About With Slight Tremors:
It’s time to take a break from the world you think you know and to step through into another one. These five stories offer a guided tour of new possibilities and different places. They rely on magic, science, and sleight of hand, and will betray your trust at every opportunity. But just because they are fantastic, doesn’t mean they aren’t real (somewhere).
You can stay tucked away on a safe perch and let this book unveil the genre-bending consequences of rather minor changes to a world that might be the one you live in, or might not; you can follow the way events unravel when cause and effect aren’t quite so boringly predictable.
Stories of ideas are, however, always dangerous. Consider yourself warned.
Excerpt:
From: IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK?
The fiber optic cables tucked neatly into conduits along the wall behind the massive computer system glowed with activity and sound. The whizzing of subatomic particles as they located and relocated themselves, industriously carrying out assigned missions, moving about in packets or individually, the pale screams of dismay they let out as the processes abruptly dislodged and relocated them, forcing them first into ones, then zeros, all blended into a symphonic yet chaotic frenzy.
Phineas Raintree Gonzales heard those sounds, and as he switched on the new module in the Defense System Mark IV Computer, he saw a surge — the glowing and screaming dimmed for an instant, then it all rose again, nearing a crescendo.
It all had, he thought, a rather frenetic quality to it, a hum of despair, as it were. And he saw only this piece of it. Yet he felt as if he’d poked a beehive, only the bees were whirling and swirling subatomic particles reaching a threshold and generally behaving with what would appear to an uninformed outsider, say your average high-IQ human, to be rather frenzied random activity.
Frenzied yes. Random, it was not. It was more like…
Well, the way Rainy (as his friends called him) saw it — well, he couldn’t actually see it, everything inside the fiber optic cables being subatomic and all — another universe existed inside those cables, an entire world of its own. It was a tiny little universe, to be sure, but a universe nonetheless, and at the moment it was (universally) upset and unnerved.
Strange, to be sure, but it was happening more often these days. He’d tried to report it, but he didn’t actually have language for what was going on. And it wasn’t precise — it was vague and variable, damnably unpredictable, and those were qualities a digital systems engineer didn’t have to deal with often. They were qualities you didn’t expect to have to deal with at all. Everything was precise, digital, one or zero. Except it wasn’t. And that unpredictability made it impossible to demonstrate to his bosses.
“Just install the upgrade,” they’d say. “Is that too much to ask?”
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