Oli Johns

Space Capsule [featuring IT as IT]

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Kaia don’t

don’t open it I don’t wanna see

don’t please

don’t

Kaia don’t

its dark out there

don’t

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Last night I had a dream, a space dream that reminded me black and white of younghood, of anxiety times when I used to fear things like knives/ freddy/ dying before Christmas/ being cut/ recycling my mother’s madness and worst of all floating above Jupiter without any support nearby no other ships or space stations or defiant or kira nerys to swoop in and save me from floating downwards to the surface of big non-ascending Jupiter and there was no spaceship holding me either it was just me and my spacesuit and my helmet and my gloves and that’s about it and although it takes time to be pulled into the atmosphere I was in a dream and dream time was the constant I was dealing with so

I could see the planet getting closer and closer and the red spot getting bigger and bigger as big as Neptune until quickly it was gone and the black was gone and I was falling into the pink and grey and blue misty stuff the thermosphere or troposphere and I know technically I should’ve been crushed or having a heart attack at this point but it was a dream so it was a hundred times worse.

The idea that you have no idea where you’re floating to it’s been done a few times in star trek specifically the night episode of Voyager and every time it makes me anxious I can’t help it and every time it happens in my Jupiter dream I wake up and thank the universe that I’m not anywhere near that fucking planet and am unlikely to be so for the rest of my life.

I want to go to space someday, just not alone in a spacesuit and not too deep where its dark and Continue reading →

Krsnik in Lisboa

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Hot light from Spanish land spread over the pastel-white buildings and the churches and the marketplace, making the 47 bodies of Lisboans killed that day look like idle sunbathers.

No one bothered to move them as if they did there’d be 48.

Instead the locals played their guitars.

And talked about the weather.

And drank

at eleven o clock in the morning.

A stranger with no luggage or purse walked into the main plaza, almost tripping over two of the 47 bodies, both women. He glanced at the slash marks on their necks, the blood tails creeping toward the church steps…then at the man sitting on the same steps, strumming a tune about the glorious coastline of La Coruna.

‘The waves are large, the sand is clean…

The rocks are smooth, unless you’re mean…

In La Coruna…La Coruna…’

The stranger listened up to the ‘mean’ part, muttered something non-Spanish then continued walking. He got to the far corner of the plaza, ignored the Moroccans selling baking powder as cocaine, and turned right onto a narrower street. It wasn’t much quieter, the place was too close to the city centre for that, but there were no more corpses. He moved quietly past the guitars, past the guitar shops, past the hawkers selling fake guitars from Sevilla, and up onto the hill by the castle.

Outside the gate, sitting on a wall with a quill and paper, was a young woman. She wasn’t particularly pretty [her face was too narrow, her eyes not sharp enough], but was definitely a step up from the guards standing nearby scratching their thighs.

The stranger moved closer, taking a leaf from a nearby tree and folding it in two. “Ona je ostal z mano…”

Some locals came up the hill speaking Portuguese, noticed the guards and the swords, switched to Spanish for a few seconds then, ten yards distant, went back to Portuguese.

“Fucking wretches,” muttered one of the guards, watching the bi-linguals disappear into the chapel on the corner. “They’re lucky that damn language ain’t banned.” Continue reading →

The Many Cabinets of Tom Cruise

Centenary screening of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari in Dublin on Feb ...

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Tom Cruise

Tom Cruise

Tom

Cruise

Tom

Cruise

Tom stood in front of the wall, saying his name.

Tom

Cruise

He would’ve stood in front of the mirror instead of the wall, but he couldn’t, someone might walk in. Someone might walk in and tell someone…

Cruise…

Tom…Cruise…

So he was in front of the wall.

Tom Cruise

Tom of Cruise

If he squinted hard enough he could picture a reflection…not completely him, but him enough.

Tom Crui-…

******

Katie sat on the couch watching Colin Farrell get on a bus in Tigerland. She wasn’t really sure, but she thought he was protesting about something.

What?

She picked up the DVD cover, looked at screenshots, but couldn’t figure anything out.

He didn’t want to fight?

She put down the cover and thought about going out.

‘I wanna go out,’ she told the couch.

The front door wasn’t far away, and the bars weren’t that far from the front door, but…

‘Damnit, I wanna go out,’ she told Tigerland Colin, already leaving on the bus.

The front door opened and Tom walked in.

Tom Cruise.

******

The first time…

 

God, I’m here with Tom Cruise.

 

The fourth time…

 

God, I’m in bed with Tom Cruise…

 

The three-hundred and twenty-first time…

 

God, this bed’s small [Pause] I wonder what Josh, James and Michelle are doing? Continue reading →

Wolfaconda

Pin on Cars/Boats/ - Transportation

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Something loopy that was up at bizarro central a few years ago…

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The sun rose, the moon fell.

Everything was the same, but one thing was different.

Mark Twain noticed it, from his grave.

So did Megatron.

My Gods!

INT: FAT BRANDO’S RECOVERY ROOM, AN ISLAND

Fat Brando put the scalpel next to the sink then shuffled out of the room humming the Superman theme.

There was blood on the floor, blood on the ceiling, blood on the walls. None on the operating table.

The wolf looked at its body; where’s the fur? The anaconda did the same; where’s my fucking head?

Both questions were good ones.

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Wolfaconda!

Based on the novel ‘Wolfaconda’ written by Brother Kat from Series 5 episode of Red Dwarf ‘Angels & Demons’

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First dilemma: Where to live?

The anaconda said rainforest, the wolf said snow.

It decided on rainforest.

To combat the extreme heat, the wolfaconda attached a fan to its neck.

There was no electricity, so it used a system of faith.

How did things go?

The first few weeks were a sharp learning curve. The sharpest of them all. The lower half of the wolfaconda kept heading towards the river, the upper half tried to move its face closer to the fan. Continue reading →

Leopard People

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This one was originally on Martian Lit a couple years back [along with pic drawn by Soren Melville]

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Lermontov got on the plane back to Russia and put the jacket over his face, trying to picture an airport without people for his return.

He tried not to think of the people he’d let down.

David Warner and his gifts.

The imagination that was no good for him.

How hard it would be…

…

Me: What?

David Warner: Do you like being here?

Me: No.

David Warner: How many lights do you see?

Me: What?

David Warner: Over there. How many lights?

Me: I don’t…

David Warner: You can leave any time. All you have to do is tell me…how many lights?

Me: How many…

…

A light came on.

Four hours to Moscow, said the pilot.

Lermontov pulled the jacket off his face, took the animal cards David Warner had given him out of his bag and read the facts on the back of each one, desperate to find them interesting.

WOLF

Dense fur keeps it warm.

Jaws twice as powerful as a dog’s.

Dominant: Wolves are nearly always the dominant predator in their area. The only animal that can drive a wolf pack off its territory is a tiger.

LEOPARD

There are more leopards in the world than lions, tigers and cheetahs put together. Continue reading →

POL POT

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Note: this was originally on spork press

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Pol Pot was dead.

Then there was a helicopter, an aeroplane, a scientist, some drugs, some lightning and a video recording of some guy screaming ‘It’s alive…mostly.’

Pol Pot was man again.

But he felt bad.

Really bad.

The last twenty years or so he had been on the edge of nothingness. But only on the edge. Something wouldn’t let him fall in, he didn’t know what, so he’d been sitting there, his legs dangling over the edge, thinking about everything he’d done in his life while others came, waved and then dropped into the abyss.

The first four years had been okay.

He’d had a decent life, hadn’t done much wrong. He’d risen high, met every challenge in the face, dealt with those who turned against him.

But still he couldn’t fall into nothingness.

After four years and a bit, a farmer from his country drifted by and called him a ‘monster.’

‘Sorry?’ said Pot, confused.

‘I said, ‘monster’,’ the farmer repeated.

‘Do I know you?’

‘Not really.’

‘So why do you call me monster?’

‘Because you told someone to kill me, monster.’

‘I did?’ Continue reading →

All you Robocops

Robocop 2 & 3 Collector's Edition Blu-ray Reviews - That Shelf

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“If you live long enough…eventually you’ll [get to] travel in time.”

 Jeff Daniels, promoting ‘Timescape’, Zagreb, 1992.

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I don’t know [why the Romulans like grey]. Ask Levar.”

Michael Dorn, signing autographs for $300 a pop while promoting TNG episode ‘Timescape’, Las Vegas, same year.

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Robocop had survived seven sequels, two remakes, one re-imagining and a spin off with the black cop behind the front desk called ‘front desk cop’ which had been cancelled after thirteen episodes, four of which were quite innovative and took place solely behind the front desk, viewing the action through the eyes of front desk cop, which was a brave move at the time as in two of these episodes absolutely nothing happened, no action, no crime, no whores sitting in reception chewing gum [that never really happens anyway, the cops rarely arrest prostitutes, it’s a myth, a myth that was put to death by these four episodes and later resurrected in the re-imagining]…

…so Robocop made it to the year 2092, which was the year a scientist came up with the idea for  time travel, an idea based on the concept of picking up strips of Space and spinning them around until a hole appeared that you could jump through and go back in time, an idea that was called ‘dumbo’ by other scientists and friends of scientists and people who’d heard the word ‘science’ once until one country was brave enough to put cash into building a spaceship to send up into Space and pick up the first strip, and it didn’t matter if the spaceship couldn’t go very far because any part of Space would do, and the actual picking up of something that wasn’t really physical was done by introducing a new material that could re-structure the atomic structure of a part of Space and make it solid, and then it could be picked up and spun around until it was weakened enough for a hole to appear, and that’s what they did, that’s what Slovenia did, and the only person dumb enough to volunteer to go up there was the only person who had already died and done sequels and remakes and didn’t care if the same shit happened again and again and… Continue reading →

Bad Prophecy [Gul Dukat from DS9]

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* Journey of the sleaziest war criminal in sci-fi through 7 seasons of DS9…

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Conversation between Gul Dukat and Sisko, on a runabout, during Season 2 episode ‘The Marquis’

Dukat: Redemption…it’s just punishment, isn’t it, Avery?
Sisko: We’re entering Cardassian Space.
Dukat: Yes, yes. [Pause] But it is, isn’t it?
Sisko: [Sighs] Punishment is punishment. Redemption is redemption. There’s a difference.
Dukat: I don’t know, Avery. It all seems the same to me.

Sisko gets up and walks over to the replicator. Dukat waits a few minutes then follows, looking over Sisko’s shoulder to see what he ordered.

Dukat: Did you ever get any redemption, Avery?
Sisko: No. I don’t need it.
Dukat: Me neither.
Sisko: The Bajorans might argue that point.
Dukat: What? Which Bajorans?

Sisko waves away the conversation, goes back to his seat, puts earphones on his head and pretends to listen to jazz.
Dukat follows him, ignoring the lack of attention.

Dukat: Ah, forget the Bajorans. My theory…just don’t fuck up in the first place…right? Just be good and don’t fuck up in the first place.

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Dukat lives for the next two seasons of DS9, making decent episodes, shaking hands, trying to stay tolerant.
But the Bajorans, they won’t let him be.
Those damn Bajorans, he thinks. Continue reading →

Burke/Surke [the real Alien 3]

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The alien drooled, gnashed its teeth, gnashed its second set of teeth, hissed, raised its arms and said [in its own language] ‘Mum-raaaa!’

Burke reeled backwards, petrified…well, his face went back a few inches, but his body stayed pretty much the same.

This is it, he thought, sweating. Die time. Teeth bites, blood, holes the size of Bill Paxton’s head. Fuck. Don’t run. Accept it. For the Company, humankind, corporate hegemony etc etc.

The Alien waited off-screen, still drooling.

Wait. I don’t want it to be it, Burke counter-thought. I’m too slick to die. I’m too smart, too good at manipulating things, too…

The alien lunged, ignoring Burke’s personal narrative.

‘Mum-raaaa!’

A noise from the ceiling. Some shitty workmanship. A piece of metal beam, military grey, fell onto the alien’s head and killed it instantly.

Burke froze.

Burke waited.

Burke touched the alien’s head with his foot.

‘Wow…’

Burke stepped over the corpse and ran out another door.

Minutes later he was on the spaceship.

Bishop didn’t seem to notice as he walked on, so he kept quiet and waited in the communal area, making defences he could use to explain himself to the others. Continue reading →

Bowser State

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Something to make you think twice about jumping on that first goomba [Bowser pic taken from http://www.screwattack.com]

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It’s a cold night in the Mushroom Kingdom.

There are three stars in the sky, none of them shining as bright as they used to.

Next to one of the stars, a flag with the dragon king; its shell military green, its eyes fiery red.

The only other thing in the sky, the moon, shines a spotlight on a small cottage, bunched with other small cottages and a control tower, on an estate just past the mini-castle on World 1, Level 1.

We go in closer, swooping like a Stazi spy in a bird costume until we’re all the way inside the kitchen.

‘I told you, I can’t…’

‘Why not?’

‘He’s our leader, Aidan.’

‘So?’

‘It’s my job to follow his orders. You know that. He’s the leader, he makes the laws.’

‘I didn’t choose him.’

‘Hey…’

‘None of us did. He just took over.’

Goomba Joanna glances at the poster of the dragon’s face on the wall, pinned up beside another poster that’s either a child’s scribbling or modern art. The dragon’s eyes are paper and colour and don’t seem to be moving.

‘Quiet,’ she whispers.

‘Why? He’s not here.’

‘He’s everywhere.’

‘Nuh-huh.’ Goomba Aidan shuffles to the fridge and pulls out another beer. ‘He’s on World eight, Level four, fucking that princess.’ Continue reading →