0 comments on "SHORT FIC: A Snapshot In Time"

TITLE: A Snapshot In Time
AUTHOR: Harper Kingsley
GENRE: aftermath of a fall, introspection

When I first woke up, everything was in shades of black and white. Color was slow to seep back into the world, and it was like her hair was blond and her dress was pink. Then the hair and dresses of the other women popped into focus, while the sky above them still looked like an expanse of pure white. Not a single speck of blue in sight.

The bug resting against my face had looked massive as it made its approach. Landing ever so gently on the tip of my nose, where it for some reason decided to stay. I was just relieved it wasn’t running around all over on my face.

That’s the most hateful part of bugs. The suddenness of their appearance. The way they could be just there, purely noticeable. Then they can do whatever. Jump up. Fly. Skitter under the furniture. Disappear.

But I couldn’t move.

I lay there on the ground face up, body splayed out haphazardly. The shock didn’t give me the option to feel pain.

I was hoping someone was calling an ambulance. I definitely didn’t want them to flop me around and paralyze me or something.

But it was eerie to look up and see them standing over me as the green slipped back onto the grass. To notice the complete soullessness of their gazes as they looked down at me. As they spoke to each other over top of me and I didn’t see a single one showing concern.

I stared at them, these semi-familiar strangers. There was the sense that I knew them, but I could not identify the relationship at the moment.

A pain was building in my body, centered on the back of my head. The pain radiated outward in an endless ache, no sense of throbbing whatsoever. Just pain.

It was a nameless torment. I didn’t even have the words to describe what I was feeling.

I had never really been hurt before. Like, I’d heard about "kids cracking their heads on the playground" and I’ve seen the aftermath when someone bit through their lip or scraped their leg. But I’d never really been hurt hurt before.

I don’t think I have.

I’d never been to the hospital for anything related to a fall or an accident. It was something I knew as natural as breathing, which felt a bit hard as the fall had knocked the wind out of me.

As the color refilled the world, the memories and the thoughts were returning. The me that had been missing was coming back. It was as though my brain’s processes were coming back on line a bit at a time.

And by the time I was loaded onto the ambulance that a kind elderly person called by using the emergency device strapped to their wrist, the sky had become so bright.

A brilliant blue sky. Warm temperatures that weren’t too hot. Everything comfortable and perfect.

It was a beautiful day.

And my step-mother had tried to kill me.

=END=

~Harper Kingsley

https://paypal.me/harperkingsley.

https://patreon.com/harperkingsley.

https://ko-fi.com/harperwck.

https://amazon.com/shop/harperkingsley0.
https://www.harperkingsley.net/blog.
https://kimichee.com.

https://www.youtube.com/c/HarperKingsley.

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Kakushigoto 01 at Amazon
0 comments on "SHORT FICTION: In a Paper World Full of Paper People"

TITLE: In a Paper World Full of Paper People
AUTHOR: Harper Kingsley
GENRE: science fiction, introspection

It was called “paper skin,” though its real scientific name was something long and largely unpronounceable. Everyone knew what paper skin was though. The fear of it was an ever growing concern. A rising stress level that left parents weeping in the night as they feared they or their children would be infected.

It was highly communicable. Lingering on hard surfaces for four hours and in fabric for close to ten. And once it got inside the human body, its effects were swift and devastating.

Blood that refused to clot and skin layers that became thin and brittle to the point that simply touching anything with an edge could cause the skin to split open.

A person with paper skin could die from a paper cut. A simple touch could cause the inside to come outside as the person bled and bled.

It was horrifying to watch. But hard to look away. Because there was no cure, no vaccine, no treatment other than to never let the infected ever come to harm.

The victims of paper skin lived in bubbles or muffled themselves with layers of cloth. They kept bandages on them at all times and carried injectors full of drugs that were supposed to help their blood coagulate. But in the end, it was a paper towel to hold back a river. Even if it took years, no one survived paper skin.

They were separated. Segregated. Surrounded by people wearing hazardous material suits, because their blood always seemed to want out of their bodies, and their blood carried the infection that was taking their lives.

People feared having paper skin. Dreaded it and fought the inevitably of it, this human plague that was taking hundreds and thousands of lives with every passing day.

The world had become harsh and terrifying. The invisible prickles on a maple seed became like hypodermic needles. The edge of a table became a blade. The strands of a person’s hair or the licking of a cat’s tongue could result in flesh shearing off to the bone.

Every day was a day of neverending fear. Mortality had never felt so close at hand. Yet here it was.

The world was full of paper people desperately avoiding the rain. Coating themselves in wax, but knowing that nothing lasts forever. It only exists for right now.

=END=

~Harper Kingsley

https://paypal.me/harperkingsley.

https://patreon.com/harperkingsley.

https://ko-fi.com/harperwck.

https://amazon.com/shop/harperkingsley0.
https://www.harperkingsley.net/blog.
https://kimichee.com.

https://www.youtube.com/c/HarperKingsley.

https://harperkingsley.bsky.social.
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/HarperKingsley.

Allies & Enemies at Amazon
Allies & Enemies at Amazon
1 comment on "search results are bonk for profile building"

If something ever happens, I don’t know what I would do if I found out my search results had become public.

Like, yesterday I was searching "Is it legal to eat guinea pig meat?" not because I have any interest in eating guinea pigs, but because Amazon Vine was giving away these reusable guinea pig cage pads. And then I started thinking "If you have reusable, washable pads to make it easier to keep guinea pig cages clean, is it possible that someone could farm guinea pigs?"

Like, they’re collecting the guinea pig poo to use in the garden. Or like, could someone gather a massive amount of guinea pig poo and make methane gas or do whatever they needed to do in Mad Max to turn pig waste into biofuel to run their muscle cars? Does guinea pig fur make fancy moccasins like they do with rabbits?

And at it’s base, all my wonderings can be led back to a book I read when I was child. A science fiction book where the best and brightest kids were chosen to be part of a program, and then they were all tricked into being frozen in cryostasis because the end of the world was about to happen and they were going to be used as the saviors of humanity, like Fallout before Fallout existed. Only the main character’s dad, who spent the rest of his life searching for his missing son, gathered a bunch of people and managed to save a huge chunk of humanity, who then spent centuries in the wastelands and there was some mutations and what have you’s, but when the kid wakes up, he finds out that his dad never stopped searching for him and that his dad was basically the savior of humanity.

And one of the things his dad left behind was the idea that there was a Sleeping Prince that would wake up one day, and that everyone should protect and care for that prince. And the main character realizes that he is the prince. That his dad loved him so much that he aimed all of human society toward ensuring that his son would have a good future.

And one of the things that really stuck in my mind was that his father had gathered a bunch of guinea pigs to raise for meat, parts, and fur for clothing. And I’m not sure–I was a child when I read that book–but I think the guinea pigs might have been bred (and effected by radiation) to be big, like, bigger than capybaras, and humans were using them as working animals? Like, putting saddle bags on them to carry supplies, but I don’t think they were big enough to ride around on?

Anyways, the whole point of this is that if someone just looked at my search results, I would seem like a psychopath because there’s none of the deeper explanations behind why I originally searched for the term, or what I was thinking, and basically, that’s why modern "AI" is so shitty.

People are clicking away at a massive "Choose-Your-Own Adventure"-machine and thinking that it’s sentient. When no. You’re making options, which takes you from A to B to Z. You’re filling in the blanks, "Mad Libs"-style, and thinking to yourself "Wow! This thing is so brilliant it can remember my name! We’re best friends now."

And the guys that created the datasets the "AI" pulls from just grabbed a bunch of random shit off the Internet to train it because THAT’S where they wanted to cut corners on a technology that cost TRILLIONS OF AMERICAN DOLLARS. That’s not in yen folks. That’s in USD.

"Instead of paying a bit of money and ensuring that all the information used for our datasets is complete and accurate… We’re just going to scrape Reddit and hope for the best. We’ve even got the archive of Yahoo Answers loaded into that baby. The technology is solid. We can now depend on AI to decide which humans should live or die."

So yeah. I’m in a bit of a mood.

Please, Robo Gods, do not build my profile based on my search results or the goofy pictures I took when I was 15 years old. Please and thank you.

And also, I have no interest in eating guinea pig meat. I just had a thought and was curious about the answer… which ended up being something produced by a terrible AI. "Yes, it is legal to eat guinea pig meat in the United States where it can be viewed as game meat… [blah blah blah]… In some countries like Peru and Brazil it is a regularly eaten meat, though in countries like the United Kingdom and the United States it is taboo and illegal to eat." Hm.

~Harper Kingsley

https://paypal.me/harperkingsley.

https://patreon.com/harperkingsley.

https://ko-fi.com/harperwck.

https://amazon.com/shop/harperkingsley0.
https://www.harperkingsley.net/blog.
https://kimichee.com.

https://www.youtube.com/c/HarperKingsley.

https://harperkingsley.bsky.social.
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/HarperKingsley.