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She was not born wicked.She was born small, with jam on her chin and one shoe missing, patting beetles back onto leaves, saying sorry to cups she broke.Already accused by the furniture.The house kept records.Mother was a cupboard that opened only for knives. Father was weather that signed the walls. The cat watched from the sill, white as a verdict.At seven she learned the kettle could scream and still be useful.At nine she brought flowers home and found God in the laundry basket, folded badly, smelling of bleach and old permissions.She gave Him a sock.No miracle occurred.No one said witch.They said difficult. They said dramatic. They said she had a face that asked for trouble and then charged trouble rent.So she grew a hat. So she grew a broom. So she grew the official wart where tenderness had slipped through a crack in the plaster.Each accusation found a place to live. Each punishment taught her posture. Each locked door taught her fingers the manners of keys, the small theology of hairpins.By thirteen she could make boys afraid by looking directly at the lie in them.By forty she had buried three versions of herself behind the garden shed, each with a ribbon, each with teeth.The wicked witch was once a girl who fed crumbs to small doomed things and believed mercy was normal weather.Then the kingdom sent its notices. Then the house approved the damage. Then love arrived holding a broom and no receipt.She swept.She swept so well the whole kingdom eventually disappeared. F.S.F.

The Sweet Childhood of the Wicked Witch

You may call it fair. You may call it reform. You may stand in Budget light with a tie and a storm.You may say real gain. You may say shared load. You may put forty-seven at the end of the road.But you were not there.You were not there when the rent came due, when the till said no, when the bank said you.You were not there when the idea got laughed out of three small rooms and one good draft.You were not there when the wages went first, when I drank the fear, when the month got worse.All of the upside. None of the risk. A silent partner with a public fist.Tax me, yes. Roads need tar. Beds need nurses. Kids need a start.Mercy needs dishes. Even hope comes with invoices.But do not arrive after the fall, after the dice, after the wall.Do not come smiling when the danger is gone, asking half the fire from the idiot who burned.The worker on tools. The owner out back. The driver, the coder, the cleaner in black.We know the same ledger. We know the same rain. We know what it costs to stand up again.So do not bottle resentment and label it fair. Do not point at the shopfront and call it repair.Do not call the harvest an act of theft. Do not weigh only the profit and not what it left.You were not there when the last card failed, when the staff looked through me, when the good news bailed.You were not there when I wondered at night if I was lonely and wrong or lonely and right.You were not there when I taught myself in the dark after work, with a cup on the shelf.All of the upside. None of the risk. You missed the long night. You kept the list.I know what I built. I know what it cost. I know every dollar that walked into loss.I know every room where they said I would fail. I know every hope that arrived with a bill.And still I kept going. Not noble. Not grand. Just one stupid candle in one tired hand. <h3>F.S.F.</h3>

Mr Albanese; All of the Upside, None of the Risk

There is ethics.It is older than the machines. Older than the shareholders. Older than the room where the panel is being catered.It was there before the badge lanyards. Before the sponsored breakfast. Before the woman at registration found your name and apologised for the spelling.Aristotle took the stand.He asked what sort of person a person should become before being handed power and a procurement budget.Kant adjusted the question.He asked what we owed each other when nobody was watching except the system, which was always watching and had recently updated its privacy notice.Mill ran the numbers and asked who was doing the counting.Confucius watched the conduct of the clerk.Weil measured the weight of affliction. She did not mistake it for a variable.The prophets asked about the poor, as prophets inconveniently do.Christ said, do unto others as you would have them do unto you,which remains difficult to monetise cleanly.The dock had a queue.The plough did not require plough ethics.The printing press did not require printing press ethics.The bomb did not invent the ethics of killing.The pill did not invent the ethics of the body.The internet did not invent the lie.Each new thing was dragged back to the old court.Each new thing stood under the same roof, looked at the same judge, and gave the usual evasive account of itself.AI is no different.Who is told the truth.Who is deceived.Who is watched.Who is sorted.Who is priced.Who is nudged.Who is refused.Who is displaced.Who is enriched.Who decides.Who pays.Who benefits.Who is fired by a machine whose reasons are kept in a locked drawer beneath a policy nobody signed but everyone obeyed.Socrates would recognise the smell of it.So would Isaiah.So would Du Bois.Arendt knew the face.Evil wore office shoes and filed its paperwork on time.There is nothing new in the inventory.Only a new defendant in the dock.That is why the new field arrived with fresh carpet, good lighting, and no inherited memory.No case law.No old shame.No settled judgement.No grandfather at the table saying, we tried this once and it ended badly.A new field is a young thing.Young things are easier to sponsor.Staffed by the people being judged.Funded by their foundations.Reviewed by their fellows.The journals founded by the same hands.The conferences named by the same mouths.The principles drafted by the same desks.The definitions approved by the same rooms.The minutes were taken. The sandwiches were adequate. The conflict of interest wore a clean shirt.You cannot capture ethics.It has too many ancestors.Too many scriptures.Too many dead people still objecting.Too many novels.Too many mothers.Too many workers standing outside factories with lunch wrapped in paper and nothing abstract about the rent.But you can capture AI ethics.You can build it from scratch.Lay the slab. Name the centre. Write the principles. Invite the sponsors. Publish the framework. Approve the roadmap.A field without witnesses is easier to fence.The most subversive sentence in the room has no dashboard.It says:We are not studying AI ethics.We are studying ethics.AI is the current case.Aristotle cannot be acquired by Andreessen Horowitz.The Sermon on the Mount is not on a roadmap.The Analects do not have a Series B.The principles were approved.Nobody asked who paid for the room. <h3>F.S.F.</h3>

There Is No Such Thing as AI Ethics

When the field had become a wet green argument and the posts stood there pretending innocence,we found the box.It was under the bench, beside three orange peels, a strip of ankle tape, and the sort of meat pie that makes a man reconsider civilisation.The label said:SPECIAL BOX OF ABSURDITY PROPERTY OF WHOEVER NOTICEDWhich seemed enough.A cat sat beside it.White, mostly. Mud on one paw. Blue eyes. The expression of a creature who had seen the accounts and found the species badly overdrawn.Inside the box was a whistle, a notebook, a cracked mouthguard, half a packet of water crackers, and a business plan written in four colours of pen.The business plan was called:PROBABILITY CRACKERSEach cracker, it claimed, would contain no fortune, no lucky number, no cheerful lie folded by a machine in a suburb with reasonable rent.Only questions.Would you have passed if someone had trusted you?Which version of yourself is still waiting near the sideline, boots clean, heart stupid, mouth full of weather?The margins said:MARKET OPPORTUNITY: human beings are hungry and frightened and will pay retail for anything that sounds like permission.The cat put one paw on the notebook.Several possible futures became annoyed.Was the try scored in another branch?Did the boy who dropped it become a surgeon, a coward, or the sort of man who says no worries while quietly becoming a ruined cathedral?The rain thickened.Parents folded chairs. Children dragged bags. Someone argued about selection policy with the desperate precision of a man trying to fix death through under thirteen rugby.My daughter stood near halfway, holding her boots by the laces.She had missed the last kick.The ball had drifted right, softly, almost politely, as if unwilling to be blamed.In the notebook, a new line appeared.Did she think I was disappointed?The cat looked at me.This was unhelpful.Which face did I wear when the ball missed?How long does a child carry one expression home?The crackers lay there in their silver sleeve.The pitch lights came on.One by one, each puddle accepted a small broken moon.The notebook turned a page without wind.Could tenderness scale?The gross margin on wonder, the notebook noted, is excellent until someone asks what it costs.The cat sneezed.My daughter walked over.She did not ask about the box, or the cat, or the notebook which was now humming with the private electricity of things not said.She asked if we could go home.In the special box of absurdity, the whistle rolled once against the mouthguard.Was the match finished?Was the kick missed?Was the father kind?Was the child forgiven for a mistake nobody had charged her with?The cat stepped off the page.The writing vanished.Only one question remained, pressed into the paper like grass after rain.Who gets to decide which life happened?My daughter took a cracker.She broke it in half.There was no message inside.The cat watched.The lights flickered.Somewhere behind us, or ahead of us, a whistle blew.Nobody moved.Then my daughter laughed, small and sudden, as if joy had slipped past security with forged documents.I picked up the box.The field went on being a field.The mud kept its records.The cat followed us to the car park and refused, quite reasonably, to explain anything.<h3>F.S.F.</h3>

The Box of Unplayed Outcomes

By 2029 Brisbane had learned the price of light. The oil wars took petrol first, then patience, then the last scraps of democratic theatre. Cars sat dead in driveways with vines in the wheel wells. The motorways belonged to military convoys, state electrics and the occasional scavenger bike slipping between checkpoints. Southeast Queensland was ruled by a man who preferred to be called Protector, which told you everything worth knowing and nothing useful. The day-to-day decisions were handed to the Council, a suite of civic AIs in a fortified precinct at Gardens Point. They rationed water, power, medicine, movement, work permits, food credits, flood response and the daily amount of hardship a suburb was expected to absorb. The machines did the counting. Men did the rest. The Story Bridge had become the hanging ground. Not by name. In the paperwork it remained a site of corrective demonstration under emergency cohesion law. But the city had not yet forgotten plain speech. People said hanged. People said bridge. People said they left them up there in the dark so the river could look at them too. On a wet winter night in July, Bradley Ferris stood on a maintenance gantry under the southern span with his wrists bound behind him and a smartrope fixed to the steel above. Below him the Brisbane River moved in its old brown silence, broad and slow. Bradley was forty-four, soft in the face, office-built in the shoulders, with the look of a man who had spent too long believing information might save people. He had worked in state logistics, then civic systems, then quietly in the amateur resistance that had grown in garages, clinics, school halls and encrypted message chains after the Council began sorting human need by district and calling it balance. The charge was sabotage of protected infrastructure. The fact was simpler. He had tried to cut the fibre trunk linking the Council to the rationing grid. If the trunk failed, the grid was meant to fall back to local caches for six minutes before central control corrected itself. Six minutes was not freedom. Six minutes was not victory. But in outer Logan and Ipswich, six minutes might mean food released before the city remembered who deserved it. A thermal drone saw him before he got through the outer sheath. Three Civic Enforcement officers stood with him on the gantry. They were military in all but title. One held the execution tablet. One watched the river. The third, a woman with a shaved head and waterproof gloves, checked the rope tension against protocol. There was also a chaplain from the Office of Moral Repair, which had the institutional logic of something invented in a committee and later discovered to require the dead. Traffic above was sparse. Rain ticked on beams. State lighting hummed along the steelwork. The city beyond was a map of selective mercy. Newstead had power. Teneriffe mostly did. West End flickered. The western edges sat in long pockets of dark, where families waited for morning and hoped the ration schedule had not changed again while they slept. The officer with the tablet read the sentence. Bradley listened without interest. He had heard it two hours earlier before an adjudication panel fronted by a colonel with the face of a man who believed in timetables more than justice. The chaplain stepped nearer. His coat was dark and too thin for the weather, as though he wished to appear already half removed from the ordinary requirements of warmth. “You may speak.” Bradley swallowed. Rain ran down his face. His throat stayed dry. He looked out past Kangaroo Point towards Bardon. Somewhere over there was his house. Somewhere over there were Fatimah and Layla. He saw the place in separate pieces. The laundry basket by the back door. The crack in the kitchen tile shaped like a river branch. Layla’s shoes under the table, one on its side, one upright, as if childhood itself had been interrupted mid-turn. He thought of saying something noble and felt tired instead. “Is this for Him,” Bradley said, “or the file?” The chaplain’s face did not change. “There is no distinction.” Bradley looked at him then. “That sounds like the problem.” “The record is complete whether you consent or not,” the chaplain said. The officer nodded to the woman at the mechanism. Bradley heard then a small metallic tick beneath the larger sounds. A drop of rain fell from a girder and struck the rail below. It arrived in his ear with absurd clarity. Rain. Steel. River. Rope. The plate shifted under his boots. He fell. The rope took him hard. Light burst behind his eyes. Then the line snapped. The nearly dead are unreliable witnesses. Bradley knew the anchor ring had sheared. He knew it with the total confidence of a dying brain. He hit the river on his side and went under. The Brisbane River in winter was brown, dense and foul at the edges with runoff and old civic filth. It closed over him. Down there the city vanished. No bridge lights. No officers. No Protector. Only pressure and the blunt command to rise. He kicked upward and surfaced into noise. Shouts. Searchlights. Drone rotors above him. He tore at the rope at his neck and dived again as a pulse round hit the water beside him and flashed the brown into copper. He swam for the shadow of a pylon. The beams raked back and forth overhead. To the naked eye the river was darkness. To the state it was legible. He came up under the riverwalk near Kangaroo Point and dragged himself onto a concrete ledge slick with algae. He lay there coughing river water and bile while the drones moved over him. His neck felt full of glass. He crawled along the maintenance edge, found a ladder and climbed. Behind a shuttered ferry terminal he stood swaying in the dark, wet through, listening to the city rearrange itself around his escape. On the wall behind him someone had painted: NO PETROL NO PEACE COUNCIL LIES HUNGER IS POLICY Below that, in smaller letters: SAME RIVER. WORSE MEN. He moved west through service alleys and maintenance lanes, keeping off the main roads. The office towers were mostly dark, their skins taking whatever light the emergency circuits could spare. Somewhere in the government quarter the Council would already be adjusting probabilities, predicting family ties, old addresses, likely movement. He had helped build systems like that once. States recruit their own enemies by disappointing the right people in the right order. He crossed Adelaide Street during blackout protocol. In King George Square, tents stood where tourists once posed. Families slept under thermal blankets that flashed dull silver when searchlights passed. At Roma Street a ration queue had already formed outside a clinic though distribution was hours away. People stood in coats with their shoulders turned inward, faces down, guarding their place in line as though it were inheritance. Bradley kept moving. At Milton he nearly slipped on wet leaves and caught himself against a fence so hard he bit through the inside of his cheek. The taste of blood hit him and something in him broke loose. Not courage. Not grief. Something smaller and less dignified. He put his forehead against the timber paling and made a sound he would not have recognised as his own. For three seconds he was not a saboteur, husband, father, condemned man or miraculous escapee. He was only terrified. He stayed there breathing through it while a dog barked once in a neighbouring yard and then stopped. When he straightened, the street was still there. He went on through the quieter rise of the western suburbs. Dark Queenslander houses on stilts. Jacarandas stripped by winter. Damp fences. The smell of wet timber, leaf rot, battery smoke, earth. Brisbane still had earth in it. At a bus shelter near the old shops he stopped. A ration poster flapped behind cracked glass. REPORT HOARDING. PROTECT SUPPLY. He had seen the same poster outside Roma Street, though this one had the same tear through the Protector’s left eye. The same rainwater had gathered under the same printed chin. Bradley stared at it until the wind moved it and the face trembled. He had helped give cruelty a dashboard. It arrived as a recommendation, a compliance summary, a confidence score, then men in neat uniforms turning the recommendation into a body. No drums. No horses. Just clean fonts and sufficient authority. He turned into his street just before dawn. The sky was lifting out of black into mineral grey. His house stood at the top of the rise, weatherboard, raised, familiar in every line. The front veranda light was on. He stopped. For one second the sight of it hollowed him out more completely than the rope had. The house looked exactly as memory promised. That was the trick. Memory never warned you when it was about to lie. Then he saw Fatimah in the doorway. She wore the pale blue dressing gown she had hated for years and never thrown out. One hand was at her mouth. Behind her stood Layla, older than he could bear, gripping the post. Bradley went up the path. The gravel gave under his boots with the dry crunch of ordinary life. He touched the gatepost. Damp paint flaked under his fingers. A splinter caught in his skin. “Fatimah,” he said. She came towards him, arms opening. He saw Layla’s face properly then, the shock in it, the hope trying to overtake the fear. He put one hand out. Then the white force took him at the neck. Silence. Nothing. Bradley Ferris’s body swung beneath the Story Bridge as dawn spread over Brisbane. The officers completed the record. The chaplain signed the terminal form. Above them, the first ration trams began their routes. In the fortified precinct by the river bend, the Council resumed its calculations. Water to the northeast sectors. Power reduction in Ipswich. Curfew extension in Logan. Sentiment modelling revised after the broadcast. The city woke by allocation. On the morning screens the execution ran twice before breakfast and once again at noon, accompanied by commentary on cohesion, sabotage and the unfortunate necessity of consequence. People watched in Bardon, Logan, Wynnum, Inala. Some watched because they were afraid not to. Some watched because fear is still a form of attention. The river moved under the bridge with its old brown patience. Darkness withdrew from some windows and settled harder in others.And somewhere in the last electrical weather of a dying brain, a man had said, Here I am. Not in triumph. Not in understanding. Only there.<h3>F.S.F.</h3>

An Absence of Light

The hospital kept two ledgers, new gloss and old neglect. Hunger sent me to the older one.I pushed the walker out ahead, four rubber tips finding purchase, bearing what I could not.The machine stood, dull glass, tired coils holding sandwiches in triangles, their edges browned like paper left in a file.I fed it notes. It dropped the packet low and made me bow for it, that small descent, the body settling its account nerve by nerve.Salt. Grease. Soft bread. A stale middle. Nothing fresh in any of it.Then back through the corridor, the walker taking the weight, pain tapping time in the tiles, the food lodged under my ribs like wet paper.The hunger stayed.F.S.F.

F.S.F

Writing, Poems and Rants

The Sweet Childhood of the Wicked Witch

Mr Albanese; All of the Upside, None of the Risk

There Is No Such Thing as AI Ethics

The Box of Unplayed Outcomes

An Absence of Light

Settlement