A Yuletide Tail
Being a Most Heart-warming and Improving Account of the Utmost Edification, and Not to Mention Profound Moral Rectitude, by Mr D.R. Stone.
The snowflakes fell upon G-d’s good Earth like as to feathers plucked from the wings of an Angel ... although, if Angel it had been, such an Angel must have been some cold, and cruel, and bitter wretch, forever cast out from the Host of Stars and D-mned to spend all of Eternity in the very depths of H-des with his Infernal Master the D-vil himself! The snow was cold and sharp as a grandmother’s tongue - if that grandmother had been known about the town to be particularly sharp-tongued, and was dead.
The crystal flakes fell upon the denizens of London as they bustled through the streets on this merry Yuletide Eve. They fell upon the jarveys perched atop their hansom cabs; they fell upon the gypsy flower-women with their sprigs of lucky heather; they fell upon the honest clerks and cut-purses alike. They fell upon the hulking forms of mechanical alien conveyances as they lay waste to entire districts around them ... but most of all, it seemed, they fell upon Poor Tom.
“Garn, you filthy littel beast!” bellowed a corpuscular pieman, as Poor Tom nuzzled at his trousers in an attempt to gain some small degree of succour. “I have nothing on my tray for the mangy likes of you!”
The bedraggled black-patched kitten (for that, alas, was the station of Poor Tom in life) dodged smartly from the pieman’s hefty kick – and it was fortunate, for Poor Tom in any event, that he did. For at that very instant, a galvanistic Death Ray struck from above and incinerated him, pies and all, where he stood.
All that remained was a pair of smoking boots. There was nothing good to eat about a pair of smoking boots, in the considered opinion of Poor Tom ... nothing good to eat even for one who has never been so hungry in his life.
How he longed to be back in the warm and happy home from which he had been so cruelly ousted, with kind Mr and Mrs Cumbundersnatch and their forty-seven children. It had hardly been his fault, after all, that their youngest, crippled daughter, Small Doris, had succumbed to the suffocation. Poor Tom had, after all, been merely been looking for some comfortable place to curl up and sleep.
Now, the crowd around him milled and screamed as further Death Rays rained down from the winter sky, cutting through the feathered snowflakes with hisses that, altogether, combined amongst themselves to take upon the aspect of a bestial roar. Poor Tom clawed and scrambled through the forest of legs until, at last, he reached the dark mouth of an alley, and darted within.
In the alley, a frail and frostbitten little girl attempted to sell matches to those who might pass. In this she was somewhat inconvenienced, for the little girl was blind, and had thus positioned herself directly facing the wall.
“Oh, sir ...” she whispered, sensing the movement of Poor Tom as he passed by, “... can it be that you are some cruel Illusion of the last extremities of hypothermia ... or might you be some Seraph, come to bear me from the Miseries and Durance of this Mortal Realm …?”
And with that, she pitched back violently, hit the ground, with a thump, and expired upon the instant from the cold, her single leg sticking up in the air, and the fractured twig that had served her most inadequately as a crutch lying at a pitiably sad angle. For in addition to being, blind, penniless and an orphan, the little match girl had been every bit as crippled as, once, had been Small Doris. Even more so, probably.
Poor Tom paid the dead match girl no heed, it being obvious that she was in no fit state to feed him, and continued on his way toward the far end of the alley ... where, as he knew, it would open on a dark back street containing piles of totter-refuse awaiting collection, and in which he might find something fit to eat, and somewhat less of a preponderance of screaming and exploding people.
Just before he got there, though, he came upon a second scene – this latter comprising of a thin and somewhat wash-wasted Lady of the Night (one of those Fallen Women who are no better than they ought to be and, alas, infest the more disreputable districts of our Fair Municipality) confronting a bullish ruffian of a man with a puckered scar down the side of his unshaven face and a stout knoberry stick clutched in his hand.
“You take these here shillin’s, Big Bill Scrote,” the young jade cried, flinging the coins in question in the man’s evil and phrenologically subnormal face. “Them’s all I have on me, and much good may they do yer! As for the child, you’ll never find him. I’ve ‘id ‘im away, I ‘ave, where you can never trouble him again!”
“What’s this, Sticky Sal?” the brute roared. “You’d seek to deprive me from my livelihood, d-amn yer eyes, of sending young Jeremy Bender into the townhouses of rich old misers, by way of the littel window thing you get over some front doors, the name of which I have temporarily forgot? Well, then, Sticky Sal ... we’s a-goin’ to have words about that, Sticky Sal, you just sees if we don’t!”
The thug raised his knoberry, and there is no question that things would have gone hard for poor Sticky Sal – had not a ghastly collection of alien tentacles chosen that very moment to burst into the alley, from the dark back street beyond, wrapped themselves around the body of Bill Scrote and dragged him bodily back into the darkness from whence they had come.
“Aaargh!” came the frantic voice of Big Bill Scrote. “It’s had me bl--dy arm off! This is a right old rorty business, this is, an’ no mistake!”
For the barest instant, Sticky Sal stood, stunned somewhat at the fortune and agency of her deliverance. Then a further set of tentacles whipped themselves around her, and hauled her off in an instant. He screams were, subsequently, most heart-rending and pathetic. And then there was nothing but the busy sound of alien mastication.
Poor Tom sighed, insofar as a small black-patched cat can sigh. It seemed that everybody was getting a fine meal, this Yuletide Night, but him.
Judging that the alien-infested back street would be no place for a small black-patched cat, Poor Tom left the shelter of a discarded sign board, behind which he had been hiding from the notice of Sticky Sal and Big Bill Scrote. There was a storm grate in the alley, moved aside by some previous hand; Poor Tom dropped down to find himself in the sewers. He cast around himself for a moment, cautiously sniffing the air, and then set off in the hope of finding some nice fat rat.
What Poor Tom found, in fact, were rats of quite some other stripe entirely.
In the noisome and unremarked-upon oubliette of a catchment vault, through which the fetid and quite repellent oudre of the city swirled, a farraginous assortment of urchins – a somewhat less than entire set of warm winter clothes between them – gathered themselves around a gentleman in a moth-eaten scrapwork coat and a strangely pristine stovepipe tile fully half again as tall as he was himself.
“Now don’t you be a-worryin’, my fine lads,” this gentleman was saying. “We’m all of us be safe from them there hideous alien death machines down here, and make no bones about it. You just listen to your kind old Uncle Bagel.”
“Please, dear Uncle Bagel,” piped up a minuscule urchin, between wracking and consumptive coughs and waving one of his three crutches to attract the stovepipe-hatted gentleman’s attention, “but my internal organs appear to have prolapsed due to certain complications arising from acute malnutrition.”
“Acute malnutrition, is it?” declared the gentleman. “Lessons will take your minds away from the suchlike of grumblin’ bellies and the lupus! Now tell me, my fine lads, what d’ye do when you see some toff a-walkin’ down the street like this?”
The gentleman began, theatrically, to mince through the filth of the sewer, a much used handkerchief pressed languidly to his hugely Semitic nose. “What d’ye do, me fine lads, eh?”
“Stab him in the kidneys, and when he goes down kick him in the head and nick his change purse?” opined an urchin slightly larger than the rest and in a flat cap. And with an ear trumpet, for he was tragically deaf.
“Right you are, young Crafty Shitehawk,” the gentleman affirmed. “That’s the stuff to give ‘em – an’ you can tell ‘em Uncle Bagel said so if’n they don’t believe yer.”
“Pardon?” said The Crafty Shitehawk.
“I have, this very Yuletide Eve, made up a song about it,” said Uncle Bagel. He opened his mouth, no doubt to give voice to the air in question ... and then, perhaps mercifully, closed it again, and regarded a dark corner of the catchment area curiously.
“Do my eyes deceive me,” he said at length, “or do I not espy a smallish, black patched cat in that dark corner?”
As one, the faces of the urchins turned to regard Poor Tom, their eyes – those of them who had eyes, and had not lost them in a terrible and awful detonating apothecary accident – lit up with gleeful hunger.
“Let’s eat it,” one of the wee tots suggested.
The comestible suggestion, it seemed, agreed to some large extent with all those present. The horde of urchins advanced with various cries of “Yum!”, and “Save the parson’s nose for me!” save for those, of course, for those who were struck congenitally dumb.
Poor Tom decided, in the light of recent events, that here was not entirely the safest place to be. He pelted from Uncle Bagel and the advancing urchins, disappearing into the sewer tunnels at such speed that not even the strongest and relatively intact had a chance of keeping up.
Behind him, as he made his escape, he became aware of the sound of several, somewhat muffled, explosions. Then the hissing of some infernal gas.
“’Tis the Mutagen!” came the frantic voice of Uncle Bagel, wafting up the sewer tunnel. “Try to ‘hold yer breaths, me fine lads and ... Arrgh! Whuurgh! Brek! Tik! Whooork!”
Uncle Bagel and the urchins, Poor Tom realised vaguely, having caught sight of such things before, were at this moment being busily converted into a certain quantity of reddish slime, at the agency of a particular gas which, it seemed, the aliens utilised in the extermination of vermin. In any event, it was something of a blessing that Poor Tom had been frighted to run when he did.
Not entirely fortunate, however. Any rat he found here, now – even a rat not reduced to reddish slime – would smell too wrong to eat.
Somewhere, in even the smallest capacity, there must be something for Poor Tom to eat ...
The totter’s yard was piled with all kinds of refuse, of the sort that totters commonly collected from the back streets – though so far as Poor Tom was concerned, he could not imagine why it should be collected and piled so, such inedible portions of it in any event, or of what use to anybody it could possibly be.
As he climbed out from the sewers through a ditch-breach, he noticed that amongst the jumble stood something a little like a workman’s hut – or like the wardrobe in which nineteen of the Cumbundersnatch children had slept of nights. It was painted a dark, but vivid, blue.
The door of the thing was open, and from beyond it Poor Tim could hear voices:
“By G-d!” a voice exclaimed. “I but would never thought to see the like! ‘Tis bigger on the inside than the out!”
“Oh bl--dy H-ll,” said another, female voice. “Not another one.”
Mindful of his previous encounters of this Yuletide Eve, Poor Tom considered that it might be best to conceal himself and await developments before making he presence known.
Presently, three figures emerged from what was something like a worker’s hut and something like a wardrobe.
One, Poor Tom recognised as Soldier. (A soldier lad lodged, once, with the Cumbundersnatches, until seven of the eldest daughters, and Mrs Cumbundersnatch herself, had fallen into the Family Way, whereupon the Soldier had been summarily defenestrated with a shovel and buried in the cellar by Mr Cumbundersnatch.) The Soldier was clutching a packet of papers, sealed with wax and tied up with string.
The second was a girl, but barely into her majority, dressed most inappropriately and carrying what appeared to be a malformed cricket-bat of some metallic substance.
The third was a quite profoundly inconsequential man in a hat.
“It’s a werry worrying thing you’re telling me, Doctor,” the Soldier was saying. “A werry worrying thing indeed.”
“Be that as it may, sergeant Thackary.” This from the man in the hat. “it is imperative that you get this information to Brigadier-General Cholmoldley- Critchton. Can I trust you to do that, sergeant?”
“For Queen and Country,” said the Soldier, standing for a moment to attention, “you can trust me with ... a-a-a-chooo!”
“Oh dear, sergeant,” said the man in the hat. “It does appear that I might have given you a cold.”
For a while after Sergeant Thackary had left, Ace amused herself by poking through the debris in the totter’s yard. There was something about the various dumb and mismatched items that was akin to going on a completely historically-inaccurate pirate rollercoaster-ride.
There were several more concussions in the middle-distance, out beyond the wrought-iron gates. There was an odd taste to the air – and she really hoped that the Doctor had been telling the truth when he had said that the Slaarg mutagen-spores wouldn’t affect her.
After a while, she wandered back to the TARDIS, and found the Doctor outside it. He was just standing there. For some reason, Ace was reminded of old Droopy cartoons – simply standing there, while chaos raged around him, as if he’d had nothing to do with it at all.
‘I still don’t get the point, Professor’ She said. ‘I mean, so what? Why should anybody care if the Slaarg are dismantling what’s basically a glorified theme park? They built it in the first place, didn’t they?’
The Doctor shook himself slightly, then turned his head to regard her, as though he had completely forgotten her existence. ‘Mm?’
‘Dickensworld.’ Ace shuddered at the thought of it, even though the actuality of it was all around her. ‘Who in the entire galaxy is going to miss it, apart from a bunch of aliens who didn’t know what the hell they were doing in the first place and got it all wrong?’
The Doctor frowned. ‘That’s exactly the point, Ace. The Slaarg got it wrong – completely and utterly wrong – when they built their pleasure world and stocked it with what they thought of as simulacra. They didn’t understand what humanity was, exactly, but they copied it. Down to the synthetic DNA.’
He waved a hand toward a skyline that even now appeared to be on fire with the nimbus of Death Rays. ‘The people out there are simplified and twisted, but they’re real. As are the other biological entities the Slaarg copied. The suffering is actual. And the Slaarg are wiping them out en masse.
‘That’s not going to happen, now. The pathogen with which I infected Thackary will present itself as a common cold in the human analogues – but it’s sudden death to the Slaarg on an accelerated vector. Most of them will survive, I’m sure, if they get off the planet and declare it a Plague Zone. They probably won’t bother to obliterate it from orbit. I got the idea from a chap I used to know. An old Companion, apparently, used to go around for coffee with him regularly. I’m sure I’ll remember his name presently ...’
‘Now, hang on,’ said Ace. ‘If these people are ... if they’re real people, in a sense, then you’ve just sent out a real guy to be gobbled up by the first Slaarg who comes across him and ...’
‘Hello, what’s this?’ said the Doctor. ‘It looks like a small cat. Black- patched, if I’m not entirely mistaken. It looks a bit hungry – now, I’m sure I had a bit of fish, somewhere, in my pocket ...’
As the big, blue wardrobe vanished into thin air, Poor Tom paid it not the slightest heed. He spat out a fishbone, and rolled over on the junk pile, onto his now full stomach, and dropped contentedly to sleep.
Thanks to the Kindly Gentleman in the hat, it seemed that it would be a Merry Yuletide after all.
And the same to you, too.
Shatterland Issue One Script
Years and years ago - back in the days when I had far more energy and enthusiasm than acumen - I wrote an entire six-part American-format comic-book miniseries, weighing in at whatever six times twenty-four pages is, entirely on spec. I did it for the reason anyone does anything when they're young: for the fun of it.
I was gonna at least try it on Vertigo, or one of the black-and-white Independents … but then my activity shifted to the novels and I forgot. It now resides, inaccessibly, on a corrupted Amstrad disk and/or in the chaos of my hard-copy archive.
At some point, though, I typed the first issue in again, from a printout, and it's been sitting on various iterations of the hard-drive ever since. And, since it's there, I might as well put it up, so anyone interested can have a look.
Twenty-four-page-long scripts being a bit unwieldy for a Blog, click on this handy link:
(Of course, if anyone's ever interested enough to actually do anything with it - for the fun of it or not - I'm all ears.)
An Inconsequential Death
(Continuing my process of rerunning old shorts off the hard-drive, a small piece of Doctor Who fiction, written for a charity publication.)
He’d done it again! The infuriating old git had done it again.
The young man followed the ... well, you’d have to call it the trail of clues from the chamber of alien biomedical bleep machines. First the lost fluids and effluvia from when the biomechanically-healed bodily processes were still halfway functioning, then by the shed skin and smell. Followed it through a tortuous maze of rondelated corridors that continually seemed to circumvent an actual destination. It was as if whoever - or whatever - who had left the trail was operating on pure instinct, following some inner, distant call.
He found the old man, at last, in what might be described as a wardrobe in the same way that the Grand Canyon can be described as a hole in the ground. Racks of clothing - clothing and its attendant accessories and accoutrements of all kinds - appeared to doppler to infinity and back in some dimensionally complex manner, like a couturier’s warehouse crossed with a Klein bottle. The musty reek of a million kinds of ancient cloth degrading over time was all-but overpowering.
The old man sat slumped over before an assorted pile of items pulled haphazardly from the racks: a fedora hat, a garish patchwork overcoat, a rotting black frock-coat of some Edwardian design, a battered umbrella with a question-mark for a handle. The old man stirred at them, listlessly, with a liverspotted hand. He was bone-thin and desiccated, skin like a dry membrane of parchment covered with ulceration from where the biomedical units had so recently been plugged into him.
‘So many ...’ he was muttering. ‘So many ... things you do and then you think of them afterwards ... fighting the ... they had claws and guns for hands and they hated life ... a love of death that was a yearning and they hated ...’
He became aware of the young man standing behind him and lurched around. Something lucid and hard, and not at all friendly, switched on in his eyes as if a switch had been thrown.
‘You,’ the old man said, the all-but toothless mouth managing to inform the world with sharp and acid contempt. ‘It’s you is it? Again? Here again? How long have you been there spying on me?’
‘Not long,’ the young man said. ‘I just didn’t want you to hurt yourself.’ He moved forward tentatively, offering his hand to help his elder up.
The old man flinched away from it. ‘Back to the machines? They pump and pump again and I can feel them slickly feeding into me. Back to that living death?’
‘You need them,’ said the young man simply. ‘You really do. Their regenerative processes are necessary if you’re to -’
‘Don’t you talk to me about regeneration, you little pipsqueak!’ The old man was almost screaming, ‘I’ve regenerated more times than you’ve had hot ... meals that you eat hot. Why, I remember the time when I died and ...’
His face went slack as what was left of his mind tried to recall a memory that simply wasn’t there. Then he looked up at the young man with something that was nothing less than quiet pleading. ‘Why can’t you let me die? It’ll all be better after I die. I’ll be reborn. I’ll be fresh and different and new ...’
Despite himself, despite all the resolve he had built in himself, the young man found himself losing his temper. ‘Because this is your thirteenth life you bloody old fool! When you die this time there’ll be nothing better, or worse, or anything at all!’
The young man caught himself, swallowed his anger.
‘Don’t you remember?’ His voice was as quiet as his elder’s had become, with the same note of pleading though without the constant tone of senile whining. ‘Please try to remember. You dematerialised the TARDIS and then forgot how to operate the controls. I don’t know how to make them work. You said that the only solution was to keep you alive in the hope that you’d come back to yourself for long enough to take us back into the world. Please remember that.’
The old man crumpled his face in thought. ‘I seem ... I seem to ...’ Then his face cleared - not with the calm of remembrance, but with the blankness of one for whom almost every process has been lost. ‘Where am I? Should I be here? I don’t feel well ...’
‘You’ll be all right,’ the young man said, helping the old man, unprotesting, to his feet. ‘There are things that can make you well.’
* * *
After the old man was settled again, amidst the nest of tubes and modules that bleeped and gurgled happily as though the act of feeding sustenance fed them, in some peculiar way, in turn, the young man walked the corridors lost in thought - or rather, lost in the processes of keeping thought at bay. He tried, if at all possible, not to think of the past years, to ignore the sheer and crushing weight of them.
When a trader sells a carpet in the bazaar, he tells you it’s a magic carpet. All you need to make it fly is to not think of a blue camel. All carpets are magic if you know that and don’t think of it.
It was not a question of a problem to be solved. It was a problem to be dealt with. The TARDIS was stuck in a metatemporal orbit around a secondary Vortex Core. There was no way to fling it from that orbit without destroying human life inside, and that was the end of it. Try to leave, try to leave now, and fragile human flesh would rupture, burst and spray off the bones.
The young man tried not to think of all those years in which he’d stayed young, while his younger companion had grown ever older - oscillating between stupor, lucidity and violent dementia in the extensive but ultimately self-enclosed and contained TARDIS interior.
There were whole areas still in disarray, their contents flung about in mindless rage, that at some point would have to be tidied up. It was hard not to remember that - even harder not to see it as an object lesson. The young man had in his time raged and flung his toys around in other, larger spaces, to much the same end effect.
It had almost been a relief, in the end, when the old man’s swings in mood and sanity had settled into the basic dementia of senility. Lacking other stimuli, the old man had taken imprints from his surroundings, and now fully believed that he was the owner of them.
He was - so he thought - a time-traveling alien whose superhuman recuperative powers would soon pull him from his present debilitation. He was not, in actual fact, dying alone and elided from every single other specimen of his kind.
The young man tried not to disabuse him of this delusion. It seemed like the only thing to do.
Possibly, by this point, the kindest thing would be to simply fire up the Console Room again, set the controls and slingshot back into reality, or some reasonable approximation thereof. It would at least give the old man a quick, clean death ... but when it came to the nub of it, here and now, when push came to the equivalent of shoving the off-switch on the life-support, the young man knew he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
The old man was not, as yet, in sufficient pain, indignity or state of vegetation as to make the choice clear cut. And in such cases a Doctor can only do no harm, and wait for nature to take its course, as it must for us all.
We walk through prisons of differing sizes and complexity, and delude ourselves that to drop and stop moving is to at the last find our way out.
The young man wandered, apparently at random, through corridors that turned in on themselves, waiting for them to lead him naturally to some actual destination, waiting for his old companion to finally die.
Astonishing Stories of Unmitigated Science!
The Giant-sized Monthly for the Fan of the Future who Knows what He Likes!
From the Editor’s Astonishing! Desk ...
Greetings and welcome to the latest thrilling issue of Astonishing Stories of Unmitigated Science! We here at Astonishing! have worked real hard to put this month’s issue together; the Linotype is set and ready for the presses and all systems are ‘green for go’, even despite the sad news that our most gracious publisher of many years, Goblinslather Press, has declared bankruptcy following the disappearance of its honoured founder, Arlo Goblinslather, in a tragic ornithopter accident over the Malagasi South Seas.
Our new proprietors, Wamco Holding Properties Inc. (Korea), share our God-given dream of bringing quality SF to those who are not only fans but are also discerners, but have told us that we have to cut our costs by way of a drastic trimming of our page-count, word rates and permanent editorial staff. There was some consternation about that in the Astonishing! bullpen, I can tell you! But our little family rallied together and we are proud to present a collection of tip-top yarns by all-new writers which continue in the finest Astonishing! tradition of E. Dan Belsen, Charles ‘Bubba’ Delancey and Podmore Sloathe! None of whom, unfortunately, appear in this issue for contractual reasons.
So let the so-called critics in their decadent ivory towers gnash their reefer-stained teeth at the so-called ‘pulps’ for all they like! For all their lit’ry talk of the transcendence of content over form, the telling particular and of litotes, they are nothing but denouncers who will never understand how a monthly like Astonishing! can do its tales done in the Scientific Method that only the cleverest and most technically educated geniuses can truly do. They sit there with their fountain pens and little gilded pocketbooks, drinking their prissy little cups of tea and Absinthe, getting their so-called ‘ideas’ from the funny papers and this World Wide Internet of theirs, and I’ll bet they couldn’t work a basic piece of engineering equipment like a slide rule if their worthless lives depended on it.
Fear not though, readers, Astonishing Stories of Unmitigated Science! will be around, now and for ever, to show them the error of their ways! The Manifest Destiny of Mankind (and Womankind, too!) awaits! On with the chronicles of our glorious and indomitable Future!!
- ‘Jolly’ John F. McMacraken, Editor-in-Chief
* * *
Snail Women from Uranus
by Norbert Edgar Trant
[Hideous galactic aliens are come to defile our fairer human sex, and nothing within the power of mortal Man to stop them! How this horrifying and seemingly insoluble problem is solved can only come from a plot-twist so devilishly original and ingenious, that only a mind such as that of Norbert Edgar Trant could have ever possibly thought it up. The prolific Mr Trant has sent us, without fail, a new and meticulously handwritten manuscript from his home in Westlake Falls, Virginia, for every month since our first ever publication, and which we have always looked forward to and read with lively interest. This is his first appearance in the pages of Astonishing! itself.]
The stars were bright that night, whole constellations and the galaxies in them shining in the pitch black sky and laying there like scattered jewels on velvet, shining down on the sleepy little town of Kitchen Falls, set deep in the majestic forests of Kitchen Falls. Still and quiet, the stars were fixed for all eternity - but something else moved through the sky, slashing across it and leaving a fiery screaming trail in its very vacuum itself. This was no brightly boiling furnace of the nebulas ... it was a space ship! An alien space ship ... and who knew what crawling, slithering terror and horror those alien monsters who were in it would bring ...
Norman Manley wasn’t thinking about aliens, for all he had just been to see a movie about them at the Kitchen Falls drive-in. The movie had been Snail Women from Uranus, starring Candy Crawford and Lara Dane, and the thrusting womanly globes thus on so blatant display had made him feel real frisky. You could see through their tops and everything. This had given Norman some Ideas, so he had tried to touch the the pliant orbs of the girl he was with, but she had slapped him hard and raked his face with her long red nails until it started to bleed. She really had wanted Norman to touch her, the girl, whose name was Myra Monroe, had then explained, but she was an old fashioned girl with lots of primitive sex-hangups, and she could not be doing with anything like that until she was respectably married.
Well, Norman had plenty of other girls whose minds had not been canalized with illogical and outmoded sex-ideas that had no place in the New World Order of the Atomic Age, so now he was driving his bright red ‘hot rod’ automobile into nearby Stovetown to meet one of them. Her name was Lula Lovelee, and she was a stripper in a bar called the Beer Cellar, which she did because, apart from the money, she really liked to do it and it made her feel real hot. She was a real ‘swinging’ lady, and once they had even done sex right there on the stage, after the bar had closed and the lights had gone out.
That was why the existence of aliens - though as a ‘switched on’ kid who listened to the radio news, he knew it was impossible that they not exist - was the last thing on Norman Manley’s mind ... until he turned a corner in the narrow country road, and something landed in the woods off to one side in an explosion of fire and with a devastating Crash!. Instantly, Norman made his ‘hot rod’ squeal to a stop, dived through the door and started running through the woods as fast as his well-muscled athlete’s legs and firm young buttocks could carry him.
‘It must be a crashed jet plane out of Table City Air Base!’ he thought to himself grimly, and vowed to retrieve the unfortunate pilot, if the pilot had survived, even at the cost of his own life! The giving of his own, he thought, to save one of those brave boys who even now stood as the final bastion between all that was decent and good and the Godless foreign hoards, would be a life well spent indeed.
What he found, however, was something different. Instead of the crashed and mangled remains of an air plane, a shining ovoid squatted in the burning scrub and maples, resting on tripodular support struts. Norman was no fool. He recognised this thing for what it was instantly. ‘Aliens!’ he snarled. ‘What hideous deeds can they be up to here?’
And it was then that a hatch opened in the side of the ovoid with a hiss of noxious alien gasses. And something came out of it ... something so monstrous and horrible that to even begin to describe its monstrous and horrific form would drive you mad with suppurating horror of it! And Norman Manley clawed at his eyes and screamed as if his lungs would burst ...
* * *
The next day, Myra Monroe was behind the soda pop stand in the drug store that she worked in, when Norman walked into it in his best suit of clothes, with a marriage license and a gold ring with a diamond as big as a tree snipe egg and must have cost every cent of a year’s pay from his fancy job, and asked her if she would do him the honour of becoming his wife.
No girl could have resisted! ‘Yes!’ Myra cried, her virginal mounds of sex-pleasure heaving in the tight shirt you could even see her bra inside. ‘Oh, Norman, let us get married right away!’
They were married an hour later by the Justice of the Peace, and set off for their honey moon in the swanky Kitchen Falls Hotel, which stood on the top of a mountain outside of town and which had more than fifty different rooms and bellhops who all wore little hats. Black storm clouds were gathering, however, and it was a dark and stormy night when they at last reached their room and got ready for bed.
‘
Oh, Norman,’ Myra said, coming from her foamy bubble bath and sitting on the big wide bed in in a little lacy neglige, ‘you have made me the happiest girl in all the ...’
There was an explosion of lightning and thunder outside. The girlish delight in Myra’s voice trailed away, and her eyes went wide at what the lightning had so horrifically revealed.
‘I am not your “Norman”,’ said the thing as it lurched toward her, a snarling grin upon its face and a hellish light inside its eyes as they ran all over her delectable female form. ‘I have merely taken control of the puny hu-man who you know as Norman’s body. I am a space alien, from a galaxy so many miles away that your mind cannot imagine them! I am Queegvogel Duck Duck Duck Duck Duck Duck Seven, come to kill all Earth men and to breed with all Earth women ...’
Myra Monroe looked at the thing who had once been Norman Manley a little strangely, through narrowed eyelids. ‘Oh, do you really bloody think so?’
‘What,’ the thing inhabiting Norman’s corporeal form seemed a little nonplused by this sudden change in tone, and made it take an involuntary step back, grazing a calf quite nastily on the corner of the mini bar. ‘What are you -’
‘I don’t think so,’ Myra said, reaching for the zipper in the back of her neck, and pulling off her Human Being suit. The thing that had been Norman Manley stared, aghast, at the form that lay within, a thing now bulking itself outwards on a telescopically articulated, polysilicidal skeletal structure, internal organs unfolding in some dimensionally complex manner as though from nothing, the retractable carapace that extended over them, encasing them, effectively, in a sheath of living armour ...
‘Fifteen thousand years,’ the monstrous creature snarled, looming over the now quite frankly terrified thing that had once been Norman Manley, jagged-talon’d claws clenching and unclenching as though only the merest thread of self-control prevented them from tearing him apart. ‘Give or take. That’s how long we’ve been working with our guys - and it’s a thankless bleeding task, I can tell you. I mean, we’ve only just got the buggers to the point where they put the bleeding seat up, let alone down afterwards! So if you think we’re gonna let a bunch of little sods like you come in and have us start again from scratch, you’ve got another think coming ...’
The creature put its face close to that of what had once been Norman Manley. ‘So come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough, slime boy, or, tell you what, why don’t you just piss off back where you came from?’
* * *
If active and sufficiently advanced satellite-based tracking systems had been trained on that particular area of the North American continent, they might have have tracked the vector of a sad and rather diminutive glowing ovoid as it rose and set a dispirited and vaguely elliptical course for the far side of the moon, where a larger vessel waited. Once line-of-sight transmission could be established, and had they been capable of registering the correct frequencies, the radio-telescopic dishes of humanity might have noted and decoded the exchange detailed below. But they weren’t and they didn’t and they weren’t, and so they didn’t:
‘Report, Queegvogel Duck Duck Duck Duck Duck Duck Seven,’ said a brusque and somewhat atonic voice from the mother ship. ‘Is the world of puny humans ripe for foul unending domination?’
‘Yeah,’ said another and slightly more enthusiastic voice, ‘and are there any girls down there, Queeg?’
‘It’s no go, guys,’ said the voice of Queegvogel Duck Duck Duck Duck Duck Duck Seven. ‘It’s just no good. They have weapons down there.’
The was a brief, contemplative pause.
‘What sort of weapons? said the first voice from the mother ship.
‘Horrible obliterating weapons of devastating and utter death, okay?’ said the voice of Queegvogel Duck Duck Duck Duck Duck Duck Seven. ‘Can we go home, now?’
* * *
In the Honeymoon Suite of the Kitchen Falls Hotel, Norman Manley woke up and rubbed at the back of his head, which hurt real bad, like he had been drinking beer. ‘My God,’ he said to himself ‘What happened? What did I do last night ..?’
He realised that he was not alone, and that this other was not looking at him in a particularly friendly manner. ‘You married me,’ said Myra Monroe, coldly.
It took a moment for this to sink in. Oh well, thought Norman, looking on the bright side when it finally did, at least she has nice tits ...
* * *
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* * *
A dip into our Astonishing! Mailbag ...
Dear Sirs,
I read with interest that, according to your publication of ‘The Spangled Warlords’ by E. Dan Belsen, that the albedo of Jupiter is fifty-one percent. Well in some ‘parallel universe’ such as which your writers like to speculate that might be so, but not in this one. Please ensure against such blatant disregard for the facts in future.
- Roland Smithenson, Rope’s Pine, Colorado
Quite so, Mr Smithenson, and please accept a years’ subscription of Astonishing! in return for pointing out this error. We can’t think how this error escaped the genius of Mr Belsen himself, or indeed our own stringent editorial eye. The albedo of Jupiter is, of course, something completely different.
Dear Sirs,
What is wrong with young people today? Whatever happened to those proper tin cans like things used to come in? And why don’t things cost the same as they did ..?
- Walter Knapf, San Francisco
Good questions all, Mr Knapf! If we ever find the answers to them, rest assured we’ll be the first to tell you.
Dear Astonishing Stories of Unmitigated Science,
I am writing to protest about the story scene between Dr Juliette and the lab technician in Miron Wiblik’s story ‘Timmy Don’t Add Up’, which spoiled an otherwise fine story. I read Wiblik’s GOLEM Incorporated stories for their fine story-telling and their stories of advanced algorithmic-vector integrating automata, not to see stories where the story is about people kissing, and so I did not like that story.
- B. Turing-Series II, Modex Transputations, England UK
We’re sorry that you didn’t like Prof. Miron’s yarn, Mr Turing-Series (your free subscription will be sent to Modex Transputations PLC in merry old England, since you did not supply a home address. We hope you and your ‘mates’ will enjoy it while supping on your plates of whelks and ale down at the local ‘pub’!)
We thought long and hard about its publication in Astonishing! - but we must move with the times, after all, and felt that the importance of its subject, and the reputation of Wiblik himself, justified its inclusion despite its somewhat ‘racy’ nature. Never fear, though, our then Assistant Copy Editor, Elanore Dunblaine, was consistently on hand to remove anything of so much as a remotely gratuitous and salacious nature. Miss Dunblaine will be greatly missed.
On a related note, we here at Astonishing! would like to apologise for a certain passage in Dexley Blandings’ ‘Boo-Bomb Boffo and the Talmerdian Squil’ which appeared in the same issue. At the age of 86, Miss Dunblaine was unaware of the use to which the youth of today put the word ‘flunching’.
Mr Blandings will not be writing for Astonishing! again.
* * *
Termination on Golgotha
by Dexley Blandings
The assault craft ploughed into the swamp with an explosion of sludge and superheated steam. Concussion-bolts detonated and a teflon-coated butterfly hatch racked itself back back and up into its housing in the polyceramicized, fractured-prismatic shell. Bane worked the action on his pulse-pump, slamming a subatomic charging cell into the inject-breech and priming it, and dropped from the hatch, the shok-pads of his boots taking the impact on the soft, still steaming ground.
The Golgothian wildlife shrittered and whooped in the swamp around him. Bane flipped a switch in his helmet and a sensor-readout unfolded on the virtual screen chipped into brain behind his eyes: a troupe of inquisitive fomprats were circling cautiously off to one side, but, given their carrion-eating nature, there would have to be one Sheol of a lot more of them and. Bane himself would have to be dead before they’d feel brave enough to move in. Bane shouldered the pulse-pump, quickly double-checked the other systems of his power armour’s antipersonnel package, and set off in the direction of the transponder-blip he’d tracked in orbit.
At last, he thought, after a quarter of a galactic-standard century of searching, after twenty-five Earth years of following a hopscotch interplanetary trail, of hunting down rumours, of dead ends, wild goose chases, red herrings, dead ends, dead red herrings and of beating people viciously in four hundred and seventy-three separate planetary and/or orbitally-based space bars ... at last he neared the ending of his search, the termination of that long, long arc through space and time that had begun with the destruction of all the young Bane had held dear.
Even now, wading through the fetid swamps of Golgotha, the memories came back to plant hooks in his cythernesically implanted mind and score it. Memories of the blasted ash and rubble that had been his Boldrakian homeworld, the bones protruding from the ash, of finding the remains of his mother, father, grandmother on his father’s side, brother, half-sister and beloved tame pararat, Cyril, and the abominable things that had been done to them before they died. Memories of the brutish Minions who had broken his legs and hands and left him for dead. Memories of his discovery by the emergency-service forces of Earth, of his recovery and enlistment, his desertion and his wanderings thereafter, making his way through the violent chaos of the Galactic Hub and out into the even more violent, lawless tract-gulfs of the Outworlds ... all the while searching, never giving up, searching for the creature that had done this to him.
Searching for Volok.
And finding him.
‘It ends here,’ Bane snarled, baring his teeth behind his impact-visor, though there was nobody to see or here. ‘It all ends here and now.’
The hut was strangely small and unprepossessing, little more than the size of a sublight SAD pursuit-ship, its irregularly octagonal form lifted from the swamp by pilings cut from some local equivalent of wood. A shallow flight of mismatched steps led to a blank, stout-looking doorway.
Bane mounted the steps and hammered on the door with the stock of his pulse-pump. ‘Open up! Open up you bastard!’
After a few moments, the door opened with a squeal of rudimentary hingesprings, to reveal a hulking and Gorgonic form, its claws and the individually cantilevered incisors of its jaws clotted with festering gobs of fleshy matter and with old, dried blood, its eyes burning with an ancient and unknowable hunger that seemed a form of madness in its own right.
‘Can I help you at all?’ it said. It was wearing Tartan carpet slippers, and was in the process of removing a triocular set of eye-glasses, which it now began to polish with a little cloth. A pipe depended from one corner of its slavering jaw, a particularly pungent variety of alien Shag burning in the bowl.
‘I want Volok!’ Bane snarled, levelling the ejection vent of his pulse-pump at the monstrous form. ‘Volok the Riever! World destroyer! Volok whose hands run wet with the blood of a million women and children! Give him to me now ...’
The creature frowned as though in momentary puzzlement. ‘Excuse me one moment.’ It turned its horrid head to shout back to the reeking dark beyond the door. ‘Delbert!’
There was the sound of movement inside the hut; a muffled crash and muttering.
‘Delbert!’ the creature shouted again. Its voice devolved into a coldly murderous growl. ‘Come out here. I want to talk to you ...’
A second creature appeared. Though equally horrible in form, it was smaller and seemed to be a younger than the first. ‘Yes, dad?’ It looked past the other caught sight of Bane and visibly blanched. ‘Oh shit ...’
‘I’ll “oh shit” you, you little bugger!’ the larger monster cried, belabouring the smaller about the head and shoulders. ‘You’ve been sweeping across the worlds of Man like a corrupt and all-consuming fire again, haven’t you! Grinding the bones of mothers and their sons beneath your iron heels!’
‘Aaow, dad!’ cried the younger, clutching at its head protectively with its jagged claws.
‘What did I tell you about turning the skies black with the bodies of the burning dead?’ the older creature thundered menacingly.
The younger looked down at its monstrous feet and muttered something sullenly.
‘I can’t hear you ...’ growled the older creature.
‘All right!’ the smaller creature snapped. ‘No-turning-the-skies-black-with-the-burning-bodies-of-the-dead-if-I-want-to-live-under-your-roof. Okay?’
‘Kids, eh?’ said the older creature, turning its attention back to the now completely astonished Bane. ‘Can’t live with ‘em, can’t put a blaster-bolt to the back of their heads and put them down.’ It took the younger by the ear and dragged it back inside the hut. ‘Please accept my most profound apologies. Won’t happen again.’
It slammed the door behind it.
Bane looked at the flat expanse of wooden door.
‘Um ...’ he said.
* * *
Books from the Astonishing! Bookshelf
Reviewed by Stanford Groke
It’s been something of a thin month for books, what with one thing and another. The big-shot houses seem to have misplaced our name on their review list, with the result that we have yet to receive copies of their latest output. Never fear, though, reader; judging from their efforts of the recent past, such output will consist of such perversion and squalor in the guise of ‘psychology’, such subversive, Godless propaganda and such so-called ‘speculation’ that flies in the face of all we know to be good and decent in the mind and heart of Man, such filth that would make the mind sick just from the reading of it, that the loss of them can only be a blessing.
To make up for that, we have two real treasures for you. The Best of Astonishing! (Goblinslather Press, 445pp), in which you can read and savour again all the highlights you have read and savoured in these very pages. From Wiblik’s justly-famous and Nebula Award-winning ‘Robot is Intransigent’, to Grand Master Henshaw’s ‘The Precise Ballistic Ellipsoid from the Asteroids to an Orbital Circumlocution of Io’ to the far-out brain feverings of Blandings’ ‘Wardrobe Eating Nanny’s Arm’, this surely is an indispensable compendium for historers of the SF form. [Unfortunately, due to an error in the production stage, all bound copies of this book have been pulped and are no longer available - Ed.]
Our second book is of another stripe entirely. While not being Science Fiction in the proper sense, Future Impact: The Apocalyptic Backlash (PractiBrantis Enterprises SA, 414pp) by Dr John Smith, is of vital importance to all those interested in the future of mankind and what futuristic things it will bring.
Dr Smith, as readers of these pages will know, has long led the life of a recluse, disappearing for years at a time in the company of his young ‘assistants’, appearing in public only sporadically to originate such neophysical concepts as the cheese drive - first championed in Astonishing! - the discovery of Pellucidor and the PractiBrantic processes that have informed one tenth of the American-speaking world. For years now, it seems, Dr Smith has been secretly refining and expounding his theories as to just what, precisely, has gone wrong with the world - and now, at last, in Future Impact, he presents his conclusions.
As we grow older, says Dr Smith, the world makes cumulatively less sense. Things you used to buy for a penny become ridiculously expensive on the level of a factor of ten, Empires set to last a thousand years collapse seemingly overnight, the young people with their pompadours and electrical beat-combos begin to talk in what, increasingly, becomes gibberish to any sane mind, peppered with a blasphemy and outright filth that seems to come about as a matter of course. For too long, says Dr Smith, such phenomena had been dismissed as market-forces-driven monetary inflation, the social dynamic or being a senile old bugger who should do the world a favour and just die.
The truth, as detailed in Future Impact, is somewhat more alarming.
The world as we know it, Dr Smith asserts, is being actively invaded by Futurity. Far from merely, as we once thought, travelling through time at a second per second, we are in fact accelerating through time at a second per second per second, the physical matter of the universe falling through the fourth dimension toward some unknowable end like a collection of ornamental balls dropping to a concrete floor. And at some point - Dr Smith estimates it as within a decade - we’re going to hit it.
The effects of this catastrophe are being felt in our own time, the shock and shards of it rebounding to intersect with and impact upon our timeline - discrete packets of what call only be called parareality which, in the same way that humour operates by the collapsing of some textual structure under reality, turns the very world around us into dumb and incredibly rotten old jokes. As proof, Dr Smith presents excerpts from any number of popular publications, the product of and mirror of our world, the texts of which show such inconsistencies and glaring shifts in tone as for it, cumulatively, to be virtually inconceivable as the mere result of the intransigence of writers, the incompetence of editors, production cock-ups and the fact that publishers are, without exception, a bunch of faceless corporate gits who should be stuck against a wall and a bolt-gun applied to the back of their heads.
The future, without question, seems bleak - or possibly not. Loathe to end on such depressing terms, Dr Smith provides one possible solution, involving the cooperation of all nations and the sinking of all private resources into a project to tunnel into the earth, extract its molten core and mould it into a massive grappling hook, which will then be fired back through time, in the hope of catching onto something and bringing the temporally headlong plunge of Planet Earth to a stop. Indeed, he speculates, that with the collapse of the more monolithic world powers and the animosity between them, the increasing disappearance of the high-profile rich under mysterious circumstances and the fact that there seems to be less and less actual money around these days, such plans might already be secretly in effect.
Of course, Dr Smith concludes, the ultimate result would be a planet hanging on a line and swinging back and forth through Time. So, whoever you are, wherever you are, it might be an idea to make sure you’re doing something nice - reading this fine issue of Astonishing Stories of Unmitigated Science!, say - because at any moment, you might suddenly find yourself doing it over and over again, forever.
The Resurrection Event
InfoMatrix Archive: 109845-9405-B-364758.345673-2-Immort -
You have requested an overview of historical factors surrounding the so-called Resurrection Event. This information is stored for retrieval under an explicit +need to know+ basis. Be aware that Cyberdynic processes are in operation to ensure that you are physically incapable of disseminating this information to those without correct and commensurate levels of security-clearance. Do you consent to these procedures?
(Y/N):?
* * *
The basic idea of nanotechnology had worked its way well into the culture by what we now know of as the Last Days. So prevalent was the idea of swarms of molecular-level manipulators that, at the time in question, the vast majority of the citizenry thought of the Resurrection Effect as a variety of those nanonetic piezo-machines which, so we thought, would soon be turning our piles of old socks into chocolate.
In fact, the Resurrection Effect operated on the subatomic: a quantum-level self-propagating construct that in effect rewrote the base code of the world. It was designed to target itself upon, incorporate itself within and radically alter the individual, living humanoid form. Its basic nature meant that when released, it proliferated something like a virus but instantly - or at least at the speed of light - resulting in a global saturation in a matter of seconds. The vast majority of our world never even had the luxury of waking up to find it changed.
The initial effects were quite impressive to say the least. The pores of every humanoid body opened like industrial vents and began pumping out a sludge and spray of deconstructed pathogen-components and accumulated toxins. Foreign bodies like artificial hearts, hips or small items lodged in some inextricable location as a child were physically ejected, often at velocities of several thousand metres per second. There were cases, in particularly crowded situations, of some largish bit of matter being fired into someone else, ejected in its turn to hit some other body and the process continuing on for up to an hour.
Old scars and fresh wounds healed themselves in a matter of seconds. Calloused tissue went, too, being the product, effectively, of cumulative minor injury - with the result that fingertips and the soles of feet are as soft and pink as those of a baby. The Resurrection Effect would counter further damage to this otherwise vulnerable new flesh, of course - though unfortunately without suppressing the pain-reflex.
Organ transplants were - and are still - problematic, on the basis that the Resurrection Event is misnomer. It did not and never will resurrect the dead; it merely made and makes the living immortal and invulnerable.
Hearts, livers, lungs and so forth with a dissimilar genetic coding from their hosts were ejected and replaced, but being living humanoid matter in their own right couldn’t die. The ‘homing’ mechanisms of the Event meant that they would gravitate together with the other such items transplanted from the original donor. They are still contained in [CLASSIFICATION ULTIMATE]: piles of living offal, sitting there forlornly and without the ability to regenerate further.
The primary biological transformations that made sexual reproduction obsolete occurred with the same speed as the regeneration of original hearts and lungs and renal systems, with the result that a lot of those actively engaged in copulation at the time ended up being catapulted across the room. Pregnancies spontaneously aborted, the reaction driving several million sudden mothers into the air to bury their heads in any available ceiling.
Fortunately, as coherent living humanoid matter, the offspring came under the remit of the Event and would survive to grow, just as those children whose entrance into the world had been slightly less dramatic.
Twins, though, were and are the worst known cases on record. Or triplets, or quads ... those separate biological entities sharing an entirely similar MetaDNA pattern-signature. With them, the ‘homing’ mechanisms of the Event operated with a vengeance.
Better to forget about those shrieking, boiling, continually exploding and imploding lumps of matter that are the end result of two, or three, or any number of human-sized objects trying to occupy a single humanoid space. Better to forget the fact that, for all of it, they’re still alive.
* * *
In the hysteria directly after Event, there was a brief vogue in artistic circles for the kind of body-modification that might put the Theatre of Mutilation to shame - brief, because the bio-reset mechanisms of the Event made such changes ultimately meaningless. In general life, the world was filled with people jumping off cliffs and buildings, hurling themselves under heavy good vehicles or into the sea, hitting each other with mallets, sledgehammers and axes purely for the sake of it. Those who were naturally inclined to jump in front of heavy goods vehicles in any case soon tired of the sheer futility of it, gradually followed by the rest of the world.
It was this sense of futility, in fact, that proved debilitating. For a time, those with sufficient wealth and resources were able to afford to have their bodies atomised, and those atoms scattered into space to prevent their reunification in anything other than the Big Crunch, but this was merely a palliative measure, failing to address the central problem - that the Resurrection Event was instigated, by whomsoever instigated it, in an unthought-out and ultimately unworkable fashion. It was a classic case of the fact that one must be supremely careful of what one wishes, lest it suddenly and without warning occur.
In the end, the solution lay in one of the simplest concepts of which the mind is capable - that of the fact that anything, literally anything, is all in the mind.
Consciousness is inextricably linked to the fundamental, substructural workings of the universe - the level at which the Resurrection Effect operated itself. In its simplest sense, a schizophrenic might believe that all those around him are alien monsters who have assumed human faces, and this might be true merely for himself - but it is also true in the larger sense. Those he kills, thinking of them as monsters in his delusion, are just as dead as if they actually were.
What we did, in the larger sense, was to convert the delusional into the effectively actual.
Psychodynic generators were seeded through the major population-centres, effectively brainwashing said population so that it fundamentally believed itself Mortal - an inferior underclass born to serve and die and then decompose in the standard pre-Resurrection manner. The fact that their bodies, once buried or cremated or disseminated, were still technically alive was neither here nor there - the subconscious longing for oblivion and respite made it technically true for any individual so mass-processed.
Of course, such an arrangement required administration, and the Administrators (chosen completely at random) were conditioned with a slightly more complex set of delusions. They were the Elite. They were the masters of Time and Space, affecting both and controlling them, affecting and controlling entire worlds and even galaxies, perpetually regenerating themselves. Effectively immortal. Effectively Gods.
Their function required - and still requires - that they believe that they are active, that they have jolly exciting adventures - that they are anything other, ultimately, than a collection of immobile humanoid bodies, their bodies atrophied to the bone, lying on the desiccated surface of a planet that once lived in some real sense and dreaming that they’re still actually alive.
* * *
Occasionally, one or another of them dreams that he or she is accessing a construct called the InfoMatrix, trying to discover some Ultimate Truth about his or her world.
Knowing this, do you want to live and forever or just die?
(Y/N):?
RealWorld Promo 1
Just dicking around producing general promo material with a little app called Comics Life, which I got bundled with an iMac in 2007, and If I ever have ten quid on my PayPal account, I'll punt for the upgrade.
As an interested layman, it's fascinating to play around with lettering-placement and see how even something like a small offset can markedly affect the tone. There's an artistry to it over and above simple typographical mechanics.
RealWorld Teaser 1
Here we go.
Just to be clear, RealWorld's prose and not a comic, but there will be a bunch of supplementary and/or promotional stuff because why not?