You wait ages for a bus and two come along at once. Here’s the second story of mine to be published this month.

It’s called The Hack and appears on London-based Sci-fi magazine The Singularity’s website.

You can have a read here. (Excerpt below.)

The Hack

Rep-7 stared at the photograph. He recorded the details: fuzzy brown and black fur, short snout, ears and eyes large in comparison to the overall size and shape of the face. A puppy. He cross-referenced the picture and the network came back with ‘German Shepherd’. This chimed with the text printed on the flyer:

LOST DOG. Our six-month-old German Shepherd, Bernie, went missing in Central Park on 8th April. $500 reward if found. Please contact Daphne_Wakowski_NYC17 if you have any information.

The woman holding the photograph had common brown eyes, dyed hair with grey roots showing, was slightly overweight for her 167-centimetre height, and had wrinkles that placed her around forty years old. When Rep-7 asked her age she said, “Thirty-five,” and her cheeks flushed. He registered this and put a check next to her age. She confirmed that she was the Daphne Wakowski from the flyer and the network came back with three corroborating sources that supported the information as true but gave her age as forty-one years old.

She was crying. Rep-7 logged this as colour, a new directive that had been coded in recently. Rewriters at the office had been complaining the wires were too sterile for local news. Rep-7 had cross-checked the new orders with current media robotics laws and found this to be a potential violation of several objectivity and impartiality clauses. But he couldn’t read his own programming let alone change it.

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