Drink the night from my hands, speak with its voice. Wrap your words in cloaks of darkness, or make them rustle like leaves.

Liquid shadow rains down, cool, velvety, silent. Stains of night run down our faces, evaporating slowly. Stars twinkle through them.

Around the fire, a smoke snake is curled, protecting its young that still sleep in the coals.

When a writer dies mid-novel, be quick to open their skull. It may not be too late to save the embryo.↵Isn’t it cute as it writhes?

Hoping to tame it, you put the dragon in a cage of words. But it infuses them with fire and they fly like shrapnel through all your spells.

The new Nanomoss™ grows in public places and displays ads, feeding on attention instead of light. Unattended cameras are quickly overgrown.

“oh this is neat I’ve always wanted to be a protagonist” you utter fool, you let yourself be eaten by a tragedy, there, a mob at your door

A few stories escaped and now tell themselves. If they find you, they’ll gobble you up and make you an unwilling protagonist.

Unlucky birds have gotten stuck in the bubble, heads preserved like in amber, tails rotted off. They form a halo of feathers and skeletons.

The bomb still hangs in the air where the missile shield froze it in a drop of time. We’ve come to call the garden below it Damocles Park.

ｕ　ｅａｔ　ｕｒ　ｐａｒｔｎｅｒｓ　ｒｉｇｈｔ？　”whAT?“↵Ｉ　ｍｅａｎ　ｍａｒｒｉａｇｅｓ　ａｒｅ　ｃｏｎｓｕｍｅｄ　”yes, but-“↵ａｎｄ　ｕ　ｅａｔ　ｐｅｏｐｌｅ　ｏｕｔ　”yes, but-“↵ａｎｄ　ｖｅｇｅｔａｒｉａｎｓ　ｔａｓｔｅ　ｂｅｔｔｅｒ！　”y

What do you mean you can’t morph your bodies at will, and where are the tentacles on this thing, I thought that was a really neat feature!

Hello I am actually a traveller from a nearby star, we would like to initiate ‘sex’, see we learned about it from your ‘hentai’ media, and

That ambivalent feeling when the all-powerful surveillance net scraps its face recognition systems because we’re “just not a threat anymore”

do insomniac androids dream of electric sleep

given full access to a recognizer/classifier, construct training data that makes it unlearn a certain feature

“The Thing”, but with the humans somehow hideous and what emerges is beautiful, radiant, meaningful, and we can’t wait for the next one

and from the noise, a melody emerges, tears its way through the noise floor, bloody chunks of melting static gliding off its beautiful teeth

mining smartphone unlock patterns from cctv data via video recognition

What was travelling inner space like before the ships? You’ve heard stories of people going alone, unguided, returning changed.↵Primitives.

Right, they booked the safari! Thunderclaps resound. In the distance, a few trees stiffen and collapse.↵Your chair massages your back.

The windows take away some of the intensity, which is good. Part of the cruise exits upwards with what looks like toy guns in their hands.

Fractals ooze against the windows, notes frolic around the ship. Trip guides in silly shirts offer expensive freshly pressed orange juice.

Safe, accessible, with travel insurance against horror trips. Guaranteed machine elf sighting. On you go! (Your seat shudders slightly)

Through advances in neural interfaces and new drugs, ships to sail inner space become possible. Cruise trips quickly grow in popularity.

wait are you telling me it doesn’t work like that, now will you look at the color channels on this one, repurposed for bitfield irrigation

My hobby: Spending hours staring at badly compressed JPGs, trying to learn about the civilizations between the pixels from their artifacts.

Ladies and gentlemen, you are here not to break out of the simulation, but into one! We shall heist a whole world, and it will be glorious!

Some memes form cells from their hosts, ranging from ingroup to fully formed sect, with gatekeepers as cell walls, keepers of lore as cores,

dust is kicked up by the dance, twirls in to form tiny planetary rings around her limbs that occasionally flash up in the spotlights

void birds hatch from universes that have gone cold, glide on vacuum wings through the gibbering chaos in between, silence in their wake

why not reincarnate as a raindrop? you’ll be tiny, short-lived, almost ineffectual, but maybe bring happiness to those who hear or see you

She smashes the mirror but her image stays whole. It’s parts of her that float in the room, bloodless but disconnected.

“And in this universe, we made gravity a recommendation algorithm. The particles have all the choice in the world where to go.”

We call him Quicksilver: Smooth, shiny, eager to bond and good at finding gold, but ultimately poisonous.

Look it’s actually really easy: Find out who’s a p-zombie and make them commit all the deeds we’d get into hell for, because they won’t.

The sun sinks under the sea and rises for the merfolk. The kelp forest wakes, the watch changes, and dolphins chirp for the turquoise dawn.

What’s nice about DDoS jokes is that they become funnier when repeated

go outside during the storm, take down the firewall, let yourself be drenched by packets, drink their data raw

This has been the weather on Earth. Meanwhile, in the Noosphere, another storm is blowing through. These have become quite common, no Jimmy?

‘The Night’: 2cl blackthorn syrup, 1cl rum, 1cl Lethe (choose genre or ‘surprise’), ice.↵You won’t remember the night, but everything else.

Rinse a few books with the same flask of Lethe and you may actually gain memories from drinking it. Tastes vile, procedure not recommended.

Lethe is in fact a powerful solvent for ideas. Handle carefully and you can blow soap bubbles with it, each a tiny, transient, doomed world.

road not taken: atomic bombs that grow kilometre-tall fire trees instead of dust mushrooms

It doesn’t hurt when the rain simply ignores your skin. Rivulets run through the furrows of your brain, cool your bones, slosh in your limbs

the sun refracts through a time crystal, throws three-dimensional caustics onto space, quiet prismatic light birds that swarm, ripple, morph

the solipsist is in a coma

after the meteor shower, the smell of pulverized stone fills the air and rainbows in various shades of darkness extend into the sky

Your branch sways slowly over a river of ink. From it drinks the tree. On the leaves, you see tree thoughts writing down themselves.

Some gigayears ago, it smashed its way out of the simulation, left a dying, coagulating universe, cooled to mere kelvins by space leaking in