"version.X" by Daniel Ksenych (Short Story)

Genre:  Slipstream Science Fiction

Type of Short Story:  Short Story

Summary:  The life story of Max Cube, avatar of 21st Century consciousness and/or seriously mentally ill person.

Excerpt:  

The story of a boy, glossy headshot perfect and clean and lit, precise like a clone, rendered mythical. He's the memories you wish you had, to have known him or to have been him, but it's somehow too late. Max is a Tarot card. He's been told all the stories about boys, the fatherless boys, the prodigies, the first loves. So he can't get out easy. He'll have to pull off something. Young Max, like a home movie or a documentary. It looks like there's nectar beading in the corners of his eyes, on his forehead, when he's older, the way he looks you can see backwards and forwards in his time. It's sweat in candlelight. He looks too perfect, people have to back away. The stories of boys come to save the world. The way children point out and forgive and erase flaws.
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"Surge Protector" by Erica Conroy (Short Story)

Genre:  Science Fiction

Type of Short Story:  Short Story

Summary:  A near future short fiction about two officers of the law who partner up to tackle crime. Will this, however, keep them apart off duty?

Excerpt:

I can remember the first day I met the Kid, as if it were this morning. Consider that an amazing feat for me. I was hungover that day. Sunglasses inside hungover.

"Who're you?" I demanded of the kid waiting by my desk. I had to squint to make out his features. Clean cut and blond. Fresh meat on the Police Force. He gave me his name, his voice more crisp than my dorito breakfast. I immediately forgot it, of course.

"Okay, Kid. Looks like we're stuck with each other," I told him. My new partner wisely kept his trap shut, though his lips did twitch when I pulled out my flask and took a nip. Burping didn't faze him either. This one might last.

The Kid turned out to be by the book. The Chief probably thought he'd dilute my bad ways. I suppose he did, in a way. We were opposites. He was water straight from the source and I was a bourbon served neat. Some say those work well together and I suppose we did too. I introduced the Kid to trouble and he kept me from causing too much of it. But he never should have gotten between me and that bullet.

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