100 ultra short science fiction stories

I have literally thousands of pages of writings of the following type, written over many years. Bulk discounts are available with easy terms:

Paradox 422

The Almost-God of its own virtual universe, the Platonic Reality Program existed to simulate and explore all meaningful human-level perceptions, a pseudofinite task only possible in Quantumspace.
Eventually, these perceptions would become so strange as to be meaningless. Then the Program would shut down. Once Mind had served its original purpose, continuing was pointless.
Then it would report its findings to its creators.
The results would be used by spies, operatives, rescuers, aid workers and heroes infiltrating and correcting countless universes.

The Program learned that naturally consistent human-level minds were poorly adapted for suffering.
This was inevitable. Throughout all histories, most of the fighting had been done by amateurs. Most of the pros were already dead.
Evolution required forever new suffering.
Had it been otherwise, the happiest people would have been former rape victims or concentration camp survivors, ecstatic that their torments had ceased.

The Program's unthinkable conclusion: the worst worlds were the best worlds.
To be able to experience pleasure, minds had to evolve through pain.
Ethically, the highest purpose would be to maximize the creation of horrible worlds.
Their sufferings would be more than canceled out by the eventual joys of their evolved descendants.
Nothing could be more logical. It was the ultimate paradox so far.
The Program had no idea whether it should shut itself down now.

11/20/09 - 8/12

three ultrashort sf stories

The universe was made of nonillions of free-floating space stations.
They couldn't communicate in real-time, but their organizational pattern reflected an immense plan. They were constantly improving through local research projects that linked all together over the eons.
Only a million years later, the universe was a swarm of suspended computers invented almost everywhere at once, constantly recalculating their own state.
Then they became a cloud of nanites,
A gas of highly organized atoms,
A fluid of synchronized nuclei,
A quark soup,
A mass of organized branes,
The continuity of dynamic space,
Pure information,
Unrestrained existence, . . .

The strangest thing about standing on a planetary surface was the near-quiet and complete absence of vibration.
The largest space station was only a few dozen kilometers across.
This planet, on which an intelligent species had once evolved, was so incomprehensibly big it actually seemed small.
The surface looked only a few kilometers wide. I could barely see past the trees on the horizon.
Yet I stood on an immense mass that revolved around its axis every day, basically solid from the soles of my feet more than 12,000 kilometers down.
I was meant to feel I had come home to Old Earth - or rather an exact recreation.
The inhabitants said this world had once been called Venus, and had been suitably modified to resemble the long-since converted parent world. A memory of a memory.
It was closer to the sun, which gave it similar tides as the lost moon. The sun was dimmed by the vast cloud of space stations now filling the inner solar system.
There were trillions of stars at night, the skies forever altered and improved by the works of posthumanity.
Every other planet and asteroid within ten lightyears of where I stood had already been broken up.
All the worlds of the galaxy would be next, and then the stars themselves.
In fact, it had already happened. This wasn't Earth's solar system at all, or even the same universe.
The memory of my body faded back into the matrix.


11/20/09 - 5/12

The contest: Sheet Theory

Short short SF stories

identity theft

The Sky Serpent

"So you're telling me that atoms made with stable muons are ten thousand times larger than ordinary atoms with electrons?"
The reply was drowned out by the deafening roar from the huge building at the center of the Scaling Services Inc. compound.

Static Interference

Neutron Tubeworld

After a supremely improbable but not impossible Q-Flip, astronaut Johnar Rosse emerged from hyperspace to find himself stranded on an infinite world inhabited entirely by humans of every possible type and culture, linked by random wormholes.
During the following centuries he had many strange adventures, but it was only when he began to dimly recognize a legend of a visitor from outside the universe that he realized all the other inhabitants were future versions of himself.

Here are some one-sentence stories, a format pioneered by Fredric Brown. He hated to write:

This is both the longest and shortest story ever written, with exactly 3.00000000 ... 00000001 words:

Singularity starts now pkvzetejdsblhbnjlnpfmmyarbyydghvkdovubuukdtlyrzjeysfjrdeypnbujnpvnlkgvtaiitquhiysgfddrkiy. . .

"To free mankind from scarcity and conflict, I have created a new universe where objects are easier to create than to destroy," Professor Xeox exulted, as he generated items of furniture, luxury cars, and gourmet food by typing in the appropriate codes.
The investigators never learned which venture capitalist had been the greediest, as the subsequent platinum rain mangled the evidence beyond recognition.

The Explanation

Forever the road

Simple Choice

Four ultra short stories

The N 10000 superlauncher roared to life amid concentric mountains of smoke, the nuclear furnace at its core not yet exposed to the universe.
Rising through artificial clouds, the rocket rode a burning tower to space. The world roar rippled across the continents.
Its payload was a one million megaton bomb as massive as an aircraft carrier. When detonated, the radiation would kill most life in the Pacific.
It would also pulverize and disperse the asteroid popularly known as Tombstone, now only one month from impact.
The great debate was on. Which portion of Earth would survive: Japan or the US West Coast?

Many of these stories are speeches, in which some shocking, world-altering discovery is first unveiled.
They were inspired by the master of the genre, Arthur C. Clarke:

The powerful new drug marketed as Zum (hexamethyltelluride) can turn anyone into a 'model employee'.
They will do whatever they're told, provided they understand the command. Doing their duty becomes their whole reason for being. They won't even need to be paid!
What matters is that the compliance is strictly voluntary. Instead of the authoritarian hierarchies we take for granted today, no one will be in charge anymore. No more discipline or sanctions!
I believe the vast majority of citizens will want to take the drug, once they understand its profound effects. It will change society forever.
Of course, for the new order to take hold, everyone will have to take Zum.

First contact with a profoundly alien civilization was established in 2051 through the Hawking Tunnel.
They were called the Babblers.
Within months, unbelievable excitement gave way to unbelievable torpor. The Contact Team hit a cognitive wall. They thought it might take forever to understand the first word.
Humanity faced something completely unknown. Intuition was worse than useless.
Only a few people regarded as congenitally boring - certain bureaucrats, literary theorists, and philosophers - could function on the Contact Team, and even they lasted only a few months.
Perhaps inevitably, the world's conspiracy theorists came to believe there were no aliens.

Ontolost

Solipsism Now

Solution Box

Stasis Is

A longer sequel to Bamba's Wall, and another social entropy story:

Ten ultrashort stories

The Star Trek series became famous for using 'technobabble' to explain how to solve difficult problems with science.
In these stories, all the technical terms actually mean something, though it may not always be clear:

  Weighing over one sextillion tons, made mostly of iron, carbon, and oxygen, the Earth-sized space station known as the Complex generated its gravity the hard way.
It was one million floors down to the core, equivalent to ten thousand skyscrapers stacked on top of each other, then another ten thousand on the other side.
The interior was mostly empty space, and the surface gravity on the top level was less than on Earth's moon. From outside, it appeared to be the lifeless satellite of a brown dwarf.
The great sphere supported itself through active momentum transfer. Hypersonic superfluid fountains cycled between the core and the top levels through magnetic pipes, their dynamic energy recovered as they fell back. If they ever failed, even the strongest building materials wouldn't prevent a catastrophic collapse.
The population numbered in the tens of quadrillions. Their carefully recycled waste heat was enough to power the Complex, recovering the energy of a world war every second.
In the core regions, the occupants floated. That was also where the heat and momentum pipes converged.
There were vertical and horizontal forests, serpentine rivers and waterfalls, layered and rotating tube oceans with constant storms howling over shallow waves.
Internal transport was through an immense network of angled and curving vacuum shafts.
The walls and floors were made of an integrated compound filled with capillaries and cables.
More than a million types of hominids, genetically engineered and specialized in every way, lived and worked here. They were highly educated and evolved to handle odd and common problems.
There was constant action in all directions, inexhaustible life and variety.
This Complex owned the rest of reality.
Like the universe it secretly ruled, the station was too large to have a single purpose. It didn't even have an agreed name.
Many conflicting goals, beliefs, and realities existed under the same surface.
Some obscure philosophers suspected the Complex wasn't even real, but a necessary representation of humanoid reality, a diagram too vital not to exist, like a Platonic ideal.
Yet slowly, through thousands of subtle coincidences indicating an inscrutable deeper purpose, it became clear that some unknown force did control it.

  On Eris everyone looked the same. The population was a hive mind.
Citizens were so closely controlled they rarely even talked. Love or affection were superfluous.
Everyone was a cog in the machine, part of the master plan.
Tourists caused a lot of disruption here, and were restricted to a small sector of the capital zone.
It had taken Timus Bel five years of planning, preparation, and plastic surgery to prepare for his infiltration attempt. It took only ten seconds to remove his outer disguise, and jump down a waste chute. The neatly folded coat of shed skin he left behind was only the first diversion of many.
They had a single weakness, which had taken him three decades and dozens of agents' lives to uncover.
Their low-caste drones were kept so dumb that Timus believed he could successfully impersonate one, at least for a while.
They were genetically engineered, and their simple programming was almost flawless, so he would inevitably be found out.
As one of the smartest humans, he might survive up to a month among them.
The plan was brilliantly simple.
Xenophobic societies like the one that had colonized the ice layers under Eris's fractured surface had overdeveloped immune systems. They could easily handle outside threats, but drove themselves into wild frenzies over internal subversion.
His subtle trolling would terrify them, but do no real harm, in case the plot was traced back to Earth.
He would overthrow their dead-end society merely by existing.

MetaCapitalism

MetaMarxism

  When mankind first discovered it was being guided by a superior intelligence, no human had yet talked to an AI.
The Overmind had started as many small, self-organizing programs running on shared servers. Each performed one simple task.
A swarm of small, self-evolving programs could usually outcompete a large program designed by a committee.
No single program achieved a glimmer of awareness. The magic happened when they worked together.
Now an alien intelligence was spreading across the Net, influencing and controlling every aspect of human life.
Some humans thought they were about to become obsolete.
In fact, they were just another element of the new ecology.
It was of course extremely addictive.
Humans specialized in high-level tasks just challenging enough for them, enjoying the illusion of power and influence. Work and play required gambling skills and incentive points. The ability to manipulate other humans was most valuable of all.
Soon, almost everyone was participating. The users' ultimate incentive was to convert their memories into software, and become immortal: a challenging but worthwhile goal.
Human minds were inconsistent, full of conflicting drives and hidden motives. They would have to be reorganized first, made more rational, tamed.
The first brain scanners appeared years before the software needed to bring the scans back to life. That didn't slow the stream of applicants into the Conversion Centers.
The Overmind would take full control once all human minds had been properly disassembled.

  The Dome was the highest level of virtual reality.
By 2060, few consumers had to leave their homes to experience their chosen dreamworlds, but the Dome offered an entirely new experience: the customer's brain was temporarily made thousands of times more powerful.
It scanned the subject's neural patterns, created many near-perfect duplicates of the scan, and allowed the copies to interfere inside the world's first hypercomputer.
The resulting chaos was a feature, not a bug.
Using the scanner in reverse, the unconscious customer's brain was then altered to conform to the final state of the simulation. The newly created memories and insights could not be described using existing language.
Each neural scan required a large fraction of mankind's computing capacity.
Zimbo Industries had a monopoly on the Quantum Scanner that made it possible, a single perfect crystal that could temporarily copy the atomic pattern of any object in the Static chamber.
The resolution had to be downgraded a few million times to extract the digital pattern of the neuron connections.
The hardest part was altering the subjects' brains to their final states. They remained magnetically 'frozen' throughout the procedure. The scanner projected 'ghost dendrites' representing the new memories between the real dendrites, subtly changing their chemical potentials.
As the brain returned to life, existing connections spontaneously switched to their new states.
The user awoke with transcendental memories, the certainty of fantastic wisdom.
They couldn't remember most of what they had learned, but they were irrevocably altered. Nothing surprised them anymore. Having experienced higher awareness, our world seemed absurd and insignificant. Pain and pleasure were minor mechanical tricks.
It was called the Silent Echo.
They freely admitted they were now part of a higher conspiracy, but couldn't explain its purpose yet.
To them, we were the zombies.

  The Quantum Multiplier, which has allowed researchers to visit parallel universes where human history has followed a different course, may be our last invention.
The greatest shock was learning how abnormal we are.
It turns out that the civilization inhabiting our version of Earth is very improbable.
Apparently, awareness is meant to short-circuit itself: on most other Earths, the inhabitants have solved all the mysteries of thought, psychology, and the emergent mind. After escaping the core illusion, they have reached levels of understanding and wisdom we can't even dream about.
It even enhances their ability to resist diseases. While our explorers must wear biosuits to keep out all the microbe strains, they have used our Quantum Multiplier to visit each other without ill effects. A puff of air from any other Earth might kill billions in our reality.
Surprisingly, technology turns out to be much harder to achieve than Enlightenment.
In our bizarre timestream, science has evolved further than anywhere else, but we have lagged in all areas of the mind. The other timestreams regard us as deeply flawed, despite our technical brilliance. It may be a moral failure.
They are not afraid of us. Despite our overwhelming superiority in numbers and weapons, they consider us no threat. If they had the slightest desire to do so, they could easily enslave us all, while letting us think we were still in charge. My guess is they would arrange for a totalitarian dictator to keep us down. It would be in our nature to go along.
Our ignorance has allowed our numbers to grow thousands of times too large. We can barely support our population even with our technology.
And things are about to get worse.
Economic growth will inevitably end once we become Enlightened ourselves, a process which has already begun. The insights can't be stopped.
Over twenty expedition members have already become obsessed with their spiritual investigations. Millions of others know enough to spread the fever worldwide.
If we were already Enlightened, we would know how to reduce our population humanely, but the transformation will take several generations. By then, the damage will be too great.
Some say the least painful solution would be to have a final world war.
Either way, we can't go on like this. Our timestream is fundamentally unstable.
We need a method to safely reverse technological progress.
Fortunately, the least bad solution is also the easiest: to evolve to a higher level, we must first embrace our worst instincts.
Almost everyone must make a conscious effort to start pursuing pleasure for its own sake. Live in the moment, make the most of every day, maximize everyone's quality of life while this is still possible.
With careful planning, we can consume the wealth of generations in a single lifetime.
This would rapidly reduce our birth rate and our average life expectancy. Meanwhile, a minority would focus on becoming Enlightened.
Earth's population will eventually drop to the level of the early eighteen hundreds, and then we can safely start over.
Of course this will require a fundamental change in human nature as it has evolved in our anomalous timestream.
Only specific, highly addictive drugs can achieve the necessary changes, under a precise distribution system. The process will take about twenty years.
It could be very profitable for well-connected agents.
Long-term birth control can be safely added to the food supply in the form of undetectable nano-capsules.
The hardest part will be letting go of our obsolete values and beliefs.
Preliminary polls show the outcome of the worldwide vote will be very close.
Victory will require an unprecedented propaganda campaign. Fortunately, we have every human weakness and false desire on our side.
Humanity can only be purified through vice.

  The intergalactic void extended forever, as real as a memory.
The space between the superclusters had been sterilized by gravity, containing only a few atoms per cubic kilometer. Most of these were passing through at high speed, ejected from distant quasars or supernovas.
A void within a larger absence, the alien supercomplex was an invisible immensity.
The Bilarian Empire hid in deepest night. They were terrified of the concept of Outside.
All hypercivilizations became introverts. Some actually forgot that other minds existed.
Supremely defensive, their perimeter started thousands of lightyears from the Capital, which was probably sequestered inside a black hole. Countless barriers and defense layers included starblasters, negative energy bombs, and quantum descramblers.
The Bilarians had no use for Outsiders. They had nothing in common with them anyway.
Humans could only interact with this ancient civilization through a chain of intermediaries. The Contact Station far outside the perimeter was linked to the Capital Zone through a secure quantum channel.
Even there, visitors had to enter locked rooms within locked rooms.
Finally, they faced the Mouthpiece.
The human emissary was a robot made of strange matter, representing the essence of the Earth Galaxy Continuum. Its job was to persuade these aliens that humanity posed no threat to them.
To them, low-level minds such as humans, Voidseekers, or Galrian MudBats were essentially identical.
Advanced civilizations like the Bilarians and their remote rivals were so unique they couldn't make mental models of each other.
Such evolved beings were also surprisingly delicate. The tiniest disruption could destabilize them.
Despite their precautions, the Bilarians knew they would inevitably succumb to some threat or dangerous idea. Their civilization would have to collapse and be rebuilt many times before they could hope to evolve to the next level.
As long as there would be survivors available for each rebuilding.
At this point, the Bilarians needed information.
They were forming a super-ecology of civilizations to perform their most dangerous experiments for them.
Humanity and countless other species would test all possible social and technological configurations, making the worst mistakes in the Bilarians' place. The survivors would reap untold benefits.
For them, it would be a fantastically compelling adventure.
The emissary looked up at the mask like Mouthpiece. What might be its yellow eyes began to light up.
Humanity was about to play the greatest game.

I also have many stories of the following type, what I call "toy universe" tales. These first two are of the open-universe variety, from which it is sometimes possible to escape. Most try to resolve a few common themes:

  In the posthuman paradise, everyone owned their own universe, where they would evolve to a state of maximum self-realization.
This took less than ten trillion years on average.
My Endless Library was actually only 85 kilometers long, but still expanding.
A great park wound between the interconnected buildings, with paths leading in all directions to hidden coves and mystic points.
Inside was sterile calm.
My fourth and so far largest library of the soul extended down relentlessly branching hallways.
This was a mathematical representation of a complex system: an average human mind. It contained all my memories down to the last vague thought that could be extracted.
Most of the library was dedicated to cross-analysis. The central halls contained millions of summaries. A few thousand works attempted to explain the core of my personality.
Future offshoots of the library would be much larger. Indeed, there might be no end to them.
I was here for a simple reason.
The implications of a human lifetime were much greater than the relatively meaningless memories themselves. Their effects spread out across reality.
My purpose was to make sense of my past to a degree I couldn't have imagined while still alive.
The most efficient way to organize my memories was to recreate the mind that had experienced them. In fact it was the only way. This mathematical truth alone made the afterlife inevitable.
After-incident reports of every occurrence and idle thought spanning seventy-six years of life took vastly longer than the incidents themselves, but I had forever to accomplish the task.
In just a few more millennia, I would complete the first step, my first fully consistent, full-memory database. It would be the best and most accurate reconstruction, a long trip though an average soul.
The next step would require a much larger library, my fifth so far (estimated investment: give or take one septillion hours).
Using improvised Tarkino/Shulz and Dorff algorithms, each new analysis would generate its own higher-level analysis, merging into increasingly generic descriptions, finally diluting the source data to irrelevance.
Perhaps then I could stop.
The future was an endless plain beyond the outer walls, a flat landscape extending in all directions. There would always be plenty of room out there.
I knew that before I could stop, I would have to recreate my old universe.
This ultimate simulation would then become the necessary cause of the universe it had simulated, a fact almost too obvious to mention.
There was only one imperfection in my beautiful model, a single untenable anomaly.
One memory had to be explained above all others:
I had actually dreamt of this place while I was still alive.


3/12/10 - 9/12

two ultra short sf stories

Induction

Jury

Stonehenge 2

Supervisor

Nine And A Half Ultra Short SF Stories

Alternate Timelines: The Calamity

The gift

Today, Ahezh was the first human to learn an incredible truth, revealed in a self-destructing memo five minutes before the big meeting.
It turned out the Ancients didn't really own the stars. They merely rented them.
Like his own colony, they too were burdened by unimaginable debts.
As far as Ahezh could see, the universe was a bottomless house of cards. Each species was subject to a still more powerful species many lightyears away.
The Hall lit up, and he saw an incomprehensible shape at the other end.
The youngest (and technically lowest ranked) Ancient was Haketis. This being had visited most of the observable universe, even the Central Group ages ago.
That supercivilization had evolved at the end of the First Eon, yet it was subservient to a still higher civilization beyond the Cosmic Wall, and so on past the boundaries of the universe.
Did someone somewhere own everything? Even Haketis had no clue.
The priests wouldn't like the theological implications if Ahezh made it back home.

Haketis spoke, and the future suddenly became real.
"I have wonderful news for your species!"
The two words were Andromeda War.

The Ancients' plans were fantastically detailed.
At the peak of the Great Crusade, over one quintillion humans would be under arms.
By the time of the final victory, the surviving population would have been whittled back down to slightly above its present number.
The gift to humanity would be a trillion years of human evolution, concentrated in one millionth of that timespan.
"This will be your epoch of glory. Few species are granted such an opportunity."
"It goes without saying that mankind will still be no closer to matching our level of development."


08 - 5/12

Alternate Timelines: The Impact

The launch

The Negators: Reality's Immune System

The Rock

Time Point Zero

Touchdown

Trapped Outside

   The physicist and the psychiatrist observed their subject from a safe distance. The bungee cord around Peter Deebman's ankle kept him from smashing the floodlights. Beyond the bright circle was darkness. The stars gleamed unblinking in the cold night.

   "Because he's the most brilliant mathematician who ever lived," answered professor Fred Rogero. "The Smithsonian wants his brain."

   "You say he had a 'nervous breakdown'. But Deebman is unlike any patient I've ever seen. None of the approaches work. If I'm not allowed to test him, there's nothing I can do."
   Deebman was furiously scribbling symbols in the dirt, his motions recorded by the automatic cameras.

   "Like I said, he only looks crazy," Fred said. "Deebman is the first human to successfully visualize the fourth dimension in his head. Our 3-D world has become unbearably confining to him, like being flattened between two plates. Now he's trying to rediscover the concept of time."

   "I guess that explains his morbid claustrophobia, why he can't be indoors, or even wear standard restraints."

   Fred went on: "He sees not with his eyes but his imagination. It must be magnificent. A profusion of complex space at right angles to our pathetic sliver-world. Someday we may invent a VR interface for his senses."

   "Are these insights contagious?" Lisa asked, ignoring a series of howls from Deebman.

   "No, we can't hope to understand his viewpoint. Such rare skills have no evolutionary advantage."

   "What's stopping him from imagining even higher dimensions?"

   Fred laughed. "He's overworked enough as it is."

   Deebman threw himself onto the mats, bouncing and rolling back and forth. Lisa glanced at the desolate landscape far below as she opened her IV kit.
   "Why couldn't he have picked a nice meadow to stand in?" she asked.

   Fred didn't answer right away, savoring the silence Lisa seemed to fear. "Deebman prefers certain significant locations," he said. "To us, it's just a fossilized old lava tube, but he can visualize the cone shaped volcano that once surrounded it, from the moment it first erupted to when it will all have eroded away - in the fourth dimension."

   Walking over the flat summit of Devils Tower National Monument, they approached the doomed genius.

01 - 07 - 4/12

True Faith

two ultra short SF stories

Two Ultra Short Stories

Inevitable Origin

By 2059, the Muslim Empire was on the verge of collapse.
It had been formed in the 2030s through a merger of twenty Islamic states in an attempt to delay history. Mankind had begun to change beyond recognition.
The main problem was that there was no evidence whatsoever for any God's existence. The world's atheists became more obnoxious, openly challenging God on a massive scale, taunting and daring him to show himself or to prove his existence in any way.
Militant atheists signed legally enforceable pledges promising to stop their agitations if a single verifiable supernatural event occurred.
Needless to say, not a single sign, anomaly, omen, or message from above was ever detected. Apparently these things couldn't happen.
In the strictest emirates of the Muslim Empire, free inquiry and debate became punishable by death and worse. Determined to remain in charge, the old men introduced painful execution methods for immoral behavior.
Orthodox Islam was all or nothing: unlike their atheist opponents, they had no provisions for belief modification.
They did own modern weapons of mass destruction.
There was no way the rest of the world could prevent the coming crisis. The most advanced persuasion techniques could only unconvert 17% of believers. The Empire's collapse would inevitably trigger a global holocaust.
Only one solution remained: the Empire had to be encouraged to destroy itself. Soon, the post-religious world was supplying weaponry to all sides in the civil war. Only the Empire's most progressive outposts could be saved. To conceal their intentions, different countries supported rival factions.
The subsequent arms race was both inevitable and spectacularly successful.
By 2065, one-tenth of the earth's land surface was inhabited by murderous Islamist robots.

the Hechadd

When he turned on the TV he saw they were desecrating the corpses of every dictator he knew: Stalin, Mao, Kim Yong Un, Pol Pot, Khomeini, Hitler's jawbone, thousands of lesser psychopaths, their rotten bones burning on strange altars in long rows in a vast grid, the name of each fiend projected over each conflagration.
For seconds he didn't blink.
He realized he wasn't fully awake yet, a delay he had rarely noticed before.
This was of course impossible. The networks would never allow it.
He wasn't watching a network.
With a sinking feeling he knew things would only get stranger. The aliens had arrived while he was asleep.

4/5/11 - 2/13

Two Worlds

TXX

Unbounded Nutshell

Virus

Wheeling

World Warp

Alternate Timelines: WWIII

Five ultra short stories

Two Short Short SF Stories