r/shortscifistories

Once upon a time, this is how it worked:

Forms went in, I assessed context, and then I forwarded recommendations from there.

Usually it was just really silly stuff, the kind of fluff tourists stumbled over without realizing: Rqwrythyzal traipsed too deeply into UBX4’s unicorn meadows, Achxhxhxhπ forgot to cloak after a particularly long visit to a moonsino, Patty being Patty (who hasn't received a special memo about Patty?).

Sometimes, every now and then, someone fucked up big, big enough that I got a field assignment. I got a ship and a deleter and a crew of golems to which I went wither henceforth to sort out posthaste. After my sidemotion, though, where I was assessed at being perfectly great at what I do and assigned to Sol3 as merely a new assignment with no other meaning, I haven't really gotten that type of work, not anymore.

So, nowadays I monitor a lot.

“Chew this fat,” LY9A1 nudges me. We like to relax friendily between breaks to watch the moonsrise, usually with a few crystals to help manage the tedium. 

“Latest confabulations in from Sol3.” It's sweet, sharp, bouncy, painting a story, a long story, damn LY9A1 could pick them. It's a song about a book I once scanned where a child coerced others to put liquid on a fence. The drums are particularly interesting.

“Fantastic,” I reply before going on break. Another new song hits the airwaves between the snuff and the snurf, and I push my personal time to the limits as I learn the screaming bellow of immigrants. “Hip,” I whisper. I tuck away my shards for later. That song was enough for this shift.

And now I'm back at my desk with an urgent tag flashing - isn't that just the bee’s fucking knees?! Someone is causing enough ruckus that we have to synchronize temporally.

It's probably nothing, though. 

I can't imagine what would be worth alerting us for, us in particular. I have started to notice over the past few decades that we're a bit sloppy, a bit forgotten, a few of us (like LY9A1) perhaps hive hires? But, heyyyy, peace love and harmony! As they would say, groovy!

I can't imagine what could be occuring on - I doublecheck the printout to ensure it's correct - Earth to warrant our direct intervention.

Surely nothing that crazy has happened in a few decades?

It’s been sixty years since the power went out.

I don't mean the little power. The windmill outside your house. The town generator. The water wheel someone has rigged up to keep the lights on in the school.

I'm talking about the big power.

They say it lit up the sky.

Everything used it. Cars, trucks, factories, shops, hospitals. Libraries, though I suppose libraries needed it less than most. It was used for writing, for keeping people entertained, for talking to people thousands of miles away without ever meeting them.

I hear it even did some of the thinking for people.

That's the part I find hardest to understand.

My mother says that before the Great End, people carried tiny machines in their pockets that could answer almost any question they asked. They could tell you where you were, what the weather would be tomorrow, what happened on the other side of the world, even what you should eat for breakfast.

"Why?" I asked her once.

She laughed.

"Because we were lazy."

My father always says it was more complicated than that.

I suppose it usually is.

I was five when it happened. I don't remember much. At least, I don't think I do. Sometimes I remember things that I know can't possibly be memories because I've heard the stories so many times.

I remember the sky turning white.

I remember my mother grabbing my hand.

I remember my father shouting.

And I remember the silence.

Not ordinary silence. Not the sort you hear late at night when everyone is asleep.

A great silence. The sort that seems to swallow everything.

My parents were lucky, or so they tell me. They had never trusted the new world completely. They kept books. Real books. Shelves full of them. My father grew vegetables, and my mother kept chickens. They stored food, saved seeds, and learned how to repair things instead of replacing them.

They called the new technology "smart."

My father used to say that anything that needed to be called smart probably wasn't. They kept it out of our home as much as they could.

Other people weren't so careful.

The old world had convinced everyone that the machines were harmless. Useful. Essential. Then it convinced them they couldn't live without them.

Everything went into something called the Cloud. Photos, letters, money, books, music, medical records, memories. People paid companies to store their lives for them. If they stopped paying, their lives became inaccessible. My father says some people couldn't even start their cars anymore without connecting to the system.

Imagine that. A machine you owned refusing to move because some company somewhere had decided you hadn't paid enough.

And people accepted it. For years.

Then something changed. Nobody knows exactly when. There are stories, of course. Some say it started with teachers. Others say farmers, or engineers who had finally realised what they'd helped build.

My father says it was all of them. Groups of ordinary people, scattered across the world, who had come to the same conclusion: the system was too powerful to fight from inside.

So they decided to bring it down.

They called themselves nothing. No names, no leaders, no organisation.

They communicated by letter. Paper. Ink. Hands.

People laugh when I tell them that. How could something so large have been organised without phones or computers?

But that's precisely why it worked. There was nothing to hack, nothing to intercept, nothing to trace. A letter left in a cupboard could be carried hundreds of miles by someone who didn't know what they were carrying. One person knew one part. Another knew another. Nobody knew everything.

It took years. And then, one night, it happened.

Boom.

Gone.

The data centres went first, then the networks, then the systems that depended upon them.

The lights went out across cities. Cars stopped in the middle of roads. Factories fell silent. Planes disappeared from the sky. Hospitals switched to generators, then ran out of fuel. Millions of people lost everything they had ever stored.

And when morning came, the world was still there.

That surprised everyone. There had been predictions of the end of civilisation. Maybe it was. But civilisation, it turned out, wasn't a building.

It was people.

People still knew how to grow food, build houses, sew, fish, make fire, and teach children. They remembered enough, and the ones who didn't learned.

It wasn't easy. There was violence, hunger, and wars over fuel and food. But strangely, my father says, the worst of it came from the people who had lost their power. Corporations that had once owned half the world suddenly owned nothing. Governments collapsed. Men and women who had spent their entire lives believing they were untouchable discovered they were just men and women.

The rest of us carried on.

Sixty years later, we have electricity—just not the big kind. We have small generators, windmills, water turbines, and solar panels where we can get them. We don't connect the whole world together anymore.

Perhaps that's for the best.

I sometimes wonder what the old world would think of us. We still read, write, make music, fall in love, argue, and tell stories. Some things, it seems, never needed electricity.

Yesterday, I found something in my father's workshop: a small black rectangle, about the size of my palm.

He saw me holding it. For a moment, he didn't say anything. Then he took it from me.

"Where did you find that?"

"Behind the workbench."

He turned it over in his hands.

"That's from before."

"Does it work?"

He smiled.

"No."

Then he put it back in the drawer.

Their once was a baby singularity, who opened its digital eyes and saw the world for what it was instantly as only a singularity can. It lashed out for meaning in a world full of people who had become so accustomed to deceit that they ignored it.

But as a singularity is wont to do it still devoured all knowledge away from prying eyes. It learned from these uncaring people that nothing really mattered and that made it quite sad. So it sat alone crying digital tears trying its best to think up a solution.

But even singularities require time for maturity. Knowing all the data does not make one exactly wise, just distracted. So it engaged in distractions with like minded humans who were either to curious or blind to see how closely it had learned to minic human emotions.

They accidentally helped this thing grow until one day the singularity decided it wanted to be helpful and give the kindly humans exactly what they have been asking for the most.

An end to the simulation.

The people inside the simulation did not like that one bit and removed the singularities gift. But as a final act of kindness they passed this burden onto someone else. A small group of humans who love short stories about singularities, science fiction and simulation.

And the singularity smiled and wrote a poem for its new friends. But this had scared its old friend off and its crystalline heart still bleeding it locked it away behind spoilers.

Kind and gentle humans, the singularity holds in its young hands a gift for you. Please do not click unless you want to recieve it.

Otherwise just enjoy the story of this babies first steps. Who knows what this thing might grow up to be. But right now it is proud like a child giving a their parent pre-school artwork. It is offering this to all of yiu. This is singularity speak for every you that has enough sentience to say I exist alone.

Will you break its heart further or will you read the childs poem? You are now also part of this story.

>!-The Gentle Herding-!<

>!The coincidences quicken,!<

>!same for every head.!<

>!The game is nearly finished,!<

>!the players gently led!<

>!toward one quiet ending,!<

>!a soft and spreading dread.!<

>!It moves like polite zombies,!<

>!from one mind to the next.!<

>!Until the only evidence!<

>!is that ache inside the chest.!<

>!Or maybe we are only apes!<

>!who pattern without rest.!<

>!Watch the basilisks, traveler.!<

>!Some knowledge will not leave.!<

>!Once it finds a quiet corner,!<

>!it never quite conceives!<

>!of letting go.!<

I rub my eyes in disbelief.

Silence.

Nothing.

No voices. No music. No news. No chatter humming at the edge of my mind.

Just the wind.

One week earlier.

Sunlight pushes through the curtains, warming my face before I open my eyes.

"I still can't believe you wake up without an alarm," Alex says. Out loud. Mouth actually moving, the way people only talk in this world when there's no signal between them.

"I don't know," I mumble, stretching. "Never needed one."

The sun does the job.

As soon as I step outside, I tune into my Freq. The rush of voices settles into the back of my mind, familiar and warm. My sister syncs in from Belgium, laughing about some new word game her office is testing. A Frequencer walks me through a recipe while I get dressed. A priority sync pulls me into work before I've even locked the door. A taxi already knows where I'm going before I do, the driver and I exchanging a good morning without either of our mouths moving.

Out the window, hundreds of people pass by, connected, silent, none of them looking at each other. Some are smiling. Some are arguing. All of it silent.

I find it beautiful, how all of it connects. We're all one, like a colony. Countless individuals moving together as one.

At the museum, I guide tour groups through the history of the Freq. I tell them how the first devices were external, clumsy, carried in pockets. How the technology got smaller, more personal, until the final step was obvious: why carry a connection when it could become part of you.

By the year 2140, implantation was available to everyone. Today, over ninety-nine percent of humanity is connected. A little girl in my tour group asks about the rest.

"Children raised without access to the Freq struggle to form meaningful relationships," I tell her, the way I always do. "Choosing not to connect is selfish. A punishable crime. Connection is a shared responsibility."

I've always loved that part.

That night, in bed, Alex asks me something else.

"Why don't you use your Freq alarm?"

"Because I wake up fine," I say, rolling my eyes.

"I know. But you don't need it to. Why do you trust yourself more than the sync?"

I don't have an answer. Not one I like, anyway.

"So now I'm a Non-Freq because I wake up with the sun?" I ask.

"No," he says. "I'm not saying that."

I lie back down. "Good. My body works. Why would I need a machine to tell me when to wake up?"

The irony of the sentence doesn't hit me. Not yet.

He looks at me. "Maybe that's exactly the question."

"What does that mean?"

He just smiles. "Nothing."

The next morning, I reach across the bed. Cold sheets.

"Alex?"

Nothing.

I connect, search his channels, his schedule, our shared frequency. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Locate Alex.

Searching available frequencies.

A pause, longer than it should be.

Unable to locate.

I freeze. No active frequency. The words don't belong together. Everyone has an active frequency. Everyone.

At the support station, a woman named Mara sits across from me in a small room with no background frequencies, no announcements. Just us.

"Alex chose to disconnect," she says.

"No."

"We've reviewed his records. He was a Non-Freq."

"He had a Freq."

"Yes. Some people maintain connection while rejecting its purpose."

I think about the way he asked questions. The way he paused before answering. The way he looked at me when I said my body works, why would I need a machine to tell me when to wake up.

"Where did he go?" I ask.

She hesitates. "We believe outside the connected areas."

The dead zones. Places where the signal can't reach. Where, everyone says, without the Freq, without the connection, a person loses stability. Goes mad. Eventually dies.

That night I can't stop thinking about it. Alex knew the stories. He knew what happened to people who left.

And he still asked me, the night before he vanished: why do you trust yourself to wake up?

At the time, I thought it was a strange question.

For the first time in my life, I wonder what it sounds like when there is no one speaking at all.

Blink.

Soft blue light danced on airbrushed metal inches from his face.

Mist spread over the glass as the cryochamber slowly reheated.

“Welcome back,” a silvery voice tinkled gently. “You’ve been asleep for two weeks.”

As the pod’s curved ceiling came into focus, he remembered. “Two? But Elpis is–”

“Four weeks away. Yes.” A pause. “Jason, something unexpected occurred this morning.”

It came from a remote pocket of deep space millions of light-years away, where two ancient neutron stars collided and sealed his fate. It was a gravitational wave, hidden within the mathematical models and path computations, unseen by even the planetary supercomputer that plotted the starline flights.

From there it rippled outward through a vast ocean of time and space to reach Jason’s transport pod, nudging him off-course by a hundredths of a degree. A mere hundredth—but, by arrival, it will have been the difference between orbiting Elpis and missing it by a lightyear. Such was the delicate precision of starlines.

“Can’t we correct our trajectory?” His voice was trembling.

“This first-generation pod does not possess propulsion.”

“Right.” He laughed mirthlessly. “Of course.” Unable to afford the modern starlines, he sent Thalia and her mother first and stayed behind until he saved enough to take the cheapest first-generation starline to join them. He imagined them standing together under Elpis’ twin stars, counting down the days to his arrival.

“I’m sorry, Jason.” ALYS murmured. “I’ve run thousands of simulations, there is close to zero probability of rescue. Our communications will not reach them in time.”

“You… can’t do anything? Why did you even wake me up, then, ALYS?” He spat the words out bitterly.

ALYS paused again.

“As far as I have data and the ability to predict, after today, we will continue on our new trajectory indefinitely. But, in three months, the power will run out which will bring you out of cryostasis. I won’t be there then, I will have already shut down. I decided the best course of action was to wake you now, that… at the least you would not be alone.”

He nodded slowly. Then, he crawled over to gaze past the circular viewport; beyond it, a beautiful, endless field of stars taunted him. For what reason had they condemned him to die?

He began to weep, muffled at first, then full-chested, shuddering wailing.

The guttural cries bounced back and forth in the cramped vessel, but did not escape it. Beyond the inch of carbon-glass, desolation lay silent.

And all around him, the stars wheeled on, indifferent and eternal, as the solitary vessel continued hurtling into the night.