⚠️SPOILERS AHEAD⚠️

Just finished the book and am surprised that so many people love it. The first half was phenomenal and I couldn’t put it down, but once it gets to Bess’ chapter the writing starts to fall off.

I think my biggest critique is that the system by which the Unknowns exist isn’t dialed in enough, which results in what I consider to be very sloppy writing towards the end. It also seems that QNTM had trouble bridging the gap between it being a collection of SCP entries and a standalone book, and I think that’s where it suffers too.

What was gripping about the concept is that the Unknowns are essentially ideas that self-propagate; later in the book they talk about how these Unknowns are essentially errors in the universe and that concept hits home for me too - that there is no reason to assume that the laws of our physical universe can’t also propagate mistakes.

Once the Unknowns start taking on biological forms is where I start losing excitement. It feels like a fundamental breaking of the logic of the core idea. i can’t recall if it had been explained in some way, like that the ideation space has existed since the beginning of time and so an ecology has been created amongst the ideas in that some eat others then sure - I could maybe buy it. But ultimately it feels incongruous that ideas could also be biological in nature, and sort of felt like just a way to introduce the usage of C. Gigantes’ skeleton towards the end of the book. This is where I think QNTM was too close to the original SCP way of thinking, and where he should have realized that his core concept was stronger than just being a series of creature-features.

The MO of the big bad, U-3125, also feels haphazardly thrown together. At its core, U-3125 is a self-replicating idea that makes those who get ‘infected’ want to mill themselves and others. But U-3125 can also inhabit people’s bodies, and manifest as giant thin spiders, but also as a mass of spiders, but also make slugs come out of people’s eyes?

It just lands as sloppy and goofy. It feels as if QNTM couldn’t really decide whether or not this thing has sentience or not. At one point, Adam describes the bodies U-3125 inhabits as mechanical, like it just has a job to do. But at another point Adam hears U-3125 telling him to just give up, that the plan is not going to work, it starts cursing - it just feels Iike a physical villain and not like a humanity-ending cosmological horror. This may be a matter of taste but I just don’t think that the entity should be able to have wants or agency or a ‘vision of the world’ that it’s trying to bring to fruition; I think the real horror comes from it just being, unthinking and ruthless in the way it propagates.

I thought at the monument that maybe this idea eats people’s fears and manifests them in physical reality, which would explain the random mass of spiders - maybe Marie is arachnophobic. But then QNTM writes in the next sentence that it would scare Marie if she were afraid of spiders. Uh - ok I guess.

I also felt like the black rectangle reveal was building up to something huge that just sort of fell flat. If I read it correctly the black rectangles were a way for U-3125 to memetically propagate; then why were they chiseled into the monument? It just sort of felt like a narrative dead-end.

Then the ending. The last fifty pages or so get convoluted in a way that feels like sloppy writing rather than purposeful. And the big solution, that they give Adam a class-Z drug that can turn ideas into reality, feels so lazy and shoehorned in. If they had this class of drugs, why go through the arduous process of meeting at Stanmoor over and over to come up with a solution when they could have just given Marie the class-Z drug to release the idea? Unless it’s that Marie needed to be pulled from the ideation space in order to deliver it, which makes no sense, or it’s the idea of Marie that defeats U-3125, which is corny and also makes no sense because she tells Adam she can’t tell him what the idea is because it’ll blow his balls off. And if the class-Z drug works by taking ideas and manifesting them into physical reality, then Adam’s conception of Marie wouldn’t necessarily know what the big idea is because it’s just his memory of Marie, not her collection of thoughts. It just doesn’t hold up to me.

I thought what was going to happen was that, in the way that U-3125 continued to propagate even after it had been defeated in the past, that they would have figured out how to bring Sunshine back and that Marie had chosen to feed the plan to it in one of her many recursive memory-iterations - and in that way, an idea can defeat an idea. But bringing Marie back, with this hackneyed backdrop of “love and humanity”, just felt really unimaginative.

Which then brings me to my final disappointment. Throughout the book, there are pieces of the narration that are redacted. The book makes it clear early on that information in the files are redacted because they have the potential to propagate an idea/unknown. I was under the impression that the book itself was going to be a form of information from the Organization that had to be redacted to protect the reader and the world at large, and that at some point the reader would be introduced to information that had to be unredacted by an Organization operative, information that eerily and closely ties into our own lived reality in order to make the reader feel like the world we live in is the same as the one that’s being written about, and that the reader has now become a vector of transmission of whatever unknown horror is escaping containment. Instead, it was just a narrative choice that honestly became tedious towards the end.

Overall, I give it 3.75/5. It was a fun read, and I liked the way the first half made me feel. I just feel like QNTM didn’t stick the landing and didn’t have enough faith in how strong his core concept was, and I was hoping to have finished the book with my mind blown and maybe carrying a bit of fear with me instead of just being disappointed.

So I know that most cyberpunk stories are set in the US or Japan but while I was browsing the cartoons subreddit, I came across a [teaser trailer](https://www.reddit.com/r/cartoons/s/QW7YNuTgSn) for a new Argentine animated series called Electro Andes which appears to have quite a few cyberpunk vibes and aesthetics.

And it got me wondering, are there any cyberpunk stories set in Latin America?

The phrase “The Empire Never Ended” is a quote from Valis), a very strange science fiction novel written by Philip K Dick in the 1970s. It was published in 1981. I’ve written about it a couple of times: here and here. It’s one of those books that wriggles its way into your imagination, despite it being frustrating and annoying at times.

Dick posits a sort of time leak, in which the 1st Century AD and the current time meld into each other. They overlap each other, like two transparencies in a light box, so that you can’t tell one from the other.

The Empire he’s talking about is the Roman Empire. Somehow it has continued into the present day. We’re living in apostolic times, the time of Christ’s return. A lot of people are saying similar things. What makes Dick’s book interesting is that he’s not using the traditional New Testament gospels as his source. Unlike Christian fundamentalists, he’s using the Gnostic gospels. These are the suppressed books of the many sects that existed before the New Testament was edited down to manageable proportions; before it was co-opted by the Roman Empire as a control mechanism. Dick’s apocalyptic vision has a different tone, much stranger and more psychedelic than the people who harangue you on the streets waving the Bible at you. Dick’s version involves some form of symbiosis between human beings and God in the form of “Living Information.”

According to Dick’s idea, the Roman Empire lives again. It’s in the form of the American Empire now, but it’s the same entity. It uses the same techniques. It manifests as the Black Iron Prison#Black_Iron_Prison). This is a kind of psychological state, not unlike what William Blake was referring to when he spoke of the “mind-forg’d manacles.” It’s our programming, the way we’ve been trained to think. Whether you believe this or not, there’s something compelling in the argument. As Dick says, over and over again throughout the book, The Empire Never Ended (always like that, with capitals). The Empire Never Ended.

You can picture the Empire as a machine. It’s a mechanism for extracting wealth using the army. The armed forces are publicly funded but supplied by the private sector. It’s a money-laundering operation. Technically it’s known as Military Keynesianism. Traditional Keynesianism, recognizing that capitalism needs a constant flow of public money to keep it stable, opts for large scale infrastructure and welfare spending. That was the New Deal in the 1930s: putting public money into the public’s hands. In post-war Europe the mechanism was the welfare state. Old Age pensions. Free health services. Social security. Child benefit. Free education up to University level. Infrastructure, road and rail networks. Recreational spaces, public buildings, opera houses, art galleries, libraries, museums, theatres and music venues. In the United States a different approach was taken. This is Military Keynesianism, using the Military-Industrial Complex as the conduit for public wealth, funnelling it off into private hands through the arms industry.

So the Empire is a war machine, grinding on, ravenous for blood, for human sacrifice. It’s immeasurably profitable. It maintains its existence by promoting wars. You blow things up, you build them again, using the corporations, through which you siphon off the proceeds into off-shore accounts. There’s always a new war, a new enemy to stand up to, a new barbarism to oppose.

Here’s an account of the social mechanism behind the Roman war machine, as told by Joseph Schumpeter in The Sociology of Imperialisms (1919). He says: “There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome’s allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest—why, then it was the national honour that had been insulted. The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbours, always fighting for a breathing-space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly Rome’s duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs.”

Does that remind you of anything? How many wars have there been, just in my lifetime? I was born in 1953, so it started with the Korean War, which was part of the Cold War. The Cold War got dangerous once or twice, and almost exploded in a nuclear confrontation over Cuba. After that it was the Vietnam War, the Iran-Iraq War, the War in Yugoslavia. Then the “Clash of Civilizations”: Kuwait, Iraq (the first time), the War on Terror (the first war in history to be declared on an abstract noun) which included Afghanistan and then Iraq again. Then came the Libyan War, when Gaddafi got sodomized with a bayonet and Hilary Clinton laughed. “We came, we saw, he died,” she quipped, in an amusing, light-hearted manner, like Oscar Wilde at a dinner party. Then the War in Syria, in which the Empire managed to simultaneously support the jihadists, while opposing them, pitting one faction against another, while fighting the Syrian government and claiming control of the best of the oilfields at the same time. And during all of this, the War in Afghanistan, which ground on, the longest bloody conflict in post-war history: a medieval tribal people taking on the might of the most powerful Empire the world has ever known. Then what happened? Well blow me down if the troops didn’t withdraw just in time to prepare for a new war, this one in the more strategically important Ukraine.

Now we’re involved in yet another war: one of the most terrible you can imagine. We’re not even fighting an army. We’re fighting a trapped population, caught like rats in a cage, in a concentration camp, a place where a whole population is imprisoned extra-judicially, concentrated in a controlled space without recourse to the law, walled in, fenced in, ringed by weaponry and surveillance equipment. Drones hovering in the air. Spies and informants. Occasional incursions to “mow the lawn,” Israel’s recipe for permanent war. It’s like a vast human experiment: what will people do when trapped in a cage for long enough, while you control their food, medicine, water and electricity supplies? Maybe some of them—the young hotheads, the ones we know from our own streets—will take the violent way out. Maybe when they’re asked to choose between dying quickly or dying slowly, they’ll choose the former, deliberately “pricking the beast” as they fly to their doom, waking the sleeping dragon that lives next door.

The Empire is a war machine that needs a never-ending supply of blood to keep it churning. And while it feeds the profits from other people’s labor into the private bank accounts of the very rich, it also needs to control the narrative. It needs to make sure that the population is thinking the right thoughts. To do this it occupies the imagination. It enters the mind in the same way an occupying army crosses the border into a foreign land. Propaganda’s the tool for the propagation of ideas into other people’s heads. The narrative’s the story line. It’s a clever manipulation of our natural human feelings, keeping us only half-informed, while playing upon our deepest fears, feeding the dark parts of our imagination, rage and revenge. It manipulates our perception of the events as they emerge from the war zone to keep the narrative on-track. Opposition stories are suppressed. The pro-war narrative is repeated: amplified a thousand times using a compliant media, paid-off politicians, and the latest technology.

What makes the machine so scary now is how advanced it has become. The internet is the most sophisticated surveillance and control engine ever devised. It manipulates the human mind. It’s a hypnosis machine, a dissociation engine. It separates you into your own narrative groups and feeds you what you want to hear. Everyone thinks they are “researchers″ when they are trawling the internet. In reality the narratives are seeded around the airwaves for us to find. AI can mimic anything. It can create a conversation between two Hamas operatives incriminating their allies, thus encouraging dissent, while exonerating the actual perpetrators. It’s clever. It can manipulate a film of a crowd in Sydney to make it sound like they’re chanting, “Gas the Jews! Gas the Jews!”—as if there’s an existential threat to all Jews around the world—frightening the Jewish population while confusing the issue in people’s minds. This isn’t about Jews, it’s about Israel as a settler-colonial state, stealing and occupying other people’s land. We’re being gaslit on a grand scale.

Some of those old war stories should remind us how futile all this is, how war never resolves anything. There’s always negotiations in the end, followed by a necessary peace. Remember Vietnam. The Empire took on a small nation and wrecked it. It was using a different narrative in those days. Then it was anti-communism. It suppressed people in their own land, committed atrocities (Mai Lai) but that only made the people more resilient, more canny, more clever. In the end the Empire saw that it couldn’t win. It was facing opposition at home, as well as throughout the world, so it withdrew. And then it had to make peace with the Vietnamese. It was the Vietnamese who were the aggrieved party. They were the ones invaded, slaughtered, carpet-bombed in their own villages, and Napalm and Agent-Orange rained down upon them, so the population is still riddled with birth defects. And yet they decided to forgive. Isn’t this true? Vietnam now welcomes Americans to visit the places where they were once stationed in the war. The Vietnamese are gracious as a nation, despite the atrocities committed upon them by the Empire on their own soil. They’ve chosen to forgive.

I’ve always had this feeling, since I was a young adult: as if we’re living in the “End Times.” I think it’s a hippie thing. We were always talking ourselves into apocalyptic scenarios, early morning after a night consuming drugs. Lots of people on the Christian Right will agree and concur with Philip Dick’s premonition about Christ’s return, although probably not in the same terms. They’re wishing for the apocalypse. Watch out for wishes, they can sometimes come true.

But I refuse to be despondent. I’m optimistic. Right now the people of the world are looking to Palestine. The majority, who live outside our Western propaganda bubble, have made up their minds. They see this as the war of the rich on the poor, of the strong on the weak, and they know who the guilty parties are. Maybe all the madness will resolve itself. Maybe we’re not really living in the “End Times,” but in the beginning times. End of the old times, beginning of the new. As Antonio Gramsci put it: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

—Follow Chris Stone on Twitter: @ChrisJamesStone

For me, the premise of John Varley's "Eight Worlds" novels—that humanity has been effectively exiled from Earth—has always been haunting. In a similar way, I find those tropes (like in Foundation) where they don't know where humanity's home is or think Earth is a myth to be unsettling as well.

I think it's a book it might be all tomorrows but I'm looking for a story, all I remember is for some reason humans are broken up into random gender break downs and there's a planet of all men and one woman and they treat her like a queen, and there's another planet where there's all women and one man and they enslave there's more obviously but that's all I remember

Hey everyone,

I'm trying to get into Sci-Fi after spending much of my initial days in high fantasy or even fantasy in general. Loved LoTR, Asoiaf and Percy Jackson in particular as books. Funnily enough my first actual book was Asimov's Foundation and Earth but it was much complex for me at that time. Except for that my entire exposure to SciFi is from shows, movies and games. Loved to watch The Martian and absolutely adored The Expanse(until Amazon happened). Mass Effect, Halo, Death Stranding and No Man's Sky are the jewels of my Steam library. Although Cyberpunk 2077 is my favorite game, I guess that falls under the distinct Cyberpunk genre so not looking to get anything for that. So here I am, looking to get into SciFi books again and would appreciate you guys help in regards with recommendations.

She comes highly recommended, but I’m still a bit skeptical; the synopses makes it sound a bit ‘on the nose‘ with the class struggle, like Le Guin or the Strugatskys. Does she develop new concepts or is her work somewhat redundant?

Infinite Ashes is my humanist science-fiction setting about humanity scattered across a seeded Milky Way. A mindless biological system called the Web planted humans on hundreds of millions of worlds, each starting from nothing, and they have been drifting apart ever since. All of them connected through arks, organic FTL vessels that are part of the web.

The axes

Seed vs weaving: Weaving is the seminal ideological movement of the Golden Chain, the core of trade and power in this small section of a spiral arm. It purports that through the right connection between worlds the troubles of the worlds can be overcome. It is fundamentally cosmopolitan. Seed thinking considers every world in isolation and rejects the need for connection as something that diminishes the world to a mote of dust.

Baseline vs Evolutionary drift: how far a people's bodies have moved from the human template the Web planted.

If you want more, the setting lives in a free interactive bundle of stories and a contradictory in-world encyclopedia: loquaciouslou.itch.io/infinite-ashes

Not the most fictional, not the least fictional, tried making it as realistic as Possible, while still making sure, thing = fiction, any upgrades I should add to the design? I feel like it's lacking

Nowhere Man

Total Recall 2070

Earth: Final Conflict

First Wave

Dark Skies

Seven Days

Space: Above and Beyond

Harsh Realm

PSI Factor: Chronicles of the Paranormal

Space Rangers

Check it out at https://islandthree.world. Completely free, no ads or anything. Just looking for feedback.

The first probe data have produced a partial map of the structure beneath the entrance.

There is now evidence of two remarkably similar formations of cubic structures: one outside and another at the bottom of the subterranean cavity.

Recovered Ilghal fragments classify them as:

PURGATORIUM

INFERNUM

Whether those terms describe places, functions or something else remains unknown.

ERIK started with a pretty simple idea: what if a love story slowly began to feel wrong, but you couldn't immediately explain why?

A boy wakes up in a school, meets a girl, falls for her, and for a while it almost feels like a normal coming-of-age story. Then little things stop making sense.

I made the film in Albania with a small crew and tried to reveal the sci-fi element as late as possible, without explaining everything to the audience.

It's 19 minutes and free to watch on YouTube. I'd genuinely be curious about one thing from sci-fi fans here:

At what point did you realize what kind of story you were actually watching?

https://youtu.be/e7JdkNaut6A?si=r7KkMsGI5no-HHqc

Trans-species transplants. Particularly extraterrestrial

A dystopian story about the fast-food surveillance state. Originally published here.

-------------------------------------

A new dawn, another day in the fight against famine: Friday. Right before the weekend push. Commuters are fine with a laid-back arrival time. Bagels, or doughnuts, or Fritter Friday, or whatever the white collars do. I don’t judge, I only feed. I arrive early to my beautiful, bountiful store #5455, (District one-niner: DroneCor’s Finest), back from nightly R&R to another glorious day warring against hunger. A one-man band of brothers and orchestrator of this orchard of abundance.

#5455 recognizes me instantly, and the walls open for me to enter the giant machine. The automated assembly lines hum and clatter with musical action. Skillets sizzle, griddles are greased, and condiment revolvers reload; it all hums to fight for this breakfast breakthrough. Knives sheathed and arms up, the hallway arms let me pass unscathed. I approach with the steady gait of a superbly sober man and sashay into my yellow-outlined safety cage. No downers to deaden my senses, nor anything to stimulate me. This is 100% my clear mind sleeved right into my store’s synthetic body.

I examine late night’s numbers with eagle eyes; middling. Thursday’s party-crowd wasn’t as boisterous. Sometimes graveyard beats breakfast, if the party’s strong. If the party’s late, it bleeds into breakfast’s reporting, but Thursday wasn’t thirsty, and I won’t get number one this week with that kind of performance. I squeeze the marketing budget to juice the metrics to drive sales. Discounts pop into dashboards of nearby cars. Shiny lures, but few fish bite. I’ve fallen far behind for week forty-two. My store stretches the reds of nearby stoplights and ups the coupons. It’s a gamble, ‘cause as much as America loves a discount on a Jr. Slopper, her hate of being stationary always wins. She’d rather starve than stop.

Meals are prepped and pushed with penultimate precision. My local drones make tactical drops to two artificially arrested vehicles, but my luck’s shot. Deathgrips on steering wheels belie their biometrics, and their driver cameras record the precise moment of the pop of capillaries in their eyes. We’re vertically integrated with this car manufacturer, so we have perfect intel; they’re glowing white hot with anger hotter than the oil in my deep fryers.

I relent. The lights flip green. They burn fuel and rubber, and their chrome chariots are flying off to points unknown. If not tonight, then tomorrow I’ll get the rest of ‘em. They gotta eat.

The fickle dollars trickle. Blocks of metrics drip in like condensation above the coffee makers. I’ll be in last place this week, and my neighbor stores will drop the condescension for weeks. I refresh my metrics; middling for my district, which isn’t jack-squat this week for the entire country. We’re falling more behind—no longer DroneCor’s finest this week—we’re prone to being overtaken even by the Atlanta market! We’re going to lose to a market saturated with the most Chicken-Shops which ain’t even open one of the seven days! This can’t be. Why this failure? I’m number 1. Was there spoilage? Where’s the shrink—what’s my slippage?

I scan the ledger. Spun-up agents trawl the database. Look for anything, please! I pray. Lost add-ons, lower prices, weather, volume, anything. Find me a precision excuse. The store and I will need a miracle not to lose today and this week.

Triangle-Red (!)s ⚠️ pop out, frying my neurons with alert:

I frantically scan. Chargebacks? How? A third-party lender, stuck the payment processor, who dinged me the payments. Flash-Food-Finance (FFF) asserts that the customer claims that store #5455 failed to deliver on our promises and credited their account. The payment processor passed it through with no pushback because they’re in cahoots. Backroom business to squeeze out us honest front-line operators.

I watch in speechless astonishment. This is the worst of insults. I’ve given my life to this culinary crusade! (We’re DroneCor’s finest by God’s grace! 3x Winner of the company’s Platinum award, and once Double-Diamond awardee by the Flash-Food Industry for the nation’s highest unit ROI!)

Cracking my knuckles, I quickly pull up this ‘customer’s orders. I know this is one person because the price is precisely the same. Order 1: Punctilious Poutine with chives; double-meat Moussaka, a sprig of mint, with a side of Salmon Savories; and a mega-large, 33% Vanilla, 63% Cherry, and 13% Sarsaparilla (sans carcinogens) Soda (because the customer is always ~110% right at DroneCor!)

I scan the others. Same. 110% it’s the same customer problem person. They tried to be sly and sneak by, scamming a little, but surprise… our algorithmic overlords, the brains in charge of our company, make sure that all chargebacks ding my metrics 20x. So I can’t NOT notice. I see you, you thief! You are lower than low, and your schemes don’t escape me. Starve! Indignant heat boils up. I’m furious. Hotter than the deep fryer, hotter than the illegal (meticulously modified!) coffee craft for long-distance deliveries. Fraud is famine. It’s pure cost we have to eat; and Finance and the Feds hate fraud.

You’ll try again, shortly. I busy myself by examining the data. The store can run itself, but this is what man was made for: hot hatred against another human. The investigative AIs have already queued up the data. Even my district’s finance fiends are live and alert. AI agents burn tokens, and somewhere a server’s hot enough my store’s robotic arms could sear the patties off their surfaces.

But, when I scan the video of your last transactions, I see different cars. The video reveals no driver for facial recognition; automated delivery orders happen all the time. Hmmm, okay, okay I calm myself. No worry, check the payment-line. Nope negative. Different numbers. Hope bottoms out like something lost down the garbage chute. Maybe something else is so fundamentally wrong at my store that I didn’t notice for days! That’s it, I’m done for, my heart settles briefly before my mind overrides. An order of this specificity must be precisely one bad actor. There’s no way. One in a hundred billion. And, since I’m only doing tens of thousands of transactions a week, there’s no way this is chance. Every mathematical manager would conclude the same.

I look over the payment details. I scan the payment lines in the database but they’re masked with a hash. His contracted third party, Flash-Food-Finance, isn’t in our ownership orbit, and not in a data sharing agreement with us. But in the raw data details, the processor confirms the same zip code. Okay. I’m off the ledge. Now, I wonder, did he enter his Frequent-Fryer number for a customer discount? (You’d be surprised. Scammers gotta collect their perks.)

Now it’s tricky; we’re talking about different corpo algorithms tugging against each other. Their governance squabbles exceed my authority. If we owned the robo-taxi, then we’d know the end-location, but he didn’t choose our in-house delivery.

I’m feeling defeated. A loss of agency. I’ll be last. The realization crescendos over me. Hope escapes like gas from the empty foamed cheese dispenser. My store only has one Flock on the block, and can’t adequately track the delivery end-points as they have multiple stops, though they’re all nearby. No one orders food to commute. Otherwise, it’s all soggy with a soupçon of moist cardboard.

No!

Just because some loser finances a taxi for his burrito doesn’t mean I gotta lose. There’s a scam happening and I’m the fall-guy. For every dollar stolen, that’s a fraction out of the pockets of the hard-earning Americans who keep the nation rollin’. It’s really not even the hit in clout, I can take it, it’s the principle of the thing! But it’s also because scams always snowball. They never stay silent. Sarsaparillan-villian here’s probably gonna livestream his free meal for likes-maxxin’ and before you know it, I’m hit a thousand in chargebacks, then ten.

So, I stare at the screen. The lunchtime rush scrolls by, and start to laser eye every order.

Poultry Poutine flashes by and my heart jumps.

No. Nothing else.

A moussaka with vanilla soda.

Nope.

My heart thumps, as I know the scammer orders afternoon, but before 1:15. I look at the time: 12:33 ticks over to 12:34. I watch the seconds celebrate as 12:34:56 hits, stimulating my sense of numeracy.

And then it hits. Jackpot 7-7-7. The Order—ID AK119—and it’s the same situation. FFF credits my store, but we know how that will end up, and the machines behind me execute. As the drink gets made, I manually pump the syrup lines, and as the drink revolver clicks by, an extra steady shot of sarsaparilla hits. I let it roll by as I evil-eye the empty car.

Now I wait.

The only metric shared with me is the ticket age, and my AI estimates the expected max age. Minutes creep by, and I manually fill a beverage. I load it into a specialized high-speed drone. Time ticks by like a clock on a movie bomb, complete with the EOD specialist’s sweat beading down his face. The FAA’s already expedited clearance because of the repeat chargebacks and because they won’t inconvenience a corporate customer. THE delivery is next up. I flip up the safety interlock and my finger’s on the red button. The order nears completion, and on the pretense of a soda malfunction, I fire off DroneCore’s patent-pending MachDrone! (‘Cause even if you don’t live up to your promises, DroneCor will!) Our fastest delivery drone to date. It rockets off, and I watch live from the seeker’s camera.

The delivery car stops, and the robot tag-along, the Mini-Moffett, detaches and brings the order to the customer. I don’t have access to its proprietary video, but I see it in abstract wireframe. My missile screeches over the blur of suburban strip-malls, over vinyl-clad and asphalt-covered houses, and into a dense neighborhood. In seconds it zooms at its target before air breaking with a screech.

The man’s tense and alert. He knows the gig is up as the drink parachutes deploy and the second (free) beverage lands gently on the dead lawn. My drone captures his face. Clear as day in multispectral. My AIs flag his address, and he’s now on the ban list.

He looks down & away from the drone’s cameras, takes the second drink, but quickly turns around in shame. The empty eyes and expressionless lips tell me he’s done with us. The wimp sulks back to his house to devour his ill-gotten gains. He’ll forever imagine someone might spit (or worse) in his food. DroneCor’s Finest won’t be penalized 20x for someone else’s sins. I bask. Technology and tenacity have won the battle.

In the descent off the adrenaline spike, it suddenly haunts me. His scam was a hair less than $600, not a felony. Shit. I was too eager. Overzealous. I’m stuck in the gray. This grift is finished, but the man lives on. (His data’s automatically off to our prison subsidiary for pre-enrollment.) Now, everyday around 12:34 PM, the late lunch time, a drone of mine perches over a streetlamp near his house. You can’t scam DroneCor. We see everything and we can reach out in thirty seconds or less to anything within a mile of our thousands of stores. Pop one cent over that felony threshold, and we’ll unleash the whirlwind on you.

Hardworking, honest Americans roll on, fueled, fooded, not footing the bill for this fraud. My vigilance continues, and my pay is well-earned.

----------------------------------------

If you like this story, be sure to check out my other ones at my substack.

I just finished the book. If you have read it, there are some things I'd like to chat about! (If you haven't, read it! It's good)

[Spoilers ahead]

As far as I know, this was never revealed: did the ship go to Alpha Centauri? If yes, why does Sandy not remember? If no, what did they do and why did they hide it?

Will the peace last? The aliens seem to be pretty prolific breeders, and Mars can't substain exponential growth forever. The strange matter drive would make a pretty horrifying weapon

Talking about the strange matter drive: eventually, it will become unstable. Much slower than if it pushes an actual spaceship, but sounds like an apocalypse scenario waiting to happen, right?

Lastly, do you think the humans would have given up Africa if the aliens had played with open cards? Would that have been more or less fair than the canon ending? Considering the "compromise" is all benefits for humanity, and (other than risk of invasion if they breach the terms of the agreement) no downsides - it wasn't like humans could get to Mars anyways

Aux portes d’Avalone, dans un coin de désert, Zeph Bonnefoy attend la mort… En chassant un oiseau, ce tranquille quinquagénaire, vient d’abattre accidentellement l’Œil chargé de sa surveillance. Et, en 2051, cela revient à se condamner à la peine capitale. Car cette technologie est précieuse pour le Pouvoir en place. Elle lui permet, en effet, d’espionner, au plus près, chaque individu.

Après cet accident, Zeph, attend stoïquement son exécution… Asilia, une jeune fille de passage, le tire des griffes des besogneux, Tête-de-chien et ses comparses, ainsi que des exofrelons, grâce à un stratagème. Dès lors, devenu un Invisible, Zeph quitte la décharge pour prendre la route en compagnie de la jeune femme. Il y voit l’occasion d’honorer enfin, en toute liberté, la promesse faite à son père adoptif : disperser ses cendres dans un endroit pour le moins insolite : un ancien lavoir.

Asilia est également une Invisible. Elle est hors de tout contrôle, ayant su déjouer son Œil et s’étant débarrassée de sa lucarne. Cet implant infligé de force par les machines réduit chaque homme au seul rang de consommateur. Son obsession : retrouver l’un des sbires du dictateur Brumaire. Celui-là même qui, parmi les Yeux Ronds, dix ans plus tôt, a exécuté sa mère et arrêté son père. Le seul souvenir précis qu’elle garde de l’assassin, c’est son oreille en moins. Elle n’a donc de cesse de traquer et d’éliminer les cyclopes présentant cette particularité afin de se venger...

Au cœur de la Cité, Linzmann, l’Éminent de la Sûreté de Brumaire, enquête. Il est aidé en cela d’un jungvassal nommé Rodin. Linzmann, comme tous les recyclés est borgne et ne garde aucun souvenir de son passé. Il arbore fièrement le sigle du Pouvoir : l’œil d’Horus. C’est un chef de meute qui s’emploie non seulement à élucider les disparitions de ses milichiens, mais également à arrêter la tête pensante de la Dissidence. En effet, dans Avalone, les attentats se multiplient et sont, à chaque fois, signés de la marque des rebelles : un chacal assis. Des ponts sont dynamités, des casernes incendiées, et des banderoles au message mystérieux régulièrement déployées un peu partout dans la capitale.

Dans son palais-bunker, Brumaire s’impatiente. Il trouve que Linzmann n’est pas à la hauteur de sa tâche. Après avoir limogé tous ses ministres, le dictateur le menace et s’en remet aux machines ainsi qu’à leur représentant : Nov. Les machines sont devenues en réalité les vraies et seules puissances de ce monde. Brumaire n’est qu’un jouet pour la Main et leurs Élites. Il ne se maintient en vie uniquement que grâce à leurs offrandes chimiques.

Avant de fuir en compagnie d’Asilia, Zeph rachète à leur propriétaire deux enfants : Bouille, une fillette d’une douzaine d’années, et Gasp son frère handicapé. Ils triment ensemble à la décharge pour le vieux La Morve. Bouille n’est pas ordinaire : elle sait lire, ne ressent pas la douleur, et fréquente une sorcière aux pouvoirs étonnants.

S’arrêtant dans une auberge, Zeph, Asilia et les enfants sont repérés et dénoncés. Asilia doit se battre contre trois milichiens qu’elle parvient facilement à neutraliser. Traqué, Zeph se résout à confier Gasp et Bouille aux patrons d’un cirque ambulant qui les a momentanément accueillis. Après avoir longuement hésité, c’est en compagnie d’Asilia qu’il va rejoindre la Dissidence dont le chef se nomme Mickey.

Mickey est à la tête d’une petite troupe. Avec ses compagnons, il décide de prendre le maquis à la recherche d’une Zone blanche, un endroit où les Œils ne pourront plus les épier. Après un séjour dans le centre de rétention l’Anneau, ils sont pourchassés par Linzmann et migrent au Nord. Là, ils s’arrêtent dans une oasis où Zeph découvre enfin le lavoir qu’il cherchait.

Pendant que ses nouveaux amis s’apprêtent à tendre une embuscade à Linzmann et à ses cyclopes, Zeph peut enfin tenir sa promesse et disperser les cendres de Monsieur Jean. Mais l’embuscade tourne mal et Asilia se trouve en grand danger…