By Wes Parish
"I presented my new vision for the company's future today."
I raised my head from the mug I was disconsolately staring into. Melinda had left me again — again! And I needed to stop feeling so morose. Of course, people would say that staring into the bottom of a bottomless mug of stout wasn't going to help me, but I needed to ... I looked up at the man who had spoken, quite loudly, to his drinking buddies.
It was Rudolph Rotnase, the new CEO of Love Thy Neighbor Guns Ltd, and he was surrounded by a group of other young management types. I shuddered. I'd been his schoolmate, and that was hard enough. No wonder I...
"Scuttlebutt has it you're going to refocus Love Thy Neighbors," one of them interjected, when the silence had begun to drag. "I hear you're planning to add an extra dimension?"
I perked up immediately. My last two neighbors had been victims of a neighbourhood feud, and I had only just come out of the suburb-wide lockdown relating to it. Something like kids' toys, please? LTNG was all too evident when you dropped by a neighbor's to say hi.
"Oh yes, the refocusing. That's why I was chosen to replace the last CEO. I took notice of the National Rifle Association's diversifying and retitling themselves the National Rifle and Bomb Association and added hand-grenades to the line-up."
There was a collective gasp. Diversifying was a risky undertaking, and — so my economist friend in high school had told me one day — risked diluting the brand.
The mug of stout wasn't quite as interesting, I stopped trying to drink and forget Melinda, looked up and — forgot Melinda. This might come in handy. Would they be interested in hiring me?
"I decided on it when I heard the NRBA's new slogan — ‘The only way to
stop a bad guy with a bomb is with a good guy with a bomb.’ It made sense to me, and so I decided to change direction."
"Did anyone on the Board approach you about it?"
"Heaps. They all agreed. And thanks to them I added an extra dimension. I'll show you later..."
He opened a briefcase and rifled through it. I looked away, and took another gulp of stout. Maybe just another presentation.
"Ah, here it is, the scenario. A terrorist sets up a bomb, you notice it, and chuck your hand-grenade at him. He doesn't set up his bomb, he dies, you win. Right. I got to thinking about suicide bombers. If ‘The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun,’ and likewise a bomb, what about suicide bombers wearing suicide vests?"
I looked up. He spread his arms out wide, as if to embrace his audience, the whole pub in fact.
"Isn't it obvious!?! ‘The only way to stop a bad guy with a suicide vest is with a good guy with a suicide vest.’ It's just so obvious. If one terrorist wearing a suicide vest is surrounded by twenty good guys wearing suicide vests, you'll deter him from acting. So we're also starting manufacturing suicide vests come Monday morning."
They all gasped. I craned my neck and saw he was proudly displaying a stylish vest, and holding — rather carelessly I thought — a small box with a red button.
I drank the rest of my stout as quickly as I could manage and got up and got to the door as quickly as I could.
The one thing about being discharged from the mental care facility of the Hullu Mental Health Foundation, is that I am certified sane. I can't say that about the rest of my fellow citizens, though...
About the Author
Wes Parish
Wesley Parish is an SF fan from early childhood. Born in PNG, he enjoys reading about humans in strange cultures and circumstances.
His favourite SF authors include Ursula Le Guin, Fritz Lieber, Phillip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard and Frank Herbert.
Wes lives in Christchurch, NZ, is an unemployed Java and C programmer, and has recently decided to become a mad ukuleleist, flautist and trombonist, and would love to revert to being the mad fiddler and pedal steel guitarist.. "Where oh where has my little pedal steel got to ... ?"
Ion Newcombe is the editor and publisher of AntipodeanSF, Australia’s longest running online speculative fiction magazine, regularly issued since January 1998, and conceived back around November 2007. He has been a zealous reader and occasional writer of SF since his childhood in the 1960s, and even sold a few stories here and there back in the '90s.
Mark Webb's midlife crisis came in the form of attempting to write speculative fiction at a very slow pace. His wife maintains this is a good outcome considering the more expensive and cliched alternatives. Evidence of Mark's attempts to procrastinate in his writing, including general musings and reviews of books he has been reading, can be found at www.markwebb.name.
Natsumi Tanaka is a writer living in Kyoto, Japan. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous Japanese magazines such as Anima Solaris, Kotori no kyuden, and Tanpen.
Evan James Sheldon’s work has appeared recently in American Literary Review, the Cincinnati Review, and New Flash Fiction Review.
Jake Dean is a writer and waverider living on Kaurna land in South Australia.
Matthew R. Doherty currently resides in Leeds, England, where he spends most of his free time writing about military history, but his other consuming passion is for science fiction.
Joanna is a writer who lives in the bush near the Glasshouse Mountains in Queensland.
Geraldine Borella writes adult short stories and stories for children and has been published in anthologies for both. In 2018, one of her children’s short stories placed second in The Buzz Words Short Story Prize and she won an ASA Emerging Writer’s Mentorship. She currently works part-time as a hospital pharmacist and as an online creative writing tutor.
Andrew writes science-fiction and fantasy from the state of Maryland on the eastern coast of the United States, often drawing ideas from jogs through forest trails at sunrise or a tasty beer at sunset. 
Tim Borella has never lost his childhood passion for SF and writing in general and has been lucky enough to have worked most of his life as a pilot — in other words, he’s never properly grown up.
Old enough to just remember the first manned Moon landing, Kevin was so impressed he made science his life.
Simon Petrie, born and educated in New Zealand, now lives in the Australian Capital Territory, where he is paid to be careful with words.
Mark is an astrophysicist and space scientist who worked on the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn. Following this he worked in computer consultancy, engineering, and high energy research (with a stint at the JET Fusion Torus).
Although a writer of the baby boom persuasion, Ed has not boomed for quite a while.
Timothy Gwyn is a professional pilot in Canada, where he flies to remote communities. During a lull in his flying career, he was a radio announcer for three years, and he is also an author.
Sarah Pratt is an avid fiction writer and a Marketing Consultant.
Margaret lives the good life on a small piece of rural New South Wales Australia, with an amazing man, a couple of pets, and several rambunctious wombats.
Garry Dean lives on the Mid Coast of New South Wales Australia, and has been a fan of SF for most of his natural life. Being vision impaired, he makes good use of voice recognition and text to speech in order to write. Many of his stories have appeared in AntipodeanSF over the years, and his love of all things audio led him to join the narration team in 2017.
Laurie Bell lives in Melbourne, Australia. She was that girl you found with her nose always buried in a book. She has been writing ever since she was a little girl and first picked up a pen. From books to short stories, radio plays to snippets of ideas and reading them aloud to anyone who will listen.
Alistair Lloyd is a Melbourne based writer and narrator who has been consuming good quality science fiction and fantasy most of his life.
