Member-only story
ASCII Double-Murder
There are a million stories in the Naked Medium City. Let’s read two of them.
It was another cold and lonely day in the unforgiving city. Lucky for me though, I wasn’t in the city. I was in my office. Jumping and dodging the barrels that only life’s Donkey Kongs can throw at you. A Dame walked into the joint. I recognized her instantly, because she was my wife. She said I left the twist-tie off the bread again. And it was stale, baby. Stale as the case I had been kicking around in my head for the past two weeks.
Octal was missing. He hadn’t been seen in years, and everyone was sure he was dead. Who had killed him? There was no corpse, no family looking for him, and no one was interested in taking a pointless case like that. Except me. Pointless was my thing.
I apologized to the lady and went and made myself a stale sandwich. I wanted to find my coffee to wash it down, but there wasn’t time. There were eight things running through my head. And all of them were Octal.
Case 1: Dial “O” for Octal
The trail had gone cold on this one. Octal had been gone for decades. So I did some digging. Way back, back to early-1900s times. I found out that before Octal was around and things got all electronic-like, this other guy Decimal was working all the…