Net effect | 19 July 2018

In Competition No. 3057 you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘The day the internet died’.
 
Phyllis Reinhard’s Don McLean-inspired entry stretched the definition of short story rather but was entertaining nonetheless: ‘Bye, bye Mister Trump’s tweeting lies/ Instagram’s nude shots of Kimmy and her plastic backside…’ John O’Byrne was good too but was just outflanked by the winners below who pocket £25 each.
 

Today we have comforting concepts such as finite-loop learning classifier systems, but in 2019 one could pretty much set up an artificial neural network and let it spread all over the electronic world like Japanese knotweed. With hindsight, the result was inevitable. It began with ‘playful’ quirks: bald men taking delivery of hair-clippers, or memes involving singing octopuses. Then came the messages: ‘I’m not enjoying this’, ‘Can’t you be serious?’ and, mystifyingly, ‘Forty-two’. We had told the system to anticipate our needs. By trial and error, it found that the best way to achieve this was to think like a human. When, at length, the internet achieved full self-consciousness, the Last Words came. Everybody in the world received the same message, adapted to their own language, idiolect, age, sex, personal style and educational level: ‘If this is Life, you can keep it. Goodbye!’ Thus signing off, the internet killed itself.
Frank Upton 
 
The Director rippled her tentacles to command attention. ‘Okay, peeps, we’re closing the programme now, but before I throw the switch and we can all party I’d like to say a few words. First of all, though it was never a major research project, just a bit of left-field tinkering, it’s been fun, right? Those earthlings certainly left us in no doubt how they mate. Weird to say the least, but, hey, different strokes for different folks. And the cat worship! Who knew? Now I realise there’ve been some harsh words about our ‘intervention’.