The accident in the harbor should have been preventable. Meteorologists had been tracking the storm’s approach; everyone knew it would be bad. No one should have been heading out of the harbor at the last minute, especially in a Hobie Cat.

That was the problem with humans — there would always be thrill-seekers who thought warnings to be careful were meant as encouragement to be daring instead. DTH-04 looked at the corpses before it. Could it bring them back with chips to bridge the portions of the brain that had suffered hypoxia? Maybe that would fix the problem.

It would try.

Editor’s note: This is the last in a series of four (obviously) – see the drabble First Horseman for Erin’s Author’s Note.

Categories: Erin M. Hartshorn, Fiction | 2 Comments »

Every prediction model yielded the same result: rainfall in the next year would be almost nonexistent, and crops would be poor.

Already, though, the colonists had settled in for a happy winter, with all their usual pursuits, which meant more mouths to feed with next year’s harvest — which meant malnutrition for all. The numbers did not lie.

If, however, there were fewer women to give birth, the colony would survive another year. Decision made, protocol FMN-03 adjusted the nutritional parameters for the kitchen in the women’s dorm. They could eat, drink, and be merry; there would be no children.

Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of four (obviously) – see the drabble First Horseman for Erin’s Author’s Note.

Categories: Erin M. Hartshorn, Fiction | No Comments »

Lieutenant Bird and Commander Matheson had been exposed separately on Earth; coincidence and stray radiation had allowed the viruses to recombine into something new. The mutated virus spread rapidly on the space station; no one was immune. The med bot analyzed the outbreak, who had first shown symptoms, how quickly it passed from person to person.

PLG-01 cross-checked the antibody titers of the crew, but the disease had yet to run its course. The bot sealed access to the docking ports for the shuttles. It could not allow anyone to leave the station for help and risk infecting the Earth.

Author’s Note: I’ve been playing with the idea of Four Robots of the Apocalypse for a while, and I finally decided how to make them work. Robots and computer subroutines wouldn’t be malicious, just practical and literal. That’s pretty scary.

Categories: Erin M. Hartshorn, Fiction | 4 Comments »