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Visions Of Odd
An Anthology of very short stories by S. A. Barton
Copyright 2012 S. A. Barton
Smashwords Edition
Find other stories by S.A. Barton on his Smashwords profile.
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Contents:
1: All Flesh Is Grass
2: Fermi Person Omniscient
3: Sleep
4: Consent Of The Governed
5: Mine Of Men
6: The Circle Of Grass
7: Ignorance Of The Law
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1:
All Flesh Is Grass
By S. A. Barton
Copyright 2012 S. A. Barton
Author’s note:
After reading this, you may suspect that I wrote it solely to justify the last line, but it’s not true. I didn’t know that line would end the story until I wrote it. This setting is more the fantasy of an especially omnivorous author.
The business calls it 'Vegan Meat'. Like every advertising brand, it's an accuracy-optional term. Yes, it's entirely cruelty-free and animal-death-free, but still definitely meat. Only a segment of tissue is grown, not the animal; there is no brain to be conscious of being a cow or a chicken, however conscious those creatures might be. Unless, of course, brains are on the menu. We don't advertise that option but it's obvious. It's true that a brain without input of some sort is just a lump of flesh, but the uninitiated can't help but think of it as an innately thinking thing.
Vegan Meat is a controversial name. The current thinking is that the controversy is an asset. It keeps the name in the public ear, keeps people talking and writing about it. It's the opposite of the thinking of the last generation of PR experts who repeatedly tried to change the name, which stuck the moment it came out of an uncredited technician's mouth. People simply ignored the new terms. Granted, some of them deserved to be ignored. 'Neat', short for 'New Meat' tops the deserved-it list. 'Cruelty-free Meat' was too dry, too factual. Also, few customers want to buy something with the word cruelty on the label no matter what the next word is or how good the product tastes. 'Cloneburger' was too weird, but collectors love to find the old packaging with Moink the patchwork mascot, a puzzle stitched of cow and pig sporting huge neon green neck bolts. And so on.
In the early days when my father was laying down footsteps for me to follow in, VM was a hard sell. Anything made in a lab was, and sometimes for good reason. Oversight was less consistent than it is today and a little too easy to sway if the right palms were greased. Vegan Meat never really fit in the much-feared frankenfood category, no matter what Moink looked like. The DNA of a piece is pure unaltered cow or chicken or whatever it is you're buying. Any blending is accomplished not by tinkering with the blueprint of life, but by growing two or more pieces of different tissue next to each other. But it's still close enough for some to distrust.
Twenty years of creeping-slow progress, of market growth measured in fractions of percentages, and suddenly-- boom. Sales double in a year, then double again the next year. Five years to pass the sales of animal-grown meat, which is mainly a boutique product now. No reason for the sudden change that anyone can agree on, though there are plenty of theories. I fall into the 'it was a teen fad that caught on' camp.
So R&D budgets explode along with the profits, and we can afford to tinker and play, to start coming up with things like beef tenderloins with a vein of pork fat cells down the middle to relieve the culinary monotony of lean that is the natural cut. We grow them with perfectly even dimensions, avoiding the difficulty of figuring out what to do with the skinny, oddly shaped ends of the muscle as it grows on a cow. We turn out Thanksgiving Turducken grown in neat three-layered sheets shaped to fold bonelessly around the traditional stuffing like a flesh burrito. Soft bone marrow in rectangular 100 gram sticks for half the price of butter. Billions of chicken wings without the complication of what to do with the rest of the bird, for which there is lower demand. Foie gras, made by the adjustment of a liquid nutrient mixture rather than a funnel jammed down a goose's gullet, regained its old appeal.
When I was starting out, just a few years before father retired, it was getting really interesting. I made my reputation in SCUBA gear scratching a dozen whales' backs-- for the skin cells we used to make a fortune in Japan. Whale sashimi without whaling. Chefs began to explore the possibilities of anything we could get a cell sample of. Rhino, eagle, sea turtle, manatee, cheetah, panda, mammoth. Sometime after the dozenth 'exciting new star of endangered cuisine' it gets boring.
Which is why I've spent a year separating myself from the company my father built and I fattened. Why I've disentangled my finances from theirs, sold my stock, divested my options, transferred my retirement fund, switched banks, fired all of my insurance carriers and found new ones. Why half of my net worth is tied up in a dark-windowed storefront in the middle of the edgy-trendiest neighborhood in this decade of the Big Apple's long history. Why the other half is tied up in the machinery of Vegan Meat-making and a chef who knows-- really knows-- what to do with anything I can coax out of it. We open our doors Friday night.
Come eat me.
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2:
Fermi Person Omniscient
By S. A. Barton
Copyright 2012 S. A. Barton
Author’s note:
My earliest known surviving piece of fiction is something dating back to grade school and involving dinosaur time machines. I had forgotten about it until it resurfaced in a box of memorabilia in my mother’s house only a few years ago. This story isn’t quite about dinosaur time machines, but that grade school story was very much on my mind when I wrote this.
“I don't think it's possible,” the Sauroid in the long white lab gown said, scratching his dim and faded dewlap with his thumb-talon. His graduate assistant, dewlap still bright with youth, puffed the organ in question up slightly with the intellectual challenge.
“Well, why not? We have an identified alternate, we can establish a larger wormhole, perhaps even on a scale visible to the naked eye...” he trailed off, plucking at the fabric of his shorter gown, the cut and the charcoal color symbolizing the subordinate status he was so close to discarding for the dress of a professional peer.
“We've tried a hundred different variations, each one with the same result. It always closes after the smallest measurable unit of time. I'm not convinced we've done anything wrong any of those times, we've been successful. We need to look elsewhere. So, discard the mechanics of the wormhole. What else is there, Ithlith?”
“Professor, if we could only see the same alternate twice, we might have an answer.”
“The problem there is that the number of alternates is functionally equal to infinity.”