A few weeks ago, I was clearing out some ancient backup CDs and floppy disks from my attic when I made a curious discovery. Pressed between a copy of Windows ME and a box-fresh copy of the original Duke Nukem Forever, I found a scratched and decaying Compact Flash cart. It was sticky and oozing a rusty looking fluid. The writing on the label looked like my handwriting, but was illegible. I ordered a cable from some Shenzen manufacturer and, after much faffing about with drivers, I managed to…
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I gently lowered my face into the autoshave. A hundred AI blades started re-sculpting my beard into this month's mandatory fashion. The snug rubber vacuum seal held tight against my skin while the microbots collected the discarded hairs and applied antiseptic to the few areas where the blades had misfired. Johanna, my partner, thought they collected the beard hairs so that they could run drug tests on them. It was that paranoia which made me love her all the more. Personally, I didn't worry…
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Throughout November I'll be releasing new weird sci-fi short stories. Each one is a campfire horror yarn, with a technological twist. Your feedback is highly appreciated. Everything you read is possible - there's no magic, just sufficiently advanced technology. Chapter 2 - The Myth of the Fall of Icarus Icarus had quarrelled with his father the night before their inaugural flight. "Beware, my son" the ancient Daedalus intoned, "These wings are temporary. We may not make landfall." Icarus…
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Throughout November I'll be releasing new weird sci-fi short stories. Each one is a stand-alone story. Think of them as technological campfire horror yarns, each with a little twist. Your feedback is highly appreciated. Everything you read is possible - there's no magic, just sufficiently advanced technology. Chapter 1 - Are Memories Made Of This? "Holly, I don't mean to be rude but you're not my best friend any more!" That was the bullet which ripped through my world. A moment before the…
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The venerable NaNoWriMo is a self-directed challenge. To whit - can you write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November? It doesn't have to be a good novel. You just need to complete it. 50k words over 30 days is 1,667 words per day. If you can type at about 20 Words Per Minute, then you can bash out a novel in 90 minutes per day. I completed the challenge in 15 days and published a new chapter every day in November. I want to talk about how I did it and what I learned from it. What I…
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The first self-replicating solar panel is the hardest. After that, it's just a race against time. Herein lies the history of our programme and the challenges we now face as an isolated Kardashev Type II civilisation. You will recall that our planet-bound ancestors were not quick to realise the potential of direct solar power. We can only imagine how the development of our civilisation may have been altered if they had bountiful and pollution free energy but, alas, these things take time. Our…
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It took the single green pixel a total of 185 seconds to travel from India's Mars Rover back to Earth. Along its 220 Gigametre journey it passed through an orbital satellite, then the Phobos concatenator, along the Deep Space Network to the Lunar L4 relay, and then to the geostationary conduit which finally beamed it down to Earth. The massive network of radio telescopes in the Complex Oversized Array averaged out the transmission, discarded any data which failed checksum validation, then…
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From the Web-Log of Doctor Nosetacular! 2032-11-28 There's no such thing as superheroes. That's why I've placed my head in a vice and am expanding my nasal cavities with a surgical drill. All my life I wanted to be special. I grew up on a diet of those glossy superhero movies and spent every birthday running in a cheap plastic costume defeating all the bad-guys in my neighbourhood. The older I got, the less I put away childish things. All my electives at college were focussed on one goal -…
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The bomb which ripped Hunter's stomach to shreds was not intended for her. It was wired up to a long-range RFID scanner and strapped inside a plastic recycling bin. The RFID scanner was tuned to the specific frequencies of passport chips and the microcontroller ingested all their data looking for patterns. When each person passed the bin, the bomb checked them out and analysed them against the list of targets. The primary target was a mid-ranking politician who was taking bribes from an…
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My parents had been desperate for a baby boy - a strong male to carry on the family name. My parents' neighbours had wanted a boy so they would have someone to support them in their old age. The family across the street wanted a boy in order to have someone take over the family business. And the family round the corner wanted a boy because they'd seen the way people in this neighbourhood treated the young women. Each of them had made an entirely logical and practical decision for the succession …
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"The CIA's special weapons trainers fed dolphins LSD, gave them hand-jobs, and told them to blow up Russian ships. Would you volunteer for that mission?" Brad thought for a moment, then piped up. "Would I be the trainer or the dolphin, sir? Because getting high and being jerked off already sounds better than basic training." A low growl of irritation came from the Professor of the History of Alternative Warfare and Classified Weapons. "This isn't a joke. I thought you were trying to find real …
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Humans often ask if it is possible to fall in love with a robot. But no one ever asks the flowers if it is possible for them to fall in love with a robot bee. Flowers, despite their innocent petals, are sexual predators. They pump out intoxicating smells which entice the male bee. As the bee flies closer, he catches sight of an ultraviolet pattern splayed out, it is the perfect replica of a willing and available female bee. His lust drives him to copulate with the flower. Thus spent, he flies…
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