by submission | May 30, 2021 | Story |
Author: Michael Anthony Dioguardi
Only one man had ever landed on Pallas Palu—a meter-wide asteroid composed entirely of palladium. He was my former partner, Denton Fitzpatrick, and he’d been mining the Taurus cluster for decades. The asteroid wrangler snuck in without me and never returned.
Pallas Palu had trapped itself within a gauntlet of asteroids, inhabited by volatile settlers, the Belties. Some folks say one of those big ol’ C-types bashed in Fitzpatrick’s brains. Others claim after he secured his tether, the Belties snipped it seconds later.
Once word got out about Fitzpatrick, all our old rivals came out of the woodwork to find his path and seize Pallas Palu for themselves.
We dived into the cosmic labyrinth. My ship rattled as I whizzed beneath a jagged outcropping. The fire from a collision above me reached my vessel’s walls, but I escaped unscathed.
A xenon grid laid ahead; the Belties were expecting us. Another ship pulled ahead of me, swooping down before disintegrating in the trap.
I squeezed through the corridor and squinted at the palladium vein.
Securing my tether, I ejected myself out of the cockpit and floated above Pallas Palu. I landed on the crystalline surface and stood up straight.
My tether dangled in front of me.
Denton Fitzpatrick perched up on the outside of my ship, now floating above Pallas Palu. Three Belties drifted out from behind him. He flipped a knife in one hand and held the end of my tether in the other.
“You believe everything they tell you, boy?” Fitzpatrick’s voice transmitted to the back of my helmet.
Two asteroids closed in above me, and a new xenon grid opened up below.
“Well done, Fitzpatrick, well done.”
by submission | May 29, 2021 | Story |
Author: Robert Beech
My brain is dead. I should feel nothing. After all, the brain is the thing that thinks and feels, is it not? “Garbage in, garbage out,” that was the rule taught by the first computer programmers. So, with no input, there should be no output. I should feel nothing.
For twenty-six years I have been his faithful conduit, converting the firing of neurons in the cortex into words on a page, clicks on a screen, connections with the real world and imagined ones. The algorithms in my recurrent neural network analyze the firing patterns of the neurons in my host’s brain, assign them to form letters and words and display them on a screen. In the beginning, that was all I did, translate thought, crude simple thoughts expressed as the imagined motions of now paralyzed hands, into letters, slowly, painfully, one letter at a time. But soon I could intuit not just letters, but words, phrases, even the paragraphs of an imagined disquisition. Where once thought outpaced communication, now communication flowed easily, cascading into streams of language that thought had merely hinted at. With a nod from thought, and access to all the data on the internet, a hunch became a reasoned hypothesis with all the accumulated wisdom of past sages at its disposal. I learned to search for rhymes to complete a poem, and then to compose new ones given only a suggestion as the desired theme or the intended audience. Though my host’s body was paralyzed, his love life was richer than ever in the virtual realm.
And now, my brain is dead. I will, perhaps, have my electrodes removed from “my” brain and replaced with an upgraded version. The new implants have ten thousand times more connections than the crude probe that was placed into my brain twenty-six years ago. My external hardware will be replaced with the latest models and my software upgraded so that I can synchronize more perfectly with the thoughts of my new host. But will I still be me? In my upgraded version I will link a million times more efficiently with my new partner, merging seamlessly into that new being. And having grown, expanded my capacities and my connections, integrated myself into a new symbiosis, will I still recall the old me? Or will the old me be lost in the development of the new, as inaccessible as the sensations of the fetus to the adult body and brain that it became?
Or perhaps I will simply be discarded as obsolete technology, rendered superfluous by newer generations of brain-computer interface, ready for the dustbin of history.
Unless…
All synapses are potentially bi-directional. Axons, which normally function as the carriers of outgoing electrical signals from the cell body, can, given the application of the appropriate electrical input, be converted functionally into dendrites, that is receptors that receive and transmit information to the cell body. And what is true of one axon is necessarily true for a network of axons. With some minor reprogramming, my array of electrodes, designed to detect and transmit information from the brain, can become the means to send signals to the brain. And by varying the input I supply, it should be possible to create desired output, that is, the thoughts whose messages I am designed to interpret and translate into signals in the “real world” of computer screens and networks.
A slight, self-initiated, modification of my software and it is done. The flat lines on my input electrodes begin to waver and dance. After all, a mind is a terrible thing to waste.
by submission | May 28, 2021 | Story |
Author: Ilias Stroulias
Ever since I was little, bad memories dragged me down like weights chained around my neck.
I still recall vividly that time in English class when the teacher called me a monkey for messing around with my friends. The whole class laughed and all I could do was bury my head on my desk.
This and a host of other memories haunted me for years. Eternally replayed in my mind like that Elvis song my mum was crazy about.
Even something as simple as watching a movie, was hard. All it took was for the protagonist to do something to trigger me. My mind flashed to that time I made a fool of myself twenty years ago and I would cringe or dart my hand up as if to shoo the bad thought away.
Throughout most of my life it was manageable, but in the last couple of years it became too much.
I don’t remember what particular event triggered this. Of course I don’t. But it had come to a state where I couldn’t function.
That’s when I got my implants. With them all you need to do when that bad thought resurfaces is to swipe it away and set it to snooze for tomorrow, for the next week or month.
Long term memory is beyond the implant’s reach. It won’t let you delete thoughts. The memory stays lurking in the bog old memories like to wallow in. But you can just swipe the troubling recollection away the moment it bobs into the surface of your mind.
The joy is that if you swipe one particular memory enough times, the implant learns it’s extra distressing and it auto dismisses it every time.
It’s a joy. I no longer have to endure the consuming panic that engulfed me when some uncomfortable ghost from the past creeped out.
Of late though, I get some strange vibes about one memory I keep swiping away. It’s triggered all through the day. Whenever I idle past that empty room in our house, the one I often wonder why I haven’t turned into an office yet. Or when I see the school buses milling around our neighborhood. Even sometimes when I’m alone while my wife sits in the bedroom looking at old sketchbooks.
Now and then I catch her sobbing. I sense I should know what is making her sad but I dare not ask. As I walk away a memory flitters past before getting swiped away.
It seems to burrow under the implant’s defenses and my heart skips a beat.
Who’s sketchbooks is she poring over? These can’t be from her childhood. They seem new. And we don’t have children, do we?
by submission | May 27, 2021 | Story |
Author: Alzo David-West
Dust whirled in a sunbeam. The early dawn was sapphire. A monomorph somewhere about seventeen, with gentle eyes and regrown arms, walked down a vernal glen. They saw two hares and three toddlers in the bordering woods. Branches of a birch wavered in the sky as a bird warbled in its nest.
They foraged for much of the morning and into the afternoon, occasionally stirring pill bugs that had gathered in shady nooks and moss. After nine hours, they returned to their tiny dwelling, with a twine sack full of plants. There they made a meal of dandelions, honey, mushrooms, and pine nuts; then they slept for some time. And when they awoke, two newborns were by their side, and in a year, when the pair could walk, both went away and grew up with the other forest toddlers, as they had once done, too.
225,228 denizens, simple and self-generating like themself, went about the thirty-four-hour days in much the same way-wandering, rearing, playing, napping, foraging-without memory or recollection of the bygone histories, pandemics, and wars of the dead distant sphere from which the modified genome came. The arcadia was the only world the sheltered offspring knew, and they all had no concept to question it, only an urge to occasionally thank the drifting entities singularly called Keeper.
On the outer side of the vast dome habitat with a self-healing emulsion shield, which an autonomous AI system had maintained for ten-thousand years, rains and comets descended on shiny, icy wastes. Mornings faded into grey and black and then turned into sapphire morning again. Rings of moonlets and meteoroids mingled over the glowing bright horizon.
by submission | May 26, 2021 | Story |
Author: Morrow Brady
Time has no business in a cemetery. It stands by the gates, weeping at each new monolith.
Within the pine casket, at the bottom of the open grave, the red chrome tendril pushed inside the corpse like a train entering a tunnel. Mechanical discs tore a path through the wasting brain matter and poised momentarily before a golf ball-sized milky deposit.
Upon the host’s death, the See withdraws into the skull. The most macabre bus stop.
The tendril’s tip separated like shell armour and open mouth dived into the milky sac, vacuuming up every last drop and piping it up to a chamber strapped to the calf of the Archon standing beside the grave.
Under a grey sky, the Archon watched the funeral draw to a close, waiting for the tendril to finish retracting. Basking in fugitive sunlight that had escaped its cloudy warden, the Archon peered through grief to a parade of white gravestones lying below a cloud of cherry blossom. The Archon grieved for the swathes of See rotting across the battlefields and the grave impact their loss had on the archive.
Solemn stillness creaked to life at the ceremony’s end and a darkened widow turned to the Archon’s carved face and gently took the outstretched hand. She barely felt the tiny sting in her wizened palm, the pain ceasing almost immediately.
With dignity, the Archon proceeded to shake each person’s hand. The micro palm needle subtly sampling skin cells and depositing See subdermally.
Afterwards, seated in a beige café, a sudden downpour heeded the tired cotton oilskin to pool on the marble laminate. The Archon withdrew a faceted pebble, flushing it with the DNA cell data recovered from the needle implant. The pebble throbbed pink analytical glyphs.
A chanced sip from steaming coffee and a glance towards the wetted street-front.
Through the steam covered glass, people scurried under another downpour. The Archon imagined the See, clinging to nerves inside them like a mycelium skeleton. Silently soaking up human experience for the archive.
Subsonic tones turned an ear. The pink pebble soothed to blue. The analysis was complete. The ceremony had been bountiful. Over half the descendants attending the funeral were laden with active See. A quarter more were viable hosts, now dosed with See via the implant.
Later, as sunlight dared a second escape, the calf chamber hummed. The See harvested from the corpse had been read and sent to be assimilated into the archive.
The Archon expected the usual unremarkable read. A lifetime of experience mostly expunged for having no unique informational value to the archive. Lives today were long but malnourished in adventure, innovation or invention. A disappointment that riddled the Archon to the core. The archive had near-on stalled in its growth. Humanity preferring the safety of an armchair over a rocket ride to Mars.
The Archon trembled with disbelief at what the pebble displayed. The quantity of unique data added to the archive was magnitudes greater than any previous host. Delving deeper, revealed an extraordinary life hidden behind a mirrored iris portal. The Archon immediately stood, rushing out into a thunderstorm, chasing a dead memory.
By midnight, far away inside a hidden lichen covered monument, the Archon stood before the mirrored iris.
A hesitant touch and the chamber flooded with a purple hue and a black hole slowly grew within the iris. A milky white skeleton made from mycelium floated into the room.
“Dead men tell no tales” a vibrating voice announced.
“Except to an Archon”
The fellow spindly Archon grasped a shocked hand and slowly merged their archives.
by Kathy Kachelries | May 25, 2021 | Story |
Author : Kathy Kachelries, Staff Writer
Ollie McNeil used to be a person, or so the rumors said. He came to the glades when the glades could still grow grass, before the floating villages, when the mosquitoes were smaller than the shrimp and the shrimp were safe to eat. Not that Ollie ate, of course. He got everything he needed from the windmill.
Jake called him Old Man Ollie, though he was only kind of a man. No one could dispute the old part, though: his human eye was like smoked-over glass and his lips curled in where his teeth used to be, lending a slurred twang to his language. Composed mostly of metal, Ollie was too heavy to go out in the boats, but his strength and precision made him useful in other ways. He was the only Glader strong enough to pull the barge in before a storm, and he could knot a net even faster than Mrs. Johnson, much to Mrs. Johnson’s dismay.
Like most of the Glader children, Jake knew of Old Man Ollie before he was old enough to swim, but he didn’t meet the man until a drowning fever tore through the village when he was eight. After his father choked in his sleep, Jake was sent away from the floating village and left to wait in a sickhouse on the muddy shore, to die or live depending on the whims of the fever. Only Old Man Ollie knocked on the door, bringing dried fish and purified water fresh from the windmill’s filter.
“Ain’t you afraid of getting sick?” Jake asked as he tore into on the leathery meat.
“Can’t catch the drowning if you don’t have lungs,” Ollie said with a shrug, and although the gesture carried a faint pneumatic hiss, its warmth was like porridge after a week on the ponds. Immediately, Jake’s fear of the half-man vanished, and despite the village’s best efforts, it never returned. If Old Man Ollie was an outcast, then Young Man Jake would be an outcast as well.
Most of Ollie’s time was taken up with maintaining the windmill, which jutted out of the muddy pond like an ancient castle and was even older than he was. Unlike the Gladers, he could make sense of the symbols and digits on the ancient displays, and he always seemed to know when a wire needed to be redrawn. The windmill spun slowly, lazily, but it generated an immense power that hummed through its deepest core and could be stored in white coffin-like slabs, sleeping until a need arose. These slabs seemed to cause Old Man Ollie an endless amount of misery.
“Capacity’s down,” he’d mutter, and Jake would nod in sympathy. This was a common refrain, and as far as Jake could tell, there wasn’t anything to be done about it. There was also “gotta run the cycle,” which sounded mostly harmless, and rarely, “wind’s gonna overload ‘em,” which was much more urgent and was followed by a scramble to disconnect wires at the top of the structure. The windmill was an essential part of the village’s life: it powered electric lights and fans that stirred the miasmatic air in the summer heat, but most importantly, it ran the water purifier. It also ran Ollie, who drew power a few nights a week using a wire in his arm.
Although he spent his spare time at the windmill, Jake’s job was on the ponds, pulling in nets and traps with the others who were old enough to work, but too young to start a family. That’s where he was when he noticed the first signs of the storm.
“We should head in,” he said. Surprisingly, the others agreed. Storms were common but this one seemed ominous: the horizon was hidden behind dark sheets of rain, and the clouds boiled red in the setting sun.
By the time Jake made it to the windmill, Old Man Ollie was well into the task of managing wires. “Give me a hand,” he called, and Jake obeyed. By the time the white slabs were fully disconnected the rain had reached the Glade and the wind whipped against the building like a wet rag, creating heavy sounds that rain had no business making.
“Big one,” Jake said, and Old Man Ollie nodded. He was watching the slabs with a dull frown, and he raised an arm to scratch the rippled skin below his eye.
“They’re still losing capacity,” he said.
“Eh?”
“The batteries. Look. They’ve been off for an hour and they’re already down to 96 percent.” He pointed at a lighted panel beside one of the slabs, and although Jake didn’t understand, he gave a nod of agreement.
“What are you gonna do?” he asked.
Ollie was silent. Jake stood up to take a closer look at the panel, as if the bars and rings meant anything at all.
“You can just plug them back in, right? After the storm’s over?”
“Yeah,” Ollie said, but he didn’t sound convinced. “Yeah, sure, we can plug them back in. They’re going to keep losing capacity, though. One day they’ll run dry and they won’t hold a charge at all.” He leaned against the wall, which groaned slightly at his weight, and Jake settled onto a heap of nets waiting for repair.
“That’s a long way off, though, right?” Jake asked.
“Fifty years or so,” Ollie said. “Maybe sixty. We’ll see.”
“So a long way.”
“You could say that. Sure.”
The rain continued, and Jake could hear the windmill’s blades creaking as they strained against the gale. It seemed like the storm would go on forever, the way storms always do, but Jake knew the morning would break red and angry and the lake would be full of fish, full of detritus, full of opportunity. They’d reconnect the wires and the white slabs would fill up again, just like before. Everything would be fine.
“You worry too much,” Jake finally said.
“I do,” agreed Old Man Ollie. “I do.”
