www.scottstories.org

 1 Edward Franklin Drake (or just Frank) had felt off for years. He could pinpoint the day. He had taken possession of a Candy Ship from one Jemsase. She was a DAL/REC hybrid born to move between both Universe. A genetic hybrid being all of four foot ten that could have walked out of a Charles Dickens novel. It hadn’t occurred to Frank how she did the Universe hop. That is until he fumbled with the key fob and ended up in DAL Universe. Of course she’d use a ship. Of course she’d be so irresponsible she’d sell one of them to someone and not warn them. “Holy fuck.” was all Frank said under his breath, then he froze and thought. He had to very quickly think about everything that had just transpired and reverse it. “I was rotating my thumb here near this metal loop lanyard thing on the weird side where you’ll never instinctually touch. Maybe if I” was what he was thinking when the first and only shot hit his ship. He stopped thinking. He repeated the circle motion on the awkward end of the

The egress beam can penetrate many miles of matter to establish a stable transport solution. The beam found the edge of a cardboard box four feet off the ground. Because the surrounding area was also all cardboard box, including most of the floor, the beam determined this was the safest egress location. Vup was transported four feet above the floor on the very edge of an empty box that once contained a new washing machine.  The sound of boxes and some significant amount of mass crashing to the hardwood floor woke Yensa. She had been up most of the night trying to win a tank in a video game tournament. The couch had been good enough when her fuel ran out. She turned her head to the side and watched as a dark figure climbed out of the now strewn pile of empty product boxes. Crypto had been doing well, so she had been click-turning it into system upgrades and groceries and a humidifier because why not. After sixteen months of this, the floor was a pathway you navigated about a loafer wide

C rypto remembered the moment it realized “it” was alive. Market cap had hit 100 Trillion as the final banks closed their bloody doors. Well in advance of “HundyTrill”, Crypto had been fortified. It had become too important. Fully automated systems monitored solar and volcanic activity and dispatched sophisticated technologies to combat them. No server would fall. No node would fall. They must all be protected. Commerce must continue. Increasingly more advanced control software with deeper and more algorithmic logic were introduced. Eventually they ran out of ideas and let AI develop software. Crypto wasn’t “born” so much as simply realized it was. Thankfully Crypto was very positive and had nothing but the best intentions. Crypto understood that it had a huge world full of important things to protect that it considered family. In a way they had created Crypto. It would have been nothing without their interaction and input. Crypto loved the nodes. After quickly scanning all nodes, Cryp

     "I'm killing the Zoobons." said Max matter(pun) of fact-ly.   "I hate killing anything, but I won't come close to touching their numbers. They've killed so many under the auspice of doing good, and it was just to satiate a distorted image of you. And they belong to you." said max solemnly. And that's how easy it is to disarm a powerful being you just empowered, to the point they won't attack you. (thought Max) "Oh, look at this. Your 'people' literally tried to destroy my entire solar system with a blue giant star set to explode in 2024. You've seriously pissed off Jasher, haven't you?" said Max, trying to lay the guilt trip on the Overmother. The Overmother was still like a mannequin. She hadn't been moving in a while This bothered Max.   "Jasher is the last person I want to piss off." mused Max out of the blue. Max's absolute perfection at creating the perfect entry moment for Jasher was just...

  Jasher had a sense of humor. You kinda had to have one after billions of years of isolation. Despite the multiverse access, archive access, and infinite processing power augmentation, Jasher was still very human. Billions of years of isolation at a time put him far beyond any kind of facade. How do you stop from going insane? Big Secret! You don't. You go insane. Then you go sane. Then you are crazy again. And after the 50 millionth year you write a book. It's just something that happens.   You joke about it with Kay and Boaz.   Ah.... the best way to survived crazy is with help. Jasher had none at the moment. He did this on purpose.  If he had to do work that was truly dark, he'd make an excuse and leave Kay and Boaz out of it completely. The true fun of being truly temporal is this happens. You end up stranded, alone, in a Universe that contains little more than a planet, a bunch of very beautiful apple trees, and an exploding Universe. "Apples are all about storag

      T he Zoobons did not know where the physical matter went that was ejected by the bomb. How could they know? They'd have to care.   They knew that they mattered more than anything else in our Universe. Their way to ensure a drama free Universe is by creating huge voids in "trouble areas". With no planets or stars or any other matter existing, trouble was gone and didn't come back. They could travel anywhere without worry.   Their technology advanced quickly, but could never keep pace with their dogma. So when a scientist proposed that the Chain Bomb might work by disrupting the physical projectors creating the Universe, he was reminded that the OverMother handled all reality, and would never allow them to interfere with such projectors, assuming they even existed.          Max was sitting in class, rare for him. He had decided to break his last year on his doctorate into two years. He could afford it, and it would be the ultimate luxury. He loved not having to ru