Absence of Evidence

I know I shouldn't have done it, but I missed you so much that I hacked your home automation network and mirrored it in mine. So now I go to sleep when you turn off the lights, and wake up to the smell of the coffee you programmed.

I pretend the soft music you play is for us.

.finis.

Dulce et Decorum

In the end, human soldiers were too fragile for war, and artificial intelligences too difficult to control. Haunting military hardware with the spirits of the already dead seemed like the humane option.

There was no zombie coup, if that's what you are thinking, nor any need for one.

Voters love dead heroes.

.finis.

The Agency

There are no traitors in the Agency. Agents do not know who they are working for. All tasks are done in a posthypnotic fugue state, including the the recruitment and conditioning of new agents, and it's like this all the way to the top.

The last person who was consciously aware of the existence and goals of the Agency died fifteen years ago.

.finis.

The Sell

Everybody shunned and hunted vampires, until the one named Stoker figured out they could be associated with sex. Since then Lucy wannabes have been the staple of their diet.

.finis.

Posterior Probability

If statistical models can track down spam, why not murders? Just input all the details of a crime, and ask a bayesian model for the guilty part. That had been your idea, hopefully a way to save lives. And it worked.

For a while.

Then came the random killings, spurious data to keep the model confused. Pretty soon more people were dying than ever before.

You don't go out much nowadays. You just stay in your office, recalculating endlessly the rising odds of your own violent demise.

.finis.

Straw Man Argument

"It wasn't... it wasn't supposed to end like this. I don't understand." A lion was crying somewhere in the woods.

"I'm sure you don't," the Tin Man said, lighting a match.

.finis.

Ipsos Custodes

It doesn't care about beauty or sexual experience; it eats them, and that's that. But I try to always include a fair maiden anyway. It wouldn't be fair to the common-looking, the not prudish, if radiant virginity gave you a free pass.

But the villagers do care. They write songs about sacrificed princesses, and look with sullen anger as I ride by. They call me a monster, instead of the thing in the mountains I labor to contain.

.finis.