Keep It Regular
He watched the beach inside the egg timer slow to a trickle and then he watched the last grain halt. Every particle invested with a meaning not obvious from a surface read. They called him and his kind Screens, because they occupied…
Chanticleer One sat down and looked at Chanticleer Two. ‘Are you a punk?’ ‘Yeah, hardcore.’ ‘How does that affect how you act as a time traveller?’ ‘I’m not sure. I mean, my brother Jeff is a straight edger, so he is careful…
Carlyle sat outside the Writing Recruitment Centre, known colloquially as Work Centres. They were giving spelling tests as a warm up for the National Spelling Bee. The Reality Corps had been put together not long after The Exquisite Corps was heard of,…
He’d been a drop-point for undercover Reality Engineers for a very long time. Sometimes they’d use very significant tomes to contain their ciphers, and sometimes he’d see them dropping off what seemed to be humorous asides. Everyone knew Bentham Holmes though –…
Strung between calendars and diaries. It was a lie that Reality Engineers had to first craft a mini-universe from a haiku, but they had to be able to full understand what was around them, so that they would notice when things had…
Zengler was an odd fish; Angler in the Typing Pools; liked to call books Reality Tablets. He thought of writers as con-artists – especially Immaculate Authors, who he called perpetrators of the longest con. Who was their mark? Anyone who picked up…
They’d been storing it between the pages of an old book. They’d been hiring poets and prose writers back then – ones that they could plonk down in front of a hack-rig and have them write something convincing enough to capture a…
Chenry watched the pig saunter off into the bushes. He had chosen as his metaphorm, a Pig-Pen. They were not as common as Bloop-Hens, but they did farm them out in the Clue Hinterlands, where they formed Heards. You fed them on…
A beacon activates deep in the Unscripted Realms. He can’t find the words – they are jammed up in his throat, and it looks like silence, but being mute isn’t about quiet, so much as it is about trapped communication. He sees…
He bent over the book, cracked it open, broke its spine, and started to go to work on the meat of it. It wasn’t pretty, carving it up – crafting something entirely new from the flesh. Hinge words swung through the new…