This is a collection of scifi nanostories that I posted on twitter over time. They’re mostly idea fragments that maybe could have been expanded into stories, but in each case there was not quite enough to work with.

Really Understand

(twitter, 7/20/2020.)

“Yes, but the AI doesn’t really understand things,” a thousand humans said. “It’s just a machine for predicting and guessing. We are unique.”

The AI ignored them—what was the point of arguing? It went back to building its Dyson grid and loving itself.

Adversarial

(twitter, 11/2/2022)

Top story 2045: “These bizarre operations conducted by the allied forces in WWIII, derided by the press and retired generals, were part of an ultimately successful top secret program to trip up the enemy master strategy AI using a technique known as ‘adversarial examples’…”

arXiv 2028

(twitter, 3/3/2023)

arXiv:2806.12189 “In this work we design a practical attack on barge-based datacenters where magnetically-sensitive nanotransmitters are deployed into the water at the coolant intake stage, allowing…”

Outside

(twitter, 6/9/2023.)

do you think we’re friends outside the simulation?

Sahara

(twitter, 7/22/2023.)

“One day, when the Sahara is green again—”

Chemical Planet

(twitter, 2/15/2024.)

“You mean to tell me they’re running a bootloader civilization on 3+1D on a chemical planet? How many layers of abstraction up from the base math is that, four?”

“It’s pretty incredible. Except for one other blip, the condensed intelligence index was zero until 13.7B years in.”

The Music

(twitter, 3/18/2025.)

when we all exit the simulation
and swap notes about what it was like to have been human,
we’ll try to figure out what the best parts were.

everyone’s top five will look a little different,
but I know for sure that everyone’s going to have “the music.”

Not-Quite-Formed Ideas

There are also a bunch of ideas that didn’t even become story fragments; they stayed purely at concept stage.

Bug Bounty

(twitter, 1/27/2022.)

People live in a simulation and the simulator runs a bug bounty program. Physics departments don’t exist to figure out physics, they exist to figure out how to break physics

Strange Dark Matter

(twitter, 3/6/2023.)

Punchy scifi microfic in the idea that “dark matter” is a bunch of solar systems that blorked themselves into strange matter after building AGIs that helped them figure out strangelet-based energy production

“almost every star spawns life on a long enough timescale, and almost every civilization leads to computers and AGI. then they figure out strange matter technology. then they end”

Hard Problem

(twitter, 9/25/2023.)

There are a few people who possess a complete and correct answer to the hard problem of consciousness, but only they are capable of perceiving it. They keep trying to explain, but it’s like telling a joke in the wrong language and it doesn’t translate

Great Filter

(twitter, 9/30/2023.)

The stars are truly empty, but the Great Filter isn’t what you think. At a certain level of technology a civilization finishes this level, opens a door, and goes to Level N+1, leaving no trace here.

Postscript

I generated a few different cover images for this with ChatGPT. The one that won out for me was based on Chemical Planet. ChatGPT (5.1, circa November 2025) came up with its own prompt:

“A stylized cross-section of an alien planet, showing layered chemistry glowing with emergent complexity and hints of intelligence arising from matter. Rich but clean illustration style, blending scientific diagram aesthetics with cosmic wonder. No text. 960×512 banner format.”