Stock exchanges conducted their business on trading floors, where men swapped slips of paper.
As computers were hooked up to the exchanges, the traders were replaced by computer programmers.
The faster the computers got, the more complex the programs needed to be.
Days became seconds.
Seconds became microseconds.
Microseconds became nanoseconds.
Eventually, the computers got so fast, it was the cable and distance that added delay. Computers were crammed together in a tight pack.
And then, a trade happened before the order.
The computers vanished into the past, waging massive financial battles.
Bigger… bigger… and then…
Bang, went the markets.
Tag: science fiction
Dr. Frankenstein At The Grocery
Dr. Frankenstein burst into the grocery store and ran straight for the produce section.
“Damn that Igor!” he growled as he reached for a bag of Romaine hearts.
Only an hour ago, Frankenstein had thrown a head of Iceberg lettuce to the lab floor.
“I need a heart, not a head!” he shouted.
“Sorry, Master!” Igor had slurred. “I’ll go back to the gro-”
“No!” shouted Frankenstein. “I’ll get it myself!”
By the time Frankenstein returned to the castle, the lightning had stopped.
He’d have to perform his experiments some other stormy day.
He shrugged, and prepared a Caesar salad.
Clone Crime
The problem with a clone of a person murdering the original is that you’ll find only one set of fingerprints and one set of DNA markers.
So, a murder will get flagged a suicide by the automatic systems, or it will get placed in the hard cases queue.
The investigators in that queue are really good at their jobs. As if they were born to do the job.
But they weren’t born to do it.
They were grown. In tanks.
And every so often, one goes astray, and kills another.
The rest circle the wagons quickly.
Call it a suicide.
Imaginary
Do imaginary children worry their imaginary parents when they have real friends?
I tried to ask my imaginary friend Steve, but he kept insisting that he was real.
“Oh, come on, you’re not real,” I said. “My parents don’t let me have real friends because I bite them.”
Steve insisted that he was real. “They tell you I’m not because my parents don’t want you biting me.”
“Aha! I’m right! They do worry!”
Steve shook his head, and went back to playing with his Tinkertoys.
I reached for the Tinkertoys… but my tentacles passed through them.
I hate being imaginary.
GMO
My girlfriend is a vegetarian who won’t eat genetically-modified food.
“You get more information from a mattress tag about what goes into it than you do from a Monsanto food label,” she said.
So, the next time she came over for dinner, I cooked up my mattress.
And it was much better than any of the tofu or bean curd crap she cooked for me.
“That was delicious,” she said. “What was in that?”
I handed her the mattress tag.
Sure, it was hard fitting it in the oven, but it was harder finding a wine that went with it.
Braintree
The origin of the name of the city of Braintree is lost in time, but historians believe that it comes from “Branoc’s Tree.”
Branoc was a farmer who lived in a massive treehouse, so massive that his whole family and all of his cousins and neighbors lived in it, too.
In the center of this massive tree was a glowing, pulsating brain, which acted as mayor, judge, and object of worship.
Wait… did you mean Braintree in England or in Massachusetts?
Massachusetts? Shit.
Those jerks just stole the name from those freaks up in the tree.
Stupid thieving colonist bastards.
Foster’s Nurse
“Foster isn’t feeling very well” is one of the phrases that the Nursebot is programmed to use.
“Foster is unavailable at the moment” is another.
The Nursebot uses those a lot when people call to check on Foster.
One phrase that the Nursebot does not have available is “Foster doesn’t want to talk to you, so he bought a Nursebot to make people like you think that he’s sick.”
Or “Foster slipped and broke his neck in the shower this morning.”
Foster’s body is covering the drain in the shower. The water is overflowing.
And the Nursebot just watches… waiting…
One Way
NASA never called it a one-way mission to Mars.
They called it a colonization mission.
But the crew knew that once they were on their way, they’d never come back.
NASA launched a series of cargo pods at Mars before launching the colonists.
The plan was to build the colony with all those materials.
Instead, an asteroid took out the lead cargo pod, and the debris knocked the others off course.
The colonists were carrying some supplies, but not enough.
And even if emergency supplies could be launched, the launch window had passed.
NASA finally called the doomed mission “one-way.”
Vanish
New York City vanished.
No explosions or fires, or strange lights in the sky.
It just vanished. Completely gone.
Scientists couldn’t explain it.
A lot of people freaked out. Lots of tweets and Facebook updates and crazy stuff.
Without New York telling everybody what to do, Los Angeles and Washington tried to step into that role.
Some followed, but others said “Fuck you, we’re tired of being told what to do.”
After a while, things settled down, and life returned to normal.
New York never came back.
They’re collecting for a monument, but I got better things to spend on.
Contact High
In a few years, the drug companies will have mastered the art of medicating out of existence every condition that interferes with the competitive consumption our society and economy depends on.
Drug A treats Condition A, but causes Condition B.
Drug B treats Condition B, but causes Condition C.
And so on, in an endless circle of pills and ointments and drops and vapors, we will torment our chemistry into a constant state of not-quite-well-enough.
We will be so saturated with these drugs, our souls will sweat bizarre toxic compounds, and devils will get deliriously high with a single lick.