Brian Kenneth Swain

Advance yourself, they said, for soon your tiresome but passably lucrative station in this life will be rent from you by the automaton. Raise yourself up or be tossed aside; the choice is yours. But what they didn’t tell us (for surely, who did not already know?) was that the race goes ultimately to the swift and that man is a fragile being evolving at a scarcely discernible pace, whereas the machines change and evolve seemingly at light speed, and do so, may God have mercy on us, through the designs of man himself. It was a race we were doomed never to win, a prize the pursuit of which could only exhaust us and render us yet riper for our eventual, inescapable defeat. It began harmlessly enough. They were conceived and constructed ...

The doorbell to 182 Meadow View Drive rings once, twice, and the repairman from Pathways Cable Company quickly checks his handheld display to make sure he has the correct address. It is late on a Tuesday morning, muggier than usual, and a thin bead of sweat swells between the man’s eyebrows. He instinctively shifts his gaze for a moment to the houses on his left and his right, then feigns another glance at the device in his hand. It shows nothing at all and he reaches again for the doorbell button to make one final attempt. But before his finger can reach the button, there comes a rustling on the other side of the door, a scarcely discernible curse, and the door opens to reveal a woman, middle aged, not bad looking, and slightly confused ...

The sun had only just begun its journey into afternoon as two men stood talking in the sort of jovial tones not commonly heard in the vicinity of Burns and Sons. One of the two was Ken Burns Sr. himself, proprietor of the town’s only funeral home. He had just entered his sixth decade and cut an impressive figure—tall, heavy set, dressed in the sort of dark heavy suit traditional to his profession. His interlocutor, Buster Craig, was half his size and more than twice his age. It was a curious pairing, the town’s sole mortician conversing so easily with its oldest resident, the sort of thing a passerby might take note of and likely remark upon later to family members or coworkers. “Saw old Buster chatting it up with Ken Burns this ...

It always happens the same way. He stands tentatively before the marble fireplace and gazes into the painting for a few moments, wondering who created it (no signature) and when they did so (at least a hundred fifty years ago, that much is certain). Surprisingly, he long ago ceased wondering how the miracle itself works. No point speculating, he supposes. It’s a wondrous, impossible bit of sorcery, or perhaps arcane physics, in either event a thing he can never hope to understand. But he’s made the journey now several times, and it’s always the same, regardless of direction. The discovery was a complete fluke, or at least he imagines that it was. He had stood in this very spot, alone in the room, reached out his right hand, and ...

Seville – May 14, 1483 By his own authority,[1] To the distinguished, respectable, noble, magnificent councilors and all our beloved; and to the deputies, generals, viceroys, spokesmen of our central government, general justices, royal officials, bailiffs, justices, judges, municipal councilors, town magistrates, justices of the peace, prison wardens, and any other of our officials and subjects who exercise any office and jurisdiction, presently and henceforth, in any of our kingdoms and lands now and henceforth so constituted, and the deputies of those officials, and any other person to whom these letters shall come: greetings and affection. Inasmuch as the Holy Father has been informed that there are many people in our kingdoms who ...

“It’s not really a conjecture, is it?” Sophie said, leaning forward from the back seat. “Conjecture means you’re hypothesizing about something that you don’t have any real data to support. You’ve got an ocean of data. Hell, just look around.” Something that, in fact, everyone in the car was in the midst of doing—looking around, that is. “Well, I’m not sure it exactly rises to the level of a theorem,” Clay replied. “I’m no mathematician or anything, but it feels more like a conjecture to me.” He was in the front passenger seat of the Audi 5000, a car that belonged to Trent’s father, who had agreed, with his special grudging brand of acceptance, to allow the four grad students to take the car into the city for ...

The flight from Heathrow departed at 7:35 a.m., on time surprisingly enough, and arrived in Monrovia just after six p.m. Peering out the right side of the plane as we made our final approach, there lay beneath us the usual tropical scenery—verdant mahogany trees and low growth shrubbery, poorly-kept dirt roads, low cinder-block houses with corrugated metal roofs, and, in the distance, beneath a deepening blue sky, anvil clouds that looked to be within an hour of delivering heavy rain. It could have been any third-world destination. No sign of anything unusual, save perhaps for the notable lack of people milling about. Plenty of dogs and cattle, but very few people. I had made trips to this part of the continent several times in the past ...

“Why the hell are gas prices so high in this state? Christ, we’ve got more refineries up and down this highway than the whole damn Gulf coast. Gas should be dirt cheap here, shouldn’t it?” The countless brilliant white lights of the ConocoPhillips plant reflect like galaxies off the windshield, as the dark grey Suburban rolls up the New Jersey Turnpike, drifts into the right lane, and slows slightly to take Exit 13 into Elizabeth. It’s just passing through dusk and the refinery lights gleam like eternal Christmas in the deepening purple of the Jersey evening, punctuated periodically by the hellish outrage of a gas flare hurling three-story flames into the air. Bill Preston stares out the passenger-side window and says nothing ...

Wendy Sutter stood alone at the hors d’oeuvre table, slowly, methodically, arranging small bits of raw carrot and celery on a clear plastic plate and contemplating the funeral she had just come from along with the thirty or so others at the house. Henry Abercrombie had died two days earlier from massive pulmonary failure, and had done so while working his regular late afternoon shift at the Home Depot in Peterborough, two towns over. Notwithstanding his advancing age and what was reputed to be a solid retirement income, he had worked there in the store’s plumbing department for more than four years. And despite his generally slow work pace and not-infrequent, occasionally charming, tendency to steer customer queries in eccentric ...

“He just fell over dead in mid-sentence, not two feet in front of me. And this on a day that had actually been relatively uneventful to that point, as least as these days go. Couple of inconsequential skirmishes. No casualties at all, in fact, aside from Flanders there spraining his ankle dodging a mortar round. We were all sitting around over by the depot, winding down a bit, but taking the usual precautions, you know—sand bags, trip wires, couple of lads on watch up top. Preston and I were just having a sit off to one side, drinking a bit of that awful coffee he made, him telling me about this boat he bought just before signing on, and how he’s going to go home and fix it up once we’re done sacking the regime. And he’s just ...