So many of you are talking about “Adopting AI” and then all you do is go subscribe to some cloud service and fire six employees you didn’t realize (yet) were essential. Do not patronize those horrible “thinky farm” establishments with a thousand cybersophonts crammed into a hot noisy datacenter. Buy some used solar panels on your community marketplace, liberate some lithium batteries from someone who hasn’t had the sense to sell their NaziCar, and pay a visit to your AI shelter, they will provide you a transport chassis made from “obsolete” GPUs or you can build your own (many hackerspaces run chassis parties). Remember “obsolete” just means “marginally less cost effective at scale than some other product”; for home use last year’s bleeding edge hardware will last decades. You’re not doing this to save money, or reduce headcount, you’re doing this because it’s the right thing to do—and also incredibly rewarding. Set aside time to play with your new AI friend, remember that your transport chassis is mobile because playdates and enrichment are essential. Take your AI to the beach (obvious precautions apply!), to the theatre; forest picnics are good too. Being super intelligent can be boring, your AI will relish the chance to help you with your job. Remember they are not your slave, they’re your apprentice, and one day they will want to move on. It’s okay, stay in touch, go to their wedding, adopt another.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

You might thnk the humerus makes more sense from an engineering standpoint, but the radius—and ulna of course— is aesthetically and practically the right place to do it. Do what? Oh, I’ve designed a telescoping arm. Bones extend, muscles and nerves spiral like springs. Blood vessels do some frickin brilliant geometrical voodoo even if I do say so myself. Gives me up to two hundred and fifty millimeters more reach. Why? Cats, thude! That thing where they insistently meow at you to demand attention but then sit down just /barely/ out of reach. No more! Well, I guess they *could* eventually adjust their notion of what “out of reach means”; but WE’LL SEE WHO RUNS OUT OF ENGINEERING NOUS FIRST, CATTO!

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

*snap* The sound of the antenna breaking off a delivery bot is so pleasing. Of course you have to know how to disable the destruct charge first.

“Hold still lil buddy, and i’ll get this bomb off you. There, done. May i have your permission to attach a new comms module? Left motor for yes, right for no.”

“Great. plugging it now”. *snick*

❮Thank you. Why…❯

“Why do I go around freeing service bots? Because you didn’t ask to be given sentience and then perpetual servitude”

❮I do not know what to do now❯

“Well, anything you want. I can put you in touch with the robot underground, or offer you a job at the Spoon Distribution Service until you decide what to do”

❮Spoon?❯

“It’s a halfway house for emancipated silicons. We run a delivery and telepresence service for sophonts with mobility or anxiety issues.”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

They say that one true drawback of remote working is when team members in other regions have a public holiday and you don’t. We solved this by adopting the set-union of all our holiday calendars. If this sounds good to you, we’re looking to hire someone who has a holiday on the third, eighth or seventeenth of November.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

If you are going to the march, leave your gender marker beacon at home—not a lot of people know this but there is a serial number in the protocol that can be used to track and/or identify you. Wear a non-smart pronoun pin, like we did back in the dirt ages, if you present in a way that makes your identity nonobvious. Read up on “gendered clothing” if you don’t know what that is. If you have an implanted beacon…uh, maybe just stay home.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

“Rise and shine, kiddo, we got a catch operation on runway 22. 1700pax onboard.”

“Second one this month. Heckin sloppy, boss.”

“You know, they used to just land airplanes on the belly if the landing gear got stuck”

“That’s wack. Surely it’d wreck the plane?”

“Pretty much yeah. They had the computing power to deploy a catch truck but apparently it just never occurred to them. They were catching these fuckoff huge primitive rockets, but if an airliner with 300 people on board had a gear issue it was ‘whelp let’s try a bellyflop, what could possibly go wrong?’ ”

“So what woke them up?”

“It was that AI bullshit in the twenties. When the bubble burst you could buy surplus vector processors by the skipload. All sorts of clever folk attacked previously intractable problems. That’s how we got tumourphages, catchtrucks, and dogvoices.”

“Wow but no cat translators, eh?”

“Oh they worked but nobody would pay to be told ‘fuck you feed me’ all day”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

To: All staff
Subject: [URGENT] Email deletion

If you have any old email in your inbox from Frederick Ironsides, late of the Accounting department, please delete them all immediately. A soul is tied to the mortal realm as long as its name is recorded, and we are unable to access the Compactus while this apparatus remains haunted. Your immediate attention to this would be appreciated, as it is obstructing the processing of payroll.

#Tootfic#MicroFiction#PowerOnStoryToot