A disgruntled, laid-off historian uses the artificial-intelligence-endowed money she was hired to produce to create merry havoc.
I was up there to see the aurora, just like the rest of the tourists, though most of them had a great deal more money than I did. I stood there in the middle of the crowd, one poor girl out of one hundred and fifty people, filled to capacity for an observation deck on a circumpolar orbital station. I had only a few novelty coins in my pocket as my severance pay like Beanstalk Jack with a handful of beans. The little weasel in "Human Resources" who laid me off even suggested I try selling them on the solar-system-wide PlanNet, that it was more than enough to set me up for life. Hah. The company had already flooded the market. I possessed about enough to buy a drink at the party before I somehow hitched a ride back down to the surface and that was it.
When I took out my magic beans to give them a look, I never expected anything strange. Perhaps I should have seen trouble in the golden eye of the little red dragon. It winked at me from the back of the Welsh pound sterling coin in the memorabilia collection in my pocket. But I didn't see anything out of the ordinary; the coins had tiny Artificial Intelligences in them that told the history of the coin to the bearer. Have you seen them? Got a pocket full of them? They're like little fairies, aren't they? So cute and so bloody dangerous.
Utterly Fantastic Occurrences is a collection of 20 science fiction short story novellas existing in hardcover, in paperback and in Kindle and Nook e-book formats.
