DJ Buddy Holly: Sci‑Fi Chronicles & The Controllerism Archive

Chances Are Slim: But Not None A Novella by David Charles Kramer This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, businesses, locations, and events depicted here are fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events is coincidental. Chapter One Four Hours Famous In Saint Vesper, a person could become famous for four hours if enough strangers were afraid to admit they had never heard of him. David Karma watched it happen every weekend. The Meridian stood halfway down Cobalt Street, between a twenty-four-hour pharmacy and a hotel that changed names whenever its creditors changed lawyers. At four in the morning, fog rolled downhill and mixed with cigarette smoke outside the club. By five, garbage trucks came through, indifferent to glamour. David liked that hour. It was difficult to feel important while a man in orange coveralls hydraulically compressed six hundred empty champagne bottles behind you. The Meridian’s DJ booth hung above the main floo...

Lost Sheep Church — Established First By forty-seven, David had learned that Christianity came with many gifts: Grace. Prayer. Scripture. Community. And, eventually, a flowchart. Catholics had one. Orthodox Christians had one. Protestants had several thousand, many of which existed because somebody objected to somebody else’s flowchart. Every chart seemed to end in roughly the same place: After two thousand years of confusion, congratulations. You have finally found us. David had spent enough time studying denominations to develop what he called Ecclesiastical Vertigo . He loved Catholics. Their churches could make a grown man lower his voice before anybody asked him to. Their prayers had outlived kingdoms. Their saints had written theology while imprisoned, exiled, starving, or hiding in caves, which made David feel slightly embarrassed whenever weak Wi-Fi affected his spiritual condition. He loved the Orthodox too. The Orthodox could take eleven words— “Lord Jesus Ch...