Original date: 22nd June 2020 Humanity, in its endless flight towards comfort and perfection, continued to innovate in the realm of artificial intelligence. Decent AI, it was hoped, would offer yet another way to offload mental effort onto an external system. It came to pass that attempts to write an entire personality onto a silicon […]
Category: Fiction
Original date: 18th June 2020 It was something of a humbling day when the Elders revealed themselves. They insisted on that label themselves, though it seemed like a first-thought one. They claimed to have been living amongst us for a while, just watching, waiting for the right time to reveal themselves. It sounds creepy and, […]
Original date: 17th June 2020 Why did the storm have such an effect on the virus? A single evening and night of torrential rain and frequent thunder, and the outbreak shrank by half – then it carried on withering over the subsequent weeks until there were no new cases. In fact, for the final few […]
Original date: June 16th 2020 I’d originally considered the concept of uploading someone’s mind into a computer as creepy, then pointless, then, when I got ill, intriguing. I’d been a sceptic for such a long time, though, that it was hard for me to admit I’d changed my mind. By the time I was wondering […]
Original date: June 10th 2020 The Gazette was an unexpected offshoot of the development of Artificial Intelligence. The implications of its contents went far beyond the events it described. The Gazette was inspired by similar periodicals published in Great Britain in the 19th century: dull catalogues of everything that happened in a town, from births, marriages […]
Original date: June 8th 2020 In the country of D________ there are two large Zones just outside the capital city. These Zones are large enough for many distinct groups of people to gather at agreed times, for agreed purposes. The Zones were established by a wise lawmaker who governed one of the towns near to […]
No one knows when the Voices began. Some theorests say that they have been audible since the dawn of time. To those peoples’ hypothesis, the Voices originate from beyond Earth, and began as the accidental outpourings of transmissions from a distant planet. It was only later, when the originators of the Voices realised we were […]
Original date: June 3rd 2020 In the 16th century they might have called me a witch. That would be inaccurate on several counts. Firstly, it would be unfair on the witches of the time to charge them with the crimes I am intent on committing. It would negate the reality of good works on their […]
Original date: June 1st 2020 There was a queue in Heaven. This might or might not be the Heaven you imagine, or are hoping for. It is merely a Heaven. I suppose it partly depends on your views on queueing. The queue was not a physical queue, and would not have been even if Heaven […]
Original date: May 28th 2020 As a journalist, I’m constantly on the look-out for inspiration. I cut my teeth on a local tabloid that required hardly more than a village incident to fill all its pages. Like that time a car screamed to a halt outside the pub, the woman driving it stalking into the […]