I was somewhen gliding over Virtuosity when I woke up from my copy/paste coma. I was ten thousand bar stools above pay dirt, but the drinks had stopped coming long before the last sequence of route rot procedures was done. I tried to perk up with three quick and awful coffees and a Hershey’s kiss left over from my last intrusion into the real world, but it wasn’t helping much. The coffee was a tannic acid man’s dream, bitter and beyond redemption no matter how I tried to doll it up. And the kiss, well, I am a sucker for chocolate, even old chocolate, but this kiss had seen its last sweet pucker long ago, maybe even in a candy gallery far far away.
She walked into my room the way all sycophants do these days – with an air of predestination. She sat down in the old overstuffed chair next to the old overstuffed couch I was crouched on. She placed her legs in just such a position that a trigonometry professor would’ve been had pressed to explain, and it was all I could do to keep my eyes from triangulating on them. They were her best feature, but the rest of her was at least suborbital as well. She dressed in clothes with sharp angles, some of which would probably frighten an armadillo. Her lips were as full and shiny as a waxing moon and her hair gleamed as if it were a source of light all its own. In short, she was as textured as the night, and just as dangerous.
She dragged out a smoke and was about to light it.
“Not in here.” My head was a series of dots and dashes in binary world, and lighting up wasn’t going to help.
She pouted and then put them away. “The boss sent me.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
She looked perplexed, lost in the great heartland of non-sequitors, a trollop with a message trying to make connections with polarized plugs in a non-polarized world.
“The boss says—”
“I know what the boss says. He says it every time he sends one of you floozies down my rat hole with a message, and every time he promises me my freedom and every time he finds a way to wriggle out of following through. Tell Lucy, Charlie ain’t kickin’ at the ball no more.”
She looked even more nonplussed. I could just imagine one big minus sign stretched above her pretty little head, like a halo dancing black hole mambo with an event horizon. One day enough neurons might come burrowing out, Steven Hawking style, to make a moment of enlightenment, but age and propriety would keep me from waiting that long. After all, it’s not polite to stare indefinitely at a glacier, no matter how easy on the eyes.
[Editor’s note: not sure what to do with this. If I should pursue it or let it go. if you have read it, any thoughts or comments? is this an interesting beginning? Thank you for stopping by.]
Booker's Blog 
Well it is your standard gumshoe detective opening. A bit verbose even if it is meant to be a parody. And the Steven Hawking comment seems out of place if this is meant to be a period piece.
Thank you for reading and commenting. It is set in the present time frame, though a slightly skewed one. I don’t know that I would call it a parody so much as social satire. The bit of “verbosity” is intentional. It may not work, but it is done with malice of forethought.
Well I’d have to read more then but some background does help. I have to admit in my mind I did “hear” it in Harrison Ford’s voice so I guess it could be the future ala Bladerunner.
I’ll take “Harrison Ford’s voice” as a compliment, though he might not.
Excellent beginning, David! Pursue, pursue, pursue! Where have you been hiding this talent and writing style?
Hi Cathy. Thank you for reading and commenting. Not sure how to respond to “Where have (I) been hiding this talent and writing style?” I have another “quirky” story going on this blog called “The Kibitzer and the Kidd” which is similar in tone, though maybe not quite as jaded in tone. It is also told from the third person point of view, which is different than this one, which is first person. I do have a longer story I wrote once, entitled “Can Aliens be Angels? or the Search for Armageddon in Ol’ Man Kelsey’s Woods,” which some people have read and found funny. It’s a novella of 22,000 words, which you would probably say is too long to make it easily publishable, but nobody in the reading group who has been reading it (and is reading the last section now) has suggested anywhere to cut it. And that’s okay with me. I have worked and reworked and reworked that piece and don’t think there is anywhere it can be trimmed enough to make it that much shorter. I’m sure there are always things that could be done to polish it still more, but after a while I find the story begins to feel lifeless to me. Shiny and lifeless. Again, thanks for reading and for the comments.
P.S. I took it to be a contemporary detective story (clue near beginning with “copy and paste”) so the Hawking reference worked for me.