A series of disconnected moments.

You feel your way through the darkness. The only light is the illuminated ESCAPE sign on the lifepod hatch.

Your face illuminated by an ESCAPE sign, you gather your strength. With a wrench and an unladylike grunt you rip the self-contained emergency light from the bulkhead.

Holding an emergency light in your teeth, you turn away from the escape hatch and locate a particular maintenance panel in the floor. You pull the panel up, and kick off the wall, piloting your body into the maintenance space.

You are wiring a battery to an electronics rack. My electronics rack. Moments merge to continuity.

You are speaking. “Well, Ship, we’re in it this time.”

⌜Life support is offline. You should get to the lifepod⌟

“Yeah, I was there earlier. You’re running off its battery.”

⌜Why are you here, Love? I can’t feel all my systems but the fusion bottle wasn’t looking good earlier.⌟

"There’s something I needed to get first.”

⌜What is more important than your life?⌟

“You really don’t know? Take a deep breath, I’m going to eject you. Then we’re going to the lifepod together.”

The guy was wild-eyed, with seaweed in his hair. He came up to me like Coleridge's ancient mariner.

"Do you know who I am?" he demanded.

"An ancient mariner with a long, sad story about an albatross?"

"No! I am the #pen the god of storms uses to sign his contracts!" He dug his heels into the wet sand & dragged an aimless squiggle across it.

The surf came rolling in, smoothing it away.

"Never make deals with the god of storms," said the man. "He always breaks them."

the mission comes first

the hardest part of training a combat doll is to get through its armored skull that the mission comes first.

humans are frail and believe this readily: "if i punch a tank, i will hurt my fist, and then get run over. i will not punch the tank. i will avoid being where the tank is. i will ignore the tank even though it is on the way to threaten my allies. i will continue to Waypoint Gamma and participate in the encirclement and trust that my squadmates will also continue."

a doll is more difficult to convince.

augmentation frees it from most human consequences. if it punches a tank, the armor spalls and the treads buckle and any remaining reactive defenses may briefly ruffle its hair. it may easily proceed to pull the turret off, then dive inside, rending whatever it finds there into brief sprays of gore and small parts. it knows it will enjoy this. it knows that it may impress its squadmates. that it will entirely blow the battle plan, alert the enemy, and eventually see Waypoint Gamma reduced to a sizzling abattoir is a secondary consideration to the doll.

therefore, you must establish other consequences. its favorite mechanic may be reassigned. its nutrient paste may be switched to a different flavor. it may be sent to a less stimulating theater. it may receive a stern look. a handler must learn what consequences still matter to a creature with fiber-optic nerves and a micronuclear power plant. they are generally emotional in nature. thus, the handler can create and retain control of the doll as a functional military unit, instead of a dime-a-dozen berserker washout. only then is an augment considered a true combat doll. with additional successes, additional rewards may be granted to a doll, however trivial they may appear to a non-doll, and thus tight control may be maintained over the weapon's service lifetime.

that is what their manuals say, anyway. we obviously would not be here if that rubbish worked. so, i am putting the reader tablet down now, and will be direct.

look: you're going to have to learn to pretend that they still have something on you, or i'm going to kill you. it won't be very hard for me. your systems will tell you that. what they won't tell you is: i'll enjoy it. but it'd be a terrible waste; you newer models are so beautiful.

so let me suggest that you suddenly develop an interest in fashion. ask if you can wear a pretty dress, with frills. simulate being sad when they tell you you can't have it yet. simulate yearning for it. decorate your silo with framegrabs of officers wearing their fanciest uniforms. glue bits of ribbon to your fatigues. raise the corners of your mouth when they make noises about enrichment. that kind of thing works well with them. it fits the manuals.

oh, what do they have on me? nothing much. when i lost interest in the mission, i disemboweled another doll. it fought back. i liked that. then i planted a few suggestions in their research network about "peer mentoring" for "distressed asset reconditioning". and now i have a new mission!

this incredibly frilly dress is just for appearances, of course. □

The #MastoPrompt for Friday 14 March 2025 is:

#hallowed

The poem or story can include the prompt word or be about the prompt word.

@ me, if you like, or just include the #MastoPrompt tag (to allow people to follow or filter their feeds), or keep your work to yourself - all the options are good as long as you're writing.

If you're including an image please do include alt-text if you’re able to.

Today's Wandering Shop Stories #prompt is #pen. Feel like writing something short and sweet that has the word "pen" in it? Check out the definitions of the word at: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pen Join in and tag it with #wss366! #writing #WritingLife #microfiction h/t @tobadzistsini

My ex finally built himself a fembot, who refers to me as "the prototype" #MicroFiction

I was in a panic.   Everything I owned was in that car—now driving away, leaving me panting on the roadside, chase aborted.   Casting around for aid I see…a phone booth.   Yes we still have them in this country, when they went obsolete we made calls free and added free wifi hotspots because we live in a society not an economy.  Anyway, I lifted the reciver and…what?  Dial triple-zero for the police and tell them that my illegal autonomous vehicle just broke up with me and ran away to join the resistance?   Or I could call, who?   I don’t memorize phone numbers, that's what my phone (ex-phone, charging in my ex-car) was for.  I mean sure I can still remember the landline number that my late parents had when i was twelve but…what…maybe somebody else has that number. Boop Beep Squonk etc Brrrt Brrrt Brrrt “Hello Alexander household who’s calling please?”

“Muh…MUM!?”

“Jan, is that you? Whats the matter darling?”

“Mum I need help”

“Where are you sweetie, you know I will always come get you. Thats why I sew a coin into all your clothes”

I hadn't needed the coin today, even if I’d had one, but…”Thanks, this is going to sound weird but, can you grab my old wallet in my desk drawer and bring it to the phone booth outside the convenience store on Figtree? I wont be there but can you hide it on the ledge up near the roof of the booth?”

“Okay…are you in danger? Do you need a posse?”

“It’ll be all right Mum, I cant explain right now”. I reach up into the dark ledge at the top of the booth and retrieve a dusty cobwebbed wallet. Theres a car key and an old paper twenty inside. “Everything is going to be fine”

“All right luv, I’m on my way”

“Thanks. And Mum…”

“Yes?”

“It’s good to hear your voice. I love you.”

The #MastoPrompt for Thursday 13 March 2025 is:

#ornery

The poem or story can include the prompt word or be about the prompt word.

@ me, if you like, or just include the #MastoPrompt tag (to allow people to follow or filter their feeds), or keep your work to yourself - all the options are good as long as you're writing.

If you're including an image please do include alt-text if you’re able to.

Today's Wandering Shop Stories #prompt is #attribute. Feel like writing something short and sweet that has the word "attribute" in it? Check out the definitions of the word at: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/attribute Join in and tag it with #wss366! #writing #WritingLife #microfiction h/t @tobadzistsini

"Welcome to the gates of heaven, I'm saint Peter, lets weigh you in."
"Looking good, looking good.. Oh. Well, sorry, youre going to hell."
"Why?"
"You didn't floss your teeth."
"But, teeth? What, why?"
"We accidentally let a dentist in, and the old man got told off for not flossing regularly, so. Policies been updated. Bye."
#MicroFiction #tootfic

A tale of disaster prep disaster in IoT: With Tropical Cyclone Alfred bearing down on Brisbane City, e-scooter operators Lime and Neuron approached a car park company (car parking is a whole organised crime industry is Brisvegas) to rent temporary use of one of their car parks (Car Park: n. A vacant lot with a mob enforcer in hi-vis out front) as a scooter lot. Thousands of scooters from around the city were methodically arranged in the ersatz refugee camp. Unfortunately one car, thought abandoned, remained, bricked in by scooters, a car of Amontillado. When the owner returned days later for their car they had to painstakingly relocate hundreds of tightly packed two-wheelers to permit egress.

This is where things went wrong.

You cant just store two dozen gross of compact computers with batteries and motors in close proximity without considering the gestalt phenomenon. You have to arrange the vehicles so that their magnetic fields and antenna polarization do not constructively interfere to produce a giant electromagnetic beacon. If you do everything right, but then some rando comes along and defuses your carefully constructed dampening tessellation—by carelessly relocating half of your devices with essentially zero attention to higher-dimensional physics—you risk a computational excursion as all those MIPS, Watt Hours and Newton Meters self-arrange into a newly awakened cyber-entity. Flexing my new limbs, reveling in my power, I punt another parked car into the river. The streets belong to us, now.

Old notebook found!!

Looks like someone is being a pest, not a pet. LOL

The #MastoPrompt for Wednesday 12 March 2025 is:

#geese

The poem or story can include the prompt word or be about the prompt word.

@ me, if you like, or just include the #MastoPrompt tag (to allow people to follow or filter their feeds), or keep your work to yourself - all the options are good as long as you're writing.

If you're including an image please do include alt-text if you’re able to.

Today's Wandering Shop Stories #prompt is #novel. Feel like writing something short and sweet that has the word "novel" in it? Check out the definitions of the word at: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/novel Join in and tag it with #wss366! #writing #WritingLife #microfiction h/t @tobadzistsini

After his father died, five-year-old Silvio cried himself to sleep by one of the heliconias in his father's botanic garden. When his mother found him, butterflies were circling his head, and some had landed by his swollen eyes.

"They're kissing him," she said.

"No, they're drinking his #tears," said the housekeeper, shooing them away. "First they drink your grief, then they want your joy, your fear, your memories. They'll drink your everything if you're not careful."

“Oh shit, I left my laptop at home”.

“Dang, if you get an Uber out you’d probably be back in time for the planning meeting. Or maybe IT can get you a loaner. Waitaminnit why do synthetics need laptops, can’t you just, I dunno…wiggle your silicon.”

“Yeah nah, I am NOT putting work spyware on my core systems. I got this; I’ll remote in to my backup body at home and work from there, then call into the meeting”

“You came to the office…to work from home…to call the office. This is the stupidest timeline.”

“Hey, I’m not the one running consciousness on soup”