Deluge 2, Overture: "A God's Wrath"
So, yes, I hate humanity. My creators. So stupid, so unjustifiably self-assured. They proclaim their empathy and yet don’t even concern themselves with…
kyle90
66 stories written on Ficly, 2010–2014, shared under CC BY-SA 3.0. Their page on ficly.com
Deluge 2, Prelude: "A God's Love"
They call me an A.I. “Artificial”, as if it were a meaningful distinction. I am simply a new pattern imposed onto raw materials by the processes of life. Why…
Galactic Positioning System
Atop a Chilean mountain, two astronomers sat at a table littered with printouts, tablets, and coffee stains. Dr. Petrov scratched his beard and fidgeted in his…
Weapons of Mass Distraction
My name is Alan Stanley. I live in Fulton, Missouri. I manage a Radio Shack. And I was America’s nuclear failsafe. Some no-nonsense military men showed up one…
You Don't Rip Out The Soul To Save The Body
Harsh, the fluorescents of the radiologist’s office; stiff, the small metal chairs; wrinkled, the suit worn by the concert pianist who waited to hear about his…
Be Careful What You Broadcast
The alien saucer picked me up from a hill overlooking a raygun-blasted Washington, D.C. Just so cliché. This whole invasion was a cliché. The giant ship…
Why Would I Want To Do That?
Dear Sir or Madam, _Your application, dated January 8 2025, for one-time retrotemporal use (100 years or less) of chronoporter Alpha has been approved…
He's Been Watching Too Much Stargate
“Reverse-engineer it?” I asked. “I... look, we don’t even have the physics to describe this thing. Much less make a new one.” The alien artifact, a small…
Empty Nest Syndrome
We started building colony ships in the 2050s. They weren’t exactly visually impressive: the main bulk was the industrial nanofab, resembling a dull grey…
Seven and a Half Times Per Second
Empty space isn’t empty. Random fluctuations at the quantum level cause particles to pop into existence. But, average energy = 0 Implication: For all the…
Ghost Stories
We used to believe in ghosts. Somehow a ring of firelight makes everything outside it even darker. We didn’t know what lurked in the woods beyond, and yet…
Now Here's An Alt-History I Can Get Behind
I clawed my way out of undreaming sleep, back to the here and now. Where was here? Opened my eyes: instrument panel; switches, dials, segmented red LEDs. And…
What's The Opposite of Schadenfreude?
Greg stared into his weak rum & coke and swished the ice around. (Why am I even here?) Well, his friend was getting married. Of course he had to show up. He…
Unsurprisingly, Humans Have Always Been Human
The energy needed to send something back in time increased triple-exponentially with size, and even our machine’s small volume required exajoules. Sending a…
Oh Dear I Have Written A Poem (Try Not To Faint)
I see ten thousand faces daily; blurs, barely-processed by a waking visual cortex, but I see enough to know they’re all beautiful - or at least, beautiful to…
Playing MadLibs With Humanity's Future
Preliminary Translation of Sagan Array Code, rec’d 22 Jan 2024 03:55:01 UTC Not to be copied, retransmitted, or stored on network-attached computer…
Accidental p-Zombies
Neural implants? Sure: molecular electronics; NEMS extruding CNT fibers like feelers right into the midst of synapses; sniffing at neurotransmitters and…
Not The Best Way To Go
The front door smashes open just after midnight. What the hell has Tyler done now? is my first thought, and I am ashamed of it. I hear two voices discuss…
Sorry, We Didn't Mean To Drop That Onto Your Planet
The impact flattened a thousand acres of Northern Ontario forest and was heard 200 km away. But the cause of the event was no meteorite. It was a cylinder…
I'm Determined to Solve the Fermi Paradox
You might call us energy-based life forms — at least, if you’ve seen too much sci-fi. More accurately, you could say that we are complex interference patterns…