Del Stone Jr.

I Feed the Machine (a science fiction story)

April 11, 2026

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INTRODUCTION

As I was writing “I Feed the Machine” I did not envision a future America where political criminals and religious fundamentalists might rule the land.

Yet here we are, in the summer of 2024. The corrupt Supreme Court has just ruled that presidents, in their capacity as commander in chief, are not subject to the rule of law, invalidating 248 years of American jurisprudence. Republicans are busy rewriting voting districts so that only they can be elected, and the GOP is silencing the ability of the loyal opposition to make its voice heard.

Simultaneously, religious fundamentalists are attacking the institutions that have made America such a wonderful experiment in democracy and egality. They would have us think and behave in their own drab perception of what is right and wrong, or good and bad.

And corporate entities are solidifying their hold over both the architecture of our leadership and the reins of our economy, ensuring that we remain indefinitely within their thrall.

Powerful forces are arrayed against us, forces that do not care about you or me, forces that have only their preservation and enrichment in mind.

I’m reminded of the following quote, taken from astronomer Carl Sagan in his book “The Demon-Haunted World”:

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. …”

“I Feed the Machine” is a fictional rendering of that quote. It is what happens when good people stop thinking and leave the solutions to others, or as the Rev. Charles Frederic Aked (not Edmund Burke) wrote, “It has been said that for evil men to accomplish their purpose it is only necessary that good men should do nothing.”

I contemplated the 2024 Fourth of July with no small degree of despair. It may well have been our last as a free people. A great evil has clouded the minds of otherwise decent and hardworking Americans, one that would have them support a felon and sex offender for the highest office in the land. And his odious Project 2025 is nothing less than a blueprint for 21st century fascism.

That is not what America is about, yet many people eagerly anticipate the calamity, as if it would solve their problems. It won’t.

Everything hangs in the outcome of the presidential election in 2024. Will America continue to be America, or will it become a Christo-fascist state with strutting, smirking potentates folding their arms, jutting their jaws and nodding at the adoring masses, abetted by evil religionists and fawning corporate parasites?

The choice, as I see it, is simple:

A vote for democracy.

Or a vote for “I Feed the Machine.”

We shall see. …

Del Stone Jr., July 5, 2024

I FEED THE MACHINE

I feed the machine.

I bring his breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

I have always done this. I always will.

The machine is a man. He is called a Tabulator. He performs calculations, and he is the company’s most valuable asset.

We live in the Redoubt, where the machine is served by me and others. Doctors. Teachers. Groomsmen. His breeding pool.

We have always lived here. We always will.

—

Sometimes the machine favors me with talk.

“Have you never traveled beyond these walls?” he asks. He knows I have not, but still he asks. “Have you never seen the mountains that conceal our fortress? Have you never seen the ocean, or the sky?”

Sometimes the machine speaks in these questions that are not really questions. He knows I was born here just as he, the fifth of his line. He knows we all were born here under the watchful eye of the company. Otherwise we might be set upon by martyrs from other companies who covet his calculations.

Or the infidels.

Mostly it is at dinner that the machine favors talk. I tell him my supervisor will punish me if I do not return at once, but the machine scoffs. “I have made it clear to the company that if I wish my servers to linger they will not be punished,” And when he finishes saying that he winks at me. It is flattering that a man of such value would favor my company, but my supervisor will be unhappy.

Still, I linger. I enjoy the machine’s questions.

—

What is a mountain? What is an ocean, or a sky?

I have heard of these things. A mountain is a mass of rock which protects us from martyrs and the infidels. An ocean is a great body of water. It separates us from the infidels, who live on the other side of the world. The sky is a great open thing from which the infidels might descend to destroy us all.

But I have never seen a mountain, an ocean, or a sky.

—

“Have you never loved?” the machine asks. His eyes are alive and glittering, and through them I see a sliver of the vast world his thoughts occupy. I tell him I have a great love of the company, and of The Rapture, our leaders of the government. He waves a hand to dismiss this answer. “We all love those things of course. I am speaking of the love of another person.”

The machine has always treated me with respect and affection. I tell him I love him.

He smiles warmly and says, “As I love you. But I am speaking of an even greater love, the love that exists between a man and a woman, or a man and a man as the case may be.”

I am horrified by his words. The love between a man and a man would be smitten by The Rapture as an abomination. And here at the Redoubt the love between a man and a woman is forbidden. It interferes with important work. We servers are given monthly inoculations to prevent it. I gaze about the dining room and my expression seems to convey more than my simple answer of no.

“It doesn’t matter if they are listening,” he says. “I am the company’s most valuable asset.” He is silent a moment. I gather his food, which he has barely touched, and as I leave he reveals to me, “I am in love.”

I cannot fathom such a thing. It is as mountain, ocean, and sky.

—

I live in a 500-square-foot room. I take my meals in a cafeteria. I have access to a gymnasium, a swimming pool, and a fitness room. For entertainment I look at approved books, compete in sporting events, or browse the aisles of the company store. I receive weekly sunlamp treatments and blood tests. I pray three times a shift at organized services. Once a month I receive a castration inoculation. I am allowed access to certain parts of the Redoubt and my whereabouts are reported by transponder. If I deviate from approved areas an explosive device with a blast radius of two centimeters will detonate inside my brain.

I have a busy and rewarding life. I have no room for love.

—

“I am in love with the Checker,” the machine whispers surreptitiously. I don’t understand.

A Checker is a person who checks a Tabulator’s work. He constructs proofs to validate or invalidate the Tabulator’s calculations. The proofs are then returned to the Tabulator, who either certifies or revises them. Once the calculations and proofs are certified by both Tabulator and Checker they are sold to the contractee, another company or The Rapture itself.

The Checker and the Tabulator are never allowed to meet. To do so might corrupt their work. They are kept away from one another and it is this I do not understand. How could the machine love a person he has never met?

“The Checker is a woman,” the machine says with a smile. “Her proofs are constructed with an intricacy that only a woman might understand and a man admire.”

The machine has been distressed. I wonder if these thoughts grow from that discontent. He is currently performing a set of calculations for The Rapture, the most important calculations any Tabulator has attempted to produce. If he is successful the menace of the infidel will be ended.

“I hide messages in my calculations,” the machine whispers to me, glancing suspiciously at the walls, “and she responds to them in her proofs.” The glitter in his eyes has been replaced with a desperate sheen.

“She validates my love, and I validate hers.”

I do not understand.

—

The infidels live on the other side of the world. They are a lost people who exist in moral squalor. They celebrate primitive animal desires: lust, greed, pleasure. They use devices wantonly and most abominable are the thinking devices, the ones that perform their calculations. They use these devices to support and export their evil culture. For their efforts they will suffer eternity in the Lake of Fire.

The Rapture wisely outlawed such devices and we are protected from the moral squalor they induce. Now only simple devices are allowed, such as the device inside my brain. The infidels would decry such a device as an invasion of personal freedom, but human beings are born with only one choice – the choice to accept or reject the Savior. I made my choice a long time ago. I am free.

—

“I have asked the company to let me see her,” the machine murmurs. “They will refuse and I will be forced to act.” The room has become cluttered with papers filled with inscrutable markings. Pages are attached to the walls and bear the frantic formulae of a genius who cannot write as quickly as he can calculate. I understand none of it, which is why I am allowed to see it.

“I am approaching a critical juncture in my calculations,” he says. He looks weary and perplexed. Perhaps he has encountered a problem he cannot solve. “If they do not allow me to see her I will be unable to complete their calculations.”

Had another person spoken these words he would have been smitten as a heretic. To threaten the company and The Rapture is unthinkable. But the machine is a genius and from him they seem words of uncanny insight, though I cringe to hear them. He says the very things we are told not to think.

“Let us hope they have the good sense not to retire us,” he says but I am not afraid. We will all be retired one shift and in some fashion. Should the machine fall from grace we servers will be retired with the push of a button, the devices in our brains detonating simultaneously. Should I slip poison into the machine’s afternoon tea I alone will be retired – not before I have been compelled to reveal the source of my corruption. Retirement is a fact of life.

But the machine seems to value something more than his life.

—

I bring the machine his breakfast. He is leaning back in a chair with his feet propped on the table. His smile is fat with glee.

“It has begun,” he gloats. “I have asked the company to let me see the Checker. They have refused. So I have told them I cannot complete the orbital calculations for The Rapture.”

I do not know what “orbital calculations” are, but I am familiar with the term “blackmail,” having been intensively studied in the dark arts of manipulation used by the infidels. I fear for the machine’s soul.

“The company will distribute my work among other Tabulators and they will fail. The company will then be required to grant my request. I expect this will take a week. Meanwhile, let’s eat!” he proclaims, rubbing his hands together. “Self-determination can give a man an appetite.”

He winks.

—

My supervisor tells me I will not feed the machine this shift.

Am I being retired?

No. It is a company intercession. The machine is not to be fed until further notice.

—

After seven shifts I am allowed to feed the machine.

He does not look healthy. His skin is sallow and hangs from his cheeks and elbows. His hair is coarse and gray. He has the sunken posture of an elderly man.

But his eyes are alive.

“The company has tried to starve me into submission,” he says, eating only a little of this and that as if his stomach were no longer capable of accepting food. “But I will not submit. I am a middle-aged man and soon a thing like romance will be lost upon me. I am determined to solve this problem.”

If he were to receive castration inoculations like the rest of us he would not be grappling with these feelings. But the chemicals might dull his ability to calculate, so the company refrains from giving them to him.

“They have promised to reconsider my request if I provide them with the first dimension of my calculations. I have agreed to do that. I will not, however, provide them with enough information to enable a second Tabulator to complete the calculations. Not until I have met with my sweet Checker.”

I do not understand why this liaison is so important but I relegate it to the body of arcane notions the machine sometimes shares with me. Perhaps I will understand it after I have seen a mountain, an ocean or a sky.

—

The machine is sobbing.

The sound is terrible. I have heard it only once in my life, during a sporting event when a fellow server was injured and suffered great pain. The machine must be suffering great pain. I cannot place his oatmeal on the table because he is resting his head there.

“The company has said it will not consider my request to meet the Checker until I’ve provided them with the second and third dimensions of my calculations.”

I don’t understand. The company said it would consider his request after he provided them with the first.

“They lied,” he says bitterly.

For a moment my thoughts go blank. The company cannot lie; lying is an abomination that would bring harsh sanctions from The Rapture.

*Image courtesy of RawPixel by way of a Creative Commons license.*

“They said they were ‘revising’ the conditions of our agreement because of unforeseen circumstances. I asked them what those circumstances were and they said The Rapture was anxious to acquire my calculations and had advanced their deadline. They said the risk of having the results tainted by my meeting the Checker were too great, and that afterwards such a meeting might be arranged. But I know they are lying.”

This is the most vexing of all the new ideas the machine has shared with me and I truly fear for his soul. The company cannot lie. Truth is the foundation of our life here at the Redoubt.

“I will not submit,” the machine says in an unsteady voice.

Has he begun to fail?

—

At my nightly prayer ritual I ask that the Savior provide clarity of thought and moral guidance to the machine. My prayers are approved by the minister who presides over the service. He is a company man. He tells me the Savior will look kindly upon my request because the machine is providing an invaluable service for all who believe in The Rapture.

Later, in my room, I wonder: Should I have asked for my own clarity of thought?

—

“Did you need further proof the company lies?” the machine snarls as I bring him his dinner. “Look at this.”

He is shaking a piece of paper.

“They told me it was a message from the Checker! Bah!”

He does not offer me the piece of paper, which is just as well. I would not know what to make of anything written there.

“It has none of her personality or her insights. In every way it says nothing. An imposter wrote this!”

I struggle for a response. I suggest the Checker may not be able to express her thoughts outside of mathematics.

“It is signed by a man,” the machine mutters grimly. “They don’t know that I know.”

I do not want to say what occurs to me: that the machine has made an error, that the Checker in fact is a man and the messages hidden in the calculations are nothing more than coincidence.

“I performed the second dimension of calculations. I asked the Checker if she had written such a message. She vigorously denied doing so.”

For the first time in my life I am sick with uncertainty. The two pillars of my belief are at war with one another and I feel I am being asked to choose.

“They will never receive the completed calculations.”

I don’t know what to say.

—

My supervisor takes me aside. I am led to a room. I am introduced to a Disciple of The Rapture.

I fall to my knees.

He motions that I rise. I am humbled by his presence. He is one of only 12 and is second only to the Foremost who is the titular head of The Rapture. Apart from encounters with the machine I have never bowed in the presence of such wisdom and insight.

He asks me questions about the machine. What does he eat? When does he sleep. What are his interests? I answer each question truthfully. Then he asks if I know what the machine hopes to accomplish by meeting the Checker. In fact I do not, as the concept of love is as unknown to me as a mountain, ocean, or sky.

The Disciple ponders this a moment and then delivers a homily in which he confirms what I already know, that the machine is performing a set of calculations that will bring the menace of the infidels to an end and I should help him to finish his work by performing my server duties to the best possible extent.

I vow to do that (without pointing out that I have always done that) and I am dismissed. Outside the room others who serve the machine are called to question.

At the end of my shift I attend my nightly prayer ritual and I pray more fervently than ever for guidance. I could have told the Disciple about the machine’s communication with the Checker through their calculations but I did not. Was that a lie? And why was I protecting the machine?

—

The machine is ecstatic. I place his breakfast before him and he shovels great dripping spoons of oatmeal into his mouth. He is hardly able to speak between his appetite and his joy.

“I met with the Disciple and he has agreed to my request!” he blurts. I can barely understand him.

But I feel two things – an overwhelming happiness for the machine and an unspeakable sense of relief for myself. The conflict is resolved. Better, my faith in the forces around me has been restored. The company is good. The Rapture is wise. And the machine is as smart and virtuous as I have always believed. It is by my relief that I measure the depth of my uncertainty, which I suppose demonstrates that what The Rapture teaches us is true: Human beings are fallible creatures who must always reaffirm their faith in order to earn a seat at the Savior’s table in the Great Hereafter.

“I must hurry to prepare,” the machine whispers as he lifts the bowl to his lips and literally sucks down the remainder of the oatmeal. It is hot and burns his throat but he swallows anyway, grimacing with pain. The sight of the company’s greatest asset attacking his breakfast with the gusto of a 10-year-old is too comical for me to restrain a chuckle, and the machine sees this and winks at me.

“Always remember: The Savior did not place us on this earth to work and pray and never celebrate the marvel of life. Even the infidels, damned as they are, know this.”

I will not let his casual heresies spoil my good mood. I collect his plates and he lunges from the table to put away papers and restore order to his living area. I leave with a smile.

I am happy for him. I am happy for myself. I am happy for all of us.

—

At my midshift prayer ritual I am removed from the sanctuary and escorted to my room by company officiates. Each officiate is armed with an omnus, a wand-like device that can disable a person with a touch. Along the way, I see other servers being similarly escorted. I have never seen such a display of military authority and it frightens me. Are we under attack? Have the infidels invaded?

As I lie on my bed awaiting instructions my thoughts take a dour turn. Might this have something to do with the machine’s liaison with the Checker? Has calamity struck? Has their relationship been tainted?

Are we all to be retired?

I stay in my room for an entire service cycle. Then I am instructed to feed the machine.

—

A company officiate stops me as I prepare to enter the machine’s quarters. “You will not speak to him,” he says. “You will leave his food and collect the dishes from the previous meal. Any deviation from these instructions will result in immediate retirement. Do you understand?”

A chill passes through me and I feel my eyes growing wide. I can only nod. The officiate conducts me through the door.

Another officiate is standing in the corner of the room. He is holding an omnus which crackles ominously with electrical charge. He watches me the way I think a predator must study its prey.

The machine is hunched over his table. He looks worse than after his starvation and my heart aches for him. An oozing weal crosses his cheek and it is clearly the stinging mark of an omnus lash. That the company would treat their greatest asset with such harsh disregard troubles me more than any heresy the machine has spoken in my presence.

“How can I work with that infernal noise,” the machine mutters as I place his meal before him.

“Do not speak,” the officiate orders.

The machine looks up at me and his eyes are wild with rage. “The meeting was a fraud! They lied!”

The officiate snarls, “Do not speak, Tabulator!” but the machine shouts, “The woman was no Checker! She came from the breeding stock of some other Tabulator! She knew nothing of mathematics!”

The officiate advances. Evil purple feelers of electricity crawl menacingly across its tip. I step back and the machine hunches down over his sheets of calculations. But the rage still smolders in his glare.

“Leave,” the officiate tells me. I collect dishes and leave.

I ask to be excused from my midshift prayer ritual. I feel an emptiness inside.

—

I feed the machine.

He has not eaten the breakfast I brought him.

Slowly I place his lunch before him and as I collect the bowl of oatmeal he looks at me with a quiet desperation and whispers, “They say I have been corrupted by the infidels!”

The officiate strides across the room and lashes out with the omnus. The machine screams and arches his back. His face is pinched into an expression of agony so complete that for a long moment he does not breath. Then he collapses to the table and the air gushes out of his lungs in a pitiful moan.

I cannot stand the sight of it. Without being told I grab the dishes and hurry for the door.

—

I lie in my room. I think about things. What is a mountain, or an ocean, or sky? What is truth anymore?

I know the machine has not been corrupted by the infidels. Such a thing is not possible. We were all born here – the machine, the Checker, and all the servers who make his life possible. We have never left the Redoubt and nobody has ever entered. The company made it that way to protect us from corruption and retirement.

Each of us has faithfully executed his duties.

Something is happening to me that I don’t understand.

A slow transformation of belief.

What is this love the machine would give his life for?

I begin to cry.

—

I feed the machine.

The room is draped in shadow with only a small lamp in the center of the table providing illumination. The officiate is a dark shape in the corner and the flickering of his omnus somehow fails to reveal any further detail, as though light itself would shun his presence. The machine stares blankly at an empty sheet of paper.

He has not eaten his lunch and I expect he will have nothing to do with the dinner I have brought him. He seems reduced, as if pain were sucking the bone from his body. I wish he would eat but I know I cannot make him. I don’t expect I’ll be feeding him much longer.

As I have always done, I carefully place the bowls and plates on the table, avoiding the precious sheets of mathematics. I remove the bowls and plates I brought earlier. I prepare to leave. As I do so, the machine slowly looks up at me. He says, “I want you to know something.”

The officiate comes striding across the room.

The machine says, “I think you already know what I was going to say.”

The officiate raises the omnus to strike and I react without thinking.

I grab his arm.

He is strong, far stronger than I, having been bred for the purpose of striking people. But perhaps he hesitates because it is unthinkable that a food server who has been conditioned from birth to obey would defy that conditioning. Whatever the reason, I snatch the omnus from his grip and ram it into his chest and it discharges with a strangely satisfying explosion of sparks. The officiate’s muscles spasm and he grabs the shaft of the omnus and receives a second jolt that knocks him across the room, where he collapses and lies still.

The machine gazes up at me with wonder. He says, “God help us but thank you!” and leaps from his seat. I am stunned by what I have done and as the machine scuttles into the shadows to check on the officiate and then returns to our island of light I begin to sense the enormity of my actions. I try to sit down. The machine helps me.

I am an abomination, I whisper.

The machine shakes his head vigorously. When I don’t respond he takes my face into his hands. It is the first time he has ever touched me. His skin is rough, the fingers callused from all the years of scribbling and erasing and scratching out. He looks into my eyes and I see his vast intelligence, unfettered now by hierarchy or ritual, and it transcends everything I have been taught.

He says, “You are a human being, and I thank you.”

He lets go. He darts back across the room and returns with the omnus. He hefts it with his right hand and collects the basket of dishes with the other. He says, “May I borrow your frock? Perhaps they’ll think it is you.”

I ask him what he is doing.

“I mean to find her,” he answers.

But that’s impossible. He doesn’t know where she is.

“If I must search every room of the Redoubt, I will find her,” he says.

But he cannot do that. The device in his brain. If he goes beyond the areas that have been approved the device will. …

“Yes, I know.”

No, I blurt. I am lost in every way now. He sets the dishes down and crouches at my feet and takes my hand into his. “You must listen to me,” he says, “and you must listen carefully because this may be the last chance you and I have to speak and I have something very important to tell you.”

I nod without understanding.

“I will not finish my calculations for The Rapture.”

I stare at him without comprehension.

“I have a very good reason. Circling far above our world is a series of hateful devices placed there by the governments that preceded The Rapture,” he says. “These devices are similar to the ones inside our brains, but they are much larger, capable of retiring whole cities in a pulse of light that would destroy many millions of people and spread poison across the face of the world.”

I cannot conceive of such a thing.

“The Rapture intends to use these devices to destroy the infidels,” he says angrily, taking his eyes from me to swear softly, “and that is what I have been doing. Performing the calculations that will tell the devices where to fall. The calculations must be executed in three dimensions, and I am the only Tabulator capable of keeping all the variables in order.”

My thoughts are a storm of turmoil.

He hangs his head in silence a moment, but when he speaks his voice is firm.

“I know nothing of these infidels. Perhaps they deserve such a fate. But I do know if the infidels are corrupt they will answer to the Savior, not The Rapture. And that is what our leaders really want – a world rendered in their image, where love is imprisoned, watched over by guards and struck down when it defies them. That is not what the Savior intended when he placed us here. He expected us to celebrate life.

“He expected us to love.”

Enough. I cannot take it all in – devices and cities and love. It is too much and I feel my world falling away from me. I do not know whom to ask for guidance.

The machine stands and smiles down at me.

“This moment has brought me more joy than any other in my life,” he says, “and I thank you for it.”

I give him my frock. I don’t know what else to do.

He steals to the door. He opens it and lashes out with the omnus. The officiate tumbles to the floor.

The machine glances back at me. He winks. And then he is gone.

I sit in the chair.

Moments later, I hear the sharp crack of a detonation, and when I peer into the hallway the machine is lying on the floor, a fine mist of blood coating the opposite wall.

—

I am confined to my room for a period of seven shifts. I wait to be given absolution. I wait for the device inside my brain to detonate. I wonder if it will hurt. But it doesn’t happen. I am brought to face an inquiry. Officiates from the company and a Disciple are there. The officiate I attacked has not regained consciousness. No mention is made of the machine. They ask me what happened and I tell them the officiate attempted to strike the machine and I intervened. They seem almost amused. They tell me my loyalty to the machine is commendable but a greater loyalty to the company and The Rapture must be observed. I insist I am telling them the truth. They tell me I am lying. They tell me I have been corrupted by the infidels. None of these things are true and I become angry. They send me back to my room to await the Hereafter.

On the seventh shift my supervisor tells me to feed the machine.

—

He is lying in his bed. His head has been shaved, and a bandage covers the right hemisphere of his skull. A wheeled table that extends over his chest is covered in papers.

Calculations.

His eyes finally find mine. They are filled with defeat.

“It seems I have been outwitted,” he says, and his voice possesses none of the vigor I had always known. He throws a weak sigh and his gaze wanders to the ceiling. “The device inside my brain … it was implanted in such a way as to disable, not kill. I am paralyzed from the waist down.” A disappointed frown momentarily clouds his expression. “How was I to know?”

I tell him I am glad to see him. He shakes his head.

“I am happy they chose not to retire you. I told them I attacked the officiate. It seemed to fit their mode of thinking.”

I am overcome by equal parts sadness and gratitude. He lied – blatantly lied. But he did so on my behalf. That a man of his importance would sacrifice himself for a server – the idea fills me with a peculiar devotion that has nothing to do with anything I have learned in my life.

“And now I have finished their infernal calculations.”

I say nothing.

“I had no choice,” he explains, his voice heavy with misery. “They threatened to retire the Checker! They threatened to retire all of you! I could not allow it. What is life in a world without love?”

He sighs again. “So I will exchange the lives of millions of people for the love of a single woman. It is I,” he says gravely, “who is the abomination.”

I tell him he is not though I cannot say why. He dismisses my objection with a flick of a finger and draws me close so I may hear without being overhead. “The courier will be here soon to carry my work to the Checker. In it I have delivered a final message. I have explained everything to her. She will know what to do.” I don’t understand, but much of what the machine tells me I don’t understand.

“And then,” he continues wearily, “I will likely be retired. But I am hopeful they will honor their agreement and not retire the Checker, or any of you.”

He clears a space on the table for the food I have brought him but I don’t want to set it down. I want to linger and draw out my time with him, but he beckons me to get on with things.

I look back at him from the door. The enclosing fog of sadness clears a moment, and he does a curious thing.

He winks.

—

I try to picture it in my mind’s eye: a vast prominence of stone rising farther than the eye can see into a limitless void. A body of water unthinkably larger than the biggest swimming pool splashing against the foundation of that prominence. Millions upon millions of people occupying those reaches, coming and going as they choose without regard for approval.

I cannot get my brain around any of it. So I remember that moment when I grabbed the officiate’s arm and wrestled the omnus from his grasp and drove it into his body. I remember a shock of some unnamable emotion, compelled by a deeper feeling of … affection? As I sort through my memory I slowly realize that whatever the feeling was, it had been there a very long time, longer than I had realized.

Was it love?

—

“The Checker has approved my final calculations,” the machine tells me. His face is radiant. “She found no errors.”

—

We are summoned to a conclave. Everybody who lives at the Redoubt attends. Even the machine.

It is unprecedented.

A Disciple of The Rapture, the same Disciple as before, stands before us. He tells us in a righteous voice the menace of the infidel will be put to rest this very evening. He thanks us on behalf of The Rapture for our work.

As we leave, those of us who serve the machine are taken aside. We are led to the sanctuary where we are given absolution.

It can only mean one thing.

—

For the last time, I feed the machine.

—

“What do you think retirement will be like?” he asks.

I no longer care very much one way or the other. Retirement is a small issue now that life itself is false.

But I tell him retirement is a slow warmth that steals over the soul followed by an awakening in the Hereafter where all questions are answered. I have been taught to say that but I no longer believe it. Soon we will all know the truth.

“I disagree,” the machine chuckles around a crust of bread. “Retirement is not a transmigration of the soul. It is merely the physical collapse of the body. The brain’s electrical signals become randomized then cease altogether. Afterwards,” he pauses to swallow, “there is nothing.”

His table is set. I begin collecting dishes from the previous meal.

“Do you think the citizens of our land could live with such a thing?” he asks. I tell him no. It defies what they have been taught.

“Yes,” he nods. “It is a principle by which the infidels live. But what if it were true?”

I finish collecting the dishes. They must be arranged in the basket in a particular way and I kneel at his bedside and set about doing that. As I work, I tell him that if there were no Hereafter then this life would become much more important.

“Yes,” he agrees mischievously.” We would celebrate life, would we not?”

I look up at him. He beams down at me.

“I knew they would not honor their agreement,” he whispers. “I knew they would retire us all after they got what they wanted – the destruction of the infidels, and a world rendered in their grim likeness. I could not allow that either.”

His expression softens.

“For all your life you believed somebody would push a button and the device in your brain would detonate and you would float away to your cozy Hereafter. But might there be a different way?” He raises himself on an elbow. I wait for him to speak.

“Suppose I were to say you would be retired in a pulse of sanctifying white light that would carry your body out of this mountain and scatter it across the ocean and sky? Suppose parts of your body would be converted to energy itself and flung on an endless voyage across the universe. Suppose we would be together – you, me, the Checker, all of us at the Redoubt – rising into the sky and falling across the world and flying into the Savior’s realm forever.

“If I told you that do you think we could share one moment of peace before it happens?”

He looks into me and I see the vast world his thoughts occupy. And then God help me I see the answer – I see it, circling far overhead and falling toward me on the gravity of the machine’s supreme calculations and as it draws closer I see it with a clarity I have struggled to achieve for my entire life and I am struck speechless with wonder.

The machine lies back into the pillow. “She accepted my calculations,” he says, his face relaxing into a contented smile. “That is my celebration of life.”

I forget to breathe as I see myself in a wave of light that spreads across a world I have never seen, and belief pours into me and fills the empty places with a warmth I have been told comes only with the Hereafter.

I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do. It is more than my heart can bear.

I take the machine’s hand and press it against my cheek. Flesh against flesh teaches me more than a life of instruction.

And a miraculous thing happens.

The hand is withdrawn. A crust of bread appears.

And the machine feeds me.

About the author:

Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”

Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.

As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .

Image courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

“Ready or Not 2 Here I Come” Starring Samara Weaving as Grace MacCaullay, Kathryn Newton as Faith MacCaullay, Elijah Wood as the lawyer, Sarah Michelle Gellar as Ursula Danforth, Shawn Hatosy as Titus Danforth, David Cronenberg as Chester Danforth and others. Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett. 1 hour, 48 minutes. Rated R. Theatrical release.

Plot summary: Sitting on the front steps of the Le Domas family mansion after the deadly events of “Ready or Not,” Grace MacCaullay finds herself swept up in a new, deadlier hide-and-seek style contest as members of four families vie for control of the High Council, a body that serves Mr. La Bail, aka Lucifer.

Spoilers: Does the Devil wear Prada?

Del’s take

Grace MacCaullay has just defeated the entire Lucifer-worshipping Le Domas clan in a night of bloody mayhem at their now flaming mansion. The authorities rightfully suspect Grace as having committed many felonies, but she’s injured. She’s taken to a hospital. She’s grilled by a detective who has already decided her guilt. Her estranged sister, Faith, is summoned, as Grace never removed Faith as her emergency contact. And then. …

She and Faith are brought before the shadowy High Council, where they learn (a) the Le Domas clan wasn’t the only collective of rich bitches who sold their souls to the devil for worldly wealth, (b) Grace’s destruction of the Le Domas family has created a vacancy at the head of a cabal of devil-worshippers called the High Council, and (c) four new families will compete for that vacant position – and the immense power it conveys – by sacrificing Grace and her sister to Mr. La Bail, aka the devil, before the sun rises the next day.

Sound familiar?

Yes, “Ready or Not 2” is about power. In an opening scene, Chester Danforth – before he is smothered by his children – watches a war play out on the TV news, then picks up his telephone, orders a cease-fire, and watches the breathless announcement of a cessation in hostilities on the very same news broadcast. And yes, “Ready or Not 2” is an eat-the-rich indulgence in wish fulfillment, especially in 2026, as the 1 percenters pad their velvet-upholstered cushion of wealth and control at the expense of poor suckers like you and me.

But what “Ready or Not 2” really wants to be is a John Wickian-style semi-comedy about the power of family, which is the weakest of its three subtextual pillars. The whole family-comes-first theme is largely irrelevant to the matters at hand – the bloody extermination of wealthy parasites and their useless scions as creatively and graphically as possible. In fact, the constant intrusion of guilt becomes annoying – how often can Faith remind Grace that she abandoned her little sister, that she “wasn’t there”? Americans are besotten with this notion of familial abandonment. It’s become trite, an easy fallback when an icing of emotional resonance is needed for tension or motivation.

The comedic aspects of “Ready or Not 2” are somewhat clever and operate on multiple levels, but the overall tone is one of satire, not slapstick, though some scenes definitely qualify as physical humor – the rocket launcher, for example. Dialogue has its moments, too, but the quality of the writing isn’t as sharp or as hilariously acerbic as something like “Doctor Strangelove.” Overall, the humor tends to trivialize, not satirize, making it impossible to view “Ready or Not 2” as anything but a trifle.

As is the case with many horror movies these days, even the ones alleged to be funny, “Ready or Not 2” is drenched in blood, and some of the violence crosses the line between horror and torture porn. For example, an extended battle between Titus and Faith became a teeth-loosening, rib-cracking orgy of mayhem that goes on far too long. Were Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett were taking far too much pleasure seeing their female character get her ass kicked?

The first act is slow, but acts two and three pick up the pace, redeeming “Ready or Not 2” as an entertaining movie. But like a SnapChat message sent late at night, anything of significance fades by morning, relegating “Ready or Not 2” to the sales bin of disposable entertainment, stat. Again, it’s a trifle. Nothing more.

I’m giving it a B. See it in a movie theater.

Mladen’s take

Samara Weaving and Kathyrn Newton are very good actresses. Their faces express as much about what they’re thinking as the words they’re saying in “Ready or Not 2 Here I Come.”

Also praiseworthy is the pit massacre near the end of the movie. Clearly, it was modeled on the way the Trump administration operates.

Between the sisters’ back-and-forth squabbling and rehashes of family history and the pit, there are a few chuckle-inducing skits. I enjoyed watching Elijah Wood play the anti-Frodo, though his rendition of a Mephistopheles wedding prayer and ritual could have been more joyful.

But, none of these bits of the positive make “Ready or Not 2” good.

Again and again and again, the protagonists and the antagonists make damnably poor choices, because, I don’t know, the scriptwriters were too unimaginative to come up with more realistic ways folks end up making dumbass decisions. Either the estranged but re-uniting sisters prolonged their misery by, say, not shooting or beheading the brother-and-sister team trying to kill them to get the chairman’s seat on the bedeviled High Council or the antagonists, whose souls have been sold to Satan, turn out to be remarkably poor shots or too conniving for their own good or just too maniacal. Come on, you’re allied with Beelzebub. Wouldn’t that automatically imbue you with capacity to have at least one of the, oh, dozen, 50-caliber bullets you fired from a high-end sniper rifle find its mark?

One other bit in the movie irritated me. It’s the poor choice of vocabulary. Whenever one of the devil worshippers violated a devil worship bylaw, they would metamorphose into a fountain of gelatinous goo that had a large splash radius. The younger MacCaullay called those splatter events “combustion.” No, no, no. The evildoers didn’t catch fire. They didn’t burn. They exploded, goddamnit.

More deeply disappointing, though, was that my building hope was dashed. As “Ready or Not 2” progressed, I started to hope that the elder MacCaullay would figure out a way to knock off Lucifer or at least subvert Hell by turning it into an alternative Heaven. No such luck. The best she was able to do was initiate the pit mayhem, which, though much appreciated, felt like she had failed to finish what she was dragged into.

I have not watched the first “Ready or Not” and I had no expectations for “Ready or Not 2.” In fact, when Dusty asked us if we’d like to see the movie, I confused it with another title that appeared in theaters in late 2025, “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t.” I knew nothing about “Ready or Not 2” before I saw it. So, my review is sincere, my counsel untainted. You can wait for this one-notch-above-a-C+ movie to hit the streaming circuit.

Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical writer. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and writer.

Image courtesy of A24.

“Undertone” Starring Nina Kiri as Evy, Michèle Duquet as Mama, and Adam DiMarco as Justin. Written and directed by Ian Tuason. 1 hour, 34 minutes. Rated R. Theatrical release.

Plot summary: A podcaster who is caring for her terminally ill mother begins to see parallels between her personal situation and a series of terrifying audio files.

Spoilers: No.

Del’s take

Mladen was unable to join me for “Undertone.” He was in Tennessee, hunting fossils. I’ve told him repeatedly if he wants to find an old stone he’s got my number, but he never listens.

His loss, because “Undertone” is quite a good movie. It eschews the modern approach to horror – jump scares, gore, full frontal monster – and relies on the viewer’s imagination to conjure the deepest scares, reminiscent of “The Innocents,” the Robert Wise production of “The Haunting of Hill House,” and Ridley Scott’s “Alien,” all masterpieces of horror. But where “Undertone” shines is its use of light and sound as a storytelling device.

The story is about Evy (Nina Kiri), a podcaster who is caring for her terminally ill mother (Michèle Duquet). She is living in her mother’s house, a small, claustrophobic relic from a bygone era. At odd hours of the morning Evy manages to squeeze in her paying job, that of a podcaster focusing on paranormal events. She is a skeptic; her creative partner, Justin (Adam DiMarco) is a believer, an obvious parallel to the relationship between Dana Scully and Fox Mulder of “The X-Files.”

Justin has received a collection of 10 audio files from an unknown contributor that are believed to prove the existence of a demon, Abyzou, a creature of European folklore who steals children because she cannot have a child of her own. As the audio files are played countdown-style over a period of days, Evy begins to realize they describe events taking place in her personal life, and her grasp on reality begins to slip.

“Undertone” is rife with subtext – religious guilt, familial guilt, and weightier issues such as Evy’s pregnancy, and whether she should keep the child or have an abortion, and her growing exhaustion in caring for her mother. But “Undertone” is as much a vibe as it is a story. The spooky atmospherics operate like a fourth character. Tuason directs the eye to a darkened doorway behind Evy, as if we should expect to see something there. The house is perpetually cloaked in shadow, just as Evy’s life is at the moment. Sounds reverberate throughout – a clock ticking loudly, the refrigerator cycling on – but there are other sounds heard by Evy – a crying baby, a nursery rhyme played backward that may contain a summons. Are they real? We don’t know. When Evy puts on her headphones, all sound ceases and the silence becomes monolithic. These elements enhance the suffocating milieu of Evy’s predicament and amplify the themes of guilt and isolation.

Nina Kiri is excellent as Evy – she appears in virtually every scene – while Adam DiMarco’s Justin, who appears only as a voice on the phone, is the rational appositive to what may be Evy’s descent into madness. Or is it possession? Again, we don’t know. Michèle Duquet’s Mama rarely moves, but when she does, be prepared for the unexpected.

“Undertone” is Tuason’s first movie and cost about half a million dollars to make. Expect more from this talented writer and director. I appreciated the dearth of modern horror movie tropes and the ingenious use of light and sound to convey dread.

“Undertone” rates a B+, maybe an A.

Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and writer.

Image courtesy of StockVault.

INTRODUCTION

This story is about a hypocrite.

A particular kind of hypocrite. The Republican kind of hypocrite.

Full disclosure: For most of my life I was registered as a Republican. The Republican Party was the party of reason. It was the party of moderation. It was the only responsible political choice for people like me – decent, simple, hard-working individuals who believed in living within their means and delaying gratification.

The Democratic Party represented a wholly different set of values. The Democratic Party was about taking your money and hard work and giving them to somebody else, usually somebody who was unwilling to work hard or delay gratification. The Democrats were about welfare, and socialism, and a new set of values that eschewed the traditional strengths of American culture.

So I remained a registered Republican for most of my adult life. But along the way, the Republican Party changed.

This change began in the 1980s, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Christian conservatives, through instruments like the Moral Majority, began to organize and seize control of the Republican Party. Over the years this lingering conservativism, masquerading as religionism, held on and festered until it found a new champion in Donald J. Trump.

Trump was, in my estimation, the worst president in the history of the United States. I won’t belabor his sins, but suffice it to say he wrecked the country AND he divided it. Maybe you don’t share that opinion. Maybe you’re wrong.

The end result is a group of people who not only don’t mind if their leaders lie, cheat and steal, but a generation of Americans who believe lying, cheating and stealing are normalized.

What an astonishing departure from everything I’ve known over my lifetime. To think, these folks believe lying, cheating and stealing aren’t so bad because everybody does it, including the president!

Worse, they lie to themselves, and that’s what “The Fire People” is about.

Here we have a woman who outwardly presents as a religious, conservative, moral person. But look beneath the veneer and you find somebody who isn’t what they seem, somebody who aspires to a different kind of life, one that they outwardly condemn when it’s somebody else but secretly embrace for themselves.

Fate has a way of tripping up people like that, and that’s exactly what happens to the protagonist of “The Fire People.”

She gets what she thinks those other people deserve.

I wrote this story in the late ’90s but sadly, it’s more relevant today than it was back then. I guess it’s true that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Del Stone Jr., July 18, 2024

—

THE FIRE PEOPLE

… and if I die before I wake,

I pray the lord my soul will take …

It was the smoke alarm that hauled Gabby out of a dream-filled sleep, a barb of sound hooking through her left ear, through the center of her brain, piercing muzzy, subconscious images of guilt and sin and virginity.

She did not know what was happening, and staggered out of bed to answer the telephone or thumb the buzzer on the alarm clock or remove the clothes from the dryer. But after a moment of eye-rubbing she recognized the shriek, and her skin seemed to shrink around her bones. Oh my, she gasped to herself, and she almost said it. She almost spoke the sacrilege:

Oh my God.

She reached for the doorknob without thinking and – too late now – it was hot, hotter than the little travel iron set on “cotton,” and the door swung open as she jerked her hand away, a surprised gasp whistling through her lips. A wave of twisting heat and light rolled into the bedroom, as if she had just popped the door on the oven after baking a tray of dinner rolls.

Fire – fire – fire –

Flames blew up the stairwell with a roar, chewing along the pebbled ceiling and gnawing at the banister and reaching for the register at the top of the landing. The air was filled with the cauterizing stench of chemicals and woodsmoke, and Gabby could think only stupid thoughts: How did this happen? What did I do to deserve this?

And then she was crawling for the sliding glass door at the other end of the bedroom, which opened to the fourth-floor balcony – never mind what she would do then; all that mattered was escape. And as a part of her brain tallied the losses – her clothes and furniture, the photographs of her Sunday school students and her great-grandmother’s Bible and the gold-plated crucifix pendant given to her by the Reverend Thomas Miller for her years of service to the Antioch Baptist Church – another part of her glanced back resentfully at the advancing flames, and that was when she saw them. Sinister movement amid the ugly glare.

The fire people.

Her muscles froze, and the breath eased out of her so that her belly grazed the furry nap of the carpet. Although she knew she must get out now or die, she could not tear herself from the sight of them.

People, in the fire. Of the fire.

People with huge, swaying breasts that seemed filled with jellied gasoline, and bulbous penises that twitched and sprayed bright arcing gobbets of lava. Copulating. Fornicating.

People fucking.

They raced across the ceiling in a kind of frantic insectile glee to roll against the draperies so that the fabric exploded in flames, or shoved impossibly long, bright, arms into the air register so that it fumed inky smoke, or rolled across the bubbling carpet toward her, shimmying under the bed where she kept her magazine photos of naked men … Oh no, don’t find them, I didn’t put them there, not mine … and then the closet doors jumped open and the fire people swept napthic penises and breasts down the breadth of her wardrobe, and the other things in there, the little box of sex things, the gels and straps and mechanical devices, so that the contents erupted in a righteous blaze that flanked her, a gallery of jittering, undulating shapes rising between her and the balcony.

Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray the lord my soul will keep … the children’s catechism sprang perversely to her mind, and as the fire people circled her and drew closer, reaching out with the promise of an embrace that would boil the meat from her bones, the next verse of that simple prayer hovered at the back of her thoughts, and she knew exactly what she had done to deserve this, and which lord had come to take her away … and keep her. …

About the author:

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .

Image courtesy of Amazon-MGM.

“Project Hail Mary” Starring Ryan Gosling as an insufficiently curious xenobiologist Ryland Grace; James Oritz as (eventually) the voice of Rocky the alien; Sandra Huller as the stone‑cold yet bewilderingly attractive Project Hail Mary program manager Eva Stratt; and others. Directed by the duo of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. Runtime a too-long 2 hours, 36 minutes. Rated PG-13. Theatrical release.

Plot summary: The Sun is threatened by a species of microorganism (Grace calls them “astrophages”) that consumes stars, which puts Earth in danger. If the sun dims too much, photosynthesis will decline and everything, including civilization, will go the way of democracy. The planet’s governments come together (yeah, right) to send an expedition to a star light years away that has somehow beaten back the astrophages eating everything else in our neck of the galactic woods using fusion to produce light and heat. Things go wrong. Our hero encounters an alien – his/hers/their planet is in trouble, too, because their sun is on the menu – and the two of them cooperate to find a way to defeat the star eaters.

Spoilers: Not if you read the book.

Mladen’s take

I can think of a couple of very good movies featuring humans and space aliens becoming buddies, “Enemy Mine” (1985) and “Alien Nation” (1988). The Star Treks and Kirk and Spock. More recently, there’s “Predator: Badlands.” Yes, yes, there are technically no humans in Badlands but synthetics Thia and Tessa are close enough.

In that regard, “Project Hail Mary” misses the mark. It isn’t Gosling’s fault as Grace or Oritz’s depiction of Rocky that made their friendship in the movie seem, ah, inert. The trouble is seeing Rocky for what the alien is, rock‑like. I’m used to placing rocks in my aquarium without worrying that I’m drowning a living being. Also, to me, anyway, rocks are repositories of past life – fossils – rather than sentient, self-aware creatures alive today who multiply by what, sexual sedimentation or crack fissuring.

The problem with “Project Hail Mary” is that it came in book form first and I read the book. Though I can’t recall the details in the book, I can recall that my imagination allowed me to interpret Rocky as some sort of fauna rock, an animal that was also vegetable and mineral. No such luck in the film. The Eridian – that’s the name of Rocky’s species – was there for me to “see” with my eyes.

Rocky is constructed of short columns of jointed hard material that made fingers and limbs, which articulated, and a thorax holding it all together. What held him together, allowed him to move? A pliant crystalline matrix like fiber-optic cabling? Ammonia‑soluble tendons that deformed whenever Rocky’s iron ore other‑than‑nervous system rusted on command? How the hell could the Eridian chitter like an insect? Golly, and this is terrible, I had the urge to vivisect Rocky to see what made him tick.

B+ “Project Hail Mary” is worth the time to see in a movie theater. There is enough action, even if that action is, in part, dependent on an implausibly maneuverable space ship, to justify dropping extra change for a Dolby theater seat. The scene where Grace and Rocky trawl the upper atmosphere of a planet to collect astrophages and something else is darned good.

I looked forward to scenes with Huller as Stratt. It was the precision of her diction when speaking English. It was her unapologetic focus on saving humanity, though it required sacrificing individuals who belong to that humanity. It was her humorous severeness and knack for taking a line of reasoning or an excuse to avoid doing this or that to the end of the line. Something like, “Grace, you say you want to stay on Earth to teach children. Well, if you stay, there will be no children to teach.” What a guilt trip. And, I must say, I loved Grace for ignoring it.

Del’s take

Mladen is too generous with his review of “Project Hail Mary.” I didn’t fall asleep once during the movie, but not because it was exciting. The theater was freezing and I’d left my hoodie in the car. I thought “Hail Mary” was boring – B-O-R-I-N-G. And it was stupid – this, from a guy who not only grew up reading science fiction but wrote a few SF stories of his own.

I wish Amazon had taken some of the $$$ it spent on “Melania” and used it to make “Hail Mary” better, maybe a little more scientifically plausible, maybe a little less slapsticky. As it stands, the movie is structurally too complicated, is inconsistent in tone, is way too long, and it failed to convince me to suspend my disbelief.

According to Mladen, “Hail Mary” is 2 hours and 36 minutes. It felt like 2 days and 36 hours. It was a two-bathroom-visits movie for me. To paraphrase a British critic who reviewed one of my books, it could have benefitted from a savage pruning of excess beats. As Mladen pointed out, the movie was not about teaching English to an alien; it was about figuring out how to kill the little bastards eating our sun, so the whole teaching-the-alien bit could have been left on the cutting room floor. And other parts should have qualified for a savage pruning. I’ll get to those in a minute.

Is “Hail Mary” a comedy? At times I thought it was. There were moments of physical comedy – actual slapstick – and the script was mostly a series of jokes and verbal pratfalls that at first were cute but soon became irritating and distracting. It was impossible to take anything I was seeing on the screen very seriously because the movie did not take itself very seriously. That may sound like a good thing but trust me, a movie about the end of the world should not be funny. Satirical? Maybe. “Don’t Look Up” and “Doctor Strangelove” come to mind. But comedic? Hardly.

The story is told through a series of flashbacks woven through a current-time narrative, and that proved to be difficult to follow, especially at the beginning when Grace awakens aboard the spacecraft with no memory of how he got there. Again, I would ask: Is that what this movie is about? No? Then why waste the audience’s time telling them things that have no bearing on the outcome of the story?

In films from the Star Trek and Star Wars universes I can accept scientific implausibilities – hyperlight, the Force, teleportation. Those movies are more fantasy than science fiction. But in a movie like “Hail Mary,” which grounds itself in science, the implausibilities become much more glaring and harder to forgive. Gosling’s character awakens after four years of zero-G induced coma. His bones should have looked like a plastic McDonald’s straw. Yet he’s able to bound around and grab hurtling spaceship parts as if he were Thor. No effing way is that gonna happen. And again, as Mladen pointed out, the spaceship maneuvering was just impossible – comedically impossible. And there were others – Rocky’s seemingly endless supply of food and air, and Grace’s endless supply of crap that would never be allowed on a starship having to contend with mass constraints. Deus ex machine was Grace’s co-pilot.

A plus was Gosling’s performance, which I thought was superb. And Mladen was right about Huller. She was spectacular. In fact, of all the characters in “Hail Mary” she was the only one I could relate to in any human sense.

“Hail Mary” is cleaning up at the box office and moviegoers are giving it Rotten Tomato scores in the 90s. Amazon needs the movie to pull in around $400 million to break even, and that will probably happen. All said, that makes me look like a cranky, impossible-to-please old fart. Maybe so. But judging by all the movies I’ve given A scores to over the years, I’d say that’s not true. I just want my movies to be really, really good, and for all the reasons I’ve listed here, I don’t think “Project Hail Mary” meets that description. Feel free to go see it and judge for yourself.

I’m giving it a score of a B-, and I think that’s generous. Maybe a C+.

Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical writer. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and writer.

Oh my God, I just made the mistake of looking at my IRA.

It’s down $35,000 over the past month.

That’s more money than I make in a year. That money is part of my life’s savings.

I know it can come back, but that won’t happen any time soon. We’re just now beginning to see the negative impacts of Donald Trump’s “excursion” into Iran. Gas prices are up locally over a dollar a gallon, and when the price of fuel increases, so does the price of everything else. Inflation rose again last month, and that’s not including any of the price increases caused by this new forever war.

The cost of Trump’s “excursion” is running about a billion dollars a day. So far, it’s cost Americans $23 billion. Keep in mind the U.S. debt just crossed the $39 TRILLION mark. One of the planks to Trump’s campaign platform, if it can be called that, was to start paying down the debt. Not one penny has been committed to paying down the debt. Instead, he’s made it worse.

Iran isn’t fighting the American military. It’s fighting the global economy, and so far, with disruptions to shipping, increases in insurance costs and damage to infrastructure, it’s winning. And the disruptions won’t end any time soon, so hair-brained memes by Republicans of “short-term pain for long-term gain” hold no water. This will be a long, drawn-out conflict that could plunge the world into recession.

But just as Trump was unconcerned about the possibility of American servicemen being killed in his ill-considered venture – 13 and counting so far – and just as he was unconcerned about the prospect of American civilians being killed in terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, he’s also unconcerned about Americans who were already struggling financially now being clobbered with astronomical prices on food, fuel and housing.

Virtually none of the election promises Trump made have come to pass – quite the opposite – yet the MAGAt orcs continue to blindly defend and follow Herr Trump. There’s a word for that.

C-U-L-T.

About the author:

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .

Image by Pexels.

Introduction to “The Garage”

Craig Terry gave me the idea for this story. He didn’t own a garage.

I met Craig in the 1990s. I was working at a newspaper, editing copy, putting together sections, and Craig was hired as a staff artist. He was also a talented political cartoonist but I worked with him on illustrations for my feature sections. Through our interactions we came to be friends. I didn’t find out later that he and his wife were friends with my mom. Small world.

At one point Craig expressed an interest in getting into comics. I had dipped a toe into that world, thanks to my friendship with Dave Dorman and Lurene Haines, and it also happened that I was working on a project called “13 Seconds,” a collection of 13 very short horror stories – all under 1,000 words – that I was hoping to sell to Joe Pruett at Negative Burn. I asked Craig if he wanted to illustrate them and he said yes.

In talking with Craig about “13 Seconds” I mentioned I was scrounging for another idea for a story. That’s when he told me his idea about a messy garage. I can’t remember the details but what emerged from that conversation was this story, “The Garage,” about a man with perhaps the world’s messiest garage – and oldest stash of hoarded goods – in the world.

We sent a couple of sample stories to Joe and he passed on the project, but as luck would have it Stefan Dziemianowicz was editing a collection of very short horror stories for Barnes & Noble, “Horrors! 365 Scary Stories.” I submitted all 13 of my super-shorts and seven made the cut, including “The Garage.”

So there you have it, a story about a man whose garage is packed with junk The farther back you go, the older the junk gets, until it gets really old.

Who knows what else might be lurking in the musty confines of that storage space?

—

THE GARAGE

By Del Stone Jr. and C.M. Terry

“It’s a beauty, ain’t it?” Parker glowed, his voice equal parts admiration and pride, the voice of a man who had just shit the world’s biggest turd – and would now sell his story to Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

But Samuelson had to admit: It did have a certain grandeur, the way train derailments or airplane disasters unfold with strange beauty, layered within the horror.

The messiest garage he’d ever seen.

“Come on; let’s take a look,” Parker insisted, speaking in a reverent whisper.

Parker’s garage was a disaster, the chintzy bastard. Didn’t he every throw anything away? Samuelson’s gaze traveled over the Escher-like arrangement of junk: bicycle parts, wheel rims, sacks of aluminum cans, lampshades, a seamstress’s dummy, wire mesh crab traps, leaning towers of newspapers – oh God, the eye refused to take it all in. It gathered in drifts at the corners, rode the walls and scrunched against the ceiling, a critical mass approaching some terrible implosion.

“I’ve got a ’67 Eldorado somewhere under all this stuff,” Parker grinned. “But the best part is back here.”

He led Samuelson down a narrow path to the back of the garage. There, he wedged his shoulder against a door Samuelson hadn’t noticed and pushed. The door groaned and gave way. Parker flipped on a light.

It was another room … filled with junk. Old ice boxes, ironclad electric ranges, fans, Life magazines, wooden crates filled with empty Coke bottles. …

“The previous owners left this stuff here,” Parker beamed. “Lots of antiques. I’m gonna make a fortune.”

Samuelson could see the dollar signs glowing in Parker’s eyes. He gazed across the room, where he saw another door. “What’s back there?”

Parker frowned. “I dunno. Never noticed it before.” He tiptoed through the clutter and forced open the door.

Another room. Filled with junk. Crockery chamberpots and blackened andirons and dusty bottles and wooden boxes. Parker had his hands on his hips. “Jesus! I didn’t know this stuff was here, but God, look at it! Ain’t it great?”

But Samuelson was staring at the opposite wall. Another door. Parker noticed, and his jaw dropped. “Holy shit! That’s impossible! The house doesn’t go back that far!”

The room was filled with spears and quivers and hairy mounds of animal skins. The walls were covered with charcoal scrawlings of bears and lions and mammoth-like creatures.

Parker’s voice was filled with wonder. “I don’t understand it,” he said, spreading his arms to take in the room, “but it’s – it’s – terrific! Stone Age junk! Can you guess what this stuff would sell for? Can you? Millions, I’d bet!”

Samuelson grabbed Parker’s arm and began to haul him back. There, at the back of the chamber, was another door, an opening, really, blocked by a fall of stones. Behind the stones Samuelson could hear a scritching sound, and a basso rumbling, as if something very large waited on the other side. A cool finger of dread began to work its way up the knobs of Samuelson’s spine.

“C’mon,” Parker hissed, jerking away and stumbling off-balance across the room. “Let’s check it out.”

“No, goddammit,” Samuelson whispered. “Can’t you hear it? Can’t you hear it?”

But Parker was already shoving rocks out of the way and shouting over his shoulder, “C’mon, man! This is my lottery ticket! This is my ship coming in!”

Then the rocks at the top of the opening tumbled loose, and something – Samuelson could not say what – reached through and yanked Parker off his feet and into the gap so that Samuelson saw only Parker’s boots vanish into the darkness, trailed only by a snapped-off scream. …

And as Samuelson turned and sprinted for the door, a sickening image arose in his mind, an image of the lock somehow ratcheting into place behind them as they’d entered the chamber, because from the opening rocks were being hurled out of the way, and something with a growl that sounded a million years old was trying to break free.

About the author:

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .

Introduction to “The Hole”

I wrote this story as part of a project I called “13 Seconds,” a collection of one-page horror stories, each with an accompanying full-page illustration. Alas, that project never saw the light of day.

But the stories did. I sold seven to the Barnes & Noble anthology “Horrors! 365 Scary Stories.” The others found homes across a wide spectrum of publications. This story, for instance, was published in Dark Raptor.

What I tried to accomplish with “The Hole” was to glimpse the inner thoughts of a sexually repressed misogynist. In this case, he’s using the telescope sight on a rifle to spy on his sexy neighbor, who’s exercising and won’t sit still. Anybody who’s ever used a telescope sight knows movement will carry the targeted image out of the sight instantly, so it’s imperative they remain still.

In his zeal to get the woman to stay still so he can ogle her, the man gets carried away and … well, something unfortunate happens.

And yes, the word “hole,” as used in this story, has more than one meaning. The protagonist is a misogynist.

—

THE HOLE

Bobby blinked and strained to focus on the wobbling image in the binocular’s eyepiece.

He wanted to see if she had the hole.

But he couldn’t see. Peering from the sliding glass door that let out of his apartment bedroom onto the narrow, vestigial balcony … peeking through the slats of aluminum vertical blinds stained with cigarette smoke and the sharp exhalation of pent-up breath … the bedroom lights off so that if she glanced his way, across the apartment complex commons, a stray look that might snag on the glint of a reflection or his black shape superimposed against the lighter wall. …

But she didn’t look, and he couldn’t see … if she had the hole – the hole that all women who hated him had.

He cursed the binoculars. He tossed them onto the bed, where they bounced like a dead trampolinist. He needed magnification. He needed power.

He needed the scope on the Enfield.

He pulled the rifle from the closet and slid off the protective covering on the sight. He used the barrel to force aside – just barely – one of the blinds so he could peek through. The building facade jerked across his field of view, then a dizzying blur of patios, until he found her patio, at first unfamiliar because of its closeness. But he recognized her potted geraniums, her director’s chair, her faux copper wind chimes swaying from the crossbeam that traversed the patio.

And then he saw her.

Bouncing in the bedroom, an exercise video playing on the TV. Smooth and long-limbed and elegant – not pretty, not beautiful, but … sexy, the way some women transcend those overheated adjectives men use when they are together and talking dirty. She was wrapped in a skimpy pink lycra body suit, like some rare, imported confection, and her dark, dark hair was bound up into a pony tail that was tied off with a bandana, and she was bouncing and swaying and kicking in a way most men would have found sexy.

But Bobby wanted her to sit still.

Because he couldn’t see if she had the hole.

He twisted the focal adjustment screw and tried to zoom in on her, but she was moving so fast, her legs kicking out behind her. And then she was bending, up and down, up and down.

Bobby closed his eyes and swore under his breath. If she would just sit still for a moment. A moment was all he would need.

He slid open the sliding glass door. Now, with only a thin screen blocking his view, he might see better.

But she was doing the deep-knee bend thing, up and down, up and down, and he could not see – he couldn’t see, dammit.

“Sit still, bitch,” he muttered, and slapped the screen door open. It slammed against the frame and made a loud, clattering sound. His heart jumped and he yanked the rifle snout out of the blinds, afraid she might have heard and turned this way.

But no. She had her hands above her head and was bending at the waist, first to the left, then to the right, first to the left –

“Sit still, you fucking bitch,” he seethed and yanked the rifle against his shoulder to squint harder through the scope.

She was bouncing, bouncing, the exercise video seeming to bounce with her –

“Sit still, goddammit – “

Bouncing, bouncing –

“Goddammit – “ he couldn’t see, he couldn’t see –

– bouncing –

He squeezed the trigger and the gun kicked and for a moment he could hear nothing but an eerie, feverish ringing. He squinted through the scope, and finally he saw her. …

Slumped over the television, her arms dangling, as if she had exercised herself to death.

But she was still, at last, and he saw it. The hole. The hole that all women had who hated him or ignored him or could care less if he even existed. What was this now? The tenth? The eleventh woman he had found with the hole? Someday, all the women with holes would be gone, and only women who cared about him would be left. He would see to that. He would make sure. They would be gone if they had the hole.

The cratered, steamy hole surrounded by a splash of blood.

The hole.

About the author:

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .

By now you must be thinking, “Del threatens to stop posting on social media when he feels the need for attention.”

That’s not true (although I do like attention. Feel free to give me all the attention you want).

When I threaten to stop posting on social media it’s because I genuinely don’t want to do it anymore – at least at that moment.

I have a problem with social media – I think it’s a poison. On the list of bad ideas it ranks up there with television and atomic bombs. I prefer my mass media to be vetted by gatekeepers who winnow out the stupidity and ignorance. Social media allow any moron with a keyboard to speak on an equal footing with professionals who’ve earned advanced degrees and spent their lives developing unmatched expertise.

The idea that “every voice is equal” is bullshit. Some people should never be heard. I say that as a person who lives and dies by the First Amendment – some people should NEVER be heard.

Yet if I want to communicate with my fellow Americans – and that’s something I’ve been doing for so long it’s baked into my identity – I’m forced to use social media. That’s where people are, so that’s where I am.

That comes at a price. The criticism is relentless. I’m attacked for my age, the fact that I’m gay, my political beliefs, even my appearance. It’s childish and I shouldn’t let it get to me, but it does.

Also, I don’t want to be part of the problem. A friend told me that’s exactly what I am – part of the problem. He said that without ever having seen any of my videos, so I’m not sure how much credence I should give his opinion. I mean, I hope I’m not part of the problem. I try hard to be fair and accurate.

I’m always surprised to hear that people find value in what I say. I’m not well educated, I’m not smart, and I’m sure as hell not good-looking. But I do care, and I care deeply, about what’s happening in this country. I hate what that asshole in the White House and his supporters are doing to America. I hate knowing he will probably get away with it.

I’ve been talking to large groups of people for going on five decades. Between my old Tennis Time column, my weekly newspaper column, my fiction, and now my social media posts, I’ve acquired a very big mouth – and the need to deploy that mouth. It’s my habit to say what’s on my mind.

Yes, the negativity and attacks get me down sometimes and I have to step away, AND tell people I’m stepping away, because that’s what I do – talk to large groups of people. But I always come back because as I said, that’s what I do – talk to large groups of people.

Please indulge me my snits. With what’s happening in this country, the need is critical and the time is now for everybody to speak up.

About the author:

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .

Image by Oakley Originals of Flickr. https://www.flickr.com/photos/oakleyoriginals/

Introduction to “The Thing in the Dark”

I’ve always been afraid of the dark. To this day, I’m hesitant to go outside at night. We live in a dark neighborhood. I don’t care how many streetlights they install, it still looks dark dark dark at night.

You never know what’s hiding out there.

I remember one night – I must have been about 14 – Mom ordered me to take out the garbage. Our garbage cans were up next to the fence on the side of the house. Next door the house was vacant. It had been empty for awhile and leaves had piled up in the yard and weeds were getting tall.

I carried the paper grocery bag full of trash through the carport and out to the garbage cans. As I lifted the metal lid from the can, I heard the telltale crunch, crunch, crunch of somebody walking through leaves. The people on the next street over had their backyard porchlight on. I could see, in the glare of that light, an eclipse moving toward me, a human-shaped shadow approaching out of the dark.

The hair on my arms stood on end. My skin froze. I think my heart stopped.

Then suddenly, I was free. I dropped the garbage and the lid and sprinted for the front door. I burst inside the house, slammed the door and locked it.

Mom asked me what was wrong. I told her, “Somebody’s out there!”

I had a shotgun, an old 20-guage bolt action, hanging from a wall rack in my bedroom. She told me to go get it. I did. It wasn’t loaded, but that didn’t matter.

Together, we went back outside, Mom hefting that ridiculous shotgun.

“All right, you son-of-a-bitch! I’m gonna blow your goddamned brains out!”

Silence.

“I’ll blow your brains out!” she shouted again.

I picked up the bag of garbage where I’d dropped it, hurled it into the can and slammed the lid closed. Both of us hightailed it back to the house.

Months later, we found out that somebody had been living in the crawlspace under the vacant house. They had a mattress and a flashlight set up under there. The idea that somebody was there, watching us come and go, still creeps me out. And that’s what prompted me to write “The Thing in the Dark.”

It was one of 13 under-a-thousand-words stories I created for a project called “13 Seconds” I hoped to sell to a comic book publisher. My friend C.M. Terry planned to illustrate each one.

Alas, that project didn’t sell, but along came “365 Scary Stories” from Barnes & Noble. I submitted all 13 stories and they bought seven, including this one.

The others are the following:

“And Baby Makes 13”

“Crisis Line”

“Mall of the Dead”

“The Garage”

“In the Wilds of the Suburbs”

“The Tooth Fairy”

“The Thing in the Dark”

—

THE THING IN THE DARK

Danny scrunched his eyes shut and pulled the covers over his head, entombing himself in darkness and silence.

On this night he would see nothing. He would hear nothing. He would spend the night in his bedroom without once screaming for his mother, his voice climbing the panicky octaves until even the sound of his own shouts frightened him.

Nothing would breathe beneath his bed. Nothing would growl behind the closet door. Nothing would scratch the window behind the curtains. It was all in his imagination, he told himself, reciting the mantra that had been drilled into him by his exasperated mother. How many nights had she staggered into his bedroom, her breath sickly sweet with bourbon, to dump herself on the edge of the mattress and yank back the covers and blabber at him drunkenly about his foolish, childish fear of the dark? How many times had she come into the room angry, then seen the look of stark terror in his eyes and try to salve her anger with sloppy kisses and stern but gentle insistences that he look under the bed, or in the closet, or through the part in the curtains?

*Image by Oakley Originals of Flickr.*

https://www.flickr.com/photos/oakleyoriginals/

Always, he had checked. And always, nothing was there.

But it was the light that chased them away, he told her, and then her anger would return and she’d stalk from the room, slamming the door behind her, and he’d try to sleep with the light on until sometime later when she’d snatch the door open – a loud rasping that always sent his heart jumping into his throat – and flick it off.

The terror would begin anew.

But tonight he would put it out of his mind. That scrabbling sound beneath the bed – that was the floorboards vibrating from a passing truck. The shudder from the closet door – it was not the furtive movement of the runner within the track as a clawed hand slowly drew the door ajar. And he did not hear a soft thumping at the window, as something out there tested the glass for a way to get inside. These things were all perfectly normal occurrences that the darkness transformed into mysteries, things that would go totally unnoticed in the blessed light of day. In fact, if he peeked at the closet door he would see it was shut, as he’d left it. If he yanked back the covers and hung his head over the edge of the mattress, he would see a jumble of toys beneath the bed and nothing more. From the window, he would see the soft glow of lights brightening the neighborhood windows.

If he peeked – if he peeked – he would see that it was all in his imagination, and that he had nothing to be afraid of. If he peeked.

He slitted an eye and eased the covers back.

The closet door was open.

The mattress shimmied ever so slightly, and the pressure of the bedspread on his legs decreased as something lifted the corner and began to probe softly for something to – something to grab and haul beneath the bed, an ankle, a calf, the arm of a trembling 9-year-old boy –

Bobby hurled himself from the bed and hit the light switch.

Nothing there. Closet door, closed. Toys beneath the bed.

And then he heard it. A tapping at the window.

He tiptoed across the carpet and paused at the curtains, knowing with dread certainty that if he dared look out, something horrible would look in –

“Bobby! Let me in!” the whisper snaked through the glass.

It sounded like his mother.

“Bobby? Are you there? Let me in! I heard a noise outside. I went to check and – and I locked myself out! Let me in!”

It really did sound like his mother. But Bobby hesitated.

“Let me in, dammit,” the voice whispered. “I think there’s someone out here!”

What if it weren’t his mother?

Bobby, there’s someone out here – I hear them!”

What if it were something using his mother’s voice to trick him into opening the window?

“Open the goddamn window!” the voice said, louder this time, a tremble of fear wiggling through the words. “Bobby, please!”

And if he opened the window, it would reach in with its claws and grab him around the throat –

“Bobby – oh, Bobby – ” the voice wailed.

– and the blood would splatter the walls and the bedspread and the closet door –

He heard a scream and a low-throated growl, and then a thrashing sound, as if some kind of struggle were being waged outside.

He stepped away from the curtains. He padded back to the bed and slipped beneath the covers. He could hear his heart pounding. It might have been a monster’s heart pounding.

But he would get through this night without calling his mother. Because it was all in his imagination.

About the author:

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .

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