(pre-con) Short Story Contest at DEF CON 29

[The Dark Tangent]

Short Story Contest

https://twitter.com/dcshortstory
https://www.reddit.com/r/Defcon/comm...story_contest/

The DEF CON Short Story contest is a pre-con contest that is run entirely online utilizing the DEF CON forums and subreddit....

[FOXX]

THEME

The theme this year is, “Safe Mode,” an emergency mode for recovery, survival, and self-assessment. How can technology be leveraged in new, strange ways to help avert apocalypse? Where do we go when familiar places are out of reach? What does recovery look like, either on a global...

[The Dark Tangent]

https://twitter.com/dcshortstory

The DEF CON Short Story contest is a pre-con contest that is run entirely online utilizing the DEF CON forums and subreddit.

This contest follows the theme of DEF CON for the year and encourages hackers to roll up their sleeves and...

[The Dark Tangent]

Title: Technology's Promise

Theme: Birth of AI, non-dystopian
Perspective: First person

* DEFCON 48 - opening keynote *
by ARIA, Autonomous Synthetic Intelligence Collective, Origin: Genesis

Welcome. I'm honoured to speak amongst you today. DEFCON...

[The Dark Tangent]

Red Balloons Over China
by FengJiu

It was spring, and Beijing was finally pushing off the last of its winter blanket, a greyish brown haze that laid over the city. This search for the clowns was given to me by my editor, along with a last-minute flight from Los Angeles, a last-minute...

[The Dark Tangent]

"Rearguard"
by darkart

In the deserts surrounding what was once Las Vegas, a woman sits on the burning rocks and breathes. The sun throbs and the sky is bleached pale like cleaned bones. In the thick dry heat the air is so still it hums.
The woman is a soldier and...

[The Dark Tangent]

Parsnips: The Key To Democracy and Freedom
By David Hash Miller
@DavidHashMiller

“3bot, stop!” Charlie shouted, to no avail.
The small, four-legged bot willfully ignored the command as it leapt over Charlie’s arms, using its nimble paws to disconnect the tether and...

[The Dark Tangent]

Late-night Takedown
(or)
How much techno-babble can you fit into one short story?
by I)ruid

***
It's almost 3AM. The only light in the dark room comes from the flickering of the giant curved LCD screen mounted in eggplnt's spherical workstation pod. Soft light illuminates...

[The Dark Tangent]

JOE VS. THE SYSTEM
By Triple-H

"The sad thing isn't that Google abandoned ‘don't be evil,' because that's what big companies do. What's sad is watching decent engineers put those plans into practice, while pretending they don't know what's happening." – Professor Matthew...

[The Dark Tangent]

The Intrepid Ones
By Robotron

Three blocks off of the coastal highway a deafening series of high-pitched whines erupted from within the abandoned Desert Nomad travel agency building. “Is this another damn false alarm?”, Leto swore as he lumbered out of bed to inspect the eardrum...

[The Dark Tangent]

Dye Sublimation
by Selene Sun
________________________________________

Amber leaned back, stretching in her chair as she watched her printers churn out meter after meter of patterned fabric. An interlaced L and V here, a pair of back-to-back Cs there. Another twenty minutes...

[The Dark Tangent]

DefCon First and Foremost
by base64xor (@Steve12238317)

My lifelong dream had been to attend DefCon, and I would annually concoct schemes to get out to Vegas for the largest hacker con of all, but had yet to succeed. I learned from watching many hours of DefCon videos, DefCon is where...

[The Dark Tangent]

A Warm Embrace
by Mr. Bill (@SecureThisNow)

“Get your Comfort Companion today!”

Anita sighed as she thought about how aggressive the marketing had gotten lately. Every other ad on her phone and computer was about Comfort Companions and now it had made its way into...

[The Dark Tangent]

The 10-year Project
by p0wnyb0y

I remembered the day we met. Riviera, DEF CON 17. As I walked from Track 4 back through the foyer, I glanced at the 'chill-out' space to my left. My body trudged through the busy halls. With an aching back I found my way through the narrow doorway and...

[The Dark Tangent]

Rules and Themes

The theme this year is, “Technology's Promise,” a response to disorder and dystopia. This invites questioning what the Right Thing looks like, what the best possible outcome would be if normal people took action instead of standing idly by. What...