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Here's an old one from 2006, inspired by "Arizona Dream" by Philippe Bullot, #473 on this page.

We left the north dock of the New Ruidoso arcology about ten in the morning. The brown terrain, scuffed by low brush, flowed beneath our aircars. The jagged paired peaks of Mesa Doble loomed on the right and the autopilot took us close enough to see the strata of pale and dark rock striping across the mesa.

"Far enough?" Derome asked from the trailing aircar. Our aircar projected his voice to sound as if it came from behind us.

Our aircar also answered his question, 14.8 km, but I turned my head anyway to pour the data into deeper parts of my brain and the aircar obliged by blocking my eye's view of the cabin's back wall with a camera-collected view through the air behind us. Derome's aircar, like ours an aerofoil cabin with two lifters mounted on forward, chicane nacelles, had passed Mesa Doble. Behind the mesa, fading in the haze, New Ruidoso climbed, its jagged profile formed of sharp edges, a mimic of the mesa. They said New Ruidoso's architecture showed respect for the natural landscape, but at that moment it seemed to mock it with its size and its straight lines. Inside our relatives and acquaintances dreamed in Virtual, tended by machines, sheltered by buckytube walls.

"Far enough," I said.

Derome's aircar yawed a bit and then sped up. He'd already punched the hacked-up override. "Race you to the river and back!" he shouted as he passed us.

SCI FI Weekly Gallery Image 19 November 2007

Sorry, between the Thanksgiving holiday and technical difficulties with my smartphone, my entry in the series for "Oblate" by Angelis Jara, #552 on this page, is late.

Eric climbed down the dropship's ladder and jumped off the last rung to the surface of the flowing lava. The cryocompressors in his boot soles hardened the molten surface and his newly-formed raft of igneous rock bobbed on the glowing lava lake. Vaporized helium flowed through tubing up his legs and lower back and radiated heat out of his suit's angel wings.

He had not thought of Anjara for a few weeks but he thought of her now. He remembered how she arched her back and sucked in breath through her teeth when he licked her labia and clitoris while his fingers stroked her G-spot. He remembered the moss-green couch and the retro brick accent wall in her apartment and how she and he sat over wide deep mugs of coffee and plotted his conquest of the world of xenogeology. Here he was, six and a half years later, leading the expedition to the magma wells of Beta Comae Berenices III-B, hated by older scientists like Geli Munday and her cohort, envied by his socially-inept peers. He was only here because of Anjara.

He froze in place but his mind swirled. He clung to the primary research questions to anchor his thoughts. Did tidal forces caused by the primary planet and the other moon explain B's still-molten core? Did the pillars of translucent komatiite date back to the moon's origin or a later impact event?

I'll never forget you, he'd said, in a last desperate attempt to make her stay out of pity.

She must have rented the worldweary expression and tone of voice from some marketer of personality traits, because he knew then and now Anjara had none of her own. The half-life of memory is seven years, she replied.

He had never cried after she ended their affair and he needed to. He needed to cry, to honor his memories of their time together and to redeem the years of byzantine academic intrigue and emotionless hookups since then. The realization rushed on him and his suit stiffened to assure his balance. His suit telltales, displayed inside his faceplate, showed his heart rate and blood pressure in their yellow zones.

Cry now, tears to be captured by the expedition's data stream? And let Geli Munday and his other enemies whisper mockingly about him in the corridors of the institute's xenogeology department?

SCI FI Gallery Image 12 November 2007

The latest in this series was inspired by "Bugdropship Liftoff" by Manfred Thraller, #551 on this page.

Lt. Harrell finished his pre-flight walkaround of the dropship. The left hind tarsal claw showed some reentry blistering but otherwise she checked out. Harrell reached for the rope ladder to climb up but hesitated. SOP gave dropship pilots three hours turnaround time during an Orbit-to-Surface Round Trip and he might as well use it. The setting sun lit the puffy edges of low cumulus clouds
and a brisk breeze rustled across the lifeless rockstrewn plain. Within the square defined by the shield generators, the recon base showed as humps of buried shelters. Most of the six people based there would be asleep or on duty
wrangling their robots, but someone might be at liberty to swap stories over cups of moonshine.

Mr. Redmon spoke in his mind's ear. --Lieutenant, is your bug physically unable to perform?--

--No,-- Harrell replied, quite consciously leaving off sir. He could chauffeur the civilian without repecting him.

--I ordered you to shove off as soon as you did your post- and pre-flight checks.--

Harrell stared past the humped shelters toward low tan hills five miles away. --SOP calls for me to give a surface base CO one hour to bundle and load packages for return to the flagship.--

Through the link he felt Redmon seethe. --Lieutenant, while I am dirtside I am the commanding officer of all I survey. Now get your ass upstairs or I'll fill your life with more bullshit than a Texas barnyard. Do you roger me?--

--I roger you. Mr. Redmon.-- He turned his back on the base, scaled his bug's thorax, and pulled the rope ladder into the cockpit after him. He tapped the controls and the bug jumped on its springy legs, pushing Harrell into his
seat. At the top of the jump the minidrives kicked in, pushing him deeper and filling the bottom of the window views with spilling yellow-white light. He turned the bug toward the sunset and his orbital insertion and wondered what kind of bribe to the dropship group's XO would free him from returning to pick up the civilian.

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I've been doing this series of sf-writing calisthenics for a while. Here's an early snippet, inspired by "Point of View" by Jérôme Bois, Cover no. 470 (April 24, 2006) on this page. (The seated woman and the servitor were visible when it was the SCI FI Weekly cover image, trust me).

"Birds don't fly in straight lines."

Across the room, legs crossed on a chair hung from the ceiling on slender carbon fiber, Priya looked up. Her gesture stopped the servitor carrying a tray with espresso
cups in mid-bow. Past the servitor, Arminius stood and stared out the window. He wore the gray trousers and green shirt combination she was certain represented a bug in his valet's software. Hands clasped behind him, his profile showed his gaze tracing straight lines through the air outside between their flat and the ziggurats downtown.

"You see a bird?" Every so often one strayed in from the
sea of wilderness outside the city, or snuck through the ductwork from the arcology's atrium.

He shook his head with a slight smile. "The aircars. Traffic control has them travelling in straight lines, but why? We've decoded the brains of birds and could code the same into the cpus of aircars."

"Birds fly into windows. You want an aircar to do the same?"

SCI FI Weekly Gallery Image 5 November 2007

This week's entry is inspired by "The Search on Glacialis Luna," by Paul Gibson, cover no. 550 on this page.

Beta Comae Berenices had risen, but that only made conditions worse, Gib thought. Under the yellow sunlight, vapor steamed out of the open holes in the ice, cloaking the surface in a thick fog. Outcroppings of magnetite thrust jaggedly out of the pack ice and spoofed the scanner on Gib's airscout with false leads. Every kilometer, Unité observation towers stood on three spindly legs, but the sensors running around the circumeference of each tower's circular top deck had been designed for warmer planets and gave unreliable data.

Even if the impediments magically disappeared, the odds were high (p = 0.91, the airscout's Bayesian system guessed) the artifact had impacted too hard and smashed against a magnetite pillar or plunged through the pack ice into the sea below. This was a fool's errand. Gib slowed the airscout and left it hovering while his mouth contorted and he shook his head at the futility of the search. He turned the stick and upped the throttle to head for home.

"Monsieur Pauli asks that you continue the search," the airscout said in its cheery alto voice. "He will continue to pay you 125% of expenses, plus time spent."

Gib hovered again. M. Pauli knew the odds were against finding the artifact, but if he were willing to spend more money--

--The artifact must be worth a lot.

"I'll be glad to keep searching," Gib said. He pushed the airscout forward at low speed and tasked every spare cpu cycle on stripping magnetite ghosts from the scanner data.

Sci Fi Weekly Gallery Image 29 October 2007

Looks like SCI FI Weekly didn't get a picture up this week. Here's my entry in the series for Alex NIKO, "SinE City: Free Port" (Cover no. 548 here)

The sky above the city was empty this morning. All the spacers at liberty and slumming bobos slept late after their debaucheries the night before. L.X. throttled down the thrusters on the runabout and levelled off above the city. The rooftops, slabbed and angled like the offcuts at a giant's stoneworks, stood like an archipelago in a sea of morning haze. The haze and smooth surfaces veiled the inner workings of the city, where crimes against nature could be indulged in the flesh and, for an added price, the chirurgical vats and neuroanatomical programmers could strip those crimes' evidence from body and mind. OKIN tolerated the free port, aware of the needs satisfied therein and confident its gates and scanners could contain the city's excesses and preserve the narrow-minded serenity of the realm beyond.

L.X. patted the black leather messenger bag on the seat beside him, sipped hot green tea, and dove to meet those waiting for him.