Weekly Prompt Story: Tramp

http://oneadayuntilthedayidie.com/?p=27539

Spring Break

By Christopher Munroe

Nobody knows how tattoo ink came to be tainted with hallucinogenic drugs.

Maybe it was a problem with their manufacture, or perhaps somebody thought it funny to spike them, but there’s no way of knowing for certain, now.

Anyone who might have had answers is dead, after all…

What we do know is that, during Spring Break, close to two thousand young women, fresh tattoos on their lower backs, were suddenly thrown into uncontrollable, murderous rage.

We did what we could to get away from them.

But by then it was too late.

We were caught up in the Tramp-Stampede…

Kanye West

Kanye West once famously claimed to be a god, but has anybody ever actually worshipped him? Like, full on, Sunday services, preaching the gospel of Versace, Jesus Walks-style worship?

If not, Could we?

I mean, I don’t understand the precise mechanism that was used, but I do know that in Australia an online campaign and some census-based shenanigans led to “Jedi” becoming a recognized, relatively popular faith down under. I can’t imagine it’d be that much more difficult here. It’d take more people, to be sure, but there are a lot more people from whom to find interested potential converts, and at the end of the day who WOULDN’T want to worship Kanye West?

He already has confirmed miracles on the record, after all. For example, the continued existence of his career after half the things he’s said on television. Or Diamonds From Sierra Leone, that tune was killer...

I am not being arch there, Diamonds From Sierra Leone was a hot track. Get the version with the Jay-Z verse, you’ll see what I mean. For his faults as a human, Kanye knows his way around a tune.

With this, plus the sizable name recognition the man commands, in mind, it seems a cinch that five to ten percent of a given country, atheists and agnostics mainly but still, could be persuaded by a sufficiently amusing online campaign to participate in some similar manner of census-based shenanigans, should the law in Canada, or for that matter the States, prove to be similar to that of Australia and census-based shenanigans be all that was required.

I’m not sure we could get people to “Do” anything for this, but I bet we could convince them to check the “Other” box for religion and write in “Kanye-ism” if doing so would create a new religion to add to the pantheon of the West.

Pardon the pun.

And, if we can do this, shouldn’t we? Some would say no, indeed some would say that being able to do something is among the worst reasons to actually do that thing, but to those I say: Whom would it hurt, to check a box and write in a word? Nobody I can see, and it would provide an amusing little trifle with which to pass the time…

And Kanye would appreciate, I think, finally receiving the worship he appears to believe he deserves…

It would be fun.

And, when entering into the Church of Yeezy West, the Latter-day Saint, we would always remember: Bring the man his damn croissant.

Weekly Prompt Story: Wave

...a day late due to Horror Con, but here it is nevertheless!

http://oneadayuntilthedayidie.com/?p=27533

Dancing

By Christopher Munroe

I’m not too old to hit up a nightclub.

I mean, an alternative club, and basically only on retro night every other week, but still, proof of concept. I can still go dancing, and by god I do!

Scene kids in our thirties, now, enjoying one another’s company in impeccable style, soundtracked by the goth/indie tunes of the ‘80s and 90s, and fun is had every damn time.

It’s an important part of who I am.

And when the Pixies play, you better believe I’m on the floor…

On a wave of mutilation.

Wave of mutilation.

Wave of mutilation.

Wave…

Life

They spent years working, the programmers, and as they did they grew closer to one another than they ever thought they would. But however hard they tried they couldn’t quite develop the system of their dreams. They knew that artificial sentience, artificial life, was within humanity’s grasp, but however close they came it always seemed one step further away.

He lapsed into despair, on occasion. She did what she could to keep his spirits up. And, he realized as they worked side by side, month after month, he was growing over time to love her for that.

And she, not that he knew this, was growing to feel the same.

One night, in a bleak mood after one more failed test run, he commented that he was considering packing it in, giving up once and for all, that the project they’d undertaken was simply too much, too complex for them to accomplish. He told her they were wasting their time attempting such a major stride when they could simply settle down somewhere in the private sector, make themselves very wealthy indeed and allow artificial sentience to happen upon humanity as it would, in the fullness of time.

And, much though she hated to admit it, she found herself agreeing. Progress had been slow to nil, and she too had developed her doubts, much though she loved both the work and the man she was working with. But love, even true love, is not enough to justify a fundamentally failed endeavor and, embracing him, she agreed that yes, their quest to create artificial life was finally over.

“After all,” she added with a blush as she pulled back from the embrace, “we could always just create life the old fashioned way, if we wanted it that much…”

Seventeen years later, after the bodies had been buried, at the trial, they couldn’t help but regret the decision.

It turns out they were even worse parents than they were programmers…

Weekly Prompt Story: Ounce

http://oneadayuntilthedayidie.com/?p=27499

Prevention

By Christopher Munroe

And ounce of prevention, they say, is worth a pound of cure.

And if that’s true, what would a pound of prevention be worth? Or a tonne?

What if we could prevent everything? Surely this would be the ultimate cure, solving every problem, everywhere, forever?

To this end, I’ve devoted my life to the concept of entropy, the idea that all systems in time inevitably break down, and spent my effort doing whatever I could to speed up the process.

Because prevention is greater than cure.

And in that light, the heat death of the universe can’t come quickly enough…

The Future

We’ve put a robot the size of an SUV on the surface of Mars.

I know this, because I’ve been in communication with said robot.

I subscribe to it, you see, and it sends me messages via a computer the size of a planet that we built by combining every computer on earth and allowing them to communicate with one another.

I access this planetary supercomputer via a phone that itself has more computational power than the shuttle we used to travel to the Moon nine years before my birth.

Oh, yes, and we travelled to the Moon. Nearly a decade before my birth.

While we were walking on the Moon, Mars was the stuff of stories, defined to us only by that which we imagined it might be. Now we have a presence there, learning what it can that we might one day go there in person and sending the information back to Earth, back to me, back to anyone interested enough to pay attention.

We have a robot the size of an SUV on the fucking surface of fucking Mars, and it is my friend on Twitter, and we made that happen. Humanity did that. We reached up into the heavens and put that robot there and it shows us what it sees and any and every one of us has the ability to watch it, it is the future that we are living in and it is a glorious fucking future indeed.

But I digress…

You were saying something about how you think we as a culture have gotten dumber due to our choices in popular media?

Weekly Prompt Story: Try

http://oneadayuntilthedayidie.com/?p=27448

Trying New Things

By Christopher Munroe

I’ll try anything once.

Well, twice, the first time you might screw it up, there’s really no telling whether you enjoy something based on the first time you try it.

But yeah, I’ll try anything. Twice. It’s important to maintain that level of open-mindedness, it keeps you open to new experiences, new ideas you might not otherwise have come to.

It keeps you young.

“Do one thing each day,” as they say, “that terrifies you.”

And so I have.

And that, in summery, is why I’m standing in the middle of your living room, in the nude, juggling live cobras…

My Weekend Plans

The weekend has come and, for the life of me, I find myself torn.

I’ve not yet seen the Entourage movie, you see, but so too have I to date missed Human Centipede III. Given that I work evenings, I only have a realistic chance of catching one or the other, and tough decisions must therefore be made.

In one film, lips are firmly, permanently attached to the ass of a person only a little ways ahead, seemingly never to be removed, as all are imprisoned at the whim of a screaming madman, trapped in a system beyond either their understanding or control. This movie sucks, it goes without saying, a whole lot of ass.

In the other, a centipede is made out of the still living bodies of humans.

Would I like to see both? No, no clearly I would not. Given my druthers I would watch neither, but there are times when my druthers are not to be had, and as such I must watch at least one, and to that end tough choices await me as I decide which one it shall be…

Huh?

What do you mean I DON’T have to watch at least one?

Both films are purely optional? Really?

You don’t say…

Well, that solves that problem for me, I suppose. Perhaps I’ll go to karaoke this weekend…

Weekly Prompt Story: The Tenth Anniversary of the 100 Word Stories podcast!

http://oneadayuntilthedayidie.com/?p=27436

Happy Anniversary

By Christopher Munroe

Ten years ago today a man had a dream that he would write a 100-word story a day, every day, forever.

They may have called him mad, but here he is a decade later, keeping up the pace he’s set for himself, providing us our daily story sustinence.

And we, his Sunday writers, have joined him, pledging ourselves to his quest, writing our prompts and sending them in, rain or shine, without end as the years go by.

Because he won’t be done until the day he dies.

And if we ever want to stop, we have to kill him…