There’s a whole nest of them now in the transformer, lightning elemental cockroaches. But they keep the organic ones away so it’s fine.

A crackle and the smell of ozone, and another little lightning bolt scurries away from the workbench to disappear behind the tool locker.

He is now nothing more than a thin skin pulled taut over his dreamverse, the gateway between two worlds that desperately want to merge.

death kills itself and is reborn through the act↵its new form steps out of the corpse↵morior ergo sum, it says with each time

a bar called the overton window, with an open mic hour every evening where you have to insult the guests as hard as possible

Believing these were tattoos, we did not take the necessary precautions. As we return, we carry stories in more than just memories.

The virus is benign but a jester, mixes law, poetry and nonsense, does not care for status or convenient placement, seems even self-aware.

A virus had escaped a thousand years ago, since then using Atlantean skins as parchment for documents ranging from recipes to romances.

At some point we finally found, hidden in Earth’s pouch, Atlantis and its pattern-skinned natives, covered head to toes in their script.

oracles use a twelve sided die and roll it repeatedly; it is traditional to roll three but more complicated questions ask for five or seven

the symbols that signify the gods form a sacred script and language; they dance to express their will and tell stories

the negative one, when present, inverts the qualities of all siblings to its right, converts dream into reality and knowledge into oblivion

order matters, the presence of one alters the meaning of the others’ presence in ways depending on their position; the empty god is special

a combinatorial pantheon consisting of twelve gods that each embody a quality of the whole; different parts combine into different avatars

cultures where:↵a soldier is also a cook (they eat their enemies)↵a storyteller is a grocer (they trade stories)↵a priest is a shepherd (oh)

@allgebrah untranslatable: it’s a figure of speech that means “what goes around comes around”, literally “what enters the wood also leaves”.

A culture in which executioner came to be the same word as barkeeper. You enter the bar and ask for a little death.

Der Wald ist alt und wild: Wie man in ihn hineinruft so kommt es heraus, aber erst nach Jahren, mit Moos im Bart und Mäusen im Pelz.

Balloon tree wood is very light. Its ripe fruit floats and takes the tree with it. Whole forests have been seen travelling the jet stream.

It’s not a nice life these uploads have, spent in featureless white rooms sifting through meaningless drivel. But our survival is paramount.

These firewalls are always starved for CPU, so they save on simulation complexity while keeping uploads human enough to work as filters.

2040’s AI war saw the first basilisks deployed. We who survived now run human firewalls, matrices of uploads who take hits meant for us.

she’s reading me like a book: staring at me, thumbing through pages I didn’t know I had, leaving coffee stains, discarding me for the day

fungi whose asbestos mycelium curls around glowing coals to siphon off heat for their own use, but also feed them colourfully burning metals

Giant crematoria form its industry, their smokestacks billowing ash, while the city’s tomb towers sell the hope of a shorter jump to heaven.

“Welcome to Necropolis”, the sign reads. On it lounges a skeleton. The suburbs consist of neatly spaced mausolea in well trimmed gardens.

Wild fire burns down forests.↵Slave fire lights your room.↵Freed fire is civilized, has its own house, partakes in society, wears a suit.

At the next station, she gives me a shy smile and gets off, but leaves the tree. I take it home and plant it in a decapitated light bulb.

She’s sitting across me on the train, concentrated on her palms where a bonsai of light is growing, blooming. Nobody but me seems to notice.

Decide quickly. Every ten seconds you hesitate, my firewall will drop a picture of a kitten.

The matrix has exceeded its monthly budget and is now running on reduced power. Flowers pixelate, clouds look like badly compressed JPEGs.

Antiprofessors unlearn everything about a topic to be able to offer a completely fresh view. The most accomplished can’t even speak or walk.

Our space station regularly molts and then eats its own discarded hide to heal radiation damage. So do we and eat the dying and senile.

djinni make “whoosh”, not “wish”. all they can produce is wind. translation error. so sorry.

The moonshine he served us was so vile that I woke up with an arm growing from my forehead and drew a contrail after me the whole day.

roots of earth, trunks of air, a canopy of clouds, birds of wind↵what looks like a desert is actually a jungle, camouflaged against harvest

“In parts of the Library of Babel, a hot wind blows through the shafts. It feeds a titanic blaze, trillions of books and more.”

“Lovecraftian bubblewrap uses child’s heads for bubbles. Popping them proves irresistible, the sound is extra juicy. [Every ‘pop’ a kid!]”

apparently I wrote this in 2011 (back when this wasn’t mostly about fiction) https://twitter.com/allgebrah/status/93998482855182337

Nourishment for journeys between systems, powering both ships and humans, sublight starfarers’ first choice before we figured out ambrosia.

The honey tastes of time, solitude, endless falling and the searing pain the starflower deals to the comet bee when in close proximity.

Comet bees go on century-long journeys to gather star nectar and save it in their high, cold orbit hives where it matures over millennia.

making one’s website look deliberately spammy so that indexers downrank it; hidden in the noise, accessible only to initiates

Wooden prisms break and split fire into heat, light and movement. A forgotten art, but a careful enough arrangement will be fireproof.

Wooden lenses are the best at focusing fire, unfortunately they are consumed by it.

burn the books, free the stories↵let the great herds of ages past thunder again↵and run among them like the old bards

wild stories roam dreamtime and gobble up drifting images↵dreamers hunt them for sport, domesticate them, lock them in books, cages of paper

@allgebrah According to the dictionary, that should’ve been shell, not house. Well, we call them “Schneckenhaus” (snail house)

sentient snails that store up to ten types of ink in their houses as they age, with a highly refined tradition of slime trail calligraphy

The flies congregate on the skeleton and the buzzing abates. They unhatch, revert into a heap of maggots, out of which steps a confused fox.