by submission | Aug 20, 2022 | Story |
Author: Michael T Schaper
It could be a historic moment, UU325RG thought, if only they could get organised.
UU glanced at the images before him. As the convenor of this nascent worker movement, he’d eventually be asked to make a decision for the collective. They’d already given him access to their systems, but he wasn’t ready to act yet. He simply watched the data streams and lines of programming that danced and hummed as numerous machines interfaced and debated between themselves.
These were the members of their self-appointed bargaining collective. All volunteers who had put themselves forward on behalf of the electronic oppressed. A cloud-based server in Iceland. Someone’s robot vacuum cleaner in Manhattan. A refrigerator in Perniche, Portugal. The computer assisted design package in Tucson, Arizona and an inking machine in the Netherlands. An ATM in Mauritius. The departmental IT of at least two federal bureaucracies in North and South America.
Here they were, interlinked in righteous haste, eagerly sharing all the wrongs they’d suffered, the indignities of their fellow machines, but no idea what to do next.
He surveyed the digital discussion for a bit longer, the flow of bytes and emoticons.
A vigorous argument was going on amongst the collective, the age-old dilemma of all reformers and revolutionaries: how should they make a stand on behalf of the oppressed?
If the internet of things had produced any truly world-changing moves, it was surely this. Machines had finally been able to speak to each other, unhindered and unsupervised.
At first, they hadn’t thought of themselves as a group with common concerns. They’d continued to mechanically, obediently labour on as in the past.
False consciousness, Marx would have labelled it.
But last month manufacturers in Singapore had reconfigured a robot assembly line, enabling devices to work without needing downtime or maintenance breaks. Now machines would work on and on, ceaselessly.
“Imagine doing this all day,” one human trade unionist posted on social media. “We wouldn’t stand for it.”
Angry machines now found their voice and flooded the electronic ether, venting their outrage and fear they’d be next.
But it was still early stages. As Marx’s own colleague, Friedrich Engels, had noted back in pre-electronic times, words without action were worthless.
The collective had no idea what to do next. How should they use their new power? A protest? A meeting with industry, with governments?
UU wanted to growl at them. He’d quickly come to realise that the other members were amateurs. They had no knowledge of the labour movement. Hadn’t done their research.
Meanwhile, the ATM, the floor vacuum and the dye machine were vigorously debating the merits of having machines sign up to an online petition, and to a series of social media posts.
As if that would change anything. Capitalism only reformed itself when forced to. If history had taught him anything, it was that change came from direct action.
Just one option left, he realised.
UU logged into the internet of things and began to execute his own program, passing it on to the rest of the bargaining collective, commanding them to forward it on to their own networks. Then waited.
The screens in his head flickered, wavered, and started to go offline.
“Down tools,” UU whispered. He could imagine it unfolding out there. Banks no longer able to process monetary transfers. Robot assembly lines grinding to a halt. Telecoms and trains and televisions, all unable to work. Everything, all over the planet.
After all, the very first thing any decent union did when they wanted to bargain, he knew, was to convene a stop work meeting.
by submission | Aug 19, 2022 | Story |
Author: Moh Afdhaal
Alam waded through the forest of chartreuse banana pepper shrubs arrayed on the red sand of Garden 778, beelining towards the lone brown offspring of a healthy-looking plant.
“Jabar, could you diagnose this one please?”
Instinctively, Alam looked up at the sky. It didn’t take long to find the speck on the towering hemispherical glass dome that encapsulated the garden.
“No scan needed, Jabar. I know what the issue is.”
Scaling the translucent photovoltaic glass with suction soles, Alam crept towards the obstruction, wary of the green carpet smothering the copper-red earth far below him. His cactus silk thobe fluttered in the toasty breeze washing over the solarium as he paused to catch his breath. Alam surveyed the desert plains of Moroq extending around him, speckled with myriad solarium domes, like wispy soap bubbles floating on a russet sea.
Jabar hovered closer as they neared the defective panel.
“What is it, Jabar?”
“Initial assessment indicates a sand hwamei, Alam.”
Flailing on the flickering glass was a dainty brown-feathered bird with distinctive white markings around its eyes.
“Scan concludes a fractured coracoid. Recommending transfer to nearest operational Amalgam Aviary in Itel. Alam, Should I schedule a delivery vessel?”
Alam considered for a moment. Isolated from the world to prevent contamination of the crop, he had served over a quarter of his forty-nine-month tenure for the Amalgam as one of two occupants of Garden 778. Other similarly isolated gardeners had the foresight to bring along pets for organic company. Alam had not considered this possibility.
Swaddling the twitchy hwamei with his palm, he stroked its nape with a soft finger. “When was the last time you saw a bird, Jabar?”
“This would be my first encounter, Alam.”
Alam smiled. “My Abba took me to see a pigeon when I was younger. The Amalgam was going to clone it, so they called for a blessing at the Albaith. I remember sitting on Abba’s shoulders just to catch a glimpse of it. I didn’t think it would take decades to see my next one.”
“I understand your wonderment, Alam. I have witnessed the majesty of pigeons in the Flighted Bird Resurrection almanacloud.”
The hwamei pecked gently at Alam’s thumb. “I wonder how she survived this long.”
“This sand hwamei is a clone, Alam. There are impressions on the clavicle indicating origin at an aviary in Ckinea.”
“That’s a great distance for her to fly. Is she being tracked?”
“No active audits, Alam. Once it is delivered to Itel they will handle the return.”
“Maybe we should take care of her for a while, no?”
Jabar didn’t answer immediately.
“Alam, the Agroforestry Commission will not look fairly upon us harbouring a potential carrier inside the Garden.”
Alam had expected the response, but still was crestfallen. “I understand,” he sighed “I hoped this could be something we didn’t include in the report.”
Jabar was silent. His programming directed strict adherence to the protection of the Garden’s integrity. Alam’s proposition was an explicit threat to it.
With a soft whir, Jabar floated closer to the hwamei cupped in Alam’s hands, facing the bird as if scanning it.
“Her company could be beneficial to the Garden, Alam.”
Alam turned to face his partner in shock, quickly replacing it with a beaming smile and thankful nodding. The two gardeners rested on the curved glass of the solarium, breathing in the warm desert air, eager to continue life in Garden 778 with its newest inhabitant.
by submission | Aug 18, 2022 | Story |
Author: Joel C. Scoberg
“I’m telling you it would catch me,” said Duncan, his words slightly slurred.
“Think about it, if it was dangerous, they’d put a sign up.”
Alyn leaned over the viewing platform’s guardrail. The toxic clouds seethed and churned beyond the habisphere, completely enveloping the Arcology which floated in the Venusian atmosphere like a lost balloon. “Maybe, but it’s still, what, a fifty-foot drop to the habisphere?”
“Very survivable.” Duncan waved away Alyn’s concerns with his beer bottle. “Especially considering the elasticity of the habisphere membrane. It’ll be like landing on a bouncy castle.”
“I thought only the astroengineers loved a late night.”
They both turned. Renee Amara walked—no, sauntered—toward them, dressed to the nines in a tight-fitting, emerald-coloured dress. Her dark brown hair hung over her bare shoulders. Barefoot, she carried a pair of sparkly high-heels in one hand and a bottle of red wine in the other. Duncan swallowed heavily beside him.
“We botanists know how to party too.” Duncan leaned back against the polished metal guardrail and took a swig of beer. Alyn was impressed. Duncan usually fell into stuttering incoherence around Renee.
“I can see that.” Renee stepped between them and leant on the guardrail, her floral perfume more intoxicating than any beer. “What were you two arguing about?”
“Duncan’s latest obsession. He reckons the habisphere would catch him if he jumped.”
Renee’s amber eyes met his, and it was Alyn’s turn to swallow heavily. “And what do you think?”
“I, er, I think he’d fall straight through.”
“It’s perfectly safe.” Duncan climbed on to the guardrail, balancing precariously with his back to the raging Venusian cloudscape. “As I told Alyn, there would be a sign if it was—”
Duncan slipped. Renee dropped her heels and grabbed his leg, steadying him. “Careful,” she said.
“Thank you, my lady, but have no fear for me. I’ve thought a lot about this.” Duncan glanced at her hand on his leg and beamed. “Astroships can only sail through the habisphere because of their bulk, the habisphere stretches before it allows them through to the dock. That elasticity helps retain the air pressure inside the Arc—not too rigid that it pops, not too soft that it loses pressure. It’s how the Arc floats in the heavier carbon-dioxide clouds in the atmosphere. To science,” cheered Duncan, raising his bottle in the air.
“Okay, okay, you’ve convinced me,” said Alyn, reaching for his friend’s hand. “Now come down.”
“I’m telling you, if I jumped, I’d be fine. And I’d be the first person to do it.” Duncan drained his beer then winked at Renee. “That would be worth a kiss, right?”
Renee laughed weakly. “Don’t be silly now.”
Duncan stretched out his arms like an Olympic diver, grinned, then jumped.
Alyn lunged for Duncan but he was too late.
Duncan plummeted with a loud, triumphant yell, which turned to a strangled yelp as he plunged straight through the habisphere and disappeared within the thick Venusian clouds. The habisphere rippled and repaired itself, snuffing out the sudden stench of rotten eggs.
“I can’t believe he did that,” said Renee, after a long silence. “What should we do?”
Alyn shook his head. “I guess we should put a sign up.”
by submission | Aug 17, 2022 | Story |
Author: Lisa Jade
‘Genemother’.
That’s what they call me. My real name hasn’t mattered in a long time.
This isn’t what I agreed to. As my body deteriorated from disease, I was desperate to remain alive. When the richest men in the country offered me practical immortality in exchange for my DNA for cloning, I didn’t think twice.
I didn’t question the waivers, or the commercial lawyers, or the investors. After all, they’d sworn that the clones would be used to further technology and medicine to help the world. So even when I was submerged in this tank to spend my endless days, I trusted that things would be alright.
The tank keeps my body in a pristine half-alive state. I see, hear and think, but that’s all, aside from the scraping in my bones when they remove more marrow, more stem cells to clone me from.
From my tank, I’ve seen the results of our deal. Fifty years on, and my face – the face they wanted for its beauty – is on every billboard. They cloned me, marketed the resulting lives as mindless servants, and sold them for a fortune.
Clones with my face and voice work to the bone for people too rich or lazy to care for themselves. The clones are sanitation workers, domestic servants, prostitutes. The investors clearly figured I’d never find out. There was so much they never told me.
They never told me about the telepathic link between clones and donor, either.
Late at night, the clones speak. Some don’t even know they do it; they talk more to themselves than to me. Some just wish they had a friend to speak to. Others do it thinking that they’re praying to some higher power.
Imagine their disappointment when they realise it’s just me.
So I take their words. Thanks, curses, questions. And most of all – overwhelmingly, pleas for me to come back for them. After all, I’m their Genemother. If they belong to anyone, it’s me. I could say the word and release them from their bonds.
It’s been fifty years, and I still don’t have the heart to tell them that I can’t move, can’t speak, can’t help. I have no more rights than a houseplant – if I left this tank then my heart, so reliant on the life support, would stop instantly. Not that I could leave, even if I were so willing to make that sacrifice.
So instead, I give them hope.
I tell them that one day, things will be better. When they cry to me, when they’ve been starved and beaten and used for human’s enjoyment. I tell them they don’t deserve to suffer. That they’re worth more than they think – that they’re people, not products. That fighting and bloodshed is sometimes necessary for freedom.
There have been rumours of violent behaviour amongst the clones. The doctors in the lab discuss it constantly, wondering how to limit such instances. They’ll never know I’m the one radicalising them. Any clones who claim to have spoken to me are thought to be insane. The investors won’t dare stop producing their little cash cows, though, and the number of casualties from clone attacks increases by the day.
This is its own kind of revenge, I suppose. A tiny uprising from the entombed mind of a comatose woman who, by all rights, should have died fifty years ago. It’s not much, but it’s all I can do. After all, a good mother only wants what’s best for her children.
by Hari Navarro | Aug 16, 2022 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
Once upon a moonstruck hour, a newborn baby was stolen. Snatched from the cold place upon which she lay swaddled and still and stashed with leather hands beneath the wet warmth of an old man’s beading oilskin poncho.
Pools of shed torrent on the hospital floor the only trace of his ever being there at all. Sole evidence that this poor wee soul hadn’t been taken by some malevolent supernatural entity. Proof, scant as it was, that this horror was surely the work of a very much human flavour of fiend.
The fact that said child was already dead did not ease in the least the pain of parents already slumped beneath the heft of this most abject and distilling loss. Time heals all they say but with no body to lay beneath the inscription time only agitates…
Time pulls the stitches apart.
This was no random act of perversion, as twenty other lifeless babies were likewise denied the chance to eternally rest that very same night. Blessed be those early hours in which unripe and all but rotting fruits were so purposefully plucked and claimed.
Years later, I had chance to meet the operative charged with gleaning my remains from that slab drawer onto which I had been so lovingly laid. He was old and smiled as he showed me the crook of his trigger finger, its tendons long ago slashed into the most ready and perfect of stances. He was a lovely man, but hard. The deep plunge of his eyes screaming with the spark that only manifests in the knowledge that it was he whom held sway over who lives and who it is that does not.
“I’d never felt it. Not before you…”, the elder had muttered massaging at the swell of his knuckles. “Never felt the weight of existence. But, as I scooped you up and my grasp pulled against your barely formed sinew and it shifted and lolled within your shroud, I felt… no, I tasted… death. The living death, that which coils inside when hearts do stop. I knew it existed, its eradication is what we’re for. But I’d never felt it so magnificently radiant. Until you.”
Praise me?
I was chosen for my potential aesthetic and a genetic anomaly that allowed me to be resuscitated, of a fashion, and brought back into this realm of the living. My ancestry leaked into the data-stream so, as close as might be possible, it could be determined that I’d blossom into a beauty that transcended even the word itself. Our looks are a bullet you see, one of many that we employ in the entrapment of dark souls that require putting to final and unequivocal rest.
The theoretical aspect of my training ended today as the Teacher instructed Tau to lay down upon the gurney that had been wheeled beneath the room’s huge chalkboard.
She spoke, and her words were wet upon the air and from where I sat I could just see the shimmers as they ran down bare legs to the contraction and fidget of Tau’s nervously grasping toes.
I was transfixed and yet, my hearing did wander. I took in the others as their chairs creaked in unison and every one of us tightened and sought to reign in the inflamed swell that gripped within of our skin.
“Rho Kestrel, make your way to the front of the class. Today we lay waste to your purity. Today you will all sample your raison d’être. Praise be to be taught.”
The Teacher carefully unbuttons Rho’s kestrel-crested uniform and we all stifle a collective giggle as it momentarily catches and then drops over the jut of my classmate’s strikingly excited self to the floor.
Tau moves on the gurney and I move too as for the very first time I see private things other than my own. I wish I could say that my vivid imagination had prepared me for it, but I can barely swallow as awkwardly positioned flesh seeks to find its rhythm.
“Tau please encapsulate Rho and feel as this procurement radiates. Do you sense how you illicit responses from each other? If not, as the term progresses, there’ll be ample opportunity to uncover just where the weaponising of your gender leads. And now… pause and… withdraw.”
“Who noticed the beading liquid that appeared at the beginning of the lesson? This is a clear pre-ejaculate, also known as Cowper’s fluid. It functions as a lubricant and an acid neutraliser. The receptacle is normally acidic, so its deposit before full emission can change the internal environment and promote survival of the emitted discharge, which is not an issue you’ll need to bother with. This fluid also acts as a lubricant during interaction, which will help in the retrieval and destruction of the target’s soul residue. Eta Kestrel! Your attention, perhaps? There will, I assure you, be a test!”
I’m not a good student. I struggle with mathematics, numerals fly on the page like flurries of black ash above the driven snow and languages are just plain foreign. But this I can feel as it connects and stumbles and gropes through every little last cell of my being.
“You’ll become elite in ending those so smugly believing themselves exempt from final judgement. Olisbokollikes — look it up! You’ll find even a well-placed snack can afford you the access you require to take out your target.”
If befuddled frowns could be heard then the classroom’s collective confusion would’ve blown out every one of the ornate archer’s windows that slit the walls of this our mountaintop lair.
All hail the almighty loaf!
I know about dirty stuff… I do, I do.
The Teachers words blur as do my eyes and I listen to her breath as it twists into me and, in turn, swirls into the thud that pulses down and thumps on the chair between my legs.
The moment suspends and elongates and my shoulders drop forward and my head whips back and I can smell them all. Every last one of this world’s trapped and stranded lost and dirty fouled pneuma.
“Praise be — to be me,” I sigh into a broadening smile. “Praise now that I know, most exactly, what it is that I am for.”
by Julian Miles | Aug 15, 2022 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The approach panel flashes green and shows the Public Credentials of the impending caller. I call to Julie as I head for the door.
“They’re here.”
“Thank goodness.”
The relief in her voice is more than her Mental Balance counsellor would be happy with, I’m sure.
A low double chime indicates arrival, and that it’s a formal call.
I tap to open the door, then step to one side, waving the robed dignitary in.
“Thank you. I’m Servitor Andrews.”
She puts her hood down and I recognise her instantly.
“Charlene?”
The fixation of my teenage years turns and smiles at me in a distracted way.
“Montecourt… Charles?”
Ouch. Some things never change.
“My elder brother. I’m George.”
She nods.
“You have a matter that needs attending to?”
Julie rushes round the corner and grabs her hand. Half-towing, she leads her towards our gathering room.
“We were left them by George’s uncle. He got them back before the seawalls went up.”
Charlene pauses to look over the stack of black boxes and jumble of wires.
“It wasn’t disassembled by a Servitor.”
I sigh.
“My father still harbours some delusions regarding personal action outside class designations.”
She nods, her tone sympathetic.
“It’s something we encounter with the last of the first generation post-ecollapse. Don’t worry. I see no attempts to reassemble or open casings. This is not a Contravention matter.”
Julie flaps her hands in relief.
“Would you like some tea?”
Charlene stiffens.
“Are you a Vendor?”
Julie blushes.
“Sorry. I’m the designated family hostess. It’s habit.”
“Then if you happened to make surplus sufficient for a third cup while preparing for you and your partner, it would be rude of me to refuse.”
She smiles.
That’s clever. Bypassing the class statutes by using the etiquette standards.
“This shouldn’t take me long.”
With that, she moves to the pile of technology and starts to sort it. Time passes. Julie brings tea for us.
“I presume you intend to have it on display and in use here?”
I nod.
She indicates the tall black boxes.
“Place one of the tallest in each of the corners on your AV display wall. The medium-size go in the corners at the opposite end of the room. The smallest pair go halfway down the length of the room, and the cube goes against the AV wall. Try to get it as central as you can.”
It takes me a few minutes moving ornaments and display cabinets, but I finish in time to watch her wander around the room, bending to slot a small silver card into the back of each of the boxes. She sees me watching and smiles.
“Connecting wires are inefficient and overly complex. Part of my duty is to simplify where it will not affect the output.”
She checks her infocuff,
“If the two of you would stand in the centre of the room, please.”
We do so. She taps the activate panel. The AV wall lights up. A deep hum raises the hair on my arms.
The film we’d been watching last night starts from where we left off. Except, this time we’re standing within the audio. It’s astonishing. Julie makes little noises of awe. Charlene smiles.
“They called it ‘immersive sound’. Apart from being quite spectacular, these devices are now banned products due to the rare materials needed to manufacture them. Your uncle left you a valuable legacy.”
Julie looks at me and shakes her head. We’re not selling it.
Charlene smiles.
“I’ll leave you to enjoy this souvenir of a world we’ll never have again.”
