Dime Novels From Oblivion

When we couldn’t hear the helicopters anymore, we knew they’d abandoned us. Though from their point of view we’d be MIA. At least until they saw our dismembered corpses being paraded through the street.
There were just three of us. A Seargent, a PFC, ad myself. We had no way out. Certain death was on the other side of the door. All we could do was wait. Crouching in the dark, watching the door counting our last breaths, thinking our final thoughts.
The walls were paper thin. We could already hear them searching apartments just down the hall. Screams were answered by bursts of machine gunfire.
It was too dark to see all the rats, but we could hear their claws tapping on the floor. They were coming to scavenge the softening flesh of the bodies piled on the bed. A fat one brushed up against my foot, and I kicked the back end of its plump body as it scurried away.
A few units over someone squeezed the trigger and bullet snapped in my ear. There was a flash of pain and the warmth of spilli…

From the deepest sleep, at a moment when my mind and spirit had wholly unbound themselves from this mortal coil, I found myself among the clouds. High enough to look down upon the entirety of my family’s capital with the same view as God himself.
It all lay beneath me.
The bustling plazas built in the shadows of the majestic peaks of our ancient cathedrals in the heart of the old city. A center connected by webs of smooth lantern-lit roads and thoroughfares to the steadily encroaching smog shrouded industrial districts built along the banks of the winding river that bisected the city.
I took this omnipotence for granted for at that moment it was what had always been. Yet, I was keenly aware that this was the first time I had noticed the startling dimensions of the faceless steel buildings. The towering smokestacks cast shadows longer than any castles spire and with a far greater reach than the crowning cross of any cathedral.
Somewhere a steam whistle screamed loud enough for the enti…

Emporer Menelik stared into the gleaming glass eyes of the two faced-wolf. The taxidermied beast stood on an altar. At nearly eye level with the mighty warlord, the lifeless animal’s dual faces were locked in a perpetual and silent scowl that gleamed an impossible cluster of cerated teeth. Its dual faces locked in a perpetual snarl gleaming rows of serrated teeth. Menelik’s heart froze in his chest.
Did it just growl?
Menelik was shaken from his trance by the arrival of his high priest.
“All is ready my Emporer,” the silk draped religious functionary informed him.
Menelik took a breath and nodded his head. “I am ready,” he said with unmistakable confidence
During his reign, Menelik had acquired a vast collection of foreign curiosities. They varied wildly in origin, but what they all had in common was they defied the warlord’s understanding of the world. He kept a menagerie of bizarre creatures. Some were of truly dazzling designs painted in colors and patterns well beyond anything on …

"Alright, allow the Jung-Unit 2-6 hours to fully integrate itself with your neurobiology. If you start experiencing headache, insomnia, nausea, seizures, or hallucinations, please call user support." This friendly warning was the last thing the sales girl named Alex told Josh about his new purchase just before he walked out of the glass pyramid that wasn't a store but a "gateway," and only after friendly technicians had injected a microscopic brain-altering machine into his blood.  Alex didn't seem particularly worried about these potentially lethal side effects, so neither was Josh. It was with the deepest conviction Josh believed the power of information technology made humanity the master of its own evolutionary path and while Josh was walking to the bus stop a machine a fraction the size of a grain of sand was busy weaving itself into his nervous system. When it finished, Josh's physical brain would be powered by the latest in 6G network technology. He…