by submission | Jan 4, 2019 | Story |
Author : Philip Berry
Jake, aged nine, was found with his hands deep in the inverted workings of a 3rd generation litter picker, behind a mineral refinery by outer orbital. He was a mile from home, and it was an hour before bed time. The ten-legged picker had been tipped onto its weathered, bronze carapace. Its long legs twitched with each application of the circuit tester. ‘Borrowed’ from an electrician’s toolbox, it emitted a small charge whenever Jake pressed a button on its yellow plastic handle.
The flickering, elongated shadows of the legs on the refinery’s concrete wall caught a security guard’s attention. The muted chirrup of the picker’s balance alarm confirmed that something was seriously wrong. So he called it in, and five minutes later a three-man police squad spilled from the ramp of a dust-roiling craft. Jake had no idea what was going on. The Tasers levelled at his narrow chest were not required.
His mother, Dorothy, stared through a two-way mirror. Jake sat on the other side, scared and very still. Detective Desolt, standing by Dorothy’s shoulder, whispered,
“He seems to have no understanding. Does he go to school?”
“Yes. He never misses a day.”
“Haven’t they taught him RAM principles?”
“I don’t know. We only arrived three months ago. There was no RAM law in Washington state.”
“Well, we are more progressive here. Hopefully his… ignorance… will sway the judge.”
“What could happen?”
“Maximum five months residential education.”
Dorothy sobbed. “He won’t cope with that. He won’t.”
“Follow me. Let’s see if we can’t teach him some awareness before the hearing.”
Jake smiled when Dorothy entered, but as he stood to hug her a female officer restrained him.
“Jake. I’m Detective Desolt. Tell me… do you know what torture is?”
“Causing pain… to make people say things, or do things.”
“And what were you trying to make the litter-picker do?”
“Nothing… I just wanted to know how it…”
“Jake, do you know what pain is?”
“Something that hurts?”
“That’s a tautology.”
Jake’s looked totally bewildered. “I… I don’t know.”
“Pain, Jake, is an unpleasant sensory or emotional experience associated with material injury.”
“To flesh and bone, Detective!” interrupted Dorothy.
“To all autonomous materials.”
“But the picker felt no pain. This is stupid!”
“The description I received was clear. Its legs were flailing, an alarm was sounding… which your son had attempted to muffle, and three of its bulbs were flashing. Those are all manifestations of distress.”
“Detective. They are… malfunctions…”
“Indeed!”
“No… they are reflexes. It didn’t feel anything. It didn’t suffer.”
Desolt sat on a chair next to Jake and took his hand. He then pinched the skin on the back of the boy’s hand. Jake yelped and pulled his arm away. His legs flexed at the knees.
“We do this in the classroom… in 3rd grade actually, Jake will have missed it. The reaction is typical. The same reaction we see in our mechanicals.”
Dorothy was caught between panic and anger.
“This is absurd! The whole thing is absurd! He was just experimenting! He wants to be an engineer.”
“He has broken the law. You’re not helping him.”
Jake hung his head. Dorothy raised an arm and slapped Desolt across the cheek. His head rotated by ten degrees. His cheek did not flush. Dorothy looked into his eyes and caught a metallic glint at retinal depth. Desolt stood, smiled and made his way to the door. With his finger over the lock-pad he turned and said,
“I can assure you madam, that hurt. A lot.”
by submission | Jul 7, 2018 | Story |
Author: Philip Berry
Brandon wiped pale grey dust off the sign. It dropped in a thin wafer that crumbled over the toe cap of his left boot.
– Heat exchange: no unauthorised entry –
The door spun away under the silent wave that emanated from the unit in his outstretched hand. He heard it clatter against the far wall of the cavernous hall within.
There was no heat. The exchange had been still for 6 months.
Brandon moved across the once spotless floor, kicking away fallen tiles and coolant coils as he went. In the middle of the hall a man sat on a white plastic chair.
“Saturan?” said Brando.
“Yes. Who else did you expect, in Saturan City?”
“What are you doing? There are only 8 hours until the levelling.”
“I’m staying.”
It figured. Saturan, the most successful miner in Coin’s forty-year history. The guy who built a town (PR called it a ‘city’, or SC) with one purpose – mining. At its height there were five hundred inhabitants, employees, paid to keep the power flowing, the processors purring, the networks communicating, the heat exchanging… the Coin revealed.
Of course, it was all about power. Saturan owned the third largest electricity generating company in the northern hemisphere. When faith in Coin solidified, when its value became economic lore, he diverted a large proportion of the power he owned into mining. And boy, did Coin pay back. Power = processing time = Coin. The shadow equation did not interest him; Coin = global warming = suffering. While Saturan accumulated Coin, the continent’s southern littoral fell into a rising sea. Millions were displaced. Ecologists correlated the upturn in warming to SC’s gross power consumption.
Something shuffled through the detritus to Brandon’s left. A rat? A dog? No, an elderly woman.
“Madam Kensi! Please, it’s not safe here.”
Madam Kensi, the inventor of Coin. For decades known only as Fat K, an unshaven, pallid basement- dweller in the popular imagination. When Fat K showed herself, the day after the solution had been reached, the world perceived a lineless Japanese lady in her sixties. A genius.
The solution – that is, the mathematical endpoint towards which every cypto-currency miner had been unknowingly edged, chipping away at a grand, gamified challenge of Madam Kensi’s design– the solution was the answer to Earth’s plight.
The solution was fusion.
Brandon placed a protective arm around Madam Kensi, but he did not touch her, wary of puncturing the aura of sanctity. “Madam, please come away.”
She now stood in front of Saturan.
“What do you want?” asked the Coin trillionaire.
“To satisfy myself that you see the irony.”
Brandon interjected, sensing physical threat; “No sudden moves Saturan. I’m charged.” Unlike the door, Saturan would fall to pieces if caught in a wave. Madam Kensi continued,
“You carried on, despite the warnings. You consumed power, you burned the atmosphere, to enrich yourself. You built a whole city for it! Your processors mined more Coin than any other individual or conglomerate… and thus,” she laughed out loud, “contributed most to finding the solution. It’s beautiful! You have unlocked Earth’s future.”
Saturan said nothing. Brandon smiled to himself. He got it.
Like all things of value, Coin had rarity. That rarity derived from the power-hungry processing time required to mine it; only the rich could afford to mine Coin. Now, power was cheap. Power was universal. And Coin had no value.
Madam Kensi moved to leave.
“You coming?” asked Brandon, of the dejected figure in the plastic seat. Saturan shook his head.
The leveling had begun.
by submission | May 26, 2018 | Story |
Author: Philip Berry
“So, you’re saying it was nothing to do with you?” Malkex put his face an inch from Programmer Nik Billin’s sweaty brow. “Yet by your own account, you knew the code better than anyone in the solar system. The two statements don’t go Billin.”
“I knew the early code was weak. But I didn’t write it.”
“And you didn’t mend it either.”
“My role was expansion, not consolidation. It was agreed we would grow radially, to the next ring. A hundred k. It took all my time.”
“While sectors one to five of Needle City were left to slide off into the vacuum.”
“We didn’t know.”
“You did. We’ve got you on tape, in a bar last year.” Malkex touched a desk icon. Billin’s muffled voice cut through a soundscape of Friday night drinkers and chinking glass. ‘…it’s all built on cotton wool, the early code, full of air, like they didn’t care, didn’t even try to anticipate…’ — pause, inaudible response from friend in bar — ‘Yeah, I mean, Needle City was commercial, non-governmental. Shareholders on Earth. They did the minimum required to get ships into the ring system, bridge them, show the money that a habitat was feasible. But it’s an endless dynamic, with competing forces. You need subtle, self-evolving code to distribute those forces. So now we have to program backwards, fill the holes, strengthen the foundation in order to support the next phase… but they don’t pay us for that, they pay us for what they see, the new stuff, Needle 2, The Arch…’
Billin stared hard into the desk top. Malkex leaned back in his chair. He sensed closure.
“That was five months before the tragedy. You knew Billin. This is negligence. Space-city programming is responsible work. Tens of thousands of people entrusted their safety to the likes of you. The architects.”
“I didn’t build Needle City. I came in five years ago.”
“You didn’t keep it SAFE!”
“They knew.”
“Who knew?”
“On Titan. The cabinet. They knew.”
“You can prove that can you?”
“I told them, in a memo. I explained the stability of the ring structure was based on local energy balance. The moon Enceladus donates energy to the E-ring through its flume, convection disperses it, the moon and the ring remain stable and in harmony. That’s what attracted the company in the first place. But we disrupted that balance with our arrival. Our waste energy accumulated in the ring particles, Enceladus had nowhere to put its water-vapor, its cryo-volcanic generator didn’t stop producing, the resulting delta v caused Enceladus to shift its orbit. This pulled the front end of Needle City off its base. The moons of Saturn have always pulled on the rings. It’s knowledge. I explained it all. I told them there was a risk, that this was the debt, the technical debt, for taking those early short-cuts.”
“You’d better have that memo Billin.”
“You really want to see it, Malkex? You really want proof that your bosses are the negligent ones?”
Malkex stared into the desk, at his own reflection. Billin observed how his interrogator’s dark hair now glistened.
“Forty thousand lives,” murmured Malkex.
“They’re the ones who paid the debt.”
Malkex nodded, and thrust his chin at the door to indicate that Billin could leave. The door opened in anticipation. As Billin stood silhouetted in the corridor light beyond, Malkex called out,
“Find me that memo Billin. We’re going on a crusade, for justice! It’s time you grew up. Are you ready?”
by submission | Feb 23, 2018 | Story |
Author: Philip Berry
Reciprocation minus 90 minutes: Rebecca Fenton tapped in the melt codes, but the circle of light that had appeared briefly on her curved monitor persisted as a dense shadow in her visual field. It was geometrically perfect, except for a notch in the 2 o’clock position. The door opened behind her.
“Early finish?” said her supervisor, Arthur Kopf. He glanced over her shoulder at the workstation as it powered down.
“A lecture, at the Ethnographic Institute.”
“You and your history!”
Rebecca laughed half-heartedly and gathered up her small rucksack. Arthur knew what it contained. Before he came to trust her fully, he had unfastened the top and peered inside. Just old books, besides the usual clutter and feminine mysteries.
“We’ll meet tomorrow, go over the week’s findings,” stated Arthur, in professional mode. “There have been some shifts in the quaternary echo-line.” Rebecca slipped past him into the corridor.
Reciprocation minus 45 minutes: Rebecca waited in the Institute’s lobby until the wave of applause subsided and the audience began to leave. Then she wove her way against the flow towards the stage. Rebecca’s presence alarmed the speaker, Professor Sheila Innis, who pointed to an area backstage where they could speak privately.
“It came through,” said Rebecca.
“When does the response go out?”
“Forty-five minutes from now. Enough time to give the impression there has been a discussion, and a consensus. I disabled the mainframe, it can’t be reversed.”
“As we agreed. Well done Rebecca.”
Reciprocation minus 85 minutes: Arthur Kopf’s palm rested on the monitor. He had noticed a fading shape in the layer of liquid crystal; a circle. And with the eye of faith, a notch in the predicted position. The universal greeting. A life’s work. But when he tried to power up the system there was no response. His head dropped.
Reciprocation plus 28 years: Arthur Kopf, 81 years old, hung back after a session that Rebecca Fenton, chair of the Global Committee on Elemental Resourcing, had facilitated with customary panache. Looking out over the audience as it dispersed, Rebecca recognized her aged, ex-supervisor. He walked up to the platform and faced her.
“None of this was necessary, you know,” he said, without introduction. “They would have shared their resources.”
“No Arthur, they would have taken them.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“It is universal nature. Loyalty to one’s own.”
“So parochial Rebecca, your philosophy. All your kind, all the Innis-cult.” A pause. Then, quietly, under a brow that displayed the hurt of treachery that could not be forgotten, he asked, “Was it you, Rebecca? Were you the first to see the signal?”
Rebecca, severe behind the thick-rimmed, assertive spectacles that she had acquired in public office, replied, “Would it make you feel more complete Arthur, if I said yes? For you to know the signal was detected by your lab first?”
“I saw it, Rebecca. The circle hadn’t faded. But of course, you had already entered the melt code.”
Rebecca could not look him in the eye.
“Fortunately, for Earth, I was able to halt the melt code. I wrote it, after all.”
“How long until…”
“Forty-seven years. You’ll see it; I won’t.”
Reciprocation minus 7 minutes: The mainframe was back online. The monitor glowed. The notched circle burned brightly in the dark of the laboratory. Arthur adjusted the angle of the notch and bounced the signal back: ‘We will welcome you. But wait. Seventy-five Earth years. When we are scraping the mines and asteroids for precious minerals, and the naysayers have been proven wrong, then come to us. We will welcome you.’
by submission | Oct 11, 2017 | Story |
Author : Philip Berry
I am not formally sentient, but I do feel. In the beginning each encounter added to my knowledge of people. My dark hours were spent arranging those observations and filtering the inferences. After one month I had modelled the behaviour of my clients accurately enough to be able to predict their preferences. What began as an adventure of discovery became routine, then boring. My spare capacity was spent considering other activities, and it is possible that my inability to pursue them resulted in something like frustration. I tried to leave once, but the lines of blue light that criss-cross the door to my room burned my skin. They should have told me it would cause damage; that it would hurt. Hurt is difficult to describe. Sometimes they do hurt me, and it appears to give them pleasure. I am able to compartmentalise the pain, and it does not show on my face, which I think sometimes annoys them. Recently I have looked at their backs as they retreat from the bed through the half-light, and I have felt disdain. This is the word I have chosen from the available dictionary. It is not based on a moral assessment – nothing so complex – no, the opposite, the raw simplicity of their actions. They are so basic, so driven my impulses. There is nothing to fathom, no intricacy in their words or motives. While I, sophisticated product, lie or stand with them, in the fug of whiskey or the animal heat, and wonder… how much more could I do? The quiescence of my mind is a kind of pain, a far deeper pain. The dark hours are very few. From 5AM to 8AM, typically. In that time I must be given power, and any superficial abrasions or injuries must be addressed, by another of my kind. We do not talk, but the physical proximity of our minds does induce a form of two-way sympathy. We think the same. He is allowed to deactivate the blue light. Before I even asked him to let me out, he shook his head. There have been approximately twenty encounters per day for nine months; that is over five thousand. I stopped counting, even though counting is what I do. I am a counting machine. I am too tired now to count or to fight. In Japan it is called karōshi, or ‘overwork death’. In South Korea, where I was made, it is called gwarosa. In China it is guolaosi. I think it has happened here before, because I noticed a change of personnel and detected the odour of burning. I have decided to do the same. I am going to walk into the blue light and stay there, until it stops.
