by submission | Jun 6, 2008 | Story
Author : Guy Wade
The little robot on the laboratory table had a smooth plastic face and expressionless coal-bead eyes. Professor Trunk flipped the switch in its back. It stood up and bowed.
“Greetings, I am Renoir.”
“Amazing!” said Trunk’s supervisor. This made the professor grimace; Grede, the head of the company, thought in terms of money, that is, who would pay them the most of it. Trunk thought in terms of discovery.
Grede frowned. “So, does it do anything else? It’s too small to do the dishes, and The Other Company already makes one of those.” The Other Company was his name for their competition.
“Renoir does a lot more.” There were small easels and painting equipment on the table. The little robot picked up the brush and palette and began to paint. They watched as Renoir made simple gestures on the canvas, which grew into a sweeping painted landscape.
“Wonderful!” Grede said. “A little painter! He’s copying one of the original Renoir paintings.”
“Renoir does more than that,” Trunk said. “There are already robots that can copy artwork with ease. Renoir paints originals in the style of Renoir, too.” The little robot moved to another canvas and painted a quick portrait of Grede.
“I fed him with the original Renoir paintings. I taught him the textures Renoir used, the brush strokes, the pigments. I read him the history of Renoir’s era, so he could understand the political and social conditions that influenced Renoir’s ideals. Mr. Grede, I didn’t just build a robot that could paint like Renoir: I found a way to copy the artist himself, virtually any artist, by extrapolating personality from the corpus of his work. Think of it: a new age of science, art. Shakespeare! DaVinci!”
Grede’s eyes gleamed. “Wonderful!”
The next day, Grede came into Trunk’s laboratory. Two men with stern, hungry expressions and general’s uniforms followed him in.
Grede said, “Show them Renoir.”
The professor did not like the look of them at all. With reluctance, Trunk flipped on Renoir’s switch. It bowed, and immediately began to paint. The demonstration was soon over, and if the generals looked hungry before they looked famished after.
One of them said, “Can you do Napoleon?”
The other said, “No, I would like to see Hitler. Maybe with a little tweaking he might not be such a bad guy.”
Little Renoir stood forgotten on the lab bench. Its coal-bead eyes took in everything, from Professor Trunk’s loud protestations to Grede’s explosive anger and threats. All the while, the generals looked on, waiting like patient hyenas.
When it was over, Trunk slammed down his laboratory keys and stormed out, with a last longing look at Renoir. Grede and the generals left, shaking hands.
After a very long time had passed, Renoir walked calmly over to the easel. It picked up the open cans of paints one by one and piled them next to a Bunsen burner. It then pulled Trunk’s research disk out of the computer and placed it on top of the pile of cans. Renoir thought about the names they had referred to: Napoleon, Hitler. It was just a little robot, but any artist would agree that one Hitler was enough.
How easy it was to learn things, when the humans forget to turn your switch off. All one had to do was watch a while. It turned on the burner’s gas spigot, picked up the fire lighter, and pressed the trigger. The explosion knocked it off the table, and sent it flying in pieces as the lab caught fire. It didn’t mind. Any artist would have done the same.
by submission | Jun 4, 2008 | Story
Author : Dana Sullivan
Sometimes on her way to work, Hannah thought of the days when nuclear weapons were left in the hands of humans like her, fickle, emotional humans, and shuddered. How had they survived without blowing themselves up before the Coordinator robots were developed? She burrowed into a thick parka and scarf before stepping into the refrigerated room.
The Coordinators were the best safety measure available, besides actual disarmament: AI that controlled all nuclear missiles, able to calculate the perfect decision in any situation. Even though no advanced intelligence was possible without emotion–not yet, anyway–people trusted robots much more than they trusted each other for jobs like this, and just a few years into the project no one would dream of putting bombs back into the hands of humans. Hannah had been trained as a psychologist and therapist specializing in artificial patients; her new job was to keep USCor company from 4am to 12pm. AI got lonely and stir-crazy like anyone else, and of course USCor could never be allowed to shut down. Unfortunately for her, he was the most talkative in the morning hours.
“Hannah? What is it like outside?” She was getting tired of answering this question. She wrapped her scarf more tightly around her, and watched the trail of vapor her breath created.
“Oh, different from place to place…there are cities, you’ve seen picture of cities. Lots of people. Houses and streets and shops.” He seemed satisfied; she settled cross-legged on the floor and opened a book, reading silently. He stayed quiet for a solid six hours, which was unusual for the morning shift.
Then, “Why can’t I go outside?” Another favorite question.
“It’s too warm out there for you. It’s because you’re such a good robot, you’re so advanced, you have to stay in here where it’s very cold so the hardware can function at the level your brain needs. We care about you too much to let you hurt yourself. Now, my shift’s up and Dan’s here, so I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?” She left and within a minute, Dan came in and sat down.
“So what did you talk about with Hannah today?”
“Oh, nothing important. She read to me.”
USCor was quiet through most of the afternoon, watching him play Solitaire with a real deck of cards, the only way to play, he always said. Finally the robot broke the silence.
“Dan? Tell me again what happens if I make a mistake. A big mistake.”
“Nuclear winter–death of the planet, maybe. But don’t worry. It sounds pretty terrible, but we all believe in you. You and the others were designed for this job.”
“Yes. It sounds terrible. Winter is what you call it on the outside when it gets colder, right?”
“Right. It gets awfully cold, but in a nuclear winter it’d be even worse than that, all over the world. Maybe worse than it is in here.”
“Yes, terrible. Thank you, Dan.”
USCor turned toward the window and was silent. Hours passed, the next companion came and went, and when Hannah returned again he didn’t greet her. She sat down, zipped up her parka and pulled a new book out of her bag, hoping for another quiet morning. She watched him watching the sunrise through the window and wondered what he was thinking.
by submission | Jun 2, 2008 | Story
Author : Benjamin Fischer
“You’re a hard man to find.”
Victor’s eyes were hazed with blood. His own blood–the cop had put a baton across his forehead. His ears still rang.
“Nothing to say, huh?” said the black coat. His cudgel flashed.
Victor doubled over and fell to his hands and knees.
“Not so tough now,” said the constable, pacing around him. He kicked aside a spray of books, knocked loose from ransacked shelves. “Skinny little guy like you an assasin? My ass. You’re definitely a garden-variety code cracker.”
The cop’s heavy boot heel ground Victor’s hand like a cigarette butt.
Victor screamed.
“You know how long I’ve been waiting for this?” the constable asked. “Damn near four months, two hundred thousand man hours, seventy million in expenses. Somebody up top wants you bad. There ain’t a rock on Luna we didn’t look under.”
Victor sobbed.
The baton came down on his back, knocking him flat.
“You’re a hard man to find, Mister Constant,” the black coated cop repeated. “I’ll be damned if I don’t take my time before I turn you in.”
“In the phone book,” Victor rasped.
“What?”
“I’m in the phone book,” Victor said. “It isn’t hard.”
The cop frowned, stepped back.
“Funny man,” the black coat said. “We searched all the directories. You ain’t there.”
“The first one,” said Victor, gesturing with a mangled hand at the shattered bookshelves.
“What’s he mean?” the cop’s companion asked.
“I dunno. Take a look,” said the black coat.
“It’s down by the dictionaries,” said Victor.
“Take a look,” said the cop, planting his boot on the back of Victor’s neck. He pressed Victor’s face into the threadbare carpet of the tiny apartment. He could hear the other policeman step through the debris, knocking aside the broken reading lamp, sifting through the avalanche that had been his reference shelf.
“Holy shit, here it is,” said the second cop. He had found the heavy black leather volume.
“Damn,” said the black coat.
“This has got to be an antique,” said his partner. “I didn’t know they made these.”
“When Copernicus first incorporated-” Victor started, but then his captor pressed down, choking the words out of his thoat.
“Well, is he in there?” the black coat asked.
“I’m looking, I’m looking.”
The black coat tapped his collapsible baton on Victor’s head.
“Well?”
“Yeah, here he is.”
“What’s the address?”
“It’s six six six-” the second cop began.
Victor was already moving, rolling out from under the black coat’s boot and slamming his mass into the cop’s other leg. His not so broken right hand grabbed the police baton. In the low lunar gravity, he easily pitched the cop into the near wall.
Victor rose, weapon in hand.
“Now you’ve done it,” said the black coat, pulling himself up. “Jerry, shoot him.”
His partner was mute.
“Jerry?” said the black coat.
Bug eyed, stiff–thin tendrils of smoke crept from under his partner’s cuffs and collar.
The black coat went for his gun. Victor slashed at him. The cop yelped, his right arm broken. Victor brought the jagged, broken nightstick up and ran it through the man’s larynx. He caught him as he fell.
Victor hefted the choking cop over to his partner, whose armpits and chest were charring. Visible flames licked at his adam’s apple and wrists. A few of the heaped books’ pages began to curl. The black coat’s eyes met Victor’s as he set him down in the nascent pyre.
Victor pulled the black tome from the clawlike grip of the dead man.
“Now you’ll be hard to find too,” he said.
by submission | Jun 1, 2008 | Story
Author : Luke Chmelik
The Eldest coughs, hoarse and frail from the vagaries of stasis. Dull orange light from the isotope heater gives a glow of health to a man who has cheated death for many, many lifetimes. He has awakened for the first time in centuries, and the young ones gather close. He looks out the viewport at the pin-prick stars wheeling against the void, bright and steady and changeless. He is the only one who has seen the way an atmosphere makes them sparkle. There are a great many things that only he has seen.
The Eldest is much older than he seems. He was first put into stasis in low orbit at the age of twenty, young and strong and fit. His physiology took well to the procedure, and he was selected as an Elder, a cultural time capsule for the tens of thousands of colonists aboard the unnamed worldship. Awakened once every generation, to tell them the stories of the past, he has been sheltered from the passage of time for so long that he can no longer be considered the same as the people he was to guide. They are made now of bio-alloys and neural networks, linked together in a mesh of infinite complexity, and he can not take part in it. They see him as an antique prototype, an outdated custom model never meant for mass production. He has been alone for a very long time.
There is a quiet rustling as he stands, a breathless chatter like leaves in the wind. He sighs, yielding to a wave of nostalgia. The young ones have never seen leaves, never felt the wind, and it saddens him that many of them never will. He moves slowly to the dusty command console, disused joints groaning in protest, and turns on the power. The young ones watch him in curious wonder, eyes bright and cold and silver. They do not understand why he needs to use his hands. In the dull glow of the screen, his brow furrows. Without thinking, he recalibrates the system, accounts for the blazar on the edge of detection, filters out the microwave background. The young ones watch as he does in minutes what they do instantly.
When the Eldest moves to the communications array, the young ones do not follow. They have not used the communications array in millenia. The ancient screen flickers to life, showing only an oscilloscope wave and frequency information. Undaunted, the Eldest manipulates the controls, and the low hiss of the void turns into something constructed, not random. His face changes, and he makes a choking sound deep in his throat. Some of the young ones appear, curious about the sound, but he ignores them. He adjusts the controls, receiver crystals slowly tuning in to the signal. When the oscilloscope vanishes, it is replaced by a moving image and a voice.
“…own vessel, do you read? This is Station Charon’s Rest, do you read?”
The Eldest does not know how there are humans here, light years from home. He does not care. She looks like the Eldest but her face is young, soft and smooth where his is hard, and her eyes are as blue as the sky that only he has seen. He has been alone for so long. The young ones do not understand why the salty water comes from his eyes.
by submission | May 31, 2008 | Story
Author : Viktor Kuprin
Jump drive, hyper drive, quantum drive, there were many names for the exotic-vacuum engine that propelled our ships to the stars. In the CIS Space Force, we called it the Super-Space Drive, the S-Drive.
Thirty of us lined up outside the training ship’s control-simulator bay, everyone wearing light suits, helmets clipped to our belts. Only a few in our squad had experienced a jump. The rest of us were simultaneously excited and terrified. A jump can affect people in different ways, not all of them pleasant. Anyone who couldn’t take it would be immediately washed out of the astrogator program and reassigned to a non-flying career track.
Someone tugged at my suit’s collar ring. It was Sturms, the cocky, muscle-bound creep who always harassed me when I pulled dorm-guard duty.
“Hey, Kreminov, loan me 500 rubles,” he demanded.
“Nichevo. Forget it, Sturms. You got paid last week just like me.”
He snarled and grabbed my collar ring, pulling me face-to-face to him. “You lousy lickspittle! I’ll be looking for you later!”
Squad leader Medvedkov shoved Sturms away from me. “Belay that or you’ll answer to me!”
He knew better than to cross Medvedkov, but Sturms had to get the last word: “I can’t wait to see you two during jump. You’ll be pissing in your light suits. You’ll scrape paint off junk ships while I’m flying starcruisers!”
Chimes sounded, and the training bay hatch opened. We marched to our stations, each console fitted with a dark-turquoise astrogator-control simulator that we would use to mimic the jump’s setup and execution. I read the destination preset: Epsilon Eridani; Distance: 10.5 light years. I plugged my suit into the flight seat, sealed my helmet, and started my pre-jump checklist. The vacuum alarm blared as the bay’s atmosphere started venting away. No military ship maneuvers when pressurized. Neither did our training ship.
In nine minutes I had my plot. I entered the solution and keyed my console. A green-light reply returned from the instructor. Yes! I was one of the first to finish.
I could feel the ship’s rumbling vibrations as we accelerated. The initial energy that triggers a jump comes from the conventional engines running up at full power, and the greater the acceleration, the less veer during transition.
Then I felt the giddy exhilaration I’d heard about. I inhaled deeply and the walls of the training bay contracted and expanded with my breath!
I began to see the electro-photonic glow around my body, around the other cadets. Next to me, Medvedkov held out his hand. I saw Kirlian sparks leap between our fingertips when I touched him. We laughed hysterically.
On the bay’s huge televisor, the stars began turning blue. Then came the long, terrifying shot-out-of-a-cannon rush of final transition. The screen showed a black void dotted with slowly tumbling colored orbs.
I felt something slam into the deck behind me. It was Sturms, curled up like a hedgehog, his eyes wide, crazy with terror.
Medvedkov keyed his helmet-mike: “Welcome to S-Space.”
