Dime Novels From Oblivion

Sophia was early into her mid-thirties and already had achieved far more over the course of her relatively short career than her ambitious younger self could ever have expected. Her practice was in a gleaming Manhattan highrise.  The carefully crafted space coupled with her reputation was enough to attract the sort of clients that could pay the rates that supported a lavish lifestyle.  She accumulated enough wealth as a confidant to the city's elite she was able to live like them. Her money trickled down among an army of service staff that handled various aspects of her life. People made her appointments, took her calls, cleaned her loft, delivered her groceries and handled her taxes. Just over two years ago she had saved her engagement thanks to the advice of a teenage boy who believed he was Adolf Hitler. He was, of course, a rising star in his field and at the time seemed like the centerpiece for a life anyone would be envious of, but her steady ascendancy turned into a meteor…

After Ivan the IV defeated the Tar Tars at Kazan, he rode on horseback to survey his conquest and wept at the sight of the heaps of slaughtered women and children. He said, "they may not be Christian, but they are people like us." Today distant and detached commander in chiefs view the results of the mechanized slaughter they unleashed through the sterile medium of field reports and they dehumanize their victims with the clinical term "collateral damage."

The flood lights mounted on the bulky environmental suits glowed like a ghostly candlelight procession in the black dust saturated air. They were guided through the impenetrable howling vortex by a mile long wire. The minors followed the cable to a tracked vehicle waiting for the inside of the storm.
The blinding lights fastened to the idling behemoth were obscured in the suffocating maelstrom.  When the minors got to the ramp, they raced for the refuge of the transport the way rodents seek sanctuary in a small dark hole
New Gaul was a facility built at the bottom of an impact point punched into the planet's surface by a meteorite large enough to rival some of the planets from humanity's celestial birthplace.  The planetary splinter had been plummeting through eternity for as long as 4 million years.  At this point in its trajectory, it was due to come within 250 thousand miles of a planet hosting “primitive life.”
The meteorite was composed of several gigatons of precious met…

The impact a revolutionary technology has had on society can only be thoroughly examined in retrospect. Regardless of what changes for better or worse peoples lives will be altered by what it brings to bare. This is the third story I have written about the consequences of a scientific breakthrough that allows light to reanimate.
The first was titled "The 3D Dead" the account of how the discovery was made and "Right to Die" an anecdote about how a dead man found himself tormented by his new station in the world as a ghost and his family's inability to let him go. The following is another story about what happens when our cherished civic institutions finally had to decide how society would face a new world where the dead are never really gone.....

Mobs of reporters and demonstrators converged on the courthouse. They were held back by a ring of riot police. The different protest groups merged into a single mass of people brandishing homemade signs with the hashtag…