by submission | Jan 5, 2012 | Story |
Author : Erin Cole
Dawn fractures through the glades of the development. Solar-paneled rooftops refract the cadmium light of sun and men prepare for their busy days, hefting briefcase to hybrid. Jen-6 wakes and rises erect.
Inside a petite helmet, embedded with black silks, is a cellular mass of encrypted energy. She snaps it into her eco-friendly skull.
There is a crackle of voltage, irregular in function, but robot mommy doesn’t report. To do so would expose dysfunction.
Dysfunction leads to the gooey darkness. Jen-6 reboots. There is no dysfunction in her world today’she is robot mommy.
Downstairs, sweet pigtail blue-eyes yawns for a bowl of muesli.
“I want a waffle, plain, cut up with syrup!” shouts the little tyke.
The glum girl in black, doesn’t respond. This presents no dilemma for Jen-6. Her upgrades included telepathic features: she wants the usual oatmeal, not too hot, or cold, stirred thick as lentil soup. With technology behind her stride, she can do anything today. She is robot mommy.
A trip to the downtown pergolas throws Jen-6 into the sharp points of shifty stares. The townsfolk are unwelcome to the new developments in robotic child rearing.
“She’s one of the new androids.”
“Who would ever trust their kids to a machine?”
“Of course they would design her after Barbie.”
Jen-6 strides past them, aloof, yet in the void of her makeup, she wishes to be one of them, to feel the heat of real neurotransmitters.
Jen-6 pays for a bundle of bread and steers away from hostile minds. Further into the arms of the city, dust from construction billows into the clefts of her sleek frame. She activates ionic cleansing agents, but her power pack has only two bars left. It is a long walk to the park and rain complicates her journey further.
Returning home, her leg casings crack and flake into metallic scales. Saline-drenched skies have eroded her modules. She slumps into a chair, stuttering incoherent terminology.
“Father, robot mommy is crashing.”
Father kneels beside her. “Jen-6? Can you reboot?”
She is unable to restart. Irises that were once silver-blue are now the shade of an eclipsed moon. Father hangs up the phone; his pleas ignored by The System. A diamond-shaped pack of guards march up the drive and heave Jen-6 into the back of a utility vehicle. Father makes a cross at his heart, hoping for another, maybe a red-haired one next time.
Thick gelatinous water rouses Jen-6 from an ashen-colored sleep. She is drifting, sinking. Quicksilver spores adhere to her body, replenishing synthetic carbon-based layers of tissue. She sways sideways, past the beams of orange-filtered lighting, down into the gooey darkness. A glitch in her system fires, a crackle, and for one diminutive moment, Jen-6 is scared, angry…human.
“Cer…eal…waffle…plain…, glum gir…oatmeal…lent…soup”
***
Dawn fractures through the oaks of the countryside. Shingled rooftops smoke from heated dew, and men ready for their busy days, steering tractor to field. Jen-7 wakes and rises erect. She is the newest protocol, rigorously tested to face every obstacle to date. She snaps a petite helmet, embedded with golden silks, into her eco-friendly skull.
Downstairs, a brown-eyed, wobbling babe wants eggs scrambled, toast with berry jam, and juice in his favorite cartoon cup. Little baby twins cry for a warm bottle of immunization-enhanced, homogenized milk.
A small hiccup in Jen-7’s system flashes a vision behind the optic sheath of her lids: a line of children at the downtown pergolas and a man in a tailored suit. Jen-7 computes the error and reboots. There will be no dysfunction in her world today. She is robot mommy.
by submission | Dec 31, 2011 | Story |
Author : Aradhana Choudhuri
“No. There’s no funds, Mr. Lawrence. None. We work with what we’ve got.”
“Then you have to repurpose this satellite, Mrs. President, or we start losing vital assets. We’re deep in Kessler syndrome time — LEO and GEO are going to have one catastrophic collision after another, each spawning off more debris. Chain reaction.”
“I get all that. That’s why I gave you Webb! The science lobby’s gonna go nuts if I give you this one too.”
“It’s the only one left that can monitor that segment of the graveyard orbit, warn us before we start losing the Geostationaries.”
“Why can’t you build more telescopes on the ground? I can scrounge a few million out of discretionary.”
“Ma’am, Earth-based telescopes can only look out at night. We’re already using each and every ground asset we can just to keep the nightside covered from dusk to dawn. Anything sunside we won’t know about till satellites start going down.”
“What about other countries? China started this problem with their testing, and they’re the only ones with enough money left to spend on watching outer-space garbage. It can’t hurt to ask.”
“You want to ask the People’s Republic of China to launch a constellation of telescopes pointed at us?”
“Nevermind. Tell me why the Japanese repurposing their visible-spectro-thingamabob satellite wasn’t enough.”
“It was never designed to focus fast-moving near-Earth objects. Pointing requirements have been thrown out the window, delta-V budgets make any kind of repositioning? The point is, it’s not enough.”
“The science lobby is powerful, Mr. Lawrence.”
“So is the telecom lobby, Mrs. President, and it’s a helluva lot more relevant to the average taxpayer.”
“I’m aware of that. That’s why I’m here.”
“Yes Ma’am. This is no longer about competing priorities — it’s about threats to the vital infrastructure of this country. You think the ARGOS/NOAA-L collision was bad? We’re going to start seeing one like that every three months.”
“When will the next one happen?”
“In ten minutes? Tomorrow? Probability goes up to better than ninety in two months.”
“Allright, Mr. Lawerence. I’ll sign it. You’ll have Kepler by the end of the quarter.”
—————-
…peoples of earth…2051 by the…transmission…share…speck of light in a…static…we heard you…must have…scope…hear us…wait…response…
—————-
…earth…093…share joy…by now you…have telescopes…transmit…AMGE…hear…respo…
—————-
…ello?…
by submission | Dec 30, 2011 | Story |
Author : TJMoore
Sam squinted into the dimly lit cupboard, the all but extinguished ICL held out in front of him like a jar of fireflies.
With a sigh he gave up on the fading lamp and began searching for the rye seeds by hand. He did like a good seeded bread and if he didn’t get it mixed up tonight, he’d have to wait another day to bake it, which may be the case anyway if it was cloudy tomorrow.
Seeds found, he turned the ICL back on to use the last possible lumens to measure out his ingredients. He’d have to mix and kneed in the dark, but he was skilled at that by now.
Fondly, he reminisced on days gone by when he could simply drive to the store, any time of the day or night, to buy whatever he wanted from wherever it came from. So many things had been lost.
The war for fossil fuels had been fairly brief once all the combatants came to the conclusion that the fight would destroy the prize. But the technology to support the population at the time did not exist without it. The war for survival lasted much longer and was more brutal than any war fought in recorded history. The survivors who didn?t live near the oil were few and hardened. Sam was such a person.
He and his neighbors, the Andersons and the Downins, worked every minute of every day just to stay alive. It took acres of land per person to produce enough food and all of that land had to be worked by hand. The Andersons had a horse which helped some, but the horse itself required several acres and a lot of additional work to keep it through the winter. The horse was also a valuable commodity that required constant protection from raiders. Sam was an exceptional shot had earned a reputation for keeping marauders at bay.
In the now dark kitchen, Sam carefully covered his bread dough with a clean cloth and set in the old gas oven to rise. The oven could be used occasionally when he had accumulated enough methane from his generator, but during the summer he used the solar oven exclusively. He groped around and found the cradle for the IC Light and plugged it in to recharge when the sun came up. He had five solar collectors on the roof that provided a few watts of electricity on sunny days; an acquisition he had made just before the wars when he could still drive to the city. A hand crank weather radio sat on his repair bench, waiting for the day when he found some spare parts to fix it. There were no radio stations broadcasting anymore, but the radio also had a light and a power outlet for recharging cell phones back in the day. He wished it was working now so he could take it on his scouting trip in two days. He and the Downin boy were going toward the city to look for glass.
by submission | Dec 29, 2011 | Story |
Author : Ian Rennie
It’s not really time travel. Not how that expression is traditionally meant, anyway.
It has long been a maxim of those involved in my kind of research that you can look back and travel forward, but never the other way round. In a way, everything we know about forensic science is a way of looking into the past with slowly increasing resolution. My work is just another step down that road. A bloody big step, but a step nonetheless.
Every movement leaves a trace. Some leave more of a trace than others, most leave a trace so small as to be beyond invisibility. Theoretically, if you had a completely closed environment, you could infer everything that happened within that environment from an accurate enough look at its current state. In practice, that’s nonsense. The world is much too complex, too many variables need to be accounted for. Plus, once you look at things closely enough, you can’t be entirely sure of exactly where everything is, let alone where it was.
Electromagnetic signals are a lot simpler, comparatively speaking. With enough computing power and enough time, it becomes only really really difficult to figure out what a signal was, rather than impossible.
The Hartnell Array has made it even less difficult than that. I won’t go into details about how it works: every time I try to explain it to the chiefs of staff I can see their eyes glaze over. Instead, I try to talk about what it can do.
With enough time, and enough energy, any signal that was ever broadcast can be recovered.
Obviously, the implications are considerable. I’ve had scientists from every field asking for time on the Hartnell Array once its up and running. Even before it was finished it was booked up for the next decade. However, the British Army paid for it, so the British Army get first use.
Well, second use. Officially we’re testing its capabilities for another two months. Unofficially I’m enjoying the major reason why I agreed to build the thing.
“Everything in order?” I ask Dr Patel. She doesn’t understand my enthusiasm, but she humours me.
“Signal reconstruction is complete. Playback is ready whenever you want.”
I settle into my chair, and hit play. The music starts at once, as does the image, blurrier than I remember from my childhood yet no less magical. In awed silence I become the first person in more than half a century to see these images.
Recovering television isn’t difficult compared to some things. There were so many broadcasts at such a strength that you can pick and choose. The only real decision was what to recover first, and for me there was no question.
106 lost episodes, of which I was now watching the nineteenth. We were getting them at a rate of four a day. We’d have every one within the month. I sent the pristine recordings to the BBC within the day, but that first viewing was mine alone.
Dr Patel walks in as the episode finishes and smiles indulgently. She never liked the show, but I think she’s happy that I’m happy.
“Everything in order?” she says, handing my words back to me.
“Perfect.” I say “I think we should go after The Daleks’ Master Plan next.”
by submission | Dec 28, 2011 | Story |
Author : Tris Smith
She sat down on the bench, overlooking the local park. She and James used to meet here. It seemed a fitting place to say goodbye. After the operation, she might never come here again. Worse, she might never want to come here again.
At 13, it had been minor. A doctor had suggested she try self harming, and that was it. With modern technology the scars weren?t a problem, and for some people it worked really well.
By 15, she was having weekly online therapy. The AI was great, but somehow it just never worked. CBT just wasn’t her cup of tea. Eventually, they gave her one-to-ones with a specialist. No matter what memories they removed, nothing seemed to help.
The final step had been to test her out in a few different virtual realities, to see if she could be happy. Apparently she couldn’t. After that it had been official. They said she was mentally defective. That no amount of talking or support could help. They suggested drugs or surgery.
She couldn’t stand the drugs. The weight gain, the constant tiredness, the knowledge they were targeting everything in her brain. The systems which worked, and the systems which didn’t. Gradually changing and modifying all of them, building up all kinds of long-term side-effects.
James sat down beside her, taking her hand. “You don’t have to do this” he said.
“I do.”
“Why?” he said.
“I can’t do it. I can’t keep going.”
“I know” he said.
“I might not change that much. Some people don’t.”
“Most do” he said.
“Jenny” he said “Don’t do this. I can’t lose you Jenny. We can find another way.”
“No James, we can’t.”
“It’s nonsense Jenny. Mental deficiency is nonsense. The brain’s still too mysterious for us. Even doctors don’t understand it” he said.
“If I killed myself tomorrow, you’d lose me. This way we have a chance.”
“Goodbye James.”
“Goodbye Jenny” he said, standing to leave. James walked away.
“Goodbye Jenny” she said, smiling slightly.
