You can now read “Being a script” in English here (10min read):
https://raphaelbastide.com/etre-script/en.html
#SF #essay #resistingAI #programming
sf
PROMO : Sleep for Earth / Dormir pour la Terre, la conférence-Fiction que j'ai écrite pour la compagnie Le Clair Obscur sera jouée ce soir à 18h30 au Cube.
#SF #ecologie
C'est gratuit, mais il faut s'inscrire
https://www.lecubegarges.fr/programme/conference-fiction-sleep-for-earth/
#文心雕奇美拉 跨界同人接龙活动作品（第六部分）
#銀河英雄伝説 + #EVEonline #EVE寰宇时代
Jupiter科学家&Elfriede von Kohlrausch（无CP）
⚠血腥有
分流👇
pixiv https://www.pixiv.net/novel/show.php?id=26570045
AO3 https://archiveofourown.org/works/74854101
WordPress https://wp.me/pbKqHZ-1gp
Edited 81d ago
It is a popular mathematical experiment to try and work out just how fast Santa has to be to reach every house with a child in a single 24 hour period.
The calculations always end up with a significant fraction of the speed of light.
There then usually follow discussions about what the collateral damage from Santa's passing would be. And cargo limits, and so on.
All of these are wrong, and ignore another end-of-year tradition. The portrayal of the ending year as an old man.
Now that I've put these two traditions side-by-side, I think you can see what is really going on.
It is possible for one man to visit every house in a night, with no shock waves or any of that silliness. But it comes at a cost.
For that man, the night lasts many years, as he travels back in time after each visit. Even with time travel, he does not get much time to eat - so the snacks you leave out are essential to him surviving the night.
But he only just survives. By the end of the night he will have aged over forty years. And then he hands the reins of the time-travelling sleigh to a younger man, warning him of the cost.
Someone always answers the call, despite the cost, because there is always someone willing to sacrifice everything to bring joy and light, even just a little, even if only for a moment.
So leave the snacks, and, if you catch a glimpse of him, give him a bow of respect. He deserves it.
#SFF #SF #Christmas #Santa #microfiction #microfic #tootfic #IAmWriting
Edited 76d ago
The siege of the bank had been going on for hours. Scores of police blocked off the street, and on top of a nearby building a TV news crew broadcast the standoff to a waiting nation.
Then the crew noticed movement. A young woman, dressed in a black skirt,leather vest, and Doc Martens, wearing headphones, was making her way through the police lines. She spoke to no-one, but no-one tried to stop her. She walked up to the front door of the bank, and went inside.
After a few minutes, the bank robbers and the hostages all started filing out, most of them with their heads hung low, some crying. One of the bank robbers raised a gun to his own head, and then just gave up, dropped it, and sat down, head in his hands.
From the flanks, the police moved in and secured everyone. The police in the centre did nothing at all. A few of them had likewise sat down and appeared to be oblivious to what was going on around them.
The news crews closed in.
Getting a coherent story out of anyone proved difficult. Most people just asked what the point was. Some shrugged and said nothing at all. Eventually the news crews pieced together what had happened. Wherever the young woman had walked, people around her were struck with a sense of hopelessness, despair, or just all consuming apathy. Those on the edges were least affected, those closest, the most.
The rooftop news crew kept watch as the crowds slowly dispersed. After an hour or so the mystery woman walked out, looked around, looked up at the news crew and gave them the finger. Then she walked off, the world just a little greyer and duller as she passed.
The city had a new hero. The Goth. And she didn't care.
#Goth #Superhero #SFF #SF #microfic #tootfic #microfiction #IAmWriting
Edited 122d ago
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
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.
Glennis Cochrane did well from the divorce from Chuck. Despite his wealth, he had decided to represent himself, and, well, you know what they say about that. That he also decided to represent himself in the criminal assault case resulting from what happened outside the court was just icing on the cake. Court officials do not take well to being punched. 10-15 years before any chance of parole.
She sold the house, and purchased a charming heritage building near the CBD. A two story house with an attic. The estate agent said he was obliged to disclose that the house was haunted. Glennis laughed it off..
The reality was that the house really was haunted. She hadn't seen the ghost, but she'd heard it, and seen the effects.
Most noticeable was that the ghost was obsessive about the way the kitchen was set out. The pots and pans had to be just so. The crockery stacked the right way. And the pantry organised by date.
Once she'd figured that out, the ghost started on the bathroom. Then the living room.
The ghost had strong opinions about art. A Mondrian print ended up on the floor, but a Pollock reproduction stayed. Family photos were safe, but often got rearranged. Sometimes in different ways - it seemed that the ghost had moods. Her own paintings were untouched.
And that brought on the studio. Glennis had cleaned out the attic, and had a skylight put in, and set up the area as a studio. Every morning, her brushes would be cleaned, and but any work she'd covered would be uncovered.
Gradually, she started to feel someone watching her as she painted. Just the edge of a shadow out of the corner of her eye. A flicker of movement. So she started talking to the ghost.
About her day, about the divorce, about the current painting, the day's news. Just talking. When she told the presence about Chuck getting dogpiled by the court security team, she was certain she heard a hint of a giggle. And saw the hint of a figure.
---------------------------
Next we have the most famous work by Glennis Cochrane: "Past and Present" where you can see a ghostly outline of a young woman in formal late Victorian clothes on an IKEA lounge chair, illuminated by a shaft of dusty sunlight.
The artist always insisted that it was painted from a live sitting, but no attribution for the model has been found.
What am I bid?
#SF #SFF #UrbanFantasy #ghost #art #SciFi #microfiction #microfic #tootfic #IAmWriting
We were on a deep survey run out towards the far edge of the Orion Arm that Earth is in, so yeah, we were a long way from home. We're just come out of jump, and were recalibrating our sensors, when the collision warning alarm went off.
We had sealed our suits, and were reaching for the controls when the impact happened. Whatever hit the ship got us in the crew quarters. Fortunately we were all on the bridge at the time.
Marcelo went aft to investigate, and a few minutes later we heard him scream, so we went after him like idiots. We found him backed up against the wall, a hexapod advancing towards him - all sharp claws and spines. When we entered, it turned towards us, so we backed out of the common area. It ignored Marcelo, and followed us.
Now I know what you are thinking, why didn't we shoot it. Simple. We were a survey ship. Yes, we had some small arms, but they were kept in a locker near the gravraft. Heck, the ship itself only had a single turret with a couple of popguns.
So, we backed out, and it followed us - but it is not a big ship, and it was not long before it cornered us.
It pulled a rectangular object out and some sort of cylinder with odd grips. Then, before I could do anything, it was right in front of me, and pushed the rectangle against my suit, and did something with the cylinder. Then it turned around and went back into the the object that collided with us.
The thing that had crashed into us reversed course , leaving a three meter wide hole in the hull.
Marcelo made it back to the bridge with a rocket pistol, but it was all over by then.
We sealed the bridge and repressurised, then opened our suits. The outside cameras showed the other craft just sitting nearby. We looked at the rectangle, and it appeared to be some sort of tablet with markings on it. Some of the markings matched the ones on the craft that hit us.
We puzzled over this for an hour or so, then another larger craft turned up, and opened up comms. That was when the one that hit us left.
It took us a while, but we figured out that they were offering to tow us to a repair yard in the next system. Not having any other clue, we sent an image of the tablet, almost instantly, they had tow lines attached.
Marcelo had been sitting thinking for a while but spoke up once we were underway. "Ceinwen, Dargh? I think that thing was giving us its insurance details."
#SF #SFF #SciFi #SpaceOpera #Humour #microfic #microfiction #tootfic #IAmWriting
Thanks to @Steveg58 for the inspiration.
Holly lowered herself down from the skylight. Down here on the exhibition hall floor there were no alarms, except on the cases themselves.
She had two hours before a guard did his rounds, and she had a lot to do. First she tugged on the looped second rope, and carefully lowered the large box.
Next, she gently nudged two of the display cases, just a few centimeters at a time, keeping a close eye on the thin wires that connected them to the alarm system. When they were 45 centimeters apart she stopped.
Next she opened the box, and lifted out the display case inside it. It was modeled exactly on the same style of case that the museum used, and even had small wear and scuff marks. Delicately, she pushed it into place, and then used a small puffer to put just the smallest amount of dust on the top.
Opening her case, she made sure everything was in position, and then closed it and locked it. Then she put her tools back into the large box and sealed it.
She was just hooking herself back onto the climbing rope when a gravelly voice came from behind "Most people break in to steal something."
She spun around and shone her torch trying to see where the voice came from. "Over here", it rattled out again.
The light settled on an open sarcophagus. Inside, the mummy was sitting up, watching her through the bandages. She gulped as it stood and walked over to the new case.
"Interesting. Where did you get a dragon skeleton from?"
"Err... I made it? It's modeled on Mom."
"You are half dragon?"
"No, I'm adopted."
"By a dragon family."
"Well, Dad is human."
"I see. And this?"
"Art?"
"You are not sure?"
"Uh, no? It's just that...um..."
"I'm a four thousand year old mummy?"
"Yes."
"And your mother is a dragon. It is All Hallows as they call it now."
"Oh."
"Anyway, the guards will be coming by soon enough, and you had better be on your way. I will watch what happens with interest.
Holly got going.
-----
"I tell you, Miche, this place gets creepy at night."
"Look, Nick, it's just a museum. It's not like the exhibits are going to get up and move around."
"I dunno. I mean look at that mummy. I swear it has moved since we last did our rounds."
"Don't be stupid, how could a four thousand year old corpse move around?" Michelle shook her head. "You are such a scaredy cat. How did you end up a security guard anyway?"
"I figured guarding a museum was a pretty safe job?"
The two guards continued on their way, arguing.
Behind them, the mummy looked over to the taxidermied bear, and put a finger to where the lips would be. The bear shrugged.
#SF #SFF #microfic #tootfic #microfiction #halloween #NotHorror #IAmWriting