Shareholders

Alan Alanwich hated stockholder meetings. "We all know in the current economy, it's necessary to enter new markets. And in a market as nascent as this one, we are literally building from scratch."

Mr. Stubbs, the shareholders representative, continued to press the issue. "I didn't travel all this way for excuses. We are behind on our projections. If you can't return the company to profitability, perhaps it's time for new leadership."

Alanwich had heard enough. "This is my company."

"The company belongs to its shareholders."

"You do realize we are on the moon."

"There you go with your excuses again."

An Epic Battle Of Wills

It was an epic battle of wills.

They tested each other beyond endurance to see who would yield first. One was content not to move. The other content not to push. It was the opposite of the irresistible force versus the immovable object.

There was no end in sight. Nary a blink nor a whisper. It was, to the untrained observer, as if neither knew of the other's existence.

"I told you, if you don't finish your dinner, you can't leave the table."

"And I told you, Mother, that I would rather die than eat any more of this broccoli."

The Seafarer's Guild

The Seafarer's Guild had very few requirements. Even the worst rapscallions and scalawags gained admittance for the right amount of gold. It got to the point that Sir Francis Drake, seeking to protect what was left of his good name, withdrew his membership rather than be associated with the Guild any longer.

Calico Jack had no such compunction. Moral qualms were a disorder for weak men fearful of Hell. Jack figured no Hell could be worse than the Hell of the high seas.

It was not long after Jack's death that the Seafarer's Guild began requiring a thorough background check.

Deliver Us From Evil

We are a lost people, driven from our homes. We have nothing except our myths. The myths remind us who we are and teach us about good and evil.

Evil men take their hearts and hide them in some secret place. If you can find their heart and destroy it, you destroy that evil.

From birth, a few of us are trained as hunters. We are no longer of the people. We are separate. We are nothing. Our names are written on a piece of parchment, and burnt without ever being uttered.

Only by becoming evil, can we destroy evil.

Truce

It was a rivalry that lasted for millennia.

Napoleon, insulted by the assassination attempt, meticulously plotted his revenge. First on Elba, to which he manufactured his own exile, then New Jersey, where he perfected his own time machine.

The damage proved catastrophic of course. Our world took on the characteristics of both men. The emperor's anal attention to detail coupled with George's creative inspiration combined to forever warp reality.

These days, the friends laugh over the destruction they wrought. They occasionally admit to some regret, but proudly note the empire runs on schedule, and tea is always served at three.

The Next Great Marketing Campaign

She sat in a corner of darkness, showing her back to the world. When confronted, her words drove stakes through the hearts of every remaining friendship. She clung to her timeworn memories until they crumbled about her in indecipherable fragments.

On occasion, for no apparent reason, she would laugh pathologically.

Every day of her life was a ritual of punishment. She obsessively opened and closed a refrigerator as empty as her existence. Her soul was dead.

For the rest of her life, if life you could call it, she would never forgive her roommate for drinking the last Miller Lite.

Requests

Lunch with Napoleon was a bust.  King George now saw the fun-sized Emperor was determined to have his Waterloo.

“Plan B,” George thought as he fitted the Crown Jewels into the contraption on his arm.  Sighting down it, he wondered if decapitating Napoleon with an energy weapon could really affect France’s entry into the American Revolutionary War, considering it concluded thirty years prior.

No matter.  Mad George was determined to regain the colonies.  If there was a chance it would disrupt history, he’d kill every last goddamn Frenchmen in the continuum.

Sometimes, he liked letting the prophyria do the thinking.

The Last Great American

Ronald Reagan was the last American president born in a log cabin. His parents taught him self-reliance at an early age. He read the Fountainhead while he was still in the womb and was so inspired by Ayn Rand's message of individualism that he was the attending physician at his own birth.

He left home at age three to enter show business. He sang Yankee Doodle Dandy to Soviet peasants and they tipped enough to fund his education at the Harvard of the South.

He kept Walter Mondale's head mounted over his fireplace as a souvenir of the '84 election.

A Greener And More Reasonable World

She was at Processing, adding the monthly recycling to the family account, when the officer grasped Rayn’s shoulder.

“Come with me son.”

“What? No, there’s some mistake.  We’re under our credit limit!  We grow our own food, we hardly use the transit system- wait!”  But, even as she protested, she saw the look in her son’s eyes, and understood.  Suddenly the last months – the mysterious class absences, the inexplicable weight gain – made sense.

Possibly – depending on how much meat he’d eaten and how hard he labored at the government farms – Rayn might see his mother again.  The Republic wasn’t unreasonable.

The New Continent

Sophia forced her way down to the wharf. After six weeks at sea, she felt nauseous, unholy, drenched. Stepping into the teeming crowd was like her first baptism. Her sins were washed away by the dirt. Sophia was free.

But life on the New Continent never proved that easy. For would be tyrants, her accent was an invitation. Sophia would never be entirely free of her cursed heritage.

Sophia dreamed not for herself, but for her children and grandchildren. She lived in their future, among the accepted, in a world where being descended from Americans was no longer a crime.