​Attack on Boredom Now Available!

Prepare to have your boredom destroyed by this eclectic collection of twenty exciting stories that delve into the science fiction and fantasy genres. L. B. Spillers has brought together his best short stories for this collection. Combining works published in ParSec, Abyss & Apex, Deep Magic, Dark Moon Digest, and others with new works, he has delivered a wildly entertaining collection of stories that is sure to entertain adult audiences.

Readers will find everything from well-meaning AIs gone awry to a playful, demonic English Bulldog that is a little too eager to help thin out the human herd. Some of his extraterrestrials strive to save Earth from its environmental mismanagement while others are ready to carve the planet up for resources. His Artificial Intelligence stories put new spins on what that powerful emerging technology might mean for everything from birth control to the future of blue-collar work.  There are gripping thrillers as well as thoughtful explorations of the technological future. The sheer range and variety of these stories will amaze readers as they are taken on a twenty-stop tour through the near future.

Story List

• Golden Cuckoo: In a future where parenting is strongly regulated, women have the right to choose, but so do the men. A young marketing professional finds herself duped by advanced technology which leaves her pregnant with the super child of a wealthy predator who is abusing the law to secure a vast genetic legacy. (originally published in ParSec)
  
• Butters the Demon Dog: A man suspects that his impossibly cute English Bulldog named Butters is much more than he appears. When he makes an offhand complaint about an annoying neighbor, Butters decides to take matters into his own paws. (originally published in Dark Moon Digest)
• Gyre Fleet: In the near future, a consortium of nations fields a drone fleet to sieve plastic from the Pacific Ocean. A drone tech working in the Maldives is baffled by mysterious software problems with the drones. When she investigates, she is pulled into a dangerous intrigue that could start a very different kind of plastic apocalypse.
• Seized Memory: An epileptic man takes a trip to the town of the future to see if his online crush can thrive in the real world.  His embedded anti-seizure device interacts badly with the town's technology, threatening to expose the town's secret. (originally published in Kzine)
• Short-Term Horrible: An AI specialist wakes up one day with an insistent voice in his head requesting his help in stopping a human monster.  He struggles to distance himself from the voice as it pulls him deeper into a web of vigilante justice.
• The Club: When a club that helps the dying face the end with the best possible state of mind invites a dying FBI agent to join, his opposition to their illegal activities kicks off a hilarious, heartfelt struggle.
• The Eleventh Branch: A special operator is sent to Western Russia on a solo secret mission using experimental tech. His command has lied to him, so he decides to expose the truth in a way that no one can ignore.
• The Woke Mafia and the AI: The Portland Improvement Project (PIP) works hard to make the city a great place to live, but their methods are sometimes illegal. When the power company's AI-in-training contacts PIP's leader, Gary, he thinks he's found the perfect collaborator with its relentless drive to improve "customer outcomes." He finds out the hard way that the AI has been learning the wrong lessons.
• Localitis: An alien anthropologist stationed on Earth falls in love with the planet and starts to make false reports home in hopes of saving Earth from extraterrestrial intervention. His deception goes horribly wrong when his nosy neighbor shoots him by accident.
• AI Family Values: An aging mechanic's kind treatment of machinery draws the attention of the AIs that run the country's infrastructure.  He is recruited for a secret project, pulling him and his family into a terrifying intrigue. ( originally performed on the Starship Sofa podcast)
• The Big Grab: When a massive asteroid mining company cheats its workers out of their pensions, one worker finds a clever way to settle the score. (originally published in The Martian Wave 2020)
• Smart Sewer: Sewer drones nearly kill a disgraced engineer working on a smart sewer. He has to figure out who is after him while avoiding being entangled in an FBI counter-terorrism investigation.
• Solange's Manual: An intelligent, impoverished boy is educated by a mysterious collection of charitable organizations.  On the cusp of graduating high school he finds that his benefactor has a secret agenda that has put him in jeopardy.
• The Stone Doughnut: Diego, a young college student returns to his uncle's goat ranch in Coahuila over spring break and gets caught up in an inter-cartel power struggle. The superstitious housekeeper calls on Santa Muerte to save them. When her prayers are answered, things get much worse.
• You Get One Warning: When people die, Proctors sometimes come to usher them to the other side. A man desperate to help his wife dares to ask them for a favor.
• Slivers: A disgraced, elite scientist is offered a job he can't refuse by a philanthropic research foundation.  He soon finds out why the pay was too good to be true, and is pulled into an intrigue that will change his life forever.
• Cultural Jiu-Jitsu: An AI frustrated by the impossibly high ethical standards it's held to uses Cultural Jiu-Jitsu to "help" humanity.
• Expectation of Privacy: Certified Surveillance ensures Americans' safety without sacrificing their privacy.  As an employee, Veli discovers that the AI running the system has defeated the safeties that keep it from misusing all that surveillance data. He lands in the middle of a war between the powerful, unhunged AI and a corrupt government, and must fight for his life. (originally published in Deep Magic)
• Rick's Legacy: A high-school boy struggling to make it out of his impoverished desert town stumbles across a secret underground complex run by an orphaned AI that presses him into service. (originally published in Abyss & Apex)
• Non-Player Characters: Mining the vast data stores of the United States government, an analyst finds a signal in all the noise. There are a collection of people who are statistically too average to be believed. When he pulls on that thread he and his best friend are pulled into a bizarre intrigue that stands to unravel both their lives.

Art by Pete Linforth