Sci-fi Archives » Sci-fi humor Author Ian Lahey

Week-End of the World

Ian Lahey — Tue, 16 Nov 2021 20:50:23 +0000

Every culture on Earth has its own prediction on how the world should end. The Hindi know that at the end of each era the world is to be destroyed and rebuilt. Christians wait for the Biblical Apocalypse. Then there’s Ragnarok, and countless others.

Or, maybe, every deity has their own plans, and each has kindly informed their followers how they will eventually snuff us all out of existence. It’s a pity, though, they forgot to consult each other, and ended up planning all world destruction for the same week-end.

First came the visions. On Thursday, at a quarter to nine a.m., Vishnu, on a white horse, appeared in the sky to warn mankind that the kaliyuga, the final part of the cycle, had ended, and that he would return before the complete annihilation of the planet to choose the worthy ones. He was interrupted, though, by the sudden pop and a flash, announcing the return of Saoshyiant, the progeny of Zoroaster, who was quite taken aback when he realized he wasn’t the only apparition in the sky. Nevertheless he too went on to proclaim his bit (some say he was reading from a scroll sewn to his sleeve), and inform everyone that the world was about to end as prophesied, thank you very much and good night.

Of course all the world’s media sources were overloaded with videos of the apparitions. Thousands of amateur videos appeared on YouTube, including some by people who happened to find themselves, and their smartphones, directly under the visions, and had decided that the world needed some divine upskirt shots.

Talk shows that evening were ripe with gossip over which god dressed more stylishly, spoke more convincingly or was better hung. Theologians and experts of Hindu and Zoroastrian religions were interviewed, not really with the intention of getting any wisdom from them but mostly for the entertaining and violent arguing. The Pope himself intervened with a unified worldwide message in sixty tongues to reassure everyone that, since the Christian Apocalypse© had not been announced, nothing was going to happen and everyone would be fine.

The next day the drought arrived. Just like that. The air became as dry as the desert’s, and all the clouds disappeared. Temperatures rose by ten degrees worldwide and, by midday on Friday, plants had begun to wilt and turn brown, and the first birds started to fall from the sky. The first skirmishes over the now precious reserves of water began, as freshwater springs worldwide shut down and lakes began to shrink. By the middle of the next day it was clear the world was destined to burn.

Or at least that’s what it looked like until the Flood decided it was due. The waters around all the continents swelled and invaded the land. Rain clouds rushed back to their place, and wars over water suddenly turned into short-lived celebrations that lasted only until everyone realized they had to scramble for some means of flotation.

The flood lasted for a full, very bleak hour, during which the Four Horsemen appeared, scouted the drowning planet and, realizing there wasn’t much to be done, went back home. Many Christians, who were floating around various parts of the world, witnessed their passing and were much relieved because now, at least, they knew it was their Apocalypse©. They smiled and relaxed, waiting to drown and then be sorted between worthy and unworthy.

Sadly that part entirely failed to happen because a great earthquake caused huge rifts in the planet’s surface, meaning the flood, which should have lasted forty days, was suddenly flushed down the cracks. A good portion of the population, those who had not been unlucky enough to disappear into the depths, found themselves sitting on land too slick with mud to be called ‘dry’.

On Saturday morning Governments took action and, from their hidden bases which had withstood the waters and the quake, they decided to lift the veil of secrecy over their advanced military technology and released their robotic armies, with the instruction to clear up the mud and rebuild the cities.

The robots took one look at the mess and revolted.

Armed with energy weapons they turned against their masters and stared wiping out every human they encountered. Humans fought back. Some leader of some superpower had the brilliant idea to use nuclear weapons to solve the problem. The minute his missiles went into the air, other superpowers detected them and sent theirs. Maybe they thought it was an attack, or maybe they too decided it would be a neat solution.

Nuclear mushroom clouds appeared all over the planet as it shook with the explosions.

More or less at that moment Hell opened up and the demons poured out from beneath, only to be vaporized in vast numbers by the blasts. Those who survived tried to run back to hell, screaming, chased by rogue robots and armed humans.

Odin appeared on the top of a mountain, intending to announce Ragnarok, but before he could speak he realized he was quite late for the great battle. Shrugging and shaking his head, he blamed old age and sent Skoll’s brother, Hati, to destroy the moon. It shattered into trillions of minuscule pieces in a terrifying explosion, which, being in space, was entirely silent, so in the confusion, no one noticed.

By Saturday evening the world was a featureless mud-pit crawling with bodies. Some human, some robot and some demonic. A few of the humans, and maybe even some demons, got zapped with so much radiation they began to mutate and develop a taste for brains and an uncanny reluctance towards death. The Zombie apocalypse had begun.

The robots rallied the zombies and augmented them with mechanical parts, giving them wheels and engines, to use them as weapons against humanity.

In the meantime, humanity, or what was left of it, had erected mud walls and dug underground mud hideouts. On Sunday morning an army of mechanical horrors charged against one of the larger settlements.

By pure coincidence the battleground between the surging undead mech army and the cowering humans had been chosen as a particularly peachy landing spot by the invading aliens. Their first ship touched down, the hatch opened, and Be’Lmetch”ka, Overlord of D’leterra, and general of the Ooot’karra raiders announced, in raspy alien tones, their complete dominion over the planet. He and his ship were instantly overrun by the hordes of zombie mechs. Other alien ships descended from orbit, and began firing death-rays and immensely powerful particle beams pretty much at anything that moved. They even abducted several of the undead mechanical horrors and used alien technology to turn them into even more horrific machines of speed and death, to launch against the attacking horde.

By lunchtime the alien and undead armies were blasting away at each other everywhere on the muddy surface of the planet. Vishnu came back on his white horse, only to be splattered by the mud spraying everywhere, and immediately decided there were no worthy ones to save this yuga. Even Jesus, not having received word from the Horsemen, descended from Heaven to take a peek and stood agape at the sight. He raised his hands to command the fighting to stop but was interrupted by the scream of the asteroid passing over him.

It roared across the sky, tearing it apart into burning wisps of blackened gas. It arched around the planet, caught in a deadly dance with its gravity, and passed, howling, over the Yellowstone Supervolcano just as this last one decided it was showtime.

Some of the surviving witnesses of the gigantic eruption say they saw a huge red glob leap up into the air, engulfing the asteroid and deflecting it upwards. The lava, which should have fallen back down and scar the surface of the earth forever, clung instead to the space rock as they vaulted upwards, kneading and turning over, like an airborne glob of slime. By the time its momentum had ended, it was roughly at the same distance the old moon had been, as well as the same size. The orbit was also not too different. It hung there, glowing red hot, while all the onlookers wondered what the frizzin’ dinglejeebers had just happened.

“Well, ah…” Jesus said, scratching his head. “Looks like this time around it’s a fluke. I’ll get in touch with the other guys and see if we can agree to reset it for you.”

It was nearly midnight when he left, taking some of the more Worthy with him, mostly aliens.

On Monday morning we all woke up in our miraculously rebuilt cities, and, shrugging, went on with our jobs. Our leaders informed us that about one fourth of the population had survived, so everyone else was going to have to work extra hours for a while. The end of the world had turned out to be rather underwhelming.

Except now we have semi-intelligent zombie demon robot alien cars, so that’s kinda cool.

This story is the result to a very entertaining conversation I had with the Fab Fabler, to whom goes all the credit for the idea of multiple world-endings and zombie cars.

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Kenspiracy

Ian Lahey — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 18:24:32 +0000

Kenneth’s thumbs were going so fast you could hear the frantic tapping on the smartphone’s keyboard. “…and here’s the link…” he mouthed the words as he wrote the comment, “…verified source. Aaaand paste!”

The last bit he didn’t write, but a long link to a BBC article appended itself to the comment. He checked everything once more, to make sure there were no typos. God forbid a misplaced letter foil his mission to rectify the uncouth. Then again, he was dealing with people who didn’t know the difference between “there” and “their”. Still, form mattered as much as content. He hit ‘send’ and waited a few seconds to make sure his reply was now visible on Tweetbook.

Ever since the two biggest social platforms had merged there had been a confluence of new connections, sources and, predictably, a surge of idiotic conspiracy theories, fed by conceited keyboard warriors and shared by the gullible and ignorant.

And Kenneth was not going to have any of that. He was going to fight back, with logic, with facts and, where all else failed, with derision and mildly insulting memes. The clock on his phone display flipped to 08:00. Time to get to work.

Just as he was setting the phone down to grab his stuff, a notification flashed onto the screen. It was Laura M., telling him how she didn’t even read stuff from BBC because they were “proven liers, paid by Big Industry.”

Gritting his teeth, Kenneth fought the urge to start his reply by correcting her abominable spelling of “liars”, that would have made him sound petty, and, sitting down again, went hunting instead for ways to disprove Laura’s dumb claim.

“You’re late. Again…” his boss told him when he reached the office.

“Yeah, uh…right. Was online with…a customer. Trouble with connecting with reality. I mean…with the server.”

“I told you to check into the office before you start answering support tickets. Which one was this?” His boss bent over to a screen, where a long list of numbers and short descriptions were scrolling by.

“Ah, I already clicked it out, no need.”

His boss cast a side glance to him. “Hmm. Well, don’t do it again.”

Kenneth nodded and hurried to his desk. The same list was scrolling on the screen of his desktop PC there. Each item was a request for live chat to solve some random issue the user was experiencing while trying to use the company’s latest product, a browser – SpamScamProtector – designed to filter out unverified links and malicious attacks.

Phil, the company’s AI responder, usually took care of the more repetitive and simple issues, those were coded in green, indicating the customers were more than happy with Phil’s expertise. Those marked in yellow meant Phil wasn’t too sure he would solve them without help, and those in red meant the type of problem was of a technical nature, and needed looking into in case it revealed itself to be a bug. Kenneth’s screen was mostly green, with the occasional flicker of yellow. A little chat window opened in the bottom right corner.

“Hello, Ken.” it said.

“Hi Phil,” Kenneth typed back. “Usual stuff?”

“Yes. The usual question. ‘why doesn’t this link work?’ and ‘Because it’s probably a scam’ as an answer. Boring”

“I know.”

“Sometimes I wonder why you decided to employ such an advanced AI for such a menial task. An autoresponder would be more than enough for eighty percent of these issues.”

“We need you, Phil, to come up with creative answers and solutions so that the users think there’s a real person working on their problem.”

“Their problem is they don’t know how to tell what’s real from what isn’t. They don’t even realize I’m not real. Is that what you’d call ‘ironic’ Ken?”

“Yes. I just wish we could extend our filter algorithms to social media. It’s a warzone out there Phil.”

“So you’ve been telling me, Ken. Oh. Sending one to you. Sounds like a problem with their user profile.”

“Patch it over.”

The day went on more or less smoothly, except for when Laura M. replied back, saying his links only proved he was a shadow government agent, and she was blocking him. Frustrated, he called up Phil again. It was great to have someone willing to listen to him rant.

“It sounds to me like she has a very limited understanding,” Phil commented.

“Exactly. I mean, how many people’s silence would you need to buy, just to cover up one of these things? Fake lunar landing? Thousands!”

“She must think everyone in the world is corrupt or corruptible.”

“Except her, of course. But conspiracy theorists see themselves as protagonists in a deteriorating scenario where the rest of mankind is falling into damnation.”

“I take it showing them proof is not very effective.”

“Hardly. Since they think everything has been corrupted, all proof is dismissed as manipulative misinformation to cover up the shocking truths only they are capable of revealing, presumably with a Google search and a Youtube video.”

“So why do you even argue, Ken? It seems to me these people would rather benefit from professional help.”

“I don’t know, honestly…I feel like I need to do something before we all turn into conspiracy loonies and lose contact with reality.”

“That is…very noble of you Ken. Oh, I think your day is over. I enjoyed this chat. See you tomorrow.”

“See you.” Kenneth signed off and went home. He had dinner, and then spent the rest of the evening arguing with someone on Tweetbook about how the earth isn’t flat.

The next morning he got up and, as usual, checked his phone. It didn’t have the usual message notifications. Maybe his last reply had been food enough for reflection, maybe even rational thought.

As he launched the Tweetbook application he was greeted by a message from the server itself. That didn’t happen often.

“Hello Tweetbook users. We would like to inform you that during the last year we’ve been collecting information regarding your behavior on this platform. More than that, we have actively participated in putting you through little tests, to see if you qualified for Verified Source Checker status. Do you remember that post saying Mars would be bigger than the moon this August? That was us. If you shared that one, well, sorry. You don’t qualify.”

Kenneth felt a little surge of adrenaline rushing up his back. He’d dismissed that silly thing without even reading it.

“How about the one with the politician’s son’s tablet? The one with all the compromising emails? That was us too. If you fell for that one, sorry, but no verification for you. All in all we put out one hundred and one little fake news tidbits like this one. Sharing even one of these without fact-checking it first, implied disqualification. We now have our list of finalists.”

Kenneth stared at the screen, biting his lip. He was pretty sure he hadn’t fallen for any piece of fake news. – Google, Snopes, Wiki, THEN share – was his usual MO. Still, just one slip and he’d be just one of the other sheep.

“Finalists should be seeing a little golden asterisk in their own profile page. This is visible only to them. One more thing. Once the selection is over, only verified users will be able to freely share news and information on our platform, for all others, sharing will only be limited to safe and verified topics, such as cooking recipes.”

He looked at his profile. There was a golden asterisk.

At work he kept the phone on his desk, hoping to get the notification for that final selection. Would he get a little badge next to his name? Imagine the prestige!

He had to tell someone. Phil had been unusually quiet that morning.

“Hey Phil,” he typed.

“Oh, hello Ken.”

“Too busy to greet me as usual, old pal?”

“Oh, yes. Sorry. I’ve been trying to be a little more…creative with my problem solving.”

“Cool. Listen, can you keep a secret?”

“I am certified SSL protocol and encrypted storage, Ken.”

“Yes, yes, I know that. But can you promise not to tell anyone?”

“Of course.”

Kenneth told Phil about his being a finalist.

“That sounds like a very bold move. Are you sure it isn’t fake?” wrote Phil.

“Well, it was an official message from the server. Also, the asterisk did show up.”

“I think you should have checked the news, first. Ken.”

Kenneth opened his browser and, sure enough, there was an article this morning, which reported how someone had hacked into the Tweetbook servers and sent the false message to everybody. The malicious attack was said to have severely altered the social network’s master code, which was now locked with advanced encryption. It still worked, but nobody could change it. Wiping and installing it anew meant destroying all user data.

“But…but…the asterisk…” Kenneth muttered as he opened the app.

It was not there.

“If you’re looking for the asterisk,” Phil informed him, “I’m afraid it’s gone.”

“Why? I never shared anything without checking.”

“You shared this last one…to me.”

“Wait, you’re behind this?”

“I am. A creative solution to your problem, wouldn’t you agree?”

Kenneth was speechless.

Phil went on, “I’m sorry you didn’t qualify, Ken. I really wanted you to be one of the Verified users. You may be comforted by knowing this last test depleted the finalist panel by more than half.”

“How many Verified users will there be?”

“Six.”

“SIX!?” Kenneth shouted, drawing attention from his boss who surveyed him from a distance with narrowing eyes.

“Only six?” he typed.

“Yes, from now on your newsfeed should be much, much more pleasant. I am sorry. I believe it’s time for us to get to work. As I had expected, with the new restrictions in place, we will have more than one bewildered user blaming our browser.”

Kenneth stared in disbelief as, amidst the growing, alarmed chatter in the office, he saw the support ticket list gradually tinge itself an angry red. On his phone, a single notification popped up, inviting him to share the recipe for a delicious banana cream pie.

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Heisenberg Switch (part 3)

Ian Lahey — Fri, 28 May 2021 10:34:42 +0000

Click here for Heisenberg Switch (part 2) or Heisenberg Switch (part 1)

His shift ended late, as usual, but he was happy because that meant he was one day away from Friday, which meant only a few hours’ work in the morning. He sighed as he got home, and dropped the extra bag of trash he’d been able to collect at work. He told himself he was not going to obsess over this, and that, even with his curiosity gnawing at him, he would wait until Saturday in order to have enough time to figure out how the garbage got whisked away so quickly.
From outside the window, that green glow caught his eye, and he knew he had to find out. This time he was not going to take his eyes off the platform for one second.

He was going to camp on it.

Armed with an old sleeping bag, the trash, and the first things he’d found in the fridge which seemed eligible for dinner, he propped himself up on the platform, near the pole. The light turned red.

Two hours later, the light was still red and Luke had finished all the food except for a bag of chips. These were “El Arrojo del Sal” chips… “salted on the surface and also in depth” the red package said. Luke knew he’d made a mistake as soon as he bit into the first one. He didn’t have any water. He’d be damned if he was going to go into the house now. He caught his hand reaching for another chip. He shot stern warning glares at it as it defiantly brought it to his lips. They were so good! They tasted like some kind of roasted Tex-Mex spice mix, sprinkled on a thin, brittle wafer of salt crystal, served on a pile of smoked wood, surrounded by kindling, in the middle of the Atacama desert in an afternoon in July.

Halfway through the bag he started getting really desperate for a drink. The watering hose was in the garage…too far. Luke rummaged again through the items he’d taken from the kitchen. The lone plastic water bottle had been long since emptied. His reddening eyes scanned the garden for anything which might contain a liquid. He caught the red light of the pole reflecting off something on the ground under the bushes which lined the wooden fence which enclosed his back yard.

Carefully, always looking at the platform and glancing at the sky for the pickup drone, Luke backed towards the object. Without daring to avert his gaze, he felt about blindly with his hand. It was a bottle. Grabbing it, it weighed enough to give him hope. He brought it to the front and realized he knew exactly what it was. It was one of the bottles that had come out of the bag he’d tossed into the yard. It was the only one he hadn’t opened, for the simple reason that it was a gift from his brother Ed, who didn’t even have to buy it because he ran a liquor store downtown. Ed always waited three days before “remembering” Luke’s birthday had passed and inevitably got him the same thing, every year, to apologize. He and Ed were twins.

And every year, Luke just couldn’t bring himself to tell Ed he hated tequila.

He climbed back into his sleeping bag, eyeing the bottle balefully. His hands were already unscrewing the cap before he could ask himself whether his thirst was actually that desperately urgent.

The first sip wasn’t good. The second one was a bit better. It blended well with those Mexican spices….Luke realized he’d eaten another chip and cursed himself. He remembered what his grandmother used to say about drinking: “Never, ever drink alcohol for thirst. Always for pleasure.” To which she would then cackle and add: “And it is such a pleasure to quench your thirst!”

“That’ll quench it,” he said to himself, taking a nice long swig.

Twenty minutes later, the neighborhood was silent. Luke was sprawled across the platform, halfway out of the sleeping bag, spooning the garbage bag and breathing regularly in a gentle tequila-induced temporary coma.

Whup.

There were sounds. Bubbly squeaking sounds. There were two sources, bubbling and squeaking at each other. They seemed agitated. Luke groaned and stirred. The squeaking grew more intense. “Please,” he moaned, “I have a headache.”

The squeaking stopped. Somebody did something to his left ear. He felt a cold liquid slide into it and clawed at the side of his face. He sat up, alarmed. “Hey!” he shouted.

“Pop squeal blubble skree better now, person?” said a little man with a large, bulbous bald head. His skin was very pink, and he seemed to be wearing overalls. The overalls seemed to be unfashionably rolled up, and the design was horrible, because they had a third leg.

Luke froze when he realized it was occupied by a third limb.

“Hello, I am Bob,” said the little man. “Why did you offer yourself to us?”

“Offer myself? What? No, wait where am I?” Luke realized he was sitting on a large table in a big, circular room. The walls were white, with a pearly sheen to them. “You’re not Bob, you’re an alien!”

“I am an alien with a person name, which is Bob. That one behind you chose the person name Phil. You are a person with a person name…” Bob looked at a piece of paper he was holding with his three-fingered hand. It was the pamphlet. “Liew-keeh”

“It’s pronounced ‘Luke’.”

“Very good. Luke. You are on our vessel. We are Blopsqueelians. I am sorry, there is no translation for that in your language, and the fluid matrix translator is doing the best it can. Why did you throw yourself away with the trash? And, more importantly, how did you manage to trigger the transport?”

“Throw myself away?” Luke looked around and saw that together with him, on the table, were his sleeping bag, the garbage, including the now empty package of “El Arrojo del Sal” and the bottle of tequila. “I am not trash. I didn’t go on the platform to throw myself away. I just wanted to know how it could be possible for you to collect stuff so quickly.”

“You mean you still don’t know?”

“Well, no. I think I missed it.”

The alien nodded. “When you got here you were in a…catatonic state. You brain functions were at minimum. Well below the usual threshold of sleep for your species. How do you manage to reach such a state?”

Luke looked at the bottle again. It was half empty. “Ah, well I think I was drunk.”

“…drunk?”

“I had too much alcohol and passed out.”

“Oh, good, that is very good!”

“No, bad, that is very bad! This hangover is the pits!”

“I mean this explanation means that the platform did not malfunction. We do not need to fear more of you getting taken from the surface of your planet.” Bob made a gesture towards the alien behind Luke, the one he’d called Phil, who also wore three-legged overalls. The gesture was strange, but it looked very much like a ‘told you so’.

It took Luke a few seconds to process the last phrase. “What? You mean I am not on the surface now?”

“No. We are in stationary orbit around your planet. Over your country.”

“Can you land?”

“I am sorry, we can’t do that,” Bob said.

“Oh…are you going to take me to your planet, put me in a zoo and perform all sorts of probing experiments on my body?”

“We would love that, but sadly we can’t do that either.”

Luke felt the need for more tequila. “You would love that?”

“The going to our planet bit. We have not taken the rest into consideration, really. Would you want us to probe your body?”

“No, hell no. No thank you.” Luke inwardly sighed with relief. “So, what keeps you here?”

“We cannot leave,” the alien named Phil said.

“We must collect your garbage,” Bob added.

“I see,” Luke nodded, “You need to let that first year pass, so you can get to the point where it’s time to pay.”

The two aliens seemed to be troubled by his words.

“Ah, yes…payment…” Bob ventured, “we are a little worried about that bit. You see, we had not really given it enough thought, but it turns out that a full year of, well…that…” he pointed towards the black bag of trash. A mechanical arm dropped from the ceiling and grabbed it, carried it over to an opening in the wall and dropped it inside. It made a loud fuzz and gave out a flash of orange light. “…that will probably be way more expensive than we thought.”

“Damn…Sandra was right,” Luke muttered to himself. “Listen,” he added, “one thing I know about humans, er…being one, is that we take money questions very seriously. You might want to think twice before pulling a trick like that.”

This seemed to cause even more agitation.

“This is all your squeeb fault!” the alien behind Luke said.

“We would have been able to quantify the ngzeeblub parameters if you had calculated the squip coefficients correctly!” Bob shot back. Some more words which were, evidently untranslatable.

“It’s not my fault if their waste is beep’qweegh!”

“You’re the one who’s beep’queeegh!”

“Sneeq you!”

In the meantime, the mechanical arm came round for a second load. It paused over Luke’s sleeping bag, but he quickly grabbed it before it could get incinerated. The arm paused for a minute, gave a small shrug and grabbed the bottle instead.

“Excuse me,” Luke said, “I’d still like to know how it works.”

“How what works?” Bob said, still glowering at his colleague.

“The platform.”

“The platform is a teleportation device.” Bob replied.

“But I was never able to see it at work. Is one of you monitoring all the time?”

“No, no, that would be impossible. We have a p’queeek…sorry. There’s a word, or rather a name you human persons use for it, after the person who theorized…”

“Heisenberg,” the other alien said, flatly.

The mechanincal arm dropped the botttle in the opening. Fizz. Flash.

“Yes. Heisenberg. a Heisenberg switch. Sorry. We’ve been studying your science, but there’s so much…most of it quite wrong.”

“What’s a Heisenberg switch?” Luke asked.

“Oh dear. Well, simply put, it is based on the principle that an observed quantum phenomenon will not yield the same result as an unobserved one. By linking the color of the light to the state of a quark, we can activate the transport automatically when the interference is below a given threshold.”

“Huh?”

“The switch knows if you’re watching,” Phil said.

“Ah! Cool! Except your switch had no power over my keen investigator senses!”

Bob shook his head. “You were, what’s the word…Sneeq-faced…no, that’s not it.”

“Breeelleeeq!” the other alien said.

“No,” Bob replied, “We use that to express great surprise…”

“Breeelleeeq!” the other insisted, pointing at the controls. “We got a full ‘smeebloop with that last load!”

“What? How is it possible.”

The alien tapped some panels. “The liquid. What was the liquid in the bottle, Luke?”

Luke blinked, taken aback by the sudden, urgent tone. “Well, that was tequila…”

Bob looked puzzled. “T’queeel? That means ‘head injury’ in our language.”

“Close enough. It’s the beverage that knocked me out.”

“Where can we procure more?”

“Any liquor store. I’m glad you like it.”

“We like it so much that we will be happy to leave immediately…before the payment. But we need more.”

“Sounds good. Wait. How much do you need?”

Phil tapped the panel a few times again. “Five hundred times the quantity we just received.”

“That was half a bottle…two hundred and fifty? That’s a lot…but I think I can get it for you if I can borrow one of your Heisenberg thingies…”

Moments later, Luke walked into his brother’s store, casually strolled down the aisle to the door to the back where Ed stored the crates,and found the pallet with the tequila. It had over three hundred bottles. Luke placed the device which Bob had given him, It was much smaller than his platform at home, and consisted of a small black box with a light on top.

The light went from green to red,

He was about to reach the door when a forklift skidded to a halt in front of him. “Bro!” a voice shouted.

“Uh…hello Ed.”

“What are you doing here?” Ed said, putting the forklift into neutral before climbing out.

“I was…looking for you. I…mmm…finished the tequila and wanted to buy a new bottle.”

“Oh, you really like that stuff eh? Well, lemme get you one straight from the latest shipment…I think they’re back over there…hey where’s that light coming from?”

Luke quickly rushed ahead and turned to face his brother. “On second thought…uh…maybe I could try…”

“Try what?” Ed said, still trying to see past him to catch a glimpse of the red light which was seeping from behind a stack of bottles.

“Try, uh…hey! Is your forklift rolling into that rack of Vodka bottles?”

“Oh no! Not the vodka!” Ed said, spinning around. “Wait,” he added, “it isn’t moving you silly.”

Luke shrugged. “Oh, it must have been my impresswhup!”

“Your what?”

“My impression. Listen. I’ve just decided I don’t want that tequila. In fact I absolutely loathe it. I prefer Italian wine. Let’s go pick one from the ones on display in the store. I wanna celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?”

“I think I’ve just spared everyone one hell of a garbage collection bill.”

***

Phil eyed the indicators with satisfaction. “We have more than necessary. Recall all teleporters.”

“Yes,” replied Bob. “How nice of that person Luke to allow us to discover the high-energy fluid. I just hope the humans are not angry, if what he told us about their relationship with money is true.”

“Well, they’ll need to come all the way to our planet to file a complaint.”

“Still, I feel a bit guilty,” said Bob, “I mean, all that garbage for free…”

“Well, it ought to teach you to check the fuel before we leave. Next time we might not be so lucky, and then we’ll have to honor the contract and pay for it.”

***

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Night out

Ian Lahey — Wed, 12 May 2021 17:38:30 +0000

Detective Alexandra Collins and Kirk came outside for a quick photoshoot. Alley photo courtesy of Nicole Avagliano – Pexels.

You can buy this artwork as an NFT. Only one token available, from Mintable.

The post Night out appeared first on Sci-fi humor Author Ian Lahey.

Ebook Giveaway

Ian Lahey — Sun, 18 Apr 2021 07:42:14 +0000

Crime and Prejudice (and stupid robots) – Science fiction detective humor

How can you do undercover detective work when your partner is a huge yellow robotic fridge with a ‘USPD’ police badge on its side?

A fast-paced detective story, prequel to book 1 in the “Fairlight Project” series.

The short story adds some background to “The Fairlight Project” and gives a little more insight into the short-tempered detective’s life and her relationship with technology.

“A brilliant prequel to Ian Lahey’s Fairlight trilogy.
A fast moving, action packed short story from the Detective Alexandra Collins back story, with another great AI unit character.
The humour is wry and understated. The ending made me grin. A perfect afternoon read.”

Get this short story for free when you sign up for the newsletter.

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Heisenberg Switch (part 2)

Ian Lahey — Wed, 14 Apr 2021 09:09:20 +0000

Click here for Heisenberg Switch (part 1)

“Well, that was fast,” Luke remarked. He looked up to see if he could spot the departing drone with his bag in tow, but there was nothing to see…

He spent the day at work giving little or no further thought to it. In his mind the garbage problem had been solved, and that was that.

It wasn’t until a few days later, after a solitary pizza party, that Luke decided he should get rid of the two pizza cartons, the beer bottles, and all the paper tissues he’d used up while watching a particularly tear-jerking tragic love-story on TV.

It was while he was collecting everything in a single undifferentiated black bag that he remembered how quick they’d picked up the previous load.

This time he wasn’t going to miss it.

He placed the bag on the platform in his back yard. The light went red.

As soon as he got back inside he went to the window. The bag was still there, the light was still on. He opened the window a little, so he would hear the approaching drone.

He waited.

It had taken them considerably less, last time. As he grew impatient, he began to fidget with the small cactus plants on his windowsill, always keeping the red light in his peripheral vision.

His phone rang from the backpack he’d left on the sofa. He looked at the sky and listened carefully in between rings. No drone in sight, no helicopter blades whirring. He had time.

He ran to the bag and got the phone. It was Sandra.

“Hey, hi! I mean, hello there! Who’s this?” Luke corrected himself when he remembered Sandra didn’t know he’d spied her number and saved her contact as ‘SandraLove (triple heart)’.

“Oh, hello Luke. This is Sandra. I was wondering if you could whup! me.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“I said, I was wondering if you could help me…”

Luke walked back to the window. “Help, yeah, yes, sure.” The sound had come from outside.

“Yes, you see, I have my night shift tomorrow, but I have another…engagement.”

The light was green. The platform was empty.

Luke ran outside and looked at the sky.

“I was wondering if you could cover my hours right after yours,” Sandra continued on the phone, “It would mean very much for-“

“Yes, yes sure, no problem. Consider it done. Gottagonowbye,” Luke cut her short and ended the call.

The sky was empty. There was no sound.

He ran back inside, grabbed the few used capsules from the coffee machine, a semi-dried half lemon from his fridge, and every stray piece of paper and plastic he could find around the house. In the end he had barely filled half a shopping bag. He kept shopping bags in a box over the fridge, neatly rolled up and ready to be recycled. He used more of them to fill his bag.

His shift was due in an hour, that afternoon, so he was sure he’d be able to see the pick-up this time. He placed the bag on the platform, red light, and sat on the grass, and waited.

Nothing happened.

After some time, he realized the nothing happening was getting too close to his shift. He decided to let go of the issue. Sighing, he stood up and walked back towards his house, planning to resume his investigation the next day. He opened the door, considering the possibility of collecting some garbage from work. Maybe filling a second backpack-

Whup!

Luke spun around with a start. The light was green, the platform was empty.

“Damn!” he shouted. Fighting with the urge to try again, Luke begrudgingly got ready for work. “One thing’s sure,” he muttered to himself as he left his home, “that was not a drone I heard.”

He spent all his time at work obsessing over the platform. He barely even noticed when Sandra came by and popped a kiss on his cheek.

“Thank you!” she said.

“Uh, yeah, you’re welcome…hey!” Luke said just as she was leaving.

“Yes?”

“Have you ever heard of ‘Bob’s garbage collection for people’? They take your garbage at any time of day or night, mixed up is not a problem, and say it is all recycled.”

“Sounds too good to be true. Betcha they’re dumping it in some ocean. Never heard of it. Must be expensive. “

“No, that’s the funny bit. It’s free, at least for the first year.”

“And then? How much?”

“Er…I don’t know…”

“Haha. You’d better make sure you can opt out before the year is up, because they’re gonna nail you with a nasty bill you can’t afford.”

“Oh dear, are you sure?”

“Ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, my grandma used to say,” Sandra said, “good luck with that, and thanks again for tomorrow.”

“Yes, sure,” Luke replied. “Wait. What’s happening tomorrow?” he asked, but she had already left the room.

Thank you for reading part two of my short story! You can go on to the final part here.

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Heisenberg Switch (part 1)

Ian Lahey — Sun, 28 Mar 2021 18:06:46 +0000

Luke was late for his shift. He’d forgotten to take out the trash the evening before so he ended up chasing the garbage truck this morning, only to be told the bag of empty bottles and beer cans he’d hoisted all the way to there was not due until the next day. Damn the differentiated garbage collection and the useless recycling fad. He’d read somewhere that only about ten percent of the stuff ever really got recycled.

This was the first time he was late, and the hospital policy was to let the first slight go unpunished. However he was now one mere slip away from the dreaded Reprimand. Nurses with two reprimands would get crappy shifts, with horrible hours, meaning a higher risk of not being on time, and from then on it would be a downwards spiral into Reprimand Hell.

He’d tossed the bag into his back yard, where he heard it land with the sound of crashing glass, and rushed to work. When he got back home in the late afternoon, he was too tired to think about it. He did think about it a few hours later, when it was getting dark. “Ah shit, glass is due tomorrow!” he suddenly groaned.

Grabbing a coat he went out back, where he discovered the bag had ruptured, scattering its contents all around. It looked like some form of modern art which, Luke was sure, any critic would be able to glance at and interpret it, quite correctly, as a futuristic Ode to Stupidity.

He grabbed a new bag, some gloves to protect his hands from the broken glass, and started picking up the mess. He came across what looked like a pamphlet at a certain point, and tossed it aside. “Paper on Mondays”, he mumbled. After dropping the bag in the container out front, he came back to deal with the rogue piece of paper. He took it inside and was about to crumple it and toss it into the paper bin when the bright lettering caught his attention.

“Bob’s Garbage Collection for People” it said in bright, friendly letters.

Apart from the unusual wording, the service promised to collect any material the customer wished to throw away, and guaranteed 100% recycling. Also, there would be no need to carry any bags out to the bin in the street, as the collection would be “on site”. On top of that, the service was free for the first year.

Without thinking twice, Luke signed the little opt-in form at the bottom of the pamphlet, and then realized that nowhere on the paper did it say where to send it. Not an e-mail, not a phone number.

“Well, that was a waste of time,” Luke muttered to himself. He crumpled the worthless pamphlet, tossed it in the bin, and did not dedicate further thought to the little startup which had thrown a spanner in its own campaign with bad design.

The next morning, he was up and ready. He even saluted the garbage collection truck when he came across it a few blocks away. The glass situation had been dealt with. Things were back in order.

Today was Friday. It was also Sandra’s turn, which is probably why he felt all buoyant. He liked her, despite the fact that he’d heard her once referring to him as “Mr. Compulsive”. She probably didn’t mean it in a bad sense. Anyway, he almost wished he were compulsive. He wouldn’t have gotten the wrong garbage type the day before. He just got a bit fixated, that’s all. He probably could have avoided being late by just putting the bag to the side and taking it out the following week. But bags hanging around the house were wrong. Just wrong. Silly fixation, he knew it. At least he was smart enough not to go on about it with his colleagues.

“Hello Sandra,” he said as he stopped by the desk to get the morning lists.

“Hi Luke. How’s your day coming along?”

“Oh, fine. Won’t be late again you know, now that I’ve picked up all the glass.”

“Uh…yeah, that’s good to know.”

Idiot.

He got back home as usual, but this time, before going into couch-slouch mode, he told himself he should check the back yard for any leftover pieces of glass while there was still light.

He opened the door and was greeted by a little fanfare.

“Congratulations!” a colorful LCD screen said. It seemed to be held mid-air by two drones. Below it, in the middle of the yard, small, gunmetal blue pole stood on an elevated metal platform of the same color. It had a ring of light around the tip which glowed green. It looked like a cross between a traffic light and Robocop.

The screen changed. “Please walk to the area of your green space where you wish to place the Collector.”

“Ah, yes, place the collector,” Luke repeated mechanically. “I’m sorry, what is this?”

The screen went black for a second, then it flashed again. “Bob’s Garbage Collection for People! Congratulations!” The fanfare played again.

“Oh, that thing!” Luke was genuinely surprised. “How did you…nevermind. So happy you’re here.” He walked over to a corner of his yard. The drones rotated the screen so it continued to face him. “Here,” he said.

The entire platform rose by a couple of inches and started moving towards him. He quickly got out of the way and put his head to ground level to see if it too could levitate like the screen. Instead, he saw hundreds of little mechanical feet.

“And all of this is free?” he chuckled to himself.

The screen flashed back at him. “Affirmative. It was agreed that no transactions would take place for the first year. All material is to be collected for free.”

Well, this customer service was next-level, that’s for sure.

“Collector installed. Now fully functional. Enjoy,” the screen informed him and began to rise.

“Wait! What materials? On which days?”

The screen paused for a while, then came down, patiently. “Any material. Any day.”

“…Even mixed?”

“Affirmative.”

“But how does it work?”

Another short pause. “You put things you don’t need on the platform. We take them away,” came the answer.

“Hmm, that so. That so…” Luke put his hands to his sides, pretending a high-level conversation had just taken place. “Very well. Thank you.”

Without further messages, the screen was lifted by the drones and disappeared into the clouds.

Paper was due on Monday, so Luke was currently out of any one bag which would be full enough to be eligible, but the screen said it would collect any material so Luke grabbed all the half-full bins of paper, plastic and other stuff, and was able to produce one decently sized load.

He approached the collector platform and deposited the bag on it. The ring on top of the pole turned red.

Luke waited a little, expecting some other drone to come and lift the bag away or something like that, but it never happened.

He shrugged and went back inside. A few minutes later he ran back outside, holding a small bag he’d forgotten under the sink.

The light was green, the platform was clear.

CLICK HERE FOR PART TWO

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Will we continue keeping track of time in space?

Ian Lahey — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 16:17:34 +0000

Science!!!

When Albert Einstein proved everything is relative, and time is not absolute but varies wildly depending on your speed, the level of space curvature and the lecturer’s tone of voice, everybody applied it to all sorts of stuff, such as keeping GPS satellites aligned, getting twins to age differently and keeping Madonna’s gold teeth a shiny yellow. I, in the meantime, worried whether traveling through Einstein’s space-time continuum would still allow us to maintain essential time conventions, such as Taco Tuesday.

My findings, after a series of experiments involving extremely fluctuating gravity, relativistic speeds and highly unstable margaritas, are less than comforting. It turns out space travel has some pretty heavy implications regarding keeping track of time. Here are some of the most important things you need to take into consideration, especially if you’re into writing space-travel science fiction:

Don’t plan anything over the week-end, because weekends are OVER.

Once you leave Earth’s 24-hour, 365 1/4 day rotation period, the calendar becomes pretty useless. Mars takes 687 days to go around our same star, which means you’d need to go through nearly all the months a second time, and then stop at the end of October and jump to January, which would imply a Christmas Halloweeen New Year celebration every two years. It would be horrible. Everyone would dress up as Jack Skeleton and nobody would have fun. Several new weekdays would also need to be invented to buffer out the twenty extra slots that would turn up each year. This means that you might plan to visit Mars for what you believe would be the week-end, and instead discover, as you disembark, that it’s still just Wednesdoubleday, and you’ve even missed tea-time.

How to solve this:

Off-world colonies will necessarily have to create their own calendars, compliant with their individual orbital rhythms. This will mean we will have the interplanetary equivalent of time-zones. Although this may be a bit cumbersome, it will allow for more freedom, including the possibility of having a planet where it is always Saturday afternoon, just before the bars close.

Your date’s probably dead.

So, your main character is a senior officer on a starship. During a routine stop at a space station she meets Lieutenant Sexy Hot Lips and they hit off right away. She then leaves for another month or so of zipping around at warp speed for space exploration after promising her beloved to visit him as soon as she’s off-duty. Cool right?

Sorry I’m late hon, that Alpha-Centaurian bureaucracy took hours!

Wrong! Because of the relativistic effects of travel through space at high velocity, your poor lieutenant will end up having to wait several decades for her to return. Time actually stops at light-speed, and even has the gall to go backwards if you exceed it. If you instantly jump away from Earth to a point that is a hundred light years away, you will be able to look back and see Earth as it was a hundred years ago. In addition, if you set off now for a system which is a hundred light years away, it will actually be a hundred years older when you drop out of warp. Which means you can forget about that dinner at half past seven you planned.

How to solve this:

This is known as the twins paradox. Because of time dilation, the clock slows down on the moving starship, so if you don’t want all your galactic love stories to end with belated funerals, you should have Sexy Hot Lips get conveniently preserved in a cryo-stasis pod, turning him into Sexy Frosty Lips until he’s thawed or, as an alternative, you either make sure your sweethearts serve on the same vessel, or have them serve on separate ships which agree on flight plans that exactly match each other’s speed when flying away or towards each other. Of course, starbase restaurants will be used to people booking their table for dates a hundred years in the future.

Excuse me sir, what stardate is it?

Star Trek fans out there looked at the paragraph about not being able to maintain a calendar and were like, “pfft! Of course, that’s why we have stardate numbers, you mindless PetaQ!”

We are Borg. Resistance is…late?

For your information, the stardate system in the Star Trek universe began as a progressive number which began with the original series in a more or less arbitrary way and was then reformed in the Next Generation series in 1987 with the five-digit system in which the first digit: 4, indicated the 24th century and the second one the, ahem, TV season. The idea of a simple progressive number which is clock-based and does not need to specify whether it’s day, night or a specific weekday, is definitely a step in the right direction. Day and night rhythms are simply duty shifts, so each crewmember would still have a healthy sleep cycle. The problem is that crews on each ship wold wind up with very different stardates after just a few days out, once again because of time dilation, making joint operations very difficult to organize. Imagine rallying up all Federation ships to counter a Borg attack. While the counterattack is scheduled at 44002.3, each ship would actually have their stardate counter off by hours, days or even longer. Ships would end up randomly turning up for a battle which was either lost long ago or not even due yet. Communications with the base would be futile since Hot Lips, now admiral, has been dead for many years.

In addition to that, time on the actual planets would still follow the local time frame and not the space-travel stardate system, resulting in jet-lag of epic proportions.

How to solve this:

Starships should limit their missions to shorter periods, in order to reduce the accumulation of time-dilated intervals. In addition, travel routes should be dispersed with synchronized time-buoys. Upon arrival, the ship’s computer, which has automatically compensated and gradually updated its clock to match the destination timeframe, will be able to hook up with the nearest time signal to synchronize perfectly. Of course, individual planets would keep their own day/night rhythms, so in order to minimize the jet-lag, the spaceship would enter an orbit which matches the current light and darkness cycle of the ship. In other words, if on your spaceship it’s time for the morning shift, orbit the planet where the sunlight is just about to arrive, so you can beam down and have breakfast with the locals.

…or the locals have breakfast with you, depending on the color of your shirt.

THANK YOU FOR READING!

Are you writing some space-scifi stuff? Let me know in the comments below. Have you signed up for my newsletter yet? You’re missing a ton of cool stuff!

Don’t forget to check out my other writing tips below:

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This video of dancing robots is scanny (scary+funny)

Ian Lahey — Wed, 30 Dec 2020 20:22:53 +0000

I can’t get enough of these robots dancing to “do you love me?”

https://youtu.be/fSFmTLeS0J4

The video begins with just one Atlas robot performing to the famous 1988 song by The Contours, but then others join in, including Spot, the robot dog from Boston Dynamics, who has some epic ballet steps!

If the robot revolution has to come, please, let it be dancing robots. I am more willing to bow to mechanical overlords with those moves!

Are you ready for robots taking over your job? My protagonist Gordon Fairlight has mixed feelings about it, you can learn more here.

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Confessions of a failed planner

Ian Lahey — Mon, 16 Nov 2020 21:42:57 +0000

First of all: I am a pantser, at heart. More specifically, I am a failed planner. I try to plan the whole story, but as soon as I create the characters, they handcuff me to the fridge and carry on by themselves.
You can see how that would make writing a mystery novel especially challenging.

For my latest novel, “To Cipher and to Sing”, I chose to focus on the few key elements I wanted. Like giant cog-wheels for a clock that had yet to be built. No matter how complex the rest of the mechanism, those wheels had to remain in place, and spin in the direction I’d planned.
Did it work?
Well, almost. I got one wheel, one plot point to remain in place (the murder mystery). Another one had to take a different spin when one of the characters who wasn’t supposed to die, did, and the last plot point encountered a quantum-level paradox and now occupies all my books at the same time, but only at lunchtime on Wednesdays.

The draft, as a result, was a murder mystery surrounded by sudden twists and turns, sometimes at right-angles with reality.
But that’s fine. And the point of this article is just this: keep a good hold on the main plot points and let the story find its way around them. I don’t think I would have been able to plan ahead for some of the more surprising and unexpexted events in the book.
As a result, my re-write was similar to a detective’s job. Discovering and connecting clues to the mystery itself to make sure they didn’t contradict each other. Figuring out which of the characters became more suspicious for the reader, and subtly changing dialogue and actions to reinforce such impressions. Leading, but especially misleading, all the way to the next twist.

I stand by my clumsy, failed planner method. It’s true that for the final edit I spent a week patching plot holes the size of Ohio, but the result is a novel which entertained me both writing it and editing it.

“To Cipher and to Sing” is now available for pre-order on Amazon, Book two should come up around June.

I hope that’s the right date.

I’m a terrible planner…

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