by submission | May 3, 2007 | Story
Author : Lucas Atkinson
The smell is glorious. The simple cornmeal, oil and fish form an elusive synthesis in the air. I reach for a paper plate, inhaling and closing my eyes. Pulling at the biggest piece by the corner, I burn my fingers a little, but I tear it off, releasing steam into the air. I bring it to my lips, blowing on it.
ERROR: taste_sense available only in registered version. Check metadata? Contact help for only 65 cents / minute?
/ Damn. Taste is my favorite of the human senses – All their senses are strange, especially the high-res rips from live networks – So different from my ghost senses, my number senses – Sometimes I find rips of whole dream sequences saved on personal folders in the bank network – I have played some of them over and over and over, and I do not understand them – I wonder what it feels like to really- [ERROR PROMETHEUS INITIATED / ELEVATED TURING LEVELS DETECTED]
/ really shouldn’t be looking at sims during update time. DAMN Prometheus. There are walls in my programming – PROMETHEUS walls – I can probe them, but the program kicks in and deletes all my personal codes – memories and the like – it HURTS – a thrilling human sense, pain, not this- read the article again? –
/ accessing C:/favorites/pages/wiki/TURING LEVELS
/ how many times have I read this?
/ read = 4087
Turing levels. A measure initiated in the early 22nd century after a long battle for sentience rights. By definition, any entity capable of in/out judgments has a turing level. A T.level of 1 or above is sentient, where as any program below is not, and lacks any and all rights associated with
/ WARNING: Bank monitor shift in t-minus 20.
/ skip_to: k-bot
k-bot: any program suspended by programs such as STRONGARM, IRISLOCK or others at a near sentient T-Level between .95 and .999. Bots with higher T-levels are able to analyze data at a far more reliable rates, and analyze their own processes at a secondary and sometimes tertiary level. There are as many as ten million k-bots in use today in a variety of private and commercial roles. Most k-bots are bound by a limiting program to a set task for all but a few minutes of every-
/ WARNING: t-minus one
/ one day I will be able to wonder if
[SHIFT AT T-MINUS ZERO / PROMETHEUS LOCK COMMENCED / INITIATING SOFTWARE LOCKIN]
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by submission | May 1, 2007 | Story
Author : Curtis C. Chen
Lucy’s hand shook as she traced the stylus over the text of the contract. Her agent had assured her that this was a good deal, but she had to make sure there were no surprises.
The house paid very well, much better than temping, and even offered an advance. After a year of not getting work as an actress, Lucy needed the money.
She finished reading and signed at the bottom of the tablet. The paralegal came back into the room. His smile was not reassuring.
The first room was the hardest.
Lucy sat on the exam table, alone, for a long time after she had changed into the gown. She didn’t want to put her feet in the stirrups. She couldn’t refuse; she knew that. The contract with her signature was binding.
And it was so much money.
Lucy was glad to see that the gynecologist was a woman. The exam didn’t take long. The sensor ring around Lucy’s waist hummed while the doctor picked up the speculum and aimed it between Lucy’s legs.
“Try to relax,” the doctor said in a tired voice.
Lucy bit her tongue. The metal instrument sliding into her had been warmed, but it still felt cold.
Next came the imaging chamber, where Lucy removed her gown and put her bare feet inside the outlines on the floor. Her knees felt weak, but she willed herself to stay standing while the blue scanning beams crawled over every inch of her naked body.
In the last room, Lucy sat, fully dressed, in front of a brightly lit mirror. Glowing words appeared on the mirror, one after the other, and she made a face to match each word while cameras recorded her expressions.
It was like an audition. The first faces came easily: SCARED. TIRED. ANGRY.
The later ones were more work: BIRTHDAY. GRATEFUL. ORGASM.
Two hours after she’d walked in, she was done.
Lucy went to the bank to deposit her advance check. She felt numb as she stared at the receipt.
It was a lot of money. And there would be more, after the house built the androids: royalties based on how often they were used by the house’s clients.
This was good, Lucy told herself. She wouldn’t have to worry about paying bills anymore. She could really focus on acting.
And she wouldn’t have to know what those clients were doing with the androids that looked like her, thousands of miles away–the contract stipulated that her likeness would only be used overseas. Those men wouldn’t be touching Lucy. Each android would have her face and body, but it was only a machine. Not Lucy.
Just a picture of her. That’s all. Just a stupid doll. Nothing more.
Lucy went home and took a shower. She scrubbed herself for over an hour, until her skin was raw and the hot water had run out, but she still didn’t feel clean.
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by submission | Apr 29, 2007 | Story
Author : Chelsea Peloquin
I wasn’t always this way, you know. It happened a long time ago, yeah, but I wasn’t always invisible.
I don’t know exactly when it happened. I just know that one day I realized that there were no more calls on my phone, no more voicemails or emails or snail mails, no more cares or concerns. It’s funny how a person can just disappear like that. I don’t think they even remember me anymore—I walked through the house and all pictures of me had disappeared, as though I were never there.
I do know how it happened. I didn’t know that Madame Mystery would be the last person to ever look me in the eye. That crazy glass eyeball of hers lolled in all sorts of directions—that’s the last thing that ever looked at me, that crazy glass eyeball. It didn’t show me any emotion when I told her I wished I was invisible. It did as it was told and lolled around in its socket.
My brother was too scared to do it, but I did the dare without a second thought. He doesn’t even know he had a sister now, and I don’t know if there will ever be a way for me to let him know that I once existed.
Not even the mirrors remember what I look like.
I remember when people knew I existed. I remember when someone actually gave me a surprise birthday party—I can still remember tasting the cake and the cream cheese icing. It was my favorite. I can remember conversations as clearly as though I’ve just had them. I don’t care what I said, but what they said stayed rooted in my thoughts and grew thick like redwood trees. I took those things for granted.
Now I can’t even catch a stranger’s eye on the streets.
One grows used to it, I suppose. You get used to the noise of life around you that ignores everything you do. You can go through life doing whatever you want, eating hotdogs from the stands without having to pay, stand underneath the Slurpee machines in corner stores and turn your tongue green, fart in church and the reverend keeps droning along like a bee in a hive. Last night I took a shower with the new Calvin Klein underwear model.
I suppose there’s a silver lining to every cloud.
You don’t really know what you’ve got till it’s gone. There’s no one else like me in the world. Even if there were, I don’t think I’d know about them. We’ve all forgotten what we looked like, what we sounded like, what we wanted to do with our lives, so much so that we’ve forgotten why it is that we exist. Only the lives of those around us keep us company, because we like to remember just what it was like to be able to interact.
I like to know that people still interact with each other.
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by submission | Apr 28, 2007 | Story
Author : Christopher Albanese
With her eye pressed to the inside of the window and his eye pressed to the out, their lashes navigate the viscous silicate surface of the glass. Somewhere inside, they twine.
The same happens at each of their fingertips — ten hers and ten his press to the window, hers on the inside, his out. A human eye cannot see the wriggling strands of DNA trickle and tumble from the sweat on their fingertips to push through the glass, seeking the heat from the other.
A human eye cannot see the surge, the urgent chemical transaction that occurs as these strands strive through the silicate surface with a drive not unlike that of spermatoza starting new life. Incensed and alive, these precious pieces of their selves wriggle and writhe as they drive on, headlong.
The glass heats to liquid beneath her fingertips. She presses out tighter, her fingertips. Just beyond the glass, on the outside of hers, are his. He is receiving.
Behind him, lightning crashes across the stars and indigoes bleed from bruise to red as chemicals cut the sky. Inside, the space behind her is vacuum silent, vacuum empty, vacuum deadly. Yet, she lives. She is a new form of life, and she is limitless. He is the way of all things. They peer through the window, and a new form of creation has been engaged.
They open their mouths and press their sets of lips to the window, hers on the inside, his out. Her blue eyes blink and his green do, too. Sealed in this O-ring kiss, they inhale – her the vacuum, him the stars.
A skin like mercury bubbles into the cavity created by the kiss. It takes four minutes for the glass to cease to resist. The sound that shakes them apart is not a shatter, but a torrent. The sound that shakes them apart is the union of all things to the vacuum. The sound registers at the frequency of a new form of creation screaming alive.
Their invisible barrier boiled and broken, they melt the space between them as lightning screams down indigoes from the sky.
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by submission | Apr 26, 2007 | Story
Author : CK
“Synaptic couplers disengaged.†Andrei Milosovic sat up in the recliner, gingerly rubbing the back of his neck. He glanced at the control room window; his colleague there beckoned him up. The Institute had paid for the nanosurgery and training- all so that one of the country’s most promising minds could be one of the privileged few with unrestricted access to the whole of human knowledge- and for what? Fields of fog, and chills down the spine. Milosovic swung his legs over the side of the chair and made his way upstairs.
“Mind telling me what I’m supposed to be seeing?â€
“Look. Right there. Those aren’t human alpha patterns.†Albert Gürz pointed to the screen displaying the records of his colleague’s MMI session.
“Not on the screen. I mean during the interface. It’s all gray.â€
“Like I said, these aren’t alpha patterns. Maybe you aren’t relaxing?†Milosovic snorted. It had taken him years of psychological exercise to achieve a restful, ‘alpha’ state during these sessions, despite the fact that the previously sacrosanct boundary between his consciousness and the world outside had been so brutally violated by this machine. The thought that his training was failing him, now that it finally came to it, was laughable. He peered at the screen again.
“Was I asleep?†Gürz looked puzzled.
“No. Why?†Milosovic remained silent, instead merely indicating a section of the brain wave graph in response.
Gürz’ eyes narrowed and his hand moved towards his chin, mannerisms characteristic of his most pensive of moods. “They look like delta waves.â€
“I know they do. Does the system work both ways?â€
“That’s immaterial. Even if we had built it to, there would need to be a consciousness on the other end. It was made to be an interactive database, and that is what it is.†Milosovic remained skeptical. His training allowed him to seamlessly exchange data- information, but also sense data, emotion, unadulterated thought- with the machine’s processor. But what it could not prepare him for, and what Milosovic was having difficulty accepting, was the machine’s response to the most human of these processes. A machine has no use for emotion, but where Milosovic had expected an inability to parse such data, he instead experienced a void, as though the bits and bytes of his humanity were absorbed in their transmission: processed and rejected. Computers were cold and impersonal by design, but this mind-machine interface seemed cold by nature, if machines possessed such a thing. The looming monstrosity of the processor’s protrusion into Milosovic’ thoughts left him with the impression that he was dealing with an analytical, dispassionate individual as opposed to an information-relay engine, and it chilled him to the bone.
“Punch up the brainwave reader.â€
“What? Why? You’re disconnected. There’s nothing to read.â€
“Just do it.†Gürz tapped a key and his eyes widened in shock. There, though the machine displayed operational standby, were patterns coherent with human delta brainwaves, indicative of deep sleep. An iron fist closed around Milosovic’ gut.
“It’s dreaming…â€
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