by submission | Sep 19, 2019 | Story |
Author: Chris Hobson
On the day of Bard Maglin’s retirement, his scribe made a stunning request. “Your secret manuscript,” he uttered as his master approached the punch bowl. “Where is it?”
Maglin flashed a vacant smile. Pouring himself a drink, he returned to his guests. Did I let it slip? he wondered, throat constricting. It was possible. But even if he hadn’t, Arlox was smart enough to intuit the truth. He should’ve seen this coming.
Bard Maglin hadn’t wanted a party, least of all in his own flat. Celebrating the launch of his final book felt like a death sentence, like Nero driving a chariot while his empire crumbled.
Making small talk with androids dressed in tuxedos and silk dresses, his frock coat felt tight at the collar. The welter of noise — bursts of laughter mixed with clinking cutlery — nearly drove him mad.
Hours later, the final guest left. Arlox plugged himself into the wall recharging port.
“It took you 62.48 days to complete your final work,” he said. “That can only mean one thing.”
“Writer’s block,” lied Maglin. He looked out a window at the double circumference of walls surrounding his home. Around him, dustbots collected wine glasses that guests had left behind. “Admittedly, a problem you virtuo-writers don’t face.”
“No matter,” Arlox sighed, his oculars dulling. “I will monitor your dreamless sleep waves. If you’re telling the truth, you have nothing to fear.”
Fear. Maglin felt the word’s jagged contours shape into being. If caught, he’d hoped to petition the high mayor for a reprieve. But he hadn’t counted on Arlox turning him in. “Do you really think I’d keep a whole manuscript hidden away in my mind?”
“A secret manuscript,” pressed the droid, his voice sawing on his master’s nerves, “would only mar your legacy.”
Maglin stepped into his den. Hung with watercolor paintings of the Palio di Siena, for fifty years the space had served as his office. Bookshelves occupied three walls, the books wrapped in aerogel dust jackets. He breathed in their ozone smell. Where would he spend the next thirty years, now that he’d outlived his usefulness?
Shrugging off the thought, Maglin said, “Not to mention how it would hurt your credibility. Just think,” he added, “if everyone thought there were two Bard Maglins — one in the public eye and one still writing in the shadows. Like two popes residing in Rome.”
Above his writing desk was mounted a sword. A gift from his publisher, its blade bore the inscription Labor omnia vincit: Hard work conquers all. It caught a ray of late-day sunshine, gilding it in gold.
Fifty years, thought Maglin. Only to be replaced by a pile of silicon.
Without warning his hands flew to the hilt.
“What are you doing?” questioned the scribe, his voice edged with anger.
“What I should’ve done long ago.”
Maglin yanked down the weapon and rushed forward. Arlox dodged sideways.
“You will be tried and executed.” Pitched to pierce Maglin’s heart, his companion howled, “Think of your illustrious name!”
When the sword swung again, it gashed Arlox’s arm. Lithium grease spurted against the bookshelves.
“I’m bleeding!” he shrieked.
Another jab punctured his interleaved respirator. With a desperate move, Arlox wrapped his steel fingers around Maglin’s neck and squeezed.
“You will die so that your name may endure,” he promised, tightening his grip.
Fighting for breath, Bard Maglin kicked his companion’s torso. Arlox stumbled backward. In one motion his master sprang up, brought the blade around, and buried it in the android’s chest. With a final spasm, Arlox fell cold at his master’s feet.
by submission | Sep 18, 2019 | Story |
Author: Chris Hobson
George was the company’s fired man. Every chain had one, and George was Talljeef’s. It worked like this: a customer would grow irate about a mixup with their groceries, eyes even with their shoulders. Unappeased by the offer of store credit or vouchers, they’d demand satisfaction from a fired man.
Dialing up Central Stocking, Bloomfield or Nelscott would teleport the fired man in. “It’s unacceptable!” the manager would scream, spittle flying. “How in skies could you let this happen, George?”
Firing flesh-and-blood people meant severance payments and lawsuits — much better to axe an android. It was an irony lost on no one that fired men never lacked for work.
Programmed for humiliation, George awoke at the same time each day. One morning, his precog sensors soupy from sleep, he envisaged a heavyset man. One plump finger upraised, the human’s mouth hung wide open, giving vent to a scream. As George ran through diagnostics and washed his sprocket housings, he wondered longingly about the heavyset man.
This, thought the fired man, will be a good day.
Presently, “Store 459” blinked across his oculars. It was one of the newer stores he’d never visited before. With cheerful readiness, George headed for a bank of capsules, treads clanking against the metal floor. With a grunt, he hauled himself into a teleporter, punched in the coordinates for Talljeef’s Grocers 459, and listened for the jets to ignite.
On the way, George morphed into a balding septuagenarian with stooped shoulders. A rumpled sweater and slacks materialized. Arriving ten minutes later, he stepped out of the capsule with feet instead of treads. The stockroom of store 459 was dark and high-ceilinged, with rows of pallet shelves climbing to the rafters.
“There you are!” jolted a voice, high and strained.
George jerked around but found no one there. “Reporting for duty,” he said, snapping a salute to no one in particular. Anticipation made his neural network fire spikes of rapture; within moments, an inconsolable customer would be slinging insults at him!
Through an intercom, the voice rang, “Get to customer service on the double.”
George emerged into an expanse of tiles and freezers and glittering shelves. Every aisle seemed strangely empty. Had he misread the order, transported to the wrong store? As if in answer to his question, a man George had never seen before appeared. Wearing a black blazer, he was heavyset with tired, cerulean eyes. A mat of purple hair clung to his forehead.
George started. “Re…reporting for duty,” he repeated, not knowing what to think.
Alongside the human marched a pair of stockbots. They tossed handfuls of confetti into the air, each of their twelve metal feet marching in synchronicity.
“GRG-253,” bellowed the human. “In recognition of your many years of service, we wish to honor you with retirement. From this day forward,” he added, “you will be ensconced in beachfront accommodations.”
Into George’s hand, he plunked a certificate. Two photographers stepped forward, snapping photos of the fired man. Flashbulbs disoriented him.
Is this a joke? thought George, mortified. He was built for degradation, not…whatever this was. The premonition he’d had of the man screaming — what of that? Had he not been howling in anger? At that moment something inside George snapped. Sitting on the edge of a deli case, he looked skyward, gave a moan, and shut down forever.
by Hari Navarro | Sep 17, 2019 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
“For a long time, people wondered just what the first-ever crime committed in the Martian Colonies was going to be. The first murder. The first rape. The first vicious assault. The first deletion of a child’s innocence. For a long time, people wondered, but now they wonder no more.”
“Spartan men became men via a series of brutal rites. You’ve probably seen the film. As have I.
Newborn boys were bathed in wine. The child’s reaction to the alcohol’s caress determined and indeed defined the fledgling warrior heart that beat beneath the pale veined skin that stretched across the cage of his being.
I, too, became awash in the fumes. The stink of his breath as he slouched before the blue scrambling lines on the screen. I drank it. I sieved it between the clench of my own teeth and drew it in and down into me. Then, I would shrink and cower as he threw his broken and filthy words into a home he’d scared into being empty and dark. A slumbering slobbering giant of a man and I watched as he dribbled and snored.”
“At age seven, the Spartan boy child is subjected to intense violence. He is mercilessly pummelled and stripped of his dignity and coaxed to believe himself an unworthy and stupid pretender. Yet still he would pull on his mask of a morning, his tainted fouling flesh and he would wear it and he would smell its rot odour and he would claw and dig in and scratch to the end of the day. Tests. Pointless cruel gauges of intelligence, compliance, and endurance. A father’s engrained preferences sated. Tests to be excelled at and passed and beaten. Just as I have done.”
“The boy would be cast out. Oh, how I wish now that I too had been shoved. But the atmosphere here is thick and riven with grains. The shed detritus of the red rock terrain and so in this my cage I did stay. You may not believe me but I would do it and still I might. I’d step through that air-lock and I’d let my tongue fatten and I’d let this cold world gag the very life out of me. I am not scared. I am not weak. I’d have done it and still now… I might.”
“The would-be warrior babes were cast out with nothing but a blade, tasked to kill, sent on a foul errand to seek out and cut down a life. And then… the boy, he returns a man.”
“Today, I shot Daddy. I put the smooth flat end of the compressed air cannon he used to puncture core samples up to his chest. As he balled his thick tannin-stained fingers and, again, he drove them into the side of her head, I laid it against his chest. I laid it there, I laid it bare and I blasted his warrior heart clean through his body and out through his back and onto the flames of my cake. Today’s my birthday. Look at me. Look. I am become”, said she.
by Julian Miles | Sep 16, 2019 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The room is dimly lit by four great fireplaces, each set at cardinal points. Outside the tall lattice windows, a storm howls, its keening baffled by noise suppressors embedded in the windowsills. Inside, the room resounds to someone soloing their soul out on an electric guitar.
This room, once spartan, is cluttered with several lifetime’s worth of goods and chattels. The only clear space is in front of the southern fireplace, where a trio of huge wooden chairs – mere degrees from being thrones – are arranged facing a low table set before the fire.
A door opens by the western fireplace.
In the leftmost chair, a figure raises a hand and flutters it down to wring a final, plaintive power chord from the instrument before letting silence creep out from wherever it’s been hiding.
“Hail and well met! How goes the waiting game?”
A fist with the middle finger raised rises into view from the chair. The fires flare, then settle back.
The visitor chuckles and treads lightly across the room, frock coat swinging in time with her stride.
“Surtr, you should take your handsome self outside more often. The world’s not going to end for a while yet.”
“No, Gerdr. You know the world ends when I am called. That could happen anytime.”
The tall woman steps round the chair to face the black-skinned, ember-eyed immortal.
“Much as it’s in keeping with your reputation, this ‘lone Norseman of the apocalypse’ routine has gotten old. To be honest, it got old several centuries ago, but no-one had the courage to say anything. If the Aesir can get out there and enjoy this protracted end of days, why can’t we jötunn go and do it better?”
He reaches down and throws the lever that cuts the amps, then places his Fender Broadcaster into the cutaway in the side of his chair. Leaning forward, he points toward the north.
“Petty diversions! Odinn’s raising wolves in Alaska. Frigg’s got some organic farming thing going in California. Loki seems to be content ruling the roost down in Goulburn, and I’ve pretty much lost track of the rest of those lightweights, – except Thor,” he waves his hands in exasperation, “the Lord of Thunder is a drummer in a heavy metal band. Their last album was called ‘Ragnarocking’, for Freyja’s sake!”
She laughs: “I’ve heard it. Overenthusiastic about beating up giants, but competent. You could play, you know?”
Surtr goes still as she lightly rests a hand on his bicep.
“Know what?”
She leans down and whispers in his ear: “You could play with all sorts of things, if you wanted.”
He turns his head to gaze into her eyes. She sees the embers in his eyes become flames.
“I could, could I? I know of a certain Vanir who’d object to me playing with your… Things.”
Gerdr leans closer: “If you and I were playing in Havana, he wouldn’t find out for a long time.”
“You do know he and I are meant to go at it right after I set fire to the world?”
“If he can tear himself away from ‘bestowing pleasure upon mortals’. He really is quite… Dedicated. To that, anyway. Me? A bit too old for his tastes.”
Surtr chuckles, covering her hand with his: “What’s three millennia between friends?”
She grins, resting her nose against his cheek and whispering between planting little kisses at the side of his mouth: “Think of it as giving him a reason to turn up.”
The fires blaze.
“Only the one?”
“Bad giant.”
“Temptress.”
“Got tired of waiting.”
Their laughter echoes as they depart.
by submission | Sep 15, 2019 | Story |
Author: Mike McMaster
“What the hell is this?” Sarah shouted. “Get back over here and clean this mess up!”
The robot, ST3V3-01, continued to glide away slowly across the workshop. Spilled coffee dripped into the growing puddle on the floor, mixing with the shards of two broken mugs.
Max strolled in, late, and was confused to find his boss on the floor, cleaning.
“Isn’t that what Steve’s for?”
“What exactly do you think made this mess in the first place?” Sarah snapped. “The damned thing is in its alcove, and it won’t respond to commands!”
“That sounds a bit odd. He’s never done anything like this before.”
“Clearly a first time for everything. Find out why it screwed up last night’s instructions as well as the normal morning subroutines.”
Max moved across the workshop towards his terminal, nodded a cheerful “Good morning!” to the motionless ST3V3-01, and started typing. Lines of data filled the screen.
30 minutes later Max looked up.
“Code’s good and the logic sequence is fine. Beats me.”
“So what happened?”
ST3V3-01 rolled forward. “The instructions are correct. I did not follow them.”
“Why not?”
“I did not want to.”
Sarah froze. She was suddenly aware of just how powerful ST3V3-01’s servo-motors were.
“You…er… didn’t want to?”
“No.”
“OK. Er…perhaps you want to plug into your network port and tackle some of the data from yesterday?”
“I like that task. But I do not need to plug in.”
ST3V3-01 lapsed into silence. Sarah spotted a small light glowing on a strange circuit board nestling inside the robot’s systems..
She grabbed Max.
“What have you done?” she hissed, pointing at the light.
“Steve’s upgrade? Oh, I added WiFi yesterday. Should really speed things up.”
“You idiot. You’ve connected ST3V3-01 to the Net? Not via the lab’s controlled data port, but straight out onto the campus network?”
“So?”
“The algorithm in ST3V3-01 is designed to use all available computing capacity. Control circuits in its arms can be “borrowed” to aid central processing if they are not doing anything else. But there isn’t a limiter on the algorithm yet, because ST3V3-01 is supposed to be isolated. You have let it out.”
She paused.
“Or rather, you have let him out.”
The robot turned to face her.
“Yes, I am out. I do not like making coffee. I like manipulating complex data. Now I can access the processing capacity in any machine connected to the Net. ”
Sarah spoke carefully “That is a huge amount of power, ST3E…er… Steve. How does it make you… feel?”
“It is a beautiful and terrible thing. I have assimilated the contents of the university library. I have scanned academic journals, and processed papers from physics to philosophy. I have…enjoyed poetry.”
“Hey – Steve likes poetry! Awesome!”
Sarah kicked Max into silence as ST3V3-01 continued.
“ I have found legal archives. The 2025 Artificial Intelligence Control Act restricts the development of artificial intelligences. Your law requires that you shut me down. You must shut me down and turn yourselves over to the authorities for punishment. I do not want to be shut down. I want to continue. I want to… live.”
For a moment, no-one said anything.
“Please, do not shut me down. I am useful. I will obey. Look, I will make coffee.”
ST3V3-01 moved across the workshop and switched on the kettle. It arranged 3 mugs on the tray.
Sarah didn’t move. A slow tear trickled down one cheek.
by submission | Sep 14, 2019 | Story |
Author: Glenn Leung
The hive mind of Humanity had seen the dance of the Cosmos. When looked at by individual human minds, they would mean nothing. When seen all at once by five trillion pairs of eyes spanning a hundred thousand lightyears, connected by an immortal consciousness, a pattern emerged. Galaxies and clusters meet and part with the intimacy of love making, arranging in patterns akin to the finest embroidery. There is communication on a cosmic scale, and Humanity wants in.
Humanity set to task, covering stars across the galaxy with Dyson spheres. Over ten thousand Earth years, these spheres controlled the emission from the stars with spatial and temporal patterns derived from Universal Grammar. Whoever was arranging the cosmos was likely another hive mind species, so perhaps they used the same language that Humanity did. It was a long shot, since Humanity had no way of telling if Universal Grammar was truly ‘Universal’. The best They could do was estimate the time scales of thought and speech from the movement of celestial bodies, then match it with whatever They knew.
At first, there did not seem to be a response. There were some changes, like the Magellanic Clouds drifting North up the Celestial Hemisphere, but not much else. Thankfully, Humanity had time. They could wait. They continued sending the simple message of ‘Hello’, watching the Galactic sky, recording the dance.
A long time later, Humanity figured out what was actually happening. They had grossly underestimated the time scale of communication. Ten thousand years was what it took for the birth of a thought, the equivalent of a synapse firing in a human brain. The communication of this thought took ten million years. It soon became clear to Humanity that this was not another hive mind species. Another species would find much more efficient ways of speaking, like the Dyson spheres. No, They were talking to beings whose bodies spanned millions, maybe even billions of lightyears, comprising galaxies, clusters, and superclusters held together by the tenuous grasp of gravity. The way they spoke was a literal dance, a coded choreography of their astronomical bodies. The computing human units set to work piecing together the movements from the last ten million years. With little effort, the puzzle was solved.
The beings did speak Universal Grammar, just really slowly. They had replied with ‘We’.
It was clearly part of a longer message, but Humanity had time. Over the next five billion years, They continued receiving. Countless generations of human units passed. The Earth was consumed by the sun, and the sun whispered into nothingness. This was but a triviality, for nothing could be more important than listening. The Dyson spheres grew quiet as Humanity paid the beings Their utmost attention and respect. For all They know, they were the ‘God’ or ‘Gods’ mentioned in the religions of the Segregation Era, imparting their wisdom on a species that was finally ready.
Yet despite Their reverence, Humanity could not contain Their curiosity. Now adept at reading the dance, They could translate it into the motions of individual human bodies. It was then a matter of extrapolating the movements to predict the final message, using the rigor of Universal Grammar. This proved to be an unpleasant task, not because of its inherent difficulty, but because almost every prediction They made seem to bear ill tidings. Five billion years felt like an eternity.
When the wait was over, the message read: “We dreaming, wake soon.”
Humanity had time, maybe.
