There Will Be No...

In an well lit conference room in the middle of a reconditioned mill that the firm of "Davis & Adams Advertising" called "The Factory" the companies best and brightest sat around a desk drinking Fiji Water.

There was Comedy Dave, called that because everyone thought he should go into stand-up; there was Martin and Mark the twins, called that because they went to the same school; and there was Mr Davis, who everyone called The Boss.

"Are you already gentlemen?" The Boss asked, not caring if they were ready. The employees nodded and readied expensive stationery so they could pretend to take notes.

"I have our new assignment. I am not going to lie to you, but this is a big one. It's a very important contract and we have to sell this effectively. There is no budget, that is not a consideration for this project. Our clients have promised to back us one hundred and ten percent with whatever we need.

"Our client is a large consortium of: biotechnology and big pharmaceutical corporations, computer hardware and software businesses, telecommunications firms. Everything high tech gentlemen. They are pitching this as the last big advertising job in history. They want us to sell the singularity," said The Boss.

"The what?" said Comedy Dave.

"The singularity. Come on people I thought you were the best and brightest. Didn't you learn anything at your expensive schools?"

"I think I read about it once in a magazine," said Martin. "Isn't that the point where technology and science start to develop so fast that it renders our notion of what it is to be human and the concept of history meaningless?"

"In a word - yes," said The Boss. "I want you to sell that. Our employers expect it to be coming soon and they need a positive spin on it."

"Well it's the future. We know how to sell the future. We do that all the time; it's easy. All we do is just say that it's the next generation. That it's the new improved model, and we say that it costs less, weighs less, looks better, and lasts longer," said Comedy Dave.

"We can't do that though," Mark pointed out.

"Why not?"

"Because like Martin said we are trying to sell the end of history and anything we say now will be wrong. There will be no flying cars or jetpacks. There will be no teleportation or warp drive. We can't use that approach to sell something when we don't know what shape it is. We aren't science fiction writers. When we make those claims about it being faster, lighter, cheaper, and so on, it normally is those things."

"The man has a point," The Boss said, trying to stay relevant.

"I don't follow you Martin," said Comedy Dave.

"I'm just saying that we've got to sell an idea and not a product. It doesn't have those qualities," said Martin.

"It's like nothing we've had to advertise before. It is almost a political campaign. There is nothing to sell but agreement with an idea. But this is an idea with no slogan and no fixed expiration date. It's existential and we can't sell that," said Mark.

"This isn't going to be easy," said Comedy Dave.

"I didn't say it would be. I'll leave you gents to it. I've got a lunch to get to. I expect to see your first ideas by close of shop," said The Boss, leaving the room.

This is based on my pitch to Texture who runs the website Weaponizer. The pitch was: "The meeting where an advertising company try to workout how to sell the singularity."

Quite frankly I could write a lot based on that one sentence. The humour and the horror of trying to sell and explain such an abstract idea fascinates me. I shall return to this.

There Are Pills For That!

You should not read this if you are any of the following: easily offended, a patriotic American, a potential employer, are related to me, or have had your sense of humour removed.

"Trust me I'm a doctor," he said to me. We were standing in the back room of the future. His office looked one hundred years old. His surgical instruments looked older.

"Are you going to use those?" I asked, pointing at the blades in the glass cabinet.

He smiled. "Oh no, those are just for show. Don't you worry yourselves with them." He scribbled words on the back of an envelope. "Take this to the chap outside. He'll sort you out."

"Thank you," I said. I left the office with the envelope. In the reception area, outside the doctors office, there was a heavyset man in a stained nurses outfit sitting at a desk groping his crotch.

"Before you ask, he makes me wear it. It's for show. Do you have the prescription?" the man grunted.

"Do you mean the envelope?"

"Whatever Do you have it?"

I put the envelope down. It was then I saw the stamps of the city prosecutor and the health department. The receptionist picked the envelope up and attempted to read the scrawl on the back. "It's no use. I'm sorry about this," he said.

"Oh no need to be sorry," I said.

"Paging Dr Smelly cunt. Did you write tranny pills?" the man shouted through the wall without shame.

I blushed.

The voice of the doctor came back through the wall: "Yes, you miserable cocksucker. Give him the real thing and not the sugar pills. I like this one." The receptionist opened the draw of his desk. It was lined with bags of multicoloured tablets which he reached into and took out a bag. He put them down in front of me. "Take the whole lot. Drink lots of water. Have a fun night," he said, before adding, "now piss off."

I left with the bag and went back to my squalid hotel room. I swallowed the whole bag and drank a liter of water. Before I went to be I checked my appointment with the travel agent and went to bed.

I didn't sleep that I night. No one thankfully came despite my screaming. I left the room in a bloody state and I put on my best dress before calling for a taxi to the entertainment district.

"Have a good vacation Miss," said the orange tanned man as he left me at the door of the holosuite. In front of me was the Union encampment at Gettysburg. I wandered the camp looking for the real people; for my needs I needed a real man and not holo-actors. I was about to give up when I saw him. His long limbs, his beard, his perfect face. He was the one. He was the man I'd loved since I was a boy.

"Mr Lincoln," I said, "I'm here to have your babies."

He looked surprised but that didn't stop him from taking advantage. What happens on holo-vacation says on holo-vacation.

Well, except Lincoln's twins.

You'll never guess the pitch this is based on. Okay you probably will. But when life gives you weird you just grin and piss on the idea of a line.

"VKlaus @fragmad MOR U SAY?! "His craven lust for civil war reinactments drove him to pregnancy"

Captain Space Bastard

"This is the voice of the Mysterons," was the phrase that two-hundred years ago would have made thousands of children piss themselves with fear. Ten years ago, it would have made the twenty scholars of culture who knew about the TV series Captain Scarlett laugh slightly. Now it's a phrase that if I hear anyone say would make me vent them out of the fucking airlock for making sick jokes, thought Captain Crveno. Life on Mars, there is no life on Mars, because it's a small rock with no appreciable atmosphere, no magnetosphere, and hardly any fucking gravity. But some stupid sensor on an orbiting satellite started sending back data that made a room full of scientists orgasm simultaneously. No don't send a probe the world government said. Instead send a manned crew on one of the new sleeper ships we've just commissioned. Go use one of those state of the art reconditioned asteroid with fusion engines attached because goodness knows we need some positive publicity. Oh and send Captain Crveno and his crew because he insulted me once by making the reentry to Earth a bit too bumpy for my tastes last time he piloted Government 1.

Space travel is never comfortable and it's not something that humans were ever designed to do. Captain Crveno would rant about this endlessly. He also ranted about the films that had been selected to watch in the hours that the crew would be awake on their voyage to Mars. It was all old and it was all about Mars. "You aren't paranoid if you know they are after you," Captain Crveno said to his science officer.

"No sir," the science officer said, "I accept that. But would you please put some clothes on. With all due respect I don't want to see you naked or naked in no gravity."

"What are you intimidated? Uncomfortable are you?" said Captain Crveno.

"Yes sir. A little bit."

"Bah!"

Captain Crveno floated to the door of the science officers office. "Do you have any results back from the imaging probes? Does it look like something we should worry about?"

"Not yet. I'll inform you when I have examined them," the science officer said.

"See that you do. I'll be in my office."

Captain Crveno floated naked in the lotus position, he was upside down relative to the orientation of the door frame, and he was smoking a joint while watching the wall sized view screen. It showed puppets.

"I have the report for you..." said the science office who centred the captain's office with care.

"And can't you see I'm watching Captain Scarlett? He has the same name as me," Captain Creveno, said blowing a thick cloud of smoke at the science officer.

The science officer coughed. "I see. Do you want to hear my report?"

"Not really. What are the bullet points?"

"It's not life. It's machines."

Captain Crveno interrupted, "I saw that film. It was shit."

"Machines that we made and destroyed in the jihad a generation ago," said the science officer.

"Oh. Is that all?"

"They want to see you sir. They have some unpleasant things to say about humanity. They've been watching us and they have some comments they wish to make."

"Excellent. I have some unpleasant things to say about humanity as well," said Captain Crveno. "I think we might get along."

"That's what I feared sir."

"weaponizer: @fragmad #flashfic #pitch Near-future: Earth expels nanobots from atmosphere and de-activates all AIs, but they migrate to Mars and colonise"

This was tons of fun to write.

I have nothing else to say on the matter.

Full of Stars

My mum hugged me as soon as I walked through her front door. "Come in, come in," she said, as she led me into the living room she'd redecorated since my last visit. We sat down and she asked if I wanted some tea. I told her that would be nice and she went away into the kitchen to boil the kettle. When she came back into the room I had worked out what I would say. My mum put down a tray of biscuits and two cups of tea. She sat down next to me on the new sofa. "Now tell me are you alright?"

"I'm fine mum," I said.

"Are you in any pain?"

"No, not anymore," I answered. "And they didn't find any cancer during the biopsy."

"That's wonderful," my mum said.

"But they did find something...."

My mum sipped her tea pretending she hadn't heard what I just said.

"Mum, they did find something. I don't know how to explain it to you though," I said.

She put the cup down and looked at me and asked me without hesitation: "Is it bad?"

"No. Well yes, it is bad. But it was wonderful," I said, as I reached into my handbag to take out some pictures. I put them on the coffee table in front of my mum. She reached for her reading glasses and picked the first picture up.

"What am I looking at?" she asked me. I don't know anything about astronomy beyond what I have learned from TV documentaries. But I knew what a galaxy was. And the doctor had explained to me that there were such things as "superclusters" of galaxies which could contain up to thousands of individual galaxies. The picture my mum was holding was the cyst that had been growing on the outside of one of my ovaries under a microscope with trillions of stars inside it.

I told her, "It's complicated mum. It's not anything wrong with me. I don't know how to explain it. What does it look like to you?"

"Stars, Julie, they look like stars."

"That's what it looks like to everyone else as well," I said.

I picked up the next picture and showed it to her. "This was taken an hour later. Do you see all of that redness? That means the stars were dying. I think, and my doctor thinks that it was sustained by being inside me, and when it was removed it all started to die."

She said nothing for five minutes. When the doctor had shown me the pictures and given me that explanation to me I had been silent for far longer.

My Mum, always one of the most philosophical members of our family, asked something which I thought was rather profound and was something I hadn't considered. "Do you think that those stars had planets and that those planets had life of any kind?"

"I don't know. Maybe."

"DrNautilus @fragmad Tiny universe in an ovarian cyst"

Yeah, this was hard to write. Okay I lie. It was hard to find the correct approach. I enjoyed writing this one. It's quite a bit outside my comfort zone. My original intention was to do a version of Star Maker, but I couldn't work out how to get the doctor to examine further details than really macroscopic without resorting to wholesale ripping off the Star Maker in a way that I'd have botched.

Long Live The King.

On a misty autumn morning two brothers stood at opposite ends of the courtyard of their father's castle.

"So father's dead then," said William, the older brother.

"Yeah. Died a couple of hours ago," Patrick, the younger brother replied.

"Did he say who's going to get the crown?" asked William.

"No. He lost the ability to speak yesterday afternoon."

"Shame. A real shame. That means we'll have to decide this the hard way," said William.

The two brothers reached for their pistols. William, always the quicker of the two brothers, shot his first. The bullet hit Patrick in the chest and bounced off a hidden breast plate. Patrick fired his pistol and missed. Both brothers threw the pistols away. They were useless now their single shot had been fired. Servants and courtiers came running to the doorways to watch the spectacle. Both brothers reached for their swords. Patrick who had recently returned from a trip to the far east held a thin curved blade. In Williams hand there was a crude lump of shaped iron with a handle. His sword was still notched from recent use.

"Are you still pretending to be a barbarian?" Patrick, shouted from his end of the courtyard.

"Are you still pretending that you know how to use that thing?" William shouted back.

"Do you really want the crown this badly?"

Will raised his sword. "Yes I do."

The audience kept to the side of the arena. None of the brothers wives or families were here. Patrick had his follower with him and they were watching with interest. William had traveled overnight from his citadel had come alone. The castle guards ignored the fiasco and the king's priest had been restrained by the captain of the royal guard but he was still shouting for the two brothers to stop fighting.

"Are your cronies going try and stop me?"

"I don't think so," said Patrick. "But if any man interferes in this fight on my behalf then they will be sentenced to death on my orders. Do you agree to do the same?"

"I do. And if any man interferes on my behalf then they will be sentenced to death as a traitor," said William.

"Goodbye brother," said Patrick, who started to run towards William.

"Idiot," William said, as he shot his brother with a derringer hidden in the cuff of his coat. Patrick collapsed to the floor with a hole in his head.

"PkmnTrainerJ @fragmad a king passes in fantasy-medieval times, and the sons find a way to name the rightful heir...with weapons of course." Okay I'm skipping a few suggestions because this is immediately easier than the others. I don't really do fantasy-medieval, because I'm lame. But I'll quite happily do enlightenment.

My brother is called Patrick. This means nothing. It's just two names picked because I'm lazy.

Edits made because I'm tired and stupid when tired. Expect more maybe.

Can't Say That.

[Ginja] I'm really happy with this story. I've always been concerned about what can happen to writers when a small group of extremist decide violence rather than dialogue is the best way to express their rage at what is normally quite a silly story.
[VKlaus] i can't wait to read it. are you going to put the whole thing on your blog? so people don't have to search twitter.
Sure sure. Just give me a few minutes to stretch my legs. I've just spent the past two hours editing it.
* VKlaus nods.
[Ginja] Okay, I've put it up on your blog. Here's the url: http://bit.ly/1bstBD
[VKlaus] Wow that's pretty good.
[Ginja] Thanks. I'm going to bed now. it's a wee bit late. Night man.
[VKlaus] Night.
* Ginja has quit (Quit: leaving)

"Will there's some post for you. I think it's from the newspaper," Will's mum shouted up the stairs. Will opened his eyes and rolled out of bed. Five minutes later after he'd read the letter, made the phone call Will was an employed fiction writer working on a weakly serial for a national newspaper.

[Ginja] You can read all the new stories on the website. Although obviously if you can buy the newspaper please get that. There will be illustrations by an artist who's wicked and awesome and batshit crazy. I'm still in shock really. It's the power of twitter.

He walked up the short path to the front door. Anger and hate suffused his thoughts. He rang the doorbell. The justification for what he what he was about to do was he was doing the right thing. The door opened, and a short half-naked man answered.

"Hello, can I help you?" said Will.

"You do not insult God," the man said. He pointed a machine pistol at Will's chest and pulled the trigger.

"It started as a twitter flashfic, it ended in murder!" That's the message VKlaus sent me and that's what I've tried to do. This one was kind of hard.

Make the Punishment Fit the Hero.

"I thought I had it all. I thought that I had a great boyfriend and career as an A-list superhero helping people, and I thought that would last forever. I suppose I first got suspicious when he asked me to knock on the front door of our apartment when I came in after my shift at the cave. He said it was so he could meet me at the front door every day. I now know better.

"I forgot to knock that last time. I walked in through into the bedroom casually to change out of my costume. He was there in our bed with Ultra. I didn't know that Ultra was gay. He was the all American hero that wore the American flag before the scandal. I broke into a rage. I saw red. I'm not proud of myself for this and that is no excuse. My ex, I refuse to say the bastards name, I ripped his arm off with my teeth. Ultra, he power blasted me through the wall into the street. And that was the end of everything as far as I'm concerned.

"We may have been superheroes. We may have been celebrates. We may have been regarded as three of the top ten most powerful people in America. We may have been these things but there's no hiding an explosion in the middle of New York and two angry super-queers fighting in the street like some perverted comic book. There are no excuses. There is nothing I can do to make amends or fix that damage and the deaths that I've caused. Sorry isn't enough, but it's all I can say. Sorry," said Shark Man in his final statement to the Court of Heroes.

The judges teleported away to deliberate. They repappeared half an hour later. Shark Man had stood the whole time waiting.

"We have reviewed the evidence," the first judge said.

"We have taken your admission of guilt into account," the second judge said.

"We have considered your situation," the third judge said.

"We have decided," all three of the judges said.

The first and most senior of the three gave the sentence: "You are guilty and you will be sentenced to five years in solitary confinement."

The second judge gave the details: "Because of your unique physiology it has been decided that you will be shipped to the uninhabitable water planet designated B20 to serve out your sentence alone."

The third judge asked, "Do you accept this sentence?"

"I do."

I put out a request on my twitter account for people to send me one sentence pitches for flash fiction stories (max 600 words). This is the first and was suggested by Magnulus in the following message: "Sharkman is left alone after he caught his boyfriend making out with The Ultra."

This was written listening to the Dark Mean "Lullaby" and Apoptgyma Berzerk's album "Rocket Science." It is a unpolished sketch as well.