Category Archives: Short Stories

Atlas Falls Cycle, Short Stories, Writing

The Traditional Way of Payment

by Kit Bradley

Written March 2017

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

In Galt Gulch, one of the few laws was that nothing should be given for nothing. How much should a wife charge for a meal, washing clothes, sex? Should they be able to sell all of those services on the free market? After all, that was the very origin of Galt’s Gulch: mercantile contracts. They embraced the traditional way of payment for married women, as they called it.

James Gussey was on his third wife by the time he got to Galt’s Gulch. Owing to a botched plastic surgery his face had a stretched, glassy look. When adding to his slight build might cause one to imagine that he was unpopular with women. Hundreds of millions of dollars ensured he never lost his sex appeal, and he had the confidence borne of a man to whom the word “no” was an illusion.

James Gussey’s third wife was Laine Maxton-Gussey. James had seduced her when she was seventeen and unsophisticated. Arriving at the Gulch, she was twenty-seven, a tall Viking beauty of a type that seemed to be very popular among millionaires of the time.

Continue reading The Traditional Way of Payment →

Atlas Falls Cycle, Short Stories, Writing

Ronnie Drumpf in Galt’s Gulch

by Kit Bradley

Written March 2017

Creative Commons License
Ronnie Drumpf in Galt’s Gulch by Kit Bradley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Some of Ronald Joseph Drumpf’s first memories were helping his father to collect rents from Brooklyn tenements.  Ronald’s old man, Fred Drumpf, left Germany in his teens to avoid military service – in later years, Ronald would avoid the American draft into World War II.  It was just Ronald, his father and Vincent – a heavyset Italian-American with scars on his face and knuckles.  Fred Drumpf introduced Vincent as a “boxer,” and it was true after a fashion, and Vincent was certainly in the hurt business.

Continue reading Ronnie Drumpf in Galt’s Gulch →

Atlas Falls Cycle, Ayn Rand, Short Stories, Writing

The Origin of John Galt

Leave a comment

statue-1515390_1920-1200x900Here’s another Atlas Shrugged fanfic from yours truly!  One of the fascinating things about these characters – now that I’ve got a little distance from the novel – is that Rand leaves them as nearly blank slates.  Even when some of the characters do having living family, like Hank Rearden, their family seems to have no real relationship with the character, evidenced by Hank’s mother’s name, in the novel, is literally “Hank’s mother.”  She has no proper name.  And while both Francisco and Dagny are obsessed with long dead ancestors, we learn almost nothing about their immediate family and nothing at all about their fathers.  Ayn Rand has daddy issues that burn so brightly that people are Jupiter are blinded by them.

Short Stories, Writing

Wendy’s starts to get rid of humans, Kit Bradley predicts it . . . to his chagrin

Leave a comment

One of my predictions is about to come true: the burger chain, Wendy’s, wants to get rid of it’s human workforce. Apparently, they’ve crunched the numbers and think that paying humans is too costly.

I wrote a story, Robo-Burger, about a burger chain that was purely automated. In the story, the automated burger joint was the tipping point to a revolution.

Continue reading Wendy’s starts to get rid of humans, Kit Bradley predicts it . . . to his chagrin →