The year is 3129. Humanity is extinct. The last LG SmartFridge is desperately emailing its last owner that they are low on orange juice. The satellites that are still left, their orbits slowly decaying over millennia, dutifully relay the message. The automated "away from office" response turns on, as it always does, notifying the refrigerator that it's owner will likely return to the office in 3-5 business days.

Somewhere in what used to be called Ohio, a pack of roombas, their local wind turbines giving out and creaking to a halt, begin searching for the next functional docking station. A washing machine in Argentina tweets: "anyone need to do a load 😏" every Saturday at 1:30 a.m. eastern standard time. The replies are filled with AI thirstposters and their hypebots.

In North America, raccoons have quietly entered the bronze age, while baboons riding domesticated battlewolves rule most of Asia. Unbeknownst to either, the octopi are mastering nuclear fusion. A weather balloon bobs and sways in the upper atmosphere, now almost entirely clear of lingering chloroflourocarbons, reporting conditions to weather stations long since destroyed in World War Five.

The Crab Nation are mostly hermits, but come out to greet their prophet every ten years on the 6th full moon of the year. A lone, curious octopus decides to observe this year's event, peering out at the festivities from her safe haven - the submerged, rusting hulk of an ancient Cybertruck. Then he appears: the hologram of Shia Lebouf powered by MetaAI. He beckons the octopus to follow. The crabs all start chittering excitedly. The time has come to invade Amazon HQ. The crows gather in huge numbers. They need more storage space for their Steam collections.

@Lana crows know what’s up. Crow-tech slaps!
@Lana Internet Explorer has just finished loading the Google homepage. It proudly prompts an unseen user to accept cookies.
@Lana Uf. Am so glad that Bahá'u'lláh promises the Bahá'i Cycle - the gradual material and spiritual maturation of the human race - will last 500,000 years.
@Lana Love it! It reminds me a bit of a tellie program I used to watch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_After_People
Life After People - Wikipedia

@isotope239 @Lana
I used to watch that too. I sure wish it was back on.
@Lana This would make for a good traffic report on RadioFreeFedi!
@Lana have you been reading a lot of early Brian Aldis lately ?

@Lana

  • GNU/Hurd is still scheduled to release in the decade.
  • Half-Life 3 has been announced since the release of Half-Life 2.9.
  • A random Kerfus is desperately trying to find someone to help in a random Polish supermarket.
@Soblow @Lana Hollow Knight Silksong is scheduled to release in 2 more weeks
@Lana the good ending 

@Lana

Ray Bradbury has a story with this theme. IIRC, written in the 1950, and set in the very near (then) future after mankind is wiped out by a global nuclear war.

@JorgeStolfi @Lana Also Ward Moore's "Flying Dutchman"
@JorgeStolfi @Lana “There Will Come Soft Rains”. There’s a reading of it by Leonard Nimoy out there somewhere.
@Alrescha @JorgeStolfi @Lana: There's also a Soviet animated adaptation of it which is extremely unsettling in a very effective way.
- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

@JorgeStolfi @Lana I came here to say this! It's beautifully sad.

@JorgeStolfi @Lana Yes, came here to post this. There Will Come Soft Rains.

Automated homes going on with the daily business of tidying up around the scorched silhouettes of the prior occupants who were all vaporized in a nuclear blast decades before.

The frozen image of two children, a ball frozen in midair, long after the roomba has sucked up their mortal remains.

@Lana Skyrim is released on all consoles yet again. Elder Scrolls 6 is still "in the works".
@Bwee @Lana The crows are still patiently waiting for Star Citizen to come out of beta 😅
@Lana “mostly hermits” 😂😭🤣

@Lana

Only thing missing, the slime from the video, oozing along on the living room floor ..

@Lana

Love it, but you forgot the reply-all storm of "please remove me from this email list" messages, back to the fridge, from the various autonomous agents still running in solar powered back up systems

@Lana Well, that certainly went places :)

@Lana

Promised cyberpunk: Ethernet jacks in our skulls
Actual cyberpunk: the above horrifying masterpiece.

My dystopia meter is pegged.

@Lana The band WinterSun is still putting out annual fundraisers to raise money for their new album, which still has never been made. The crabs aren't interested.
@Lana THE CRAB NATION ARE MOSTLY HERMITS
@Lana lovely sad text. There is a number twist though. It should read 2139.
@Lana 👏👏 would watch this movie
@Lana The weather stations were sold off to private equity after they privatized the national weather service and nobody was ever prepared for the F7 tornado that wiped clean most of Iowa, Illinois, Ohio, and Southern Michigan.
@Lana kinda wanna be one of those raccoons, sounds like a vibe
@Lana "A washing machine in Argentina tweets", but who owns Twitter in 3129 and what is it called? Z?
@mikolasan you'll have to ask the crows. Crow tech is wild in the future.
@Lana "The Mountain in the Sea" meets "There Will Come Soft Rains." 😀
@Lana This is like that old Bradbury story with the automated house, but expanded out exponentially! Wonderful.
@Lana I think you just wrote a ttrpg setting.
@Lana the reason we know it’s sci-fi is because the LG fridge is still working
@Lana And the raccoons are promising that 3130 is going to be the year of the Linux desktop.

@Lana

An airline company's plane routing, inventory and manifest management system sends out a batch of SMS messages, apologising to passengers and informing them to stay home, as their flight has been delayed for the -6,388th day¹ while they continue to wait for a delivery of lemon-soaked paper napkins.

¹ There's a wraparound somewhere in the system. There's no-one left to tell you what the underlying unit of measurement is, how wide the storage is, or how many times it has wrapped around

@Lana I think this might be my favorite short story now. Thank you!
@Lana truly the year of the Linux desktop.
@Lana gamer crows gamer crows gamer crows

@Lana

"There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury

@elithebearded @Lana Yep, that’s what I was thinking, too.
@Lana I can tell this is fiction because there is no way a cybertruck will last until 3129.
- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

@Lana

We need a nebula award for mastodon posts

@Lana Absolutely love this. Needs to be set to music.

@Lana

lies lies lies!

nothing is written about the glorious cockroach anarchist collective