3 Minutes
When the app dropped it was downloaded 12 billion times in the first hour. By the end of the day everybody had it.
No one could resist the chance to find out what the future held, even if it was only 3 minutes into the future.
Nobody knew how it worked. It had been a while since anybody knew how anything worked. Algorithms wrote algorithms, nobody knew what they did. We were no longer in the realm of reason and logic; this was a world of magic. The magicians communicated with us through the app store, releasing bundles of code designed to help humanity.
Sometimes it was just a meme engineered to inspire as many people as possible. Sometimes a game that would relieve the boredom of our automated lives. This was different. This took all the data available, from the satellites in the sky to the underground cables connecting the continents, it took data from the nanobots coursing through our veins, from the cameras you couldn't escape, from the undeletable personal history of every single one of us and constructed an exact picture of the world. A picture so precise it could predict the future. Each prediction came with an accuracy level, this held up for 3 minutes before disintegrating into a stream of possibilities with accuracy levels no better than conjecture.
Enjoying this story? Don't miss the next one!
SUBSCRIBE TO DSF
It turns out 3 minutes is not that much. When you stared at the app with its running commentary of your future, mostly it said you'd still be looking at the app in 3 minutes time. Some got obsessed, hypnotized by the stream of predictions. After a while, most people got bored and just set the alert to warn them if danger loomed on the 3 minute horizon. Accidents became a thing of the past.
After a while the app, with its magical abilities, became just another process running in the background. But 2 minutes ago everybody got the same message: Prediction accuracy 100%: You are going to die.
The End
This story was first published on Wednesday, February 27th, 2019
We hope you're enjoying
3 Minutes by
Adam Walker.
Please support Daily Science Fiction by becoming a member.
Daily Science Fiction does not have a paywall, but we do have expenses—more than 95% of which are direct payments to authors for their stories. With your $15 membership, less than 6 cents per story, we can continue to provide genre fiction every weekday by email and on the website to thousands of readers for many years to come.
Tell me more!
Support Daily Science Fiction
Please click to rate this story from 1 (ho-hum) to 7 (excellent!):
Please don't read too much into these ratings. For many reasons, a superior story may not get a superior score.
4.8 Rocket Dragons Average
Please join our mailing list and
receive free daily sci-fi (your email address will be kept
100% private):
