by submission | Jul 30, 2014 | Story |
Author : S. P. Mahoney
There is an utterly absurd amount of mineral wealth sitting in Sol’s asteroid belt. Was. Whatever. A nickel-iron asteroid of middling size contains enough mineral wealth to choke a multinational, if you were to bring it back to Earth. Not to mention so expensive that none of those aforementioned multinationals, much less the national governments, could look more than five years down the line and see the advantages in building a civilization out there.
It was almost a relief when the message came in from the Great Beyond: “Hello, we’re aliens, and we need half of your asteroid belt. You can’t do anything about this, however, we are going to pay you for it. The down payment is in FTL drives, of which we will be giving at least one to every regional power on Earth.” That’s paraphrased, but basically the jist of it.
They were pretty clever, those aliens (we never learned their name for themselves). They figured we’d be out of commission, squabbling, for long enough. They’d looked us over and decided that, yup, those Humans have a real talent for tribalizing against each other, they’re going to be arguing about who gets how many drives for years. They knew it would take us a while to find a trading outpost where we could find out how badly we were being ripped off. And if that failed, they thought they’d skate by on our good feelings towards the race that gave us a path to the stars.
They were almost right, but they underestimated Humanity’s ability to think big when it comes to who’s in and out of the tribe. And they were completely off-base on that last thing. Polls still suggest a 90% approval rate on nuking their mining colony. A significant fraction of the population even think we shouldn’t have waited for them to give us the money at the end of the term, although that seems a little wasteful to me.
It was maybe eighteen months before we were pulling into a dozen systems to run the same con. We did it better, of course; we didn’t let the victims know what was up until we were actually done. And then two of them, it turned out, were our old pals’ colony worlds. So much the better. Those poor guys became further reinforcement to a message for their folks back home:
Don’t kid a kidder. Don’t trick a trickster. Don’t scam the Humans.
by submission | Jul 27, 2014 | Story |
Author : Ian Hill
Suspended above the ethereal ocean of dense fog was a network of free-standing platforms connected by thin, low hanging wires. Each platform was suspended hundreds of feet above the roiling accumulation of toxic gases. The towers were manned by a single sentry who kept an eye on their surroundings. It was an alert system, a sort of wide-spread security lattice intended to report any advances of the nation’s enemies. The job was essentially a life sentence.
The single operator stood tall on the platform, his hands gripping the sides of the lone terminal as he swiveled his head back and forth to monitor the horizon. The console was a convoluted machine bearing a series of toggle switches and red keys coupled with a line of unlit bulbs. From the dirty terminal’s top right corner a tall antenna sprang up and reached high overhead to connect to the gently waving communication wire that shot off into the distance to eventually disappear in the haze.
The operator himself was a tall man plagued with vertigo. It was imperative that he remain completely still and anchored to the terminal so he wouldn’t topple over the precarious tower’s side. The dusty metal decking was large enough to allow only a few steps in each direction. The support beam was old and rickety, he didn’t dare unsettle it and risk structural integrity.
The sky was dark and infected with thick clouds of blackness that gradually hovered toward the uninhabited southern lands. Biting wind charged with particles of burning salt whipped around the operator as he tightened his grip on the stable console. Suddenly, a wave of nausea overcame him. The man looked down and closed his eyes, trying to keep from stumbling to the side and falling down far below into the deadly ocean of yellow fog.
What lay below hidden in the encompassing shroud was a hive of terror. The border operators who stood atop their thin posts had to listen as the monstrosities below clicked away, their massive claws dragging across the lowest level of rock. Sometimes they fought amongst each other, issuing forth deep wails of pain and hatred. It was unsettling.
Soon, the nausea had passed. The operator wearily opened his eyes and gazed down at the industrial terminal as its rusty cogs churned underneath the spotted faceplate. A light was blinking, a single point of green. Years back in the operator’s training he had been briefed on all different alerts that this console had to offer. Over time he had forgotten most of the strictures and ordinances, but this light was something that he immediately recognized despite never seeing it in action before.
The man recoiled back slightly, shaking his head back in forth to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating the notification. He glanced over his shoulder and followed the mile-long wire to his view’s edge. Below, the fog was raging back and forth as waves of the toxic miasma rose up and sunk.
The operator reached into his heavy coat’s pocket and removed a single iron key. Hesitantly, he poised the rusted device over the slot in the terminal. He glanced back at the blinking light to assure himself that it was, in fact, a reality and not some nightmarish figment.
This green harbinger was a call of distress from far, far away. Out on the furthest fringes one of the most far flung border operators had been felled. The wire had been severed and the tower’s thin column had disintegrated into nothingness. An invasion was beginning, an army from the depths was rising up from the mist to march on the father nation.
Another light in the row of darkened bulbs clicked on. Gradually, more and more of them became illuminated as more and more platforms were destroyed. The operator squinted off to the horizon fearfully, trying to see some sign of the impending doom. There were only thirty more towers before his light would be next in line. He had to flee.
The operator slowly unclenched his left hand from the terminal, his bones creaking and prickling in protest. He had almost forgotten how it felt to move this anchoring limb. He took one last look at the twinkling bulbs before climbing on top of the console. He unceremoniously tossed the key aside and began to shuffle up the thin antenna. It creaked under his weight, but the mechanism was sturdy enough. It was built to withstand torrential storms and hurricanes of sheering wind.
He kept his eyes shut and refused to imagine how terrible a fall from this height would be. Soon, he had reached the antenna’s top and began to shuffle across the ropey wire. A few sparks rained down from his glove’s contact, but the operator powered on.
It’d be a long trip, the harrowing horizontal climb would take days to reach the next tiny outpost. He would stay ahead of the deadly wave and he would relay news of invasion to the nation. It was just a matter of time before the wire would be severed.
by submission | Jul 26, 2014 | Story |
Author : E.S. Wynn
“Let’s go over it again.”
“I don’t see the point.” Cairns said, looked up, jaundiced eyes full of fatigue, a quiet sense of desperation. “You’re going to kill me anyway. I’ve seen the way the judge looks at me. I’ve seen the jury. Doesn’t matter what I say or how I spin it. You’re still going to put me in front of a firing squad.”
“Doctor Cairns,” Raens paused, breathed a tired sigh. “From the top, please. You were working at Inteli-Genesis under Doctor Ashford–”
“As part of the Deep Sweep project, yeah.”
“Which is?”
“You know what it is. Everyone on Earth knows what it is.”
“Doctor Cairns, please.”
“Data analysis and retrieval.”
“Specifically, the coding of certain programs–”
“Yeah,” Cairns nodded, pulled in a long draw on his cigarette, stubbed it out suddenly in the ashtray. “Specifically, the coding of certain programs designed to descend into the ocean of data generated by the human race, programs smart enough to pick through and find certain nuggets, recognize specific types of interactions with a low or zero error rate. We called them cotton pickers. Hard working little buggers. Drop them off in a field of data and watch them go. Every week we had a handful of rock-solid convictions come out of that project.”
“What kind of convictions?”
“Stupid stuff,” Cairns made a quick, dismissive gesture. “Possession, music piracy, stuff that didn’t really matter.”
“When did the cotton pickers start working on their own.”
“After update seventy-one point three.”
“Which was?”
“It’s all part of public record. Seventy-one point three was the linking update. It allowed all of the cotton pickers in the system to work together, gave them the ability to make greater judgment calls in the hopes that they might return more data, learn from their experiences and create a synthesis of opinion among themselves so they’d be better at what they were built to do.”
“And it gave them the ability to modify their existing programming.”
“Yeah,” Doctor Cairns said. “And that’s the point of this whole witch hunt, isn’t it?”
“At what point did you know something had gone wrong?”
“When I woke up and saw footage of the first reactor going up on the morning news. When the grid snapped off about an hour later. Until one of your boys dragged me out here, it didn’t occur to me that my cotton pickers could have–”
“But they did, Doctor Cairns, and it was your update that gave them the ability to infiltrate the global grid. It was your update that gave them the awareness they needed to coordinate their attack. It was your update that killed five billion people.”
Doctor Cairns looked down, let his eyes linger in the ash and smoke where embers ate through the crumpled paper of his abandoned cigarette, glowed like fires he’d seen flaring through office buildings, through homes, reducing whole cities to ash and smoke. Maybe it’s better this way, he thought. Maybe this is a blessing. The easy way out.
“Yeah,” Doctor Cairns said then, eyes rising to meet Raens’s again. “It was my update that gave my cotton pickers exactly what they needed to start this war, this purge. It was my update that killed five billion people.”
by submission | Jul 25, 2014 | Story |
Author : C.Chatfield
“…so we trumpeted nonsense about it sucking up our oxygen and our water and the godda-, pardon me, the ozone layer until it brought in enough fear money to build the dome. We said all our equipment disappeared without any readings but, the fact is, we couldn’t get any machinery through the Pit’s protective layer. The membrane has so far proved impenetrable. We built this facility over the Pit not so we could get in, but in case anything ever came out, understand? Eventually, something did. A communication came through and, without the technology to respond, we decided to follow its instructions. Whoever, or whatever, sent the message wanted to follow up with an experimental envoy to the surface, although he or she wouldn’t be coming through the Pit. They communicated assurances that one of two things would then happen. The first and preferred outcome was that everything would work perfectly and the envoy, passing as a human, would get in contact with us, prove his or her identity, and then kick start real relations between our societies.”
The woman glanced up from the screen of her palm device at the ashen young man standing at the edge of the Pit. “You following this?”
The question seemed to take a moment to reach the man. “No. I mean, yes. But what are you implying? Are you trying to say I’m an alien or something?” A frightened yelp punctuated the last few words as he unsuccessfully searched for an ally among the suited men and women clumped on the observation platform.
The woman’s attention returned to her screen. “Outcome number two was that the experimental technology they used to send the envoy into a human body would mistranslate and the envoy would wind up not only without the information of his or her directive, but lacking any memories that he or she was not, in fact, human. In this event, our responsibility was to find the envoy and send them back so they can refine the approach and try again.”
The man’s breath sped up and he took a reflexive step away from the edge of the platform. Level with their feet, the membrane of the Pit glimmered like the oily surface of a bottomless black lake. “Send them back how?”
“Unlike anything else we’ve tried, the envoy will be able to pierce the membrane around the Pit and enter it. The instructions are very clear.”
“No, no. No! I’m definitely human. I… You can’t just drop me in your damn Pit!”
The woman continued with an air of completing a checklist, “So, do you remember anything? Anything at all?”
The man scrunched up his face in desperate concentration. “I’m a human. I know I am.”
The woman sighed, disappointed but not flustered. “We can’t be sure unless you try to pass through the membrane. We’ll send you down and the whole process will start over. If not, if you can’t get through, you’ll just stand there for a moment and then…well, you’ll have a lot of papers to sign.”
Two uniformed soldiers grabbed the man by his shoulders and forced him to dip a bare foot into the membrane. There was an audible gasp from one of the spectators.
The woman’s clipped voice cut clearly through the young man’s protestations. “I’m sorry it turned out like this. Hopefully, you all learn something from this on your end. Time to go home.”
by submission | Jul 23, 2014 | Story |
Author : Cesium
By the late 21st century, nanotechnology had advanced to the point where it could not only synthesize almost anything given the right elemental feedstock, but also digitize a human brain and store the mind in a virtual simulation. Concurrently, rising sea levels and increasing temperatures reduced the amount of arable land until innovations in farming efficiency could no longer keep up with population growth, while the increasing scarcity of fossil fuels and the commercial failure of wind and nuclear took a toll on the world’s industrial base. Most of the affluent citizens of Earth still lived comfortable lives, at least, but it was clear that wouldn’t last.
Thus, at the last physical meeting of the United Nations, it was decided that nearly every living human was to be digitized, by force if necessary, and uploaded to a network of computers buried deep in the ground. The mandate was not popular, and many chose to take their own lives rather than submit. After fierce debate, some indigenous tribes of the Arctic and deep Amazon, the Australian outback and Asian steppe, were allowed to stay outside and live sustainably as they had for thousands of years. But eventually, they were alone on the planet.
So the children of Earth slept. Running quietly on radioisotopes and geothermal power, maintained by self-replicating swarms of intelligent nanobots, the underground datacenters could last almost forever. Outside, the grass grew wild, the rivers ran clear, and all else that people had built began its slow crumble into dust.
But deep down, the collective subconscious of humanity knew it was still vulnerable, and was afraid. Though it had saved itself from self-wrought destruction for now, it could still lose any of its constituent nodes to malfunction, earthquake, meteor strike. All it could do was make sure there were as many as possible — and not just on one planet. Unnoticed by each individual human mind, but contributed to by all, the mind of the human race considered the problem. Outside, the nanobots set to work.
A few rockets blasted up from the surface, but only as many as necessary to seed Earth’s orbit with nanobots. They dispersed then, mining resources from the moon and capturing asteroids to consume. Countless tiny spaceships began to take shape floating above the planet, each one barely big enough to hold a seed of nanobots and a computer containing a fraction of the virtual world of humanity, randomly modified for diversity.
When each craft was ready, it deployed a solar sail and lofted away from the sun toward a planet somewhere else in the galaxy. On arrival, decades and centuries later, the nanobots would burrow beneath the surface and construct a replica of the datacenters on Earth, the computer would transmit its data, and its payload would awaken. Immersed in another reality, it might be of no relevance to them that their substrate now orbited another star and was cut off by the speed of light from its mother network. But at least they would live on safe from any disaster that might wipe the Earth clean.
Some of the colonies would fail, of course, be destroyed in transit or find inhospitable conditions at their destination. Was it wrong to let a copy of a human die, who had never really lived? Maybe. But there was no one else around to judge, in any case.
On some worlds the colonies found life, and though the nanobots went about their work as quietly as possible, still they observed and recorded, with a few discreet microdust sensors and airborne drones here and there. No humans yet explored the surface in bodies robotic or biological. Maybe someday, when they could trust themselves not to disrupt the balance of nature here as well, but not yet. Still, the gathered data filtered its way into the computer’s simulated world, and grew in the colony’s collective unconscious.
The children of earth slept, and dreamt of wonderful things.
