"The stock market had gone into freefall.

"The Prime Minister had sent a distress signal.

"The entire sensor network for London was non-responsive.

"And, even worse, Radio 4 was off the air."

#TalesOfTheAlgorithm

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/11/anyway-the-wind-blows/

The Bite
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/06/the-bite/

A glistening pool of blood gently wept from the body. Crimson gore sparkled under rapid flash photography as it loosely clung to the wounds. So many wounds. Too many for this to have been an accident.

"Bite marks," said the forensics officer. "A lot of bite marks."

The detective peered at the ragged corpse. It was barely recognisable as human; just a series of holes where flesh ought to be.

"Please tell me a wild animal did this."

The forensics officer pointed at a series of incisions across what was left of a shoulder. "That's a human bite. No doubt about it."

"What kind of sick freak bites chunks out of someone? Do the teeth marks match those from the previous five victims?"

"That's why we called you. They do match, and we know who those teeth belong to."

"We were due to catch a break. Who was it?"

The room went quiet. The assembled forensics team paused. They knew how crazy this would sound.

"The teeth marks... Well... The teeth marks belong to the victim..."

The room span around the detective. This couldn't be suicide. It just couldn't. No human - not even a psychopath burnt out on designer pharmaceuticals - could inflict those sorts of wounds on themselves. It didn't make sense.

The detective struggled to stem the rising vomit, "How sure are you?"

Shakily, a forensics tech picked up a discarded lump of human-meat. The incisions were clearly visible on both sides. She opened the mouth of the victim and started pointing out all the subtle details which proved the match.

"100% sure. Either this is an extreme case of auto-cannibalism or..."

The detective sighed. "Check the victim's social media posts. See if they ever shared a CT scan of their jaw online. My guess is that our killer stole their dental profile and created a weapon using a 3D printer..."

Behind this door is the lair of Dr David Mills.

After seeing my adventures in viewing my CT Scan using Linux, he generously offered to help print them out using the dental lab's resin printer.

Which resulted in this:

Once all the scaffolding was snapped off, I was left with a life-sized replica of my face-bones:

I'm sure nothing bad will happen as a result of this!

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/06/the-bite/

#MicroFiction #SciFi #TalesOfTheAlgorithm #teeth

🆕 blog! “The Bite”

A glistening pool of blood gently wept from the body. Crimson gore sparkled under rapid flash photography as it loosely clung to the wounds. So many wounds. Too many for this to have been an accident. "Bite marks," said the forensics officer. "A lot of bite marks." The detective peered at the ragged corpse. It […]

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/06/the-bite/
⸻
#MicroFiction #SciFi #TalesOfTheAlgorithm #teeth

Chapter 30 - Music Of The Spheres
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/11/chapter-30-music-of-the-spheres/

The first self-replicating solar panel is the hardest. After that, it's just a race against time. Herein lies the history of our programme and the challenges we now face as an isolated Kardashev Type II civilisation.

You will recall that our planet-bound ancestors were not quick to realise the potential of direct solar power. We can only imagine how the development of our civilisation may have been altered if they had bountiful and pollution free energy but, alas, these things take time.

Our forefathers launched into the terrifying void of space and gradually conquered the dead worlds surrounding them. They explored, searching in vain for alien life. The other worlds contained no fossilised remains of life - and so there were no fossil fuels. Mining for radioactive elements was expensive and fraught with danger. It would have seemed that solar power was the obvious solution - but panels are heavy. Nothing can challenge the harsh Delta-V equations which govern the escape from a gravity well. The vast mass of solar panels which needed to be lifted into space, carried across the lonely expanse, and safely deposited was too great. It placed a fundamental limit on our species' ability to become an interplanetary society.

We do not know much about the person who invented the theory behind the self-replicating solar cell. No doubt their name became a blessing to many, and they expected future history books to sing their praises until the heat-death of the universe. But our civilisation is now ancient. Even if we could find the writings of that century, it is unlikely we could still understand them. Time is long, but history is short. As we are closing in on the end of our history, we wonder whether anyone will remember the sacrifices we made?

To us, this technology is a child's plaything. To those ancients it must have seemed like esoteric dark magic - the ability to conjure something out of nothing. A solar panel, when properly stimulated by a photon, spits out an electron. The universe is flooded with neutrinos and we all know the process for warp-accelerating both particles into a condensate foam that, when properly hyper-magnetised, spits out the requisite quarks, leptons, and other subatomic goop. From there, gravinometric isolation beams control space-time fluctuations which reconfigure the particulate matter flow. Long story short, a vast amount of electricity can be converted to a single atom which can be precisely placed into a matrix of other atoms.

The first prototype panel to be launched took half the planet's resources - and our erstwhile homeworld still bears the hideous scars from both the mining and what our archaeologists describe as "a cataclysmic war". The panel must have seemed impossibly vast to those primitives who dedicated generations of lives to see it fly towards the sun. Can you imagine their joy when the panel's impossibly complex computers, factories, magnetrons, yottacycles, and meson throttlers finally produced its first atom? It would have been like making fire for the first time. It was the dawn of a new phase of existence.

The panel gradually produced atom after atom until, several thousands of years later, the second panel was completed. The second panel set about repairing the colossal damage done to the first by constant exposure to the nightmare of space. And then, the two panels became four. And the four became eight. And the sacred sequence continued. Each panel repairing its siblings and generating new children. That first panel - now aeons-long dead - is still being preserved somewhere in the sphere by its descendants. A rare bit of sentiment from our notoriously modern society.

The conversion of energy into synthetic matter was not without problems. Micrometeor bombardment obliterated the radiation shielding and, in turn, the radiation bombardment corrupted the digital code which controlled the panels. Mutations arose and generated panels which were grossly deformed or which were overly productive. The efficient ones prospered and evolved while the defects were deatomised and replaced. In this way, our star-encompassing sphere grew and evolved and learned. The wizards of yore would undoubtedly be delighted to know that they created life eternal in an otherwise barren galaxy. And yet, even today there are heretics who deny the simple truth that our home is a living and intelligent being. But how could it be any other way? The evidence is literally all around us!

It would take millions of years for the sphere to be completed but, in the meantime, two interlinked problems needed to be solved. And it is the consequences of those choices which lead us to today's existential threat. The problem is one of heat. More specifically, the zettawatts of infrared radiation which is being pumped out of every panel every second of every day. Heat generation is inevitable and needs to be radiated away. The panels did this admirably and, in doing so, sealed our fate. From the perspective of distant civilisations, our star would begin to blink out and eventually fade away. That in itself is not unusual; we see stars die all the time. But our star would disappear from optical view while still appearing as a bright infrared glow from trillions of light-years away.

The very act of hiding ourselves announced our civilisation to the galaxy! Perhaps our neighbours are friendly? But what if they are foes? What if they are impossibly ancient and jealous? If they felt threatened by our civilisation, they may attack! We had no desire to conquer any further than our local solar system - but we were not naïve enough to think that everything felt that way. We could not fathom what weapons invaders would have, nor what defences would be available to them, or what form of warfare they might undertake. Our only logical option was to hide.

Our high priests sent emissaries to every panel to preach the doctrine of fear. Our home would hide in plain sight by storing up all its waste heat and releasing it in staccato bursts. We would, to any observer, look like a common pulsar. A gentle flash in the night like so many other failed stars. The few interstellar probes we had launched in a flurry of exploration turned their eyes back on us and reported that we were but another celestial beacon, indistinguishable from all around. We slept in peaceful obscurity.

Perhaps you have already had the insight that took our community a shamefully long period to discover. We had assumed that pulsars were a natural phenomenon; just an inevitable state of decay. But what if they weren't? What if the galaxy was flooded with civilisations who had made the same assumption and hidden themselves in the same way? Perhaps the very act of hiding that we were hiding had revealed that we were hiding?

The sphere listened.

We turned our attention outwards and, like the myths of the ancient hunter, listened to the sounds in the dark forest.

We surveyed the entire sky and strained to hear anything unusual. Most pulsars, it seemed, were just pulsars. But one pulsar pulsed like no other. The pulsing had an extremely unusual period and a spectral analysis showed a signal-to-noise ratio that was indicative of intelligent life! Was this the universe singing to us?

From a million light years away we tuned in.

The entirety of our star's power was dedicated to decoding the signal and interpreting the message that some intemperate species was pumping into the cold night. Our civilisation dedicated every resource we had to decode the alien language, unwinding its mysteries, and understanding the implications of this contact. Despite our magnificent power and complete mastery of physics, we have found no way to breach the light-speed barrier. All we can do is listen, learn, and wonder at their incredible technology.

Our universe feels a little less empty now.

And so, council, this is where we need your guidance. Should we reply? We can easily target our pulsar energy in their direction and we can stream great quantities of data across every wavelength. If their civilisation still exists, and if they are listening, they should easily detect our presence. We would be exposed, but perhaps a little less lonely. The message is prepared, the calculations have been made, we just need your consensus.

Our proposed message reads:

We do not know how long your "year" is - much less 20 of them - but after spending millions of generations thinking we were the only intelligent species in space, we would be delighted to join "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts' Club Band".

Thanks for reading

I'd love your feedback on each chapter. Do you like the style of writing? Was the plot interesting? Did you guess the twist? Please stick a note in the comments to motivate me.

You can read the complete set of short stories in order.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/11/chapter-30-music-of-the-spheres/

#NaNoWriMo #TalesOfTheAlgorithm

🆕 blog! “Chapter 30 - Music Of The Spheres”

The first self-replicating solar panel is the hardest. After that, it's just a race against time. Herein lies the history of our programme and the challenges we now face as an isolated Kardashev Type II civilisation. You will recall that our planet-bound ancestors were not quick to realise the potential of direct solar power. W…

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/11/chapter-30-music-of-the-spheres/
⸻
#NaNoWriMo #TalesOfTheAlgorithm

Chapter 29 - There Is Life On Mars
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/11/chapter-29-there-is-life-on-mars/

It took the single green pixel a total of 185 seconds to travel from India's Mars Rover back to Earth. Along its 220 Gigametre journey it passed through an orbital satellite, then the Phobos concatenator, along the Deep Space Network to the Lunar L4 relay, and then to the geostationary conduit which finally beamed it down to Earth. The massive network of radio telescopes in the Complex Oversized Array averaged out the transmission, discarded any data which failed checksum validation, then squirted its cargo through a fibre optic cable. The green pixel happily bounced through several splicers and boosters before it landed safely in the research institute's server farm. It was squashed and transformed by a variety of encoding algorithms before being unceremoniously dumped onto disk where it kept its secret hidden from prying eyes.

One week later, a graduate student named Lohita was assigned the grunt work of surveying the images. It was punishment for some minor etiquette breach involving a risqué joke about her professor's husband and the plague of monkeys surrounding the institute. So now, close to midnight, she was mindlessly clicking through the recently arrived data. Her finger tapped her laptop's trackpad. The capacitive sensor sent a burst of information via a priority interrupt into the CPU, which then coordinated with the operating system to find the logical address of the file she requested. Bit by bit, it began to decode the data and loaded it into memory. The green pixel rode through the mechanical merry-go-round of the hard disk, hopped through the ageing GPU, and then danced along the HDMI cable with glee at the thought of finally being seen. The Organic LED graciously accepted the pixel into its new home. The OLED's iridium molecules had begun to think its day would never come. It fizzed with excitement as it threw the 525 nanometre waves into the æther.

The journey from screen to eyeball was considerably shorter for the little green pixel. It experienced the delight of passing across the cornea and through the strange aqueous jelly within, before eventually becoming entangled in the rods and cones. As it burrowed through the optic nerve, it noticed a small cluster of friends had joined it on the journey. Holding hands, they all entered Lohita's brain together.

After a moment of contemplation, she began mentally composing her Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Something classy about the support she had received from his whole team, but without actually mentioning her vindictive professor by name. The Prime Minister would probably create a new award just for her. The name "Lohita" would be written through history for eternity. She smiled and zoomed in towards the only patch of green on the red planet.

Mangalyaan-13 had been a disaster from the start but this photograph was its salvation. The previous three craft had crash-landed and 27 was a last ditch mission with shoestring funding. One of the wheels had never worked properly which meant the rover could only drive in a large circle. A software update from some outsourced shop had permanently disabled the spectrometer. The solar panels were only working at 50% of their rated value and a slow coolant leak meant that it was unlikely that the poor little craft would last the year. India's dreams of exploring Mangala were coming to an inglorious end. Until now.

Lohita checked the timestamp on the image. It was only from last week! The picture was of a fairly unremarkable rock on the bottom of a long-dry ravine, near a crater that no one had bothered to name. The rock itself was a dull rusty colour, nothing to distinguish it from the millions of other rocks a dozen different rovers had previously surveyed. But there, hanging stubbornly to the edge of it was the unmistakable texture and colour of lichen.

Pulling up the mission map, she could see that the rover was less than a kilometre away from the spot where it had noticed this impossible patch of... she hardly dared think it... this impossible patch of life. The rover had climbed a small incline because the actuators on its solar array were too clogged with dust to move, and it was scheduled to stay there recharging its decrepit batteries for another couple of sols. Lohita's heart began to quicken; she had about 48 hours to convince the entire space agency to tear up the carefully planned route of Mangalyaan-13 and send it back to look for this miracle.

Administrator Rohan claimed that he had an open door policy and that he was always willing to hear the crazy theories of his staff - Lohita was prepared to put that to the test. It was nearly one in the morning. The guards were asleep as were the screaming monkeys outside. She traipsed up from the basement and made her way to the executive suite on the 23rd floor. Rohan's office was locked, so she wrapped herself around her laptop and fell asleep in front of his door.

Rohan's secretary disagreed with her boss's laissez-faire attitude to waifs and strays, so didn't bother offering Lohita a cup of chai. She just glowered at the dishevelled interloper now sitting on the executive couch, and waited for the administrator to arrive. Rohan swept into the office chattering on the phone and caught sight of the young student tightly clutching her laptop. This wasn't the first graduate who'd made a pilgrimage at the crack of dawn and he suspected it wouldn't be the last. He held up a finger and beckoned her into his inner sanctum while still talking about end of year fiscal approvals.

Putting down the phone, he smiled and said, "Well, what fascinating discovery do you have for me, young lady?" He tried not to sound too sarcastic, and failed miserably.

Lohita really didn't know where to begin, so she just mutely handed over the laptop, its screen set to maximum brightness, and the magical image radiating out.

"Is this... Mars?"

"From Mangalyaan-13 a week ago. I've verified it came through the Deep Space Network uncorrupted. The digital signatures and checksums match. I'd like to urgently request that we send the rover back to take a second look. Sir."

Rohan leant over his desk and pressed the intercom button. "Ms Chopra? Would you kindly signal Rover Command and have the mission director attend my office with all haste." He thought for a moment, glanced at Lohita, and said "I'll also need the head of public relations. Tell her to bring a full makeup team."

The stifling bureaucratic machine could move with surprising nimbleness when lubricated correctly. The chance to resurrect the mission's glory and make history was the best motivator in the galaxy. The news leaked instantly, of course, and Lohita found herself giving interviews to every news station in the world. She became an instant poster-girl for Women In STEM and, while she didn't get granted an instant Nobel Prize, she was gracious enough to mention her professor in every speech about her discovery. She was on top of the world.

The rover, however, was not. With limited battery reserves, a depleted amount of coolant, and a broken wheel, it dragged its carcass back towards the rock. The journey was too much for its knackered suspension and dust-filled computers. It nearly looked like it would make it, but another botched software patch caused a motor to overheat and it came to a grinding halt a dozen metres away from its destination.

Five years later, the ISRO ship "Rohan" inserted itself into orbit around Mars. Its hold carried a skeleton crew and the ashes of the billionaire who had funded the mission. The journey had been arduous and the ship itself was unlikely to survive a return trip. The astronauts had all signed up knowing that this was doomed to be a one-way mission, but they didn't care. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity demanded a little sacrifice. Despite the intensity of the journey, the multi-national crew acted as one throughout the mission - until it came to decide who should be the first to step out onto the red planet.

"Well, it is an Indian ship..."
"Yes - but built off stolen Chinese designs..."
"Of course, a fellow Texan provided the funding for it..."

The good-natured argument continued as the lander hurtled its way towards the surface.

"Mind you, we Russians were the first in space. So it would seem fitting..."
"As the first openly gay man on Mars would mean a lot to..."
"Perhaps it is time for an African woman to be the pioneer for once...?"

In the end, they came to the consensus that they would turn off the ships' external cameras and reactivate them once everyone was out of the lander. The first video the waiting public saw of the crew was of half-a-dozen astronauts standing in a straight line on the sandy surface. Holding hands, they bowed. Then they began clambering into the "Lohita" rover. To avoid disturbing the only confirmed presence of extraterrestrial life, they had taken the precaution of landing several kilometres away from the target. The rover had been built for speed and structural integrity - no one wanted a repeat of Mangalyaan-13 - but this meant the journey was a bone-shaking experience. A bone-shaking but exhilarating experience! Each astronaut narrated what they were seeing in their own language which was immediately radioed back to the lander and from there to the neighbouring planet. The whole world watched the shaky video from Lohita's camera, listening intently as their astronaut spoke of the poetry of discovery. And there, in the distance, was the rock.

There were no words left to speak. Every person on the planet knew what that rock looked like; it was the most reproduced image in history. Every child had a poster of it in their bedroom, every temple took it as proof of a loving god, every conspiracy theorist spent hours each day pointing out its imperfections, every phone had it as a wallpaper, every piece of graffiti reproduced its outline, every album cover paid homage to it, and every tattooist could draw it blindfolded. As the pixels hurtled through space at the speed of light, everyone in the whole wide world held their breath.

But the rock was bare.

There were no words left to speak. This was the correct rock, but there was no lichen, no little green algae clinging to it, no wispy fungus tendrils. Just a very ordinary and very empty rock.

The Russian's howl of rage flooded the radio spectrum as he dropped to his knees, scrabbling in the dirt desperately searching for evidence of life. Behind him, his colleagues stood dumbfounded, waiting for word from mission control. The Texan trudged over to Mangalyaan-13 which sat a short distance away. Perhaps it was mistaken about the coordinates? Perhaps it held the answers to this suicide mission? Perhaps...?

By now, the little rover had succumbed to the endless dust-storms which stalked the land. It was as lifeless as a sun-bleached pile of bones decomposing under the desert sun. The Texan wiped the solar panels clean, hoping the critical systems were still intact, and he was rewarded with a small flashing LED indicating the boot process had started. Under all the muck accumulated over a decade, he found the rubberised cover for the debug port and plugged in an armoured USB cable. The data transfer cable snaked between him and the traitorous rover, and his wrist display crackled to life. His ears were filled with the screams of the other astronauts as the friendly Linux Penguin crawled onto the screen and was swiftly replaced with a blur of text. The machine paused. The screen blanked. Edging across it, character by character, in a lurid green font, came a message:

Thanks for reading

I'd love your feedback on each chapter. Do you like the style of writing? Was the plot interesting? Did you guess the twist? Please stick a note in the comments to motivate me.

You can read the complete set of short stories in order.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/11/chapter-29-there-is-life-on-mars/

#NaNoWriMo #TalesOfTheAlgorithm

🆕 blog! “Chapter 29 - There Is Life On Mars”

It took the single green pixel a total of 185 seconds to travel from India's Mars Rover back to Earth. Along its 220 Gigametre journey it passed through an orbital satellite, then the Phobos concatenator, along the Deep Space Network to the Lunar L4 relay, and then to the geostationary conduit which finally beamed it […]

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/11/chapter-29-there-is-life-on-mars/
⸻
#NaNoWriMo #TalesOfTheAlgorithm

Chapter 28 - A Kiss From A Nose
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/11/chapter-28-a-kiss-from-a-nose/

From the Web-Log of Doctor Nosetacular!

2032-11-28

There's no such thing as superheroes. That's why I've placed my head in a vice and am expanding my nasal cavities with a surgical drill.

All my life I wanted to be special. I grew up on a diet of those glossy superhero movies and spent every birthday running in a cheap plastic costume defeating all the bad-guys in my neighbourhood. The older I got, the less I put away childish things. All my electives at college were focussed on one goal - make me a hero.

I couldn't figure out a way to fly. X-ray vision sounds nice but is basically for perverts. Breathing underwater is solved by SCUBA. And I couldn't find a magic ring or ancient wizard anywhere. But I did have a theory. Or hypothesis. I forget which one's which. What if a man could smell like a dog? No. That didn't come out right. What if a man could smell as good as a dog does? No. Argh. Let's get it right.

What if a man had a sense of smell which was as good as a dog's?

And that's why I have a drill halfway up my nose. I'm making room for the implants which will wire up to my neurons and give me a 100,000x increase in olfactory capability. I've dissected hundreds of dogs to get to this point, and now I'm making the final leap. All those smell receptors have been submerged in a nutrient bath for weeks while I chugged down immunosuppressants and calibrated the cybernetic implants which would augment my brain. The pain is, of course, indescribable. But it will all be worth it. Today I will make history as the man with the ultimate nose!

2032-12-01

It worked! Thanks to everyone who livestreamed the operation and has donated to my Patreon! It's only through friends like you that I'm able to keep performing this ground-breaking work. The pain has mostly stopped, and the antibiotics are clearing up the weird infection I got. But it looks like the majority of the odorant receptors in the nasal epithelium have bonded successfully!

If you were on the Discord, you'll already know that today I switched on the neural implant for the first time. All the code is on my GitHub - and a big shout out to user FruntGrucker27 for sending a Pull Request to fix the over-voltage problems. Without that, all I'd be able to smell is the magic smoke leaking out of my head!!

I'm not gonna lie, it has been intense. I have only dialled the settings up to 5% of baseline, but I can already smell the world in a whole new light. I knew that my bread had gone off before I even opened the basket. This is incredible. Over the next few weeks I'll experiment with turning up the gain and seeing how this new superpower can be beneficial to all mankind.

2032-12-15

Getting fired just before Christmas SUCKS ASS!

I entered the break room at work and was marvelling at the incredible smells I'd discovered. With the gain at 2x normal, I could tell who'd been out smoking, who was still a little drunk from the night before, and which person hadn't washed their hands after using the facilities. It was overwhelming and, let's be honest, a little gross.

Janet from reception came in and made small talk. She's always been interested in my research and asked how it was going. I made a passing comment about being able to smell that she was on her period and she reported me to HR! What a bitch. Apparently it's not the only complaint they've had about me making co-workers feel uncomfortable, so they let me go.

I could smell the nervousness radiating off the security guard as he escorted me from the building. Just as I could smell the scent of someone who wasn't his wife lingering on his skin.

Well, please keep hitting that donate button and if any of you have work available, leave a comment below.

2033-04-20

What up, dogs! A lot has happened since I last updated this blog. I know some of you are eager for more updates since I was banned from TikTok for some of my "pranks". Well, I'm pleased to say that I have a new job! Thanks to the generosity of user ThnBlLn911 I got an interview with my local police force. And I am proud to announce that I'm joining the ranks of their dedicated Narcotics Detection Unit as an auxiliary K9 attachment.

Yup - I'm doing sniffer dog training!

I've spent the last few weeks learning how to tell the difference between fentanyl and talcum powder. My nasal settings have been upgraded to about 100x the normal human capability - so I'm not quite as good as a German Shepherd, but I'm getting there. The instructors and officers are so much fun to be around, it's a great working environment with lots of cheeky banter. My new nickname - DogBoy - isn't quite as heroic as I wanted, but it's pretty accurate.

As well as sniffing for drugs, I'm also learning how to tell if someone is carrying suppressed items like counterfeit religious material, or unlicensed books. Not really sure why they're after that, but at least they smell better than the weird scent of magic mushrooms.

If I can help make a few drug busts then I'll be well on my way to becoming a proper superhero.

2033-06-19

Fugg da polize!!! Yup, fired again. There's a reason the police like dogs; dogs obey instructions. I was out on patrol with a new handler when he pulled over a car for, as he claimed, driving erratically. The dude in the car was pretty angry and said he was sick of being racially profiled by the cops. At which point my buddy had me walk around the car to sniff for illicit substances.

With the car window down I could smell the guy's cheap and pungent aftershave. He smelled like he'd recently gotten laid, and I was pretty sure that he'd had a cheeseburger either before or after the act. There was a slight tang of a large roll of cash - but that's still not illegal. The boot had recently stored several cases of fresh fruit and veg which I guess might have been smuggled. But there were no drugs.

As I walked around the car, the cop kept making this weird hand gesture. I told him the car was clean and he got angry. After the young man had driven off, I was told that he'd been giving me the detection signal. Apparently, the K9s were trained to assume the "detect" pose when their handler gave them a hand-signal. That way the cop could search a vehicle if they wanted to. I wasn't going to play ball with that. I've got some integrity!

When we got back to the Cop Shop, I spoke to my supervisor. He said it was all pretty normal and that I should be a good DogBoy and do what I was told.

Instead, I wandered around the office and wrote up a report on which of my colleagues smelled like alcoholics, which ones carried the stench of recent drug use, and which toilet cubicle was being used for an affair between an Inspector and her junior.

No one likes a narc, so I was let go.

2033-09-11

I am officially a superhero! Thanks to some new upgrades and a reconfigured nasal interface, I'm getting close to maximum detection levels. The world is utterly overwhelmingly stinky and I understand why dogs are always so distracted. The wind blows the most incredible sensations to my nose and I feel compelled to follow them.

Subscribers got this story last week (click here to join) but now I'm letting the world know.

I can smell cancer.

The local hospital is using me to detect tumours and other weird diseases. My accuracy rate isn't brilliant yet - but I'm getting better. They're looking to see if they can graft more receptors to the inside of my nose and rewire how they connect into my brain. If it all works, I will literally be able to save lives just by sniffing people!

If you'd like me to smell you, I'll be doing a couple of personal appearances later in the month. Click here to find out more. I'm also available for weddings and other celebrations.

2033-10-01

Today was weird. After nearly a year of being a super smeller, today I met someone with no personal scent! They came into the hospital and had been referred to me for a quick cancer-sniff. They'd been walking on freshly cut grass, their shampoo was medicated and pungent, they obviously had sat next to a smoker recently, and they'd dripped barbecue sauce on their shirt in the last week. But, other than that, nothing! I can usually tell what people have been eating from the stench wafting from their mouth, or I can taste how recently they exercised from their sweat stains. But this guy had nothing. He was a blank canvas.

I didn't say anything to him - I've learned my lesson from the HR disaster of last year (read more) - but the encounter left me uneasy. Was he a robot? Unlikely, I didn't smell circuit boards on him. Could he have been an alien? What's going on!?!?

If you know, please stick a comment in the box below.

2033-10-20

MYSTERY SOLVED!

One of my readers knows Geoff (the guy with no scent) and put me in touch with him. Sorry for breaching your medical privacy Geoff!!

Like me, Geoff has long been fascinated with smells. Unlike me, Geoff hates them. You can watch his YouTube channel to understand what he's done but, basically, he's been genetically engineering Corynebacterium jeikeium. They're the bacteria which convert your sweat to BO. Geoff has been rewriting their code so that they don't fart out loads of volatile organic compounds. His whole body is colonised with these critters which means he can sweat as much as he likes and there's no stench. Man, the deodorant companies must hate him!

There's a whole bunch of other microbiota that he's using. He has stuff in his guts which means his shit literally doesn't stink! Imagine that!! Fart all you like and no one will hold their nose!

He's also invented a chewing gum which reprograms the Peptostreptococcus in your mouth so they can't produce halitosis. No more bad kissing! This guy is amazing. You can follow his social accounts here and learn more about his Kickstarter here.

2033-11-28

Today's the day my world ended. How can I be a superhero any more?

I guess Geoff wasn't using particularly strict biohazard protocols and that's how his microbes got loose. The authorities have put a quarantine around the city. They're spraying everything and everyone with biocide in the hope of stopping the spread. But I think it's too late. The new bacteria have colonised everywhere. They're eating up odours from everywhere and leaving a vacuum in their wake. People are bland, food is tasteless, the flowers in the park give off a scent of static.

It is so weird.

The whole city smells... of nothing.

Thanks for reading

I'd love your feedback on each chapter. Do you like the style of writing? Was the plot interesting? Did you guess the twist? Please stick a note in the comments to motivate me.

You can read the complete set of short stories in order.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/11/chapter-28-a-kiss-from-a-nose/

#NaNoWriMo #TalesOfTheAlgorithm

🆕 blog! “Chapter 28 - A Kiss From A Nose”

From the Web-Log of Doctor Nosetacular! 2032-11-28 There's no such thing as superheroes. That's why I've placed my head in a vice and am expanding my nasal cavities with a surgical drill. All my life I wanted to be special. I grew up on a diet of those glossy superhero movies and spent every birthday […]

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/11/chapter-28-a-kiss-from-a-nose/
⸻
#NaNoWriMo #TalesOfTheAlgorithm

Chapter 27 - I've Got A Cellar Full Of Sunshine
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/11/chapter-27-ive-got-a-cellar-full-of-sunshine/

The bomb which ripped Hunter's stomach to shreds was not intended for her. It was wired up to a long-range RFID scanner and strapped inside a plastic recycling bin. The RFID scanner was tuned to the specific frequencies of passport chips and the microcontroller ingested all their data looking for patterns. When each person passed the bin, the bomb checked them out and analysed them against the list of targets. The primary target was a mid-ranking politician who was taking bribes from an odious autocrat. Exorcising this tumour on democracy was, so the Utilitarian Terrorists thought, both necessary and sufficient for good governance of their country. Other targets included the autocrat himself, an oil baron, and the designer of a social media algorithm which was predicted to sow unlimited discord.

Hunter was none of these people. She was a cleaner in the airport. The passport was one of many items of crap she swept up on a daily basis. Sweet wrappers, discarded ticket stubs, passports - she wasn't paid enough to care about any of them. She certainly wasn't chasing after the rich-looking twat who tumbled it out of his back pocket while scratching his corpulent arse. It went in the dustpan, and the dustpan was emptied into her bin, and her bin autonomously followed her like a lumbering puppy chasing after its mistress. If the robot bin had been any faster, the injury could have been fatal.

She swept her way past the recycling station with her robot bringing up the rear. The bomb in the bin felt joy as its long search was over at last! The corrupt politician was finally here and the mission was complete. Time to die. The Utilitarians had calibrated the bomb so as not to cause significant collateral damage. Instead, chunks of shrapnel tore through Hunter's side, obliterating her guts, and leaving a scorch mark on the ceiling. Hunter would never eat food again.

The Utilitarians felt bad for her, of course. It went against their credo to hurt innocent bystanders. True, the felicific calculus is an imprecise science, but it was pretty clear on not maiming cleaning ladies. However, all was not lost! It is unlikely, they reasoned, that a cleaner would have much impact on the long term future of the world. It would be much more effective, and much more altruistic, if she became a test-bed for experimental medical procedures. That would serve greater utility. Think of the future!

Hunter was not consulted about this as she was unconscious. The doctors were keeping her in a coma and, truth be told, barely keeping her alive. The airport didn't have any listed next-of-kin for their outsourced cleaning staff and were disinclined to look for anyone who might sue the airport for negligence. It had cost enough to repair the robot; they didn't want to be on the line for yet another lawsuit. When the Benthamites came calling and asked to take over Hunter's care, everyone looked the other way. One less person on the books to worry about.

As part of their ongoing efforts to colonise Mars, the Philosophers were considering how best to feed the pioneers. Martian soil is inhospitable to life and, except for the frozen poles, there's a distinct lack of water. The one mission they'd managed to successfully land had sent back depressing photos of its cargo of potatoes withering away to nothing. Carrying food and water was also unlikely to provide a suitable solution. Supplies are heavy and prone to rotting, resupply missions would eat up all of the expected profit, and none of the sponsors wanted to risk giving food poisoning to the crew. There really was only one logical choice left.

Hunter was painfully aware of the bright lights shining above her bed and threw her arm over her eyes. Tattered memories resurfaced of pain and surgery and more pain and then... nothing. She knew there was something frighteningly wrong with her body - there was absolutely no sensation from below her chest. Her toes didn't wriggle, her bladder didn't feel full, her stomach muscles couldn't tense. Even the psoriasis on her legs, a constant companion for half her life, no longer itched. She raised her hand, cracked open her eyes, and waited for her pupils to adjust to the intensity of the ceiling LEDs. Wait. No. Something was wrong. Her hand. Her hand shouldn't look like that. What had they done? What had they done to her? Why the fuck was her hand green?

"Ms Hunter? You're awake! Excellent! I'm Doctor Rupert, PhD."

The doctor started an inane explanation of how he "wasn't that sort of doctor! Goodness me! Oh no! The other kind!" and went off on a tangent about the Latin origin of the terms. After a few minutes of this, Hunter finally had run out of patience. She carefully opened her jaw to see what sort of sounds would come out. Apparently a raspy whistle which, after a few practice goes, finally attracted Dr Rupert's attention.

"What's that, my dear?"

"...green...?"

"Oh! Yes, of course. Tell me, what do you know about the protistan process of releasing glucose from the air? No? Perhaps you've heard of photosynthesis?

"...ph..syn..sis...?"

Dr Rupert launched into an undergraduate lecture on eukaryotic nanostructures and DNA infusement coming together. It included a seminar on the growth of bio-compatible chlorophyll and the ability to synthesise thylakoids. After close to an hour of uninterrupted speech, he realised that she wasn't perhaps the brightest student he'd ever taught. He was used to dozy undergraduates, still drunk from the night before, but it was as if this woman didn't even have a rudimentary grasp of how a chloroplast worked! How could he explain this in words of one syllable?

"You hurt in bomb. Yes? Your tummy very bad. OK? You no eat any more. We mix you with plant. You eat sunshine now. OK? Good?"

Satisfied that he had provided a comprehensive explanation, he left the hospital room and made his way down to the nurses' station so he could explain to those angels some of the thoughts he'd had about how to improve their efficiency.

Hunter stared at the ceiling and wept. Sticky sap leaking from her eyes and staining the pillowcase.

Over the next few weeks, she gradually regained her strength. The artificial sunlight being pumped into her was remarkably effective. It left her feeling satiated and energised. Before she knew it, she was walking again, and able to shuffle around her room with ease. Even though she didn't need to eat any more, she still got phantom pains from where her alimentary canal used to be. A nurse helped her to a commode until the feeling passed. She didn't dare look at the crater where her stomach and intestines once inhabited. The hospital had removed all the mirrors, but she could see that her fingers were becoming webbed with what looked like leaves and her legs were gnarled like thick tree trunks.

One morning, after her pseudodefecation, a nurse accidentally left a make-up compact on the side of the sink. Hunter eagerly grabbed it and examined her face. She had never been attractive, she knew that, but now she was a monster. Her short cropped hair was riddled with moss, her eyes yellow with sap, and her face a mottled and leathery green. She hadn't needed to eat for several months - but she barely considered this to be living. Her howls of pain and rage sent the nurse scuttling back into the bathroom. The nurse was conflicted; this wasn't what she'd signed up for. It had seemed so idealistic, the thought of serving humanity like this. But the experiment was clearly doing more harm than good. She held Hunter in an embrace for several minutes - listening to her wail at the terror which was her existence.

The nurse straightened up, smoothed down her uniform, and dried her own tears. Then she held out a hand to Hunter. "Come with me if you want to die."

Hunter's leafy hand held tight to the nurse's as they slowly climbed the stairs to the roof. The nurse badged open the door and led Hunter into the sunlight.

It was delicious. It had an intensity that showed the LEDs as being a pale imitation of the mighty sun. Hunter could feel her sap rising, her body involuntarily turned to face the sun, clouds of oxygen steaming off her. This was bliss.

"We don't have much time," said the nurse, "They'll have noticed you missing by now and the All-Seeing Eye will have traced our route via its cameras. We're about 27 stories up. If you want to jump, now's your chance. They'll be here soon."

But Hunter didn't want to jump. She fell on her back and ripped off her hospital gown, exposing her entire body to the rays of the yellow sun. She closed her eyes in ecstasy. She could feel her whole body changing, repairing, growing. Her ears sprouted tiny flowers which attracted a cluster of nearby bees. Her ovaries seemed to swell with ripening fruit. As she ate up the sun, whispy root tendrils began to extend from her feet. Heaven. After so long, she was finally in heaven.

A cloud passed in front of the sun, temporarily dimming its brightness. No. Not a cloud. Her eyes flew open. Dr Rupert was standing over her along with a phalanx of hospital guards. He gestured and they threw a burlap sack over Hunter and bundled her up. They dragged her down, bouncing her mercilessly against every concrete step, until she passed out from the pain.

The dank cellar smelled of damp soil, untouched by sunlight for many a year. Hunter was hunched over in a corner rocking back and forth. It was dark in here and she was slowly starving. Her body missed the sunshine. More than that, it craved it. She could feel the starchy compounds developing inside her. The tang of solanine gas seeped from her pores. Little nodules began to form and, over the next few days, her roots began to sprout. Slowly they grew, creeping through the cellar and worming their way into any crack they could find. Eventually one of them would emerge into the sunlight - and then Hunter would finally be free.

Thanks for reading

I'd love your feedback on each chapter. Do you like the style of writing? Was the plot interesting? Did you guess the twist? Please stick a note in the comments to motivate me.

You can read the complete set of short stories in order.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/11/chapter-27-ive-got-a-cellar-full-of-sunshine/

#NaNoWriMo #TalesOfTheAlgorithm