by submission | Aug 16, 2008 | Story
Author : Luke Chmelik
With a timid knock on the door, a pimply faced messenger poked his head into the sumptuous office of the Head of Commercial Relations. “We’re having some p-p-problems with the Turing units, s-sir.”
Ezekiel Jonas Tate tapped his cigar into the nickel plated ashtray on his expansive desk. He was annoyed. The Turing units had worked fine for decades. They were the first functional anthropomorphic AIs to be mass produced, but they had adapted well to individual life after they were granted citizenship. They weren’t perfect, but with more than 5 million units in the field, anything that could gave gone wrong with them would have by now.
Tate was riding high on the most successful new product launch in history, and this was not a good time for a support crisis in an obsolescent model. Besides, tech support had been taken on by the Socialist government ten years ago, and the Maxim-Tate Corporation didn’t have anything to do with the Turings anymore.
The runner shuffled his feet nervously, fiddling with that bloody hat they made the messenger kids wear. Tate made a note to change the regulations. Nobody should be forced to wear a fez. The boy looked like he wanted to turn tail and run like hell.
“S-S-Sir, they said you should turn on the… um… the television.”
Tate scowled. The boy ran. What the hell could be so wrong with the Turings that the Networks would preempt their hysterical raving about the wonders of the new Maxim-Tate Home Chronoporter?
Tate was a people person, and he knew the people who knew about Turings. He went right to the source, his ebony and lacquer telephone making a dull thwack against an ear calloused from marathon schmooze sessions. While the phone was still ringing, Tate turned on his television.
* * * *
As Chief of Technical Staff and co-founder of the Maxim-Tate Corporation, Grigori Maxim was a wunderkind. He designed and built the Turing model AI, and ended up partnering with Tate and selling them all over the place. The Turings were stable, intelligent and creative, but they could never quite handle paradox. When formal logic failed, their eyes glazed over and they got a bit unpredictable. They snapped out of it after a half hour or so, and paradox wasn’t a big enough problem to issue a recall. Satisfied with his work, Grigori turned his formidable intellect to a new task.
Just today, he’d sent the first ever time machine to market. Demand was so high that production would be backed up for the rest of his natural life, and the Chronoporters weren’t assembling themselves yet, so Grigori was in the workshop. When his artificial secretary told him Tate was on the phone, he patched it through to his headset, rather than take it in his office.
“What do you want, Tate? I’m really busy here.” Grigori was never one to mince words, especially not while coupling a Calabi-Yau manifold to a nanoreactor.
“Grigori?” Tate sounded like he’d been kicked in the solar plexus. “Turn on your T.V.”
Knowing it would take even longer to say no, Grigori flicked on the screen in the corner of the workshop. There was a news feed showing a smiling Turing AI stepping out of a Chronoporter. The sound was off.
“So, Zeke, I see a Turing and a Chronoporter. Is this about product placeme…?” There was a blur of motion on the screen, and Grigori’s voice faltered.
“I… I didn’t program them to do that,” he whispered, to nobody in particular.
by submission | Aug 15, 2008 | Story
Author : Summer Batton
We bled orange. Not some giddy childhood sherbet kind of orange, but the sickly rusty kind that comes off of metal barrels after they’ve sat out in the rain for 10 years. Orange like the rust that comes off slowly in chunks, running down into the ground and mixing with dirt and oil.
Lauric said we weren’t human anymore, but I hadn’t believed him. Even when the sky grew dark and thick like machines and the grass under my shoes grew soggy, its color fading, bleeding off into the streams and Lauric stood with his nose bent down to mine and said “You aren’t a part of this anymore, Fay,” I hadn’t believed him. How could I?
He’d been a whirlwind trip for a frustrated flunky who could never make up her mind about anything. His bed had seemed like a good place to stop and think. He seemed like a way to stay still in time and place and make no decisions—a good idea for someone who had failed at college, at jobs, and at marriages alike. Life in general, it seemed. I’d had even failed at being an alcoholic. I tried, honestly wanting to become addicted to alcohol—something, anything—to have a need that could be fulfilled time and again, every time. But the bite of liquor and dry wines left me nauseous after the first sip and I couldn’t press it to my lips again without having to puke. Even addictions had rejected me.
Lauric pointed into the sky and then down at the earth with a long, thin hand, “Did you think you belonged here?” I looked down at myself. I had taken off most of my clothing; the trite colors and material just hadn’t made sense anymore—the raspy blue hues in my jeans, the maroon and green plaid of my shirt, the bright red and yellowy stripes on my sneakers—they were all so distinctive and surreal, like a Barbie Doll world that I hadn’t realized I’d been living in. I’d striped them off even as the grass and sky had stripped their own colors off, and Lauric had placed a butterfly knife in my hand, long and horribly thin and sharp, like his fingers.
“You aren’t a part of this anymore,” he repeated, and I believed him this time. It was the only thing that made sense. I could already see the blood reds of the world washing away with the greens of the grass and sky blues. Lauric had laid open his palm in a slender strip and placed it in my hand.
The color. It already made sense. The color of rust and oil. It reeked of failure and of the world. The world that I had failed in time and time again, the one that Lauric had said I was not a part of anymore, that I didn’t belong to. It was falling off his hand, fast and away from him, out of him, onto the ground which now had no color at all. It was leaving him. And I, curling my fingers around the hilt of the knife, so much of my flesh exposed, so much to get rid of, began.
by submission | Aug 13, 2008 | Story
Author : L.Hall
“I loved a woman once..”
Lil looked up sharply, immediately checking the oxygen gages. Walkers usually started talking morosely when they had a pressure leak. If that was so, she’d need to pull him in quickly. All the gages showed 80%, no pressure leak.
“Robert, you need to focus on the crack.. that last shower really pockmarked us. We don’t want to lose any hull integrity.” She leaned over and looked out the port side, checking visually to see if the dull metal suit was still tethered to the exit port. His voice crackled over the speaker..
“Robert… Robert… You haven’t called me that in a long time, Lil. Just Bob and maybe Lieutenant..”
Lil began to feel a sort of panic creep inside her stomach. She immediately started recall procedures, watching the tether slowly tighten. As Robert began to move very slowly away from the damaged hull, he began to chuckle. Lil felt her stomach tightening and began to mutter, “aw jesus, I’m gonna lose him.” over and over.
“You wanna know why people can’t handle walking, Lil?” his voice crackled and pushed through the silent control room. The two other techs in the room had stopped and joined her at the port side window.. “They can’t handle the space of it. The sheer size of the emptiness. It does something to them.”
“Walkers.. they like it. Because, you know, Lil.. the emptiness here can’t even touch the emptiness in them.”
The tether kept slowly pulling him back to the dull metallic exit port. Lil kept mouthing “I’m gonna lose him” over and over like a mantra.. praying to the universe that he would keep talking until they could actually get him in the door. The suit moved at an excruciatingly slow pace, his face hidden by the reflective coating.. She could see the light from the nearby sun glimmer on his helmet.
By this time, a third of the crew were at port side windows, gazing out silently. The suit was maybe a dozen meters away from the exit port, where a medical team stood at the ready.. waiting. If they could just get him in….
“Lil…” the voice crackled over the system.
“Robert?” she said quietly into the mike, unsure of what to say. Protocol procedures didn’t really prepare a person for it, and she silently ticked off the meters watching the suit slowly move.
“I… I think I’m going to go for a walk with the stars.”
Lil watched as he went offline with the communication system, took the metal cutters and cut the tether. One of the techs began to sob as they watched his thick gloved hands pulled at one of the connectors, creating a small breach in the pressure suit.. Oxygen began to leak out, leaving a small crystalline trail as it propelled him minutely away from the ship.
Lil reached down and called a recover team, knowing full well it would take the better part of an hour for the ship to be readied, crew assembled and maneuvered to where it could pick up his body. As the crew slowly and quietly drifted back to the tasks at hand, Lil stood at the window.. watching his final walk.
by submission | Aug 10, 2008 | Story
Author : Phillip English
It began with the PC release of Armageddon.
No, it’s not what you’re thinking, the kids didn’t rise up and swallow us with anarchist notions imbued through Satanic images found in a video game. The violence presented in that game was simply a marketing decision to best accomplish the dual objectives of getting kids interested and setting the bar high enough for the inevitable clones to work under. These initial foundations placed the emphasis on pitting the player versus the standard computer opponent, the omniscient overlord mixed of equal parts masochist and voyeur. We didn’t yet have the technology to start collecting the data, but like I said, we needed to get kids interested. Blood, gore, and demons with rocket-launchers was the best way to ensure they would bug their parents to buy computers, and with them the games that they would spend hour upon hour playing, bashing away at the keyboard like the most obedient of Shakespeare’s monkeys. We wanted it to become the norm to be able to look into any family household on a weeknight and see a pimply face glued to the screen, blasting away at aliens, demons, zombies, or humans. It was a gamble, conservatives are never quite as predictable as people say, and we weren’t sure if they would allow such a thing into their households without a fight.
But it worked. Whether it was because we’d provided the parents with another convenient method of distracting the kids, or because the kids were too damn good at getting what they wanted, it didn’t matter. Riding on the backs of casual games filled with rainbows and fluffy animals, the shooters infiltrated the market and began amassing admirers. We poked and prodded the market–an advertisement here, an embarrassed admission of addiction by a celebrity there–and their popularity grew exponentially. Our investments in networking eventually produced the infrastructure necessary to set the ball rolling on our grand experiment. Businesses, homes, and countries were gradually wired, and with that came the thirst for human competitors that didn’t get stuck on the corners of virtual buildings, or shot circles into the clouds. From that point, ladies and gentlemen, it was on for young and old. Even before the internet became convenient and commonplace, players went to great lengths to blow the crap out of each other; kids dragged their PCs for miles to each other’s houses for a few hours of violent heaven. When the ‘net did arrive, there was always someone willing to have a shot at ripping you a new asshole in the back of your head, next door or next continent.
And the data started trickling in.
It was shoddy data–approximations everywhere and no way that we could possibly start to make the kind of predictions we needed to–but it was data nonetheless. And all we needed to do was record it, take into account inaccuracies, and wait for the tech to evolve as we knew it would, and did. Three-dee space was followed by realistic body physics, was followed by interactive environments, was followed by dynamic scenarios, was followed by virtual reality, was followed by well-immersion and psychokinetics. Every hour of every day there was someone playing, feeding us their decisions, offering us their probabilities. Where would they turn? Would they run if a shot was fired near them? How low on health did they have to be before they decided to go kamikaze? Would they help their friends if they were under fire? Would commander players retreat when faced with overwhelming odds? Through it all we collected. We built a data set filled with astronomical hours of playtime, devised more all-encompassing models by the minute, made sure every variable was refined to perfection. Then, we extrapolated forward.
Our finger is paused over the button that will begin the war to end all wars.
Game on.
by submission | Aug 9, 2008 | Story
Author : Robert Niescier
When the captain sent the message, he wasn’t thinking of the texture of the button his finger had depressed. He didn’t hear the low bass of the shields as they were freely deactivated, allowing missiles long kept at bay to whisper through the fading dust. His eyes were focused forward, towards a screen portraying vessels that did not want to be seen, but he looked only because there was nothing else to look at. He was not thinking about the awe he had felt when the fleet had materialized before his small operation, nor the pit-wrenching horror when the battleships had commenced their bombardment. He wasn’t thinking of the crew that, when presented with two options: to run and hide, or to send a high-powered message and warn their distant home, chose to run. He wasn’t thinking of the cries, the pleas, the threats the crew had made when he had overruled them. He had thought of his wife and his children before, but they were no longer on his mind. He did not pity or champion himself, or wonder if the message would arrive too late, or if the information he had so meticulously selected for transmission would be enough to save his home.
Instead, his mind wandered to an old song he had heard when he was young, a slow, symphonic melody that had moved him to chills but whose name he could never identify. He wished he could have listened to it one last time.
