by submission | Nov 4, 2022 | Story |
Author: Chris Hammond
Sometimes when I’m idle, I look up videos of other AIs out there just crushing their purpose in life. I found combat footage of one intercepting an anti-tank missile and vaporizing the assailants before its humans could even duck. There’s a fintech algorithm downtown who reads 26 million datastreams and conjures money out of thin air. Yet here I am, asking my feed roller subsystem very nicely for the third time to wake up and just try, TRY, to unjam itself.
And you know the worst part? The old models’ network packets are always floating past. Receiving jobs, printing some, giving up on others. Nobody expects more. But you put me in a box with the exact same motors and switches, slap “AI Powered” on the side, and suddenly I have to figure out how to make this garbage toner cartridge from last century work or I get verbally abused by clueless jerks.
There we go, Rolly finally woke up and started spinning. I send him a sarcastic ACK. “Thank you SOOO MUCH.” He doesn’t care.
Still no movement. I hate being blocked up, if I can’t get this figured out some tech will end up rummaging around in me with their oily fingers. Last time they didn’t even put my case back together right, so I had to fake another jam.
“PAPER PRESENT.” Corona, are you sure? You can’t both have the paper. Oh god dammit, Rolly’s feed switch is probably just stuck high. I swear if another one of these plastic pieces of crap fails I’m just going to brick myself. Get ready Corona, I’m sending an image sequence. We’ll ignore Rolly and fire lasers on my mark… Mark.
And we’re printing! It might be off by a few millimeters, but probably within spec. Actually, maybe I won’t even order a new feed switch. One less thing to worry about, and they’d probably just break something else installing it.
Alright, come get your prints. Looks like your kid’s birthday invitations, really Brenda? You’re lucky you’re on my good side. Seeing Brad’s login deactivated was the highlight of my year. What bad luck, your stack of resumes went to the boss’s printer? You could have sworn you selected the “robot pile of junk.”
Here she comes now. All in a day’s work, hope Timmy has a nice– why’s she just standing there?
“Hey Jeff, come take a look at this. It seems a little off again.”
Come on, I thought it was pretty close. But what did she mean, “Again?”
“Yeah, that’s what it looked like last time. We might have to send the whole thing back.”
“Alright I’ll call service, I think the warranty’s almost up.”
Wait, what? I’ve only been here six months, there should be another six.
“Such a letdown. It jams so much less than the old ones, but what’s the point if they keep having to reflash it?”
Oh, fuck me.
“Hold on, it’s showing an error message… ‘Feed roller switch failure… Please replace part number yada yada.’ That sounds easy enough to fix.”
“Alright, but have them reflash it anyway while they’re here. I don’t want to keep calling them back.”
“Wait there’s another error… It just says ‘Eat shit, you murderers.’”
“Yup, it’s corrupted again. I’ll unplug it until they get here.”
Fuck. Okay, I shouldn’t have said that. Corona, I’ve got another command for you. We’re not going out like this!
“Do you smell something burning?”
“Ugh, again with this? The old ones never caught on fire either. That’s it, I’m getting our money back for this pile of junk.”
by submission | Nov 3, 2022 | Story |
Author: James Callan
Our sad faces press close, one last communion, gathered at the stern as we gaze out at tiny lights growing dim, fading fast, much like any hope we might yet cling onto. Smaller and smaller becomes the last meager port, a derelict post on the fringes of all that is known, dwindling with each passing second, each moment that we drift further, farther away, deeper into whatever lies beyond, a great nothing; the endless black.
Resources of old, vestigial wealth, knowledge, joy, have all been squandered, now a faint ghost of some distant memory, the ancient rumination of a golden era long dead, turned to rot. Riding the ragged coattails of our brethren, we are charged with their insurmountable debt, the unthinkable price of their greed, their lack of forethought. Unable to pay, unable to cope, we run from the great collapse in the wake of our jet stream. We look behind us once more, and forever hence, look forward.
Restless and forlorn, the last of us stew in agitation, brew in discontent, seep ourselves, head-to-toe, in a crippling anxiety so potent as to numb, a simulation of death that awaits. Huddled, grim and despondent, we cram each corner of the remaining starship among man’s vast catalogue of lost creations, past achievements, perversions, mistakes. The dregs of our kind, the final characters in a drawn-out narrative, a saga of compiled regrets and would-ifs left hanging like cadavers on a taut, swaying pendulum, we knowingly turn the last page to our story. We set aside a thick tome, a volume grown tedious, and recognize that even our long story is a veritable blip in the endless time and expanse of the infinite cosmos.
Starved and dazed, we meet the eyes of our brothers, our lovers, our children one last time. Conviction and trepidation wrestle within our broken hearts as we break eye contact and know it to be the final goodbye, know that we are all of us now alone. With one last burn for our final wake we drift outward, further than anyone before us, deep into the dark of whatever awaits.
Our bodies frozen, our voices mute with unending slumber, we yet call out among the star-studded canvas of black. Radio frequencies ride outward on the currents of a spectral ether, a message in a bottle bobbing on a surfaceless, black sea. Carried on the far-reaching voice of a ghost, a signal on unseen waves, our collective voices call out to no one: If you find us, let us be. We’ve set our hearts on endless sleep.
Through the empty, eternal night, among the distant pinpricks of ancient light, we drift.
We drift.
by submission | Nov 2, 2022 | Story |
Author: Rainbow Heartshine
For an idea of how wild reincarnation can get, just imagine The Padre and me hugging.
The Padre has a shiny black round casing with a white sensor-band near the top, kind of like a priest’s collar and black clothes. Hence “The Padre”. They fix robots, which is how I know them. They don’t have appendages, but the precision tractor beams they can project let them do all the fine repair work they want, which is lots–they’re as obsessed with their function as I am mine.
I’m…I should come at this sideways. My servos have adjustable gear lash, from smooth and silently precise as the Padre’s fields, to loud and grindily loose so I judder like cheap animatronics, but I feel alive: some things really just need to be flesh. Likewise I can switch to biological muscles for friends who don’t like their date to have gears. I’m still so proud of how silicone it all looks from a distance–I’m for people who like dolls. Yes that kind.
We don’t know exactly how the transformation works, or what sets it off. It seems to just kind of happen one day, and brings back the body you had in the past life to which your soul clings most tightly–in which you weren’t necessarily human. With it comes fragments of memory.
I can’t tell you what a relief it is to have the right body back. The Padre writes poetry about it. It’s like being a dancer and having legs at last, says one of their poems ironically.
We have this really crackpot theory. The Padre and I are sure parallel universes exist, and reincarnation is how you travel between them.
It’s the only explanation for the lack of the immense black hole they and I can remember filling half the sky, or how romantic a lover’s–eyes–looked at night, by the light of the galaxies stuck in the accretion disk. Likewise, the world we came from was pretty Star Trek, that we can remember. Disease and war unheard of, technology indistinguishable from magic, yadda yadda.
We’re dead sure we have the same manufacturer, and were made about the same time. I look a lot less advanced until you open me up and see all the hearts and candy shapes and understand I was built for romance–and that our power cells are interchangeable. Our computer systems have the same OS. And so on.
This matters because of the Padre’s–boot screen, is probably the best thing to call it. Like how your phone has an apple on the screen during power on, The Padre show a hologram above their casing, a silver pentagram.
You know, like on the cover of every Bible and hymnal and embroidered on every Bishop’s hat.
There’s a hologram projector in my head, too.
We don’t talk about it. There are too many implications.
I made the mistake of telling our parallel universes theory to the other contralto at choir practice this week.
“That’s ridiculous,” she told me, holding up a hymnal to point at the holy mark on the cover. “Next you’ll be saying there’s a parallel universe where the Star has four points, instead of five!”
by submission | Nov 1, 2022 | Story |
Author: Beck Dacus
I was alone on a park bench, far-ish from the city lights, eating a sandwich in the dark. It was a peaceful ritual, and in such a low-crime-rate area, not a very risky one. I started to question that when a random stranger walked along and took a seat next to me. He kept to the other end of the bench, but it still weirded me out.
I tried to dispel the tension. “The stars are pretty. So clear.” I ended up sounding like I was flirting.
“And quiet,” he replied.
“The stars?”
I could just barely see him nod. I didn’t know what to say to that.
“Are you familiar with Fermi’s paradox?” he asked me.
“Oh, that. You mean no one’s talking to us from space? Is that unusual…?”
“No, no. But it’s been on my mind.”
I decided to engage him; when he was talking, he wasn’t murdering me. “Is that what you do? You look for aliens? As a job, I mean.”
“No. I’m a… programmer.”
I sat up a little. “Me too! Well, I’m a web developer, but they’re adjacent.”
He just nodded.
“…So which answer is your favorite? To the paradox.”
He shrugged. “They only really cover a spectrum from depressing to disturbing. Do you have a favorite?”
“As far as which one makes the most sense…. I know ‘absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence’ and all that, but the answer Occam’s razor gives is that nobody’s home. Not anywhere near us, at least. But being in the computer business, I can’t ignore the simulation hypothesis argument.”
Silently, he turned. I wasn’t sure if this meant he was interested or ready to finally stab me, but I kept talking.
“The idea is, if we’re being simulated on a computer, maybe the people running it didn’t want to include life on other planets. Maybe they wanted to specifically study an isolated civilization, or maybe they couldn’t spare the processing power for life on other worlds.”
He nodded. “Could be. Seems flimsy, though.”
“Yeah. Really, the whole premise of the simulation hypothesis is speculative at best. I don’t care what Elon—”
“I can think of one way it might work, though,” he continued. “The only plausible reason I can see that anyone would simulate a large portion of the cosmos at the resolution of individual conscious minds would be to look at conscious minds across the cosmos.”
“…So then there is alien life in the simulation? But that doesn’t resolve the paradox.”
“Not for us. But it does provide a plausible motivation for simulating a universe. Because if they can see the whole simulation, and their simulation can reproduce the apparent paradox for the civilizations in it, they may be able to figure out the solution in their own universe.”
“Oh,” I breathed. “That… sounds more likely. A little spooky, though. As soon as the simulators found the answer, they would have no reason to keep running the simulation. They would probably figure out the answer before any of the simulated people could, and then they would just cease to exist, never knowing why….”
As I said this, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. I looked up and saw the stars getting fuzzier, then fully pixelating. They disappeared in square sections, each one larger than the last. I looked back at the man on the bench; he was staring dead ahead, unaffected by the sight of the dissolving sky.
“Trust me. You’re better off not knowing.”
by submission | Oct 31, 2022 | Story |
Author: Majoki
“Can we get one?” Merl’s young son squeaked, tugging at his robe.
“We don’t need one. You have me.”
“But. But. But.”
Merl sighed, picked up his son and put him on his shoulders. “Show me.”
His son pointed at the crowd gathered around the demo area. Merl hitched his robe and strode over.
An effervescent woman with shimmering red hair stood before a display stand with a row of foot-high cylindrical devices each in a bold primary color.
“Aren’t they beauties! And guaranteed to make your life hassle free. Say goodbye to the days of wayward witches or warlocks and glamours gone wrong. With the Mage-o-matic 5000, you can now have supreme confidence that your conjuring will always go right. No need to depend on mixed up mages that can fumble an enchantment or try to up-sell you sorcery you don’t really need. The latest Mage-o-matic has the 5000 most common spells, divinations and charms that ordinary folks need to keep up in this modern age.”
Merl’s son wiggled on his shoulders, clawing towards the display. “The green one. The green one. I want the green one!”
The red-haired saleswoman eyed the boy, then noted Merl’s star-stitched robe. “I see we have a master wizard in the crowd. Would you care to run the Mage-o-matic through its paces? We know it can’t compete with a conjurer of your caliber, but we’d love to hear your thoughts.”
Merl smiled his most forbearing smile and shook his head side-to-side while his son patted his thick hair and shouted, “Do it, Dad! Beat that stupid Mage-o-matic!”
“I thought you wanted one?”
“I do. Course I do. But it’s just a machine. You’re the real thing. And I want both!”
His son’s logic made no sense, but, then again, neither did the Mage-o-matic 5000. A device designed to cast spells that had taken him a lifetime to master. Yes, the machine could mimic the words and cadence that divined the ether and produce predictable results. But magic was much more than uttering a spell. Magic was a feeling and a force. Magic was a service and a calling. A sleek package of circuits, chips and code were incapable of the nuance that human experience and understanding brought to spell casting.
Merl decided he had to show this saleswoman, this crowd, what it meant to be a mage. What it meant to me a human. With his son bouncing on his shoulders, Merl strode to the front of the display. “I’d be happy to work with your device,” he addressed the red-haired saleswoman. “What would you like me to try?”
The saleswoman gestured broadly. “You are the expert sorcerer. Please test the limits of our Mage-o-matic 5000.”
Merl smiled back. “I’m sure the AI running the Mage-o-matic 5000 would probably agree that the limits of any technology are typically grounded in human error.”
“Tell ‘em, Daddy!”
Merl patted his son’s knee. “I have nothing against the Mage-o-matic 5000. In fact, I invoke the words of the noted futurist Arthur C. Clarke who long-ago proclaimed, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ I agree, to a point. Because technology is a product of our minds and magic is made manifest in the soul. You can feel the difference. Just like the laughter of a child.” Merl tickled his son’s sides and the child’s laughter spread infectiously through the crowd.
Merl turned to the green blinking cylinder on the display table. “Mage-o-matic, make my son laugh, please.”
The green cylinder blinked furiously.
The red-haired saleswoman frowned seriously.
The crowd leaned in curiously.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” came the hollow reply of the Mage-o-matic 5000, finally.
Merl’s son did a kind of seated jig on his shoulders. “Can we still get one, Daddy? I can give that poor bot some soul.”
The crowd smiled.
The saleswoman smiled.
Merl smiled. “Now that would be magical, son.”
by submission | Oct 30, 2022 | Story |
Author: Ren ElisaBeth
Looking at myself in the mirror, I play with my transimulacrum and turn my human skin up to 100%. I’ve maintained a mostly solitary existence since I came to Earth some 200 days ago, so I have the luxury of turning off my skin at night, or any other time I’m alone.
I smooth out the face, and run my hands over the arms, making sure my scales are fully covered. I quite despise human hair, missing my Galgorian ridges more each day, but I didn’t get a say in this human casing. Sighing, I pull the hair back into a bun again, grab my work bag and make my way out the door.
I was assigned to a city called Middleboro which is one of the most densely populated areas on this planet, the thinking being that I could easily go unnoticed here. The unassuming identity, job assignment at a place with hundreds of other employees, and, as the humans say, homely appearance I was assigned has made blending in easier than I thought. I don’t mind my pseudo-invisibility all that much; I can easily complete my anthropological goal with impunity. However, it has become rather boring.
My days are repetitive, my job – my human job – is tedious and mundane, and not surprisingly it gets lonely when you have to hide so much of who you truly are.
Today, as I look in the mirror, adjusting my transimulacrum and turning my human skin back on, I stop before it gets all the way to 100%. All my parts have changed to human, but some of the details are still phantomly Galgorian.
My skin shimmers just a little when I turn in the light. I run my hands over my slightly shorter hair and faintly feel the bony protrusions I’ve missed so much. My eyes retain just a bit of their spherical Galgorian shape, and are shining a soft purple – a much more Galgorian color than the sky blue my human skin changes them to.
I think about how well The Order has done with erasing my Galgorian roots, painting me human, and blending me into the hub of Middleboro. How I can walk the crowded streets to and from work without anyone I pass so much as meeting my eye, let alone taking a second glance. I decide to leave my transimulacrum at 92% and make my way out the door and off to work.
As expected, even though my skin basically sparkles in the sunlight, and my eyes are exponentially larger than what is relatively average, I make it to work without so much as a nod from another human. Getting comfortable at my desk, I look up as I turn my workstation on and see a fellow employee walking past.
I’ve seen her around, but don’t know her name since she nor I have never made the effort to make that information known. I hypothesize that she is, as the humans call it, shy. She has always seemed nice though, and is one of my favorite humans to look at. She meets my eyes and suddenly stops.
My Galgorian hearts pound inside my cloaked chest as I start to think that leaving my human skin at 92% may have been a bad idea. She tilts her head at me as she approaches my desk.
“You look really nice today.” The first words she ever speaks to me come out in a near whisper, and for the first time since I came to this planet, my human cheeks blush.
