David R. MacIver

For thousands of years, the dark lord has ruled over the realm. Once every century the gods grant power to a chosen hero to challenge the dark lord and win our freedom.

At least, that’s how it’s used to be.

You see, the key there is “thousands of years” and “once every century”. That’s a good 20, 30 heroes who have challenged the dark lord and snuffed it. People were getting more than a little tired of the whole “generations of oppression by an immortal and unfathomable evil” thing. So about 40 years ago, a town official named Arin (better known to me as “dad”) had a bright idea. It ran sortof as follows: So, this dark lord. Pretty powerful, right? On the other hand… there are a lot of us. And we can build siege weapons.

Bloody warfare, much suffering, etc. Eventually confirmed that the fine print on “immortal” in “immortal and unfathomable evil” includes the phrase “As long as you don’t pack him in half a ton of black powder and set fire to it in a confined space”.

So, things are pretty good these days. It’s no utopia, but we’ve got a fairish system of government going, people are generally feeling less oppressed and life is looking up.

So you can imagine how surprised I was when a messenger of the gods arrived to tell me I was the chosen hero, to be gifted with the ability to inspire the hearts of men, near invincibility and awesome destructive power. And a cool sword.

I did try to tell him that there’d been a horrible cock-up and the dark lord was dead, but he was having none of it. Insisted he couldn’t possibly leave without granting me power. Oh well, if you’re going to twist my arm over it go on then.

So, here I am. Divine powers of leadership and warfare, and no dark lord to challenge me.

Muahahaha.

(This story is loosely stolen from an idea of Charles Stross’s)

The light from the explosion will probably be reaching us soon.

I hear the lesser magellanic clouds are pretty.

“Gods. What egg did you hatch out of?”

I get that a lot. With billions of species to mix and match genes from the birthing eggs can produce some real oddities. I get to be one of those oddities. I could change my body, but despite its eccentricities I find I’m rather attached to it.

Still. Two legs, two arms, a single head. Bilateral symmetry even. I’m a bit of a freak.

I spent some time as a superintelligence once. It was weird. Eventually I got bored of it, trimmed myself down and stuffed myself back into a body.

I don’t remember a great deal about it – it’s hard to remember what it was like to be smarter than you are now – but every now and then I get flashes where I remember some fact or event.

For example, once I remembered how the travel gates work.

It turns out this was not a good thing. I ended up terrified of using them and couldn’t bring myself to leave the planet I was on at the time. I spent most of the next century drunk out of my mind and, when I finally sobered up, I resolved to do something about it, built myself a slowboat (you wouldn’t believe how much effort it takes to bootstrap a society from hunter gatherer to interstellar) and took a thousand year trip to find someone I trusted to help me edit my memories.

Anyway, mission accomplished, I got the knowledge expunged from my mind and happily returned to the life of a modern interstellar traveller, gating all around the galaxy. What a lark.

Thing is, there’s a problem with memory editing. You tend to edit out the reason you got your memory edited in the first place. And then you start burning up with curiousity. After a good few hundred years I finally couldn’t take it any more and just had to find out. And I did.

Want another drink? I think I’m going to be here a while.

I recieved the strangest message earlier.

“HOt SlutS will be begg1nG for your cock!!!”

Well, yes. I suppose they could be. But it would be a bit childish, don’t you think?

Anyway, I tracked it down to an old archive machine. It seems it had been purely in monitor mode, but through some bug or malice had started forwarding messages from its data source. Rather odd ones, but that in itself wasn’t so remarkable.

Still, it was curious, and I had a few minutes spare time, so I thought I’d investigate further.

It seemed mostly to be concerned with sending text like the above amongst itself. There were a couple common variations – something to do with “viagra”  or “cialis” (perhaps they were the same thing?) appeared to be the most common theme, but “amateurs” featured frequently as well.

It wouldn’t do to let this sort of thing get out of hand after all.