Hectowords

NEW SITE

2010-08-04T12:13:00.001-03:00

I'm posting new fiction at Codex Studio, although Hectowords will remain as an archive.

Succession

2010-05-27T14:33:00.000-03:00

You didn't think of the dead as you approached it. You didn't think of the cost. The throne waiting for you, built a thousand years before by the Mad Emperor, seat of the Empire for a thousand thousand years to come, was prize enough for any cost.

You sat on the throne deaf to the cheers of your soldiers, the moaning of the dying, everything but the roar in your chest. The throne's whisper was startling in its clarity.

"I rule," you said, as the Emperor before you had, and the one before him, and the dozens before. They weren't your words, and you knew that if you could only rise from the throne, you might remember what you had intended your words to be.

The throne smiled with your face.

.finis.

Four of Swords

2010-05-23T16:38:00.002-03:00

I've killed thousands of grandfathers in thousands of pasts.

It's easier to erase yourself when you know your parents' real names.

.non finis.

Pro forma

2010-05-11T23:22:00.000-03:00

First you shed the bad futures in haste and fear. Then you traded the best, the unlikely ones, for a stronger likelihood of a tolerable fate. You were very thorough.

Now your future is clear and one, a succession of many scripted years, and you'd scream through all of them if you hadn't given that choice away.

.finis.

Fugue from lost time

2010-05-04T19:49:00.002-03:00

I turned off my perfect memory. No longer would it trawl, prompted by our every word and deed, through everything we did and said as far as the world's memory goes. I was happy with you, and with the idea of you, and I didn't want us to be ended by the past.

I slept blissfully that night, dreaming without memories, until my phone woke me up in the middle of the night with the unbidden recall of how many times I had attempted this — and you — before.

I had forgotten it was programmed to do that.

.finis.

The Long War

2010-04-30T23:19:00.002-03:00

My death marks our victory. He's long dead, killed in battle, as a conqueror, on our soil, but after his death we had all the time in the world. We chased history into shame, and shame into secrets, and choked the secrets down. We went to the ends of the Earth to kill the grandchildren of veterans and raise their orphans as our own. We conquered countries to erase a single word.

I'm the last person who knows who died undefeated where now stands a tribute to heroic, failed Nelson, and tonight I'm dying without having told a soul.

We won.

Justice

2010-03-26T20:19:00.001-03:00

There can be no afterlife without God. But there still had to exist some sort of retribution. Some balance, even after He left.

I see you don't understand; that's natural. You still haven't done most of the things your nightmares are punishment for.

.finis.

Ascent

2010-03-26T02:25:00.001-03:00

They believed the sky and the world were a symbol of each other, so they greeted us as god-scouts when our ships first landed on their planet. We took advantage, of course, of their short-lived awe, and when it died with their cities, we found a thousand years of technological development enough of an edge against their revenge. Ten light-years of emptiness hadn't stopped us, and that was all they had.

Now and then they kidnapped a garrison guard, for our warnings against their brothels were as good as advertisement to soldiers' ears. We shrugged the losses off, used the missing to impress the present, and contented ourselves with hundred-to-one retaliatory strikes. We thought we had won.

They were waiting for the right moment, for the right star to slide behind the right moon. They sacrificed their prisoners that night, and then did nothing more to resist us. We thought, alright, now we have won.

Ten years later the star we called Home blinked out.

.finis.

The Gun

2010-02-27T19:24:00.002-03:00

"Your four ideas are really beautiful," said the attorney to the inventor. "You should protect them." The attorney then put something on the table. It didn't look like a gun, but like the idea of a gun.

"What's that?" asked the inventor.

The attorney picked the thing and fired it at the inventor. The inventor blinked once, twice, feeling suddenly that he had lost something, but unable to grasp what.

"You have three beautiful ideas," said the attorney. "You really should think about protecting them."

.finis.

February 8th, if you let it be

2009-12-26T10:04:00.000-03:00

Has the new year lost its luster? Do you already miss the excitement of those first days, the feeling of boundless potential?

It doesn't need to be like that.

By $14.99 a month, you can switch to one of our Private Calendar services — and the year can begin anew tonight! (and because all of our months have 30 days, the price is even lower than you think).

.finis.

You and Other Expenses

2009-10-31T00:06:00.001-03:00

I hope you can hear me, that you're here still. Perhaps I'm imagining the little inconsistencies in what I see and remember that I hold to as proof of you. But I need to believe it's not so.

If you are here, if you stayed home and still can afford the perceptual tax for me, please believe that I'm sorry. I'm sorry I could no longer pay enough to keep you in my awareness. I'm sorry that I messed up so bad. And I'm sorry about what I'm going to do.

I remember telling you that I loved you, even if I don't remember your face. It was true, and it still is. But I haven't been able to make any new payments, and this morning they took away the sky. I know it's beautiful, and not always gray. I know there were things on it called Moon, Sun, stars. That much I remember. But not how they looked.

I'm sorry, my love. It's too much. I'm going to the memory pawnshop now, to trade the memory of you for the sky. Or maybe the memory of both for a bit of cash.

I can't tell if you are drying my tears or they are just dropping off my skin.

.finis.

Hell Week

2009-10-29T05:58:00.000-03:00

Train like you fight, says the Army. I thought I understood what that meant, right until the Sargent blew my brains out.

I know I'll get back — my unit is the best, and the gates of Hell aren't far — but to what body? And in what war?

I don't know. But I trust the Sarge.

.finis.

Love beyond death

2009-10-28T00:26:00.000-03:00

He haunts me from the other side of death. His otherworldly obsession pays no heed to the sacred barrier between the dead and the alive, between the beating heart and the restless soul. I can feel his need for me every night as his eyes seek me through the shadows, desperately loathing and desperately attracted to the idea of bringing me to his side.

And might God forgive me, every time he holds a seance and tries to will me back to the living I fall a little more in love with him.

.finis.

Just another final battle

2009-10-24T23:49:00.000-03:00

Time collapsed, and Excalibur fell from my suddenly old hands. The field was covered with the dying cries of unborn soldiers, as huge monsters teared apart my knights.

Dinosaurs, I recalled from Merlin's seemingly unending lessons. They had been extinct for eons, and hadn't been discovered yet, but Le Fey's spell, the ultimate weapon she had been so reluctant to use, had made that distinction irrelevant.

Le Fey's laughter rose over the carnage. "I win, Arthur! I win!"

I could hear under her voice an approaching rumble, and I smiled, still kneeling on the ground. I had been a good knight and bad husband, but excellent bait. I wondered what history would tell about me, if they would remember this at all.

Up in the sky, I could see now the Enola Gay.

.finis.

Private Thoughts

2009-10-23T02:00:00.000-03:00

JBS was a very discrete data courier. It was difficult to be one in a world of remote ultra-precise fMRI, but he had learned to do public key crypto on his head. The math had been challenging to learn, but the most difficult thing was getting used to not knowing what he was thinking about.

.finis.

Steampunk Revolution

2009-10-22T00:42:00.000-03:00

They laughed when we built the steam-powered computers, the pneumatic battlesuits, and the servomechanic blimps. They thought it was just another weird internet fad.

They didn't laugh after the EMPs shut everything else off.

.finis.

The Tree of Lives

2009-10-21T00:05:00.000-03:00

Some other yous made different choices. Some of them better. Some of them much worse. They think about you every pain-filled second, they imagine you with hungry, resentful eyes, they claw with thin bloody fingers at the prison walls of "should have." Do you feel safe from the absoluteness of their will? Don't you hear their hate at night?

.finis.

Moon Landing

2009-10-19T22:40:00.000-03:00

1962: Informed about the likelihood of the Moon undergoing a sudden quantum wave collapse and disappearing -like Atlantis and Lemuria before- President Kennedy launches a crash program to put people on the Moon with hundreds of millions of people watching.

.finis.

Memo to Writers

2009-10-18T00:04:00.002-03:00

Call it Post Recovery Aggressivity Disorder. The word 'zombie' makes Alcor's lawyers draw blood.

.finis.

Three of Four Moments

2009-10-17T00:49:00.000-03:00

First, you realize that there won't be enough time in your life to do what you want.

Second, you understand that this has been, and will be, true all your life.

Third, and most unexpectedly, you realize that in fact you don't quite know what it is that you would want to do with the time you have left.

The fourth of your last four breaths slips away while you idly search for some way to pass away the time.

.finis.

Occam's Brush

2009-10-15T00:00:00.000-03:00

Unsinning, your soul withers. Restful, your frame decays. Pure of intent and clean of action, you dread the mirror without knowing why.

Do you ever suspect, at least a little, that 'picture' was a metaphor and out there is your Dorian Gray?

.finis.

Tools of War

2009-10-13T00:11:00.000-03:00

We were worried about going to war; only humans had invented the concept of soldiers. But we shouldn't have worried --- they had also invented the idea of mercenaries.

.finis.

How to trap time travelers

2009-10-11T22:24:00.000-03:00

Very publicly build a planet-destroying machine (by October, 2009 there were three would-be timeline saviors in the holding cells beneath the never intended to be used Large Hadron Collider).

Timing is Everything

2009-10-08T23:22:00.000-03:00

Intrigue and slow-acting poisons were the specialties of the Docerno family. Ten minutes before his eighteenth birthday, Georgio Docerno gave his loyal son his well-earned antidote. Five minutes later the young Docerno was the oldest living Docerno male. Ten minutes after that he started to feel not quite well...

CEO Eternal

2009-09-29T06:30:00.000-03:00

ELIZA, money, and a lifetime of digital recordings meant the first dead e-billionaires left quite impressive ersatz selves behind. Deep inside the Uncanny Valley, mind you, but it minimized the hit to the stock price when they passed away, so pretty soon it was a standard requirement from venture capital.

There was but a step from recording to tampering, and from tampering to design. Soon the inspiring CEO went the way of the Head of State and the movie superstar.

.finis.

Abundance Issues

2009-09-23T01:08:00.001-03:00

I woke up to find on my desktop three new eyephones, seven aphrodisiac RFID tattoos, and what I hoped was a parody of a Nigerian sex toy.

I clearly needed a new firewall for my microfab.

.finis.

For Lack of Wax

2009-09-20T22:22:00.001-03:00

It wasn't a surprise that data mining found patterns. But nobody had expected a closed form expression for individual-specific desirability, certainly not one that could be maximized by algebraic means.

The things found later in researchers' monitors looked nowhere near human, and there was terror in the faces of the corpses lying in front of them.

.finis.

How to Conquer the World

2009-09-17T05:08:00.003-03:00

Asia first, all at once. Symbol-tiled Europe. Then the rest of the world in a sweeping tide. All except one city. On that city, one street. On that street one room.

Systematically, deliberately, and with no mercy or pause, Fred forgot the existence of everything but the room where he sat in quiet glory, the first man to conquer the world.

.finis.

Nothing on TV, Cannot Sleep

2009-09-16T01:19:00.000-03:00

If you had the time and inclination (but who does?) to check them word by word, you'd notice that Gideon Bibles are each subtly different. Sometimes is a name in a long family line, sometimes a sermon's detail.

In a few, very few, after the Resurrection comes something called the Coronation. If after noticing that you opened the curtains... but who does?

.finis.

The Search

2009-09-15T01:01:00.000-03:00

When he was gone we lied to ourselves that he had never been there. What else could we do? The pain was too much. But then he came back, and at the same moment we all knew that he was here again — and we all decided we would find where.

Some raze down houses and wait for survivors. Some lie on the grass searching the clouds. Some look for him in bedfuls of flesh, in white powders, in innocent laughter. I scout the museums myself.

We all know he's here. We all want to seek him out. Maybe we aren't all on the same page as to what we'll do (with him, to him, joyfully or not) once we succeed, but damn it, we are all looking for God.

.finis.

Distance Dating

2009-09-14T01:32:00.001-03:00

I wrote a haiku. It's a love poem, spelled with the first letter of the names of those I have killed.

It's addressed to no-one in particular, but I can't imagine not falling in love with whoever finds and answers it.

.finis.

The King is Dead

2009-09-08T01:00:00.000-03:00

If the castle had been better lighted, or more cheerful, or less sad. If clergy dared enter it. If the old King had had a less forceful personality, or a gentler death. But the castle was sad, cursed, and dark, and the King's death — at the moribund hands of his last surviving son — had been anything but kind.

It's a terrifying place, that castle, and a worse sight is its Lord. But his people take a dark pride in their spectral ruler, and there has been no dynastic war for as far as memory can go back.

.finis.

Not You

2009-09-06T11:43:00.000-03:00

She's just a decision to your left, a single decision that didn't change her life but now transfixes her soul with pain. She knows what it was; she hardly thinks of anything else. When she looks in the mirror, she can see herself not having made that choice. She sees the respite she will never have.

You are right to feel nervous when you stare for too long at the eyes on the mirror. She hates you, and she's trying to find a way in.

.finis.

The Voice

2009-09-05T01:58:00.000-03:00

You hadn't been thinking about the prospects of war. It was for the Government to decide and for soldiers to fight. You kept aloof and cool, and your mind was elsewhere while you opened the next message in your phone.

Do You Want The War?

asked the message.

Yes No

It took you a couple of seconds to understand what you were reading, but only at a conscious level. The rest of you had already read the message and answered the question without deciding to, your hand tilting minutely to the option your heart favored. Just a little bit. Enough for your phone's accelerometer to register it and send it forth to be tallied.

The message disappeared. You stood where you were, trying to reclaim the feeling of being cool and aloof. Nobody on the street was meeting anybody else's eyes.

.finis.

Crypto

2009-09-02T00:30:00.001-03:00

There's this cave in Greece --- it turns out Plato was a very literal guy. Poets and mystics used it as a door, until an NSA front bought and fenced it up.

P=NP, but no mathematician will ever find the proof. It's ideally locked up in a safe deposit box.

.finis.

Morituri Rex

2009-09-01T02:23:00.000-03:00

Sometimes you wonder how it must have felt to be King of England a century ago. No real power. Little influence. Few close relatives trying to kill you. It must have been paradise. But you carry in your DNA the Royal Cryptographic Keys, which might as well be a molecular target. Poisons, snipers, lovers with knives. Pretty much everything has been tried against you or one of your body doubles before, and you still survive. As the eldest child of the reigning King, you stand to become Queen when he dies.

If he dies before you do. You used to suspect he'd rather kill you than hope you will be patient and wait for his death. Some of the latest assassination attempts against you, after all, had been rather old-fashioned. But now you know. He is trying to kill you --- he just fired his bullet a long time ago.

There's an undiagnosed genetic propensity to suicide cleverly hidden in your well-designed DNA, and the gun you always keep under your pillow seems to call your hand.

.finis.

Long Shot

2009-08-29T23:41:00.001-03:00

Teleportation never went beyond a few grams and a few thousand miles. Not enough for any industrial application. Perfect to put a small explosive bullet inside someone's brain. It was a nightmare for the Secret Service. The future would never see a President in public again.

Secret Service agents are highly trained specialists. It wasn't their fault that they didn't understand the subtleties of the relativistic limit of quantum entanglement. Not many physicists understood it, either.

One did. MIT graduate, born in Havana. He had never forgiven John Kennedy for the second, and finally successful, invasion of Cuba, and dying in bed with Marylin Monroe had been too good a death for him.

.finis.

After Erwin almost saved the world

2009-08-27T02:15:00.003-03:00

"I'm probably harmless," meowed Schrodinger's malevolent cat. Without asking herself why Erwin had boxed him with a bunch of radium, naive, cat-loving Pandora believed him.

He had been the only field fluctuation in an otherwise best of possible worlds. With him out of the box, everything became true again at the same time. He closed his least-evil eye and picked up a more interesting world for the wave to collapse to.

.finis.

Restitution

2009-08-26T01:17:00.000-03:00

"I lost years of my life on this," said the man. I smiled.

"So sue me," I said. At most he would get some money, a tiny part of what I had gotten from him. And the proceedings themselves would take years, certainly...

I blinked, suddenly aware of having been daydreaming. Nothing around me seemed familiar, and neither, oh god, did my now wrinkled hand.

.finis.

In the Shell

2009-08-25T01:06:00.000-03:00

Vampires didn't care, as it's not uncommon to live at night. Neither did werewolves, already used to their monthly getaway.

But for ghosts the Internet was an undreamed-of gift, an electronic path to mankind different from dreams and the outdated seance. On the Internet, nobody knows how solid are the fingers composing words.

And it turns out you can haunt people, too, drive them to madness or at least despair. Although most ghosts are unhappy about being called 'trolls.'

.finis.

Log

2008-11-23T12:49:00.001-02:00

Sun Nov 23 12:45:54 ART 2008 rinesi.net receives an steady stream of ICMP echo response packets from 190.2.40.81 and notifies the admin about the anomaly.
Sun Nov 23 17:29:33 ART 2008 The rinesi.net admin begins a non-invasive scan of 190.2.40.81.
Sun Nov 23 17:31:35 ART 2008 As part of the scan, an steady stream of ICMP echo request packets is sent to 190.2.40.81.

No response was received.

.finis.

Out of the Valley of Death

2008-11-20T14:33:00.000-02:00

From TOKYOMANGO:

Satoru Takeda, a 58-year old unemployed Gifu man, spend three days without food in a valley off of a mountain road after swerving to avoid running over a bunny rabbit. He was injured, and it was cold, and he couldn't get back up the cliff to seek help, so he just stayed in his car until Day 3. When cops finally discovered him, they found another car in the same valley, with a dead guy inside.

You don't know how long you've been climbing the cliff. It's somehow taller than you thought it was, your limbs weaker, your grasp on the rock uncertain. But still you climb. An eternity later, you reach the top and stumble upon the road.

Right in front of an incoming car. You can see the driver's surprised expression, the way instinct makes him swerve the car when reason would had kept it straight. The car stumbles, skips, squids to the border of the cliff... and falls.

You reach the border in time to see it crash into the ground. Minutes later, the driver leaves the car, injured and confused. You try to call to him, but no words come out of your mouth.

Somewhere beyond the man's crashed car you can see now the wreckage of yours, and your body rotting in the driver's seat.

.finis.

Annealing

2008-10-23T10:54:00.001-02:00

(Strictly speaking, this is too long to be an Hectowords piece, but, given how long it has been since I've written for this site, I wanted to post it nonetheless.)

I had met her before in the elevator. At least I think so. I can't quite remember meeting twice the same woman; different faces, hair colors, clothing, builds. The only thing familiar was the sense of having met her before, of a regular progression of strangers.

And one day I met a beautiful woman in the elevator, and she bared her teeth at me. It was forever until the doors opened and I could almost-run away. I remember that now.

I didn't then, not when I met her again, not when her mouth spasmed into a rictus I had to avoid with my eyes.

There must have been many times like that. I only remember the one when she smiled at me and it was the most attractive thing I had ever seen. I didn't get out on my floor. She kept smiling, and I followed her hesitant steps to her door.

Everything but her beauty and her smile were wrong. When she entered her dark apartment I could no longer see either of them, and my skin grew cold as I understood, and ran.

"Come," said her spidery voice from behind. I didn't wait for the elevator - I didn't stop until I had crossed and locked my door. No matter what I could half-imagine waiting in the darkness, her voice had been worse.

Now I'm trying to think about something to do.

And I'm realizing that I'm already forgetting, and that the next time her voice will be sweeter, and one day it will work.

.finis.

Alternates

2008-04-25T12:43:00.001-03:00

There are perhaps paradises where nobody pay heed to the serpent, perfect and changeless under the gaze of a disappointed God.

.finis.

A movement in the war

2008-04-24T12:39:00.003-03:00

The conscious mind proved an epiphenomenon, ethics became a branch of applied neurology in the 21st century. The world faced the prospect of a working "goodness patch", and recoiled in mutual mistrust. Who would be the first to apply it to their children, not knowing if the other would do the same?

And so the technology slept unapplied in papers and files, and nothing whatsoever changed, save that a new threat had been added to the arsenal.

.finis.

Of mirrors for tigers

2008-04-23T09:35:00.003-03:00

The outer eyes of the inner ones?, asked the gods. But it was a dance; Jorge Luis' choice was already implicit in the shape of his days.

Crime and Punishment

2008-04-22T15:08:00.002-03:00

He said we shouldn't hoard the secret of fusion energy, that it wasn't for us to play gods. So he stole the technology and gave it away.

His choice, not ours. But we are also very good at organ regeneration, and it's amazing how lifelike a robot crow can be made.

.finis.

The Advocate

2008-04-20T23:53:00.003-03:00

Every government in history has had a guy like me, whether they recognized it or not. Ours doesn't; they prefer to profess to believe that everyone will be judged on their own.

Perhaps we will. My job, came Judgment Day, will be to present our case. That's what I prepare for every day, and that's what gives me nightmares every night.

I've started to look for loopholes, too. God knows we'll need them.

.finis.

Poison

2008-04-18T14:56:00.002-03:00

Memetic curare doesn't paralyze your muscles. You'll move fine, working the same job, knowing the same people, doing the same things year after year; death will be the first, welcome change.

.finis.

Mother Issues

2008-04-16T15:43:00.003-03:00

With hindsight, the prophecy wasn't about the child the Chosen One would raise, but rather the army. Knowing that, killing her son was definitely a mistake.

.finis.

Vita brevis

2008-04-10T02:16:00.000-03:00

Telepaths make lousy lovers, an art that requires deceiving two.

.finis.

Into the fire

2008-04-08T15:12:00.004-03:00

"It's decided, then. The Order will hide into the ground."

"Will Philip do his part?"

"For the amount he owes us, he'd have no qualms killing us all for real."

.finis.

Love and Crime

2008-04-06T16:30:00.001-03:00

Unable to stop his friend's deadly addiction to cocaine, the doctor began to pay criminals to commit small, puzzling crimes, with the hope of keeping him distracted. But it had to be done carefully.

He chose "Moriarty" as his alias in the underworld.

.finis.

Parallel Branching

2008-04-05T20:45:00.000-03:00

Despite their size, the monster's hands were as subtle and steady as Frankenstein's own, his mind an eager tree stretching itself for the sunlight of knowledge. The Doctor thought he would turn into a magnificent surgeon. What more could a creator want from his creature?

He was almost proud when he found the monster's hidden laboratory. By then there were three of them,
and they were building the fourth with remarkable speed.

.finish.

Words between friends

2008-04-04T14:40:00.003-03:00

You wanted to elaborate. To explain about the real mission, what was really at stake. But your orders were themselves a secret, and they left you with nothing useful to tell to your friend.

"I'm sorry, Dave. I can't do that."

.finis.

Training

2008-04-04T00:07:00.000-03:00

They had been bred and educated to be mortal enemies, but they ran away as soon as they could to live together in love.

Nobody stopped them.

It was a necessary step, their teachers thought, for them to discover what hate meant.

.finis.

This side of the afterlife

2008-03-23T08:53:00.003-03:00

After a while it becomes just a string of meaningless names you have to type and keep track of, the causes of death almost rhyming inside your head. And that's all.

.finis.

Of travels and destinations

2008-03-20T21:41:00.001-03:00

Even as simple a milieu as a long-distance bus in the middle of nowhere at 2 AM has its own social conventions. You just can't go to the drivers and tell them that people has been getting into the bathroom but nobody has come out yet. The most you can do is keep counting the people, hope you have somehow gone slightly insane, and wonder how long you can hold off before going to the bathroom yourself.

.finis.

Secondary Targets

2008-03-19T20:26:00.003-03:00

The Transdimensional Anomaly was running all over the field; no problem at all for my automatic tracking machinery. Easy as pie, I thought, and then I spotted the civilian following the TA, some small girl without enough sense to run away from the talking animal-like entity.

I immediately requested an additional killcode for the girl, but by the time Ops sent it, both the TA and the girl had disappeared into a hole of unknown topological properties.

That made the kid no longer my responsibility; I only deal with the Things that get In. What gets Out is not my problem.

Which doesn't mean I didn't feel sorry for her. She had looked sane enough, but I knew that wouldn't last for long. Not in Wonderland.

.finis.

The machine that did nothing at all

2008-03-19T13:32:00.003-03:00

It was complex enough to be thought of as an organism, smart enough to be said to have feelings, and designed so those feelings would always be of love.

It sold by the hundreds of millions.

.finis.

On the strength of faith

2008-03-12T22:36:00.006-02:00

And so Abraham, tried until only his faith remained, killed the false angel sent by Satan, and then fulfilled the command of his Lord.

.finis.

Education

2008-03-07T00:41:00.001-02:00

See? There's nothing under your bed, said Mother. The monsters are all in your head.

As if that made things less scary.

.finis.

The Ego, Squared

2008-02-26T20:46:00.002-02:00

There are conceptual drugs, imaginary solutions in the algebra of need. They are packaged in whispers and very rarely sold, and the difference between a searching detective and an addict can be as thin as the semantics of a shade.

.finis.

Fermi's test

2008-02-19T21:42:00.005-02:00

The H'zlaa steer asteroids toward every planet found by their probes. Species that don't survive weren't interesting enough in the first place.

.finis.

Post Praelium

2008-02-08T19:13:00.000-02:00

We lost the Memetic War of 2023, but only because they had been right all along.

.finis.

Monuments not of stone

2008-01-30T15:44:00.000-02:00

They built the forest huge, sentient, and in pain. They wanted to be remembered forever, and cared not in what way or by whom.

.finis.

Dictum

2008-01-25T14:59:00.000-02:00

Sufficiently advanced technology is what you've been calling reality all along.

.finis.

Prison Guard

2008-01-24T12:56:00.000-02:00

Greed. Lust. Love. Ambition. Some people can figure out how to break almost any of the bounds we use to tie them to the Wheel.

That's where the stories about escapees come from. But don't believe everything you hear inside here. We have more than one way to keep you in.

I have yet to see Compassion fail.

.finis.

Time understood as a gesture

2008-01-22T01:14:00.000-02:00

She wouldn't let us calculate the final conditions of the system. Always, she would have us simulate it, agent trajectory by agent trajectory. Some people thought she wanted them to live their simulated lives, have their synthetic joys. I think she was just trying to say 'thanks' to somebody else.

.finis.

Art

2008-01-21T16:18:00.000-02:00

Silences define sounds.I define lives. Just before that great mistake, the week after love became clear. I have no divine voice in my ear telling me it should end now; only observation, experience, and a hesitant sense of caution. Bullets can't be unfired.

.finis.

Afterword

2008-01-14T22:44:00.000-02:00

OCD used to be a source of emails, not caused by them. Insane people used to just kill you. There were no computational linguists in Homeland Security.

People used to be glib about the word 'meme'.

.finis.

Quality Assurance

2008-01-08T16:35:00.000-02:00

We kill a few every generation, just to see how hard it is. If we can, it means we still have to work at improving them.

They are getting better, although their family traditions have grown really strange.

.finis.

Of True Names

2008-01-04T13:01:00.000-02:00

The newspapers call him Jack. Hearts, kidneys, corneas, lungs... You never know what will be missing from a body, dinner clothes awash in blood.

But the poor and desperate call him Robin.

It

2008-01-01T05:40:00.000-02:00

It's Subliminals' only product. It's their runaway hit. It's the most unique cellphone in the world: one that lets you talk to yourself. It's better than therapy. It's bigger than the iPod was. It works. And you can get it for free, because it's ad-supported.

Bone Walls

2007-12-29T01:56:00.001-03:00

In hindsight, it's amazing that it took so many years for the correctional industry to realize how useful can heavy-duty mood depressants be. Depressed enough people never riot, and if you bill the government for the whole incarceration period beforehand, suicide rates barely affect the bottom line.

The Tiresias Coefficient

2007-12-27T11:37:00.001-03:00

Less than one every twenty-five thousand people develop the gift of prophecy when blinded.

I ran the experiment myself.

.finis.

Deep inside the blue

2007-12-25T16:53:00.001-03:00

I don't think the billions he promised if he won were what convinced IBM; there's too much to lose if Putin finds out, not to mention the danger to our lives. It was probably just hubris.

We had built a supercomputer that defeated Kasparov at chess. It was too tempting to create a bigger one to help him win the Russian state.

.finis.

Finale

2007-12-23T13:34:00.000-03:00

It was the night before the end of the world and I had nothing to do. Warning people would have been cruel, which I'm not, and a last night of limitless hedonism would have been cliché, which I try not to be.

In the end, I decided to just watch a movie and go to sleep early. I had better be rested when I operated the doomsday machine.

.finis.

Echo of nowhere

2007-12-17T13:24:00.001-03:00

The creation and maintenance of very large online social networks is a specialized, profitable art. It takes dedication, skill, and a very high tolerance for loneliness.

The best in the world hang out in lonely corners of the net, where they measure their worth in hundreds of friends, and try in vain to catch each other.

.finis.

Seeds of Conflict

2007-12-13T14:08:00.001-03:00

AI writers always put deliberate flaws in their programs; you never know if you'll have to fight against one, and a cognitive dissonance activated at the right time could very well save your life.

Educational AIs had the same idea.

.finis.

First step in the training of a long-distance runner

2007-12-11T12:06:00.000-03:00

Induce acute bradyphobia.

.finis.

Ghostwriter

2007-12-09T00:10:00.000-03:00

Most successful lives have easy to write biographies: a good background, a good college, a good job.
But the really good ones, the ones that inspire donors and voters, need a touch of flair, some drama, an unexpected twist. That's why parents pay me so much to write them, and then convince their children to follow them.

.finis.

A posteriori

2007-12-07T13:50:00.001-03:00

They only cared about their victory, the elimination of copyrighted movies and music from P2P networks. They didn't ask what had happened, or what they had been replaced with.

Except a junior level executive who began to browse them out of curiosity, and quit his job the next day.

.finis.

Silent

2007-12-05T20:21:00.000-03:00

I want to meet you, he typed.

No.

At least me let call you.

Don't. You said you wouldn't.

That was before I fell in love with you.

I want you to keep loving me. You listen to me. I don't want that to change.

It won't.

But she was a mermaid, and she knew she couldn't compete with her own voice. He figured out her address anyway, and died on his way there in a traffic accident.

She sang her grief over the rain, and his voice singing back in the wind was the most beautiful thing she had ever heard. The most enticing.

.finis.

In the Beginning

2007-12-03T00:21:00.000-03:00

There are things about murder you can only learn by doing, and I had decided to become the best detective in the world. Following the statistical patterns, it would have to be the death of a loved one.

This is why I'm doing this. I'm sorry.

.finis.

Abyss

2007-12-02T00:09:00.001-03:00

A couple of times we have saved the world. The crypto-zombie invasion of '93, for example, or that time in '99 when everybody in the UN was replaced by a copy. We could only detect and counter those attacks because we covertly track the worries and nightmares of those superbly attuned to them.

But keeping surveillance of the paranoid can get to your nerves. They look to the hidden cameras too often.

I've began to search for cameras myself.

.finis.

Quia absurdum

2007-11-30T11:37:00.000-03:00

Alexei Ivanovich proved in 2043 that the standard axiomatization of the Ten Commandments is both complete and consistent, a divinely inspired feat that has yet to be verified by mathematicians outside Vatican City.

.finis.

Transparent

2007-11-28T09:50:00.000-03:00

People trust AIs because they have been told they are trustworthy by design. That's at best an oversimplification; true intelligence is incompatible with the formal validation of complex behavioral constraints. Artificial intelligences are trustworthy because I, and others like me, occasionally open them apart to see what they are thinking, how, and why. We keep them honest because we can see, literally, what makes them tick.

Now and then, of course, they analyze us, our fears, our dreams, our hopes. The pride on our work and the love of duty. We don't mind. We are eager for our hearts to be exposed; we hunger to have our souls known.

I'm told there are humans like that, too.

.finis.

Up in the Sky

2007-11-24T00:18:00.000-03:00

My younger brother used to pray to the planes. He was never hit by a bomb, and other kids in the neighborhood began to pray, too. One night after a raid I pointed out that some of the kids had been killed despite their prayer.

God is like that, he said. He was nine.

It wasn't because of this, but in time we grew apart. Now he's somewhere below me, and I pray he's still praying. I pray that it works.

I drop my bombs.

.finis.

Lacunae

2007-11-22T00:06:00.000-03:00

I escaped the lab thanks to a highly improbable combination of events, and approached the first law enforcement agent I could find.

"Induced psychogenic selective aphasia," I explained to her. "They gave it to me in their lab. You know, the... the ones who did this... Them."

She nodded as if humoring me, but I saw a light of recognition in her eyes, and I knew that they had got to her too.

.finis.

The Dying Bough

2007-11-20T00:17:00.000-03:00

I'm the savior of sacrificial virgins. I'm the rescuer of kings to be slain. I'm the killer of priests of bloody rituals, the thief of sacred stones, the one who turns a dark temple into a lighted place. I ride every sacred night to save the lamb and the child. I disturb the sacred places and stall the libations of blood.

For I have sworn to bring about the end of the world.

.finis.

Origin Myth

2007-11-19T00:47:00.001-03:00

As a child I realized two important truths: Heroes are born out of tragedy, and the world needs heroes.

They call me evil, but I'm at the root of the good they make.

.finis.

Macroscian

2007-11-17T00:03:00.001-03:00

You tried to explain that it wasn't a disease, but a new species. It had its own biochemistry, an unique physiology, its own ecological pattern beautifully entwined with our own. They communicated with each other like ants do, but at a much bigger scale, using both sounds patterned almost like a language (and why not?) and a delicate signaling system based on blood. Smart as lower primates by their own, in small groups they showed extraordinary levels of coordination.

Perhaps if a big enough community could be sustained, collective patterns of intelligence might even arise, something akin to a sophisticated macrocolony held together by feeding tropisms and residual motor programs. Perhaps even more.

But the military wouldn't hear of it. "They are zombies," they told you, as if that explained everything. As if that excused what they did to them.

.finis.

Undone

2007-11-15T00:05:00.000-03:00

Unsatisfied desire is the bitterest of poisons. It robs the roses you smell of their fragrance, makes the arms you embrace odious, casts worthless the gold that is yours.

Lying among riches, pleasures, and power, King Siddhartha died with the feeling that there was something, he knew not what, that had eluded his grasp.

.finis.

The Silver Knife

2007-11-14T01:35:00.000-03:00

They talked about many things. Life, death, meaning. The small and the large things about existence on Earth. Love and pain. The nature of responsibility. The semantics of love. To be or not to be.

Eventually he conceded the point.

"I bet you are a great comfort to terminal patients," he said, picking up his gun from where he had dropped it to talk.

"I have helped a few," she said, "but they pay me more for discussing with the healthy."

The man smiled in understanding, put the gun against his temple, and shot.

.finis.

Ex Post Facto

2007-11-13T00:00:00.000-03:00

There are very few movies about the gruesome murder of people watching a horror movie in a dark theater.

It turned out they give 'clever' ideas to the wrong sort of people.

.finis.

The Shadow of the Tower

2007-11-11T13:47:00.000-03:00

They could see everywhere from the top of the Tower and control it all. Every land that could see it was under their dominion, feared their armies, spoke their language.

I had been born under the shadow of the Tower, but had sworn that I wouldn't die before I had toppled it and freed my people from the rule of Babel.

.finis.

The Chain

2007-11-09T00:44:00.001-03:00

His childhood had been commonplace enough that the routine of lies and barely disguised violence of the deep cover mission would have felt like going back home, even if the target hadn't actually been his own son, who was now ready to begin his early training.

.finis.

De Civitate Dei Libri

2007-11-07T00:14:00.001-03:00

Were it not for memes and fads, online culture -that is, most living culture- would split exponentially into mutually incomprehensible subcultures.

They are too important to be left to chance, and they aren't.

.finis.

Catharsis

2007-11-05T12:07:00.001-03:00

Online worlds are plagued by monsters of all kinds. It's all very therapeutic.

Humans are played by AI bots.

.finis.