In Between Flights

If I were a cyborg...


I am at the airport between flights. I am on my way to Bangkok so I decide to relax. I walk into a room outfitted with lounge chairs. I insert my IDCC and am allowed entrance into a smaller room equipped with the Black and Leathery 2000, my favorite. The room greets me. My favorite music and scents fill the room. I outstretch my hands. The nimble-end probes, some padded, some with chrome, wash over my body, unbuttoning me softly and quickly. Massaged and buffed, I melt away. The leathery probes unknit every knot. Sighing I love you, two sharp pincers come out and dig right into my ears. Twisting and turning my mind into a highly suggestible state of mush. The room changes into soft mood altering colors.

Two wire mechanical hands come from both sides its soft pads caress my breasts. Big circles at first with slow gradual focus on my nipples. Cold metal pinches. Between my legs a shaft of air is blowing while a mechanical tickler excites me. Gets me to open up more. The second layer is removed. A cold cylindrical dildo gently enters in then out, teasingly. It vibrates from within, whizzing and whirring. Fingers maneuver to probe me. I can’t sit still. I run to a corner assuming the fetal position next to the Black and Leathery 2000.


The dildo chrome enters. SLowly at first like the yelp I emit. a scarf is placed upon my lips. I bite down hard on soft-stifling shrieks. My body a pulsating gyrating slump of fat jiggling flesh, I flop around like a dehydrating fish till I am splayed open raw, oozing into the black and leathery 2000.

I awake in a quiet room fully clothed. I eject my IDCC and head toward my plane, it is boarding.

Jared Januschka talking about the Girl who was Plugged In

The Girl who was plugged in was about a lonely, low-life girl, who wanted love and to be a celebrity but didn't realize the price of it all. The story begins with her broken down on the street, rock bottom. She is picked up by people (after trying to commit suicide) who want to turn her into an advertising cyborg. Since they cant advertise directly, they create a beautiful body that will act as a celebrity and use all of the products to trick people into buying them. The girl (P. Burke) is the mind of that body. However, the catch is she can't feel anything in the body and she lives in a small room, plugged into wires. It's okay though, because she believes that she's helping people with the marketing scheme. The reader learns she isn't. Gradually, she develops a following, makes it on TV, gets married and then the unthinkable happens. She falls in love. His name is Paul and he's a yuppie revolutionary who doesn't know her dark secret. He hates the system (ironically created by his dad) of cyborgs and when he finds out she is caught up in it, he won't stop until he frees her. Due to his idiocy, and lack of understanding of what is going on, he kills P. Burke in her little room, thus killing the body. It is a tragic story that raised questions on what humans are willing to give in order for that perfect life and the consequences that result from that decision.

How Many Pixels Are There In Wilford Brimley's Mustache?

How Many Pixel’s Are There In Wilford Brimley’s Mustache?
by Avaryl Halley


Date: March 12, 2072
Day: Wednesday
Time: 8:00 am
Place: Charleston, South Carolina

I open the door to find Ed McMahon on my door step. A bushel of red balloons in one hand and check the size of my couch in the other. Wishing I had gone with my gut and had that cup of coffee before answering the door I begin to focus on what is happening. Half-awake I listen to his speech about taxes and limitations but find my mind wondering, Does Ed McMahon write those huge checks himself? If so is his check book the same size? and consequentially, does he have a pen to match? As the image of this eighty year old man wrestling a giant pen crosses my mind I recall that Ed McMahon died over sixty years ago. Before I can finish my thought this faux Ed McMahon is beating me over the head with the novelty check. I am thrown into the back of a white van with Publishers Clearing House written on the side. Laying on the cold metallic floor I can only think of that cup of coffee I wish I had had.
I am slapped awake by a man who looks an awful lot like Wilford Brimley in a lab coat. Because I skipped breakfast I instantly begin to drool, fantasizing about Quaker Oats.
“Follow me.” Wilford Brimley seemed to be in a hurry and a bad mood so I follow. Feeling my forehead for any record breaking paper cuts I follow closely down the corridor. The whole place would seem terribly sterile were it not for all the obnoxiously bright colors littering every surface. Colors so bright I hadn’t seen them since I found that old picture of my grandparents at prom in 1985. Suddenly we are in front of a pass-coded door, Mr. Brimley nods at the guard, who is the spiting image of Sir Ben Kingsley. At this point I am contemplating what was in the sushi I ate the night before. What could all these celebrity personalities from the twentieth century be doing here? Could this be hell? I am about to pinch myself when we turn a corner and I am presented with a bright green cubicle. In the center is a matching monitor and a single joystick. Wilford Brimley indicates that I should sit, and places a set of equally bright green headphones on my head.
“I will see you after dinner.” Brimley closes a gate I had not seen before, locking me in and leaves.
The monitor in front of me turns on. Music begins to play a very catchy electronic melody synonymous with one thing, Tetris. After seven hours Wilford Brimley returns. He helps me out of my chair. My eyes are having trouble focusing and my legs feel disconnected from my body. Is this what an out of body experience feels like? I heard so much about them in college but have never had the pleasure. Fully prepared to demand an explanation I work up my best authoritative voice but before I begin that bastard Wilford Brimley forces a pressure syringe into my arm and throws me onto the cold floor. I am unconscious in seconds. I dream of pixels, and shapes, tetris shapes. “Where is a long piece when you need it, no, no, not another square!” After a restless night of tetris strategies I awake to find that I have already been put into my bright green chair, headphones and all. How much longer can this go on, tetris all day drug induced comas at night.
No longer can I see the details of life, only cubes, shapes and pixels. That desk chair certainly looks like one of those uneven pieces I really could have used yesterday. I don’t know how long it’s been since I saw Ed McMahon’s face but it feels like an eternity. Since then I have seen Joseph Cotton, Meg Tilly, Buster Keaton, and I swear one day my nurse was Hedy Lamarr but I know better now, they must be impostures. What is this place? Who are these people? Certainly the government could not be funding a project to resurrect twentieth century personalities from the dead only to have them test the limits of my sanity.
Every time I think I have reached my breaking point I recall the day I was allowed into the common room. The day I realized I was not alone. The day I met Pacman, our leader, there were six of us total, Pacman, Centipede, Asteroids, Frogger, Pong and me, Tetris. Each girl had their own quirk by now but it was Pong who was the most affected, her eyes never quite focused as they panned back and forth as if watching an eternal tennis match. That was when we decided to escape, planning out every detail so it couldn’t fail. “No longer will our minds be turned to mush in front of our eyes” Pacman had said and she was right. I wake up, Wilford Brimley walks me down the long neon colored corridor. We reach the pass-coded door and I salute Sir. Kingsley, a smile spreading across my face. Today the neon green of the cubicle seems vibrant and less maddening. Even my game of tetris seems less arduous because I know it will be my last. Exactly one hour after I am locked in my cubicle our plan goes into action. There is a strange comfort in knowing we will all be together. I stand up, joystick in hand. I pull the cord out from the wall and string it around the beam above my head, as I wrap the cord around my throat I can’t help but think that the beam above my head looks like one of those long pieces I have been hoping for all this time.

Programming Version 2.0 by Anna Cruze

When she wakes, she is manacled to a wall in their flying machine. The cold steel is irritating against her flesh, and she has a killer headache from the EMP blast. She can feel the little electrons buzzing through her mind, trying to convince her not to use her superhuman strength to yank the manacles out of the wall and kill everyone on board. Just because she’s been reprogrammed doesn’t mean that it’s particularly easy to quash five years of her previous programming. When she first had been captured by the machines and turned into a Skinnie, it had taken the programming months to override her mind. She could remember the terror the human side had felt as the machinery had taken over, turning her mind against her own will. She remembered, but felt detached, somehow. The woman she had been was gone, upgraded into the assassin she had been for five years. So now she let the machine do its work to change her mind once more. She let her circuits and wires change themselves. Part of her still resisted—but that was normal. It wasn’t easy, reprogramming Skinnies, no matter what the human’s believed.

More than just a Hangover by Abe Elmourabit

“Hey gorgeous”. I look worse than I smell. My face is covered with some type of sticky substance, my eyelids are swollen, and my lip’s are covered with scabs and dead skin. My hands instinctively reach for the faucet to wash away the fog. Nothing. “Not even the damn faucets work”. Silence The Hispanic folk singer who was woefully providing me with a soundtrack through my disorientation was abruptly muted. All of the sudden a feeling in my gut tells me I should have stayed passed out on the ground. And just like that it happens. My body is paralyzed. I fall to the floor screeching like a wounded banshee being tortured to death. That throbbing migraine intensifies twenty-fold as a sound so high it couldn’t be heard by human ears pierces my eardrums and sends me to the ground convulsing like an epileptic. In my psychotic episode I’m able to see three men approach me as if they had appeared out of thin air. They’re wearing industrial ear muffs to protect them from the invisible weapon that has turned me into a defenseless but wrathful beast. The faces are covered with a reflective mask. They attempt to pick me up but in doing so one of them gets knocked to the ground when he gets my foot lodged into his skull. I try to fight them off as much as I can but they easily overpower me and hogtie my limbs behind my back. The last image I see are the pile of used condoms staring me in the face as the room slowly begins to fade to black.

Excerpt from “Sale of a Deathman”

Excerpt from “Sale of a Deathman”
Tomas Seidita

In the multibillion-dollar industry that is the Afterlife, no one holds more sway than the YHWH Corporation, ltd. “YHWH: Insuring your soul for eternity… today,” as the adverts say. Since the beginning of time, YHWH and its CEO Jehovah have provided affordable post-life services to any and all comers (provided they’ve signed the appropriate contracts and followed the set terms and conditions). And what a job they have done! The massive conglomerate grew from a small startup company with a devoted customer base to one of, if not the, most powerful worldwide Afterlife service providers. The company not only ate up multiple competitors, some of which remain extant as subsidiary brands, but also invested in a number of non-afterlife oriented companies. Time Warner (now merged with AOL) is in fact the company’s largest mortal-services subsidiary group.

On the other side of the fence is MorningStar Inc., the parent company of Clear Channel and the market leader in Eternal Damnation. MorningStar’s history as a company mirrors its biggest competitor’s in many ways. MorningStar was born in the garage of founder and CEO Lucifer not long after he had been fired from YHWH over a case of corporate espionage. Lucifer used the experience he’d gathered over his millennia at YHWH to start MorningStar.

As time wore on, the two companies began to settle into their places as market leaders, buying out or bankrupting any company standing in their way. Eventually none were left standing but the two, set to reign for eternity over the Afterlife. And the two moguls saw all that they had made, and, behold, it was very good. Centuries ticked by, people dying, some going one way, some going the other, and neither company made the slightest move against the other. Until quietly, so quietly that it took anybody quite some time to notice it, greed slipped into the room.

Science fiction final Beutiful Decay

Beautiful Decay
By James Raymond
I used to love super hero movies. The idea of seeing such a fantasy world be portrayed in a real world setting is very interesting. However these movies seem to be stuck in a mold and are getting progressively worse. I have always had an idea for a super hero story that would try to break out of this formula. My story takes place in the future, in an imaginary city. The city has lots of old architecture in it and the sky surrounding it is so polluted that it is constantly orange. The main character Keith is a masked graffiti artist with acrobatic talents who can tag walls in back alleys to the top of skyscrapers. Early in the story Keith becomes obsessed with a woman named Janice who is engaged to a popular modern artist, who is dying of moon syndrome, a disease where your body slowly turns to stone. Keith and the modern artist named Steve Anchor get into a rivalry with each as who is the better artist. On top of this a gang of mutants are after Keith since he tagged over their graffiti sign in their neighborhood. I originally intended to be this story to be a movie but since the budget will go over zero amounts of dollars I have, I have decided to collaborate with my Friend Anthony Rodriguez who will be illustrating the story into a Graphic novel.
Although this story can fall into the super hero genre, I feel it is also highly influenced by science fiction writing. I enjoyed the aspect of Slipstream writing where the future has become the present. I would say that this is relevant to my story as the world these characters live in seem more in an alternate universe than an exact assumption of what the future will look like. The strangeness of their world does not affect any of the characters because they have always been living in this world and it is all they know. The slipstream science fiction course defiantly helped me combine all my ideas into one relevant story.

P.S I am not sure if this is where this is supposed to be, but here it is anyways