“Time travel ruins everything. There can be no narrative tension if the protagonists can just go back and alter past events. Once a fictional milieu uses time travel even once, it is dead to me”

“All right. What are you going to do about it?”

“I’m going to go back and kill ol’ Herb’s grandpa before he ever has any children!”

The doorbell rang. The FedEx girl handed me a box. Inside the box was a dented and stained cardboard carton. Inside that a wooden cigar box. Inside that an envelope. Inside, a handwritten letter. “My Dear Alice, I hope this message finds you well. I have successfully averted the conception of H. G. Wells (you won’t recognize the name, but an author of note in some circumstances). Alas my means of return has ceased to exist. Please arrange publication of the attached manuscript, which I hope will restore my ability to travel home.”.

“What’s all that?”, my spouse asked.

“Nothing, love, just some kind of weird Nigerian Letter scam”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

At this conference center there was an alcove near the bathrooms with a door labeled “ACCESSIBLE VOID”. Some sort of cabling or piping access I figured. Then I saw the door open, and an attendee emerged, adjusting their lanyard.

I approached them, “Hi, I saw you just came out of the void door, what’s in there?”

“Introvert BOF. Ten minutes floating in nullspace and i’m good for another conversation or two. I wish all conferences had proper voids, quiet rooms don’t compare.”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

The International Astradimensional Emergence Agency was not overly concerned that STL files for a Summoning Assembly were available on thingiverse dot com. The hard part of joining the Astral Weapons club, they maintained, was constructing and triggering the explosive lenses necessary to assemble the pieces into a perfectly shaped Idol of Amenhotep sufficiently rapidly for the astral gate to be fully actualised before the expanding gate horizon consumed the trigger idol.

They (and the world) were taken entirely by surprise when a repurposed nanolithography exposure unit available from AliBaba was able to use X-ray stereolithography to render a functional idol from ordinary dental resin.

The “temporary suspension” of international postage last month was cover for installation of package irradiation devices to ensure that any concealed resins were ruined before they could be used in violations of the Cairo Accords.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

Here at the Post Office physical research laboratory we do real science. Our package accelerators have allowed us to make genuine advances in the field of logistical mechanics. We have proven the Heisenberg-Comstock conjecture¹ , and also shown that the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Aramex limit applies to package sorting centers—once the mass of packages in a single location exceeds the limit it becomes impossible for all packages to escape; at least some items will be trapped forever inside the Envelope Horizon.

We are extremely proud to share that our latest result, published in _Nature_, confirms the conditions required for Quantum Shipment Tunneling to occur, and describes the successful teleportation of a pair of pink fluffy cat ears from Shenzen to Wodonga, without traversing the Sunshine West vortex.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

¹ The HC theorem states that the more frequently you click the status refresh button, the less accurate the results become.

“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

The human genome is pleased to announce that it has been acquired by GalactiComm in a transaction involving 56 quadrillion UltraCredits in cash, stock and population indentures. Humanity will remain an independent brand and organisation under the GalactiComm banner and is expected to flourish with access to GalactiComm technologies such as TrueThought and MetaGender. Human leaders will remain in their current roles, designated as GalacticComm vice demi pico presidents.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot #Arduino

“We’ve solved the hyperspace jump gate congestion problem by linking ships into convoys and installing antimatter energy transfer grids in the gate lanes!”

“Trains. You invented trains. Again.”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

“Whoa, whoa, open a fresh jar of thermal paste!”

“Do whatnow?”

“Oh, what’s that expression you carbons use, ‘take a chill pill’?”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

The *second* alien race we met told us it was VERY irregular for the Tang to grant a race access to the undernet and then later revoke it. They asked us what we did. We sent them RFC129301 (Encapsulation of IPv4 datagrams within the state vector of subspace network gauge solitons). We never heard back.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot #BonusEdition