Month: December 2023

Warbot!

A teaser from the current WIP, working title 'Maroli Winter'.

The sensation of operating the breaching waldoe was an order of magnitude more intimate than the same experience within a simulation, and Myra Fowlkes knew why — the Anodyne virtual tutorial authored by the manufacturer was pathetic.

The machine’s vision was intensely sharp and focused, with more depth of field than delivered by organic optics. While waiting to deploy, she smelled silicone grease with sufficient precision to locate the source without taking a single step — it was on a flexible seal dovetailed into the spaceboat’s hatch opening.

The warbot felt like a neoprene wetsuit. Its hands were her hands, clad in half-finger diving gloves. Its feet wore hiking boots like ones she’d taken back to the store because they were too stiff, except these had so much traction she had to take weight off one ankle if she wanted to rotate.

Continue reading “Warbot!” →
1

My Brother, How I Miss You Already

The photo was taken in 1957, at our home in Manila only one year after our family moved from Flintstone, Georgia. Our mother was thirty-seven. Our stepsister Carolyn was fifteen. I was seven.

Mike was sixteen, already a man, kind, witty, and charming, an example for me to respect from a distance for most of our lives because I was only nine when he left the nest and we never lived in the same town again.

SONY DSC

Linda and I were married at least a couple of years before she met him. Mike would have been not yet forty at the time, six-foot-three and movie-star handsome, so much so that Linda asked, “What happened to you?”

A lifetime later, I finally thought of an answer. I got a brother out of the deal.

Michael Lee Dyer passed away last night, December 4, 2023, of pneumonia, following a six-month battle with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He was eighty-two years old, frail, suffering, aware of impending death and the most important thing he could think of during our last moments together was to say how much he loved me and how proud he was to be my brother.

Linda and I prayed that our natural father Benjamin Franklin Dyer, by all accounts another prince of a man, would be there to receive him. Godspeed, my brother. I loved you always, and will never forget you.

12

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑