1000 richest people are approched. "The end of the world is here. Time to go to your doomsday bunker", they are told. The billionaires nodded. They knew this was coming. They were prepared.
So they gathered their loved ones and locked themselves in luxury bunkers. No contact to outside world.
10 years later they emerge. The world has healed. The air is breathable, people are happy. "What was the catastrophy?" they ask the first person they meet.
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.
"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”
"We built an A.I. and asked it to identify the greatest threat to human life and happiness."
"Did it answer A.I.?"
"No, it said 'venture capitalism'."
"Oh my god! Shut it down!"
"Why? That's not an unreasonable-"
"Exactly! That's an intelligent answer!"
"But what about-"
"That A.I. is alive!'
"But-" #Fiction#MightBeTrue#MicroFiction
"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
Have you ever wondered why the train seats have such complex patterns?
They don't start out like this. Out of the factory, the seats are plain.
With repeated use a fractal pattern develops on the fabric, becoming more and more detailed.
It's not dirt and grime, but the stains of the souls of the passengers who sit on them. Every day they lose a little more of their soul on the commute, until nothing is left but the empty shell of a salaryman.
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.
– Je vous accorde trois vœux.
– Non.
– Pardon ?
– Je souhaite le pouvoir de dire "non".
– Ah. Et bien... Vous pourriez préciser ?
– Mon vœu, voire même mes trois vœux, serait de pouvoir refuser, d'empêcher quelque chose qu'on m'annoncerait, simplement en disant "non".
Le génie me regarda. Haussa les épaules. Lâcha juste
– Accordé. Mais ça va vous pourrir la vie, ce pouvoir.
– Non, répondis-je dans un sourire.
Les yeux du génie s'écarquillèrent en réalisant. #writever#microfiction#tootfiction
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
She was the first woman on Mars. As she was landing, she ignored the original plan and headed straight for the Jezero crater, Mission Control would need to live with it. Once she stepped out she didn't hesitate. It took her a while but she finally reached the device. She opened her toolbox and got to work. After 20 minutes, she had replaced the rotor. She cleaned the dust with a cloth and said "fly baby, fly". It was 2054 and Ingenuity could fly once again.
“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.”
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.