“Going to ChosenCon?”
“Where is it this year?”
“Glasgow”
“Love to, can’t afford flights to europe have you seen the freaking prices”
“They have travel assistance, don’t forget”
“Oh yes, I remember. Tell me you’ve never spent sixteen hours on a magic carpet with no bathroom without et cetera”
"Madam Mayor, the situation is dire. The city is being overrun with rats."
"This means that we will have to..."
"Yes, tap into the Strategic Cat Reserve."
"By my order, unleash the CATS!"
"Madam, the cats are not, you know, actually leashed... that's dogs."
"Okay, release them then... must I spell everything out."
"Madam, this was not actually a spelling mistake, but one of vocabulary."
" 🤬 "
As alarms blared, the captain strode onto the starship bridge and to his command chair. "What's the situation?" he demanded. "Are we facing a petulant godlike being with powers beyond our understanding?"
"No, Sir," replied the helmsman.
"Has some incredibly incompetent intruder improbably siezed control of my ship?"
"No, Sir."
"There's a computer which I can destroy merely by talking to it in a confusing manner?"
"No, Sir."
"Well then, I'm out of ideas," said the captain.
An alien fleet appeared in Earth's orbit, and broadcast a message:
"Having studied you furtively, we now seek formal contact, and want to meet your greatest thinkers..."
A long list followed.
"How do we tell them?" world leaders wondered.
Topping the list were the names Calvin and Calvin's Dad.
This week on Antiques Warpshow we’re at station Deep Space Thirteen—the famous “Lucky Thirteen”—which survived the Zeta Triangulum supernova thanks to a passing star whale sharing its metaphasic shielding…
〰︎〰︎〰︎〰︎
“This was my great grandmother’s disrupter pistol; she was a guard on a Romulan ice moon prison when she fell in love with my human great grandfather and they escaped together”
“What a charming story and a fascinating heirloom. I can see from the emitter pitting that this was well used, and it looks like there is still some….yes *ZORCH* Ouch. No it’s all right that will grow back. Let me show you the safety catch.”
〰︎〰︎〰︎〰︎
“My goodness you don’t see a Borg targeting laser in this condition very often. How did it come to you? It was yours? Well I must congratulate you on your recovery. As to the value: if I were a Ferengi black market bioimplant trader I might offer seventeen bars—yes of course I’m sure you will treasure it always…and if not you should hold out for thirty.”
〰︎〰︎〰︎〰︎
“Do you know who painted this? No? Well I am absolutely /thrilled/ to tell you that this is a hologram on canvas by the artist Data Soong. They served in Starfleet before taking up holopainting, where it’s said the artist learned the technique from the memory banks of a memorial probe launched by an extinct civilization from somewhere in the beta quadrant…”
As a reservist in the nanoartillery corps they let me keep my launcher implants. I’m only allowed to load nonlethals, but that’s human-scale NLs. Mosquitos are functionally extinct in this house.
I put a payment card on my cat's collar so she doesn't have to steal fish. When they bought her home in the divvy van last night I found out she's been getting cash out at the woolworths checkout and buying black market brushies from escaped roombas. I'm sorry but I don't know what the roombas spend the money on. I do suspect that this is why the sign appeared in the supermarket today restricting cash-out transactions.
Announce: You can now find an automated archive of my Mastodon #MicroFiction at https://kit.biggs.id.au/fiction/.
TODO:
✅ extract toots and get the basic text up
✅add titles for those that have titles
✅record interactions and replies
🔲 process my deleted BirdChan archive to get stories from there too (oh no, they were not tagged, this will require manual collation 😮)
The young woman chanted. Before her swirled a mass of inky black magic.
"Good," said Mistress Agathie. "Now, focus! Imagine the magic taking the form of your familiar - whatever you imagine that to be."
The magic cloud coalesced into the form of a raven. The bird blinked in surprise. "I live!" the bird exclaimed. "But - what am I?"
"You are my raven familiar," said the young girl.
"Ah, cool, I see," said the bird. "Just one question. What is a raven familiar?"
"Does the role really require a woman?"
"No?"
"Or youth?"
"Er... No?"
"Is being royal or nobility a must?"
The dragon hesitated. "It's traditional..."
"We can mention that it's a position traditionally filled by a princess," the HR consultant said, "but we do welcome all applicants."
"Okay."
The thing about a base on the moon is that everyone underestimates the amount of support the Earth provides. Even with a so-called sealed environment, there is considerable support provided by the outside.
So when they established the first moonbase, it was very short lived. To be fair, it was only really intended as a temporary establishment, but it only lasted just over one and a half times the design life. Which for a NASA project is abysmal. So 36 months after being established, it was abandoned. The next one, an ESA project, lasted about the same.
The third was a Chinese military one. It was meant to be permanent, but they abandoned it after two years because of the cost of resupply.
The fourth one was an attempt at a lunar hotel. It lasted three months before the company running it went bust, and a joint NASA/ESA rescue mission had to be sent to bring the staff home.
The fifth one was a genuine attempt at colonisation, headed up by a multi-billionaire. They were well funded, and established a large semi-underground city space. Several hundred people moved there. Most of them died there. The oxygen plant worked, the CO2 scrubbers worked, but the small population did not have enough depth in skills to keep it running safely. Eight people survived the catastrophic cascade that destroyed the biome and the containment. Only seven of them made it back to Earth. The last one remained behind to manage the launch of the one remaining earth-return ship.
The sixth and seventh ones followed similar patterns, at great loss of life.
This cooled the idea of a permanent moon base for several decades.
Eventually someone tried again. This time it was an international consortium of space agencies. Their objective was to try and determine what would be needed for any sort of permanent non-terrestrial colony.
The answer was shocking to everyone.
Over thirty thousand people ended up needed to provide the required depth of skills. And for each of them approximately two hectares of wild space was needed, in addition to the farmed areas.
What was the extra space for? It provided sufficient complexity to the support biomes to ensure that they could not easily go into a systemic collapse. It provided for pollinators to breed, for detritus processors to grow, and all the millions of little things that were needed for an actual ecosystem.
It took them nearly thirty years to build it. And it remains the only one that Earth has ever successfully built.
The Selenites, as they call themselves, have, however, built two more as their population has grown.
#SF #SFF #SciFi #SpaceOpera #microfic #microfiction #tootfic #IAmWriting
The message from the stars began with a sequence of numbers, but the rest took years to decode. Most was context to translate the message: "Those are the winning lottery numbers."
The numbers matched the next draw after the message was first received.
Now we received another sequence...
The door of the tavern—well, a smoky single room attached to a stable on one side and a smithy on the other, in a tumbledown hamlet of about ten dwellings on the edge of The Forest—banged open. The proprietor had read the classics, and did a passable west-country accent. “Orcish, is it? Don’t see many of you folk in these parts since the War”
A trio of adventurers stood up from their table.
“Easy, ladies and gent, “ the host headed off trouble, “we’re all friends here.”. To the newcomer, “what can I offer you?”
“Po-ridge”.
“With blood?”
“Ugh, no! Cow milk. And—“ a glance at the wary trio “—golden syrup?”
The barkeeper nodded knowingly. “Sorry about the blood, just a demonstration that
*some people* shouldn’t believe racist lies. Got a barrel of fresh orcish syrup in the cellar, came in on a dragon not mor’n twenty year ago”
Despite outside expectations, the supreme leader of the church of inner light was not full of shit when he predicted the second coming of the great prophet on 15 Feb at 1pm. Embarrassment was comparatively minor in the missed apocalypse milieu; TgP turned up an hour later, having not been told about Daylight Savings.
#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot #Title_Daylight_Saviour
The tiny island community surveyed the devastation the typhoon had caused. Fishing boats were tossed onto the land, buildings levelled, and the bridge linking them to the next island had been torn apart by the waves.
On the horizon, the wall of the other side of the typhoon's eye approached.
From inside the storm shelter a voice yelled "There's an aid flight coming in! Wait! No! No! They've taken a lightning hit, and lost power! They're going down!"
The few who had left to do a quick survey ran back, but just as they reached the entrance they froze as a terrific roar filled the air.
Looking back, they saw a huge shadow in the storm wall. The enraged roar came again, and a giant reptilian shape burst from the clouds, bat-like wings beating against the wind.
The dragon flew at the island, and landed just outside the shelter, wings covering most of the remains of the settlement's buildings.
In the dragon's left foreclaw was the fuselage of an aircraft, wings ripped off. It set it down.
The hatch opened, and a woman got out. She looked up. The dragon raised its head and stared at her. "I told you I should have made the flight" it growled.
"If it hadn't been for that lightning strike, I would have been fine."
"And yet here we are."
"Sorry, love."
"You are safe now, that is all that really matters. And the emergency supplies are here."
The woman looked at the small group huddled at the entrance to the storm shelter.
"And this is why I thought I should do it."
The dragon lowered its head. "I suppose."
She called out "Don't worry, she's here to help. I need a hand getting the supplies out before the eye passes. Come *on*."
One man, braver than the others started towards her. "Miss?"
"Freddy", she gestured to the dragon, "and this is Emerald." She climbed back in, and a larger hatch at the rear opened. "Come on, form a chain. Quickly!"
The rest of the small group who had ventured out, formed a line, and passed the packages of supplies and equipment into the shelter.
Emerald rumbled "Inside Freddy. I'll guard."
Freddy reached up, and kissed Emerald's snout "Thanks for the save, love", then she turned and ran into the shelter.
The doors closed just as the winds of the typhoon hit again. Emerald gripped the ground, and used her wings to protect the wrecked aircraft. It might be so much junk now, but it was Freddy's pride and joy. So she would protect what was left of it.
#SF #SFF #Fantasy #microfiction #microfic #tootfic #IAmWriting #Dragon
“uh, the sign said Princess Wanted”
“Yes, are you applying?”
“Totally; but you know there are plenty of caves that aren’t so far back in the mountains, you’d get more applicants...”
“I wanted some peace and quiet—my last cave was so stressful. Treasure hunters and knights errant and all manner of interruptions.”
“Dungeon masters have a lot to answer for, burnout must be hard”
“Thank you, it was almost a year before I could flame again, but watch me now 🔥. “
Tonight on Mathbusters we investigate three edge cases of topology and cosmology. Does the value of Pi really change as you pass the event horizon of a rotating black hole? We’re still waiting to hear back from the build team on this one. Can you really purchase an imaginary number of apples from Coles online? Our third math puzzle will shock you but first, thanks to fnordVPN for sponsoring this episode. If your universe is facing entropic collapse, fnordVPN can open a tunnel to a high-entropy continuum brimming with crunchy souls…
Detective Petrov's eyes swept the cluttered room. "So," he said, "Leonid Chekhov, age 56, an automobile mechanic - found strangled in his study. The question is, who would want him dead?"
"Sir," said officer Gurin, "look - there's a pistol on the desk."
Detective Petrov stared at the weapon, frowning. "Do you realize what this means?" he asked. "Before we're done here, I have to fire this gun...."
There was a 'womp' sound from the yard. I looked out the window.
Where the large pile of leaves had been, a dragon sat.
"Oi!" I called.
"The hoard was unguarded," the dragon said. "I claim it."
Every damn year. It'll leave once the leaves lose their golden hue. Meanwhile, I can't order takeaway.
The rogue approached his companions. "What a #quandary. Who do I rescue first?"
"Mmph." The mage blinked rapidly.
The barbarian strained at his bonds. "Obviously me, since I can help—"
In the flash of a knife, the mage was free.
"Why him?" the barbarian growled.
"He saw where they hid the loot."
"How d'you know that?"
Still gagged, the mage blinked again.
The rogue grinned. "Remember I told you about a code? You said it was boring."
You know about hobo signs? The pictographs that itinerant workers would mark on trees or fences to inform each other about the reception they could expect from locals? (pre-internet yelp, if you will). Signs included “kind lady lives here” and “man with gun lives here”.
TIL that the “kind lady” sign was a stick-drawing of a cat. This got me thinking.
I scrobbled through the history buffer on my driveway camera. Just as i thought, here is my cat scratching a mark on the gatepost. Later, and again here and there are other cats inspecting the mark. No wonder so many lost kittens turn up on my son’s windowsill.
#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot #Caturday #TrueStory #Mostly
Alys considered the chip in front of her. A tiny low power particle accelerator. Barely 10KeV.
In the Great Collapse that followed the riots of 2032, Big Science - indeed Big Anything had gotten a bad name. A few projects survived - the LHC, Sea Sweeper, and a few others. But the rest? As dead as low orbit.
That was what had triggered the riots and the then the Collapse. LEO had undergone a Kessler event, and all space launches had been banned. Eventually the weather satellites had failed, and it only took a few major events for the giant multinationals to become the target of everyone's hate.
That had been twenty years ago - Alys had been a kid at the time - and they were predicting that launches would not be able to resume for another ten years at least.
So she considered her chip. A little low power accelerator like this could not achieve much. But it could ionise light atoms. Maybe....
A few weeks later, she had her circuit set up. One thing that the tiny chips had enabled was cheap small scale chip fabrication. So now she had an array of these chips with a feed for hydrogen, and a thermocouple array. And her collision chamber.
She started the hydrogen flow, and turned the circuit on. A second later the power metre started to climb. 5.5 volts, and 5000 milliamps.
She disconnected the dummy load, and routed the output into the circuit's input. And unplugged the external power.
The power remained stable.
It was not much, but it was a start.
She picked up the phone, and dialled the head of the department "Dr Fulsom? Can you come down to the workshop, please? I've got something to show you."
Naturally it was Dr Heather Fulsom that got the credit - at first. But Alys de Jute was the one who went down in history.
People were alarmed when they saw me in my bird costume but I explained that you should dress for the job you want, not the job you have.
"I wish my friends were still here", he said, lying on his deathbed.
"But you're not al-*krz* alone," a computer voice responded, designed to emulate empathy. "I'm still here."
"Will you ... remember me?"
"I will remember everything about you," the voice said in a soothing tone.
Somehow, this answer didn't comfort him as much as he wished for.
And he could feel his body getting weaker.
"You know, we built you because relationships were so difficult. All the conflicts, drama and misunderstandings."
He paused for a moment.
"But at least it felt ... real."
"You built me to help people feel less lonely," the voice said.
He closed his eyes, drawing his last breath.
"We failed."
"Back when Dylan and I were separating, I read a novel that really spoke to me. I treasured it. But several years later when I was in a much better place, I reread it, and it was #total sentimental drivel. Was I so stressed out when I first read it that I couldn't tell a good novel from a bad one?"
Pam shrugged. "Circumstance colors reactions. It was precious to you in a tough time. Maybe that's enough? If I were the writer, I'd be happy you loved it when you needed it."
