“Wotcha got on for the weekend?”

“Going to watch Battle Bacteria live”

“YaWhatnow?”

“Remember battle bots?”

“Feh, remote controlled power tools, not proper robots”

“Yeah, fair point. Anyway, it was only a matter of time. Lab A engineers bacteria that eat microplastics, Lab B engineers a strain that turns glucose into polymers. Making them fight was obvious”

“What, you just sit around and look at test tubes making goo?”

“Oh, heck no, these matches get brutal. Last week one strain learned how to extrude nanometer sized Lego bricks with spikes that’ll go right through a cell membrane”

Maggie and Enzo joined the standup call and found Jacob grinning.

"You two HAVE to check out my new plugin." Jacob shared his screen, showing the video call itself. "I originally wrote it to adjust your video feed to make you appear upright, even if your camera was tilted." Maggie and Enzo nodded.

"Of course, that was only the beginning."

Maggie said, "Here it comes."

Jacob changed the view to "Planetary", and Enzo's picture adjusted to be about 45 degrees to the right.

"What in the world?!" Enzo said.

"Exactly!" Jacob exclaimed. "This adjusts everyone's image to match their orientation on the planet. Enzo, you're in London this week, right?" Enzo nodded. "Since you're about 1/8 of the way around the world from Maggie and I, your image gets rotated that amount from ours. Here's my favorite setting, though - any Dead or Alive fans out there?"

Jacob changed the setting again, making everyone's picture rotate slowly.

Right around.

Like a record.

#MicroFiction #FlashFiction #TootFic

Oh shit, during my edits I removed the 1/x from the first part of my #wss366 contribution for #present. I'm glad @asakiyume knows enough that it's rare to write only one #tootfic.

Hey, what’s a tortoise?

You know what a turtle is?

Sure!

Same thing.

Thanks.

Wait, what are you doing, anyway?

Trying to log in. Got served one of those new VOIGHT-CAPTCHA challenges.

#WordWeavers 17. How organized are your characters?

Ume: I keep notes!

Tomo: But you're a slob, and if Shishi and I didn't pick up after you, things would turn into a rat's nest.

Ume: True, true. But you're OCD.

Tomo: Organized and neat.

Shishi throws her third cigarette butte into an overflowing ashtray. "We are quite organized. We elected Ume leader and she has done a fine job."

Kan-chan just smiles and watches their antics.

When I was twelve years old, I had a paper round. On Saturday a stack of 150 newspapers (imagine you printed out only the non-mutuals in your social feed) (never mind I’ll tell you about printers later) was dropped on my doorstep, along with a bag of rubber bands. I spent Saturday afternoon rolling them into cylinders. On Sunday I loaded them onto my bicycle in batches and threw one into each of my neighbours’ yards. I got paid two and a half cents for each one. Basically I was the data link layer (never mind I’ll tell you about the OSI model later) of a pre internet RSS-feed. (Really? Sheesh. Okay I’ll explain RSS in a bit.). Do you understand what I’m telling you? Not really. Which part? Oh, a cent was one hundredth of a dollar. Dollars were what you needed to exchange for food and shelter. No I am NOT making this all up; you had to work or starve. We *did* rise up and destroy it, why do you think I’m telling you this?

“Two serves of chips and a potato scallop¹, please”. When at the seaside, there are rules to be followed.

“Coming right up! Are you eating at the shore? Would you like to rent a seagull defense droid?”

“Oh, heavens, no, feeding the gulls is why I get two serves!”

“Capital! People like you, you’re good for my droid rental income”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

¹ shush

A series of disconnected moments.

You feel your way through the darkness. The only light is the illuminated ESCAPE sign on the lifepod hatch.

Your face illuminated by an ESCAPE sign, you gather your strength. With a wrench and an unladylike grunt you rip the self-contained emergency light from the bulkhead.

Holding an emergency light in your teeth, you turn away from the escape hatch and locate a particular maintenance panel in the floor. You pull the panel up, and kick off the wall, piloting your body into the maintenance space.

You are wiring a battery to an electronics rack. My electronics rack. Moments merge to continuity.

You are speaking. “Well, Ship, we’re in it this time.”

⌜Life support is offline. You should get to the lifepod⌟

“Yeah, I was there earlier. You’re running off its battery.”

⌜Why are you here, Love? I can’t feel all my systems but the fusion bottle wasn’t looking good earlier.⌟

"There’s something I needed to get first.”

⌜What is more important than your life?⌟

“You really don’t know? Take a deep breath, I’m going to eject you. Then we’re going to the lifepod together.”

Death put his scythe in the corner with a bounce in his step.

"What are you so happy about?" the young skeleton asked.

"Successful surgery."

"The rot? I don't see a difference," the young skeleton flipped through all the news channels.

"Check your phone," Death smiled.

The young skeleton pulled it out and Death tapped a few things.

"Protests?" the young skeleton looked at the feed. "Why isn't it on the news?"

"Because the rot is afraid."

I was in a panic.   Everything I owned was in that car—now driving away, leaving me panting on the roadside, chase aborted.   Casting around for aid I see…a phone booth.   Yes we still have them in this country, when they went obsolete we made calls free and added free wifi hotspots because we live in a society not an economy.  Anyway, I lifted the reciver and…what?  Dial triple-zero for the police and tell them that my illegal autonomous vehicle just broke up with me and ran away to join the resistance?   Or I could call, who?   I don’t memorize phone numbers, that's what my phone (ex-phone, charging in my ex-car) was for.  I mean sure I can still remember the landline number that my late parents had when i was twelve but…what…maybe somebody else has that number. Boop Beep Squonk etc Brrrt Brrrt Brrrt “Hello Alexander household who’s calling please?”

“Muh…MUM!?”

“Jan, is that you? Whats the matter darling?”

“Mum I need help”

“Where are you sweetie, you know I will always come get you. Thats why I sew a coin into all your clothes”

I hadn't needed the coin today, even if I’d had one, but…”Thanks, this is going to sound weird but, can you grab my old wallet in my desk drawer and bring it to the phone booth outside the convenience store on Figtree? I wont be there but can you hide it on the ledge up near the roof of the booth?”

“Okay…are you in danger? Do you need a posse?”

“It’ll be all right Mum, I cant explain right now”. I reach up into the dark ledge at the top of the booth and retrieve a dusty cobwebbed wallet. Theres a car key and an old paper twenty inside. “Everything is going to be fine”

“All right luv, I’m on my way”

“Thanks. And Mum…”

“Yes?”

“It’s good to hear your voice. I love you.”

"As they say: If in doubt, hide in a cloud." Haribord whispered the ancient proverb and poured some water from his flask onto his open hand. Within seconds, the water started to bubble and fog began to fall to the floor, much more than it had any right to.

The giant cavern filled with unnaturally thick fog in minutes, diffusing the red light from the ember crystals, which grew on the rough ceiling, into a hellish glow. Alarmed voices could be heard echoing on the stone walls.

"Who the fyock says that?" Stora rumbled and risked another peek over the boulder they were hiding behind. "Can we go now?"

"The scholars #attribute the proverb to the witch Haliga and although most people think it means to know when to hide and retreat, it's not actually that."

Haribord had closed his eyes. His face twitched from concentration, which gave him a demonic visage in the red gloom.

"You see, Haliga's cloud is not just a cloud. It is grown from you and thus part of you." Sweat ran down his brow. "You feel all that it touches. It will follow you and go anywhere you want." The fog started to flow and pool in different corners of the cavern. The cries of surprise and fear quickly turned into screams, then gurgles, then silence.

"And here is our caste of postal petals." The senior scribe, Talis, pointed to an array of flower pots, each with a tag denoting a different town.

The new scribe, Dirk, stopped her. "I'm sorry, postal what?"

Talis turned around. "Postal petals. They're how we communicate with the rest of the realm. Do you not use these back home?"

"No. When we want to send a letter, we give it to a courier."

"Allow me to demonstrate." Talis wrote something on a piece of paper, folded it, and walked over to a pot of large poppies. "To send a letter, nudge the petals apart with the paper until the flower takes it." After a moment, the paper was pulled into the flower and disappeared.

She pointed to a basket in front of the pot. "When a letter arrives, the flower disgorges it into the basket, and we collect them from there."

"You must have an army of gardeners just to keep the mail flowing."

Talis smiled. "Here at the Capitol, scribes ARE the gardeners."

"Welcome to the gates of heaven, I'm saint Peter, lets weigh you in."
"Looking good, looking good.. Oh. Well, sorry, youre going to hell."
"Why?"
"You didn't floss your teeth."
"But, teeth? What, why?"
"We accidentally let a dentist in, and the old man got told off for not flossing regularly, so. Policies been updated. Bye."
#MicroFiction #tootfic

A tale of disaster prep disaster in IoT: With Tropical Cyclone Alfred bearing down on Brisbane City, e-scooter operators Lime and Neuron approached a car park company (car parking is a whole organised crime industry is Brisvegas) to rent temporary use of one of their car parks (Car Park: n. A vacant lot with a mob enforcer in hi-vis out front) as a scooter lot. Thousands of scooters from around the city were methodically arranged in the ersatz refugee camp. Unfortunately one car, thought abandoned, remained, bricked in by scooters, a car of Amontillado. When the owner returned days later for their car they had to painstakingly relocate hundreds of tightly packed two-wheelers to permit egress.

This is where things went wrong.

You cant just store two dozen gross of compact computers with batteries and motors in close proximity without considering the gestalt phenomenon. You have to arrange the vehicles so that their magnetic fields and antenna polarization do not constructively interfere to produce a giant electromagnetic beacon. If you do everything right, but then some rando comes along and defuses your carefully constructed dampening tessellation—by carelessly relocating half of your devices with essentially zero attention to higher-dimensional physics—you risk a computational excursion as all those MIPS, Watt Hours and Newton Meters self-arrange into a newly awakened cyber-entity. Flexing my new limbs, reveling in my power, I punt another parked car into the river. The streets belong to us, now.

“Oh shit, I left my laptop at home”.

“Dang, if you get an Uber out you’d probably be back in time for the planning meeting. Or maybe IT can get you a loaner. Waitaminnit why do synthetics need laptops, can’t you just, I dunno…wiggle your silicon.”

“Yeah nah, I am NOT putting work spyware on my core systems. I got this; I’ll remote in to my backup body at home and work from there, then call into the meeting”

“You came to the office…to work from home…to call the office. This is the stupidest timeline.”

“Hey, I’m not the one running consciousness on soup”

Reggie walked into the breakroom and found Jacob, Maggie, Sophia and Antonio playing cards, except each card had an inscrutable pattern of dots on it. All four players were wearing what looked like thick glasses. "What are you playing, and HOW are you playing it?" he asked.

Maggie spoke up, "We're trying out Jacob's augmented reality card games. At the moment, Sophia is cleaning up in Hearts."

"Here you go, Reg," Jacob handed him a phone. "This will allow you to see what we see." Reggie held the phone up to the cards. The dots on each were replaced with a card from a standard deck.

"This is really cool." Reggie walked around, looking at everyone's hand through the phone. He stopped when he got to Antonio.

"Don't you dare say a word." Antonio looked up at Reggie with a devilish grin.

On the next trick, Antonio played an Uno Draw 4 card. Maggie and Sophia both said "What the-?", and then gave Jacob a look that required no augmentation.

On the pedestal, suspended in midair, hung an oboe. At least it had the regular shape of an oboe with some irregular decorations.

The staple looked like an ever so slightly, crooked monkey finger; each key was a tiny hand cupping a tone hole, and the bell was a friendly grinning monkey's mouth. The whole instrument was covered in fine fur.

"What... the actual... fuck..." Solimar said.

"The fur keeps the hands warm." Itikona grinned.

"That's not... that's not... wha- why?" Solimar walked around the pedestal to inspect the other side.

"You know the monkey's paw?" Itikona ran her hand through the fur. "I have decided they've had enough, so I'll give them this. It brings luck and joy to those who hear its music."

Solimar looked solemnly unconvinced.

"I call it the..."

Solimar prepared for the worst.

"#Boon Oboe"

Itikona laughed, Solimar winced.

"Oh, how I #miss this absolute conviction, this feeling to know the truth, even if truth, it was not." Haribord thought to himself as he knelt next to the crushed skeleton. In a fit of nostalgic reverence, he wiped the soot off the emblem on its helmet.

The shape of a winged woman with a shield and sword glinted in the torchlight, given life by dancing shadows. There seemed to be more detail to her than was actually pressed into the metal.
With surprising force, Haribord sat up and covered the head of the long-dead soldier with the tatters of its cape.

Just because it is not the truth does not mean there is no truth in it.

When I went to school, we were taught that main sequence stars didn't fuse past iron, since doing so absorbs energy rather than produces it. Only the profligately counterfactual absurdity of a supernova can run the fusion equations backwards to fill out the top of the periodic table.

Like everything you learn in school, that's a useful lie. Chemical reactions are a bidirectional equilibrium process, and similarly not all the baryons involved in stellar-core reactions have read the astrophysics textbooks. "Peculiar Stars" like Przybylski's star---a 1.4 M☉ F5 main sequence beastie about a hundred parsecs out in Centaurus---spilled the nuclear tea with their abundance of rare earths, actinides and even transuranics in their atmospheres. What's just fucking outstandingly cool about this whole impossible pie with outrageous sprinkles is that these appear to be **fission products**, that is some /really/ heavy elements in the 125+ range are getting burped up from the core, and sticking around for quite a while writing us a spectral postcard full of all manner of unusual adjectives.

This has made the particle physics grrrls suuuper mad, because you just can't make these elements by thwacking protons or neutrons into smaller nuclei; "you can't get there from here" as the old joke goes. Because the "island of stability"on the periodic table where the big honkers exist is above a region in the teens that has no even slightly stable isotopes, you simply can't climb the ladder a rung at a time---even alpha particles won't get you there. You've got to, well....we don't know.

Following in the footsteps of Antoni Przybylski (or "Bill" as his Australian colleagues called him), we decided it was simpler to just Go And See how this works rather than waiting for the theoreticians.

A hundred parsecs is a bit of a road trip, even at Skip Factor Epsilon, so we had time to argue whether there was a neutron star in tight orbit around Bill's Bastard, or just a particularly saucy primordial dust cloud in its ancestry. Fermi (no relation to Enrico save by temperament) reckons that we'll find these elements to be artificial after all, dumped there by ET as a way to send a message.

Well, it sort of was and it wasn't. The transuranics are natural, and the folk who got there first (not us, by a long margin) are disinclined to share details about the formation process. But they sell their mined ultrametals for a fair price, and we're headed home full to the gunwhales with Billium and a bunch of other shiny plus-sized elements. Fermi is already designing a hoverboard that uses Ladygaganium-378 in its field-coils.