It's been a while since I reposted a short story, so here we are again. Read Only Memory is a part of the Hellflower series. It's set somewhere after the end of Archangel Blues, and was published in The DAW 30th Anniversary Science Fiction Anthology (ISBN-13: 978-0756400644) back in 2002.

I'm sure Sheila was expecting me to weigh in on the fantasy side of things when she invited me to play, but my first love has always been SF, and my first writing love has always been Sword and Planet -- as is clearly visible in the work that follows. (My apologies to C. L. Moore.)

Read Only Memory started as a fragment produced and set aside back in the early 1980s, a time when I could reliably get into a short story without any means of getting out again. A number of those half finished (in the sense that a trip is half finished after the vehicle crashes into a brick wall doing 90mph) stories lingered in drawer and hard drive for years thereafter, periodically making their presence known by arpeggios of mocking laughter.

So this was a chance to finish one. I hope you enjoy it. I'm rather fond of it.

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