“Crime,” crooned the great detective Falconer. “Its musky discharge is the finest perfume to me. It is all I can do to stop myself from milking the juice of crime from suspects, like rare fragrance from a civet’s glands. Of course, civets carry a variant of SARS, so you can’t really chew on them the way you want to. I miss the days when you could have a good chew on a cat. Also people. Did you know that’s illegal now? There is crime everywhere. Terribly good for the prostate.”

Falconer, amazingly, has never been convicted of any crime.

SPARKLINES: ideas under 100 words. © Warren Ellis 2010

Contents of bottle: lock of hair, brown, dyed blonde; cinema tickets (2); press-on fingernail, red, cracked, skin residue at tip; condom, used, cleaned, “decorative symbols” drawn on in gold ink; receipt for purchase of flowers, “THIS IS A WARDING SPELL” written on back; scrap of telephone bill envelope with “i really like u kevin” written on (different handwriting to previous); “Zink” photo prints of three recent crime victims, female.

Bottle found: in garden outside flat, label attached reads “STAY AWAY FROM ME I LOVE YOU”

SPARKLINES: ideas under 100 words. © Warren Ellis 2010

Falconer, the infamous detective, lit the Cigarette of Victory with relish. “Indeed,” he intoned, “I was shot three times in what we professionals term ‘the crotchal region’ by the suspect. Nonetheless I was able to disarm, overpower and briefly tamper with him before your timely arrival.”

“But how,” said the policewoman, “did you survive being shot in…?”

“This old thing?” Falconer said, pointing to his groin. “I had it replaced with something altogether more resilient and commodious years ago. You’re a pretty one, aren’t you? Very pretty.”

The sound of tiny motors and telescoping steel purred from Falconer’s lap.

SPARKLINES: ideas under 100 words. © Warren Ellis 2010

Falconer, the great detective, flicked the dead man’s nipples with contempt. “The solution is obvious,” he barked to the attending policeman. Indeed it was. The nipples were hinged, and revealed tubes extending into the obese corpse’s chest. “Look at the scars on that magnificent gut,” Falconer said. “If the edges were not sealed, would that not look for all the world to you like… a hatch? Your kidnapped child, officer, is inside that man, sustained by a breathing tube and a food pipe. And probably has his legs jammed in the man’s pelvis. Those are not child-bearing hips.”

SPARKLINES: ideas under 100 words. © Warren Ellis 2010

He liked to pretend he could feel the tiny computers moving inside of him. There was a peculiar sense of loss every time someone came with the needle to harvest the computational pus from his infected parts. Tetanus was a nice strong bacterium, but it was very hard to breed robustly enough under lab conditions. Once they learned how to make DNA do computing, lots of companies needed lots of DNA computers. He was only renting his body as a tetanus-computer vat for the summer. The money would buy medical insurance. He’d laugh, if it wasn’t for the lockjaw.

SPARKLINES: ideas under 100 words. © Warren Ellis 2010

What bothered me most about the aliens wasn’t that they insisted upon seducing and having sex with our Earth women. Well, not as such. The thing was… they had no real attraction to humans. Biologically, we were as different as cows and coral. And it’s no fault of the human race that we can find pretty much anything attractive. It really did nothing for them, to charm and pleasure Earth women.

What bothered me is that they did it just to fuck with Earth men. Their awful chittering voices: “Don’t you wish your Earth boy was a freak like Kargon?”

SPARKLINES: ideas under 100 words. © Warren Ellis 2010

His wife hadn’t seen him naked in ten years. An open relationship that was dead at the heart, by all accounts. She couldn’t explain the membership card for a “surgical club” in his wallet, nor the unusual scarring around his chest. Nor the seam that popped open to reveal a swing-wing ribcage. People wondered out loud about the nature of the “club” when they saw the UV tribal-style tattoos on his heart. Vaginal-fluid fingerprints on the aorta. Only when they saw the badly-reconnected pulmonaries did they begin to understand why the club was called “Heartswapping.”

SPARKLINES: ideas under 100 words. © Warren Ellis 2010