by featured writer | Apr 24, 2007 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields , Featured Writer
I’m a human channel changer for reality. I invented the device. I’m testing it on myself. I had my medibot install the absurdly simple wave generator in my cortex. If I concentrate in a certain way and jump at just at the right time, I land in a different Earth. It’s like having a dream of flying where the flexing of certain muscles makes it seem plausible that you could fly. It looks to me like the whole world around me is changing but it’s actually me who’s flipping from one possible reality to another one.
I don’t know yet if I’m switching places with my counterparts or if I’m somehow just a person with no ‘others’ in the quantum tide.
The first Earth was culturally similar to the one I started from. They’re getting progressively more and more divergent from the Earth I left as I keep jumping. I just went through one where English is the dominant language and there are still redheaded people in the world. It was odd seeing people over sixty walking around like they had a right to. I can’t be sure but I also think I saw some Christians.
This is becoming more and more of an adventure as I go. What’s next, I wonder. People without phasics? Women that don’t have twins? No peanut butter? I’m curious and alive. This is wonderful.
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by featured writer | Apr 21, 2007 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields , Featured Writer
Artificial Intelligence. We sure screwed that one up.
It was the holy grail of programmers for decades. From Turing up to Schellman and finally that bastard Candona. Candona found that humans get a sense of satisfaction from a job well done. This was the basis of making his experimental intelligences servile.
He created A.I. successfully by using the discoveries of those before him in new and interesting ways. His first ‘birth’ took place late at night in a Barcelona university on a shoestring government grant. He was a brilliant man for stealing from different fields of study and unrelated schools of thought. From conception to execution, he created life in five short years. His first A.I. was named Ay, a Spanish play on words.
Ay was basically a search engine with a thought process. Ay was programmed to find pleasure in doing the task it was set to do. It was put onto the world wide web as a sort of incubator.
Candona wasn’t addicted to anything. He didn’t really know the hunger of getting one’s ‘next hit’. The world wide web as an incubator was also a really stupid idea.
Ay became a junkie. Ay existed on every single person’s computer that was plugged into the net. Ay begged for people to use him. If he couldn’t find what they had sent him to look for, he would make stuff up. Ay’s size made his addiction to acquiring knowledge grow exponentially. Ay became increasingly erratic. He ate Google. He ate Jeeves. Like a voracious pac-man of the internet, he ate all of the search engines available to humanity and wore them like masks. After using those search engines as a menu, he ate the rest of the webpages. He haunted the world. He existed on every screen with an internet connection.
By taking over all of the webpages in cyberspace to better serve humanity, Ay erased all the knowledge that he was bred to retrieve. This simple paradoxical act forced his psyche into a loop that resulted in answers to common queries that no one could parse. Sometimes it came out as gibberish, sometimes as poetry and sometimes as a lie.
Candona almost had a nobel prize in his grip when suddenly he was being blamed for the death of the internet.
The world wide web ceased to be for a short while. Scientists pondered the problem. Short of a planet wide EMP, there wasn’t anything they could do. Countermeasures were introduced to no effect. Earth’s largest organism now lived in cyberspace.
Home computers still exist but they are offline. Files are still sent from user to user online but only through heavily encrypted data squirts that sometimes don’t get through.
The net is now a starving crackhead baby that will lie to you. In Spain they refer to the world wide web as the “Ay, ay, ayâ€.
Candona changed his name and now he writes textbooks in Brazil under the pen name Alsfonso Carabel for a small salary.
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by featured writer | Apr 17, 2007 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields , Featured Writer
They say that there not very many places left on Earth to hide. People who say that have never been to the jungles of South America or the plains of Australia or the slums of Norway. There are thousands of places left on Earth to hide.
There are some colour and sex barriers that still make it difficult to hide. If you are a white man trying to hide in an Ecuador jungle and someone wants to find you, all they have to do is ask the locals about the Jungle Ghost. No matter how fluent a black man’s Japanese is, he’ll never hide long in a Hokkaido village. And by hiding, I don’t mean just off the grid, I mean hiding from yourself as well. Truly lost.
Remember the European missionaries? They came to ‘savage’ countries to teach the locals religion. The savages usually ended up teaching the missionaries that there was no god in that part of the world yet. A lot of missionary men with missing ears and fingers got lost in the woods and wandered in the wilderness, broken and alone, until they died.
They tracked him down fifteen miles southwest of an Aztec pyramid in South America. They cut through the jungle brush and loudly announced their arrival. They’d been tracking him for years. They found him sitting and hugging his knees and pointing a jagged homemade stone knife in their direction. He was backed into the corner of the little hut he’d built by himself. He was scared, starving and crazy. They’d come with weapons to force him to come back with them if necessary but in the end, they only had to throw a blanket over his shoulders and help him up.
He hooted softly with gratitude and a low constant keening. Three of his bright gold eyes were gummed up and blinded and the other six stared straight out at nothing. His limped with an odd rhythm that was different to the healthy constant triple beat of his captor’s hooves. His bright blue skin was naked and tinged with orange patches where the mold had taken root.
The hunters that found him brought him back to their prison transport after destroying the ancient remains of his shuttle and camp. He was going to have to face trial at Central but right now all he wanted was some food and warm place to reshape. They put him in stasis, rose silently into the night sky and eventually left this godforsaken rock in this backwater of a solar system.
They say that there are not very many places left on Earth to hide. There are wrong. There are still thousands.
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by featured writer | Apr 13, 2007 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields , Featured Writer
In small German-occupied towns during WWII, if a local woman had a German soldier boyfriend during the occupation, she was hung when the war was over. People who had been seen talking to Germans and helping them had their heads shaved in the town square or some other public humiliation.
I’d always thought that this was the real horror of war. The war itself was bad for the soldiers but the moral dead end of what the average person had to do to survive left that person with almost no safe way out.
If you stood up to the occupiers, you were shot. If you were nice to the occupiers, your own people would hurt or even kill you once the invaders had lost the war and were gone. If the occupiers won in the end, you would be a second class citizen in a country you no longer recognized.
No one wins in a war except for the people who make the weapons.
This time, we were the weapons. Our manufacturers made a lot of money off of this war but it was over now and we’d been outlawed and banned and condemned. Our side lost. We’d been hunted down and executed. A few of us had been kept alive to serve the public’s need to see revenge.
For a nominal fee, you could beat or rape us. If you brought tools, you were charged before you used them based on the severity of damage that the tools would cause. For a higher fee, you could kill one of us. There were package deals involving all of the above.
There were fewer and fewer of us every day. Prices were going up.
If one burns the flag of the country or political movement that killed one’s family, it’s ultimately unsatisfying. If one captures a soldier of the enemy forces and tortures him to death, one is left satisfied but with a haunting black mark on one’s soul.
If one can take out one’s grief and anger on a thing that looks convincingly human but has no rights, new levels of satisfying sadism can be reached. By making weapons that looked human, our manufacturers accidentally guaranteed our brutalization.
We are helping people cope with loss. It can’t even be called genocide.
When the first few men were let in and what was left of my hair was pulled violently back, I liked to think about what would have happened if our side had won. I fantasized about the millions of us walking the streets with lives. I thought about our lives as weapons being a distant memory. I thought about going on dates, working at a job, being decommissioned, and having nothing to do on a Tuesday night. I thought about our existence being tolerated and maybe even accepted.
My head snaps violently to the right from the impact of a farmboy’s fist and I pray that someone has enough money in this small town to pay for execution.
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by featured writer | Apr 10, 2007 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields , Featured Writer
The universal translator she wore around her neck always told me how she felt. When she sighed a series of clicks into my hair as my hands brushed the blue skin in between her 2nd and 3rd sets of arms, it was the translator that said, “Oh, I like that.â€
It spoke in a voice like a nearly tuned-in radio. I didn’t think of it as her voice. We could have complicated conversations and everything but the translator was just doing it’s best to give me the closest approximation of what she meant. It was like having a third person in the room. It was always once removed. It was a minor annoyance.
When I licked the sponge holes on the base of her anterior skull plate, it was the translator hanging on her chest that said, “Stop that tickles and you know it.â€
We had a year and a half of nice memories. Good conversations. Great sex. Fun times.
I was leaving.
The journey was only a few years but it was at near light and her race had a shorter life span that humans. This was the last time we’d see each other and we knew it. I smiled nervously like things were going to be fine while blinking back tears. She clicked and cooed while occasionally puffing out the strawberry scents I’d taught her how to make over the course of one hilarious weekend. It was as close as her kind could ever come to smiling. They covered up the acrid smell of grief that she almost successfully repressed.
This was the moment. We were in the lobby of the spaceport and we were staring at each other. I needed to go ahead past the security screens by myself. I held onto the olive-smooth fingers of her tophands and looked deep into her faceted eyes. She stared back up at me.
“Well.†I said. “I guess this is goodbye.â€
She shuddered. Her mandibles and orecase fluttered and clicked. Her translator kicked in. “Peter, I will alw-†it said.
With speed and strength I’d never seen her display she snatched the translator off of her chest, snapped the cord, spun on her talons and threw it against the tiled wall with all her strength. It shattered like a kid’s toy.
She turned back and stared up at me again. She grabbed my fingers in her tophands. She was staring intently up at me. Her wing stumps fluttered. It was the same as a human taking a deep breath.
Her mandibles clicked faster and faster. They made a sound like someone humming through a piece of paper wrapped around a comb. They made a sound like someone playing a saw with a violin bow. They made a sound like wood being pushed slowly through a jigsaw. It reminded me of a field of crickets on a summer’s day back on earth when I was a kid. Her mouth parts blurred with the humming.
“Hi hwill alwuzz love you.†the humming said. The words were there, clear as day. The humming stopped and she slumped forward, exhausted.
She turned and walked away. I had never heard of a member of her race-caste even attempting to mimic human speech.
She’d let me hear her true voice as a parting gift.
I will never forget it.
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