Bogus Shorts

By Kevin Williams

this is a collection of 36 short stories, in a variety of styles,
sf, fantasy, blogs, horror, medical, humor... whatever struck me
.stories range in length from 200 to 25,000 wds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kevin Williams
• Release date: Oct 4, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463832370

Kevin Williams

ANNOUNCEMENT.For my ten year anniversary here? New covers+ upgrades for everything!At a million words a week, I should be done by the end of feb.(Man! Had everything proofed before posting. Shoulda been after.)Oh, the AI rev? Bring it.Stealing market share, capturing a demographic, developing a fan-base?That's the game. Always has been.Unfortunately, so are goons, thieves and legislation. Luckers, people.Latest novels:The Finest Evil in the System : AI Woes Jan 2024FANTASY Aaron+Henna: The Elfin Princess's Kiss may 2023SF: Teddyhunter Rogue planets June 2023BOTH The Finest Evil in the System : AI Woes Jan 2024Shorts : The Finest Evil in the System; Loons, goons + booms.Novels are usually 100,000 words: freebies vary. (And might be ANYTHING!)If you don't fall over laughing at least once while reading, the book is a failure.Other than that, SF is the lit/philosophy of western urbanization.Problem-solvingthe effect of techon peoplevia new mythology.Beware, you MAY learn something. Or think a bit here and there, even in the comics..Cartooning? Does-is-ought. Take a does, show what it is, (is is?) discuss the ought. (ie: table= work-server= that gossips)SF? what if, then what, so what?Fantasy? Any sufficiently advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic. (Characters in conflict over issues)***Readers are welcome to proof-read; if I think it's a good correction, it goes in. (just send an e-mail, book-name + quoted line) Thanks. (One long-suffering reader got a few books dedicated to him.)On a personal note; I've got nearly 2 million words published at smashwords.com now. SF + fantasy novels, cartoons + short-stories.Jeez, lemme see; This whole mess got started in grade school; shorts in HS; novels after. (first one done in pencil.)Dozen or so 80,000 word novelettes (mostly type-writer.); first computer stuff, 80's; novels+shorts.Years of zines, quarterlies, novels, cartoons; (apple-clones, compacts, pcs) '86: BBSing a shorts echo (rogue-bone), blogs and cartooning. I THINK I can add another million words there. Maybe. Most of them are lost unless some old CD backups turn up.2021: Dead tree? If you don't make the best-seller list with your first novel today, you don't get a second. An 8-million web-wonder hit is entry-level stuff. (for movies. An ebook best seller is 10,000 or so) I think my count is 43 currently published over 8 years; and another dozen or so early works lost.******************* WARNING! * Live and live, (long i vs short) tho and thou. I use thou as tho sometimes. It's the most common complaint. Mostly edited out, but I still do.******************Writing has been a hobby of mine since the third grade, and was an ambition even earlier. Cartooning, music + philosophy are other bad habits I keep up. (Plus a few secret ones I'm NOT telling you about, so there!)Zining SF cons with shorts for years (on the freebie table) was a hobby. Well, till charging for intros,(lessons) freebie-table placements and contests became common. It was fun; quarterly editions, mostly. Fantasy, horror (Halloween), children's (Christmas), romantic comedy, (Valentines, st pats) hard SF, on july 1st or world con.Most are in the short-story collections, tho I'm still writing the occasional one today.Enjoy, thanks, pass it on! (Have a day of it, eh?)

Book preview

Bogus Shorts

By Kevin Williams copyright 2018

Smashwords License Statement Smashwords Edition. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover Art:Escher_Waterfall.jpg

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction and similarities to persons living or dead is a coincidence.

Canadian ISBN:978-1-988261-21-8

ISBN: 9780463832370

Dedicated to John Bee. He was right, I need help.

Author’s Note: Fan-mail, biz, complaints and suggestions to [e-mail]

Kevin Williams is on

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/packrat2

https://kevinwillpkgd.tumblr.com

He authors an SF series, Teddyhunter: (about runaway teddybear robots), a few books of short stories, comics and the Aaron+Henna fantasy series. The first in every series is usually a free ebook.

Teddyhunter

• Teddyhunter: The Underground

• Teddyhunter: The New World Order

• Teddyhunter: The Nano-zombie War

• Teddyhunter: I Can Get Better In The Parking-lot!

• Teddyhunter: The Neanderthal Gene

• Teddyhunter: New Genes

• Teddyhunter: Baby-Blues

• Teddyhunter: The Underground Railway

• Teddyhunter: Blob2

• Teddyhunter: Rogue Worlds

• Teddyhunter: Right in the Shorts

• Teddyhunter: 2022 shorts

Aaron+Henna

• The Gateway Project

• Girl-Ghost

• Aaron+Henna: The Witch-Wizard War

• Aaron+Henna: The Singing Sword

• Aaron+Henna: The Way of The Rat

• Aaron+Henna: The Terrible Twos

• Aaron+Henna: Summer Rain

• Aaron+Henna: Broken Magics

• Aaron+Henna: Dirty Float

• Aaron+Henna: Dragon-Witch

• Aaron+Henna: Teen Learns

• Aaron+Henna: The Elfin Princess’s Kiss

• Aaron+Henna: Short Stories

UFO Observer (comic)

• UFO Observer Book 1

• UFO Observer Pt Two Book 2

• UFO Observer Part Three Book 3

Shorts!

• Shorts From All Over

• Christmas Shorts

• The Apprentice’s Shorts

• The NWO: The Orderlie’s Silent Spring V2.

• Bogus Shorts

• SF Shorts

• By The Shorts

• 2021 Shorts

• 2022 Shorts: Odds and Ends

• Shorts 2023

comics

• Friday The 13th Sex-cult Problems

• Stalking Millionaires

• The Pour Witches of Fenwick

Canada

• The Cold Grows, The Roads Shrink P2

• The Maple Dyraid Life

sf • JoyToy:Singularity

FEITS

• The Finest Evil In the System: Omnibus

• The Finest Evil in the System: Goons, Loons and Boons

• The Finest Evil In the System: AI Woes.

***

start

Humph. Another 36 stories, one a Tracker HS story. (Found a 35 page I pared down a little. Gotta be 45 years old. Self-editing on that scale is a lot like giving yourself a lobotomy, really… Bist gnerk hasonly! Rasah.)

Enjoy. Some of these have been published before, some are from the bonus materials at the end of novels, some rediscovered rants.

There are a couple of them I can’t bear to read anymore. Feel free to skip them.

***

chapter 1 happy-girls

-I have several of these hill-billy stories somewhere. I suspect most of Acadia and NB of inbreeding. (Sigh). Yes, I’m related to ‘em.

Prelude: Autumn. The darkness grows, morning-mist makes the hill-shadows moist all day. There’s more than momma skunk kicking the kids into the wild up there too. Here’s a real horror for you.

***

First things first. These low hills are 3.5 billion years young here, some of the first granite ever made. There’s lots of it and the monsters in the hills are old too. Nobody knows how old; the local snack-food bugging them about it doesn’t tend to work out very well.

We have a small clan out here; more than a few of us on more than a few small farms, a couple old mica mines and the like. Some rare earth deposits, ‘way too small to be commercial. Not much outside traffic around here; not enough votes or money for anyone to blast decent roads in. Our elders pay govt not to, actually. Mostly in happy-girls when the inspectors do fly by, mostly because we don’t have anything else fun here.

(My ed said to tell you happy-girl is our brand of pot. I asked if I should explain that, too.)

Elders are a pain. Gramps is a snoopy old man always interested in kids forcing growth of any new powers. Too interested, by most of us. See, you don’t force extra power, that’s dangerously stupid.

Almost all of us have one or two anyway, that’s why we’re out here. Hey, if you had personal anti-gravity every government in the world would find good and pressing reasons to rip it out of you as fast as they could. Or kill you to stop anyone else from getting it.

Puberty is hard around here, seeing how most of us do develop something special about that time. (You should hear the girls talk about that sometime. Wowsers!) Yes, your voice still breaks. An erratic mind-reader might see porn from Hong Kong and miss his mom standing beside him; till they grow out of it anyway. What comes of blind forced-development always made lots more trouble than it was worth, everyone knew that.

Here in the swamp we had enough trouble without going out to look for it. More than bears, too.

Huh? Teleporting? Man! Think infrastructure. A couple years of really intense effort, luck and better thinking than you’ve ever done before and maybe you learn how.

But without a sense of direction better than birds, being able to visualize better than Rembrandt and energy enough to move anything at all? The results were usually so grisly and no one with an ounce of sense ever tried it again. Most never get to try it twice, in fact. And there’s things out there worse than gramps and just as interested in power too. Yeah, more trouble. The Canadian shield is old and has lots of snoopy old monsters living here.

The monsters? A collection of weird pre-dino types smart enough to survive multiple ice-ages, comets, asteroids, flying saucers and us. Like billion year old dyraids that don’t like all these modern newfangled trees and slime molds that could eat New York. Dragons, the originals.

There’s both loners and hidden colonies of stuff. Which reminds me, be careful where you wander up here. Very careful. Do not go into caves blind, for instance. Or at all, really. Trust me.

Anyway, they’ve been here a while. Not that any of us are a billion years old or anything, tho Uncle Eddie won’t admit to being young anymore. Like gram and gramps, he can lead you to lots of hidden viking road-signs carved into boulders, so no one argues with him about it. He knows better than to experiment, too. We the clan young already knew if you weren’t born with a power, it was a long, hard road s′killing it, or even developing anything at all. Most of what did come out was usually insanely erratic, had unpredictable side effects and was very dangerous.

Connecting sound good? Want all those private thoughts accidentally broadcast to everyone within seven miles instead? Live, in color and with a running commentary by your hind-brain. Or maybe you connect to a primal scream from something that won’t go away.

The anything part was what interested gramps, as we all knew. New silliness, ha! Having a mental F-1 racer dropped in our little swamp was interesting, but kinda useless. No roads, no fuel, a 900 horsepower something-or-other that spent more time going sideways than anything else. Neat, but a real steep learning curve without any backup, facilities or cultural infrastructure.

Newbie powers didn’t last very long. The ones that did survive usually left awfully fast.

You learned not to power up; it was hard to do and made lots more trouble than it was worth. Plus gramps and the old ones were always watching. Not that a couple of us didn’t try, right?

Lemme tell ya about a cousin of mine and Jef, who hated it here in the granite hills.

***

The latest problem for our backwoods clan was Shelly; Shelly was too cute for words.

The look on gram’s face said it all; she was covering for girls even as she tossed one of her less-than favorite great-great grand-daughters under the bus. Shelly was the problem, but what she’d been taught was the bigger issue no one was talking about. What happened after was all her own nickel, tho. No one was talking about the prenups; female magics were still an unspoken reality here.

They were allowed, see. Guy-magic, not so much unless it involved hitting something bigger than you in the face and getting away unscathed.

Girls are born playing politics; mostly looking for boyfriends I guess. Or a tribe or something. Around here, the local femmes get really, really good at jerking around the few single grunts we have running around loose. Typical small town, right? Supportive, preventive, curative power-trips from a desperate cutie? No. Loot, rape and pillage any handy resources for their nesting-aims was a lot more likely.

Huh. Nesting, social climbing, personal fulfillment. Girls aren’t really that different from guys, are they? Eat, bend over, sleep. Then look for someone to blame your troubles on.

Anyway, politics. The art of getting people to do what you want them to do and like it. Easier for cuties and other super-communicators and Shelly was exquisite in every detail. An absolute power corrupted absolutely.

Getting good at making guys do anything she asked them to do with a wink and a snozal was first. Soon that wasn’t enough and Shelly went deeper, remolding her grunts from reflexes on up, making them into what she needed. A couple got very good at learning what she wanted them to do, no matter how vile or complicated.

These antics were hard on the lads. Using grunts for stuff they were never designed to do broke the boys fast. Worn them down-and-out. New powers popping out were not unknown at her place, all burn-out ones.

A couple fights, a couple breakdowns and a couple almost-suicides later Shelly left her homestead in a hurry, gramps hot on her cute little tail. The girl had new magics; new and of the oldest kind. While this wasn’t pre-cog or anything else you got used to dealing with here… (Yes, pre-cog. How do you think we managed to stay hid? By staying out of trouble before trouble even knew we were there.), Shelly’s latest trick was definitely an elder-attracting pain.

Have I mentioned the elders from the swamp around here yet? The run-screaming if you do part? You’ve never met one, obviously. You won’t be asking.

Anyway, Shelly. She’d concentrated on and taken feminine wiles to a brand new level; her boyfriends were mere drones awaiting impulses now. Psycho-zombies. Completely brain-dead unless she wanted them otherwise, then near-genius sociopaths. Completely reprogrammed to fulfill her tiniest whim with new limbic reflexes, emotions built and configured their hypothalamus; and brand new powers too.

If she thought to ask for them. Shelly didn’t always, she was not one of the brighter girls here.

It only took a couple of days for the drones to follow her out, Jef included and that made another whole mess to deal with. Gram was stuck here trying to get a lot of very frustrated young ladies to behave again. Gramps hit the road to get the boys back.

I sneak, that’s my skill. That went into play. Next up. Shelly Queen-bee and the zombie-drones of Montreal.

***

Getting there late didn’t help me any, or slow me down. I just hung near the cop-shop to find our fleas and as I figured, a couple drones got pulled for littering, walking around in public and not having good tongue-police references fast. They’d got DNA sampled while in the tank and kicked right back out on the streets when they came out as clean, just english. And stupid.

It is to laugh. It didn’t really matter the clan had been living here as long as Mont-royal had been about; DT Montreal was on another purity-kick and the officials were trying to kick cash out of stones again. (Make your own horrid rolling-stone jokes at this point. Hey, we live here and already know passionates are not terribly developed, tolerant or sophisticated. It’s my way or mayhem with most of them.)

If they know anything about it.

No one was worried about city-hall doing anything; the evidence room hereabouts had been treated by the local force as petty cash, a staff prank-pit and the black paint of vengeance for hundreds of years.

Our village elders drag kids out of here often enough we had our own backdoor, operator-on-call and a couple robes sympathetic to the cause. The cause was keeping stupid kids out of their hair, in case you’re wondering. There’s a lot of that around our place too.

That might change when the Baffin Island iron-mine opens up, but today? Criminals were an expense. I picked our flakes up outside the jail and followed them home. Pain ruled and Shelly was following tradition here, from their talk. She would not be pleased with them.

People do their thinking with Darwin awards and elders figured they deserved whatever happened to us, including them. Montreal, my village and the swamp types were all the same. Brute force ruled; not freedom, liberty, privilege and prerogative. Not duty and responsibility. Not shame, guilt, dread. Not greed, vanity, power. Not results.

Not even a grumpy god demanding sacrifice, loyalty or skills. (The hill swamp-elders laughed at the great old ones back in the day. The first gods? Great old ones were millions of years old. The swamp-elders around here were BILLIONS of years old and preferred to act like none of them even existed yet.)

Pain, and lots of it. We were still at a sit-in-garbage-and-die level and all the elders enforced that with malicious glee.

(Bah. My best guess was the smart ones had moved on long ago; the one-year-of-experience 500 billion times types were what we had to deal with now. A mighty deep rut to fall into, right? Short-sighted, short-tempered and short. Mean and petty; nasty, brutish and that was gramps in your shorts.)

Everyone else around here was worse and that included Shelly and Montrealers.

***

Shelly had taken over an apartment somehow; charming new roomie was my best guess as he looked like a twad. The idea of having a live-in female street-gang at his place must’ve appealed to him. I got there just minutes ahead of gramps, the local constabulary and unfortunately, not long after a wandering swamp-elder had gone thru.

That was weird. It took the second-coming of chrism to even get a blink from most of swamp types but there was one here today, working Shelly’s moves.

The door was open, the place silent. I hadn’t noticed a thing till walking in and had no idea why everyone was interested in Shelly’s magic. It looked mundane to me, hardly more than a bent mother’s-milk, but apparently she was getting deep enough one of the old-school swamp-elders was awake and snooping out her action.

Well, that’s a lie. Swamp-elder’s don’t snoop. Most of the ones I knew of were firm devotees of the ‘kill-em-all-and-let-their-god-sort-it-out’school of problem-solving. Maybe this one just liked coming into town for smoked-meat sandwiches, tho. Maybe he owed gramps a favor, after gramps had arranged for something to happen to him. You can never tell with these guys. Or gramps.

Anyway. Food was still cooking in the apartment when I walked in the open door. Krap-dinner, but… it was quiet. Eerie-quiet. The bodies were still. Everyone in Shelly’s place had been… Erased, as far as I could see. Gone. Electronic enemas that removed memories. Most of them needed diapers changed.

Killing the stove, I moved faster. This might be catching, right?

It was a whole apartment of live-but-quiet types, like they’d forgotten how to make noise. Motor nerves were still functioning, hearts beating, eyes blinking and so on. I shrugged. The wiring these kids had spent years getting into place would probably recover fast, nerves were like that. So were personalities. Starting with hungry, and soon. Time to go.

Nothing missing, just cleared. One of the chaired grunts was already staring at a remote in his hand like he almost knew what it was.

Everyone was erased including Shelly. A kind gesture, I figured. The elder could’ve just vanished them, or stopped their hearts enmasse. Wondering if they’d volunteered forgetting over death, I left before gramps arrived and recruited me into the messy part getting the veggies back home.

Jef waved me across the street to him outside. He hadn’t gotten erased. Remember Jef? He hates granite, liked Shelly and had missed the troubles inside due to being on a latte-run for the gang. The quiet and my sneak had alerted him to stay away. Little bro Jef was why I was here in Montreal at all, right?

He had coffee, lots of it. We yakked. Gramps appeared in a truck and went right into the apartment, not even noticing Jef and I hiding between a couple tarp-garages across the street. He had the police with him and everyone seemed serious and intent.

That’s when things started getting interesting so we left.

***

Pines at the top, moose-muck at the bottom. Hills, trees, rocks and yuck!

Arrogant Worms rip-off. I grunted, worming my way thru the crowd. Being a sneak, I could walk on any bus, train or plane I wanted. No one complained as I slid thru the press. Old song, bro. Get a new one.

Jef could not sneak. In fact, being young and stupid he attracted more attention than I really wanted to think about. I don’t wanna go back to those stinking hills. Jef complained uneasily. The girls there get pregnant if you look at them hard.

I shrugged. Walk, then. County poor-house is right beside the jail. Or the hostel. Sign in anywhere and gramps’ll pick you up in an hour or so. You might get yourself erased twice, tho.

I can hitch to Winnipeg, or better yet, Van. Jef groused, looking around nervously.

Yeah, I hear Uncle Lester is on good terms with a few squash. He might like seeing you up there. Or anywhere north, really. I snorted at him. It’ll be a lot easier to go home see what they did to the rest of your gang.

I can’t sneak like you. If I’m home, they’ll know. Jef was very unhappy. And get after me.

He was complaining too much and that was a bad sign. Ok, what did Shelly ask you to do? I rumbled out as little bro chewed on the edge of his coffee cup. He was getting hungry. You got something out of this. Gramps wants it erased, but it’s something you want to keep. What is it?

Shelly? Nothing. Ah, she’s just a bitch making warlords. Nothing new. Instead of 24/7 relationship or fun, it’s 24/7 working it with her. Little bro did not seem impressed with whatever Shelly had done.

Since It’d gotten an elder out of the swamp and into DT Montreal after her, I sure was.

Shell worked it and you. Jef went on uneasily. Bull, violence and delusion. Not gramp’s weirdness either. Some got bent trying to get away, that’s all.

That one mostly got past me, but a grunt and nod kept Jef happy. I could see how the other girls would be very keen. They’d be keen to get anyone working for them and if this Shell-game made work out of whine from anyone at all, they’d all be interested. Intently interested.

Shelly would hurt if you tried to get away. The harder you squirmed away, the more she hit your sore spots. Jef confessed uneasily, looking embarrassed.

Everyone there had a glitch. I nodded. The Shelly-pest was a nurse, a good one and knew all the weak spots. She’d