Science-fiction short stories, mostly from the less-serious end of the spectrum. You'll find zombie presidents, talking sharks, world-endangering sub-woofers, coffee-toting terrorists, an unhealthy number of 80s references and a whole lot more. Th...
A/N: The prompt for this one was pretty simple - exactly 5000 words, inspired by the picture below.
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There are a million stories in the Aqua City. Obviously, not exactly. Although, I guess, if you think about it, it's possible that there might be a million. But not very likely. I mean, what are the odds? Pretty low, I'm guessing. Like, one in a million. So, when I say a million, I mean a lot. A shedload. A bunch. A heap. Like, you might think there's a whole lot of M&Ms in one of those big party-size bags, even after you throw away the blue ones, but that's nothing compared to how many stories there are in the Aqua City. Even if you took a hammer and whacked the crap out of that bag, until all the M&Ms were smunched up into little tiny pieces, there would still be more stories in the Aqua City than there are pieces of smunched-up M&Ms. Even if you left in the blue ones. Actually, if you're going to smunch up M&Ms with a hammer I recommend just smunching up the blue ones because you were probably going to throw them away anyway, and they may as well serve some purpose. Then you can eat the rest, which if you'd left in the bag to get smunched, still wouldn't have made enough pieces to come even close to how many stories there are in the Aqua City and therefore would have been sadly wasted. Although, now that I think about it some more, if you really, really, really smunched up those M&Ms, like right down to their component molecules, or if you could somehow get a large-hadron-collider hammer and smunch them down to quarks, then you probably would have more pieces than there are stories in the Aqua City, even though, as I hope you're beginning to grasp by now, there are a lot of stories in the Aqua City. These are a few of them.
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High above the Aqua City, a helicopter slowly circles.
"Behold, my friend. Behold the Aqua City. Behold what I have wrought, with nothing but my vision, determination and spirit."
"Well, that and a bucketload of venture capital, sir."
"You know, Jenkins, you really need to stop thinking like an accountant. Take a look at the bigger picture. This is a bold step into the future, an unprecedented technological marvel, and a quantum leap in the evolution of humanity."
"It's also a pretty good tax dodge, sir."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is that side of things. But this is hardly the time to be focusing on the undignified and and unseemly pecuniary aspects of the venture. This is a time to celebrate our achievement."
