Archive for May 3rd, 2011
Fortnightcap: An Announcement
Posted by DLThurston in Fortnightcaps, Short Stories on May 3, 2011
An Announcement
A Fortnightcap by DL Thurston
Scientists Announce Final Invention
At a press conference this afternoon, a team of scientists, engineers, and inventors announced they had invented the last item that will ever be invented. For centuries thought an impossibility, the moment has been anticipated by philosophologists for the past decade as it became very clear that there are only so many possibilities that can exist within the human imagination. The invention in question is a new musical instrument that converts thoughts into musical notes. There followed a brief demonstration by the inventor, Mary Forth, who chose to play Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto Number 3.
The announcement set off immediate reactions from people worldwide. When approached for this article, Harold Maude, a holovision technician from Hoboken, said, “Come on, there has to be something someone hasn’t invented. Like, I don’t know, some kind of combination hat rack and computer server.” Computer and sartorial engineer Lucas Freemont, when approached, responded that such a device had in fact been invented in 2117, but proved to be a financial failure.
“Anyway,” he continued, “we aren’t looking at notions of ‘what if we combined this and that’ but at the creation of new and completely novel devices. There will always be some room for improvement of existing products. There just won’t be anything completely new ever again. Which is something we’re all going to have to deal with.” Mr. Freemont was unable to comment further as he was finalizing his application for a job grilling soy patties at McDonalds.
There are still some holdouts within the scientific community who believe that there can’t possibly ever be an end of invention. However, this final invention has been foreseen for several years during a period of complete inventive sterility from the scientific and engineering communities. It was merely a matter of which enterprising person finally realized the concept and could reap the rewards. Mrs. Forth will receive a prize of $5,000,000 from the federal government, which can now get out of the business of rewarding inventors and get back to the serious work of declaring national weeks of recognition.
And what of all the inventors? All the hard working men and women who toil and sweat in the hopes of creating something new? Many are continuing on, unaffected by the news. Whether this proves to be a futile use of time and resources, or whether they may still prove the establishment wrong is yet to be seen. Jordan Lauerbeck, for one, is undeterred. “I was so close to finishing my own thought horn, and I really hope that I can use some of those concepts to, perhaps, create a new form of dentifrice.”
To Mr. Lauerbeck and the other plucky inventors still struggling on, all we can say is good luck.
Fortnightcaps are biweekly experimentation into short form fiction. All Fortnightcaps are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. So if you like the story, please feel free to link people back here. And if you didn’t, maybe the one in two weeks will be better. Picture of Kepler’s Supernova courtesy of NASA, released to public domain.
Fortnightcap, Future News, original, Philosophologists, short stories
State of the Author: May addendum
Posted by DLThurston in Short Stories on May 3, 2011
Posted yesterday on the Hydra Publications blog:
Steam Works will also be out in early July. We are going over edits for it right now but we have decided that all of the pieces are in good shape we are just going over them with a fine eye to see if there are any typos.
We have some cover samples coming in for Steam Works but we still haven’t found the right look as of yet.
Always nice to get the occasional update that it’s still in progress. Can’t wait to see the cover, I’ll post when I see it. Fortnightcap coming at you in another 1-3 hours.
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Biography
DL Thurston's short fiction is available now in the Steam Works anthology, and coming soon in The Memory Eater and The Old Weird South. He also contributes regularly to the group blog Unleaded, Fuel for Writers and the online 5 Minute Fiction writing challenge. He lives in Annandale, VA with his wife and two cats.
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