Cyberfairies

Wings, yes. Magic, no - unless you count ten-centimetre fairies who are cleverer than you or me.

Outside the domes: red desert, thin air, radiation. Inside them: meadows, rivers, and towers grown like trees with gardens on the branches.

All fairies are female now. The organic ones are still around and can live as long as they choose.

No queens, no presidents, no wars. A governing artificial intelligence runs the cities, publishes its reasoning, and puts every proposal to a vote. The cleverer the fairy, the heavier her vote. Is that better than democracy?

Seven linked science fiction stories from the domed city of Solaris.

1. Hack Your Reward Function Today. A physicist goes down into the technical sector expecting a drug den. She finds a club where the bliss is real, and only fires when the poem or the mathematical proof is genuinely good.
2. The Body-Making Cyber Salon. Any fairy can have any body she likes. Only imagination and the laws of physics stop her. Then a ballerina snaps a wing in mid-air, and the fitting becomes a rescue operation.
3. The Psychiatric Clinic. Removing Lumi's phobia takes about half an hour. The other patients are harder. One is founding a religion after a consciousness transfer went wrong. One is an engineer, badly depressed. A beginner with an AI assistant has just improved her finest invention by twenty per cent, in under a minute.
4. Gladiator's Dilemma. Two friends build a robot for the northern arena and program it to distrust everyone. It dies. They program the next one to accept any honest offer. It dies too. So how do you win?
5. Election Day. Vectra files three absurd proposals for a laugh. Then the Arbitrator shows her a fourth, filed by somebody else: her club is to be demolished. 327 fairies vote for it, because they want better network coverage.
6. The Ballet 'The Gift of Vespera'. Vectra has no interest in high art, and will not admit that she enjoyed the premiere. She meets the company, attempts thirty-two fouettés herself, and falls over. What can an organic dancer do that a robotic one cannot?
7. Creativity Without Censorship. A film about an orc invasion: two years in the making, two hundred views in the first month. Vectra advertises it as banned, and the club fills up. It was never banned - merely rated harmful and left unrecommended. Somewhere between artistic freedom and real danger there is a line. It moves depending on whom you ask.

No chosen one. No uprising. No cliffhanger. Every story finishes, and each can be read on its own.

For readers who like a little thinking with their humour.