Possibly, this is the furthest in the future we’ve ever done for a Friday Fiction. The technology in “The Many Spaceships Of The Biggest City” seems possible, eventually, but it could be hundreds, if not thousands, of years before it would be on this level.
Just because we said the next story—this week’s story—would be even weirder than our last, doesn’t mean that it’s going to also be a funny story.
Because this is not. “Ceiling Men’s Managers” is very much not.
What would you do if a grasshopper came to your door?
That’s the absurd question at the heart of this surreal short story from Brandon Scott.
You got to take the day as it comes, right?
Well, at least that’s the perspective of our MC. It’s a normal day for them—but quite the strange one for us. Because they’ve got the most unusual superpower.
This is the tale of Marcus.
He has a monster inside of him. But not in, like, a metaphorical way. Somehow, by some mechanics, Marcus ends up with a being of immense knowledge inside his soul.
I feel like, as these things go, you can already tell a lot of what this story is about from that title.
Last week, we looked at a dragon who enjoyed bacon—as well as some other fun monsters.
This time, the scale is a little higher, but the food involved is just food.
Imagine, dear reader, if you could know all there was to know about a planet. What would you do with such knowledge? What might you think of the universe?
Gaming is a lot of fun. It’s a favorite pastime of so many people. And the technology is getting better all the time.
In this version of our future, it’s gotten very, very good. Possibly beyond what is actually possible—but, hey, this is a science fiction story. Let’s roll with it.
In many stories, especially cosmic horror stories, humanity is threatened in some way or another. The reader is a witness to a potential end of the world.
This is such a story, but it does have a twist to it. For it is not an attack that threatens humanity.
Are you in a room, dear reader?
If so, look at a corner. Isn’t it cool how perfectly the two walls mesh into one another? There’s no space between them.
Behold, dear reader, the following:
A lamentation told in a rolling, long-sentence-filled, almost stream-of-consciousness (but not really) narrative style about a person and his friends from our world finding a different world where things are not much fun.
