engineered martyr

A media figure who endorses a preemptive war against another country is extradited to that country, tried and execute for war-mongering.

bridge and chorus

after some years of exile he returns to conduct the city orchestra. his opponent in the election which resulted in his exile has been executed for transgressing a new morality law. He is taciturn. People say it is because of his resentment over his exile. He claims it is a demeanor he learned while working as an aviator during his time away. He becomes more congenially once he dries out – liquor is harder to get in town and he doesn’t think he needs it now.

Advertisement

diagnosis

he was first medicine man to ask questions about his patients behavior and environment, in order to try to better determine the cause of their ailments. without the ability to write his techniques down they quickly devolve into linking sickness as the result of proscribed behavior, as he discovers when he travels to other villages.

eosinophil, inc.

A celebrity hires a bodygard company, which bills itself as a “privacy agency”, and which promises to drastically reduce the irritation of the paparazzi. And indeed the paparazzi start disappearing, completely enough to warrant a police investigation.

difference

Sisters Frannie and Annie have been living together, dressing the same, eating the same things, working the same job, living the same life together for decades. Until someone breaks into their home and rapes one of them. Just Annie. And afterward it’s Frannie who has a hard time coping, who thinks that things can’t be the same, that they can’t be the same. Not because she’s ashamed of Annie, but because she doesn’t think she’s worthy anymore to share the same life with Annie – Frannie feels like the one locked out of Annie’s life.

stretcher

a team of medics must get an injured woman out of a forest of various carnivorous plants without the location, sensor and guidance equipment on which they usually rely.

gesture

a traveler is invited to a kind of puppet show or dance, where scenes from an epic mythical story are re-enacted through hand gestures. It’s a combination of javanese dance, the mudra of Buddhist sculpture, adn sign language. after he finishes watching it his hosts ask him what he thought the story was about. he gives his interpretation and they all laugh. he’s way off. the explain some of the gestures and give him the real plot. the dancer joins them for dinner afterward, and the traveler thinks he sees her give some of the same gestures as she picks the meat off of the bones. he glances at his other guests who are all giving him knowing looks.

scheduled time

he was too busy at work with a very important project to process his grief over the death of his mother, so he stored his grief on an external drive, to download on the weekends and emotionally process a little bit at a time. in the same people used to schedule time on mainframe computers and supercomputers, he was scheduling time with his own heart.

foraging

the cook for a band of air pirates goes out on a hunting expedition with some of the raiding crew. it’s good to get out of the dirigible once in a while. They are over the ocean. Ater harvesting some savory sponges, and bagging some flying fish, he convinces his companions to hunt for boar on an island. They are attacked by a group of large predator birds, which they ttry to exterminate lest they follow back to the airship.

contest

at the musical competition the judges were dazzled by greg’s fingering, but his win was disputed by roberta, who claimed to prove with electronic measurements that his tone did not conform to the official tuning rules.