I'm trying to find a sci-fi short story. Unfortunately, I do not remember anything about the author or title. It is at least a decade or two old, available for free online.

The entire story is set aboard a starship in deep space, and everyone has advanced technology (nanomachines?) that can repair tissue damage that would normally be deadly. Unfortunately, the ship is hit by a massive radiation burst, nearly killing everyone aboard, causing all kinds of damage, and contaminating much of what's left. Somehow, the worst affected have massive brain damage, and the nanomachines are driving them to instinctively seek raw materials for repairs--which can only be found in the brains of relatively intact survivors.

In short, the whole setup is basically an excuse to have space zombies. The nanomachines keep them alive even when their organs are falling out, but they're dumb and slow and they want braaaaains.

Other things I remember:

• The protagonist is female, and was protected by the initial burst because she was working inside a large water tank.
• The protagonist is trying to help her romantic partner, who is comatose, but it's implied they might wake up as a zombie.
• The protagonist is trying to avoid killing the zombies when possible, because there is still a chance of curing them.
• The protagonist is looking for raw materials that aren't radiation-contaminated, to help her partner and repair the ship.

Crossposted from https://lemmy.world/post/12012321

If you're writing Advent of Code solutions in Rust, then I've written a crate that can fetch the user input data directly from the main website.

Long story short, you provide it a login token copied from your browser cookies, and it can fetch the input data by year and day. Inputs are cached locally, so it'll only download it once for a given problem. This was heavily inspired by the PyPi advent-of-code-data package.

Unlike other AoC-centric Rust crates, that's all it does. The other crates I've seen all want the code structured in a specific way to add timing benchmarks, unit testing, and other features. I wanted something lightweight where you just call a function to get the input; no more and no less.

To use the crate:

• Follow the AoCD instructions to set the AOC_SESSION environment variable.
  This key is used for authentication and should not be shared with anyone.
• Add the aocfetch crate to your Cargo.toml [dependencies] section:
  aocfetch = { git = "https://github.com/ooterness/AdventOfCode.git" }
• Import the crate and call aocfetch::get_data(year, day) to fetch your input data.

An example:

use aocfetch;

fn main() {
    let input = aocfetch::get_data(2023, 1).unwrap();
    println!("My input data: {}", input);
    println!("Part 1 solution: 42");    // TODO
    println!("Part 2 solution: 42");    // TODO
}

If this goes well I will submit it to crates.io, but I wanted to open this up for beta-testing first.

Reddit users will prevail but also be injured so badly they need life support for 10,000 years. (It's a metaphor.)