Single-use paths through the city are produced in the following manner: a map of its streets, ideally eleven inches across by seventeen inches tall, is laid out on a level surface. Next, a single shell is loaded into the cartographic apparatus, filled with a mixture of cuttlefish ink, magnetic gel, and iron shavings. Finally, the trigger is pulled, allowing the electrically-charged cocktail to splatter across the entire breadth of the page.
The subsequent patterns show jagged paths through the city which can only be traversed once. The wanderer must be actively carrying the produced map for such shortcuts to be visible, and each disappears approximately one hour after the map was made (at which time its brittle ink begins to crumble). As such, anyone who intends to use such a path must do so quickly and decisively, and furthermore, if they have a specific destination in mind, they should be prepared to exhaust numerous maps and shells until an exact combination is found which leads them there.
Because the paths indicated by these maps cannot be retraced, it follows that only one person can ever actually use each one successfully. Anyone who attempts to accompany or tail the person using it will find themselves lost and separated somewhere along the way.
On the other hand, the carrier has a once-in-a-lifetime experience. There are entire neighborhoods, restaurants, and even shopping malls which only exist in these liminal spaces. Strangers who are met here are always happy to have company, for they rarely ever see anyone pass their way, and likely never will again. Their lives are bound to the conjunction of map and territory, and most do not live past the point at which the ink that birthed them fades.
Such matters are one of the major reasons why single-use paths remain unpopular; that, and the fact that following them is an experience that cannot be shared. Most who use these byways simply keep their heads down and ignore their surroundings until they arrive at their destination.
Magnetically-charged ink can have other consequences.
The ammunition for this apparatus can also be used for tattoos.
The lives of those born from ink can be short indeed.
Single-use paths through the city are produced in the following manner: a map of its streets, ideally eleven inches across by seventeen inches tall, is laid out on a level surface. Next, a single shell is loaded into the cartographic apparatus, filled with a mixture of cuttlefish ink, magnetic gel, and iron shavings. Finally, the trigger is pulled, allowing the electrically-charged cocktail to splatter across the entire breadth of the page.
I worked on the sixty-first floor of the tower, a height from which the streets could not be seen, but we were all gathered at the window that day, looking out at the rainbow spectacle. A flock of sky anemones was migrating through the city, slowly floating from west to east, back towards their home vortex over the open ocean. The jet stream had tossed them further north than usual this year, paralyzing the city below. Their elastic bodies bounced and rolled against the windows as they wandered, leaving venomous smears behind.
By the time the photographers arrived, all that was left of her was a chalk outline. Her corpse had been removed from the scene, leaving the otherwise empty alleyway to a handful of spectators and journalists. Their voices filled the air with speculation: “From fifteen stories? Nobody could survive that.” “Nah, no foul play is suspected. People who knew her, they knew she’d eventually pull something like this.” “Her husband doesn’t want to talk. Just wants a lawyer. Go figure.”
The noise didn’t last. One by one, the reporters disappeared, back to the newspapers from which they emerged.
Then, as moonlight filled the city, she rose from the pavement once more.
“The ASCII standard begins with a set of control characters,” she explained. “If you type the last of these on a modern computer, an invisible character is added, one that usually doesn’t do anything. It’s a relic from another time called the ‘delete’ character, number 127. These days, programmers sometimes use it as a placeholder, but for the most part, it’s obsolete.”
“I’m looking to get my nephew something special for his birthday.”
The witch nodded. “So you are. I take it you’ve heard about the arts that I practice?”
“I have. I was wondering if you could make an alligator for him. It’s his favorite animal.”
“Sure, that’s easy enough. I can make just about any animal that you can imagine."
“Trust me. You don’t want to be awake for the procedure.”
“Oh, believe me, I do.”
“No, you really don’t. You don’t want to know what it feels like to have a katydid crawling down your throat. That, and without the proper anesthetic, it would almost certainly trigger your gag reflex.”
“What is this?” The old man asked. “I’ve never seen a piece like it before.”
“It’s called ‘the Prophet,’” his opponent replied. “In this chess variant, there are no bishops. You place your Prophet kingside, and your Spy queenside.”
“This thing’s a search engine?”
“That’s right.” The device looked like something of a pipe organ, with tall, brass pipes protruding from a central chassis, yet it featured a typewriter’s keyboard instead of ivory keys. An array of thirty-some enigma-like rotors could be seen churning within its glass case. “A search engine, and an entirely mechanical one at that. Type anything you want here, and it will search the world for relevant content, no wires attached.”
“You’re not going to find anything down there,” Dr. Price explained. “There’s no such thing as a negative radio frequency. You can represent them mathematically, sure, but there’s no real world analogue. A wave observed forward or backward in time is physically identical.”
Those words didn’t seem to have any effect on her student, however, who continued turning the knob on her device counterclockwise. “Well, you and I might know that, but does the radio?”
“I’m looking for a love potion.”
“Of course you are.” It was that time of year again, when teenagers came to the mall seeking far more potent things than they could handle. He had a variety of substitutes that he’d sell them, from concentrated moonlight to seahorse hormones, but he never gave them exactly what they asked for. “Prom’s coming up, yes? And there’s someone in particular that you want to go with you?”
Francis Caldwell, certified professional accountant and frequent flyer #7005412, had a particular ritual that he performed whenever he checked into a new hotel room. Whether or not he needed to make use of it at the time, he would sit down on the toilet with his suitcase open in front of him, examine each of the bathroom’s complimentary toiletries one by one, then hide each little bottle in his luggage. [...]
When it came to the Hotel Coagula, however, Francis found his routine interrupted by a single, anomalous item: a tiny jar labeled “try me first! black champagne and anise-flavored reality enhancement blend.”
The escalator god has very few worshippers, and the same can be said of the elevator goddess. As latecomers to the pantheon game, they’ve been fiercely competing for the attention of a handful of devotees from the confines of their fiberglass palaces. Without a Trojan War or a Ragnarok in which to prove their worth, they’ve been forced to develop a much less glamorous system of competition.
My roommate arrived home from her death coughing between fits of laughter. Her hair was freshly dyed, evergreen on brown, and her shirt was soaked in blood (hers, this time). She ran over to squeeze my daylights out, pinned me against the counter, then shoved my hand into her chest. Her skin was cold, adhesive, and pale- already blue in a few patches. “Check it out!” She yelled, grinning madly, and staring into me with inch-wide pupils. “No pulse! It’s finally over!”
The old man loads another cartridge of glimmering sand into the dreamthrower, then takes aim. Each of its three scopes rattles into alignment as he turns the crank, wrapping a collection of infrared crosshairs around the teenage skateboarder’s face. His weapon’s ribs glow brightly in the midnight fog. “God damn insomniac kids,” he yells. “For the last time, stop fucking around with the city’s circadians!”
There are chambers beneath the city where sound continues to exist without space in which to propagate. For most species, including human beings, these environments appear to be little more than solid walls of limestone and granite. For bats, however, these barriers are as permeable as the air they breathe. They dip in and out of the subterranean passages hidden beyond, preying upon the immaterial insects within.
She fills the filter cartridge with crushed cinnamon, then slides it under the boil-jet. The inverted kettle howls to life as vapor erupts from its exhaust system, mere seconds before water begins gushing through a Medusa’s wig of transparent pipes. The fluid slowly takes on a shade of burnt umber as the cinnamon concentrates inside, combining with milk and black honey in its coils. The final product trickles into her mug, still steaming from the heat of the machine’s galvanic wires.
The bag of popcorn that you’ve been handed is covered in rules and regulations. “Do not allow your popcorn or any other items from concessions to contaminate the screen. Be considerate of the allergies and tastes of other movie goers.” “All food containers must be thoroughly disposed of before leaving the theater. Failure to abide by this policy renders you subject to search and seizure.” “No drinking from cellular phones is allowed.”
It seems excessive, but you’re excited nonetheless. This is the first time that you’ve been cleared to see a film on Screen Zero at the Electric Fool’s Theatre.
“They say that our universe exists as a pipeline for carrying the void from one place to another.” She spoke with that unmotivated tone common to government-employed oracles. “Your chart exemplifies this principle. You were born while the moon was in the house of the locomotive constellation, which is carrying darkness between two of our neighboring realities.”
It takes quite a bit of paperwork to extradite a criminal from the afterlife. Because she died without a federal grave license, however, officials were able to arrange for serial bank robber Daisy Cormorant’s arrest after a single round of negotiations with the gods. She had purchased a luxury condo in the underworld using an assumed name, and had also drastically altered her appearance by tanning in the light of the planet’s core; regardless, a combination of dental records and tax audits led to her capture.
One evening, my roommate came home from an illegal grocery store in the western quarter. She was wearing one of those heavy canvas military jackets, and it was covered in fresh smears of indigo fluid that I would later find out was something’s blood. “Check it out.” She slammed a gallon-sized mason jar down on the table. A creature could be seen squirming inside, something covered in tentacles and thorns with no discernible body of its own, sloshing around in that same blue ooze. “They let me pick one out of the tank myself.”
After the journalist’s death, they mummified him in newspapers from faraway lands. Those who attended the burial looked inside his sarcophagus and read of his sentencing to the electric chair in the Agarthan suburbs, the terrible hunting accident that claimed his heartbeat on the outskirts of El Dorado, and the crocodile that tore out his throat in the sewers of New York. Apparently he had even taken a sharpshooter’s bullet while serving as a war correspondent in Troy. Every inch of skin and each hypothetical wound was obscured by contradiction.
Wherever he goes, he carries a pack of American Spirits in his left hand. He never actually smokes them; each one attempts to wriggle from his grip as he draws it from the carton, but to no avail. He devours all of them like popcorn, grinding raw tobacco and ash between his gnarled teeth. His skin has faded to the tone of pewter during the course of his term, likely due to this exact habit.
While you’re busy drinking a cocktail of anteater blood and vermouth, a well-dressed businessman next to you shoves three curled, nacreous tokens towards the bartender. You recognize them from an illegal magazine that you stumbled across three months ago; these are mermaid fingernails, the official currency of the Illuminati.