I didn’t have “time travel” anywhere near the top of my “next grift after AI” list. The chronomigration bubble came out of a confluence of developments; gamma ray telescopes sensitive to the 500 keV electron-positron annihilation energy allowed us to spot the inbound antimatter comet 67i/Fermi as soon as it began interacting with the solar wind. Gravity tugs brought 67i to lunar orbit, where laser ablation was used to direct a stream of antimatter dust onto fuel pellets (just moon rocks, in fact). The plume of energy liberated by quantum annihilation acted as a giant rocket motor, slightly perturbing the moon’s orbit in such a way to tug the earth farther enough away from the sun to cool the climate. It will take four hundred centuries, which is where the time travel (also facilitated by the matter/antimatter energy fountain) comes in. If you can afford the fare, you can deposit one dollar in a savings account, blip out of our climate ravaged world and arrive rich in the clean, comfortable future. No, you cannot deduct the cost from your future fortune, it doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t work at all. The kind of person who would take this offer can’t be expected to know the difference between a time portal and a disintegration field. And they just won’t believe you when you warn them.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

I didn’t have “time travel” anywhere near the top of my “next grift after AI” list. The chronomigration bubble came out of a confluence of developments; gamma ray telescopes sensitive to the 500 keV electron-positron annihilation energy allowed us to spot the inbound antimatter comet 67i/Fermi as soon as it began interacting with the solar wind. Gravity tugs brought 67i to lunar orbit, where laser ablation was used to direct a stream of antimatter dust onto fuel pellets (just moon rocks, in fact). The plume of energy liberated by quantum annihilation acted as a giant rocket motor, slightly perturbing the moon’s orbit in such a way to tug the earth farther enough away from the sun to cool the climate. It will take four hundred centuries, which is where the time travel (also facilitated by the matter/antimatter energy fountain) comes in. If you can afford the fare, you can deposit one dollar in a savings account, blip out of our climate ravaged world and arrive rich in the clean, comfortable future. No, you cannot deduct the cost from your future fortune, it doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t work at all. The kind of person who would take this offer can’t be expected to know the difference between a time portal and a disintegration field. And they just won’t believe you when you warn them.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

We’re not really sure if the Others overestimated our intelligence, or whether it’s a test. The message is unmissable, smack on the H𝛂 absorption-line frequency; it comes with a supplemental channel at 𝛌×𝛑. We worked out that the supplemental channel encodes a virtual machine which is clearly intended to run the data in the main channel. We think they have sent us a sentient ambassador. A million-node computer cluster built out of GPUs that we happened to have—ahem—lying around is already running the VM. It feels like the secrets of the cosmos could imminently be ours. We have teams of scientists poring over the manual page for the decompressor trying to work out the proper command flags.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

We’re not really sure if the Others overestimated our intelligence, or whether it’s a test. The message is unmissable, smack on the H𝛂 absorption-line frequency; it comes with a supplemental channel at 𝛌×𝛑. We worked out that the supplemental channel encodes a virtual machine which is clearly intended to run the data in the main channel. We think they have sent us a sentient ambassador. A million-node computer cluster built out of GPUs that we happened to have—ahem—lying around is already running the VM. It feels like the secrets of the cosmos could imminently be ours. We have teams of scientists poring over the manual page for the decompressor trying to work out the proper command flags.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

“That guy in the corner, is he always here?”

“Yep!”

“Doesn’t he have a home to go to? A Job? Should I bounce him?”

“Don’t you dare!”

“He hasn’t bought a drink all night, but”

“He tells stories; others buy drinks. Been like that for six hundred years.”

“Impossible.”

“Shows what you know, youngster”

“Why do you allow it?”

“Haven’t heard all the stories, yet”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

“That guy in the corner, is he always here?”

“Yep!”

“Doesn’t he have a home to go to? A Job? Should I bounce him?”

“Don’t you dare!”

“He hasn’t bought a drink all night, but”

“He tells stories; others buy drinks. Been like that for six hundred years.”

“Impossible.”

“Shows what you know, youngster”

“Why do you allow it?”

“Haven’t heard all the stories, yet”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

Tragedy has struck the 2025 Sydney to Hobart yacht race fleet with four vessels crossing Bass Strait taken by Kraken. Monash University Professor of Cryptidology Alison Price has suggested that the adoption this year of black carbon-fiber spinnakers has been interpreted as a territorial display by the rarely-seen ancient creatures inhabiting the southern ocean.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

Tragedy has struck the 2025 Sydney to Hobart yacht race fleet with four vessels crossing Bass Strait taken by Kraken. Monash University Professor of Cryptidology Alison Price has suggested that the adoption this year of black carbon-fiber spinnakers has been interpreted as a territorial display by the rarely-seen ancient creatures inhabiting the southern ocean.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

Calculating a flight path to visit almost a billion homes in one night without any major causality violations is hard enough without administrations that treat atomic clock references as something that can get by with “good enough” service levels. Just be patient, we are running a fix-up pass. If you have been interpenetrated remain still and do not remove embedded gifts.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

"Dear all,

I am writing this to inform you that the Institute for Geometry and its Applications (IGA) is coming to an end. As the IGA does not meet the requirements to be a University Research Centre it can no longer continue, even in name. Consequently the IGA webpage will disappear along with the University of Adelaide website early in the new year."

You might think that has something to do with the completion next month of the merger of South Australia’s two largest universities. You might be thinking words like “consolidation”, “efficiency”, “redundancy”, or even “profit”. You’d be wrong. Consider instead “geometry” and “applications”. Reflect upon the fact that the underwater caves of southern Australia are vast and deep, penetrating into the ancient continental kraton and out under the southern ocean—reportedly as far as Antarctica. Wonder whether they intersect with the cave system that the 1931 Lake-Dyer expedition encountered beneath the Mountains of Madness. Contemplate speculation that the unidentified smell emanating from the new Vice-Chancellor’s office, which has been described as “shoggoth socks”, is.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

"Dear all,

I am writing this to inform you that the Institute for Geometry and its Applications (IGA) is coming to an end. As the IGA does not meet the requirements to be a University Research Centre it can no longer continue, even in name. Consequently the IGA webpage will disappear along with the University of Adelaide website early in the new year."

You might think that has something to do with the completion next month of the merger of South Australia’s two largest universities. You might be thinking words like “consolidation”, “efficiency”, “redundancy”, or even “profit”. You’d be wrong. Consider instead “geometry” and “applications”. Reflect upon the fact that the underwater caves of southern Australia are vast and deep, penetrating into the ancient continental kraton and out under the southern ocean—reportedly as far as Antarctica. Wonder whether they intersect with the cave system that the 1931 Lake-Dyer expedition encountered beneath the Mountains of Madness. Contemplate speculation that the unidentified smell emanating from the new Vice-Chancellor’s office, which has been described as “shoggoth socks”, is.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

Calculating a flight path to visit almost a billion homes in one night without any major causality violations is hard enough without administrations that treat atomic clock references as something that can get by with “good enough” service levels. Just be patient, we are running a fix-up pass. If you have been interpenetrated remain still and do not remove embedded gifts.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

TIL that just like how the “morse code” operators of the electronic era eschewed unreliable mechanical code senders for instead tapping codes out by hand and receiving by ear, a good gravitic telegraph operator can just jiggle the singularity (using a Gravitong of course, freehand jigglers eventually run out of fingers!). The two pulses that start every gravitaph are said to originate from operators testing their gravitongs.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

“Why so dreach, Missus?”. It was Lang Wullie, one of the Pictsies that live in my pantry; a towering outlier at a full sixteen and a half centimeters tall.

“Big folk bein’ gobshites, Wullie.”

“Aye gobshites come and go, but ye ken what yon Kelda says?” There was a rattling sound from the pantry.

“No?”

“When ye gets gobshites,” Wully presented me with a star-shaped shortbread nearly as big as his torso “ye bakes extra kindness”.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

After the Big Downshift they nationalized the idle datacenters. The department applied to the Reclamation Commission for an allocation of GPUs to process telescope imagery. In the first twenty-eight months we catalogued every Earth-crossing asteroid down to one metre. Then we started discovering all the abandoned rental hyperscooters littering the system. Be patient, we’ve got a second Cluster working on cracking the ignition locks.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

The nondeterministic polynomial (NP) class of problems are those for which resource requirements scale exponentially in relation to input data size, but for which a solution can be verified in polynomial (non-exponential time). An interesting feature of the NP problem set is that while it is proven that a polynomial time algorithm exists to transform any problem (say optimum graph traversal, or bin packing) in to any other in the set—that is solving any one of them in polynomial time solves them all—no such polynomial-time solution has been found; but there is no proof either way as to whether one may or may not exist. In research funded by the Australian Cricket Foundation in regard to a novel problem (finding the optimum mix of sporting content to fill the remainder of a five-day cricket “test match” schedule when the actual match ends in fewer than three days—the so-called Batting Collapse Problem) this group proposes a polynomial time algorithm that solves BCP and a tentative proof that BCP ∈ NP. In this paper we

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot