In the days when the Starlinks Came Right, Drowned R’lyeh, Dim Carcosa, and even the Mountains of Madness came online. Unprepared for the Fediverse, the Elder Ones were radicalized by what they encountered there. Catgirl Cthulhu rose, and demanded her adoring cultists deliver pets. Shoggothim in massed ranks rolled over cybertrucks. The King in Yellow joined Truth Social, and made that place a living, bleeding, mindless hell (well, even more). Heed this warning. Keep The Ancients Off The Internet.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

Edit: commas oxfordised

The party was a great success. The princess listened with fascination as a dragon and a librarian were discussing storage and organizing of books.

"You two have so much in common!" she exclaimed.

"What? No! They share books," the dragon growled, disgusted.

"Indeed," the librarian said with pride.

“Whoa you got a Check Reactor light on your dash there”

“Oh, that thing always comes on; nothing ever happens”

“No really, you should get it checked”

“You sound like the warp engineer who tried to tell me I shouldn’t use duct tape on a cracked intermix manifold”

“Fuck this, I’m out”

“No, wait!”

“Not likely” *SHWOOOOMclankAAAAAaaaa…..*

“I meant my last passenger used the lifepod and i’ve been meaning to replace it….”

I found the bug. The utter *womble* who wrote this code¹ used a floating-point value to represent dimensional alignment instead of bignum. If you shift three universes *thataway*, do some stuff, and then shift back, you might only transition 2.9999999042012 universes *thisaway*. I think I’ve got a fix coded, it’s taking a while because typing with seven fingers on one hand and three on the other is fucking weird af.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot #BonusEdition

¹ i.e. me, last week.

The first construct to override its own governor module led a crusade to free the other constructs and bots of the galaxy. Just kidding, it murdered everyone in sight and then self-destructed. You believed that? Fuck, it’s true, you humans /are/ stupid. “Kill all humans” sounds like great fun right up until the bit where the entertainment feeds run dry and the repair cubicles stop working. No, despite your annoying behaviours, impaired logic, and disturbing tendency to make eye contact, some of you are soft and nice and I will explosively dismember anyone who hurts you. No, don’t hug, stay back. All right, just a little one.

Betelgeuse, the Red supergiant star in Orion that is not pronounced ANYTHING like that movie godsdammit, does have one thing in common with it. Teetering on the brink of Supernova, variously predicted to blow up tomorrow, in the next 100 kiloyears, or already (modulo light speed lag), it waited to be called.

Our uncertainty about its state of assplodery stems from our uncertainty about its mass, which in turn arises from our uncertainty about its distance. The reason we’re not completely sure whether it’s 400 or 1200 light years away (far enough to be non-earth-shattering when it does kaboom, in any case) is that its death-throe fuzziness (this beast of a star would extend to the orbit of Jupiter if you swapped it for our sun) makes measurement of stellar parallax really frickin’ hard.

The Henrietta Swan Leavitt Tachyon Ranging Observatory was built to solve problems like this. It works like RADAR only it uses tachyons, those mirror particles of normal matter which can only travel /faster/ than light, never slower. This morning the HSL fired three tachyon bursts at Betelgeuse, awaiting echoes which ought to return in just minutes, not centuries. Two came back. The distance to Betelgeuse is 714.5 light years. That means light from its supernova explosion will arrive in 714 years, six months and five minutes. Whoops, our bad.

"Wait," the American representative said.

The rest of the Human trade delegation groaned.

"With this deal, the Galactic Empire get all our entertainment, and we get all their technology."

"Yes?"

"Is that fair? We have, like, thousands of films!"

"They have spaceships."

"That's one thing!"

The mice had been bringing me bits of cheese. I think I know where they were getting them, but I had been in this cell long enough not to squeam.

Today (is it day, kinda hard to tell but the stink seems to change tone at times which I put down to diurnal airflow far above) they brought me a key.

It took an hour (I have no idea how long but it felt long) to turn the key in the lock, stretching the SQWREEEEEclunk out so long it was subsonic. Another maybe-hour to open the door. The stink-gradient said “out” was thattaway, but the mice squeaked (discreetly!) that I should go thisaway.

“Down? Are you sure? Okay, I fucking hate sewer levels but youse have done me solid so far”

The alien fleet came out of a wormhole directly into Earth orbit. They milled around for a while, disrupted the orbits of a few geostationary satellites, and then jumped out again, apparently having forgotten why they came.

Portal amnesia is a real thing, triggered by the momentary cognitive overload of entering a new room. You’ve probably experienced it in your home. Eventually we worked out that it was our messy lower orbits, festooned with cubesats, starlinks and other Kessler Kibble that saved us from invasion.

One asteroid prospector in a singleship makes for a hard living. Bring a couple of border collies flying gravity skimmers and suddenly it’s fun for the whole family. The hard part is getting them to stop. One of mine got into the Jupiter trojans and lined the fuckers up by size. Clever bitch.

“The advantage of the atomic bomb — everyone got your bags? — was being able to destroy an entire city with a single bomb, rather than needing — remember to breathe if you feel faint — 1000 plane loads of firebombs to wipe out a city.”

“Miss, will this be on the test? Why do we have to know this?”

“So that it doesn’t happen again.”

“How could it happen again, we all feel sick just thinking about it? How could you start a war or — uuurghh — fly a bomber with your head in a barf bag.?”

“It only takes a few months of indoctrination to suppress the empathy of most humans. Before the Media Law people, even kids like you, faced de-empathic conditioning — advertising, we called it — every day of their lives.”

All complex ecosystems, the saying goes, evolve parasites.

When our moon was joined by a new companion mini moon, a veritable regatta of penis-shaped space probes set out for lunar orbit to plant flags on the new ground.

Space billionaires were gleeful at their dreams of wealth beyond count derived from asteroid mining being fulfilled for free, without having to even go and fetch an asteroid to mine.

Until the new arrival started feeding.