2022 Submissions and Winners

The judges have read and rated all of the submissions: we have our winners! A huge thank you to all the participants for their delightful or scary submissions, and for giving us some of their time. Thank you to the judges for their help!

A recurrent topic in many entries was mRNA sequencing. Many of our participants imagined ways to exploit vulnerabilities in the computers used to analyse data from viruses: as the most obvious entry point of outside information, sequencing was a prime candidate for malicious tinkering. But some entries also wondered if natural evolution could cause feedback loops between computers and biological organisms. And finally, some entries imagined less nefarious motives for cross-domain infection: research! We also had one human-AI team with an AI-generated entry. The judges were not able to guess which one...

Let us know what you think about the entries: far fetched? Plausible? Threatening? Did any of them changed the way you think about a given phenomenon? And of course, if you publish your impressions (blog / twitter / paper...) or have your own story to submit, we'll be glad to add the link to this page. Contact fiction.for.science {at} gmail.com

Congratulations to:

- Romain from France for "Bio-infection through computer virus heavily suspected", winner for Prompt 1: First Case of Biological Organism Infected by Computer Virus.

- Claus ARANHA and Diego ARANHA (No relation) for "Nature finds a way", winner for Prompt 2: Computer Virus Nicknamed 'Akabake' Believed to Have Biological Origins. This submission got the highest score all categories.

The competition was fierce, and the winners were only 1 point away from the 2nd best submissions in each category. "Peaches, Pears, Plums" by Jo Walton gets a special mention for creative writing, but lost points on the technical front.

Here is the ranking for each prompt. Click to read the entries!

Prompt 1: First Case of Biological Organism Infected by Computer Virus

1. Bio-infection through computer virus heavily suspected, by Romain

2. Octopus skin hijacked by computer virus, by Michael Timm

3. mRNAhakt (ex-aequo), by Geoffrey Mason

3. StuxBridge (ex-aequo), by Daniel Finley

4. US Releases Details of Cyber Attack on Pandemic Research Lab, by GPT-J (AI) and xrcyz (Human)

5. Anomaly in viral genomes reveals laboratory cyber espionnage, Loic Cressot

6. Peaches, Pears, Plums, Jo Walton

Pompt 2: Computer Virus Nicknamed 'Akabake' Believed to Have Biological Origins

1. Nature finds a way, by Claus Aranha and Diego Aranha (No relation)

2. Co-evolution between the biological and the artificial: a new paradigm for the interaction between humans and computers?, by Federico Pigozzi

3. Science Fiction in the making, the virus way. Its name is 'Akabake', by Dimitris Nakos

4. The first ever « natural » computer virus, by Loic Cressot