by submission | May 29, 2010 | Story
Author : Cesium
They were together when the city stopped.
Their office perched atop a spire reaching up from the business district. Usually holoscreens afforded them a panoramic, unobstructed view of the city, or of whatever other landscape they wished to see, but those were dead now and only a single transparent wall afforded them a view of the neighboring towers, now suddenly gone dark and silent.
Then, because it was their job, they ran down the hall to the backup interface and tried to trace the problem.
Basic systems were still running — power, water, air — but all higher-level functions had ceased. Citywide routing and guidance algorithms had failed, leaving vehicles to come to a halt on their own collision-avoidance routines. Only a few emergency lights, designed to be always on, still cast their soft glow onto the streets. And of course all information and communications systems were down, including the interactive panels that lined these corridors.
The backup interface was a wide area packed with machinery whose purpose even she wasn’t sure of. It was the first time either of them had seen the city go down, and even their teachers had only been able to offer advice instead of concrete knowledge about this situation. He glanced at her; she shrugged, but tossed him a manual. It was a physical book, thick and bound, and he fumbled for a second before he could open it. Outside, some of the lights were starting to come back on, as they were switched over from the city’s unresponsive power-management grid to standalone controllers.
The first test was to try the direct neural interface. But the link was down; her thoughts couldn’t establish a connection. Similarly, the giant holoscreen mounted on one wall flashed red and displayed an apology; it couldn’t locate the city server.
They tried then interface after interface, going through the long list of communications protocols that the city understood, which it had accumulated over centuries of upgrades to its computer core. And slowly they discovered what the machines filling the room were for. After the first hour they had to abandon the holoscreen. One method used an interface combining hand motions with voice control, which she found immensely tiring. The fifth hour found them both staring at a flat screen, touching a pad in front of them to manipulate symbols and icons. And still they kept running into failure after failure. The protocols they were using were too high-level; the error was somewhere deeper.
By the seventh hour, they’d gotten out an ancient piece of polymer called a mouse, and were moving it around on a table. And then, the screen lit up. It was something he’d tried on a whim, activating a function buried deep in the code. The screen bore the words “more magic”, and a crude line drawing of a bearded figure on a cloud. Below was a button labeled “let there be light”. She glanced at him; he shrugged.
She clicked on the button.
by submission | May 27, 2010 | Story
Author : D. Maurer
“Coffee?” I asked him; we were watching a recovery procedure. This poor sap died well over five hundred years ago. He was the oldest meat popsicle we had attempted to revive.
“Excuse me?”
“Would you like some coffee?”
“No. No, thank you.”
I looked at him and the giant polygon that the popsicle was in.
“You’ve been staring at that thing for at least 2 hours. Nothing’s happened yet. Not supposed to for a while yet.”
“But we never know.”
“But the machines notify…” I trailed off. We were not really doctors like they were back when this guy was first alive. More like engineers. That’s as good as bad.
He sighed. “Of course, but it’s not the same.”
Pause in the dialogue. I thought about it.
“I can see that.”
“See what?” He looked closer at the polygon. 13 sides. Matte black. Longer one way than the other, of course. Some industrial designer’s idea of modern. It sat in a small room. We sat in a small room carved from the other room by glass walls and a door.
“I mean, I understand. It’s not the same seeing them when they first wake.”
“Understand what? Oh. Yeah,” He leaned closer, nose almost against the glass.
“What did he have?”
“Something with his kidneys. Or his heart. Or cancer. Doesn’t matter. We’ve grown new organs. I’m not worried about anything but the brain,” he looked at me for the first time in hours. “And you should only be worried about that, too. The rest is,” he flipped his hand over, looking for the word, “fixable.” He turned back to the black thing.
We’d heard some people getting revived with massive brain damage; if the damage is too severe to a given cell, it’s abandoned by The Process. You didn’t want too many of those; even a handful in the wrong brain area was bad, but if someone woke up with a soup of cell components instead of proper nerve cells, there was really no telling.
Best case: memory loss was common, incontinence close second, but you were alive. Catheter and therapy took care of the urine issues; time and therapy took care of the memory.
And he stared at the damned polygon for another hour before it opened. When it did open, it revealed a bald, naked, and scared human being.
We entered the room and I spoke quietly to him. I spoke a dozen old languages and dialects; my partner, a dozen others. Between us we had most of the popsicle languages covered.
“Richard, we’re here to help. You were frozen when you died; we cured what killed you and you’re still alive,”
“You can hear me but probably cannot talk. We will teach you these things.”
“You died in 2034. The year is 2561. You have been dead for 527 years but now you are alive. You were rich and your investments have paid off handsomely. You are rich almost beyond measure. Your first-hand history will serve you well. You lived in an interesting time.”
He was trying to talk, a sound close to “Matilda?”
His chart said he was married. This Matilda had moved on and had elected not to be frozen and revived. A good sign he asked about her, though. Memories and all.
“We’ll get to that sir. Can you stand?”
He could. We led him to the recovery area. He only peed a little bit on the way there. I talked to him because he was more alone now than I could imagine.
by submission | May 26, 2010 | Story
Author : Q. B. Fox
17th April 2002, a concrete room, off an unmarked tunnel on the Northern Line.
“How long were they down?”
Simon looked up from what he was doing, and even in the dim light of the rack mounted servers I recognise the pinched expression.
“12 days. A power supply shorted some circuits in Prophet a week last Friday. Without the proper predictive model Lösch became CPU bound by Saturday morning, so we shut it down before something else broke.”
Lösch, both the software and the specialist machine it ran on, was named after the 20th century economist Sir Richard Lösch, whose work on monetary systems was the underlying principle of the program.
But it became apparent when they started trying to run Lösch that this theoretical model wasn’t designed to incorporate real feedback efficiently. So the coders built predictive software to take real information from the markets, combine it with the theoretical model and feed its predictions back into Lösch. The pun was just too delicious for them not to call it Prophet.
“12 days?” I frowned. “The economy’s pretty stable now; surely leaving it to run itself for 12 days won’t have caused any problems.”
“Ask Dr. Rob,” Simon indicated the other corner of the room. Visible only by the light of green text reflected in his tiny spectacles, and from his pallid, sweaty skin, Dr. Rob chewed his tongue like cow and silently scanned his monitor. Who themed green text on a black background? Dr. Rob was old school.
“Imagine,” Simon explained, presumably as it had been explained to him, “walking on a tightrope. Lösch keeps its balance by a gentle nudge here, a small purchase there. I’d assumed that because Lösch was making more frequent smaller trades that the whole system was stabilising. Turns out I was wrong.”
I turned towards a grunt expelled from Dr. Rob; he was rolling his eyes in an exaggerated manner that would have been comical if he’d known he was doing it.
“It turns out,” Simon continued, “that we’ve been tightrope walking in high winds, and that Lösch was correcting and counter correcting the whole time. Now imagine our tightrope walker blacks out for a second.”
I imagined and gulped back a sudden rush of financial vertigo.
“The first forecast from Prophet this morning was showing hyper inflation in the near future, could be as bad as 65%. We set Lösch to work on it. The data came out about an hour ago. You can tell the prime minister that, as of today, Lösch can hold the inevitable off for about 5 years but eventually it will happen.”
“And we can’t stop it?” I was alarmed.
“Not without something beyond the scope of Lösch,” Simon explained, “not without a major human intervention. Dr. Rob’s working on it, but don’t expect an answer any time soon.”
Contrary as ever, Dr Rob’s deep bass filled the room for the first time. “We need a recession, a genuine, but planned, collapse of confidence.” He chewed. “And I think I have an idea. Have you ever heard of sub-prime mortgages?”
by submission | May 24, 2010 | Story
Author : Liz Lafferty
Seven years I’d waited for my DNA match.
Seven years of anxiety about what she would be like. Seven years of stress about whether she’d find me attractive and a suitable provider.
Nineteen billion people inhabited the planet. I never understood why it was so difficult to find the right person. The wheels of Sovereign Earth ran slower than any single nation’s government had before. Always paperwork.
The idea behind DNA review seemed palatable: to prevent physical defects and mental illness. I’d just never thought I’d have to wait so long or that I wouldn’t love my match.
Whoever she was, we were the fortunate ones. We’d get life partners. We’d get to breed, have a plot of our own in one of the eight hundred outliers of our city. It would be better than the concrete and steel, four hundred and ten square feet we were entitled to as singles. I’d recently lost my only window, too, when some bureaucrat’s son trumped me on the ‘need’ scale.
The match meant freedom.
I’d picked up my papers yesterday morning from the databank in Pelnan. I’d slept with them under my pillow.
I only knew her by her serial number. It would be imprinted on her spinal column if I wanted to check once she arrived. I didn’t. I just wanted to see her, say a few words, find out if her match had been as difficult in finding as mine had been.
And then…the rest of our lives.
I was expecting the knock but it startled me anyhow. When I opened the door, my sister Livy stood there.
“Liv, my gosh, how are you?” I pulled her into my arms and hugged her. I hadn’t seen her since my work orders came in. When I gripped her shoulders, she stared at me like she didn’t know who I was. “What’s wrong? Is it mom?”
“No. I…” Tears rolled down her face.
“Tell me!” I nearly shook her to find out why she was so upset.
She held up her papers. They had the Sovereign Earth databank seal. Like mine.
“I came here to meet my DNA match.”
I might have gone as pale as she did. My legs gave out and I collapsed into the only chair I had. “You mean…”
She nodded her.
“Oh, Liv. I’m sorry. How long have you waited?”
“Nine years. I thought this was it. What about you?”
“Seven.”
Seven years I’d waited for my DNA match.
Seven years to find out the clowns running Sovereign Earth matched me with my own sister. The next election cycle seemed years away. And it would probably take that long to convince the czars running the databank they’d made a mistake.
“Could be worse,” I finally said.
“I don’t see how.”
“At least we’ll have our own plot of ground.”
by submission | May 23, 2010 | Story
Author : Mark Robinson
“But, how is any of this possible?”
Despite the scene she’s making all I can focus on is the pink tip of the pregnancy test strip – which we stock on aisle five – that she’s waving around in the air; watching the droplets of pink-tinted urine fleck across the counter where I’m standing, completely at a loss as to what I should do.
A steady line of customers, hands still holding onto the item they were looking to buy before the woman burst into the store ranting, peek out from between the shelves I’ve yet to finish stocking.
Any answer I give will be the wrong one; even though the thought occurs to me that we currently have a special on synthetic breast milk.
“How’m I meant to tell my husband? He’s in deep space and won’t be back for another twelve months and what d’you think he’ll say when he lands and sees me holding another one of these?”
I never noticed the woman was holding onto a kid with her urine-free hand.
When she doesn’t get a response, she turns to the counter display of condoms; “And, these things don’t work,” picking up a couple of boxes and slamming them down in front of me on the counter. “I’m gonna sue the pants of your manager when he gets back from lunch.”
So that explains why we’re short on stock and he ducked out early.
A brief silence hits the woman while she looks at the clock above my head.
“Which one did you use?” A small, thin teenager standing behind the woman and her toddler.
The quiet woman looks at the stick in her hand and shoves it in the girls face.
“Yeah,” She nods, “I had a false positive with one of them.”
The woman’s eyebrows hover slightly before narrowing her eyes back at me then dragging her kid around to aisle five.
The teenager looks at me waiting for my thank you; I pick up the boxes of contraception and place them back into their racks. When the counter’s clear, the woman drops three boxed test strips down for me to swipe.
“Tell Joe if they come out positive again, he owes me nine-ninety-five.”
I scan the barcodes and hold out my hand for her payment which she ignores, snatching up the boxes and dragging her kid back out the door.
An elderly woman hobbles up to the counter, close enough to have heard every word of our exchange; “You’d think she’d be more careful in this day and age?” Dropping before me two packs of cancer cream and a USB vibrator. “They should bring back sterilisation,” routing in her purse for her money, “never did me any harm.”
When I look up the headset goes black and I hear my history teacher clear his throat. Back in the classroom, I remove the headset; afraid to look him in the eyes.
“Did you spot the deliberate mistakes?” He asks, greying fussy eyebrows bouncing above his head.
After a moment I think I grasp it, “It would take longer than twelve months to get back to earth from deep space in 2009.”
His mouth opens to comment. I hear a few titters from my classmates. Then I realise what I just said. “The cancer cream?”
Professor Grey smiles; “And?”
All I can do is shrug. Behind me, Stacie raises her hand to answer.
“Stacie?” He says, taking the headset from me.
She smiles at me, “When women used to give birth, it only took nine months to gestate.” She holds her smile in place. “And, the test turns blue when it’s positive, not pink.”
