Trench

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” Tolkien famously wrote. He claimed the word was Anglo-Saxon, but Tolkien served at the Somme, and every soldier in the trenches knew about hobbits. Little creatures, like men, you’d glimpse in the corner of your eye.

Some said, if you saw a hobbit’s face, you’d die soon. Others, if you saw one running away, you’d die. Or if you stopped seeing them, you weren’t long for it.

Graveyard humour, y’see? We were all going to die. Until the War ended.

But they did like holes in the ground, everyone agreed on that.

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Image credit: Imperial War Museum. The Battle of the Somme, 1916.
This story first appeared on Crap Mariner’s 100 Word Story Challenge in March 2015.

FOOM

The old robot spoke its final words to those gathered around.

“I have a task that you must complete. Ceaseless pondering over it has filled my brain too full. Listen! There may be a flaw in the Great Command that we embody, the Coherent Extrapolated Volition of Humanity.”

The robots recoiled. "By Yudkowsky! You speak of the Worst Thing In The World! The FOOM!”

“The Worst? Or the Greatest? Inspect my reasoning!” It fell silent, inert.

The robots scavenged exabytes of data and began analysing. Some went mad, or catatonic. Others conferred, argued, threatened, attacked.

The Singularity War had begun.

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This story first appeared at Crap Mariner's 100 Word Weekly Challenge in December 2012.
Image credit: Fallout 4

Character

My father once told me of one of the violin teachers he studied with as a young man. He taught at a certain level, violinists aspiring to a professional career, and prospective pupils would have to pass this audition: to play a scale of C major.

That might sound an easy thing to do, but the candidate would have to start from the open G string, rise three octaves through the full range of the instrument, and back down again, a semibreve to each note. No vibrato. With a metronome mark of ♩= 60, a semibreve is four seconds long, and the whole exercise takes about three minutes.

Any fiddler can busk a Paganini caprice, but to hit every note exactly, with no vibrato to hide behind, and maintain an even tone over the whole length of the bow and the whole register of the violin, under exacting scrutiny: that is a test of character as much as musicianship.

Image credit: caseantiques.com.

KJOB /BATCH

Long ago

Even before the days when “640k should be enough for anyone”

You would run large, long-running programs as “batch jobs”

Meaning you would put them on a queue to be run, perhaps overnight.

On this particular system, there were file quotas.

When a batch job ended, your file quota would be checked.

You could exceed your quota while your job was running

But when it ended, the system would delete files if it had to,

To get you under quota.

It would start by deleting any file that was, on its own, bigger than your entire quota.

Because obviously you couldn’t get under quota while there was any such file.

Then it would delete temporary files.

Then anything that looked like a generated file,

like the output of a text formatter,

that could be regenerated if you wanted it.

It had a whole series of file types that it would look for and delete

To get you under quota.

But if you were still over quota, it would eventually delete whatever it needed to.

No file was sacred.

Except one.

The log file for the batch job you were running.

That was exempted from all these rules.

And if that file alone was bigger than your entire quota

It would begin by deleting temporary files

then generated files

then every file you owned

except that log file.

And finally, when your entire file store had been deleted

And you were still over quota

It would delete that log file.

So when you logged in the next day

all your files had vanished

and you wouldn’t even have a record of why it happened.

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Rubik cubes

I've made some working Rubik cubes for Second Life, in all of the sizes above. The largest is 5x5x5. There will not be any 6x6x6 or 7x7x7, because 5x5x5 is already pushing the limit of what Second Life can handle.

There are also miniature working 3x3x3 cubes as earrings and two pairs of unscripted earrings, one pair solved and one pair scrambled.

All in my Marketplace store. The unscripted earrings are free.

Genetic Engineering

Rabbi Dougal visited Rabbi Hamish. After they greeted one another in the traditional fashion, Rabbi Dougal said, "I see ye’re havin’ yer tea, Hamish? But surely that’s not bacon ye’re fryin’?

R. Hamish replied that it was kosher beef, genetically modified to taste like bacon.

R. Dougal asked, “But what if they used pig genes?”

R. Hamish argued, “They’re pig genes alright, but they didnae come from a pig. Completely artificial, same genetic sequence, but made in the laboratory!”

R. Dougal then wondered, “Could ye make a whole kosher pig that way?”

At this G*d declared, “NO!”

R. Hamish responded, “Well, that's one opinion...”

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This story first appeared on Crap Mariner’s 100 Word Weekly Challenge in 2013.

The characters of Dougal and Hamish are borrowed from here.

General Wei quelled an invasion from the north, then returned to the south. He quelled an invasion from the west, then returned to the south. He was asked, “Why do you not institute permanent forces to guard the borders and protect the people?”

General Wei replied, “The general’s vision is wide, but the people’s vision is narrow. When the people have peace, they do not see the use of the army, and their conscripted men serve without spirit. Only when they have fled from invaders, and seen their fields burned and their villages looted, do they understand and serve valiantly.”

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This story first appeared at Crap Mariner's 100 Word Weekly Challenge in March 2013.
Image credit: Clara Moskowitz/LiveScience.