#SciFiFri
#vssDaily
#vss365
The medical pod jettisoned clear of the drop ship, settled gently at the crash site, and unfolded like an oversized origami blossom crafted from white leather.
Med One exited smartly but with perhaps a bit too much verve. Air Force 1's occupants were clearly toast.
#SciFiFri
#vss365
#vssDaily
Tarmac didn't feel like a criminal. Why should he?
"Quantum potential is non-local. How can it be a crime to transport energy across a border when that energy is borderless?" he asked.
The judge answered, "Because the information potential was copyrighted. Next!"
#SciFiFri
#vss365
#VSSdaily
The injection machine groaned as the mold opened; every forty-two seconds. Ejectors pushed the article into a can of identical components. A swarm of microbots waited to arrange them into a "dumb" weapon.
It wasn't AI sophistication but sheer numbers that now prevailed.
#SciFiFri
#vss365
#vssDaily
Emiko flailed. She'd never held a sword, so she decided to just throw it.
"Impact!" Ed yelled.
Kaiju intestines spilled into the alley. Pungent contents flooded homes. Digestive acid liquified screaming school children.
"Never seen that in an anime," Ed said blankly.
#SciFiFri
#vss365
#vssDaily
"The ability to communicate effectively is underappreciated", she mused.
Tested the tap.
"As is quietly cracking the encryption to eavesdrop", she countered to herself.
Artificial gravity induced decoherence was tripping Wang Chao.
"Still a reek job," she concluded.
#SciFiFri
#vss365
#vssDaily
PIXIE 573 initiated shutdown. System noise had abruptly spiked. Followed by a suspicious override command. The chum bucket could wait.
"Log says John Doe triggered a reset. Initiated the exchange."
Sergeant frowned. Third suicide-by-pleasure-model this week. Nasty one.
#SciFiFri
#vss365
#vssdaily
Elon looked at the judge.
"Yes, sir. We parked our sat at a Lagrange point near the site: a trojan asteroid stuffed with Mischief Miners' people.
We was just recon, right. So we blaze up. That's it.
We didn't send no drone in. And we sure as hell didn't detonate one!"
#SciFiFri #VSS365 #vssDAILY
They sat together near a beech tree. Yellow bark clad its low-slung branches. The tree's trunks splayed violently like a giant weed or a spider on its...
She woke.
"Spiders," she whispered. Unwanted memories they continued to restore as they dug into her amnesiac mind.
#SciFiFri #VSS365
Fragrant waves of pollen from '× Wistericinus' - an impossible intergeneric hybrid based on the Japanese wisteria - floated gently through open windows. Unsure why, the AI had designed and deployed it years before to be the sweetest, most agonizing death by suffocation imaginable.
#SciFiFri #VSS365
She'd targeted the free radicals and increased resonance to improve their stability, but the quantum tunneling she was sure would work had failed.
Hamartia weighed heavy in her soul. There was little she could now do to reverse the discharge's excruciating march through her body.
[Note: C4ISR is the military acronym for Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance systems.
CASREP is the U.S. Navy acronym for Casualty Reporting, with C-4 being the worst: loss of primary mission capability.]
#vss365 #vssdaily #writeSky
The C4ISR broke through the liminal buffer insulating blind loyalty from moral intuition. In the blink of an eye strict adherence to chain-of-command evaporated, warhead safeties re-engaged, and the war ended.
A C-4 CASREP to extract "mercy" was issued within the hour.
[Note: Anthrobots are real. They are created from trachea cells and are being developed as drug delivery systems. They're tiny, and when they self-assemble, form what are called "superbots".]
#vss365 #SciFiFri
The anthrobots streamed up his arm in a sloppy if parallel formation, like conscripts learning to march at basic.
She swung the scope away.
"It's the cilia. Structural consistency remains a challenge; impedes self-assembly. But we can field ten superbots per micro-drone. Today."
#vss365
"There's a place among all the places somewhere along New Gulf Coast way, where divers can get into this aquarium near what was the old French Quarter. And back in a part never open to visitors, there are, get this, mermaid cages."
The bartender sighed.
"Pay your tab, Leon. Time for bed."
#vss365
"Y'see, there's a cost associated with everything," he stated flatly. "You may not want to get involved in this here situation, but that comes at a steep price."
"I don't care," the miner replied. "You can just leave me out ..."
And with that, the stranger's gun completed the transaction.
#vss365 #amwriting
Product development ground to a halt.
"The Frankenmodel is freakin' amazing but this prototype sucks," she lamented.
"U/L won't certify bare wires," he explained.
She crawled under the sheets, switched the model on and lit up the bed.
"But the electric shocks are a feature!"
#SciFiFri #vss365 #vssdaily
It was an especially challenging puzzle: segmentation of lower limbs; serrations on both left and right flank; injection sites equidistantly placed along the vertebrae.
"You know, humans also had a game called 'Operation'," the artificial construct stated. "Not as fun."
#SciFiFri #amwriting
Their grind came to a halt.
"I know what needs to be done," an agent stated.
"Before we proceed, shouldn't we know for whom we're conducting this work?" another agent asked. "Maybe the fractures are deliberate."
"Of course they are," another replied. "The question is 'Why?'"
#vssdaily #vss365
"Pause," the apparition commanded. "Time enough to drink."
The agents entered input() standby.
"Try reframing the problem as a puzzle, but with dynamic images on each piece; until assembled, of course. Think along the lines of an analog quantum simulation."
exit() hallucination
#vssdaily #vss365
The infinite DO hammered the collective consciousness. Synaptic transmissions overloaded receptors like chalk dust blanketing the tabula rasa of an unborn child.
Racing to a horizon whose distance never changes, a form of madness set in.
Hallucinations provided the only clarity.
#vssdaily #vss365
How chronometric chaos could be stitched into viable simulation data with only the most delicate thread of causality chains was the unanswered query.
And brute force application their only option.
A recursion with no condition a splinter in their compromised visuospatial memory.
#vss365
Fragments of possible history amassed within the tenuous shards, like airport luggage during a white out.
They deployed kirkyans to track their discoveries before they dissembled like snow flakes on eager tongues.
Silenced.
Chains of interoperability converted into retconned narratives.
#vss365
Artificial euphoria swept across the group.
They'd been searching an indeterminate frame - seemingly forever - and had, until now, failed to recover a single shard from what could be a multitude of shattered time crystals.
The moment passed.
The group subdivided.
The work continued.
#vssdaily #amwriting
A year passed before she again took to water.
She'd acquired much since her arrival. The seasonal patterns of these people. The rudiments of their language. A boat of native origin.
She had never been more an immigrant.
She paused, then steered eastward toward a new life.
#vss365
Sunlight filtered through gossamer sheets draped across the island's canopy. She wondered what spider god had spun them as she prowled toward the encampment.
An unexpected voice speaking a language she recognized pierced the droning of jungle insects.
"And who might you be?" he asked.
#SciFiFri #vss365 #amwriting
The beat of drums pointed her to a nearby island and natives busily preparing boats as if for pilgrimage to a distant shore.
It was a voyage she would be unable to make.
Her stores were low. And her medicinal plants were turning a shade of mignonette; they were dying.
#vssdaily
Markings near the altar were indecipherable. And illustrations accompanying them depicted events unknown to her. Except one: a great flood.
Even these people, this distant culture, was touched, she thought. And perhaps there were some, like herself, still among them.
She needed to know.
#vssdaily #amwriting
Thunder rolled across ocean swells. It was an almost normal morning, except for everything.
It had been days since she arrived on the island. Time enough to recover her strength; to discover a crude altar with fresh remains.
She wondered to which god they might sacrifice her.
#vss365 #amwriting
Realizing they'd been abandoned, the stragglers dropped their catch, raced into the water and began swimming to the nearest boat.
Wondering if it might satisfy her insatiable hunger, she waited patiently until men and boats were out of sight before retrieving the abandoned meal.
