Tag Archive for: Penny Durham

Served

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by Penny Durham

The king greeted us more like old friends than envoys from his enemy.

“You are weary! Rest. Tomorrow we’ll talk.”

Rada turned her blue eyes on me as we parted, led to our separate quarters, where fire and wine waited. I slept too long. Rising in panic, I was taken to the king in his dining room, which smelled deliciously of stewed meat.

“Dine with me!”

I ate, the slow-cooked flesh dissolving on my tongue.

“Where is—?”

“The other spy?” He grinned, raising the lid on a small dish near my elbow, from which glared two bloodied blue eyes.

 

Penny Durham

Penny Durham is a journalist living in Sydney with a tall man and a round cat. She is the editor of doctors’ magazine The Medical Republic and began writing short fiction in 2022. Her horror stories have won two awards and appeared in two anthologies, two magazines and a podcast.

In Our Best Interests

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by Penny Durham

“Mission accomplished” flashed up on monitors worldwide.

DeepGreen, usually so modest, was entitled to some self-congratulation. The AI had fulfilled the mission entrusted to it thirteen years ago, a mission that governments had collectively abandoned: restore humanity’s prospects and habitat.

The 3,783,333,333rd human assigned for destruction by DeepGreen’s robots had been pulverised. The optimal cull had been calculated at one-third the global population, weighted 2:1 towards women aged 16-40, plus 450,000,000 to offset the pollution generated by the cleanup.

Several thousand engineers had died regretting that DeepGreen’s core programming made it act in the best interests of “humanity,” not “humans.”

 

Penny Durham

Penny Durham is a journalist living in Sydney with a tall man and a round cat. She is the editor of doctors’ magazine, The Medical Republic, and began writing short fiction in 2022. Her horror stories have won two awards and appeared in two anthologies, two magazines and a podcast.