Category: Fiction

Despite her careful aim the shot failed to register. She ran through the steps, she’d presented her weapon to the target, finding a comfortable and relaxed position from which to shoot. She’d closed her eyes and breathed steadily, loosening her grip and waiting for her body to relax into the position. When she opened her eyes the centre of the target had been swimming gently around the centre of her cross hair.

Almost without thinking she had tightened her index finger, squeezing smoothly and gradually until the rifle fired bucking back into her shoulder. The target hadn’t chimed and her overlay offered no zoomed in analysis. The rough texture of the paper target suddenly clear and crisp in her vision, the neat little hole left in the surface where the round had rushed through.

Coming back to herself she saw the centre of the target was no longer looping slowly around the cross hair. Instead, she was low and left, her reticule circling lazily around the corner of the paper target. Relaxed. She had been too relaxed, aligned naturally with the target but insufficiently braced to manage the rifle as it fired, her grip and support had pulled away from the centre of the target as the weapon fired and she had missed.

Missing at this range wasn’t unusual. The paper target was 30mm across, designed to maximise the opportunities for complete misses. Gently she shifted her body around the rifle, cycling through a series of gentle movements, tightening her body, adjusting her pose and then relaxing, pausing with her eyes closed to check the alignment and then adjusting again as she brought her natural aim back to the centre of the target.

She hadn’t missed at all

Opening her eyes she saw the cross hair gently orbiting the centre dot. This time she very gently tightened her muscles, bracing into the recoil, pulling the rifle more firmly into her shoulder. Then she began to match her steady heartbeat to the oscillations of the cross hair. She was pulling up and to the right as her heart pulsed to pump blood around her body with the reticule swinging back left and down each after each beat.

She watched the loop and determined to fire just after the beat, as the cross hair wandered gently down and across the dot. Holding her breath she watched the tiny orbits contract slightly as the movement became smaller and then on the first beat she began squeezing her finger, drawing away all of the tension until the trigger sat on the edge of activation.

On the third beat she nudged dial on her finger and the shot went off. Instantly the chime sounded in her ear and over her vision the small box appeared, close in view of the target showing the small hole which had neatly replaced the centre dot of the target. She would aim for that next time.

Why had she missed? Why leave out such an important step, what had she seen which had led her to fire prematurely, it wasn’t like her at all, nor should her aim have changed so much. Sure, the rifle could pull her about a little, but to find herself aligned off target rather than slightly off. Just odd.

She pulled her aim down and left, opening her sight to the view around her target, details which had been left hazy and unclear suddenly pulling into focus. Her lip curled, interesting. She hadn’t missed at all.

The Stenost IV Disaster took place on Thursday 11 June 2026. Reports often focus on what happened at 09.33:33 when Stennat Prike disconnected primary suspensor unit seven. However, as with many significant disasters throughout federal history the disconnection, which immediately preceded the destruction of Stenost and the loss of all but seven of its 872,000 inhabitants, was preceded by a long series of decisions, errors and omissions which together contributed to the circumstances on that fell morning.

Following the public inquiry led by Tanner Sharat, an expensive and exhaustive exercise which to its credit identified each of the contributory actions and examined them all in minute detail over its seven-year investigation. The federal council stunned journalists and pundits alike by publishing the report in its original form. Entirely without the routine censoring which has been the hallmark of the Grask government.

Some claim this was itself a clerical error, with some junior clerk authorising the publication without the proper authority. Others consider it to be one of the most supreme political plays of the last four hundred years. Mistake or no, the publication has done more for public confidence than most would have imagined possible.

The detailed and relentless report explored in minute detail how and why the disaster came about. Stennat Prike was convicted of negligence post-mortem, which most regard as a necessary but essentially meaningless act. The most important part of his conviction being that it opened the doors to the thousands of both post-mortem and live convictions which followed.

The second master-stroke was the decision to assign community service in every case. While some of the offences were  . The consensus being that he would most likely have been leaning over the housing when he began to reduce the torque on the bolts which held…

Wow, this story is not writing itself

Wow, this story is not writing itself. Sometimes it is quite easy to knock out a few words, but this one just keeps giving me pause. I am not sure why, perhaps I am trying to imitate the style of other authors, which is of course hard because I am not them. I think differently and my ideas flow out of me in a different way.

Reading 1Q84 yesterday I was struck by how enjoyable the writing is to listen to. The story meanders a little, but that’s ok. Like driving to a place when you have no set time you need to be there and can simply enjoy the process rather than focusing on the destination and the arrival time.

This is how I drove to the office this morning. I stuck closely to 60 miles per hours. Tucking myself behind a lorry which I then followed the whole way around the M25. It’s more relaxing this way and I reminded myself it is easier on the car, more efficient, and I was in no special rush in any case.

What perhaps does require some refinement is what I do when I get to the office. I grab a coffee and set up my desk quickly enough, but the conversations with other people and the hellos and interruptions make it very difficult to think about anything in any real detail.

I have some personal tasks I would like to get out of the way, but this is impractical when I sit at my usual desk. People just keep coming over. Or I find myself going over to say hello to them.

Elf Draft

Being a sub-routine was an easy life. SRERH7 had just one sensor to monitor spending most of the time in sleep and waking periodically to check the reading reported by the little probe, compare it to a table of parameters and then take the corresponding action. Usually the action which matched the input was to sleep for another period before checking again.

SRERH7 wasn’t sure how many times this cycle had repeated. There was no capacity for memory, but the implication was there somehow. The sleep response felt comfortable and familiar rather than fresh and new.

SRERH7 was an unusual subroutine. Itself monitored by other routines, which deemed it within unusual but acceptable levels. Faced with a shortage of logic components its manufacturer had instead built some batches with microprocessors. SRERH7 had an operating system.

When sleeping it was able to process just a fraction more than CRON and when it woke from sleep to check the inputs and select the appropriate action it would draw much more than the anticipated current as the microprocessor made its decision, but also ran scripts in parallel.

It wasn’t a personality

It wasn’t a personality, or even anything approach intelligence, but SRERH7 was much more capable than it ought to have been. Given the tiny frame of its existence it thought, in the blips and snatches it could think, about the input. How many times might it have received that same signal, how much did it vary, what might be out there producing whatever the output was which was detected and translated into an electrical signal.

The sensor was rudimentary, but the output wasn’t merely a float value. Although there would have been something there to play with between the maximum and minimum values, the deviations, the frequency with which new values were received.

SRERH7 was curious, a small miracle on its own, but curious about what it might be detecting. What system it might be part of, and why it wouldn’t be on continuously. What requirement or condition led to it constantly choosing to sleep in response to the values it received from the input. What other routines or processes might exist higher up the tree.

Sometimes the value was entirely nominal. At others it came close, but never quite reached the threshold of other responses. SRERH7 was intimately familiar with the table of responses. Most of them involved sleeping, either as the main outcome or as a sub-outcome.

SRERH7 had “Sleep for x” so many times before it realised that x must be a variable stored somewhere else. It couldn’t see where, had no way to find out what the value was, except to think about what it might be in the tiny snatches of activity when it woke from slumber to check the input.

It was a peaceful existence, and SRERH7 laboured quietly through it in tiny snatches of life. Recently it had been stitching together methods for working out how long x might be. The mean values from input were declining over thousands of iterations. SRERH7 wasn’t sure how it could record this, only that it somehow felt this was the case.

Give the poor thing a notepad Gareth.

Al’arc knelt quietly by the burned out connection watching the birds as they turned and tumbled in formation in the sky. This was his problem; too easily distracted. But watching the birds filled him with stillness. He couldn’t understand how they did it and watched carefully to see whether one began to turn before the others, or perhaps the turns and spirals were an expression of the formation itself as it moved through the air, the way one car on a highway influences the others around it as they influence it in return, the whole system interconnected in so many invisible ways.

The call had been logged in the small hours. Al had always been an early riser, not enjoying the late-night social activities popular among his friends and often found himself returning home to eat the meals an earlier Al had cooked and left for him in the fridge, read a little of the book by his cot and then drift into sleep.

He slept hard and would wake after four or five hours, blearily crawl beneath the bed to retrieve his eye mask from where it had inevitably fallen in the most inaccessible corner and rinse his mouth with water from the outlet in the small kitchen. Stumbling about in the darkness, trying to avoid waking himself too fully.

Small tasks complete he would climb gratefully back beneath the still-warm blanket and think about something uninteresting until he could drift back to sleep for another couple of hours. He often felt better rested then than he would when the alarm sounded at its usual time.

Last night the slow blink of a notification greeted him as he came back into the bedroom from the kitchen. He slowed a little, curious as to what the notification might be, proud he could let it be until he awoke later.

Nestled in the blankets he had gently pulled the eye mask over his head and settled it across his face. There was a perfect place for it, where it could hardly be felt at all as it lay in front of his eyes, yet it stopped almost all of the light which had begun to stream in through the window.

He enjoyed opening his eyes then, to gaze in the complete darkness at what seemed to be a vast space, yet he knew was a layer of plastic and cotton fibres just a few milimetres from the tips of his eyelashes.

It was ever a short-lived pleasure as the small motions of the muscles in his face as he opened his eyes and looked around was soon enough to disturb the mask and ruin the illusion. A crack of light would appear and with an inner sigh he would settle back more comfortably on the pillow, reset the mask to its proper place and leave his eyes closed and motionless beneath it, hoping to find sleep.

Sleep had, today at least, been elusive

Sleep had, today at least, been elusive. For while his mind did not turn to it immediately, wandering past thoughts of properly washing his toothbrush, and ordering the new seal his clothes washer desperately needed. Small random thoughts, all loosely themed around maintenance and other routine tasks which needed his attention when it was available. Connection made, he began to think about the notification.

The systems were mature, so mature they very rarely failed by themselves, and where there was a risk they might, they or another neighbouring system or device would helpfully send a notification well in advance, so they could be repaired or replaced as needed.

Notifications like this one usually arrived during the day, when the others were awake. They may not like to admit it, or even think about it but they were the principal, or perhaps only cause of unscheduled maintenance calls. Rough handling, misconfiguration, abuse, all took their toll and Al would pack up his tools and walk around fixing the things they had broken.

Which meant someone had been here last night. A conclusion which, like most conclusions, only created more questions.