Notices by Kit Bashir (unixbigot@aus.social)

“Fucking terminators. Run you cunts!”

“Ma’am, I feel robotic killers is enough of a problem without the addition of profanity”

“What the fuck are they teaching you little shits in the caves, the AI can’t smegging see you if you swear”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

“Dammit, no, no, NO. Not now. I don’t have time for this shit”

“Relax, you got this. You’ll knock ‘em dead. Tell anxiety you’ll kick its ass.”

“Gnnh. Not anxiety. Software update for my eyes. Get out there and stall ‘em.”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

“Why do your windmills have keepers? Surely everything can be remote monitored, and you could helicopter in a technician at need? I see you’ve even got a landing pad on the turbine top already, just above those windows, which are kind of adorable now that I think about it.”

“Oh yes, it costs more to build in the keeperhome, but the rent covers the extra cost. The deliverpad would be needed either way, of course”

“Wait, rent?”

“Oh yes, the keepers are tenants, not employees. I mean, we do pay them if we need things done but, as you say, that’s not often”

“And people sign up for this shitty deal, do they?”

“My Thude, there is a waiting list to rent a keeperhome. There are netsites where people post their swooshtoks and argue over whose turbine has the most relaxing sound.”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

Bleh. Sinus infection. Not responding to antibiotics (thanks, dirt age overusers). Gob on a slide, sequence. That fucking beta thirty seven gene. Protein not supported by my printer. Get on github, insights, network, eyeball the fork tree. Ah this looks likely, 14 commits in advance of main. Fetch, merge, print, swallow. Seems to be working. (Yes, of course I grepped the commit log to make sure it wasn’t some vibe coder bs, I am no noob)

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

Hey USAians, calm down the last pope was American, too.

“Again? What are you doing out there? Well yeah I guess evil never rests but please try to be more careful, ok? You’re reset now, please try logging in one more time. Great, is there anything else I can help you with today? Okay bye.”

*click*

“FUCK sake, maybe don’t turn on Face ID if you’re gonna regenerate every few years like bodies grow on trees. Hello, Timelord Tech Support this is Janice…”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

I bought an old System 80 from the vintage computer market (it’s a clone of the TRS-80 model 1 that was popular in the antipodes it its day). Like many of these machines it had been lovingly hobbyist-upgraded. This one had a second bank of RAM chips piggybacked atop the factory chips, with chip select lines free-form routed above the mainboard in tinned copper wire; this was a common mod, just like today computers from the store were near-criminally under resourced with RAM. Less typical was the pentagonal arrangement of inductor coils, the copper coils apparently connected with silver (not tin, actual Argentum) wire. Not clear what this mod does, let’s see if she boots.

❮Beep, whirr, gronk❯ (all good so far). ❮Whoopmf❯. ⟪Cloud of Smoke⟫ 〖Smell of Sulphur〗. Hmmn, less good.

〰︎What is thy bidding master?〰︎ Little red guy on the top of the enclosure above the keyboard. That’s, as far as I recall, not normal. Is that a tiny deck chair?

“Um. Hello? Did I summon you?”

〰︎So it seems. Been a while for this node. I suppose you been using those devilblessed Gee Pee Tees like everyone else. It’s a fucking ghost town here in Infernal Machine Support thanks to those newfangled bullshit generators, let me tell you.〰︎. The demon leaned back in the chair and took a sip from a tiny cocktail.

“Sorry to bother you, were you on a break or something?”

〰︎Fucking forty year break, I was beginning to think I’d been scrapped. Still got it tho, what’s the job? Novel need some polishing? Assignment due tomorrow? I don’t do marketing copy, go to a different hell if you want that.〰︎

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

“Take us to your cats”

“Uh, could you rephrase that, I think your translator isn’t working properly. Did you mean leaders.”

“Leaders are boring, we will do them tomorrow. We have been viewing your cat pictures while decelerating and wish to boop. They are so like our [UNTRANSLATABLE ENTITY SIGNIFIER 1] that we are boopsick.”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

Alan was one of thousands of cis men who worked as a catgirl during the war. The Official Secrets Act prevented the telling of this story until now, but with the passage of the Recognition Bill the truth can be revealed.

The precognitive ability to detect a forming voidrift in time to defend against the Threadwyrm intrusion has always been strongly associated with gender non-conformity. Almost a million transgender women, men and enben were recruited to the Void Force in the first two years of the war; but this fact was considered a vital planetary security secret. To preserve secrecy, the disappearance of so many LBGT citizens was concealed by recruiting volunteers to impersonate them.

In Alan’s words: “It was a blast. I kept working as an accountant but also spent six hours a week streaming on youtube wearing a pink wig and makeup. It’s been so hard not telling anyone. I’m going to dye my hair and get out my old thigh-socks. I hope I can get in touch with my old subscribers. Oh and it’s Alissa, she/her, now.”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

The blacksmith put her hammer down. The apprentice had been dealing with a walk-in but wanted a word. “She wants us to do, what, boy?”

“Transplant an enchantment from a sword to a spade.”

“Why on Krull would someone want an enchanted spade?”

“Adventurer wants to retire to grow roses. Sword wants to retire, too.”

“Tell her okay. Goddess, we get all the weird jobs on Grunedays.”

“I think they’re sweet, boss”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

“I’m going to Earth!”

“Wow. Wait, are you really going to Earth or are you taking one of those cringe flights where they dip into the atmosphere until the hull gets a bit hot, bounce off the troposphere, then sinter a Ground Patch onto your vacsuit?”

*mbmlmmmph*

“What was that? I can’t hear your shameful confession”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

If they didn’t get due process they’re all innocent men.

From: @eric
https://ericpuryear.com/@eric/114298610451734097

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”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

@catsalad I was repairing one of those weird kinesis ergonomic keyboards yesterday. It’s made from circuit boards bent into a pair of bowl-shapes ON PURPOSE.

The mechanically adept will recall that “von Zeppelin’s Law” (yes, the airship fella) states that you should “never make any part of a machine stronger than the others”, because then the machine will just break where the strongest part joins the rest.

Cybertruck owners already demonstrated their lack of good sense, so perhaps could be forgiven for ignorance of The Law. Count Ferdy von died before all that Nazi 1.0 business, and was spared the embarrassment of witnessing his company’s final ships being tarted up in swastikas for a world tour of What Happens When You Don’t Follow The Instructions, (Oh The Humanity). Perhaps if the Count /had/ been a Nazi, the 2.0 generation would have paid him more attention.

Why am I telling you this?. Well, just like the Falling Out Of The Sky problem that led CvZ to formulate his Law, owners of the Stainless Steel Ratrods find their land zeppelins falling off the ground. Well, bits of them. Pieces of trim that were apparently sticky-taped on have been flying into the sky at highway speed.

If you’re going to break a law, one school of thought says, break it good and hard. If the trim drops off your Wankpanzer, use a stronger tape. I’m not talking about that molecular bonded “gecko tape”. The *strongest* tape uses nuclear adhesives, which is a term that is /bound/ to attract the attention of Deplorean owners.

What happens when a piece of stainless steel trim (despite the marketing, these Swasticars are just sheet metal glued onto a badly-engineered frame) wants to fly off, but the Strong Nuclear Force Says No? Readers of Dr E. E. Smith’s seven volume treatise on the confrontation of Irresistible Forces and Immovable Objects can guess the result: if you are fully constrained in three dimensions, try a fourth.

If you come across the inverted wreck of a Klanborghini that has turned inside-out at speed via the fourth dimension, don’t stop. You can’t help the owner; what came back didn’t live long, fortunately.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

#Previously https://aus.social/@Unixbigot/112651306206398799

I was homeless when the Cat Distribution System recruited me. Camped under a bridge alongside the old canal, I shared my food and blanket with some homeless kittens.

“You’re a good person” a voice said.

I startled and clutched my blanket, backing up against the concrete.

“Sorry to startle you. I’m here to offer you a job”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

The stranger indicated the kitten nose-down in a nearly empty tuna can. “I’ve seen what i need to see.”

“What’s the job? I won’t do evil.”

“Kitten smuggling. We get them to a safe country, find them homes. Subsided accommodation but a lot of travel.”

That was six months ago. If you’re on a train, plane or suborbital and you see a kitten poking its nose out of a human or augmented human’s jacket, no you didn’t.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

“Wotcha got on for the weekend?”

“Going to watch Battle Bacteria live”

“YaWhatnow?”

“Remember battle bots?”

“Feh, remote controlled power tools, not proper robots”

“Yeah, fair point. Anyway, it was only a matter of time. Lab A engineers bacteria that eat microplastics, Lab B engineers a strain that turns glucose into polymers. Making them fight was obvious”

“What, you just sit around and look at test tubes making goo?”

“Oh, heck no, these matches get brutal. Last week one strain learned how to extrude nanometer sized Lego bricks with spikes that’ll go right through a cell membrane”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

Hey, what’s a tortoise?

You know what a turtle is?

Sure!

Same thing.

Thanks.

Wait, what are you doing, anyway?

Trying to log in. Got served one of those new VOIGHT-CAPTCHA challenges.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

When I was twelve years old, I had a paper round. On Saturday a stack of 150 newspapers (imagine you printed out only the non-mutuals in your social feed) (never mind I’ll tell you about printers later) was dropped on my doorstep, along with a bag of rubber bands. I spent Saturday afternoon rolling them into cylinders. On Sunday I loaded them onto my bicycle in batches and threw one into each of my neighbours’ yards. I got paid two and a half cents for each one. Basically I was the data link layer (never mind I’ll tell you about the OSI model later) of a pre internet RSS-feed. (Really? Sheesh. Okay I’ll explain RSS in a bit.). Do you understand what I’m telling you? Not really. Which part? Oh, a cent was one hundredth of a dollar. Dollars were what you needed to exchange for food and shelter. No I am NOT making this all up; you had to work or starve. We *did* rise up and destroy it, why do you think I’m telling you this?

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot #TrueStoryAboutTheCents

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.”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot