My very short science fiction story “Your Badge and Your Gun” (which explores themes of AI and creative writing) has been published by Hollow Oak Press as an Acorns Flash Fiction Feature.
Here’s a sneak peek:
Your Badge and Your Gun
by Karl El-Koura
Although she hadn’t written in months, Stephanie Alta still woke at 5am, over an hour earlier than necessary. She still french-pressed a cup of coffee, still brought it to the small kitchen table.
About a year before, she’d asked her apartment’s smart system, whom she called Big Brain, a question for a story she’d been working on. In time she’d trained him to become an excellent writer’s assistant—researcher, editor, even coach and advisor.
Presently, she placed her mug on the table, got comfortable in the wooden seat, and creaked open the screen of the old laptop where she’d done her writing for the last decade.
“All right, Big Brain,” she said. “How about this? An ancient monster from the deep shows up in a seaside village, takes over the whole place—men, women, girls, boys, old, young. They see the monster as whatever they most want: a beautiful woman, someone to help around the place, a kind face with time to listen. They stop leaving their houses, stop checking in on each other, even stop eating until the monster consumes them one by one. It hollows out the village, then sinks back into the sea, satiated, ready to re-emerge when it’s hungry again, maybe centuries later.”
The idea had come to her in the middle of the night as she’d done battle with her pillow, trying to get back to sleep.
Usually it took Big Brain a moment to say, speaking through her kitchen speaker, “That’s The Tempest in space,” or, worse, “That’s been done many times. Should I list them?”
She’d sigh, close her computer, then scroll mindlessly on her watch while her coffee grew cold, until she had to shower and get ready for work.
But this time Big Brain didn’t say that. For a few moments, it didn’t say anything at all. Then it said, “No, that hasn’t been written yet.”
Keep reading on Acorns.
