by
What happens when an AI assistant is always whispering in your ear? Does hacking into the structure of reality help you get a prom date? When your world is dying, how far are you willing to go to save its people? What is the nature of identity, and who are you, anyway?
Flashes in Time explores these questions and more in sixteen imaginative short stories set atop a fourfold table of science fiction and fantasy, contemporary and far off.
A diverse cast of characters explores the limits of what it means to be human, and what our choices make of us.
From darkness to light and lingering in between, the scenarios and thought experiments take the reader on a journey with surprising yet inevitable twists.
Publisher: Water Dragon Publishing
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Languages Available: English
Languages Available: English
In hindsight, the tickling in Roger’s disappearing toes should’ve been his first clue that hacking the nature of reality was a bad idea. But what was a young man with needs to do to impress the ladies? Larry, for one, had his gene-spliced chess master orcas, and while the school’s bioethics council was frowning on the use of Kasparov DNA, the grand master’s estate had shrugged and said that good old Garry would’ve loved bringing chess to marine life. With their blessing, and with nobody being able to prove that there had been any specific sort of foul play involved in how Larry had gotten his hands on the nucleotides, he was off to the races in the school science fair.
READ MOREAnd Jack had gone and gotten in touch with a bunch of bona fide extra-terrestrials through his tachyon ansible. Not that the ETs were very helpful in providing humanity with scientific breakthroughs, technologies, or whatnot, but they cracked a mean pun—or at least that was Jack’s working theory as to what was going on behind the universal translator at their end, what with the aliens always seeming to be quite amused with themselves without any clear reason why. Jack’s machine learning algorithm was still working on reverse-engineering the original ET language under the assumption that every communique was riddled with homophones.
So really, it wasn’t as if Roger had any choice but to try and become a god. In the modern competitive high school environment, anything less wasn’t going to secure him a prom date with Sally Meadows, the most beautifully deadpan know-it-all in Roger’s class. Sally herself would be demonstrating solutions to NP-complete problems in polynomial time using a time-looped computer. That kind of girl had standards.
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