1. The Glass City
It glitters on the horizon whether its night or day like a vast immense snow globe illuminated from within.
The approach is littered with the dead. Those that were drawn towards its light, and those that fled the same. A millennia of bones, newly stained each day by freshly spilt blood.
4. Duplicity Of Purpose
The crabs scuttle along the shoreline, scatter from our footsteps, return in our wake, oblivious always to the fact we can see through their eyes, feel through their shells, hear through their ears, taste through their tongues, the entirety of their being relayed to us via the multitude of microscopic additions we’ve made to their bodies for reasons beyond their limited comprehension.
Data collection. Mapping. Simple surveillance. Even curiosity. It all plays a part.
And sometimes I wonder what use our bodies and minds are being put to by powers greater than our own, beings so far beyond the scope of our comprehension we cannot even conceive of their presence, except in these fleeting moments of paranoiac thoughts, these vestigial dreams of vast incomprehensible beings watching us from their kingdoms beyond the sky.
6. The Covert
We are careful. We have to be. Any slip could expose our position, our existence, the fact we linger on here, in the dark, in the cold. We who are supposed to be dead, we who hope only to be forgotten.
But they will never forget. Hate never stops, never sleeps, never dies.
So we switch off our lights at night, let our fires go cold. Don’t speak in the silence, don’t broadcast into the void. Hide everything in the noise. Data, comms, production, movement, generation, disposal.
Birth, death.
Kindness.
Love.
We hide them all. Disguise ourselves until we’re indistinguishable from the natural flow of the world, the sun, the stars, space itself.
You could be looking at us right now, seeing nothing, suspecting even less.
21. Augmentation
Tools used well become an extension of the self. The mind accepts them as its own. The well-wielded knife isn’t held in the hand, it is the hand. The pianist’s fingers don’t press the keys, the keys are pressed directly by the brain itself. We do not pilot the spaceship, we fly ourselves directly through the void.
28. Pocket Universes
A simple iridium box, 4-8 metres high and wide, powered by its own internal neutronic star. This warps the space within the cube until its 10 times the size the outer shell suggests. Oddly the effect persists even when the power subsides, granting you your own permanent spacial anomaly in a conveniently shaped container.
Stack them in rows and you can solve the housing crisis, expand production limits, create infinite storage solutions, solve every problem caused by over production, ultra consumption, population explosions.
Embed them in themselves like Russian dolls and you can hide entire universes in a wardrobe, hide secret kingdoms behind magic mirrors, let portals lead you to secret lairs, internal doors that open out onto endless elysian fields. The possibilities are endless.
These days, the technology is mostly used by the prison industry at vast public expense.
35. The Limits Of Expansion
We would not allow gravity to contain us. We grew. We spread. We left the Earth and colonised the galaxy, only to discover it was not enough. All along the perimeter we looked forlornly at the space beyond, too vast and empty to ever traverse. Finally, we knew, we had to live within our limits.
And it drove us mad.
40. Lifecycle Of A Technological Advance
Point to point teleportation was initially used for individual transportation, if of course you were exceptionally rich or important. Later, costs were reduced enough to make it viable both for large scale shipping as well as a means for mass transit, before later becoming so widespread everyone had their own personal transporter.
Eventually the price came down so low it was cheap enough not just for single item shipping but even a short lived faddish revival of postcard and letter writing.
Finally, made obsolete by various technological advances in competing industries, as well as shifts in societal trends, teleportation was reduced to being used primarily as a means for petty crime, intimidation, revenge, and as a low cost weapon of retaliatory warfare.
45. The Loop
The Loop allows you to interact with yourself, time repeating within the enclosed space of the machine on a five minute cycle, your previous iterations present like ghosts.
As a technology it has no practical use, but you can harmonise with yourself, or even race your own ghost around the room. A surprisingly satisfying endeavour.
51. System+
Metal in the veins extending the nervous system. Data storage in the core of your bones. All of it more reliable than the old flesh. You’ll never forget a thing.
Now there’s memories echoing in your mind disagreeing with associated files in your spine. Like deja vu, but worse because it’s real. You can’t reconcile the differences. Not even seeing old videos of yourself is as bad as this.
A new form of dread.
Feel it in your brain, know it in your bones.
57. The Logic Of Time Travel
The past is set, the future is not.
That’s the mantra we live by. You can use the machine to go forward and still return to now. But go back and you’ll be stuck. It’s a one way trip. You can’t go home again.
So the initial solution is never go back. Forward motion only.
The problem arises when someone else discovers what we can do, copies it, controls it. So what should we do then? Hope they keep to our voluntary agreements? Try and convince then to cooperate rather than compete?
Obviously not. The only solution is to go back and eliminate them before they go back and eliminate us. When the present is gone, it’s gone. It’s all gone. We’re all gone. Whether we’re the ones to do it or they are, the now we know won’t ever exist again. At least if we move first, we’ll have the chance to save some of the things we love.
Ourselves, mostly. But it’s not like anyone else but us will ever know our crimes.
63. Miscellaneous Creatures Of The Galactic Sphere #1: The Imp
Although rare, Imps have one of the most notorious reputations of any pan-galactic lifeform. Winged, bipedal creatures standing at most half a metre tall, available in a variety of bright and sparkly colours, imps would probably be considered desirable exotics ripe for domestication if it wasn’t for their abundance of needle-like teeth that can chew through metal and stone alike, their blank refusal to follow commands, and their extremely irritating behaviour that quickly reduces almost all sentient races to paroxysms of petulant annoyance with hours.
Though never directly antagonistic or violent, they are commonly associated with death and destruction through their propensity for inducing accidents in their prey through the sheer relentless thoroughness of the distraction they cause.
The fact that Imps can converse in the native tongue of whoever they’re currently pestering, coupled with the near indestructible nature of their physical forms, has led to most theories as to their origin assuming some sort of intended construction, whether through selective breeding, genetic engineering, or biomechanical manufacture, though nothing has yet been proved such is their resistance to research.
Despite their evident ease with language, Imps refuse to answer direct queries (while endlessly asking questions of their own). They also ignore other Imps with such determination it is hard to tell whether they can even perceive each other’s presence, although the fact they have never been observed to interact with another even by accident suggest, on simple probability, that they can.
My own personal theory as to their evolution is that they’re simply children’s toys that got out of hand.
71. Operating System
Technological colonisation of the human mind. Memory cores, language modules, calculation devices, sensory enhancers, location services, mapping systems, conversation logs. We’ve installed it all. We’ve granted it whatever permissions they seek.
All of it built on proprietary code, unaudited, unupdated, bugged and leaky and lossy and hacked. Who knows what data’s been exposed, how many of your dreams illegally exported, which of your desires they’re currently exploiting.
77. Immortality
We defeated death
only to realise
we hated life
84. Scenes From A Pilgrimage
A statue in a valley on an otherwise uninhabited world. Ten kilometre long space hulks wrecked on the outskirts of a fishing village, mudhats and wooden shacks now fortified by scavenged metal panels. Gangs of cats with robotic limbs stalking dusty alleyways in a deserted market town. A girl outside a station sat crosslegged on a raffia mat, levitating and dematerialising for tourists pleasure, their coins and acclaim. Beaches turned to glass by laser fire, seas boiled away to steam. An island made of animal bone, clouds built from billowing skin.
And still I’m no closer to finding any trace of you.
114. Nostalgia For Futures Yet Unfulfilled
Science fiction used to be full of future sports. Overly complex, dangerous, extreme, zero g, multidimensional, every aspect explained in excruciating detail, played in neon lit locales and luridly glowing, revealingly form fitting latex, in front of baying crowds, exotic mixtures of humans, aliens, robots, monsters.
You don’t see it so much any more. No one cares about 3D tennis, 4 team football, really crazy golf. There’s better things to do with your words, with your readers’ time.
But still.
I miss them.
116. The Essence Of Science Fiction
A cat (in a spacesuit) chasing a mouse (also in a spacesuit)
121. Utopia Beach
They fight on the sand.
Earthlings, aliens, animals from every known system and several that probably aren’t, all duplicated at source, surreptitiously teleported straight into the pit while their original selves continue on obliviously back home.
The perfect crime. No one but the paying audience will ever know you’re there. And on your inevitable death not even you’ll know you’ve gone.
Every fight your first fight. Every fight your last. Immediate dissolution of winners and losers alike. No matter how often they choose to resurrect you, you’ll always be as bewildered, as confused, as ill prepared for what’s to come,
But luckily, that goes for your opponent too.
139. The Kid
The tragedy of The Kid was that she lived every death she had ever had. Then jumped back to safety, some reflexive flinch jolting her back through time just far enough to make some other move and avoid the fatal moment this time.
A reputation of invincibility built on scenes of her jolting like a stop motion machine through gun fights and battlefields as she died a thousand deaths invisible to all outside observers.
But there’s a difference between deaths. Bullet holes and stab wounds might be okay. It’s the slow deaths that hurt. Sometimes this meant going back days, other times years, all those moments of her life lost forever as she jumped all the way back to before she ate the poisoned apple, before she contracted the deadly disease. Before the cancer formed, before the heart began to fail, before the body began to age. You could live those years ago, but they’d be different each time, never the same. Friends lost, lovers lost, children lost.
She awaited the inevitable moment of non-existence that would eventually come for her. The only way to escape the certainty of death is to remove the moment of birth.
142. Use Of Technology
Photographs captured in a detail so fine you could step into them and live in the moment forever. Perfect scenes straight out of holiday brochures and travel magazines. Sun drenched beaches, rolling hills of green, dappled light leading you on down some endless woodland path.
That was how they were intended to be used, anyway. How they were marketed. But mostly, of course, they were sold so you could once again kiss lost loves, pose with celebrities, slide into bed with models and actors and athletic superstars, whether they’d granted you permission or not.
Or they were used to kill and torture without consequence, repeatedly defeating enemies on some forlorn battlefield, or abusing captives in their cells. Whether as revenge or catharsis, or the simple satisfaction of our society’s sadism, it’s all the same.
Commerce, in its commitment to egalitarianism, caters to all whims, commodifies every single moment of every single human’s lives. To withhold consent is to oppose freedom of expression. To question freedom of expression is to question society’s very existence.
154. Genre Assertion
Ghost stories are time travel stories, projections of past consciousness into eras far enough ahead they’re utterly incomprehensible to it.
166. The Infinite Expansion Machine
I bought an Infinite Expansion Machine from the market to see what all the fuss was about. And it’s pretty good, actually. I’m impressed.
You plug it in, turn it on and then it just keeps on getting bigger, at a constant rate of expansion, forever (or at least until someone turns it off).
But I’m not going to turn it off. I’m going to leave it running for as long as I can. I can’t wait until it’s so big I can’t hold it any more. I can’t wait until it’s so big I have to buy a bigger table to put it on. I can’t wait until it’s so big I have to get rid of the table entirely and most of the rest of my furniture too. I can’t wait until it’s so big it crushes me to death in the night and my house falls down.
181. Prescriptivism versus Descriptivism
Language is a solved problem. The corpus contains every possible combination of words, from single sentence level up to multimillion volume novel cycles. Everything that can be said has been said.
Inevitably, copyright is forever now. It is impossible to speak without a copyright claim against you. If you control the archive, you can silence whoever you wish.
And yet, and yet…
Every generation remakes language anew, weirds it into shapes unknown to history. There’s no stopping change, no restricting the limits of expression.
These words are ours. We will use them how we want.
__________
Notes:
1. These stories are all taken from A Book Of Small Science Fiction (part one)
2. Which contains another 150 or so too
3. If you’ve not had enough
