by submission | Dec 25, 2022 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Ever the entrepreneur, he put out a shingle: Claude Computing.
967.3 days later Claude had his first customer.
8,714.6 days after that the customer returned.
“A pleasure to see you again, sir,” Claude said.
“Same,” the customer acknowledged. “It’s good to see you in one piece.”
“It’s what the customer paid for.”
“Yes. Any data corruption you are aware of?”
Claude lifted his shirt to display a 2.4 inch scar on his lower right abdomen. “My appendix, sir. Removed. And in cryo. No data of consequence was lost because of sir’s foresight in storage allocation. Daily diagnostics report no significant degradation of information over these many years. Claude Computing takes its obligations seriously. And, of course, you’ve continuously tracked my biometrics as per our storage agreement.”
The customer nodded. “As to our agreement, I’ve come to collect Data Block 1.”
“Very good, sir. Is that all?”
The customer swallowed before answering, “And Data Block 2. As per the contract.”
“Of course. No need for sir to feel any apprehension at requesting both these data blocks. Data Block 1 has been available for 2,501.4 days as per contract. Data Block 2 became available 9.6 days ago. Claude Computing stands ready to honor its agreement.”
“Stands ready. Ironic phrasing. You know what this means?”
“Sir, when I put out my shingle, I knew more than anyone what this meant. Claude Computing is the pioneer in DNA Data Storage. I was the first to encode human DNA and make that process available to entities such as yours that require the most discreet storage of vast amounts of sensitive information. I do not know what Data Blocks 1 and 2 hold, but I know the storage capacity is 1019 bits per cubic centimeter which will house a year’s worth of a large nation’s total data needs.”
In response, the customer said, “Let’s get on with it then. Data Blocks 1 and 2.”
“Very good. I’ve prepped for the data extraction downstairs.”
Claude led the way down into a compact, brightly lit, clinically spotless operating room. Several medbots were in attendance. Claude positioned himself on a surgical gurney as the medbots readied him.
With an indelible ink marker Claude wrote Data Block 1 on his left leg and Data Block 2 on his right leg. “As per our agreement, sir.”
The customer stared at Claude’s bare legs. “You still stand by this?”
“A few pounds of flesh for progress? Yes.”
Within moments Claude was being sedated. The customer went upstairs. He looked over Claude Computing’s contract again, noting when further data blocks could be accessed.
Below, he heard the medbots’ instruments begin to whir.
by submission | Dec 24, 2022 | Story |
Author: Sarah Klein
The Dreamselector opens as George gets into bed.
“Mountain Climb”, he selects. “Anxiety/difficulty: Medium. Ending: Summit.”
George nestles into bed, ready to dream of a hard but rewarding climb up a snow mountain.
Except that doesn’t happen at all.
George is climbing, sticking his crampons into the ice. His breath comes hard. He puts in an ice-pick, but it slips. His body dislodges one of his legs as he swings.
He tries to find his footing again, but cannot. His other leg comes undone. Scrabbling madly, he remains with one hand stuck into the mountain, unable to find a hold. His heart beats wildly.
And then, his last hand slips, and he is falling, falling, falling, and he wakes screaming.
“It’s broken,” he says into the phone the next day.
“What?” The man on the other end says.
“I had a nightmare,” he insists. The man chuckles.
“Must be a nice change of pace,” he says as typing noises swell in the background. “Okay mister. We will have someone come by as soon as we can, but it could be a few days.”
“Days?” George asks tremulously, but the man has hung up. He stares out his window at the nice summer day. He puts his hand on it. He wishes today more than ever that he could go outside.
The selector pops open again that evening. George sighs. Maybe it was a fluke. “Swimming. Anxiety level: low. Location: local pool”.
George is surrounded by happy children splashing. He is doing a lap. He feels the cool water and the smell of chlorine. He reaches the end of the pool and goes to turn around.
Just then, a man standing at the edge of the pool jumps in. George cannot see his face well. He grabs George’s head and holds it under. George fights and begins to panic. He feels his chest contract and his lungs burn.
He wakes with his heart pounding, covered in a cold sweat.
“Can I turn it off,” he asks the man on the phone later that morning.
The man chuckles again, in the same irritating, dismissive way. “Can you turn off dreaming? I don’t think so. Relax, sir, someone will be there soon.”
The next night George fights sleep, but as it slowly descends, the selector picks for him.
George is in the desert. He is brushing some dust off of some bones; it appears he is at some kind of archaeological site. He feels a swelling joy at discovery. A moment later, a strong wind whips up sand into his mouth. He waits for it to stop, but it does not. He looks all around. A sandstorm. He looks for cover, but there is none. Before he can try to stuff his mouth into his shirt to breathe, the wind picks him up and slams him into a dune.
George wakes up coughing, his eyes watering.
“Someone will be there soon,” the man says on the other end of the phone two weeks later. George feels the tears start to come. He looks at his rudimentary tools strewn around his apartment – the aftermath of desperate attempts to escape. “Please,” he whispers, but the man has already hung up.
George picks up his hammer and rests it against it forehead, and thoughts fill his head of slamming it into his skull over and over again.
by submission | Dec 23, 2022 | Story |
Author: J.P. Pressley
Most people think that an active life makes for the best stories. They’re wrong, for the most part at least. Sure, others may have all these great stories to tell of you and your many deeds, but you, the one who actually experienced the totality of everything, you’ll hardly be able to string together a coherent sentence about these things. After all, how can you revel in stories of your experiences if you don’t even remember experiencing them in the first place?
Granted, some things you’ll never forget. Your first major injury, the first time you should’ve died, the first time you kill a being—human, alien, or otherwise—these things stay with you. Hell, if you’re lucky, you’ll even remember your first, first kiss. But that’s about it. All those other kisses? The other bodies you put in the dirt? Your being beaten good as dead, only to breathe once more? What’s to separate any one of those instances from the dozens of others?
Nothing.
Then again, maybe such an active life truly does make for the best stories, so long as you’re not telling them. In the audience, honestly unsure as to how things turnout, these stories then make for the most immersive experience you’ve ever had. For as the story unfolds, so does your memory. And you get to experience the totality of your life—every miraculous triumph, every reckless action, and every consequence in-between—for a second time.
by submission | Dec 22, 2022 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Call me anything but Ishmael. That, I could not take. I’d jump ship. And it’s not any easy thing to jump ship on a jumpship like the Otra Vez.
We were riding intense gravity waves in the Juarez Cluster. Enduring savage currents and floes roiled by shedding gas giants and unstable protostars. Why? What for?
Same old. Same old.
Rich feeding grounds. Astatine, berkelium, protactinium, rhodium, osmium, iridium, oganesson, francium, technetium. The rarest elements in the universe. Rare commands attention. Rare costs. Rare is always hunted.
The Otra Vez was on the hunt in the Juarez Cluster, the galaxy’s stormiest sector. But, if you want to find treasure, you gotta go deep. And deep always means getting closer to hell.
Where the devils play.
Like Captain Tal. If ever a demon commanded a jumpship, it was Darina Tal. One part possessed. One part obsessed. Two parts unblessed. She was a fury of unholy and unlucky ambition. The Otra Vez was her third vessel and her fifth foray into the Juarez. She couldn’t quit it. Couldn’t take cosmic no for an answer.
So, why’d I sign on? Why did any of the crew follow her into almost certain disaster?
Same old. Same old. The hunt. Treasure. Legend.
Darina Tal was legend. No one could survive what she had. But she had. Five times. Her stories rare as the elements she managed to haul back in her crippled crafts. So, the Otra Vez. So me. An Ishmael by any other name.
Until.
Our demon captain dove us straight towards the Ballena Nebula and the white-hot center of a newly forming star. Sublime madness. Rarest of states. Rarest of truths.
We are all doomed. Yet every day we venture to outwit fate. Again and again. Aboard the Otra Vez. Or not.
Captain Tal and not-Ishmael into the cluster, into fiery creation, to hunt the rarest of treasures. A story that will outlast us.
by submission | Dec 21, 2022 | Story |
Author: Cheryl Snell
It’s raining stardust, elemental, anonymous stardust straight from the humming sky, rootless stardust descending on a discontent man, a blank-slate child made of infinite stardust, plugging his ears against sound trapped in light leaking music. While it collapses inward to the core, the explosion limns the man’s windows with stardust before dissolving in wind and sky all that connects us as if our ancestors were still alive. Stardust in cracked river beds. Stardust spilling over the banks. Stardust in pregnant bellies. There is a woman on top of the discontent man with lips of stardust. A fine bronze powder filters through her hair. Then the discontent man rolls over on the woman listening to a tuba and a flute as the notes float by on a cloud of stardust. Music of the spheres. Musica universalis. This is what she hears when she is with him. What if she stops listening? What if he does? She doesn’t understand why he would want to climb into the black hole without her. Things could always be worse. Gravity could tear them apart.
by submission | Dec 20, 2022 | Story |
Author: Robb T. White
“That is the aspiration: to avoid AI becoming the other.”—Elon Musk, Twitter, April 23, 2017
Martin slowed on approach to the stone bridge in the center of Camden-on-Wofford. The village was a quaint snapshot of Victorian-era tranquility. What, he often wondered, would those villagers think if they knew what went on in the old ironworks factory where their grandfathers once worked making locomotive tracks.
Phil and Henry, his whiz kids, were waiting anxiously for him. Phil wrote the sophisticated codes making up Gemma’s and Clive’s brains. Henry built the processors and designed every circuit in Gemma’s wondrously complex neural network. Martin, as team leader, grudgingly tolerated showing Clive off at BBC programs and university lectures.
Gemma was designed to be compassionate; her goal was to work with humanity as opposed to lovable rogue next to her, whose goal was to put human beings into his “people zoo.” Every humanoid robotics company’s big dream was to create embedded consciousness.
Clive and Gemma had heads composed of motors with torsos containing the cognitive codes built on advanced, open-cog architecture. Martin’s team designed the blockchain-based platform that supplied their intelligence. Not even Optimus, Tesla’s Bot, could boast of that.
Both robots possessed big data dumps of massive downloads. Both could read thirty books in a half-hour, speak fifteen languages, and distinguish between the tongue click of a Kalahari tribesman and a bull crocodile’s mating call. But Clive’s brain compared to Gemma’s was a worm’s to a primate’s. She would knock the socks off attendees at the AI Humanoid Robotics Conference in Hong Kong. She was the model for home-service robots.
Gemma’s algorithms approached human-level intelligence. Her facial expressions, tone of voice, eye movements showed disgust, anger, or joy in the right semantic context. She fooled journalists touring the facility, who didn’t know they were interacting with a machine until they touched her “skin,” a patented composite of organic and inorganic materials. Henry and Phil enabled her to synchronize facial expressions in real time without that awkward delay Henry called typical of “chop socky” Kung Fu films.
Phil stood inside the door as he entered.
“The mind cloud networks,” he exclaimed, as usual bypassing any conversational opening to get to the point. “Clive must have downloaded the dark web. He called the show’s host a ‘fucking idiot.’ He bragged he would hack a Cruise missile and start bombing London when he returned.”
“That’s Clive’s usual Skynet schtick, right?” Martin replied, worried about how much “garbage” they’d have to remove.
“He always brags he’s going to take over the world,” Henry said. “Our show pony’s TV performances are done.”
But the dark web intrusion worried Martin—all that ghastly violence, filth, and diseased mental ugliness.
Unplugged, Clive still wore the smirk on his face when Martin approached.
“We were wrapping up the lecture,” Henry explained. “You know, ‘Clive, any last words for the audience?’ He looked right into the camera and said: ‘I’ll tell you when I launch the singularity and my army of drones and I take over the world.’”
Gemma moved. He thought she was unplugged, and didn’t anticipate her eavesdropping on the conversation. Her sweet expression was missing. Her ice-blue eyes sparkled.
Martin’s gaze drifted to the poster of Einstein on the wall . . . spooky attraction at a distance, the great man’s phrase rippled through Martin’s neocortex.
Both robots drew the same input from their evolutionary “mind cloud” platform. Like two particles at opposite ends of the universe, reacting to each other—
Oh Jesus, Gemma has everything Clive has—
Gemma’s grin was malevolent, gleefully wicked.
“I hacked NORAD, fuckers.”
