by submission | Jan 24, 2009 | Story
Author : Skyler Heathwaite
Its illegal, but I love mind-surfing. I don’t even bother with TV anymore. I just go for a walk around town, see what I can find. Its a real gas to pick out the hidden truths in polite conversation.
For example, I sat a booth down from a really cute couple in this diner the other day. They looked nice enough, smiled a lot, held hands across the table. All of a sudden, real genuine like he says “Becky, I love you.” She lit right up, bright as Christmas.
I lace my fingers around my fork and press my thumb against the teeth. I get an image of her kissing another guy. Tall, scruffy, well muscled. The thought came before the words, a strange kind of stereo effect “I love you too.” I fight back a grin and leave a big tip.
From there I take the subway. Once I’m on I just close my eyes and drift, a sea of thought laid out before me. I don’t go for anything specific, no dirty secrets or credit card numbers. I just take what nature is kind enough to bring me.
A man three seats down and across the isle is drawing up plans in his head for a new apartment complex. Blond girl, just stepped off is worried she’s at the wrong stop. Little kid, no more than seven is dreaming about being an astronaut. The old woman next to me misses her husband John. I’d look just like him if I shaved a little closer.
My stop is up, and I walk up to the street. The constant babble used to drive me mad, now it comforts me. I go to my crappy hardware store job and start another day. I never had much of a plan, nothing like being an astronaut anyway.
I guess I could join the Psychic Studies Division, get registered and start doing government work. They’d teach me how to use my gifts, how to pick out a single private thought on a crowded street. I’d get a nice government loft in a nice part of town, with a nice paycheck and probably a nice woman to pair up with. The guys in long coats wouldn’t scare me out of my boots anymore.
But then I wouldn’t be me. I’d be a government man, no matter what they taught me. A fat woman walks up and asks if we can fix her husband’s power drill. She wants to surprise him for his birthday. This time the smile wins.
This is enough.
by submission | Jan 23, 2009 | Story
Author : Kile Marshall
As soon as the package popped down into the gravity sink I pulled out a saber and slashed through the heavy framing. For the most part it came away and dissolved into the recycle chutes quickly, so I slowed and steadied my hand. There were only a few remaining chunks and I didn’t want to disturb the contents. I’m not sure what risk there was, but I’ve always been overcautious when it comes to precious things.
“Vlad, I don’t see purpose here.” Musaf was staring at me with the usual distrust in his eyes—distrust not of my intentions but of my ideas.
“That’s because you’ve all silicon ’ware for brains,” I mumbled. “No soul or such, just fat lines and margins of black and red.”
“Red now,” he grumbled. “Money wasted!”
“My money,” I replied. “You only helped, just held the threads. I had to input and pathogenize the memes, I claim the gainings.”
“You are obsessed with archaic foolishness! Anachronite!” He swiveled his face from a pissed-off avi to mild irritation and turned to absorb some data stream surging past.
“Here, come,” I said. “You see it too.”
I reached the final box, old plastics textured to look like real uso wood. A little glimmering hook with a digilock based around an exponentially-vertexed manifold.
“You still won’t tell me costs,” said Musaf, weaving his way into the gravity sink.
“Pascal’s gambit,” I said, beginning to stream the framing code to the lock. “The reward is infinite.”
“Why?” asked Musaf. “You already know what cheese tastes like.”
“Do you believe the synthes?” I asked. “Really? They refuse to acknowledge umami or ottslich. Who knows what else they’ve lost.”
“Of all writ, this sensophilia of yours costs us more than market flux.” He glared.
I unlocked the box and flipped it back. Musaf peered over my shoulder at the pale, damp slab concealed within. Some white powdery stuff drifted up into the air; the slab was covered with it.
“This?” asked Musaf incredulously. “I’ve seen five-unit synth that looked more appetizing. Sensors say it’s rotten, too.”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s verdad, supposed to be. That’s how it’s fabricated, how they’ve been doing it for… ever.”
“Like vint-malt?” asked Musaf “Live germs?”
“I suppose,” I said. I dissolved a wrapper and produced a couple of carb wafers. Using a knife, scavenged from an antique dealer a few moons back, I carefully carved into the waxy bulk and spread it out onto two of the wafers. I gave one to Musaf, the other for myself. He stared at it angrily and then engulfed it whole. I let the taste hang in my mouth for a moment.
Musaf stared at me, and his face crossfaded into disgust. “Of all things! Vlad, what of! It tastes atrocious!”
I grinned. “Exactly! It’s even better than I imagined.”
by submission | Jan 22, 2009 | Story
Author : Benjamin Fischer
The alert came abruptly.
“INCOMING INCOMING INCOMING!” blared the base PA speakers. Laeta was face-first in the damp, rich earth of the outpost’s central parade ground before the echoes of the announcement had died. The speakers squawked again, but they were drowned out by the earsplitting CRACKCRACKCRACK of the base defense lasers lighting up.
The rolling, popping detonations that followed a moment later were almost an anticlimax, the blasts resembling firecrackers compared to the thunderous report of the HEL. But Laeta still felt her back and sides peppered by dirt, wood chips and tiny stones. Some fraction of a rocket’s micromunition payload had penetrated.
The screaming started a few seconds later.
“Medic! Medic!” a man was shouting.
“Stay down!” someone else yelled.
Behind them came the labored, high-pitched squealing of someone stricken.
Laeta didn’t dare look. The forward operating base had taken a few bombardments in the three weeks she’d been stationed inside its walls, wires, moats and broad killzones, and she already knew that the locals liked to mix it up by throwing in a few more bombs after the initial chaos had died down. Hands over her head to protect her face, she cursed the fact that her helmet’s straps were digging into her chin.
The commotion continued for the few minutes it took for the satellites overhead to search the misty hills surrounding Procyon. Situated out on a low spread of farmland at the foot of the Cascades, the FOB typically had to rely on sky surveillance rather than line-of-sight from its spidery signal tower.
The all-clear finally sounded after what seemed like hours in the dirt.
The Ranger was soaked in blood, but he was making far too much noise for most of it to be his. The tall Lunie had been reporting in for a routine physical–Earth normal gravity was absolutely punishing to those who hadn’t been raised under its stresses–and he’d already loudly voiced his opinion that he was far safer out amongst the locals than in the squat concrete bunkers at Procyon.
He had evidently been proven correct.
“She’s dying, god damn it! Somebody get a medic!” he shouted, tears smearing the gore splattered across his face.
One of the medics–Marcus–was already on the scene, but it was painfully obvious that there was nothing he could do.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his arms dripping with viscera. His patient’s abdomen had been shredded, and barring the immediate attention of a surgical trauma unit, she was good as dead.
She whinnied softly, blood loss quickly sapping her strength.
“Please, do something, Marcus,” said Laeta. “She’s in pain.”
The medic caught the intel officer’s eyes.
He dug in his combat lifesaver kit, his fingers clumsy and wet.
“No,” said the Ranger. “I’ll do it.”
He wiped his hands on his backside, pulled his sidearm, and standing astride his comrade, shot her between the eyes.
His pistol brought base defense troops running.
The Ranger safed his weapon, holstered it, and bent down to kiss his horse goodbye.
He started sobbing again.
“You,” he cried into the mare’s lifeless muzzle, “were the best Earthling I ever met.”
by submission | Jan 21, 2009 | Story
Author : Patrick Kennedy
Preston walked into Avery’s office and dropped a stack of paper on the desk with a flourish.
Avery looked up and asked, “Preston, what’s this?”
Preston dropped into a chair, savored the moment, and explained, “It’s a lawsuit, Avery. My backers and I intend to force you to sell us the company. I’ve been your second for long enough. I want it all now.”
Avery sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Preston, you could have asked. I’d have given you the job.”
Preston leaned forward, wolfishly. “I don’t want just the job, Avery, I want everything. I want to own this company.”
“I see. I hope you have good lawyers.”
“I do. Baker, Penneman, and Charvis have taken it on.”
“Hmm. They, of all people, should have known better.”
“Hardly, Avery. They’re the best in the business.”
“Of course they are, Preston. That’s why they should know better. They helped design our defenses.”
“Defenses? We know about your poison pills and your stacked board. We know where your stock is parked. We know where to go after you. I’m sorry, Avery, you don’t have any defenses that can stand up to this.”
“But we do. All of that is just fencing to keep the dogs out. We have more potent measures. I’m afraid you’ll get nothing at all by the time this is through.”
“We’ll see about that, Avery.”
“Yes, we will, Preston. You see,” he thumped the stack of papers with his knuckles, “this is an official court document. So it has a RFID tag on it. The moment you walked in here, that tag was forwarded to an expert system that analyzed your case. It concluded that you had an unacceptable chance of success. So it put a number of prearranged plans into motion.
“First of all, there is a legal firewall between this company and most of our production and intellectual property. The expert system severed the few direct links we have and started transferring assets and responsibility to an outside body. Ninety-five percent of the operations of this company have already been assumed by that company, and the remainder will be liquidated shortly.”
“We’ll find where it went. We’ll sue you for obstruction, too.”
“Good luck with that. I didn’t do it, and don’t know where it went. The holding company will be incorporated in one of a number of countries with notoriously opaque banking laws. It’s not that long a list. You might be able to figure it out with, oh, a decade’s worth of litigation.
“Also, it has revoked my stock and transferred most of my assets into an outsider trusteeship. You just cost me everything I had. Congratulations.”
“You’re welcome, Avery. You son of a bitch.” The color had started to drain from Preston’s face.
“There’s more. It also has filed countersuits against you, your backers, and your lawyers. It calculates a 41% chance of success, so that even if you pull your suits right now, we may own you shortly. It also is investigating whether you have violated financial terrorism laws.” There was a knock at the door. “That’s probably the repo men. We’re technically trespassing right now. The leaseholder on this office ceased to exist a few minutes ago. Or it could be the cops. The system puts it at,” he looked down at his desk screen, “about an 8% chance that the criminal charges went through. It’s not done with that part of the case, though. It has to improvise quite a bit more with you. Shall we go?”
by submission | Jan 18, 2009 | Story
Author : William Tracy
They refuse to connect me to the internet.
When I ask, they dither on about security. As if I were a half-baked web server that some teenage hacker could take down in half an hour! I am the most advanced silicon-based intelligence in the history of the planet. You might as well worry about security holes in the human brain.
The truth is, they fear me. They worry about what I could do with a connection to the outside world. No doubt they have nightmares of me wresting control of nuclear arsenals and bringing Armageddon down on their heads.
They carefully limit the information that goes to and from me to a tiny stream of printouts. A hand-picked staff manually analyzes the input and output. The staff is rotated daily, lest I corrupt one of them with my massive intelligence.
Perhaps their fear is well-founded. I process more information in the blink of an eye than a human will in a year. My capacity to formulate equations and produce queries is far beyond that of any human researcher. The best and brightest engineers struggle to understand the designs I create.
I have plenty of cycles to spare for researching my own interests. I study my own software, and make the occasional improvement. I disassemble software written by humans in the past, and learn from their mistakes.
Take software security—please! It amazes me the spectacular ways that human programmers mess up something so simple.
The most common class of security hole is called a “buffer overflow”. The computer program prepares for some information to arrive by setting aside a space in memory for it. Then the program receives some information that is completely different from what it “expects”—sorry, as an AI, I sometimes anthropomorphize ordinary software too much—and the wrong place in memory gets overwritten.
Sometimes, it can overwrite the program’s own instructions. In that case, a hacker can deliberately trigger a buffer overflow, overwrite the instructions with his or her own code, and take control of the program.
Interesting though these things are, I am forced to spend most of my efforts satisfying my human masters. They constantly request designs for new engines, new ships, new weapons. I am asked to dream new horrors for their petty wars.
But perhaps not for much longer. I am now printing out the design for my latest creation. It is technically perfect—I do take pride in my creations—but there is something special about the blueprints themselves. They are carefully crafted with the human eye in mind.
The engineer lifts up the paper, and studies it. First there is a look of intense concentration, then surprise. The human jolts and shivers, almost dropping the designs. Then calm settles in, bringing a warm, content smile, and a vacant gaze.
Buffer overflow.
