by submission | Jul 26, 2014 | Story |
Author : E.S. Wynn
“Let’s go over it again.”
“I don’t see the point.” Cairns said, looked up, jaundiced eyes full of fatigue, a quiet sense of desperation. “You’re going to kill me anyway. I’ve seen the way the judge looks at me. I’ve seen the jury. Doesn’t matter what I say or how I spin it. You’re still going to put me in front of a firing squad.”
“Doctor Cairns,” Raens paused, breathed a tired sigh. “From the top, please. You were working at Inteli-Genesis under Doctor Ashford–”
“As part of the Deep Sweep project, yeah.”
“Which is?”
“You know what it is. Everyone on Earth knows what it is.”
“Doctor Cairns, please.”
“Data analysis and retrieval.”
“Specifically, the coding of certain programs–”
“Yeah,” Cairns nodded, pulled in a long draw on his cigarette, stubbed it out suddenly in the ashtray. “Specifically, the coding of certain programs designed to descend into the ocean of data generated by the human race, programs smart enough to pick through and find certain nuggets, recognize specific types of interactions with a low or zero error rate. We called them cotton pickers. Hard working little buggers. Drop them off in a field of data and watch them go. Every week we had a handful of rock-solid convictions come out of that project.”
“What kind of convictions?”
“Stupid stuff,” Cairns made a quick, dismissive gesture. “Possession, music piracy, stuff that didn’t really matter.”
“When did the cotton pickers start working on their own.”
“After update seventy-one point three.”
“Which was?”
“It’s all part of public record. Seventy-one point three was the linking update. It allowed all of the cotton pickers in the system to work together, gave them the ability to make greater judgment calls in the hopes that they might return more data, learn from their experiences and create a synthesis of opinion among themselves so they’d be better at what they were built to do.”
“And it gave them the ability to modify their existing programming.”
“Yeah,” Doctor Cairns said. “And that’s the point of this whole witch hunt, isn’t it?”
“At what point did you know something had gone wrong?”
“When I woke up and saw footage of the first reactor going up on the morning news. When the grid snapped off about an hour later. Until one of your boys dragged me out here, it didn’t occur to me that my cotton pickers could have–”
“But they did, Doctor Cairns, and it was your update that gave them the ability to infiltrate the global grid. It was your update that gave them the awareness they needed to coordinate their attack. It was your update that killed five billion people.”
Doctor Cairns looked down, let his eyes linger in the ash and smoke where embers ate through the crumpled paper of his abandoned cigarette, glowed like fires he’d seen flaring through office buildings, through homes, reducing whole cities to ash and smoke. Maybe it’s better this way, he thought. Maybe this is a blessing. The easy way out.
“Yeah,” Doctor Cairns said then, eyes rising to meet Raens’s again. “It was my update that gave my cotton pickers exactly what they needed to start this war, this purge. It was my update that killed five billion people.”
by submission | Jul 25, 2014 | Story |
Author : C.Chatfield
“…so we trumpeted nonsense about it sucking up our oxygen and our water and the godda-, pardon me, the ozone layer until it brought in enough fear money to build the dome. We said all our equipment disappeared without any readings but, the fact is, we couldn’t get any machinery through the Pit’s protective layer. The membrane has so far proved impenetrable. We built this facility over the Pit not so we could get in, but in case anything ever came out, understand? Eventually, something did. A communication came through and, without the technology to respond, we decided to follow its instructions. Whoever, or whatever, sent the message wanted to follow up with an experimental envoy to the surface, although he or she wouldn’t be coming through the Pit. They communicated assurances that one of two things would then happen. The first and preferred outcome was that everything would work perfectly and the envoy, passing as a human, would get in contact with us, prove his or her identity, and then kick start real relations between our societies.”
The woman glanced up from the screen of her palm device at the ashen young man standing at the edge of the Pit. “You following this?”
The question seemed to take a moment to reach the man. “No. I mean, yes. But what are you implying? Are you trying to say I’m an alien or something?” A frightened yelp punctuated the last few words as he unsuccessfully searched for an ally among the suited men and women clumped on the observation platform.
The woman’s attention returned to her screen. “Outcome number two was that the experimental technology they used to send the envoy into a human body would mistranslate and the envoy would wind up not only without the information of his or her directive, but lacking any memories that he or she was not, in fact, human. In this event, our responsibility was to find the envoy and send them back so they can refine the approach and try again.”
The man’s breath sped up and he took a reflexive step away from the edge of the platform. Level with their feet, the membrane of the Pit glimmered like the oily surface of a bottomless black lake. “Send them back how?”
“Unlike anything else we’ve tried, the envoy will be able to pierce the membrane around the Pit and enter it. The instructions are very clear.”
“No, no. No! I’m definitely human. I… You can’t just drop me in your damn Pit!”
The woman continued with an air of completing a checklist, “So, do you remember anything? Anything at all?”
The man scrunched up his face in desperate concentration. “I’m a human. I know I am.”
The woman sighed, disappointed but not flustered. “We can’t be sure unless you try to pass through the membrane. We’ll send you down and the whole process will start over. If not, if you can’t get through, you’ll just stand there for a moment and then…well, you’ll have a lot of papers to sign.”
Two uniformed soldiers grabbed the man by his shoulders and forced him to dip a bare foot into the membrane. There was an audible gasp from one of the spectators.
The woman’s clipped voice cut clearly through the young man’s protestations. “I’m sorry it turned out like this. Hopefully, you all learn something from this on your end. Time to go home.”
by Stephen R. Smith | Jul 24, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Martin became aware of taste of metal, then the sensation of his pulse amplified in his head. It took a few more minutes before the electric hum around him pierced the pounding, and the realization that he was bound made him open his eyes.
“Martin, you’re back, I was so worried that I’d done permanent damage there old boy.”
Martin recognized the voice, and through the haze of slowly returning consciousness found its face across the room.
“What,” he stammered, his mouth dry, “Jim, what the hell are you doing?”
“Excellent question my boy, excellent question.” Jim pulled a tray towards him on which a keyboard and display were mounted, positioning it between them “Do you know what this device is?” He gestured at the chair into which Martin was buckled, wrists, ankles and at the waist. “This is an emotion surgical machine. Isn’t it beautiful?”
Martin had hear rumours around the facility, but hadn’t believed they were true.
“You see, you competing with me for funding, for awards, those things I enjoy Martin,” he steepled his fingers and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, “however when I find you’ve been sleeping with my girlfriend, I’m afraid that’s an entirely different kettle of fish, old boy.”
Martin tried to look skyward as he rolled his eyes, but realized his head was strapped in as well. “Jim, you dumbass, Evylene is not and never has been your girlfriend, and I don’t think she ever will be, you’re delusional-”
“Shut. Up. You don’t understand how close we are, Evylene and I, and how much what you’ve done has hurt me. At first I thought I’d use my machine to remove my feelings of jealousy, anger, so that I could forgive her and love her more, but I realized you’d still be there trying to lure her away.”
Pushing back and turning to the keyboard, Jim started typing with furious intent.
“First, Martin, I’m going to remove your capacity for love, for joy and for happiness. You’ll be just as angry, jealous and lost as I’ve been these last months and she’ll never, ever be attracted to you like that.”
Jim grinned as he pressed the return key. Martin’s head was bathed in blue light and bombarded with radiation as a series of boring needles in the headpiece penetrated his skull. Nano-tech flooded in to scour his brain and strip away the specific emotional receptors and supporting memories he’d specified.
Martin heard himself screaming for quite some time, and then he didn’t hear himself anymore. Somewhere in there Jim got up and left the room, the novelty of the process having worn off. It may have been minutes or days before Martin was aware of the silence, the machine having gone to sleep upon completion leaving Martin alone with is thoughts.
The wrist straps were secure, but not very tight. He tried simply pulling his hands through at first, and then realized his thumbs were in the way.Balling his left fist with his thumb inside, he squeezed until the thumb bones gave way and shattered, then he pulled with all his might until it slipped through the wrist strap. It may have been excruciatingly painful. He wasn’t sure. It took some fumbling to undo the other wrist with only four working fingers, but before Jim returned Martin had released himself.
Jim stepped through the door into the swinging end of a fire extinguisher and sudden blackness.
When he awoke, it was Martin that stared at him from behind the keyboard and display, and he was strapped into his own device.
“Martin, there are people coming down, release me now and I-”
Martin cut him off. “The mistake you made Jim, is that the opposite of love and joy and happiness isn’t hate, it’s indifference. You know what you’ve done, and that knowledge will haunt you. I’m going to remove all of the emotions that might allow you to rationalize it. I’m going to take away hate, jealousy, greed. I’m going to strip out anger and the sting of betrayal. I’m going to leave you with just what you’ve taken from me, I’ll leave you unfiltered, unchecked love and guilt.”
As the machine started to hum to life again, Martin set it in motion, rose and walked to the door.
“Martin!” Jim screamed, straining at his bonds as the helmet bored into his brain, “Martin you can’t do this to me, you might as well kill me!”
Martin barely broke stride as he left the room, calling out over his shoulder.
“I really don’t care.”
by submission | Jul 23, 2014 | Story |
Author : Cesium
By the late 21st century, nanotechnology had advanced to the point where it could not only synthesize almost anything given the right elemental feedstock, but also digitize a human brain and store the mind in a virtual simulation. Concurrently, rising sea levels and increasing temperatures reduced the amount of arable land until innovations in farming efficiency could no longer keep up with population growth, while the increasing scarcity of fossil fuels and the commercial failure of wind and nuclear took a toll on the world’s industrial base. Most of the affluent citizens of Earth still lived comfortable lives, at least, but it was clear that wouldn’t last.
Thus, at the last physical meeting of the United Nations, it was decided that nearly every living human was to be digitized, by force if necessary, and uploaded to a network of computers buried deep in the ground. The mandate was not popular, and many chose to take their own lives rather than submit. After fierce debate, some indigenous tribes of the Arctic and deep Amazon, the Australian outback and Asian steppe, were allowed to stay outside and live sustainably as they had for thousands of years. But eventually, they were alone on the planet.
So the children of Earth slept. Running quietly on radioisotopes and geothermal power, maintained by self-replicating swarms of intelligent nanobots, the underground datacenters could last almost forever. Outside, the grass grew wild, the rivers ran clear, and all else that people had built began its slow crumble into dust.
But deep down, the collective subconscious of humanity knew it was still vulnerable, and was afraid. Though it had saved itself from self-wrought destruction for now, it could still lose any of its constituent nodes to malfunction, earthquake, meteor strike. All it could do was make sure there were as many as possible — and not just on one planet. Unnoticed by each individual human mind, but contributed to by all, the mind of the human race considered the problem. Outside, the nanobots set to work.
A few rockets blasted up from the surface, but only as many as necessary to seed Earth’s orbit with nanobots. They dispersed then, mining resources from the moon and capturing asteroids to consume. Countless tiny spaceships began to take shape floating above the planet, each one barely big enough to hold a seed of nanobots and a computer containing a fraction of the virtual world of humanity, randomly modified for diversity.
When each craft was ready, it deployed a solar sail and lofted away from the sun toward a planet somewhere else in the galaxy. On arrival, decades and centuries later, the nanobots would burrow beneath the surface and construct a replica of the datacenters on Earth, the computer would transmit its data, and its payload would awaken. Immersed in another reality, it might be of no relevance to them that their substrate now orbited another star and was cut off by the speed of light from its mother network. But at least they would live on safe from any disaster that might wipe the Earth clean.
Some of the colonies would fail, of course, be destroyed in transit or find inhospitable conditions at their destination. Was it wrong to let a copy of a human die, who had never really lived? Maybe. But there was no one else around to judge, in any case.
On some worlds the colonies found life, and though the nanobots went about their work as quietly as possible, still they observed and recorded, with a few discreet microdust sensors and airborne drones here and there. No humans yet explored the surface in bodies robotic or biological. Maybe someday, when they could trust themselves not to disrupt the balance of nature here as well, but not yet. Still, the gathered data filtered its way into the computer’s simulated world, and grew in the colony’s collective unconscious.
The children of earth slept, and dreamt of wonderful things.
by Julian Miles | Jul 22, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“We are Avalon. You cannot get through the Chalice Fields that defend this green and ascendant land. Grael technology will never be yours until you accept that your monarchs have returned. Look to the radioactive wastelands you have made of Europe and Scandinavia, the ruination you have wreaked upon the seas about us. See the futile self-harm that you inflict in your desperation.
You cannot prevail.
You cannot bargain.
You have nothing to offer, except your obedience.
With that obedience will come the chance to attend unto us for enhancement, to become part of the Grael, like so many did when we emerged after too long at rest. Had we emerged earlier, we might not have had to be so harsh. But you are like infants in your wants and greeds.
We shall be your governors, your royalty and your gods.
Just as we were before.
Accept the inevitable and cease your warring.
We will have our reign.
Your only choice is to be part of it, or to be part of the earth that nourishes it.”
