Set Up
Author: Ken Poyner
This is randomization night.
Some nights it is the classy brunette with gentle elastic curves and an alluring fragile shyness. Others it is the bold blonde with an opulence of everything, leaning at the line of overdone. Yet for others, it is the dark-haired mystery in stilettos.
Evermore, though, it is randomization.
But it is not randomization, really, is it?
All day, you have been watching me, collecting pertinent data points, patterning my undefended actions, listening for hints, and direction in my voice. And, in a subroutine droning in the background, you have been offering me subtle environmental mapping actions – a word here, a lean there, movement of eyes or eyelashes or lips.
No, not random.
By the time you reconfigure yourself, both of us will be the sum of calculations, a present selected through observations from the immediate past. My behavior and wants, in ways, dictated to me by your latest edition AI, with your adaptations driving my adaptations until practically we are a unit.
How could I not love you, but why should I?
The Past
365tomorrows launched August 1st, 2005 with the lofty goal of providing a new story every day for a year. We’ve been on the wire ever since. Our stories are a mix of those lovingly hand crafted by a talented pool of staff writers, and select stories received by submission.
The archives are deep, feel free to dive in.
Flash Fiction
"Flash fiction is fiction with its teeth bared and its claws extended, lithe and muscular with no extra fat. It pounces in the first paragraph, and if those claws aren’t embedded in the reader by the start of the second, the story began a paragraph too soon. There is no margin for error. Every word must be essential, and if it isn’t essential, it must be eliminated."
Kathy Kachelries
Founding Member
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