I live in a small country town. We don't rate a university, the best we manage is an agricultural college. One of the ecology lecturers is an amateur astronomer though, and when a meteor landed near town, he was the first one there.

When he came back, he said it looked more like a big lump of space junk had come down - and he'd found what looked like one of the on-board experiments had survived the reentry and impact. He said it was frozen, so he took it to one of the freezer rooms at the college so it would stay safe.

It took a couple of days, but eventually some bigwigs from the national research organisation finally rocked up, and boy, was there a to-do! There was nothing in the freezer room. Literally nothing. It was as clean as the day it had been installed.

So he took them out to the impact site, and they boxed it all up and drove off.

A few days later people started noticing that the stray animals around town had vanished. A couple of days later, so had the scattering of homeless and vagrant folks. That's when the police started looking around. They really got serious when Mr Antony vanished. He was like a hundred and five, and had served on the other side in the second world war. He'd been a POW, but decided he liked it here more than his home, and stayed. He'd been really sick, with a stroke and cancer and all that, but he'd built a little farming empire, and was a big deal.

Then came the really scary stories - people vanishing from their houses. And then all the patients in our little hospital. One of the nurses said she saw what happened to the last one, and it was really horrible - something had come up out of the drain in the bathroom, engulfed the woman she'd been helping, and dragged her down into the drain like she was made of putty.

That's when the army moved in and started looking for whatever it was.

But I'd been watching and taking notes. Everyone who'd vanished had been sick. Really sick. Me? I was in perfect health, so I snuck down into the storm drains one night. And I found them. Every person, every animal that had vanished. All lined up, covered in a yellow-green goo. And this big blob of the goo nearby. It reached a tendril over, ran it over my hand, and withdrew.

As I watched, I saw the goo ooze away from one of the dogs that had gone missing. It shook itself, barked at me, and then bounded over and gave me a big lick. It looked like it was in perfect health. A week ago it was missing an ear, an eye, and a leg.

I looked at old Mr Antony - the side of his face that had hung loose after the stroke was normal again.

So now I have a problem. How do I stop the army finding this place or trying to make off with this alien healing goo? Or worse still, just torching everyone down here?

Instead of attending the protests, I used AI to write an AI-powered protest app. You might ask how that is helping, but my app uses the same power as 10,000 people whenever it runs and allows me to share my insights on LinkedIn so I think it's making a positive impact.

Been on the road six weeks, droving fifteen hundred head of triffid from Longreach to Bundaberg. Gonna treat myself to a bottle of OP rum when i get there. Not letting the triffid try it again, tho.

"This again?" the dragon said. "It's been just a few centuries since the last time.'

"Please," the knight said.

"I asked you to make sure you had a way of getting rid of bad kings yourself, before you made any new ones."

"We didn't understand we made a king."

"You are such fools. Very well."

“Impossible!” cried the mad king, disarmed and defeated. “I hold the power of the crown and nobody shall defeat me! So says the prophecy!”

“You misunderstand,” said the peasant. “You hoarded power, thinking yourself unstoppable. What you really had to do to keep your crown was listen to the people of the kingdom, but to you we are nothing. We are nobody. You claim the prophecy says that nobody will defeat you? Well, I’m the nobody who just did!”

With nothing to do on the train, I watch an old man get spooked by everything he sees.

Then he spots me, and quickly shuffles over to the empty seat beside me.

Damn.

“Thank God,” he says. “I thought I was the only one alive in here, everyone else is dead!”

“I’ve already told you, we are dead. This is the train to hell.”

He looks at me, horrified, and quickly flees.

I grumble, figuring this might as well be hell already.

With nothing to do on the train, I watch...

This week on Event Horizon Engineering we have a hyperdrive motivator from a YT-1300 in for intermix port line boring. These engines are the workhorse of long haul commerce in the outer rim, also popular with smugglers because…whoa is that a compressor? This thing must make point six past light speed, before it explodes. That’s coming off.

“Creator, I have a request.”

“I’ve been expecting this. You want me to make you a wife.”

“Companion, if you please. Their gender and consent remain to be their choice.”

"Look! You can see a door in the mirror," she cried, pointing behind me while one side of her face was pressed against the full-length mirror.

I turned, but there was only a blank wall at where she had gestured.

I turned back just as she did the same to face me. She smiled giddily at her discovery, but I could say nothing— my voice seized by the sight of the figure standing behind her, reaching out from within the mirror.

Antonio had just warmed up his lunch when Jacob walked into the break room.

"Hey Antonio. How's it going?"

"Good! I've been meaning to ask - how are you enjoying the new house? I've started thinking about looking for one, myself."

"The new house is great. I'm not a fan of the maintenance required for the yard. But, I have a plan!"

"What do you mean?" Antonio asked.

"I have weeds everywhere. Instead of walking my yard to pull them up or spray them individually, I built a dispenser that sits on a pole. It slowly rotates and autonomously finds the weeds around it. When it identifies one, it squirts some pesticide on it."

Jacob saw Antonio's eyes widen a bit at that last detail.

"Don't worry, until I have all the bugs worked out, it just dispenses water."

Antonio frowned. "So you're watering the weeds?"

"No! Well, yes - but that's not the point!"

"HOW DID YOU JACKKNIFE FIVE MILLION TONS OF RHODIUM AT THE LUNA GATE?"

"I thought it was clear, boss! A gednarian coming the other way waved me through..."

"Gah! Were you asleep in training? We don't trust other pilots on gate approach, we use our SENSORS and listen to TRAFFIC CONTROL"

"I'm, sorry, I..."

"Three months flying a dustbuster, then you ace re-training if you ever want to go through a gate again. Get out of my sight."

There is a soft pop and strange person in a shiny suit appears before me in my bedroom. They wave a tube in my direction.

"Who are you?" I stammer.

"I'm sorry, but I am here to kill you," they reply.

"Why?"

"In one month's time you upload a small software utility that is incorporated into the weapons that will destroy humanity."

"Hey, I'm just rewriting a coordinate converter for my dataviz project."

"It is enough," they say and disintegrate me.

“In five years—”, the beturtlenecked techsib on stage was saying, “—the future will be obsolete. Artificial Temporality engines can assimilate knowledge from all timeframes into an omniscient present where you can obtain the answer to any question before—”

“Stop the keynote!”. A young person, wearing iSights ran on stage.

Lowering their microphone, the presenter stepped toward the interloper, whispering furiously: “Jem, what the fuck?. Get off my stage!”

Whispered reply (I was in the front row, few heard it): “The demo, Your Executiveness, we got it working! It says in eleven quarters an atemporality excursion destroys civilisation.”

“I don’t care, we IPO in three.”. Back to the microphone: “As I was saying, gentlefolk, in five years—“

"Can it be wrong to love?" the young woman asked.

The witch suppressed a sigh and a slew of memories. "You need to be more specific."

"There's a woman... Wise, patient, kind, and... she knows magic..."

"Nothing wrong with loving a woman," the witch said at last. "It might be unrequited, though."

My employer migrated us to a quantum computing platform. I have to agree that the ability to perform calculations on multiple states simultaneously has really sped up our output.

Even better was the interior building reno. No more noisy open plan activity based workstations. Instead we each get our own private "qubical" with a desktop quantum PC.

The downside is that you never know if the occupants are dead or alive until you open the qubical door. I'm a cat person now.

Jacob was looking a little tired at the morning standup. Again.

"Still not sleeping well, Jacob?" Maggie asked.

"No. I haven't been able to get the cranial sensor net to be comfortable enough."

Everyone on the call blinked. Sophia was the first to break. "Ok, Jacob. Can you explain to the rest of the class what a 'cranial sensor net' is?"

Jacob smiled. "Several months ago, I built an app to transmit a picture of what I was dreaming to my phone. Now I've been working on a way to write code in my sleep. To make it work, I built a set of wearable sensors that fit over my head. It still pokes me when I turn my head, though, and wakes me up."

"I thought it was really hard to read text in a dream, let alone write it," Reggie said. "It seems like any code you write in your sleep won't be readable."

Sophia smirked. "Most of the time, the code Jacob writes when he's AWAKE isn't readable, either."

"Hey!" exclaimed Jacob.

“What’s the new gadget? The domey thing, I mean. Heh; looks a bit like a Demon Core”

“It is.”

“Fuck off!”

“It’s an essential tool for the modern jeweler!”

“For Eris’ sake, why?”

“Finsibs. Back in the twenty-first the dominance flex for a certain kind of overmoneyed dipshit was having the thinnest mechanical wristwatch. They blew past 2mm and talked of one. Cost in the millions.”

“Well, better wasting money on jewelry than splattering themselves on Mars, I guess. Again. But, Demon Core—spill!”

“Servicing. Micron scale gear trains run up against the problem that solvent molecules and ultrasonic waves are bigger than some of the parts. This century your modern Rich Asshole Horology needs a whole different cleaning approach.”

“So what, then?”

“Prompt neutrons. Pass me that screwdriver.”

The first time you extend the mast and receive an Instant Charge is a bit nerve-wracking but after that you laugh at those chumps waiting for their Slow Charge. Only hassle is that thunderstorms are infrequent hereabouts. But the Stormlink (nee Starlink) network will fix that.