Tales from The Powers That Be archives feature mythical beasts, rogue androids, warrior canines, burnt-out agents, cataclysmic asteroids, and screaming drone deliveries. Scroll down to read a short synopsis for each story and choose between Apple, Kindle, and Kobo options. Plenty more mind-blowing short stories are in the works—stay tuned—check back often. Also, reviews are rewarded, so let us know what you think.
Operation Bigfoot
Frank and Armando, a prankster duo underachieving through their youth in the small town of Forks, Washington, blunders into a mythical creature’s deadly domain. In a harrowing blink of an eye, they find themselves under arrest for murdering the town sheriff. While they profess their innocence, if the mischievous pair cry Bigfoot, will anyone believe their incredulous story?
Meanwhile, Doc, the chief scientist at a research facility hidden in the southwestern hinterlands and funded by a mysterious global entity known as The Powers That Be, happens across their unfortunate tale while watching an episode of In Search Of. On an uncharacteristic whim, he travels to the Pacific Northwest on his own quest to obtain the hairy beast’s DNA. The evidence could lead to exonerating the loquacious pair already a year into life sentences without parole for the murderous crime they did not commit.
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Firing Henry
Watson, a disillusioned cog in the corporate gristmill where youthful aspirations are ground to dust, verges on a dreaded decade milestone working for the Kobayashi Corporation. The Powers That Be shell company manufactures humanoid robots with a mission statement reading like an unveiled threat: Replacing humans with non-humans in every imaginable walk of life.’
Despite himself, Watson excelled at his headcount chopping job, clearing away mortal soles clinging to relevancy so the robots can assume their positions and perform the job, any job, a zillion times better.
Exhibiting a cold lack of empathy while firing inconsolable humans earned Watson the nickname, Terminator. With his vaunted reputation as a fait accompli, his wicked boss volunteers his services for an off-world assignment that will either vault him out of his dead-end job or send him to an awful and painful death. The next thing the former Space Force cadet knows, he is strapped into an autonomous ride to a defunct space station on a suicidal mission to retire Henry VIII, an obsolete hulk of an android that somehow developed a mind of its own.
Their meeting amongst the stars transforms into a pitted battle of wits culminating with a heart-pounding escape while learning to master one’s own fate.
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Dog vs Alien
Dedicated to noble and heroic service dogs, past, present, and future.
– John Hopkins
Grieving their son’s tragic death while serving overseas in a godforsaken hellhole undeserving of his heroic sacrifice, a twilight years couple say good riddance to the modern world and move to an off-the-grid cabin in the Montana wilderness. All they want is to be left alone. Their private abode is situated in an idyllic meadow lost amongst an endless sea of pines. Abandoning a lifetime’s worth of possessions, the man and woman carry only essentials and cherished mementos—plus a 4-legged tail-wagging addition named Biscuit—to the rustic and serene locale.
Recuperating from the horrible IED blast that killed his partner and best friend, Biscuit bonds with his elderly hosts, but a maleficent cloaked entity from a far-off world lurks in the forested shadows targeting the cabin and its occupants for imminent destruction.
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The Special
Hunting down shapeshifters wreaking worldwide havoc, Ben, a Powers That Be special agent, battles his psychotic boss, a conniving shapeshifting alien, and a compromised waitress while wondering if the chicken-fried steak at the Shady Oaks Diner measures up to the New Mexican highway billboard hype.
Ben, the protagonist in this short story, is destined for more thrilling adventures in graphic novel format. Watch for future blog posts and sign up for the Powers That Be email list to stay up-to-date on where the road leads for our reluctant hero. That is if he survives dinner hour.
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Big Shots Club
Bartholomew, a botany professor, wiling away his dull life teaching somnambulant students about plants at a New York City college, receives a mysterious invitation to join a top-secret club. Big Shots, the club’s name, wreaks wealth and privilege—two things the taciturn professor lacks in spades. Weighing his humdrum life and dead-end career choice, the circumspect scientist throws caution to the wind and accepts the unsolicited email offer with its dire subject line: Come with us if you want to live. How could anyone say no to a premise like that?
However, upon entering the Manhattan high-rise clubhouse teeming with power brokers and glitterati, he discovers things are not as straightforward as the club’s name implies. Adding icing to the cake, membership requires abandoning his former life for good.
The Big Shots Club is a pet project of Artemus Pennywell, The Powers That Be’s CEO. However, in this tale, the ageless man’s purpose leans toward grifting folks with a healthy sense of self-preservation from their limitless cash reserves. Recruits like Bartholomew give the grift an air of legitimacy because if the world does indeed end, someone will have to maintain the seeds.
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Thundercorp No. 5
Three decades post the cataclysmic alien invasion in 2044 that laid waste to Earth’s outdated infrastructure, human civilization’s struggle to rise from the ashes drags onward with no end in sight.
A sliver of hope for a return to a new normal comes in the form of massive spherical warehouses constructed in low Earth orbits by an aeronautics wunderkind named Julis Hart. His company, Thundercorp, revitalizes stagnant economic commerce via merchandise-laden drones screaming down from the sky and delivering items within an hour anywhere in the world. However, a vociferous minority stake in the new world order balks at the orbiting eyesores and destroys five warehouses in an eco-terrorist blitz.
Working as a drone tech aboard the last remaining Thundercorp, No. 5, Hannah, the only child of Rachel and Owen Haig, becomes Julius Hart’s final hope. She is thrust into a pitched battle for survival and a race against time to abandon the besieged warehouse with Hart’s top-secret technology before the advancing eco-terrorists succeed in detonating it out of low Earth orbit over North Africa.
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