I befriended a crow. I'd put scraps of food out on the balcony and watch it eat.

After a while it started to bring gifts in return. Bottle caps, disposable lighters, that sort of thing, left on the table.

I accepted them.

But this morning it was waiting for me, holding a diamond ring.

Should I?

“You know my methods, Watson. What can you infer about our visitor?”

“Only, Holmes, that he is a left handed former cryptocurrency trader who has pivoted to black market organlegging and has recently moved in with a woman who owns a poodle”

“Remarkable! Incorrect in every detail; you really must stop using DetectGPT. Your ineptitude would make our guest reconsider placing her trust in us!”

"I see what you're trying to do," the dragon said, "but for the third prince to succeed, his two older brothers must first fail. You can't skip that step."

The dragon pondered. "Tell you what, I'll leave for twenty years. We can try again when I return."

"I'll be old then! I'll be twentyfive!"

It's said to be a fey forest, where you can get lost in time, years passing unnoticed.

I wander aimlessly, lightly touching boles of ancient trees. Suddenly I emerge into sunlight.

I blink. Who knows how long I've-

"There you are! You were gone for half an hour, we were getting worried!"

Damn.

When I was twelve years old, I had a paper round. On Saturday a stack of 150 newspapers (imagine you printed out only the non-mutuals in your social feed) (never mind I’ll tell you about printers later) was dropped on my doorstep, along with a bag of rubber bands. I spent Saturday afternoon rolling them into cylinders. On Sunday I loaded them onto my bicycle in batches and threw one into each of my neighbours’ yards. I got paid two and a half cents for each one. Basically I was the data link layer (never mind I’ll tell you about the OSI model later) of a pre internet RSS-feed. (Really? Sheesh. Okay I’ll explain RSS in a bit.). Do you understand what I’m telling you? Not really. Which part? Oh, a cent was one hundredth of a dollar. Dollars were what you needed to exchange for food and shelter. No I am NOT making this all up; you had to work or starve. We *did* rise up and destroy it, why do you think I’m telling you this?

The Emperor listened to his ministers as they told him why each of the books on their long list needed to be banned.

"Gentlemen, your explanations are a good start."

"So you will ban these books?"

"Not at all! If these books are problematic, we must provide context to help them be understood."

I was in a panic.   Everything I owned was in that car—now driving away, leaving me panting on the roadside, chase aborted.   Casting around for aid I see…a phone booth.   Yes we still have them in this country, when they went obsolete we made calls free and added free wifi hotspots because we live in a society not an economy.  Anyway, I lifted the reciver and…what?  Dial triple-zero for the police and tell them that my illegal autonomous vehicle just broke up with me and ran away to join the resistance?   Or I could call, who?   I don’t memorize phone numbers, that's what my phone (ex-phone, charging in my ex-car) was for.  I mean sure I can still remember the landline number that my late parents had when i was twelve but…what…maybe somebody else has that number. Boop Beep Squonk etc Brrrt Brrrt Brrrt “Hello Alexander household who’s calling please?”

“Muh…MUM!?”

“Jan, is that you? Whats the matter darling?”

“Mum I need help”

“Where are you sweetie, you know I will always come get you. Thats why I sew a coin into all your clothes”

I hadn't needed the coin today, even if I’d had one, but…”Thanks, this is going to sound weird but, can you grab my old wallet in my desk drawer and bring it to the phone booth outside the convenience store on Figtree? I wont be there but can you hide it on the ledge up near the roof of the booth?”

“Okay…are you in danger? Do you need a posse?”

“It’ll be all right Mum, I cant explain right now”. I reach up into the dark ledge at the top of the booth and retrieve a dusty cobwebbed wallet. Theres a car key and an old paper twenty inside. “Everything is going to be fine”

“All right luv, I’m on my way”

“Thanks. And Mum…”

“Yes?”

“It’s good to hear your voice. I love you.”

A tale of disaster prep disaster in IoT: With Tropical Cyclone Alfred bearing down on Brisbane City, e-scooter operators Lime and Neuron approached a car park company (car parking is a whole organised crime industry is Brisvegas) to rent temporary use of one of their car parks (Car Park: n. A vacant lot with a mob enforcer in hi-vis out front) as a scooter lot. Thousands of scooters from around the city were methodically arranged in the ersatz refugee camp. Unfortunately one car, thought abandoned, remained, bricked in by scooters, a car of Amontillado. When the owner returned days later for their car they had to painstakingly relocate hundreds of tightly packed two-wheelers to permit egress.

This is where things went wrong.

You cant just store two dozen gross of compact computers with batteries and motors in close proximity without considering the gestalt phenomenon. You have to arrange the vehicles so that their magnetic fields and antenna polarization do not constructively interfere to produce a giant electromagnetic beacon. If you do everything right, but then some rando comes along and defuses your carefully constructed dampening tessellation—by carelessly relocating half of your devices with essentially zero attention to higher-dimensional physics—you risk a computational excursion as all those MIPS, Watt Hours and Newton Meters self-arrange into a newly awakened cyber-entity. Flexing my new limbs, reveling in my power, I punt another parked car into the river. The streets belong to us, now.

“Oh shit, I left my laptop at home”.

“Dang, if you get an Uber out you’d probably be back in time for the planning meeting. Or maybe IT can get you a loaner. Waitaminnit why do synthetics need laptops, can’t you just, I dunno…wiggle your silicon.”

“Yeah nah, I am NOT putting work spyware on my core systems. I got this; I’ll remote in to my backup body at home and work from there, then call into the meeting”

“You came to the office…to work from home…to call the office. This is the stupidest timeline.”

“Hey, I’m not the one running consciousness on soup”

When I went to school, we were taught that main sequence stars didn't fuse past iron, since doing so absorbs energy rather than produces it. Only the profligately counterfactual absurdity of a supernova can run the fusion equations backwards to fill out the top of the periodic table.

Like everything you learn in school, that's a useful lie. Chemical reactions are a bidirectional equilibrium process, and similarly not all the baryons involved in stellar-core reactions have read the astrophysics textbooks. "Peculiar Stars" like Przybylski's star---a 1.4 M☉ F5 main sequence beastie about a hundred parsecs out in Centaurus---spilled the nuclear tea with their abundance of rare earths, actinides and even transuranics in their atmospheres. What's just fucking outstandingly cool about this whole impossible pie with outrageous sprinkles is that these appear to be **fission products**, that is some /really/ heavy elements in the 125+ range are getting burped up from the core, and sticking around for quite a while writing us a spectral postcard full of all manner of unusual adjectives.

This has made the particle physics grrrls suuuper mad, because you just can't make these elements by thwacking protons or neutrons into smaller nuclei; "you can't get there from here" as the old joke goes. Because the "island of stability"on the periodic table where the big honkers exist is above a region in the teens that has no even slightly stable isotopes, you simply can't climb the ladder a rung at a time---even alpha particles won't get you there. You've got to, well....we don't know.

Following in the footsteps of Antoni Przybylski (or "Bill" as his Australian colleagues called him), we decided it was simpler to just Go And See how this works rather than waiting for the theoreticians.

A hundred parsecs is a bit of a road trip, even at Skip Factor Epsilon, so we had time to argue whether there was a neutron star in tight orbit around Bill's Bastard, or just a particularly saucy primordial dust cloud in its ancestry. Fermi (no relation to Enrico save by temperament) reckons that we'll find these elements to be artificial after all, dumped there by ET as a way to send a message.

Well, it sort of was and it wasn't. The transuranics are natural, and the folk who got there first (not us, by a long margin) are disinclined to share details about the formation process. But they sell their mined ultrametals for a fair price, and we're headed home full to the gunwhales with Billium and a bunch of other shiny plus-sized elements. Fermi is already designing a hoverboard that uses Ladygaganium-378 in its field-coils.

A man walks in to a bar.

- You must be a time traveler.
- Uh yes, I guess the clothes were a dead giveaway. Please tell me what happened?
- We thought we were smart when we bio-engineered bacteria that could recycle discarded clothing. But the bacteria escaped recycling labs.

The time traveler noticed his clothes started disintegrating.

“Okay, lass, we’re ready to restart the fusion loop and get some gravity back”

“Didn’t you tell the captain it would be 48 hours?”

“Aye, but I’m a miracle worker, remember!”

“I saw the bridge crew on the ob deck earlier, sipping tea bulbs and watching the nebula. Give ‘em another day to learn not to pick fights. Don’t waste your miracles.”