John Hornor Jacobs's Page

Once there was a robot, a fabulous and intricate robot, with a steel chassis, a dynamo for a heart, and brain capable of trillions of computations a second, with no one to talk to but himself. This robot, which had no name but thought of itself as 1B0RN, lived in a high metal tower with no base, just a room circling the dead Earth, now pocked with glowing craters. For a thousand years, 1B0RN circled the earth, watching, accessing the tower's computers, searching the archives and history of the w… Continue

We walked through fields asleep with snow, in the twilight of the year. Crystalline clouds skittered across the sky, pale blue and indifferent to our grief, as we came upon the weathered old barn, paint scaling, where she had hung herself. Underneath the sky we diminished and shrank, down into ourselves, hunched into parkas, billowing breath into the air from mouths too dumb to speak. She had climbed into the loft, still smelling of summer hay, and shimmied out onto the rafter, where she let her… Continue

Shreve watched the house. The halogen streetlights cast long shadows across the road, filling the night air with yellow motes, like sediment swirling in water at the bottom of a cracked glass. He checked the revolver, adjusted his jacket, and opened the door. At Tessa's window, he could see that Mick was with her, the brute, and they weren't dancing anymore, at least not dancing on their feet. He walked around the house, popped the lock, and then trudged through the silent hallway and into the b… Continue