A glistening stream of blood gently wept from the body's jagged holes.

The crimson gore sparkled under rapid flash photography as it loosely clung to the wounds. So many wounds. Far too many for this to have been an accident. Under the forensic lights it appeared ethereal. The skin a dull shade of nothing and the hair a pale motif of sadness. The lights washed out any shadows, making the scene look like it had been drawn by an unskilled comic-book artist desperate to get to their next panel. The dripping sound of blood mixed with the high-pitched whine of a dozen flashbulbs repeatedly charging and discharging sounded like the worst kind of musique concrète. An avant-garde composition of despair.

The forensics officer was clad in synthetic white. A portrait of purity amidst a scene of unimaginable depravity. The suit hung loosely on their slumped frame, its fringes sullied with flecks of red. A splatter of colour to outline their form and bring definition to their washed out edges. After a dozen years of mopping up the tattered remains of an uncountable number of humans, there was no life left in his eyes. Two hollow orbs, brimming with unexpected tears, peering out from behind a transparent perspex mask. This didn't get any easier.

"What have we got?" Said the detective.

"Bite marks," said the forensics officer. "A lot of bite marks."

Truchet was a cliché of a modern detective. Long trench coat, poor posture, and a face covered with an impenetrable visor bristling with a dozen sensors, each sniffing out the environment. Inside, the visor beamed augmented information directly into his eyeballs, ultra-violet overlays, infrared patterns, chemical compositions. It whispered constantly in his ears, muttering updates from the æther, letting him listen in on the incessant chatter around him. The mask blanked his face, leaving him completely anonymous to any lurking scumbag. From a respectable distance, he focussed the visor's sensors on the crime scene, letting the LIDAR paint the room with invisible rays. There, in the centre, was the ragged corpse. The visor's AI struggled to form a comprehensive overview of the data it was picking up. The remains were barely recognisable as human; just a series of holes where flesh ought to be. He couldn't tear his eyes away from the incisions.

Detective Truchet was green. No one around him knew that he'd only been on the squad for a couple of months. Detectives like him were interchangeable resources, sent where they were needed to gather, assess, and investigate. Now that the visor was fused to his skull, he was just another "Det" to the rest of the police. An augmented NPC like so many others. There for a day and then gone. No time to build up a human relationship with his colleagues - that was antithetical to impartial police work, apparently. The visor detected his nervousness, felt the bile rising in its host, and flooded his brain with calming hormones.

Even with the synthetic relaxation, Truchet's voice was a quivering wreck he could barely keep from cracking. But all the forensics officer heard was the impassive tone emanating from the visor. "Please tell me a wild animal did this."

If only it had been that simple. Some nuclear-mutant from the scrubland finding its way into a restricted zone was rare, but not impossible. Pheromone-seeking drones could be deployed to sniff out such creatures - pursue and subdue was the polite euphemism. Even the neo-Vegans didn't put much effort into their protests when a wild ultra-boar was rampaging through a school, impaling and irradiating every child in its wake. Once, a reanimated Woolly Mammoth had made its way down from the frozen tundra and started to stomp around one of the clusters of refugee tents. Long-dormant viruses had blasted out of its trunk every time it sneezed, spraying infection across the camp. The entire zone had been "sterilised" and the incident covered-up.

The forensics officer reluctantly looked back at the victim. He bade the Det to kneel down and pulled out a laser scanner. He waved the tool over a series of incisions across what was left of a shoulder. The scanner happily chuntered away, pulsing a series of coloured lights onto the tattered skin, briefly turning it into a disco. The scanner started feeding directly into the visor, and Truchet's eyes were infused with a confusing series of diagrams. Mandibles, jaws, compression rates, shearing force, incision ratios. The laser projector was so strong that even when he screwed his eyes shut against the horrors, those puncture-wounds were still etched onto his retinas.

The scanner beeped and finished its transmission. The lights died and Truchet's vision returned to normal, but his heart couldn't stop pounding.

The forensics officer's voice was a rattle of sadness and incomprehension. "That's a human bite. No doubt about it."

Truchet's visor started working overtime as it reacted to the sudden and drastic changes in its host's endocrine system. It quickly locked down the Det's bladder and bowels, placing a tight constriction on the whole area. The stomach was sent an unhealthy dose of muscle relaxant to prevent the eruption of vomit which was forming. Simultaneously, caffeine was flooded into the brain to allow Truchet to cope with the influx of information pouring in from multiple online sources, and a mild dose of dopamine left him feeling happy that he was helping solve a problem. A spasm of electricity was zapped down his spine, causing him to stand up straight. To the outside world, it looked like military precision and professional indifference.

The forensics officer stood slowly. "What kind of sick freak bites chunks out of someone?"

An unbidden thought flashed across Truchet's brain; what if these really were the end times? The world had gone to hell and it didn't look like it would be redeemed any time soon. The oceans were boiling while plagues of locusts swarmed across the few remaining crop fields. A foul pestilence had been stalking the land since before he was born; but for how much longer? Was it really so unlikely that man would turn on man? Everyone was hungry these days. Synthetic meat gave you nutrients, but it couldn't satisfy the primal hunger people had for slaughtered flesh. Perhaps an omni who was sick of the forced rationing had taken matters into their own hands? Their own jaws.

The visor sent an encrypted signal back to HQ that it was running dangerously low on mood-altering chemicals along with a suggestion that its host might need a few sessions of aggressive re-education. Somewhere, unknown to Truchet, a counter incremented - taking him one step closer to retirement. Detectives were expensive to breed, expensive to train, and even more expensive when they went wrong. It was nothing personal, of course, merely economics. An annoying waste on a spreadsheet, sure, but he was one of a thousand Dets in the city-state. The algorithms could always promote someone else. Someone with a less heightened sense of fear.

"What do we know about the victim?" The visor modulated the panic out of Truchet's voice.

"Depressingly little, sir."

"Biometrics?"

The forensics officer braced himself. He didn't have the benefit of chemical alteration at the scene. That would have to wait until he got home to his illicit still. The official alcohol they served in licenced establishments was watered down and laced with hormones. The more you drank, the more you loved the government. Sometimes, after a day of seeing the worst of humanity, what you really needed was to get black-out drunk on domestic moonshine and damn the hangover.

"No biometrics, sir. As you can see, the finger-prints have been chewed off."

"RFID tag?"

"No sir, shattered due to this incision. The attacker knew which parts to target."

"It isn't your place to speculate!" The visor spat back before Truchet had a chance to digest the implications. Social order must be preserved at all times, and a mere technician making deductions from their limited dataset was inimical to good police-work.

"Sorry sir, of course. We don't have access to dental records though, perhaps you would care to look?" Reluctantly, the Det made his way round to what appeared to be the front of the body. He felt his feet squelch on the little lumps of flesh strewn across the grimy floor. Thankfully, the mouth of the corpse was wide open, twisted in pain, but offering an unobstructed view of the teeth. His fingers prodded the air, instructing the visor where to scan and which databases to correlate against. There was something… his brain was urgently trying to tell him something. A runaway process was going haywire and screaming for attention. Even in his chemically addled state, he could feel his mind writhing in terror at something deep within his subconscious.

The victim's records came back within a few seconds. Young-ish. Male-ish. Famous-ish. A wannabe tuber with a respectable if dwindling follower count. Someone the kids could look up to and the adults could perv on. They were ten-a-penny these days; each scrambling to find a niche to exploit. Each hoping the algorithm would favour them next. This guy had been pumping out videos since he was a kid. His parents had sensibly availed themselves of one of the few remaining economic activities allowable to their class. The visor started playing back some of his biggest hits at double-speed, skipping the now-redundant exaltation to like-and-subscribe. In another world he may have had a successful career as the handsome lead in low-brow talkies. But here he was, shattered and ravaged. Another victim in a sea of horrors. The Det's subconscious finally broke through. Even the visor wasn't quick enough to catch him recoil from the victim or silence his terrified gasp.

"Oh my god! I have a match!"

"From the dental records?" The forensics officer was confused.

"No. Yes. I... Sweet merciful..." The visor muted its host until he regained his composure.

The room went quiet. The flashbulbs were silenced and the forensic cameras flew back a respectful distance. Truchet sent an emergency embargo on his feed. He needed a moment to think about this before it was streamed out to the viewers back home. Perhaps a few of them had already made the connection. They'd probably be censored automatically before they could reveal the awful truth. He breathed in filtered oxygen from his visor. He needed to pause. Just a moment. Either he was crazy, or the world was.

He beckoned the forensics office over and pressed the visor's speaker to the white-clad ear. He set the output volume to the minimum possible. Barely a whisper. Quiet enough that any listening devices in the vicinity would be hard-pressed to distinguish the signal from the background noise.

"The teeth marks on the victim. I have a match. They… they belong to the victim."

The room span around the forensics officer. This was deranged, a sick joke, a freak coincidence. This couldn't be suicide! It just couldn't. No human - not even a psychopath burnt out on designer pharmaceuticals - could inflict those sorts of wounds on themselves. No. Impossible. It didn't make sense. "How sure are you?" he whispered back.

Truchet relaxed and surrendered to the visor, he let it control his motion even as his brain screamed for mercy. He saw his body act autonomously, picking up a discarded lump of human-meat. His hand, no longer under his conscious control, moved the still-warm pound of flesh to the corpse's mouth. The incisions in the skin were clearly visible on both sides. His visor started an augmented reality overlay, confirming what his pattern-matching subconscious had already determined. It started pointing out all the subtle details which proved the match. Each tooth mark in the victim's body matched a tooth in his skull.

This wasn't auto-cannibalism, of that the Det was sure. No one was flexible enough to bite their back like that. A double-jointed mutant with burnt-out pain-receptors wouldn't have been able to inflict that much damage on themselves. It was an impossibility. The data was messed up, surely? His visor was faulty? Something, anything other than the truth.

The visor started to play the victim's latest video. It looked like it had been shot in a doctor's office. The background was sterile and the lighting harsh - a far cry from the sensitively lit and carefully cluttered videos he usually posted. The victim was yammering about how excited he was to be getting a full medical scan courtesy of today's sponsor. Expensive medical equipment swam into view as the camera-drone tracked a wide selfie shot. As he sat down in the face scanner, he started describing how he would soon have a detailed CT scan of his jaw, which would allow him to play around with some open-source plastic surgery tools.

The camera tracked around. "Pause!" shouted Truchet. The visor stopped the video. Truchet instructed the city's mainframe to algorithmically enhance the few frames that contained an oddly coloured square in the corner. An aeon of computer time passed, gigajoules of energy were consumed, until the answer was spat back into his vision. There, stuck to the CT scanner, was a sticky-note. On it, in neater handwriting than befitted a doctor, was the medical system's master password.

The cybernetically enhanced detective felt a surge of relief; he'd cracked the case. The killer had stolen the CT scan and then 3D printed a duplicate jaw to use as a weapon. His visor started pinging him urgently. Somewhere, across town, another victim had been found.

Thanks for reading

I'd love your feedback on this story. Did you like the style of writing? Was the plot interesting? Did you guess the twist? Please stick a note in the comments to motivate me 😃

Hungry for more? You can read:

• 2024's "Revenge Of The Mutant Algorithms"
• 2023's "Tales of the Algorithm"

Every culture has their own version of Grimm's "Der süße Brei". A cautionary tale of a magic porridge dispenser which, thanks to one woman's forgetfulness, engulfs the entire village with an endless supply of food. The Dutch warn their children about the dangers posed by the rijstebrijberg - rice-pudding mountain. Strega Nona's pot drowns a town in pasta. Asbjørnsen and Moe recorded the legend of an avalanche of herring in Norway. Babad Tanah Jawi regaled Indonesians with Jaka Tarub's travails with a magic rice cooker. Every child of West Africa knows how Thunder gave Anansi a cooking pot which would never empty - and how it caused tragedy. It's a common concern.

But none of those stories come close to the madness of Tina's blasphemous miracle.

People need to eat and, traditionally, have grown food in soil. That's a labour-intensive process with uncertain results and a requirement for fertile land, clean water, and constant sunlight. None of these things are available on a space craft thrusting its way between planets. So the Mars Unlimited Space Kompany, in a rare show of symbiosis, launched a public competition to find a way to feed hungry astronauts on the way to Mars.

Tina was a student at the time. She was studying agricultural science and business administration with a view to taking over her family's moribund fruit and vegetable company. On hearing about the competition she immediately broke into the science lab to steal some samples.

In later retellings of the story - while dressed in her trademark black turtle-neck - Tina variously claimed to have "accidentally" acquired the samples from a roommate or to have slept with a professor in order to obtain them. The University remained silent on the true cause of her expulsion - but they are pleased to offer the Yamaguchi memorial scholarship to dozens of bright students each year. Tina earned enough honorary doctorates in her lifetime to offset never finishing her undergraduate studies.

Back to the beansprouts.

Tina's genius was in realising that a simple organism could be selectively bred in such a way that it was susceptible to diseases usually only found in complex organisms. There's very little point giving a potato sickle-cell anæmia, and rice wasn't hardy enough to withstand acromegaly. But beansprouts... Well, beansprouts happened to be just right.

From the consumer's point of view, it was simple. Place the Perpetual Beansprouts™ in a specially designed box with a dozen holes on the side. Once plugged in to a USB port, the box illuminated the sprouts with specially crafted LEDs pumping out precise wavelengths of light. Pour a little water into the container and watch the magic happen.

On a good day, the beansprouts would produce a couple of metres. Each. Chop off the ends. Wait another day, harvest them again. Forever.

Boil 'em, stir fry 'em, stick 'em in a stew. While not nutritionally complete, the humble sprout could be tricked into producing a range of vitamins. And that was good enough. Every colonist on Mars had a 'Guchi. No one cared what was in them - it was an infinite supply of vegetable matter. No one wanted to peek behind the curtain.

What was the magic ingredient? What did Tina exfiltrate from the lab?

The Yamaguchi Foodstuffs Conglomerate's dominance of the worlds' food supplies is now unassailable. Tina's name will live forever - just like her sprouts. The patents have long since expired and, besides, no one is going to stop eating just because they know the truth. Every child knows the story of Tina's struggles and triumphs. Every kitchen is a little shrine to her genius. Her reputation is immortal - and no revelation can rewrite history. We can scream the truth in the streets, and no one will care as long as their bellies are full.

Buried deep in the Yamaguchi archives is the original petri dish which revived the company and kept both worlds from starvation. The label is grimy and faded. But the four letters on it match the genetic analysis taken from the earliest samples. Our empire is built on the back of a monstrosity. The world is not a fairy-tale strangled with unstoppable plant-matter, but our souls are forever tainted; smothered by someone else's sin. Everyone needs to know.

Perpetual Beansprout is HeLa!

The speed of light is a universal constant. This "speed limit" is fundamental to everything we understand about physics. Information - when propagated via the electromagnetic spectrum - cannot travel faster than 0.3 Gigametres per second. There is no argument here. Every experiment conducted by our top scientists has confirmed it. There are no "warp drives" and no "worm-holes" and "quantum entanglement" is a bust. Simply put, information cannot travel faster than light.

At least, that's what we all thought…

Our advanced research lab have devised a testable hypothesis which they think will demonstrate how this can be violated. What is needed is a set of objects which change state immediately. When something happens to Object A, there is an instantaneous change in Object B. No matter how far apart, A⇒B is reliably instant.

To that end, we're raising funds to put our experiment into practice. We are going to send a team of scientists to the planet Mars. At its furthest, light takes 22 minutes to travel to the red planet. We will enact an action on A, and receive notification from Mars that they have noticed the effect on B. If the notification arrives in less time than it takes for light to make a round-trip from Earth to Mars (44 minutes) we will know that we have conveyed information faster than light.

Le mort saisit le vif

Let "Object A" be the current ruling Monarch. And let "Object B" be the next in line to the throne.

As per the Divine Right of Kings (James VI, 1598), accession to the monarchy is instantaneous. Often quoted in the pithy phrase "The King Is Dead - Long Live The King!" The moment that the old King dies, their heir becomes the new King.

Our plan is to send the current heir to Mars - along with a team of top scientists and theologians. The heir will be constantly monitored to ascertain the very moment they become our new King. When their supremacy is detected, the scientists will radio back to planet Earth. Approximately 20 minutes later, they should receive notification from us that the heir is now the King.

We do not need to engage in regicide, thankfully; the abdication of the ruling monarch also immediately triggers succession.

Towards a general theory of monarchy-based communication

There are several practical limitations with this approach.

Firstly, communication is uni-directional.

This is relatively easy to solve. A⇒B⇒C where A is the Monarch (remaining on Earth), B is A's heir (sent to Mars), and C is B's heir (remaining on Earth).

With a long enough line of succession, we could transfer individual bits back and forth between planets.

If we manage to solve the above problem, this would only provide for a bi-directional communications link.

If it is possible to detect the change in status of heirⁿ⁺¹ - that is, the heir's heir's heir - we may be able to distribute the Royal family across the Interstellar Empire. With a sufficiently large family of heirs, and precise enough equipment to detect each heir's position in the chain of succession, we would be able to communicate simultaneously across multiple planets.

Error detection will be a problem. Unfortunately, Monarchs sometimes die. Sometimes they are forced to abdicate. This means that an unintended communication may be transmitted.

Finally, we are only able to communicate a single bit of information. In order to make this a useful communications link, some pre-arranged codes will need to devised.

For example, the triggering of the Monarch protocol could be a signal that the home-world is under attack.

A more complicated protocol could involve, for example, days of the week. If the bit is transmitted on Monday, it means X. Transmitted on a Tuesday means Y. Etc. This would require precise time-keeping at both ends - something not always possible with relativistic travel between worlds.

Assuming that a planet had multiple heirs - e.g. heir^{1, 3, 5, 7, 9, …} - they may be able to send a complex message by choosing which heirs renounce their position. Note that a lower number heir abdicating would automatically remove their descendents from eligibility to the throne.

We are confident that all these problems can be addressed - given enough time and funding

Back our Kickstarter!

Elon Musk has generously agreed to allow us the use of a SpaceX rocket at cost. We need your help to raise enough money to send our scientists, theologians, heirs, and equipment to the Martian base.

Every Kickstarter backer will earn their place in history by helping to create superluminal communications. We can only do this if we all work together.

And, if you're a member of a Royal family - please get in touch!

Here's how it worked¹:

• You pay money to the artist (Bowie)
• Artist uses that money to buy the rights to their back catalogue
• Every time one of the songs from that catalogue is sold, or played on the radio, the artist gets paid
• Investors receive a share of that payment

It's a primitive "smart" contract². Money flows back to the individual investors.

Imagine if you could do this today. Let's say you want to invest in The Rolling Stones. You can't.

You can invest in Warner Music Group. Which is the corporation which owns the label which controls the rights to the music of the Rolling Stones³. But that means you'd also be investing in bands that you don't like - or may even hate.

Imagine a future where a fan could directly invest the The Rolling Stones. Not just by buying records, concert tickets, or merchandising. But literally buying a percentage of the Stones. When their music gets played, you get money. If their latest record fails to sell, you lose money. You could trade your shares in them just like any other share.

What perverse incentives might this produce?

• Obnoxious Evangelist. You know those dudebros who derail every online conversation with how great Tesla is? Now imagine them at every gig. Ew!
• Pump and Dump. Hack a load of Spotify accounts, set them all to play Sympathy for The Devil on non-stop repeat. Cash out.
• Activist Shareholder. At the shareholder meeting, agitate to replace Keith Richards with Justin Bieber - that'll produce a short term price bump. Albeit at the cost of artistic freedom.

Let's go a step further. What if you could directly invest in the artist themselves? Buy a share of Mick Jagger.

Mick releases a viral video on TikTok? Your shares go up! Revelations about some dodgy behaviour in the 1970s? Your shares go down. Just like Celebdaq!

Cool! But, again, what emergent behaviour might that encourage?

• Abuse. If your share price goes down, will rabid fans start harassing the artist?
• Shorting. Could you intentionally reduce the share price in an artist by smearing them with malicious falsehoods?
• Share washing. Jagger knows a lot of millionaires. Could he get his friends to artificially inflate his share price in order to defraud unwary investors?

Finally, what is guaranteed to send an artist to the top of the charts?

Death.

If you knew exactly when an artist would die - how much money could you make from that?

This is, sadly, the logical end-case for the NFT craze.

Someone who is emotionally invested in an artist - to the point of obsession - is a common trope. Stalker fans are an unfortunate reality for some popular artists. Now mix that with financial investment. Imagine a fan, distraught that their favourite band has broken up and financially destitute because the share price has cratered.

What might that drive them to?

Or, perhaps a syndicate of wealthy investors realise that the cost of engaging the service of an assassin is a low price to pay for a guaranteed Return On Investment. Even if one - or all - of them are caught, the smart contracts can't be rescinded. Code Is Law. As the songs climb the charts and the memorial concert is sold out, all those micro-cents will flow through a tangled network and automatically land somewhere untraceable.

The future is going to get even weirder than we can imagine.

Governments are a monopoly. There is only one institution which can grant you a passport - Her Majesty's Passport Office.

That's not quite true, of course. You are free to seek citizenship in other countries. And some countries will sell you a passport.

In business studies terms, other countries might be termed as "traditional competitors". Much like BBC1 competes with ITV in the TV environment. A competitor might come via a different delivery mechanism - like cable or satellite - but they're essentially the same proposition.

And then Netflix comes along. It doesn't deliver linear TV. It doesn't travel over the airwaves. It has a completely different revenue model. It is convenient. And it eats the competitors' lunch.

This is the essence of "disruption". Asymmetric competitors which don't play by your outdated rules.

So, what can disrupt the state?

Let's suppose that the Republic of Wakanda decides that they want to open up to international travellers. Rather than issue passports themselves, they do a deal with an airline. Anyone with enough BA airmiles to get Platinum Status is automatically granted a Wakandan Passport. It is, nominally, certified by their passport office but is entirely operated and managed by British Airways.

Perhaps this "passport" isn't recognised by any other state. But that's OK, some customers are happy to only travel between their home and the land of the Black Panther.

And then... The country next door realises the economic advantage of these travellers, and starts accepting Wakandan / BA passports. Then a former Russian state of Arstotzka thinks it has nothing to lose so also goes for it. Perhaps Pan Am launches a similar "passport" with Tomainia - and anyone with WorldPass Ultra status gets a passport.

It starts small - like Netflix's DVDs by post. Then expands into other markets as competitors encroach. And then "Wakanda and Fly?" becomes a catchphrase.

To be clear - I don't think this is the future and I don't think it's a good idea. This is an exercise in "what if...?"

Could Uber issue its own driving licences for its semi-autonomous vehicles? Would you subscribe to Securiroo to get an off-duty Police Officer to your door in 30 minutes or less? How about paying your tax directly to Monzo and then they can negotiate a cheaper rate with HMRC on behalf of millions of customers?

These are deliberately absurd ideas.

But there are business ideas out there which will disintermediate the state. What are they and how should we react to them?