Category Archives: science fiction

You Are Not Expected To Understand This

comment

© Arun Thomas / Image: The New Stack

/*
 *You are not expected
 *to understand this.
 */

Glenn laughed out loud in spite of the enormity of the problem facing him.

“You are not expected to understand this.” It was probably the single most famous code comment in the history of UNIX and maybe the history of all Operating System programming. It first appeared in the Sixth Edition of the UNIX OS in 1975 and preceded the explanation of how context switching was performed.

The phrase has become so popular that it has appeared on everything from adult sized t-shirts to baby onesies.

The code comment disappeared in 1979 when context switching was rewritten for UNIX v7, but it lives on in the collective consciousness of nerdness.

The comment would have been a lot more funny if he understood the code that had been constantly streaming through his console for the past month. It reminded him of the scene in the movie “The Matrix” when Cypher was looking at the Matrix in code.

The code for the Matrix was too complex to be processed through an interpreter so you had to monitor it raw.

Too complex.

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The Barbie Syndrome

barbie body

© rehabs.com / dailymail.co.uk

She was forced to walk on all fours thanks to her oversized head, it being two inches larger than it was before the surgery. To make matters worse, her head was sitting on a neck twice as long and six inches thinner than the one she had before.

“Dr. Brennan, I can’t lift my head.” Sophia’s dream of being “Barbie beautiful” had turned into a surreal nightmare.

“We discussed all this, Sophia, and your head is the least of your worries. Your waist is only 16 inches, four inches thinner than your head. We had to greatly reduce the size of your liver and intestines to accommodate it.”

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An Alien Walks Into A Bar

alien

Comic book cover from 1958

Frank Lyman was working on his third Vodka Collins when the alien came through the door. Frank had been stopping by Murphy’s Bar every Friday night after work for nearly ten years, and this was the first time he thought the booze was spiked.

All of the regulars at the bar, plus Murphy serving drinks behind it, froze like ice sculptures and stared.

“RJhmzzxpingwqupnmkl-ooo-dx!” Static came out of the alien’s spacesuit. It adjusted a knob on its chest.

“Better? Understand?”

“What?” Frank forgot to swallow and his drink dribbled onto his shirt.

“Spaceship broken. Roadside service here?”

Okay, I know the image I used as an inspiration doesn’t show a bar, but when I saw it, I thought it looked like the beginning of a bad joke, “An alien walks into a bar.” I wrote it for fun.

Flash fiction of 99 words.

Oh, the comic book was published in 1958.

Taking Care of the Family

counterclock

Image: Odditymall.com

It worked. I changed everything for the better. Now my son Charles marries a hardworking, loving wife and mother instead of a depressed lay about. Now my son Chris makes his career decision five years earlier and gets a tenured position before the recession hits. Now my wife has that business she’s always wanted and the franchise money will make her rich. The Time Changer worked, but with one catch. Instead of me being a successful scientist, I’m a divorced drug addict, dying of lung cancer in the local hospital’s charity ward, a total human failure. It was worth it.

I’ve been writing so much flash fiction over the past few days, that when this idea popped up, I thought I’d take advantage. No prompt, no challenge. Just the way my head works.

Uncle Eli’s Machine

the machine

© Sandra Crook / Found at Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’ blogspot

For two weeks, Evan had been investigating the odd, sprocketed contraption in the basement of the house he’d inherited from old Uncle Eli, an eccentric inventor who’d been tinkering with it for the past sixty years.

Evan didn’t fathom the machine’s purpose, but he did think he could get the gears moving.

He made one last adjustment with his screwdriver.

Evan jumped back as the large driver cog suddenly lurched one “ka-chunk” counterclockwise.

Then the light changed. “So, my time machine finally worked, I see.”

Evan turned. The figure speaking to him was Uncle Eli at age 26.

I wrote this as part of (last week’s) Friday Fictioneers challenge hosted by Rochelle Wisoff-Fields. The idea is to write a piece of flash fiction using a max of 100 words and base it on the photo prompt you see at the top of the page. The details are at Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’ blog (scroll down).

Read all of the responses to this flash fiction challenge at InLinkz.com (over 80 as of this writing).

My story is exactly 99 words long.

First Contact Imperfect

ted

From the film “Ted 2” (2015)

The Qredderq came very close to their goal of communicating with humanity. However, being just a little off was going to have difficult if not disastrous results.

The Qredderq weren’t aliens in that they came from another planet. The Qreddreg were transdimensional life forms, and that sort of life was abundant. However, piercing transdimensional barriers in order to communicate was highly technical, energy intensive, and not always reliable, as the Qredderq were about to find out.

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Who Is A. Isaacs?

the perfect woman

Image: shutterstock.com

It was the third time this week that Jerry got an upgrade request for the server farm he managed from the mysterious “A. Isaacs.” Upgrade requests for the database from Operations and Development weren’t unusual, but ever since A. Isaacs joined the Ops/Dev team in Palo Alto, he or she had submitted the vast majority of them, and they were weird.

Jerry Mason was the Chief Maintenance Technician for CozmicCorp’s vast array of servers in the desert south of Phoenix. He was responsible for receiving requests and assigning them to the relevant personnel. He also reported on the ongoing status of the hardware and software, but the IT Team in California could monitor all of that automatically at this point.

What made Isaacs’ requests weird was that he or she seemed to have an unlimited budget. Isaacs had spent over a million dollars so far and Jerry got the feeling he or she (it was annoying not knowing which personal pronoun to use) was just getting warmed up.

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Tales From The Dystopia: Training The Toxic Dog

woman walking man

Image: YouTube

Carl Jason had been wandering in the woods for three days when he saw the lights through the trees. He’d gone for a hike away from the camp and became disoriented. He had a knife, so he cut fir branches to cover himself at night so he didn’t freeze as he slept. He knew something about the local plants, so he at least got some small amount of nourishment.

The lights, it was near sunset and he might have missed them in full daylight. As the trees thinned and he stepped out onto a grassy field, he saw it was a complex of buildings, like a business park or something. He hoped there was still someone around. He needed to phone home. His brothers and Dad must have gotten frantic when he didn’t return to their camp.

It was an annual tradition. Carl and his brothers Mike, and Dave, all lived in different parts of the country. The only time they could be sure to reconnect with each other and Dad was during their yearly autumn camping trip.

Carl was stiff and cold. He’d tripped yesterday and collected some scrapes along with a twisted ankle. He could walk on it, but he limped and he was slow.

“Hey!” Carl saw a few people in the distance walking between two buildings. “Hey there! I need help!”

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Harvey’s Suit

smart glove

The Rapael Smart Glove

His nervous system wasn’t working anymore, so they had to give him a new one.

Harvey Lincoln was 59 years old when he was diagnosed With Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS, sometimes also called “Lou Gehrig’s disease.” A visit to the Mayo Clinic and undergoing an exhaustive battery of tests confirmed the diagnosis.

Harvey just felt numb going over the test results in Dr. Bell’s office. Harvey’s wife Sara sat by his side quietly sobbing.

That was three years ago, and the degeneration and death of Harvey’s motor neurons was steady, but thankfully slow. Harvey knew he was living on borrowed time, to use the common aphorism, but it was having time that allowed him to participate in the experiment.

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The Tribe of the People

rain forest

Image: ABC.net.au / Rocky Roe

Petia, the Chief of the People, had listened to all of the arguments presented by the strangers from the East. He had discussed them with the Council, which included Antipa the Medicine Priestess, Prim the War Chief, Cleitst the Spirit Talker, and Valdem the Voice of the People.

The strangers from the East offered much, but would what they offered be best for the People? They offered more sturdy homes which would be warmer in winter, efficient methods of farming that would produce more food, and an organized education system for the children of the People.

“It is clear the strangers offer different ways than ours.” Petia was old but sturdy, and his wisdom as Chief had not been questioned for all the fifty seasons he had been tribal leader.

“We cannot trust them.” Prim was War Chief and it was his responsibility to state any danger to the People he perceived.

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