As I receive contracts and final edits from authors, I’ll post a teaser from their story here and on our Facebook page. You know where to get the rest, right? Comments are welcome.
The Last Cyborg
By
Randy Ennis’ implants were killing him. He heard it in his dreams—liver talking to heart talking to legs, talking to ears. It wasn’t supposed to be like that, of course. He had designed the medical implants to function as a unit, the way his own body functioned as a unit controlled by Randy’s brain. He didn’t understand it. Nobody did. It wasn’t that the implants didn’t work. It was that they worked too well, every new organ adding its voice until they overwhelmed the body they were in.
Randy paused his work, leaning on his oversized broom. A lousy inch of snow had fluffed over the Grosse Pointe Country Care Facility, not enough to even bother with the shovel. The orderlies said it was their job, he shouldn’t bother at all, but he suspected they secretly appreciated his help. At age ninety-six, he didn’t sleep much and this gave him something to do in the mornings.
So, why did we take this story? This one definitely swam upstream. My reaction to the first version we saw? “Oh, Dear Deity. There is so much wonderful here, yet the story is shaped all wrong.” But it was such a cool classic SF concept, we couldn’t bring ourselves to say no. We asked for an extensive rewrite and M. Yang delivered. The revised version was much stronger. We did a little more tweaking in final edit to speed up the opening. The original was 3400 words; the rewrite came in at 3800 words; final edit is 3600 words.
Tune in tomorrow for our next tease. The full Table of Contents is here.
Have you checked out our Kickstarter project yet? 13 days and roughly $0 to go. That’s right, we made it thanks to you generous people out there. At risk of destroying my macho image, I’ll admit it brought a tear to my eye. I’d like to think Ann would be proud. I know she would be happy. She almost always was.
