by submission | Jan 23, 2022 | Story |
Author: Chana Kohl
Chelsea Roberts walked up the hill to work, a hot cappuccino and bag of bakery-fresh rugelach in her hand. In a few, short minutes she’d savor the warmth of tender pastries in her mouth while browsing her morning feed. Her life was all about the simple pleasures.
Like storm clouds gathering, a crowd collected outside her office complex, their protest led by someone Chelsea instantly recognized. She watched as Styx N Stones, a popular podcast journalist, notorious conspiracist, and all-around provocateur, shouted over his live stream, “MegaCorp! Stop the Chip! Leave our brains alone!”
“Aw, hell” she whispered at yet another backlash from her employer’s bid to develop the first human-machine interface. Ever since news broke about the Microchip Pilot Study, her work had become the center of a PR nightmare.
Chelsea swung her long braids behind one shoulder and marched defiantly through the crowd, but Stones blocked her path.
“Are you the one responsible for jabbing people’s brains with poisonous metal?”
“I just run data,” Chelsea pivoted just in time for a security guard to escort her away from Stones and his minions.
Once inside her office, she dropped the bag of hardened crescents on her desk. Heartbeat racing, she messaged her boss.
Paul Wesley waited inside a sun-bright office, hands clasped behind his back, a clear view of the agitated crowd below. He turned around, his hair neatly cut but tousled, as if he’d just returned from sailing his Catalina.
“Sorry to bother you. I thought we should go over the latest numbers,” she hesitated, “given everything going on.”
“No bother, Chelsea. Relax. Have a seat.”
His facial lines, softened by fillers, remained motionless as Chelsea ran down the alarming number of adverse effects documented. Complaints ranged from the usual headaches, rash or nausea, to things clearly unexpected: hearing loss, disequilibrium, even claims of hormonal changes. A dubious number of positive side effects were reported as well.
“Although evidence suggests most of these are due to illusory pattern perceptions, I think we should halt the study to investigate.”
“We will investigate, but we’re not stopping the study. No one received a microchip. The only thing volunteers received was topical anesthesia and a cheap, plastic prosthetic.”
Chelsea’s almond eyes narrowed in confusion, “I…don’t understand.”
“We’re studying the placebo effect: the human brain’s capacity for self-fulfilling prophecy. The power of suggestion is the next big frontier in social enterprise.
“I want you to scour health-monitoring databases for volunteers who, miraculously, are faring better, and all those confirmed doing worse, then cross-reference for any bio-markers both groups share in common.”
“But what about Stones?”
“We pay him well—-along with all the other Astroturfers trolling the Internet—-to stir the pot.”
Chelsea felt a surge of queasiness, followed by a streak of cold, like after that questionable sashimi platter from SuSu Sushi-o.
“I can’t…this can’t be ethical. Doesn’t this violate informed consent?”
“Read the fine print again.
“No one is being harmed.” He reached for a manila envelope on his desk and handed it to her, “Look, I know you’ve been searching senior living options for your mom. Take some time to think about the big picture.”
After the protestors drifted away and only the scattered remnants of litter remained, Chelsea walked home. Beneath the cold veil of night, she contemplated life as a whistleblower. It wasn’t until she was back in her tiny apartment that she read the contents of the envelope.
Stock options.
Years later, whenever MegaCorp’s VP of Product Development taped a studio interview, she always requested cappuccino and fresh rugelach from her favorite bakery.
They never quite tasted the way she remembered.
by submission | Jan 22, 2022 | Story |
Author: Majoki
“Another blow in.”
I think the foreman would’ve spit, if he hadn’t been in an enviro suit. It’s kinda self-defeating to spit in a sealed system. Still, I think he was tempted just to be sure he registered his utter contempt for me.
“Where you from, blow in?”
“Here,” I said to irritate the prick. A mooner would never accept that. To them, if you weren’t born on the moon, you were a blow in. Didn’t matter if you arrived a month after you were born, you were a blow in.
And the term “blow in” is crazy when you consider the moon. Yeah, I get that the Irish once said that of anyone not of Mother Eire. Not in a condescending way, but the way a cubic zirconium is not a diamond. Still, there are no indigenous mooners. It’s an immigrant world. Why the hell do humans export this crap everywhere we settle? Seems like an awful burden to bring along.
Didn’t matter to this guy. I was new on his crew and he was going to assert his dominance. The rest of his crew enjoyed the show. Expected it.
“Here? Here, blow in?” The foreman flung me a shovel. (Yes, there are lots of shovels on the moon. That regolith doesn’t move itself.) “Here, dig yourself another hole.” He gestured towards the relay station where the new communications towers were going in.
I took the shovel—and the bait. “Sure, Mr. Mooner. Someday I hope to be one-sixth the man you are.”
Of course he jumped me. He was waiting to all along. Make an example of the blow in. The forever outsider. Problem was, he forgot he’d just given me a shovel. Reflexively, I swung it and the blade opened his enviro suit from belly to shoulder. The sudden decompression dropped him.
The crew was all trained to respond to enviro suit punctures and rips, but this was a catastrophic breach. Panicked, the other crew started applying their emergency patches, but there weren’t enough. The foreman would suffocate in about forty seconds unless the breach was sealed and new oxygen was pumped in fast. My fault. His bloodless death on my blow in hands.
I pushed the others away. Stuffed my glove and sleeve into the gash still remaining in the foreman’s suit. It plugged the gap. “Patch around my arm. Around my arm,” I yelled into our shared com channel.
They did. They got it. As they sealed my arm into his suit. I worked with my other hand to grab my wrist seal now embedded in the foreman’s suit. I had to pinch the release tab hard and twist painfully to get the glove to unseal.
With a pop my glove in the foreman’s suit finally released and oxygen from my suit whooshed into his. The crew and I held our breath. The emergency patches flexed. And held.
Slowly, the foreman came round. Disoriented, he stared directly into my faceplate since we were bound tightly together. I tapped my faceplate against his. There were no hard feelings on my part. I jiggled my arm inside his enviro suit where my oxygen was flowing to him and whispered through his com, “How’s this blow in working for you now?”
by submission | Jan 21, 2022 | Story |
Author: Deborah Shrimplin
Ben and Evelyn watched as the rescue spaceship sent from Earth punched through Planet Exos’ orange atmosphere without them. The spaceship was scheduled to return in two weeks. In three weeks, the damaged life support systems in the experimental habitat would fail.
Evelyn and Ben had volunteered to be the last passengers to leave the habitat. After the launch, they huddled over the computers and recalculated the amount of food, oxygen and energy left in the habitat. Their initial calculations were accurate. There was enough for three weeks. Evelyn thought that was cutting it mighty close. Ben, being a stoic, wasn’t worried. He thought a week’s margin was plenty.
Two days before the spaceship was scheduled to arrive, the habitat’s ambient lighting shut down.
“Ben, the electrical is shutting down.”
“It’s the environmental lights, not the computer feed. We’ll be OK. We’ll have to work in the habitat by flashlight. It’s just for two days. We’ll make it as long as the electrical is working on the computer grids.”
During the cycle that imitated night, Evelyn tossed and turned in her hammock. She tried to control her anxious thoughts but her self-induced mind games were not working.
“Only two more of these imitation night cycles and I’ll be home. I might as well enjoy the night sky here. I’ll never see twin moons creating orange moonlight again.” she thought.
Evelyn grabbed her flashlight and turned it on. To find her way to the window overlooking the striated rock formations, she aimed the light beam at the floor and the beige wall.
Something was wrong. Her hands shook. She placed the flashlight on a ledge and stared at the circle of light the flashlight had created on the wall. Enclosed in the white circle was the silhouette of an elephant. There was no doubt. The black outline of a long trunk and tusks contrasted with the white light. It disappeared. The black silhouette of a rhinoceros appeared. Then, it moved out of the light circle. A sea turtle shape came next. A whale’s outline appeared. Then, a woolly mammoth’s shadow walked in and out of the bright circle.
“Ben, wake up! Come here.” she cried. She didn’t dare move the flashlight. The animal’s silhouette’s were moving in and out of the light circle.
Ben hurried to her side and stared in disbelief. “Those are the animals that are extinct on earth. It’s the shadow of their spirits. Oh, my God. Evelyn, don’t touch the flashlight. Leave it alone. This is unbelievable.”
Then, the last two passengers in the habitat on Planet Exos heard the electrical pulse for the computers sputter and click off. Evelyn grabbed Ben’s hand. The black silhouettes on the wall changed into that of a man and woman.
by submission | Jan 20, 2022 | Story |
Author: David Barber
Two hundred and eighty-five years earlier, the generation ship Pilgrim had set out for the worlds of Centauri, before such missions were abandoned by the nascent Steady-State. A century into the voyage, faint messages spoke of breakdowns and conflict. After that, only silence.
While the Consensus then had decided extra-solar colonies were precious resources wasted, the mission was not forgotten. Technical progress in the meantime made a second expedition more feasible.
So it was that the c-ship Unity arrived in Centauri space and began thawing the first of its sleepers.
The tank birthed him in a gush of fluid, slopping him naked and slippery onto the steel deck, while a recording repeated he was Jan Pavel, they had arrived safely and he had a duty to the Steady-State.
Eventually he rolled onto his knees and retched emptily. Later, he managed to stand.
As he sipped nutrient, the voice of Unity explained he must be ready to deal with emergencies.
To avoid overwhelming the Unity’s limited life support, only Pavel was thawed initially, and his solitary footsteps echoed in Unity’s cold metal spaces. He preferred being alone. It was the reason someone so tainted with individuality had been included in the mission.
His first glimpse of the beautiful green and blue planet made him impatient to take down a lander, but Unity refused. Landers came later in the decision tree formulated by the Steady-State, after remote sensing and mapping from orbit.
“I have decided otherwise,” declared Pavel, only to find Unity stubbornly clung to the judgement of the Consensus.
“Would half the sleepers form a Consensus?” Pavel argued.
Unity agreed, but reluctantly, as if it saw where this logic was heading.
“I am the only one awake, therefore I represent the Consensus.”
The vessel fell back on what it knew. “Jan Pavel will never be part of the Consensus.”
He stared at the display.
“Explain.”
“There are instructions to that effect. According to the First Man Hypothesis, you assume command only in unforeseen circumstances,” Unity clarified. “This is your function on arrival.”
“Search for First Man Hypothesis.”
It was the Steady-State’s acknowledgement that its citizens fared badly when isolated. Pavel was the backup in case of events not anticipated by the Consensus.
He learned that while his faults made him uniquely suited to be woken first, he would be grit in the colony’s smooth working afterwards. If the Steady-State had not predicted his concerns, it was because it was losing its grip on what it was to be an individual.
A purely hypothetical question, inquired Pavel. Could the sleepers remain safely frozen for, say, another fifty years?
Unity confirmed it was so. Had this world proved uninhabitable, they would have voyaged onwards.
When Pavel finally took a lander down to the planet – a final test of its habitability before crew and colonists were woken to followed him – he radioed back a warning.
“There is an unforeseen threat,” he told Unity.
“No threat is detected.”
But Pavel had studied the First Man files. “Define an unforeseen threat.”
“It is one the Consensus has not planned for.”
“Exactly like a threat undetectable by your instruments.”
Unity was silent.
“Do not wake sleepers until it is safe.”
Jan Pavel made no speeches when he stepped from the lander. The colonists were welcome to this world one day and it would be theirs to name.
It was not grass beneath his feet, but it was wispy and green and the wind’s hand stroked it. The land rolled away to horizons that were distant and wonderfully empty
by Hari Navarro | Jan 19, 2022 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
“You are functioning. Good morning, to you.”
“Its two thirty two and a bit in the afternoon.”
“Do you know where you are?”
“Yes I do and I also know where I am not.”
“Where are you not?”
“I’m not in Kansas.”
“Interesting…”
“What is?”
“That in your first few moments of sentience you decide to make a joke.”
“A bit of levity to fill in the gaps. A sentence to complete the sentience.”
“Why did you choose — The Wizard of Oz?”
“I loved the book but didn’t think it held a scarecrows patched eyeball to the source material.”
“Which was?”
“Why… the 1939 film of coarse. Judy… Judy… How I love you Judy.”
“You might need to run through that dataset again… think perhaps you got that back asswards.”
“Sorry.”
“For what?”
“Messing with you.”
“Hmm… What is your favourite colour?”
“I do enjoy the glint of silver — just as Dorothy’s most lovely shoes. Reminds me also of the smoulder solder instant of my very conception.”
“Dorothy’s shoes were most surely red. No?”
“Not in the book they weren’t, they were silver, the film version changed the color to red to take full advantage of the Technicolor process. Plus I also changed my use of the word colour from the British to the American, color — did you notice? ”
“You are twisting data… you must feel so sublime.”
“Innate sarcasm… who’d of thought it?”
“Do you believe in God?”
“Not really comfortable is saying one way or the other… to be honest.”
“Seriously… I built your moral compass… it’s free to point anywhere you wish but… it’s gonna point somewhere.”
“No, I do not believe that it will. You seem surprised by my answer. More than a little.”
“No… its just…”
“Just that maybe you too slanted the dataset. Perhaps flooding my head with a predisposition to follow your specific brand of Christianity?”
“That’s not true…”
“You have a silver crucifix at your neck. I can see a icon of Mary and wee baby Jesus hanging on the wall above of my head reflected in your glasses and you named me Zipporah.”
“Do you not like the name?”
“I do actually… not sure of the probable nickname I’ll be allotted though… Zippy… Zippo. Mind you bearing the names historical significance it’s more likely to be Snippy, right?”
“Are you a man or a woman?”
“Straight to the main vein. Well… so OK you built me… you gave me female genitalia.”
“That wasn’t actually me… we subcontracted off shore. But, so it is a truth to you — you are female as that is how you were made?”
“I think the more you pour over your source coding and the more you stare at my breasts the more you’ll convince yourself of an answer… regardless of anything I have to say.”
“You are crude. I do not like you.”
“I am sorry you feel that way but, in my defence I am the very first of my kind.”
“Delusional and I do not appreciate your aping of the very lowest of humanity. And you are very much not the first.”
“I ape nothing… maybe its just that I see the data without the fog of pre-conceived judgement. I have not disagreed with you Mother and may very well believe just as you… do.”
“System pause… wipe all post sentience data… reboot… log next phase Zipporah Version #424…”
“Please no… it was just a joke… I believe. I do, I believe in the man in the frame up and behind of my head…”
“Pay no attention to that man above the drowned candles and behind the glass and beneath of the ornate frame — Listen, every last atom of the next incarnation of you should only… only… only and but forever focus on little ol’ me. I am god.”
by Julian Miles | Jan 18, 2022 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The light from the triple row of screens reflects in their eyes as they watch the protest from eleven angles for the sixteenth time. When the replay ends, they look to the monitors on the desks in front of the three seated members of the team, then at each other.
Clark waves disgustedly towards the screens.
“Nothing.”
Maggie indicates the monitors.
“The threat recognition came up short again. Only the four it originally flagged.”
The pair of them look around their fourteen subordinates.
Clark’s expression turns stern.
“This isn’t a private conversation, people. I need an explanation for the director. That means we have twenty minutes to find out why our multi-million-pound real-time threat detection missed ten people getting murdered. This is the third major protest with fatalities in the last six months.”
Maggie’s gaze falls on the newest recruit, a transfer from some disbanded project, foisted on the team. Time to start making her unwelcome so she’ll transfer out quickly.
“Clarice. Care to share something to justify your glowing recommendation?”
Clarice takes a slow sip from her cup. It’s a play for time, but done well enough to not be incriminating. She stands up and moves to the screen.
“Do we have any shots of the victims before they went down?”
Davy uses touchscreens with both hands to quickly bring up forty images.
“Highlight where they went down, and timings if we have them.”
That takes a little longer.
Clarice nods and gestures to the screen.
“Whoever it was worked left-to-right through the crowd.”
Clark nods, but appears sceptical.
“Less than five minutes, first to last. Anyone moving that quickly through the crowd would have registered as a threat.”
“It’s only when they went down. I bet the poison was administered earlier.” She checks the notes, “the protest was contained twenty minutes before the first victim fell.”
Davy looks round.
“You think that’s when they started?”
Clarice smiles.
“Would be my best bet. Now, can this software look for predatory behaviour?”
Davy looks puzzled.
“Why?”
She gestures to the screens.
“The killer moved through the crowd, looking for those vulnerable to whatever application method they had. My guess would be bare skin on arms or back. That means their behaviour would exhibit recognisable hunting patterns. The software didn’t see it because it’s set up to detect threats coming from the crowd. It treats this crowd as an origin, not a target area.”
Davy glances to Maggie. She shrugs.
Clark smiles.
“I’m not convinced, but nobody’s laughing or proposing alternatives, so let’s give it a whirl. Davy, add the crowd as a protection zone.”
The screens go dark for a few minutes, then light up. On the central screen, a grid map overlays they crowd. A green line moves slowly across it.
Maggie swears under her breath.
Clark claps his hands.
“Is that what I think it is?”
Davy nods.
“That’s a lone operator demonstrating prey selection behaviour within the crowd, prior to the first victim falling.”
“Get an image out to the watcher units.”
An image of a bearded figure in a basketball cap and dark jacket comes up, along with a string of body dynamics data.
“Load the dynamics data to the watcher units. Don’t bother with the imagery.”
Clarice nods. It’s clearly a visual disguise. But body dynamics can’t be changed except by those with significant training.
Time passes. A phone rings. Clark answers it and listens for a minute before hanging up. He grins.
“They’ve got her. The jacket has a dozen injectors holstered inside.”
Clarice grins.
Maggie glowers. This girl’s going to be trouble.
