• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary navigation
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

M. Darusha Wehm

Explorer of Worlds Real and Imagined

  • News
  • Buy Books
    • Digital Download Store
    • Get Print Books
  • Podcasts
  • About
    • Bio
    • Demographic Info
    • Bibliography
    • Press Kit
    • Privacy Policy
  • Contact
  • Now
  • Short Stories
    • Bodies at Rest, Bodies in Motion
    • Fire. Escape. – Sample
    • The Foreigner
    • Major Tom and the Lucky Lady
    • The Interview
    • Lucidity
    • Fame
    • Chekhov’s Phaser
    • Career Opportunities
  • Science Fiction
    • Beautiful Red
    • Children of Arkadia
    • Andersson Dexter
      • Self Made
      • Act of Will
      • The Beauty of Our Weapons
      • Pixels and Flesh
    • Modern Love and other stories
    • The Voyage of the White Cloud
    • Retaking Elysium
    • The Qubit Zirconium
    • Hamlet, Prince of Robots
  • Mainstream Fiction
    • Devi Jones’ Locker
      • Packet Trade
      • Sea Change
      • Storm Cloud
      • Floating Point
    • The Home for Wayward Parrots
  • Anthologies
    • Many Worlds or The Simulacra
    • Immigrant Sci-Fi Short Stories
    • The Stars Beyond
    • Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction & Fantasy, Volume 4
    • KeyForge: Tales From the Crucible
    • Trans-Galactic Bike Ride
    • Fireweed: Stories from the Revolution
    • Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume I
    • The Dame Was Trouble
    • Dystopia Utopia Short Stories
    • Science Fiction Short Stories
    • Procyon Press Science Fiction Anthology 2016
    • Use Only As Directed
  • Games/Interactive
    • The Martian Job
    • Alexander Systems
    • You Do You
    • if ink could flow backward
  • Books

communications

Fame

February 14, 2012

“Pupusas?” The woman’s nasal voice reached Randall at the back of the bus before he saw her pushing her way down the aisle. He could smell the warm, raw meat smell of his own sweaty body, and his stomached wriggled. He was hungry, but he couldn’t face mysterious little bits of meat.

“Quiere pupusas?” the voice called again, and Randall saw the plump figure with her plastic tub approach his seat.

“Frijol?” he asked, his high school Spanish failing him for a full sentence.

“Sí,” the woman answered. “Frijol y queso.”

“Dos, por favor,” Randall said, and fished in his pocket for a crumpled bill. The woman passed him a paper envelope of warm dough that smelled pleasantly of mild spice and cheese, and he gave her the money. She dug into the frilly, ribboned apron she wore over her cheap nylon shorts and gave him a handful of change.

“Pupusas?” she continued to hector the remaining passengers on the bus, before exiting from the back doors just as the bus lurched away.

Randall ate his warm snack carefully, grateful that they were not so hot as to leak runny beans and cheese all over himself. The corn flour dough was barely warm to the touch, but the filling was good and his stomach momentarily stopped its gurgling. Randall had been riding the garishly painted repurposed school bus for about an hour, heading south, heading away from what anywhere he thought of as civilization. His pupusas gone, Randall leaned his head against the metal side of the bus, and tried to relax.

#

Brian Randall was a name that wasn’t famous in the way a screen actor’s name might be famous, but he had several thousand online followers, and he couldn’t go to a conference or industry party without a dozen or more fans tagging along after him. He was the first to admit that he loved the attention. He’d enjoyed a good success with several of his online ventures, and the following was one of the perks of this success. Of course, the money was a strong motivator, too. But Randall would have developed cute little gadgets and toys for the online market even if people hadn’t been willing to pay his way. Indeed, he spent the first several years of his career working out of a dumpy apartment in the Bay area, with a pair of equally bookish roommates, coding day and night for the sheer thrill of it. Brian Randall was a natural.

He first struck it big with a tool he called the “all in one reader”. Once he sold it to Google, their marketing people rebranded it Google Summary. It really was ingenious: you could feed the service any kind of file, and it would output a shockingly sensible summary of it. It was not terribly revolutionary for text files, but it worked just as well on audio or video. And much more interesting for the development set, you could upload a piece of code in any of the popular languages, and it would give a text description of what the code would do. What it did with images was much less useful, but absolutely fascinating. Randall had made certain that the output on image files was always exactly one thousand words.

Randall could have lived easily on the sum he earned from the sale of the product, but he still had more ideas. He moved out of the cramped apartment, got a fancy set of digs of his own, and started noodling. After the Summary sale, he was asked to speak at one of the major tech conferences in the Bay Area, and there he got his first taste of fame. He had only just arrived at the exposition hall, and was picking up his conference package, when a tall, attractive young man approached him.

“Are you Brian Randall,” the man asked, a shy smile on his face.

“Yes,” Randall said, wondering if there had been a problem with his registration or something.

“The Brian Randall,” the man continued, “of the all in one reader?”

Randall smiled to hear his own name for the technology. “That’s me,” he said. “You can just call me Randall.”

“Wow,” the other man gushed. “I’m such a fan of your work. My name is Chick Hernandez.” He stuck out his hand, and Randall shook it. “Can I interview you for my blog?”

Randall laughed, and said, “Sure, why not?” They exchanged email addresses and IM handles, and met that night for a beer after dinner. Chick blogged between rounds. After Randall’s talk the next day, Chick Hernandez was the envy of all the major tech bloggers for the scoop. Randall left the conference with at least fifty more entries in his contact list.

Read on a single page

Pages: Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6

Filed Under: Stories Tagged With: communications, mundane, short stories

Primary Sidebar

Book cover for “Hamlet, Prince of Robots” by M. Darusha Wehm. A blue-green robot skull with a golden crown in the style of a neon sign, over a dark glitchy background. In the top left is a quote reading “Enormous fun and a real gift to lovers of Shakespeare or science fiction or both. Familiar and surprising, clever and moving.” From Kate Heartfield, author of Sunday Times bestseller The Embroidered Book.

Hamlet, Prince of Robots

Learn More

Free Stories

Career Opportunities

Jo-Lynn had always laughed at Charlotte, her stupid sister-in-law, who believed the crap in those so-called newspapers she bought at the supermarket every week. It was no wonder that her no-good … Read More... about Career Opportunities

Fame

"Pupusas?" The woman's nasal voice reached Randall at the back of the bus before he saw her pushing her way down the aisle. He could smell the warm, raw meat smell of his own sweaty body, and his … Read More... about Fame

Fire. Escape. – Sample

This is a novelette that explores a different aspect of the world of the Andersson Dexter novels. You can get the complete ebook for free when you sign up to my mailing list. It all started with the … Read More... about Fire. Escape. – Sample

Publications

  • . ….. ..story .. time
  • A Most Elegant Solution
  • A Most Elegant Solution (audio)
  • A Thorn in Your Memory
  • A Wish and a Hope and a Dream
  • Alexander Systems
  • Fear of Lying
  • Force Nine
  • Good Hunting
  • Home Sick
  • Home Sick (audio)
  • Homecoming
  • I Open My Eyes
  • if ink could flow backward
  • Microfiction @Thaumatrope
  • Modern Love
  • Modern Love (audio)
  • Preventative Maintenance
  • recursion
  • Reflections on a Life Story
  • Showing the Colours (audio)
  • The Care and Feeding of Mammalian Bipeds, v. 2.1
  • The Interview
  • The Stars Above Eos
  • War Profiteering
  • War Profiteering (audio)
  • we are all energy

Footer

Social

  • Facebook
  • Twitter

Connect

  • Email
  • RSS

Poetry

  • . ….. ..story .. time
  • 140 and Counting
  • creation myth
  • Force Nine
  • how to make time
  • if ink could flow backward
  • recursion
  • the chrononaut
  • we are all energy

Non-fiction

  • 90ways.com

Elsewhere

  • Darkly Lem
  • Many Worlds
  • Mastadon

Copyright © 2023 M. Darusha Wehm