“Did you see the news today?” Jan asked me, with that look on her face that told me whatever it was, she didn’t like it.

“No, why?”

“They’ve just invented a robotic human brain, it’s the last organ to be cracked, so now you can build a whole human from robotic organs.”

“Wow, you’d never make a mistake, think how useful that’d be, bet it’s expensive.”

“It’s like all the other robotic organs, only the richest can get them. You know I read a piece in the paper the other day, it’s reckoned that 99.8% of the worlds wealth is in the hands of people who are between 85 to 97% robots. This new brain will push that number even higher, maybe up to 100% in some cases.”

“So they’ll be living longer and be less prone to mistakes.  Tony at work reckons they can communicate in way we don’t know about. I have to say that even though I always thought the world would get taken over by robots, I never really thought it’d be quite like this.”

by Russell Ruffino

They wanted his pinky finger at customs.

At first, he’d thought maybe they just wanted a print or a blood sample. But then, he’d seen what happened to the tentacle of the sapient in line ahead of him: It walked away with a fresh blue-weeping stump, the tip excised by the eye-blink swipe of a sterile blade.

He knew that that particular genotype could regenerate tentacle tips – but he doubted that the customs agents here knew or cared that pinkies didn’t grow back. At some passport inspection earlier, one of them must have made a mistake in classifying him and shuffled him into the wrong lane.

No one spoke English here – and why would they? He was the first human being ever to be processed by the gateway station. All he’d had going for him was the universally encoded information in his travel papers.

Alerted to the hold up in the queue as he balked at the tissue sampler, a hard-shelled uniformed agent trundled over. It squawked and helpfully directed his hand toward the machine.

by l. m. orchard