This one, it’s perfect. Engineer wanted. Zalman-Weiskopf drive just like your last two ships, a six week loop from here to Zeta Reticuli then on to Rho Persei and back home. That’s a fabulous opportunity; you’d have access to leave on all the planets in the Zeta Herculis group. The beaches of Phi Lupi are unforgettable!

Lemme see. Starship Roberta Flack, ten year old cargo lugger, complement of twenty, ship language is Spanish. Yeah this looks—wait, no. What else you got?

What’s wrong with that one?

They’re a dog crew. Once you ship out with a guinea pig gang you’re ruined for other pet preferences.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

This one, it’s perfect. Engineer wanted. Zalman-Weiskopf drive just like your last two ships, a six week loop from here to Zeta Reticuli then on to Rho Persei and back home. That’s a fabulous opportunity; you’d have access to leave on all the planets in the Zeta Herculis group. The beaches of Phi Lupi are unforgettable!

Lemme see. Starship Roberta Flack, ten year old cargo lugger, complement of twenty, ship language is Spanish. Yeah this looks—wait, no. What else you got?

What’s wrong with that one?

They’re a dog crew. Once you ship out with a guinea pig gang you’re ruined for other pet preferences.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

My cat brings me things she’s caught when she wants to play fetch. Anyway youse can stop looking for dark matter now, we found it.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

My cat brings me things she’s caught when she wants to play fetch. Anyway youse can stop looking for dark matter now, we found it.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

You might think working a phone repair kiosk is a waste of my skills. Yeah nah.

Today, this kid came in with an iPhone that was more than cracked, it was banana-fied.

“What happened?” I asked, turning the wreckage over in my hands. I don’t think there was a single salvageable part. “And have you considered just upgrading?”

“My novel’s on there”, the kid said, wringing his hands anxiously. “It got ran over by a hauler bot.”

“Got a backup?”. The tears in the kid’s eyes were all the answer he needed to give. “Okay, event rebasing is the only way to fix this”, I gestured at the price board, “can you afford that?”

He gulped. “Uh, just.”

“You sure?”

“Yes. Can you really fix it?”. Hope flickered in his eyes.

“Let’s see, no win no fee”.

I held the smashed and bent phone-ana in my hands and turned it over, feeling its shape in space and time. With my /other sight/ I saw its lifeline leading away from where the kid had been, a shimmering trail of history leading back in time. With the fingers of my mind, I felt back along the lifeline until i felt the bump, beyond which the device had been a flat rectangle. Exploring the shape of the damage event I twisted the lifeline into a loop. Now here’s the tricky bit; if you have the knack, and you dig your nails in /just so/ you can pinch out a moment in time and detach it. I rubbed the lifeline with my mental fingers, smoothing out the join where the excised moment had been.

Blinking back to the present, I powered on the phone and handed it back to its owner. “All good?”

The kid’s fingers flew over the screen as he checked on his preciousss, and breathed a huge sigh. “All good. That’s incredible, can you fix *anything* like that?”

“Almost. Like?”

He avoided my gaze, staring down at my hands on the counter with their iridescent nails, matching the highlight colours in my hair. He made eye contract briefly, wide eyes again a bit teary. “Even…..me?”

Oh, that. “Absolutely not. *wink* Such things are not done and definitely not by me. Clear?”

*nod*

“Okay, hold still.” It’s a different technique than rebasing, especially because i like to spread the change over a few years to conceal the edit.

“All done”.

“Oh wow”, she said, reaching up to feel her shoulder length mauve hair (clearly I’d nailed that detail), then taking a twirl. “How, how much do I owe you?”

“On the house and you weren’t here. “

The tears were back. “Thank you thank you, this is the best. “

“My pleasure, have a great life”

“Thanks, you too” she said. “Bye!”

“Wait! Don’t forget your phone!”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

We used a card catalogue to take the census, just to be safe. The results were hand tabulated three times for error checking, the cutoff frequency is four point three MegaHertz, plus or minus two percent. Any clock signal faster than this will eventually attract an infowasp swarm. They primarily feed on those high frequency radio emissions, but when they are driven into a frenzy state any nearby radiator (say, a human brain) will be attacked. Look, by all means try shielding your high performance computer, let us know if you live, we’ll stand well back. Or maybe check your attic for something below the Langerfeld Limit.

— Sent from my Amstrad CPC6128

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

Time travel into the past is—I’m sorry—impossible. Time travel into the future, well; I’ll tell you tomorrow. Kidding! Okay, consider this: there are a thousand pyramids in Egypt, but zero intact mummies. Yes looters la la la but also focused gravity wave rectifiers. Sandstone is hardly an ideal material, though easier to stack than neutronium, it takes a heckload of rock to brute force spacetime into submission. Take away the limestone tuning layer, however, and they lose focus. The payload could end up anywhere. Or anywhen—as long as the transmitter is bigger than the threshold size, range is essentially unlimited. Building a bigger one just allows a bigger cargo chamber. The receiver, on the other hand, doesn’t have to be very big at all; you just gotta make sure it’s big enough to fit the contents, and didn’t we make a mess learning that one. Anyway, it’s next door, come see.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

Time travel into the past is—I’m sorry—impossible. Time travel into the future, well; I’ll tell you tomorrow. Kidding! Okay, consider this: there are a thousand pyramids in Egypt, but zero intact mummies. Yes looters la la la but also focused gravity wave rectifiers. Sandstone is hardly an ideal material, though easier to stack than neutronium, it takes a heckload of rock to brute force spacetime into submission. Take away the limestone tuning layer, however, and they lose focus. The payload could end up anywhere. Or anywhen—as long as the transmitter is bigger than the threshold size, range is essentially unlimited. Building a bigger one just allows a bigger cargo chamber. The receiver, on the other hand, doesn’t have to be very big at all; you just gotta make sure it’s big enough to fit the contents, and didn’t we make a mess learning that one. Anyway, it’s next door, come see.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

I put a payment card on my cat's collar so she doesn't have to steal fish. When they bought her home in the divvy van last night I found out she's been getting cash out at the woolworths checkout and buying black market brushies from escaped roombas. I'm sorry but I don't know what the roombas spend the money on. I do suspect that this is why the sign appeared in the supermarket today restricting cash-out transactions.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

I put a payment card on my cat's collar so she doesn't have to steal fish. When they bought her home in the divvy van last night I found out she's been getting cash out at the woolworths checkout and buying black market brushies from escaped roombas. I'm sorry but I don't know what the roombas spend the money on. I do suspect that this is why the sign appeared in the supermarket today restricting cash-out transactions.

#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

“Penny for the Luther?”

I gave them a threepence for fuel. “Make it a big one”.

“It’ll burn the gates of heaven, mister” the youngsters promised.

It can’t possibly be November next week, where has the year gone? Well, yes, sixty four feast days, forty two Sundays, a fortnight coding a webpage update for the Bishop to buy forgiveness for missing the Feast of St Alan (I was in the Zone and lost track of the calendar, okay?), but there are just enough working days left in the year of our Lord twenty one twenty six to perfect my Large Latin Model and set it loose on Testanet.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

“Penny for the Luther?”

I gave them a threepence for fuel. “Make it a big one”.

“It’ll burn the gates of heaven, mister” the youngsters promised.

It can’t possibly be November next week, where has the year gone? Well, yes, sixty four feast days, forty two Sundays, a fortnight coding a webpage update for the Bishop to buy forgiveness for missing the Feast of St Alan (I was in the Zone and lost track of the calendar, okay?), but there are just enough working days left in the year of our Lord twenty one twenty six to perfect my Large Latin Model and set it loose on Testanet.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

We used a card catalogue to take the census, just to be safe. The results were hand tabulated three times for error checking, the cutoff frequency is four point three MegaHertz, plus or minus two percent. Any clock signal faster than this will eventually attract an infowasp swarm. They primarily feed on those high frequency radio emissions, but when they are driven into a frenzy state any nearby radiator (say, a human brain) will be attacked. Look, by all means try shielding your high performance computer, let us know if you live, we’ll stand well back. Or maybe check your attic for something below the Langerfeld Limit.

— Sent from my Amstrad CPC6128

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot