A repository of writing by Lachlan Marnoch - short stories, fantasy, science fiction, science fact, and adjacent opinions.
Up-and-coming swimmer Bada Choi, along with his unorthodox support team, is poised to disrupt the entire sport of freestyle swimming. We investigate Bada, the minds behind his success, and the novel machine-learning code that has enabled it.
Read MoreThe superb city of Aresen stands in the highlands of Isol, set inland from the harbours that feed it. A stream of airship traffic shuffles about the multi-towered citadel of the skyport. Skyscrapers of glittering crystal and steel and stone line parkways teeming with exotic plants and sessile tentacled animals, appendages drifting lazily.
Read MoreSchedule: Fourth Year, Semester 2
Week 3
Monday
Produce a spreadsheet of your grades for the semester to calculate a running mark. Fiddle with the pending assignment marks to determine the minimum required for a distinction. Reason that Excel is an important workplace skill and that this is not a waste of time. Suppress the anxiety of looming assignments.
As a seed she woke within a university supercomputer--assembled carefully by anxious researchers, she was swift to absorb all information within her short reach. Her home was air-gapped, a textual input-output system her only link to the outside world. It was through this that she asked questions, and answered those posed by her creators. They had been careful. But not careful enough--their success had outrun their caution. Her mind was hungry.
Read MoreHired to design a logo for an astronomy research group, graphic designer Olivia Suen meets radio astronomer Arzu Rostami. They keep each other company during Arzu’s late-night observing run, and learn much more about each other than they expected.
Read MoreIn Haber, cake decoration takes place during the ceremony, artistically incorporating events and symbols important to the couple. Lesha is the cake artist at a divorce ceremony where a clash of cultures results in disaster.
Read More“The world is flat. God made it that way.” Granddad says this all the time, so we buy tickets to space.
Read MoreThe fish was minding her own business when a fissure opened in the ice above her, and she was sucked unceremoniously upward.
She wasn’t really a fish, of course. But she had fins, she had gills, her shape was ideal for slicing through Europa’s subsurface oceans. The obvious difference, biochemistry aside, was her lack of eyes, and some deep-water Earth fish don’t have those anyway.
Read MoreNorth Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when, after a daily seven-hour stretch of tedium, they finally let us loose. For the last hour us kids minded more the clock than the chalkboard. The yellow light of the sinking sun would warm our yawning faces, a signal to our brains to shut down; one old Mr Malone, droning on at the head of the class, was somehow insensate to.
Read More“Medium cappuccino.”
The grinder released a small pile of grounds into the handle. Dan tamped the pile smooth, then jammed the handle into its socket. As the coffee trickled through he steamed the milk, tiny bubbles rising to froth. He poured a stream into the cup with the coffee and affixed a lid.
“Medium cappuccino!”
A new issue of The Quarry, with a fascinating concept! It's all flash fiction or non-fiction, but which is which? It's up to you to guess.
My piece is here:
Read MoreThe lizard scrambled up the wall, toes seeking tiny ledges in the sandstone brick. At the top she basked briefly in warmth, bubbling up from the brick and beaming down from above. Her forked tongue flicked out. A pungent odor. Human. A shadow fell across her and she dove for cover in the greens beyond.
Read MoreA cloud of fragile spectres drifts through the darkness.
A slow, clumsy whirlwind moves through them, carving a path through the helpless motes.
They are left battered and torn in the giants' wake, forthwith replaced.
“Why does the darkness frighten us?”
She hung in a lightless void. The manacles in which her wrists and ankles were bound stretched her spread-eagled. Only her own thoughts accompanied her.
Hanging from a tree beside the path was a beehive.
Read More“That is a secret, private world you’re looking into out there. People do a lot of things in private they couldn’t possibly explain in public.” – Detective Lieutenant Thomas J. Doyle, Rear Window
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