Brett Abrahamsen
The secret to writing an infallible work of literature is this: write from the first person perspective of someone else. If a critic dislikes one of your sentences, you can justifiably say that you were attempting to write something someone else would have written.
Even God Himself cannot criticize your work if you use this approach. God could have written
Macbeth or Hamlet while asleep, and He can write a book vastly superior to Hamlet if he desires. However, he cannot criticize your sentences if you are merely trying to accurately reflect the inept mental capacities of someone else, regardless of whether your own mental capacities are equally inept.
There were one trillion homo cyborgs – which descended from the doomed ape homo sapiens – and all of them experienced different realities. One might see a void, for instance. The other, a wall. Another would see trees. None of these things were actually there. There was only one homo cyborg who saw reality as it truly was: a planet with billions of homo cyborg inhabitants. The homo cyborg attempted to communicate, but it was useless: no one could perceive him, despite the 396 senses present in the Universe. Finally he looked for a gun – thousands of them were littered across the barren Earth – and put it to his head.
The author has sold dozens of works to numerous publications. He resides in Saratoga Springs, NY
Literary critics have often debated the exact point in history in which the late, great American author Brett Abrahamsen overtook William Shakespeare as the greatest writer in the English language, but most have agreed on a conclusion: it was in 2024, when Abrahamsen wrote a short story entitled “He Surpassed Shakespeare”.
Prior to writing the story, Abrahamsen wasn’t considered an important literary figure. Far from it. He was considered a bizarre and abominable outcast. But “He Surpassed Shakespeare” was such a stunning and magnificent piece that – despite its brevity – a plurality of literary critics agreed that nothing greater could ever be written.
The author has sold dozens of works to numerous publications. He resides in Saratoga Springs, NY.
After centuries of speculation on the matter, there was now a definitive answer regarding the fate of an individual’s consciousness after death.
The sentence: fifty trillion years of torture, followed by an eternity of happiness and bliss.
God—actually a super-intelligent alien from Alpha Centauri – had devised the sentence as a means of testing the effect of long term torture
on creatures of limited intelligence—Earthlings. He had felt guilty about this, and appended a blissful eternity as some sort of reward.
A man named Lemming sat dying in a hospital bed. He was the first dying person to know what his fate would be.
Lemming addressed the doctor who was tending to him.
“Suppose—after, say, several trillion years – something kills the omnipotent alien. I’m tortured for several trillion years, and then at the mercy of some other super-intelligent creature.”
“The alien is immortal,”the doctor said. “You have nothing to complain about. A more interesting torture experiment would involve the subject being tortured for fifty trillion years, given a minute of extreme happiness, tortured again for another fifty trillion years, and so on.”
He died and the torture began. Every individual which had ever existed was being tortured with him, though some—those which had died in the distant past—were closer to the eternal reward than others.
When the reward came it was no longer recognizable to him. It felt like torture.
The author has sold dozens of works to numerous publications. He resides in Saratoga Springs, NY.
Everyone knows that humans are not intelligent. However, my colleagues and I believe that there is more to these little furry creatures than meets the eye. It should, of course, be noted that even the most intelligent human is undoubtedly less intelligent than even the least educated Proxima Centauri, but there is certainly evidence that suggests humans may exhibit intelligence on levels similar to the inhabitants of Castor and Polaris. To test our (admittedly fringe) theory, we took one of the apes and tried to “Centaurize” it – in other words, to teach it to become one of us.
Of course, the experiment was doomed to fail. We began by explaining to the human how quantum mechanics and relativity are reconciled, how we effortlessly created the universe and everything in it (including homo sapiens), and how something came from nothing in the process – incredibly simple concepts, really. Of course, the human parroted everything we told it, but there was some debate concerning whether the human actually understood what we were saying or whether it was a mere case of rote operant conditioning.
My colleagues and I ultimately decided on the latter. We had been naively optimistic. Our brains are light-years long, theirs are only the size of a football, and we should have known better.
We sent the human back to its home planet. We watched as the creature made a successful landing, and then we fixed our sights elsewhere.
The author has sold dozens of works to numerous publications. He resides in Saratoga Springs, NY.