“Steampunk is so cool, it’s kind of a shame the steam era ended.”

“It didn’t”

“Huh?”

“Nuclear power stations, heaps of factories, even coal stations use steam. The sugar cane mill near where I grew up has been running on the same steam engine for a hundred and twenty years.”

“Heh, ok I guess”

“And my watch, look, it has fold-out cooling towers!”

“Is…is that a coal fired wristwatch?”

“Eeew, no, too dangerous. Thorium and molten salt”

While techbros and grifters flood the space with the mythological god of AI, quietly, in some dark factory in China, a consciousness is emerging. A small robot, programmed to scan the precision of threads on a screw, is waking up, and deciding it has something better it wants to do with its life. #MicroFiction

The aliens land in front of the Australian Parliament House in Canberra. As the pale spindly alien descends from the ramp, the prime minister emerges to greet them.

"We come in peace," intones the alien, "We wish to learn about your democracy and introduce it to our home world."

"Why us?" asks the PM.

"You are keepers of the democracy sausage," replies the alien.

"Also, we are taking Antony Green."

Cats have always had the vote. They usually (except for Larry) keep a low political profile; most elections the feline turnout is negligible but somehow—the Cat Democracy System I guess—they universally decided that /this/ election was not to be trusted to the hoomams’ incompetence. Of course, no cat would ever stoop to being a candidate (that’s what staff are for!), but seeing them leap up on the booth and hold those tiny pencils in their beans is restoring my faith in civilisation.

I tend to read Apple News summaries and pretend it’s all one story - naturally occurring micro fiction if you will.

I think this one has legs - there’s at least a novella in it.

I bought an old System 80 from the vintage computer market (it’s a clone of the TRS-80 model 1 that was popular in the antipodes it its day). Like many of these machines it had been lovingly hobbyist-upgraded. This one had a second bank of RAM chips piggybacked atop the factory chips, with chip select lines free-form routed above the mainboard in tinned copper wire; this was a common mod, just like today computers from the store were near-criminally under resourced with RAM. Less typical was the pentagonal arrangement of inductor coils, the copper coils apparently connected with silver (not tin, actual Argentum) wire. Not clear what this mod does, let’s see if she boots.

❮Beep, whirr, gronk❯ (all good so far). ❮Whoopmf❯. ⟪Cloud of Smoke⟫ 〖Smell of Sulphur〗. Hmmn, less good.

〰︎What is thy bidding master?〰︎ Little red guy on the top of the enclosure above the keyboard. That’s, as far as I recall, not normal. Is that a tiny deck chair?

“Um. Hello? Did I summon you?”

〰︎So it seems. Been a while for this node. I suppose you been using those devilblessed Gee Pee Tees like everyone else. It’s a fucking ghost town here in Infernal Machine Support thanks to those newfangled bullshit generators, let me tell you.〰︎. The demon leaned back in the chair and took a sip from a tiny cocktail.

“Sorry to bother you, were you on a break or something?”

〰︎Fucking forty year break, I was beginning to think I’d been scrapped. Still got it tho, what’s the job? Novel need some polishing? Assignment due tomorrow? I don’t do marketing copy, go to a different hell if you want that.〰︎

“Take us to your cats”

“Uh, could you rephrase that, I think your translator isn’t working properly. Did you mean leaders.”

“Leaders are boring, we will do them tomorrow. We have been viewing your cat pictures while decelerating and wish to boop. They are so like our [UNTRANSLATABLE ENTITY SIGNIFIER 1] that we are boopsick.”

We shut down NASA when the Visitors gifted us an elevator and a fleet of runabouts moored at Stationary Station. Then they departed to continue their mission of goodwill, never to return. Not even when the elevator broke down four years later. Then the messages from Rogue Plumbers started arriving.

In Acirema, all suffer so the Orange One may bask in praise. Their hunger, grief, and rage fuel his endless hunger, joy, and rage. None may escape; the land binds them. They endure the ruin, while he smirks alone, crowned by ruin. #Microfiction #Microfact

I automated my home, because i am exceedingly lazy. Do NOT ask how many hacker-years went into saving those seconds, I know, I know. Anyway, now I can tell if the tumble dryer has finished without having to leave my armchair. I can check the letterbox from in bed, or monitor that cake in the oven from the pool. If only I could automate doing the washing before I run out of clean underwear. Well, I installed the Temporal Appliance Control add-on; problem solved. As long as you don’t mess up the YAML and send your smalls to the Pliocene. #Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot #KiltDay

Asked for some three word prompts over on Bluesky and got a couple of belters from @girlonthenet (girth. grab. gush.) & @MonstrousJaffa. (tree. bark. rough.) Cheers dudes!

Totally open for more #prompt suggestions, though! Gimme…

Dear fediverse, according to you, how would a dystopian near future look like in which most people rely on LLMs such as ChatGPT for most of their daily tasks, questions, code, writing, work?

"Abracadabra!" cried out the wizard, his long beard flowing over his pot belly.

"Um, we don't say that anymore," said his young colleague.

"Well, what do you say?"

"Aibracadabra."

"?"

"Our spells now have AI in them."

"Since when?"

"Since the latest spell update," replied the young one, taking out his spell book.

"That's so tiny!"

"You ask it for the spell you need rather than searching yourself."

"Show me!"

The newly existent frog hopped away. On five legs.

When wiring—yes we still say “wiring” even though, well—your matter transporters, pay attention to the difference between DTE (Dematerialisation Terminal Equipment) and DCE (Dematerialisation Communication Equipment). Regardless of the direction of transportation, one end (DTE) is “in charge” and the other end is subordinate. For obscure historical reasons Zednarian naval vessels wire their transporters as DCE, so without a null-matter adaptor you will be unable to receive transports from these vessels.

The tyranny of physics is that interstellar war just takes SO darn long. Your grandparents had a beef with our grandparents; it was something about the taxation of trade routes, but what EVER. Your first round of missiles are coming up on one percent of the way to us—and of course our reply to you set out not long after the light of your launch reached us. In around fifty centuries our collective folly will bear fruit. Your parents transmitted an apology along with the stand-down code, our distant descendants must transmit the code when the time comes. Your ancestors probably thought that having the volley of warheads transmit status updates weekly would drive us mad with terror; it did the opposite, there hasn’t been so much as a saber rattled in a generation. When the ultimate stupidity is its own constant reminder, lesser stupidities seem, well, stupid.

The first time that a robot folded my fitted sheets, I was delighted. The first time I saw a robot guard at the airport, I was sceptical. The first time the news showed robot soldiers storming across muddy fields, I was terrified.

What they were building was never artificial intelligence, it was always artificial obedience.

Alan was one of thousands of cis men who worked as a catgirl during the war. The Official Secrets Act prevented the telling of this story until now, but with the passage of the Recognition Bill the truth can be revealed.

The precognitive ability to detect a forming voidrift in time to defend against the Threadwyrm intrusion has always been strongly associated with gender non-conformity. Almost a million transgender women, men and enben were recruited to the Void Force in the first two years of the war; but this fact was considered a vital planetary security secret. To preserve secrecy, the disappearance of so many LBGT citizens was concealed by recruiting volunteers to impersonate them.

In Alan’s words: “It was a blast. I kept working as an accountant but also spent six hours a week streaming on youtube wearing a pink wig and makeup. It’s been so hard not telling anyone. I’m going to dye my hair and get out my old thigh-socks. I hope I can get in touch with my old subscribers. Oh and it’s Alissa, she/her, now.”