Josh Roseman - The Clockwork Russian and Other Stories

Oh, for fuck’s sake… here, have a tissue. Don’t get snot on my controller.

Hey. Get up.

I’m not telling you what time it is. You don’t need to know. Just get up. It’s time to play.

Yeah, I know, I had some things to do. Didn’t have time to play games. You know how it is.

Okay, fair enough, right now you don’t know how it is.

Hungry?

I brought McDonalds. Just try to keep the grease off the furniture.

Ha! Yes! Oh, that was a great game! Gimme five!

Get up.

I said get up.

I SAID GET ON YOUR FUCKING FEET AND PLAY MADDEN YOU PIECE OF SHIT!

The broken fingers are your own damn fault. You left me hanging. Would it have killed you to give me a high-five?

BECAUSE IT ALMOST KILLED YOU NOT TO!

Y’know what? Fuck this. Stay in there.

How’s the hand?

Good. I’m glad.

Look, I’m sorry about that. No one else here even tries to play. I like you because you make the effort. The others… they just sob and beg me not to kill them. Or hurt them. Or rape them.

No, you idiot, I’m not going to rape you. I’m not gay. I told you: I brought you here to play Madden with me. If I wanted to fuck, I wouldn’t have come to your room.

Last night? Yeah, that’s what you heard. Guy’s got to do what a guy’s got to do.

Come on. Let’s play.

I’ll go easy on you.

“Playmate” is previously unpublished, although it did get to the final round in a Pseudopod flash fiction contest. I wrote it because I used to play Madden on my PlayStation and PS2, and I could never find anyone to play with me. Playing against the computer (especially a computer that cheats when you start doing too well) gets old after a while. I’ve since given up Madden for fantasy football and board games; I managed to convince my partner to join me on the former, and my daughter joins the two of us for the latter.

The kid’s surprisingly good. At age six, she started winning games of Settlers of Catan , and at nine, she watched us play Carcassonne about three times and then beat us the first time she played. (We only helped her a little bit — until we realized she was better at this than we thought and we’d better start trying to win.)

Aaron stared at the horizon. The dust in the atmosphere obscured the moon and the stars, so really he couldn’t see anything at all. But he knew where it was. His entire crew knew where it was.

What was left of them, anyway.

“It will be daylight soon.” Cesar’s voice. “Two hours.”

Aaron didn’t turn around.

Cesar’s boots crunched on small rocks and grit as he walked toward Aaron. “I knew I would find you out here.” He handed over a flask. “I brought you this.”

“Thanks.” Aaron drank, and the bitter fire of moonshine burned down his throat. He usually avoided the stuff — it made him sick the morning after — but that didn’t matter now.

“Gina is dead,” Cesar said.

“Good.” Gina had been shot, but she’d refused morphine, refused to die before she helped the others on their way. Then there had been no morphine. Aaron had come outside to escape the screaming. “Who’s left?”

“Lise and Jamin. And Yva is still trying to raise a rescue ship.”

Aaron passed Cesar the flask. “Too late for that.”

Jamin took four thick chocolate bars out of his coverall and handed them around. He’d been saving them for the end of their mission: three long years scouting for planets the Consortium could mine for minerals or metals. Lise, the geologist, had said this planet had taravite — “more than I’ve ever seen in one place.”

The proximity alarm had broken the mood, and moments later a small, fast cruiser had blasted a hole in the engine compartment and latched on with grapnels. After stealing the locations of every promising planet, the pirates had locked a landing solution into the computer and zipped away.

“Better to have killed us quickly,” Aaron said. He swayed a little on his feet — too much moonshine; the last of it, he supposed, with Priya dead. “Why didn’t they kill us all?”

Cesar shrugged and bit into his chocolate bar. Lise held hers in one hand, still in the wrapper, watching the horizon. Her husband had been the first to die.

Aaron checked his comp: one more hour.

“That’s it.” Yva climbed out of the ship and joined the others. “I’m done.” She lit a cigarette and inhaled. “Gina said these things would kill me.” She blew a smoke ring. “Anyone else want one?”

“I do,” Cesar said.

Cesar and Yva smoked. Jamin nibbled his chocolate. But Aaron and Lise just watched the horizon. “At least we won’t burn to death,” she said.

“No. We won’t.”

The sky was lightening quickly, shades of beige and mustard yellow. “I want to die,” Lise whispered. “Do you think I’ll see Jared? When it happens?”

“I don’t know.” Aaron was starting to feel nauseous. Behind him, Jamin threw up. “I hope you do.”

The edge of the sun came over the horizon. Aaron dropped to his knees, unable to stand. Someone — Cesar, he thought — was singing.

Aaron just stared at the sun.

“Aubade” is from an Escape Pod flash fiction contest; it made it to the final round but didn’t win. This is its first appearance. You can see some of the themes I reused later in “Survivor”, and if I ever finish rewriting “The Man Who Evacuated the Planet”, you’ll see them reappear there as well. I only have a few views of the future in my brain, so they tend to pop up over and over. I’m sure I’m not the only one who does this.

I remember writing this story in one day, after seeing Dictionary.com’s word of the dayon 3 February 2010. I thought it was a lovely word, and deserved to have a story written about it.

This book would not have been possible without Bigg Anklevich, Tina Connolly, Dayne Edmondson, Kay T. Holt, Marguerite Kenner, Mur Lafferty, Marshal Latham, Bart R. Lieb, Rish Outfield, Casey Seda, Norm Sherman, Tony C. Smith, Cavan Terrill, Carrie Tierney, and, alphabetically-last (but certainly not least), Sheila Williams. Editors have some of the hardest jobs out there, because they have to pick stories that aren’t only good but also that their readers will want to read. Thanks to all of you for thinking mine meet those criteria.

Lots of people have helped to make my work better. I can’t name every single person who ever read any of the stories in this volume, but here are some of them that deserve a mention: Scott Graham, Beau Hall, Liz Helenek, Michael H. King, Linda Sullivan, Dave Thompson, and Lisa Watson.

I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge my friend and fellow author Shon Richards, who let me pester him a few years ago about Kindle formatting for my release of “Secret Santa”. I’m still using the same template I built with his help. (If it sucks, blame me, not him.)

To my daughter Alyssa: it’s not Monkeybutt , but your name did finally make it into one of my books. I love you.

And, for so many reasons, I couldn’t have put this together without Celestia Price. Every day I appreciate her more; every day I love her more. The grass truly is greener on this side.

Josh Roseman (not the trombonist; the other one) lives in Georgia (the state; not the other one). His fiction has appeared in Asimov’s , Escape Pod , Toasted Cake, and the Crossed Genres anthology Fat Girl in a Strange Land , among other places. His fiction has been reprinted by the award-winning podcasts Cast of Wonders, StarShipSofa, and The Dunesteef Audio Fiction Magazine . He also writes reviews for Escape Pod and a weekly column, “Six of the Best”, for Nerdery Public. He is a 2013 graduate of the Taos Toolbox writing workshop and an active member of the SFWA. When not writing, he mostly complains about the fact that he’s not writing.