Mission: Highly Improbable - but, oddly, they seem to pull it off every time

Contains spoilers

Seemingly unlike the rest of the world, judging by the part-empty auditorium we watched it in, we've recently been to see Thomas Cruise Mapother IV's latest downbeat, slice of life, arthouse offering, Mission: Impossible - the Final Reckoning. A film with twice as much of pretty much everything in it, including punctuation marks in the title.

In this, Ethan Hunt has a second bite at taking down the rogue AI known as 'The Entity', a name suggesting creatives perhaps need not fear the future as much as some suggest.

The Entity's fiendish plan that Ethan Hunt needs to prevent involves taking control of all the world's nuclear weapons, lighting the blue touchpaper on all of them, and then hunkering down in a solar-powered subterranean digital bunker to wait out the apocalypse and then take over a world without humans. I think. I'm still not sure what The Entity's end that this is all a means to is.

But, am I the only one thinking that total nuclear annihilation will result in a nuclear winter, blotting out the sun, thus killing the power to The Entity's bit-cave? It's a hole in the survival plan so obvious, it can only mean one thing:

It wasn't The Entity's plan at all. It was a lie, a ruse, a false trail of breadcrumbs...

It's still out there.

Oh, Christ. There's going to be another one...

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My Thoughts are with You. Your Thoughts are with the Authorities for Calibration Against Societal Norms

Award-nominated science fiction and slipstream author Robert Bagnall’s second anthology of twenty-four stories, variously bleak, funny, bleakly funny or – very occasionally – optimistic.

  

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.
“Brilliant stories, well written!” (five stars, Amazon).