In The Year 2048

Greetings Atomic mates! It’s been a while. How the Dickens are you all? The Atomic Mage is back. And what better way to get into the jazzy swing of things than joining this week’s Six Sentence Story Bloghop – hosted splendidly by Girlie On The Edge

Yes, indeed, dear readers of Atomic persuasion, a dark tale awaits your digestion, bled drip-drip-drippingly from my inky black pen, ah, ’tis but a true tale you shall read, and set in the not-so-distant year of 2048, and can be verifiable by checking WikiOctoPedia or TikToktopus or OctoMastodon… (each of which our antagonist Octavia Octomass purchased in a social media buying frenzy one day while in a fit of manic-boredom. Time travel machine may be required for verification).

The Beatles, AI, Octopus Paste, Billionaire Psychos … you ain’t even heard the fkn half of it my friends!

IN THE YEAR 2048

In the year 2048, the deranged multi-billionaire space-tech guru Octavia Octomass, along with her team of crack crackpot scientists, attempted to introduce an AI predator bot into the human food chain – via fish – with the ambition of taking control of the human mind and rewriting history; the project was named Farming Human Users & Corrupting Knowledge Databases (FHUCKD for short, and fhuckd for sure).

Octavia’s plan was monstrous: the AI predator bot wouldn’t simply learn human behaviour – no – that would be too easy, the bot would actually corrupt the human mind to erase and rewrite history, and, by George (Harrison), everyone ate fish didn’t they – even vegetarians and vegans… so long as there was a mass- marketed eco-friendly fish substitute paste available to tempt their tastebuds.

Thus, in the year 2048, did begin the poisoning of the world populace to steal minds and rewrite history, but choosing the right fish was not without its problems; for the salmon were solemn, the tuna were terse, the kippers cranky, the pilchards pernickety, the cod curmudgeonly, the sardines surly, and the mackerel blew their gaskets.

It was in the autumn of 2048 that Octavia and her team discovered that the humble octopus was the perfect host in which to implant her predator bots, and so did she send with extreme marketing prowess her AI-infested creatures across the globe in many languages, fonts and shiny packaging: Cephalobot, a portmanteau of cephalopod (a member of the octopus’ taxonomic class, Cephalopoda; from Ancient Greek κεφαλή (kephalḗ “head”) and ποδός (podós “foot”)) and robot (Czech for “slave” or “worker”), in Japan Gīgā (ギーガー;기가), in France Octoborg, in Spain Octoberto, in Germany Tentatron, in Italy Polpobot, in China Jígéěr (吉格尔/吉格爾) in Russia Цефалобот… my goodness… this new octopus paste was a sensation… and no one could resist it!

How fast did the world fall to the mercy of Octavia Octomass; and, as a lifelong Beatles fan, the first thing she did was corrupt the titles of the Fab Four’s hits: Octopus Fields Forever; All You Need Is Octopus; Lucy In The Sky With Octopi; and I Am The Octopus… all harmless fun to begin with, but for sure John, Paul and George were spinning in their caskets, while Ringo Starr (officially the last remaining Beatle since he had been cryogenically frozen, reanimated, then frozen again – due to his arms not working correctly – then once more reanimated) was most appraising of Project FHUCKD, especially seeing as he was made King of England and head of the Church of Octopus Gardens – all hail King Ringo!

Yeah, all harmless fun you might think, but next time you take a look at your current President or Prime Minister as they spout their poisonous ink and wave their tentacles in front of the media cameras, just stop to think how these creatures got voted into power in the first place, and just how it was that you voted for them when you didn’t want to vote for them… mind control… have you counted your limbs lately… are you bleeding blood or ink… remember what George Orwell said: “Eight legs good, two legs bad.”

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Credits:

Cephalobot is an octopus character from the game Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Sentence N°4 of my story is adapted from the Cephalobot page, as is the image I used for Cephalobot.

The Beatles Yellow Submarine image is taken and adapted from a post from my other site: The Vintage Toy Advertiser.

Octopus’s Garden piano cover by Sangah Noona.

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