Time Zones

Posted on May 11, 2015 by Mad Scientist Journal

An essay by Gary MacDonald, as provided by Robert Dawson
Art by Dawn Vogel

Teenagers are pretty wonderful people. They are hard-working, tidy, enthusiastic, well-dressed, well-groomed, and polite.

Everybody else’s teenagers, anyway. Every parent wonders how they got the ones who sleep until noon in bedrooms out of Thrift Store by Tornado, sulk silently until they want to borrow the car, and know there’s a passage in the UN Declaration Of The Rights Of The Child saying they don’t have to wash dishes. Ever.

Over breakfast, Jean appealed to me. “Gary, hon, can you make sure Troy gets up in time for school? Maureen said in Pilates that Lindsey has a big math test today, and I’m sure Lindsey’s in Troy’s class. It’s my turn, but today’s the funding videoconference for the matter transporter project.”

“How’s that going?”

“Badly. The airlines and truckers are lobbying against it, and there are intellectual property problems. I suppose Bill meant well when he put a general public license on the matter coherence algorithms, but it makes financing the project really difficult.”

Bill Zimmerman and Jean were an item at MIT for a while, but they ended up “just friends.” Bill ended up marrying Betsy, and now they’re at CalTech, working with Jean on the matter transporter. The first long-distance test sent two American silver dollars from his bench in Pasadena to hers, here in Nova Scotia. One of them’s framed in Jean’s office; Bill has the other.

“So where does that leave you?”

“Well, it’s not dead yet, but the word from the money guys is that unless we can find a big new market beyond what the airlines are serving now, it’s stalled. We thought about cargo, but we can’t bring the price low enough yet to compete with electric trucks or container ships. There are some specialized markets–the provincial government wants us to ship lobsters to Europe–but that’s not enough. We need a killer app, and I hope somebody else has ideas, because I’m just about out.”

Time Zones

Tonight we have Vladimir, then Hiroshi, then Bill and Betsy’s daughter Kayla; and then it’s the weekend and Troy gets home. I’m looking forward to that.

To read the rest of this story, check out the Mad Scientist Journal: Spring 2015 collection.

Gary MacDonald has a PhD in geology, and teaches at a university in Halifax, Nova Scotia; but he is mainly known as the husband of Dr Jean Munro, who shared the 2035 Nobel Prize for inventing matter transmission. Their son Troy is widely credited as the inventor of daystretching, the defining social phenomenon of the cohort of youth known as Generation Gamma. Their weekchildren are Pippa Digby-Jones, Vladimir Kovrov, Hiroshi Tamura, and Kayla Zimmerman.

Robert Dawson has a PhD in mathematics, and occasionally runs into Dr. Macdonald in the Faculty Lounge. His research interests include geometry and category theory; out of hours he likes hiking, fencing, and cooking. He is the husband of Bridget Thomas, a meteorologist. Their sons, Alex and Ian, firmly disavow any connection whatsoever with this story.

Dawn Vogel has been published as a short fiction author and an editor of both fiction and non-fiction. Although art is not her strongest suit, she’s happy to contribute occasional art to Mad Scientist Journal. By day, she edits reports for and manages an office of historians and archaeologists. In her alleged spare time, she runs a craft business and tries to find time for writing. She lives in Seattle with her awesome husband (and fellow author), Jeremy Zimmerman, and their herd of cats. For more of Dawn’s work visit http://historythatneverwas.com/.

This account originally appeared in the November 2013 issue of Perihelion.

Posted in Fiction | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Time Zones

Mad Scientists in Beyond Science Fiction!

Posted on May 5, 2015 by Mad Scientist Journal

A1llQMudxmL._SL1500_[1]The latest issue of Beyond Science Fiction features both MSJ alum Jason Bougger (who wrote “A Bad Case of Rabies” for our Winter 2014 quarterly) as well as MSJ editor Dawn Vogel! Check it out!

Posted in Mad Scientist News | Tagged , | Comments Off on Mad Scientists in Beyond Science Fiction!

Daddy Who

Posted on May 4, 2015 by Mad Scientist Journal

An essay by Anna Beth Wilson, as provided by L. L. Phelps
Art by Scarlett O’Hairdye

It all happened like this.

Last year, during my first semester at college, my roommate, Val, had this boyfriend who was all into Doctor Who. You know, that time traveling alien dude with the blue box? Yeah, played by that hot guy. And the other one. Anyway, so I was eavesdropping on her phone conversation one night, and I heard her mention this episode where one of the companions goes back in time and tries to save her dad. You’ve seen it? Ok, well, I haven’t, but I got the gist of it from the conversation. Anyway, it got me thinking. If one could travel back in time, one being me of course, maybe I could find out who my father was. Wouldn’t that be something? To actually know.

You see, it’s like this. Years ago, before there was me, my parents couldn’t have kids. Well, my dad couldn’t have kids. My mom knew this going in, and she was fine with it. You know, adoption and all that. But then she found out about sperm donors and got to thinking. Why not, right? At least the baby would be hers. As for my dad, no one would ever know I wasn’t his as long as the donor resembled him and all that.

Anyway, I wasn’t supposed to know any of this, but I figured it out by accident a decade after the guy I thought was my biological father had died. My mom was furious that I knew, saying it violated my father’s wishes and dishonored his memory or whatever, but it gave me a sort of peace at the time, you know? I’d always been different, and that my father was some random unknown donor made so much possible for me. I could be the child of anyone–a scientist, a brain surgeon, a famous author. There’s something thrilling in that, especially for a teen girl with daddy issues. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I knew that I’d probably find out he was something lame, but still, a girl can dream, right?

Anyway, I did my best from that point to find out on my own who my biological father was, but in the end, it turned it out that somehow or other the doctor who had done the procedures had lost all records from before 2000. I should have given up then and let things go like my mom had wanted in the first place, but I had this strong desire to know, you know? So when I overheard this conversation about time travel and all that, that’s where it all began, my grand scheme. I would travel back in time to December 1995 when my mom got her donation, and I would see who the dude was that gave the sperm.

So now you’re wondering how I would manage this time travel thing, right? Of course you’re wondering that. I wondered it myself at first. Then I found this cool group of time travelers online. According to them, the best way to travel in time was through bending time backwards. You know, like that yoga position where you bend and your belly is up in the air? Anyway, I’d heard this before, about bending time, and that it had been managed by ordinary people like myself, so I figured this group and their time travel method was legit. The only downside was that it left the time traveler in a ghost-like state, seeing as they weren’t supposed to be in the past in the first place. This meant you could see what was going on, but no one else could see you. But whatever, I didn’t need to talk to the guy, just see him, right? So this worked for me.

Daddy Who

But he was my father. My daddy. I wished there was a way I could apologize for where my thoughts had been, apologize for coming back in time for that stranger down the road rather than the man who had changed my diapers and kissed me goodnight, but in that ghost form, all I could do was look at him and feel regret for the years I’d been without him.

To read the rest of this story, check out the Mad Scientist Journal: Spring 2015 collection.

Anna Beth Wilson is a college sophomore currently majoring in Sociology. She has no further plans to time travel.

L. L. Phelps is an American speculative fiction author currently living in Taipei. You can find her often on twitter @LLPhelps1 and occasionally on taipeiwritersgroup.wordpress.com. Her stories have appeared in Daily Science Fiction and the anthology, Dragon: Ten Tales of Fiery Beasts.

Scarlett O’Hairdye is a burlesque performer, producer and artist. To learn more, visit her site at www.scarlettohairdye.com.

Posted in Fiction | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Daddy Who

Mr. Merkel’s Mug

Posted on April 27, 2015 by Mad Scientist Journal

An essay by Jeff Phillips, as provided by Jarod K. Anderson
Art by Luke Spooner

Frank Merkel was the CEO, and his coffee mug wasn’t made of ceramic or metal or plastic. I could see the sutures where the bone plates had fused. It was definitely organic. Definitely human.

Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of bits and pieces around the office that were made from human remains. Even my tiny cubicle sported a file rack made from a section of ribcage. But Mr. Merkel’s mug was different. It was shaped like a mug, handle and all. One solid piece, like he had found someone walking around with a coffee mug for a skull.

Our firm was in the business of headhunting, so I had seen a lot of professional-grade artistry used in the manipulation of skin and bones. I’d seen bone and sinew transformed into wingback chairs comfortable enough to fall asleep in. Our firm even perfected a working clock made from the delicate bones of the ear and hand. But in every example I could think of, you could still tell that the thing used to be human. You could identify the parts. The mug was different.

Mr. Merkel's Mug

My plan was simple and, at the time, I thought it was subtle. I’d run into Mr. Merkel as I dutifully went about my daily work. We’d strike up a polite conversation between coworkers, and I’d admire his beautifully unique mug. He, in turn, would thank me and give me a bit of background on the object of interest. Then, we’d part on congenial terms, and the mystery that had been monopolizing my thoughts would be solved.

To read the rest of this story, check out the Mad Scientist Journal: Spring 2015 collection.

Jeff Phillips is a junior shipping clerk at the headhunting firm of Merkel, Johnson, and Doombringer. He majored in Osteo-engineering at Crooked Jaw Community College with a dual minor in operations management and flaying. He enjoys dermal origami, watching TV, and camping.

Jarod K. Anderson is a writer of speculative fiction and poetry. His work has appeared in numerous online and print publications including Daily Science Fiction, Escape Pod, The Colored Lens, Cast of Wonders, and elsewhere.

Jarod’s book, Inklings: 300 Starts, Plots, and Challenges to Inspire Your Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy Stories (co-written with Leslie J. Anderson) is available on Amazon and his forthcoming book 100 Prompts for Science Fiction Writers (co-written with Leslie J. Anderson) will be available from Sterling Publishing this November. Visit his website at www.jarodkanderson.com.

Luke Spooner a.k.a. ‘Carrion House’ currently lives and works in the South of England. Having recently graduated from the University of Portsmouth with a first class degree he is now a full time illustrator for just about any project that piques his interest. Despite regular forays into children’s books and fairy tales his true love lies in anything macabre, melancholy or dark in nature and essence. He believes that the job of putting someone else’s words into a visual form, to accompany and support their text, is a massive responsibility as well as being something he truly treasures. You can visit his web site at www.carrionhouse.com.

Posted in Fiction | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Mr. Merkel’s Mug

Table of Contents for Selfies from the End of the World

Posted on April 23, 2015 by Mad Scientist Journal

The contracts have been signed and money has been sent out. Here is the list of stories that will appear in the book, organized by author first name! Where possible, we’ve linked to their websites.

Alexis J. Reed – “The Story of After”
B. T. Joy – “The Men on Eldama Ravine”
Brandon Nolta – “Elegy for a Mountain”
Caroline Yoachim – “An Impromptu Guide to Finding Your Soulmate at a Party on the Last Night of the World”
Charity Tahmaseb – “In a Manner of Speaking”
Dusty Wallace – “Not Even a Whimper”
Garrett Croker – “The Adventures of Zombiegirl”
Herb N. Legend – “Apocalypse in an Armoire”
J. C. Stearns – “Last Stop: Hanover”
Kate Elizabeth – “In Transit”
Kris Triana – “Dog Years”
M J Wesolowski – “Down There”
Mary Mascari – “Limbo”
Mathew Allan Garcia – “Bridge To Nowhere, Train For The Forgotten”
Matthew R. Davis – “Happy At the End”
Natalie Satakovski – “Streetcleaner”
Nathan Crowder – “The Last Real Man”
Nick Nafpliotis – “Soul Jam”
Nicole Tanquary – “Sounds of Silence”
Rhoads Brazos – “Our Blessed Commute”
Samantha Dunaway Bryant – “Smoke Scream”
Samuel Marzioli – “The Silence and the Worm”
Shivangi Narain – “Untitled”
Sylvia Heike – “Winter in My Bones”

Posted in Administrative | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Table of Contents for Selfies from the End of the World

Lasagna with Legs

Posted on April 20, 2015 by Mad Scientist Journal

An essay by John Baker, as provided by Rich Knight
Art by Justine McGreevy

“I’ve created a monster!”

… is what I wish I could say. But I can’t. Not with this sad, pathetic mess writhing on my kitchen table. The best I could say is, “I’ve created a mess,” and even that was being generous.

“Why did you even think this would be a good idea?” my friend, Tony, asked me. We both studied Applied Science back in college. His field is genetic epidemiology. I’m still playing with my food.

“I don’t know.” I lied. I do know. It’s because I love both science and cooking. After I graduated Johns Hopkins, I went to the Culinary Institute of America. “I thought it would be fun.”

“Right, but how does ‘fun’ pay your bills, John? This isn’t even something that you could sell on the market. And I mean any market. Quite frankly, it’s hideous. I don’t even want to look at it any longer. Are you going to put it out of its misery or what? Does it have a brain? Is it sentient?”

It was, but I didn’t want to freak Tony out, so I shrugged. But before he got here, I had tried sticking a fork in it, and it shrunk away from me. I had given it a mouse’s brain and reproductive organs, and also some hard wiring. It was practically half mouse, half machine. Oh, and ricotta cheese and red sauce, too.

Lasagna with Legs

I guess this is a good time to mention that I’d been experimenting with transplanting brains into food for months.

To read the rest of this story, check out the Mad Scientist Journal: Spring 2015 collection.

John Baker currently lives alone with his pet Lasagna, Linda, but is working toward creating a friend for her, possibly an Eggplant Parmesan with centipede legs. When he’s not dabbling in cooking or experimentation, he is often found on dating websites, searching for the right woman who likes both pets and food. (His searches for women who like pets that are food have come up fruitless, unfortunately.) And despite leaving multiple messages on his answering machine, Tony still won’t return his calls. It’s probably for the best.

When Rich Knight isn’t teaching, he’s writing. A lot. He has been published in many publications such as Complex, Cinemablend, and Weightwatchers, and is starting to venture out into fiction. “Lasagna With Legs” is his first published sci-fi/fantasy short story. His novel, The Darkness of the Womb, can be found at http://thedarknessofthewomb.com/. You can also find him ranting about something or other at his blog: http://knighttakesrook.blogspot.com/. Swing by.

Justine McGreevy is a slowly recovering perfectionist, writer, and artist. She creates realities to make our own seem slightly less terrifying. Her work can be viewed at http://www.behance.net/Fickle_Muse and you can follow her on Twitter @Fickle_Muse.

 

Posted in Fiction | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Lasagna with Legs

That Man Behind the Curtain: March 2015

Posted on April 17, 2015 by Mad Scientist Journal

This month, the payment from our Kickstarter dropped, so we actually look profitable for once! Plus, we shipped out copies of our first print edition of our zine to contributors, so our printing costs spiked. Let’s look at those numbers.

The Money Aspect

Amounts in parentheses are losses/expenses.

Hosting: ($17.06)
Stories: ($100.01)
Art: ($329.88)
Advertising: ($20.00)
Processing Fees: ($291.23)
Printing: ($303.74)
Donations: $99.00
Ad Revenue: $0.54
Kickstarter: $3,080.00
Book Sales: $231.66
Total: $2,351.03
QTD: $1,465.89
YTD: $1,465.89
All Time: ($8,980.35)

As per usual, I try to list costs for art and stories under the month that the stories run on the site rather than when I pay them. Sales are for sales when they take place, not when it’s actually paid out to me. I also cover Paypal expenses when paying authors and artists.

As happened last year, Kickstarter skewed our numbers a bit. Also, the amount that was originally pledged was not the amount that was actually processed. We had received $3,085 in pledges, but after they processed all the credit cards we only had $3,080. One of our $5 backers fell through.

Submissions

We only accepted submissions for Selfies from the End of the World in March. Because of the limits of our book budget, we were only able to accept a small fraction of what we received. Out of 118 submissions, we have accepted 24. That’s 20.33%. This drops our all-time acceptance rate to 48.52%.

One of our backers asked if we could give a summary of submissions. We don’t release the names of our submitters, as it’s sort of awkward to list everyone whose stories we have declined. If people want to self-identify, that is their choice. Instead, we choose to celebrate the people we did choose. We’ll have a list of the authors we accepted once we get all the contracts back.

But I can summarize the sorts of submissions we received. In terms of how the world ended, we had:

  • 11 alien invasions.
  • 3 ends brought about through supernatural means.
  • 21 tales of what I’m calling “natural disaster”, which ranged from the sun exploding to meteors hitting the earth to the Earth just imploding.
  • 29 pandemics. 7 of them involved zombies, 1 involved werewolves, 1 that only targeted men.
  • 1 story that featured the extinction of all women by men.
  • 4 tales of social/financial collapse.
  • 1 famine.
  • 1 killer monster.
  • 14 global wars, 6 of them nuclear.
  • 10 stories that I just didn’t know how to neatly classify.
  • 15 that did not explain how the world ended, just that it had.
  • 8 stories that did not meet the submission guidelines. This broke down into 3 not in 1st-person POV, 5 that did not have an apocalypse. (I didn’t bother to figure out the nature of the apocalypse for the not-1st-person stories.)

Followers

Number of followers in social media as of the end of last month. We had a weird drop in followers on Facebook. I’m guessing a bunch of dummy accounts got eliminated. Either that or people really lost interest in us after our Kickstarter.

Facebook: 938 (-12)
Twitter: 382 (+9)
Google+: 53 (+7)
Tumblr: 72 (+4)
Mailing List: 36 (+1)
Patreon: 10 (+1)

Traffic

Our traffic increased in March. My best guess would be because of call for submissions for Selfies. We had a total of 2,404 visits. Our traffic consisted of 1,576 users and 3,631 page views. Our highest day of traffic was 135.

This month’s search engine term is “scientist butterfly”. Because I would like to believe they were looking for a butterfly that is a scientist. For honorable mention, it’s worth noting that we had another visitor looking for “ebay 1979’s quilt patterns”. There were two last month, so having a third this month is just mind boggling.

Posted in Man Behind the Curtain | Tagged | Comments Off on That Man Behind the Curtain: March 2015

The Nightingale of Atlantic City

Posted on April 13, 2015 by Mad Scientist Journal

An essay by W. M. Higgins, as provided by Meg Merriet
Art by Leigh Legler

Her melodies, no matter what song was requested, haunted the dreams and nightmares of mortal men. When the Nightingale sang, the sound of silverware and polite conversation dissipated until all you could hear was her voice, her father’s piano, and the gentle hush of the tide.

Her hair and face were painted on sheet metal. She wore a shapeless gown festooned in beaded applique and vectors of sheer fabric. In spite of her hard mechanical form, her delicate mannerisms looked human in the dim lamplight. As elegant as any woman, the automaton drew admirers from across the globe to the establishment known as the Lighthouse. The mechanical songstress made headlines as the Nightingale of Atlantic City.

Her question response system had been meticulously designed, but she did not possess any emotion or private thoughts. All the same, every weeknight after closing my shop, I went into the restaurant and ordered the cheapest thing on the menu paired with six or seven snifters of whiskey. Leonardo Vicaris played piano behind the pretty robot, his eyes rolling in the back of his head as he drifted through a sea of music.

The Nightingale of Atlantic City

Her hair and face were painted on sheet metal. She wore a shapeless gown festooned in beaded applique and vectors of sheer fabric. In spite of her hard mechanical form, her delicate mannerisms looked human in the dim lamplight. As elegant as any woman, the automaton drew admirers from across the globe to the establishment known as the Lighthouse. The mechanical songstress made headlines as the Nightingale of Atlantic City.

To read the rest of this story, check out the Mad Scientist Journal: Spring 2015 collection.

Confectioner by day, tinkerer by night, William writes as his way of coping with the loss of a dear friend. He emigrated from Ireland as a child and grew up working in a cotton mill, crawling under machinery and tying any strands that came loose during production. He now enjoys a leisurely existence in Atlantic City, running a successful saltwater taffy shop with his wife and daughter.

Meg Merriet is a writer of short stories, novels, and plays with an inclination toward gothic fairytales and gritty, dark narratives. Her short story “The Bedfellow” appeared in the Spring 2014 issue of The Antigonish Review, a journal published by St. Francis Xavier University. She currently resides in Jersey City and is developing the play “The Shapeshifter” for production at Art House. “The Nightingale of Atlantic City” is dedicated to Raven Kneally, who taught Meg how to climb gates, how to dance the “Twitch,” and all the joys of anime, video games, and reckless adventuring.

Leigh’s professional title is “illustrator,” but that’s just a nice word for “monster-maker,” in this case. More information about them can be found at http://leighlegler.carbonmade.com/.

Posted in Fiction | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on The Nightingale of Atlantic City

Futility

Posted on April 6, 2015 by Mad Scientist Journal

An essay by Dr. Robert Anstruther, as provided by D. J. Tyrer
Art by Luke Spooner

This is my seventieth day here in this bunker and I am no closer to understanding the true nature of the scourge afflicting mankind. Why are the dead walking the earth rather than resting easy in their graves? What has caused this? What motivates them? These are all questions I swore to answer. These are questions that must be answered if mankind is to survive. Only by understanding the hows and whys may we devise the strategies with which to combat this horror, perhaps discover a cure or a vaccine that can prevent the living from this terrible post-mortem fate, maybe even find a means for the living and dead to coexist.

All we know for certain is that this phenomenon is a new one, at least on this scale. Of course, there are all sorts of legends and folk tales about the dead returning to life, but few that hold any credibility as precursors to this global disaster and none that are comparable in scale. Thus any traditional explanations such as sin, curses, and pacts with the Devil can be rejected. Equally, the drug-induced state of certain Haitian zombies is of no help.

Although apocalyptic pronouncements that Hell is too full or that the dead are rising pending the final Judgement have been made, there is no empirical evidence to back such claims, and they are a poor fit for much observed behaviour.

Thus it is that the most popular explanation is that what appear to be the dead returned to a state of unlife are, in actuality, infected by a virus. Unlike supernatural claims, this possesses scientific plausibility and fits with the evidence that bites spread the infection. Unfortunately, there are many accounts of the dead rising without being bitten, meaning that bites are not the sole vector, if a source of infection at all, and calling into question the entire hypothesis. Unfortunately, any such virus has yet to be isolated and cannot yet explain the dead nature of victims: all the evidence indicates that the walking dead are just that and not infected humans.

In short, I remain mystified.

Futility

After initial attempts to isolate a virus went nowhere, I turned my attention to the dead themselves. Our earliest experiments focused upon their physiology. If there was no virus, nor any obvious sign of a parasite, perhaps we could still isolate the cause for their anomalous behaviour.

To read the rest of this story, check out the Mad Scientist Journal: Spring 2015 collection.

Dr. Robert Anstruther was born in London to an English father and an American mother. He studied Biology at Cambridge University before moving to America to study medicine at the Yale Medical School, where it is claimed he was a member of Skull & Bones. He joined the CDC and later liased with the British HPA, before disappearing from public view. It is rumoured that he was seconded to USAMRIID. His current whereabouts are unknown.

D. J. Tyrer is the person behind Atlantean Publishing and has been widely published in anthologies and magazines in the UK, USA, online and elsewhere, most recently in Steampunk Cthulhu (Chaosium), Tales of the Dark Arts (Hazardous Press), Cosmic Horror (Dark Hall Press), and Serial Killers Quattuor (JWK Fiction), as well as Tigershark ezine. In addition, two novellas are available on the Kindle, The Yellow House (Dynatox Ministries) and Acting Strangely (Jazzclaw Publishing).

D. J. Tyrer’s website is at http://djtyrer.blogspot.co.uk/

The Atlantean Publishing website is at http://atlanteanpublishing.blogspot.co.uk/

Luke Spooner a.k.a. ‘Carrion House’ currently lives and works in the South of England. Having recently graduated from the University of Portsmouth with a first class degree he is now a full time illustrator for just about any project that piques his interest. Despite regular forays into children’s books and fairy tales his true love lies in anything macabre, melancholy or dark in nature and essence. He believes that the job of putting someone else’s words into a visual form, to accompany and support their text, is a massive responsibility as well as being something he truly treasures. You can visit his web site at www.carrionhouse.com.

Posted in Fiction | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Futility

Mad Scientist Journal: Spring 2015 is now available!

Posted on April 3, 2015 by Mad Scientist Journal

This is both our first dead-tree edition of our quarterly, as well as the first time we have released the quarterly before any of its stories appear on the site. Give it a look!

MSJ spring 2015_errow

Posted in Administrative | Comments Off on Mad Scientist Journal: Spring 2015 is now available!