The radical Islamic community started circulating that the asteroid was really God’s way of bringing justice to the heathens in the rest of the world, and that any Muslims killed during the apocalypse would be given 20 virgins and all that nonsense.

This idea, of course, led Al-Qaeda to threaten to bomb any mission launches to destroy the asteroid. To prove their seriousness, they bombed some other stuff as well, including the Kennedy Space Center. All of the bomb threats led to a series of security re-thinks on the mission, which caused the first of the delays.

China, annoyed by this delay in the United States, withdrew their support of the mission in favor of starting their own world-saving enterprise. The new competition put ever growing strain on the foreign markets supplying the goods to both missions. As a result, both became even further delayed.

The downward spiral led Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, to declare that the whole thing was just a fake, and a ploy by the “white devil” to cheat the Latino people of the world out of their hard earned money and resources. He actually began to get some support among the members of the United Nations, most notably North Korea, who began to threaten to launch nuclear attacks against any rocket launched to intercept the “fake” asteroid.

Thus began the widespread – and ultimately correct – notion that neither competing mission would ever get a chance to destroy the asteroid. The resulting panic caused chaos. Hoarders, murderers, rapists, and weirdos all had their time in the limelight. Goods were few and far between, but end of the world debauchery was in abundance.

A few people built underground shelters which wouldn’t have outlasted the effects of the asteroid, but they felt better about at least having tried. The extremely wealthy launched their own fleet of private space craft to be able to live in orbit until the earth started to look green again. Turns out it’s not hard to get into space when the government is in such shambles that no one can enforce the red tape that’s supposed to stop you from going up.

By the time the asteroid actually came, the world was already over, at least as far as what we knew it to be. At the rate we were going, we would have been extinct in a few years anyway.

Too bad the asteroid was near miss. Close enough that the tail made some pretty lights in the sky and killed the wealthy in orbit, but not close enough to kill anything on the surface. The world went on, but nobody was the same after that. We all still live with the consequences of the end times…and regret them every day.

The north pole looks nothing like it does in the various children’s fairytale stories. A factory here, a warehouse there, and smokestacks everywhere. Every building being run 24 hours-a-day by the elves.

The elves themselves are strange little creatures. Not the long bearded nice old men of some stories, or the sparkling children of others, they are gruff, wrinkly chain smokers with a bad cussing habit. Most don’t live past 45 due to the harsh labor conditions that Santa has forced them to work under. The few that do make it longer are usually euthanized once they can no longer meet quota.

The women are few, and far between. They have become such a precious commodity that Santa has them kept in special breeding quarters under the watchful eyes of Mrs. Clause. They are kept constantly pregnant. The best workers from among the men are selected as the breeding stock. Starting from six weeks after her last child birth, the female elf is forced to have sex with the breeding men daily until she becomes pregnant again. If she is unable to become pregnant within 12 weeks, she is euthanized. Most only live to 35 years of age.

As Suzanne watched from her perch on the outskirts of the Workshop Complex through high powered binoculars, the big red man himself was touring the facility. His face was ruddy and smooth, with a jolly smile. The only thing around here that looked like the fairytales. Suzanne wondered if Oscar Wilde hadn’t meant The Picture of Dorian Grey to be a metaphor for Santa. She couldn’t help but believe that somewhere in this complex was a closely guarded portrait of Santa that looked like a hideous monster with fangs, sunken eyes, and pale flesh pulled tightly over narrow bones. The picture was so strong in Suzanne’s mind that she felt a chill run up her spine at the thought of seeing something so hideous.

“The B-2s are in place,” said John, “we’re just waiting on your order to strike.”

“Let’s do it then. Radio the bomb raid.”

The B-2s were silent and deadly. The steady clamor of the North Pole erupted in flames. The bombers targeted Santa’s house and the breeding facility. Mrs. Clause was almost certainly dead, as she rarely left her breeders, but Santa was touring the factories. Several of the warehouses were hit as well; there would be no toys for Christmas this year.

“Alpha and Bravo teams move out. Charlie team follow my lead.”

The factories had come to a stop. There were still resounding explosions as the fires worked there way through the gas pipelines. Amid the clamor, gunfire erupted from all around the complex. Alpha and Bravo teams made quick work of the remaining elves. The elves packed guns, but they were handguns. They were no match for the P-90s carried by the Squad.

Charlie team had one mission: kill the fat man in red pajamas. They headed straight for the factory where he was last spotted touring. Inside was a maze of machinery and half-built toys laying in racks. Suzanne was not looking at the toys and decor, but she caught out of the corner of her eye that they looked like the latest video game system. At first, she started to think that Santa had disappeared. They had been wandering the factory for about 30 minutes when Alpha and Bravo teams radioed “all clear.” She was amazed at the speed in which they cleared the other factories. They were lost in this one, but then it was about the only one not on fire.

“Ho Ho Ho mother fuckers!”

Suzanne spun on her heal to face Santa. She raised her gun to aim, but her arm didn’t want to work. She looked to see why and saw the blood dripping from her shoulder. Thuds on her chest, she looked there and saw yet more blood. Gunshots rang out around her. She saw now that Santa’s chest was a little redder than usual as well. But he kept shooting. She saw nothing else after that.

See the Dead Santa was founded by a bunch of loonies whose sole goal in life appeared to be the disillusionment of small children. It started simply enough – one man, Bill, in his basement with a strong desire to make people stop believing in Santa Clause. Alright, so the guy was a little nuts, but he held services in his basement in which people would burn images of Santa and sing songs of Santa hatred and tell stories of how Santa had let them down. They would say that Santa was a lie from the pits of hell. They even went so far as to spend most of their weekends running around town trying to “convert” random strangers – and this in the middle of April!

All went fine and dandy at the Dead Santa for quite a few months. But then somebody burned a four foot tall paper machete statue of Santa. Bill’s house caught on fire and burned to the ground. It seemed that the Dead Santa had come to an end.

Well, it seemed that way, at least until Bill decided to hold a fundraiser on top of the ashen remains of his house. He was in his boxer shorts, but in his defense the rest of his clothes were smoke stained and he didn’t want to look like a slob while officiating such serious business.

He may have had nothing other than a bunch of loonies attending his meetings, but they were apparently rich loonies. He raised enough money that they were soon able to open the Dead Santa “book” store. They insisted that it be called a “book” store, but it was a book store in the same way that Christian “book” stores are book stores. That being they had almost no books – just a few written by members of the club and all self-published. They also sold things like “There is no Santa” bumper stickers, “Just say no to Santa!” buttons, and the ever popular “Friends don’t let friends celebrate Christmas” T-shirts.

For a while it seemed that all was good. The members of the club got to have their fun, and now they were getting paid by the few non-club members that shopped there. Things soon changed, however, when a group of Santa lovers decided to start a war with the Dead Santa book store.

The war started – as most good wars do – with a hobo. This particular hobo was a man by the name John.

John had spent the better years of his life wondering the city streets looking for a free handout. He was perfectly capable of having a good job, but he was lazy, and, well, people were easy. So, he collected their money everyday sitting out on the street corner with his sign. Usually, the sign said something like “Will work for food,” or the overly simple, “Spare change?” But, one morning John sat down in front of the Dead Santa book store with a sign that said, “Santa is real.”

John didn’t intend to start a war. He just wanted people to believe in the man that made his childhood so great, but in his defense, John technically didn’t start the war, his dead body did.

Sometime that night, a passing stranger saw John’s sign and gave him a Santa hat and beard, but it turns out all John really needed was a blanket. He froze to death that night while wearing his new hat and beard. That was fine by John; life was just a passing thing to him, dying just proved that assumption. The next morning, however, a Santa supporter found his body and started spreading the rumor that it was the Dead Santa book store that had poor John assassinated for trying to undermine their efforts to stop Santa belief.
In response to that one unfortunate event, a group calling themselves the Santa Alliance For Everyone (SAFE) began vandalizing the Dead Santa book store. The Dead Santa members mostly handled this with speeches of outrage against the “minions of the red devil.” The Dead Santa members were mostly calm people, since, contrary to popular belief, crazy people are rather cool and collected.

Things got heated, however, when a SAFE member brought a shotgun to one of the speeches. Bill, the Dead Santa’s much loved founder, died from one slug to the head.

The Dead Santa members reacted with essentially an escalated form of hate speech. See, they didn’t kill anyone, but when you burn down the Times Square Christmas Tree, you tend to gain more enemies than friends.

And now we come back to Sam, who was prompted to take his current mission after seeing the Times Square Christmas Tree burning on television: Sam finally finished his slow meander toward the middle of the Dead Santa book store. He walked there with his head hung low, staring at his feet wondering if he was really able to go through with it. He loved Santa, and these people were clearly a threat to Santa’s position in the world. But there are some things that just seem wrong, even if they are done for the best of reasons. As he came to a stop at the center of the store, Sam had begun to release his grip on the bomb’s trigger. Breathing a deep sigh of relief at having decided to not do it, he looked up.

There standing in front of him was giant stuffed Santa – clothes torn and half naked – tied to a stake with glowing artificial flames at his feet. Sam felt like he was going to be sick. The sight of something so horrible once again bringing all his hatred of these people to the surface…

Sam pushed the button.

One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter, there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small that perhaps in the course of the hour, one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges, and through a relay releases a hammer that shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.¹

Today, Billy was going to be the cat, well…sort of. Billy devised a deviously simple yet powerful spin-off experiment. He would be the creature in the box. Only he would be unconscious – after all, he didn’t want to observe anything and throw the experiment off – and the box would also be able to save him by means of another device that would be triggered by the presence of hydrocyanic acid. The device, upon triggering would inject Billy with an antidote, thus reconciling his living and dead selves into one coherent whole…without outside observation. The box would then open and he would be allowed to step out.

The brilliance of this was, of course, that with no intelligent observation performed on Billy while he was in the box, he would continue to be both alive and dead, because once the box was open, one state would not be distinguishable from the other.

Most scientists would have been content just to have hypothesized this experiment, and would have never gone through with it. What good could it serve the scientific community? The facts were proven without ever having to kill yourself to get them.

Well, Billy didn’t give a tiny rat’s ass about the scientific community or anybody else for that matter. He was doing this for himself.

Billy had his own hypothesis of what would happen when the box opened. It’s a fairly well regarded fact that matter in a wave function (matter existing in two simultaneous states as per the laws of quantum physics, such as Billy’s body be in this experiment)  no longer follows the laws of classical physics. It, in fact, follows no laws. The matter within a wave function is essentially free from the laws of gravity, friction, mass, energy, and even density. It could be everywhere at once, or nowhere at all. It could fly across the entire universe in a matter of seconds. Its power is limitless!

And therein lies the reason for this mad endeavor. Billy’s body would be permanently stuck in a wave function. He would be infinitely powerful. He would be like a god.

Billy entered the box thinking that in the course of the next several hours, he would become a god. What Billy didn’t realize, however, was that his powers would also be uncontrollable. Control relates to observation, and that can’t be done on wave function, or else it ceases to be a wave function.

As Billy left the box, his mind stopped sensing his body. He couldn’t feel it. He couldn’t see it. He couldn’t use it to interact. To everyone else his body had disappeared also. The box just opened to dead air. But Billy was still alive, his mind containing every known square inch of the universe. He could not feel his body but he could feel the center of the sun at the same time he felt the absolute zero of the coldest portions of the universe. Saw the brightest bright and the darkest dark at the same time; every color bombarding his non-existent eyes at once. He smelled every atom at every second. He even tasted them. He knew what the center of the sun tasted like. He could even have told you that the milky way actually tastes something like a red hot chili pepper with extra vomit. He could have told you that, if he could have talked. But he had no control over any of it. His mind became a passive input machine for every scrap of data that the universe put out. He wished that he could commit suicide, but his mind persisted. It persists even to this day. Coldly observing everything, wishing for death to come and end its endless torment.

“When you cease to dream, you cease to live.”

Malcolm S. Forbes

I’m sorry that I had to leave you so soon, but I promise that I’ll see you again on the other side. I’ve always loved you, even when I was too scared to say it. I know you loved me as well. My one regret was not kissing you when I had the chance. I promise to make up for it. I’ll shower you in my love for all eternity.

Don’t cry for me. You must be strong, not for me, or even for yourself, but for the man you call husband. He can never see this letter. Our love must be kept a secret until it is the only one that matters. Go now, and be strong through the pain.

Remember that I’ll always love you in death, just as I always have in life.

Untill we meet again,
Mrs. Robinson

I moved this last February into a mobile home. It’s one bedroom larger than the town house we were renting but it’s also cheaper per month to own this than to rent the old place. The extra space is so nice.

I started writing a book. I’m about thirty pages into a spelunking sci-fi adventure. I’m hoping to actually be able to publish this one, and not just self-publish on lulu. Don’t know the first thing about getting it published though, but I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it. Right now I just want to finish writing it. Of course at the rate that I write, that will still be like six months.

Not much else to write about now. I’m gonna try to keep the flashes and short stories coming and not let this slip so far out of date again.

Here’s to a new beginning!

“Yes sweety?” the Angel answered.

“Mommy looks like she’s in trouble. What’s wrong with her?”

“She had a stroke, baby.”

“Will she be coming with us today?”

“No baby, she has a lot of good left to do down here.”

“Oh, OK.”

“Come on Random, we need to get going. Your grandpa is waiting for you on the other side.”

“What’s Grandpa like?”

“He’s a good man. You’ll really like him.”

“What’s it like in heaven?”

“You ask a lot of questions.”

“Cut me some slack! This is the first time I’ve seen anything but blackness.”

“All right, I’ll give you that.”

“Thank you… But you still didn’t answer my question.”

I love you Random. I miss you.

In other news, I’ve opened a store on Etsy.com. It’s called Recycled Chic, and I sell mostely jewelry made out of things like pop tabs, junk mail, and such. Check it out and maybe buy something!

Let’s see. Alicia’s job did get extended. She has to complete a ten week training course (paid), and she’s still technically employed through a temp service. But it usually takes at least six months to get hired in to the company, and she can work through the temp service indefinitely now instead of having a four week cap.

I’ve just been a stay at home dad. I have been working in my spare time on a book that has been in the work for the last two years called Eternity. I’m about half-way done. I hope it won’t take me another two years to finish the second half, but who knows.

Right now I’m sitting at my mother-in-law’s house because my house is getting sprayed for roaches. I tried when I first noticed them to get rid of them myself, and it hasn’t worked. So after fighting with my land lord for several weeks I finally got her to spray the apartment. I have two hours left to wait for it to be safe, but at least I don’t have to worry about them anymore, thank God.

Ok, not much else that I can think of for now, so until next time!