This prompt (in brackets) is taken from Complete the Story by Piccadilly Inc., which I got from the Scribbler box.
[The wind whispered through the dark, empty trees like a warning in a foreign language. Winter was coming, and with winter] came the snow.
Grandma never understood what that meant. She wasn’t all there by that point, and had forgotten about the weather bots we had sent into the sky. In her mind snow meant snowball fights, building snowmen, making snow angels. To her it meant cozy winter holidays, watching it drift softly to gather on the ground, mindless, safe, beautiful.
I would try to explain to her that snow was different now. That the AI weather stations built the snow, that each snowflake was a nanobot, and that each of those nanobots had the directive to create more snowflake nanobots out of materials they found. That if they were left unchecked to pile outside they would eat through everything and self-replicate until all was consumed. But grandma would wave me away and laugh, as if it was a silly story. At least she stayed inside. There were plenty of stories of people – children especially – who ventured outside without protection and were eaten up by the snow.
All I could do was check my gear, to prepare for the winter and the snow. Soon the snow would fall. Soon it would be everyone’s duty to destroy every single snowflake.
