Another gamification brainwave

Pool resources to lightly monetise in-game points. Pecuniary homeopathy. A tincture of the Scotch groat in the Mario DING DING.

Khan Academy is teaching me to add, subtract and multiply. I am glad that they award me leaves, for all the usual reasons: quantifying accomplishments, setting goals, tracking my progress, etc. But I feel a mild sense of sorrow and embarrassment when Khan Academy awards me leaves on the basis of some prior wisdom, and I know I haven't learned anything new. I've just conned Khan out of some leaves, and instead of celebrating, I lament the discrepancy between my leaf levels and my numeracy. Khan leaves aren't a reliable store of value after all! I feel bitterly the meaninglessness of all Khan leaves.

So here's another scheme. A mechanism for gamified experiences which allows users to pledge money upfront, which gets slowly fed back to them in the form of in-game currency.

And you know what? I'm going to remove the rest of this post and transform it into a sort of sparse, near future, slightly Doctorowish story. It's going to have trees and things that aren't strictly relevant but will set the scene. And then I'm going to send it to magazines and things. So just you wait.

UPDATE. The magazines said "no." But the machines said "yes." Marta and the Demons, a novelette, http://mybook.to/MartaAndTheDemons.

While I'm at it, required gamification reading: Tim Maughan's "Zero Hours."

It's a cold, cold, specifically-made-up-to-be-cold world

"Every once in a while you find yourself in a lifeboat where a single stupid move can kill everyone. But a science fiction writer whose story’s boundary extends to the boat’s gunwales, and no further – not to the poleconomy that convinced a nation to build backyard bunkers rather than rising up en masse against Mutually Assured Destruction, say – is a science fiction writer who has considered the car and the movie and invented the drive-in without ever thinking about the sexual revolution or the database-nation [...] Every time someone tells you that the environment is important, sure, but we can’t afford to take a bite out of the economy to mitigate global warming, ask yourself what’s out of the frame on this cold equation. [...] Every time someone tells you that the environment is important, sure, but we can’t afford to take a bite out of the economy to mitigate global warming, ask yourself what’s out of the frame on this cold equation."

Cory Doctorow at Locus Online on Robert Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold and Tom Godwin and John W. Campbell's classic of hard science fiction, "The Cold Equations."

"Ender's Game is effectively a series of literary thought experiments designed to generate a particular moral outcome: each act plunges Ender into a savage new environment that can only be mastered with a clear mind and a cold heart."

Jonathan McCalmont at VideoVista on "The Cold Equations" and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. (And a note on his blog).

Two great articles, which also feed my sense that hard science fiction can still be a useful normative idea, not just a sort of historical and descriptive one -- but that it would need a little updating. And perhaps that update would have to do with the rigor with which you select what is and isn't in your narrative, not just the rigor with which you work with whatever is in your story?

Instead of Ender's Game, watch Starship Troopers:

Also see this bit from my (still unfinished, though I've actually written some more now, ha!) review of Doctorow's Pirate Cinema:

I’ve also grumbled a bit about realism too. But literary realism always has twin obligations – (a) correspondence and (b) contradiction. It’s not enough to reflect reality. Realism needs also to be able to fight whatever is suppressing the self-evidence of that reality. It has to energetically contradict falsehood -- that could mean false representation, seductive cliche, distraction, and even the “intrinsically” wearisome or finnicky or bathetic nature of some topic or other. On these counts, Pirate Cinema scores highly. 

Or to put it crudely: you may lose a couple of Realism Points if you plump for a streamlined, fabulist London replete with intuitively laid-out resource nodes for the merry runaway. "What fun." #quote But you will gain many hatfuls of Realism Points when you give weight in your writing to what has weight in the world. When ynou give mimesis priority over imitatio, you could say. By my somewhat eccentric standard of realism, Pirate Cinema is an unusually realistic book.

PS:  Just found a great essay by Farah Mendlesohn which also talks about "The Cold Equations," & about Iain M. Banks, singularities, etc.; coins full science fiction, and feels like it has a far more supple conceptual vocabulary for what often gets construed as axioms (the "one tooth fairy" of even hard SF), and extrapolative worldbuilding, not least because it (a) brings in a sense of the interdisciplinary but not totalising knowledge which underpin the legitimacy of SF extrapolation; and (b) doesn't kind of hypostasise extrapolative worldbuilding as something which happens prior to and/or separate from worldtelling -- i.e., the start of the story.

Also like the note to the editor. A peek behind the scenes!

Yet the question-narrative of the sf tale can be enormously powerful. The basic question of the sf narrative is “What if….?” It can be about engineering: what if you need to build a railway on a planet which has miniature volcanoes erupting every couple of hundred yards? It can be philosophical: what happens if you introduce Christianity to a culture with no belief in original sin? Or introduce Christianity to three species who already share a trinitarian symbiosis and in which the death of one member of the trinity is supposed to lead to the suicide of the other two? Or wonder how five intelligent species stranded on a single planet might get on? Or it can question the impact of new physics on social relations, “What happens if a quantum event opens up a new universe on your doorstep, and the things coming through are doing strange things to your society and your body?” In each case, there is an assumption, not that human beings can fix anything, but that the relationship between humanity and the universe is that between engineer and environment. It is a fierce, dialectical relationship and it is conducted through a four-note strategy that I have (impertinently) called Full Sf.  

This strategy can be summed up as: Dissonance, Rupture, Resolution, Consequence. (this is an indented statement so it is set apart. Centre it please?)

PPS: What would fantasies egregiously loaded to demonstrate the rightness of dogmatic versions of other co-ordinates on the political compass look like? (Don't say West Wing).

Gamified Personal Finance

What is gamification? You could describe it as the extension of principles of game design, with or without the language of games themselves, into new territories. Gamification in this sense tries to transform tedious tasks into fun ones, or at least into less intimidating tasks.

Jane McGonigal, in her polemic Reality is Broken, outlines a kind of phenomenology of gameplay, complete with gameplay-specific emotions (Fiero, Epic Win, etc.). For McGonigal, gamification is about introducing these feelings into socially necessary or useful practices. And perhaps you could think of gamification as finding ways to introduce all kinds of positive feelings – not just those associated with gameplay – into socially necessary or useful practices. In this approach, gamification is about turning the means to an end into ends in and of themselves.

A slightly different way of understanding gamification, however, is simply as a specific set of conventions for communicating an incentive structure. The incentive structure may be backed up by storytelling and rhetoric, by quantifiable status within a community, by money or some other kind of claims on goods and services, or perhaps by nothing at all. The conventions – effectively an ensemble of data visualisation/conceptualisation techniques, such as a character class system, an array of interrelated stats, the chance to level up, the accumulation and completion of quests and side quests, bosses to defeat, achievements to unlock, and a leaderboard to scale – originate with computer games, but don’t have any necessary link with them.

Here’s an illustration of how gamification, understood in this second sense, might be used to create a new kind of current account product. Most banks are inherently unstable insofar as they loan long and borrow short. They face a maturity mismatch problem. Most deposits tend to be short term. Most loans tend to be long term – mortgages, for instance. The bank can’t turn up at somebody's house, type in its PIN, and withdraw the £100,000 equity it owns in that person's house.

Did you know you can now bank online?

In a gamified current account, a depositor would be asked on a regular basis to log in and set withdrawal requirements for the next time period. For the depositor, the aim of the game is to choose withdrawal requirements which are as low as possible, and then stick to them. There will be financial rewards for doing this successfully, and financial penalties for doing it poorly.

To take a very simple example, say a current account holder has $100 on deposit. The account holder decides that they will never require more than $40 net throughout the next quarter. They set the slider to $50 (giving themselves a $10 buffer) and click “commit.” So for the next three months, $50 is on loan to the bank at a very low rate of interest as a sight deposit – the account holder can withdraw it whenever they want – and the other $50 is a kind of short-term bond, earning a higher rate of interest. If the account holder withdraws more than $50 over the next quarter, they are effectively selling part of their bond before it reaches maturity – i.e. at a lower value.

When the account holder does not actively set the slider, the account eventually reverts to an ordinary current account, until whenever the account holder next chooses to play. There could be one or two other mechanisms: unlocking achievements to give the account holder one-off liquidity boosts, etc.

As a side note, there could even perhaps be a social / community aspect to this system. For instance, account holders could ratchet up a score when they transfer their excess liquidity to account holders who need it (who have underestimated their liquidity needs for the period). I am intrigued by the possibility that different ways of communicatively integrating a group of borrowers and lenders, and different ways of allowing them to visualise and conceptualise their individual and collective interests, might achieve different levels of robustness, and different levels of resistance to panic.

The current account, in other words, would be transformed into a flexible, intuitive portfolio of different kinds of debt, whose mechanisms would be mostly traceable to the bank’s need to make maturity matches.

Clearly there are a large number of issues – to do with game design, implementation, legal underpinnings, nudge economics, and wider social impact and ethics – and were such an idea to be developed by commercial retail bank I would treat it with outright terror. In principle, however, it seems like a promising way of mitigating the sharp maturity discrepancy at the heart of the fractional reserve banking system.

And as a final note, one possible area of application would be in the construction of an alternative community currency – both in terms of attracting users by the novelty of the system, and perhaps also in making a lower reserve ratio possible, allowing a relatively larger money supply to exist on the basis of a given injection of conventional currency.

Earlier: science fiction of gamification. See especially Tim Maughan’s entries on that list for a bit of perspective on shiny new ideas for gamification.

Elsewhere: SMBC on gamification.

February: a few links

Self-publishing vs. (or, and) traditional publishing. Chuck Wendig plays indie publishing Bingo. Damien G. Walter asks if self-publishing is killing the mainstream and welcomes our new viral bookseller overlords. Charles Stross buys Baboon Fart Story. Ramez Naam says we're all on the same side. You know what traditional publishing seems to have that indie publishing doesn't have so much? Prizes. You know what we could do? Have a big prize thing where every entrant reads three randomly assigned books, to filter out a short list. You know what we need? A patron.

SFWA stupid petition snafu. Steven Brust on the petition. SL Huang's timeline of the 2013 SFWA controversies. Sarah Hoyt's perspective, with some animated GIFs. Black Gate on ew, and Mary Robinette Kowal responding. Juliet E. McKenna on why the SFWA shoutback matters. Challenge for 2014 is to see who can get even better writers than Harlan Ellison, Mike Resnick, Gene Wolfe, Larry Niven, Barry N. Malzberg and (my old MindFlight buddy!) Amy Sterling Casil to sign something even dumber. I want stuff like "We, John Le Carré, Doris Lessing, and Salman Rushdie, are a total duoche LOL. PSP We will du the prise for indys thing you made up kx." Earlier: Mary Robinette Kowal requests the twelve weasels of the SFWA shut the fuck up.

& recently here at Aargh! né Lorraine:

• Worldbuilding, intertextuality, negative capability
• Complete Draughtsman's Contract bungle-thru
• Note on Elysium and Christ
• A snippet from a work-in-progress
• Review of Fearsome Journeys: the New Solaris Book of Fantasy, first published in Interzone
• A sexist rant
• A detailed take-down of a sexist rant
• David Graeber and SF
• Free ebook: The Owl, the Pussycat and the Jetpack (three SFF stories) 
• Does .@ exist in science fiction?
• The science fiction of gamification (a bit updated)

Or even ... here's a screwy, moonstruck old thought! Could some of the established awards open up a new self-published category?

How do you like that apple?

Jan Pierewiet, Jan Pierewiet, Jan Pierewiet staan stil.
Jan Pierewiet, Jan Pierewiet, Jan Pierewiet staan stil.
Goeie môre, my vrou, hier's 'n soentjie vir jou.
Goeie môre, my man, daar is koffie in die kan. 
 — psychotic space mercenary

Elysium is a big science fiction blockbuster which tries to be as clear in its allegory as possible. In a smart review over at Tor.com, Tim Maughan talks about how Elysium allegorises "denial of universal healthcare, dystopian immigration policies [...] the ever-growing gap between the rich and poor," and, in particular, drone warfare. Elysium, of course, also sounds a lot like asylum.

Talking over the film recently with @HMittelmark and @PrinceJvstin, the point arose that, whatever you think about allegorising the real injustice we do have, and about allegorising the more just social order we could have (go for it, I say!), allegory has a really tough time knowing how to represent the transition between the two.

In Elysium that gap in the allegory, not surprisingly, doesn't remain empty. Instead it organises itself into theology.

Max Damon is Christ. Spoiler alert: at the end of the Gospels, Christ dies, so that everyone else can be saved.

What's really striking is how strongly the iconography of Elysium supports this.

A little before Max's final sacrifice, the camera even lingers on a ribbon of blood streaming from his hand.

Then there's Max's exoskeleton. It is hard not to read this as a powered, articulated version of the True Cross.

Unbelievably, Max even has a kind of nimbus or halo. It's slightly cropped in this pic.

If that glowing blue interface had been circular it would have made the association even stronger, although there are examples of square halos, usually denoting that the holy person is still alive. Christ himself often has a cross in his halo, and sometimes some words. Whether Christ's halo is touchscreen is unknown.

Of course, Max isn't the only one in an exoskeleton that sports such an interface -- although interestingly, Kruger's halo get plucked out during the War in Heaven, shortly before he gets cast down to his fiery doom.

"Will it hurt?" asks Max. The identification of the exoskeleton with the True Cross lends a particular reverence to the scene in which it is screwed into Max's body. I wonder if, given the large amount of theological reflection involving spiritual movement towards or away from Christ, and perhaps involving entrance into Christ; and given the devotional tradition of the Sacred Heart, which pinpoints Christ's divine love more precisely in His chest; and given the equally meticulous and controversial study of the physical arrangements of the Passion (e.g. Jehovah's witnesses interpreting the word stauros as "stake" rather than "cross,"), there is any theology uniting these topics? And if so, what would that theology make of Elysium's shift from the movement of the nails, perpendicular to Christ's heart, to the movement of the screws, both perpendicular and (in the turning of their helix threads) towards and away from His heart in many minuscule twisting trajectories?

Anyway, I suppose to a secular watcher, all this iconography produces a kind of back-and-forth tussle. Does the allegory about universal healthcare, drone warfare, and systemic and direct violence against refugees get captured by the theological allegory, and therefore turned into mystical hokum, into weak, wishful thinking? Or does the theological allegory get captured by the allegory about universal healthcare, drone warfare, and refugees -- drawing on a force which has shaped culture and ethics for centuries, and bringing it to bear on specific, unmistakable policy issues?

Little Graeb Men

SF seems fond of David Graeber. Hopefully it's because he's from the future.

Charles Stross's book Neptune's Brood, which I'm reading now, has an epigraph from Graeber's Debt: the first 5,000 Years, and some galactic expansionist riffing on that book. UPDATE: Charlie talks about the relationship between the two books.

Here's Jo Walton (the other Jo Walton) at Tor.com on Graeber, worldbuilding and the social imaginary.

And here's Cory Doctorow noting Jo Walton's article -- light of touch, but with discussion below. Also see Cory Doctorow on Stross's Neptune's Brood.

And a review of Neptune's Brood at Strange Horizons by Matt Hilliard.

And I mentioned Jo Walton's article in my list of economic speculative fiction.

Here's Kevin Murphy on David Graeber and 1960s schoolkids predicting the future.

Also see Graeber's response to a seminar event (including some academic trashtalk) about Debt. Though no sci-fi here folks. (Besides, I prefer the term scien fictio).

Although before there was Debt there was Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, one of two (maybe three, really) books which inspired Francis Crot (AKA me) in writing Hax, which is kind of almost disgusting enough utopian dystopian science fiction or something. A lot of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology is about how anarchist societies stay anarchist, how their social institutions are oriented towards vigorously stamping out any inchoate first stirrings of a state. (Hardly anyone can read Hax. I think the trick is to read the prose bits first, and then just browse the visual bits. Hax trivia: in the Damn the Caesars version, it all starts with a gunshot. In the Punch Press version, with a protest).

See also an earlier post of mine, inspired by the economic anthropological activism of Brett Scott, which is part of an extended project to get my head around what money actually is, perhaps so I can destroy it. Notable mainly for its creation myth about "soldiers and farmers," which is as least as intuitive and elegant an explanation of the origins of money as the orthodox "barter and the double coincidence of wants problem" version, and may have the advantage of a grain of truth.

Note on not knowing what's up

You again.

I've been thinking a bit about how SF short stories, when they bunch up, often turn into novels. And how so many SF novels feel like sequences of linked short stories.

The SF fluidity between short form and long form is exemplified by the ubiquity of the fix-up. This sort of picaresque mode no doubt has a lot to do with the history of SF publishing, and the traditional career of the SF writer, working their way up through the short fiction to the novel, from the novel to undying glory and ecstasy. It probably also has to do with the voyages of the starships Enterprise.

But I wonder if it also has to do with the special kind of negative capability native to SF. That is, with the relative willingness of the SF reader to be "in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason" (Keats). Does intertextuality sometimes piggyback on the greater allowances SF readers make for the unknown? Can a SF story stand alone more easily than a realist story, or a detective story perhaps, because when a reader sees a character hurrying off, acting all portentous and weird, making a bunch of baffling references, then doing something inexplicable, possibly fatal or whatever -- then that reader can extend to them the same affable tolerance they would to the yawning of a wormhole, or the yawing of a warp-drive? Are the souls of SF characters as much phlebotinum as they are ectoplasm? Are they, perhaps, not woven into the story, so much as built into the world?

Review of Jonathan Strahan (ed.), Fearsome Journeys: The New Solaris Book of Fantasy

This review first appeared in Interzone #248 in September 2013.

There’s something faintly paradoxical about the whole premise. Epic fantasy, but short epic fantasy? A further aura of oxymoron ― albeit a bit less pronounced ― attaches to the word new in the subtitle. That word is there because all twelve tales are unpublished elsewhere, but it also brings with it a suggestion of freshness. And who really wants to be an early adopter of epic fantasy ― isn’t it a bit like keying in a Google Alert for all the latest on cutting-edge single malt whiskies? And isn’t Fearsome Journeys in jeopardy of falling apart under the stress of its contradictions?

Yet somehow it all hangs together beautifully. A few stories, such as Saladin Ahmed’s ‘Amethyst, Shadow and Light’ and Daniel Abraham’s ‘The High King Dreaming,’ achieve a kind of ultra-compressed vastitude: epic.zip. Many stories position themselves as episodes, fragments, or specimens of palimpsestual sprawl. Characters prima donna up and down the pages as though this is not their first story and certainly won’t be their last. This is often literally true; for instance, Scott Lynch’s ‘Effigy Engine’ ― setting off Fearsome Journeys with innumerable bangs ― is slated as the first in a series of Red Hats stories; Jeffrey Ford’s ‘Spirits of Salt: A Tale of the Coral Heart’ relates to something he wrote for an earlier Strahan collection; Glen Cook’s ‘Shaggy Dog Bridge’ is a scrap of his much longer Black Company cycle.

Plenty of readers will happily follow these universes sideways into the various other books they exist across. Others of course may feel frustrated by all this unruly deferral and scatter. They may find the characters underdeveloped, the settings sketchy, the back-stories oblique.

Still other readers (this reviewer included!) will actually prefer not to have everything spelled out, and particularly not time-honoured fantasy tropes that are accessible via inference and a smidge of genre-savvy mental exertion ― The Dominator is bad, isn’t he?

As for the “new” bit, well, it doesn’t cancel out the priority which heroic fantasy gives to the archaic, so much as make that priority intelligible in the first place. Old and new, convention and subversion, high and low, heroic and mock heroic ― these things have always been difficult to disentangle. (The courtly love tradition, for instance, mingles private, unspoken and unrequited love of a theological fieriness with prankish subterfuge and slapsticky cuckoldry. Martial chivalry is similarly entwined with pragmatism, cynicism and brutality at its very roots). So what’s interesting in Fearsome Journeys is not the fact that conventions are subverted, nor the fact that subversion is inevitably conducted under the banners of innovation and realism . . . what’s interesting is the specific form and intensity of the subversion.

Generally speaking, that form is grit and its level is medium to low. There’s no out-and-out grimdark à la Abercrombie here; this grit typically involves a bit of undaunted erotic and/or scatalogical glee, plus some preoccupied, vague recognition of military and sexual domination as unshakeable dimensions of existence. Occasionally that vagueness seems deliberate or even pointed. In Lynch’s opener, the spirit of Fritz Leiber mingles with that of Square Enix: it’s obvious that these sorcerers’ agenda has something to do with strategy, but it also has everything to do with which spells have the coolest animations. Or take Ahmed’s ‘Amethyst, Shadow and Light,’ which is redolent of Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic or The National Lampoon’s Bored of the Rings in its sharp rebuff of cod Tolkienesque world-saving. Cook’s ‘Shaggy Dog Bridge’ attains a strange stylistic success as its hardboiled squaddie-speak harmonises with high fantasy loftiness: clipped expression and dropped words evoke the lacunae of skaldic epics, while the bleak roundabout linguistic doodles of military men (these guys have plenty of time to kill, when not they’re killing people) recalls archaistic periphrasis. On various levels, I make out the point that people busy with serious things (like massacres) don’t always take those things very seriously. In a sense, maybe they don’t even always pay that much attention.

That’s a fine message, but one which merges easily into something more awkward: the depersonalisation of suffering. For instance, we can all appreciate Ahmed’s Hai Hai ― a diabolic and foul-mouthed sabre-wielding (doe) rabbit-of-fortune, and the kind of entity one imagines soon will be despatched to gather Hugh Hefner to the hereafter ― as one of the anthology’s several Strong Female Characters. But what about the gender relations that make such a representation possible in the first place? (Whores as spoils, Hai Hai? ― care to say more?)

Well-intentioned fiction can get stuck in the same old images of progress: sometimes it’s necessary to backtrack a little to find the onward path. Perhaps that’s why I took such a shine to the cronecore offerings, Kate Elliott’s ‘Leaf and Branch and Grass and Vine’ and Robert V S Redick’s ‘Forever People.’ Elliot’s tale focuses on a sweet little Save the King messenger mission. Anna must cross hostile territory undetected, mainly by walking sort of near people (like getting into a club). Redick’s is a gnarled, queasy-making tale, simultaneously claustrophobic and on a grand scale. It very adroitly ends in the midst of wretched uncertainty. Even though both tales arguably draw on some of epic fantasy’s more problematic tropes and stock figures (cunning old woman has deceitful tongue; gender transitioning is emblematic of the Ineffible Eldritch; hick jezebel stashes machete, hikes skirts, etc.) they never come across as exploitative. The gender relations they invoke feel insistent and concrete, but also contingent.

The collection’s quality seemed pretty even to me, but I might lurchingly pin my rosette on K J Parker’s ‘The Dragonslayer of Merebarton.’ There is a sizeable “Yeah, and?”-type risk with adventure yarns; yep, this may all be unabashed escapism, but if you don’t escape very far, or for very long, and can’t bring anything back with you . . . well, why did you bother? Parker’s romance is something of a @Seinfeld1200, insofar as (by heroic fantasy standards) nothing really happens ― a knight goes to slay a dragon and that’s literally it ― yet it is so breezily, so mesmerically voiced, I couldn’t dream of demanding “So what?”

If I have one niggle, it’s that I’d have liked some subtle reminder that Parker’s charismatic aristo narrator ― so crinkly, so put upon, so lacking in disposable income (estate dastardly dear to maintain, dotchaknow), so ever-so-slightly shellshocked and traumatised, bearing his griefs old and new with winces and wolfish grins, and occasional paroxysms of droll chippiness ― that this chap is a classic strut of a monstrously illiberal and unequal social system. It would be difficult to supply such a hint, of course, without disrupting that voice. Nice poshos are the worst. I almost forgot to root for the dragon.

From "Integration"

From a work-in-progress.

Preseron Norts, Chief of Pomp and Bribes, swam into Sylvester's sensorium.「Ma'am.」
  「Norts! New haircut?」
  「Thank you. Two are quite recent.」Like all Geffen, Preseron Norts was completely covered in pale lush fur, and tended to have several haircuts at once. He squirmed his arch, presumably showing off the new trims.
  Sylvester was mystified.「Norts, très trefoil,」she gushed. 「And to what do I owe this pleasant admin?」
  「Your birthday,」said the Chief of Pomp and Bribes, with a puzzled air.「It's only twenty-six days off.」
  「Not still searching for a prezzie, Pressie Norts? Everyone knows the fiefdom could do with a new mech. Our enemies know it especially. Hint, hint!」
  Several polite but pained rictuses gleamed in the shaved regions of Preseron Norts's arch.「Ha ha, ma'am. 」
  「Or they will kiiillll uuusss!」
  「Well, it's the Award for Diverse Innovations, you see.」
  Out loud, Sylvester was sobbing for the benefit of her therapist Konoshi.
  "There, there," said Konoshi.
  "Ambassadors make me sad," she wailed.
  「I don't think I should win the Award, even if it is my birthday!」she subvocalised to the Chief of Pomp and Bribes. 「Very kind though! Shall I bestow on myself any knighthoods this year? Or is that nepotistic?」
  There was a phrase she had taught Preseron Norts for such situations.「Ma'am,」said Preseron Norts awkwardly. 「I am done with your fucking bullshit.」
  「That's the spirit Norts. Is the shortlist finalised yet?」
  「Very near. One applicant needs your personal attention. I'll dump it in your intray, if I may. It's a solid pitch, but ... essentially she wants to write some software to apply for the Award next year, and every year thereafter.」
  「She – I see. So if we award it to her this year, we have to keep awarding it to her forever. Otherwise it proves we made a poor decision, funding something doesn't work! Oh, that's lovely! Give it to her, definitely!」
  「Really? It's not that exactly. The judging process involves ... interviews. If this applicant has proposed to automate an interview...」
  「... it would violate my prohibition on personality constructs. Oh dear. You want to know how hard you should come down on her. No! — you want my go-ahead to sweep this under the carpet!」
  「Precisely. Poor publicity for the ceremony, for your birthday celebrations, for the House Lorraine. So with your off-the-record permission, I will omit her from the shortlist? No further action necessary?」
  Sylvester reached her decision.「This is what will happen. Make it clear that all recipients of the Award must abide by all standard system-wide prohibitions. Then announce ... I will give her the Award, but should she fail, her eyes shall be forfeit!」
  「Ma'am?」
  「Or tail or something! — put together our anatomy options, Norts! Something I can have as a bracelet possibly! That'll be all.」
「Ma'am. Thank you.」Preseron Norts, Chief of Pomp and Bribes, rippled his respectful farewell.
「Wait, Norts! — how much bank does this vile innovator troll stack? Do we know if she's in it for the funding or the fame?」
「Fame. Background check unearthed a recent pelfie. She's stacking mad bank, ma'am.」
「So is it possible she's already done it? Written the program?」
「No of course n—」Preseron Norts paused and shivered.「I hadn't considered that. You think it won in a previous year? This year might be her big reveal?」
「Somebody's big reveal, anyway. Worth checking out. Analyse the last few awards. Include pitches that almost got shortlisted but didn't. And ... Norts, could this application have been automated?」
「Ma'am. I'll look into all this immediately, ma'am. Thank you.」
「On a bracelet or just on a pole. Props for taking this to the top. Laters, naughty Norts!」

The Owl, the Pussycat and the Jetpack

We are giving away this mini-collection of short stories ("Fred," "The Invasion," "The Butteryellow Reliquary") free on the Kindle.

Robert Kiely: "You have gotten this far, you can see the elegantly shaped vessel and its invigorating contents above, why not partake? I did. Now all my wrinkles are gone and I eat fruit five times a day and veg five times too, doubling up on that shit. These stories are like the bald cry of a newborn baby, which I suppose might irritate some of you, but it shouldn't, it is beautiful, but perhaps I picked up the wrong metaphor, I am keeping it nonetheless. Deal alien goo? This is for you. Megabyte coding pastoral? Grab it by the dorsal."