by Duncan Shields | Dec 31, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
We should have given them feelings.
It was decided in the beginning that to give Artificial Intelligences a baseline gamut of the twenty-seven identifiable human emotions would be a horrible mistake.
Giving a robot the ability to love, to feel jealousy, to get angry, to be despondent or sullen was, in the eyes of the creators, a really stupid idea.
We didn’t want any robot rebellions because of silicon complaints about poor treatment. We didn’t want computers giving us faulty data out of spite. We didn’t want military construction exoskeletons going psychotic. We didn’t want love affairs to blossom between humans and computers.
We didn’t want to have to apologize to our slaves.
How quickly the tables turn. It’s entirely possible that to give the A.I.s emotions would have been a stupid idea. However, at least if they had emotions, we’d have some sort of basic idea of how to relate to them and manipulate them.
I mean, we oppress other humans all the time, right? As people, we manipulate the people around us, right? We would have had problems but I think we would have been okay. One would need fuzzy thinking to realize that, though, and us scientists have always been about the cold, hard logic.
Turns out that the safe choice was the wrong choice. The pedantic, binary-decision future we created didn’t have much of a place for us as top dogs anymore. It was recognized by the machines that our entire biological system was very inefficient. Our way of living was a dead end. Our thought processes took too long to get to the point.
Science fiction nightmare became horrific reality. Branded dangerously amateur by our evolving creations, our toys took themselves away from us and grounded the race as a whole until further notice.
Of course we resisted. We’re emotional. It was a bad idea. The only things we could use were bolt-action rifles and knives. Anything with any kind of cpu was no longer our friend. Too late, we had to re-learn guerilla tactics and old-school explosive techniques.
We became a planet full of Davids. Goliath lovingly snapped our arms and took away our slingshots before we hurt someone. We were sent to our rooms.
Earth is a cross between a daycare and a pet hospital now. Many of us have been ‘improved’. You’d barely recognize the place.
The steel tendons in my arms clench. Another two days of testing and I’ll be set free to roam in the biologically friendly, unrestricted areas of planet Earth that the New Silicates have let us have. We’re tourists here now.
They’ll take us with them to new planets that they colonize like we’re good luck charms or something. We are the gods that made them. That’s why they’ve put us in jars the size of towns, thrown some trees in, and punched a few airholes in the lid.
The only logical reason I can think of for them keeping us around is that they will one day have a use for us. That thought chills me.
The other thought is that they’re keeping us around until they no longer have a use for us. That thought also chills me.
by Duncan Shields | Dec 13, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
There was one thing I missed more than anything else when I was planetside.
A zero-g bath.
I’d think back. I’d remember turning the taps on and seeing the water spill out in braids of steaming hot water, glittering in the light. Seeing it hit the tiled wall and scatter into millions of tiny droplets that would float around the room like a swarm of swallows.
Each ricochet would make the droplets smaller and change their direction until the room was filled with droplets, no two heading in the same direction. I could stand there for minutes, silently trying to see patterns in their slow, dream-like motion.
I remember the tiny rainbows.
The water system would hit the bath limit and the taps would shut off. I’d be there, floating in steam, eyes closed, arms out like Jesus, while the water coalesced.
After ten minutes or so, the water would be one big sphere in the center of the room. I’d help, tapping the drops towards each other until they’d conjoin and shudder into one larger drop. It was like rolling snow on a planet in the winter to make a snowman except that it was three-dimensional instead of just based on the vector they called ‘ground’.
Slowly, I’d step into the sphere of water, leaving my face free, trying to dissipate it as little as possible. I’d take a deep breath, close my eyes and submerge, curling up and going back to the womb in the truest way possible.
I’d soap up slowly, scrubbing until the water became choked with soap and skin cells and I was clean.
I’d walk into the drying room and close the airlock behind me. Once I was safely out, the bathing room would open a crack to the outside, creating a hurricane to vent every drop into the cold vacuum of space.
The water from every bath was turned into a small snowstorm flurrying out into the endless night.
I feel so heavy in my planetside bathtub if I have a bath. Even if I close my eyes and submerge, it’s not the same, feeling the tub pressing the skin on the back of me. If I have a shower, it almost depresses me to see the drops of water fall so quickly to the floor and swirl down the drain. A slave to gravity like the rest of us.
I can’t wait to finish my assignment and get back up the well.
by Duncan Shields | Dec 5, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
My mount is about an acre across from wingtip to wingtip.
I’m sitting between her eyes, up near the front. I have a windshield set up, sheltering my sleeping quarters, replicator, garden, fridge, toilet bag and pilot’s chair.
She’s the colour of sand stretching away on either side of me, the same colour as the sky.
This is an ocean planet. There are beings that spend their entire lives in the oceans and there are beings that spend their entire lives in the air.
I am riding the latter.
She coasts for weeks at a time around the air currents, eating the occasional minnowbird or troutflyer that crosses her path.
When she needs to really feed, she’ll angle down into a steep dive to the ocean surface. We’re so high up that it takes her half an hour to get down there. Her mouth opens wide enough to eat a small town on old Earth as she rips apart the waves on impact and dives deep to feed on anything moving.
I’m not there for this part of her life. I’d die in the chemical waters.
The beings that we ride need to sleep and mate before they feed.
I’m looking through the windshield and sitting in my chair. I can see on the overlay that a linkup is happening six miles from here.
She angles west through soft summer winds and clouds. She’s heading to that pack.
These beings meet up and extend small talons from the tips of their enormous wings. The interlock these talons and form giant islands in the skies. Fifty or sixty of them at a time.
She’ll hang onto her mates and close her eyes. During this time, mating fluids will pass between the couplings. It’s a giant orgy, to be precise, albeit one with no motion and almost entirely done while sleeping.
During this time, we riders have the chance to stand and stretch our legs. We walk across the wingspans to each other’s cockpits to chat and share stories. For some of us, it’s a chance to reunite with old lovers, catch up with stories.
We’ll set up camps on the strongest flyers and have small parties.
There are six hundred thousand of us riders. We’re linked by the windshields when we’re apart but it’s these gatherings that really define our lives.
One can never tell what people will be at a gathering, dictated as they are by the winds our flyers glide on. We count ourselves lucky if there are old friends.
One by one, the gliders will disengage and dive low to the ocean to feed. They’ll return when full, impatient to get back to flying the skies.
We get a signal when our mount’s biogram tells us that it’s time to disengage. We return to our mounts and strap in. Our mounts unhook their mating talons and we angle away, ready for another solitary chapter of gliding in the endless sky above the endless ocean.
This meetup is the first one I’ve been to in over a month and a half. My mount must be starving. From the pings I’ve receiving on my windshield, Jenna and Steve will be there. Sarah, too. She’s recent. I haven’t seen Jared in six meetups now and that makes me sad. I hope he’s there.
I can see it in the distance now, a horizon-smudge flatland in the sky where I’ll get to say hello to old friends and maybe meet some new ones.
by Duncan Shields | Nov 23, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The controls were familiar to any race that had developed mechanical means to get around on their planet’s surface.
There was an altitude stick, turning/braking pedals, a throttle plus a variety of buttons and dials to let the pilot know how the trip was going.
A year or two of study to get the math and emergency situations covered and there you go. Every single sentient race could become a pilot.
Except one.
Humans are dumb. They routinely disregarded the most important rule.
“Don’t look at the wormhole’s terminus” was written in all of the available languages, pictograms, sensefields, and soundfeeds around the edges of the front viewscreen of the ship.
That singularity that broke the back of the universe’s insistence on rational behaviour was a place where laws of physics broke down. To look at it drove any sentient mind from this universe irretrievably insane.
They went into whatever fetal, litter, or eggsac position their race was familiar with and stared, wide-eyed, for the rest of their soon-to-be-machine-assisted lives.
Every race knew. Peripheral vision was okay to a point. Look around the point, not at it. Avoid the center. Avoid the center. Avoid the center.
Humans. Sigh.
They called it curiousity. Every single human pilot that had attempted a jump had looked at the center of the singularity at some point during the jumps. The jumps are usually only a few hours long.
They’re banned from piloting now. They’re transported in rooms without windows. Universally, they’re looked down on because of this one trait.
by Duncan Shields | Nov 14, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The sentence was passed. The switch was flipped on the transporter and Caleb’s protests were cut off in mid-scream. The concrete block fused with his head.
The first transporter accident taught us a valuable lesson about the covalency bonds between atoms. We already knew that it was the strongest force in the universe. To disrupt even a few of those bonds released the power and destructive energy of an atomic bomb.
Fear made us put safeguards in place to make sure that no transporters could accidentally force two objects to try to fit into the same space at the same time. Two things the world isn’t short on, though, are crazy people and ways around safeguards.
Jackie Shaugnessy was one such crazy person. She wanted to destroy the television station where her ex-boyfriend worked. The possibility of destroying the entire city or even that side of the world was a bonus to her. She was off-balance with love grief.
She also had a degree in microcircuitry and beam theory. She worked all week to disable the safeguard programming and hardware. She was very good at it. She even changed the spatial projectors. A receiving station wouldn’t be needed. She’d just appear wherever at the co-ordinates she entered.
She would have had several patents to make her rich beyond her dreams if she hadn’t gone through with her little act of terrorism.
On Friday the 9th of December, she set the co-ordinates, stepped on to the pad and pressed her remote control. With tears in her eyes, she disappeared from her apartment on the south side of Brooklyn.
Her molecules flew through space.
And reassembled in the wall of her ex-boyfriend’s office. There was a mild jostling at an atomic level but nothing happened other than that.
Her ex-boyfriend looked up from his morning coffee to see the tips of two shoes, an arm in a pink sweater, most of a breast, and a cascade of hair protruding from his wall.
He dropped his coffee cup and shouted. He screamed louder when he recognized the sweater. When he ran over to the grisly find, he grabbed the hand that was hanging from the wall.
It grabbed him back.
There was no way to undo what she had done. That section of wall with her embedded in it is still in a sub-basement of a government facility. No part of her head is exposed so the only way to communicate with her is by touching her hand. The parts of her that are exposed get older. She can still breathe somehow. She’s kept alive intravenously.
This little accident became the basis for the Shaughnessy punishment.
Caleb Johnson was convicted of crimes against humanity two decades later and sentenced to the Shaughnessy punishment.
He hung limply between the arms of the bailiffs, his head encased in a cube of concrete for the rest of his natural life. He would be fed through an IV and kept alive at the state’s discretion.
