The Sky Didn't Load Today and Other Glitches, page 1
The Sky Didn't Load Today
And Other Glitches
Rich Larson
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, and eventsare entirely coincidental.
The Sky Didn’t LoadToday and Other Glitches
First Edition.September 3rd 2024.
Copyright © 2024 Rich Larson
Published byShacklebound Books.
Visit us at www.shackleboundbooks.wordpress.com
Stories written by Rich Larson.
Interior illustrations by Rich Larson.
Cover art by Zishan Liu, used with permission by Deposit Photos.
Cover artdesign by Eric Fomley
Advanced Praise for Rich Larson and The Sky Didn't Load Today
“Larson demonstrates his superhuman ability to weld wild future-world concepts with immediately relatable characters. Upload this book into your mind at the fastest possible Mbps.”
– Mike Allen, World Fantasy Award-nominated author of Unseaming and SlowBurn
“Startling and seductive…These stories are a virtuosic exploration of human striving in the face of existential collapse.”
– Ian Muneshwar, Nebula, Locus, and Shirley Jackson Award finalist
"Rich Larson is one of my very favorite short story writers, and his powers are undiminished in these haunting brilliant short-shorts, each one a deeply-felt world in miniature."
– Sam J Miller, Nebula-award-winning author of Blackfish City
“Effective flash fiction that leaves an impression... Rich Larson writes brilliantly at every length.”
– Ellen Datlow, multi-award winning editor of short fiction
“Larson has a knack for fitting mind-bending ideas, interesting characters, and dark and compelling twists into each and every story. Science fiction with depth, heart, and swagger.”
– Maria Haskins, author of Six Dreams About The Train
“The Sky Didn’t Load Today is a multiverse of stories…Blends quirky and absurd humour with melancholy, exploring love, fear, survival, loneliness.” – Ai Jiang, Nebula and Bram Stoker award-winning and Hugo award-nominated author
“A fantastic collection of dark sci-fi... Even when you think you know where a story is headed, Larson surprises.” – Dawn Vogel, author of Dead-Starred Futures
"Nobody does short fiction like Rich Larson — each of these tiny tales is a barbed-wire curio that sparkles in an alien light."
– Charlie Jane Anders, author of Lessons in Magic and Disaster
"Fiction caviar...ultra-short but hyper-imaginative; you can't readjust one."
– Hugo finalist Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, author of Equimedian
"Pocketful of shocks
Mind when you reach a hand in
A slip might draw blood"
– James Patrick Kelly, winner of the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards.
"A shrewdly observed collection of razor-wire anxieties and depravities...The Sky Didn't Load Today is dark SF at its best."
– Michael Kelly, World Fantasy Award winner
"A 30-course meal—sweet, salty, sour, bitter, umami...filled with wonder as much as dread."
– Richard Thomas, Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, and Thriller Award finalist
“Short, savage strokes, bristling with energy…Rich Larson is one of the most original and imaginative science fiction talents of our time.” – Nicholas A. DiChario, Hugo, World Fantasy, and Calvino Prize nominated author of Giovanni’s Tree: New Italian Folktale
For Heather, long-time reader and all-time sister.
Contents
1. Molli’s Oggles
3. Grin Minus Cat
5. Mind Blown
7. Always Personal
9. Pherobomb
11. Cues
13. Reproduction on the Beach
15. Limping Toward Sunrise
17. Someone Else
19. A Beginner’s Guide to the Hieronymus Box
21. Define: Symbiont
23. Six Month Ocean
25. Skinned
27. Pilgrim Problems
29. Breathing for Two
31. Playmates
33. For All Your Rampage Needs
35. Caring For Your Damage Sponge
37. 123456
39. Lowlife Orbit
41. Moving Day
43. Horseplay
45. Some Of These Stars Might Already Be Gone
47. The Sky Didn’t Load Today
49. Treadmill
51. Moose Trap
53. We’re Talking About Practice
55. Won’t You Stay Longer
57. Ascension’s Eve
59. Get the Lights
61. Acknowledgements
62. Publication Credits
63. About the Author
Molli’s Oggles
“The move’s been tough on her,” Molli’s dad said. “So we thought, if there was a way, a non-invasive, non-chemical way to give her a little boost or to make her feel a little safer, we thought that might be good. She’s always got her Oggles on anyway. You know how kids are.”
“It’s just moving from a small town to a big city,” Molli’s mom said. “People are different, you know? They don’t smile at each other. They don’t stop and say hi. Everything’s a lot faster and dirtier and noisier. Me, I love it. I mean, the pace of it. The energy. I was born in NYC, you know? New York. But Molli’s never experienced that, and the adjustment is hard. She had a little, a panic attack? I guess you’d call it? The other week. So the anxiety filter will be good for her.”
Molli said nothing, so none of the grown-ups noticed when she slipped out the door. Her new house was an apartment in a big gray block of concrete; she set off now for her new yard, a park across the street with withered grass and a plastic playground. She donned her pale pink Oggles on the way, nestling the matching earbuds into place. Pale pink had been her favorite color when her parents bought them for her – she still liked them, but secretly wished they were forest green, her new favorite color.
The Oggles blinked to life. She closed the digital dollhouse she’d been playing in earlier, giving her an unobstructed view of the park. The sky was gray, but not the steely stormy gray she’d loved back home, dotted with gulls and petrels wheeling out over the ocean. It was thick and hazy with gasoline fumes from all the noisy trucks and with smoke from the forest fires up north. Hardly anything was green or growing. The sidewalk was strewn with bits of blown trash. In the distance there was a screech and a honking horn and a mad voice.
She flipped the anxiety filter, and everything changed. The sky turned a cheerful blue with fluffy white clouds and a bright yellow sun. The park grew lush green grass she could nearly smell; the sidewalk sprouted moss instead of garbage. She could still hear the distant shouting, but it was distorted, softened, sing-song, more like a warbling bird than an angry person.
For a while it was nice, playing on the now-shiny playground with digital squirrels scampering around her and the traffic noises replaced by the familiar percussion of waves and crying seabirds. But before long she got a queasy feeling in her stomach. Maybe because the ocean sounds were making her homesick. Maybe because she knew that it was all very fake and nowhere near as good as the real things they’d left behind.
A man sauntered past, and he had a big pixelated smile like a cartoon instead of the usual frown people wore here. Molli didn’t like that at all.
She flipped the anxiety filter off. The sky turned gray again, and the park’s grass went back to dull yellow. But it was real, and it felt easier to grip the climbing frame hard now that the bars weren’t all sparkly clean. She heard the neighbor’s dog barking, which wasn’t a bad sound, not really. It wasn’t something that made her feel anxious.
She found a bunch of paintings on the wall of the park’s bathroom that the filter had covered up. Some of them were just words she didn’t know, done in big bubbly capital letters, but some were faces or intricate designs. There was a swirly one with forest green vines, or else tentacles, all tangled up in a barbed wire fence like the one around her grandparents’ farm. She liked that one a lot and snapped a picture with her Oggles.
Two boys asked her to play tag with them, and she did it even though they were a little younger than her. They asked for her name and she said Molli, instead of saying Molli from New Brunswick how the teacher had called her at school. One of them had the same Oggles she did, but yellow.
Her parents could see where she was on their map, and her dad chatted her that there was dessert. But it was tapioca pudding, not chocolate, so she kept playing until she saw her mom’s new co-worker and her wife leaving the apartment block. They waved; she waved back, which meant people did wave to each other in the big city.
The sky was getting dark, so Molli headed back inside, not feeling anxious at all. The city wasn’t so bad. It was even kind of exciting, how her mom kept saying, with the rushing cars and rushing people. Her Oggles reminded her of the door code and she thumbed it in.
Her parents’ voices came in a familiar cadence, staccato and sharp like knives. Molli froze in the entryway. The pit of her stomach sloshed.
“At least we had a house,” Molli’s dad growled. “At least we had friends. We had family.”
Molli didn’t want to shake. She hated shaking. But she could feel it coming, feel her hands and arms and her whole body start to tremble as her heart sped up, her chest heaved.
“You were entry level,” Molli’s mom snapped. “It was going nowhere. Absolutely nowhere. And living with your parents always hovering over my fucking shoulder, you think that was easy for me? You think I liked that?”
Molli didn’t want to have a panic attack. She didn’t want another thing that would make her mom cry and smoke and her dad sulk and pace.
She flipped the filter and stepped inside, peering around the kitchen wall to see the goofy digital smile retouching her dad’s red-mad face, listening to the muted sing-song of her mom’s cursing. It wasn’t so bad.
Molli crept off to her room before they could notice her.
Grin Minus Cat
It’s a busy night at Fleisch, booths and bars packed with lonely suckers worshipping at the altar of evolutionary urges, draining their banks dry to watch women who’d never in a century fuck them dance like tonight they just might.
Me, I’m here on business. Some fresh faced small-timer calling himself the Cheshire ripped us off last week – hijacked a whole shipment and ghosted before I could get my boys on the scene – and now he’s trying to negotiate a buy-back with the big boss.
Frankly, he’s lucky I intercepted the message. Nino would have probably sent a butcher squad. Me, I just want to talk it out and get the shipment back where it belongs. I’m a good cop that way.
I just need a drink first. The glowing bar attracts its own little swarm of love bugs, those little gengineered things that prick you with an aphrodisiac-amphetamine cocktail to really get you spending. I swat one dead against the countertop and smear its guts into a smiley face with my thumb.
The bartender grimaces. “What’ll it be?”
“A dumbshit with a deathwish,” I say. “Name of Cheshire. Should be waiting for me.”
Her eyes flick to the spot my police holo would usually be, then she nods toward the private booths. “Third down.”
I order one of my standards, a rotgut vodka with hot sauce, and walk it to the back, past the jack-off stalls where fleshpads grow the orifice of choice – face costs extra – for overstimulated clientele. The Cheshire’s not quite at that point when I find him in booth number three, but he looks close.
Small man, striped purple jacket, splayed back on the gel cushions and utterly transfixed by the stripper wrapped upside down around the slowly rotating pole. He paid for quality: she’s long and lithe and beautiful, all hollow cheeks and beestung lips.
He only looks up when I click the door shut behind me. He frowns. “You’re not Nino.”
“Of course I’m not Nino.” I swirl my drink. “You thought Nino fucking Alvarez was going to come meet a nobody like you? I’m the trashman.”
He smirks. “Oh. Well.” He returns his gaze to the stripper, who is now moving spider-like toward the ceiling, clutching the pole with neon blue claws. “No mess here, Mister Trashman. Run along. The Cheshire only talks to big fish.”
I slosh my drink directly into his eyeballs, dousing them in alcohol and capsaicin. When he gropes inside his striped jacket, blind and howling, I smash the empty glass over his skull for good measure. He goes down in a heap.
“Look at that, you Alice-in-Wonderland-ass motherfucker.” I grab the edge of his orange-splattered coat, dislodging a few crumbs of glass. “A mess.”
I pocket his gun, a cheap modular thing still warm from the printer, while he rolls and moans and clutches his eyes. The stripper keeps doing her thing, either a true professional or just doped to the gills.
“Where’s the shipment you stole?” I demand.
“My eyes,” he sobs. “My fucking eyes, man – ”
I grab him by the lapels. “I’ll take them out with a spoon if you don’t answer me. Where’s the shipment?”
“You’re in for it now,” he groans. “He’s in for it, right?”
And I get that little premonition, that little something-something plucking at the back of my mind, right before a slender muscly arm clamps around my windpipe. Neon blue nails waggle in my peripheral, close enough to look blurry. I know, instinctively, they are scalpel sharp.
“Hi,” says a very lucid voice in my ear. “These have neurotoxin on them, so just pretend you’re a statue, okay? A monument to the city’s dirtiest cops.”
Her other hand worms into my pocket and retrieves her partner’s gun, then yanks mine from its hidden holster. I’ve got limited head movement, so I stare down at the small man in the striped purple jacket, who’s apparently not the brains or even the muscle. He gets to his feet, glaring at me through his burst capillaries.
The two of them work together to cuff me to the pole. Then the man steps back, gun leveled, and the stripper, who I am fairly certain is also the Cheshire, comes around front. She slumps down into the gel cushions, folds one long leg over the other.
“I got a butcher squad waiting outside,” I say. “It’ll be easier on you two if they find me alive.”
Her lips peel back, and I realize the nails aren’t the only thing that glows. “You came alone, actually. And that message you jacked was never meant to get to Nino anyway.”
The hairs on my neck hackle up.
“Yeah,” she says. “Funny thing about that shipment we stole. I’m new in town, but I checked around and the drug purity’s about twenty percent higher than what Nino’s been selling.”
My heart pounds hard. “I don’t find that funny,” I croak.
“Nino wouldn’t either,” she says. “He’d think one of his bought cops has been ripping him off for almost a year already. Taking a slice of the high-purity product to sell on the side, and double-cutting the rest down to baby powder.” She shakes her immaculate head. “I tried that shit. Barely even buzzed me.”
“What do you want?” I ask, already suspecting, maybe even hoping.
“I’m new in town, like I said.” She shrugs. “I’m going to need a trashman.” She stands up, wraps herself in a chameleon coat scrolling designer patterns. “I have the booth booked until morning, maximum privacy. You’ve got plenty of time to think about it.”
They head for the door, and the last thing I see before they shut it is her radioactive blue grin floating in the dark, and shit, I guess this is what love feels like.
Mind Blown
“Snappy dresser,” Barbier says, taking a pull off his vape.
“Professor,” Shadrack explains. “Turned skull-popper.”
Below the neck, the corpse is immaculate: shiny brown loafers, tailored trousers, a cashmere sweater over a crisp white shirt and lilac tie. He appears to have died in his favorite chair, a high-backed hand-tacked antique that would be better matched to a brandy and a crackling fireplace than to the syringe and bio-canister now being bagged into evidence.
“Classic tree-of-knowledge scenario, then,” Barbier says. “He wanted to die like God.”
“You think God wants to die?” Shadrack asks, distracted by a buzzing insect.
“Of course. Awful job.” Barbier glares at the corpse. “So, too, did this fuck, so why are we even here?”
“Politics.” Shadrack nods toward a small man in a housecoat, watching the proceedings through glassy and bloodshot eyes. “Husband of the deceased is a friend to the force. Doesn’t like the idea of his partner taking the emergency exit.”
“We can use the OD script, then,” Barbier says. “Pretend he misjudged how mind-expanding his self-induced neuro-elephantitis would be. Makes him tragic. A brilliant academic, fallen in the most noble pursuit – ” He chokes on his own smoke. “That of knowing a bunch of shit.”
Shadrack watches the trembling husband. “Never really about that, though, with skull-poppers. No academic wants a breakthrough if they’re not alive to accept the award.”
Barbier pulls up the file. “Time of death is seventy-two hours ago and the spouse just found him now?”
“The spouse was staying in a hotel all week,” Shadrack says.
“Oh.” Barbier huffs a laugh, but his eyes aren’t in it. “Our man was after a different kind of breakthrough, then.”
