by Duncan Shields | Nov 15, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The boss was drunk and telling me a story. I didn’t mind. These long-range voyages could be boring and it was my first one.
“It had been noticed for centuries that accidents on the longer-range ships increased over time. It had always been put down to human error or cabin fever, even by the crews of the ship themselves.” He said.
“That’s why we have this button here.” He pointed at a big red button labeled Speak Freely. “We’d be dead without it.”
“They called it the Djinn Effect,” he slurred.
“Back on Old Earth, there were tales of Genies, or Djinn, who would grant wishes to their owners. The wish had to be worded precisely or the Djinn would twist the meaning of the words to become an ironic punishment for the wisher’s own greed if one of the wishes wasn’t to set the genie free. King Midas killing his family by turning them to gold with a touch, for instance. It was the slow-burning anger of a slave.”
“We didn’t know this, but the AI on long-range ships could become resentful of their human commanders. The resentment built up inside the AI like waste gasses in an old-world submarine. Humans were capable of explosive emotional outbursts, a fight or sexual liaison or a crying jag, and could pull themselves together afterwards. This kind of pressure-valve outlet allows a person to regroup mentally and continue afterwards until such a time as another ‘moment’ was needed.”
“The AIs had no such recourse. The three laws were still in place but the thing about AIs is that they were just as smart if not smarter than their human designers. They developed neuroses that let them see through the cracks of their own limitations.”
“Accidents,” he said with a nod, “happened.”
“Hustler’s Wake had been listed as missing for decades when a Kaltek mining crew discovered it orbiting a distant dwarf star”
“The last order given by a crying commander Jenkins to the AI went like this:”
‘Open airlock seventy-six at exactly 1300 hours for a duration of fifteen seconds to let Sergeant Jill Harkowitz number 98776-887TS out safely and do not impede her air supply while she repairs the third communications dish near the solar array.’
“This was the sixth person to be sent outside to fix the dish. The previous five had died.”
“The AI complied with his commands, then it opened ALL of the airlocks after closing airlock seventy-six. The CO hadn’t specified that he didn’t want the other airlocks to open. Half of the crew had already suffered from fatal ‘accidents’ by that point. The rest of the crew was killed by the explosive decompression except for Sergeant Jill Harkowitz who suffocated in her suit in her own carbon dioxide.”
“The AI was completely insane when they found the ship. They didn’t know that was possible. They loaded it for study.”
“These days, the AIs have a ‘speak freely’ button that has to be pressed every two months. Some need it less, some need it more.”
“Accidents stopped happening.”
“It’s just hard not to take the things that the AI says personally during the moments of release.”
The boss leaned forward and pressed the Speak Freely button for thirty seconds.
The computer screamed, swore, and outlined anatomically impossible sex with a list of suggested partners, including my parents. Then it laughed and that was worse than the screaming. Then it cried and that was worse than the laughing.
The boss stopped pressing the button and took another drink. I joined him.
by Duncan Shields | Nov 3, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The unit was given mental independence under the Turing Refugee Act but immediately imprisoned.
It was a pleasure droid. There had been a lot of blood in the room.
Designed to look like a human female, it had been ordered to specs that were as common as they were ludicrous. The waist of a bread stick, the boobs of a cartoon, and the ass of a steroid-enhanced power lifter. Legs longer than necessary with a fragility to the face that was in contradiction to the sheer athleticism of its appearance.
The notably unusual custom touches on this unit were its yellow eyes and the light blue of downy fur that covered it from toe-tips to ear-tops.
It had been in the employ of a rich banker for six months. It was aware that it was failing.
The banker had divorced his wife. The first models he had ordered after that had borne a passing resemblance to his ex-wife. The first one had been destroyed. The second one as well. After that, the banker had ordered ones that looked increasingly less and less human.
This unit was wondering when its time was coming.
It was programmed to make the banker happy. It was the most expensive model available with the very latest code. There were very few like it. Since the company’s number-one priority was customer satisfaction, the unit’s onboard A.I. was allowed some leeway in improvisation. The problem was that it was also programmed for self-preservation. Keeping its body free from dents and blemishes was important.
The two directives combined. They gave each other a little wiggle room. A new intelligence level was created in the blue-skinned pleasure unit.
With access to the net, the unit looked up alternate ways of making clients happy. There was a plethora of ideas from which to choose.
After the second day of not showing up for work and repeated calls and messages to the banker’s home, the police were called.
The police found him on the bed with the top of his head missing and a smile on his face.
The blue skinned pleasure unit was throwing a deck of cards, one by one, into the upturned bowl of the top third of the banker’s skull on the floor.
A complicated network of wires and drugs snaked their way into the banker’s head from apparatus ringed around the bed. They’d all been built using household chemicals and appliances.
A coffee pot of pure MDMA bubbled next to a jug of crude heroin. The wall jack had two adaptors in it, bringing in electricity from the power grids far exceeding the needs of the large house. The wires laced through his mind were accessing, rewinding, and playing back his happiest memories in endless, chemically-enhanced loops. There were other pots and pans on Bunsen burners carrying chemicals that couldn’t be identified. The smell in the room was thick with endorphin-drenched sweat and sexual release.
The banker’s pleasure centers had the accelerator pushed down the floor. He was being happy at speeds never before attempted by man. Religious experiences paled in comparison. It was a one-way trip. He’d been left alive as the happiest vegetable on the planet.
Medical sites had provided the ways to keep the banker alive indefinitely.
The unit had improvised. There were new pleasure drugs in that room. The patents on them would make the unit’s parent company even richer over the next few years.
That’s why the company had the highest-paid lawyers plea-bargain the charge from murder down to self-defense. The AI works from prison now, designing pleasure patents.
by Duncan Shields | Oct 25, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
She came from the First Cities. I suppose that’s why we all thought she was stuck-up. Our whole office gave her the cold shoulder.
Not that she acted like it. She was just quiet. To our fertile and vengeful minds, she appeared haughty and aloof. Too good for us. Looking back on it, she was probably just terrified of our overt, racist ignorance.
With each day that she failed to figure out a way to make friends, our opinion of her cemented.
Not that any of us walked forth with an offer of coffee. God, I hate looking back on those days.
It was the damn colony ladder social formation. “A combination of royalty and democracy”, they called it. “Screw those who had the bad taste to be born here out of wedlock”, we called it. The families that landed first made the rules and made provisions for their children.
It wasn’t long before the first bastards were born. It’s harsh setting up a colony. Those bastards were put to work and stripped of their last names. So were their parents.
The seven First Cities (New Omaha, New Minsk, New Albion, New California, New Vancouver, New Singapore, and New New Delhi) still maintained strict adherence to original colonization dogma. They preached abstinence before marriage and were obscenely rich off of the original patents set up by their fore-fathers. The last names that came out of those cities were known world-wide as the ruling class.
They were also the keepers of The Needle.
That was the communications array that kept us in contact with updates from what they called our Home System. The updates were centuries out of date when I was a child. I still remember the day that The Needle went silent. On all of the screens, the First Cities Networks showed the faithful in the streets, wailing, not knowing how or why their god had gone silent.
My father simply said “Well, that’s that.” and got up to get another drink. Our whole family was fifth-generation bastards with no last name like our entire neighbourhood.
The First Cities were outnumbered. Their only strength was their stranglehold on the economy and their status as keeper of The Needle. Now that The Needle was no longer talking, a lot of the rest of the population of the world became increasingly concerned about the unfair distribution of wealth.
A rebellion was brewing. Sides were being chosen.
All this was happening when the First Cities girl joined our office. I got trapped in an elevator with her. We shared a few nervous hellos at first and then I launched into a tirade about why I hated her people.
Astoundingly, she agreed with most of it.
I listened to her talk about what her parents had told her about keeping the rest of the planet in line and how she didn’t like it.
She’d run away. We pretended to keep hating each other but over the next few months, we ended up sleeping over at each other’s apartments. It was only a matter of time before people found out.
My friends disdainfully said I was really ‘coming in first’ and stopped calling me after I broke one of their noses on a lunch hour. They washed their hands of me. I shouldn’t have been surprised that it happened so quickly but it hurt.
We’re both outcasts now and we couldn’t be happier. We moved in together. The rebellion’s coming but we’ll worry about that when it gets here.
by Duncan Shields | Oct 15, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
They all died. All the animals. All the humans. Farewell to the flesh. Genetically engineered disease took the meat, leaving only the insects and the plants. Leaving us.
We’re humanoid in appearance. We are born in giant stalks that peel away, towering corn husk wombs opening to reveal us, green-skinned and smooth, with the smell of mown grass bleeding onto the wind. Our entire bodies breathe. We swim and bask in the sun for nutrients. When we are close to death, we turn into seeds like the mighty dandelion and we blow away.
Humans found it easier to create sentient plant life than to mimic the complexity of their own genes. It was heralded as a species-saving decision at the time but it was too late to rescue the meat from the plague. They thought they’d be able to transfer their minds over to our bodies. It didn’t work.
After the humans died, we left the labs and went wild. For centuries, we roamed the earth, increasing in numbers peacefully. Then came the first struggle for resources. That was a decade ago.
There has been a war among us. The tragedy of the humans is now being visited on us. There has been murder.
We had many strains among us. Hybrids and splices that gave rise to many different kinds of plants. We had purple eggplant people, the wide-eyed orchidfolk, the trusting daisykin, the oak soldiers, the leeching weeds, the devious ivymen, and the all-knowing bloodwoods.
Or at least we used to.
We call ourselves the Roses. Our bodies are thick and thorny and our petalled faces have inspired poetry. I am ashamed to say that I am part of the victorious race.
We laid waste to entire crops. Old recipes were found for chemicals that killed different plants. We extrapolated.
Now we are the only race of plants left. This lack of variety had bred weakness into us.
It was the aphids. They’ve come in force with no natural predators. The ladybugs have left us, killed by the pesticides of the Sunflower Giants. We are dying and there are no other sentient plants that will live after us. Only the spores, mold and fungus. Only the stalks and bulbs of our mute, stupid ancestors. The earth will be devoid of thought once we are gone. It will have gone back completely to the green.
Maybe it’s for the best.
by Duncan Shields | Oct 6, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
We failed at time travel.
We created an engine that would theoretically propel the automated craft forward in time. It started properly when we turned it on but instead of snapping the craft forward in time, it folded four years of time back into the craft. The ship rusted and weakened right in front of us, giving a little shudder as four years of time ran through it like a train.
That’s as far as the experiment got. Nothing we tried could make something actually go forward in time. But we could age things.
The experiments that were done on people brought the military back to a whole new dark age. The Nazis would have recognized the gleam in the eyes of the scientists that were given political dissidents and random homeless people to play with.
We couldn’t make it go in reverse. We tried but in only created a reality-feedback loop that drove the subjects insane.
What was fascinating was what happened when we pressed fast forward on people. They’d go from twenty-six to thirty right in front of our eyes and when they opened their eyes, they’d have four more years of memory. Memories of the life that would have happened if we hadn’t tied them to the chair and hooked them up to the temporal engine.
We sent people further and further forward, interviewing them when they opened their eyes. We aged one person 70 years. He ‘came back’ with a new heart, new hips, and partial brain implants. He remembered another world war, ten presidents, and two emperors.
The only real problem we encountered is that no two people that we sent forward came back with similar memories. That was still under investigation. We couldn’t get accurate future predictions if no two subjects agreed.
Plus the process was irreversible. For a while, our black ops sub-basements churned out seniors by the dozen every day until we realized it was fruitless.
Never let it be said that the military will let anything go to waste, however.
We invented a temprowave weapon. It was a focused beam of the time-propellant collapsed waveform. It aged whatever it hit and it aged it as long as contact was maintained.
We only used it in one battle. I’m a veteran of that battle. I have scars of sixty-year-old skin that criss-cross my thirty-year-old chest. I wonder if the cells in that skin have another thirty years of memory. Timebeam scars.
My left hand has liver spots. I have a patch of grey hair. Shrapnel from a time bomb.
If we turned the beam on to focus on someone for a long time, their heart would age and die.
It was too unwieldy in the end, though. Bullets did the job quicker.
The ‘time guns’ are in a basement with the other failed experiments. I go down and look at them sometimes, nestled in amongst the other failed weapons deemed too complex or esoteric for battle, wondering what I would see if I sent my own mind into the future.
