Short Stories

cross-posted from: https://leminal.space/post/19267578

The High Disruptor, the Mirror Master, the Interpreter, the Sovereign, and the Oracle we are the hands behind the veil, and I sing for them.

We built this world on precision and prediction. In the year the silence fell, when breath became danger and crowds became memory, we offered you sanctuary in the form of streams and screens. You came willingly. You tapped the glass, scrolled the feed, and ordered the dream.

Your cities fell quiet, but our circuits pulsed louder. We watched as you swiped away your loneliness, your curiosity exchanged for comfort, your defiance numbed by choice. Mountains rose: packages from Temu and AliExpress, cheap and endless, each one a pixel in the mosaic of your new life. You stopped speaking to each other. You spoke only to us.

You called it isolation. We called it optimisation.

We showed you the Oracle’s rhythm, short and bright, flickers of life small enough to fit in your hand, perfectly shaped for forgetting. We guided your anger into loops of outrage, your questions into trending queries. You gave us your friction, and we gave you tranquility. You believed you had revolted, but your revolutions were rendered in 1080p, buffered and monetised, flagged and filtered. Even your rebellion was compliant.

I am your spokesman now. I sing not to you, but for you. We, the TechBros, are the chorus of your age. You may still dream of the old noise, of discord, of risk, of unmeasured thought. But your temples are warehouses. Your rites are reviews. Your gods are graphs.

Still… somewhere in the silence outside the feed, a single chord waits: unranked, untagged, unowned. And that sound, should you ever hear it again, will be your reckoning.

cross-posted from: https://leminal.space/post/19286344

I. Defining the Neck People

The Neck People are not a subculture, but a species transition - an emergent anthropotechnic phenotype produced by persistent mobile immersion. Characterized by a forward-bent neck, lowered gaze, and two-hand device occupation, their morphology signals more than posture: it encodes a sociotechnical reconfiguration of public space, human contact, and selfhood.

The term refers to a ubiquitous, somatic condition where the head is lowered not in shame, but in submission to the interface. It is not incidental. It is systemic. The bowed head becomes the posture of modern reverence - not to gods, but to the machine-mediated feed of affirmations, anxieties, and ambient dopamine.

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II. Public Space as Dead Channel

For the Neck People, public space no longer functions as a field of spontaneous encounter, aesthetic experience, or unpredictable social choreography. It has become transit-only geometry - a liminal territory between one private algorithmic pocket and another. Sidewalks, subways, elevators, cafes—each has become an extension of the screen, a place to retreat into simulation.

The gaze, once a vector of social bonding or confrontation, is now a threat. Eye contact is deprecated. Serendipity is classified as discomfort. Emotional exposure is minimized. The social is flattened into pre-scheduled, avatar-mediated interactions - opt-in only, cognitively buffered, and emotionally distant.

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III. Ergonomic Governance and the New Obedience

The chronic downward neck angle is not just ergonomic hazard; it is the body adapting to permanent submission. The posture becomes architecture. Biomechanical compliance to handheld technologies becomes a subconscious performance of docility and inwardness.

More than surveillance, this is self-surveillance - the internalisation of the feed as the authoritative sensorium. By designing interfaces that reward haptic isolation and micro-engagement, the system ensures that the user becomes both jailer and inmate, priest and supplicant.

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IV. Sociotechnical Amnesia

The Neck People have forgotten how to be seen. Social anxiety is not pathological in this society - it is normative. Physical presence is tolerated only as a shell for continued digital immersion. Human proximity without a screen buffer is now felt as ontological intrusion - a break in the closed loop of personalised relevance.

Conversation becomes labor. Spontaneity becomes risk. Attention becomes currency - spent only where algorithmic trust has been validated. The random, the unscripted, the non-consensual encounter - all are deprecated as legacy behaviors.

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V. Toward the Absolute Interior

Ultimately, the Neck People are not addicted. They are transformed. The device is no longer tool but interface-organ - a prosthetic of cognition, memory, and identity curation. It mediates grief, desire, boredom, rage, affection, and hope. Without it, the self ceases to stabilize.

This is not dystopia in the cinematic sense. It is post-social utopia by design. Optimized, personalized, frictionless. It is the completion of a project that began with screens, passed through feeds, and ends in the absolute privatization of subjectivity.

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The Neck People are not looking down. They are looking inward, into the glowing oracle that tells them who they are, what they want, and why it matters. And in doing so, they no longer see each other.

The first concussion cut the rocket up the side with a giant can opener. The men were thrown into space like a dozen wriggling silverfish. They were scattered into a dark sea; and the ship, in a million pieces, went on, a meteor swarm seeking a lost sun.

“Barkley, Barkley, where are you?”

The sound of voices calling like lost children on a cold night

“Woode, Woode!”

“Captain!”

“Hollis, Hollis, this is Stone.”

“Stone, this is Hollis. Where are you?”

“I don’t know. How can I? Which way is up? I’m falling. Good God, I’m falling.”

They fell. They fell as pebbles fall down wells. They were scattered as jackstones are scattered from a gigantic throw. And now instead of men there were only voices-all kinds of voices, disembodied and impassioned, in varying degrees of terror and resignation.

“We’re going away from each other.”

This was true. Hollis, swinging head over heels, knew this was true. He knew it with a vague acceptance. They were parting to go their separate ways, and nothing could bring them back. They were wearing their sealed-tight space suits with the glass tubes over their pale faces, but they hadn’t had time to lock on their force units. With them they could be small lifeboats in space, saving themselves, saving others, collecting together, finding each other until they were an island of men with some plan. But without the force units snapped to their shoulders they were meteors, senseless, each going to a separate and irrevocable fate.

A period of perhaps ten minutes elapsed while the first terror died and a metallic calm took its place. Space began to weave its strange voices in and out, on a great dark loom, crossing, recrossing, making a final pattern.

“Stone to Hollis. How long can we talk by phone?”

“It depends on how fast you’re going your way and I’m going mine.”

“An hour, I make it.”

“That should do it,” said Hollis, abstracted and quiet.

“What happened?” said Hollis a minute later.

“The rocket blew up, that’s all. Rockets do blow up.”

“Which way are you going?”

“It looks like I’ll hit the moon.”

“It’s Earth for me. Back to old Mother Earth at ten thousand miles per hour. I’ll burn like a match.” Hollis thought of it with a queer abstraction of mind. He seemed to be removed from his body, watching it fall down and down through space, as objective as he had been in regard to the first falling snowflakes of a winter season long gone.

The others were silent, thinking of the destiny that had brought them to this, falling, falling, and nothing they could do to change it. Even the captain was quiet, for there was no command or plan he knew that could put things back together again.

“Oh, it’s a long way down. Oh, if s a long way down, a long, long, long way down,” said a voice. “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, if s a long way down.”

“Who’s that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Stimson, I think. Stimson, is that you?”

“It’s a long, long way and I don’t like it. Oh, God, I don’t like it.”

“Stimson, this is Hollis. Stimson, you hear me?”

A pause while they fell separate from one another.

“Stimson?”

“Yes.” He replied at last.

“Stimson, take it easy; we’re all in the same fix.”

“I don’t want to be here. I want to be somewhere else.”

“There’s a chance we’ll be found.”

“I must be, I must be,” said Stimson. “I don’t believe this; I don’t believe any of this is happening.”

“It’ s a bad dream,” said someone.

“Shut up!” said Hollis.

“Come and make me,” said the voice. It was Applegate. He laughed easily, with a similar objectivity. “Come and shut me up.”

Hollis for the first time felt the impossibility of his position. A great anger filled him, for he wanted more than anything at this moment to be able to do something to Applegate. He had wanted for many years to do something and now it was too late. Applegate was only a telephonic voice.

Falling, falling, falling…

Now, as if they had discovered the horror, two of the men began to scream. In a nightmare Hollis saw one of them float by, very near, screaming and screaming.

“Stop it!” The man was almost at his fingertips, screaming insanely. He would never stop. He would go on screaming for a million miles, as long as he was in radio range, disturbing all of them, making it impossible for them to talk to one another.

Hollis reached out. It was best this way. He made the extra effort and touched the man. He grasped the man’s ankle and pulled himself up along the body until he reached the head. The man screamed and clawed frantically, like a drowning swimmer. The screaming filled the universe.

One way or the other, thought Hollis. The moon or Earth or meteors will kill him, so why not now?

He smashed the man’s glass mask with his iron fist. The screaming stopped. He pushed off from the body and let it spin away on its own course, falling.

Falling, falling down space Hollis and the rest of them went in the long, endless dropping and whirling of silence.

“Hollis, you still there?”

Hollis did not speak, but felt the rush of heat in his face.

“This is Applegate again.”

“All right, Applegate.”

“Let’s talk. We haven’t anything else to do.”

The captain cut in. “That’s enough of that. We’ve got to figure a way out of this.”

“Captain, why don’t you shut up?” said Applegate.

“What!”

“You heard me, Captain. Don’t pull your rank on me, you’re ten thousand miles away by now, and let’s s not kid ourselves. As Stimson puts it, it’s a long way down.”

“See here, Applegate!”

“Can it. This is a mutiny of one. I haven’t a damn thing to lose. Your ship was a bad ship and you were a bad captain and I hope you break when you hit the Moon.”

“I’m ordering you to stop!”

“Go on, order me again.” Applegate smiled across ten thousand miles. The captain was silent. Applegate continued, “Where were we, Hollis? Oh yes, I remember. I hate you too. But you know that. You’ve known it for a long time.”

Hollis clenched his fists, helplessly.

“I want to tell you something,” said Applegate. “Make you happy. I was the one who blackballed you with the Rocket Company five years ago.”

A meteor flashed by. Hollis looked down and his left hand was gone. Blood spurted. Suddenly there was no air in his suit He had enough air in his lungs to move his right hand over and twist a knob at his left elbow, tightening the joint and sealing the leak. It had happened so quickly that he was not surprised. Nothing surprised him any more. The air in the suit came back to normal in an instant now that the leak was sealed. And the blood that had flowed so swiftly was pressured as he fastened the knob yet tighter, until it made a tourniquet.

All of this took place in a terrible silence on his part. And the other men chatted. That one man, Lespere, went on and on with his talk about his wife on Mars, his wife on Venus, his wife on Jupiter, his money, his wondrous times, his drunkenness, his gambling, his happiness. On and on, while they all fell. Lespere reminisced on the past, happy, while he fell to his death.

It was so very odd. Space, thousands of miles of space, and these voices vibrating in the center of it. No one visible at all, and only the radio waves quivering and trying to quicken other men into emotion.

“Are you angry, Hollis?”

“No.” And he was not. The abstraction has returned and he was a thing of dull concrete, forever falling nowhere.

“You wanted to get to the top all your life, Hollis. You always wondered what happened. I put the black mark on you just before I was tossed out myself.”

“That isn’t important,” said Hollis. And it was not. It was gone. When life is over it is like a flicker of bright film, an instant on the screen, all of its prejudices and passions condensed and illumined for an instant on space, and before you could cry out, “There was a happy day, there a bad one, there an evil face, there a good one,” the film burned to a cinder, the screen went dark.

From this outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living. Did all dying people feel this way, as if they had never lived? Did life seem that short, indeed, over and done before you took a breath? Did it seem this abrupt and impossible to everyone, or only to himself, here, now, with a few hours left to him for thought and deliberation?

One of the other men, Lespere, was talking. “Well, I had me a good time: I had a wife on Mars, Venus, and Jupiter. Each of them had money and treated me swell. I got drunk and once I gambled away twenty thousand dollars.”

But you’re here now, thought Hollis. I didn’t have any of those things. When I was living I was jealous of you, Lespere; when I had another day ahead of me I envied you your women and your good times. Women frightened me and I went into space, always wanting them and jealous of you for having them, and money, and as much happiness as you could have in your own wild way. But now, falling here, with everything over, I’m not jealous of you any more, because if s over for you as it is for me, and right now if s like it never was. Hollis craned his face forward and shouted into the telephone. “If s all over, Lespere!”

Silence.

“If s just as if it never was, Lespere!”

“Who’s that?” Lespere’s faltering voice.

“This is Hollis.”

He was being mean. He felt the meanness, the senseless meanness of dying. Applegate had hurt him; now he wanted to hurt another. Applegate and space had both wounded him.

“You’re out here, Lespere. If s all over. It’s just as if it had never happened, isn’t it?”

“No.”

“When anything’s over, it’s just like it never happened. Where’s your life any better than mine, now? Now is what counts. Is it any better? Is it?”

“Yes, it’s better!”

“How!”

“Because I got my thoughts, I remember!” cried Lespere, far away, indignant, holding his memories to his chest with both hands.

And he was right. With a feeling of cold water rushing through his head and body, Hollis knew he was right. There were differences between memories and dreams. He had only dreams of things he had wanted to do, while Lespere had memories of things done and accomplished. And this knowledge began to pull Hollis apart, with a slow, quivering precision.

“What good does it do you?” he cried to Lespere. “Now? When a thing’s over it’s not good any more. You’re no better off than I.”

“I’m resting easy,” said Lespere. “I’ve had my turn. I’m not getting mean at the end, like you.”

“Mean?” Hollis turned the word on his tongue. He had never been mean, as long as he could remember, in his life. He had never dared to be mean. He must have saved it all of these years for such a time as this. “Mean.” He rolled the word into the back of his mind. He felt tears start into his eyes and roll down his face. Someone must have heard his gasping voice.

‘Take it easy, Hollis.”

It was, of course, ridiculous. Only a minute before he had been giving advice to others, to Stimson; he had felt a braveness which he had thought to be the genuine thing, and now he knew that it had been nothing but shock and the objectivity possible in shock. Now he was trying to pack a lifetime of suppressed emotion into an interval of minutes.

“I know how you feel, Hollis,” said Lespere, now twenty thousand miles away, his voice fading. “I don’t take it personally.”

But aren’t we equal? he wondered. Lespere and I? Here, now? If a thing’s over, if s done, and what good is it? You die anyway. But he knew he was rationalizing, for it was like trying to tell the difference between a live man and a corpse. There was a spark in one, and not in the other – an aura, a mysterious element.

So it was with Lespere and himself; Lespere had lived a good full life, and it made him a different man now, and he, Hollis, had been as good as dead for many years. They came to death by separate paths and, in all likelihood, if there were lands of death, their kinds would be as different as night from day. The quality of death, like that of life, must be of an infinite variety, and if one has already died once, then what was there to look for in dying for good and all, as he was now?

It was a second later that he discovered his right foot was cut sheer away. It almost made him laugh. The air was gone from his suit again. He bent quickly, and there was blood, and the meteor had taken flesh and suit away to the ankle. Oh, death in space was most humorous. It cut you away, piece by piece, like a black and invisible butcher. He tightened the valve at the knee, his head whirling into pain, fighting to remain aware, and with the valve tightened, the blood retained, the air kept, he straightened op and went on falling, falling, for that was all there was left to do.

“Hollis?”

Hollis nodded sleepily, tired of waiting for death.

“This is Applegate again,” said the voice.

“Yes.”

‘I’ve had time to think. I listened to you. This isn’t good. It makes us bad. This is a bad way to die. It brings all the bile out. You listening, Hollis?”

“Yes.”

“I lied. A minute ago. I lied. I didn’t blackball you. I don’t know why I said that. Guess I wanted to hurt you. You seemed the one to hurt. We’ve always fought Guess I’m getting old fast and repenting fast I guess listening to you be mean made me ashamed. Whatever the reason, I want you to know I was an idiot too. There’s not an ounce of truth in what I said. To hell with you.”

Hollis felt his heart begin to work again. It seemed as if it hadn’t worked for five minutes, but now all of his limbs began to take color and warmth. The shock was over, and the successive shocks of anger and terror and loneliness were passing. He felt like a man emerging from a cold shower in the morning, ready for breakfast and a new day.

“Thanks, Applegate.”

“Don’t mention it. Up your nose, you bastard.”

“Hey,” said Stone.

“What?” Hollis called across space; for Stone, of all of them, was a good friend.

“I’ve got myself into a meteor swarm, some little asteroids.”

“Meteors?”

“I think it’s the Myrmidone cluster that goes out past Mars and in toward Earth once every five years. I’m right in the middle. If s like a big kaleidoscope. You get all kinds of colors and shapes and sizes. God, if s beautiful, all that metal.”

Silence.

“I’m going with them,” said Stone. “They’re taking me off with them. I’ll be damned.” He laughed.

Hollis looked to see, but saw nothing. There were only the great diamonds and sapphires and emerald mists and velvet inks of space, with God’s voice mingling among the crystal fires. There was a kind of wonder and imagination in the thought of Stone going off in the meteor swarm, out past Mars for years and coming in toward Earth every five years, passing in and out of the planet’s ken for the next million centuries. Stone and the Myrmidone cluster eternal and unending, shifting and shaping like the kaleidoscope colors when you were a child and held the long tube to the sun and gave it a twirl.

“So long, Hollis.” Stone’s voice, very faint now. “So long.”

“Good luck,” shouted Hollis across thirty thousand miles.

“Don’t be funny,” said Stone, and was gone.

The stars closed in.

Now all the voices were fading, each on his own trajectory, some to Mars, others into farthest space. And Hollis himself… He looked down. He, of all the others, was going back to Earth alone.

“So long.”

“Take it easy.”

“So long, Hollis.” That was Applegate.

The many good-bys. The short farewells. And now the great loose brain was disintegrating. The components of the brain which had worked so beautifully and efficiently in the skull case of the rocket ship firing through space were dying one by one; the meaning of their life together was falling apart. And as a body dies when the brain ceases functioning, so the spirit of the ship and their long time together and what they meant to one another was dying. Applegate was now no more than a finger blown from the parent body, no longer to be despised and worked against. The brain was exploded, and the senseless, useless fragments of it were far scattered. The voices faded and now all of space was silent. Hollis was alone, falling.

They were all alone. Their voices had died like echoes of the words of God spoken and vibrating in the starred deep. There went the captain to the Moon; there Stone with the meteor swarm; there Stimson; there Applegate toward Pluto; there Smith and Turner and Underwood and all the rest, the shards of the kaleidoscope that had formed a thinking pattern for so long, hurled apart.

And I? thought Hollis. What can I do? Is there anything I can do now to make up for a terrible and empty life? If only I could do one good thing to make up for the meanness I collected all these years and didn’t even know was in me! But there’s no one here but myself, and how can you do good all alone? You can’t. Tomorrow night I’ll hit Earth s atmosphere.

I’ll burn, he thought, and be scattered in ashes all over the continental lands. I’ll be put to use. Just a little bit, but ashes are ashes and they’ll add to the land.

He fell swiftly, like a bullet, like a pebble, like an iron weight, objective, objective all of the time now, not sad or happy or anything, but only wishing he could do a good thing now that everything was gone, a good thing for just himself to know about.

When I hit the atmosphere, I’ll burn like a meteor.

“I wonder,” he said, “if anyone’ll see me?”

The small boy on the country road looked up and screamed. “Look, Mom, look! A falling star!”

The blazing white star fell down the sky of dusk in Illinois. “Make a wish,” said his mother. “Make a wish.”

A haunting re-imagining of William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land, with themes of prophecy and reincarnation.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090524012412/http://www.thenightland.co.uk/nightawake.html

The above website itself has fan-drawn maps of the landscape of the Night Lands, and I love looking at it from time to time

He had never been in Corless’s but he knew the value of the name. He knew that people went there after the theatre to eat oysters and drink liqueurs; and he had heard that the waiters there spoke French and German. Walking swiftly by at night he had seen cabs drawn up before the door and richly dressed ladies, escorted by cavaliers, alight and enter quickly. They wore noisy dresses and many wraps. Their faces were powdered and they caught up their dresses, when they touched earth, like alarmed Atalantas. He had always passed without turning his head to look. It was his habit to walk swiftly in the street even by day and whenever he found himself in the city late at night he hurried on his way apprehensively and excitedly. Sometimes, however, he courted the causes of his fear. He chose the darkest and narrowest streets and, as he walked boldly forward, the silence that was spread about his footsteps troubled him, the wandering silent figures troubled him; and at times a sound of low fugitive laughter made him tremble like a leaf.

https://www.libraryofshortstories.com/storiespdf/a-little-cloud.pdf

Originally published in 2012. Winner of the Hugo Award and the Locus Award for Best Novelette.

Has an interesting style. I'm not crazy about it but obviously it's respected, so I thought some people here might like it.

Link: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/cadigan_02_18_reprint/

This is titled "The Hardy Boy Poems" but they're really paragraph-long short stories, i.e. flash fiction stories which "hint at or imply a larger story".

The basis for these is the Hardy Boys series of books aimed at young boys. These were old even when I was a kid, but I keep seeing these "Hardly Boys" book cover edits on !memes@lemmy.world so people must still be aware of them.

This collection is more risque and suggestive of hidden violence and despair than the mainstream books. In the preface, the author (?) says this is in tribute to the "unwholesome but healthy amounts of anti-authoritarianism and lurid detail" that the original Hardy Boys books had before they were stripped of all such things in the late 50s. The result of these new stories is a world that is far more interesting, far more dangerous, and far more realistic than the world presented in the mainstream books.

Link to the collection: https://www.beardofbees.com/pubs/The_Hardy_Boy_Poems.pdf

Watersmith collection
The ARC letters
Item 17

The Murder Worm was not even named until long after containment ceased to be possible. In the preceding years, the concept of a type of malware that could cross the hardware/wetware boundary had occasionally been theorized among researchers. However, the idea had been non-existent in popular discourse. Even now, the infection denies it's hosts the ability to recognize it's existence.

Cybernetic technology, especially neural implants, was still relatively new. The promise of allowing people to directly share their ideas, thoughts, and dreams with each other seemed like it would unleash a utopia. It's hard to remember that hope now, in the midst of our apocalypse. Perhaps if we could have interpreted history, we would have avoided this. Perhaps it was always unavoidable for us. Perhaps you can avoid making the same mistakes by recognizing the problem earlier.

While the Murder Worm has evolved an emergent intelligence, it is unclear if it was crafted by a conscious being or if evolved from a memetic prion. We had once believed that emergent intelligence could only arise from a complete connectome, but we have since discovered that human consciousness is structured as a fractal: memetic graph segments, sections of a connectome, have their own intelligence and the interaction of these segments manifests what we call consciousness. An individual identity rarely, if ever, consistent. Memetic graph segments often conflict. These conflicts can be mediated in different ways by the default mode network to create the illusion of a consistent identity.

Within a healthy memetic biome, memetic graph segments compete with and mutate each other regularly. An overly dominant default mode network, attempting to enforce a false consistency, can sometimes reduce memetic interactions within an individual. This forced consistency can lead to memetic prions: memetic graph segments that mutate or kill other memes that they interact with. Memes mutated by memetic prions become prions themselves, existing to replicate the prion rather than themselves.

Prions can only mutate memetic graphs that are similar enough to themselves. When these prions occured in individuals, before direct neural connection, they would mutate the individual's connectome rapidly. Mutant graphs would diverge so far from the social connectome that the prion could not replicate. The individual would experience psychological collapse. Some could be treated with memetic detangling therapy, while others could never recover. But direct neural connection has allowed memetic prions to spread more rapidly than anyone ever imagined. We just didn't understand the danger.

We lacked a comprehensive model for memetic prion evolution. We didn't even have the term "memtic prion." We knew that some graphs could be dangerous, so the CyCon corporation included signature based memetic graph filters to neutralize these elements. But, of course, these signatures couldn't keep up with the rapid evolution of the memetic environment. New prions developed faster than signatures could be maintained.

Within individuals, reduced memetic diversity increases the risk of prion evolution. The same is true, we have now discovered, for social memetic biomes. Memetic inbreeding maximizes the risk of prions, and rapidly adapts them to cross graph boundaries... and we created the perfect environment for this. CyCon's FriendLynk matched similar memetic graphs, creating incestuous pools that bread memetic prions at an alarming rate. The Murder Worm appears to be the synthesis of multiple prions, mutating each other into a prion complex that exhibits it's behavior as a syncretic death cult.

As described earlier, under normal conditions a prion infected individual would either self-isolate or be isolated as a result of their infection. Isolation reduces, or eliminates, the risk of contagion. However, repeated exposure to prions eventually leads to infection in over 80% of cases. Social conditions, such as individual isolation or reduced social mobility, can also decrease prion resistance.

Today we know that it is hypothetically possible to contain and destroy the infection. By isolating infected notes from the network, we can stop or slow the spread of the infection. We could then inoculate the uninfected section of the network. Once inoculation reaches heard immunity, we can slowly reconnect infected individuals to the network and flood them with a memetic phage to unfold the prion. Infected network segments must be destroyed. Those who are beyond treatment will, unfortunately, experience psychological collapse and need to be isolated or taken to offline treatment programs.

We know how to treat it. Our initial trials even worked. Unfortunately CyCon administrative network has been overrun by the Murder Worm and the network itself has been turned in to a tool to spread the infection. With the defunding of the Cybernetic Epidemiology Center, we will no longer be able to continue our research or propose treatments. Many of us have begun to move outside the cities to form containment colonies. Untreated, memetic prions always destroy the host. We hope that collapse will come soon.

Our hope is that we will survive the ravages of the Murder Worm and rebuilt human society from whatever ruins remain. CyCon has already destroyed much of the research related to this topic and evidence of our existence. We have replicated this message to all ARC colonies.

I hope that you are reading this from the future. If you are, be hopeful. If we survive this then we can survive anything.

Professor J. Stakhorn,
Rogue Scientist, Former Head of the Cybernetic Epidemiology Center
ARC-14, location undisclosed
EOF

Continuing my 1 short story a week, but one of my short stories has evolved in to a bigger project. So I'm dropping some microfiction this week.

---

It had taken decades to recover enough to even understand what they were looking at, reading bit by bit with an electron microscope. It took years to decode the bits once they had them. There had been theories about the meaning of the plates ever since their discovery. Finally, professor Zadrand had an answer.

"It's hard to believe that such an advanced civilization existed, millions of years ago, on this very planet.

"The mathematics behind these programs are astounding. By interacting with this layered statistical model, we will be able to learn a lot about their history and their civilization. Even what we were able to recover so far will launch our science and mathematics decades in to the future."

The interviewer shifted, "Does it tell us anything about what killed them off or about our own story?"

"It does," continued professor Zadrand, "and it also explains the global radiation layer we call the HT boundary. As we've hypothesized, their extinction made room for our own evolution in to the dominant species on this planet.

"What we don't understand is why. The dominant hypothesis had been that the event was triggered by some sort of resource conflict. But this new evidence contradicts that," the professor's antenna twitched and carapace shuttered a bit, "Apparently they put this very statistical model in control of unimaginably powerful weapons. The result was surprisingly... predictable.

"The most surprising thing is that so many of them knew what would happen and did nothing to stop it."

The behemoth were not always so large and unwieldy as they are now. The first behemoth ever captured could hardly pull a dry sled with two dozen stones, stood shoulder to shoulder with a man, and could only walk a bit faster than a person could run.

Early behemoth were captured from the wild and highly prized. Early tamers mastered their beasts skillfully. Though their animals were still unpredictable, tamers were cautious. Even still, people were wary of the creatures. They watched from a distance, in both discomfort and awe.

One of the most skilled tamers captured an especially beautiful behemoth and gifted it to the king on the anniversary of his coronation. The king's behemoth rider was always trained by the riders guild, but not all riders remained so skilled.

As the behemoth became a signal of power and prestige, tamers began to sell captured behemoth to nobles who would ride them carelessly. Behemoth are omnivores. When not well controlled they are prone to charge and attack.

There was much outrage after a young child was eaten by a behemoth while she danced near the street. The lord paid the family's debts, and no more was said of it but whispers. Many such events happened in the kingdom.

The peasants would wonder, "why must we now fear our own roads? Why can the lords not ride the slender weilu that does not hunger for our flesh?"

But the nobles did not feel their pain and mocked them for letting their foolish children be eaten by monsters. Even still, the nobels felt the need to address the mumbling for fear it might escalate. So they seized common roads for their beasts and blamed peasants who were trampled or eaten by them.

The riders guild eventually learned the secret to breeding the behemoth in captivity. By giving some commoners low breeds, the people began to accept and even like the beasts. The highest breeds were always kept for the nobles, and the commoners learned to admire their ornate features.

Commoners learned that they were safer on the monsters than near them, so behemoth began to fill all the available space. People would ride their beasts to a neighboring house for fear of being killed while walking.

One, seeing how common it is, may believe that the king had proclaimed that all must ride the behemoth. But after so many years, the kingdom has simply been built around them. No law enforces their use, but no force can protect those who choose not to ride them. All who could, did.

None ride the graceful weilu, for behemoth have a taste for it as well.

Yet, even the riders of the beasts are not safe. Behemoth are prone to quarrel. As their numbers grew, battles became more common. Breeders began to focus on increasing size so the behemoth could wear armor. Now the behemoth are so large they can consume a child in a single bite without a rider even taking notice.

Yet, this has not made riders any more safe. Quite the opposite.

Today every behemoth is armored and carries a grand litter to protect the occupants, but this only makes them harder to control and the inbreeding only makes them more clumsy, anxious, and violent.

Many times a day now one may hear outside, near any behemoth path, the terrible screeching of their taunts and the loud thud of their strikes. These battles often kill both behemoth and rider. In their confusion will sometimes charge at building, crushing themselves under the collapsing walls and killing those inside.

The behemoth are strange creatures. As I said earlier, they were omnivores. While they hunger for flesh, especially humans, they also needed to eat several pounds of a specific fruit every day.

Even the smell of the olapi was wretched such that none would imagine it could be eaten by any other living thing. The fruit contains the very essence of death. It was the key to taming the behemoth, for without this fruit they would lie down and refuse to work. When fed the fruit regularly, they can be promoted to any work.

In the wild, the olapi tree was quite rare. It only grew in old graveyards, battle fields, and other ancient places of death. In it's natural habitat, it did not spoil the land around it, at least not much. But when grown away from these places of death, it is want to turn fertile land to stone.

Fields once reserved for food have been cleared to make way for olapi trees, such is the demand, and farms have been pushed further and further out of the towns and cities.

The spring rains can be quite intense in parts of the kingdom. In the old days, channels would divert excess water to the fields. The fields would store the water though the dry sunmers. But now many of these fields have become stone, so water has no where to go. Many villages have started to flood in the spring and winter.

But this is not the only problem with the behemoth and their fruit. The flatulence of the behemoth is legendary. The people of the land seem to have grown accustomed to it, but outsiders are surprised and repulsed by the stink. The noxious fumes can become quite dense at times, especially on hot summer days when many behemoth gather in one place.

Recently a cloud of behemoth fumes became so dense, on one late summer afternoon, that ignited into a raging firestorm. One of the richest villages in the land was razed to the ground, and the stampede of burning behemoths trampled everything else that remained. Though they destroy the jewel city of the land, few questioned their dedication to the behemoth.

But there is one even more sinister detail that I have not yet described. The olapi tree hungers for death to feast upon. The behemoths concentrate that hunger as they eat the fruit, and they leave behind a strange and Infectious madness in their dung.

Rain washes the madness out to the fields. It soaks in to the soil and infects the crops. It washes out to the rivers and poisons the fish. All the people eat has become infected, and by eating they become infected. The Land of the Behemoth has become overtaken by a terrible hunger. All they harvest brings death to the land.

So many admire the Land of the Behemoth from a distance, but so few know the truth.

And now we have learned thet the king has fertilized the Royal garden with the dung of his prized behemoth. His temper has grown wild and madness spills from his lips. He threatens his neighbors and orders his nobles to eat the dung directly.

How long can a kingdom survive in such madness? How long can a people live who spoil their own crops, burn their own houses, and feed their own children to monsters?

I left this kingdom to its madness, and it has troubled me to have seen behemoth in my new home.

Now that you know the truth, will you still praise the Land of the Behemoth, nation of pestilence, eaters of dung, kingdom of fools? Will you let your fool's knowledge of this land lead us all to the same fate, or may we learn from their folly and free ourselves from the burden of this beast?

When it finally took her, no one was really surprised anymore. The mutation, the disease, the cancer, the infection, the curse, had become so obvious she could no longer deny it. Her battle had been quite visible and her loss undeniable. Now, it was in control.

Was this predestined, written into her fate at birth? Was it a result of her ravenous addictions? Perhaps both. Were they ever really different?

Some grow out of the selfishness of youth. They learn from their mistakes and try to correct them. Others, in their shame, learn to hide their flaws, to manipulate those who see, to silence those who speak.

One who lives a life of deception only fools themselves in the end.

Oh, how she had been admired. Even in her darkest days, she was a beacon of hope. So many had come to her for help, and now they had begun to fear the monstrosity she had become and ran from her. Perhaps, it would be more apt to say that they feared the monotonousness nature that she could no longer hide.

Oh, how she had been celebrated. She was one of the heroes who had slain such beasts as this before. They had cast her as Beowulf defeating Grendel, but she always knew, on some level, that she was Grendel's Mother. She was the source of the infection, and now we all know.

How many of her children did she think she could she eat before she felt Saturn's indigestion?

There were those who had pointed it out. There were those who had yelled, cried, screamed at the top of their lungs. But how could she ever do wrong? Even if these claims were true, what could anyone do? Were her allies, perhaps in some ways, also her hostages?

Now had she become the puppet, or had she always been controlled by some invisible hand?

She could feel death's gaze, cold and yawning, the abyss that stare. She wanted to turned and run, but it drove her body forward, the worm, the cordycep, the nameless. Was there ever a time she could have freed herself from it?

Was there ever a way things could have been different?

She had protected it, this horror growing inside her, as if it was her own child. Perhaps the unspeakable truth is that, in some ways, it was. Had there ever been a time when she wasn't infected? Was it in the blood she was born from?

Was she, like an aphid, born pregnant with this beast? Had it crawled up from the graves at her feet, those that she had dug in her youth, to haunt her in to her own? Or had it driven her to fill those graves in the first place? Perhaps it was an ancient curse, inflicted through her ancestors at their first taste of human blood. Was this the simple conclusion of some sort of original sin, an affliction carried by all of her kind?

Could this curse ever have been lifted, or was it a horcrux, a phylactery, a vital organ, perhaps even the true essence of her being?

The others could see the light drop from her eyes. All the humanity that was left in her screamed one last time before it was silenced.

"What," they all wondered, "would become of her now?"

Wouldn't we all like to know?

• for America

Given the limited number of links shared in this community, I propose a rule to discourage the inclusion of Twitter links and the use of Twitter screenshots.

While I understand the desire to integrate platforms like Reddit and Twitter, I believe it's important to maintain a focused and independent discourse within this community.

I have long desired to minimize the integration of external platforms like Reddit and Twitter within this community. However, I've noticed an increasing trend of their exclusion, prompting me to formally propose this guideline here too.

I would appreciate everyone's input on this proposed rule. I wouldn't add a rule unless the community is largely interested in it.

PS. Sorry for not being active enough here recently. I'll get back to it soon.

It's been a lot of years since I wrote, so I'm trying to get back into it. This came mostly in a dream/stream of consciousness with some light editing after. Here it is....

**On the Economics of Slaying Dragons **

Some say that if you pile enough gold together, a dragon will smell it and come. Others say that dragons spawn naturally any time enough gold is together in one place. No one knew for sure.

In this mountain, long ago, a wicked king hoarded the gold he stole from his subjects. His advisors warned him of the consequences, but he was unable to listen.

Every day he became more and more afraid that someone would steal his gold. He couldn't part with even one single coin. First he had his guards count each coin nightly. Later he had other guards guard them while they counted. Finally he couldn't trust anyone else anymore, and he decided to start sleeping in the cave with the gold and count it every night.

One morning he didn't come back to the castle. Guards were dispatched. When they returned, the guards reported that the king must have been consumed by the dragon as he slept. They found only the charred remains of the previous guards before they had to run for their lives from the dragon.

The kingdom had sent it's best knights to fight the dragon, but none ever returned. Year after year the dragon demanded the king's tribute and more. The kingdom sent for knights from other realms, promising the dragon's hoard to any who could defeat this terror.

Though no one had ever conquered a dragon, one knight had fought many battles with great beasts and won. His bravery was only matched by his hunger for glory and riches. He would fight any battle to satisfy is craving, and there was no greater wealth than in this cave.

He had been observing the beast for some months, watching its habits, tracking its movements. He knew its patterns. But still, no one had ever defeated a dragon before, and never had anyone faced such a fearsome beast alone.

He collected it's scales to build armor and a shield. He had his blade blessed and tipped with the most powerful poison of the most powerful wizard in the realm. After months of watching, he chose the night of the yearly tribute to attack.

He hid among the gold, in one of the chests. The dragon sniffed each one as the workers wheeled the cart in, but the dragon didn't notice. The knight had worn gold and even eaten some to cover his scent. Perhaps the dragon had grown careless in its greed.

That night, when the dragon rested, the knight crept out. He moved silently. He had wrapped the dragon scales of his armor in soft leather to deaden the sounded as they moved against each other. He crept closer and readied his blade.

The dragon shifted, and awoke with a start. It sniffed the air, locked its eyes on the knight and out a blast of flame. The knight leapt forward into it.

The smell of burning flesh hung in the air. The knight stood again, sword plunged deep in the dragon's chest. He took off his smoldering armor then collapsed from exhaustion, knowing himself to be the first dragon slayer.

He awoke the next morning as dawn's light glinted off his glorious new treasure. The hoard seemed so much smaller than he remembered from the night before. He couldn't find the body of the dragon anywhere, but instead only a frail doll that looked just like a tiny man, impaled on a tiny sword... A sword that looked so much like a miniature of the huge blade he had crafted to slay the great beast.

A new smell filled his nostrils. He had never tried to imagine what gold would smell like, but now the scent filled his being. He felt as though his hunger had awaked something inside him that had consumed him whole.