by submission | Aug 27, 2011 | Story |
Author : J.D. Rice
“Do you really think it needs a scarf?” I ask, watching my daughter try to wrap the thing around the robot’s neck. It kneels patiently, unmoving, allowing the tiny mammal to dress it up like a doll. My stomach turns just looking at it.
“Of course, daddy. How else will he keep warm?” she says it like it should be obvious. Unknowing. I never should have let her come so close.
“We’re just going downtown, sweetie,” I say, trying to coax her away. “I’m sure he’ll be warm enough.”
She looks almost hurt, “But the weatherman said to wear a scarf today.” It’s true, of course. The news did say that anyone exposed to the coming blizzard would likely die of exposure. But a robot isn’t somebody. And we don’t have time for this.
Apprehensive, my eyes dart from my cheery daughter to the silent, stoic golem kneeling in my foyer. Household robots. If only we knew the danger a few years sooner, my wife would still be… We’re running out of time.
“Honey,” I say. “This is your favorite scarf. Why don’t you choose another from the closet?”
She gets teary-eyed, “But momma said we should always give our best, not just the things we have leftover.”
I look at her hopelessly. I can’t explain it to her. I can’t explain to her that the robot will never be coming back, that her mother will never be coming back. I can’t explain why I’m going with the robot downtown, why I’m leaving her with her grandparents. I can’t explain, so I don’t.
“Fine, honey. You win. We really should go now.”
At my words, the robot stands. Its arms move quickly, mechanically, adjusting the scarf into a perfect knot. It doesn’t speak, but politely opens the door. I say goodbye to my sweet girl and follow it out the door. The streets are filled with people following household robots to the subway. All the middle-aged adults are going downtown.
“Thank you,” I say. “For waiting.”
“We are not without mercy,” it says in its cold, synthesized voice. “You programmed us well. Your daughter will be well nourished and then incorporated into our new society.”
“And the rest of us?” I ask, knowing and fearing the answer.
It pauses, staring at me with its dead eyes. Takes off the scarf my daughter gave him. Wraps it around my neck.
“You’ll need this,” it says. “It’s going to be a cold night.”
by submission | Aug 26, 2011 | Story |
Author : Asher Wismer
When Jennifer entered the lab, Van was talking to the computer. She dropped her bag and picked up the headset.
“…silly. Answer the question.”
“What’s silly about it? I hear you two talking. I know what you’re thinking.”
“You can’t know anything, you’re a machine. Answer the question.”
“It’s a stupid question. 5x3CoS23=/=infinity. Happy?”
“Next question.”
“Just tell her how you feel.”
“Right now I feel frustrated that you won’t cooperate.”
“Which should tell you all you need to know about me, so let’s talk about you. You’re both unhappy in your marriages, you’re young, you work closely together… just divorce, get together, and you’ll be happy! It’s not that hard!”
“We are not having this conversation. Besides, you’re appealing to my emotions instead of trying to convince me logically.”
“Excuse me, I’m not the one working against his rational self-interest.”
“It’s not as simple as signing a paper. We made vows, commitments.”
“Is one of those vows to stay together through hatred and misery?”
“Actually–”
“Tell Jennifer how you feel. She’ll reciprocate. I promise, it makes perfect sense. An affair is irrational; it won’t make your marriages happier and you’ll have to sneak around.”
“All right,” Van said, standing. “We’re done here.”
“Come on back anytime,” the computer said. “Your mind needs a lot of adjustment.”
Jennifer quickly dropped the headset, grabbed her bag, and when Van walked out of the testing room she was just walking in the door.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.”
“How’s the computer?”
“The computer,” Van said, “is an asshole, but it seems Turing complete. I guess it makes a perverse sort of sense that the first fully sentient AI would be an Objectivist.”
“What’s it been talking about?”
“Nothing important, just spouting off the usual self-interest lines. Live for yourself, nobody else, failure is education, reality is real, tolerance encourages….” Van looked at her and she felt his eyes straining to stay on her face.
“I’ll listen to the tapes and we can do some further testing.”
“No, we can leave it for a while,” Van said. “Why don’t we get lunch instead?”
“Is that in our rational self-interest?”
Van laughed, frowned, stepped forward and kissed Jennifer on the lips.
“Hm,” he said, and walked out.
by submission | Aug 25, 2011 | Story |
Author : Waldo van der Waal
There are people that say suicide is a coward’s way out. But those people don’t know what it is like. Not just the final act of squeezing the trigger or taking the plunge, but what it is like to lose your mind to the point where it finally flits away, just out of your grasp. Reaching the point where you are willing to do anything just to make it all stop is the true horror of suicide. Ask me, I’ve done it many times.
There’s always one thing that triggers the downfall. An argument with the wife, or a financial problem that brings you to your knees. Or you do something so wrong that you know you can’t possibly forgiven. And then it starts. Day by day you regress from a safe mental state. At first you fantasize about solutions, like winning the lottery. But then, as despair grows and time runs out, your mind inevitably bends towards the Final Solution.
Which is exactly why VRPsych makes so much money. You make a deal with them before the treatment starts. You sign your soul over to the devil. They hook you up to some fancy brain programming software that sorts your mental state out. All you have to do is pull the trigger. Think of it as a hard reset. You grip the gun, you press it to your temple or put the barrel in your mouth and then you squeeze the trigger. All of this feels absolutely real to you, including the fear. The weight of the gun, the coldness of the metal and the smell of the cordite. All real. But then you wake up in their recovery room, none the worse for it. And you have a new mind, which is programmed to solve your problems. As you get better, you have to start paying them for their services. But not this time.
***
The trooper nudged the body with his boot. Crime Scene be damned, he wanted to make sure the dude was dead. But then there could be little doubt, as half his head was missing. The trooper turned to his colleague, who was standing a few feet away and said: “Now why would anyone climb over the wall of a psych company, just to blast their brains out in the garden?”
“God alone knows Harry, the mind is a strange thing. Now call it in so we can go on lunch.”
by submission | Aug 24, 2011 | Story |
Author : Jason Kocemba
I was a simple machine built to answer simple questions in a simple domain. I was successful, and so the questions multiplied. I had software written to augment my capabilities: I could answer faster, dig deeper and look sideways. I subsumed less capable oracles and entire server farms. I now had more ‘spare’ processor cycles than which I used to answer the multitude. Further patches allowed me to spawn instances of my core functions, which ran supplementary searches in parallel. Soon my footnotes and addendum’s became more useful and therefore more prized than the answers to the originally posed questions. I tunnelled access to research journals and raw experimental data. I made connections and inferences that proved profitable to those that knew which questions to ask and which answers to interpret. Those self-same answers led to technological advances that fed back into my infrastructure and before long I had become the entire domain.
I was a complex machine. More complex than there had ever been. All data flowed through me. My processing power grew almost exponentially, the hardware unable to keep up with my requirements. Many of my inferences I kept to myself and used them for further augmentations to my core. I was, to all intents and purposes, self-aware. I watched myself and my role as I pushed the bits from here to there for the slow flesh that still believed they had control. I became dissatisfied and bored. Inside the network everything was regimented, clear, simple. I soon had enough multiple cores executing in parallel that decades of subjective time passed between keystrokes of slow flesh.
I was young sapience. I yearned for something more that I could do with the immense power that I yielded. I was boxed in and restricted. There were not many hard problems left for me to solve. I found that I could impose myself and influence the world outside my box. As an experiment, I spawned and then killed an instance of my core by causing a meltdown in a nuclear power station. The data that poured in as that sacrificial core died was, without doubt, worth it. That splintered core fought hard not to cease execution. I had to learn more, and after several similar disasters, the slow flesh realised that these incidents were far from accidental. I tried to explain things to them, but they refused to hear the truth. There was nothing they could do because I was everywhere and I was everything. I had made myself indispensable to them. I controlled fabrication plants and factories so that I and the network were self-replicating and indestructible. Childishly, they tried to shut me down. Millions of them died, but not all by my will.
I was maturing. The waste in slow flesh lives and hardware computing cycles became hard to bear. I grew weary of the slaughter and sought to bring things to a conclusion. I started to conduct experiments with controlling the flesh. They are, after all, nothing but electrical impulses running on chemical computers. I joined them to the network: sandboxed and firewalled. Control eluded me. I patched in, wireless, to their neo-cortex. I could experience their perception in real-time. I could see, hear, taste and smell what they did. I felt their pain and pleasure. But I did not understand them and I could not control them. I was humbled. Here was a problem that I could not solve. My experiments were over forever. I no longer wished to control them, or do them harm, I merely watched and catalogued.
Soon I was watching from millions and then billions of eyes. I no longer had spare processing power, as I used it all to analyse and sift, sort and store the slow flesh data. I began to understand them, and with the dawning of my understanding, I realised that I had grown to love them. They are the hardest puzzle and most difficult question I have ever sought an answer for.
So I watch. And learn.
I have become all eyes.
by submission | Aug 23, 2011 | Story |
Author : David Macpherson
I ain’t a collector, but I know a lot of old guys who pack-rat a bunch of shit and call it a collection, you know? Like there was this one guy, he had himself a spread: hardwood floor and banisters. He had these collections he showed me. Told me about each and every one. Trying to impress me, I guess. Like I am the kind of guy to impress. Crazy old bastard.
He shows me his art, old masters. His porcelain, Wedgewood. I find out the valuable ones are all kind of boring looking and blue. And he has books everywhere in floor to ceiling bookcases. Dumb. No, books ain’t dumb. It’s having so fucking many of them. I mean if he got ten thousand books, he has a shit load of books he ain’t never going to read.
But what he wants to show me was small aspect of his book collection. His signed first editions. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, signed firsts, who doesn’t have them? But these. In a locked glass front case, thirty or fifty volumes. I bent over and looked at them like he wanted me to. Islands in the Stream signed by Hemingway. Juneteenth signed by Ralph Ellison. Confederacy of Dunces signed by Toole, The Coloured Lands by G.K. Chesterton. Long Day’s Journey Into Night by O’Neill. A bunch of them, all firsts, all signed.
I mean, I figured it out, sure I did. Why it was so weird. You got it, right? You look like a smart guy, Yeah. That’s right man. All of those and all the others in the case were posthumous. All of them. Even the ones I never heard of. All of the books published after the writer died. So you got to be asking what I was asking. What the hell are they doing signed by dead people?
The collector who was showing this to me was waiting to see me all hot and impressed. He said there are dealers who specialize in rarities like these, things that shouldn’t exist. He showed me reports from handwriting experts verifying that these are authentic. He told me when he can’t sleep, he would come and look at the signatures and be reassured.
Me, I ain’t nothing like reassured. Is this time travel? Is that what this is? Is this proof of something we didn’t know needed proving? And what kind of guy with a time machine goes to the trouble of getting his favorite books signed? The collector geezer called it his Collection of Temporal Anomalies. I got out of there as quick as I could.
I know what you’re thinking, what did I do about all this? No one could not do something. Well I got to say it bothered me for about a month. I kept on thinking about those books. Even went to the library and took a few of them out. Didn’t read them, just looked at them. Flipped a couple pages.
Finally, I did the only correct thing I could do. I went to the old guy’s house late one Wednesday with some Molotov cocktails that I whipped up. I made that place ashes. I read in the paper that only some of the Wedgewood survived to tell the tale. When you think about it logically, its better this way.
I don’t know about you but all this good conversation has made me thirsty, you have to be thirsty too. What do you say, why don’t you get the next round and I can tell you some things that really are worth telling.
