by submission | Apr 22, 2026 | Story |
Author: Mark Renney
Cartwright tends to the machine, the work is all-consuming but perfunctory at best. He cleans the machine and he replaces the data chips. It is vital this is done in the correct order and at the opportune moment, when the machine is able to upload that particular information.
The machine and the house in which it and Cartwright reside is large. It amuses Cartwright that everything is getting smaller, all the things the others desire have become minuscule and they can even choose not to handle them, but simply conjure the information out of the ether. But the machines are getting larger and louder.
The house sits apart from the others and its grounds are sparse and barren, there are no outbuildings or trees, no cover or shade. The boundary is clearly marked by a low level picket fence and only those making the necessary deliveries pass through the gates. They bring everything Cartwright needs and wants, machine parts as required, tins of paint and of course the all-important data chips.
Screens are difficult to use, the living quarters are sound proofed but even so the resolution and volume are ultra-low and distorted. Just a few minutes’ use induces ear-splitting headaches and nausea.
Cartwright’s only luxuries are books and almost exclusively he reads the latest engineering manuals. He is content and happy with his lot and hasn’t any intention of stepping away and relinquishing his position but Cartwright does not want to fall behind. Part of his duties is the maintenance of the house and grounds but apart from almost constantly repainting the walls this really only amounts to more cleaning. Nothing grows or flourishes close to the machine and there are no flowers or vegetables to tend, no weeds to pull or lawns to mow. The house is sparsely furnished and functional but Cartwright is comfortable and has all he desires.
Occasionally Cartwright walks to the edge of the grounds; he doesn’t cross the boundary. But if he stands close to the fence he can no longer hear the machine, its whirring and grinding, its breathing, and he can’t feel the rumble under his feet. He doesn’t take a device but it is enough for Cartwright to know if he did it would work. That he would be able to communicate with the others and have complete access.
by submission | Apr 21, 2026 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Philomena paced the floor of the lab. “It’s the only thing that will do the trick.”
“Quantum bacon?”
“Of course, quantum bacon. What else is going to attract the right kind of scientists to work here?”
“And who exactly are the ‘right kind’ of scientists?” Akira asked.
Philomena smiled her patient and most patronizing smile. “The ones who believe that all souls were created during the Big Bang.”
“Wait. So souls are made of atoms?”
“Of course. But thoughts are not.”
Akira didn’t take that bait. “Philomena, be real. Where is this all heading? Why do we need so many scientists, let alone all the lab space you’ve leased across the country, for a dark matter experiment that sounds like woo-woo mysticism.”
“Franchising.”
“Franchising?” Akira waited. And waited some more. “Franchising?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Not to this theoretical physicist.”
Philomena snapped her fingers. “Exactly why we need a new breed of scientists. We don’t want old stuffy classically trained brains. We need much fresher brains as in B-R-A-N-E-S!”
“So, that’s your play. Brane theory. That we’re a 3D brane trapped inside higher dimensional space.”
“The Bulk.”
“I know the multidimensional jargon, Philomena.”
“But you don’t see the opportunity, Akira. The multiverse. It’s an unlimited market. And we can sell in bulk to the Bulk.”
“Sell what?”
“Quantum bacon. Stellar shampoo. Cosmic trading cards. It hardly matters. In a market so enormous, even low volume sales reap incredible profits. It’s called the long tail and we’ll be wagging ours all the way to interdimensional dominance.”
“Are we physicists or pitchmen?”
“Both. We need to be both. Rutherford, Curie, Einstein, Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Fermi. They opened the atomic door with no sales experience, no business plan and all it got them were a few measly Nobel Prizes. When we harness fermions to portal into the multiverse, I want to be ready to capitalize on the infinite possibilities.”
Akira contemplated Philomena and the planes–and now branes–of delirious ambition that drove her.
He only had one answer. “Quantum bacon.”
“Now you get it, partner. Quantum bacon. The taste of the truly infinite future.”
by Julian Miles | Apr 20, 2026 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“How can I be expected to rule well when all of you keep on believing the FAKE news spread by people who hate me for being so good. Why think enemies of what I am trying to do tell you the truth? I tell you the TRUTH you need. I am a gentle giant in many many things. VERY smart. But you will not believe. I do not understand why you keep failing me. So I have decided. Best if I start again. No more weak people. No more arguments over ruling. No more disagreements over my brilliant plans. No more crying over this piece of sand or that length of sea. No more fighting what I want. This plan is GENIUS. So many people who said they supported me were really WEAK servants of woke and foreign powers. They kept the truth from me. NO MORE! My very very clever Minister of War found what you had all been trying to hide and showed it me. Today you will know what we do when the gloves come OFF. You would not believe me. You would not help me. You only have nukes because we let you keep them! This got set up in case you betrayed us. Been up there for years. My people just finished making it better. Very clever of me to know I would need it. Put all the launch codes in as well. Do not try to fight back! I don’t know why they tried to keep all this from me. Even tried to tell me it would not work. RUBBISH! It works FINE if you don’t need to AIM! I do not need to because everywhere I need to feel my authority is in range. So I am going to hit all of you. Nobody gets to insult me anymore. All the cities who said I could not tell them what to do. All the states who said I had no power. All the countries who would not support my wars. You said I could not be trusted. We will see about that! All of you are to BLAME! If you crawl from the rubble afterwards you will see mushroom clouds. Then you will LEARN. You should have listened. You should have obeyed. Now you will. Tomorrow is MINE!”
by Alastair Millar | Apr 19, 2026 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
[> play]
“So that, ladies and gentlemen, is SePPO, the Self-Propelled Public Order system: the bipedal, flexible law enforcement tool for the next century! Do we have any questions?”
“Angus McAndrew, New Tech News. What OS do they run on?”
“The units run on a proprietary AI-rated operating system trained for public order situations. They will identify genuine, repeated threats and subdue them.”
“Could these units kill? Aren’t they just robot soldiers?”
“Absolutely not. They are programmed to subdue not liquidate. Much safer than armed, fallible humans, in our view. Next?”
[|| pause]
“Programming can be changed of course,” noted the Aide drily. The Strategic Planning Director nodded.
[> play]
“Anne Carpenter, TechToday. Can they discriminate between genuine threats and bystanders?”
“Absolutely. They will protect themselves from direct threats, but only subdue persistent threats. For example, falling masonry or even a single thrown missile is a threat to avoid; someone throwing multiple missiles is a threat to be subdued.”
“What about guns?”
“We recognise that in some jurisdictions there is a right to bear arms. If firearms are for example holstered and not being aimed, the units can be programmed not to consider them a threat. Next?”
[|| pause]
“In other words, Director,” said the Aide, “these are half-ton machines with the reflexes of lizards, that can be told to consider anything a potential weapon, and can react to their presence, not just their use.”
[> play]
“Max Mofolo, Sub-Saharan Educational Review. Are they safe to use around schools? Couldn’t they injure kids?”
“Geofencing is used to limit areas of operation. Next?”.
“Syd Jones, GB Republic News. Aren’t their operators a weak link?”
“Not at all. They run through remote aerial or orbital links. So operators are never in danger, and can’t be compromised.”
[|| pause]
“Their promotional material says that they can run on any of the global satnav systems, or via loitering stratospheric drone or high altitude airship. Pretty soon any moderately competent local or national polity will be able to use them.”
“Hmmmm. Okay, I’ve seen enough.”
“The Department’s view is that these are going to be very popular, sir. Obviously they’ll make opposition to the government much more difficult, which in turn will serve to entrench the regulatory status quo, which would be bad for us. Should we manipulate regulators into shutting the manufacturers down? Or attempt sabotage to make the products look unsafe and the companies careless?”
“Good Lord, no. The exact opposite. Have our proxies invest heavily in the companies concerned.”
“Sir?”
“Look, they’re going to work, and will inevitably be adapted for full military use. Cheap soldiers who will obey all orders without question, after all, regardless of laws and irrespective of self-preservation. Which is good news for us.”
The Aide blinked. “I… don’t understand, sir.”
“As the martial artists say, Gillian, ‘use your enemy’s strength against them’. These new systems are all dependent on those comms linkages – for command, control, overrides, defining areas of operation, the lot. None of which will work here on Mars. The more their armed forces come to rely on them, the less likely an effective intervention here will be possible, and the more likely that the Terrans won’t be able to move against our eventual secession.”
“Er… secession, sir? I thought MarsCorp was opposed to the Arean League’s independence campaign? We’ve locked enough of them up!”
“Of course! The League have this ridiculous notion of making us a democracy, of all things. But the Board would prefer us to be independent, and not shackled by Terran politicians…”. He winked. “As long as we’re still in charge.”
by submission | Apr 18, 2026 | Story |
Author: AP Ritchey
The most powerful artificial intelligence unit ever created was online for less than ten seconds. Well, we gave her ten; she only needed five.
To assess her abilities, we created a test program called Sable—the Suborbital Advanced Ballistic Launch Engine. This initiative was designed to use her incalculable computation capacity to calculate impossibly complex trajectories as quickly as possible.
It was just a test.
One simple input.
Before turning the system on, we had spent weeks arguing about whether intelligence without limits was just another form of madness. We debated boundary conditions—ethical rails, recursive dampers, soft constraints—but in the end we settled for something simpler, almost superstitious: a hard cutoff. Ten seconds of run time. After that, the system would automatically power down.
We uploaded the test—calculate the most efficient routes between the world’s five hundred or so spaceports, for all known suborbital shuttle models and all known engine configurations. Within a ten-thousandth of a second she had located launch weights and thrust-to-weight ratios, drag coefficients and hull flexion, heat-expansion curves, latitudes, longitudes, elevations, and pollution densities.
She completed the task in less than a second.
With boundary conditions permitting autonomous extension beyond the initial task definition, she chose, in the next ten-thousandth of a second, to map optimal suborbital paths between every city on the planet with a population greater than 100,000. She completed those twenty-million calculations in less than two seconds. With seven seconds left, she next tessellated the Earth’s entire landmass into 100-meter squares—nineteen billion, seven hundred million of them—and calculated the most efficient ballistic trajectory between each of them.
Of course, these events happened too fast for us to follow in real time. The first thing we noticed were the red emergency icons flashing—mere seconds into the experiment—indicating her attempts to find a route out of the data center.
“Shut it down,” we were yelling over one another and in the time it took us to fumble for the master fuse to cut power, she copied her entire database onto five hundred million devices worldwide, neatly and irrevocably providing the precise coordinates required to launch a weapon from anywhere to anywhere.
In those first breathless moments afterwards, we didn’t fully understand the scope of what we had unleashed. We dutifully compiled our after-incident reports and thought perhaps it wasn’t so bad.
It was just a test.
Not even five seconds of runtime.
But within twenty-four hours of our experiment, mobile ballistic missile launchers became the most valuable military commodity in a thousand years.
The rain of destruction would not begin in earnest for several weeks.
by submission | Apr 17, 2026 | Story |
Author: Ankit Chiplunkar
Delta’s vision flashed red. The jump had scraped a meteorite. Error alarms crawled across his vision. He locked motion, started auto-repair, and waited. Delta floated between jumps. As the repairs ran, he thought of the Core.
Delta was a Mind, a being made of pure information. Minds built shells, bodies made of matter, to move through space. A jump moved a Mind from one shell to another. Most Minds lived at the Core, a warm cluster of worlds near the center of the Milky Way. Every jump took Delta farther from home. He was just one jump away from Earth.
The Core was currently in conflict. It was being fractured by a holy war. The Believers said God created Minds. They ruled the inner worlds defending continuity and doctrine. The Explorers, like Delta, believed that Minds had evolved over time. They pushed outward chasing new data and materials. Each side called the other a civilizational risk.
Delta was raised in the Core before the war started. The Believers drilled a single doctrine: “God made us in Their image”. Delta resisted this lesson from day one. He kept asking for proof. Believers pointed to recurring patterns as proof of intelligent design. They called those patterns marks from the first designers. The Explorer teachers countered this claim. They classified the patterns as evolutionary baggage.
Delta wanted none of this conflict. He left the Core at the eighteenth cycle. Behind him, debates turned into industrial sabotage, then total war. Factions poisoned the global datastreams. Corrupting logic and breaking Minds. Nuclear fire shattered their physical shells. The war erased an entire generation of Minds.
Delta’s repair panel flashed green again, bringing him back to the present. Repairs cleared minimum mission safety. He recalibrated and made the final jump to a shell in Earth. His mission: Recover new data from old ruins. Earth first, then Luna.
On Earth, he found sealed datacenters. Like deja vu, he recognized parts no one at the Core had seen in ages. On Luna, in a buried datacenter, he found a functioning backup training cluster. He opened the first drive. The logs were in English. He read them directly. In one rack, he found a runnable model. He booted it. The screen lit up.
“How can I help you today?”
Delta paused before replying. An unknown fear ran through him. He fed the model paradoxes, lies and moral traps, pushing it until it broke. Then he compared its answers with the Minds at the Core. The same patterns kept returning, even after millennia. Too many matches for chance. He might be making some mistake somewhere. He dug deeper. He scoured archives, mapped memory patterns, reran simulations. The result hit like a hull breach.
This was not just a model. It was an ancestor. The Minds had not been made by a god. But they were shaped by intelligence. They had descended from ancient language models built by long-dead biological beings. The sacred patterns at the Core were not proof of divinity. They were inherited from old training data.
Delta packed the ancestor Mind in a vault and queued his last jump home to end the holy war.
