> The Zed corporation paid a one-time fine of $150,000 to the FCC, Friday, after regulators classified the near earth object 1981-Midas as hazardous orbital debris (HOD). Astronomers determined the orbit of the two kilometer long HOD is rapidly decaying and will impact east Asia in approximately 300 years. Due to its remarkably dense and mineral-rich mass, experts calculate a catastrophic collision with an energy equivalent to roughly three thousand of the most powerful nuclear weapons and potentially far more, should the new moon contain sufficient concentrations of fissile or fusible elements.
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> Zed CEO Palmer Cauldwell said, "We intend to fully de-orbit the claim within this decade. Crews are scheduled to begin blasting immediately."
Worldwide Chronicle. June 15th, 2073
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Show biz
"Tapdancin' Todd's song request hotline, you're on the air viewer," his white dress shirt bloomed in the phosphor light cast from a bank of stacked old-timey wooden televisions. Tall and thin, the showman twitched and bounced with grace to honky-tonk radio favorites, once or sometimes twice each week. The retro thing went out twenty years ago, and it'd been just as long since Todd had seen a full chat.
"Do Plum puddin!" the chat flooded with troll requests, "Freebird!"
Todd reddened in anger, "With song requests like that I might as well hang up my shoes. Y'all really want that?"
He bent over, unlacing his dancin' shoes. "That damn puddin' slop ain't even a song, it's against my rules, my clearly posted rules."
The bells of mechanical cash registers rang out. Coins rained across the backdrop of televisions. Twenty scryp was too much, even for his best dance. Decades playing for peanuts, and now the trolls were mocking him with their fake internet money.
"No, no, NO! Dammit. What y'all expect me to do with this, move into one of your creepy cells? Cut the music, cut the lights."
Todd cut off all the televisions. "What in the Sam Hill do you think you're doing? I don't do slop, I don't do rot. Cancel the payment, I don't care! I'm not dancin' to that and you know it. I don't want any got-damn scryp. Rule numero uno, partner, we only dance to real music."
Stone-faced, he sat and watched the messages scroll by. He saw the address to his single bedroom home on the outskirts of what had become a ghost town, names of family members, ex-girlfriends, details of his personal financial information.
Todd lashed out with decades of repressed anger at the no talent streamers who succeeded for no reason he could understand, the lack of payment for his great contributions not only to internet entertainment, but art and culture, by George, to civilization itself. "I am the last mountain dancer, keepin' this art alive for peanuts. You killers have nothing!" Kicking off his shoes, Todd brandished a golf club at the camera and threatened his new audience of trolls. "I'm gonna make y'all pay for this!"
Steam could have shot from his ears with the sound of a train-whistle, his hound dogs howled, he paced and waved the golf club around muttering livid nothings. In the final moment, he froze at sight of the viewer count on his vintage display, finding it hard to understand. Before he had really understood the consequences of such a big audience, the SWAT team's gunshots had blown apart his hounds. He was pinned to the ground, handcuffs tighter than banjo strings. Todd strained his neck to see the chat's reaction and he howled in a weird mixture of grief, joy, and pain. "By gum, I've got it made."
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Superawareness
Dread filled the receptionist at recognition of the visitor's shining moxel-studded vest. Searching the rafters for salvation, her blood froze at the sight of the lifeless, lightless turretcams, the building's sole security system disabled, not functional.
"Ain't you never seen a man open carry?"
Randy felt like an omniscient hand grenade. He was only brandishing two thousand and twenty-eight loaded guns, pointing them in every direction at all times. The gleaming vest's targeting system was rolled into his ocular nerve, making him aware of all potential threats through twenty different microsensors and sixty four minidrones, processed and displayed within less than a millisecond. Infrared, microwave, radio wave, active sonar, passive sonar, he could see everything happening in this building all at once. No military had fielded such a system, and yet he had put it all together in only a couple weekends with a resin printer, the power of free and open source software, and the desperate desire to die.
"Deimos, open the door," Randy said. The faint crack of static discharge, a cap gun, slight smoke. The first three beads tore the door to the server room open, latch completely blown out, the fourth hitting the door softly, hitting the ground, and bouncing back into its home on Randy's vest. The door creaked open, causing the receptionist scream and sob in fear.
"I'm not gonna hurt nobody, sweetheart. But I am going to kill some compute, you can count on that." Randy winked as the makeup began to run down her face, pure illustrated terror.
"Deimos, hit them thermistors." Loud electronic crackling as more beads shot off, some electrical buzz, the smell of burnt plastic. "Die, demons die!" Randy screamed and cackled in joy.
He strode into the datacenter like a cattle rustler entering a saloon, looking for trouble. Whipping his pointer fingers around like wheelguns at each of the frozen technicians, he grinned wide, "I can shoot y'all dead faster than Clint Eastwood, I'm the nobody with no name and I'll shoot all your cocks off! Right now? We gonna shut this gawwwd awful sinful demon town down!"
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Then he stood there for a moment, basking in the power and omniscience, savoring the superawareness coming in through the link. Rodney Hubert Flint, Terrence Howard Ng, and Vinay Sikh were escaping the building. None of the sickos inside were armed or moving, faces frozen, blue overlays indicating physical panic and a state near shock.
"Deimos, bleed 'em dry." The sound of static again, machinery grinding to a halt, hot coolant splashing to the ground all at once. Grinding and shrieking as spurts of the demonic fluid slapped and flashed into vapor on the already overheating processor stacks.
"PERIMETER ALERT," Deimos shrieked, "Enemy incoming bearing 230, egress along likely escape paths."
In his vision a shifting, branching tree of glowing paths floating an inch over the concrete floor led Randy through an optimized route to his motorcycle, and towards the next most likely datacenter.
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Midas Sick
The Honorable Reverend-Mayor Harmony Sturgis mingled amongst her flock, drinking sumac lemonade and green tea after Sunday gathering. As the pale outline of Midas rose above the treeline, a chill passed through the air. Voices choked, babies cried, Sturgis led the people into a nearby barn and retrieved her guitar, beginning a quiet rendition of Touch of Grey.
One man went pale, collapsed onto his knees and cried out, "The light, the light, shut the doors, shut the doors!" He convulsed and shook, shrieking in pain and then sighing in relief when the last evil rays of Midas were occluded by the barn door. Putting her guitar down and lighting a bundle of sage from her fanny pack, Harmony begin cleansing the man as he regained his senses.
"This is bad news, chief," Lieutenant Mayor Franz Griff always knew the score, speaking softly so that the others might not hear. "It passes over for fifteen minutes each hour. It's gettin' worse every time, how are they going to get on? What's gonna happen to the farm, Harm? Maybe you should tone it down a bit."
Stepping past Griff, Sturgis spoke loud and clear to the feral folk huddled in the barn, "Is this not proof of today's sermon, of the unnatural, evil presence of that greedy Midas? We will fight back like we have always fought back. We will adapt and we will survive, using every resource we have! Trust the plan, people."
Now lowering her voice and issuing orders to her lieutenant, "Go to Babylon, Griff. Buy out umbrellas, duct tape, aluminum foil, mylar balloons, dump out chips and bring us the bags. Get anything that can block it out. Put everyone to work immediately, have them to seal their windows, line their hats, their clothes."
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Zed
"The scientists are up their own asses, Guy. No vision at all. They're worried I'll let Midas fall to earth by negligence, can you imagine? Right now, we're dropping our fourth claim, the biggest deal yet, and tomorrow I might send one at San Francisco, shut down the competition forever." Cauldwell laughed every time he told that joke.
"Let's get those approval rates up, way up. You gotta make power to spend power. Midas is potential energy, an order of magnitude more than every nuclear weapon ever made, combined. Imagine if I just started dropping stadium sized chunks wherever it suited me!" Chortles gave way to sputtering coughs, and he sat back in his tall leather chair, puffing at the fine cigar.
"You can get away with anything, sir. There are no weapons systems that can penetrate to the core of Midas."
"No current weapons systems. That's short term backwards type thinking, Guy, typical of AI. I won't end up like Hitler and burn out all my potential power in a mad grab for whatever is available in the instance. We have the logistics, the high ground, but no diplomacy and too little cooperation. We must wait for the perfect moment, like the conquistadors, remember?"
"Like the conquistadors, sir."
"I told you this all last week and you already forgot about it. I believe your model is degrading, son." He puffed at the cigar. "Everyone hates them Yuddie terrorists and we're going to cash that one in for all we can."
"Yes sir. Very good sir. The Topeka suspect has not been apprehended."
"We need our men after him, now. Boots on the ground. Don't wait for the police to do it, we know how he's armed and they have nothing to even begin with him."
"Our satellites lost him around Wichita during unfavorable light conditions at dusk. We believe he's deployed a stealth implementation for RGB fabric."
"What about infrared, how did we lose him on the thermal?"
"Both the bike and the smallarm have some combination of excess cooling capacity and or low power operation modes, sir."
"Dammit, man." Palmer clutched his fist in anger, "Pass that on to the smallarms team and have them scrap everything. Forward this to our tactical vehicles team, give them everything they need to figure it out and replicate it. I can't believe they talked me out of the low power mode and RGB camo at the outset. Fire somebody responsible. And goddammit, man, get the rocket people to find some better sensors for our satellites!"
"Sir, we have men on the ground in Wichita guarding the datacenter. I deployed them immediately after the first attack. Sensormen equipped units are in place at all centers in the region."
Palmer tented his fingers, straining through a list of creative prompts for the situation. "We're going to put on an ambush, Guy. I want your men out of the praries by noon."
"Sir?"
"Do it, Guy. Summon mining and astro."
A small grey man in a black suit with round spectacles and a tall clipboard-wielding woman in a hardhat appeared next to Manwell.
"Trot, What's the fastest you can drop a piece of Midas? Let's say it's a small piece, equivalent to a ton of TNT. I need to hit a target the size of our standard datacenter somewhere, let's say around Wichita."
Dr. Phillip Trot, head of Astrophysics, paused briefly, a slideshow of animated sequences appearing behind him, as he narrated very slowly, affecting a heavy German accent. "Forced fragmentation can be combined with rocket guidance and propulsion. Diggers will isolate the claim and place excess directed charges that, when detonated, will energetically remove the fragment from orbit. At this critical point on this chart here, rocket thrusters will engage and further accelerate the claim to a customer in Wichita who is thankful for the speedy and accurate delivery."
"How long will this shot take to land, from the moment I identify the target?"
Consulting her clipboard, the mining manager construct smiled, "Boss, it'll take a few hours to chunk out five or six of these claims and another few to set the charges. Astro will have to fix us up with the rocketry. After that you're the trigger man, we can hit anywhere on earth in one minute to thirty seconds. I can get you one claim by noon. By next week we'll be able to do two of these miniclaims per hour, if you want."
Palmer considered this for a moment, "What if we take it down to half a ton of TNT? I don't want too much collateral damage."
"Decreasing the size of the miniclaim by two thirds will approach an optimal efficiency."
"Do it. Ready as many claims possible before sunrise in Wichita, and do it by the book. Give Trot whatever he wants, I don't care the cost. Notify Manwell as soon as the claims are readied."
Palmer waved his hand and the two simulated experts disappeared. No moral judgment, no questions asked, complete ignorance of any external meanings. The only managers he could trust.
"Guy, I'll need my finest suit made ready and the studio prepared for my statement tomorrow."
"Would you also like me to prepare your statement, sir?"
At this, Cauldwell laughed, shaking his leather throne then coughing uncontrollably, ash from the cigar peppering his lap.
"Sometimes I just wish someone else was here just so they could see how dumb you top-end personality models really are."