SF STORY PREMISE:
SETI program decodes an alien signal clearly targeting us.
Hi! We see you're still facing the Great Filter! We want to help! Based on your anatomy per broadcasts we decoded, here is a blueprint for a device that will solve your problem!
Humans: decode blueprint.
It's for an improved guillotine.
Took me a sec - at first I thought it was "kys lmao" but I like that angle.
@cstross That's a good "microfic" as is already.
Makes me ponder wistfully ... the human written prompt for AI slop is, likely, far more interesting to read than the LLM generated AI slop output. I could see it as a legitimate microfic format.
@dearlove Ideally the spell does it deniably, eg. by giving them an aneurysm or an unfortunate fall from a Moscow apartment window or something not obviously magically-induced. At one per day, in one week we could get rid of Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and quite probably Vladimir Putin and a couple of other deplorables. I'd call that a job well done!
The snag is, what if the spell has no termination clause and keeps going. After a few years we run out of billionaires …
@cstross 😁
Ok, but, how do you improve a guillotine? You make it laser? But then you need electricity. You make it serial/self reloading victims? But then you'll miss the show. You make it self cleaning blood residue? It makes it less scary!
It's such a perfect, simple, efficient, terrorizing machine...
@lgsp @cstross You give the blade carriage bearings, you make the uprights actual rails and the blade carriage use the kind of multi-wheel interface a modern roller-coaster car does, and you use a pneumatic piston rather than relying on gravity.
If you're feeling merciful, you stop using a blade at all and use a linear electric motor or an explosive charge to crush the person-being-executed's entire head at above nerve propagation speeds. 250 m/s would be plenty.
@lgsp @cstross A guillotine relies upon sliding motion, whereas a rotating blade can provide much more efficient cutting.
Notice how we slice cold cuts with a circular spinning blade, not a sliding blade.
An improved guillotine could use a circular blade attached to an axle. The axle rolls down a ramp. This ramp has a slot for the blade, and this slot is aligned with the victim's neck.
@cstross Don't go there, murder is already so normalised and so attractive for its catharsis.
We absolutely must push for expropriation of excess wealth, and a just reckoning for hoarders who undermined society. But what happened to a progressive movement that was optimistic about humanity and against capital punishment?
I wish the Epstein Class long lives.
In prison.
And not one of those cushy, country club, white collar prisons.
"Takes us to your leader" does hit differently when the aliens show up with a guillotine.
<grinch's evil grin dot gif>
Me, to the aliens with the guillotine: "One sec, I need to look up the address to Mara Lago."
I read an SF story years ago where the decoded signal was an alien phishing scam.
This is a good short story and I am kinda tempted to do it as like a 4p comic.
@cstross Slightly reminds me of this story fron the 80s version of The Twilight Zone.
Why would you want to invade a planet?
(That's a serious question. If you're human-equivalent people with viable interstellar travel your tech is as far beyond ours as a Soyuz capsule is beyond a flint hand axe. You can *transport a fricken' commensal biosphere* good enough to support your kind of life. Why mess with ours, it's dangerous, untamed, and unexplored! (At the viral/bacterial level.)
@cstross @tiberiustribun There's also the Predator motive. They evolved to enjoy hunting and fighting, and so it's more fun to invade Earth than to simply exploit resources from defenseless asteroids or whatever.
As for tricking humans into killing themselves, that could be just for the lols. It's not much cost to send a signal, so any random sicko could send them.
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