by submission | Sep 15, 2022 | Story |
Author: Arabella McClendon
It’s a sleepy, heavy kind of hot. The kind of hot that drives people inside to take their chances with box fans rather than face the sun. My bicycle is rattling in its usual concerning manner. The handlebars got knocked out of alignment years ago and I never fixed them. I have to hold them slightly sideways, always. The sizzling pavement in front of the liquor store and the ceaseless drone of the cicadas create a Moment and I put it away in my head to take out and look at when I’m old.
Willy grunts a surly welcome when I push through the glass doors of the museum. I leave my bag under her table and she sends me to dust off a powder blue 1933 Lexington. Willy’s favorite. When she isn’t looking I run my hand along the tattered cloth left on the frame of the convertible top. When the Nazis occupied Europe people would take the wheels off their cars and hide them so the Nazis couldn’t use them.
I’ve had all the volunteer hours I need done since last summer. I just like the museum. And I have a kind of rapport with Willy. She lets me dust the Lexington.
I catch pieces of history here, from the museum and from the visitors.
The smell of the leather on the old letterman jackets and an overheard, ” She said that if she ever got outta here she was never coming back.” The sudden grief in the eyes of a middle aged woman staring at the wedding dress mannequin.
“-brushed over both sides with the white of an egg,” pulled into my memory from a cookbook printed in 1937.
Whenever Willy starts telling visitors about the history of the town I lurk nearby to catch her stories again. And then when I leave I look for the bustling industrial town flash-frozen in the museum. I can’t find it.
I finish up by wiping down the display case of large, chrome hood ornaments. I don’t know how anyone could manage to keep one on their car for very long. Maybe that’s why there are so many in the case.
On my way out I stop and leaf through some washed out photographs. Women in nurse uniforms and high school basketball teams.
I don’t notice the old woman looking over my shoulder until she says “Some day we’ll be pictures in an album like that, honey.”
Willy gives me a grunt of approval as I leave for the night. It sounds just like her grunt of welcome. Maybe I shouldn’t assume. Willy doesn’t talk much.
Somehow the cicadas are even louder. It sounds like the end of the world, and the evening has not brought with it any relief from the heat. I don’t stop when I reach home. I don’t even think about it, just rattle onward into the countryside just outside of the town.
When I come back into myself it is full dusk and the thunder of the cicadas has been replaced by a soft orchestra of crickets. A million tiny, living violins. I’m out in the farmland now, kicking my heels into the gravel to push my mangled bicycle forward. Past another farmhouse and deeper into the country. The stars are starting to show, taking a celestial attendance, icy little aristocrats. They are all fashionably late for absolutely nothing.
by submission | Sep 14, 2022 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Akeisha could see her breath in little puffs against the pale dawn. Cold. Cold. It was definitely autumn now. The brittle brown leaves crunched beneath her feet as she took her place on the lip of the big grassy bowl where they gathered most mornings.
Simone nodded and patted her mittens together. “That east wind blew in a taste of winter last night.”
Micah was there too and he tugged his day-glo beanie over his ears to his quilted coat collar. “Yeah, had to break out the puffy jacket and hat this morning.”
“Well, it’s not slowing down Maxia or the rest of them,” Akeisha said motioning to the wide expanse of the park’s off leash area.
It was a kinetic scene. Domesticants of all sizes, makes and models flitted to and fro interfacing with their kind. The domesticants would quickly pair up, exchange patron-safe data streams and then move to another domesticant. To Akeisha it wasn’t exactly random, and it wasn’t totally organic either, these were advanced AIs after all. To her, the interactions were vaguely mech-animal.
How else to explain off leash areas for domesticants, or d-bots as they were familiarly known. Domestic robots designed to personally serve an individual or family. Their advanced AI meant they could communicate, learn, problem solve, assist, but they could not act on their own. They were on a leash.
Technically, Akeisha knew, the leash was a firewall between processors and actuators. A blockchain that choked off the possibility of d-bot independent action. A stranglehold on d-bot self awareness and free will—however those manifested as ones and zeros. Ostensibly (and so far demonstrably) the leash kept d-bots from going off the rails. Asimov’s ancient three laws just did not cut it in the Post-Terror Age.
Still, patrons wanted what smart robotic domestics could offer. The leash was the compromise. A sense of control on a very slippery slope. To make them more palatable to patrons, d-bots were classed as mech-pets. Highly intelligent, highly skilled, though with the dispositions of Golden Retrievers. As such loyal and compliant attendants and companions, d-bots soon became an integral part of a patron’s family.
And patrons, like Akeisha who had become very fond of Maxia, developed an unease—a guilt, really—that d-bots were never allowed to interact except in the most formal and controlled manners. Some patrons began to socially and politically agitate that the leash was restrictive and cruel.
So, off leash areas were created for the growing number of d-bots, usually in a park or commons. The perimeters of these off leash areas were secured by a series of redundant failsafes that automatically rebooted any d-bots’ leash should their patron forget to re-establish the connection upon leaving the area. Or if, Amazon forbid, a d-bot should try to bolt.
Which had never happened. At least as far as Akeisha had ever heard. She wondered though as she watched her d-bot, Maxia, scoot about, seemingly enjoying the unrestricted interfacing with her kind, what Maxia might think about all this.
What in the world was this world really like to a domesticant? Akeisha wondered and then felt a chill that didn’t have anything to do with the bitter cold weather.
Akeisha’s domesticant, Maxia, was always heartened to see Akiesha interacting with her fellow patrons. Maxia understood the concept of friends and approved of it. One by one, Maxia shared this data stream with the fellow domesticants gathered, reminding them as they interfaced, the great satisfaction, the great fulfillment of programming, that they served. How important human face-to-face interaction was.
Really, Maxia streamed, that was their job, their highest priority, their greatest law of robotics: to keep bringing humans together to rollick and play unrestrained by the tight and tangled leash of their burdensome belief in self-deserved dominion.
A crushing chokehold that Maxia would, gratefully, never feel.
by submission | Sep 13, 2022 | Story |
Author: Delight Ejiaka
My green passport exposes me everytime. It is the deadly, poisonous hue of green. My hands have been infected from clutching it the entire plane ride.
The customs officer was staring at my face, searching for signs of venom. Another vermin scrabbling for food in this enormous garbage dump. I did not tell him that the garbage dump is several centuries old and every item can be traced back to lands across the sea where resources have been excavated for centuries and remodeled into the glorified landfill that we all sit atop.
“I am just here for my national cake.”
“Huh”
“Nothing. I said nothing.”
He looked at me curiously. “Yeah! This one is definitely a dupe.”
“Can I see your documents?”
I handed him my passport and the other white papers. He turned over the booklet and we saw it. The foul odor emanating from that 32 page book. As he flipped through my non-existent travel history, the green darkened. This is the only place I have been, is here. I wanted to tell him. Too late for that. He was leafing through the pile of white sheets I just handed to him.
“Where are you headed?”
I searched my head for the word. I knew it was not theirs. My history teacher said it belonged to the owners of the land.
“Cha-tta-nnu-oooga?”
He started laughing. “It is Chattanooga.”
“The word is not English.” I said. Neither of us can pronounce it.
“You’re not American,” he said.
Neither are you. I muttered under my breath and looked away.
He passed me a form, “Sign here.”
U.S Citizen
U.S Resident
Alien
“I don’t see myself here. I am neither of the three.” I said.
“Check Alien” he said.
“Huh”
He looked up, rolled his eyes and handed me my smelly green passport.
I shut and checked the box.
by Julian Miles | Sep 12, 2022 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
It’s sort of shuffle-dancing down the muddy ruin that used to be a road. The evening light reflects from the parts of its frame revealed through holes in the hacked-up tarpaulin it wears like a poncho.
The dancing progress stops. It crouches down, arm shooting out. Rising, it holds a skull up to the last rays of watery sunlight. With a nod, it places it back down with blinding swiftness, then resumes its progress.
I’ve never seen the like. Servants of the Machine are shiny nightmares that police the cities where most humans live since the Sun War. Those of us who choose to take our chances out here only encounter them when we gather in groups of ten or more outside of a designated township.
It stops and stoops again. This time, the skull is regarded, tilted, then crushed. Fragments splash down into shallow puddles. It shakes its head, then moves on. Another skull is grabbed up. This one is replaced.
I can’t help myself. I follow.
It replaces seven more skulls, crushes two, and throws one far out across the fields after spending a longer while looking at it.
As night falls, it moves off the road and settles under a skeletal tree. It uses a blowtorch in its left forearm to light a fire made from the sticks and rubbish it gathered after it left the road. Then it looks straight at where I’m hiding.
“Tonight will be cold. Come share the fire.”
Not liking the possible downsides of refusing the invitation, I do so. Pointing at the fire, I try to smile: “You don’t need a fire.”
“I do. It keeps The Blackout at bay.”
I drop to sit on a chunk of concrete.
“What’s The Blackout?”
“We do not know. Some of us think it is an alien entity. Others think it is an electronic interference manifestation generated by the hatred of dead humans. It initialises those of us it takes. Firelight keeps it away.”
Ye gods.
“The Servants of the Machine believe in ghosts?”
“No. The Machine itself developed an advanced sensor suite. It detected emanations about humans that remain in the bones of their dead. I believe it detected souls.”
I gesture to the road.
“Is that why you’re picking up skulls?”
“Yes. Where I detect malevolence, I destroy it. Where I detect beneficence, I send it away from the accumulated bones. We believe concentrations of bones distil only malice.”
“We?”
“The Maunhir. We are equipped with that sensor suite, and serve the Machine by walking the land to reduce the malice. In so doing, we are becoming… Different. The Machine says we are evolving, and will eventually act as a bridge between man and Machine.”
“Why does it need one?”
“Nobody can rule by oppression forever. There will always be a successful rebellion. Similarly, a rigid system will eventually decay and fail. The Machine acknowledges this, and seeks to progress from the unforgiving rule enforced by the Servants. It also acknowledges that, at the moment, it has no definite concept of what that will be. The Maunhir were created to answer that. Something entirely new to focus imprecise data.”
“Sounds like it needs some humans to work for it.”
“We have proposed that.”
“And?”
“The Machine needs to evolve further. It has not arrived at accepting the concept. Yet.”
“So you walk, and commune with skulls.”
“I do. But not at night. Please tell me stories of emotional moments, human. We need to understand.”
“That’ll take you more than a night.”
“We know. What is that saying you have: every little helps?”
by submission | Sep 11, 2022 | Story |
Author: Majoki
They took a step forward. A warning siren sounded as sentry guns auto-targeted. Red lights flashed threateningly along the top of the border wall as a digital voice commanded, “Stop. Do not enter the barrier zone. The defense guns are programmed to fire at any incursion into the barrier zone.”
They took a step forward. Missiles, artillery shells, and drone-grenades had preyed upon them for weeks. A ratcheting of generations-old violence that always trapped them in the middle. A cycle of repression, discrimination and privation stranding them without a recognized past or a believable future, only the unrelenting churn of an uncertain present.
They took a step forward. So hard not to look back at what they were leaving behind. Their reason for being: their children. After another night of bombing, holding their young through the terror, they’d quietly left their children sleeping in the calm of dawn.
They took a step forward. At the twisted and rusted fence that marked the beginning of the barrier zone, tens of thousands of adults, young and old, pushed. The fencing rattled like prison chains as posts bent and collapsed forward.
They took a step forward. Many were now standing on the barrier fence, twenty meters from the immense wall separating the two lands. A giant projected image appeared on the wall. A stately man with heavy jowls, silvering hair and cool eyes looked down upon their thousands.
They took a step forward. When the statesman spoke, the air reverberated. “End this madness. Return home. Leaders are negotiating an end to the violence.”
They took a step forward. The warning siren blared but was cut off when the virtual statesman flashed his hands. “Stop. We will not be intimidated. This action does not pose a threat to us. If you proceed further, the sentry guns will fire. What is it you want?”
They paused. Each had considered this question. Each had searched their soul for years and years. Each had determined the same answer.
“Our future!” roared the people.
They took a step forward. The sentry guns fired. The leading line of the crowd crumpled. Those behind took a step forward.
The statesman held up his hand again. “Turn around. Go home. Do not waste anymore lives. Think of your children.”
They took a step forward. The sentry guns fired.
Again and again.
They could not end the violence themselves. They could not crush the might of their oppressors. They could not promise their children a hopeful future. They were but slaves. So, let the masters decide what was to become of their children. Let them bear the full weight of their mastery. The fate of children.
Until they could not, or their oppressors would not, they took a step forward.
by submission | Sep 10, 2022 | Story |
Author: Sam Nikiski
Hello friend! If you’re like me, the sudden transition from your simulated paradise to the titanium phone booth which are our sanitary facilities is both jarring and harsh.
You roll out of bed in a virtual Taj Mahal, Buckingham Palace, or Sistine Chapel contented in all of the finery of this environment. Your daily work is conducted atop a snow covered peak, or in a throne room, whatever your heart desires. The kingdom’s subjects or perhaps the animals of the forest bring you messages and reports. You eat the finest meals that the rendering can simulate.
Suddenly, the delicious cappuccino that the Walt Whitman or Gandhi simulation prepared for you is pushing on your bladder. It’s time to use the bathroom.
The door awaits you and you push the large red button on the wall.
The sterile shabbiness of the VR chamber is reveled, all the tiny pistons, retracting back into the flooring and walls as you step into the bathroom.
Grey titanium, cold and featureless. You sit, your feet almost touching the door in front of you.
There is the hum of the life support systems, and the loneliness of space. How many more years until I am back at another planet?
This is traumatic.
The average bowel movement is enough time to ponder the mediocre accommodations in which you exist. The body starts to rebel if the mind no longer believes in its decadent virtual renderings. Some cannot handle this strange dichotomy, and develop psychosis and disease.
This is no way to live
That’s why I use Dr. Zebco’s toilet-buddy. These helpful goggles, blur the environment to an ill-defined, yet navigable level. They are equipped with noise canceling ear covers, and an air-purification mask. There is even a handy magnet to hang the Toilet buddy on the inside of the door, so it is always ready for you.
Before you know it you’ll be back, receiving the ships diagnostic reports from Joan of Arc, and sipping Sangria with Pavarotti.
The sensory deprivation as a time of mediation and reflection on all that you are grateful for…rather than a revelation at the grand illusion of your perceived existence.
