Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Detail



Angre grit his teeth rictus, wishing he hadn’t been so impulsive in his dealing with the Avatar.
The field smouldered black and littered; limbs and assorted technology silhouetted against the sky.
The leopard slunk diagonally in Angre’s general direction, nose slung low in search of anything salvageable, camouflage rippling in the smoulder, while the monkey on its back chattered memos and statistics back to The Rememberancer.
Angre lifted the shroud to his face, touching it to his tongue to confirm its authenticity – if nothing else, there would be finance to be gained from this.
He re-ran the timelines and negotiation responses through his predictive scenario algorithm for the 73rd time and came up with the same answer as he had the previous 72 times.
Somewhere in the back of his mind he could taste something bitter; something he’d missed in calculating his responses to the Avatars negotiations; something that was going to bite back somewhere down the line.


8 comments:

Tom said...

future techno-jargon; it could mean anything depnding on the context--superfragilistic

the walking man said...

Best to leave the incarnations of the deities to themselves, they wreak the havoc they will, with or without our negotiation.

Garth said...

Tom: Ironically some of the jargon is old... rememberancer is a official in the English court during the 18th century and the shroud I was thinking of is the Turin one :)

walking man: as PKD once said "whom the gods notice, they destroy"

James Higham said...

It's how I'm feeling.

Yodood said...

Of what spirit is Agre the incarnated avatar? The Rememberancer knows I'll wager.

It would seem the word verification thinks the solution lies in making money: adswers

Garth said...

Yodood: Perhaps Angre is the consummate professional soldier/businessman and the Avatar the greedy king/trader - perhaps what is waiting down the line is some form of poetic justice :B

Harlequin said...

it's all the perhaps-es that are intriguing... reading with and without connecting to the possible historical/future artifacts is a nice unhinged experience

Garth said...

Harlequin: I keep trying to write the shortest of (coherent) short stories - unfortunately I believe Richard Brautigan has already done it best

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