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.
by submission | Jul 20, 2014 | Story |
Author : George R. Shirer
“Well,” murmured Agent Dumphy, “you don’t see that every day.”
Brillson didn’t reply. He was too busy squinting at the luminous graffiti covering the alley wall.
“How many people do you think have seen this?” asked Dumphy.
Brillson pursed his lips. “Back here? Bunch a winos and some garbage men. Maybe some delivery guys.”
“That’s atypical,” said Dumphy. “Usually carriers tag someplace busy, with lots of eyes, to maximize the spread.”
“I think it knows we’re on to it,” said Brillson. “So it’s getting sneaky.”
“Well, crap.”
Brillson nodded. The command had been tracking this conceptual lifeform ever since the Beijing Disaster, when its ideogram had appeared on several skyscrapers, cunningly shaped by office lights and window shades. An estimated three million people had been infected, leading the Chinese to nuke their own capital and blame it on Hong Kong dissidents.
Since Beijing, the Text had gone underground, popping up on random websites that folded as quickly as they appeared. It had somehow infected a fashion designer in Milan, who had integrated the Text’s ideogram into his show, infecting hundreds of the rich and famous. Then it had infected a window display designer for Macy’s at Christmas, infecting hundreds more.
“What do you think it wants?” asked Dumphy.
“I don’t know,” said Brillson. “Maybe it doesn’t want anything. Just ‘cause it’s alive doesn’t mean it’s sentient. It could just want to reproduce and spread like a regular virus.”
“But if it’s getting sneakier, doesn’t that suggest intelligence?”
“Maybe,” said Brillson. He shrugged. “It’s really above our pay grade. You got the paint?”
Dumphy nodded, hoisted an industrial-sized can of spray paint.
“Do the honors.”
Grinning, Dumphy shook the can and then directed a blast of midnight black paint across the luminous ideograms.
Command had discovered they could neutralize the transmission medium by defacing it. How they had discovered it, Brillson didn’t know. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. Just like he didn’t think he wanted to know how Command had worked out people with achromatopsia – people like Dumphy and he – were immune to infection.
Thank God for small favors, thought Brillson. Otherwise they’d be in a quarantine camp, undergoing tests to chart the psychological and neurological changes the Text imposed on its carriers. Carriers spent their days doodling the infectious ideogram on everything they could between bouts of Tourette-like outbursts.
Not a pleasant existence at all, thought Brillson, as he watched Dumphy deface the graffiti.
Command was working on a weapon to kill the Text, a sort of memetic bullet they would release via the Internet. Brillson was certain they’d work it out, sooner than later. Command wasn’t about to let some random, viral thought-form take the world.
“After all,” murmured Brillson, to himself, “we were here first.”
by submission | Jul 19, 2014 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
“It’ll cost me that much?!” asked the thin man in a louder voice than he’d intended. The man in the black suit who sat across from him in the coffee shop leaned in and gestured for him to lower his voice.
“For the service you require, Mr. Dalrymple, the cost is quite reasonable.” The man sipped his espresso con panna.
“But that’s,” the thin man began and then leaned in and spoke more softly. “But that’s almost all the money I embezzled.”
“And you’ll get an equivalent sum back, plus or minus a few percent. Two percent of your funds will be invested in a very diversified portfolio. Even with taxes and market crashes, one hundred years of compound interest adds up.”
“But I’m losing ninety-eight percent up front,” protested the thin man.
The man in the black suit gestured at one of the waitstaff robots that ran along tracks in the ceiling. It glided over to the table. The machine telescoped down to eye level and took his drink order.
“Mr. Dalrymple, you appreciated the scope of the service I’m offering, do you not? A whole new identity including name, birth certificate, social security number, and detailed education transcripts, work history, and medical records. Suspended animation for one hundred years. A nanotech wetware package to give you knowledge of historical, sociopolitical, economic, and technological advances during your hibernation, as well as fluency in the top three predominant languages at the time of your reanimation. And there are, of course, the little matters of not going to prison and being able to enjoy the money you…appropriated.”
“How do I know I’m not going to simply be put in suspended animation indefinitely? Or maybe for just a day? And then I’m reanimated to discover my identity was never changed and the police are after me and you’ve made off with the money?”
The waiter robot returned, descended, and placed another espresso in front of the black-suited man.
“Do you recall a recent news item involving a man named Jason Underwood?”
“Yeah. He was that guy who pulled off that big bank robbery 20 years ago. The cops just caught up with him finally. Say, I remember them saying he didn’t look a day older. Was he…?”
“One of my clients? Yes. Mr. Underwood was a stubborn man. I recommended a much longer duration of suspended animation than 20 years. He wouldn’t hear of it. And then he was foolish enough to contact his old girlfriend after his reanimation. It was she who betrayed him to the authorities. I always warn my clients never to contact old family or acquaintances. A clean break with one’s past is required.”
“Aren’t you worried he’ll tell the authorities about you?”
“What name will he give them? The one I gave you? I have nearly two dozen identities I employ. And I put myself into suspension for years at a stretch with some regularity. One does not pursue this career successfully for half a millennium by being sloppy.”
The thin man considered his words. “Alright,” he said at last. “How do we begin?”
The man in the black suit handed him a card. “Bring the money to this address tomorrow at 9:00 am. Don’t arouse suspicion by telling your family and friends goodbye. Simply know that after tomorrow morning you will not see them again.”
The thin man took the card, stood up, and walked out of the coffee shop without a word.
“Pleasant dreams, Mr. Dalrymple,” the black-suited man said to the empty chair. “Give my regards to the future.”
