Editor's Note: Brain Games: Stories to Astonish

 Life's become something of a shifted chessboard, hasn't it? My gang has worked hard to put together the Fall/Winter 2020 edition of Third Flatiron Anthologies, a huge issue with 27 short scifi, horror, and fantasy stories. The theme of Brain Games: Stories to Astonish focuses on puzzle solving and ingenuity, inverted tv tropes, inventions (clockwork, practical, or Rube Goldberg), masterful creations, mythology, and social commentary. A number of these tales cross over to the dark side, in keeping with the season, and our final short story ushers us into the winter holidays. (Note the young Santa at work on the cover.)

 

We open with an odd space mystery, as asteroid miners try different theories about who stole their Earth shuttle. Brian Trent gives us "Theft, Sex, and Space Pirates."

Further bending our minds, Geoff Taylor gives us "Killer dApp," software scifi that presents a completely evil yet plausible way to take advantage of anonymous cryptocurrency (hey, kids, don't try this at home). Jetse de Vries dishes out Japanese AI warrior scifi, with embedded poetry.

With the coronavirus playing havoc with people's smellers, it could be important to keep our noses in tip-top health. Two of our stories disagree on what space aliens smell like. Alyce Campbell is pretty sure they smell garlicky ("Kwatt Games"), while Brenda Kezar speculates that they smell like patchouli ("US Portal Service"). Maureen Bowden dips into "The Sweet Smell of Sheep" to tell the story of the Trojan War from Paris's ex-wife.

As we are encouraged to stay in our homes and socially distance ourselves, mail delivery becomes an even more important daily service, not to mention that postal service is a pillar of civilization. We're not so sure a quantum portal would be a good replacement. Rebecca Fung posits that Santa might agree with us, as he gets all his toy ideas from kids' letters, in "The Greatest Toymaker in the World."

Artificial intelligence, androids, and robots seem to be on a lot of people's minds. That is, do they have minds like us? Henry McFarland describes some "Perfectly Rational Gamblers," and their frequent visits to casinos, while C. J. Peterson writes the code that would determine whether two supercomputers have achieved self awareness (hilarity ensues). But could we be living in a computer simulation? In Paula Hammond's "All Your Bases Yada-Yada," a woman discovers what seems like a glitch in the pixels on the way to work. It's a bittersweet symphony. Although they didn't have 3-IN-ONE oil back in Medea's day, she helps out Jason and the Argonauts against a giant robot that's prone to rust, in Jenny Blackford's "A Bronze Giant to Guard Her."

For you players of games: A cop in training gets too comfortable living in virtual reality in Jess Hyslop's "Softlock."

Intelligence different from our own may arise from Nature, as Ellen Denton reminds us, in "Minds Unseen."

We hope to rely on good old-fashioned human ingenuity to get us out of scrapes like deadly viruses. Let's see what the Nobel Peace Prize address in "Stockholm, 2066" might be, as told by Joseph Sidari. And we wonder what Graham J. Darling is referring to in his comical postapocalyptic tale, "The New Season." Is it the new flu season, or the election season? And which is scarier?

Lisa Timpf shows us it's possible to do our shopping without all of today's "helper technology," in "The Disconnect."

Halloween season wouldn't be complete without some horror tales. Eleftherios Keramidas's sorcerer just can't resist applying the latest technology to outsmart a deadly magical book, in "Toxic." Monica Joyce Evans's "Forced Teaming" discusses the cons of a job holding the digital copies of dead human personalities. For some Frankensteinian steampunk, Dennis Conrad's "The Incredible Machine" sucks the life out of us. Otherworldly calls come in through a village's outdated switchboard in David Rogers's ghostly "Numbers." In M. Richard Eley's "Bad Connection," a hacker gets his just comeuppance when he Zoom-bombs the wrong meeting.

To spice things up, Justin Short offers "Mock Me Amadeus." (It's a graveyard smash.) Dominick Cancilla recounts the adventures of "Joey and Rue," a riotous mashup of demons and Rube Goldberg, while M. K. Hutchins writes an empathetic tale about getting on the Grim Reaper's good side in "Upcycling Death."

As usual, we conclude with the flash humor section, "Grins and Gurgles." If you're fed up with the constant pillow guy commercials, Steve Zisson tells us how to DIY your own. Aidan Doyle channels his lovable evil villain to lecture his minions in "To All the Creatures I've Hid from Ethics Committees," and Lauren Lang's lingerie model suffers the discomfort of outer space to find "The Best Bra for the Boobs."

Brain Games: Stories to Astonish is available in eBook on Amazon (free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers), and there's a paperback edition.