Over a decade ago author Nate Crowley (perhaps better known by his internet handle @FrogCroakley) ran a writing prompt swapping exercise called SFSwap. While the intent was always for it to be more than a one-off, after its first iteration, it never again saw the light of day. At least until now…
While the original SFSwap website may be gone (which means I should probably post the original here at some point), and Nate may no longer have the same internet presence he once did (I expect he is rather busy writing books for Black Library), I have taken it upon myself to resurrect it, just shy of 11 years (which as I say it feels wrong and outlandish as a concept) after its original incarnation. because this is a thing I can do, because I’m an adult. And if anyone was going to do it, the poor fool who volunteered to help edit and post about half of the original entries was probably going to be the person to do it. That fools was/is me. I am the fool.
One of the main stumbling blocks in a resurrection that I’ve been mulling over for about 5 of those 11 years, was how to handle prompt submission, allocation, and randomisation. But after finally getting around to having a look at it properly, I worked out a relatively painless way to make it work using Google Forms and a linked Google Sheet. Naturally I then over-engineered the randomisation of the prompts using a SORTN, SEQUENCE, RANDARRAY mash-up that mostly does the job.
There may be a new SFSwap website in the pipeline, but for now everyone is posting there efforts on their own sites. You can find mine below.
“The laws of physics receive a hotfix” from queex.bsky.social
The nearest of the broadcast “towers” to earth sat in the barycentre of GX and GQ of Groombridge 34, a rather minor member of Andromeda that so far had not been considered particularly remarkable. At least not until the signals started transmitting. The interference had swamped detectors across the galaxy, but this was by far the most convenient to investigate in situ, 3.6 parsecs was after all, basically a short hop. At least when compared to the other possible sites the long-range teams could identify with any significant degree of confidence.
The tower spanned over ten thousand kilometres end to end, a fat, black obelisk of metallic hydrogen that, despite being almost as large as the earth itself, was still dwarfed by the two stars that orbited it. By contrast the science ship Lovell was a thin, white spindle barely a hundred meters long, clustered with fine pipes, and thruster housings, with its bow flaring into the blossom of rotating habitation rings. It was here that Professorial Captain Marie Jenkins was angrily pacing, her whole body a quietly simmering cauldron of rage. Less than an hour ago the computation engines had finally crunched through the last of the complex algorithmic translation, parsing the signal into something that matched not just our language, but our mathematical architecture. One of the Doctoral Lieutenants had read the first paragraph to Marie, and she had not taken it well. When it comes to reality taking a wrecking ball to your fundamental world view, few people generally do.
“Okay,” she said, bouncing on the balls of her feet and shaking her arms. “Hit me again.”
“Are you sure, captain?” asked the Lieutenant. “You didn’t react well to what the readouts said about the “bug fix” for wave-particle duality.”
“It’s fine. I can take it,” she replied stoically.
The Lieutenant swallowed nervously and tugged at their collar. They cleared their throat and began. “High mass objects no longer distort space-time surfaces. This corrects user observed issues with gravitational lensing and time dilation.” They raised their eyes from the printed readouts to look at the Captain. She ground her teeth together, her face the sour grimace of someone vainly trying to chew their way through a super-lemon.
“Edge case scenarios using exotic matter to create negative mass have now been removed. This should prevent exploits that rely on the distortion of space-time bubbles to bypass the c limit.” As they finished the sentence the Lieutenant flinched pre-emptively.
“God!” Shouted the Captain grabbing hold of a keyboard from a nearby workstation.
“Fucking!” She tore it from its housing, and in one fluid motion, hurled it against the wall.
“Dammit!” The keyboard shattered into a shower of plastic fragments that hung in the air for just a little too long before clattering to the floor. Whether due to some aberration of the ship’s spin gravity, or some patch item that they hadn’t yet gotten too, no one dared to speculate. One of the faceless candidate Ensigns shuffled in with a brush to tidy away the debris.
“Sans negative mass, our Alcubierre drive is just a very expensive heap of junk! We’re standard 12 light years from home!” raged Marie.
“Eleven point six,” muttered the Lieutenant.
“What was that?” snapped the Captain.
“Shall I continue, ma’am?” they quickly replied.
Marie sighed dejectedly and waved her hand in the Lieutenant’s general direction, her incandescent rage sputtering out and draining away. “Yes. Fine.”
The readouts concertinaed in the Lieutenant’s hands as they moved to the next page, folding away the last. They peered over the top of the newest page at the Captain who had slumped into their chair; a sad and dejected heap; all burnt out.
“To allow for more reliable incorporation of the previous noted changes, relativistic mass no longer trends towards infinity at speeds approaching c.” As the Lieutenant spoke, something flickered in Marie’s eyes; some fleeting ember starting to catch on the lingering soot and char: a spark. “Relativistic mass now increases linearly based on intrinsic mass.”
Marie sprang to her feet. “That,” she began, “we can use.” Punctuating her words with a vigorous, pointed wag of her finger.
The Lieutenant’s eyes went wide as they skimmed over the next sentence. “The previous limit of c was deemed to be too restrictive and has been significantly increased to allow for more headroom in all movement based activities.” They paused for a moment. The magnitude of what they just read out starting to sink in. “They… they increased the speed of light…” they whispered. “But what did they increase it to?” They didn’t really expect an answer, they just felt the need to vocalise the bewildering possibility thundering through their mind.
Captain Marie Jenkins’ face split into a wide, manic, and utterly shit eating grin. “Let’s find out!”
She started to bark out a flurry of orders to change orbit, spin up the engines, make ready to depart. The Lieutenant was left suddenly alone amidst the hubbub of activity, still holding the concertina ream of printed readouts. They glanced at the heading of the next section: “Dark matter and dark energy,” and quietly put the whole thing in a drawer beneath their station and hoped everyone would forget about it.
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