asmwDear Fediverse,
what's the limit of microfiction?
Is there a tag for more than microfiction but less than a true shortstory?
Is there a tag for threaded stories?
June stared at the mirror and sighed. She looked as tired as she felt. The stim levels on her autodoc were running alarmingly low, and she had dialed everything down as far as she could, but the stress was wearing her down. It had taken days until the cooperative had greenlit Marga's plan to erase June from her current employer's systems.
"Won't be clean though." Bjorn had said. "People have active knowledge of you 'cause we tried to buy you out."
June pulled herself away from the mirror and lurched into the meeting room, where Rip pushed a mug of steaming coffee into her hand. She mustered a thankful smile.
"I didn't know that future shaping space discoveries would involve so much paperwork and politics." She said after her first big swig.
"Yeah, you'd think that would be different with the rogues and renegades," Rip pondered, "but bureaucracy is everywhere."
Marga entered with a bowl of popcorn and set it on the table and sat down next to June. The big screen lit up, showing a map of the seven gates and surrounding systems.
"Like every good capitalist conglomerate, your employer has locations near every gate, so attacks need to be synchronized across all locations." A smattering of red dots appeared on the map.
"That'll take more days." June's heart sank.
"Nah." Marga flicked a popcorn into her mouth. "I set up everything immediately. It executed as soon as the auth came in; we're just waiting for the last relay."
All the dots except those around gate seven turned green, and a big countdown with a little more than twenty seconds appeared next to the map.
Silence descended upon the room as everyone stared at the ticking numbers, occasionally pierced by the crunch of popcorn. When the countdown hit zero, the last red dots turned green.
Cheers and popcorn fountains erupted. June sighed with relief, smiled, and stuffed a handful of popcorn in her mouth.
13/X
We usually met on the second level of the mall, in the coffee shop run by some weird dreadhead. They didn't seem to mind a couple cyberpunk kids hanging out in the back, as long as we drank copious amounts of coffee. Also, the uplink was exceptional.
We had already fueled up and jacked in. Shelly hooked a tripwire into the shop's cams, to let us know if someone got too nosy, security in the mall was a joke.
"Yo check this out." bROOTal dumped a couple twilight addresses on the channel. Ain't gotta tell us twice.
0pid moaned "Sooo slooow! Where the fuck is that routing?"
I set up a jail, opened a connection, and data trickled in. We dumped checksums and partial payloads in the channel.
"Huh, everyone gets a bespoke stream, headers look like VR sims." Shelly had started annotating patterns in the binary and bROOTal had set a ghidr/ai loose to decompile the code. "There's connection code in there, and lots of crypto. What's a #veilid?"
"So, anyone wanna sample?" 0pid's avatar started wagging an eyebrow.
"Fuck it." I flashed a hard damper onto my interface and the world grew dim. Less pressure from the seat and the cup in my hand felt cooler. My vision grew a little blurry and muted. I fed the payload into the runtime.
The world vanished. No more seat, cup, or hand. No more vision. I floated in absolute blackness. Then a fractal of light exploded in the sky. Unfurling tendrils of complexity ate away the darkness, replacing it with pulsating constructs of nightmarish beauty. Nothing was dampened. My head hurt and I tried to remember how to unplug, but instead of my memories I found a face. Not a human face. A facsimile of one, nearly correct but wrong. Smiling a wrong smile with too many teeth. Speaking without opening it's mouth.
«BE. MY. GUEST.»
The headache got worse. There was pressure on my ears and my heart was racing. I couldn't breathe.
«LET. ME. HELP.»
The face grew a body with too many limbs and stretched an arm out to touch me. Just before the hand reached me, I snapped back.
I lay on the floor of the coffee shop, smelling vomit and tasting blood. My friends were staring down at me, and so was a weird dreadhead.
"You alive?" They slapped me gently on the cheek and I moaned as the headache flared up again. My friends grabbed me and pulled me onto a seat. Dreadhead threw us a pitiful look.
"So you're smart enough to find trouble, and dumb enough to not know."
They grabbed a coffee, pulled up a chair and sat at our table.
"Listen up, kiddos, today we'll learn the lesson: Fuck ICE."
#guest #wss366 #cyberpunk #writing #tootfic #macrofiction #microfiction #scifi
Benjamin SimpsonOn Exoplanet 09774 these seeds have gained the name of Walking Apples. Plants don’t walk, (well, except for Triffids) but these ones do, sort of. Once dropped from the branch, the ‘legs’ move the seed along the soil upwards of 10 meters. There are no birds to spread the seed on this planet, which is probably why they walk. The seeds mostly trundle along at night, although we don’t know why at night, or how they know it’s night, although the nights do normally last 37 earth hours.
#scifi #exoplanets #macrofiction #nature
#scifi #exoplanets #macrofiction #nature
Ruweg 🇳🇱🐺A monstrous terrapin is brought down to smallfolk size so that he can visit a town. But his horny body has other plans...
Read my latest macrovember story here: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/63344208/
#macrovember #macrotober #macrofiction #RuwegLit #furryfiction #furrylit
Boring dungeons aren't so boring anymore if you equip some exciting new gear.
Time for a cursed equipment minotaur TF!
Read my latest story here: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/63288327/
#macrovember #macrotober #macrofiction #RuwegLit #furryfiction #furrylit
An experimental anxiety medicine works really well, that is until the experimental part becomes quite transformative.
Read it here: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/63253958/
#macrovember #macrotober #macrofiction #RuwegLit #furryfiction #furrylit
An abandoned power plant hums with power as the pokemon holed up run out. You go in and are confronted by the one powering it all.
Read my latest story here! https://www.furaffinity.net/view/63199816/
#macrovember #macrotober #macrofiction #RuwegLit #furryfiction #furrylit #macrofur
Rats are experimented on in a facility, but one day an experiment goes wrong with big consequences for one of them (or does it?)
Read my latest Macrovember story here: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/63177880/
#macrovember #macrotober #macrofiction #RuwegLit #furryfiction #furrylit
A village prepares for the coming of a werebear at night, but someone in the village does not like this disturbtion of his peace and quiet.
Read the story here: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/63133067/
#macrovember #macrotober #macrofiction #RuwegLit #furryfiction #furrylit
