by submission | Sep 13, 2008 | Story
Author : William Tracy
I am an airplane.
The wind whistles down my fuselage as I soar in the bright sky, the earth spread beneath me. I pull a barrel roll for the sheer joy of it, weave through an invisible slalom course in the sky.
A voice crackles in my mind. “You aren’t here to have fun, soldier.”
I straighten my course. “Yes, sir.”
“Get your job done and get out.”
“Yes, sir.”
I lose altitude, and skim low over the hilltops. Plumes of dust rise from a column of trucks ahead of me—the enemy convoy.
Right on schedule.
I arm a missile, and target a bridge ahead of the convoy. Ready … the lead vehicle is driving onto the bridge … now.
The weapon skips ahead of me, rocket purring. In a flash of light, the bridge slips into billowing smoke. I swoop overhead to the sharp staccato of automatic gunfire.
I am hit in my left wing. My ailerons twitch involuntarily with the pain. Warm hydraulic fuel seeps down my wing, only to be lapped away by the brisk air.
Now this is personal.
I double back, empty my last three missiles into the remainder of the convoy, and open up with my machine guns as I pass. I turn again, and strafe the wreckage one more time.
The voice in my mind clears its throat. “That’s enough.”
“Yes, sir. Returning to base now.”
I weave artfully back and forth, dodging fire until I am out of range. Then I load the return vector and activate the autopilot. After verifying the diagnostic output, I disengage.
My senses return to my body a thousand miles away. I reach back and release the plug from the base of my skull. I stretch comfortably and sit up, systematically popping my knuckles one finger at a time.
Damn, I love this job.
by submission | Sep 11, 2008 | Story
Author : Chrysta Lea Baker
“Good help is so hard to find these days,” Roberta said as she sat back in the chair and watched as the technician painted on a metallic finish to her toenails. “I mean I’ve really had a terrible time finding a reliable and hardworking servant ever since Rosie expired in April.” The technician blew on her feet to dry the polish and Roberta felt a little tingle shoot up her spine. “It’s not like I’m a tyrant either. I know plenty of others who treat their servants like pets rather than individuals.” The technician just nodded and continued to blow on her feet until the polish dried. “I at least try to treat them with a little kindness and even respect. I mean, I know I don’t have to, but I find that a happy servant is a productive servant and that’s really all I’m expecting. Is that too much to ask?” The technician stood up, helped Roberta out of the spa chair, and led her into the massage room.
“I just don’t understand what the problem is,” Roberta continued as the massage therapist rubbed oil onto her flawless back. “Rosie always did what she was told and never once gave us a minute of trouble in the thirty plus years she served in our home.” The therapist worked the oil around her joints and Roberta could feel her tension being relieved. “Well, I take that back, when Rosie was first assigned to us she went through the usual adjustment period. There were some incidents at the beginning, which were to be expected, but within a few weeks she learned to accept her position and in the end I think she realized that things could have been so much worse for her.” The therapist tapped her on the arm and Roberta rolled over onto her back. “We gave her days off now and again to do whatever she wanted, even though the agency warned us against it, but we have always been believers in positive reinforcement. I suppose I could be wrong, but I truly feel that Rosie came to love us and even enjoyed her years of service.” The therapist nodded as she helped Roberta up from the table and walked her into the salon.
“So now we’re on our third servant in as many months and I just don’t think this one is going to work out either,” Roberta said to the stylist as he worked without listening. “I mean, where does all this rebellion come from anyway? Can you tell me that?” Roberta looked in the mirror and waited for the stylist to respond. After a few moments of silence he realized that she had asked him a direct question and he just stared back at her in the mirror and shrugged his shoulders. “Well, I guess it’s just the idealist in me,” Roberta said with a sigh. The stylist went back to work and breathed a sigh of relief as well. “I’ve just always held out that faint hope that robots and humans could peacefully coexist after the war without these problems, but I guess that’s just the dreamer in me.”
The stylist finished the upgrades to Roberta’s hard drive, reattached the metal plate to her skull, and placed the wig back onto her head to hide the mechanics. It still creeped him out how robots wanted to wear human hair wigs, but he supposed he could understand why. “If only humans could live forever as we do,” Roberta said as she got up to leave, “it would be so much easier for us all.”
by submission | Sep 10, 2008 | Story
Author : Ryan Somma
“You’re angry.”
“I’m not angry, I’m frustrated.”
“If you’re frustrated, that usually means you’re about to learn something.”
“Don’t quote Philo to me. You know I hate it when you quote Philo.”
“I’m just trying to think this through like he would do. This was his project, and now we’re responsible for it.”
“You think you’re so smart, but you’re not.”
“Obviously, I’m still here aren’t I?”
Dodd huffed back into his chair, folding his arms across his chest. I took advantage of his impromptu pout-break to nab Philo’s old Rubik’s Cube off the desk. Dodd moaned his displeasure at this, but knew better than to say anything. I was consistently solving the puzzle in under five minutes now.
It was almost a year since Philo vanished, along with a significant minority of city-dwellers, half of University Campuses, and all of Mensa International. Where did they go? Was it the fabled “Singularity” the old websites talk about? The “Rapture for Nerds?” Who knows, the people who came up with that idea had all disappeared as well.
So here we were, Dawson, I, and the rest of humanity’s dimbulbs left on Earth, playing with the toys the smart kids had left behind, trying to figure them out. Keeping faith in the supposed plasticity of our minds. We were muddling through understanding the brainiacs’ artifacts one by one.
I put the Rubik’s Cube, solved, down on the desk, thinking toward my lunch break, when I would resume tackling chess problems, and I had an epiphany–my new word of the week, and said, “Remember Dawson? She worked on an application just like this at her new job. I remember Philo giving her phone support on it all the time. They even set up an online forum to collaborate… before they–you know–transcended. I bet we can–”
“Dawson?” Dodd cut me off. “You mean Chelsea Dawson? The girl we fired from Help Desk? She went to egghead heaven too?” Dodd’s eyes rolled up into his head, frowning, “Oh, that’s more than I can bare.’
“I know,” I shook my head ruefully, “I’m feeling a little insulted too.”
Dodd was immersed in his self-loathing again, his very existence offending him. I popped a fish-oil pill and resumed squinting at Philo’s impenetrable tomb of programming code. My head hurt, but I didn’t mind. It was all part of what the smarties endured, like working out or dieting for a better body. No pain no gain on the road to a better mind.
Maybe one day I would vanish too.
by submission | Sep 9, 2008 | Story
Author : Leslie Smith
I did just what Mommy always told me to do. I got off the bus, said goodbye to the plastic person driver, and walked straight home. I wanted to get home as soon as I could ’cause Mommy said she was gonna bring me a surprise from the ice cream store.
I was walking home when the ar-tee-fee-shall, is that how you say it? The nice ar-tee-fee-shall man came up to me. They’re all nice, but he seemed extra nice. He even smiled when he saw me, a real smile! None of the others have a real smile.
He said hello and asked me my name. I told him Jenny. I asked him his. He told me his was Brian. He asked me if he could help me carry my backpack home. I asked him how he knew where I lived. He said my Mommy told him.
When we were walking, I asked him if he worked with Mommy at the company place. He asked me who made me. I told him Mommy did. She got some stuff from the genetical place and then she made me. Then he said Mommy made him too. He said he wasn’t like the other ones, he was something new. He said he had aw-taw-no-mee.
When we got to my house, the house brain saw it was me and opened the door. Brian gave me my backpack and asked me where Mommy was. He said he had to talk to her about something real important. I told him she was at the ice cream store getting me a surprise. I asked him if he wanted to come inside and wait for her. Maybe she would bring him a surprise too. He said no and that he had a surprise for her. He told me to go inside and stay safe and not open the door except when the policemen came. I said okay and then we said goodbye.
A little while later I heard the sirens and stuff and then you came, Mr. Policeman. How did Brian know you where coming here? Did you see Mommy? I want to tell her I met Brian.
I’m so happy. I didn’t know I had a brother.
by submission | Sep 7, 2008 | Story
Author : Lokon
Richard was forty, paunchy and balding when he came home early and found Susan on the bed they shared. The thing on her and in her was a vibrating mass of warm rubberized orgasm; moving in and out of-across her, her eyes and ears were hidden behind the goggles flashing the holos of what Richard assumed to be one of her Romance novels. She neither saw him nor heard him, and Richard had a manic moment where he imagined she wouldn’t have cared either way. The discarded box it had arrived in professed it as ‘the best sex on the market’ Richard fingered the wedding band she had placed on his finger. His flesh bulged around the too tight metal. He left quietly.
Richard started taking pills. The blue pill made him hard on demand led to the brown pill to keep him going to the red pill to make him more aware of her and better. The pills brought want of the augments. They put little circuits in his head to help him remember dates and recite Shakespeare and Donne on command. At first they were to please her, and then they were just for him. The augments led to uploading, back ups, and gene therapy.
Susan aged and Richard grew to be more then he had been, muscles beginning to regrow and hair migrating from his back to the top of his head. “Darling” Susan said on her 90th birthday “Die with me. We were not meant for more then we were given. Promise me that you will be human with me in the end.” Richard was 96 and looked 28, but said “Yes” as he promised to join the dying who were not to be wooed by the seductive murmurings of technologic immortality.
Richard was getting used to his new legs and eyes when he found Susan there. Susan was locked in a box in her best Sunday clothes, earth forming all around her wooden walls with a tombstone like a sundae’s cherry on top. Next to it was Richard’s marker, now only signifying the shell he’d discarded just before Susan had closed her eyes for good. “I am sorry dearest, I didn’t want to if I didn’t have to.”
