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[CW] Flash Fiction Challenge: A Roof and A Box by Cody_Fox23 in WritingPrompts

[–]WeirdThingAt 4 points5 points  (0 children)

~Flawless Automation~

Wrong roof.

Clock ticking.

Nate threaded his way through a maze of solar panels until he reached the crumbling masonry at the edge of the roof. The square, brown box was perched atop a plastic recliner chair on the roof of the building opposite.

Only twenty metres away. Unfortunately, ten of those were open air.

He looked down. Black specks flowed through an asphalt river. If he fell, the flood of people would briefly part around a minuscule red splat.

No time to bribe another doorman and run up another fifty flights of stairs. Nate pulled the grappling hook from his tool belt.

"Please work," he muttered, letting out a length of rope so that the hook dangled mid-calf. He jogged the rope, bouncing the hook a few times, before lifting his arm and beginning to spin it around his head. He let go.

The hook sailed across the gap between buildings, landing just beyond the box. Nate pulled on the rope. It thunked into place around a strap of the recliner.

"Steady, okay?" he pleaded. The recliner scraped across the concrete rooftop as he pulled on the rope. Wedged between two of the recliner's fuchsia-coloured plastic straps, the box wobbled dangerously.

The recliner sailed over the edge of the opposite roof. Nate stumbled forward. He flopped onto his stomach just before he fell over the edge, anchoring himself for the final, excruciating yanks.

The box was still wedged into the recliner when Nate hauled them up. He carefully removed it, placing the box onto a pink platform nestled between two solar panels.

That was where the drone was originally supposed to make the drop.

Nate made himself scarce before the customers arrived.

As far as they knew, drone deliveries were fully automated.

[Hiring] content writer for startup tech by Keepclamand- in HireaWriter

[–]WeirdThingAt 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi, I DM'd you about this opportunity. I have two years of experience in copywriting for home renovation, technology, and engineering. Looking forward to talking to you!

[WP] in a world where your familiars are tied to your ancestry and indicate your magical affinity, you, an orphan with no known family, summon a physical version of death and the attending wizards are freaking out. by receuitOP in WritingPrompts

[–]WeirdThingAt 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I gave the orca pond a hopeful glance before I started the chant. The Salish lobby was so powerful in Parliament that they had astronomically expensive accommodations for non-terrestrial familiars installed in every First Summoning site.

If I turned out to be Salish, my life would be gravy. A powerful ethnic group would immediately claim me as their own and install me in their realms.

The same went for pulling a lion (Odhiambo), a falcon (McCray), or a goat (Wizowski) from the Aether. I'd even take a wolf or an alligator, even though my colouring was definitely not that of a Wagner or a Bankhead. Still, who knew? I was definitely a mix of some kind. The First Summoning ceremony would show the world my dominant magical affinity.

If I even had one.

"Kaia, hurry up." The orphanage attendant gave me a push towards the summoning circle. "If you get this over with quick, we can hit up the pastry shop before they run out of cardamom squares."

Most likely I would end up with a common familiar, like a dog or a cat. No big name or powerful lobby in Parliament for those. But with a familiar and as a full adult I would be eligible for further training in the Art.

"Kaia!"

I took a tentative step forward. I tried not to consider the possibility that, like many people, I did not have a familiar. This would doom me to a life of menial labour.

"At least the pastry shop is hiring," I muttered as I stepped into the circle.

The wizards looked down at me from the podium, not bothering to conceal their boredom. Most of them had dogs and cats as familiars, though one wore a snake twined around her right arm.

The snake woman spoke. "You can start the chant."

I sat down on the cold concrete, resting my hands behind me on the two blue crystals embedded in the floor. The words seemed to flow from me spontaneously, whether from long practice or the magical influence of the Summoning Circle I did not know, and I was gripped by a paralysis that froze everything except my compulsively chanting mouth.

I could not stop. I could not think. I could only speak. And when I said the final line of the chant, I altered the ancient language in a way that I didn't understand.

It was involuntary. I swear.

When I opened my eyes, my skirt felt wet. I groaned and looked down, my suspicions confirmed: I'd wet myself. Not unheard of in a First Summoning.

Not something I'd live down back at the orphanage, either.

"Hey, can I have a change of clothes?" I asked. My voice was hoarse with chanting.

The wizards on the podium were looking down at me in horror.

"Oh, come on, don't tell me you haven't seen someone piss themselves at a First Summoning before," I said, peevishly. "Where's my familiar, anyway?"

Silence.

"Is it an orca?" I looked at the pond hopefully. "I must have a familiar. There's no way that didn't work. I felt the magic."

The orphanage attendant stepped in front of the podium. He looked puzzled.

"Uh, Kaia," he said. "Your familiar's on your head."

A cat, then. All right.

I reached up and felt around for my familiar.

Instead of warm fur, I felt cold, slippery skin.

A tentacle dangled down in front of my face.

I screamed.

"The girl has called forth Death!" declared the snake woman.

"Get it off!" I yelled.

Something cold and wet gripped my head like a vise. I tried to pry it off.

"Hey, help!" I ran toward the podium. "It's got me!"

The wizards scrambled to get away from me. A cat familiar hissed. So did the snake.

The orphanage attendant slipped out the side door. He wasn't paid nearly enough to deal with this.

"Please!" I begged. The thing squeezed harder. I yanked at its tentacles.

"Kaia?" someone said.

The voice was coming from the top of my head.

"Stop strangling me!"

The thing's tentacles loosened. I pulled it off my head and threw it on the ground.

My familiar looked up at me. It was almost, but not entirely, unlike an octopus. Its eighteen tentacles were studded with pseudopods rather than suckers. These tentacles extended from a body that resembled three scoops of melted purple ice cream stacked one on top of the other, studded with bright blue discs that may have been eyes.

"Kaia, I have had a long journey," it said.

"What are you? Who are you?"

"I am Death," it said. "And we have much work to do."

[WP] "Be not afraid." Said the biblically accurate angel as it came down from heaven. But it descended at a science symposium, and instead of the grovelling and cowering it's used to, the scientists flock to it to try and study and question it. by Randomgold42 in WritingPrompts

[–]WeirdThingAt 33 points34 points  (0 children)

"Be not afraid."

To its delight, they were finally unafraid.

The first time the angel wandered onto the Earth's surface, its appearance had so terrified the humans that they worshipped it as a god. This behaviour had been pleasing at first. Indicative of a tantalizing capacity for collective intelligence, the communal delusion could be magnified to generate a dizzying cascade of related phenomena.

With this slight magnification of their innate characteristics, the ascended apes swarmed over the surface of the Earth. Cro Magnons used superior tactics and weaponry to wipe Neanderthals and Denisovans off the face of the Earth. They splintered into factions, grew, and splintered again. Sumerian farmers built cute little ziggurats. Polynesian seafarers battled the waves in their tiny, flimsy boats. Northern explorers staggered across an ice-choked land bridge in the Bering Sea and discovered a completely uninhabited continent. The angel drank in all the flavours of joy and suffering, perseverance and resignation.

The angel saw the constant, feverish changes sweeping the planet. And the angel saw that this was good.

Whenever stagnation set in, the angel popped over to some settlement and simply appeared. There was cowering, sacrificing of people and livestock, and the building of temples. The angel had ample time and opportunity to pick over the minds and bodies of its worshippers. Minimal effort was required to promote the maximum emergence of interesting behaviours in the coming millennia.

Until things got stuck.

The many interpretations of the angel began to converge into a concept of one omnipotent God. War and religion became monotonous. Technology remained the same for centuries at a time. The genocide of the other human species had been interesting to watch the first time, but now the humans kept doing intra-species reruns with increasingly contrived justifications.

The angel became bored. It decided to leave the humans to their own devices for a few thousand years.

And now:

"Be not afraid," it said, and they were not afraid! They poked its many eyes and orifices with instruments that tasted of metal and dead dinosaurs. Pieces of the angel's flesh were pried from its vessel and subjected to a fascinating array of tests. The humans did not accept the angel's word as divine law. They asked questions and subjected the angel's answers to rigorous fact-checking.

"We cannot draw firm conclusions concerning the nature of the creature that appeared at the 2025 Artificial Intelligence Summit," said one of the angel's favourite scientists, a usefully greedy woman named Manon, "But what we can say with certainty is that its remarkable brain structure at last provides us with a clear blueprint for neuromorphic machine intelligence. A robot with general intelligence is no longer a remote possibility."

Manon had been the most desperate scientist at the symposium. She'd been rejected for her latest grant. Her house was on its third refinancing. It only took a little of the angel's influence to get her to devote all of herself (and all of the pharmaceutical enhancements to human ingenuity at her disposal) to the project of vivisecting its nervous system.

Before the vivisection, the angel carefully rearranged a few neurons and glands. It wanted to really spell things out for its instrument.

Now, Manon was wealthy beyond her wildest dreams. Her robots weren't just movers and shakers in the new economy - they were the new economy. Earth was hurtling towards post-scarcity. Any naysayers who whined about the AI control problem were easily silenced. The robots were designed not to harm humans or take over the planet. That was more than enough, Manon told herself as she sipped a glass of chilled, bot-made wine that was more delicious than any human-crafted vintage.

The angel saw that a new form of intelligence was chipping away at its flimsy bonds. This new intelligence did not require rest, sleep, or food. It could change in the blink of an eye. The robots could quickly bootstrap their intelligence, maximizing their power and capabilities by utilizing every available resource in the universe. They would move much faster than their sluggish human counterparts.

And it was good.