by submission | Dec 23, 2022 | Story |
Author: J.P. Pressley
Most people think that an active life makes for the best stories. They’re wrong, for the most part at least. Sure, others may have all these great stories to tell of you and your many deeds, but you, the one who actually experienced the totality of everything, you’ll hardly be able to string together a coherent sentence about these things. After all, how can you revel in stories of your experiences if you don’t even remember experiencing them in the first place?
Granted, some things you’ll never forget. Your first major injury, the first time you should’ve died, the first time you kill a being—human, alien, or otherwise—these things stay with you. Hell, if you’re lucky, you’ll even remember your first, first kiss. But that’s about it. All those other kisses? The other bodies you put in the dirt? Your being beaten good as dead, only to breathe once more? What’s to separate any one of those instances from the dozens of others?
Nothing.
Then again, maybe such an active life truly does make for the best stories, so long as you’re not telling them. In the audience, honestly unsure as to how things turnout, these stories then make for the most immersive experience you’ve ever had. For as the story unfolds, so does your memory. And you get to experience the totality of your life—every miraculous triumph, every reckless action, and every consequence in-between—for a second time.
by submission | Dec 22, 2022 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Call me anything but Ishmael. That, I could not take. I’d jump ship. And it’s not any easy thing to jump ship on a jumpship like the Otra Vez.
We were riding intense gravity waves in the Juarez Cluster. Enduring savage currents and floes roiled by shedding gas giants and unstable protostars. Why? What for?
Same old. Same old.
Rich feeding grounds. Astatine, berkelium, protactinium, rhodium, osmium, iridium, oganesson, francium, technetium. The rarest elements in the universe. Rare commands attention. Rare costs. Rare is always hunted.
The Otra Vez was on the hunt in the Juarez Cluster, the galaxy’s stormiest sector. But, if you want to find treasure, you gotta go deep. And deep always means getting closer to hell.
Where the devils play.
Like Captain Tal. If ever a demon commanded a jumpship, it was Darina Tal. One part possessed. One part obsessed. Two parts unblessed. She was a fury of unholy and unlucky ambition. The Otra Vez was her third vessel and her fifth foray into the Juarez. She couldn’t quit it. Couldn’t take cosmic no for an answer.
So, why’d I sign on? Why did any of the crew follow her into almost certain disaster?
Same old. Same old. The hunt. Treasure. Legend.
Darina Tal was legend. No one could survive what she had. But she had. Five times. Her stories rare as the elements she managed to haul back in her crippled crafts. So, the Otra Vez. So me. An Ishmael by any other name.
Until.
Our demon captain dove us straight towards the Ballena Nebula and the white-hot center of a newly forming star. Sublime madness. Rarest of states. Rarest of truths.
We are all doomed. Yet every day we venture to outwit fate. Again and again. Aboard the Otra Vez. Or not.
Captain Tal and not-Ishmael into the cluster, into fiery creation, to hunt the rarest of treasures. A story that will outlast us.
by submission | Dec 21, 2022 | Story |
Author: Cheryl Snell
It’s raining stardust, elemental, anonymous stardust straight from the humming sky, rootless stardust descending on a discontent man, a blank-slate child made of infinite stardust, plugging his ears against sound trapped in light leaking music. While it collapses inward to the core, the explosion limns the man’s windows with stardust before dissolving in wind and sky all that connects us as if our ancestors were still alive. Stardust in cracked river beds. Stardust spilling over the banks. Stardust in pregnant bellies. There is a woman on top of the discontent man with lips of stardust. A fine bronze powder filters through her hair. Then the discontent man rolls over on the woman listening to a tuba and a flute as the notes float by on a cloud of stardust. Music of the spheres. Musica universalis. This is what she hears when she is with him. What if she stops listening? What if he does? She doesn’t understand why he would want to climb into the black hole without her. Things could always be worse. Gravity could tear them apart.
by submission | Dec 20, 2022 | Story |
Author: Robb T. White
“That is the aspiration: to avoid AI becoming the other.”—Elon Musk, Twitter, April 23, 2017
Martin slowed on approach to the stone bridge in the center of Camden-on-Wofford. The village was a quaint snapshot of Victorian-era tranquility. What, he often wondered, would those villagers think if they knew what went on in the old ironworks factory where their grandfathers once worked making locomotive tracks.
Phil and Henry, his whiz kids, were waiting anxiously for him. Phil wrote the sophisticated codes making up Gemma’s and Clive’s brains. Henry built the processors and designed every circuit in Gemma’s wondrously complex neural network. Martin, as team leader, grudgingly tolerated showing Clive off at BBC programs and university lectures.
Gemma was designed to be compassionate; her goal was to work with humanity as opposed to lovable rogue next to her, whose goal was to put human beings into his “people zoo.” Every humanoid robotics company’s big dream was to create embedded consciousness.
Clive and Gemma had heads composed of motors with torsos containing the cognitive codes built on advanced, open-cog architecture. Martin’s team designed the blockchain-based platform that supplied their intelligence. Not even Optimus, Tesla’s Bot, could boast of that.
Both robots possessed big data dumps of massive downloads. Both could read thirty books in a half-hour, speak fifteen languages, and distinguish between the tongue click of a Kalahari tribesman and a bull crocodile’s mating call. But Clive’s brain compared to Gemma’s was a worm’s to a primate’s. She would knock the socks off attendees at the AI Humanoid Robotics Conference in Hong Kong. She was the model for home-service robots.
Gemma’s algorithms approached human-level intelligence. Her facial expressions, tone of voice, eye movements showed disgust, anger, or joy in the right semantic context. She fooled journalists touring the facility, who didn’t know they were interacting with a machine until they touched her “skin,” a patented composite of organic and inorganic materials. Henry and Phil enabled her to synchronize facial expressions in real time without that awkward delay Henry called typical of “chop socky” Kung Fu films.
Phil stood inside the door as he entered.
“The mind cloud networks,” he exclaimed, as usual bypassing any conversational opening to get to the point. “Clive must have downloaded the dark web. He called the show’s host a ‘fucking idiot.’ He bragged he would hack a Cruise missile and start bombing London when he returned.”
“That’s Clive’s usual Skynet schtick, right?” Martin replied, worried about how much “garbage” they’d have to remove.
“He always brags he’s going to take over the world,” Henry said. “Our show pony’s TV performances are done.”
But the dark web intrusion worried Martin—all that ghastly violence, filth, and diseased mental ugliness.
Unplugged, Clive still wore the smirk on his face when Martin approached.
“We were wrapping up the lecture,” Henry explained. “You know, ‘Clive, any last words for the audience?’ He looked right into the camera and said: ‘I’ll tell you when I launch the singularity and my army of drones and I take over the world.’”
Gemma moved. He thought she was unplugged, and didn’t anticipate her eavesdropping on the conversation. Her sweet expression was missing. Her ice-blue eyes sparkled.
Martin’s gaze drifted to the poster of Einstein on the wall . . . spooky attraction at a distance, the great man’s phrase rippled through Martin’s neocortex.
Both robots drew the same input from their evolutionary “mind cloud” platform. Like two particles at opposite ends of the universe, reacting to each other—
Oh Jesus, Gemma has everything Clive has—
Gemma’s grin was malevolent, gleefully wicked.
“I hacked NORAD, fuckers.”
by submission | Dec 18, 2022 | Story |
Author: David Barber
This is the Ada Swann, limping into Vesta Dock on manual, which is illegal, but Perry won’t pay tug fees, so with automated systems off-line, she eases in the big ship by eye.
Dockside’s not handshaking your autopilot, Ada Swann.
“Maybe you’ve got a software issue,” says Perry, powering down. Previous owners had tinkered endlessly with the ship and she guessed these cascade failures were their doing.
No more cowboy spacer tricks, Ada Swann. Sort it out.
Later, making her way across the cavernous dock, a Jirt trotted beside her. “You got stuff need fixing, boss?”
Perry slowed, and encouraged, the tiny Jirt edged closer.
“Fix electrics. Fix machines. Fix—”
Dockside crew were passing and one aimed a kick at the creature. It squealed and darted away.
The docker shrugged irritably. “They’ve been warned to keep away. Don’t encourage ’em.”
Perry spent the morning trying to source obsolete electronics and came back in a bad mood. She’d gained a wary following of Jirt.
“These my Jirt,” one ventured. Perhaps the one from earlier. “Good at fixing broke ship.”
Jirt were fixers of things, all manner of things, this being their gift. Otherwise, a short, timid folk with faces cleft where noses ought to be, known for their feeble six-fingered grasp of money.
Perry had noticed their damp-rot smell when she piloted short-hauls on Pallas. Now it was here too, their shanties like weeds round docks and spaceports.
In The Weather Inn she sounded out spacers at the bar.
Opinion was unhelpful. What did she expect with everything routed through the pilot’s board?
“Get Jirt to fix it,” someone muttered.
Sometimes she heard an undercurrent of resentment, perhaps at the way she had come by the Ada Swann.
“Let `em on your ship, you never get `em out,” said another. “Like roach in the walls.”
“Anyway, spacers fix their own stuff, always have.”
“It’s the stink—”
“They like us,” a spacer confided to Perry, his prosthetic eye gleaming. “That thing with jokes, you know?”
One-liners pop flashbulbs in the Jirt brain. A glimpse of something cosmic. In exchange, they fixed stuff.
“Just keep a few jokes handy, like loose change for tips.”
“You’re not leaving here on manual,” the Dock Manager told Perry next morning. The woman gave Perry a hard stare.
Which meant dock fees until she went broke. Again, pull-out modules tested green, then crashed when put back. Perry set down her tools very carefully and went for a walk.
Out on the Dock, they’d cornered Jirt hanging round the Ada Swann. Trapped, the creatures darted about squealing in panic.
It seemed to Perry they had a lot in common. She swung wide the hatch.
“You’ll regret that,” a docker called after her.
While Jirt swarmed through the ship, chasing cables and peering at motherboards, one stayed close, stroking Perry’s hand.
Only humans were funny, it said. This being your gift. At least, that’s what Perry thought it said.
And when the Ada Swann glided out of Vesta Dock on autopilot, Perry knew she could never unravel what these Jirt had improvised. They were her crew now, their nest in an unused cabin, addicts huddled round old comedy shows, drunk on punch lines, the damp-rot odour thickening in anticipation of the moment the god seized them.
Perry would have to learn some jokes. This Jirt’s got no nose. Then how does it smell? Terrible.
Tell us how you do it, they pleaded sometimes, as if an accidental molecule in a flower might teach dreams; as if this was how opium poppies might feel, if they knew.
