To the sound of a scream, a ball of the crumpled paper flew across the bedroom and landed in the trash atop a pile of similarly scrunched-up sheets. On the other side of the room, hunched up over her desk, Susie ran her hands through her hair and scowled in frustration. Why was this so difficult?
It was such a simple assignment: write a short description of a world you’ve invented. Her English teacher had clearly given it to them for fun, as a way of letting them relax after all the exam prep they’d been burying themselves under. Most of her classmates had finished it in class…
But she just. Couldn’t. Do. It!
With a scream, Susie grabbed the last remaining sheet of paper on her desk and tore it in half in a single dramatic motion. This done, she stomped her way to bed. Throwing herself under the covers, she rolled over and moaned. Maybe… she’d have more luck in the morning…
Flicking off the light, she lay there looking out of the window at all the twinkling stars in the night sky… She sighed. How many of them had worlds spinning around them, she wondered?
It wasn’t as if she couldn’t think of a world to write about. In fact, she could think of hundreds. They spilled into her mind in an endless deluge, like a group of rambunctious children fighting to be the first to use the arcade machine. One moment, she was surfing a planet wide river of lava, the next she was taking tea with a race of adorable elf-like aliens. A few minutes later, she’d be whaling on a moon, accompanied in her hunt by a gang of charming grayliens.
Urgh! She screwed up her eyes and rolled away from the window, massaging her temple in a vain attempt to suppress the headache her imaginings had summoned. Taking a deep breath, she lay back and sighed. Maybe if she didn’t drink so much coffee…
Over an hour passed before Susie finally slipped off to sleep. She spent most of that hour half-awake, her mind still sailing the imaginary cosmos like a turbocharged speedboat, skipping from one island of wonder to another to another to another. The alacrity of it all left her with whiplash.
Eventually, of course, her brain’s fuel simply ran out. Burying her face in the pillow, she shivered in delight and sank deep into dream…
*
In the dream, Susie floated in space, suspended naked, her body aglow, in the orbit of a planet that looked a lot like Earth if you didn’t look too closely. That is to say: it had a blue oceans and green continents, and a swirl of white clouds swaddling it like cotton. But the continents were the wrong shape, completely the wrong shape: when she looked for North America she found something more like a dragon’s head, and when she flitted around to the other side of the globe in search of Africa or Asia, she saw only shapes like a giant bowl and… well, it wasn’t exactly a toilet, but….
Floating back into her initial position above Dragon Land, Susie came to a stop and stroked her chin in thought. This was a really weird dream. Why was the planet before her so clear? She’d never had a dream with such a high-resolution. And why was she naked? And glowing? Her dreams weren’t normally this simple or consistent. Normally they revolved around really weird things like the Clown with a Centipede for a Nose or the Dog Who Ate a Trombone.
She was glad not to see those two here. Even if this was a strange dream, at least it was on topic. Maybe she could find some inspiration for her assignment?
The planet below turned, its cottony clouds swirling. Of course, she’d have to get a little closer. She couldn’t just write about ‘Earth-but-not’, and that was pretty much all she could tell about the place from up here.
Since this seemed to be the kind of dream where she could fly, she tried to float down to the planet’s surface. It worked… to an extent. Just as it seemed she might actually be able to do it, she found herself stuck against some kind of soft resistance, as if the air pressure had jumped up by a thousandfold.
Stepping back, she considered her situation. For some reason she couldn’t reach the planet itself. Maybe that was because she wasn’t actually near it? It was like she’d seen it on the computer screen and tried to stick her head through the glass to reach it.
Whether that actually made sense was a little beyond her at the moment, but it seemed as consistent as anything else in this dream. Tapping her chin, she thought about it some more. If she couldn’t go to the planet… maybe she could bring the planet to her? You can’t take the school computer home, so you print off what you need and take that, right? Yeah, that made a certain amount of sense…
Studying the planet some more, she decided it was at least worth a short. Now, how to.. Ahah!
She made a motion with her hands she’d seen cowboys make in films. A golden lasso, seemingly spun of her own hair, formed in her hands and grew to planetary size with a few swings round her head. Grinning with pride, she flung it. The golden hoop wrapped around the world and grew tight around the equator.
Still smirking, Susie tightened her grip and tugged as hard as she was able–
–DRRRING–
*
–RINGRINGRINGRINGRING!
She snapped upright in bed and slammed her hand down on her alarm clock. Sweat beaded her face and dripped onto the bedsheets. Her heart pounded as if with great exertion, and her muscles ached as if she’d spent the night lifting weights.
What a weird dream… she thought, rubbing her head. She flicked a glance at her desk and the empty sheets upon it. I guess it makes sense I’d have nightmares about it though.
Rolling out of bed, she strolled to the bathroom. Weirdly, the dream refused to fade. Normally she forgot her dreams within a minute of waking up, but this one remained clear in her head even as she brushed her teeth and took a shower. She could see the alien planet in her mind’s eyes as clear as on Google Earth. Spin it around, zoom in on it. Even reach out and touch it if she really wanted to.
Returning to her bedroom, she sat down at her desk and grabbed a fresh sheet of paper and a pen. She didn’t know exactly what was happening to her, but she wasn’t going to miss the chance to exploit.
Hmm, how exactly should I start? Closing her eyes, she concentrated on the world looming in her mind’s eyes like the prettiest little jewel. Concentrating, she zoomed in, shooting down to the planet’s surface far faster than had been possible in the dream. Finding herself over open ocean, she zipped sideways till she came to something resembling a port. As she hovered there, a giant cargo ship sailed beneath her, its desk overflowing with containers. A bird–it looked like a seagull, only… not–flitted past her with a squawk. Susie winced and tried to focus.
Shooting forward like a meteor, she dropped till she hovered over the very surface of the water. When the waves rolled past beneath her, she actually felt their crests touch her toes. The water felt cold–it made her want to pee herself.
Before her, the port city squatted like a cluster of metal mushrooms. (…Hey, that was a pretty cool simile! She’d have to write that down.) Ships of every size and type imaginable choked the docks: beyond them spawled rows of rustic buildings, and further on: some leviathan skyscrapers glinting in the sun. Floating there, Susie wondered if she could make notes without losing her focus and disrupting the whole weird experience.
As she struggled to experiment, another ship–a yacht bustling with partygoers–happened to sail in front of her and block her view. With a frown, Susie did something instinctive. She raised her hand and swatted it, sweeping it aside like a bug.
A terrible boom struck her ears, making the water ripple like the skin of a beaten drum. The yacht, and everyone on it, vanished. She had a vague impression of a silhouette fading into the sun, and then it was gone. The waters settled–her view was clear.
There was one other change to the simulation, of course: from the other nearby boats came the sound of screaming.
Susie winced. This fantasy wasn’t just complete, it was annoyingly complete. Wasn’t there something she could do about it?
She looked around and, to her delight, found a mute button floating in the air just to her right. Exactly where I expected it. She punched it. The sound died.
Satisfied, Susie floated forward, past the sailing boats silently fleeing her position and onto the docks, where the cranes had stopped moving and the workers had dropped their tools to flee.
Susie ignored them the same way she would have ignored ants, turning her gaze on the city around them instead. As helpful as this little fantasy was, she really wanted more information. She couldn’t just write about ‘the port city’. She needed a name or something too.
As if on command, glowing letters spun into existence and formed a word before her: Miranean.
“Miranean?” said Susie. “That’s a lame name. I can’t use that.” She thought for a second. “How about Susopolis?”
On cue, the letters before her shifted and changed, replaced by her suggestion. And though she didn’t see it, this little Find and Replace happened to every other instance of ‘Mirenaean’ on the planet. As far as the signs and advertising and records were concerned, the city had always been named ‘Susopolis’.
Floating on, Susie found she could open her eyes and still maintain a clear, if somewhat translucent image of Susopolis in her mind’s eye. Snatching up a pen, she set about scribbling, taking note of every interesting detail that entered her vision.
But by the time she'd filled up a page, Susie couldn’t help but feel disappointed. Susopolis was so boring. This wasn’t a fantasy world–it was just like any city on Earth. She wouldn’t get any points for writing about this crap.
Come on, Susie, she thought, massaging her temples. Use your imagination…! Surely there’s something you can add to make this place more interesting…?
An idea came to her in a spark. She grinned. Perfect! Dragons! Dragons make everything interesting!
Closing her eyes, she focused her gaze on the city street ahead of her with the palm trees running along its sidewalks and all the little cars and people scurrying between them. Dragons!
She snapped. She hadn’t actually known how to snap before, but in the dream it came easy. With a pop, a dragon–big and red and scaly and just generally draconic–appeared in the air above the city. It did a loop-de-loop and crashed down on the main street, where it wasted no time in snatching up and devouring a couple of the slower-reacting bystanders.
As she watched the carnage that followed, Susie couldn’t help but notice how silent the whole scene was. Even the cars made no noise as they sped away, leaving tyre marks on the asphalt. (The Mute Button hovered just out of sight, forgotten about.)
Grinning to herself, Susie made a few notes about the less-than-friendly dragon who lived in cove to the east and loved to fly over and gobble up the occasional citizen. But as she wrote, she felt a sudden knot in her gut. At first she thought it was the gory sight below her, but a second later she realized the truth:
“Crap,” she said, “I completely forgot about breakfast.”
Opening a single eye, she flicked a glance at her clock. Crap, I don’t have time before school!
Groaning, she massaged her temple. And she was so hungry too! Maybe she could grab a slice of toast on the way out…
Floating there, ignoring the rampage of the dragon and the silent screams of Susopolis’s unfortunate citizens, Susie couldn’t help but let her imagination wander. No, forget the toast. I’ll grab a burger from PattyQueen on the way to school.
No sooner had she thought of her makeshift breakfast than the delicious image of it fell into her mind. The soft bun, the plump patty, the crunchy lettuce. Oooh, she wanted it in her mouth now.
As Susie’s focus changed, the world around her shifted subtly, so subtly that in her hunger trance she didn't notice it. When she thought of the burger's bun, the buildings around her blurred, the concrete that formed their walls losing all its harshness and gaining hundreds of little protrusions… like seeds sprinkled on a bun.
When she thought of the dripping cheese, the world around her changed again. Behind her, the giant crane of the port groaned and lost its strength. The legs bent, and the entire thing simply crumpled in on itself. Instead of striking the ground with the clatter of tortured metal, it struck with a splot, and melted rapidly into a puddle.
When she thought of the crunchy lettuce, all over the billboards on the surrounding buildings crinkled, dripping tiny beads of frigid perspiration.
Finally, she thought of the meat, of the plump, delicious patty, and down on the ground…
The hundreds of people fleeing the dragon screamed to find themselves sizzling and spitting as surely as if its breath had caught them. Collapsing to the floor, they rolled about in horror or leapt into the ocean, desperately trying to put themselves out. It didn’t work, of course, but in the latter case it at least made them nicely salty.
As you might have guessed, this wasn’t a coincidence.
The more Susie focused on the Platonic hamburger she wanted to buy from PattyQueen, the more the imaginary world she’d lasso receded from her mind, gradually gaining distance till she floated in space looking down on it from orbit.
Except…
A delicious smell struck Susie’s nostrils. She frowned and sniffed, looking around without opening her eyes like a dog scenting a treat in its sleep. At first, she thought she’d fallen back to sleep, but when the smell refused to fade…
Susie snapped her eyes open. And blinked. Where the imaginary world of her dream had been floated a gigantic burger, a perfect, dream-like Ideal of Burgers whose mere existence was enough to make her ravenous. In an instant, Susie forgot all about school and her project. She wanted nothing more than to open wide and stuffed the perfect burger into her mouth.
She paused. This was kinda like a dream, right? Why couldn’t she stuff the burger into her mouth?
With a big grin, she raised her hands and snatched the patty out of space as if it were no longer than any normal burger. She opened wide, wide, wide, wide as the orbit of the farthest planet of the solar system and stuffed inside her like the morsel it had become, taking her time to chew the crunchy cabbage and savor the gooey cheese. It was the richest patty she’d ever tasted, juicy and thick, and she wanted nothing more than to chew on it forever.
As she swallowed, a knock on her door reminded her what time it was. Her eyes snapped open–the dream faded. She looked around, heart pounding in shock.
“I know! I know! I’m going,” she called, hurrying to change out of her PJs. As she did, she flicked a glance at the notes she’d taken of the dream world. Scanning them now, they didn’t look all that impressive. Aw, to hell with it. She’d just rip off Tolkien.
Grabbing her back, she hurried out the door. She barely even noticed the fact she wasn’t hungry.
*
Samantha wanted to scream, but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t.
Everything had been going perfectly for her. She’d had a hard morning at work, what with the death of her entire extended family in a freak hot air balloon accident, but her boss had seen her struggling and suggested she take the afternoon off. At first, she’d decided to spend it at home, but after some more thought, she figured it might be better to go for a nice walk on the beach. Where better to get over your trauma than the beach, after all?
That was when the trouble had started.
As she approached the docks, she heard a terrible sound: like a giant clapping his hands right in front of her face. She’d scrambled to cover her ears, but the sound still resonated inside her, making her want to double over and throw up.
She looked in the direction of the source, fearing a shooting or a bomb or–God forbid–a hot air balloon, but there was no sign of what had happened whatsoever.
As she struggled to figure out what had happened, everything went silent. Utterly silent. She squealed again and heard nothing. The cars on the street had turned silent, the squeak of seagulls on the wind had cut out. Even her body had–! She couldn’t hear her own breathing!
A flash in the corner of her vision snatched her gaze in the direction of the town center. Looking up, she gaped in horror. A giant scaled lizard, like something out of myth, flipped and loop-de-looped over the city, spitting flame. Even as she watched, it landed on the roof of a nearby building and incinerated several people below with a blast of its fiery breath. Samantha didn’t hear herself screaming.
She turned and ran, wanting to be anywhere, anywhere but here, but as she fled, the world changed around her.
All of a sudden, the smooth stone of the pavement felt so soft, like she was stepping on a mattress. When she took a step, her foot sank into the stone. Stranger still, little lumps were appearing all over. At first she took them at first to be pebbles, but on closer inspection she realized they were seeds, giant seeds. Her feet hurt when she stepped on them.
She picked up the pace and ran for home, though she couldn’t hear her pounding heart or anything save the sound of her own lungs. What she did feel was the heat–a terrible, all pervading heat that welled up from inside her as if she’d been on the longest run of her life.
She slammed to a stop and clutched her chest in horror. She hadn’t run that far–why did her body feel so hot?!
For a moment, she thought the dragon had caught her. Was this what being incinerated felt like?
She found the truth a moment later. Raising an arm, she found her skin sizzling like a burger on the patty, dripping juice and darkening to a perfect, delectable brown.
In silence, Samantha screamed.
A moment later, the world compacted in on itself, crushed. She found herself hauled into the air and slammed into a hundred others like herself. Their clothes vanished–their naked bodies squished together. In the face of the invisible vice, they deformed, limbs wrapping around each other till they were all but indistinguishable, and still they couldn’t scream, not even to plead for mercy.
For several moments, they lay there in this morass, trapped, naked, hot and sweaty. Samantha wanted to whimper, to scream, but all she could do was lie there in silence, lost in her own terror and misery.
Something struck her new world and cut through it like a knife. Samantha found herself flung backward, bounced off a smooth, wet surface, and thrown down a long, fleshy pipe.
Just as she thought things couldn’t get any worse, she hit the acid.
***
Susie moaned as she read the assignment. “Write a description of an imaginary world,” she said with a groan. “Urgh, I hate this kind of task.”
Her writing tutor looked at her sympathetically. “Sorry, Susie,” he said, “but this is probably one of the easier assignments I have for you. If you didn’t want to write, you shouldn’t have picked a Creative Writing degree.”
Susie groaned again. “It’s not the writing, it’s the worldbuilding! I just have too many ideas. I get stuck picking one to use.”
“Just go with your gut,” said her instructor with a smile. “Don’t overthink it.”
“Mmn.”
That night, in her dorm room, she sat there tearing up sheets of paper exactly as she had in high school. Her roommate had long since gone partying, leaving her with little in the way of distraction, but that had done very little to help Susie’s focus.
“Oh forget it,” he said at last. “I’ll think of something in the morning.” Crumpling the last sheet into a ball, she threw off her clothes and leapt into bed, where sleep soon swept over her wearied mind like the ocean over a shipwreck.
*
In the dream, she floated golden and bright above the cloud wreathed ball of a pale pinkish planet.
For several minutes, she simply floated there in silence, barely processing the glorious sight before her. It reminded her of something, though she couldn’t exactly explain what. All she could do was float in orbit, a golden observer, celestial.
Then she remembered. It came to her in a flash, like bumping her head on the door frame. Hey! This is just like that dream I had in high school! The rest of the incident came back fast, a blur of images too quick for her to process. The waking dream, the perfect clarity of its visions. The delicious burger she’d finished off the whole experience with.
She laughed and flitted about in delight. She’d written the whole experience off as a hallucination her sleep-addled brain had worked up, but no, here she was again. It was real.
Laughing to herself, she sailed around the planet as a streak of gold, a human meteor. As before, she tried to land, but for whatever reason, her astral form couldn’t make contact. In the end, she ended up sitting in orbit again, wondering what to do next.
“What did I do before?” she asked aloud. “Didn’t I lasso it… or something?” With a frown, she made the relevant motions… and gasped it glee as a giant golden lasso sprung from her hands to wrap around the planet. Laughing in delight, she gave it a tug. And a tug. And one last, emphatic–
She woke up in a snap, as if the planet had crashed straight into her forehead. Whatever the truth, it was impressed on her mind in one sense: whenever she closed her eyes, she could see it as clear as anything, bright and pinkish amid the darkness of her eyelids.
She hurried over to her desk and grabbed a pen. Okay, let’s see if we can find some inspiration…
Closing her eyes, she concentrated. The planet swam into focus, filling her eyes like an ornate gem. “What’s your name, little fella?” she asked, as if it were a puppy. Letters sprang into being around her, coalescing in the order of a word.
“Prinhilk,” she read, scowling in contempt. Well, it was certainly a name for a planet. Whatever, though. She could always change it in post. “Now, let’s see what you’ve got to offer, Prinhilk.” She willed herself forward.
The planet shot towards her like a speeding car, and the next thing she knew, she was standing in New York City. Nope. Wait. Take a second and process things. The writing on the signs definitely wasn’t English, and there was no Empire State Building nor Statue of Liberty or anything else she would have expected to see in NYC’s skyline.
A… she had to assume it was a taxi… sped past her, though it was a bright sky blue instead of the yellow of NYC’s. It came to a stop a few meters away, and a door opened to let out a young man and what could only be his girlfriend. The two walked on, hand in hand. Their clothing–feathery, with flaps like a flower’s petals–resembled nothing she’d ever seen before.
“This is so weird,” she said, floating forward. (If any of the natives were surprised by the strange floating woman who’d descended from the heavens, they didn’t show any sign of it.
Looking around, she tried to find something to write about. Now she was here, she remembered the problem she’d had last time. This world was too similar to Earth!
Coming to a stop in the middle of an intersection. She tapped her chin in thought. She needed some way to spice the whole place up. Something that would make it more interesting to read about.
One of the sky blue taxis beeped just beneath her. She groaned in disgust. Just as she was about to turn away, a smile lit up her face. “Ah! There’s an idea! There’s nothing more creative than an alternative mode of transport!” She clapped her hands.
With an utterly undramatic sqwibble sound, every car in the… she had to assume the whole world… vanished, replaced by comical, cartoonish carriages drawn by giant, googly-eyed chickens.
Cries of confusion and screams of panic filled the air. Susie, floating unseen, burst into a round of laughter. “That’s much better!”
Traffic, unfortunately, had slowed to a standstill as all the former-drivers tried to figure out how to make a chicken run. With a snap of her fingers, she made the chickens move herself–fresh screams choked the air as everything spun back into motion.
Folding her arms, Susie beamed in pride. “Well, that was a start. Now, what should I do next?” She looked around for inspiration.
The first thing that caught her attention was the banality of the skyline. It really did look just like New York City, and New York City looked like shit! (Disclaimer: New York City only sort of looks like shit.)
She tapped her chin. “How can I improve it?” Humming to herself, she floated over to the last row of buildings, which cut through the city like the Himalayas through Nepal or wherever.
Humming to herself, she made a gripping motion and wrenched her fist into the air as if pulling a carrot out of the ground.
With a series of comical pops, the entire row of buildings snapped into the air and floated there suspended, as if in an invisible puppeteer's strings. Screams sounded from the ground and inside the buildings alike–if she looked, she could see little faces gazing in horror out of the windows.
With her free hand, Susie made a motion at the empty lots they’d left behind them. Grass and trees and flowers sprouted at her command, rapidly transforming the empty lots into a beautiful park.
“Much better,” she said. “I’m sure they much prefer having a nice park to a bunch of stuffy office buildings.”
Speaking of… Susie held the buildings there in the air for several more seconds as she figured out what to do with them. In the end, a smirk lit up her face. With a simple gesture, she snatched the largest building out of the crowd and brought her hands together as if molding clay.
Just like that, the building collapsed into itself, crushed into a cube of metal and concrete and glass barely a hundredth of its former size. Interestingly, you could still hear people screaming inside it.
Laughing like a demon, Susie molded and sculpted her invisible ball of clay. At the same time, the building itself changed, the dull gray concrete turning bright and colorful and smooth, turned to plastic, while the fresh appendages sprouted from its side.
Finally, with a grin, Susie made a throwing motion at the ground. The former building shot downward and unfurled like a flower, and just like that, the park had a new work of public art–a bright red, liquid-y lava lamp-y thing–for the citizens to enjoy.
If you looked really closely, you could just about make out faces in the plastic.
Reveling in her newfound power, Susie did something similar to the rest of the floating buildings, adding molten clocks and stacks of cubes and sculptures that looked like different things from different angles. This done, she floated back and took in her work with a grin.
“Not bad,” she said, clapping her hands in delight. “Now… what should I do next…?”
*
Heart pounding, Adrian drew back his fist and slammed it hard, against the window of the building. “Let us out!” he screamed, voice breaking as he spoke. “Let us out of here!”
Tears running down his face, he spun around in search of something, anything, that might possibly help his situation . The others had all fled by the emergency exit, but Adrian had stayed, knowing how little good it would do them. What good was the exit when the building was floating in the air?
Sweat running down his face, he turned back to the window again, all but ready to drop to his knees and pray to every deity he knew for help.
Before he had a chance, he felt a pressure, a terrible, all-crushing pressure. He stopped screaming and gaped in shock. He felt as if he were suddenly standing on the bottom of the sea.
In terrifying, unearthly silence, the walls and the floor and the ceiling and everything in between them all flew towards him, crushed inward. He screamed and raised his arms to shield his body, but it turned out not to matter.
As the objects hit him, he found himself deformed. When a desk struck his chest, he curled around it like rubber. A chair hit him from the other side, and he flattened where they met as if caught in a vice.
A moment later, the walls and ceiling and floor all reached him, and Adrian found himself squished impossibly small, crushed into an infinitesimal cube indistinguishable from any of the objects around him. He couldn’t tell where they ended and he began. In fact, he could feel them as if they were part of his own body.
His eye had ended up pressed against the glass, and so he saw the skyline rising as he and the rest of the compacted building dropped. A moment later, they hit the ground–he felt it as if against his stomach–with a thud.
Sitting there in the dirt, Adrian felt a different kind of pressure, as if several pliers were pinching his plastic flesh and pulling. His legs grew, while his former arms curled around to join up with them, forming a large loop of distorted, glossy flesh. He couldn't see himself, but for some reason he thought of a donut.
Seconds later, another, larger pair of pliers seized his entire upper body and stretched it like a piece of gum, looping him around him like two links of a chain, and leaving him looking down on himself from a particularly unusual angle.
As his former flesh finished settling into a hard, smooth plastic, Adrian struggled to comprehend what he was seeing.
It looked a little like the bubbles of a lava lamp.
*
For the next several hours (she had the whole morning free), Susie created, erased, and transformed to her heart’s content, replacing every aspect of the city she found boring.
She replaced a stadium with an enormous coliseum, fusing the gathered crowd into the stonework of the new seats in the process. She tore the subway out of the ground and converted it into a series of high-tech glassy tubes which coiled through the air like some kind of playset for hamsters. She even melted the city’s business district into water, converting the whole ugly mess (and everyone unfortunate enough to be in it) into a beautiful lake.
As she worked, she occasionally opened one eye and made a few quick notes on her wonderful creations. She supposed it was ironic, really. She wasn’t using the imaginary world as inspiration so much as a sounding board for her own ideas, but if it meant she passed the assignment, she couldn't exactly complain.
Finally, her notepad full, Susie floated on to the city’s docks and, with a flick of her hand, replaced it with a beautiful beach covered in towels and ice boxes and parasols. (She didn’t bother to ask where all the dockworkers had gone.)
Plopping her ass in a convenient deckchair, she lay back with a sigh, delighted in her work. This might not be the most efficient way to complete a writing assignment, but it was certainly the most fun.
As she lay there, her stomach rumbled.
With a sigh, she opened one eye and peeked at her watch. 11:00AM, waaaaay too early for lunch. She was planning to meet her roommate for it at twelve, so she’d just have to wait until then.
This resolution didn’t exactly solve her hunger pangs though. Sitting there in her dreamworld, listening to her belly, Susie couldn’t help but imagine its grumbling as the roar of a giant monster come to devour the whole world.
She smirked. “That's a funny mental image.”
“RRRRRAAARGH! I’m here to devour the whole world!”
Susie blinked. Looking over her shoulder, she found herself staring at… her? It definitely looked like her, though she was pretty sure she wasn’t 200 meters tall and wearing a cheap Godzilla onesie.
Sitting in shock, she watched as her gigantic doppelganger drew in a deep breath and roared, before leaning down and snatching up some of the crowd standing stunned at her sudden appearance. Tossing them into the air, she threw back her head and opened wide. A few moments later, her teeth clanged shut, and she swallowed with an enormous gulp.
In the same instant, Susie–the real Susie–felt a strange taste on her tongue. Opening her mouth, she stuck it out for inspection, but there was nothing on it, let alone anyway sign she’d eaten anything. Just the taste, and the strange feeling of satiation.
With a tremendous roar, her giant counterpart snatched up car after car and forced them into her with a series of terrible crunches. The screams rolled all the way to the real Susie on the beach.
As her doppelganger swallowed a whole bus full of civilians, Susie tasted something oddly metallic. “Urgh,” she said, hacking and spitting. “Vehicles taste like shit.” Turning back to her double, she snapped her fingers.
Suzilla had just picked up another bus full of people–they banged at the windows, screaming for mercy. As she raised it to her mouth, however, there was a comical pop, and just like that, the bus was gone, replaced by a gigantic subway sandwich.
“Much better,” said the real Susie. Her counterpart opened wide and took an enormous chomp.
*
Stacy gripped the support poles and screamed like everyone else around her as the bus sailed into the air like a child’s toy vehicle. To the monster, they weighed nothing more than a simple can of soda.
Her mind ran in circles of terror. It’s going to eat us. It’s going to eat us. It’s going to eat us. She could already feel the giant’s teeth rending her flesh, slicing through muscles and grinding bone as easily as she’d devoured her lunch. Whimpering, she screwed up her eyes and wailed. No! No! It’s not fair! It’s not–!
A wave of something tingly rolled through Stacy’s form and made her stop crying and open her eyes and look around just in time to see them all start changing. It happened quickly, so quickly she barely had a chance to process it. One moment, they were a group of flesh and bone passengers trapped in a metal bus: the next, the vehicle had turned soft and beige and doughy, and Stacy found her fellow passengers a lot more brightly colored.
Looking down, she squealed to find her own skin a dark red, slick with condensation. She smelled something. Something familiar. T-Tomato?
She wasn’t the only red one--several others had gone all red-faced on her too. Others had turned green and crispy, others brown and juicy. And several had turned bright yellow and started to drip.
Before she had a chance to process this horrifying transformation, she felt a terrible pressure–as if she’d suddenly traveled deep, deep underwater–and screamed as she compacted like a can in a press, slamming into the person beside her and collapsing, crushed, as the ceiling and floor of the bus fell on them like a vice.
Lying there, blinded, unable to move. Stacy could only listen and whimper. What was happening? What was happening?
A snap like two giant blades striking sounded, and suddenly Stacy could see again. Everything before her was gone, replaced by a slick red cavern and two rows of bright white ivory. For a moment, she simply stared at them in confusion.
A second later, the teeth came for her.
*
Suzilla continued for rampage for around twenty or so minutes, by which point the real Susie was more than sated. Having vicariously snacked on countless civilians, vehicles, and even a few whole buildings, she felt fuller than she ever had in her life.
Sitting there, she patted her belly and sighed in relief. Opening an eye, she peeked at a watch, she realized she should probably be getting ready to meet her roommate. Wherever they went, she didn’t think she’d be ordering though.
As she willed the planet to leave her, a feeling of absence suddenly struck her. She was missing something, wasn’t she? What was it…? What was it…? Ah! Of course.
She always finished her meals with a drink.
Looking down on the planet before her, Susie raised her hand, and mimed wringing a rag. Squelch!
Before her, the planet crumpled as if it were made of sponge. Its bright pink color faded, reduced to something closer to gray than red, and from the bottom of the world (from Susie’s perspective), a bright pink fluid, glistening and sweet began to drip.
Tightening her hands, Susie zoomed back in close and watched with a smirk as every organic molecule on the planet–plants, animals, and all the nutrients that gave them life–compressed, flattened and liquified, forced down, down, through the pores of the planet itself to emerge from the bottom as a delicious organic smoothie, rich in everything a healthy body needed.
Flying back into orbit, Susie squeezed till the planet was a shriveled gray husk floating above a glistening ball of pink fluid. With a flourish of her wrist, she had the substance bottled up and transported to her hand for ready consumption.
“Ah,” she said, tipping back her head. “Worldbuilding is thirsty work.”
*
The end of the world started with the falling of the sky, though this happened to work a lot differently to the way Peter had always imagined it.
As he strolled through the city center after a brief shopping trip, a bag of new clothes swinging at his side, he found himself slammed against the floor and held there, trapped, unable to move. From around him came hundreds of screams as everyone else in the plaza slammed into the ground too, held there as if by a giant, invisible hand.
Struggling to look up, Peter found it wasn’t only people affected: the pigeons lay scattered around too, pinned as surely as the humans, as did the trees they’d put in to make the place look more natural. They lay on their sides as if felled in a storm, creaking under the weight of the terrible pressure assaulting them. Thick, pinkish fog formed on the ground around them as if the atmosphere itself were being flattened too.
Muscles straining, Peter struggled to stand upright. With every second, the weight became a little more unbearable, till at last, he could only release a gasp and slump, unable to bear it anymore.
He clearly wasn’t the only one: around him, the screams had faded to whimpers as the rest of the shoppers gave up their resistance. They lay there feebly, struggling even to twitch.
Then Peter heard the first splot.
With a grunt, he snapped his eyes to the source of the sound and found the young woman who’d been lying there gone, replaced by a pile of empty clothing in a puddle of pinkish liquid sinking rapidly through the cracks in the stonework. He blinked.
Splot! Splot! Splot!
Peter watched, eyes wide in horror, as person after person around him gave up under the pressure and popped like blisters, bursting into blobs of pinkish fluid and leaving only their empty clothes to remind you of who they’d been.
The pressure on him increased. A thin moan escaped his lips.
Then, just like that, splot! He found himself crushed like an insect. His body burst into goo and ran as a liquid. There was no pain, nor the sudden termination of his life that he’d expected. Instead, he just flowed like the liquid he’d become… down, down, into the earth, which drank him up with an unrelenting thirst.
As he flowed, half terrified, half unbelieving, through those tiny channels in the dirt, Peter found himself meeting up with others in the same situation. Their bodies collided and fused, meshed together, inseparable. He felt their thoughts, tasted them like his own, and as more of them built up, he soon lost track of his thinking. He couldn’t tell where he ended and the others began.
Together, inseparable, they sank and sank and sank through the earth, until at last the strange gravity affecting them dragged them back into the light again. Floating there, formless and inanimate, Peter felt hundreds, thousands like himself, all cuddled up close, floating there in the frigid void with him. He wanted to call out, but he didn’t have the strength.
As he wondered what would happen next, more confused than scared of it all at this stage, a giant cage of glass materialized around them. Its harsh walls squeezed them even tighter, but this feeling of being trapped with a billion others was nothing compared to what happened next.
The world turned, gravity seized them again. Peter found himself and everyone around him flowing down…
…through the throat of a giant and into the cauldron of its stomach.
***
The phone’s ringing cut off as she picked it up and put it to her ear. “Hello, this is Susie Albarn. Oh, hey Deborah. It’s good to hear from you. You want to talk about my next project?”
Things had been going well for Susie since college. The novel she’d written on the side, inspired by her impossibly vivid dreams, had been an instant success, catapulting her straight to the top of every bestseller list. Overnight, her publisher had gone from treating her like dirt to worshiping her like a superstar. Her agent’s phone had blown up with requests to talk about her next work.
Overwhelmed with success, she’d done what she’d always done: gone to sleep, wrangled another planet, and–after some little tweaks–written a story based on it.
Once again, it had been an enormous hit. Sure enough, Susie found herself endless requests for book-signings and interviews. The reading public couldn’t get enough of her, and neither could her publisher. They wanted a new novel yesterday, and they weren’t going to stop ringing till she wrote it.
So she'd gone back to sleep, wrangled a dozen new worlds and gone through each of them in order in search of their best parts. Some she’d torn to pieces and reassembled. Others, she meshed together whole. A handful, she’d discarded outright, consigning to the recycling bin of her brain, and presumably oblivion. She hadn’t had to think twice. After all, they weren't real.
Things had changed with the talk show. She’d been booked for a standard interview, nothing special (Here’s my new book! Buy it! Buy it! Buy it!), but the person she went on after was a scientist. And not just any scientist, but an astronomer focused on exoplanets. Sitting just off set, Susie had listened to him, fascinated, as he talked about the field’s big mystery of the year: how a planet with a name like Elon Musk’s new child had vanished from all of their instruments.
“It’s the strangest thing,” he’d explained, as Susie sat up in her chair to better listen. “We located it a while ago, and we were in the process of studying, trying to figure out whether it could sustain life. Our calculations suggested it had a high chance to sustain life–we’d even seen some sign of biomarkers suggesting life was already there.
“And there, one day… Poof!” He snapped his fingers. “It just up and vanished.”
For Susie, realization set in quick. Claiming a family emergency, she’d canceled her interview and left in a hurry.
Back in the present, Susie twirled the cord of the phone around her finger and bit her lip as she listened to Deborah outline their contract.
Could she really do it? Could she really doom another world just for some more money and fame?
She clicked her tongue. “How much did you say you’ll give me again?”
“We’ll pay you a $10,000,000 advance.”
To hell with it! Of course she could!