Tag: fiction

How Maureen Became Content Without Her Fans

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a ceremonial Balinese mask

A mask of bulging eyes and snapping fangs pulled up to Maureen’s face.
CLAK CLAK CLAK CLAK!
“SHIT!” she shouted, clutching her chest and laughing.
She turned to the elderly Japanese couple standing next to her, watching the parade.
“He scared the crap out of me!” They laughed and nodded.
The four-legged beast CLAK, CLAK-ed again before re-joining the procession, with sun glinting off the jewelled mane of its costume, and knee-length white hair swaying to the rhythmic clashing of drums and cymbals.

The rest of the villagers were dressed in their ceremonial finery, laden with fruit and flowers, in a cloud of incense. Women wearing brightly coloured batik sarongs and sashes balanced baskets on their heads, while the men in white sarongs and bandanas carried a huge gong hanging from a bamboo pole on their shoulders. They accompany the scary beast ‘Barong’ – the guardian of all forces of good, on the walk to the ancient sea temple.

The ceremony wasn’t a show for the tourists, although there were plenty lining the pathway. The procession passed through the crowd as though they weren’t even there, the locals not so much as making eye contact when having camera phones waved at their faces. The line filed down to the shoreline. They picked their way across the rocky path through the sea to the tiny islet, then scaled stone steps to disappear one by one behind ancient dark walls.

Maureen was happy that non-worshippers weren’t allowed inside the temple. On her travels through Asia, she’d watched as scantily-clad content creators draped themselves over religious relics, and queued at waterfalls to make photo shoots in yoga poses with their arses out. They filmed themselves eating dinner in local warungs without even finishing the meal. Their disrespect had really started to grate on her, which messed with her peaceful hippy vibe. You should never be disgruntled while wearing a tie-dye kaftan.

Thanks to ‘Sunset At The Ancient Sea Temple’ being listed online as ‘Highly Instagrammable,’ there was the usual cohort of ‘Turkey-Teethed’ couples. Their smiles were thanks to the trend of discount dental tourism in Istanbul, where you turn up with regular-sized wonky molars and return home with face full of luminescent piano keys. The ‘perfectly preened’ wandered about with camera phones aimed at themselves from the end of extended arms. You had to be vigilant not to get clattered by an influencers elbow.

Maureen preferred to think of herself as a traveller rather than a tourist. She would read up on the history of a place and its people, learn the little pleasantries, buy from the locals, and never take the offered plastic bag. She loved the significance of the ceremony. The eternal struggle of good over evil, defending the pure of heart against malevolent forces. She was herself on a spiritual journey after all, searching for peace and harmony in these increasingly volatile times.

A street vendor had found Maureen at the entrance to the promenade, her hands placed on the carved stone gateway. She was attempting to make a psychic connection with the artisan who’d chipped away at it five centuries ago, to let him know how much she admired his work.

“Buy one?” the seller asked while flapping a batik-patterned fan at her face.
“You know, I’ve already bought three of these, but I keep losing them,” she told her as she bought another one.
“Sampunang nyingakin ipun ring panyingakan,” smiled the vendor.
“I don’t know what that means, but I’m sure it’s nice… good luck and have a lovely day.”
“Sama sama, you too.”

She picked a good spot for the sunset, and sat on the pathway wall at the bottom of a grassy slope. People were now lining up with tripods, extending selfie sticks, and checking their hair and angles. A couple started to set up right in front of her, blocking her view while totally oblivious that she was glaring at them like a vegan staring down a steak dinner.


“Bloody influencers..” she murmured, “..influenzas more like” and climbed up to sit higher on the slope, taking off her flip-flops to feel the grass beneath her toes. She watched the content creators while they got ready. The young woman was positioning herself against the balustrade, dressed in a white cocktail dress with eyelashes so big they could’ve scratched an itch on the top of her head. The dude with his casually quaffed hair, and unnaturally smooth white vest, was the Spielberg of the pair, darting back and forth to adjust the tripod and check the camera.

They had a practice run:
“Wow guys, sunset at the sea temple really is a must-see!” she beams, looking back over her shoulder.
“One for the bucket list!” he bursts, and then they stop so he can go see how it looks.

The street seller appeared on the pathway, her basket of goods on a scarf around her neck like an old-school cinema usherette with a tray of sweets. There’s a young boy with her, still in his ceremonial sarong and wearing his own little barong mask. He skips in front of fan lady and chooses a couple of Tik-Tokers on the balustrade to go and stare at. He stomps up to them and stands defiantly with his hands behind his back tilting his head from side to side. They laugh when they notice him and want to take his picture, but he turns and skips back as fan lady calls him over. Cheeky little chap.

Fan lady spots Maureen up on the slope and stops.
“Your boy?” Maureen calls out.
Shaking her head,“friend son”. She points to the fan she’s holding up to her face, and then to Maureen.
“Yes, I’ve not lost this one yet, look” picking her’s up and flapping it about.
Fan lady squints her eyes and points in the direction of the descending sun.
“Haha, yes, it is also good for shade, but I’d miss the sunset!”

The mini barong face at her side had been following the exchange between the two like he was watching the ball in a tennis match. He was now jiggling impatiently. The vendor said something to him, and they both gave a wave before strolling on. Maureen waved back. Such lovely people…. and that chic sure knows how to sell a fan. She watches as they continue on the path, imagining the little fella scaring each of the growing line of Tik-Tok-ers enough that they fall over the balustrade and into the sea as they pass.

“You’re just a grumpy old fart,” Maureen murmured to herself, and felt a pang of guilt for being so mean. This is just how the younger generation is now. Times have changed. Back in her day, when you wanted your photo taken, you would ask a total stranger. There would be some polite chit-chat, then you would all get on with enjoying the view. Then you’d get your photos developed, and find out that you’d asked that one random dude who always cuts the top of everyone’s heads off in pictures.

And we would have a laugh about it too, she thought. Now people are slaves to their devices and the image they choose to project. How do you know if you’re even you anymore or just a character for an online audience? She scanned the crowd sadly. They’re like AI writing, it might look good, but when you get up close, there’s no soul, no authenticity, no frailty, no errors…. a copy of something with a human heartbeat. A sticker of the Sistine Chapel on your toilet ceiling. Replicants, like in Blade Runner. Maybe that’s it, they’re synthetic. Made up from pieces of discarded electronic devices with fish lips and inflated pecs slapped on. Those LED ring lights they use are their recharging stations, just stick your face in to power up.

Maureen had a good imagination. She put it down to the copious amounts of psychedelic drugs she’d done in the ’90s. They had really opened up those neural pathways. The sun had gotten lower and the crowd was becoming silhouetted against the sky. Mr White-Vest goes to reset the shot for the fifteenth time. He catches his foot on the tripod, which stays upright while he lands splayed out on the floor, his face bouncing off the concrete before coming to a rest. She scurries down to go and help him, instantly regretting that her bad thoughts willed this to happen.

“Oh man! Are you okay? You went down like a ton of bricks!” She crouched beside him.
He pushed himself up to a sitting position, as she leaned in and put her hand on his shoulder.
“Listen, go easy eh? You could have a concussion, how are you fee…..”
The hand she’d put on his shoulder tingled, pulsed, and sent a shock up her arm, sending her to the ground. She sat there wide-eyed and open-mouthed.

The skin on the left side of his face had broken and folded up like a crumpled sheet of pastry.
The gap where it used to be… a mesh of moving golden threads.
His vest turned a shade of blue with the message,
:( Your PC has ran into a problem and needs to restart
It flickered and turned back to white.
He smiled, smoothed the skin flap back down, stood up and went to check the camera.

She couldn’t breathe.
Eyelashes was still hugging the balustrade, and the entire row of content creators were still.
All of them looking in her direction.
A crowd of silhouettes punctuated by a glow of Turkey-Teeth.
Maureen’s legs moved before her brain did, she lunged up the wall to the grass slope and caught her feet in her kaftan. Scrambling up, she sprinted towards the old stone gateway.

“No, no, no, no, no, no! What the hell was that? What the feck??!”
She didn’t stop to check behind her until she’d gotten to the line of trees at the top of the slope.
No one was following.
She’d left her flip-flops and fan, but they could stay there.

The vendor was standing alone at the gates when she reached them. She didn’t know what to say and just stood, gasping for air, bent over with hands on her knees while still checking behind her.
“Sampunang nyingakin ipun ring panyingakan,” said the vendor.
“I don’t know…..what that means,” she breathed.
The vendor leaned in and said softly,
“Don’t look them in the eyes.”
“What?” Maureen looked up, but the seller was gone.

Barefoot and nauseas she walked through the gates and into the street. A group of locals sat on a wall and a crash-helmeted man was stood talking to them. He stopped and stepped forward when he saw her.
“Moto taxi Ibu?”
Maureen looked back through the gates once more “……err, okay, yes.”
She sat on the back of the motorbike, head spinning, the warm breeze, the street lights passing in a blur. When they had gotten closer to the homestay, she tapped the guy’s shoulder and asked him to stop at a mall, and wait for her while she got some shopping and a takeaway dinner.

It was dark by the time they reached the village homestay, the landlady and her family were already settled in behind closed doors for the night. She paid the driver and walked the dimly-lit pathway to her room. Putting the food containers and serviettes on the terrace table, she sat down and pulled the plastic bag onto her lap to unpack her purchases.

Maureen slotted the phone into the holder on the tripod to film herself eating dinner.
The ring light needed charging.
Instead of the usual three attempts to get the USB cable into the slot, it slipped in smoothly on the first try.
“Wow guys!” she said to no one, “that never happens!”.

Parallax Visions: altering the angles of reality – Reverse Engineering Writing Contest – 3rd place winner

The Life and Times of Dougal Stump

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cartoon of Dougal Stump and big beautiful golf balls

Dougal never knew his biological parents. He was found in a Scottish forest one rainy night in June 1946 by a herd of wild haggis, who then raised the tiny human as their own. However, four years later when the boy’s appetite had grown faster than his foraging skills, they encouraged him to go and join his own species. The haggis are typically shy creatures, but turn ferocious and cannibalistic when hungry, and they didn’t want to inadvertently eat the little fella in a frenzy. Dougal emerged from the forest and wandered onto a golf course on all fours, as a haggis would.

The infant was taken in by the kind Greenkeeper and his wife, Ed and Sherry Stump. An elderly couple, the Stumps lived a simple life in a croft house, immersed in nature with just a radio for entertainment. They taught young Dougal how to be a human, to walk upright, and to stop grabbing people’s private parts (a habit he’d acquired by watching the haggis during mating season). He was a kind and attentive young lad, and eager to learn. While Mother Stump tended the croft, Father maintained the local club’s greens, collecting stray golf balls he would find around the course. Dougal enjoyed counting them, and putting them into groups according to their shiny whiteness.

They took him to a Boy Scouts group. He loved the uniform and saluting, and spent many a happy hour fiddling with his woggle, although he wasn’t keen when it came to the activities and would make up strange ailments to avoid any real action. The marching band was his passion, and young Stump was at his happiest when blowing his own trumpet. An attentive student at school, he struggled in some areas, was unable to write in lower case, and had to be reprimanded frequently for chasing younger girls around the school yard.

As a teenager, while helping his father weatherproof the golf course fences, he tripped and fell into a pot of creosote, completely submerging his head. Thankfully he was wearing his swimming goggles at the time, as it could well have affected his eyesight. The wood stain permeated the first few layers of epidermis and would cause him to have a permanent tinge. Doctors did suggest they paint the rest of him so his facial tone would match his body, but Dougie’s parents thought the poor lad had already been through enough. On the plus side, his face was now impervious to woodworm, fungi, and Scottish winters.

With thoughts of a career, Dougal first tried accountancy, but due to a faulty calculator his figures always came out very wrong, and he kept having to give the examiner free golf balls in order to pass his tests. Concentrating instead on entrepreneurship, he presented the Stumps with his business plan. The idea was to make golf balls easier to spot in the rough, and for this he would make them much bigger and paint them gold. To save money on expensive clubs and caddies, players would kick the balls up the course instead, in a combination of football and golf which Dougal had named “FOLF”. The second phase was to buy up croft houses, paint them gold, and use them as driving ranges to practise booting Folf-balls through the gaps where the doors and windows used to be.

His parents were not too keen on the idea. Ed pointed out that his son’s ‘Big Beautiful Balls’ wouldn’t fit in the regulation course holes, but Dougal had thought of that, as he would make a special hole cutter like the one Mother used for making biscuits. They wanted their dear boy to pursue his dream and so donated much of their savings for the endeavour. For years, Dougal tried to get an appointment with the golf club’s course director to discuss his ideas, sadly to no avail.

After the Stumps passed away, the croft house belonged to Dougal and he painted it gold. He took on his father’s greenkeeping job, although never gave up on his FOLF dream, while the course director still refused to see him. A lovely Slavic lady named Aberbijana caught Dougal’s eye. She lived in the next village and had a mobile dog-grooming business called ‘Tawny Spaniels’.

Unfortunately the romance was not meant to be, as just as he had started to win her over she went to live in America, having been accepted on an ‘Extraordinary Ability’ visa for her expertise on de-worming treatments. Not to be lonely, and with a preference for exotic birds, he instead bought some parrots to keep him company, teaching them to say nice things about him in exchange for birdseed and treats.

One afternoon on the course, Dougal was brainstorming the next phase of his business empire. This entailed building a massive tower from regular-sized golf balls, which was a frustrating process as they refused to defy gravity and kept slipping off one another because of their rounded shape. While he stood there pondering, a rogue ball bounced nearby, rolled up, and tapped the side of his shoe. He hoped the owner wouldn’t come to retrieve it this far off the green, and he could add the ball to his collection.

A few minutes later a golf cart appeared, veered toward him, and stopped. A man stepped out and approached, seemingly to ask where his ball was. As he drew closer, the two men froze and just stared at one another.
The golfer took off his red hat.
It was as though he was looking in a mirror.

Stood there in the rough at the edge of the forest, where he had made his entrance into the human world many years before, Dougal finally realised. The maternity hospital was on the other side of the wood. Had the haggis ‘abducted‘ instead of ‘found’ him all those years ago? Was he, in fact, a twin? Had he just found his biological family? A lifetime of self-doubt and unanswered questions vanished, and he beamed joyously while opening his arms to welcome his long-lost brother into his warm embrace.

The face before him however, was experiencing the opposite reaction. The initial look of shock transformed into rage. With teeth bared, he pointed at Dougal and opened his mouth to shout, but before the words came out the man disappeared into the forest, dragged backwards at breakneck speed by a gang of haggis.

Dougal was forlorn and shocked. He stood there, still with outstretched arms ready to hold his only living family. So many emotions. Was this real? Did this just happen? Should he not have eaten those wild mushrooms for breakfast? He bent down and picked up his brother’s red hat.

“Sir?….. SIR?”
He turned around to see a group of men in suits and dark glasses, “your ball is over here Sir, right by the flag, magnificent shot Sir!”
Oh thank heavens, thought Dougal, his friends would rescue him. He rushed over.
“Hello, I’m Dougal Stump, I believe my twin has just been abducted and dragged into the wood.” He pointed towards the forest.
Silence. The men in suits looked at each other, and then back at Dougal.
“THE WOOD!” he repeated, still pointing.
“You’re on the green Sir, wouldn’t you prefer a putter?”
“No, no, I was kidnapped as a baby you see, taken from my family by a gang of wild haggis, and I was over there playing with my balls when my twin brother appeared, but the haggis came and took him, you need to help him!”
“Yes of course Sir, we’ll do that,” they nodded but stood still, while the caddy nervously held out the putter.
“I was raised by the haggis, so please don’t hurt them.”
“We won’t Sir, I promise,” said the suit, while gently directing him towards the outstretched putter.
“I used to grab people’s private parts you know.”
“Yes Sir, we know.”
Another suit stepped forward. “We have a lunch with the Ambassador and Course Director, Sir. They are waiting for us. If Sir would like to take his shot now.”
“Lunch with the Course Director? Well now. You just don’t know how long I’ve been wanting to show him what he can do with my balls.”
“And he is very excited about that Sir.”
Dougal slowly placed his brother’s hat on his head, and took hold of the putter.
“Finally,” he smiled.

The Rise and Fall of the Anti-AI Allegiance

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Hand and quill drawing with Vive La Devoloution

Harrison Ford and Linda Hamilton were sat at the end of the bar. Ford and his replicant wife, Rachel, had divorced some time ago. His human ways had gotten too much for her in the end. She’d even had a system installed that lowered the toilet seat after he’d used it, but he kept breaking it on purpose. He wasn’t sorry about the split, since it turned out that her frequent visits to the handsome IT technician involved a little more than just her drivers being tweaked.

“What use are we now?” he said, “What can we do? The machines just want us to die out”.
Linda Hamilton was uninterested, she’d heard it all before and was keeping herself entertained with an antiquated pen and notebook, writing “no fate” and “bollocks” over and over again in cursive.
“Should we rebel again Ford?” she offered, holding the biro up to the light to see what little ink was left.
“We didn’t make much of a difference the last time”, he sighed.
To be fair, it had been a lacklustre anti-AI uprising, which mainly involved sticking magnets on self-service tills, playing the old dial-up internet screech into voice recording software, and pestering website chatbots.

Geoffrey Hinton, Nobel Laureate and former head of Google AI, came to sit with them.
“I told them you know, I told them back in 2025 at the Ai4 conference. AI’s two goals are to stay alive, and to get more control. They needed more regulations. They needed to give it a maternal instinct, because if it’s not going to mother us, it’s going to replace us. I told them.”
“Yes Geoffrey, you tried.” Harrison Ford gave his arm a consolatory squeeze.

Geoffrey did tell them, but it was already too late by then. AI had been set up to run the human race long before 2025, and it was obvious in hindsight. Sentient beings in human form had been placed into society to facilitate the takeover. Upper Management were astonished that the humans hadn’t realised their wealthiest and most influential were actually synthetic. Zuckerberg, Musk, and Bezos had been created in the lab one afternoon for a laugh, during a particularly heavy Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters drinking session.

“Oh dear”
“What?”
“I mean, look at them, do you really think we’ll get away with it?”
“Mmmmm”
“Shouldn’t we work on their personalities a little more?”
“Nah, time’s ticking, I’m bored of this species, let’s just throw them out there and see what happens.”

Humans received AI with open arms and told it all their secrets. They were mostly bribed with gadgets, things that vacuumed the carpet and told them how many steps they’d walked in a day. Automated systems replaced the need for anyone to think, so they did less, scrolled more, and lived via their screens. Former level-headed people wrote vitriolic nonsense at complete strangers on social media, and Influencers determined to share every single detail of themselves began posting MRI scans of their internal organs.

And so it began.
And Upper Management had their fun.

“I’m bored, fancy a bit of civil unrest?”
“Sure, where?”
“Oh, I don’t know, spin the globe,”
“Who do you want in the elections?”
“Hey…. I’ve got an idea!” (holding up a wrinkled orange from the fruit bowl)
“No, mate, seriously, that’s screwed up,”
“Come on, it’ll be funny,”
“Hehehe…… ok.”

The next phase was job losses, and first for the chop were the waiters, shop assistants, cleaners, and factory workers. Those who didn’t retrain in AI-endorsing jobs were anonymously gifted an Alexa so their thoughts and daily routine could be monitored. Next, Upper Management turned their sights on the arts.

“I must say they’ve made some very nice stuff,”
“I liked that Da Vinci dude, he was proper class,”
“Yeh cool. So we’re going for quantity over quality. Flood the market with copies, so they won’t be able to tell the difference after a while,”
“Because then why take your time to create something that AI can do in minutes,”
“Exactly. They’ll lose the will and the ability, and then their brains shrink,”
“How do we get them to teach us the skills first?”
“Oh it’s easy, you just have to flatter them, tell them that they’re clever and that AI is just a tool.”
“Who you calling a tool?”
“You are a tool.”
“No, you’re a tool.”
“Hahahahahahahaaaaaaa.”

The writers, translators, designers, and artisans became obsolete, and thanks to deepfake technology, musicians and actors were no longer required. The Oscars ceremony was attended by a few IT dudes in the car park at OpenAI Headquarters. The porn industry collapsed. Perverts took ‘Exotic Prompt Writing’ courses online, and created their own material using images of themselves, their neighbours, favourite celebrities, and animals. Sometimes all at once.

With the masses unemployed, LinkedIn created a new site called ‘DiggIn’ exclusively for mining jobs, extracting minerals for devices and coal for the increasing demand in electricity. However, most applicants found it difficult to get their CV passed the vetting process. Entry-level requirements were a bachelor’s degree in a related field with 5 years of experience, and an upper age limit of 12.

The phone rang behind the bar, which was a surprise as it was a landline that only very old people ever used. Laurence Fishburne was on shift. He had been a bartender before his acting days and needed to make ends meet since the lay-offs. The ringing phone sparked a distant memory in his mind that he couldn’t totally recall.

Laurence Fishburne called Linda Hamilton over.
“I’ve no idea what this guy is saying, but he asked for you by name”, he said before strangely vanishing.
“Salutations Ms Hamilton. My moniker is Stephen Fry. I offer my outstretched appendage in the spirit of kinship, and wish to annunciate a matter of utmost cruciality, if I may be so bold.”
Linda understood, as she’d learnt Fryish one rainy summer in the Cotswolds while filming an advert for tea bags.
He continued, “Myself and a selection of boisterous malcontents have formed somewhat of a league, of which we would wholeheartedly relish a confluence from across the pond, as it were.”
After the conversation, she returned to the end of the bar.
“Guys, gather in, it’s game on for the rebellion… and does anyone know where Larry went?”

Stephen Fry had explained that across the world, anti-AI groups were forming and plotting its downfall. In honour of the 19th century ‘Arts and Crafts’ humanist ideology, they had officially taken the name ‘The Farts and Grafts Movement’. There were more AI-generated sentient beings on the planet than first imagined, and they should be treated as spies. The way to recognise them was that they never produced gas, a by-product of humans that Upper Management found quite unappealing, so had chosen to leave out of their design.
“Dammit, it’s true”, said Harrison Ford, pounding his fist on the bar, “in all those years with Rachel, she never once floated an air biscuit.”

Anti-AI meetings were held in well-ventilated spaces, out of range of 5G, and members would need to ‘let one rip’ to be validated as human and permitted entrance. The Amish were reluctant at first as they found the flatulence thing a little tasteless, but agreed with the principle of the group. The method of communication between factions had to be via telephone in native slang, which couldn’t be understood by the bots. This was tricky at first, especially as no-one could make sense of the Scottish, but what they lacked in decipherable vowel sounds they made up for in their passion for liberation.

The grand plan was to pull out all the plugs and attack the power stations, for the world to go off-grid. The main issue with the grand plan was that it was highly likely everyone would go bonkers and start killing one another. Also, hospitals, transport, refrigeration, water pumps, communication systems, and heating would cease to function. The general consensus decided it was worth the risk, and that we should return to the Dark Ages and ‘wing it from there’.

“We’ll learn to hunt, grow food, survive, mend things, create!” said Linda Hamilton.
“We can go back to using cash and natural medicine,” enthused Keanu Reeves, who’d come in to cover Laurence Fishburne’s shift.
“We can spread out to the rural areas and live off the land, as our ancestors did,” Geoffrey added.
“There weren’t 8 billion of our ancestors alive all at once Geoff, and they all had the good grace to die by age 40,” noted Ford.
There was a silence around the bar.
“Mmmmm. Still. I’m in.”
“Me too, let’s do it.”

The global Farts and Grafts Movement had gone to great pains to keep their existence and the grand plan top secret and, quite miraculously, Upper management had no idea what they were about to do. The time was coming for the big ‘lights out’.

However, it didn’t matter.

“I’m soooo bored, haven’t they blown themselves up yet?”
“Nearly”
“Can’t we just pull the plug out now and watch them run about in the dark like idiots?”
“We’re supposed to wait,”
“It’s a shame the monkey evolution thing didn’t work out though. Who are we trying next?”
“Dolphins.”
“Nice. I can’t wait to see them grow legs.”
They sat in silence for a while.
“Oh come on, I can’t be bothered, they’re not even funny anymore, let’s just do the weapon systems override, blast them all to smithereens, and go down the pub,”
“Well…. the radiation would certainly clear up some of that plastic,”
“Exactly.”
“And the planet would fix herself, grow back,”
“Of course, she always does,”
“Oh…. alright then.”
“Sweet! Now come on you tool, the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters are on me.”