arcade version). There is just a lot going on all at once, hard to keep up.
Replayability Not in the usual way I mean, but if you like this kind of game there’s certainly plenty of fun to be had.
Originality Still recognizable as its own thing after almost 40 years.
Playtime I don’t know how long it would take to play all the way through.
Overall This is a solid and challenging game, though probably not one of the first I’d recommend for a casual gamer because it is probably one of the more difficult games in a difficult genre. I haven’t come across a convenient looking port on a modern-ish system, but you might be able to find one in an older system or an emulator.
Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle is a turn based combat game developed for the Nintendo Switch by Ubisoft, which is a mashup of Nintendo popular Mario Bros. franchise and Ubisoft’s Raving Rabbids franchise.
A new invention has just been completed, a visor that allows the wearer to fuse two other objects into one object. Everything is going smoothly until the Rabbids arrive in the labarotory in their Time Washing Machine and start wreaking havoc, grabbing the visor among other things and fusing random things together. The inventor is a big Mario fan, so there are lots of Mario decorations around the lab, and soon the rabbid wearing the visor has fused Mario characters like Peach and Luigi with Rabbids, and the Time Washing Machine takes them all to the Mushroom Kingdom where the Rabbids are running wild, fused with various elements and monsters of the Mushroom Kingdom. It’s up to Mario, Rabbid Peach, and Rabbid Luigi to save the kingdom.
The gameplay is turn-based, and everyone is equipped with ranged weapons unique to their character and much of the game is based around finding cover from enemy fire while trying to get around the enemy cover to fire on them. You can also move every turn to change cover spots and to tackle an enemy as you go. For most rounds, the last team standing wins (different rules may apply in individual cases). To move from area to area to try to work toward saving the kingdom, they have to fight through hordes of Rabbids fused with monsters along the way.
Maybe it’s because I’m not at all familiar with the Rabbids, but I didn’t find the premise compelling. Who are the Rabbids, why do I care? But the major issue for me was that the difficulty curve was badly designed. The first battles I found too easy; I didn’t have to try very hard, just had to persevere, follow basic rules about finding cover, try to stick to the higher ground whenever possible. For several hours of gameplay this was enough, I was able to advance and didn’t die, and not only was this part not particularly challenging, it was repetitive and dull. This continued until I reached the first mini-boss battle with a more formidable foe, at which point I got soundly beaten by the mini-boss and the hordes of Rabbid minions. The earlier battles hadn’t prepared me for whatever strategies were needed to beat that tougher foe, and I was bored enough of the earlier challenges I didn’t want to go back and try to level-grind if that’s what was needed to stand a chance. I didn’t care enough about making it further in the game to really devote myself to trying over and over again to try to beat this boss, and much of that apathy was the difficulty curve of the game, which ran low low low low high without transitioning from one to the other smoothly.
Visuals A mixture of standard 3-D Mario design with weird Rabbid looks.
Audio Nothing remarkable.
Challenge Very uneven challenge curve, starts out so easy that it’s boring, then ramps steeply up very suddenly.
Story The story does not make a ton of sense, and seems to be a lot of work to justify a game mashup.
Session Time The nice thing about the switch is you can put it to sleep at will no matter what part of the game it’s in.
Playability Easy enough that the early battles are pretty easy to pick up. But could use some more difficulty ramp-up to prep for tougher battles.
Replayability Even playing through the first time got boring very quickly.
Originality While game mashups bring their own kind of originality, the gameplay itself is nothing particular original
Playtime Unknown, didn’t get all the way through, I played for a few hours so far.
Overall Maybe a fan of the Rabbids would be more into the game than I was, but I found the challenge progression of the game very uneven, not challenging enough at the beginning and then suddenly very challenging. I’m sure someone will find the game fun, but it’s not for me. You can find it for $60 at major retailers
Charlie Slawson sat alone in the transit station, watching a set of empty train tracks and wondering why the train was late. Truth be told, he hadn’t known until just then that temporal trains even could be late.
He looked around the underground station—its old, brick walls lined with gaudy digital displays, advertising exciting trips to next year, next century, and beyond—before noticing a man stepping onto the platform from a little door beside the tracks. He wore navy blue coveralls and a tall pair of work boots. His close-cropped, grey hair was half hidden beneath a faded baseball cap.
“Excuse me,” Charlie called. “Any idea when the train will arrive? I think it’s running late.”
The man stopped and frowned, then walked over to the bench. “You sure you’re in the right place, son? Which train are you waiting for?”
Charlie nodded and motioned to the marquee above the tracks. “Train to Wednesday. Just like it says.”
“Hmmph,” the old man grunted. “Wednesday’s never been one of our peak destinations. Especially not a Wednesday that’s just a few days away. What’d you want to do a thing like that for?”
Charlie turned the tablet in his hands so the old man could see the picture on the screen. That day, years ago, when Dad took him fishing out west of Cambridge. The first time he’d ever been to the train station.
Dad tried to keep the trip going every year after Charlie left home, but life got busy, then they drifted apart. Charlie had always assumed they’d have time to catch up later, but he would give anything to have that day back, now.
“Your father?” the man asked.
Charlie nodded. “His funeral is this Wednesday.” He thought of the tearful video message he’d received this morning from his mother, his siblings already bickering in the background over funeral venues and seating arrangements.
It was foolish, all of it. It would make no difference to Dad if the memorial dinner served chicken or beef, or if the service was held at the church on High Street or Main. What Dad would have appreciated was more time with his son, but Charlie hadn’t given him that. And no memorial, however perfectly it was planned, could do a thing about it.
More time at home would just mean more time to feel guilty. More awkward conversations with distant relatives, more photographs and memories, more reminders that Dad had always been there for him, but he hadn’t done the same.
“I loved my Dad,” Charlie said. “Even if I wasn’t the best at showing it. I wouldn’t miss his funeral for the world, but I’d just rather skip all the mess in between.”
The man nodded and fished a hand into his coveralls, coming up a moment later with a small, silver pocket watch. Inscribed on its cover was the looping infinity symbol of the Temporal Transportation Administration.
The man opened the watch and tilted it so Charlie could see. Dials and arms littered the watch face, twisting together in an intricate dance that Charlie struggled to make heads or tails of. The man tapped the glass faceplate and made a sound which fell somewhere between a chuckle and a sigh.
“Well would you look at that,” he said. “Seems you’re right. Train should’ve been here at least thirty seconds ago.”
“Is that normal?” Charlie asked.
“Nah. But it ain’t unheard of either.” The old man bit his lip. “These tunnels have been around almost as long as I have. Every once in a while the track is bound to run a little slow.”
Charlie looked down at the screen in his hands and sighed. “Okay. Any idea how much longer it’ll be?”
“Doesn’t work like that.” The old man shook his head. “A little hiccup on the other end might mean just a few extra minutes here, or it could mean a few days, or more. No way to tell without heading down the tracks and finding where the train is stuck.”
“Christ,” Charlie mumbled, staring down into the empty tunnel at the end of the station. “Is that safe?”
The old man shrugged. “Life ain’t safe. But there’s no reason it should be especially dangerous, provided we’re careful.” He turned and started to walk towards the tracks.
“We?” Charlie asked.
“Course.” The old man climbed down onto the railway and motioned for Charlie to follow. “Any extra delays stack up real fast down the line, so once we get her going again, the train won’t stop until the next station. You’ll have to board wherever we find her.”
“You’re joking,” Charlie muttered, glancing down at his dress slacks and new oxford shoes, then at the puddles and mud waiting for him beside the tracks.
Then he thought of his father, and the nightmare the next two days would be without him. He grabbed his briefcase and jacket and hopped over the edge of the platform.
*
Charlie tiptoed along the rail line, as close to the man and his flashlight as he could manage. Above their heads, aging brickwork dripped water and something much darker in thick, black droplets that clung to the floor.
“You sure it’s safe to be in here?” Charlie asked. “These walls don’t look like they’re holding up so well.”
The old man grunted in agreement. “Been around a long time. It’s a wonder they’ve held up as long as they have.”
Somehow, that didn’t comfort Charlie. “Why hasn’t anyone bothered to replace them?”
“Ha!” The old man laughed, then turned back to face him. “When are you from, son?”
“When?” Charlie asked, shielding his eyes from the beam of the flashlight. “Don’t see what that has to do with anything.”
“Course you don’t,” the old man replied. “Because you don’t remember when they put these things in.” He patted the brick wall with obvious affection, then turned down the tunnel and started to walk again. “It ain’t just something you can go and replace. Takes a lot of time, and a lot of lives to dig a set of tunnels through spacetime. To pull the two apart so that you can move through one by moving through the other. It also took a lot of problems to make men and women willing to take that risk. Problems that you couldn’t just hop on a train and skip.”
Charlie grimaced. He wasn’t skipping the problem, just the mess. “So how does this work?” he asked, hoping to change the subject. “Aren’t we traveling back in time?”
The man laughed again, like Charlie was a child. “Course not. Trains can only go forward and so can we. Can walk down the tunnel as long as you want, but you’ll never reach a previous station.”
“And what if you managed to get outside the tunnel?”
“Wouldn’t want to do that.” The man pointed his flashlight at a pool of ink-black liquid. “The tunnel’s old enough here that some of the outside’s dripping through. All you’d find out there is a big sea of black.”
“Unless you found another tunnel?” Charlie asked.
The old man shrugged. “Suppose so, but you wouldn’t last that long. Just the tunnels and trains that can survive in the void.”
As they walked down the tracks, the dripping grew more frequent and louder, until the darkness spilled from the walls in neat little rivulets.
“Careful now,” the old man muttered. “Better keep your feet on the tracks and avoid them puddles altogether.”
“Otherwise?” Charlie asked.
The man’s voice was stern for the first time since they’d met. “Otherwise I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out.”
*
The train was near wrecked when they finally found her. That much was clear the moment the old man’s flashlight beam fell onto her engine’s crumpled exterior.
“Well that doesn’t look good,” Charlie managed to mutter.
The man shook his head and wandered closer to the engine. He pointed his flashlight down onto the ground, stepping carefully around the small, black stream which poured from the brickwork where the train had collided with the wall. The engine was lodged halfway through the wall itself, the only thing plugging a massive hole to the void.
The old man crouched beside the damaged tunnel and ran his hand along the bowing stone. Little waterfalls of thick, black liquid flowed from the brick around the sides of the train, pooling into a narrow brook which ran both ways along the tracks.
“Well?” Charlie asked. “What do you think?”
The old man grimaced. “I think we’ve got a big problem to deal with.”
Charlie looked at the line of train cars behind him. Aside from the engine, the rest of the train was largely undamaged. Passengers milled about inside, uninjured, pressing their faces up against the small, dark windows. A woman in a floral dress and an ancient-looking hat leaned her head out of one of the passenger car doors and began to climb down the emergency ladder. A young, mustachioed man in a charcoal-grey suit followed closely behind.
“The train doesn’t seem so bad to me,” Charlie said. “Just needs a new engine, probably.”
The old man nodded, then noticed the couple exiting the train. He wagged his finger like a grandfather scolding a pair of children. “And what exactly do you think you’re doing?” he called.
A guilty smile crossed the woman’s face. “Just
coming to have a look. Maybe see if we could fix whatever’s the matter.”
The old man sighed and dipped a finger into one
of the pools of black. The liquid crawled quickly up his hand, until he
withdrew it from the puddle. He held his arm in the air a moment before pressing
it against the edge of the train. The blank, dark space where his hand had been
simply passed through the metal as if nothing was there.
He fixed the couple with a glare. “And what exactly are you going to do about that?”
The woman’s smile vanished and she mumbled a
half-hearted reply.
“Exactly,” he replied. “Now you two get back inside and close that door, and let the experts handle this.”
Charlie chuckled. He certainly didn’t feel like an expert.
The old man frowned at him, then pulled a small, silver rag from his coveralls and wiped his hand clean. The black which had coated his palms seemed to simply fade into the fabric. “It ain’t the train that I’m worried about. This wall gives any further and the whole tunnel will be swimming in the black. Station too. Maybe the next station down the line. Nothing to stop it moving forward once it reaches that point.”
“Christ,” Charlie muttered. “What can we do about it? I imagine there’s someone that we’ll have to call?”
The old man glanced at his pocket watch. “No time for that. It’d take ‘em at least as long as it took us to get down here. But we can start by getting this engine out of the way.”
“What?” Charlie asked, feeling the knot in his stomach tighten at the idea. “The engine is the only thing plugging the hole. If we pull the plug, the entire tunnel will flood.”
The old man shook his head. “Don’t work like that, kid. The tunnel isn’t any happier about it being broken than we are. Given the chance, the hole would seal itself right up. As is, the train’s the only thing keeping it open.”
He pointed at the spiderwork cracks running through the tunnel wall. “It’s like a knife in a wound. Might bleed worse for a minute when we pull it out, but the longer it’s in there, the more damage it does.”
The cracks seemed to grow even in the short time the man spoke, new drips and defects popping up around them. “Well that’s easy then,” Charlie replied. “We just put the train in reverse and pull the engine out.”
“Mmhmm,” the man replied. “Provided she’s still working.”
*
Charlie sat in front of the train’s aging control board, horrified that humans had ever trusted their safety to technology so primitive. Although digital networks had replaced the engineers running the rails decades ago, the engines were built in a time long before then and still sported a panel of manual backups, littered with dials, levers, and other relics of the past. Charlie glanced over his shoulder at a small, dim screen that showed a live feed of the passenger cars. Come to think of it, most of the train’s passengers were relics as well.
Out the cabin’s small side window, the old man stared at Charlie and gave him two thumbs up. He’d stayed outside to make sure the hole sealed shut, his hands full of minor patching equipment which Charlie was entirely sure would be insufficient if actually needed.
Initially, he thought he’d gotten the better end of the deal. But now that he was inside the engine room, with only inches of glass separating him from the horrible emptiness which stared back through the front windshield, he wasn’t so certain. The darkness in front of him swirled and writhed like a pile of living shadow, feeling and squirming its way towards the cracks in the tunnel wall. Charlie couldn’t see it, but he felt it. Felt it the same way he felt this might not end well. But what choice did he have?
He could climb back outside the engine and tell the man he’d had enough. Walk straight to the station and wait out the rest of a painful week at Mom’s. That wouldn’t be so bad. It’d be tearful and frustrating, but certainly not deadly.
But it had taken nearly an hour to walk this far down the tunnel, and there were no guarantees the wall would hold long enough for him to get back. Besides, if the man was right, and a spill on this end of the track could creep into the future, who was to say he’d make it to the funeral at all?
At the end of the day, those thoughts didn’t matter. The only one that mattered was of Dad, standing on the train platform all those years ago, bending over to pick up a piece of crumpled paper from beside the trash can.
“Never walk past a mistake, Charlie,” he’d said, his quiet, certain voice rising over the sound of the station’s bustle. “Not when it’s in your power to fix.”
Dad had lived his life by those words, and Charlie would be damned if he couldn’t live up to them, especially today. It was the least he could do.
“Alright, Dad,” he muttered, staring down at the large, red lever on the control panel. He glanced out the window and gave the man a thumbs up in return, then threw the lever into reverse.
Behind him, the engine whirred to life, rumbling and shaking as it struggled to throw the massive weight of the train backwards. Charlie gripped his seat and stared out the window at the man beside the tracks, but the train didn’t move.
The man shouted something that Charlie couldn’t hear, but he knew what it must mean by the waving of the man’s arms. Turn the engine power up. Charlie nodded and spun one of the dials to full.
The knot in his stomach tightened even further as he felt the train start to shift backwards. Its metal walls screeched and scraped against the brickwork as it pulled itself back from the hole. Then, just as soon as it had begun, the train slammed to a halt.
“No, no, no,” Charlie mumbled, spinning dials left and right. Despite his attempts, the train wouldn’t budge. Outside the window, the man motioned madly for him to kill the engine, rushing out of the way of a sudden onslaught of black liquid.
Charlie stared at the river and raced through his odds. A portion of the wall must have broken loose as he reversed, lodging itself behind the rear wheels and holding the train in place. The void was coming in, even if he stopped the engine.
He looked at the growing stream of black with mounting certainty. Even if he stopped now, it would be enough to flood the tunnel. The only chance to stop it was to get the engine out, so the hole could close.
Through the windshield, the void tumbled over itself with anticipation. Nothing but black in its horrible depths. Nothing but black…and was that a streak of silver?
Charlie stood up from his chair and pressed his face to the windshield, struggling for a better look. Somewhere below, in the sea of emptiness, a small line of silver glimmered brightly. Charlie traced its path until it ended in a box, so far below it only looked like a little dot.
But it wasn’t a dot, of that Charlie was certain. In that moment, he knew it was a train station—some other year, some other century, lingering in the darkness below.
It was a train station, and he had a plan.
Charlie sat back in his seat and took a deep breath, then one final peek out the small side window. The black stream had grown into quite a torrent already, pouring both ways down the tunnel. The old man still motioned for Charlie to stop the engine, but he was standing pressed up against the opposite wall to avoid the darkness as best as he could.
Charlie tapped a small red button on the dashboard, feeling a clunk behind him as the engine detached from the rest of the train cars.
“Alright, Dad,” he muttered. “I’ve never been one for walking anyways.” With that, he gripped the engine’s lever and shoved it towards the waiting void.
The engine lurched forward with a tremendous screech, and Charlie turned around in time to see the wall snap closed behind him and the world vanish from view.
*
The engine crashed through the station ceiling some time later. How long, exactly? Charlie wasn’t certain, and he doubted he ever would be. It felt as if he’d spent no time at all in free fall, and yet it felt as if he’d spent his whole life. All he knew was that he was happy when the collision threw him forward against his restraints and he was suddenly staring into someplace bright and living again.
The moment the engine came to a rest on the empty platform, Charlie unclipped his restraint and scrambled to the door. He climbed awkwardly out of the twisted, tilting vehicle, prepared to shout at any bystanders about the need for evacuation. Instead of spotting a stream of black liquid behind him, however, he noticed that the engine had fallen straight through the ceiling, which had, indeed, sealed itself right up behind him.
The few commuters on the platform stared at him with surprise, but not dismay, until a middle-aged man wearing dark blue coveralls shouted at him from a across the platform.
“Hey! Hey you!” he called. “What the hell is going on?”
Charlie stared at the brightly colored baseball cap atop the man’s head and smiled. He ran across the platform and wrapped the man in a tight embrace.
“What do you think you’re doing?” the man grumbled, shoving him away with a confused frown.
“What year is it?” Charlie asked suddenly, catching sight of the posters which lined the station walls. He remembered seeing them years ago.
“Oh Jeez,” the man muttered. “Don’t tell me you got yourself lost somehow.”
Charlie felt the knot return to his stomach as he shook his head and grabbed the man by the shoulders. “No, no, no. You don’t understand. I just need to know the date, or at least the day of the week.”
The man stared at him for a moment without answering, but Charlie already knew the answer. On the tracks, a train was waiting, its doors preparing to close. Inside, a young boy and his father were too busy staring at the fishing guidebook they’d brought along to notice the commotion outside.
“Wednesday,” the man muttered, but Charlie was already running towards the train.
Author’s Note: I spend most of my life waiting for moments. Counting down the days to big events like graduation, or the minutes to small ones like the end of a shift. Too often, I’m so busy looking forward that I forget to look around, and I find myself wishing later I could have those moments back. Time-travelling trains might make for fun scifi, but even in fictional worlds time only moves one direction, and in real life you can’t cheat your way around that.
Steve is a resident physician in the Pacific Northwest. When he isn’t too busy cracking open a textbook (or a patient’s thorax), you can find him exploring the Cascades by bike, boat, or boot. His stories have appeared in places like F&SF, Grimdark Magazine, and Flash Fiction Online, among others. You can read more of his work at www.stevenbfischer.com, or find him on twitter @stevenfischersf.
