Model Organisms

I am a fan of short stories, but it's kind of rough picking through anthologies to find gems. I have to say I love when authors take advantage of modern publishing and publish their short stories independently, it makes it less daunting to find good short stories. This book is one of those, and it's currently free on kindle, as well as just 23 pages, so give it a read. It'll only take 30 minutes max.

This short story is a part of Almeida's spiral worlds, an illustrated short story collection that spans two volumes and tells an interconnected story. Model Organisms is a stand-alone story, but it does connect to that body of work, so there's more to check out if you wind up liking what you read.

Okay, so what is this about? Well, to start, this seems to be set in some kind of virtual world/collection of interconnected worlds. The story is told from the perspective of Scout, who is one of an entire school bus of pregnant clones. The bus is driven by the Devil, at least that's what Scout thinks, the woman at the wheel is wearing glowing horns. This bus is hauling ass trying to escape what appears to be the collapse of civilization or possibly even the world around them.

You aren't given a lot of context for what is happening, but there are a ton of interesting details concerning consciousness, the nature of reality, and inherited memory. I imagine reading the rest of spiral worlds will illuminate some of the more wacky stuff that's going in this story, but I should say that there is a lot of wackiness, and I'm not sure if I like it that much as a stand-alone work.

I should also mention that there is some pronoun stuff going on in here, zir gets thrown around some and there is exposition on personal identifiers (oh great heavens). It didn't necessarily bother me, but this story was only 23 pages long, and you've got a bus full of costumed and pregnant clones doing 100 on the freeway-tell me more about that stuff, please.

This has sparked an interest in the larger spiral worlds series for me, but this story did read like random happenings when divorced from the context of that series.