Welcome September 9, 2008
Posted by gznork26 in Uncategorized.2 comments
Welcome to KlurgSheld. Most of what you’ll find here is fiction, even some of the conventional posts. For example, there are a few items here by the ‘Bank Shot Blogger’. These posts were written from the point of view of ‘John Frachetti’, a character in my series about the three-year incarceration of the Fremont-Wayfarer Corporation. You’ll find links to that series in both the Political and the Business sections. I do, however, occasionally lapse into my real voice and write a commentary which didn’t want to be submerged inside a story.
Prowl the categories listed in the “About my Short Stories” tab (above) and pick a few stories at random. Enjoy!
P. Orin Zack
P.S.: If you find something you like, please tell someone. Stories need to be read, just like cats need to be pet.
Short Story: “Steam Cycle” January 5, 2012
Posted by gznork26 in Business, Fiction, Short Stories.Tags: collapse, currency, money, steam engine, theft
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What’s in your pocket? (This series of business stories on the aftermath of the Financial Meltdown started in “As Is“)
“Steam Cycle”
(Part 7 of a series)
by P. Orin Zack
(12/2/2011)
Peter Epas gazed blankly at the desert horizon while the sunbaked highway rolled back unnoticed beneath him. The mental schematics he’d busied himself with for the first few hours of the trip had given way to the hypnotic interplay of rubber against deteriorating pavement and the steady whine of the bike’s low-slung steam engine. His sightline had just drifted down to the leading tip of his shadow when the screech of a raptor overhead startled him back to wobble-wheeled alertness.
It had been first light when he headed south out of Parker that morning. Elspeth, the mechanical engineer he apprenticed under, had topped off her bike’s biopropane canister at the repair shop last night after locking up.
“You’re sure you want to do this?” she’d asked while tightening the engine mounts for the umpteenth time.
A wordless glance was all the reply he gave. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned from you,” he added a few beats later, “it’s to never second-guess myself.”
Rising, she opened the cash drawer and counted out two piles of bills. The first, which sported heavily saturated pictures of dead actors, were Angels, the money issued in Los Angeles after the Dollar cratered. The oddly faded notes in the second pile were from Phoenix, and they were the reason he was headed there.
Peter thought about that second pile as he rolled on through the dusty afternoon, and wondered how the people behind them would react to his proposal. “When we first encountered your money,” he told a hypothetical banker, “it hadn’t yet started to fade. As far as we knew, it was no different from the Angels that filtered in after the Dollar crapped out.”
He frowned. “All right. How about this…” But his thoughts were abruptly shattered when the bike lurched from the impact of a wall of air at his back. (more…)
Short Story: “The Phoenix Narrative” November 18, 2011
Posted by gznork26 in Business, Fiction, Short Stories.Tags: collapse, currency, money
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What’s in your pocket? (This series of business stories on the aftermath of the Financial Meltdown started in “As Is“)
“The Phoenix Narrative”
(Part 6 of a series)
by P. Orin Zack
(11/11/2011)
As Beth coasted down a curving stretch of Arizona 95, she gently squeezed the handgrips on her bicycle, engaging the home-built regenerating brakes. She hesitated briefly, smiled, and leaned into a right turn onto Parker Dam Road.
A few years earlier, before the economy cratered and governments around the world fell apart, she might have driven the ninety-miles back from Lingman without a second thought. Even now, with gasoline so hard to come by, she’d made the trip out in an afternoon, thanks to the damaged baby steam engine rattling around in her saddle basket. But the ride back had taken considerably longer because Norwyn Rosset, the cretin she’d gone to thank for his part in bringing the world to its knees, had kicked the overtaxed machine from it’s mountings after it succumbed to the stress of pushing them both up a hill.
Parker Dam had been a touchstone to her even before she’d moved to Parker to escape the rat race her engineering degree had sucked her into. Towards the end of the corporatists’ reign, new hires out of school were like a drug to penny-pinching managers eager to consign their senior, and more expensive, employees to the growing ranks of the unemployed. But like many of her cohort, she’d taken strength from the global Occupation movement and chose to strike out on her own rather than help her moneyed masters further drive down the value of human labor.
After parking her bike on the untraveled roadway high atop the curving concrete dam, Beth turned her back to Lake Havasu and drifted towards the southern railing. She took a deep breath, and cast the anger she’d worked up against Rosset to the gentle breeze, imagining it drifting down over the Colorado River, where it was absorbed and cleansed by the flowing water. Then her gaze lifted, across the rocky horizon, and up into the early evening sky. She smiled as she envisioned herself soaring low over the river, down past Lake Moovalva and Headgate Rock Dam in the steam-powered ultralight of her imagination.
“Someday,” she told the river, “I’m going to skim your length not much higher than this. Someday.” But first, she reminded herself, she needed to get back to Parker. Dusk was falling, and she knew that pedal-powered headlights were neither as dependable nor as bright as steam-powered ones. (more…)
Short Story: “Loose Ends” May 7, 2011
Posted by gznork26 in Fiction, Politics, Short Stories.Tags: 9/11, Barack Obama, bin Laden Hoax, black ops, false flag attack, George W Bush, hoax, intelligence, leaks, Osama bin Laden
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“Loose Ends”
by P. Orin Zack
[5/7/2011]
“Like I explained in my anonymized email, I can’t let you find out who I am, and there will never be a way to corroborate what I’m about to say.”
Robert scowled at the digital puppet on his screen, an amalgam of Avatar-style facial mimicry and open-source voice processing that looked and sounded enough like Richard Nixon to be distracting. “And yet you expect me to believe you?”
Faux-Nixon nodded. “I like the irony.” (more…)
Short Story: “Eulogy” May 5, 2011
Posted by gznork26 in Fantasy & SF, Fiction, Short Stories.Tags: biological warfare, ecological collapse, first contact, genocide
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“Eulogy”
by P. Orin Zack
[4/28/2011]
Drake was wrong. The astronomer’s formula for the number of detectable civilizations in the galaxy was flawed. Not that it mattered now. Not since the people of his planet committed autogenocide. But then, their search for extraterrestrial life had lasted only about fifty years; hardly long enough to make a difference, even if they hadn’t blinded themselves to the very signs they were looking for.
Irran slipped the silvery disc out of its sleeve and held it up to the mid-day sun. When it had been recorded, the walls of the Great Hall surrounding him supported a vaulted ceiling. The building’s designers had drawn their inspiration from millennia of the planet’s cultural histories. But that was before the conflagration, which happened while Irran’s team was still speeding alongside space on their one-way First Contact mission. Now, the remains of those walls stood watch over the rubble of the Hall’s destruction. (more…)
Short Story: “Allegergic Reaction” April 11, 2011
Posted by gznork26 in Fantasy & SF, Fiction, Short Stories.Tags: allegory, allergy, experiment, Gaia, new words, nova, origin of life, scientific journal
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“Allegergic Reaction”
by P. Orin Zack
[4/2/2011]
Alexandra took another sip of Kona, tickled the mousepad to highlight a few words, and turned the laptop towards the more casually dressed woman across the small table from her in the noisy coffee shop. “Is this a typo in your Abstract? Did you spell it that way on purpose, or did you intend to characterize your findings as an ‘allergic reaction’?”
Faye chuckled and shook her head. “Well, I suppose you could describe it that way, but it’s not really the same sort of thing that happens when an oyster makes a pearl to keep a speck of sand from itching.”
The two had been close friends since they roomed together at college, but this was the first time Faye needed a professional favor. The juxtaposition of their divergent interests, with Faye being a science geek and her former roommate being a linguist, had sparked a lot of humor between them over the years, most of which was incomprehensible to either one’s co-workers. So when Faye finally completed the research project that had swallowed her life for the past few years, she decided to ask Alexandra to help polish her paper before submitting the results.
“Are you sure it’s even a word? Your spell-checker’s called it out, too.”
Faye bit her lip. “I know, Alex. And that’s the most complete dictionary module I could find for my field. But it’s the only thing that accurately describes what happened.”
“Okay,” Alexandra said after a long pause, “let’s take a different tack. How well do you know the journal’s editorial guidelines? Are they sticklers for using accepted terminology? I mean, if they’re likely to reject your paper because they don’t like your choice of words, maybe there’s some other way to describe whatever it was that happened.”
“Like what?” She glanced nervously around the shop, at a knot of customers by the counter who were chatting excitedly with one another, at the guy at the next table who was staring intently at whatever was on his screen, and at the woman by the door who was so caught up in a phone call that she didn’t realize she was splashing coffee on someone. “I’ve had my head into this problem for so long I’m not sure I could explain it to any of these people.” (more…)
Short Story: “Focus Group” March 6, 2011
Posted by gznork26 in Fiction, Politics, Short Stories.Tags: collective bargaining, Egypt protests, Iraq War protests, labor unions, protest, Tahrir Square, teachers union, Wisconsin protests
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“Focus Group”
by P. Orin Zack
[3/4/2011]
Lonnie strode through the encampment of pro-union protesters outside the capitol building in Olympia with a timid smile on his face. A dozen organizations had come together to fight the new governor’s plan to strip the state’s public service unions of their collective bargaining rights, each one proudly identifying itself both in dress and on signs. Gail Kerr, the leader of the teachers’ union, had just concluded a rousing speech, and Lonnie joined in the cheer that followed.
“No class warfare!” he yelled, nodding conspiratorially to the people around him. “No class warfare!” With this good-natured camaraderie returned in kind, he joined in the public grousing against the governor, his party, and the business interests supporting them, yet held his tongue when the mass of protesters took up a chant to oust the man from office. (more…)
Short Story: “Prices to Pay” February 28, 2011
Posted by gznork26 in Business, Fiction, Politics, Short Stories.Tags: apps, credit cards, EULA, in-game purchases, interest, mortgage, precognition
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This series began with “Riffing the Life Fantastic“.
“Prices to Pay”
by P. Orin Zack
(7th of a series)
[02/25/2011]
“I told you,” Phaeron Huxley said angrily as he backed into his partner’s vacant desk, “I’m not going to go hang out in a goddamn forum just to clean up that bastard’s mess!”
Majgda Brourske, the fractured partnership’s overworked office manager, took a deep breath and tried to calm herself, but failed miserably. “That ‘bastard’, as you call him,” she said, still shaking, “was responsible for making this business a success.”
“A success? My god, woman, haven’t you been paying attention? Alluis Benoit single-handedly turned whatever success we had into a laughingstock!” He glanced away disgustedly, and then glared at her in contempt. “That moron crapped all over our customers! And you think I should defend him?”
Both turned as one when the roar of a tractor-trailer rig flooded through the suddenly opened doorway. Ben stood there, backlit by the bright Kansas sky, with one hand on the handle and the other splayed at shoulder-height in greeting. He’d opened his mouth to say something, but never got the chance. (more…)
Short Story: “Particle Wave” February 21, 2011
Posted by gznork26 in Business, Fiction, Politics, Short Stories.Tags: bloggers, business incubator, discrimination, hobbies, statistics, Unemployment
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This series began with “Riffing the Life Fantastic“.
“Particle Wave”
by P. Orin Zack
(part 6 of a series)
[2/18/2011]
“Hey,” the man peering over Kaylee’s shoulder breathed, hooking his thumb towards the door, “isn’t that the guy from that video? You know, that math geek who wiped the floor with DC’s finest?” (more…)
Short Story: “Toasted Roles” February 15, 2011
Posted by gznork26 in Business, Fiction, Politics, Short Stories.Tags: democrat, dreams, memories, police, precog, psychology, republican, roles, standoff
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This series began with “Riffing the Life Fantastic“.
“Toasted Roles”
by P. Orin Zack
(part 5 of a series)
[02/13/2011]
The uniformed officer across the table from Ben turned his outspread hands palms up. “Yeah, I get why you decided to turn yourself in, Mr. Benoit. That part I understand. And I commend you for taking the initiative. But this is not an issue for the D.C. police. You’re charged with stealing that motorcycle in Kansas. They’re the people you ought to be talking to, not me.” (more…)
Short Story: “Outlier” January 30, 2011
Posted by gznork26 in Business, Fiction, Politics, Short Stories.Tags: black swan, dreams, gaussian curve, Homeland Security, outliers
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This series began with “Riffing the Life Fantastic“.
“Outlier”
by P. Orin Zack
(Part 4 of a series)
[01/26/11]
Alluis Benoit was so relieved by the familiar memory of what was about to happen that he missed part of Kaylee Strumble’s brainstorm. “I— I’m sorry,” he stammered, “what was that about commercial résumé aggregators?”
The owner of Chicago’s premiere handcrafts conglomerate shook her head in agitation. “Look, Ben,” she said sharply, “I only agreed to let you participate in this launch because of your record in getting businesses off the ground. But if you’re going to flake out before we’ve even posted the press release, I’ll just have to cut you loose. Don’t think I’m not aware that you were also instrumental in the demise of your first two businesses.”
Ben’s heart raced momentarily at the prospect of being shut out of his fourth fortune, and then it quickly dropped as his memory of the unfolding incident overlaid the reality of it. He knew that Bob was about to intervene on his behalf, and glanced expectantly at the older man.
They’d met when Robert Verdun pulled over to see if Ben was okay after hitting a rock and trashing his motorcycle on the Interstate. Once the businessman’s Passat was back in traffic, Bob overheard the cell call he knew would lead to his third fortune, and used his memory of the unfolding event to position himself as Verdun’s partner in the enterprise. While the two were at a conference in Chicago, they’d spoken to Ms. Strumble after her presentation, and now, Ben knew, his memory of the future was about to multiply that fortune.
Verdun, however, did not look pleased, and this ran counter to the memory unreeling in Ben’s head. Instead of leaning forward into the role of gracious intermediary, he sat back and crossed his arms. “You know something,” he said evenly, eyeing Ben with unblinking animosity. (more…)
