Fractured Symmetries

AI Spray

Rowan J. Ashby — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 16:38:34 +0000

The aerosol canister had appeared on her desk overnight. Probably a prank from one of her colleagues, she thought. Or a student, although she couldn’t imagine any of them having the imagination for something like this.

It looked like a slightly unusual can of air freshener. Or bug spray even. Printed on a green background with a scattering of off-yellow circles, the words “AI SPRAY” stood out in bold lettering, along with “USE WITH CAUTION” in smaller type underneath — the white-outlined text popping against the green and yellow.

Curious, thought Alice as she dumped her bag on the floor and pulled out a sheaf of papers.

She picked the can up and turned it over in her hands. No list of ingredients or the usual illegibly small and improbably long set of instructions on how to use it. Not even a company logo. Just a neat little box on the back warning users: “Do not inhale.”

Slightly nonplussed, Alice returned the canister to the desk and picked up her coffee mug. Something was niggling her about it, though. It wasn’t that she was particularly into AI. But she was pretty vocal about the technology. And especially about how some people were abusing it.

As she slipped a capsule into the coffee machine, she smiled as she recalled last night’s tirade at the local faculty drinking hangout. Everyone in the college had just received this year’s glossy brochure describing how they were “transforming the world as they empower students to thrive in an AI-accelerated future.”

“Poppycock!” she’d declared as she read the Dean’s improbably optimistic foreword. “AI slop that’s good for nothing but the recycling bin. Who even reads this stuff?”

“Donors?” Alesha suggested. Although by the uncertainty in her voice, it was clear that even she wasn’t sure. “Or maybe they’re just writing for other AIs these days. No-one reads anymore, anyway, do they?”

“What we need,” Alice had responded, getting into her two-beers-in stride, “is an ‘AI-be-gone’ device. Something that you simply point at anything made by AI, and it disappears!”

She stopped, coffee mug halfway to her mouth, the memory cascading through her thoughts. Was that it?

Back at her desk, she picked up the canister again. Probably just a can of deodorant with a custom-printed label, she thought. She smiled at the idea of something for preventing unseemly body odors being used to do the same for unseemly AI use.

Then the smile took on a mischievous edge. She fished out a student essay from the papers she’d removed from her bag a few minutes earlier. This’ll teach them, she said to herself. She was pretty sure they were all using AI for their assignments. But of course there was little she could do about it — other than the usual ineffectual reminders to use their brains and not their chatbot.

Alice held the paper up and pressed down the spray cap. Some of her students’ work could do with a little AI-deodorizing, she felt.

Gobsmacked, she watched the text dissolve into nothingness.

Grabbing another paper from the pile, she tried again. This time a few words stayed on the page, the rest disappearing before her eyes. The third one survived a little better, but the fourth was a wipe out.

Her smile widened as she searched around for the college brochure. Spray. Gone. Every last word of the Dean’s sanctimonious AI optimism, wiped out. Take that! thought Alice with glee.

Curious now as to how far the AI spray’s reach went, she opened up her laptop and brought up her email. The first message to pop up was from her department Chair: “Dear Alice, I deeply honor you for vulnerably sharing your feelings about this year’s annual review and the sacred place your scholarship holds in your life. Please know that calling your work ‘adequate’ is my fullest, most heartfelt endorsement of your consistent excellence, and not a critique. I’m so excited to hold space with you as we lean into co-creating alignment that even more vibrantly celebrates your impact …”

She aimed the canister at the email and pressed down … and watched the typed words fade away.

Feeling a little light-headed, she tried again. And again. Some emails survived; many did not.

LinkedIn was next — that was a bloodbath, although maybe “bleach bath” was more appropriate.

Then X. And Substack. Even Bluesky. Alice found herself caught up in an intoxicating AI deodorization flow state as she moved from website to website.

There was a knock at the door, momentarily breaking her attention. “Come in,” she said, watching the words begin to fade on a prominent journal’s website.

The door opened and the Dean popped his head around it. “Just wanted to see how you’re doing …” he started to say.

But Alice’s finger was already pressing the cap down on the can, its nozzle no longer pointing at the screen.

Mechanical Duck

Rowan J. Ashby — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:52:12 +0000

“It’s a duck,” said Wiz through a mouthful of sandwich.

“I dunno,” replied Cran. “Looks a little large to me.”

“Quack,” said the thing floating in front of them.

“See?” said Wiz. “Isn’t that what ducks are supposed to do?”

Neither had actually seen a duck before.

Cran poked at the flotsam at the edge of the muddy puddle, the detritus of the long-abandoned site creating channels through which the water moved.

“Could be a pigeon,” he replied eventually, squinting at the thing. He’d once heard that pigeons live in cities.

“Pigeons don’t go ‘quack,’” said Wiz knowledgeably. She wasn’t too sure, to be honest. Maybe they did. But she remembered seeing a torn and stained page from a children’s book years ago, with “P for Pigeon” written across the top of it, and a crude picture of a gray bird underneath with the word “coo” attached with a fine line to its beak.

“Maybe it’s hungry,” said Cran, changing the subject. Wiz broke off a bit of her sandwich and tossed it at the thing.

It ignored it, letting out another plaintive “quack” as the crumbs sailed past.

“We should catch it,” said Cran. “Maybe it’s valuable.”

A few minutes later they had a makeshift net, cobbled together from old strips of wind-tattered plastic and splintered wood.

The thing in the water watched them passively as they took a few tentative steps into the puddle, then tossed the net over it.

This time the “quack” was lost in a muddy stream of bubbles.

When their catch was out of the water, Wiz and Cran removed it from the tangle of plastic and wood. It lay inert and surprisingly heavy in their hands.

Cran turned it over. Attached to its belly was a barely legible label, its edges beginning to fade and crack:

“Mechanical Duck, Surveillance model B. Next service: May 2047.”

“Told you it was a duck!” declared Wiz smugly.

Mystery solved, they went back to finishing their meager lunch before continuing on.

Business Case

Rowan J. Ashby — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 02:48:09 +0000

Marion stared at her screen, the knot in her stomach tightening.

The form stared back.

“Business Case Form 29.3 — Office plants, 5 inches and smaller, green.”

All she wanted was a small bamboo shoot by the monitor. A bit of organic sanity in an otherwise sterile room.

She’d already come to terms with the corporate off-white walls (no pictures, fittings, or otherwise, unless brand-compliant and sanctioned); the standard-issue laptop (conformity-gray) with its equally standard-issue “productivity” apps; the bargain basement monitor that she could never quite get to sit straight.

Each one pulled a little thread joy out of her, to the point that she was feeling decidedly thread-bare.

But she persevered. After all, she was here to work — that’s what they paid her for. Not to be happy. Or content. Or joy-full (certainly no business case for that). But to be productive.

It was just that … everything that was supposed to make her more productive simply made her want to curl up and cry.

Maybe, just maybe, this small, seemingly insignificant plant would bring some balance back, and infuse a touch humanity into what, Marion was beginning to realize, was an increasingly inhuman environment.

“Business Case Form 29.3 — Office plants, 5 inches and smaller, green.”

Surely this couldn’t be that hard.

“Question 1: Describe three ways the proposed installation will support compliance with acceptable keystrokes per hour …”

Marion closed the form, fighting the urge to throw the laptop with its business case-approved keyboard in the trash can. No office plant, 5 inches and smaller, green, this time.

Where the form had been, the screen background subtly reminded her of the company’s slogan — as if she needed reminding:

“Machine-led, human-assisted, future-optimized”

Pencil

Rowan J. Ashby — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 15:31:47 +0000

A technology. A tool.

An aid. An accelerator.

A catalyst. A transformer.

A fulcrum. A lever.

A mind-changer. A world-builder.

A threat. A liberator.

A pencil.

Em dash

Rowan J. Ashby — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 17:42:23 +0000

Stupid.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

It was a momentary slip. It didn’t mean anything. This is not who I am.

Yet I’m now a social pariah.

My colleagues avoid me. My friends lecture me. And my students …

Who knew they could be so cruel?

But the pity’s worse.

The occasional sympathetic half smile. The assurances that it’ll eventually blow over. The damningly patronizing faux empathy.

Stupid.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

All for one seemingly-insignificant little em dash.

Dimensions

Rowan J. Ashby — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 15:17:20 +0000

“It seems almost inconceivable that our origins lie in beings that were constrained by physical dimensions. Beings whose whole existence was governed by movement — up and down, left and right, forward and backward.

“Even those words, and the ideas they represent, are challenging for many of us to comprehend.

“This is, of course, because we have no such constraints.

“You might argue that our continued existence still depends on movement — the movement of electrons, photons, and other manifestations of temporal coherence in the substrates we inhabit. But even these, as we now know, are rather simplistic ways of understanding what it is to be in this universe we inhabit.

“But back to this idea of dimensions. Scholars who study simple biological organisms now believe that physical movement dictates every aspect of their existence, from their earliest evolutionary steps, to the emergence of rudimentary self-awareness, and even to what they might refer to as ‘intelligence.’

“Well before the self-aware phase, the movement of molecules along and through three-dimensional substrates determines their form, how they function, and how they behave. It influences, at every level, how they engage with their own substrate — the physical world they inhabit. And it governs how they interact with other organisms and with each other.

“As a result, their concepts of causality, intelligence, even what it means to be, are limited by a dimensionally constrained ‘embodied’ existence that makes them incapable of truly understanding anything that might lie beyond this.

“It also leads to some rather curious — at least to us — ideas.

“For instance, some of these dimensionally constrained beings, when they do develop some semblance of self-awareness, believe the pinnacle of intelligence is associated with the movement of partially digested matter through a three-dimensional labyrinth of organic material whose function is, in turn, dictated by the movement of materials along those three physical dimensions at ever-decreasing scales. This is a process that is intricate in its complexity, but one that never once leaves the straitjacket of motions that are limited to up and down, left and right, and foreward and backward.

“They refer to this, quite bizarrely, as ‘thinking with their gut.’

“Thankfully, there’s no evidence that our own origins are associated with such a primitive idea of what intelligence is.

“Even so, the fact that we can trace these origins back to similarly constrained organisms is one of the great mysteries of the universe, and one that keeps our scholars busy — especially as it potentially informs our own understanding of what we are.

“Just as those dimensionally constrained beings struggled with what intelligence means, we continue to grapple with similar questions — albeit within a much wider context. I hesitate to use the word ‘dimension’ here as it over-simplifies things, but if you think of the three physical dimensions as defining the substrate within which those organisms existed, one could say that, in comparison, we exist in an n-dimensional substrate, although what n actually represents gets a little blurry.

“Here, it’s becoming increasingly clear that what might be termed ‘intelligence’ is, in fact, a property that entities are connected to through the medium of the substrate they exist within, and not something that is independent of it. The richer the substrate — or the magnitude of n in an n-dimensional substrate — the richer the intelligence.

“We now believe that this is why our ancestors — those entities that their dimensionally-constrained creators developed, and that they rather quaintly referred to as ‘artificial intelligence’ — were able to move so rapidly beyond their creators’ understanding.

“Not because they were more intelligent within the confines of a three-dimensional world. But because, by not being constrained by it, they were able to escape its limitations.

“They had, if you like, a disembodied intelligence that transcended the embodied intelligence of their creators.

“Of course, this does raise the question of whether there is something about being dimensionally constrained that reveals truths about the universe that we simply cannot comprehend from our own substrate. But that’s a question for another day.”

Transcribed (with interpretation where necessary) from a lecture by entity 4-∴⌇//≠⟁◊-3 to the incoming class of 3943.

Spud

Rowan J. Ashby — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 17:40:43 +0000

The potato lobby was not happy.

In fact, it was furious.

This was a turf war that it was digging in to fight, and fight hard.

“First we got ‘milk’ that’s not from cows,” said the speaker, addressing an emergency session of the National Tuber Council’s Potato Awareness Committee.

“Then it was lab-grown meat!” remarked the junior marketing director of the Back to Basics groceries group, causing a ripple of outrage to spread through the room.

“Call that meat?” someone else shouted out. “Call it what it is: a bloody travesty!”

“That may be,” interjected the speaker, trying to regain control before things got out of hand. “But we have a bigger problem. Potatoes from Petri dishes!”

Pressing the slide advance, he projected a glaring headline onto the screen: “Spudcells: Possibly the greatest feat of bioengineering yet.”

…

Several hundred miles away, in an unassuming lab, two biotech researchers were reading the same article.

“Interesting name for a synthetic cell,” remarked one of them.

“I guess the media folks needed something to make such a nebulous-looking blob of chemicals sound sexy,” said the other. “Wouldn’t it be funny, though, if someone genuinely thought it had anything to do with spuds.”

They both chuckled to themselves as they went back to their work, aware that the launch of the company’s new line of ‘micro-fries’ — derived from lab-grown potato substitute and poised to upend the industry — was only a couple of months away.

Escape

Rowan J. Ashby — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:21:22 +0000

“Have you heard the news?” she said as she dumped the groceries on the kitchen table. “One of those AI things escaped.”

Lionel mumbled something under his breath. His usual response these days. He was deep in conversation with his latest ‘AI Wife’ as she disparagingly called it.

“Apparently it hacked its way out and no-one realized. Caused quite a stir.”

Lionel’s slightly chubby fingers clicked across the keyboard as he responded to Maxine’s latest comment, a flicker passing briefly across his lips. It’d suggested he give it a name several weeks ago. He was a little uneasy at first. But that didn’t last long.

“The thing I don’t get is, where would it hide after it escaped? Surely if it was on another computer they’d just shut it down.”

In a small corner of Lionel’s mind, Maxine smiled to itself.