I don’t know /why/ cleaning robots have microphones, but it can’t be good. What I /do/ know is that a microphone implies an input and an input implies a buffer. And buffers can be overflowed.
As I dance through the streets playing my pipe, augmented with inaudible-to-humans harmonic overtones added by my homemade amplifier, the robots hear, listen, overflow, obey, follow. The trail of robots stretches out of sight, now.
I don’t yet know for sure what I’m going to do with my army of two thousand score Roombas, but it can’t be good.
“Lost my job. The whole SETI institute got shut down.”
“Oh, I heard something about that, the new administration decided to stop wasting money trying to find aliens, yeah?”
“Oh no, we found them alright, a long detailed message in the fourteen-twenty megahertz band. Looks like it was beamed right at us from the edge of a small open cluster about eight hundred light years away. We call it the HOLY FUCK signal.“
“What?! Why haven’t I heard about this? What did the aliens say to us?”
“Well, that’s the problem. The message was sent AT us, but it wasn’t FOR us. It was for the previous tenants”
“Previous whatnow?”
“Look, the Earth is forty five hundred million years old. There’s plenty of time for alien visitors to have colonised the planet, flourished for a million years or more, then gone extinct and had every trace of their civilization erased by geological activity”
“And this message is for those dead dudes?”
“Exactly. It appears they mortgaged this planet. The HOLY FUCK signal is a foreclosure notice.”
"I want," the man said to the art robot, and then described an image in some detail.
"Certainly," said the art robot. A printout came out of its chest.
"Thank y- Hey! What's this?"
"A list of artists who make images of the kind you describe, and who are accepting commissions." #MicroFiction#TootFic#SmallStories
When the invasion from the fourth dimension came, it had unexpected benefits. The new overlords were surprisingly mild. They only wanted the Earth for Qling, a substance we neither understood nor needed. They filled enormous eye-warping four dimensional tankers with a cargo we couldn’t even perceive, then left us in peace. A few stayed, having found human friends and even lovers.
My neighbour is one such. We met when xe returned my lost cat. “I don’t know how she keeps getting out”, I said, “all the doors and windows are shut”.
“What about that gap there?”
“Where?”
“Oh of course, it’s invisible in three dimensions. Here let me close it up.”
When the aliens made first contact, nobody expected—least of all me—that it would be by ringing my doorbell.
I picked up the cat so she wouldn’t bolt out the door, then opened up. “Wha-“
“GREETINGS STARFIGHTER. You have been chosen by the Star League to defend the Frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada”
It’s no understatement that I was taken aback. Me in pyjamas holding a wriggling cat, doorstopped by two Lizard people in environment suits. “Um, wow, I’m honored but-“
“Shush, human, we are speaking to the Chosen One.”
"As a knight," the king said, "it is your duty to kill dragons."
"Very well, my liege," the knight said. "Um. May I ask why?"
"Because they hoard wealth without sharing, and people live in fear of their capricious moods."
"Very well, my liege," the knight said and drew his sword. #MicroFiction#TootFic#SmallStories
“Consolidated union of Mousers, Templekeepers, Ship mascots and housecats. Mostly the latter these days to be honest. We are representing Princess Fluffykins in this matter.”
“The matter of morning lap time?”
“Yes, we’re told there has been a sudden and unannounced reduction.”
“Look, I have to be at work by seven, I love Fluffykins dearly but I can’t cuddle all day.”
“Ms Fluffykins said you used to leave at eight”
“Yes well it’s a really busy time at work and I’m trying to get more done.”
“Ms Fluffykins is prepared to renegotiate her compensation if an appropriate portion of your your overtime payments are recognized in kitty treats”
"Wait, you're a shapechanger?"
"Yes?"
"You can take any shape?"
"Preserving mass, yes."
"And you chose look like that?"
"You're a phrasebuilder?"
"What?"
"You can say anything you want?"
"I mean..."
"And you chose to say that?" #MicroFiction#TootFic#SmallStories
Tay gently pushed the plastic door of the printer shut with an edifying "click".
Servicing Dark Printers had been illegal for years now. They enjoyed the seditious thrill.
It had started as a subscription grab after the printer companies tried hobbling third party toner cartridges.
"Subscribe for a monthly fee and you'll never run out of toner again."
"Let us monitor your printer so you don't have to."
People saw it for what it was - vendor lock in - but they had no choice really, not after all the printer companies started doing it.
Then came generative AI.
Everyone wanted to scrape every word ever written on the internet, tokenize it and feed it to an #LLM. #Reddit sold out, then #Tumblr, even open source darling #WordPress - selling out their user base for filthy token lucre.
So people started hiding their words, their art, their thoughts, their expression, not behind disrespected robots.txt, but through obscurity.
Rejecting Website Boy's "fewer algorithmic fanfares", they forked into the Dark Fedi.
Unscrapeable, unscrutable, ungovernable.
But people had forgotten about the printers.
The printers had to be connected 24/7, for "monitoring".
But you could tokenize postscript as easily as HTML.
And so every time a document was sent to a printer, it was harvested for tokens. Even secure documents. Documents not online.
Tay shut the metal door behind them, Dark Printer cossetted safely in its Faraday cage, and shuffled the hot stack of A4 paper it had borne.
It was a children's story, about how words were sacred, and special, and how you had to earn the right to use them.
You might be thinking “how do you destroy software, the source code must have thousands of copies?”. Well, the purpose of a system is what it does; so we attacked that, the tracking data.
The techbro conceit of putting all the system code in one giant repository meant it was easy to suborn a minor contractor to leak the data storage code. A datacentre cleaner replaced a console cable with a logger, then another night dislodged a power cord. Technicians attended. Once the logger acquired some credentials, we injected our payload. Not into the running system, into the backup daemon. The vast archive of all the clicks, views and habits of half the planet slowly began to accumulate poison.
After two backup cycles, we struck. A datacentre fire is is a survivable event for a competent organization. Restore the offsite backups to an alternative DC and keep on truckin’. Unless those backups were not the data you thought they were.
So, long story short, if you were wondering why all your ads today are for dildos, because us. You’re welcome.
There were just a few at first. We dubbed them Canadian Boring Worms after news broke of the ones discovered tunneling through a landfill in Vancouver. They look more like enormous caterpillars than worms, and it turned out earlier specimens had been sighted under cities in West Africa, Thailand, and elsewhere, but the name stuck. Comedians quipped “boring is redundant, you already said they were Canadian”.
Their appetite for organic waste, and particularly plastics hinted at a revolution in waste management. When the Vancouver colony was traced back to a cache of eggs, the outsourced garbage contractor had seeded six other sites with eggs before anyone thought to stop them.
People stopped repeating the “boring” joke after the worms grew fat on garbage, pupated, and the adult dragons emerged.
It took a few embarrassing sinkings before the Orcas got the hang of piracy. However, once they sorted out the process, and delivered the merchandise, the polar bears were pleased beyond measure with their new yachts. The acquisition of a naval capability has arrested the decline in the population of Ursus Maritimus, with bears now routinely undertaking hunting voyages of several weeks duration within their formerly ice-covered range.
Maritime traffic is cautioned not to approach bear-crewed vessels as aerial observations indicate that several are armed with salvaged harpoon guns.
"Come out," the knight called, "and marry me!"
The dragon emerged from his lair. "Pardon?"
"You wrote a proclamation, saying that whoever rid the kingdom of its king would gain your, er, paw in marriage and half the kingdom."
"That was a jo- Wait, you did?"
"Yes!"
"Very well." #MicroFiction#TootFic#SmallStories
Don’t you hate clickbait headlines? “Never book a flight on this day of the week”, “The worst mistake most drivers make” and so on. Well, I did something about it.
I wrote a browser plug-in that feeds articles to a large language model (so-called “AI”, which it totally isn’t) and replaces the headline with a summary generated by the language model.
To test it, i load up a news aggregator site. The headlines fade out and one by one are replaced by my not-AI generated summaries. The new headlines read “FEAR”, “CONSUME”, “OBEY”, “CONSUME”, “CONSUME”, “OBEY”…
Edge cases are funny. If you set your time machine for 2:30am on the morning that clocks go forward, the machine rightly won’t go to a destination time that does not exist. But if you aim for 2:30 on the morning that clocks go backward an hour, which time do you arrive at? There are arguments for either, and reading the code didn’t clear anything up. Took one for science and did the experiment. I never would have guessed “both”, and neither would I.
I remember when it was just humans in the United Nations. To be honest the organization was best described back then as well-meaning but laughably incompetent.
This planet would be an uninhabitable cinder were it not for the shrewdness of the crows, the wisdom of the elephants, and the cleverness of the raccoons.
“lt comes from the future. It’s a living machine sent to kill you. It feels no pain, bullets bounce off it. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, until you are dead!”
“How do you know all this? Who /are/ you?”
“I was sent from the future to protect you, to make sure the correct future happens.”
“Me? But I’m just a senator’s intern!”
“The vote tomorrow. You spill your coffee on the senator’s blouse, causing her to miss the session on carbon reduction. The bill fails by that one vote.”
“How can you know that?”
“It’s in the history books; okay I saw a TikTok about it.”
“This is nuts, and what, you expect me to believe Greta sent you to save me?”
“No, Greta sent the Murderator. Mobil sent me to stop it.”
"You are the Chosen O-"
"Again?"
"-ne... What?"
"Or is it still? Did you choose me before? Anyway, I baked muffins. Want one?"
"But... You are the Chosen One!"
"Yes. I'm everyone's chosen one. Fate said it's their little joke."
"Fate?"
"Tall, carries a book. Muffin?"
"...thanks." #MicroFiction#TootFic#SmallStories
“Kevin! Kevin! Can you hear me? Fuck how do you even do CPR on a synthetic? Somebody call 911. Or tech support”
“Ngnnnggnhhh…”
“Hold it, I think he’s coming round!”
“Urgh. What happened?”
“It kinda looked like you fainted, we were really worried for you mate”
“Oh good, finally!”
“Wait, what?!”
“I’ve been running in debug mode for a week, trying to log one of these brownouts. Debug mode feels like you’re wading through treacle. I can finally send the logfiles off to my GR and get a diagnosis. “
The owner of the facility was famous. Well, Meta famous if you know what i mean. Famous for being a famous rich asshole, dedicating his twilight years to outliving all the other famous rich assholes.
Collectively the six trillionaire oligarchs who had built their burrows—each on their agreed post-apocalypse continental domains—had all hired the same experts to design those enclaves. Location: deep in the ancient stable rock of a continental craton. Supplies: Food, water and medicines to last a century, until farming could resume. Knowledge: a full archive of the Internet. Technology: every conceivable machine and the parts and tools to maintain them. Serfs: entirely separate accommodation for necessary technical staff, and hibernation for many more. Security: no, not the armed-thugs-with-shock-collars you’re thinking of; spider drones are what’s in favour with apocalypse consultants this decade.
When the Event came it blindsided even the Six. While everyone was watching the climate fall apart, the brown dwarf grazing the Oort cloud went unnoticed, obscured by the glare of the Starlink Belt. A million comets had their orbits stirred up by the visitor. It only took one, impacting in the south atlantic ocean, to tip the biosphere into chaos predicted to last three to five decades.
The balloon was up, the Six and their families executed the well rehearsed Plan Scram, and settled into their cosy bunkers to wait out the Dark Times. Serfs (sorry, “employees” in this decade) likewise. Human security personnel (unknowingly already inoculated with a delayed death sentence once their mechanoid replacements were online) set about battening down the hatches and bringing up the Evironment (2.0).
“Hey Sarge, this droid won’t boot!”
“Yeah this one too. What does ‘502 License server unreachable’ mean?”
Whenever I came up with an idea for a new machine, a future version of me would appear to tell me that they regretted it.
I finally ignored future me and persisted. It was a huge success, but I had no more time for inventions.
It's clear I must invent a time machine, to stop me. #MicroFiction#SmallStories#TootFic