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The Line
The Holy Vessel of the Security Forces of The Line, christened Inevitably Successful in All Circumstances, cut through space and time, arriving in the Real just outside orbit of agri-world 3B-L02. The world’s planetary overseers had complained for months of pirates intercepting shipments of foodstuffs as they were being prepared for shipment from the orbital…
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Raymond’s Women
Raymond was dead. There was no mistaking it — his frail form laid motionless atop his bed in the dark, a hardcover book spine up across his chest. As she waited motionless on the couch in the dim lamplight, Lisa wondered if she’d ever be able to get the image out of her head. She’d…
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The Dragon
I remember how excited I was for the launch of Reverie Moon Online. My friends and I had read about it in magazines for months, talked about it after school while trading Pokemon cards. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before — a 3D roleplaying game that let players cooperate with strangers around the…
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Larry
It takes a certain kind of temperament to be a bus driver. My uncle told me that. He drove city buses for forty years and during that time he saw some crazy shit. Women going into labor, couples getting into explosive arguments, people pulling knives on each other, the full spectrum of human experience crammed…
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Connection
When Facebook and the mass internet started to really take off one of the most interesting things was realizing how widespread and shared personal quirks and behaviors really were. A lot of these came from childhood. Remember that Facebook fan page for “turning the pillow over to the cool side?” Things like that. It was…
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Survival Instinct
The world was anathema to life. Well, Belan considered, that wasn’t entirely true. It hosted a thriving ecosystem of flora and fauna that were uniformly hostile in the extreme. Its atmosphere, thoroughly poisonous to him, had apparently created the perfect conditions for organisms deadlier than any he’d ever known to thrive. It was as if…
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Little Gods
Anyone who’s been online long enough knows the format of these things, right? You know how it all goes: someone remembers a TV show from their childhood, or they download a cursed ROM, or they find a video tape at a garage sale, and then something terrible happens. Do people even have garage sales anymore?…
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101 Street Fighting Secrets
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The Collector
This piece originally appeared in Tower Magazine Issue 1. At some point, everyone in the retro video game collector community has “The Dream”. It goes like this: you find yourself in a store. You’re not sure how you got there or why you’ve never been in before. You start looking around, and you notice that…
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Bloodlust
I used to know this guy who had this fantasy, a real longstanding, deep-rooted-can’t-explain-it-but-probably-something-to-do-with-childhood-trauma fantasy of being pissed on. So one year for his birthday his girlfriend ties him up and puts him in the bathtub and has all of her friends come over and whenever they have to pee they go and do it…