He told her, “I need you like I need a slap in the face.”
She gasped and slapped him.
“Thank you,” he said, wincing slightly. “I did something weird to my jaw the other day and I think you knocked it back into place.”
Theirs was an atypical love affair.
It was approaching midnight, and Mandy didn’t have a clue where everyone else was. All she could see was darkness; all she could hear was soft sloshing and splashing. Where were they?
Something moved past her leg, startling her. She jumped and screamed: “Marco!”
A chorus of voices replied, “Polo!”
The cow’s tongue was rough and uncomfortably wet as it slapped its way across his face, licking and licking and licking. He was paralyzed with fear, sure it was getting ready to open its mouth wide and take a bite…
And that was how he got the nickname “Salty Face”.
Kraig drove off the lot with the fastest street-legal sports car available, the Chevrolexus Landjet XII, and he felt good about it.
His wife wasn’t quite so enthusiastic.
The problem wasn’t that it was unsafe or expensive: it was just impractical, in 2049, to drive a car on the ground.
“Sam? Saaaaaam! There’s a dwarfy elf thing on the lawn!”
Sam rolled out of bed. “Quit gibbering, woman! What is it?” He stumbled to the window.
There was a hobbit in the front yard.
“Dwarfy elf thing?” said Sam. “You have to read some Tolkien.”
He went back to sleep.
“Is this what happiness is supposed to be like?” he asked himself. “Am I happy?”
He stepped out of his door. “Have I ever been happy?”
He made his way toward town.
“Oh, right. This makes me happy!” he thought, as his robot hands crushed another puny human head.
Tom Brendlinger often goes by the username of TomBrend.
The floor of the small, drably painted room was covered in sticky notes. Frantic “To Do” lists were scribbled on them, with frequent duplications and repetitions.
A brilliant man had once lived here.
He’d been obsessive-compulsive. That explained the sticky notes.
The battery-powered light bulb he’d swallowed explained the brilliance.
“‘You saved my life, Ratman! How can I thank you?’ – ‘I didn’t save you so you could thank me, Mr. Cheese. I just wanted to eat you myself!’ – ‘Oh no! Help me, someone!”
“Rusty, stop playing with your food!” snapped mother. “Why can’t you act like we normal mice do?”
“They emerged at twenty-three hundred hours and were above sixty major population centers within thirty minutes. For twelve hours they scanned us in ways we don’t even understand.”
“And then they just… left?”
“Yep. Gone.”
“Any theories?”
“We think maybe they were looking for something. And they didn’t find it.”
It was New Year’s Eve, and the world was quiet. There were no people banging on pots and pans, no fireworks, no descending balls of light.
The humans peacefully, mysteriously slept.
Arthur C. Clarke predicted contact with extraterrestrial life in the year twenty-ten.
He was wrong by half an hour.