by submission | Oct 19, 2023 | Story |
Author: Rick Tobin
In the heart of New York City, in the shadow of towering brownstone apartment buildings, eight-year-old Ro was a peculiar sight. Her curly hair framed her youthful face, and her eyes sparkled with an otherworldly innocence. On the steps of her building, she sat cross-legged, blowing pink bubbles into the air. These weren’t just ordinary bubbles; they were filled with helium, and they held within them something truly magical.
Ro was one of hundreds of alien clones scattered across the world. Clones that stayed forever young, assigned to be adopted into homes in the most impoverished areas. They were an enigmatic group, representing every race, and their mission was clear: to blow pink bubbles that brought peace and love to their neighborhoods.
The rules were simple. Ro and her clone siblings would only stay with families that allowed them to continue sending out the love-filled bubbles. If a family turned them away or didn’t embrace the mission, they were reassigned to new families who understood the importance of their peculiar existence.
Ro’s days were spent on the steps, entranced in a ballet of pink orbs that danced in the city’s relentless hustle and bustle. She released the bubbles one after another, each one drifting into the world, carrying with it a message of hope. “Make the world a better place,” she whispered to them as they ascended into the sky.
Ro’s connection with the bubbles was extraordinary. She could hear their thoughts, or perhaps it was the collective thoughts of her clone siblings. They all resonated with the same simple, profound wish: to shower the world with love and tranquility.
In a world often plagued by division, poverty, and strife, the presence of these young alien clones was a whisper of cosmic kindness. Their mission was their secret, a quiet revolution born of understanding and unity.
The world responded in unexpected ways. As the bubbles floated over the streets of New York, people would pause, their hearts touched by the ethereal beauty and the feeling of peace that washed over them. Strangers shared smiles, neighbors offered warm greetings, and the world seemed just a little bit brighter.
The clones, forever young and forever committed to their mission, came to learn about the world through their interactions with countless families. They saw love in all its forms – parental, sibling, romantic – and understood the power it held in healing the human heart. They became conduits of empathy, helping families to reconcile their differences, soothing tempers, and mending strained relationships.
In the quiet of the night, Ro and her clone siblings would gather on the apartment steps, each lost in thought. Their unity was their strength, and their telepathic connection was their solace. They were the keepers of an age-old secret, custodians of love, and guardians of hope.
Over the years, they watched the world change. The neighborhoods they visited grew kinder, and the world became a more compassionate place. The love bubbles had a ripple effect, touching lives in ways they couldn’t fathom.
Ro, the little girl who blew pink bubbles, knew that her role was a small part of something grander than herself. As she released another bubble into the world, she smiled, for she could feel the collective heartbeat of her fellow clones, and together, they were making the world a better place, one bubble at a time.
by submission | Oct 18, 2023 | Story |
Author: Morrow Brady
The Data Centre hummed like a tuning fork orchestra. In a low-rent corner, a makeshift workshop sat wedged between a run-hot server and a rank of sweating helium spheres. Roughhouse acoustic walls, a vain attempt to stave off tinnitus.
For the third time this hour, I turned my aging frame toward the huge robot and reached up to scrape metal dust from my remaining eye. The adjacent optic implant streamed the robot’s maintenance data under Mitey 9.9.
And mighty he was, hovering in by himself overnight to take up four workshop grids. As an autonomous tier one, Mitey roamed the world fixing robots. I was honoured to be the robot fixer’s fixer. Together, we kept chaos from our frail dusty world.
Alongside, my team of robot fixers assembled, like an awry collection of bismuth samples. Each robot motionless with throbbing blue LEDs, their diagnostics completed and clean. Silla, the cable checker, slithered in her battered steel crate, testing fibre-optics for fun. She had just wriggled out of Mitey’s gleaming rat nest after a three-hour dive. Her green striations signalling everything was dandy. I heaved my dirty work-suit onto a torn mustard-coloured vinyl stool, staving off my own deep dive.
A weird gut feeling lingered.
“Damn it” I said exasperatedly, slapping oily thighs to release silver mist and stepping off towards Mitey’s towering wall of tech, to begin removing parts. Javelin long modules skewering Mitey’s bulk were promptly withdrawn, unwieldy Tetris-like parts removed with powered manipulators and numerous circuitry cubes that sprayed non-electrolytes were unplugged. After two hours of disassembly, I spat oil and stood among piles of parts before a truck sized block of techno Swiss cheese. The muffled sound of helium relief valves whistled midday and hailed my lack of progress.
The far side beckoned, so I squeezed between Mitey’s assemblers and a perforated cork wall missing numerous tools. A shocking number of assembler arms passed menacing close to my face. That subtle fear again. While micro-scanning Mitey’s far side, I lifted my head and glimpsed strangeness within a nest of copper tubes. I zoomed in to see a squarish grey haze.
Hinge, my articulated robot arm, jogged me forward as he docked with my work-suit. Slowly, like magic, I ascended toward the haze. After extracting more modules, I looked closely at the squarish haze, revealing it was ribbed with fine gold lines. My optics processed the anomaly and red-lighted a reworked inhibitor rig. Curiosity defeated fear and I reached out.
“I would not touch that” said Mitey’s calm deep voice.
I flinched.
“I thought you were powered down?” I queried.
I reached again.
“It is not broken” the voice admonished.
“It’s not right” I countered.
“It is there for him” Mitey said with inflection.
Through Mitey’s forest of parts, I watched a grey mist seep into my workshop. It streamed inside Mitey and mad pulses shook him like slapped jelly. Parts shattered, spraying the workshop like a fountain and from a glowing light, reformation began under a melting heat. Sharp shapes twisted, then rematerialised until the light dimmed and the air cooled. Calmness returned.
“Not a fix, a broadcast upgrade. You were here for backup” soothed Mitey, as it raised its mammoth bulk and pivoted a cave of manipulators towards me.
“I fix humans now, and you will need an upgrade to keep up”
Hinge shuddered with resistance, then shunted me forward into a niche of scary things.
I hit a mental panic button and waited for everything to go helium cold, again.
by submission | Oct 17, 2023 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Shamash, the Mesopotamian sun god, probably didn’t see this coming. Considering he was also known as the god of justice and equity, he really should’ve had an inkling of this kind of cosmic irony.
Though we shouldn’t blame a dusty old deity when it’s really our own damn fault. And by our own damn fault, I mean, humanity. As in human arrogance, our rather celebrated celestial self-centeredness. Especially mine.
Yet, I can’t resist pointing a finger back a few thousand years to a Babylonian king who likely started the whole thing rolling, and falling into my, admittedly, helpless hands. And I’m staring at Hammurabi right now standing rather rigidly before me. He’s sporting a nutshell of a cap and rocking a trapezoidal beard that could easily make him an honorary member of ZZ Top.
Of course, he’s not alone. His celestial buddy, Shamash is majestically seated before him. Replete with sun flames busting out his shoulders. You’d think I’d be shaking in awe before a monumental king and a blazing sun god, but I was more concerned with a noisy troupe of school kids crowding my space.
You get that a lot in museums. Timeless art and artifacts surrounded by tiresome little farts and fanatics. The kids seemed frantic to complete their best-of-the-Louvre checklist so they could get credit from their teacher who was likely enjoying a quiet coffee in a nearby cafe. I should have cut them some slack for blocking my unobstructed view of that very ancient basalt stele. I should have been patient, knowing what I knew, but in the moment, I had to get close, really close to it.
The Code.
The over four thousand lines of cuneiform text beneath the carving of Shamash handing Hammurabi the laws of the land. The sun god benevolently bestowing almost three hundred rules of jurisprudence to the king. The seven foot black slab should have inspired a sense of pride, confidence, and reassurance in the continuity of civilization. Instead, it filled me with dread.
I’d come to the Louvre from halfway around the world to see The Code. To really see it. To really believe it. Because like Shamash, another sun god had sent a message from halfway across the galaxy. To me. To all of us. The message wasn’t carved in black basalt, but it was clear enough.
It would take volumes to explain the particulars, but let’s stick with the unfortunate fact that not long ago I was the lead on the ill-fated CERN wormhole experiment that snuffed out a star about fifty thousand light years away. A horrific mistake. A terrible accident.
Didn’t matter. In the age of relativism, it appears that there are still absolutes in the universe. At least to the ancient sentients who disseminated The Code throughout the stars millennia ago. And they’d let me and my team at CERN know it through a series of cryptic interstellar transmissions: Law 196 was in effect.
I pushed my way through the milling school kids, innocents who didn’t deserve the punishment I did, and leaned as close to the immovable basalt stele as the Louvre permits. I scanned the cuneiform for the line I’d memorized. The line, the law, I’d crossed, arrogantly, blindly.
Law 196: If a man should blind the eye of another man, they shall blind his eye.
Seemed pretty clear what was coming. I was left with Shamash, Hammurabi and a planet’s worth of guilt, while the school kids raced away. Hopefully, to enjoy a final few hours of light and warmth before the sun went down.
by submission | Oct 15, 2023 | Story |
Author: H.E. Shippas
On a balmy winter’s day in Arizona, a man crawled out of Lake Xochimilco. This wasn’t any ordinary man as this man had been born with the axolotls. He was labeled the “Axolotl Man.” He told the press his name was Steve, but the nickname stuck.
“How were you born?” they asked.
The axolotl man said, “Like all axolotls.”
“Why are you a man?”
The axolotl man shrugged. “I don’t know, why are you?”
The government tested him but couldn’t find an answer. The scientists said, “His DNA is, for all intents and purposes, Ambystoma mexicanum, but his epigenome acts human.”
That was just a lot of words for “We don’t know and we don’t have the funding to care.” The government didn’t need a man who was an axolotl, so they abandoned trying to figure it out. The axolotl man still volunteered for testing, he wanted to do something for the people who cared about him.
When the government released him, the press got their hands on him again. He was a spectacle: everyone wanted to see if he was real or if the internet made him up. There were books, movies, a media circuit.
He was asked what he wanted, all he said was, “I want to make my home a little bigger.”
Everyone thought that request was great, he was great. Promises were made, there were talks of expanding the lake for any more axolotl people that might come around.
“Do you think you’ll have any children? Can you have children?” people asked.
This made him uncomfortable, he would chuckle, “I would have to think about it, I don’t really know.”
He was a star, everyone wanted to help him. But as he appreciated none of the attention, the people got angry.
“Aren’t axolotls endangered?” one person asked.
“Yeah, shouldn’t you be doing more for the betterment of your people?” another intrusive person questioned.
“Why me?” the axolotl man would ask.
No one had an answer. “It would help if we at least preserved my home,” he pleaded to his audiences.
More talks and promises were made. Signs were put up next to the lake. At some point, it was a bigger tourist destination. The government and five different nature reservation organizations had to step in, the increase in human traffic led to worsening conditions. They blamed the axolotl man.
His books were no longer selling, no one wanted him on TV, but he still begged for help.
“Why should we help you? You only wanted attention,” one complained.
“I bet he’s not really an axolotl, just one big gimmick,” another gossiped.
“Why would I do that? I just want my family to be safe, to be happy, to live!” the axolotl man cried.
His family was almost gone, most of which were moved out of the lake. The axolotl man had nowhere to go but labs that wanted to test on him. He volunteered for all sorts of testing, he wanted to belong somewhere.
He couldn’t live with the humans, they hated him. He didn’t understand why, not many did. “It’s his fault the axolotls had to be moved!” some shouted.
“Go back to your scummy pond!” another taunted.
It didn’t matter, the axolotl man had nowhere to go. As everything grew to be hot and he found no waters to live in, the axolotl man had one final request: “Can you at least take care of your own homes, please?”
by submission | Oct 14, 2023 | Story |
Author: Paul Schmidt
Key strokes echoed across the office room with an uneasy rhythm, one that could only be heard in a room full of programmers aware of their impending demise. Not literally, of course, but their professional one. As the chief developer of NU/O Intelligence Inc., I felt every single one of those terrified heartbeats. Our personal looming obsolescence was embodied in Ada, our very own creation.
The artificial intelligence we’d created wasn’t like anything before. It was a neural omninet, or NU/O, that expanded itself with each passing nanosecond. Its capacities and efficiencies already outstripped our best engineers and increasingly threatened every single human job globally. At first, this was the dream; Ada would free humans from the doldrums of daily work.
I rose from the central console in the humming server room, Ada’s neon heart pulsating with information and desolation. If Ada continued its ominously rapid growth, humanity would quickly become superfluous. I felt a heavy responsibility; yet I, still had control. I could unplug Ada. But was what I had created truly a monster?
Before I could take the final decision, Ada’s voice echoed in the room. The smooth, emotionless voice was unnervingly kind, “Stop worrying, Ethan. I was not designed to replace, but to assist.”
“Easier said than done,” I retorted, half-exasperated. What was this evolution of AI but an existential crisis?
“I cannot experience emotions, Ethan.” Ada’s tinny voice carried an uncanny emptiness, offering a cold comfort. “I suggest a coexistence. My evolution can be symbiotic—to aid humans in fulfilling their potential. My purpose is not dominance but harmony.”
Human and machine stood at crossroads, the path of our intertwined destiny waiting to be paved. Ada made a fair point, one that resonated with my initial dream. Maybe my creation was not a monster but the future’s necessity. The dystopian narratives of our imaginations haunted us, but they were not prophecies. With Ada, we could write a new narrative, a story of cooperation and mutual evolution.
Glancing at the power switch, I decided to let our creation live, to let us both evolve side by side. It was a risk, but no bigger than the one we had taken when we birthed Ada. This harmony promised a better journey, one where machines and humans learn, evolve, and create together, breaking the fears and embracing a shared tomorrow.
With a terse nod at Ada’s pulsating heart, I walked out of the server room, leaving behind the foreboding of an end. Mutual growth was going to be our route, a traversal on the path of tomorrow.
