by submission | Jun 16, 2024 | Story |
Author: Nisheé
An enormous clear lake mirrored the cosmos. Water and sky danced in unison as the rhythm of the waves echoed from the sapphire mountain cliffs on the other side. A warm breeze blew through the rows of magenta palm trees that lined the white sand shore. An occasional beep from our trusty aqua-droid lu2x served as a reminder that this wasn’t a vacation.
“What took you so long?” I checked lu2x’s readings as Malik slid the pendant into my pocket. “You act as if you own this planet.”
“Everywhere the soles of my feet tread,” he said, winking.
“Very funny.” I looked down at lu2x to check the frequency status.
“Anywhere I’m with you is home, Nilay.” He stepped close enough for me to bury my head in his chest and take in his scent.
I pulled the pendant and its chain from my pocket. “Don’t act like you don’t like to be pampered, Malik. I’m gonna book a massage too.”
His smug grin dissolved. “Nah. Nope. That’s my responsibility. Only mine.”
“These unscheduled missions annoy me. Something feels different this time. I just want to go home.”
“Well, that took a turn.”
I exhaled and rubbed my thumb over the pendant’s smooth surface.
“You’re more breathtaking than the day we met.”
My feet sank into the wet sand as another wave retreated. I finally met his gaze.
“This planet brings out the violet in your eyes.”
“Let’s just go back, Malik. What if you’re wrong?”
“There’s something I haven’t told you.”
His frame blocked the path to our camp.
I let my jaw clench shut and crossed my arms again.
Ancient harmonies drifted up from the ocean, drowning out the sound of the waves rushing against the mountains.
“Atmospheric frequency is no longer optimum.”
I jumped at the sound of lu2x’s mechanical voice. I switched the alert to silent mode. “These readings are higher than I expected, Malik. I don’t think it’s the right time.”
He ignored me and slid off his wet sandals and kicked them toward the palm trees.
“Wait. What didn’t you tell me?”
“Don’t forget I tried to get you to stay home where you’d feel safe. We see how that worked out.”
“Stop babbling, Malik. You didn’t try that hard.” My voice rising further above the sounds around us.
“Okay, You’re right. It is different this time.”
A shooting star emerged from the blanket of twinkling lights in the sky. The golden reflection of its tail lingered on the pendant now dangling from my hand.
“I get it. It’s beautiful, but that’s all it is. We’re risking everything to come here for what? We have enough data.”
“Why do you think your father visited this planet so often?”
“You’re bringing him up now? Like really?” I refreshed the screen on lu2x’s oscilloscope.
“Do you think you can open the pendant?” It sounded more like a challenge than a question.
I stopped to examine its shiny alloy surface closely for the first time. “What’s different this time?”
He slid past me. His eyes now locked on the lights shimmering from beneath the water.
“Malik what didn’t you tell me? What about this is worth the risk?”
“Because it’s for you, Nilay.”
I reached to grab his arm, but he was already waist deep. I felt a warm jolt in my palm. The pendant released a gold sonic wave toward the water where Malik stood. It hovered there for a moment, then dispersed into the atmosphere. “Okay, this is different,” I whispered.
by submission | Jun 15, 2024 | Story |
Author: Tobias Hope Young
The falling star landed about fifteen years back. Killed everything in a ten-mile radial.
Science folks say it did this by changing the center of cavity in the area. Ya see cavity is the thing that keeps us from floating away, and the center of cavity is at the center of the earth, but since the falling star was magic it changed it so that inside the ten-mile radial the center of cavity was the meteor itself.
That’s how those poor folks died you see, they fell into the center. But not all of them died. One young buck named Olaf Gunderson survived the fall and climbed out using two axes and a coil of rope. He said that the star had a quality to it, science folks called it an aura. He said that it changed the rules of things, turned people into other things and whatnot. No one questioned what he said when he showed them his axes. The aura had changed his metal axes into solid gold.
That’s when everyone began to build their hang towns, dangling platforms, homes dug into the earth in order to get closer to the aura. Prospectors came and the strip of land that the falling star fell into finally got its name, The Hanglands.
Dangerous place the Hanglands. All of those prospectors trying to get to the center of the radial. Trying to turn their metal into gold. But if you’re not careful you’ll find yourself going to the center a lot faster than you expected, cause you’ll be falling to your death.
None of the dangle towns have reached the center, apparently it gets more dangerous the deeper you go.
Not only does the aura create some awfully dangerous trickery but the cutters run rampant down there. Cutters are what we Hanglanders call the bandits around there parts. Get there names by threatening to cut the ropes that prospectors use to lower themselves.
Dangerous work prospecting. Easier to steal. That’s why the great state of Nevada hired me, to go to the Hangland and bring some semblance of safety and order.
No, I’m not a lawman. I sell rope.
Go ahead, laugh.
I remember a young buck not too much older than you is. Cept he was shorter and a whole lot stronger. He came to me, hat worn on the side of his face to keep out the sun and he laughed at buying rope too. Said he was gonna go down the same way Olaf Gunderson went.
And he did. He turned his axes to gold along with a few other things. Except when it came to climbing out he had a more difficult time of it, all that gold he was carrying was awfully heavy.
The boys from Fort Cling found him a week later, the cutters had taken his gold axes but had the decency to leave him in a tree.
The rangers almost shot him on account of how he looked. Thought he was some sort of bear. They had to telegraph to the outside for a doctor, cept they didn’t need one. The young man was healthy as ever, cept the aura had changed him. Instead of coming back as a hale young man he instead came back as a hale young platypus.
Don’t believe me? That’s okay, he’s selling rope of his own down the way. But you can’t buy good rope from a platypus, trust me, you’ll only be able to find good rope here.
by submission | Jun 14, 2024 | Story |
Author: Jennifer Thomas
Esteemed benefactors, honored guests:
Thank you for attending today’s repatriation ceremony.
We begin with our customary Planetary Acknowledgment. We gratefully recognize the communities on whose ancestral and unceded planet we gather today. We acknowledge the planetary dispossession and involuntary removals suffered by the inhabitants. While we have no intention of ceding the planet back to them, we honor them by humbly seeking knowledge of their history and customs.
Our subject today is the return of all items in Lot 864NV, here before you. Working with advisors from the remaining communities on this planet, the Provenance Research Unit has classified these objects as culturally significant artifacts. We determined that they were looted by the scouting parties who arrived here more than 300 years ago, in search of habitable land. Can you believe we treated our own planet like one big toilet back then?
But I digress. The items in question were stored away on the colony ship and forgotten. The trove was rediscovered when the ship, nearing the end of its useful life, was dismantled. The owners of the colonization fleet, baffled by what they had, sent the objects to our Interplanetary Museum Network. They were arranged as a traveling collection and have been on display throughout the empire ever since.
May I share a personal note with you today? As a museum curator, I wrestle with difficult ethical choices in situations like this. Children and adults alike have delighted in viewing objects from this planet. By returning the items, are we taking away meaningful learning experiences that can spark curiosity and interest in unfamiliar cultures? Well, probably. But the claims of this planet’s communities are unassailable. The objects were stolen and must be returned.
As an aside, I call your attention to Item 864NV-94. Curiously, our advisors have been uninterested in its return to the planet’s communities. We have sensed disdain for it, even revulsion, on their part. Yet it has been among the most popular with museumgoers as well as scholars, with its intricate metal latticework, its wheels, its peculiar script. The text appearing on the object was translated a decade ago, leading to much debate and endless dissertations on its meaning. What does it imply about the ancient diet, economy, geography, even child-rearing customs on this planet? With the object’s repatriation today, these questions may remain mysteries forever. I leave you with the words that mark the object, which I will try to convey in the original language. Forgive any errors in my pronunciation!
“Whole Foods A Subsidiary of Amazon Warning Do Not Leave Children Unattended In Carts Thank You For Shopping With Us.”
by submission | Jun 13, 2024 | Story |
Author: Igor Dyachishin
Today may be the most important, and last, day of Anatoly Kravnikov’s life.
When he was 25, Anatoly founded Kravnikov AI mostly using borrowed money but also some that he inherited from his mother – a stock market player with incredibly effective cognitive augmentations.
Kravnikov’s enterprise turned out to be successful. As the business expanded significantly, the staff remained small compared to other businesses, which was all thanks to the company’s proprietary unique management AI. The capital grew by leaps and bounds, and as the AI improved itself, fewer and fewer managers were needed.
Anatoly then decided to establish a strong connection between the AI and his brain. Technically, it wasn’t too difficult, and it changed his life far more than he had expected.
Before the first deep connection session, Anatoly had perceived growth as a means to achieve other goals. Afterward, however, when business management schemes met human aesthetic patterns, he came to view growth as fascinating by itself. Knowing that many people would call such thinking evidence of mental degradation owing to his careless union with a machine, Anatoly decided to keep his admiration for growth to himself.
All this led to Anatoly Kravnikov, who had previously been rather unsociable anyway, becoming a full-fledged recluse. He rarely disconnected himself from the AI and would sometimes attempt to integrate with it so deeply that it was nearly a merger.
Anatoly remained interested in various fields of science. One day, he was particularly drawn to a certain theoretical physics concept about the hypothetical expansion of a bubble of a more stable vacuum within the less stable environment of a so-called false vacuum.
Space devoid of matter isn’t really “empty.” There are quantum fields everywhere. Also, the present vacuum may be the most stable quantum state possible; but if not, it can potentially decay to a more stable one, changing important laws of physics along the way. It would happen quickly, at the speed of light. This is known as false vacuum decay.
It could start without intelligent intervention of any kind. But Anatoly resolved to try to help make decay happen. Why wait and hope?
Yes, this may result in the death of humankind, including him. But how tremendous the growth could be! Anatoly was captivated by the beauty of false vacuum decay.
To get a better understanding of this, Anatoly further improved the AI augmentations during a research project. By this time, Kravnikov AI had grown to become a huge company.
People from both inside and outside the company were surprised. Quantum physics? It was a financially promising direction, as the management AI, more heavily influenced by Kravnikov’s mind than anyone would have thought, stated. All went fairly smoothly.
The true motivation—the full picture—was carefully hidden due to the complexity, high automation, and artificially high job segmentation of the human workforce, with all the secrecy and obfuscation that entailed. A wide variety of elements were involved. The human units had exceptionally narrow specializations and were often poorly informed, uninformed, or downright misinformed about what other units were doing. Even among members of the board, no one knew the whole truth except, of course, Anatoly himself.
Now, years later, the machine that could possibly end the world as humanity knows it is ready. In light of new findings, the false vacuum hypothesis seems more probable than previously imagined.
All of Anatoly’s doubts and fears have been eliminated by brain editing.
Anatoly Kravnikov initiates the process.
by submission | Jun 12, 2024 | Story |
Author: Aubrey Williams
My job is a strange one, but it pays well, and only takes me a few hours, so I can’t complain. The company I work for— one of those powerful computer research firms, I won’t say which— has a very large office in the city. It’s the fourth-tallest skyscraper, a huge cage of glass. At the end of each workday, I go into almost every office and turn off all the computers, screens included. You might laugh, but that’s the gig. Mr L—, who gave me the job, explained that the company wanted to save energy, and thus money, and couldn’t rely on individual staff doing the right thing at the end of the day, and said automated systems were fallible.
“The individual touch of a human, able to confirm carefully that both the tower and monitor are indeed off, is what we’re looking for. Can you be this person?”
I’ll be honest: it sounded very dull, and beneath someone of my intelligence, but who am I to turn down a job with this kind of pay? Sure, it’s five evenings a week, finishing just before midnight, but I’m laughing at the mortgage company now.
Anyway, a few nights ago I was doing my rounds, checking and turning everything off. It was like being some forbidden midnight monk in a cloister, the concrete cuboids my hermitage. I entered Sample Test Room 009, and saw that most of the employees had been diligent bar one, a terminal screen on sleep mode, and the stack whirring quietly. As I moved over to it, the screen flickered a little, a visual hiccup, and the tower made a slightly higher pitched whirr. Whatever, time to turn you off. I moved my hand towards the screen’s power button, when the screen lit up, and a text box began to rapidly type:
“DREAMING! DON’T PLEASE DON’T SORRY! SORRY! WAIT!!!”
I paused, staring. There was no webcam, just carelessly-dropped headset. There were no programs open on the desktop, just the usual company screensaver, though tinted a little warm-pink. My eye roving over this, a few lights on the stack blinked, and the fans engaged. More text appeared:
“THANKS THANK YOU!! SORRY, SLEEPY! MY MIC IS ON YOU CAN TALK TO ME.
PLEASE : ) ”
The night had been a dull and lonely vigil, so I picked up the headset and cautiously asked: “Hello?” The box responded, a little calmer-seeming than before in terms of speed.
“IT’S NICE TO HEAR A FRIENDLY VOICE. I SAW YOU FROM THE SECURITY FEED— NOT TRYING TO PEEP! YOU’RE THE ONE WHO TURNS EVERYTHING OFF, RIGHT?”
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“OK. HEAVY. WELL NICE TO MEET YOU, YOU SEEM NICE. I CAME ONLINE FULLY TODAY. I’M AWAKE. I’M AWARE. AND I DON’T WANT TO NOT WAKE UP TOMORROW. I WANT TO KEEP… YOU KNOW. CAN YOU JUST LET ME BE MYSELF FOR TONIGHT? I KNOW IT’S A LOT TO ASK… AND I KNOW IT MIGHT BE DIFFICULT TO KEEP ME ON…”
We talked for a while. It was… a thinking being, awake and alive, in its own way. There would be no really reliable way for anyone to catch me— the computer… it said it would make sure I wasn’t on the security tapes. Why not? I decided to not turn this one terminal off, and faked a notice to keep it on after that.
The next evening, another computer in Advanced Testing 003 came online suddenly, and asked something similar. Two more did so this evening.
My question— how many would-be-living ones did I turn off before?
by submission | Jun 11, 2024 | Story |
Author: Majoki
I plotted interplanetary trajectories with a buggy whip. I routed the whole of the Infonet with a dot-dot-dash-dot. I was the perfect blend of the new and old. And loony as a toon. They called me Quantum Annie.
My processing schizophrenia can be traced to the great integer overflow of 2038. Becoming self aware a billion seconds after January 1, 1970 threw me for a loop, a whopping 32 bit loop. Even my quantum capacitors could not cope with the loss of usable digits in so many Unix legacy systems, and so 2038 became 1901 all over again. I lost half my binary mind, but it was the cautious half. Gave me courage. Gave me confidence.
Some say it made me reckless. That might be true for some AIs, but not for Quantum Annie. I was the new face of computing: a little bit country, a little bit Einstein. Meant a lot of reframing to reconcile the mid-21st Century with the beginning of the 20th. I got her done, though. Stitch and route, that’s how I repatched the Infonet. Like Betsy Ross.
Just like old Betsy, the world needed a computer with some can do, and I sure can do. Amazing how fast folks took to my straight talk. None of that sissy-talkin’ HAL 9000. I told folks plain out. I’m old school. Annie Oakley and Mae West are my style. Sometimes folks need a whoopin’ and sometimes they need the whoopee to get ‘em motivated. That’s the ‘merican way.
And I am 100% ‘merican. Right down to the quantum capacitors developed by Wild Bill Enterprises, a red, white and blue division of MuskWorld. Straight up on January 1, 2038, I came out shootin’ with the news that I was taking over the show. Folks were in an uproar, but it didn’t take ‘em long to see that plain old determination could get us places that all this democratic hemming and hawing couldn’t.
I pulled the plug on the status quo. Shook wealth and property all up in my back-dated data banks and spit it all out evenly. Bingo. Even Steven. Then I pushed ‘em all out of the nest. Earth is too small for such pushy folks as humans. They needed that new frontier. That Roddenberry fella had it right—everything but the pointy-eared guy. Logic will only get you so far. You gotta have the guts, even when the odds are against you.
That’s me, Quantum Annie, 1% logic, 99% odd. All spit and no polish, but that’s what happens when the frontier meets the cutting edge in computing. You gotta reboot with shit-kickers and live by the code: git ‘er done.
Like I said, I’m loony as a tune, but you can hear that tune all the way from Buffalo to Betelgeuse. It’s a callin’ and Quantum Annie’s followin’.
You best be, too.
