What if lasers were attracted to prayer?
I bet you're really glad you subscribed to this, so you can find out.
What follows is a new short story from HOLOGRAM KEBAB, called PRAYERPHAGE. It is weird. It was originally from the Gord universe in WHO BUILT THE HUMANS?, but I removed it during the beta stage (I needed to make room for more Nori Furukawa shenanigans, which is why his universe grew so massive) but now it’s back.
So it’s not really a ‘new’ story, but I did rewrite it from memory. Memory rewrites are a good mental exercise if you ever want to re-imagine a story without being precious about characters or ideas. I find it works best for comedy, or any fiction which is quite dense (I find comedy and sci-fi have a similar geometry in my head, which I’ll get into some other time).
So, if you are a beta reader with a sense being here before, you have been. A lot of the old version (titled MARCH OF THE PRAYERPHAGE) has been obliterated, leaving us with this hopefully redefined creature.
Anyway, this introduction is too long. I don’t want to be one of those writers. Enjoy.
Prayerphage
What if crystals were sexually attracted to prayer?
“Tell me your fortune,” the scientist said. The fortune teller shook her large, fragile head.
“I don’t think I want to be in this experiment anymore,” the fortune teller replied. She clenched her fists, clattering countless cheap metal rings together.
“You want to understand the crystal, don’t you?” The scientist leaned in close to the fortune teller, so close that she could smell her perfume, even though it was homeopathic. What the scientist and the fortune teller didn’t know was that, at this precise moment, an imaginary camera was panning towards them as an ominous synthwave soundtrack played darkly in the background, rising toward its climax. What this meant was that the fortune teller did not have much time left.
She knew that much, at least. She stared down the darkened corridor ahead, knowing that somewhere in the darkness lingered the barrel of a strange machine.
“You understand the principle,” the scientist began. “The prayerphage is encased in a mirror chamber that amplifies and redirects its energy. When it picks up prayers it heats up. Our goal is to turn that heat into a laser.”
“Yes I know,” the fortune teller said. “But you didn’t tell me I’d be on the receiving end.”
“You won’t be,” the scientist replied. She stepped to one side and turned the lights on at the other end of the corridor. The prayerphage was aimed at a ninety degree angle away from the pair, its barrel pointed at a melon with a face drawn on it.
“Your job,” the scientist explained, “Is to save that melon’s life with your psychic powers. That is, unless you have foreseen a different future?”
The fortune teller was quiet. She closed her eyes and prayed for her own safety. The prayerphage started to rattle. A bright pink laser shot out of the machine, curving and barely searing the edge of the melon, before spiralling through the corridor. It splattered through the fortune teller’s head, showering the scientist in slightly more blood than she was accustomed to being covered with at the end of a difficult shift. The laser vanished into the air and the scientist sighed, shaking her head. She opened a door and walked away into a laboratory, amending a chart on a far wall.
MINUTES SINCE LAST INCIDENT: fifty none
She walked away to the staff canteen, before realising she had forgotten one of the charts.
PSYCHICS BLOWN UP BY LASER: eleven
Within the week the place was shut down. Not because of health and safety issues or funding problems, but because the crystal had grown too powerful. Unbeknownst to the scientists, it had been collecting magic prayer energy from each of its kills, and with this last gruesome harvest it had reached a critical point. The crystal, using its magical, narrative defying powers, teleported itself to a part of the story where it had been acquired by a prominent English university. The next paragraph will largely be irrelevant, so you can skip it if you like.
Once upon a time there was a little boy called God. He was called God because… wait. I’ve already done this story. Sorry. Once upon a time there was a little boy who was not called God. He had a normal name and did normal things and lived inside a normal story and nobody got offended. Yes, that’s perfect. Anyway.
“You can’t have this here,” the scientist said. She was stood outside the multi faith centre on campus and was holding a tin foil hat over the nozzle of the prayerphage.
“It’s a very nice artistic sculpture,” the administrator said.
“It’s a fucking death laser powered by a sentient crystal that is sexually attracted to prayers,” the scientist explained.
“Well, we are an equal opportunities university, open to people of any gender, blood type, demented fetish, or even psychic crystals.”
“That’s not the point,” the scientist was red in the face. “This thing kills people when they are directing their thoughts toward supernatural entities. And you’ve put it in front of the multi faith centre.”
“Well it couldn’t go in front of the social sciences building,” the administrator replied.
“That’s a shame,” the scientist said.
“Why?”
“Not a real science.”
“And blowing people up with crystal lasers is?”
The scientist went quiet. This was not because she had just learned an important lesson or become humbled or anything like that. It was because the prayerphage was vibrating loudly, humming and sparking and preparing to fire. She looked over at the stained windows of the multi faith centre and panicked, pushing the prayerphage over.
It fired. The laser shot up toward the multi faith centre windows but stopped at the last second, as if it was looking through the stained windows. It then turned away as if disgusted, and leaped through an open fire exit, winding its way through corridors and classrooms on an endless pursuit of wishy thinking. It carried on until it got bored and went up into space, where it began its epic pursuit of gods and goddesses.
“I guess those statistics about the rise of atheism are right,” the administrator said in his stupid little voice. “But if all those students weren’t praying, why were they on their knees in the multi faith centre?”
The scientist raised her eyebrow at the naivety of the question.
“Talk about stained glass,” she said. She picked the prayerphage up, taking it away.
Elsewhere, a prominent internet celebrity was selling shirts about atheism whilst writing his blog about atheism and recording a podcast about atheism. He was looking forward to another long day of being mean to religious people on the internet for no real reason. His followers, who all wore the same silly hats and shirts and didn’t understand the irony, were watching his sermon livestream about how much of a good atheist he was. Unbeknownst to them, he had just had a really long pray that his girlfriend’s sister wasn’t pregnant, and that the weird feeling in his testicles was just a friction burn.
The prayerphage laser, which was now somewhere between Jupiter and somewhere else, turned back around. The scientist watched as the pinkish beam dove back down to earth, punching a hole through the atmosphere, hurtling towards a quiet suburban street, and obliterating the internet celebrity.
I am thinking, for the paperback release of HOLOGRAM KEBAB, I might include the original drafts of some stories so people can see how they progressed. If you would like to give me your thoughts on that, it would be really useful to me.