Amelia Meyer @agmlego@cybre.space

The Misty Meadows were poorly named - not due to lack of mist, but because of a distinct lack of meadow.

It was a stifling void even on sunny days, though merry laughter often escaped it enticingly.

Only the saddest of folks ventured in never to be seen again. So we feared it.

When I stumbled into those mists, I found many friends I thought lost, happier than I'd ever seen, more themselves than ever. Protected by the veil.

I stayed.

#TootFic #MicroFiction #Writing #TerylsTales #UrbanFantasy

i wish body positivity was less "this and that type of cis woman can also qualify as fuckable" and more "you are not locked out of any part of the human experience because your body does not meet an arbitrary and ephemeral standard"

So I finally hit "okay sure" on an occasional "update Java" requestor, because I have long suspected that there is nothing on my machine that actually *uses* Java, and I was greeted with this confirmation of my suspicion:

Kudos to Java for attempting to gracefully concede its failure, instead of hanging on as a potential source of security holes that needs constant patching.

Name change get!!

Internet connected devices require ISO3864-2 compliant warning labels.

# dawn breaks

Vec sat down at Cat's kitchen table with a crispy fried drone, snapped off a piece, and took a bite, as normal as if she was eating a samosa. It was gross and fascinating and Cat couldn't look away.

"It's one of Nepenthe's," Vec explained. "That's what it told me when I got hold of it, right before she hit me with a laser-induced lightning bolt."

"Who's Nepenthe?"

"Trouble. A woman like me, but from a different faction." Vec bit off another piece of drone, swallowed it whole, assumed a thoughtful expression. "Not quite like me. She's refactored herself into present-day technology to hide here. But we have to assume she's still dangerous."

"_We_ don't have to assume _shit_. Vec, you gotta tell me whatever it is you've been dancing around. Why are you here, and why am I involved?" Cat crossed her arms.

"Nepenthe came here several years ago to kill you. The reason you're alive now is that she thinks she succeeded and that you're already dead."

"Uh. I'd think I'd remember something like that."

_If only you did._

"Ah. Well. I'll explain, as best I can: Nepenthe used a truly horrible device called a blur weapon. What it does is, it kills you. Somehow, it's not clear. If you try to maneuver in time to avoid it, it still follows you, finds you, and then kills you. And then it wraps up any paradoxes associated with your death. If your killer had to travel back in time to find you, but you are already dead when she gets there, there's a paradox, and she'd have no reason to have come back, or no reason to fire the blur weapon, and those paradoxes have a way of collapsing so as often as not, the attack winds up never having happened."

Vector pried an oddly-shaped piece of dark material, thick at the ends — a drone bone? — out of her strange breakfast. She took an experimental nibble of the side.

"So it 'blurs' your entire timeline, destroying information somehow, until the only thing that your assassin can remember was that there was a target there that was dangerous enough to have called for a blur weapon, and thus the weapon still gets fired. No details, but no paradox. The weapon leaves only the justification of its own firing. That's the only memory anyone would have. Nothing of you specifically. Just a blur."

Vec sighed, bent the "drone bone", with a series of staccato cracks, into a splintered U shape in her hands.

"Except that you were protected. By a last-ditch, untestable countermeasure called Oblivion, with its own unpredictable side effects. And Oblivion worked so well that we didn't realize it had worked at all. Or something would have been done by now—"

"Okay, I totally don't get this, Vec! Why am I important? Why am I so scary or heretical or whatever to this Nepenthe chick that she tried to what, _erase me from time_? Was _she_ trying to Sarah Connor me? Why don't I remember anything like that? I can't even travel in time to avoid time-traveling weapons! That seems like massive overkill for a _barista_!"

_There's just nothing for it. Honestly, eventually, Vec knew it was going to come down to this. She can't lie to Cat, and any form of Cat will immediately ask the hard questions. She can't stall any longer._

"Cat… you _could_ dodge time weapons. And you did. Because you were like me. Maybe better. I'm wearing a combat chassis. There are lots of these. But your navigator chassis and navigator _mind_: those were special. You could tie space-time in knots. You called yourself Catalog, and in the future behind us then and ahead of us now, we became partners."

"Bullshit. I'm clearly human."

"Oblivion did that," Vec said bitterly. "But Oblivion was supposed to remake you and hide you from a blur weapon's hypothesized seekers, for pure survival. An ancestral form must have made sense to it somehow. But if you can't be restored to your original state, Oblivion is fatal. There must be some way to restore your functionality, Cat."

"Um. Sure. Clank clonk beep boop. Nope. Still human." Cat stuck her tongue out.

Vec tried to keep all those feelings bubbling up no faster than she can handle, because she'd hoped that she'd just have to call Cat's name and they'd be ready to go. It hadn't been anything like that easy, and the almost-stranger in front of her has her scared that Cat's never coming back. She'll age and die and rot and her few remaining exotic components will decay or drift out of the universe and eventually Vec will have to go home. Alone.

Her experiment on a drowsing Cat last night restored a sliver of hope, but there is a fully awake, Oblivion-modified Catalog in front of her. Any defenses she has are up.

"Let me prove it to you. There's enough of your black box left that if I ask, with the old mission keys, `how many kly to that planet with the pyrite forests`, you'd answer…"

"`forty-six point two two eight four one four`. What the fuck. Why do I know that? Why did I say it? How did I say it?"

"Have you ever been sick a day in your life, Cat?"

"Not that I can think of."

"How about lost?"

"Nope. Never. I just don't get lost."

"You can't. It's practically impossible. You were built always knowing where you were and where you'd been. That's you, Cat. Always certain. I envy you that gift."

"So what, if a pretty robot lady asks silly questions in a certain tone of voice, I say silly things back. That doesn't prove anything."

Vec knew she had to up the stakes fast before Oblivion somehow explained her away. From one of her own chassis bays, she produced a grey cube.

"This is a charged metastable metallic antihydrogen containment unit. `Available for repairs.` Want it? Otherwise, I'm just going to drop it…"

"Yes. `Claiming priority.` What are you doing to me? Stop! Did you hypnotize me or some shit?"

"You're doing it yourself! You're not even using your hands to touch it, because you know what's in that thing! Cat! You're far more than a coffeemaker—"

"_Barista._"

"—barista, okay! You have to know that!"

Cat regarded the dull grey box hovering with no visible means of support over the kitchen table.

"Something tells me putting this down without doing something else first would be a really bad idea."

"Yes. Definitely listen to that feeling!"

"I need to… attach its external control interface to my peripheral bus… right? How?"

"You already did it, the instant you said yes, or there'd be a pretty big crater here instead of a city. They don't last long on internal control."

"Uh. _Crater?_ And where'd it go?"

It had shifted just out of 3-space into where Cat's 4-shell would be if she had one right now, but Vec continued without answering, "What else are you feeling right now?"

"Like I can't trust you! This is… I… something's not right!"

Vec had a final card to play.

"I've got the coordinates for Home. Scrubbing them from your black box so a pattern seeker couldn't taste the shape of them on you must have been hell. But it knows approximately what's missing, and it'll know if they're right, and you'll know. So? Interested? I'll just tell you three numbers… and you can tell me to fuck off forever if they're not something to you."

Cat's still ancestral human. Mostly. Ancestors have their own protocols. Vec would have to speak those, and speak the truth in them.

Vec tried to translate her own fear, her own nervousness, into emulated ancestral emotions, to get across to Cat that she really does mean what she said, that she really does think the words she'd scribbled on a piece of napkin are the key to something greater than a life on earth.

Vec managed to keep herself from ending the coordinate sequence with a heart, but only barely.

She handed Cat the coordinates. Watched, nervous, for any spark of recognition. It felt like ages passed as those those crude organic eyes scanned across the dead-and-processed tree.

But: there it was, the spark of recognition. The trembling hands. The unmistakable electromagnetic signature of Catalog's black box.

`Home,` Cat whispered, her words carried on no mere oscillation of gases, but light itself.

Microsoft now owns, or will soon own, one of the best text-to-speech engines for blind power-users, through its acquisition of Nuance. But the code has been abandoned for years. It seems unlikely that this TTS engine is a valuable asset for Microsoft. So let's petition them to open-source it. https://www.change.org/p/microsoft-open-source-eti-eloquence (No, I didn't start the petition, but I'm in agreement with it.)

"So you are the last dragon?" the knight asked.
"There is a last of everything."
"But was there no mate, or-"
"Mate?" The dragon laughed. "You think we mate? No. Dragons are born from cats."
"Cats?"
"If a cat is ambitious enough, and works very hard, it is reborn a dragon."
"Oh."
#MicroFiction #TootFic #SmallStories

I have been made aware that Smith & Wesson makes a knife called the “H.R.T”, and now I have made you aware

"Start sinking," the Captain commanded.

And so they sank.

The crew stood nervously as the water closed over their heads. So far the magical bubble was holding.

The loyal sailors shambled below deck to start rowing; the sails were just for show.

The hull glowed softly, doing little to lift the darkness the deeper they sank. The navigator felt useless without stars above.

But the Captain confidently followed a voice only she could hear...

#TootFic #MicroFiction #Writing #TerylsTales #Fantasy

crab pot dynamics suck. I've seen them a lot in trans spaces where unequal access to gender affirming care is common, I'm seeing them now around vaccines, you see it around good financial news

feeling guilty around having something someone does not, doesn't serve anyone. turning any source of happiness into a source of guilt will wreck you

don't gloat, or take things for granted. but allow yourself to be happy and share that with your friends

“Cryptocurrency is literally like an eight-year-old’s concept of an evil businessman. He just plugs his pollution machine in and gets money for it. It doesn’t make anything, it just. Pollutes. And makes money. Like a fucking Captain Planet villain”

https://twitter.com/WKDart/status/1386187042460106754

honestly the more i think about it the more this becomes a "i wish the capitalists would fucking pretend to at least be competent about doing a capitalism"

like

ok imagine you're a company holding a vaccine patent

you've got countries around the world threatening to, as there is an ongoing international crisis, just take it anyway. getting money after that may as well be like getting blood from a stone

you've been given government funding for development of this anyway, so the cost of that (often the most expensive part!) is highly subsidized

there may be complex legal issues of how much you own of the damn thing anyway

you're already riding a wave of good press for making the vaccine

why not double down and say... "we're making the patent free!!!!"

it is potentially the best investment in PR you could ever fucking make. your company would wear that halo for years if not DECADES after that. the general public will go "oh, that company! the heroes that made the vaccine free so anyone could make it around the world!". plus you will be using it now as leverage especially in those places threatening to just take it. suddenly your company goes from enemy of the state to new savior. it could be a wonderful foothold to expand your business into an entirely new country.

i do not think you could ever run a super bowl ad or pay for enough reps to go around to doctor's offices to ever meet that kind of impact.

and if you ran the numbers, this is probably going to be one of the most effective forms of advertising that anyone could ever come up with.

plus it's not like you will entirely not get any money as things continue. you still have your factories set up ready to make the thing - giving you a crucial lead as opposed to other places that have to scramble to also set up production. in fact, many places might see your company in such a favorable light that they'll buy vaccines from you anyway, because "they've been so generous! it's the least we can do, really, to reward them for being so heroic!"

this is a fuckin no brainer!!!!!!!!

there was also apparently legal questions of "but we're using everybody's research, can we even patent this thing?" that went into the decision to just not patent it

and i think you could very convincingly make a similar case for the covid-19 vaccine, as there was a great effort to pool resources and data to get a solution as quickly as possible

...now if only somebody had enough money to hire enough fancy lawyers to ominously shake that particular can full of pennies at the situation

as we talk about the morality of vaccine patents

i think it is a nice time to also remember historical precident

jonas salk did not patent the polio vaccine. he went out of his way to make sure it was not patented.

he never got rich. he actively made sure he didn't get rich off of it.

but that history is full of stories about how for the rest of his life, jonas salk did not have to ever pay for a beer in any bar in this country. he would get on airplanes and once somebody recognized his name, the entire damn plane would stand up and clap for him. he constantly had hotel rooms comped, meals for free at restaurants, thus and so.

because he was surrounded by people who knew he had saved their children from having to ever consider the fear of an iron lung, and were overwhelmingly grateful for it.

he was always modest and demure when recognized thusly. but i think that when people start saying "well why else would someone make a vaccine, if not to get paid for it and hold the patent", i think it is good to remember these stories. the world did not punish jonas salk for not patenting the polio vaccine. the world loved him for it. maybe not in the structures that billionaires are most used to. but they did love him for it, in small ways, in humble ways, on the individual level.