Mrs. C’s newest passion? A.I. data analysis.
First, she tackled elf toy-production workflows. The warehouses were filled by Labor Day. Santa grumbled.
“More time to spend with me, dear,” she said.
Next came reindeer breeding and reindeer game reorganization. The team was selected by Halloween. Santa fumed.
Nice/naughty discrimination was done in a jiffy, lists double-checked by Thanksgiving. Santa groused.
“Isn’t relaxing with me before Christmas wonderful?” she asked.
Finally, route minimization. That required real-time tweaking, so she tagged along. Santa seethed.
“Next year, you’ll return to me in no time.”
Above the clouds, Santa looped a corkscrew. Mrs. Claus, unsecured, plummeted away.
Now, thinking of the off season brought a twinkle to his eye.
“Ho, ho, ho! Finally, more than one night of alone time!”
________________________________________
Jeff Currier works too many jobs so has little time to write, but the words kept screaming for release. Jeff finally relented and set them free, in very small batches. Now they’ve run amok with no telling what mischief they’ve caused. You can find them roaming in various anthologies or in Sci Phi Journal, Stupefying Stories, Dark Moments, and Flash Point SF.
If you enjoyed this story, you might also want to read:
The Pete Wood Challenge is an informal ad hoc story-writing competition. Once a month Pete Wood
spots writers the idea for a story, usually in the form of a phrase or a
few key words, along with some restrictions on what can be submitted,
usually in terms of length. Pete then collects the resulting entries,
determines who has best met the challenge, and sends the winners over to
Bruce Bethke, who arranges for them to be published on the Stupefying Stories web site.
You can find all the previous winners of the Pete Wood Challenge at this link.
This
time the challenge was to write a flash fiction story of no more than
150 words in length that played off the phrase:
“the off season.”
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