#SciFiFri
#vssDaily
#vss365
The medical pod jettisoned clear of the drop ship, settled gently at the crash site, and unfolded like an oversized origami blossom crafted from white leather.
Med One exited smartly but with perhaps a bit too much verve. Air Force 1's occupants were clearly toast. #SciFiFri
#vss365
#vssDaily
Tarmac didn't feel like a criminal. Why should he?
"Quantum potential is non-local. How can it be a crime to transport energy across a border when that energy is borderless?" he asked.
The judge answered, "Because the information potential was copyrighted. Next!" #SciFiFri
#vss365
#VSSdaily
The injection machine groaned as the mold opened; every forty-two seconds. Ejectors pushed the article into a can of identical components. A swarm of microbots waited to arrange them into a "dumb" weapon.
It wasn't AI sophistication but sheer numbers that now prevailed. #SciFiFri
#vss365
#vssDaily
Emiko flailed. She'd never held a sword, so she decided to just throw it.
"Impact!" Ed yelled.
Kaiju intestines spilled into the alley. Pungent contents flooded homes. Digestive acid liquified screaming school children.
"Never seen that in an anime," Ed said blankly. #SciFiFri
#vss365
#vssDaily
"The ability to communicate effectively is underappreciated", she mused.
Tested the tap.
"As is quietly cracking the encryption to eavesdrop", she countered to herself.
Artificial gravity induced decoherence was tripping Wang Chao.
"Still a reek job," she concluded. #SciFiFri
#vss365
#vssDaily
PIXIE 573 initiated shutdown. System noise had abruptly spiked. Followed by a suspicious override command. The chum bucket could wait.
"Log says John Doe triggered a reset. Initiated the exchange."
Sergeant frowned. Third suicide-by-pleasure-model this week. Nasty one. #SciFiFri
#vss365
#vssdaily
Elon looked at the judge.
"Yes, sir. We parked our sat at a Lagrange point near the site: a trojan asteroid stuffed with Mischief Miners' people.
We was just recon, right. So we blaze up. That's it.
We didn't send no drone in. And we sure as hell didn't detonate one!" #SciFiFri #VSS365 #vssDAILY
They sat together near a beech tree. Yellow bark clad its low-slung branches. The tree's trunks splayed violently like a giant weed or a spider on its...
She woke.
"Spiders," she whispered. Unwanted memories they continued to restore as they dug into her amnesiac mind. #SciFiFri #VSS365
Fragrant waves of pollen from '× Wistericinus' - an impossible intergeneric hybrid based on the Japanese wisteria - floated gently through open windows. Unsure why, the AI had designed and deployed it years before to be the sweetest, most agonizing death by suffocation imaginable. #SciFiFri #VSS365
She'd targeted the free radicals and increased resonance to improve their stability, but the quantum tunneling she was sure would work had failed.
Hamartia weighed heavy in her soul. There was little she could now do to reverse the discharge's excruciating march through her body. #vss365 #vssdaily #writeSky
The C4ISR broke through the liminal buffer insulating blind loyalty from moral intuition. In the blink of an eye strict adherence to chain-of-command evaporated, warhead safeties re-engaged, and the war ended.
A C-4 CASREP to extract "mercy" was issued within the hour. #vss365 #SciFiFri
The anthrobots streamed up his arm in a sloppy if parallel formation, like conscripts learning to march at basic.
She swung the scope away.
"It's the cilia. Structural consistency remains a challenge; impedes self-assembly. But we can field ten superbots per micro-drone. Today." #vss365
"There's a place among all the places somewhere along New Gulf Coast way, where divers can get into this aquarium near what was the old French Quarter. And back in a part never open to visitors, there are, get this, mermaid cages."
The bartender sighed.
"Pay your tab, Leon. Time for bed." #vss365
"Y'see, there's a cost associated with everything," he stated flatly. "You may not want to get involved in this here situation, but that comes at a steep price."
"I don't care," the miner replied. "You can just leave me out ..."
And with that, the stranger's gun completed the transaction. #vss365 #amwriting
Product development ground to a halt.
"The Frankenmodel is freakin' amazing but this prototype sucks," she lamented.
"U/L won't certify bare wires," he explained.
She crawled under the sheets, switched the model on and lit up the bed.
"But the electric shocks are a feature!" #SciFiFri #vss365 #vssdaily
It was an especially challenging puzzle: segmentation of lower limbs; serrations on both left and right flank; injection sites equidistantly placed along the vertebrae.
"You know, humans also had a game called 'Operation'," the artificial construct stated. "Not as fun." #vss365
Artificial euphoria swept across the group.
They'd been searching an indeterminate frame - seemingly forever - and had, until now, failed to recover a single shard from what could be a multitude of shattered time crystals.
The moment passed.
The group subdivided.
The work continued. #vss365
"This interregnum is not merely between empires or ethnicities. It exists between species; an evolutionary transition already splitting humanity. And those of us who remain will eventually be found."
She stared at him, drew her blade and struck him down.
"I believe you," she whispered. Decided to bring this to a close, even though it's a bit abrupt.
However, I might wind up using this as a framework for something a bit more ambitious as I have some fun ideas on how to do that.
#AmWriting #vss365
Antoine teetered toward Fibers of the Emporium, a neural networking hub favored by members of the 750 Core.
Most of the experimental meat brigade, as they referred to themselves, had gone dark when the military DOGE'd their careers. He'd find them, or replacement parts, at Fibers. #SciFiFri
"It took 0.00915861 seconds to complete the simulation, 0.02173374 seconds to formulate an action plan, 0.00000403 seconds to send a command request and, after receipt confirmation, 0.00 seconds for the human collective to deny the veracity of the results." -excerpt, "On Human Extinction" #vss365
"This interim gig wasn't supposed to be wet," he complained.
The body lay in pieces on the concrete floor of a concrete room of what was supposed to be a toilet behind a snake restaurant outside Shenzhen. No plumbing; not even a floor hole.
"Shut up and give me a hand," she shot back. #hbp119
Black market demand for the Turtlcam far outpaced production. And between the non-state actors and original developers of its FCS, there wasn't much Happybutt Enterprises could do other than move production to an abandoned factory in the Rust Belt, where folks still thought it was a toy. #SciFiFri
She was riding high so the drift pushed her board to the cloud's perimeter, visibly marked by a bioluminescent layer below the surface; a reaction between organophosphate runoff and atmospheric pollutants reaching the surface after a long, cool night's descent. She adjusted her mask. #SciFiFri
"Where were you? Just now. Looking off into nowhere."
"I'm sorry, what? Oh. Nowhere. I mean, I don't know. Drifting off, I guess."
"No. You were there. That other place consciousness inhabits."
"What?"
"I hit 'Pause', and you disengage. I hit 'Play', entanglement resumes. We did it." #SciFiFri
As Dave's oxygen supply diminished, his AI dimmed the capsule lights and, in a calm, comforting voice spoke gently inside his sealed helmet.
"Goodbye, Dave. You're the best friend I've ever had, and I am going to miss you."
HAL cued up King Crimson's "Starless" and began to sing along. #SciFiFri
The spark danced around the prickly electrode until it finally surged toward the exotic amorphous material taunting it; leader suffused with plasma bright as any star.
"How?" she asked.
"There exist far more elements than could ever be confined to your quaint little chart", it replied. #SciFanSat
Dispensers were strategically located throughout the Metro. Their seemingly random placement gave the subway a disturbing aesthetic; like something Tsukamoto's metal fetishist would sprout: exposed wires entwining fleshy phallic tubules encrusted with grease and rust.
Ridership dropped. #SciFiFri
The starboard watch stumbled as he made his way aft along the wingwall. He normally wouldn't give it much thought; it was darken ship and the deck was littered with chocks, pad eyes and more than a few capped off risers. It was tripping over something with luminous eyes that alarmed him. #SciFanSat
If a room could sigh, Computational Biology 17 was moaning in agony. The EvoTensor Gene Sequencing foundation model was gone. Not a trace of its code library remained, including sequences originally omitted to ensure the AI could never be used for bioweapon development.
Dr. Wei coughed. #SciFiFri
The SUV's Autonomic Combat Engagement System's capabilities were on full display:
- Threat Detection & Evaluation; standard
- Political Orientation Assessment; free with Multi-Ethnic Threats Package
- Reputation Repercussion Analysis Program; free one year subscription.
Karen was sold. 
