Meat. Illiterate by Lorenzo Trenti. Birthday Boy : 365 tomorrows. By submissionMarch 21st, 2008 Author : Ian Rennie.
Memento Mori by Jonathan Nolan. This short story was the basis for the movie, Memento.
I added the part numbers because I found myself reading it incrementally; they are not part of the original story. The italics, type, emphases, and so on are original. This was copied from the Esquire feature on it, and is also available on the DVD version of Memento. I archived both here to avoid link-rot. "What like a bullet can undeceive! " Your wife always used to say you'd be late for your own funeral. Right about now you're probably wondering if you were late for hers. You were there, you can be sure of that. Ogden Nash - More Short Subjects, Naturally. The Gravity Mine - a short story by Stephen Baxter. The Gravity Mine a short story by Stephen Baxter Call her Anlic.
The first time she woke, she was in the ruins of an abandoned gravity mine. At first the Community had chased around the outer strata of the great gloomy structure. But at last, close to the core, they reached a cramped ring. Here the central black hole's gravity was so strong that light itself curved in closed orbits. The torus tunnel looked infinitely long. As they hurtled past fullerene walls they could see multiple images of themselves, a glowing golden mesh before and behind, for the echoes of their light endlessly circled the central knot of spacetime.
Exhilarated, they pushed against the light barrier, and those trapped circling images shifted to blue or red. The Last Question. The Last Question by Isaac Asimov — © 1956 The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time when humanity first stepped into the light.
The question came about as a result of a five dollar bet over highballs, and it happened this way: Alexander Adell and Bertram Lupov were two of the faithful attendants of Multivac. As well as any human beings could, they knew what lay behind the cold, clicking, flashing face — miles and miles of face — of that giant computer. They had at least a vague notion of the general plan of relays and circuits that had long since grown past the point where any single human could possibly have a firm grasp of the whole. Multivac was self-adjusting and self-correcting.
A Jar of Goodwill by Tobias S. Buckell. Points On A Package You keep a low profile when you're in oxygen debt.
Too much walking about just exacerbates the situation anyway. So I was nervous when a stationeer appeared at my cubby and knocked on the door. I slid out and stood in front of the polished, skeletal robot. "Alex Mosette? " There was no sense in lying. "The harbormaster wants to see you. " I Cthulhu. Or What's A Tentacle-Faced Thing Like Me Doing In A Sunken City Like This (Latitude 47° 9' S, Longitude 126° 43' W)?
Cthulhu, they call me. Great Cthulhu. Nobody can pronounce it right. Are you writing this down? Every word? Story #1777. Ted Chiang's "Exhalation" Night Shade Books Presents For your 2009 Hugo Award "Best Short Story" consideration Ted Chiang’s "Exhalation" As Published in Edited by Jonathan Strahan Eclipse Two © 2008 by Jonathan Strahan This excerpt from Eclipse Two © 2009 by Night Shade Books "Exhalation" by Ted Chiang. © 2008 Ted Chiang.
Digital Edition Eclipse Two: New Science Fiction and Fantasy Night Shade Books. Teddy. Jean Thompson stood in front of her fifth-grade class on the very first day of school in the fall and told the children a lie.
Like most teachers, she looked at her pupils and said that she loved them all the same, that she would treat them all alike. And that was impossible because there in front of her, slumped in his seat on the third row, was a little boy named Teddy Stoddard. Mrs. Thompson had watched Teddy the year before and noticed he didn't play well with the other children, that his clothes were unkempt and that he constantly needed a bath. And Teddy was unpleasant. The Hungry. Immortality Blows. Man, I wish I'd never found that goddamn lamp.
Stupid fucking genie. I just had to blurt it out, didn't I? "I wish I were immortal! " Half the time they can't even make you immortal, but Sim Allah Bim of the Seven Winds just snapped his fingers and said "It is done. " The Adventure of the Cardboard Box by Arthur Conan Doyle.
In choosing a few typical cases which illustrate the remarkable mental qualities of my friend, Sherlock Holmes, I have endeavoured, as far as possible, to select those which presented the minimum of sensationalism, while offering a fair field for his talents.
It is, however, unfortunately impossible entirely to separate the sensational from the criminal, and a chronicler is left in the dilemma that he must either sacrifice details which are essential to his statement and so give a false impression of the problem, or he must use matter which chance, and not choice, has provided him with. With this short preface I shall turn to my notes of what proved to be a strange, though a peculiarly terrible, chain of events. It was a blazing hot day in August.