October, 2010 Archives

21
Oct

A Modern Day Chastity Belt

by thegooddoctor in 100 Words

I keep careful track of my house keys. Each one is tagged with a tiny GPS chip so that I can pinpoint their locations at all times. I note every person that has ever touched one in my key journal.

I don’t trust locksmiths, so I apprenticed myself to learn lock making techniques. I developed a special algorithm based on integral wave theory to measure out the grooves, giving my locks the equivalent of 256-bit encryption.

You might consider me excessively cautious, but no one has ever broken into my house.

My key journal has only a single name listed.

14
Oct

A Diligent Man

by thegooddoctor in 100 Words

He thought of himself as a diligent man. He was strict with his friends, strict with his colleagues, strict with family. If he was likely to show favor to anyone, it would be to a complete stranger.

He considered himself fortunate, married to a sober woman, and the father of twins.

He would never force his children to wear identical outfits. Rather, he always provided two thoroughly divergent costumes, one rather fashionable, one utterly hideous. He then required his children to fight for the right to choose, thus teaching them the lesson that life is what you make of it.

13
Oct

Palimpsest

by thegooddoctor in 100 Words

They are faint echoes coloring every moment of my continued existence. You can’t call them memories, not exactly, because they never actually occurred. They are more like dreams. Or possibilities.

Either way, I am haunted.

They say–and by they, I mean the quantum physicists–that prior to its observation, a particle exists in superposition, in every possible quantum state simultaneously. I know this to be true. My world, ever since the moment of the accident, has become superpositioned. There is the world in which she died, or the world in which she’s still alive, and they exist in parallel.

12
Oct

The Sovereignty Network

by thegooddoctor in 100 Words

I think of myself in the singular. Using we to talk about myself strikes me as monarchic.

When I first plugged ourselves into the network, I experienced what one might call a feeling of narrative omniscience. I no longer understand the world through a first person point of view. I now see everything with the polygonal eye of an insect. And I am no longer restricted to one place, but have disseminated myself everywhere.

I don’t like to think of myself as a monarch, but plugging ourselves into the network was what allowed me to assume universal command of Earth.