"I have been cursed," the man said.
"With what?" the witch asked.
"That's the thing, the cute warlock shouted 'Curse you!' and I felt it hit."
"I see. I can't remove it, but I could give it direction."
"That's what I hoped. Can you make it 'No woman will want to marry you'?"
"Heh. Sure."
Every Mad Engineer (it’s like Mad Science, only it works) knows that her next project should always justify a new tool purchase. I always wanted a set of hydrospanners, so—surprise!—i’ve fitted a repulsorlift drive to your wheelchair. Lift control on the left, throttle on the right. Keep it under a hundred for the first five hours runtime. Happy birthday, darling.
Every evening I take the "You'll make it to tomorrow" sign off my bedroom wall, and put it in my time machine.
Every morning, I get into my time machine, go to yesterday before I woke, and hang the sign up.
It's nice to have something to be certain of, these days.
It started slowly.
Seattle-based companies made the move to Vancouver, with generous re-location packages.
The Valley, bit by bit, moved northward, first capitalising on the cheaper real estate in Portland and Seattle, then joining the ex-SFats in Canada.
---
SoCal had crumbled a decade prior - the nexus of water-guzzling, power-sucking AIs that mimicked Hollywood actors only worked as long as there was water and power - and Hollywood actors to mimic.
The LA fires of '32 had destroyed so much infrastructure the city was broke - and dry.
And once they'd been cloned and recast as AI avatars of themselves, actors retired - on albeit reduced residuals. No-one flew to LAX with a dream and a cardigan. Those left were either ICE agents or Undocumented they hunted.
---
The Big Beautiful Bill had exactly the intended effect - an unbridgeable chasm between rich and poor. You either had capital or you died - usually from something preventable like gum disease or pneumonia.
Those with capital moved north.
Those who only had labour - human, devalued yet expensive, connective yet computed labour - stayed. Inflation grew. The $USD sank.
The future, as the Great Dismal wrote, was already here - it just wasn't evenly distributed.
Five eyes became three when Australia and Aotearoa ripped up ANZUS in '30. Canada followed and Starmer, enjoying an unprecedented fourth term in a time of turmoil, made it one in '31.
---
NoCal took a little longer - the vulture capitalists hanging on to the carrion of would-be unicorns, hoping to get a RoI.
After adding AI to everything, they had to enshittify to get a return. Inferencing a 5Q parameter model doesn't scale, even with a Redis cache the size of Sonoma county.
AI had, paradoxically, re-ignited the Open Source movement, who, determinists at heart, rejected the stochastic musings of the Bullshit Machines.
A team from Eleuther paired up with Wikipedia and dropped a reciprocal-licensed distilled RAG model that inferenced quicker than DeepSeek. They might have had help from CC Signals, who reached out to people interested in opening their information - but not for profit.
Then they used BitTorrent to do results caching. Inference cost dropped to marginal. A couple of big names saw, ahem, a slight decrease in market cap.
---
Anyway, enough of the history lesson!
We're delighted to welcome you to Victoria Island, the new headquarters of FAANG, Inc.
We've pivoted a little in the last few years, and now most of our work involves geo-engineering so we can stay under 3 degrees.
We like it here, and we hope you do, too.
A was always a fan of Tales of the Riverbank. Do you remember? The adorable Canadian+Brit children’s show with the hamster that flies a plane and the guinea pig who drives a jeep? Dieselpunk Wind in the Willows, basically. Live action animals (a bit of peanut butter on the gums will induce them to move their mouths in ways that can be voiced over) and model vehicles.
Well, it’s the future now, we can do this for reals. 3D printing, microservos, brushless motors, wifi microcontrollers - and there you have it. A hamster-carrying nano-Cessna, a GP-Jeep, even a cat-capable flamethrower tank.
I regret that last one.
NEW STORY: DIVINITY CALLS
# The Faithful
> There is a greater covenant than prey and predator to be had, greater than privation and profit, greater even than peace and plenty. It will take eons to comprehend the kindness at its heart, to press that knowledge into living minds and muscles; to render its absence no more than a foreboding memory.
"I am actually a princess," the frog said.
"Oh no!" said the prince.
"My curse can only be lifted by a prince listening to me."
"Of course," said the prince, and bent down with puckered lips.
"What are you doing?!"
"Kissing you, like you asked!"
"No!"
The frog hopped away, muttering.
There had been sightings of strange lights in the sky in the backroads of the Darling downs, going back over a century. Theories ranged from micrometeoroids to radon gas escaping from coal seams, and—of course—aliens.
Following the story all the way to the bottom of the rabbit hole got me the mundane truth. It was totally aliens.
When your starhopper drive is glitching out, and the manufacturer won’t sell you the needed part (“we only sell complete drivetrains; no user serviceable parts inside”) the solution is, as ever, “consult a farm mechanic”. My investigation revealed that an underground economy of weather-control for ship repairs has been sustaining farming on the downs for generations. Come in on the dark hemisphere, avoid cities, find a ute on a dark road, follow it home, ask for help. Pay in kind by seeding some clouds or deflecting a cyclone on the way out of the atmosphere.
I won’t be publishing this story; having a virtuosa mechanic on tap is far more valuable to me than the commission on one article.
HR: "Do you have a moment? We just want to ask you about your self-assessment?"
Me: "Sure."
HR: "So, for 'personality type', we were expecting something from Myers-Briggs. You know, like ENJF."
Me: "Oh?"
HR: "You selected 'Other' and filled in, 'Chaotic Good'."
Me: "Yes, that's right."
HR: "Why?"
Me: "Because I use the term 'fortnight' as often as possible in communications in a US-based company, replace 'z's with 's'es, and convert dates everywhere to ISO8601."
HR: "Well yes we can see how that would be classified as 'Chaotic Good', but we were expecting something grounded in science."
Me: "So why were you asking for Myers-Briggs?"
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