Story Time, Volume 21
This week's Daily Micro Fiction stories, plus a bonus story at the end!
He inserts a nickel. The mechanical oracle springs to life, selecting numbers from a pseudorandom list of auguries.
The predictions aren't correct. He doesn't mind — it's nice to be wrong sometimes.
The woman with the red ribbon sat by herself on the bench, sipping her coffee.
I knew two things. One: if I talked to her, I'd marry her.
And two: if I talked to her, she'd one day kill me.
"Hi."
Beneath you is a floor, or perhaps some dirt. Below that, kilometers of crust. Further still, massive gouts of molten mantle surge.
Beneath all that, improbably, sits a small tungsten cube.
The shift was small, almost imperceptible. But after days spent hammering at the boulder pinning his leg, any progress felt like a miracle. He shouted in triumph.
Then it shifted back.
There were more and more screens: first computers, then phones, then watches, then glasses, then mirrors, then doors, then cars, then—
Gradually, every conceivable surface was connected.
Mainstream historians still debate the year when humanity finally transitioned from carbon-based to silicon-based evolution. Many peg it to the first artificial brain, developed in 2183 at Meta labs. Some, though, point back further — to a keynote address, given in late 2008, announcing a revolutionary new type of phone.