Cafe Three Zero - new forums

The independent writing group, Cafe Three Zero, have set up a new suite of forums. They are for writers to discuss their writing, offer advice, post up writing for feedback, in fact anything to do with writing.

There are already some lively discussions going on so why not join in?

 See you there?

             http://ctzwritersclub.forumshome.com/

Three ages of man

Three ages of man

The boy is waiting for his seventeenth birthday, looking into the unknown future towards his age of man, not knowing in which land it lies with its infinite branching possibilities.

             He does not know that his future is fixed, just waiting for him to follow that one critical path.

            He does not know that the arrow of time does not move, it is just a pointer to show when he is. Time flows around him to coalesce behind him to form his passed times and to add pages to the history book of his life.

            He is unsure about everything. He knows nothing, but he knows that he knows everything.

            How can it be otherwise in a teenaging boy?

His age is but a twentieth of a millennium, the mountain is four million times older, a Variscan G G G G...Great Grandfather.

             He clawed his way up the foothills of the corporate mountain range until he reached the sunlit uplands of calm acceptance, no more promotion, just the casual fending off of upstart steers who would dislodge him from his upland summer pasture.

            He waits for his pension, happy not to strive but to graze efficiently with minimum effort until he leaves the threshing floor at the five of each day to return to his dependable family.

The man is old, but not old as the mountain knows old, the mountain that he can see with his one good, though rheumy, eye . A rheum with a view.

            His back is bent in a way that only a wind resisting tree knows and his skin is barked like that same tree, the events of many years embossed on the lignin.

            His walking stick is cut from that very oak; unfair as he does not care to prop up the supplicating sapling that bows before the lazy wind.

            Is there enough wood groan yet to form his coffin so that he can dye happily in the scarlet satin lining?

A Sonnet

Ambrosia

Shall I compare thee to a can of rice                                            

Round of body but top and base conflate:                                              

Financial storms inflate the bogof price,                                      

Anne Summer’s lease hath all too short a date:   

                 

Sometime too hard the might of Tesco strike,                             

And oft his gold ramps up the price                                            

as every fair trade cost from far oft places spike:                        

By chance or corporate plans change to gneiss

                             

But thy internal dessert shall not decay,                                      

Nor lose possession of that fair trade thou must;                         

Nor shall Death erode and change day to day                             

When time advances, to sell by or change to rust                        

So long as men can breathe, or palate can taste                           

So long lives this, not set to fall to waste

The independent writing group, Cafe Three Zero, have just published their latest collection of short stories. They have departed from their previous method of asking their team of authors to write on a similar theme. Book 2 was called RED, for example, as that was the theme running through the book.

      This collection - RANDOM - does what it says on the cover and you will not find a theme running through the stories. The authors were each asked to come up with a different theme and then these were distributed randomly - hence the name of the book.

       A cautionary note. There are some adult themes in this book which are not suitable for ages below 18.

       The winning story from Cafe Three Zero's 2012 competition is also included in the collection.

     You can find the book, priced at £ 1.53. inc. VAT. ready to download at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/RANDOM-Tales-Volume-Three-ebook/dp/B00BJAM34G/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1361544705&sr=8-1

and at Smashwords:

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/288270

More information on the Group, including details of their previous publications and their authors can be found at:

http://cafethreezero.wordpress.com/

Have an enjoyable read!

The Queue

There was only Mrs Brown and the vicar from St Martin sin front of me so it shouldn’t have taken long to get what I wanted. I could have them without gift wrapping, that would save a bit of time as I didn’t want to be late for the match at the Karl Marx snooker club.

      I tried not to listen to what they asked for, it was none of my business but what would a vicar be wanting at this time of night and why hadn’t he gone straight to the event horizon anyway instead of here at the five corner shop?

      ‘I’ll just take a sermon today please Mr Patel, if that is your pleasure’ said the vicar irritably. I think he was a little cross with himself, which he wore on a silver chain, bouncing against his chest, with his belly shelfing enough to catch it if the chain broke and choked the monkey.

      ‘Mounted, rev?’ asked the shop keeper.

      ‘Always, it wouldn’t do to hide our lamp under a bushel would it?’

      ‘Err, whatever, that’ll be thirty five beatitudes Mate.’

      ‘Bless you my son,’

      ‘I haven’t sneezed yet, your Grace.’

      ‘Well, just keep it in your bushel until you need it then. Thank you. I’ll wish you a very good night Mr Patel.’

      ‘Any indulgences today, your Eminence?

      ‘Not a chance’ said Reverend Bishop, as he stomped off up the Mount to deliver his sermon on horseback.

            ‘Hi there Mrs Brown, we ain’t seen you around here for a while have we? I hopes you ‘aven’t been disloyal, doing your shopping at nouns-R-us or up at that new gerund place?’

            ‘Oh no, I wouldn’t do that, it’s just that I haven’t been too good lately, I’m a slave to me bunyan so I haven’t been making much progress recently, just a pilgrim through life making do with adverbs, and treating myself to the odd coincidence on Sundays.’

            ‘Only teasing Mrs Brown, what can I get you this evening?’

            ‘I think I’ll try two wins and a coincidence please.’

            ‘Any special medium you prefer?’

            ‘No, I don’t really do paranormal, just standard is fine.’

            ‘OK, I’ll just drop a little telepathy in the brown paper bag then, OK?’

            ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have said that, it’s really not necessary.’

            ‘I know, but I do enjoy a spot of telekinesis, BBC2 mainly’

            ‘And what’s wrong with Emmerdale then?’

            ‘Well it’s not Corrie is it and it never has that nice prof Brian Cox in it.’

            ‘That’s ‘cos he’s a physicist.’

            ‘Could still leave BBC2 now and then couldn’t he, even if he is a necromancer. There’s no art blacker than Emmerdale to my mind.’

            ‘OK then, I’ll arrange it for you, but it will cost extra you know, plus tax..’

            ‘That’s fine, just take it out of my paradocs’

            ‘OK, see ya Mrs Brown.’

            ‘’Night Mr Patel, see you next week.’

It was now my turn but, before I had a chance to step up to the plate, a saucer landed just in front of me and demanded the cup that it had just one so where was it? Mr Patel had to admit that he had swatted it, thinking it was a fly. It was not one of the main characters in the film, just an extra…terrestrial. I knew then that I would have to charge him with cuppable homicide.

            Swatting flies soon becomes a habit with anyone who lives here in Cue. The town makes its living from exporting flies and dust by rail to Meekatharra and then on to Perth. You can’t see the flies for dust of course. The gold mines closed at the end of the war. A few men work at the Crosslands iron ore mine to the west. So iron or flies and dust just provide a living for this forgotten town of 328 people.

            ‘G’Day Bruce’ I said to Mr Patel as I arrested him.

            ‘Should get your shopping done before you arrest me, mate,’ he said – always the salesman.

            ‘Ok, I’ll take an infundibulum then, I don’t want to be late for the barbie do I?’

            ‘D’ya want the chronosynclastic or the antediluvian model?’

            ‘I’ll take the chronos, don’t try and fob me off with one of those old models that don’t work during the Wet. Can you deliver it to the snooker hall for me?’

            ‘No worries, mate,’ said Mr Patel as he struggled to rain in his sled dog.

            ‘Woooof,’ coughed the dog who was feeling a bit husky and a little horse.

            ‘Could you throw in a paradox please, I don’t think Occam is on duty tonight?’

            ‘OK, mate, that’ll be twenty seven dollars but, of course, it will all be free.’

Excellent service I thought, right on cue.

            I looked out the door to see if Mrs Brown’s coincidence had turned up yet. She had. ‘How nice to see you Mrs Brown,’ said Lydia. ‘I havent seen you for years. I didn’t know you lived here, you were the last person I expected to meet. How is your daughter doing, I believe she went off to Perth to marry that nice miner? How long ago was that? Must have been just after my second operation…’

I walked up Main Street after dropping Bruce off at the sheriff’s office to be charged, he was getting a little dim. The snooker hall was on the Left and the barbie was just being lit in the fire pit.

            That was my cue from the infundibulum, which had clearly done its job well, to join the queue to use the only available cue in Cue to take my shot before heading off down the pit to the barber queue for a shave, a horse burger and a cold tinnie.

Cue house lights and curtain.

966 words

Gadgets

      I’ve been a Service Engineer, working on 3D printers since I finished my apprenticeship in 2015. I was a little green at first and had to suffer the usual Newbie tricks like swapping a UV resin for the base starch mix so producing rock hard objects rather than the programmed choc chip muffins. I got over all this nonsense and saw myself as a true professional who could sort out most problems from my home, using the print anywhere ® software my Company had developed, in a very short time.

      Part of my job was selling and installing upgrades – I enjoyed this part, mainly because I got sales commission but also I enjoy supplying customers with what they want. Most of our income comes from the materials we supply which is why the printers themselves are so cheap. It is the same system that was used in the 20^th century when companies would almost give the 2D printers away to get the sales of the ink cartridges. We don’t supply ink of course but a range of material flasks that allow the printers to produce anything from the choc chip muffins I talked about earlier, through engineering parts for cars and home appliances, prosthetic body parts to bespoke doseage pills of any drug you can imagine. You buy a prescription over the internet then feed the code into the printer and out pops the pills.

      Some clever guys started modifying the software so they could turn out the other type of drugs but we easily stopped that by inserting a couple of lines of code in the Bios that added a sneeze inducing chemical to the mix so anyone with a sneezing fit was automatically arrested. The cold and flu viruses had, of course, been wiped out in 2017 so there was no danger of an innocent cold sufferer getting imprisioned.

      I went to the annual sales conference in 2018, at the Bristol Centre. We were shown the new temporal chip® that had been developed exclusively for our range of printers by our in-house tech guys. It was a very clever idea and did exactly what they said it would. I know this because I saw several demos. Our Company now had a Unique Selling Point – the world’s first true 4D printer.

      ‘So what?’ I hear you ask, ‘Any 3d printer can produce any item you want so what’s the use of  the extra vector in space-time?’

      A good question that has an interesting answer.

      Everything wears out eventually, right? So therefore you design each item with a dimension along this fourth vector – in other words each item you produce on your printer will have a built in life. This is ideal for food of course as you can set the shelf life so the product diappears just before the goes off and becomes unfit to eat. ( This system struggled with some French cheeses… )  This facility can also be used for many engineering materials. You can make car ignition keys that disappear a week after the MOT is due so that a car cannot miss it’s due date. The chip is remotely programmed from DVLC at Swansea so that there is no cheating. Aircraft throttle levers have a similar system so that the engines cannot be run up to full power if they are due for an overhaul. There are inumerable possibilities like that so our printers were starting to make the world a safer place using our Limited-Life technology®.

      Every silver lining has a cloud however and they certainly started turning up. If all these items disappeared as soon as they reached the end of their design life, where did they go? Unfortunately that is a null question because the answer is that they disappeared into their future. But what about the other part of the vector I hear you ask, what about the dimension in the future direction? That, of course depends on the original setting in the source programme. Some careless programmers had set this dimension to a very small value so, for example, after a car key had disappeared as planned, it was likely to turn up again at some random time in the near future. As for the place, that would be where it disappeared from so keys started appearing in mid air in all sorts of inconvenient places and even more inconvenient times. I think you can probably imagine some of those and the chaos it caused…

      Then there was another breakthrough by George Dirac who was working in the temporal development lab. He is a maths wizard who was playing with imaginary numbers one day – you know the ones –‘operator j for example which is the square root of minus one and has the effect of rotating vectors through 180^o around the y axis.           Anyway, he was trying out different equations for the patented algorhythms we use when he had a eureka moment. He changed the polarity of the fourth vector by incorporating j in the algorhhythm equation. This had the effect of keeping the vector dimension the same but reversing it’s effect. Rather than objects being produced on the printer and then lasting for a finite time in the future, they now travelled to the past. Young George had invented a time machine!

      He quickly got some techs to build a suitable printer. He placed a choc chip muffin on it and pressed the ‘start’ button. We all watched in amazement as the muffin slowly dematerialised and the materials flasks started filling up.

      Everyone crowded round George, shook his hand and congratulated him but I had a thought, ‘what about the application of this technology? I could see it being the end of our Company. I was right – it goes something like this.

      A customer buys one of our new 4D reverse temporal® printers, which we sell at a loss to get the future sales of the base materials. The customer goes home and makes all sort of things that he thinks he needs. He runs out of materials, but instead of ordering some more, he puts some of his new gizmos that he has found that he doesn’t really need on the printer and operates it in reverse mode. His material flasks fill up and he can now make some new gizmos, that he thinks he needs more than the old ones.

      This was great for our green credentials as all items produced on our printers could be recycled indefinitely. The problem was that the sales of our base materials rapidly dropped to near zero.

      We reduced the orders to our suppliers in line with our sales and they reduced the orders to the mining companies and farmers in line with their sales to us. The mines shut down, the farmers went bankrupt, the transport companies folded, the taxes dries up so hospitals and schools had to be closed, the economy went into deep recession and unemployment soared.

      What happened to our Company I hear you ask?

We couldn’t sell any base materials now so we tried putting the price of the printers up and selling those at a profit instead. Didn’t work – I am sure you know why?

      Our customers were scouring the old landfill sites, collecting any old junk, as long as it had been made on one of our printers, taking it home and reverse printing to get the materials but then…

      George Dirac had set himself up as a freelance software engineer ( hacker ). He had reverse engineered the source code to make our printers and was selling this to anyone so our ex customers could now print their own printers.

And what did I do?

      I took delivery of a top of the range printer, in lieu of my redundancy settlement and set up as a shoe repairer. People would come into my shop with a scruffy pair of shoes and the original software. I’d take the shoes, put them them through the printer to recover the materials, modify the software to change the design to the latest fashion and then reprint them. Bingo! A pair of brand new shoes in the latest style. I also trimmed down the materials used by about 10% so after recycling ten pairs of shoes, I had enough to make a new pair which cost me nothing, also in the latest style.

      Well, everyone has to make a living and Tempus Fugit…

Snow

Snow

‘Daddy… daddy… DADDY.’

      ‘Yes, Gorgeous Daughter, why are you shouting at me?’

      ‘Cos you were ignoring me, Mummy never ignores me.’

      ‘I was busy doing something so I didn’t hear you.’

      ‘Mummy always hears me, even when she is doing two things at the same time.’

      ‘OK, Miss Andry, that’s enough of your aggressive feminism, eight is too young for that.  How can I help you?’

      ‘Is it true what my best friend Fiona says?’

      ‘What does Fiona say?’

      ‘She says that her daddy says he knows everything. Do you know everything?’

      ‘I know as much of everything as Fiona’s daddy, in fact more because he’s a muppet.’

      ‘What’s a muppet?’

      ‘Never mind, Gorgeous Daughter, what were you going to ask me?’

      ‘Why is snow white?’

      ‘Well I guess it is because she is tired from looking after seven dwarves.’

      ‘No silly, I mean why is snow white when rain isn’t?’

      ‘Oh, that’s an easy question. The fairies paint each snow flake white on its way down from the sky.’

      ‘Where do they get the paint from?’

      ‘Same as we do, from B & Q of course.’

      ‘I’ve never seen any fairies when we’ve been shopping for paint.’

      ‘That is because B & Q only run their fairy price promise on Thursday mornings and we usually go on Friday evening or Saturday morning.’

      ‘Oh, OK.’

*

‘Daddy.’

      ‘Yes, Gorgeous Daughter.’

      ‘If each snow flake is painted white by the fairies, why isn’t there a lot of white paint left on the garden when the snow melts?’

      ‘That’s a very good question.’

      ‘When you say that it usually means you don’t know the answer.’

      ‘Of course I know the answer, I told you, your daddy knows everything.’

      ‘So what’s the answer then?’

      ‘Well, err, it’s…/

      ‘You don’t know do you. Wait ‘till I tell Fiona. She’ll tell her muppet daddy.’

      ‘Of course I know the answer, I was just teasing you. Don’t tell Fiona that I called her daddy a muppet will you?’’

      ‘OK. Well, what is it then?’

      ‘If you stop stamping your feet, I’ll tell you. The white paint dissolves into the earth so you don’t see it.’

      ‘What does dissolve mean?’

      ‘When you have a cup of tea, you put a spoonful of sugar in it don’t you?’

      ‘Yes, so?’

      ‘The sugar is white, just like snow flakes but when you have finished drinking your tea, you don’t see the sugar at the bottom of the cup do you? It is just the same with the white paint.’

      ‘Oh. OK’

*

‘Daddy.’

      ‘Yes, Gorgeous Daughter.’

      ‘Where does the sun go when it gets dark at night?’

      ‘It goes behind the earth so we can’t see it.’

      ‘OK, when you put me to bed at night, you or Mummy read me a story.’

      ‘Yes…’

      ‘Then when you have finished the story, you turn the light out.’

      ‘Yes…’

      ‘If the sun goes behind the earth at night, where does the light from my bedside light go?’

      ‘It goes back along the wire to the plug in the wall socket and then back along the wires in the wall.’

      ‘So it’s in the wires all night waiting to come out?’

      ‘Yes and if you turn your light on at night, the light comes back down the wires and the light comes on.’

      ‘If I turn the switch off at the wall socket, the light goes off’

      ‘Err, Yes.’

      ‘If I turn the switch off at the wall socket, unplug the light and then switch the wall socket switch on again, will light come out of the socket and make a puddle of light on the floor?’

      ‘Have you tried it?’

      ‘No, I don’t want to make a mess on the floor.’

      ‘That’s right, please don’t try it, we don’t want to have to clean up a big light puddle do we?’

      No, I suppose not.’

*

‘Daddy.’

      ‘Yes, Gorgeous Daughter.’

      ‘Does the sun really go behind the earth at night?’

      ‘Well, it looks like it but it is really the earth turning once a day that makes it look like that.’

      ‘So the earth is spinning?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘But when you take me down to the swings in the park, you tell me to hold on tight when I have a go on the roundabout as otherwise I would fall off. Why don’t I fall off the earth if it is spinning like a roundabout?’

      ‘Because the earth is a lot bigger than the roundabout, it has what is called gravity which pulls you on to the earth. So when you jump in the air, you soon come down to stand on the earth again.’

      ‘But if I look under my shoes, there is no string to pull me down with.’

      ‘That’s because gravity is a force which no one can see. It is like invisible string.’

      ‘Oh, OK.

*

‘Daddy.’

      ‘Yes, Gorgeous Daughter.’

      ‘Will you always answer all my questions?

      ‘Yes, of course I will.’

      ‘Why are boys different from girls?’

      ‘Err, go and ask your Mummy.’

      ‘You don’t know do you?’

      ‘Err, no.’

      ‘Fiona’s daddy doesn’t know either, she had to ask her mummy.’