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Lovecraftian Slime Department:

If math is the language of the universe, formulae are the swearing of the universe.

THE UNNAMEABLE FUNCTION © 2025 by Rick Hutchins

“So we might as well break it up,” said Sally. “We can reschedule whenever Beverly decides to show up.” She was sitting at her desk in her office, while Thom, Kath, and Rhonda sat in the chairs they had wheeled in.

“It’s so strange,” said Rhonda as they got up to leave. “Beverly has never been late before like this.”

“Maybe some trouble at home,” said Thom. “We’ve all been there.”

“Tell me about it,” said Kath, rolling her eyes. Thom and Rhonda chuckled.

“Whatever,” said Sally, trying not to sound irritated and failing. She had scheduled this meeting for the first thing in the morning because she wanted to get it out of the way. “We’ll figure it out.”

As the others wheeled their chairs back to their offices, Sally opened her laptop and brought up her email. And, wouldn’t you know it, right there at the top was an email from Beverly, with the subject line “for the meeting” and time-stamped just after midnight. Sally opened it up. There was no message, just an attached Excel spreadsheet named “Untitled 1.”

She downloaded it and opened it.

At first she thought that the spreadsheet was empty too, but then noticed the dreaded little “#NAME?” displayed in Cell A1. She clicked on it and up came the weirdest and most complex Excel formula she had ever seen. She pressed F2 to show the whole thing and it scrolled halfway down the screen. There were logical operators and array operators and symbols she didn’t even recognize. What were that upside-down triangle and trident supposed to be? It looked like something Einstein would cook up.

But it seemed to be doing something. At least a half dozen random cells were showing numbers, constantly changing, too fast for the eye to follow.

She decided to watch for a bit.

Conversation from the other offices drifted in, but she was barely paying attention as she stared, fixated, at the cells.

“Maybe one of us should call her, just to be sure she’s okay.”

“Good idea. You do it.”

Cell E7 stopped calculating and returned Pi.

“I am. Okay, now I’m really worried. Number not in service.”

“Okay, that’s too weird. I’m going to look in her office. Maybe she bailed on us.”

“God, I hope she’s not dead in there.”

“Don’t even think that!”

Cell K27 stopped calculating and returned 2.718.

“Oh, my god,” exclaimed Rhonda.

“What’s going on?” asked Thom.

“Sally, you better come see this,” said Rhonda. “Beverly’s cactus exploded and there’s green shit all over her desk.”

Cell D17 stopped calculating and returned 33i.

And now somebody was screaming. Why the hell was somebody screaming?

Sally looked up and Rhonda was standing in her doorway, staring at her, hands on the door jams, her face an almost comical rictus of terror as she screamed and screamed.

It was only then that Sally noticed the thin oily black tendrils that snaked out of the sides of her laptop and the back of the screen, coiling toward her like vines, sliding up her sleeves, under her blouse….

Entangling her braids….

Into her ears and nose and throat….

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Espionage and Badinage Department:

Name that pastiche, win a No-Prize.

THE ADVENTURE OF THE SECOND CUCUMBER © 2025 by Rick Hutchins

Without breaking her stride through the crowded Bangkok street, Briz pressed on her earphone to hear the broadcast more clearly.

Lawson’s voice said, “Team Azores has secured Target Alpha in Ponta Delgada.” The communications device looked like nothing more than an iPod. “Repeat: Target Alpha is secured and isolated.”

Briz nodded imperceptibly and quickened her stride through the wildly costumed throng. The street was a cacophony of colorful neon signs and techno music spilling through open nightclub doors.

Barely dressed in a black slip and stiletto heels, Briz was all breasts, legs and electric blue hair; to all outward appearances, the spoiled progeny of European wealth, in Bangkok to party.

She pressed the transmit button. “I’m on Soi Cowboy,” she said. “Still no sign of Jerek. Dad, any intel yet on the nature of the weapon?”

“Working on it, Agent Sidrow,” replied a stern male voice. “Keep your focus on your objective.”

A younger male voice spoke over the wire. “I just spotted him going into the Casbah. Unfortunately, the doorman turned me away. I’m going to try the back.”

“Good work, Vartin,” said Briz. The Casbah had come up during the ops briefing: A high-end club catering to upscale foreigners, mostly young Arab sheikhs and princes. “Lawson, can you get me past the doorman?”

“Duck soup,” replied Lawson. “Well, not literally duck soup. That wouldn’t be much of a bribe, not for those guys, they make good money, and they can probably get free soup on their coffee breaks, anyway….”

Briz cut across the street, dodging a gaudily decorated Asian elephant, and hurried past a go-go bar, a karaoke joint, and a massage parlor; the prostitute in the doorway gave her the once over and turned up her nose.

“And not really figuratively, either,” continued Lawson. “You’re way down in Southeast Asia, I’m in Washington, two-second delay even by proprietary satcom….”

“Lawson!”

“Right! Doing something….”

The doorman at the Casbah was a stout, bald Thailander in a tux and Ray-Bans; he placed himself between Briz and the entrance.

“Find another club, doll,” he told her.

In her ear, Lawson said, “You’re a friend of the owner.”

“I’m a friend of the owner,” said Briz.

“Which owner?”

Lawson said, “Mister Sukhumvit. He should call him.”

“Mister Sukhumvit. Call him,” said Briz.

“What’s your name?”

“Brisbane Sidrow.”

The doorman took out his cell phone and pressed speed dial; after a pause, he said, “Sorry to disturb you, Mister Sukhumvit. There’s a Brisbane Sidrow here to see you.” Another pause. “Yes, sir.”

Without another word, he stood aside and Briz hurried into the bar.

“How did you do that?” she whispered.

“Cell signal diversion, some voice altering software I wrote last week… kind of crude, but it was short notice.”

Her father’s grim monotone came over the wire again. “The weapon is a genetically engineered form of Yersinia pestis. Bubonic Plague. Team Alpha reports the first shipment was transported as a liquid solution injected into a cucumber.”

“Copy that,” said Briz. Unleashing the Black Death on the sons of Arab royalty would certainly advance the Initiative’s goal of increasing international tensions.

Briz was inside the smoky bar. It was crowded wall to wall, mostly with young Arabs in Western-style clothing. Beautiful young Thai girls, dressed only in bikini bottoms, danced in gilded cages hanging from the ceiling.

Pushing her way across the floor, Briz scanned the room for her quarry. There he was! His perfect white skin and close-cropped blond hair, groomed almost to the point of being effete, stood out like a beacon.

“Got him!”

Jerek disappeared through the kitchen doors at the rear of the club and, two minutes later, after winding her way through the groping crowd, Briz followed him.

Another bouncer confronted her. “You can’t come….”

A Kung Fu kick brought her stiletto heel in contact with his trachea; he choked, sputtered, clutched at his throat and went down.

Briz drew a mini gun from under her mini dress and moved deeper into the kitchen. Among the clouds of steam and giant stainless steel pots, the cooking staff stared at her silently, confused and immobile.

“Ah, hello, Brisbane.”

She whirled around, but it was too late. There stood Jerek, smirking, his Luger drawn; he had the drop on her.

“So we meet again, Brisbane” he said.

“Bio-terrorism, Jerek? That’s a new low, even for you.”

He shrugged. “The money was good.”

With that, the sharp sound of a muffled gunshot cut the air and Jerek’s face fell; a moment later, so did he. Behind him stood Vartin, a crooked smile on his lean, scruffy face; his gun was bigger than Briz’s, but he had more room to conceal weapons in the Armani suit.

“Got him that time.”

Briz and Vartin descended on Jerek’s body and quickly searched his clothes; Briz pulled the smooth Mediterranean cucumber from the inside of his jacket.

“I suppose this was meant for the salad,” she said.

“The extraction team is en route,” said Vartin. “Let’s get out of here before somebody calls the cops.”

They got out of there.

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Ye Olde American Pulp Department:

It's Independence Day Weekend! Let's celebrate one of the great unsung heroes of the Revolutionary War. People who don't exist don't get near enough credit.

THE DEADLY PLAN OF DOCTOR POX! © 2025 by Rick Hutchins

“Call me Doctor Pox, my dear,” said the man in the scarlet cloak and theatrical tragedy mask, as he finished binding her wrists behind her back. Beneath the cloak, his proper British attire was spattered with mud from hard-riding the buckboard through the night.

“How dare you?!” she cried for the millionth time. “My father is Colonel….”

“I know your father!” screamed Doctor Pox, silencing her. He quickly regained his composure. “My dear Sybil.”

Turning on his heel, the madman marched off to a dark corner of the barn, out of the small circle of light cast by the single kerosene lamp.

Sybil struggled against the leather straps that bound her to the wooden beam, but to no avail. Her light blue Polonaise gown had been torn to shreds in the struggle and her low-cut bodice had been ripped, exposing an unseemly amount of decolletage. Strands of brown hair fell in her face, her bonnet having been lost in the kidnapping.

Doctor Pox reappeared from the shadows, dragging something heavy through the dirt and straw. “Yes, my dear,” he said, “I met the esteemed Colonel Willing during the Siege of Boston. He was so proud of his cannon upon Dorchester Heights. So proud of his ruffian irregulars who guarded the roads.”

He was dragging a large wooden coach trunk with iron braces; huffing and puffing, he positioned it three feet in front of Sybil. Leaning in close to her, his theatrical tragedy mask, which seemed wrought of copper, hovering near her face, he said, “It is my tender sentiment for your father which has brought you here.”

With a flourish of his scarlet cloak, the doctor turned and flung open the top of the trunk.

When Sybil saw what was inside, she screamed.

And with that, the barn doors burst open and in strode a tall and stately figure.

“Goodman America!” gasped Sybil.

His face entirely masked by white cloth, the famed mystery man was dressed in a waistcoat and tricorn hat of brightest blue; his vest bore thirteen red and white stripes. His breeches were midnight black, as were his rugged highwayman boots. The knob of his walking stick and the rattlesnake insignia on his hat were rumored to be of pure silver, smithed by Paul Revere himself.

“Surrender, Doctor Pox!” he commanded.

“Never!” replied the madman, drawing a flintlock pistol from beneath his scarlet cloak.

But Goodman America was upon him in an instant and knocked the weapon from his hand before he could fire. The two masked men faced off, circling each other warily, preparing for hand-to-hand combat.

Grimacing with disgust, Sybil reached out with her foot– she had lost her shoes in the scuffle as well– and knocked the coach trunk shut with her stockinged toe.

The noise distracted Doctor Pox for but a moment, but it was enough for Goodman America to throw a punch. The mighty blow knocked the theatrical tragedy mask from the madman’s face.

Both Sybil and Goodman America recoiled in horror, for that face was so hideously scarred and twisted that it was barely human.

“Look then!” shrieked the doctor. “Look upon the face of Doctor Silas Conduct! See what the smallpox epidemic of the Siege of Boston did to me! If Colonel Josiah Willing had let us pass that night, I would not be thus disfigured– and my beloved wife would not be DEAD!”

He pointed savagely at the coach trunk.

“But when the bits and pieces of the rotting human remains in that trunk, raging with smallpox, are added to the food and water of the Continental Army, then so too will the American rabble die! And the daughter of my most hated enemy will be the first to….”

The silver knob of Goodman America’s walking stick struck the doctor’s temple sharply, and he fell unconscious to the ground.

“Don’t tread on us,” said Goodman America.

Drawing an officer’s saber from a scabbard hidden beneath his blue waistcoat, he quickly went to work cutting the leather straps that bound Sybil Willing.

“Hurry!” she cried. “We must get away from that horrid trunk!”

As Sybil ran ahead through the open barn doors in her stockinged feet, the masked Patriot grabbed Doctor Pox by the cloak and dragged him out into the night.

“Wait here,” he told Sybil, as he dropped the doctor’s body in the dirt and ran back into the barn.

Taking the kerosene lamp from its hook by the door, Goodman America smashed it upon the coach trunk. Within seconds, flames had engulfed the trunk and begun to spread to the straw and wooden beams.

Returning to the barnyard, as the flames rose into the night sky behind him, the Revolutionary Hero looked around.

“Where has Doctor Pox gone?” he asked.

“He ran off across the fields,” answered Sybil. “But no matter! When that madman kidnapped me, my gentleman friend, Mister Nathan Hand, was knocked to the street and hurt. He is a man of learning, not combat, and I fear for him!”

“Then rest your fears,” said Goodman America. “I have already seen to Mister Hand and he is even now being tended to by the Sons of Liberty in their meeting place.”

“Thank God!” cried Sybil.

And beneath his white mask, Nathan Hand smiled.

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Poetry Corner Department:

Have some tea. We have biscuits in the shape of tesseracts.

PLANCKTOWN © 2025 by Rick Hutchins

One night in bed, drifting between sleep and not, nurturing hypnagogic seeds of dreams, Willard managed to uncarefully sift down between the interstices of the Planck constant, somewhat like a nickel insinuating itself behind the cushions on the couch. He found himself in a wooded countryside where rampant wisteria bloomed in purple bunches and brooks gurgled over glacial rocks to feed a wide, rippling lake. The people in this curious corner of the polyhedriverse lived in a startling variety of crafted treehouses and commuted on their everyday errands in brightly colored hot-air balloons which were kept parked in fields and clearings where they were tended by balloon tenders. These friendly people took Willard to the oldest man who lived in the tallest tree, though quite near the bottom and was said to know most of the answers. He told Willard that sifting down between the interstices of the Planck constant was basically a one-way trip. Willard was upset about this for a minute, because he thought he ought to be, but, since he had left pretty much nothing behind, he got over it. The treehouse people let him work for food and lodging and, as he quickly demonstrated an aptitude for balloon tending, he was soon gainfully employed. Furthermore, at Saturday night campfire stories, he met a small brown woman with a big smile named Saralee who tended the local branch of the library and he was inspired to build a house in a big old fir tree by the lake. Saralee moved in with him and planted white and yellow honeysuckle in a window box. They purchased a hot-air balloon of their own that looked like marigolds and orange blossoms and they often floated over the lake on hummingbird and honeybee summer days. Throughout their long, happy lives, Willard held on to Saralee every night for fear of sifting further down between the interstices of the Planck constant and leaving everything behind.

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Fiction Pulp Fiction Department:

Less than a year after the start of WWII, Roberta McKenna published Reich Vampire, the first of what would become the Marlo the Monster Hunter series. Over the next twenty years, the series would grow to as many volumes, finally ending in 1962. The character of Marlo was based on McKenna's childhood friend, Mary Hampden, who was, by all accounts, the very opposite of the promiscuous and alcoholic private eye-- although she was said to be very amused by her counterpart's antics. By this time, McKenna had married her husband George and Hampden was ostensibly employed as their live-in maid. Literary historians debate the alleged status of Hampden as sister wife, but whatever the arrangement, it lasted for two decades. Then, in 1962, Hampden died from late complications of childhood tuberculosis and McKenna never wrote another word.

In Book 5 of the series, The Lone Werewolf, Boston-based Marlo is hired on the down low to find the missing son of a prominent Blue Blood family. This inevitably leads her down yet another dark alley of the soul, this one involving Medieval jewelry and lycanthropy. Like all of McKenna's books, this one is exciting and entertaining. Unfortunately, you'll never get to read it, because it only exists in a far corner of the Polyhedriverse and you can't get there from here.

© 2025 Rick Hutchins

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All The Myriad Cereals Department:

Doesn't it suck how alternate universes get the best stuff?

© 2025 Rick Hutchins

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Night Of The Laughing Dead Department:

So you think the Zombie Apocalypse genre is all played out? Think again, my friends. Imagine this: A weekly anthology TV show wherein each episode pays homage to a classic sitcom by meticulously recreating every detail-- with one exception. Zombies!

ZOM-COMS - Volume 1 © 2025 by Rick Hutchins

Three’s Company “Three’s Apocalypse”

INT. APARTMENT LIVING ROOM - DAY

The apartment is bustling with its usual quirky charm. JACK TRIPPER (late 20s, goofy yet charming), JANET WOOD (late 20s, sensible), and CHRISSY SNOW (early 20s, a bit ditzy) are sitting on the couch, enjoying a comedy show on TV.

JACK (Chuckles) Oh, this show is a riot!

Suddenly, a loud, frantic knocking at the door interrupts them!

JANET (Startled) Who could that be?

Jack cautiously approaches the door, but before he can open it, the knocking grows louder and more persistent.

CHRISSY (Nervous) Jack, maybe you should…you know…not open it?

JACK (Smiling) Come on, Chrissy, it’s probably just Mr. Roper complaining about our noisy plumbing again.

Jack opens the door, revealing MR. ROPER (60s, grumpy) and MRS. ROPER (60s, eccentric) standing there, but they look disheveled and, well, undead.

MR. ROPER (In a low, growling voice) We heard you kids were having a party, and we wanted to join the fun!

JANET (Screaming) Jack, they’re…they’re…

Before Janet can finish her sentence, Mr. and Mrs. Roper lunge at them, teeth bared.

JACK (Backing away) Holy cow, they’re…zombies!

Chrissy lets out a terrified scream as they all scramble to escape. They barricade themselves in the kitchen, panting and terrified.

INT. KITCHEN - CONTINUOUS

JANET (Breathing heavily) What are we going to do, Jack? How did this happen?

JACK (Putting on his brave face) I don’t know, Janet, but we need to stay calm and find a way out of this mess.

Chrissy, still shaken, spots a frying pan on the counter.

CHRISSY (Grabbing the pan) I’ve got an idea! We can knock them out with this frying pan!

They cautiously make their way back to the living room, where Mr. and Mrs. Roper are stumbling around.

JACK (Whispering) On the count of three, Chrissy.

They swing the frying pan simultaneously, knocking Mr. and Mrs. Roper out cold.

INT. LIVING ROOM - LATER

The roommates have tied up Mr. and Mrs. Roper to chairs, hoping they’ll come to their senses.

JANET (Worried) What do we do now, Jack?

JACK (Grimly) We need to figure out how widespread this is. Maybe it’s just our neighbors.

CHRISSY (Cautiously) And if it’s not?

JACK (Smiling) Well, then we’ll just have to keep making them laugh and hope for the best.

They all share a nervous laugh as they ponder the uncertain future of their sitcom apocalypse.

FADE OUT.

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The Mary Tyler Moore Show “Mary’s Undead Reunion”

INT. WJM NEWSROOM - DAY

Mary Richards (30s, smart, and lovable) is diligently working at her desk. LOU GRANT (50s, gruff but endearing) is nearby, grumbling about something.

LOU (Grumbling) Mary, I swear, if Ted messes up the news report one more time…

Before Lou can finish, the office phone rings. Mary answers it.

MARY (Answering) WJM Newsroom. Mary Richards speaking.

A frantic voice comes through the phone.

FRANTIC VOICE (Screaming) Mary! You won’t believe what’s happening! It’s chaos out here!

MARY (Worried) Calm down. Who is this?

FRANTIC VOICE (Breathing heavily) It’s Rhoda! You gotta help me, Mare! Zombies are everywhere!

Mary’s eyes widen in shock.

INT. MARY’S APARTMENT - LATER

Mary, Rhoda Morgenstern (Mary’s best friend, sassy and witty), and Phyllis Lindstrom (neighbor, nosy and eccentric) are gathered in Mary’s apartment, trying to make sense of the situation.

RHODA (Pacing nervously) I’m telling you, I saw Ted Baxter, and he was not looking for laughs this time!

PHYLLIS (Eyes wide) Oh, dear. Not Ted, too?

MARY (Thoughtful) We need to get to the bottom of this. Let’s head over to the WJM studio and see what’s happening.

INT. WJM NEWSROOM - CONTINUOUS

The trio sneaks into the newsroom, where they find TED BAXTER (40s, pompous and clueless) reading a news report to a group of zombies.

TED (Smiling obliviously) …And that’s the news for today, folks. Stay tuned for more exciting stories!

The zombies clap slowly, then turn their attention to Mary, Rhoda, and Phyllis.

RHODA (Whispering) Oh no, Mare! He’s become their leader!

Mary grabs a nearby camera tripod and, with a well-aimed swing, knocks Ted out cold.

MARY (Breathing a sigh of relief) That’s one problem solved.

They manage to outsmart and evade the zombies, making their way to the studio control room.

INT. CONTROL ROOM - CONTINUOUS

They find MURRAY SLAUGHTER (40s, witty and resourceful) hiding there, frantically operating the controls.

MURRAY (Excited) Mary! Rhoda! Phyllis! You’re alive!

PHYLLIS (Nosing around) Murray, have you seen where Lars is? I need him to fix my sink!

MARY (Shaking her head) Phyllis, focus! Something’s gone terribly wrong. We have to figure out how to stop these zombies.

Murray quickly hacks into the TV signal and broadcasts a message that causes the zombies to become disoriented and wander away.

INT. WJM NEWSROOM - LATER

With the zombies gone, the gang regroups in the newsroom.

LOU (Smiling) Well, Mary, you certainly know how to handle a crisis.

MARY (Grinning) Thanks, Lou. Just another day in the newsroom.

As they share a laugh, they can’t help but wonder what other surprises the world has in store for them.

FADE OUT.

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Room 222 “Room 222 of the Living Dead”

INT. ROOM 222 - WALT WHITMAN HIGH SCHOOL - DAY

PETE DIXON (30s, charismatic teacher) stands at the front of the classroom, engaging his students in a lively discussion about history. Students JASON, LINDA, and KAREN (diverse and eager) are attentively listening.

PETE (Smiling) So, class, what do you think the key turning point in American history was?

Before anyone can respond, the classroom door creaks open, revealing PRINCIPAL SEYMOUR KAUFMAN (50s, stern) looking disheveled and with a slightly greenish tint.

PRINCIPAL KAUFMAN (Mumbling) Brains…I mean, grades…

The students gasp as Principal Kaufman stumbles toward them, arms outstretched.

JASON (Whispering) Is he…okay?

KAREN (Whispering) I think he’s looking for more than just our grades, Jason.

Principal Kaufman lunges at Pete Dixon, who manages to dodge just in time.

PETE (Backing away) Principal Kaufman, what’s going on here?

Principal Kaufman responds with a low, guttural moan.

LINDA (Whispering) Oh my gosh, they’re zombies!

Pete, Jason, Linda, and Karen make a hasty retreat to the school’s front office.

INT. FRONT OFFICE - CONTINUOUS

They barricade the doors with desks and chairs.

PETE (Panting) This can’t be happening. How did this start?

JASON (Thinking) I heard there was a strange new cafeteria dish today. Maybe that’s connected?

KAREN (Anxiously) We have to find a way out of here.

LINDA (Smiling nervously) I’ve seen enough zombie movies to know what we need to do. We need to find something to distract them.

They spot a box of old yearbooks in the corner.

JASON (Grinning) I’ve got an idea. Let’s use these yearbooks to distract them.

They start throwing yearbooks one by one out the window, causing the zombies, including Principal Kaufman, to follow the books and leave the office.

INT. FRONT OFFICE - LATER

The coast is clear. Pete, Jason, Linda, and Karen cautiously exit the office.

PETE (Exhales) That was close. Now, let’s figure out how to stop this outbreak.

INT. SCHOOL HALLWAY - CONTINUOUS

They discover that the strange cafeteria dish was the cause of the zombie outbreak, so they work together to remove it from the school kitchen.

INT. ROOM 222 - LATER

With the threat neutralized, Pete continues his history lesson.

PETE (Smiling) Now, as I was saying, class, the key turning point in American history was…

As the students listen, they can’t help but exchange knowing glances about the unusual turn of events that day in Room 222.

FADE OUT.

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The Bob Newhart Show “Bob’s Undead Therapy”

INT. DR. ROBERT HARTLEY’S PSYCHIATRY OFFICE - DAY

Dr. Robert Hartley (40s, mild-mannered psychiatrist) sits in his office, listening to the woes of his patient, EMILY (30s, neurotic). They’re in the middle of a session when they hear a commotion in the hallway.

EMILY (Nervous) Dr. Hartley, what’s that noise?

Before Bob can respond, the office door bursts open, revealing HOWARD BORDEN (40s, Bob’s quirky neighbor) and JERRY ROBINSON (30s, Bob’s best friend), both looking disheveled and zombie-like.

HOWARD (In a monotone voice) We want to talk about our problems, Bob.

JERRY (Zombie-like) And we’re feeling…really…listless.

Bob and Emily exchange alarmed glances.

INT. DR. HARTLEY’S LIVING ROOM - LATER

Bob, Emily, and a now-zombified Howard and Jerry sit awkwardly on Bob’s couch.

BOB (Nervous) Emily, this is…unexpected.

EMILY (Whispering) Is this a new form of therapy, Dr. Hartley? “Confront your fears by having a zombie intervention”?

BOB (Sighs) I wish, Emily, but this is…different.

INT. BOB’S APARTMENT - CONTINUOUS

They try to make sense of the situation and learn that a strange cafeteria dish was the culprit behind the zombie outbreak.

EMILY (Excited) Dr. Hartley, what if we use therapy techniques to help them regain their humanity?

BOB (Apprehensive) Well, it’s worth a try.

They conduct impromptu therapy sessions with Howard and Jerry, asking them questions about their feelings and frustrations.

INT. DR. HARTLEY’S LIVING ROOM - LATER

After some hilarious and absurd therapy sessions, Howard and Jerry start showing signs of improvement. They regain their personalities and human traits.

HOWARD (Smiling) You know, Bob, I think therapy might actually work!

JERRY (Nodding) And, Emily, I’m starting to feel like myself again.

They all share a laugh as the once-zombified friends return to normal.

INT. DR. HARTLEY’S OFFICE - DAYS LATER

Bob wraps up a session with Emily, feeling relieved that Howard and Jerry are back to their usual selves.

EMILY (Smiling) Dr. Hartley, you really have a unique approach to therapy.

BOB (Laughing) You could say it’s “outside the coffin” thinking.

They share a chuckle, grateful that things have returned to normal in Bob’s world.

FADE OUT.

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Leave It To Beaver “The Beaver vs. the Zombie Invasion”

INT. CLEAVER LIVING ROOM - DAY

Ward Cleaver (40s, wise and patient) is reading the newspaper while June Cleaver (40s, nurturing) prepares lunch. Beaver (12, curious) and Wally (15, responsible) enter from school.

BEAVER (Excited) Gee, Mom, you wouldn’t believe what happened at school today!

JUNE (Smiling) Tell us, Beaver. What’s the big news?

BEAVER (Animated) We had the weirdest cafeteria food, and then some of the teachers started acting all funny!

WARD (Skeptical) Beaver, you’re probably exaggerating.

Suddenly, Miss Landers (Beaver’s teacher) and Mr. Lumpy Rutherford (school friend) burst through the front door, looking zombified.

MISS LANDERS (Blankly) We want…homework.

BEAVER (Panicking) See, Dad, I told you!

WALLY (Protective) Come on, Beaver, let’s get out of here!

INT. CLEAVER KITCHEN - CONTINUOUS

The Cleaver family and Eddie Haskell (Wally’s friend) barricade themselves in the kitchen, brainstorming a plan.

WARD (Determined) Okay, we need to figure out what’s causing this.

EDDIE (Smug) Maybe it’s because the cafeteria food is so bad it turned them into zombies!

BEAVER (Naive) Gee, Eddie, I don’t think it works that way.

They decide to sneak back into the school to investigate.

INT. SCHOOL CAFETERIA - LATER

The group discovers that contaminated cafeteria food is the source of the zombie outbreak.

WALLY (Whispering) We need to find a way to stop this and save everyone!

BEAVER (Excited) Maybe if we put some ice cream in the cafeteria food, it’ll taste better, and they won’t be zombies anymore!

INT. CLEAVER KITCHEN - CONTINUOUS

They concoct an ice cream plan and serve it to the zombified Miss Landers and Mr. Rutherford, who suddenly snap back to their senses.

MISS LANDERS (Smiling) Oh, that’s much better! Thank you, boys!

WARD (Grinning) Well, Beaver, sometimes ice cream can solve even the weirdest problems.

FADE OUT.

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One Day At A Time “Laughter in the Face of the Living Dead”

INT. ROMANO APARTMENT - DAY

Ann Romano (40s, independent divorced mother), Barbara Cooper (16, rebellious teenager), and Schneider (30s, the eccentric building superintendent) are going about their day when they notice strange behavior outside their apartment window.

ANN (Curious) What’s going on out there?

BARBARA (Smiling) Maybe it’s a surprise block party?

SCHNEIDER (Nonchalant) Nah, just your typical zombie invasion.

They all exchange bewildered looks.

EXT. APARTMENT BUILDING COURTYARD - CONTINUOUS

Zombified versions of the neighbors are wandering aimlessly.

ANN (Concerned) Oh no, what do we do?

BARBARA (Sarcastic) Well, we could invite them in for tea.

SCHNEIDER (Grinning) Or, we could fight the undead with…comedy!

INT. ROMANO APARTMENT - LATER

Ann, Barbara, and Schneider gather in the living room, brainstorming Schneider’s comedy plan.

SCHNEIDER (Excited) We’ll turn this apartment into the funniest spot in the zombie-ridden neighborhood!

BARBARA (Rolling her eyes) Right, because nothing says “survival” like stand-up comedy.

They set up an improv comedy show in their living room.

EXT. APARTMENT BUILDING COURTYARD - NIGHT

The trio performs a series of humorous sketches through the apartment windows, catching the attention of the zombies.

ANN (Smiling) It’s working, Schneider!

BARBARA (Laughing) Who knew zombies had such a soft spot for humor?

As the zombies gather, they seem momentarily distracted from their usual zombie behavior.

INT. ROMANO APARTMENT - LATER

The makeshift comedy show continues, with the trio pulling out all the stops to keep the zombies entertained.

SCHNEIDER (Performing) Why did the zombie go to therapy? He had too many “dead-issues”!

The zombies, surprisingly, let out a collective groan of laughter.

BARBARA (Amused) I never thought I’d say this, but Schneider, you’re a genius.

EXT. APARTMENT BUILDING COURTYARD - DAWN

The zombies, having had their fill of laughs, start to disperse and wander away.

ANN (Grateful) Schneider, you saved us with your crazy comedy idea.

SCHNEIDER (Grinning) Just doing my part to bring joy to the undead.

As the dawn breaks, the Romano apartment building returns to its peaceful state, with the living and the formerly undead sharing a surreal yet heartwarming experience.

FADE OUT.

--------------------------------------------------

Fear not! Zom-Coms will return in the future!

[rj-drive-in]

Get A Laugh Department:

Because Hugh demanded it! Thanks, Hugh.

© 2025 Rick Hutchins

[rj-drive-in]

Lovecraftian Slime Department:

The struggle is real.

AND THERE’S A WINO DOWN THE ROAD © 2025 by Rick Hutchins

The rutted asphalt hadn’t been re-paved in decades and the paint on the run-down business fronts was cracked and peeling, but the air was oddly fresh as the sun rose early on a Sunday morning. Stray trash and litter formed a greasy mess in the gutters, and weeds poked through the cracked sidewalks and foundations, but all was quiet and still.

Against a rusty, leaning chain-link fence sat an old man in ragged clothes, holding a brown paper bag in his lap from which he occasionally took a mouthful of Wild Irish Rose.

“Down the hatch,” he mumbled, every time.

Mainly he thought of someone named Evelyn, who he had once bounced on his knee and taught to drive. He had let her down badly. She was out there in the world somewhere with kids of her own now, with no use for him.

A cop car rumbled slowly down the road, bouncing in the potholes, casually glancing at the padlocked doors and cardboard windows of the businesses. The cops ignored the old man.

“Fuck you and the horse you rode in on,” he said as they passed him by.

A while later, the sun was higher, but gray clouds had moved in, bringing a chill.

Something began to happen in the middle of the street.

The old man didn’t know what he was looking at. It was a spray of sparks, like a welding arc, but it was just hanging in the air. Then the sparks stopped and there was some sort of mirage, like a slice through nothing, like the heat waves over a hot dog cart. Like a floating wound. There was something inside of it but it made no sense to him. Maybe he had something in his eye. He rubbed them roughly with his dirty, blackened fingers.

No, it was still there. And something was coming out. A green octopus was reaching through.

“The day has come,” he said. He choked and succumbed to a fit of coughing. “I’ve gone mental.”

The giant green tentacle reached further through the gash, coiling around, seeking, touching the gritty asphalt, stroking a wall, brushing a telephone pole and a fire hydrant, probing like a tongue looking for a piece of gristle between teeth. It didn’t really look like an octopus now that he had a better view of it. More like a slimy snake from a rotten swamp, with bumps all over it like cancerous growths.

And it wanted something. It had intentions that rolled off of it like a bad smell, and the old man could see those intentions like pictures in his head. Pictures of burning cities and dead forests and a billion bodies floating face down in the thick mucus of poisoned seas.

It wanted the world. It wanted Evelyn’s world.

The old man sat up and rolled over onto his elbows, and got his knees under him. He pushed himself up onto first one foot and then the other and rose up onto wobbly legs. He brought the brown paper bag up to his lips and swallowed a mouthful of Wild Irish Rose.

“Over my dead body,” he said.

He shuffled slowly over to the curb of the sidewalk. About thirty feet of that coiling tentacle had made it through the hole in the air and the thickest part was as big around as a truck tire. The tapered tip was sliding along the ground, coming near his feet. The old man took the bottle of wine out of the paper bag, holding it by the neck, and swung it, shattering it against the fire hydrant beside him. Wild Irish Rose splashed over his clothes and the ground and the writhing green tentacle.

The thing immediately lunged, wrapping itself around his middle and his legs like a boa constrictor. Gray smoke billowed where it touched him, as its unearthly substance burned through his clothes and flesh and fat like boiling oil.

The old man screamed his throat raw.

He could see it now, all of it, in the pictures in his head. Squatting green in the darkness, something the size of a moon, with a million more tentacles, and then a million more beyond that. And millions of crimson crystal eyes that moved and crawled and pulsed with avarice, and millions of mouths, and millions of tongues, and millions of teeth….

He still held onto the broken wine bottle by its neck. He raised it up over his head and brought the sharp, jagged edge of glass down upon the tentacle, cutting deeply into its reptilian hide. It bled something thick and black.

“How do you like that, fucker!” he screamed.

There was a roar of hot wind and deafening rage from the hole in the air, as if he were standing next to a jet engine. The thing on the other side had never felt pain, never known of it, never imagined that such a thing could exist, never imagined that it could feel hurt. For the first time in its existence, it flinched, cracking the old man’s ribs.

But the old man chopped away at it, again and again. “Take that and that!” he cried.

Finally, he chopped all the way through and the tentacle dropped to the ground, melting into the asphalt like an oil stain. The stump of the thing pulled back through the hole in the air and the hole closed up like a stone dropped in a pond.

And then there was silence, like there had never been any sound.

The old man gasped for breath. The broken bottle slipped from his trembling fingers.

Slowly, he turned around, every movement bringing flashes of agony to his burned flesh and broken ribs.

“Stupid fucking monster,” he grumbled.

Like a journey of a hundred miles, he haltingly dragged his feet back across the sidewalk and leaned onto the rusted chain-link fence, the only home he had known for a long while. He sank slowly to his knees. After a while he folded up and collapsed to the ground on his side.

He thought of Evelyn as he faded away.

[rj-drive-in]

Whose Woods These Are Department:

Make sure your shots are up to date. Just saying.

IT CAME OUT OF THE WOODS © 2025 by Rick Hutchins

This was the end of the trail. Zeke knew it. Taps. Lights out. Close curtains. Right here and right now, he was going to die.

The thing that had been chasing him through the woods for the past three hours was slow, but relentless. It was like a horror movie. No matter how fast he ran, it was always right behind him. And he just got slower and slower, weaker and weaker, until he was stumbling through the fallen leaves and twigs of the forest floor.

And now he was all done. He collapsed against a tree trunk and slid to a sitting position.

“Why is this happening?” he gasped, his chest heaving.

He reflexively reached for some bottled water in his pack, but he had tossed off that extra weight two hours ago.

And there it was. He could see it coming through the trees. Shuffling or limping, as if it were lame, but it was tireless.

“Go away!” he sobbed hoarsely. “Leave me alone!”

But still it came.

Seven feet tall, shaped like a malformed ape, with green skin the color and texture of an alligator, it was the most terrifying thing Zeke had ever seen. Its stumpy legs and long, bowed arms were as thick as tree trunks. It had black, menacing eyes and tusks that curved up from its lower jaw.

And it growled incessantly.

Closer and closer it came, as Zeke lay there, paralyzed with exhaustion and fear. Now it was standing right over him, reeking of rot and decay.

“Good-bye, mom,” he wept. “I’m sorry, Naomi.”

The thing reached out with its right hand, the blackened yellow nail of its forefinger coming for his face. He squeezed his eyes shut as it made contact. The claw moved back and forth, as if it were carving a figure into his forehead.

Then it withdrew.

The pain started instantly. He screamed as his muscles twisted like splinter sticks, his arms and legs writhed like they were being ripped out by the roots and his ribs cracked open and pulled apart. His jaw fractured and his eyes burned like acid. His consciousness slipped toward darkness in the agony.

Then, just as quickly, the pain throbbed away and he was looking down at his own twisted body, lying in the shreds of his clothes. The green and roughshod skin, the malformed limbs. He had become like it. Whatever species of inhuman creature the thing was, he was one of them now.

But the strangeness had not ended.

Because the creature itself was changing, deflating, shrinking. The knobby skin was smoothing over, even as the rotten green color softened to brown. The tusks withdrew while the arms shortened and the legs lengthened, the overall proportions tapering and composing. The shoulders leveled out as black curly hair tumbled down over them.

The thing was now a human woman.

She smiled jauntily.

“You’re It!” she said.

[rj-drive-in]

A Bridge Too Far Department:

What's the countersign?

© 2025 Rick Hutchins

[rj-drive-in]

Super-Adventures! Department:

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

THUNDER AND LIGHTNING © 2025 by Rick Hutchins

Then there was that time a dark gray thundercloud boiled out of the forested foothills of the Berkshires on a sunny summer day and headed East, against the wind. It was the size of a baseball field and looked down on the world with two huge, green– but human– eyes.

It was less than a mile outside of Amherst when the signal came over the emergency radio. By the time I put on my costume and flew out through the secret tunnel, it was inside the city limits.

As I flew low across the common, I saw people fleeing from the cloud; when they saw me coming, they pointed and shouted with relief and encouragement.

The cloud had begun to release devastating bolts of lightning, blasting apart parked cars and storefronts. The roof of the Jones Library was on fire and the fire department was already on the scene, trying to save the building.

I caught up with the thundercloud as it dropped down toward the physics research lab at U Mass. Every deafening lightning bolt threw up a shower of bricks and shattered glass. It was then that the growling, booming thunder inside the cloud began to form words: Do you see? I was right! I was right! Now do you believe me?!

You’d think that dealing with a living lightning storm would be a piece of cake for a superhero called The Meteorologist, right? But this was no natural storm and my powers could not affect it. I tried creating a second storm to counteract it; I tried blowing it away with a jet stream; I tried lowering the temperature so that it would snow itself out of the sky; but it was all for nothing.

Ultimately, I whipped up a whirlwind of dry dust from a construction site that sucked up the moisture of the cloud, and the whole mess fell to earth as mud. Later, it was all trucked away and buried under a slab of solid concrete at an undisclosed location.

When it was all over, sixteen people were hurt, one of them seriously; it could have been a lot worse, but I didn’t feel especially triumphant that day.

We backtracked the cloud into the mountains and to the burned remains of a small modular cabin and wind generator. It was full of what used to be some kind of complex electronic equipment, now fused beyond recognition. Nobody, not even the scientists at the physics lab, had any clue as to the person behind the cloud or his motivation.

We never did figure it all out.

[rj-drive-in]

Time and Tide Department:

What lies below? Friend or foe?

SHADOWS UNDER A DEEP BLUE SEA © 2025 by Rick Hutchins

They called him Old Man Kowalski because he was old and his name was Kowalski. They called him a stubborn fool because he was a loner with no fear of the sea.

He was an old lobsterman, long retired, and in the summers he would take his 80s-vintage Nauset named Leokadia out of Provincetown and round Wood End to the Bay and then straight out to the almighty Atlantic. There he would spend his day, maybe fishing or drinking or talking to God. He never did say. He sometimes told old stories, but never new ones. At least not until that August when he took the Leokadia out for the last time.

When the sun came up at a quarter to six, he was already out of sight of the diving boats on the Bay, as usual. But what happened in the hours that followed was far from usual. What I tell you now is hearsay, told to me by the crowd at the Widow’s Walk, so don’t press me for details that I don’t know.

Old Man Kowalski reached his favored fishing spot and set about on his private daily routine, whatever that was. Based on the personal items they found on his boat, he favored Hemingway novels, comely island ladies, and Narragansett beer. But on this day his peaceful existence was disrupted by a devil from the deep blue sea.

It started with a thud on the side of his boat, which is hardly a distraction in those waters, but then it came again, and then again. The thudding and bumping came first on the port side, and then starboard, and quickly grew stronger and harder. Kowalski was curious, but not frightened at first, because the stripers and horse mackerel grow big out there and the schools don’t make them smart. He went back and forth and from side to side to catch a glimpse of his assailants, but could hardly have expected what he finally saw.

He barely had time to register the thing in the water before it leaped up, grabbed the edge of the deck, and flipped the old man over the rail like chum. He went under, the thing went after him, and that’s when he got his only good look.

It was a man, in the sense that it had a head, two arms and two legs, and, shall we say, a man’s tool. But it was also a fish, covered in scales, with webbed fingers and toes on clawed hands and feet, and wall eyes and wide bony mouth. And it went for his throat. He could not have fought such a thing, but as it choked him and dragged him down, something struck him from the side and he was engulfed in darkness. It was like being crushed in a giant slimy fist, and the fish man was pulled away.

Kowalski then saw sky again and breathed of the air, and as he treaded water there in the cold Atlantic he saw his second wondrous sight of the day. A humpback whale broke the surface, with the green monster hanging from its mouth. It bit down, bursting the thing like a blowfish, and spit it out before diving back below. Kowalski swore before God the humpback winked at him before it went down.

This story he told to the regulars at the Widow’s Walk and they told it to me. It’s said that the bartender has a video on his phone of Kowalski telling it, but I can’t vouch for that. The only facts that can be confirmed are that the stubborn old fool soon after sold the Leokadia for half its worth and moved to Nebraska.

[rj-drive-in]

Lovecraftian Slime Department:

Some days it just don't pay to get out of bed.

THE MOLD FROM OUT OF SPACE © 2025 by Rick Hutchins

It was a pleasant morning in May when Farmer Heath stepped out on his little front porch to greet the day. A fine mist hung over the fields and groves, softening the sun and lending a cool freshness to the air. He had slept a little later than was his habit, despite not staying up to watch the meteor shower, so he was surprised to see no bottles of fresh milk on the stair.

“Not like Mr Milligan to be late of a Tuesday,” he mused. “Perhaps he stayed up to see the shooting stars.”

With that, Farmer Heath set off across the dewy grass to the shed, where he quickly noted a small round hole in the shingled roof.

“Don’t that beat all,” he said. “Must have been a meteor. Might be worth a couple of bucks down to the college if I can find it.”

But when he opened the slatted wooden door of the shed, the space rock, just about the size of a plump apple, was right in front of his nose, in the middle of the jumbo bag of cat chow that it had struck and burst. Farmer Heath frowned and knelt down. In the dimness of the shed, he could see that the scattered kernels of cat food were covered with a fuzzy mold that seemed to glow a bit green. Or something similar to green that he couldn’t quite pin down.

Then he heard a meow from above him.

“Percy? That you?” He looked up and saw a pair of green cat eyes looking down at him from the dark corner of the ceiling. “What are you doing up there, boy? Come to think, how are you up there? There’s no shelf or beams.”

With that, the slitted eyes began to descend toward the floor. They descended straight and smooth, oddly enough, not all back and forth like a cat climbing down should look. When Percy reached the dusty sunbeam streaming through the door, Farmer Heath could see why. The cat was lowering itself head first on a thick cord of green webbing that came out of its butt. It also now had six legs.

“Aw, Percy,” he said. “You ate the moldy food.” His old granddaddy had told him about meteor mold, but he had hoped to never have to deal with it himself.

Before the cat could touch the ground, Farmer Heath grabbed the pitchfork from the corner and impaled it, pinning it to the dirt. The creature shrieked and wailed. He quickly beheaded it with a spade.

“Sorry, old friend.” How was he going to tell Mavis about this?

Shoulders slumped, the old farmer trudged back over to the house and slipped quietly back inside the kitchen door. He didn’t want to wake up Mavis, but he could hear her stirring in the bedroom.

“You up, Bert?”

“As you can see, I am, beloved.”

“There’s a mess to clean up in the shed, dear.”

“You’ve been out there?”

“Ayuh, I went out for the milk and decided to feed Percy too.”

“You touched the cat food?”

“Yes, Percy’s all fed.”

“And you fetched the milk.”

“Yes, dear. It’s in the fridge.”

“You’ve had some?”

“Had some in my oatmeal. It’s especially good this morning, Bert. Especially good.”

“That’s nice to hear,” Farmer Heath said sadly. “Why don’t you lay abed awhile, beloved? I’ll head on out to the shed.”

For the pitchfork. And the spade.

[rj-drive-in]

What's Done is Done Department:

Without experimental evidence, theory is just talk.

CURVES © 2025 by Rick Hutchins

The morning mist was just beginning to burn off when Augustin finished his lap around Goldstone Pond on that fateful June morning. He walked up the shallow slope to the picnic table where he had left his bottle of water and took a long drink as his breathing and heart rate returned to normal.

He was admiring the view across the pond, the rising sun sparkling on the water, when something happened in his peripheral vision. It wasn’t exactly a flash of light or a blink of darkness, but it seemed like both, and it was subtle, but enough to get his attention.

Turning to his left, he saw that he was no longer alone. An oddly dressed young woman was walking toward him across the pine needle-carpeted ground of the picnic area. She wore a silvery metallic jacket over a body-hugging blue jumpsuit– and not a bad body to hug it was– with a matching blue skullcap from which shoulder-length red hair tumbled. He wondered exactly how young she was. Since turning thirty, he had become more careful.

“Good morning,” he said as she came within conversational distance.

She stopped walking. “Augustin Cosgoode?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said curiously. “Do we know each other?”

“In a manner of speaking,” she smiled.

“Who are you?”

“Your granddaughter. Viola.”

With a wry grin, he spread his arms as if to say, Take a look. “You’ve got the wrong guy, don’t you think?” he said. “I’m not even old enough to have a kid your age, let alone a grandkid.”

The young woman laughed and took something out of her pocket that looked like a television remote. Before he could move, she pointed it at him and clicked twice. Bright red beams of light lanced out, striking him in the stomach and chest.

“Oh, no, no!” he gasped, amazed at the blackened holes that had suddenly appeared in his body. There was no pain, but he could feel his heart stopping. A wave of faintness passed through him and he fell over onto the picnic table, rolling to the ground.

The young woman stood over him as his vision grew dark.

“Why?” he sighed weakly. “Why…?”

“Sorry,” she shrugged. “Just making a point about closed timelike curves in a four-dimensional Lorentzian manifold.”

[rj-drive-in]

A Pi For A Pi Department:

When exploring the multiverse, please try not to break anything.

SUPERNUMERARY © 2025 by Rick Hutchins

“The drug worked,” said the text from Mansingh. “Come to my lab at once!”

Fuck me, I thought miserably in the middle of the darkened auditorium. I was halfway through the second day of the astrophysics symposium in Aspen, two thousand miles away from Northampton. We had agreed, goddamnit, that the denial of the application for human trials was the end of it, once and for all. I should have known better. Mansingh was never one to take no for an answer.

I texted back and got no response, repeatedly. Back in my hotel room, I tried calling and got only voice mail. Facebook and email proved equally ineffective, and instant messaging was useless. My anxiety level increased as the hours passed, and I seriously considered contacting the police; but it was too late to undo whatever had happened and I was not going to be responsible for Mansingh being brought up on criminal charges.

If I could help it.

The second two days of the conference went by in a blur, punctuated only by my continuing attempts to contact Mansingh. The competition between Shabana and Garabedian over calculating pi to a new extreme should have been the highlight of the presentations, but I had to feign amusement. And when Rabinowitz asked me back to his room after the awards dinner, which was something I had honestly been looking forward to with anticipation, I pleaded a headache and it was not a lie.

Monday morning, I flew back to Logan on schedule and hurried straight to my car. The drive back to Amherst took nearly two hours, despite most of the traffic being in the other direction. After a perfunctory shower and throwing on some clean clothes, I headed down to Northampton. Would I find an unparalleled scientific breakthrough or the premature ending to a brilliant scientific career? In my darkest thoughts, I found a corpse, but I told myself that I was overreacting.

*****

Twenty minutes later, I pulled into the driveway of Mansingh’s single ranch home on the outskirts of town. There was no answer at the front door when I knocked or rang, but I still had my key from our grad student days. Inside, nothing seemed amiss, but there was that staleness in the air of a house that had been empty and disused. And through the hallway past the dining room, I could see that the door to the back porch was open.

The porch was wide, screened in, facing the yard and a field and the tree line; perfect for Summer nights full of stars and fireflies. The old brown comfortable couch was to the left of the doorway and as I stepped through and turned I experienced a moment of horrified vertigo that I will never forget as long as I live. My darkest thought, my deepest fear, was true, for there was Mansingh, on the couch in her underwear, head tilted back, arms limply at her sides.

Eyes closed. Mouth hanging open.

I was beside her in an instant, my knee hitting the coffee table, the array of empty wine bottles spread out on it jostling like wind chimes. Her hand and arm were cold and clammy as I felt for a pulse.

But it was there. And strong.

“Oh, holy fuck!” I said, nearly puking with relief.

She stirred slightly, lifting her head. “Dixon? That you?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I came to kick your stupid ass.”

“You go, girl,” she said, dropping her head back.

*****

A hot cup of coffee and a bathrobe later, Mansingh was almost human again. But despite the noontime temperature of nearly 80, her skin was still clammy. We sat on the porch couch and I watched her carefully, troubled by her eyes. They were the same warm brown as always, but distant and dilated. Beyond lost in thought. Beyond lost.

“You took the drug,” I said at last.

“Oh, yes,” she replied, sipping. “Oh, yes.”

I died inside, as a litany of dooms flashed through my mind. Brain damage, vascular dementia, seizure disorder, vegetative state, death, death, death– Miesz’s formula was a powerful and exotic concoction and we had no idea what it would do to a human brain. That’s why the NIH had denied our application for clinical trials.

“Why?” I implored. “You promised.”

She turned to me with the touch of a sad smile. “As if you don’t know.”

“You and your instant gratification.”

She laughed softly and put the empty coffee mug on the table. She seemed troubled, but peaceful, like the morning after a funeral when all the crying is done. That was it. She didn’t seem lost. She seemed ancient.

“I had to know,” she said, leaning back on the couch. “I had to see for myself. I needed to see the structure from the outside. The Mandelbrot Set is only a hint. A shadow of a superfractal that is an artifact of the mathematical engine of the universe. But I’ve always known that the numbers are real, not just an abstraction, and we’re the result of that.”

‘Yes, I know,” I replied quietly, rubbing my eyes.

“I wanted to see the numbers themselves. Those are the real gods.”

“Mansingh….”

“And I did, Dixon, I did.”

I looked up at her. “You have to be kidding.”

She shook her head. “Miesz’s drug did everything he promised. His little custom molecules turned my neural mitochondria into a network of quantum computers that were not bound by our time and space. Oh, it worked. It went far beyond anything we expected.”

“You hallucinated.”

“I don’t think so. I saw it. I saw more than we bargained for.”

“Well, what did you see?”

Mansingh frowned. “I don’t really remember it all now,” she sighed. “The drug wore off after a couple of days.”

“You hallucinated.”

“No!” she said adamantly. “I don’t remember everything I experienced, but I remember what I thought about it. I remember all my impressions, and my realizations, and my feelings, and my analysis. I saw the reality of math. More than that, I touched it. And other things, besides and beyond math.”

“What do you mean?” I have to admit that I was intrigued. How could I not be?

Mansingh ran her fingers slowly through her hair. “It’s so hard to explain,” she said. “There really aren’t words in any human language. Or any concepts in any human philosophy, for that matter. Scientists and science fiction writers have always theorized about parallel universes where the laws of physics are different, which is true, or alternate histories where events happened differently, which is also true, but those are just points on an infinite plane. I mean, the very ideas are just points on an infinite plane of ideas.” She frowned and shook her head in frustration.

Holding my breath, I resisted the temptation to prod her. I wanted to let her gather her thoughts. While I waited, I glanced sidelong at the wine bottles on the table, hoping to see one that wasn’t empty, but no such luck.

“What we think of as solid and real,” she continued at last, “or what we think of as consciousness or what we think of as an individual mind, are the results of math, just like pi or e is the result of math. But it’s the math that’s really real. And there are other things like math that aren’t math, that aren’t really like math at all, that do other things that math doesn’t do. But even math and the other things that aren’t math are really just the protons and neutrons in the larger scheme of things. And then… oh….”

Her voice trailed off and her eyes grew unfocused.

“Then what?”

She sighed and shook her head. “In the distance, it… like molten blue shapes in a thick fog on a bottomless ocean….” This was the closest thing to poetry I had ever heard come from Mansingh’s mouth. “There’s no end to it. Even with the drug, it wasn’t enough. There could never be enough.”

“Okay,” I said slowly, “do you remember anything specific, any new mathematical principle, some testable observation, some new proof or theorem that might be evidence that all this was not just an acid trip?”

She glared at me a bit for that and I saw a little echo of the old Mansingh in her eyes for a moment, then she sagged back on the couch again. “No,” she said. “I don’t remember anything along those lines.”

I struggled for something diplomatic to say, but then she spoke again:

“I’m just hoping I didn’t do any damage.”

Somehow that sent a chill running down my spine. “Damage to what?” I asked. “Yourself? Your nervous system? Your reputation? Or something else? Where’s Miesz? Where was Miesz while all this was going on? Have you talked to him about this?” My blood ran cold. “Has something happened to Miesz?”

She fluttered a hand in the air dismissively. “Oh, he’s in Stockholm with what’s-her-name. He doesn’t know anything about this. I’m talking about damage to the universe.”

Cold? My blood was ice. “The universe,” I repeated quietly. “Mansingh, I want you to listen to me now. You know how much I care about you. Even if we’re not together now, that doesn’t change how I feel. I want you to take my advice and have some tests done. An MRI maybe, or a PET scan. And I want you to talk to somebody, somebody professional.” I was close to babbling at this point.

Mansingh sat limp on the couch, her head tilted back, her eyes closed, her long black hair splayed across her shoulders. She was beautiful. After a long moment, a sad smile touched her lips.

“Thank you, Velvet,” she said.

“Come with me now.”

“No,” she said. “I know you don’t believe me and I don’t for one minute blame you for it, because I wouldn’t believe it either if I was in your shoes. But it’s all true. I saw a greater reality. For one brief, shining moment, I was a pixel in the Mandelbrot Set who got to step back and see the entire fractal, in all its infinite recursions. Not only did I get to see it, but I got to touch it. And… and I got to change it.”

How was I going to deal with this? “Okay,” I said carefully, “let’s think this through together. Even supposing that the drug worked the way you think it did and your consciousness was expanded to perceive a larger reality– how could you change reality? It was your mind that expanded, not your hands. You have no tools or machines that can affect other dimensions. How could you change reality? What is it about reality that you think you changed?”

Mansingh sighed and shrugged sheepishly. “I’m not entirely sure now. While I was there, while I was in touch, I saw that changing four basic constants of this universe would benefit humanity profoundly. Pi was one. The other three have not been discovered yet. All four are transcendental numbers and it involved changing just a short string of digits in the far reaches of its decimal representation. Although it was a bit difference in practice. But I only got to change pi before the drug wore off.”

“But how? You’re not telling me how.”

Her fingers twined restlessly, like she was molding clay. “The universe is math, the constants are math, we’re math. Math can interact with math, changing values back and forth. The so-called reality that we’re used to is just a crude hologram, a simulation with little options. It’s like asking why fish never discovered fire. And numbers, really– there’s really only one, isn’t there? It’s so easy to spin it around, so it’s showing a different side of itself, casting a different shadow.”

“So there’s no change to the universe that we can observe or measure.”

“Maybe, maybe not. The change to pi is there, but we’d have to calculate it out a lot farther than the current record. Which won’t do any good if I can’t remember what changes I made to it. Whether or not there’s any measurable change to the universe, I don’t know. That’s what worries me.”

“Why does that worry you?”

“Because I was only able to change one of the four parameters. Think of the observable universe as a massively complex computer program. If you make a change in one part of the code without making corresponding changes elsewhere, you can create a bug or a glitch.”

She tilted her head and looked at me oddly.

“Or you can crash the system.”

“Mansingh,” I said slowly, “you cannot change a mathematical constant. That’s why they call it a constant. Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the diameter of a circle. That is not a variable. Nothing can change it. You had a bad trip, that’s all.”

“No, you’re still not getting it. I told you that math is real and the world we know is the result of it. Pi is not an equation that describes the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle, the ratio is the result of pi. Change pi and you change the ratio. Besides, pi is about a lot more than circles.”

“But don’t you see how ridiculous that is? A ratio is a ratio. It is what it is. And even if you’re right, how do you change something that’s a fundamental part of the universe? The universe outweighs you by exponential trillions of tons.”

“That’s true,” she conceded, “but you only need 39 decimal places to calculate the circumference of the observable universe. You only need 77 decimal places to calculate the diameter of the unobservable universe. Think of it like a flagpole. At the base of it, on the ground, it’s solid as a rock, but the farther up you go, the more flexible it becomes. Pi just goes on and on. After a few billion digits, it practically melts in your mouth.”

The conversation was growing orders of magnitude more surreal by the minute, but the more she talked, the more I was starting to believe her. So I took that last remark as a cue to change the subject. “When was the last time you ate?” I asked.

The answer turned out to be an unknown quantity of days, so I got her dressed and took her out to the Thai Garden on Bridge Street, where she put away a Rama Garden before I had barely started on my Pad Thai. Afterward, we took our tea up the street to the little park by the cemetery and watched the kids playing on the swings. She still had that look about her like someone who had been touched by God.

“Fractals,” she said, her eyes drifting from the kids to the clouds to the leaves rustling in the trees, to a swarm of ants on a popsicle stick at our feet.

“So,” I said slowly, “everything seems normal. No other-dimensional vortices or rifts in the space-time continuum or Star Trek anomalies. It looks like you didn’t break the universe, after all.”

“Maybe,” she replied, sipping her tea. “I hope not. I just wish I could get back there and fix it, or finish what I started.”

“That’s not going to happen,” I said. “I don’t want you going anywhere near that drug ever again. Where is the rest of it?”

“Are you kidding? I took the rest of it already.”

“Holy shit, Mansingh! Are you trying to kill yourself?”

“It was the first thing I did, of course. I wanted to get back. It didn’t do any good, though. Nothing happened. Apparently it only works once per person.”

“Nothing happened that you know of,” I said. “God only knows what it’s doing to your brain cells. Tomorrow we take you to your doctor, and I’m serious.”

She took a longer drink of her tea and thought about it. “Okay,” she nodded. “That’s a reasonable thing to do.”

“Okay. Good.”

I was beginning to think I could get her through this without her being arrested, fired, or institutionalized.

*****

The next morning is when things started going from bad to worse.

I woke up early, but I wanted to let Mansingh sleep in so I killed time by catching up on my emails and forums. Most of it was just a blur to my distracted mind, but I did notice that Shabana and Garabedian were taking a lot of teasing over both of their pi-calculation programs crashing at exactly a trillion decimal places. Of course, I only took notice of that because the very concept of pi was giving me nightmares.

Finally, I decided that Mansingh had racked up enough sleep to face her primary care doctor, so I pulled out my phone and gave her a call. Her cell rang a half dozen times and went to voice mail. I gave her a couple of minutes to pull herself together and tried again. Voice mail. Third try, voice mail again.

I got in my car and headed down there.

Maybe she was just in a heavy sleep after her stoned excursion through the cosmos. Maybe she was taking a long, refreshing shower. Maybe I was an idiot for leaving her alone and should have brought her home with me.

This time I let myself in without wasting time knocking. She wasn’t in her unmade bed or the dry shower or on the back porch. Or anywhere. Her cell phone was on the kitchen counter next to an empty glass of orange juice.

I never for a second considered the possibility that she had woken up, gotten dressed, and headed out to her primary care doctor’s office on her own to cheerily explain that she had taken several doses of a highly experimental mind-altering drug that had sent her on a psychedelic trip that would put David Bowman to shame and that it might have turned her frontal lobes to Swiss cheese and that it might be a good idea if she had an MRI immediately if not sooner. I knew her too well for that.

“You stupid little shit,” I said. She was going to find a way to experience that high again.

And that meant she had to find Miesz. So I had to find him, too.

Naturally, he didn’t answer his phone either when I tried calling him. He was vacationing in Sweden with Elizabeth from CalTech, so he wouldn’t be inclined to pick up a call from me. Especially if he had already talked to Mansingh. Hell, if he had already talked to Mansingh he might be afraid to return to the States.

So I tried to find Mansingh any way I could think of. Over the next couple of days, I called all our mutual friends, I called all her own weird friends, I called acquaintances, I called professors, I called undergrads, I called her shrink, I called complete strangers who didn’t know either of us but who she might contact for assistance with her little project, I even called some people on campus who I knew dealt in hallucinogens. Nobody had seen her for days or weeks or ever. I tried email and Snapchat. I monitored her Facebook page and the physics message boards where we both hung out, but there was absolutely zero evidence of recent online activity.

Maybe she would actually try flying to Stockholm to find Miesz. I tried checking, but the airlines wouldn’t even talk to me. I started to seriously consider hiring a private detective, and went as far as to Google names.

Then an idea occurred to me. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. I got Elizabeth’s last name and contact info from a mutual acquaintance at CalTech and called her. First and second attempts went to voice mail, but on the third try she actually picked up.

“Yes, he certainly did get a call from your friend,” she said. “It was a couple of days ago. And now he’s gone.”

“Gone? What do you mean, gone?”

“Exactly what I said. Gone. He talked to her for five minutes, as we were sitting down having dinner, then he got up and literally ran out of the restaurant without a word. Leaving me with the bill.”

“Oh, my god. Uh… sorry about that. Have you heard from him?”

“No, I haven’t. When I got back to the hotel room, he had already been there and left with his things.”

“So you have no idea where he is now?”

“I don’t really fucking care where he is at this point.”

Things were really bad, I realized, but I still didn’t understand how bad. I was still thinking in terms of brain damage and psychosis and dementia. I started calling Miesz constantly, leaving frantic voice mails until his mailbox filled up. That was about the time I started becoming aware of the ominous buzz on the grapevine.

Shabana and Garabedian, those clowns from MIT, had started their competition over again after their programs crashed the week before. They had each written algorithms that they claimed would calculate pi faster and better than anything that had been done before, and each was determined to beat the other. Everybody had gotten a good laugh when both of their programs had crashed simultaneously at exactly a trillion digits, but the guys had debugged their programs, scored new hardware, and started over.

This time, they both crashed simultaneously at a little over ten billion digits.

The feeling in the pit of my stomach was that of a cancer patient given a grim prognosis.

There was no connection between Shabana’s and Garabedian’s projects. Nothing via the Internet or wireless, nothing in the code, or the servers. Both were written and implemented, and were running, in complete isolation.

News started coming in over the following days from various schools and labs all over the world. People began to set up special projects to check and double check, calculating in every possible method, on every type of machine, in every type of programming environment, and in every language. The results were invariably identical. Every attempt to calculate pi would crash at the exact same time at the exact same decimal place. And the number of decimal places was shrinking.

It even got a mention on cable news channels. The anchors smiled about this funny mystery that had a bunch of nerdy scientists scratching their eggheads. The dedicated science news sites were a bit more subdued.

But it continued to get quietly worse, even as fewer and fewer locations bothered to report their results. We heard of a few people who just quit and moved away with their families. Some just walked out and went off the grid. Entire labs began to grow silent. CNN began to report on it as some kind of a worldwide UFO cult story or something and I just turned them off. Garabedian threw up a simple message board on the dark web where the few remaining researchers could post their results and speculations. There’s very little in the way of speculation, and we’re losing random chunks of digits every day.

We’re down to less than a million now.

Pi is crumbling– and I shudder at the thought of what will happen when it reaches this side of the decimal point.

[rj-drive-in]

Down With Entropy Department:

They just don't make reality like they used to.

FROM OUT OF THE OLDER CYCLE © 2025 by Rick Hutchins

“I don’t get it,” said Bellamy, his voice cracking with despair. “I just don’t get it.” This was the result of checking his headline news app one too many times.

“What don’t you get?” asked Fernando.

“All the conflict, the petty squabbling,” said Bellamy, throwing up his hands. “The wars, the hate, the politics, the religion, the ideology. What’s the point? Why does it keep happening and happening, over and over?”

“I suppose there are a lot of reasons.”

“But I mean, we’re all made of essentially the same stuff, right? We’re all made of the same cells, the same DNA, the same molecules, the same atoms, the same particles– the same elements that were formed in the same stars a billion years ago.”

“No, not all of us.”

“Exactly! So why do we– wait, what?”

“We’re actually not all made of the same particles and elements.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” demanded Bellamy, making a face like he was trying to read fine print written in cuneiform.

Fernando sighed. “Well, I suppose there’s no harm in telling you,” he said. “I, myself, am made out of a substance left over from the previous cycle of the Oscillating Universe.”

This came out of left field for Bellamy. “The previous… what…. of the what….?”

“The Oscillating Universe,” explained Fernando, “is a cosmological model that states, briefly, that the universe is created in a Big Bang, expands for trillions of years at an ever-decreasing rate, eventually stops, and then contracts more and more swiftly, finally ending in a Big Crunch, whereupon the cycle starts all over again.”

“So the previous universe is completely destroyed?” asked Bellamy, wondering why they were even talking about this.

“Not quite completely,” said Fernando, scrunching his face and wagging a finger. “Some small tiny fraction of it survives. And it survives because the matter and energy of the previous universe is superior to the Big Bang of the subsequent universe.”

“You’ve lost me,” said Bellamy.

“Let me try to find you,” said Fernando. “The name of the game is entropy. Think of making photocopies at work of a form or pamphlet or something. You start off with a pretty nice, crisp original and you make a copy. It still looks pretty nice. You can hardly tell the difference. But then you lose the original and you have to make a copy of the copy. Still good, but not as great. Next time, it’s obvious that it’s a bad copy. This happens a dozen times. A hundred times. Eventually you’re stuck with a pretty fucking shitty copy.”

“This much I can follow,” said Bellamy. “But….”

“Well, that’s what’s been happening to the universe, only it’s happened trillions of times over googolplexi of megayears. The original universe was perfect, like Heaven or something– I don’t know, I wasn’t in that one– but now we’re living in a shitty, umpteenth-generation copy. Only my ‘substance,’ as you call it, is from the previous, slightly less shitty version.”

“Actually, I called it ‘stuff.’”

“Back in my universe, we called it ‘substance,’” said Fernando. “We had a better vocabulary than you people.”

Bellamy shook his head like he had bugs in his ears. “What does all this even mean? How would you even be different? It’s still all just protons and neutrons and electrons and stuff. I mean substance.”

Fernando chuckled a bit condescendingly and shook his head. “That is where you are wrong, my friend,” he said. “The previous universe was fundamentally superior at the most quantum level.”

“At least you had a quantum level.”

Fernando shrugged. “I use the term for the sake of familiarity.”

“Well, then,” said Bellamy, folding his arms skeptically, “if you didn’t have atoms– and stuff– what did you have?”

“Okay, since you ask, I’ll tell,” said Fernando. “Our version of atoms had a perfectly spherical and solid nucleus called a centeron. From out of it grew a multitude of strings called linkons which ended in little seven-fingered hands called hands. None of your fractional particles with fractional charges that can’t decide if they’re points or strings and don’t know where they are or how fast they’re going at the same time. Just good, solid particles and strings and hands that know exactly what they are and what they’re doing.”

“How did they form elements if they were all the same?”

“Elements were determined by the special secret handshakes between those seven-fingered hands. No other element knew another element’s secret handshake. That’s how stability was maintained.”

“And this is what you’re made of?” asked Bellamy, pointing at Fernando’s belly button for some reason.

“Precisely.”

“You’re full of shit,” said Bellamy.

“Not even a little bit,” retorted Fernando. “Have you ever seen me use a restroom? I’m above that sort of thing.”

“Well, no, I suppose not.” Bellamy scratched his chin thoughtfully. “I actually don’t think I have.”

“There you go.”

Bellamy looked at him appraisingly for a long time, and then said, “But if you’re made of sterner stuff from a superior universe, why don’t you do something?”

“What do you mean? I do lots of things.”

“I mean besides playing Star Trek Online and hooking up at Applebee’s. Why don’t you do something for the world?”

“What do you expect me to do for the world?”

“I don’t know! I’m part of this shitty universe. You’re from the superior previous universe. You should be able to get out there and inspire people or something. Get them to follow you and live up to a higher standard. You should be able to lead people out of this steaming pile of a mess we’re in.”

Fernando paused for a moment. “No,” he said.

Bellamy sat up straight as a duck. “You paused for a moment!” he said. “You know I’m right! You have to do this. With greater superiority comes greater responsibility.”

“I don’t know,” said Fernando, making a sick face. “Work with people? Try to make something out of them? Seriously, they give me the willies.”

“But you are Nietzsche’s Ubermensch. You must save us!”

“You’ve read Nietzsche?”

“No, I read that in a thoughtful treatise deconstructing Superman on a blog about obsolete comic book characters.”

“That’s pathetic.”

“And proves that we need help.”

Fernando sighed. “You surely do need help.”

“Well then?”

Fernando stood up and nodded firmly. “All right, I’ll do it! I’ll bring all my superiority from the less-entropic reality of the previous cycle of the Oscillating Universe to bear, and I will save the world!”

“Hello there!” shouted Sebastian from behind.

“Jesus Christ, Sebastian!” squeaked Fernando, jumping six inches into the air. “You scared the shit out of me. Where did you come from?”

Sebastian smiled smugly. “An even older cycle,” he said.

“Damn it!” cried Fernando.