Guess Who’s Microwaving Dinner?

Danna and Scott had been wanting to have a normal date night for months. That was the hard thing about married life: you got busy, schedules filled up, and then before you knew it, you and your spouse hadn’t eaten a meal together in over a week.

“This is the best new restaurant in town, I promise,” Danna said, fixing her makeup in the car mirror. “I hear they have bottomless margaritas.”

“Now you’re speaking my language!” Scott said, chuckling. 

But as they drove, they found themselves doubting the accuracy of their GPS. They passed the downtown area with its many restaurants and bars and ventured into the outskirts of their little town. As they drove further, the streetlights became sparser, the road unpaved and gravelly. 

“What did you say this restaurant was called?” Scott asked. 

“Out of the Frying Pan,” Danna said. “It’s one of those trendy new places with stuff like deconstructed meatloaf on the menu.”

They continued on in trepidatious silence, finally stopping in front of what looked less like a restaurant than a haunted house. Danna checked the GPS nervously. 

“There’s no way this is right,” she said, arching her neck to look at the road sign. 

“No, that’s it.” Scott pointed to the barely lit sign. “Bat Outta Hell Way.” 

“Who on earth names a road that?” Danna asked, and before Scott could answer, they caught sight of a figure descending the front steps of the house. 

“What the hell?” Scott asked. “Is that…is that a man in full makeup? Wearing a…”

“…a gold lamé tuxedo, yes,” Danna said. 

The figure walked up to the driver’s side window and knocked on it, lipsticked lips stretched into a garish rictus of a smile. The top three buttons of his tuxedo vest were undone to reveal a freshly waxed chest. Scott rolled the window down uneasily.

“Well, if it isn’t Danna and Scott,” the figure said in a soothing baritone. “My name is Rocky, and I’ll be your server tonight.”

The First Olympian

Harrison had never thought of himself as a hero. Up until the night before, he’d just been a regular sixth grader, going to Mrs. Hephaistos’s class and eating lunch with his friends and playing his favorite video games after school. But something magical had happened the night before, something transformative. Harrison had gone from having nothing else to worry about besides math and social studies homework to being the only eleven-year-old to ever be tasked with saving the world. 

It all started when he got home from school and his dog, Cookie, had run up to him as he dropped his backpack on the floor, eagerly licking at his knees.

"Not now, Cookie," Harrison said. He was feeling hungry, and wanted to eat a snack before curling up with her on his beanbag to read his favorite Percy Jackson book. 

“Mom?” he asked, wandering into the living room. “Are you home?”

But Harrison’s mom wasn’t home – he checked all over the house. It was strange, given that she was usually home from work before he got home from school. Frankly, it made him a little nervous. 

As he walked upstairs, he heard a very unusual noise: a strange kind of cawing. He stopped walking and listened, then heard it again. 

“Who’s there?” he asked, frightened. 

But then something strange happened, something that separated Harrison from the rest of the kids. He kept walking upstairs. In fact, he started running. He was still scared, but now the fear was mixed with a strange kind of excitement, a knowing.

And there in his room stood something he had never seen before: a most majestic and massive creature with the body of a lion and the head of an eagle. Upon seeing Harrison, it cawed loudly and stamped a front paw.

Harrison was surprised by how unsurprised he was. 

“Did Zeus send you?” he asked, not even understanding why he knew to ask the question.

“Yes,” the griffin said in a deep, jowly voice. “He needs your help, Harrison. The light has gone out of the world, and only you can bring it back.”

Nerd Romancer

Ivan and Sarah had been warned time and again that it was not a good idea to open a detective agency on the very postmodern mean streets of New BloomingTokyo. You’ll get eaten alive, their friends said. This place is the deepest crime pit in what remains of the United States. Plus, you two already have a family together – how are you going to maintain any semblance of a work-life balance?

Never mind that the kids were off to college and Ivan and Sarah actually wanted to open a detective agency together: it was hardly something their friends would understand, given as they were to quieter pursuits like bocce, Scrabble and fishing for isotopic fish in the denaturalized, ionic remains of what had been dubbed the Neon Mississippi. And if they couldn’t understand that, then how could they possibly understand that it was precisely the danger Ivan and Sarah were after. They wanted to meet the seamy underbelly of New BloomingTokyo; hardcore posthumanists that they were, they wanted to stare death straight in its hellish cyborgian face. 

And plus, it wasn’t like anyone else was going to clean up the robot riffraff in town. There’d been serious trouble in Bloomington, Indiana ever since the year 2040, when the entire town had caved in like so much poorly-patched drywall. It turned out that it had no foundation, built above the inner-earth city of Asgrad (since gentrified – all the gods had moved back into the firmament, and it was overrun with golems), its superstructure held together with literal duct tape. After that, the investors had swept in, and Bloomington became Post-Bloomington and then Post-Post Bloomington and briefly New Tokyo and then New BloomingTokyo, which the mayor had framed as a form of “cultural exchange,” but which Ivan and Sarah only saw as a failure of branding. 

And the mayor, himself rumored to be half cyborg, was beyond corrupt. He was taking bribes from every organized crime family in the world from the Cosa Nostra to the Yakuza to a fringe group operating out of what remained of New Zealand called the Bassoonists. He’d been “elected,” if you could call it that, on a “restorative justice” platform, but from what Ivan and Sarah could see, all he’d restored was the entitlement of criminals of all stripes. From petty thieves to career grifters to some of the most depraved AIs around, New BloomingTokyo seemed to have it all. 

Maybe it had been all the punk shows of their youth, or else the steely carapace one must develop if they are to survive either in academia or adjacent to it, but Ivan and Sarah would sooner shy away examining the mayor’s myriad wrongdoings than – well, play a game of bocce. 

Which was why, on a fateful and unseasonably crisp autumn day in 2062, it was with a strange kind of glee that Sarah bounded in the front door of her and Ivan’s house, a case file in hand. It had been mailed to their office anonymously, she explained, and was printed on dot matrix paper. 

“What? Why so analogue?” Ivan asked in befuddlement. He was poring over some grisly photos of cyborg remains from a recent laser shootout, wires and valves and microchips in unholy arrangements that would have made the average viewer blanch. But Sarah didn’t flinch as she peered over his shoulder: by now, she’d seen it all.

“I know, it’s truly weird. Like, I don’t know – it’d be dated even in a cyberpunk novel that’s imagining the future.” She handed him the paper. “And just wait until you get a look at this.”

Ivan took the paper from Sarah, and she watched his eyes widen. He looked up at her, then back at the paper, and then swept the crime scene photos aside. 

“So this is – if I understand it clearly –” he began to say, but Sarah cut in.

“It’s a HoneyBot. A con-borg who runs honeypot scams. A, um, pickup artist, if you will.”

“What the…?” Ivan shook his head. “Why does whoever sent this want us on this? Don’t they know we do, like, machinicide, racketeering busts, stuff like that?”

“I know, I thought the same thing.” Sarah took the paper back from Ivan and examined it more closely. At last she found the words she was looking for: KNOWN TO TARGET WHAT WE CALL “ANALOG ENTHUSIASTS” OF SOME MEANS WITH PROMISES OF A LIFE WITHOUT SCREENS AND MACHINES. BOOK READERS, PUZZLE-DOERS, POETRY-WRITERS, &C. NONE ARE SAFE.

“My god,” Sarah whispered. “It’s a…nerd romancer.”

Ivan nodded morosely. “I see now,” he said. “This one’s personal.”