SCARS Message From: L667UW / L11482
Message: PAX IN A1 SMOKING IN AIRLOCK. MISTOOK PURGE BUTTON FOR EXTRACTOR FAN. CORPSE MAY BE HAZARD TO L1 APPROACHING CRAFT
[Track Spacecraft www.satview.org]
Area: Earth-Luna L1
The doorbell rang. I checked the peephole, and saw someone who looked almost like me. I let him in.
"I'm your future self. Listen-"
"Wait! How did you even get here?" I asked.
"British Rail, Anytime Return ticket."
"They killed British Rail in 1997!“
"It'll be back. But list-"
He disappeared.
"What's that ticking sound?"
"Tiger counter"
"Don't you mean Geiger"?"
"Why would I be worried about radiation in a zoo?"
"It's getting faster"
"Feeding time; they're all on this side of the enclosure, waiting"
"Aren't you worried, being in here unarmed?
"No, I've got you"
"What am I good for?"
"Breakfast. Bye."
"There's been a new breakthrough on flying cars! Soon, the-"
"It won't happen."
"This time, they fixed the-"
"Doesn't matter."
"Why not?"
"Dragons."
"What?"
"Flying cars get popular, dragons appear and eat them all, and make us forget it."
"What?"
"Happens every time."
"What?"
"Yup."
Did you ever notice how every “disruptive” business idea contains the seeds of its own destruction? All these “revolutionary” ideas like AirBNB, Uber, self-driving cars, delivery vanbikes that can (ab)use bicycle lanes, restaurant reservation flipping services et cetera…. These all work if a few people do it, but break society when everybody does. AI slop is the same, it puts one person ahead of the pack, until the pack catch on. The early adopters get rich and then the whole house of cards falls down.
Disruptr, our new AI business model generator helps you find your next disruptive business idea and predict the optimum moment to eject before collapse. It…wait, who threw that. What are you…Aargh. No help.
— Transcript of bootleg footage from the riot at Something Digitial Launch keynote, Brisbane, Aug 2025.
I have just finished Atmosphere. I am emotionally devastated. More to come.
#bookstodon #literature #tootfic #amreading #books #bookreview
I know you lost a lot of money on those bored apes, I hope you remember I tried to warn you. I still get a kick out of writing “bitcoin wallet” on failed hard drives before i bin them. You didn’t need my help to stay away from AI, well spotted there. Now that quantum has burned down you might be looking for the next hype cycle to avoid. Hwæt: you are going to start hearing about metaphysical computing, and something called a Field Effect Thaumistor. Some people will call it magic. They’re right; get in on that shit early. Trust me, when have ever I led you astray?
We thought the elder races were gone; extinct or transcended or estivating inside black holes until the frigid far future when their mainframes will run cooler. You’d be forgiven for overlooking that they ever existed except for the occasional hollowed-out asteroid, certain isotope imbalances in planetary crusts. And the wormhole network, of course.
Not gone, it turns out. Just, ah, 🐰semi-retired🐰. Not sure what we did to cheese them off, but now that they’ve implemented age-verification at the transit gates I’ve gotta solve this puzzle or walk home from Fomalhaut C. What have you got for thirteen across?
“Aw, she’s got her mother’s eyes!”
“Yes, well you can’t get replacement smarteyes without advertisements built in any more; subjecting a kid to that is just wrong. So Marta, bless her heart, bit the bullet and got new peepers for herself and passed her old ad-free ones down to Miss Four.”
“So kind”
“Yeah but it’s wearing thin. She thought there’d be a jailbreak for her eyes by now, it’s been almost a year”
“WHO DARES AWAKEN ME FROM MY AEONS-LONG SLUMBER?!”
“Yes, very good, excellent delivery, forgive me for not laughing, but you’re the sixth one today. You girls should have workshopped your jokes together before going into stasis”
“Oh. Ah? How long have we got until the big 10k, and how are my investments doing? And do you still have updog in the future?”
“It’s 2288, forget about year ten thousand we’ve got bigger problems. Your investments tanked in the quantum wars. And nice try but the last corpsicle got me with that one”
“Fuck. What now?”
“Asteroid impact is what
now”
“Cool, and you need programmers to calculate how to divert it.”
“Nope, we did that already.”
“And that worked?”
“Noooooot as such, no. Typo in the value of the gravitational constant.”
“Woopsy, so you need a cadre of 21st century digital girls to brainstorm a last minute plan B?”
“Nope, plan B worked just fine, the folks at the Indonesian moon base worked an incantation to kick the Earth a day forward in time, while the asteroid sailed through the empty spot. Well mostly fine; I can’t get used to the month being four days longer now.”
“Aha! You need us to work out how to get the moon back in orbit?”
“No, we’ll live with that. We need you to fix the timezone data files”
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