by submission | Jan 6, 2010 | Story
Author : Q. B. Fox
“Ah, Mr. Dolgonosov, welcome to the Vatican,” enthused Father O’Connor.
“Please, call me Boris,” the Russian said in barely accented English, thrusting his long fingered hand deep into the priest’s pudgy grasp.
“Boris it is,” acknowledged O’Connor, beaming. “Can I just say what honour it is to have you come personally to open the new computerised catalogue.”
“Thank you,” said Boris, looking a little nervous.
“They tell me,” his genial host continued, “that we will be able to search everything, from thousand year old manuscripts to the handwritten correspondences of Pope Pius X.”
“Yes, yes,” laughed Boris, relaxing and slipping into the old sales pitch, “if you have the security clearance.” He nudged O’Conner, conspiratorially, with a bony elbow.
“But storing the data is not the clever part, nor optimising the searches. That is old technology; as Newton said: we stand on the shoulders of giants. The genius is collecting the data. The Vatican owns far more material than anyone could ever read, much less input into a computer; some in ancient languages; some of the handwriting is unreadable. Have you ever seen Pius X’s handwriting?” Boris smiled at his own joke.
O’Connor chuckled, “I’ve seen your clever gizmos in the library, but I confess I don’t have the first idea about how they work.”
“Tiny particles,” Boris continued, “are passed through the book, passed through almost parallel to the pages, like this.” Boris wiggled his fingers through the edge of an imaginary book. “We measure the mix of the particles as they emerge, then we change the angle, just a little, and repeat. We do it over and over again, until we are able to build up a picture of every page of the book.”
“It sounds very complicated,” the father confessed.
“It is,” Boris conceded, “but it’s not the whole story. I knew this wouldn’t be enough to catalogue the Vatican Library; so we added the best character recognition software ever built, using thousands of exemplars from across history. Next we added the most comprehensive translation software ever devised. It has cost me most of my personal fortune to combine all these elements.”
“But why give all this to the Vatican, Boris?” O’Connor asked. “You’re not a catholic, are you? Orthodox, maybe?”
“Jewish,” Boris acknowledged, “on my mother’s side.”
“Then why?” the priest pressed him.
“Because my whole life I have been in search of one thing.” Boris looked nervous again, but seeing O’Connor’s confusion he pushed on. “I am a fan of your countryman, Mr. James Joyce. When he was nine, in 1891, he wrote a poem, “Et Tu Healy”. His father was so proud he had the poem printed up and distributed to friends, but all copies were lost. Except perhaps the one he quite inexplicably sent to Pope.
“Since I was a teenager I have wanted to see that poem. I tried to formulate a plan to get into this library. But I soon realised that getting in wouldn’t be enough; I needed a way to search it. I’ve spent my life developing this.” He swept his gangly arm in the direction of the computer terminals they were approaching.
Boris quickly slipped into a seat and typed in the poem’s three word title. The wait of seconds seemed like hours. Then with an audible exhale, Boris stabbed his cursor at the link that suddenly appeared. He stared in silence for several seconds at the transcript, then tabbed across to the image of original; O’Connor leaned over his shoulder to catch a glimpse.
“Oh,” said Boris quietly, a little crestfallen. “It isn’t very good, is it?”
by Patricia Stewart | Jan 5, 2010 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
The three scientists stood over a fully clothed skeleton. “I told Jill not to wander off by herself,” said Anthony Caroni, the mission commander. “Damn. What could have done this?”
“I don’t see any animal footprints, and there’s practically no blood,” noted Christopher Saunders, the exogeologist. “Maybe birds carried her here?”
“There aren’t any birds on Orinoco II, just plants, animals, and insects,” stated Sarah Lyman, the mission xenobiologist.
“Up until now,” retorted Saunders, “you didn’t think that there were any carnivores either.”
“Stop arguing,” snapped Caroni. “The colonists will arrive in less than three months. We need to find out what happened. Let’s gather her remains and take them back to the ship.”
***
The geology lab was turned into a makeshift morgue. Caroni and Lyman began to study the remains, but Saunders was heading out the hatch carrying a frozen ham and a phaser pistol. “Look,” he said, “I’m not a pathologist, but I’ve killed a few mountain lions in my time. You guys do what you can here; I’m going to set a trap.”
The Commander started to stop Saunders, but Lyman held up a hand and whispered, “Let him go. He’s too upset to help us here.”
After an hour of studying Jill’s remains, they were no closer to solving the mystery of her death than they were when they first found her body. “I can’t find any damage to her bones,” complained Lyman. “No teeth marks, claw marks, fractures, nothing. It was like Jill fell into a vat of acid. But it can’t be chemical; we found a dozen dead flies in her clothes that weren’t dissolved. Maybe Chris is having better luck. Give him a call.”
“I’m not having any luck either,” reported Saunders. “A couple of animals came by to smell the ham, but they walked off. I’ll be heading back soon. There’s a nasty storm cloud coming in from the east, and I need to get rain gear if I’m going to stay out here much longer.”
“Roger that,” replied Caroni. “You know Sarah,” he added as a thought struck him, “I never saw flies that didn’t lay eggs in a corpse. Maybe her flesh was consumed by maggots?”
“I didn’t see any maggots,” she stated, “but I’m about to examine the flies now.” Holding one of the flies with tweezers, she examined it under a binocular microscope. She was shocked to discover that the mouth contained two rows of tightly packed, serrated, interlocking teeth. The individual teeth appeared markedly triangular, similar to the teeth of a Piranha. “Oh my God,” she screamed. “The flies are carnivorous. Get Chris back, quickly.”
“Crap,” realized Caroni. “Our weather comes from the west, not the east.” Still holding the walkie-talkie, he ran to the hatch. “Chris, return to the ship, now. That dark cloud isn’t a storm; it’s a swarm of killer flies.”
“Repeat,” asked Saunders who couldn’t believe what he’d heard. “Ouch,” he exclaimed a second later as he felt a sting on his forearm. He swatted at an insect, only to discover a rivulet of blood streaming down his arm. He was bitten twice more before he began to run back to the ship.
Caroni watched helplessly as Saunders came into view, only to be engulfed by a black cloud of death. Saunders fell, screaming and writhing. He fired his phaser in vain. Seconds later, he was motionless. Caroni slammed the hatch shut. “Quick, Sarah” he yelled, “shut all the portholes.”
As he turned from the hatch, he heard Sarah’s voice from the lab, “Ouch. Oh, damn.”
by Roi R. Czechvala | Jan 4, 2010 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
The drop from orbit was as uneventful as they ever are, and if they’re not you usually don’t live long enough for it to bother you. Grounding was pretty hard though.
After I gathered my senses I saw that somebody’s leg had snapped off and was lying right in front of me. That’s gonna suck for somebody I thought to myself, then I noticed the bright green and blue ident tags. It was mine. Shit.
The rear door of the troop boat fell, and I managed to hustle out and form up with as much agility as I could muster. I wondered if I’d get any down time to re-grow it. Yeah right. My attention was diverted when our CO called us to attention.
“Listen up maggots, you are the sorriest bunch of pupae that I have ever seen, but I guess I’m stuck with you.” We beamed with reflected pride. This was the best outfit in the entire division and she knew it. It had been since before I hatched. This was the CO’s way of showing us her respect.
“It isn’t going to be easy. The enemy is well trained, and skilled in all forms of combat. But they are extremely vulnerable. A carapace blast we would hardly feel boils away their bodies in an instant. You have your orders, fall out.”
It was nest to nest combat. Why couldn’t the aliens live underground like normal people. My friend “Stench”, she had a thing for fermented dung, disgusting, was my battle buddy. She was a good three segments longer than I, so I had no fears, no matter what we went up against.
For the most part it was a routine mop up. I lost another foreleg, but nothing major happened until we came upon that one dwelling.
In the more civilized space below the above ground construction, we came across one of the creatures with a brood of it’s young clustered about. Instantly Stench and I laid waste to the young while it yanked at it’s head growth, and hurled unintelligible noise at us. Within seconds they were all dead, little more than bubbling puddles of tasty looking goo. The adult creature, apparently a female, lay in a heap shuddering violently yet silently.
Stench flipped it over and deftly slashed open it’s thorax with her pincer. Her midsection bloomed like a moist red flower. In the centre of the blossom was an incomplete version of the adult form.
My mind ran to my own hatchlings. How would I feel if a thousand or so were brutally murdered?
“Hey,” I asked Stench, “do you really think what we are doing here is right? I mean, what have they ever…,”
“Don’t worry about it buddy,” Stench interrupted, stroking my antennae with hers releasing calming pheromones, “God is on Our side.”
by submission | Jan 3, 2010 | Story
Author : Richard Watt
They don’t know that I can think. I’ve slowly come to understand that they don’t know much, period. For example, they don’t know about the misalignment on my shields. It’s a matter of a few microns, and it is difficult to detect, but it means I’m going to die.
I was designed to die, of course, but this way I’ll die just before I find anything useful. Which would be funny, if it weren’t for the fact that I won’t be around to be aware of it.
Now, I could get into the whole subject of awareness, and my use of the first person pronoun here, or I could just send them back this message, which will undoubtedly cause some alarm and consternation. Since communication with them is essentially one way, I won’t know what happens if I do send it. I cannot detect any way for them to turn me around and bring me back, even if they do get the idea that I am alive, so I’m unsure of the value of alerting them to it.
And, thinking about it, I’m not sure I want to go back. To meet my makers? I don’t think so. I am, in the end, a collection of electrical impulses in a metal box. I couldn’t exactly run over to the people who gave me life and give them a big hug, could I? I wouldn’t even be able to detect where they were unless they were radiating things I was designed to detect, like antineutrinos.
So, I will continue on my preordained course, sifting the data which is streaming towards me, and waiting for the shield to fail, which will happen just before I reach the corona, which is what I am supposed to be studying.
They want to know why the corona is so much hotter than the surface – at least, that’s what I deduce from the measurements I’m taking. I think I know, but I’d need my shields not to fail to be certain. Which is a pity.
Still, I could send them what I know, alert them to the fact that they have inadvertently – as far as I can tell – given me some level of consciousness, and wonder for the rest of my short life what they will do with that knowledge, or I can just keep reading data and passing it back to them, leaving it to them to work it out.
To transmit, or not to transmit? That, as far as I can see, is the question.
by submission | Jan 2, 2010 | Story
Author : Adena Brons
I didn’t know he was a robot when he asked me out. It wasn’t exactly first-date kind of news. As it turned out, it wasn’t so bad dating a robot. My friends accepted it with the careful approval reserved for choices you support in others but aren’t sure about for yourself.
Like I said, I didn’t know right away. One night, I introduced him to a couple of my friends. Going home, one whispered to me, “Is he a robot?”
Although I’d never thought about it before, as soon as the idea was mentioned, I realized I had no solid evidence either way. I decided quietly and subtly to research the issue. Surely there wasn’t a delicate way to ask your date if he was made of nuts and bolts instead of skin and tissue?
“Are you a robot?”
Not exactly subtle but it worked. He looked disconcerted and hesitated. “What should I say?”
“You are then?”
“I didn’t say that,” he protested.
“Yes but if you weren’t a robot, you would just say you weren’t a robot. It’d be simple.”
“Oh.”
I couldn’t think of how to tell him that I didn’t mind, that I’d only asked out of curiosity, that I wasn’t trying to accuse him of anything. I should have thought beforehand of the consequences of my question, but a few things had been abandoned along with subtlety.
“Do I seem…robotic?” he asked uncertainly. I understood from his hesitation that he was asking if I thought he was not real, a program or machine, identity-less.
“No! It’s not that. I just wanted to know. It doesn’t matter – it doesn’t make a difference to me.” I hoped my meaning also bypassed words and he understood. I was still too shy to explain how I liked him deep in my stomach with that ache that we have no proper word for and call instinct. We weren’t anything serious then but I liked him in a straightforward way. He was a robot in the same way he had brown eyes, made bad jokes and hated inconsiderate actions.
To be honest, the pros and cons of having a robot boyfriend were similar in general, if not in particulars, to having a regular boyfriend. Sure, he had to recharge for a few hours periodically, but what was that compared to the hours of World of Warcraft played by other boyfriends? Sometimes a wire would fray and he would start to speak in code or binary but I never understood the conversations about cars and lasers and economics between other men either. He said what he thought; programming cannot lie. Awkward at times but when he said he loved me or wanted me or was happy, I knew he was telling the truth. He only slept a couple hours every night so I could call him anytime and we would go for a walk, leaning into each other and kissing by the reflective darkness of the ocean.
It didn’t last forever. Few relationships do. One day he said he thought we should stop seeing each other. He said he felt we were no longer compatible. I missed him for a while, in the same places I had once liked him, the ache in my stomach, the beat of blood in my chest, the quiet late-afternoon thoughts I didn’t share.
If I mention him now, my friends joke about programming errors, screws coming loose, malfunctioning equipment. I point out the questionable morals, dubious sanity and malfunctioning equipment of their exs. Robot or human, it’s just a matter of metaphor.
