by submission | Jul 28, 2016 | Story |
Author : Rick Tobin
“Get down!” Carol yanked private Pennington to the ground below low walls of disintegrating bricks. Enemy snipers pinned them.
“Sorry Captain. Just wanted a look.”
Pennington stared at his commander. The ship’s cook was learning the game. An alien shootout in a California town was new.
Carol did a team perimeter search. Six still huddled below withering attacks.
“Just stay low. I’ll call air support…” She halted. Pennington disappeared below her. He faded, peacefully, without distress. The game screen froze. Her remaining team stopped playing. There was no cry of sorrow. It was the price of losing a member in cryosleep.
The Company psychiatrists invented cryosleep mind sharing to prevent deep-space ‘cold insanity’ that was devastating a third in long suspensions; however, they misreported the powerful side effects as crews realized chamber failures during sharing.
Carol shook it off, excising her demons, but her remaining team disintegrated, one by one. Horrified, she hurried back to the commander’s control center for hibernation. Her fingers pushed through the panel. She dissipated into dull shadows.
“What…where am I?” She was confused while acclimating to new views. She was slipping gently away from the shredded star ship Clemens, wrenching in meteorite hail. The titanium hull sparked as it turned and twisted. A kilometer away, Carol watched flashes of oxygen reach the fusion drives hydrogen recyclers. Explosive light and pressure waves raced through her with no effect. There remained six rotating orbs nearby, within a larger glow, all drifting like her toward the double star in an unfamiliar system. The spheres rotated and trembled, sometimes approaching each other; other times drifting apart, displaying bright colors, and then regrouping. Carol felt their pull but could not discern how to reach them. She had no sense of her own body or any means to move. She thought about Pennington and his final, peaceful stare. Suddenly, she was next to one of the shimmering bubbles.
“Didn’t have any beliefs beyond life, did you, Carol?” She heard Pennington’s question clearly. It was disturbing. “No, don’t be afraid. We are still us, or at least a core of us, whatever that is. Is this my soul? Maybe we are ghosts, but we exist, even if our bodies didn’t make it home.”
“So this is it? We just drift out here, in a vacuum, forever, with no purpose? I’d rather have pure darkness. Where is all this extra light originating?” Carol felt anger replacing her fear. “This is the hell idiots believe in. This is the ultimate punishment. We’ll never see Earth again.”
“No, Carol.” A deep voice, resonant, sweet and overpowering entered her. “We are here. Our joy is your return to the colony of souls, as we exist to assist all life traveling throughout this solar system. We collect the disembodied spirits of consciousness and then reunite them with the all knowing and all loving.”
“Pennington, did you hear that?” Carol saw the other globes about her glide behind her toward a fuzzy, lustrous patch of light. It was a comet hurtling past them to the twin stars.
“I hear it, Carol, and see the beautiful gathering on its surface?”
“Every system works the same,” continued the gentle voice. “Every star is connected in the web of creation. Listen to others sing of their returning.” Carol heard soothing choruses of a million life forms she now gathered with for her soul’s continuing evolution.
“You will enter the star incubator, returning to your system of origin through the multiverse threadways. We, the shining ones, are collectors— guides. We retrieve consciousness back to source creators of every system. Welcome home.”
by submission | Jul 27, 2016 | Story |
Author : Arthur Carey
Sacagawea stepped off the damaged recharging grid. Battery life registered in the “failure imminent” range. Within hours, the robot would become an immobile piece of junk in a deserted space station pummeled by raging solar winds and debris.
The scientific team studying the impending death of Copernic 362, a dwarf star of 7.7 magnitude, had left hastily in an escape pod. It was their second forced evacuation after a violent flare-up on the dying star’s surface.
Sacagawea discovered Commander Mary Callis was no longer on the communications link. Nor were her four male subordinates, Slim, Roofie, Jones, and Rako.
Initially wary of serving under a woman, the men had come to like and trust Callis. She joined in the raucous camaraderie of poker games, winning without boasting and losing without complaint. On birthdays, she “discovered” hidden flasks of joy juice and whipped up cakes from limited meal resources.
When her own birthday came, the men surprised their commander with a pseudo female companion—the ship’s made-over general utility robot. They attached black plastic eyelashes above the robot’s view slits and painted the toes of its magnetic boots red, giving it a crude female appearance if not personality.
The robot was an AI model enhanced to perform tedious data analysis. Before the transformation, the crew had referred to it simply as “the bot.” But Callis renamed it Sacagawea after a famous Indian guide in the time long ago. She downloaded data files of women’s history, lifestyles, and preferences into the robot’s memory banks and addressed it as if it were a real person.
The robot reviewed its final instructions from Callis: “Saci, we’re leaving, at least for now. We’ll try to record some of what happens from a safe distance. Try to patch any oxygen leaks. Oh…and sprinkle the garden with whatever liquid nutrient is left in the distiller. If the explosion is another false alarm, we’ll be back within days.”
But the explosion hadn’t been a false alarm, only the prelude to a series of internal blasts that tore Copernic 362 apart.
The station’s lights flickered and died, leaving the interior lit only by sparks from fried electronics equipment and lights flashing beyond the viewports.
Sacagawea switched on a headlamp and waded through strewn laboratory records, broken furniture, and discarded clothing to the attached bubble that housed the bio-regenerative hydroponic system.
Four plastic troughs bristled with greenery. The plastic drip system lay in tatters, LEDs shattered. The robot drained the last of the nutrient from a recycling tank and sprinkled it over the three troughs containing carrots, potatoes, and red lettuce.
Sacagawea pulled two scraggly plants from the fourth trough. Wilted blossoms drooped from sharp-spiked branches. The robot scanned the objects. Classification: Genus, Rosa; Family, Rosaceae; Pigmentation: Crimson; Essence: Tea; Viability: Moribund.
The robot dropped the plants and prepared to grind them underfoot. Unlike vegetables that sustained human life, flowers weren’t eaten. Therefore, they had no function. Without function, there was no justification for their consumption of oxygen, water, and light.
As Sacagawea raised a metal boot, a microcontroller running at 80 MHz and performing 100 million operations per second activated. A visual and aromatic simulation of red, white, and yellow blossoms bobbing gently in the breeze beneath an azure sky flooded the memory nodes of the robot. Sacagawea paused to consider an unfamiliar concept.
What was regret?
by submission | Jul 24, 2016 | Story |
Author : Hasen Hull
“Rise and shine, sleepyhead.”
He groans, as if forced to life.
“It’s eleven and we’ve got things to do. Come on. Get up.”
“Ten more minutes, baby, alright?”
I smile. “Five, and that’s my final offer.”
There were protests at first. Human rights activists calling for bans, sanctions, restrictions. Jason once told me about a group of people called ‘tree huggers.’ People who claimed they cared for the environment so much they clung to trees to stop them being cut down. Jason and I agreed that these activists went the way of the tree huggers.
“You ever get sick of this place?” he asks.
“What do you mean?”
“You know. Tired. Trapped.”
“No. Not really. I like it here.”
“So you’d never think about leaving?”
I consider this. “Maybe. But where would we go?”
“Anywhere.” He stretches his arms out wide. “The sky’s the limit.”
Beyond that, there was little opposition. With safeguards in place, governments were unconcerned. The market was ready for it, and when the first celebrities came out in support, so was the public. It was a natural progression, and the counterargument quickly fell out of fashion.
“And Brad’s coming over?”
“Brad and Naomi, yes.”
“Ooo-la-la.”
I shoot him a look, before breaking into a laugh.
New Horizons was founded in 2048 by a wealthy businesswoman named Samantha Doeer, and it marked the future of humanoid technology. Operating under the slogan The Sky’s the Limit, then Serving Humanity, it reinvested the enormous capital gained from first-generation humanoids – already of adequate complexity to carry out a multitude of interpersonal tasks with lifelike accuracy – in order to establish the foundation of its future operations. Within a decade, ten base models became one hundred and twenty, followed by custom-made options to almost any specification.
“Absolutely not. Impossible.”
“Oh, you keep telling yourself that.”
“I will, because it’s true,” he says, grinning teasingly, goofily, both.
“One of the first things you said to me was you couldn’t even do stick figures. Now you’re telling me you’re the better artist?”
“What can I say? I learned from the best, surpassed my master, all that.” He points to the twin WaterScape frames propped against a wall, not yet installed. “Look. Just look.”
“Yours is good.” A deliberate pause. “But mine’s better.”
There are still activists, and now they protest not ‘the devaluation of human relations,’ but for the right for humanoids to be recognised and treated the same as humans. Great strides have been made towards this, facilitated by how difficult it has become to tell human and humanoid apart, but activists are pushing for legislation that allows humanoids to erase the knowledge that they are created, not born. As part of regulated trial tests, some humanoids already have this characteristic.
“Alright, alright, we’ll go out-”
“Like you said we would.”
“-like I said we would, and then we’ll come back, and then Brad and Naomi. Okay?”
“Ooo-la-la,” I say.
I see it on holoscreen, and feel it on the streets. A sense of community and meaning. A sense of belonging. Sometimes Jason reads out passages he likes on his reader, from stories written over a hundred years ago. Between people, there is always a struggle, cold and bitter, an endless stream of loneliness and wasted life. Not like this. Deep down, I know that this is it: this is what I’ve always wanted.
“But can you tell?”
I tilt my head. “Tell what?”
He smiles. “How beautiful you are.”
by submission | Jul 23, 2016 | Story |
Author : Travis Gregg
The two men sat in silence across from each other in their usual booth at the diner. Thomas was brooding, clearly upset about something and Stan had known him long enough to just let him stew. The two men had been friends since college and still tried to get together semi regularly despite jobs and wives and kids. Although nearly the same age, Thomas looked noticeably older. His hair was mostly gray and his shoulders sagged significantly.
“I always had a fantasy,” Thomas started, breaking the silence, “or at least a day dream I would indulge in, where I had a couple more copies of myself. Imagine the productivity, the things at work I could get done. I used to really enjoy owning a small business, but more times than I can count I have wished for a couple copies of myself. No more calling in sick for bullshit reasons, no more saying the wrong thing at the wrong time in front of the customer. With at least a couple more copies of myself things would really get done.”
Stan knew where Thomas was going with this. He’d heard bits and pieces from mutual friends but hadn’t gotten the full story.
Thomas continued, more talking to himself than anything. “When I saw the advertisement, the one that everyone saw, the one where you could get yourself or a loved one cloned, I knew it was for me. The company that was making the clones had never had a request for a 32 year old clone. Most of the time people wanted kids who couldn’t have them. Maybe an accident happened and they’d want someone a little older. The company had also never had an order for eight. I had to negotiate for weeks but a couple months later they showed up. I was only going to get two at first but why not go big. Got a quantity discount too.”
“The day the clones showed up I fired my entire staff. Every role, the warehouse guys, the accountant, the two sales guys. Everyone. Didn’t need them, I already knew how to do their jobs, and if I knew then my clones would too. For the first couple hours it was kind of awkward but we all got over it pretty quick. They were me after all, and then we got to work.”
“That seems pretty extreme. Some of those guys worked for you from the beginning,” Stan replied.
“The first month was the best we ever had,” Thomas continued, as if he hadn’t heard Stan. “Sales were up, complaints were down, and I didn’t have to worry about someone screwing up. A couple mistakes were made but I literally couldn’t have done any better personally so I couldn’t get too upset.”
“After that first month though, things slowed down a bit. A little less enthusiasm in the office, especially form the warehouse guys, was the start of it. We all agreed to shuffle the roles a bit. Obviously some positions were better than others and we were all capable. Spread it around a little bit.”
“A couple months after that, clones Four and Five started embezzling and clone Two stopped coming in entirely. Could I fire myself? That’s a pretty complicated question it turns out.”
“Six months after my brilliant idea we had a literal coup and for a time I was ousted. I got Six and Seven on my side, convinced Two to come back, and Three after some tense negotiations to form a majority but it’s tenuous at best. The next step is going to be litigation for sure and I’ll be suing myself for the next couple years if I’m lucky.”
“It turns out I make a terrible employee, in fact I’m the worst employee I’ve ever had.”
by submission | Jul 22, 2016 | Story |
Author : Matthew Prosperi
The glowing keys of the command console reflected lazily off of my “Best Team Player!” mug that sat dangerously close to the expensive equipment in front of me. I considered knocking the mug over longer than usual before glancing outside my small observation window into the hub of activity on the factory floor below.
Mr. Rockwell, the head of the labor union placed me here after the accident, and here I stay. Condemned for the foreseeable future keying pre ordained commands into a computer. I returned my gaze back to my mechanic partner with a sigh, and noticed a red light flickering on and off. I stared in shocked silence for several moments until a voice from orientation ran through my head;
“If that red light ever goes off: call administration immediately.”
I picked up the phone, which led upstairs to administration as I turned around to face the manufacturing floor. The units were being shuffled along like they had every day since I started, and nothing seemed to be amiss. Their human faces always made me uncomfortable. They looked less human and more…dead.
I kept scanning the room while waiting for the phone connection to reach my superiors until I saw the error. A unit was standing off the supply line and facing away from me.
Someone must have moved it. The machines were programmed to be service units. They have no ability to act on their own. As if in response to my thought, the machine in question began to move. I then realized the machine was holding a tablet. Finally, the other line answered as I hurriedly tried to explain the situation;
“A unit is operating on its own, please advise.”
The voice on the other line sounded confused and replied; “Please repeat, a unit in manufacturing is acting on its own?”
Frustration gripped me as I responded, “YES! PLEASE ADVISE.”
Feedback began to override what the voice was saying before the line went dead. I stared at the useless phone and then diverted my glance outside as I remembered the immediate threat. The machine was interacting with the tablet and seemed to be proficient in its use.
I quickly began putting the emergency codes in action, which locks the manufacturing area and prevents anything from getting in or out. The doors were locked and the manufacturing stopped.
A sigh of relief escaped me and I looked at the unit curiously…and it looked back. We made eye contact for several moments until it turned back to the tablet. I stifled my worries because I knew that with the emergency protocols in place, nothing could leave the factory floor.
I almost didn’t notice my right arm until it was already putting commands into my console. I stared in shock as my arm was operating autonomously. I grabbed it with my other arm and swept it off the console. But it immediately began typing into the computer again, inhumanly fast. I stared in horror while the possibility of remotely hacking cybernetic prosthetics was suddenly introduced to me in the most terrifying of ways. I quickly diverted my attention to preventing myself from allowing the rogue unit from escaping the floor but it was too late.
The emergency protocols were lifted and the factory doors began to open as I looked on helplessly. The machine then strolled into the control room until it stopped in front of me, looked up, and smiled.
