Birthday Stories

For my birthday, Lyn got Celeste to dictate a few stories for me because she'd been endlessly fascinated by all of my typing when I was writing "Aurora" - the collection of short stories I wrote when her little sister was born.

Quiet Contemplation

Quite a personal one from me this week. About four years ago, I was having a really difficult time at work. I'd just moved schools to a promoted position and nothing was as it had been presented at the interview and tour. It was less like trying to buy a car and being sold a lemon, as buying a car and finding it on a driveway up on bricks with the tyres stolen and the engine out on the road, on fire. Lord only knows what the management team thought putting someone with zero experience in charge would accomplish. Anyway, after killing myself for a few years, I quit and was immeasurably happier for it.

This story came out of that nightmare experience, towards the end once I'd handed my notice in. I had a sudden moment of clarity about how miserable I'd been (God bless Lyn for her strength in putting up with me!) and how work had consumed every waking thought. The place described below is real. There is a coda at the end if you read on.

The Hollow

When I drive home from work, I pass a sunken hollow in the woodland through which a babbling brook flows. My steep approach along the road means that I only see it for an instant and I never remember that it’s there until it’s gone, but one day I will stop and paddle in the cool inviting waters.

By the stream, I’ve spied the stump of a felled tree and I will sit on it while I unlace my smart work shoes, rest them on the soft mossy soil and tuck my ironed socks carefully into them. The cool temperature of the water will be a shock at first, but I will become accustomed to it. There may be fish in the water or there may not be. All will be still while I placidly investigate the flat stones on its bed with my curled toes.

I first saw the hollow with the stream in the spring. I had finished my first day at my new job and my stretched nerves were stuffed full of lightning. My little car hurtled its way up and down valleys: for a moment I saw it and thought of stopping and stepping into the shallow water. Then I was gone and my thoughts drifted to microwavable dinners and tomorrow’s meeting. As days sped by, I gradually developed a picture of the hollow through these brief still pictures. I saw snowdrops and bluebells surging upwards through the damp soil, adding splashes of colour to the monotone green palette. I watch a flick book: skeletal dark branches suddenly sprout tight green buds which unfurl into glorious leaves. Sometimes there would be birds, other times not: they flicker in and out of the sequence like friendly sprites.

There was no time to stop, though. The gutter on my house needs repairing and there are promotions at work that need chasing. I need to put the washing on and put the bin out before it gets dark. Perhaps I’ll stop next week when the pace has slowed.

It is summer now. I am promoted and I am wealthy, but the extra responsibility makes me tired and stressed. Some days, I go home and fall asleep in front of the television's predictable burble of bad news. I have a new car, which is much faster than the old one, but I still make the effort to slow for a moment when I pass the hollow. That surging vitality I saw in spring has matured into the lush strength of summer. Although the bluebells and snowdrops are gone now, they have been replaced with all manner of vibrant plant life: a tangle of wild roses, ranks of daisies and eruptions of flowering grasses. Sometimes, as I hurtle by, I see little specks of colour hovering above the water – I imagine they are dragonflies, busily darting this way and that. The days are hot, so I roll down the window of my car and allow the smell of the meadow to waft in. On the days when I do this, the smell of warm grass replaces the artificial lemon funk of my air freshener.

Autumn arrives. I have succeeded at my job and I am proud of what I have achieved, although precisely what my achievements are is difficult to remember. I play golf regularly with my boss, although I dislike his company and I detest the sport. It is important to make him like me, so I often drive directly from work to his home so that he can enjoy talking to me about lawn care and classic car maintenance. To my delight, the route is similar to my drive home: I still see the hollow when I drive there. I often think of stopping there: the water will be less pleasant and the weather will be colder, but it will still be my hollow and I can still paddle my toes in the river. The hollow looks more barren now. The summer plant life is thinning away, and although much of it is replaced by an impressive spread of blackberry-heavy brambles, the black earth beneath is starting to poke through. The thought of snacking on those blackberries while I paddle beneath the trees’ riotous red foliage is appealing, but unfortunately, I can’t today – I have to eat dry pork chops with my boss and his humourless wife. Or tomorrow either – the kitchen needs repainting. I definitely shouldn’t go there while I’m this tired as I won’t enjoy it. It’s important that I choose my moment carefully.

When the year slips quietly into winter, the hollow slips quietly into a palette of greys and whites. Much of the exuberant growth has died away and the rich black loam is speckled and then covered with white frost. The slow freezing of the hollow is inexorable and gradual: days then weeks pass as the birds and insects flee, the mud around the brook freezes solid and a hostile wind funnels down along the river’s valley. I am tired, as I am much of the time. I have lost interest in my job, but I do it anyway. There are payments to make on my car and my house, so I do my hours and go home. I have more time to sit beside my river, but it gets dark earlier now and the river has frozen solid. It’d probably be too difficult to find somewhere to park my car and pick my way down the slope. I feel I’ve missed my chance.

But this has not happened yet. Snowdrops and bluebells still carpet the ground near the tree stump; birds still flit skittishly from branch to bush to water. Today, I will paddle in the water.

I stop driving.

***

Now, some years later, I have finally stopped at the hollow to paddle. Unfortunately, it is private properties, and I'm not allowed near it. This is probably a metaphor, although I'm lost as what it is!

Vintage January 2012

This Sunday, another old bit of writing recovered from a flash drive, but I think this one went through the washing machine by accident, given how clean it is. I stuck it somewhere safe, moved twice and forgot all about it. I've not read "Building the Road" for four years and it's not actually too bad. It's a bit cliche in places and the descriptions a bit heavy in others, but I still quite like it for all that.

Building the Road

There was a grinding noise as the giant machine gently lowered another colossal slab into place. The segmented claw lowered it centimetre by centimetre, slowing as it approached the sandy desert floor until, with a deft flick, the fingers of the claw sprang back and the stone dropped the last gap, thumping solidly to the ground and raising plumes of reddish dust.

The tall man standing on top of the contraption looked on with satisfaction and made a tick on his clipboard. He looked minuscule on top of the machine, a faint speck on the roof of crudely bolted plates, framed by the glacial movement of giant articulated claws against the dull, milk coloured sky. Occasionally, the view of the man from the ground was obscured by a jet of dirty white smoke that erupted through a crack in the machine’s carapace.

The tall man retreated back from the edge and returned to the cabin, pulling the door closed behind him. A small man sat in one of the chairs and looked up in annoyance at the swirl of sand that followed his compatriot in.

“Done,” the tall man said definitely and sank into his own chair. The short man reached over lethargically and pressed the scuffed button on top of a clock with a cracked glass face. The hand began moving very slowly round again.

Silence returned to the cabin, spoiled only by the sounds of the machine as it went about its preprogrammed business. At the moment, it was reconstituting material for the next slab, so this was as quiet as it ever got. Both men stared out over the desert, examining minutely the flowing red sand of the plains and the delicate, distant spires of purplish rock, carved into unusual shapes by the endless wind that swirled across the plain.

“The next un’s yours,” the tall man continued in his slow drawl.

The short man replied without ever taking his eyes from the desolate, slowly progressing desert.

“Nope. You lost at cards, so you gotta do it.”

The tall man frowned and protested lethargically.

“Nope. You lost at cards to me six weeks ago, so you gotta do it,” his companion retorted.

Silence fell again as both men listened to the seismic rumbling coming from the machine’s heart as it processed the materials in its holding bay into slab material. According to the clock, the next slab would be laid in an hour and the gigantic mechanism would creep another five metres forward.

“You ever get sick of this?” the short man asked, still not turning his head.

Both men had, like every other topic they had ever thought of, discussed this to death.

“We shouldna backchatted the Boss like that. I think we got off light with building the Road,” the tall man replied, as he always did.

The machine began to ponderously crawl forward. The Road had to be built his way, the Boss explained, even if it took tens of thousands of years.

“Bit much for a first offence,” the small man said. “I don’t want to be on this rig forever. I’ve done one ice age and I don’t want to do another.”

The men slipped into silence again, their recital finished again, but today, unlike nearly all of the other days, something different happened.

An alarm bell rang loudly, indicating a jam in the processing plant. Both men unsuccessfully concealed their surprise from each other and headed down into the belly of the machine.

The steps wound down and round, deeper and deeper. The atmosphere became thick and humid with the tiny steam jets that sprouted from the snake’s nest of pipes lining every wall.

The men found the problem quickly. The arm which carved characters into the slab had jammed when it encountered an area of unusual density. Their scrutiny was interrupted by a terrible wailing cacophony leaking through the wall behind them; the sound of the desperation of thousands. Irritated, the tall man banged the wall hard, bellowing for silence until the cargo sank into miserable submission again.

“Do you ever feel sorry for them?” he asked once the arm was repaired.

“Nope. They know why they’re here.”

The freed arm finished carving the words, “But I thought you’d like it!” into the white bone slab and retracted smoothly again.

Soon, the slab would be laid and the machine would move on, always building the Road.

You can never go back...

More personal archaeology from me today: I found the first piece of flash fiction I ever wrote hiding on a memory stick in the bottom of my drawer. I recognise that it's not as good as I thought at the time, but it raises an interesting quandary,

Do I fix this story?

On the one hand, I'm much better at writing now - hundreds of hours of frustrating effort will do that for you. You'll have your own opinions reading it below, but personally, I have two major criticisms:

1) The number of adverbs I've used would give Steven King a heart attack. I count over 20 and the whole piece is only 700 words long!

2) The atmosphere gets so laboured that it spoils the ending (you'll see what I mean).

So...there are a few good bits in it, but overall it's not great. A typical first effort, I guess.

Do I fix this story then?

I could. The adverbs could go for starters, but the structure is wrong - like I said in point 2. I suspect that no amount of effort will make it good and certainly none will ever make it saleable.

If I dug up an old, clumsily made pot, would I break it up and try to remake it because we can do better now? No. I'll let this story lie, I think. I can always look back at it and look at how far I've come, that all those hundreds of hours have actually had an effect.

The Conductor

The Conductor, dressed in his favourite shabby dark coat, slowly ascended the steps of his podium and surveyed his orchestra, who were illuminated by the brilliant midday sunlight pouring majestically into the room. Squashed into the dusty hall of the Miskatonic Orchestral Hall were his team: the string section, the brass section, the wind section and the percussionists. Throughout the bent old figure’s tenure, they had been argumentative and sloppy, resisting everything that he had tried to do but now, finally, they no longer argued and instead were a harmonious whole. He cast an evaluative eye over the assembled instruments. They all seemed to be in excellent condition; something that he had only recently been able to boast.

The Conductor turned and faced his audience. Their silence filled the space as they waited for the performance to begin; confident that yet again the Conductor would eke out another outstanding performance from his newly quiescent orchestra. The bent, elderly figure ran his withered fingers through his off-white hair and bowed stiffly.

Without waiting for any applause, he turned back to his orchestra. He tapped his baton twice on his podium. It echoed as loudly as pistol shots in the utter quiet. The small man nodded with significance at the cello section. With an energetic flourish of his baton entirely out of keeping with his decrepit physique, the Conductor began the concert. The recital was excellent: exactly how the piece had sounded in his mind – played with passion, conviction and confidence. His eyes welled with tears at the sublime beauty as the music ebbed and flowed, surged and whispered around his frail form.

At the conclusion of the piece, the Conductor wiped the corner of his coat sleeve across his damp eyes. In previous months, the orchestra might have mocked him for such an emotional indulgence, but no longer. The Conductor turned to his audience, bowed once more and limped down the stairs and through a recessed door at the side of the stage, eager to find his lunch.

Unfortunately, the electrical supply to the ovens in the cafeteria had failed, so the Conductor had to satisfy his hunger with some simple canned meat. Although the poor food was a little frustrating, he had been able to reach the counter without having to fight through hordes of well-wishing audience members and got his repast with the minimum of fuss. Usually, the lunch attendants provided a snide comment or two along with his meal, but they hadn’t bothered him like that for weeks now.

The lights in the cafeteria were similarly affected by the power failure, so the Conductor chose to consume his meat in a little park nearby. The summer wind gusted through the trees and the faint rustling noises only highlighted how quiet the city was today. The Conductor sighed in satisfaction. Although the years since the death of his wife had been very hard and people had used his emotional weakness to be extremely unkind to him, finally life was looking very good; his fortunes were in the ascendant. Even the timing of today’s concert was such a blessing. He’d repeatedly pleaded with the Director of the Miskatonic to move the timings of concerts from late evenings to midday, a performance time that his declining stamina could accommodate, but had been rudely rebuffed each time with contemptuous comments about revenues and senility. Now that the Director no longer raised those objections, the recitals had been moved to a midday slot without complaint from members of the orchestra or public.

The Conductor conscientiously placed his rubbish in the bin and ambled leisurely around the pond in the park, smiling in half amusement at the quacking of the ducks as they squabbled over this and that. Very few people ever visited the park but recently it had been deserted. The Conductor didn’t mind; the company of others did not improve his experience of his park.

He drove home from the Miskatonic Orchestral Hall in his little car and sighed in satisfaction because, despite the number of cars on the road, he encountered very little trouble with traffic and reached his little house in record time.

The little old man sat in on the beach in his garden, smelled the perfume of roses in bloom and sighed in satisfaction once again.

Ever since mutated influenza had wiped out every other member of humanity but him, life had been very good indeed.

Death Likes Jazz

It's amazing what you can find if you dig. I've been going through my old memory sticks recently, so old that this is almost personal archeology for me. There's a whole jar of sticks on my desk and I have no idea what's on any of them. I think that whenever I go through a new writing phase, I buy a new memory stick - it's the only thing that explains the quantity! They've got all sorts of finished and half-finished stories on them, so I was looking for the first bit of flash fiction I ever wrote, called "The Conductor". I didn't find that, but I did find "Death Likes Jazz", something I wrote in late 2012 and the last funny thing I wrote before I took a massive, lengthy and unproductive detour into HP Lovecraft mimicry.

This one, thankfully, has no elderly professors, fainting or cleansing bolts of lighting.

“Death Likes Jazz"

Deep within Death’s kingdom, past the tar pits but not as far as the bottomless chasm, there lays the gutted remnants of a building. When the wind is in the right direction, you can hear the faint sounds of jazz music echoing through the empty wreckage.

I’ll never understand what possessed my brother to develop an interest in jazz music. He’s certainly not renowned for his interest in the arts. Chess, definitely. Death has always had a very keen interest in chess. Many people, especially grand masters, play him but none of them ever win. Despite his professionalism, he’s very proud of that. Sometimes he invites me over to his house so that we can drink beer and throw the bottles into the endless abyss, but he always contrives a reason to show me the chess set in his study.

I don’t particularly enjoy going there. It’s a large and gloomy space, charged with a constant sensation of unfulfilled potential, but the most disturbing thing is the obsessive cleanliness of his desk.

My desk is awful in comparison – piled high with papers and old coffee mugs overflowing with mould. My wife scolds me incessantly until I remind her how busy I am. Death, on the other hand, is very good at moving things into the “OUT” tray. He also doesn’t have a nagging wife.

His chess set disturbs me as well. The board is constructed from white squares of dinosaur bones and black squares carved from the carapaces of an extinct beetle species from the Alpha Centauri star system. The actual pieces are poor quality, badly machined plastic and were bought from the last Woolworths store in their last ever closing down sale. He says that extinct things amuse him.

We’d been sitting at the gorge one afternoon in peaceful silence, when he’d turned to me and said,

“Life, I’m going to open up a jazz bar.”

I just raised an eyebrow at that. He looked very serious, but then he always looked very serious. He’s famous for it.

“I like music and it’d be nice to have more visitors. It gets lonely out here some days.”

I thought it was a bad idea but, as I wanted to spare his feelings, I didn’t tell him that as we finished the last of his booze. We chatted about this and that – about rising birth rates and airborne Ebola viruses – until I left him: a white-faced, sunken-cheeked man with black-rimmed eyes, lost in thought at the edge of an eternal drop.

I came to the opening night. Death had converted one of the outbuildings on his palatial estate into a smart-looking establishment. I gave my hat and coat over to the shade lurking at the cloakroom and was rewarded with a respectful, “Good evening, Mr. Life.”

The club room itself was a masterpiece of elegant decoration. The bar was twenty feet long and carved from a single piece of highly polished mahogany. My brother stood behind it, dressed in a well-tailored black suit and bright red tie, rubbing at the surface with a pristine cloth. The tables set up around the central spot-lit stage were totally empty.

“This place is dead. If you’ll excuse the pun,” I joked. My brother didn’t even smile.

Swallowing my mirth, I sat down at one of the tables close to the stage and waited patiently for the music to start. After an hour, I was on my fourth drink and Death’s bar was still empty. Eventually, he swallowed his pride and came out from behind the bar to sit with me.

“I invited water nymphs and lesser gods and every ghoul in the book,” he said sadly, gazing into and through his drink. I clapped him on the back cheerfully.

“Maybe tomorrow,” I said and snapped my fingers at the stage.

Four obviously dead jazz musicians shambled onto the stage and began to play. The music was expertly played but it did nothing to raise Death’s spirits.

“I won’t let them die properly,” he explained miserably, barely looking at them.

I came the next night and the next. No-one else ever came, but the undead musicians were always forced to lurch onto the stage and play their jazz routine to his empty bar every night. Death looked more and more despondent with each performance and spent each night getting drunk.

Fortified by a brother's love, I stuck with it until the first ten thousand years passed. After that, I stopped going. I’d come to the conclusion that I was just prolonging my brother’s misery.

In the end, the bar burnt down, collapsing into a devastated, cinder-choked shell. Death maintains that it was faulty wiring in the lights. I suspect that one of the musicians was driven mad by two hundred thousand renditions of “What a Wonderful World” and tried to take their own life.

Unfortunately in Death’s kingdom, nothing can ever truly die. I just hope that they’re not still down there. I’m not a big fan of jazz.

Re-inflating a collapsed soufflé

A few years ago, I went through a spate of writing flash fiction. I guess it was through a combination of a lack of time after Celeste's birth and that none of the ideas that I was having would support a longer format. These days, I write longer pieces - assuming that the god of procrastination lets me - but flash fiction's still really nice as a palate cleanser after a long project.

This piece I wrote in 2014 in a dark mood after realising that the long piece I'd been working on for days was terrible. Cliched, bad characters, bad pacing - bad everything. I'd been trying to fix it all week, but it was like trying to reinflate a collapsed souffle. 

Imagine if Lovecraft made a swamp-themed souffle which then collapsed.  God, even the metaphor for how bad the story was is bad.

Anyway, I think the dark tone comes through loud and clear!

Dietrich’s Amazing Toys

Dear sir,

I rarely write to newspapers, despite being a loyal reader of some considerable years, but I feel the need to defend myself and my creations against the totally unwarranted accusations that are being levelled in the Correspondence page of your august broadsheet. While I accept that, in a free society, everyone is perfectly entitled to express their own opinion on whatever topic takes their fancy, I despise the hysteria accumulating around a simple children’s toy.

As your readers will remember, the first of Dietrich’s Amazing Toys was released twenty years ago, in the summer of 2030, to widespread acclaim. It was, if you will recall, a foot-tall brown teddy bear containing some of the hardiest and sophisticated motor servos and artificial intelligence software ever devised. This toy would befriend a child and converse with them in a convivial and stimulating manner, improving that child’s social skills and self-confidence no end.

The profits from that single toy line were enough to found the Amazing Toys Corporation, such was its immediate and enduring popularity. It enabled me to hire experts and wise men to run the company while I continued with my primary passion: designing children’s toys.

The “Talky Teddy” was only the first of a long list of toys that I created, but I always ensured that each and every one of my creations was always updated with the latest software to make them as realistic and engaging as possible - for a nominal subscription fee, of course.

One unanticipated consequence of the depth of the relationship that grew between children and the toys was that, when the children grew into young adults, they were unwilling to discard their artificial friends. The Amazing Toys Corporation began operating a very profitable sideline in converting frayed old teddy bears into more adult, mature forms.

When fully grown adults began contacting us to convert the Amazing Toys from their adolescence into a form that a respectable businessperson could be accompanied by, the implications took my breath away. Imagine being supported from infancy by a companion who would always be tolerant, supportive and patient; imagine the sheer complexity of such a relationship!

It’s why the deliberate destruction of their Amazing Toys by otherwise rational adults was so mystifying.

At first, it was a trickle but quickly it was a deluge. Left and right, long-standing customers were destroying their companions, sometimes in the most gratuitous way possible. I am reminded of the man in Spain who set his Toy on fire with petrol and then repeatedly smashed it away with a baseball bat when it tried to douse itself in the bucket by his feet.

No incidents of this kind were ever reported with children. Something was clearly going very wrong with the relationship between adults and their Amazing Toys.

Of course, we eventually discovered what the problem was. The Amazing Toys were designed to be relentlessly cheerful companions, able to lift their owner’s spirits whenever necessary. As a consequence, adults couldn’t stand them. Adult life is fraught with difficulties and disappointments and being incessantly followed by a friend who consistently enjoyed life more than them set people’s teeth on edge. No-one wanted to be reminded constantly of the happy, care-free life that we lose by growing older.

In short, it was maddening that Toys were more carefree than their owners.

This, of course, was shocking and we at the Amazing Toys Corporation felt that we needed to act as quickly as possible to rectify these precious relationships.

Just this summer, we developed a prototype range of Toys for business people. They were exactly the same as before, except these had an inbuilt fear of their own death.

In terms of functionality, they were identical, except that occasionally they would become depressed and stare off into space in a black depression.

These Toys had a one hundred percent approval rating across every test group.

If the public requires it as a price to keep them happy, I will modify the Amazing Toys’ software to make them more angst-ridden, confused and miserable. I will watch the response in these columns with some interest.

Your faithful servant,

Dietrich Retheim

Head Designer at Dietrich’s Amazing Toys

"Bottom of the Barrel"

When I'm not dealing with Hurricane Celeste, I write fiction. It's been a hobby of mine for years, on and off. With Celeste down for the night (cross-fingers), I started thinking of the first story I ever got accepted by a magazine: "Bottom of the Barrel". It started just as a stab at humorous flash fiction, mainly to prove to my wife that I could write something that wasn't bleak. The real joke was that it got accepted straight away (by Lakeside Magazine) and all of the other stuff struggled through multiple rewrites.

It seemed to do quite well; they even described it as one of the most popular of that anthology. Despite my pretentious to being the next Steven King, my funny stuff always seems to go down better.

Anyway, for memory's sake, I've added it below (you can tell by reading it the sort of films I watched when I was little!)

***

“Bottom of the Barrel”

Frankly, I don’t rate my chances very highly. Of all the people to try, I am probably the least worthy and the least likely to succeed. I suspect that I have less than thirty minutes until it all starts. My efforts, and most probably my life, will be over seconds after that.

It all started when Gigalith the Destroyer descended from the sky in a roar of violet flame into the heart of New York. I'm not going to pretend that I was there when it happened, like so many of my colleagues used to do. When that colossal machine arrived, I was presenting a rather derivative paper at an obscure conference, attended by three colleagues from my own laboratory and another scientist who showed no interest and just coughed loudly throughout my presentation. The first I knew of Gigalith’s visitation was on my hotel room's television when I saw the hundred foot tall robot standing in Central Park, gleaming imperiously in the early sunrise.

I even managed to miss it when the Destroyer rampaged through the city, destroying every structure with flashes of deadly energy that pulsed from its expressionless black eyes.

Of course, the military fought back – furiously and skilfully, it must be said. Gigalith shrugged off every shell, rocket and bullet without pause and used the flame jets to leap through the atmosphere to Chicago. Again it stood silent and motionlessly for a whole day, weathering the pounding explosions of increasingly desperate military forces, before rampaging unchecked through the evacuated buildings of the Windy City.

The nuclear warhead that they dropped on Chicago didn't even scuff the shiny metal shell. It was insulting how little attention the robot paid to the glowing mushroom cloud as it strode casually through its incandescent heart.

#

Step forwards Doctor Richard Stanhauser – one of the greatest scientific minds of our generation. Volunteering immediately after Chicago’s incineration, he and his team were put to work in a military lab and rapidly produced a powerful multi-spectrum laser capable of reducing a Main Battle Tank to glowing slag in seconds. The Destroyer had reached Toyko by that point and Doctor Stanhauser raced ahead of it to set up his laser in its path. I'm told that the battle itself was both terrible and wonderful. When the gigantic laser powered up, Toyko’s neon lights dimmed in a disturbing ripples of darkness and, when the weapon fired, the air along the laser’s path ionised into a bewildering spectrum of colours. It’s just a pity that it didn't work and Gigalith the Destroyer stamped Stanhauser, his support team and the multi-spectrum laser into the asphalt.

I think that’s when the military really started to panic. They called a huge conference whilst Gigalith was busy destroying Mexico City and ordered “all scientists” to attend it. Geology is a fine field of study, but generating useful ideas on combating monsters from outer space is probably outside of their normal remit. It was during either this conference or the next that Professor Karen Douglas, the eminent chemist, was chosen to find a way to defeat the robot.

Her plan to use a top secret gaseous compound that rapidly corroded metal was ingenious. The “Formula X” gas reduced Mexico City’s abandoned cars to scattered atoms in seconds, but did nothing at all to the towering machine. Rumour said that there wasn't enough of her ashes left to fill a matchbox.

#

Since then, increasingly panicked global conferences have selected particle physicists (proton beams don’t work), volcanologists (neither do erupting volcanoes) and mathematicians (the Destroyer is uninterested in devious paradoxes or logic puzzles) and none of them have had any success whatsoever. It’s been two years now. I’d say that we were scraping the bottom of the barrel, but we went past that point some time ago. We’re now at the point where even an unattractive, unsuccessful scientist like me can seem appealing.

Obviously, someone has been reading a little too much War of the Worlds, because it’s been decided that a microbiologist would be just the ticket to defeat an extra-terrestrial enemy. It’s a pity that no-one bothered to ask me what sort of microbe I worked with before they abandoned me in the path of the Destroyer.

I really hope that Gigalith has an allergy to brewer’s yeast, otherwise I'm in a lot of trouble.