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Weekly Contest #360
By late morning the overlook was ahead on the mountain’s shoulder and in the heat of the high afternoon I hiked along a steep stretch. Looking down below, I imagined the shape of the river as a half-heart bending back and forth around the town. I had always thought the river warded the town safe from harm, safe from the bothers of the world, safe in a bubble.I had set out on the hike early enough, but going down I realized our dinner club would have already arrived by the time I made it back. I picked up the pace, jogging on the smooth dirt ...
Weekly Contest #357
I completed my rounds. First, I pulled the panel off the life support grid. But it wasn’t enough just to know all the toggles were lit up green. I closed the panel and walked down the corridor to actually see what was going on at AQuality Deck, and slid open the warehouse doors. The CO₂ converters, the size of a landing field on the moon, with enough space for six ventilating craft from the X23.5 generation, were pushing air.Next were the food generation fields on the solarium decks. The rows of corn stretched under the white grow lights. Tw...
Weekly Contest #351
The boat left and twenty students in the retired seniors class were on the lawn. One of them asked me if I was the monitor. Sure, I said, and slipped to the rear. This was before the professor showed up, but soon an older man took the lectern.He peered out at the class over the top of his tortoise shell reading glasses. “We are judging your Creativity Assessment today. Some of you will not be moving forward to graduation commencement.”A lady in pink sweatpants and a gray ponytail raised her hand.The professor stroked his chin. He wore the sl...
Weekly Contest #329
Even though it was two in the morning, Martha Wilkins finally turned off the lights at Enterprise Car Rental. A small Idaho airport, Enterprise waited for the bus when airlines couldn’t land, like now, in a snowstorm. She told Jessie about his Uber fare waiting once he came out of the men’s room.“Where is she?” Jessie asked.Martha threw a thumb at the entrance. “Another reunion gal I suspect. They’re gathering like flies to honey. You should go to the reunion yourself, Jessie. Hoot it up, see some old high school friends.”Jessie glanced back...
Weekly Contest #326
Don’t get me wrong, I loved my first wife, Martha. But she passed—bless her heart. My second wife, Fanny Mae? I’d never say I loved her more than Martha, but maybe I did. And it wasn’t just the double D’s, whatever people thought. Or the thirty-five year age difference, her thirty and me sixty-five. No, I needed her—for my son. After Martha died, my boy and I struggled to communicate. But he was a man now, just turned thirty himself. All this sounds harsh, and crude, but nobody can judge me harder then my own self.Anyway, he’d say something ...
Weekly Contest #312
If the adage was correct, ‘I think, therefore I am’, I suppose we had some pride in the method of our demise. This, of course, reminded me of another adage, ‘pride before the fall’, which was ironically just then punctuated by both the thumping sounds of feet on the roof above and the pounding on the door, both of which were the beasts trying to get in.CHU+, my research assistant, hadn’t interjected into the dialogue in days, leaving me only AC& to talk to. But AC& is just not that interesting. He’s in charge of security, which means...
Weekly Contest #306
Farewell AddressRain tapped the windowpanes in soft pulses. The sound of a lone siren rose and fell faintly in the distance. Inside, the Oval Office lights were harsh.The president sat at his desk with his sleeves rolled up. In his hand was a printed copy of George Washington’s Farewell Address from 1796, double-spaced and underlined in blue ink.He started to read from the document, but then looked up to finish what he’d memorized. “The name of American, which belongs to you in your national capacity… must always exalt the just pride of patr...
Weekly Contest #304
May 2025I remember the breaking heat, a late spring reminder of the summer to come. After parking, I made my way to the Pentagon, trying to ignore my gnawing anxiety about the weather. The article in The Times was on my desk. It broke hot as well. Like the weather, it had its own early message.OpenAI was buying IO, a startup run by Jony Ive—the man who helped develop the iPhone. Six and a half billion dollars. This gave me pause. As the Chief Technology Officer for the National Security Agency, the NSA, I knew every coder’s career in the wor...
Weekly Contest #296
The bank of diagnostic equipment blinked and hummed in Harold’s garage-lab. He crouched at the center console in a wall of consoles. The screen cast an eerie green, a waveform which pulsed like something alive. Something hungry. And the signal was there—buried in the digital noise.His cellphone buzzed. “Dad, stop being paranoid. Mom’s fine. Everyone’s fine. You’re the one acting strange.” They think of me as a retired curmudgeon, he thought, at first for leaving his cell phone at home, refusing to watch TV, ignoring social media. But who say...
Weekly Contest #293
Congressman David Chen found himself where he never guessed he'd be: the dining car on The Express, a high-speed train humming through the Hungarian countryside. A patchwork of browns and gray-dirty snow flashed by. Abandoned Soviet-era factories passed surreal in skeletal frames, riddled with broken windows and crumbling walls. David’s head pounded. Nausea caused him to sweat. He hated trains, but loved his wife, and the Prague conference was over. Just one more meeting, and then he and his wife could take a river cruise out of Budapest.Stu...
Weekly Contest #290
McKenzie’s eyes were sunken, shadows of exhaustion. His hands twitched where they gripped the table. Sweat streamed down his face, stinging his eyes. After three days of interrogation, he searched his mind and flung open door after door, only to find them all empty. Opposite him, a hulking man directed a spotlight (Thegor was his name). He rasped, “We’re running out of time. We can still help each other.” The man was deformed. His back revealed a grotesque formation of vertebrae creeping up his neck.After noticing McKenzie’s taking in his ve...
Weekly Contest #286
Jason was concentrating on his computer screen. He would type a sentence or two, and then stop, think a bit, then type a sentence more. The story he was writing unfolded in his mind and transposed to the page. It was a story about a boy, no more than ten. He began to type:****The boy sprawled on the living room floor, the snow blowing against the window. He was excited to be missing school. Earlier, his mother, haggard, with little sleep, black circles under her eyes, had taken his temperature.“It’s 101,” she said to the boy who was lay...
Weekly Contest #285
"One cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return?"— H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, An Invention, 1895•───────•∞•Ж•∞•───────•Chief Minister Cloe Martin stood at a floor to ceiling window in a conference room six floors up from the streets of London. Her spine tingled with a newfound fear that had struck her days before. She was overwelmed with gnawing thoughts telling her she was over her head; she couldn't sleep. The twisting grip deep in her stomach hadn’t waned. From this same window, on what had started as a city workday as any other, s...
Weekly Contest #280
Should we order wine?Sure.Don’t be that way.What way? Order wine if you want.I will then.Go for it.…Waiter. Please bring me a wine menu.Yes madam.…See. You can do it.Now you’re just being difficult. Stop it.Or what?Or I’ll leave.Leave then.…What happened to us?Life. Life happened.Life happened? That’s it? A cliché?Life is a cliché.Did you ever love me?What is love?Don’t give me that. Did you?…Madam. Your wine list.Thank you. Leave it.…Did you?Did I what?Love me? Did you love me?Maybe not.…I could always tell when you were...
Weekly Contest #277
“Can you lose yourself? Why do I long, a lonely desperation, to find myself again?”“You’re not alone,” my father, Time, answered. “Many feel an emptiness, a search for meaning. Although within your heart you ache, you also aren’t the same as men.” I saw my father as heaven’s strength, but Time was running old. “It’s true, Father, I often lie awake in early hours, my memory’s fingers barely touch the thing. The hound slips its bounds and taunts me in a fog. I know it’s there, but when I grasp the thing firmly, only mist escapes my h...
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