Selected Short Stories Featuring Cry Wolf
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Henry, by the by. I used to think I’d wake up. Or find a way out. At least maybe die of old age before he got me. But I’ve seen enough crickets come and die to know it’s a matter of when, never if. I’ve seen smart ones and fast ones, young and old, all food for the beast. I wish I could say I was at peace, or that at least I’d made mine, but, I’m not ready to die. I don’t know that, barring circumstances, I ever would be, but I know I’m not ready to die yet, and I sincerely doubt I’ll live to a point where I am."
"How long have you been here?" asked Jim.
"Oh, I’ve seen a couple new waves of immigrants come and, um, well, go. It was hard the first time, because they were good folks I knew, good folks I grew up knowing. The second time was easier. I didn’t talk to them much; I warned them as I could, but, well, young crickets are always hard to talk sense to. There was a girl with them, who I think I remembered from larvalhood. I couldn’t remember if she was from the same clutch as me or not, but I think, had she lived long enough, I’d have bred with her. Desperation, strange bedfellows and all that."
"You seem pretty calm," said Peter.
"I seem that way, yeah. Because you can’t panic. If you panic, he wins. He waits and he eats when he wants. There’s really no telling when he’ll be hungry again next. So you just stay calm, and try to keep your wits about you as you can," Henry replied.
"What do you know about the beast?" asked Jim quietly.
"I’d think the beast was god if I were that much of a cynic, and if I hadn’t seen bigger things. Hell, we’ve all seen bigger things if you think back to it- the big pink things that took us from our home in the first place and crammed us into this hell. I sometimes wonder if we’re being tested, that if we last this damnation long enough, we’ll be let loose in a field without predators or parasites, teeming with females swollen with eggs, or males that won’t give us retard children- but it’s wishful thinking, and it’s killed better bugs than me."
Michael collapsed onto the fake rocks and muttered, "Damn. I was hoping to live until spring. So I could pass on my superior libido."
Jim interjected, "You don’t have a superior libido, you just have no self-control."
Michael responded, "Yeah, but I think that would be genetically helpful."
"Where the hell did you learn a word like ‘genetically’?" asked Peter.
"I don’t know. Doesn’t it have something to do with genitals?" asked Michael.
"Um, yes and no?" responded Jim.
"But mainly no," added Peter.
"Except when it’s yes, which is mainly in spring," added Cecil.
"Yeah, except then," agreed Peter.
"Oh…" Michael said solemnly. "So… is it spring yet?"
Table of Contents
Hickbots
Agriculture was one of the last industries to be fully automated, because it's one of the most unpredictable. That year the paranoia and doomsaying that warned how an economy without laborers would fail proved less hysterical than everybody thought. Trickle-down economics was exposed as a farce as the wealthy continued to hoard their wealth, which is what had defined them as wealthy in the first place.
The robots came with multiple personalities, but to ease the transition for the human workers, the men who owned the land mostly chose the "rural" factory personality, without the frills. After most of the humans had been replaced by cheap bot labor, no one really thought to turn off their personality simulators. Rumor was you could find a bootleg Jim Crowe persona, complete with blackface hologram, and a primitive ebonic language interface.
They're programmed to remember only living where they work, raising barns and tipping cows in their youth. They wear boots and have the broken gait of a man who spent more time on a horse than on his own two feet. They vent their exhaust through disposable filters during smoke breaks.
Low, quick whistles of a spiritual in binary enunciated in morse code weaved through the grain stalks. Even through cheap MIDI synth the notes bore a mournful dew as servos clacked through a rhythmic reply.
Hank blipped and whirred in a vague southern accent about his shoulder joint, and Roy spat some canola on the rotator cuff for him to stop it from grinding. Gene beeped a crack about the way he mothers Hank, something along the lines of closing off the valve of his metal teat. The others clicked their amusement, never slowing in their work, never resting. I imitated the sound with my dry throat, and tried to ignore the burning from my muscles.
Table of Contents
I'm Sorry I Got Caught In Your House
I could make excuses; I suppose for our friendship, perhaps I should. But I never intended any of it.
You've never met Rachel (at least, not before today), but she's different. In a good way, I think, today notwithstanding.
We've been together a month, so yes, we're still in the "like rabbits" phase of it. The other day she was looking at my keys, and realized I had more on the ring than she might have supposed.
She asked why that was; I told her I had keys to my mother's, and my father's, my grandmother's (who's since passed, though my brother lives there now), and of course, to your house. That took some explaining, actually, because she knew better than to believe me when I left it at 'a family I'm friendly with's home'. But she wasn't mad, either, when I told her I dated your daughter; she was actually sympathetic when I explained how bad that had gone.
But perhaps that's because the idea had already struck her: to have sex everywhere my keys could get us. It's been the most exhausting week of my life since.
My mother's house wasn't too difficult, you see it's not that large. My father's house, on the other hand... Suffice to say my knees still hurt. And my hips. And my right pinky toe (which is a story all itself). My grandmother's/brother's house was easy after that; all we had to do was buy him a case of beer and he cleared out for the day.
And then we came to your house; obviously, I was getting to that. We started in your daughter's room; I think actually being here, Rachel got a little... competitive. Then she asked where else I'd been with your daughter in the house. Check off the main shower and the master bedroom (before you moved in, actually, which I know, makes it a little creepier, using your dead father's bed). We hit a snag with the pool table, since you guys sold that, and then turned the pool room into your other daughter's room, but um, we improvised.
And of course, from there, you know we ended up here in the kitchen. So what I'm saying, I suppose, is I'm sorry. I didn't mean for any of this to happen. I'd been meaning to give the key back ages ago, but somehow, I could never bring myself to come over, for fear, well, you-know-who might have been here. So there, take back your key; I appreciate the sentiment, but I've had it too long as it is.
Of course, I'll stop by some time, next week, with some donuts; and of course, that time I'll be wearing pants. But thank you for being so understanding about this (and thank God I keep my work keys on another ring).
Table of Contents
Space Beer
My daddy was an astronaut and a teetotaler; I suspect, though I’ve never had any proof, that one night he hit my mother and it took his CO to convince her not to leave him or file charges, and because of that he swore off the sauce. Either way, the old man was insufferable.
He never really liked me as a kid- though in fairness, he never seemed to much like anybody- but when I got charged for minor in possession at 17, that’s when he stopped having a son.
He was one of the astronauts they sent on the second trip to Mars- the one where they seeded the planet with colony-building robots. At the time everybody thought it was a massive boondoggle- up until the 2070s when the colonies provided space for the always multiplying population. But that pretty much ended his career. The astronauts on that mission never flew again, and his commission in the Air Force ended shortly after that.
I tried not to care. It would have been fair, or ironic, or whatever, if I’d have been able to ignore my father and his achievements, since he did his damnedest to ignor
e me, but he was a hero, back when astronauts were treated like astronauts, anyway, before every Tom, Dick and moron with a vacation check had been to the moon and bought themselves officially licensed “Genuine Astronaut” t-shirts and foam hats.
He was genuinely shocked when I got a decent score on the ASVAB and signed up for the Air Force. I don’t think he’d talked to me that whole year, but when I told him I’d passed my physical and been accepted as an aviator he said, “Huh. Never occurred to me you might be worth a shit.” Prick, I know.
I flew a handful of combat missions against the Chinese when the trade war flashed hot, but it didn’t last. I hear it’s because somebody in Beijing tracked down the numbers and realized that accounting for parts and labor- especially higher end parts that were manufactured outside the country- the Chinese economy was losing $1.05 for every plane they built. Commie bastards were willing to feed their people into a meat grinder, but the moment it impacted their cheeseburger-buying abilities, suddenly they wanted to go back to the negotiating tables.
But, before that happened, I managed to get called in off my shift to move my plane; they thought the Chinese were going to bomb the planes on the runway like the Japanese did in WWII. The information was legit, and I got into the air, but before I got altitude or speed one of the Chinese shredded my tail and the plane went down. Brass decided to investigate my crash, since it