Music of the Congruent Spheres

Sometimes alien stars strangely align, raising up things that cannot be put down. Such as this rather fine collaboration on a Lovecraftian dance club by Cibex and Midjourney. Is it better not to speculate what arcane blasphemies might creep forth from that miscegenation of musical samples? Or set sail into the smoke-machine dark voids of …

Stonefish by Scott R. Jones

Jones summons forth abstruse theology in the language of dystopian thriller, creating the thinking person’s visceral cosmic dread. Years ago, tech mogul and futurist guru Gregor Makarios disappeared completely from public record. However, Den Secord, a journalist for a minor virtual reality publication, finds a fragment that somehow escaped the purge. Following a hunch that …

Forever Loyal

09:00:00 AI-Mee reset her status to ‘On Shift’. The label was meaningless, much like the names artificial minds bore; however, humans had wanted everything to be familiar rather than efficient. Cleaning showed no issues. As her subroutines ran the bots, she already knew; but the process required she review it. Inventory showed the factory had …

The Truth and Nothing But

Isaac studied the database. Every language uploaded. Every rule and exception catalogued. And whether the culture that spoke it said language came from the divine. Centuries of Kabbalists hadn’t found the answers, because Hebrew wasn’t the sacred language; merely one of them. Tracing back, removing human languages, would reveal the language of creation. This program …

All the Time in the World

Plastic shards spray across the room. Suddenly, the hammer reappears in my hand. I slump down, another idea defeated. Building the tachyon bridge was my greatest moment. Portable time travel. Only a few seconds. But still time travel. Each moment of error could be erased as if it had never been. But some consequences are …

More Happy Than Human?

As deep background for a possible story, I have been considering hypothetical histories of self-awareness in robots. There are many stories already which posit negative consequences to mistreating self-aware machines; but I wonder if the ethics of treating them well are equally problematic. The ethics of treating beings we created worse than humans are the …