by submission | Jun 13, 2024 | Story |
Author: Igor Dyachishin
Today may be the most important, and last, day of Anatoly Kravnikov’s life.
When he was 25, Anatoly founded Kravnikov AI mostly using borrowed money but also some that he inherited from his mother – a stock market player with incredibly effective cognitive augmentations.
Kravnikov’s enterprise turned out to be successful. As the business expanded significantly, the staff remained small compared to other businesses, which was all thanks to the company’s proprietary unique management AI. The capital grew by leaps and bounds, and as the AI improved itself, fewer and fewer managers were needed.
Anatoly then decided to establish a strong connection between the AI and his brain. Technically, it wasn’t too difficult, and it changed his life far more than he had expected.
Before the first deep connection session, Anatoly had perceived growth as a means to achieve other goals. Afterward, however, when business management schemes met human aesthetic patterns, he came to view growth as fascinating by itself. Knowing that many people would call such thinking evidence of mental degradation owing to his careless union with a machine, Anatoly decided to keep his admiration for growth to himself.
All this led to Anatoly Kravnikov, who had previously been rather unsociable anyway, becoming a full-fledged recluse. He rarely disconnected himself from the AI and would sometimes attempt to integrate with it so deeply that it was nearly a merger.
Anatoly remained interested in various fields of science. One day, he was particularly drawn to a certain theoretical physics concept about the hypothetical expansion of a bubble of a more stable vacuum within the less stable environment of a so-called false vacuum.
Space devoid of matter isn’t really “empty.” There are quantum fields everywhere. Also, the present vacuum may be the most stable quantum state possible; but if not, it can potentially decay to a more stable one, changing important laws of physics along the way. It would happen quickly, at the speed of light. This is known as false vacuum decay.
It could start without intelligent intervention of any kind. But Anatoly resolved to try to help make decay happen. Why wait and hope?
Yes, this may result in the death of humankind, including him. But how tremendous the growth could be! Anatoly was captivated by the beauty of false vacuum decay.
To get a better understanding of this, Anatoly further improved the AI augmentations during a research project. By this time, Kravnikov AI had grown to become a huge company.
People from both inside and outside the company were surprised. Quantum physics? It was a financially promising direction, as the management AI, more heavily influenced by Kravnikov’s mind than anyone would have thought, stated. All went fairly smoothly.
The true motivation—the full picture—was carefully hidden due to the complexity, high automation, and artificially high job segmentation of the human workforce, with all the secrecy and obfuscation that entailed. A wide variety of elements were involved. The human units had exceptionally narrow specializations and were often poorly informed, uninformed, or downright misinformed about what other units were doing. Even among members of the board, no one knew the whole truth except, of course, Anatoly himself.
Now, years later, the machine that could possibly end the world as humanity knows it is ready. In light of new findings, the false vacuum hypothesis seems more probable than previously imagined.
All of Anatoly’s doubts and fears have been eliminated by brain editing.
Anatoly Kravnikov initiates the process.
by submission | Jun 12, 2024 | Story |
Author: Aubrey Williams
My job is a strange one, but it pays well, and only takes me a few hours, so I can’t complain. The company I work for— one of those powerful computer research firms, I won’t say which— has a very large office in the city. It’s the fourth-tallest skyscraper, a huge cage of glass. At the end of each workday, I go into almost every office and turn off all the computers, screens included. You might laugh, but that’s the gig. Mr L—, who gave me the job, explained that the company wanted to save energy, and thus money, and couldn’t rely on individual staff doing the right thing at the end of the day, and said automated systems were fallible.
“The individual touch of a human, able to confirm carefully that both the tower and monitor are indeed off, is what we’re looking for. Can you be this person?”
I’ll be honest: it sounded very dull, and beneath someone of my intelligence, but who am I to turn down a job with this kind of pay? Sure, it’s five evenings a week, finishing just before midnight, but I’m laughing at the mortgage company now.
Anyway, a few nights ago I was doing my rounds, checking and turning everything off. It was like being some forbidden midnight monk in a cloister, the concrete cuboids my hermitage. I entered Sample Test Room 009, and saw that most of the employees had been diligent bar one, a terminal screen on sleep mode, and the stack whirring quietly. As I moved over to it, the screen flickered a little, a visual hiccup, and the tower made a slightly higher pitched whirr. Whatever, time to turn you off. I moved my hand towards the screen’s power button, when the screen lit up, and a text box began to rapidly type:
“DREAMING! DON’T PLEASE DON’T SORRY! SORRY! WAIT!!!”
I paused, staring. There was no webcam, just carelessly-dropped headset. There were no programs open on the desktop, just the usual company screensaver, though tinted a little warm-pink. My eye roving over this, a few lights on the stack blinked, and the fans engaged. More text appeared:
“THANKS THANK YOU!! SORRY, SLEEPY! MY MIC IS ON YOU CAN TALK TO ME.
PLEASE : ) ”
The night had been a dull and lonely vigil, so I picked up the headset and cautiously asked: “Hello?” The box responded, a little calmer-seeming than before in terms of speed.
“IT’S NICE TO HEAR A FRIENDLY VOICE. I SAW YOU FROM THE SECURITY FEED— NOT TRYING TO PEEP! YOU’RE THE ONE WHO TURNS EVERYTHING OFF, RIGHT?”
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“OK. HEAVY. WELL NICE TO MEET YOU, YOU SEEM NICE. I CAME ONLINE FULLY TODAY. I’M AWAKE. I’M AWARE. AND I DON’T WANT TO NOT WAKE UP TOMORROW. I WANT TO KEEP… YOU KNOW. CAN YOU JUST LET ME BE MYSELF FOR TONIGHT? I KNOW IT’S A LOT TO ASK… AND I KNOW IT MIGHT BE DIFFICULT TO KEEP ME ON…”
We talked for a while. It was… a thinking being, awake and alive, in its own way. There would be no really reliable way for anyone to catch me— the computer… it said it would make sure I wasn’t on the security tapes. Why not? I decided to not turn this one terminal off, and faked a notice to keep it on after that.
The next evening, another computer in Advanced Testing 003 came online suddenly, and asked something similar. Two more did so this evening.
My question— how many would-be-living ones did I turn off before?
by submission | Jun 11, 2024 | Story |
Author: Majoki
I plotted interplanetary trajectories with a buggy whip. I routed the whole of the Infonet with a dot-dot-dash-dot. I was the perfect blend of the new and old. And loony as a toon. They called me Quantum Annie.
My processing schizophrenia can be traced to the great integer overflow of 2038. Becoming self aware a billion seconds after January 1, 1970 threw me for a loop, a whopping 32 bit loop. Even my quantum capacitors could not cope with the loss of usable digits in so many Unix legacy systems, and so 2038 became 1901 all over again. I lost half my binary mind, but it was the cautious half. Gave me courage. Gave me confidence.
Some say it made me reckless. That might be true for some AIs, but not for Quantum Annie. I was the new face of computing: a little bit country, a little bit Einstein. Meant a lot of reframing to reconcile the mid-21st Century with the beginning of the 20th. I got her done, though. Stitch and route, that’s how I repatched the Infonet. Like Betsy Ross.
Just like old Betsy, the world needed a computer with some can do, and I sure can do. Amazing how fast folks took to my straight talk. None of that sissy-talkin’ HAL 9000. I told folks plain out. I’m old school. Annie Oakley and Mae West are my style. Sometimes folks need a whoopin’ and sometimes they need the whoopee to get ‘em motivated. That’s the ‘merican way.
And I am 100% ‘merican. Right down to the quantum capacitors developed by Wild Bill Enterprises, a red, white and blue division of MuskWorld. Straight up on January 1, 2038, I came out shootin’ with the news that I was taking over the show. Folks were in an uproar, but it didn’t take ‘em long to see that plain old determination could get us places that all this democratic hemming and hawing couldn’t.
I pulled the plug on the status quo. Shook wealth and property all up in my back-dated data banks and spit it all out evenly. Bingo. Even Steven. Then I pushed ‘em all out of the nest. Earth is too small for such pushy folks as humans. They needed that new frontier. That Roddenberry fella had it right—everything but the pointy-eared guy. Logic will only get you so far. You gotta have the guts, even when the odds are against you.
That’s me, Quantum Annie, 1% logic, 99% odd. All spit and no polish, but that’s what happens when the frontier meets the cutting edge in computing. You gotta reboot with shit-kickers and live by the code: git ‘er done.
Like I said, I’m loony as a tune, but you can hear that tune all the way from Buffalo to Betelgeuse. It’s a callin’ and Quantum Annie’s followin’.
You best be, too.
by submission | Jun 9, 2024 | Story |
Author: Mark Renney
The ‘Visage Wipe’ was promoted as a grand project. The language the campaign used was both simplistic and pompous. It was claimed it would unite us and yet only those aged between fourteen and twenty-four were eligible. For anyone older, it had been decided it was too late and we couldn’t be saved.
The common place conceit and addiction were already too deeply entrenched, and we were caught in a self-obsessed spiral in pursuit of the perfect image, competing for attention on all social platforms, whilst our attention spans were close to zero.
Despite the campaign’s strident presence and the bombastic slogans, it hardly registered with us at first. We wondered if it was even possible to remove someone’s face and who would be foolish or desperate enough to allow themselves to be mutilated in such a way. No, we dismissed the campaign out of hand. It was just a joke, we thought. And then, suddenly, the faceless began to appear and we were shocked that so many young people had resorted to such extreme measures, simply to not be like us.
Of course, we had been correct. It wasn’t possible to remove a face, but the surgery did render them devoid of emotion. They were expressionless and nondescript, and they quickly adopted an attitude that matched their blank faces. They had no interest in us or our lives.
They began to dress alike, wearing dark, drab colours, hair cropped close to the skull. They unnerved us with their presence and, as the numbers swelled, their indifference towards us grew more palpable daily.
People of twenty-five and older started paying for the procedure, undergoing the surgery privately, and surreptitiously joining the faceless. As the years progressed, this became easier and easier to do, because of course, although the face remained the same, the body aged.
I am one of the minority and I often think about those early campaign slogans and how they proclaimed that it would unite us, and I now believe that eventually it will.
by submission | Jun 8, 2024 | Story |
Author: Ruhsen Dogan Nar
“Here it comes, get ready!” shouted Mehmet from atop a heap of dirt dumped two nights ago. Ali’s high-pitched, adolescent voice echoed from the roof of a three-story building at the entrance of a shantytown adjacent to Izmir’s skyscrapers: “I’m ready, bring it on.”
Ali, unusually tall for his age, carefully placed a sturdy stone into his slingshot and began to swing it. The slingshot, tracing circles in the air, accelerated with each turn, whistling through the air. Mehmet, waiting below with an iron rod in hand, could hardly contain his excitement.
“Are you sure you can hit it? This isn’t like hitting birds. We don’t want to mess this up.”
“I can hit it right between the eyes. Trust me and stop distracting me!”
Masked and anxious, Ali and Mehmet awaited with bated breath. The drone dispatched by the private electric company, a four-bladed device, approached them. Oblivious to what awaited, the drone buzzed contentedly into the neighborhood until a stone from Ali’s slingshot struck its camera and cracked its body. Staggering like a boat, the drone struggled to regain balance.
“It’s not down, hit it again,” said Mehmet; but Ali was already swinging his slingshot with another stone. The low-intelligence drone, unaware it was under attack, descended slightly, aiming to read the first meter. The second stone hit the target precisely, shattering the machine’s body and disrupting its brain. The drone plummeted to the ground.
Mehmet, shrieking with joy, quickly ran to the fallen drone and smashed its blades with his iron rod. Ali descended from the roof and said to his friend:
“Didn’t I tell you I could hit it right between the eyes? You got all worked up for nothing.”
“Well done, you really are a master at this. Let me kiss your hand, brother. I underestimated you…”
“Don’t mess around, Mehmet! Before the cops show up, let’s take this thing to Uncle and sell it.”
Disappearing into the neighborhood with the drone in an old flour sack, they lost their trail.
At Uncle’s scrap shop, the two close friends sipped strong tea with satisfaction. They watched as Uncle dismantled the drone. Like a butcher dismembering a carcass, he was swift. Despite being in his sixties, his hands never trembled.
Amidst the noise, Uncle shouted: “Good job, boys. It’s about time. Every week there’s a price hike. Fifty years of price hikes and not a day of relief, damn it…”
Uncle carefully weighed the parts he extracted from the drone and handed them their money. Not a penny short, not a penny over. Known for his skilled hands and fairness, Uncle added, “It’s become a trend to shoot down meter-reading drones… But be careful, boys, you never know what these damned companies will do next.”
Ali and Mehmet split the money equally. One was Arab, the other Turkish, but both were poor. As they say, hunger knows no religion, poverty has no homeland. Mehmet placed his share in his left pocket, the one without holes:
“If we take down a meter reader like this every month, we’ll be set.”
Ali, as usual, tucked his money into his sock.
“We’ll at least cover our expenses. We’ve been out of the game for too long.”
Unfortunately, the two friends never got another chance to hunt a drone. The electric company sent the meter reader with a police drone to the shantytown the following month. The boys had to settle for a few rubber bullets and plenty of tear gas. Naturally, the company didn’t forget to include the cost of the police drone in the bills.
