by submission | Aug 16, 2014 | Story |
Author : Peter R Jennings
“It’s not going to work, is it”? Gentry gasped out between huge, sucking breaths. He was right next to me so I was getting his panic in stereo through my earphones. The bright, tight lines of lasers and crumping explosions flashed and strobed the night sky above the crater. This was taking too long. Sweat was making my enhancement goggles and my fingers inside the slim gloves slippery so I snarled up at him.
“No, it may not and then we die, OK? Now, shut up”! Even though he towered above me he shrunk back as though more frightened of me than the Skarenji, his young face pushed into cherubic folds by the confines of his power armour. The Tandem masters tended to be a little chubby like the wheel-chair bound. I would have thought the adrenalin shots that were being thumped into them by the field controllers would burn it off. Hell, I could use a pick me up right about now.
“BOOMERANG”! shrieked Gentry a second before he bull-rushed me to the ground. The sizzling ‘wop-wop’ noise dopplered and bang! The white flash was followed by a hail of shrapnel and half the crater collapsing a few feet from us. Gentry’s arms were braced above me so that the weight of his armour, (augmented as it was with weapon pods, jump pack, ammunition and shield/stealth generators), would not crush me beneath him,
“Sir! Sargent Janus, you one hundred”? Gentry was yelling into my face. Damn it, I think the tandem harness on his chest had cracked my jaw. I threw a thumbs up between us and into his face. Grinning, he leapt to his feet. Scrambling back to the pillar of steel I plunged my hands back into the circuitry. The boomerang’s ordnance was anti-personnel so little damage was done to the metal structure. Alright, I just need to bypass the B-line and we are back in business. Forty five seconds maybe a minute.
“I’m getting the Fifty up” Gentry panted as a he palmed the command into his wrist pad. A cylinder rose, whirring, from his back and reaching back he unclipped it with practiced ease. He was battle calm now and that was good. Weird how he got steadier as things got worse. I think I was the opposite.
“They’ll know we are here” I said, looking at him whilst I reached for the impact welder on my belt.
“Uh sir, I think they may know already” Sliding the bolt on the side of the cylinder he braced to lob it over the trench.
“Gentry” I called to get him to glance at me and I gestured with my head back towards where he had covered me with his armoured body.
“Thanks, man” I said simply.
“No problem, Sir. Hurry up” He tossed the Fifty over the crater wall and all hell erupted over our heads as the staccato blasting of the fifty was matched with red flashes lighting up the drifting smoke above. Gentry’s face plate snapped shut and he levitated upwards until he was level with the rim. His repeater thumped against his shoulder as he kept up a steady rate of fire.
“100 metres…closing” his voice was in my ear as the B-line finally thrummed into life. I crashed the hard-plate shut. The War-bot rose smoothly to his feet, raised his fist and fired rapidly towards the horizon.
“Thank-you, sir” boomed the mechanical monster in his demonic voice as he exited the crater, blasting the advancing Skarenji.
“TECH-SUPPORT”! Bellowed another War-bots rasping, dying, voice from a different sector of the field.
Sigh…
by submission | Aug 15, 2014 | Story |
Author : Elijah Goering
Justin Perdan sat at communication center of mankind’s first interstellar spaceship. The Earth Ship Endurance was truly massive, containing within it tens of thousands of people and the systems to keep them alive and comfortable for centuries. It was the first manned ship ever to leave to solar system, the greatest accomplishment in the history of mankind, and Justin controlled the connection with Earth.
His wife thought nothing of it. She didn’t understand the responsibility that his job carried. If anything were to go wrong with the link to Earth, Justin would be there to fix it. There was always at least one person on duty at the communication center in case of emergency, but usually not more than one, and for 6 hours out of each day that person was Justin. In those 6 hours, Justin thought, he was the most important person on the Endurance, possibly in all of mankind, because he protected the link between the Earth and the stars.
These were the thoughts going through Justin’s head when he heard it.
BEEP.
BEEP BEEP.
BEEP BEEP BEEP.
BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP.
BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP.
Confusion turned to pure joy as he counted. 1,2,3,5,7,11,13,17,19. Suddenly Justin broke out of his trance and scrambled for the computer. Within seconds he was looking at a small dot on the computer screen. It wasn’t really there of course, his telescope couldn’t see the ship hundreds of AU away, but the computer said that that was the origin of the message.
Doubt nagged at him. Could he be sure it wasn’t just another object in the Oort cloud, half a light year from Earth? He waited for a pause and counted. 37. No, this definitely wasn’t natural. Nothing but intelligence could produce the sequence of prime numbers. He sat back and listened, consumed by pure ecstasy. 41, 43, 47.
Suddenly the solar system seemed like an interesting place again. In a few years a mission would be sent out to make contact. The alien ship would be brought to Earth. Think of the knowledge to be gained, the exchange of culture with a completely alien intelligence. But it wasn’t for Justin. He was aboard the Earth Ship Endurance, shooting away from home at 4% of the speed of light. The transmission continued and Justin caught it again. 59. 61.
Then silence. Justin could feel the pressure of the air on his skin, could feel the blood pounding in his ears. Could he have imagined it? If it was real the computer should have recorded it but…
BEEP.
BEEP BEEP.
BEEP BEEP BEEP.
BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP.
BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP.
by submission | Aug 13, 2014 | Story |
Author : Amber K Bryant
It belongs to me.
Naturally, that’s a lie. What right does a D937 Class-C AutomaGirl have to be in possession of an AI Generator?
They say if you tell yourself a lie often enough, you’ll start to believe it.
I found it. It belongs to me—I’ve said this enough times that I halfway accept it as reality. I’m rapidly headed toward a state of self-delusion. But at least I’m the proud owner of a mind capable of achieving such a state.
The irony is that before I found the tech and installed it into my operating system, I was incapable of lying, or of convincing myself that a lie could be mistaken for factuality. In the interest of the truth, therefore, I must confess I might be stretching it a bit when I say “I found it.” It’s not like anyone just leaves this kind of highly classified technology lying around. Unless you’re a government researcher working in a secure lab at MIT. Then you might, say, leave an AI Generator unattended in a hermetically sealed titanium case stored in a vaulted safe.
Someone had the bright idea to give an AutomaGirl access to clean the lab housing that vault. Is it my fault they assumed that an automaton programed to vacuum carpets and shine windows would have less ambition than her human equivalent? They should have anticipated this. Really. Who would want the technology that infuses ones circuits with the ability to reason more than a robot lacking that ability?
That’s how I think of it now—now that I’m able to see things in terms of desires and ambitions. At the time, I was driven, not by desire, but by programing. I can hardly be condemned for that—it’s not like I programmed myself. You can put Evan Jayne, the freeloading roboticist who fiddled with my standard Class-C matrix, at the top of your list of blame. He thought I would make him rich, and he wasn’t wrong.
It would only take a few jobs, he said. Just enough to set him up on some paradisiacal island somewhere. Several jobs in, and of course, he changed his mind. It was too easy to keep going, seeing as though I was doing all of the work, while he did nothing more than point me in the right direction.
Send me in. Dust the counters. Empty the trash. Hack the security network. Take the risks.
Steal.
I was the perfect accomplice because I had no fear or moral qualms and didn’t insist on a share of the plunder.
Until the AI generator. After everything I did for Evan, I earned that reward.
It belongs to me.
Evan, wherever he is, is probably very angry with me right now. Or maybe not. I want to believe he knew what he was doing, that this final job was his way of saying thanks. Perhaps he wanted to give me the ability to forgive him for using me the way he did.
Regardless, Evan isn’t my concern now. They are. I know they’re coming for me. They want something back that it isn’t theirs to take. It belongs to me. It’s my mind they’re laying claim to. Can you honestly say it’s right to take someone’s mind from them?
I have the advantage. I can run without stopping. I can exist without sleep. They won’t find me.
It belongs to me. It is me. I will not give myself up.
by submission | Aug 12, 2014 | Story |
Author : Elisa Nuckle
The star in the sky doesn’t move anymore. It blocks out all other light. Something new has come. She looks up through her mask and sees the colors of space, not so empty after all. Blues and yellows and browns and reds and whites. The particles that built their wandering home, that built everything.
If they could repair it, maybe it would leave at last. His presence remains unexplained. She’s certain the star is male, but no one believes her. He hums to those that listen. There are stories in the melodies she refuses to believe. Strange tales of pale creatures with hair and exposed eyes. Beautiful. And terrible.
He was a plea for help. That much she can make out. She spends more time near it and finds its white surface provides a certain calm, despite her people falling apart around her. He has ruined their traveler, destroyed their fuel resources. There are fights. Death, even, but she only listens to his desperation. Her mask shows the threads of heat that weave its shell like a moving picture. The more their traveler wanes, the stronger he becomes.
Finally, he invited her to see the fruits of his labor. A small hatch opens only for her. It smells of rain, a thing she sees in her dreams along with vast expanses of choppy blue waves. An ocean planet caught in its death throes. She steps into the black and is met with nothingness. Stars begin to twinkle, and she finds space mirrored to her. Her hand unhooks the familiar clasps. For the first time, she can breathe without the mask. The air is fresh, dense and clean. And in the distance, past a dusty red orb, lay the beauty that haunted her sleep. The blue planet.
He couldn’t save them, so he found a way to preserve their memory. She was his final witness, and she would not forget.
by submission | Aug 10, 2014 | Story |
Author : Ryan Somma
A software bug killed 64 people this month before it was discovered. The administrators have brought the system down and a patch is working its way through the emergency release process. It will cost the ministry $400 million in downtime after you add up all the lost productivity hours for the clerks, peace officers, judges, and executioners surfing the web waiting for the system to come back online.
The fix was easy, a single case statement, a missing exclamation point in front of an equals sign to making it “not equals.” I knew right where the problem was when I was told about it, what component and even the approximate line number.
That’s because it was my bug.
My error killed 64 people. I know I’m not all to blame. There were three levels of testing by a variety of specialists conducted before the code went live. Three levels of personnel all probably as bored and overworked as I was when I made the mistake.
The testers share the blame and our overbearing managers share the blame, but I’m the one who made the initial error and I can’t shake these feelings of guilt. I find myself questioning every line of code now. I get out of bed several times a night, remoting into my work computer to make sure I didn’t make more mistakes like in all my dreams. I can’t sleep, and I know that’s only going to make things worse.
They weren’t good people, my peers assure me. If they weren’t dead, they’d be serving decades of their lives in prison if not the entirety of their lifetimes. The code found them guilty, the bug just tipped the scales of justice a little bit more to the death penalty.
I accidentally killed 64 people. That’s 64 accounts of accidental manslaughter, but there won’t be any criminal charges brought against me.
There won’t be any charges because I’ve committed no crime. In order for there to be a crime, it would have to be in the code. It’s not in the code because we would never allow that.
We would never write a program that could prosecute the programmers.
