Petard by ELKA BONG

pe·tard /pəˈtärd/ noun historical
1. a small bomb made of a metal or wooden box filled with powder, used to blast down a door or to make a hole in a wall.

"Hoist with his own petard" is a phrase from a speech in William Shakespeare's play Hamlet that has become proverbial. The phrase's meaning is that a bomb-maker is blown ("hoist", the past tense of "hoise") off the ground by his own bomb ("petard"), and indicates an ironic reversal or poetic justice.

I felt my cheeks getting hot. "Who cares how smart someone is, if he's a dick?" I couldn't quite bring myself to use the word "Evil."

"Dude. Smart is at least as important as evil."

I'd been taking Miskatonic as an existence proof of a part of the world that the rot-fungus had not yet colonized. But, afterward, I found myself turning our conversation over and over in my head. Yes, maybe she had offered all that great, free, uncensored Internet goodness because she was outraged by the dirty tricks campaign. But maybe she was doing it because she knew that appearing outraged would make her — and her company — seem like the kind of nice people that we should all give more money to. Maybe they don't give a damn about Ftp or fairness or eviction. Maybe it's just an elaborate game of soundbites and kabuki gestures that are all calibrated to the precise sociopathic degree necessary to convey empathy and ethics without ever descending into either. She hadn't bought the coffee or the banana bread.

It's easy to slip into this kind of metacognitive reverie and hard to stop once you start. Now I found myself questioning my own motives, scouring my subconscious for evidence of ego, self-promotion, and impurity.

The thing was.

~ Cory Doctorow, from "Petard," a techno-Lovecraftian sf story in Bruce Sterling's "Twelve Tomorrows" anthology for MIT Tech Review in 2014: mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535595/twelve-tomorrows-2014/

AL MARGOLIS
“... is some sort of evil genius working with sources radically altered up to an utterly unrecognizable state, anarchic manifestations moving in compact determination.”
~ Massimo Ricci

WALTER WRIGHT
is an interdisciplinary artist, his practice includes computer programming, music, and video performance. His focus is on “improvisation as a way of being present in the world.”