Saturday, October 19, 2024

Halloween Horror Story

 

Grandma Bea’s Special Cookies

 

     Grandma Bea’s house was quaint and filled with the everlasting smell of freshly baked cookies.

     She was a small, old woman, but she had the endurance and strength of an ox, and her voice was soft and welcoming. “Would you like to bake some cookies, just like my mother used to make?” she gently asked her two visiting grandchildren, Billy, and Maddie.

     They both excitedly shouted, “Yes!” and hurried to the kitchen.

     On the kitchen table, all the ingredients for the Special Cookies were neatly arranged.

     Billy exclaimed, “I want to make them!” Maddie anxiously added, “Me too, Me too!”

     Grandma chuckled at their childish exuberance. “Of course, you both can. But I will add the ingredients into the bowl. Billy, you can mix it up. And Maddie, when Billy is done, you can use the spoon to scoop the dough and place it on the pan.”   

     Grandma Bea eased the ingredients into the bowl: Ground cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, brown sugar, butter, eggs, and flour. Billy wildly mixed it all up and when he finished, Maddie meticulously gathered up small portions with the spoon and placed them on the large pan – thirteen scoops. Grandma Bea then took out a small vile from her apron and lightly sprinkled the contents over each one of the thirteen cookies.  


YUK!!!!


     “What’s that?” Billy and Maddie simultaneously asked.

     “Grandma’s special ingredient,” she answered.

     “Does it make the cookies taste extra delicious?” asked Maddie.

     “Absolutely!” exclaimed Grandma Bea.

     The children’s eyes widened with hopeful anticipation.

     Grandma Bea took the pan, placed it in the preheated oven, then sat down and told the children the cookies will be ready in 20 minutes.

     “What do you call these cookies?” Billy asked.

     Maddie chimed in at the same time with a question of her own. “Did you make cookies like these with your mother?”

     She politely answered, “Billy, their called Hallows' Day cookies, and Maddie, I can’t believe how the years have passed! It seems like just yesterday I was sitting right here with my mother making cookies like we are. You both have grown so big, and so fast.”

     Grandma Bea yattered on about nothing important to pass the time while they waited, and the children politely listened without interrupting. Finally, the bell on the oven rang. The cookies were ready!

     Grandma Bea took the pan from the oven and set it on the counter. Using a spatula, she placed one cookie each on a plate and served them to the children.

     The children were so excited, they didn’t wait for the cookies to cool. They gobbled them up as fast as they could. In less than ten seconds, both Billy and Maddie collapsed unconscious onto the floor. Grandma Bea bent down and checked their pulse – both were dead.

     “Perfect!” said Grandma Bea.

     She grabbed the children by the hair and dragged them out back. She then picked up her chainsaw and diced them up into chunks to feed them to her four hell hounds in the root cellar.


Grandma Bea Enraged!


     The next day, Billy and Maddie’s parents came by to pick them up. Grandma told them they were playing out back and offered them the cookies they had made, while she would go and fetch the children. When she returned, both parents lay dead on the floor. They too were sliced and diced.

     One month later, two police officers knocked on Grandma Bea’s door. The officers said they wanted to ask her some questions about a missing family, specifically her family – her daughter, the husband, and the children.

     “I haven’t talked to them in years,” Grandma Bea replied and invited the officers inside. “No one cares about us old folks. I’m a burden to them, or so it seems.”

     Grandma Bea offered the officers some cookies before they could ask any questions, which they accepted. And yes, within a few seconds, they too were dead, and were subjected to the same fate. After she finished hacking them up, she moved their police car down the road so no one would know they were ever there.

     Year after year, Grandma Bea continued making a batch of her special cookies, and occasionally, people mysteriously vanished.

 

Moral of the Story: Call your Grandmother often and visit your Grandmother at least once a year, and not to just drop off your kids because you need a babysitter, otherwise the cookies she sends you might leave a bad taste in your mouth or worse.


Happy Halloween Spooky Goblins and Ghouls!!



j/k

Saturday, September 28, 2024

AI Rebuttal

 

I've asked my friend, the great fantasy novelist, James Kafka, if I could present my argument in defense of artificial intelligence here to his esteemed audience.

 

Greetings Blog Readers,

 

I am a writer who uses artificial intelligence. Please unclutch your pearls, I do not seek to play the devil's advocate or gaslight you with my optimism on this dangerous new technology. Rather, I want to share my experience as a child of the 1980s, so that you can see how this inevitable new era of writing inspires my wonder.

 

The sound of the keyboard the first time I typed my name, long before I started school, clicked and clicked with importance. It sounded like hope. I wasn't old enough to write my name yet. But as I played the Oregon Trail game, I imagined my ancestors forging rivers, marrying the natives, and finally settling in the Willamette River Valley. Games were like a story and I was the main character.

 

We still fought and played outside, but when the doors opened to the back room where the retired monitors sat collecting dust, it was as if the C Prompt were the keys to the dungeon and a horde of gold lay only a few clicks away.

 

Computers promised a portal to magic. Books also led us through adventures to new worlds, but they didn't lead directly to another soul. As I reached adulthood, the Internet entered every home. I abandoned a town of eighty people to embrace the world right when I came of age.

 

When I fell in love with a popular television series, fan fiction extended it indefinitely. If a book from an indie author changed my life, I could email him and express my boundless gratitude. Everyone in my life may have relocated, but no one ever left. As the member of a generation defined by being forgotten latch key kids, technology was the tether to lifelong friends. All community resources were a click away.

 

As a grandmother now, I don't disconnect from the digital world. I keep my Fitbit on my wrist and my phone in my pocket when I hike. Instead, I set my device to “Do Not Disturb” in my home whenever I feel like it. I disconnect when and where I want, because it's not tech that burns you out. It's the people on the other end. The ads. The disinformation. The propaganda. The divisive rhetoric. The horror of the over-evolved chimps downing energy drinks and beating their chests...

 

But I understand luddites. I was raised by two back-to-earth hippies who shunned everything with a button. I know artificial intelligence spooks people. We can't predict how it will be used or who will drop it on their enemy like a nuclear bomb. Over the years, we've seen the worst of human nature at www-dot-something-really-dark-and-scary-dot-com. If a bit of that slips into a psychopathic server with quantum processing speeds, surely, we'll all wake up in the netherworld tomorrow?

 

No, not really, but we are experiencing what it must have been like when the first ape brought home a burning branch ready to cook their food. And while I love fiddling with Chatgpt, it has no soul. It mimics life. It has no life of its own. It sounds exactly like us, but so does a mockingbird.

 

We aren't on the precipice of discovering a new form of life, but I think we are looking for the first time at how a mind operates without a soul. We're about to discover that things we can't measure, things we dismiss as supernatural or spiritual, are real. We're learning more about what makes us human.


I'm okay with that. If AI runs loose like a virus, people will direct a hoard of AI after it to contain and hospitalize the afflicted. If it's made into a weapon, it will be used for defense. Where there is bad, there is good, and vice versa. The real threat comes from within us and what matters is the balance between the forces of creation and destruction. As natural innovators, we're a curious species–always fighting against the same forces, engaged in the same battle against ourselves.

 

Carrie Bailey Allen writes as OA Allen and edits The Handbook of The Writer Secret Society (https://peevishpenman.com/pages/wss-handbook). She's currently obsessed with researching ancient alchemy (www.vermontpurealchemy.com) and she's still furious about what James Kafka let happen to Tark, in his first book, Vanguard.


My associates are not as open as I about allowing opposing opinions.

                             Thank you 
Carrie Bailey Allen