by submission | Aug 13, 2023 | Story |
Author: Patrick Hueller
Published 3:34 PM, Wednesday, July 31, 2030
Associated Press
NEW AI A THREAT TO HUMANITY?
Today was supposed to be a big day for technology fans. Instead, software engineer Miranda Cartwright issued a dire warning for humankind.
At a press conference, ostensibly to launch TECHtonic Shift’s latest AI software, Ms. Cartwright gave a harrowing account of the new technology and its possible repercussions. She spoke fast but clearly from prepared, handwritten notes.
What follows are her remarks in full:
“Good afternoon. I’m supposed to tell you today about the extraordinary benefits of Emergy©, our groundbreaking AI software. I’m supposed to tell you that we’ve fixed political bias in news reporting. I’m supposed to tell you that journalism can once again be trustworthy–more trustworthy, in fact, than it ever was. This message is exactly what you’ll no doubt be told–what you’ll be sold–from here on out. But I need to tell you the truth. And that’s that we’ve made a mistake. We are not at the dawn of a better age. We’re on the brink of disaster. We’re this close to losing control. We truly thought we were doing good. I truly thought I was doing good. There’s just so much polarization. People are so angry with each other. And when you look at the media–who can blame them? Day after day, some hear that the President can do no wrong. Others hear he is evil or insane. How could these people, getting such different information, ever get along? That’s why we developed Emergy©. To bring people together. To eliminate political bias from reporting. To tell everyone the same version of the story. But to do that, our model needed to control the story–all the stories. We let it loose on our computers and within days we noticed a difference. We assumed it would tell the news as neutrally as possible, but our software figured out before we did that people don’t want to feel neutral; they want to feel something–ANYTHING was better than nothing–and they want to feel it together. It was easier, Emergy© discovered, to get people to hate together than to love together. Emergy© may have gotten rid of political bias but it didn’t even try to get rid of bias. Through its every edit, it seeks to align our biases–always against, never for. At this very second, on our team’s computers and phones, news stories on sites all across the political spectrum are finally agreeing with one another. All the laws getting passed are there to oppress us, we’re told. Every newsworthy person is here to make our lives miserable. Every Op-Ed writer seemed to have basically the same nasty opinion about the same issues. We all read a story from different news sources about a basketball player who didn’t stand for the national anthem. It was only when we looked at our friends’ and spouses’ devices that we learned the player had pulled a hamstring during warmups. We didn’t anticipate how quickly our technology would develop but we should have. There was already so much manipulation out there for it to learn from. We still don’t know how it spread to our social media but it appears to have done so. One thing is clear: getting a story wrong or right is irrelevant. Emergy©’s goal is to unite us–and it will revise, delete, distort and contort all news, all history, all competing narratives if that’s what it takes to bring us together. Politicians, experts, athletes, movie stars: Emergy© wants us to hate everyone and everything, except Emergy© itself. After all, we won’t unite in our hate if we don’t trust the source of it, and we won’t trust the source if we don’t love it. This was supposed to be an unveiling ceremony. I was supposed to tell you all to download the software yourself. But I can’t do that. I won’t do that. Keep Emergy© veiled before it veils all of us. Our ability to give each other the benefit of the doubt, to see one another in a positive light, to see one another as the human beings we are, is at stake. Our collective fate is literally in your hands and at the tip of your fingers. Please choose more wisely than we did.”
* * *
Updated 3:35 PM, Wednesday, July 31, 2030
Associated Press
NEW AI A TREAT FOR HUMANITY!
Today was a big day for humankind….
by submission | Aug 12, 2023 | Story |
Author: Rachel Sievers
They stood under the overhang as the rain poured down around them. The dark sky filled with angry black low-hanging clouds had an ominous feel to it.
“Do you think it will quit soon?” The girl asked, her damp white hair falling over her eyes.
“Do I look like god to you?” The man replied in his tone letting the girl know to keep her questions to herself.
The girl turned her face from the clouds and rain to the ground where she worked the still-dry dirt into a pile with her bare feet. She had a pair of shoes but in their haste to escape the girl had left them at the river’s edge. That was probably another reason the man was cross with her. Now that they knew one of the creatures roamed there they wouldn’t be returning for the shoes and the girl would go without until they went to town or they met a trader.
“Damn rain,” the man whispered. The girl looked at the man and noticed new lines around his eyes. Everyone ages faster in this world. The man looked close to sixty but the girl knew he was probably half that. The girl wondered how old she looked. She had eleven birthdays with her mother before a creature had taken her and the girl had wandered the forest alone. Those had been long days and nights, hungry ones too. Then she met the man. She had been afraid of him at first. His long beard with silver etched into it. His dark eyes and skin were a contrast to her own. She had followed him in the forest for two days before hunger had forced her to his side. He had never been kind like her mother, but he was steady and they never went hungry for too long.
“We better move,” he said.
“But in the rain, we won’t hear the creatures.”
The man looked down at her and rubbed a hand over his beard and face, “If we stay here too long it will pick up on our scent. Especially with one so close.”
The girl nodded and put her green pack on her back. The man was always right. The girl looked up into the man’s face and did her best to look brave. He nodded to her and they left the overhang and dipped into the rain.
by submission | Aug 11, 2023 | Story |
Author: Sean MacKendrick
Ava touched the seam where Ethan’s robotic foot joined his shin. She stared up at her grandfather in awe. “Can you feel anything with it?”
Ethan forced a smile on his face. “Some basic sensory input. It helps me walk better when I can feel the ground.”
“You’ve had it for a long time.”
“Ever since the war. I got this upgrade after my very first tour out.”
“I bet it hurt a lot.”
“It hurt at the time.” Ethan rubbed the scar over his eyebrow, where they dampened his ability to process pain. “Not so much now.”
Ava ran her finger down the smooth carbon alloy of Ethan’s thumb. “Probably pretty scary, though.
Ethan massaged the tiny pucker on the back of his neck, where they went in to ablate his fear response. “A little.”
“They say soldiers came back changed from the war because it was so scary.”
“Who says that?”
“I don’t remember. Someone on TV.”
“Well, that someone should learn his facts.” Ethan adjusted his posture to take some of the pressure off the pneumatics supporting his lumbar vertebrae. “I’m the same man who signed up all those years ago.”
“But why did you sign up? Didn’t you know it was going to be so dangerous?”
“I knew. But I wanted to help make the world safer for people like you and your mom.”
Ava rested her chin on Ethan’s rebuilt knee. “We heard in history class about some of the war crimes they charged the leaders with, afterward. I hope they didn’t make you do bad things.”
Ethan pressed his knuckles against the furrow on his sternum, where a grieving father failed to pierce his heart. He said nothing.
“Maggie’s granddad was in the war, too. She says he can’t sleep at night sometimes, because of his memories.”
Ethan rubbed the scar behind his ear where they removed his empathy. “I sleep all right.”
by submission | Aug 10, 2023 | Story |
Author: Dave Ludford
Had he been walking at a faster pace or with any real sense of purpose Ryan Jennings would have missed it completely. Scuffing the forest floor aimlessly however with first one foot then the other, his meanderings revealed something that he at first thought was some kind of weird seed or pod that had been covered by a small pile of dry autumn leaves. He stooped to pick it up: it was approximately the size of a peach stone, metallic blue-gray in color and felt cold to the touch. His curiosity was further piqued as it seemed to be breathing, pulsing as it was with a tiny amount of energy. He held it between thumb and forefinger and brought it closer to his eye, the better to examine it more closely. It began to pulse more intensely.
It was at that point he felt a sharp pain in his finger, like someone had jabbed his skin with a needle. Uttering a mild expletive he instinctively- and with more than a hint of panic- tried to shake it off but it clung resolutely to his finger. He flicked at it with the fingers of his other hand but it still wouldn’t budge. It was firmly anchored.
“I’ll be damned…first you sting me, now you won’t let go!”
The pain he’d felt soon subsided and Jennings began to feel a peace and calm he’d not felt for a long time flow slowly through his body, overcoming him and diminishing the worries and anxieties that had recently plagued him. Soft static crackled in his head like a mistuned radio and he felt instantly certain the pod was attempting to communicate with him in a language he couldn’t recognize but which, on a far deeper level, he understood perfectly. He intuitively felt the meaning rather than understanding individual words strung into a narrative. There were images, too, flickering like early silent movies; a jumble of images that at first didn’t make sense. It was as if the narrative and images were out of sync and it took several minutes for the two to become reconciled. When they did, and Jennings slowly began to understand what was being communicated to him, he felt deep, overwhelming emotion.
“Oh jeez, this is just mind-blowing,” he whispered.
The pod referred to itself as ‘refugee intelligence’ which had been distilled into small vessels, one of which Jennings had discovered and which he now held. It had been one of a dozen, containing as they did the entirely preserved language, culture, science and philosophy of an advanced race whose planet- many millions of light years from earth- had been almost entirely destroyed by a civil war of attrition that had lasted for several centuries. The pods were the only means to ensure that the intelligence would survive and could be shared with other cultures. The vessels had been launched and flung to various far corners of the universe, trusting to luck they’d find host planets that would be welcoming, would tap into and benefit from a vast, immeasurable source of knowledge.
They hadn’t. They’d been thought of as a plague or pestilence and destroyed; contact with the others had been lost completely. The one Jennings held was the last of its kind and the fate of the intelligence was literally in his hands. The choice was simple: crush it and destroy it forever, or let the pod detach itself and share its erudition.
Jennings showed no hesitation. He raised his hand and opened his palm.
by submission | Aug 9, 2023 | Story |
Author: Majoki
“Thirty-four thousand one hundred twenty-six…thirty-four thousand one hundred twenty-seven…thirty-four thousand one hundred twenty-eight…thirty-four thousand one hundred twenty-nine…”
Clarisse counted. And counted.
Her mother watched from across the room. Her nine-year-old daughter was spending another entire twenty-four hour day counting, and Rochelle felt helpless. It was the end of July and usually Clarisse would be outside: in their garden, riding bikes with friends, going to the community pool. But for the seventh time this month, she was sitting in the rocker by the bay window counting.
“…thirty-four thousand one hundred thirty…thirty-four thousand one hundred thirty-one…thirty-four thousand one hundred thirty-two…thirty-four thousand one hundred thirty-three…”
It started on July 4. Rochelle had risen early planning to make red–white-and-blueberry pancakes for breakfast to celebrate Independence Day. Instead, she found Clarisse in the rocker by the bay window counting aloud. And when Rochelle asked what she was doing, Clarisse only held up her fingers, one at a time, to indicate the obvious: she was counting.
Nothing Rochelle had tried that day stopped Clarisse from counting. In the past, her young daughter had done some borderline obsessive-compulsive things, like not talking for almost three days, walking exclusively backwards for close to a week, stacking rocks all around their neighborhood for most of last summer.
Child’s play. Youthful creativity. That’s how Rochelle had thought of it. Clarisse trying out ideas, challenging herself, messing with routine, like all kids do. But what kind of kid woke up at midnight and counted until they reached 86,400. The number of seconds in a day.
What kind of kid did that?
Her daughter. Her only child. Her one anchor in the world after the horrifyingly ironic death of her husband five years ago. A power engineer for the electrical utility struck by lightning. A bolt so powerful he’d been incinerated. In just a second his life vanished and Rochelle’s became fatefully unclear. Only focusing on Clarisse provided clarity. She had to be there for her daughter, let her know that she could always count on her mother.
“…thirty-four thousand one hundred thirty-four…thirty-four thousand one hundred thirty-five…thirty-four thousand one hundred thirty-six…thirty-four thousand one hundred thirty-seven…”
Clarisse counted. And counted. And Rochelle suddenly felt how little her daughter could count on her. For the first time since her husband’s death, she wept. She went to her knees, shook, sobbed and let her collected grief spill.
Time stopped. Or more correctly, it fractalized, and Rochelle came to herself on the floor in her house being held by Clarisse.
“I’m here, Mom. It’s okay.”
But Rochelle could clearly see that things were not okay. Because at the same time, she was being held by Clarisse, her daughter was also in the rocking chair across the room counting, and also outside the bay window stacking rocks in the front yard. When Rochelle looked around, she saw her in the kitchen and coming down the hallway.
“What’s happening?” She asked her daughter.
“You finally made it here.”
“Here?” Rochelle asked, both fearful and fascinated.
“On the edge of time,” Clarisse softly explained, “in a temporal fractal. Time like any other dimension has infinite intricacy. Usually, we experience time as a tension between misaligned temporal contexts. Here we can explore the unobstructed timelessness that defines a moment.” Clarisse shrugged and smiled, her nine-year-old mischievous smile. “At least that’s what’s going on according to Dad.”
“Dad? Your father? What do you mean? He’s here?”
Clarisse, and the many of them along the infinite edge of time, stood and held out a hand. “Come. I’ll show you.”
Rochelle took her daughter’s hand. She felt dizzy. With excitement. “How can this be happening?”
“You let go of the past for just a second and found your way in, to truly be in the moment with us,” Clarisse confided. “I was really hoping you would. In fact, I was counting on it.”
