myweirdfiction

2006-10-10T00:44:00.000-05:00

She Wore a Black Hat
by Paul Hosler 10/9/2006

I would have never seen it coming, not ever. Believe me when I say I was totally blind sided. After all she had been my wife for fifteen years. Yes she may have acted a little geeky at times, but an uber geek! Absolutely no freaking way! Sure she had silly stories from her high school days when she modified Dig Dug so the character would never die, or when she figured out how to make her own report cards when things were not going so well. But my dear, sweet, wife a hacker? That was, hell still is, hard for me to wrap my head around.

Oh, I suppose there were signs. She always had her own computer, we never shared one. She would "work" on things impossibly long hours through the night. No matter how many times my computer was fried by malicious software, no matter how many stinking re-installs I had to do on my machine, she never seemed to have those problems on hers. I was being as careful as I could, trying to never go to web sites that were know to distribute mal-ware, and never, not even once downloading any software from the Internet. The only time I ever downloaded anything, was when my software vendor made updates or bug fixes available for my operating system. She, on the other hand, always had the newest coolest games, the coolest office software, and, well, she had loads of software on her computer. All I could do was admire the fanciful things she had zipping around on her desktop. You know, I have never seen her have to do a re-install because some script kiddie baked her system. For me once every three months, like clock work. One time I went six months without re-installing, but seriously, it got pretty boring without the Internet.

One memorable occasion, was a time when a buddy of mine brought his computer over to our place. I have always been handy fixing computers, and I have had plenty of experience installing operating systems and just trying to keep my computer running. My buddy and I had been studying his particular problem for about three hours, we were honestly trying to avoid wiping his hard drive and starting over, but as it is with these things we had decided it was a lost cause and it was time to start anew.

Then, she came over. "Don't touch that button!", she said this loud enough that we almost dropped the rescue CD that came with the computer when he bought it.

"What do you mean? I've done this a hundred times," maybe a little to curt on my part. "How would you know anyway, you never have to do this to your computer?", I honestly didn't think she would be able to answer.

"David, do you really want to lose all your hard work?", she had decided to ignore me and go straight for the poor guy that didn't know any better.

"You can do that? You really know how to fix this?", a glimmer of hope washed across David's face and a small tear welled in his left eye.

"Certainly, it's easy," she beamed at him, "would you like me to walk you through it so you'll know what to do next time, or should I fly?"

"You had better do it this time, I'll try to pay attention to what you are doing," David looked and sounded like a heavy weight had been lifted off of him.

Sure, he tried to watch to see what she was doing, but basically it all happened so fast that I doubt that either I or David would be able to describe exactly what minor miracle she preformed. Basically, and mind you this is the best I can do, she clicked here and there, brought up a little black box, typed a few lines into it, clicked here, there, and some other places that seemed just for good measure. Within ten minutes she had him back up and running and ready to roll.

"Make backup copies of everything, especially your personal files before you do anything else, then get in a habit of making backups, often," she admonished him lightly, but she was dead serious. It was a rule in our house that we make at least weekly backups, and honestly it does make recovering my computer close to normal a lot easier. I don't know exactly how or what she did, but I was glad she was able to help David out, she had given up on me a long time ago. Well that isn't exactly true, I just wanted to fix the thing myself, and I knew that if I did it, then at least it would be right. Now I was beginning to feel ill, I had never imagined the speed and ease that some problems could be fixed, and my wife had just managed to do something I thought impossible.

It's been several weeks now that I seem to have met my wife for the first time. I have been paying more attention to what she is up to, sneaking looks over her shoulder while she is "working" and I've, well, I've been asking her questions. I have to ask, because if I don't I could never understand the things she is doing. I would never have a clue to what she is up to. She seems willing enough to share the knowledge she has, but sometimes I can sense overwhelming frustration welling up from deep inside her. There are times that I have had to back off because she picked up a large stick, with clue written in large black letters down it's length, and threatened to beat me with it. That stick was very frightening, after all, who would want to be beaten by a clue stick?

>>>>MORE TO COME<<<<

2006-10-03T11:25:00.000-05:00

This is a story idea that just came to me in a flash, I don't know what to call it yet, and I am not sure what it is. Horror, thriller, crime, I don't know, but it's in my head and it's... well disturbing.

Here is what I have jotted down so far, hopefully I can turn it into a story.

Man writes letters to young girls. To him they appear innocent, kind, sweet, and thoughtful. He has been doing this for years, he keeps some, mails others. He never really remembers mailing them or even how or where he got the addresses.

He works, but really can't remember much about it. That isn't real to him. He can only recall the sweet, thoughtful letters he writes to the girls. He really doesn't know them, but he somehow feels like he does. He feels connected, very close. To him he is a kind uncle or caring father that is far away and hasn't seen his children in a long time, but he writes to them constantly, expressing his love and encouragement to them.

He is not an old man, but he feels tired and sore most of the time. He is plagued with tormenting dreams that he can not recall, but he knows they sometimes keep him from rest. His bizarre dreams are filled with buckets of water, the smells of pine and urine, bathrooms and bloody toilet seats.

One time he wakes in horror as a dream that feels all to real makes bile rise to the top of his throat. He barely makes it to his tiny bathroom as he collapses to his knees and heaves violently into the small porcelain bowl. He tastes the blood he was licking from the white rims from his nightmare and begins to vomit wildly again. At last he crumples to the floor, dry heaves still convulsing his weakened body.

Of course he can not remember this when he awakens in the morning. He only feels that he has not slept well. As the morning smell of coffee fills his senses and brings memories of long ago, he writes....

copyright Paul Hosler
10/3/2006

2006-09-15T17:49:00.000-05:00

Wow I haven't posted since March, so call me a lazy blogger! It's Friday! Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis are on tonight. I am excited about them again, the past few episodes have been fairly decent. I'm still having trouble getting used to the Farscape folks being on SG-1, it really makes me miss that show. Of course the spoof of Farscape on the 100th episode was a riot. Heck the whole thing was funny. Alas, I'm not sure where Atlantis is heading with this good Wraith bad Wraith thing. The Wraith are supposed to be vampirish, consumed by hunger, monsters. Not our best buddies.

Battlestar Galactica is supposed to be back in Oct. or Nov. drats I can't remember and I don't feel like looking it up. I'm also looking forward to this coming back to TV and Dr. Who as well.

I haven't read any good fiction lately, I've been reading technical books - Perl programming stuff. But books like that are for another place. I was writing a short story for this blog, but I guess I got distracted. Maybe I'll finish it, maybe I'll start a different one. Basically it was going to be based on "Bushisms", the funny things our President says. Basically this person wakes up and everyone is speaking in Bushisms. Honestly I got the idea from an episode of the Twilight Zone I saw a long time ago, where this salesman wakes up and the whole world is speaking some type of jargon that he does not understand. Ultimately he has to relearn the language and at the end he is reading a children's book, his effort in self education. The primes of Bushisms was going to be the same, the protagonist would be able to understand everything that was being said, but none of it would make sense or be in some sort of way out of place context.

Okay, maybe that is a little too challenging for me, even as a short story, heck I don't know if I could even get a good essay out of it. It sounded fun when I came up with the idea though.

More later, maybe I'll talk about the SG shows after I watch them, oh joy ;)

2006-03-11T00:34:00.000-06:00

You are visiting My Weird Fiction

If you are here that means you might be interested in some weird fiction. I might be able to provide that, either through my own sporadic writing, or by reviews of things I may have read or watched recently, or in the past. I am not looking for critiques, spelling, or grammar corrections. If you don't like what you're reading, then read something else. This is just something fun for me to do, and if I happen to accidentally write something that someone likes, well then all the better.

To post to this blog I am using Slackware Linux as my OS, XFCE as my desktop of choice, and Drivel as my editor. I have a fondness for penguins, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, and Battlestar Galactica. I am also looking forward to Dr. Who premiering on the SciFi channel later this month, next Friday I think. I am also looking very forward to the return of Stargate SG-1 in July. I suppose though that SG-1 is a little disappointing, I really like space ships and all, but it just doesn't seem right on this show. I do find it a neat idea though, that our government has inter-stellar space craft that only a few people actually know about. It also surprises me that actually so many people seem to know about the star gate program and the space ships, but no one has ever actually spilled the beans on the whole operation. Not that a few haven't tried, but it never seems to get very far. Can you imagine the Washington Post or NY Times not having someone snooping around to find out about that stuff. I guess with Bush causing hurricanes and Port Gate are much more important news topics though. ;-)