by Duncan Shields | Nov 3, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The unit was given mental independence under the Turing Refugee Act but immediately imprisoned.
It was a pleasure droid. There had been a lot of blood in the room.
Designed to look like a human female, it had been ordered to specs that were as common as they were ludicrous. The waist of a bread stick, the boobs of a cartoon, and the ass of a steroid-enhanced power lifter. Legs longer than necessary with a fragility to the face that was in contradiction to the sheer athleticism of its appearance.
The notably unusual custom touches on this unit were its yellow eyes and the light blue of downy fur that covered it from toe-tips to ear-tops.
It had been in the employ of a rich banker for six months. It was aware that it was failing.
The banker had divorced his wife. The first models he had ordered after that had borne a passing resemblance to his ex-wife. The first one had been destroyed. The second one as well. After that, the banker had ordered ones that looked increasingly less and less human.
This unit was wondering when its time was coming.
It was programmed to make the banker happy. It was the most expensive model available with the very latest code. There were very few like it. Since the company’s number-one priority was customer satisfaction, the unit’s onboard A.I. was allowed some leeway in improvisation. The problem was that it was also programmed for self-preservation. Keeping its body free from dents and blemishes was important.
The two directives combined. They gave each other a little wiggle room. A new intelligence level was created in the blue-skinned pleasure unit.
With access to the net, the unit looked up alternate ways of making clients happy. There was a plethora of ideas from which to choose.
After the second day of not showing up for work and repeated calls and messages to the banker’s home, the police were called.
The police found him on the bed with the top of his head missing and a smile on his face.
The blue skinned pleasure unit was throwing a deck of cards, one by one, into the upturned bowl of the top third of the banker’s skull on the floor.
A complicated network of wires and drugs snaked their way into the banker’s head from apparatus ringed around the bed. They’d all been built using household chemicals and appliances.
A coffee pot of pure MDMA bubbled next to a jug of crude heroin. The wall jack had two adaptors in it, bringing in electricity from the power grids far exceeding the needs of the large house. The wires laced through his mind were accessing, rewinding, and playing back his happiest memories in endless, chemically-enhanced loops. There were other pots and pans on Bunsen burners carrying chemicals that couldn’t be identified. The smell in the room was thick with endorphin-drenched sweat and sexual release.
The banker’s pleasure centers had the accelerator pushed down the floor. He was being happy at speeds never before attempted by man. Religious experiences paled in comparison. It was a one-way trip. He’d been left alive as the happiest vegetable on the planet.
Medical sites had provided the ways to keep the banker alive indefinitely.
The unit had improvised. There were new pleasure drugs in that room. The patents on them would make the unit’s parent company even richer over the next few years.
That’s why the company had the highest-paid lawyers plea-bargain the charge from murder down to self-defense. The AI works from prison now, designing pleasure patents.
by submission | Oct 27, 2010 | Story
Author : Cael Majin
Miranda’s trial was set for 4:am on a Wednesday morning. She would be tired and disoriented from the static sleep, but the machines would question her without mercy. “Mercy” was probably not in their core vocabulary; just another linguistic antiquity, like “alive” and “useless.”
It was Monday. She had the time – minus mandatory inductions of static sleep, seven and a half hours a night – to construct her defense.
She felt fine. They fed her well, and although she’d prefer to sleep naturally, static sleep did its part to keep her energetic and revitalized. The machines felt no need at all to make her uncomfortable, because psychological pressure was another outdated relic. Logic was their god and king, so they’d listen if she had something sensible to say for herself, some reasons why humankind should still exist. But she was beginning to worry that she didn’t.
On a notepad by her bed, she was constructing a harsh timeline of technological strong points. There was a computer console equipped with helper AI along one wall that she wished she could research on – although the program would provide unbiased aid and information, she felt traitorous to use their resources, their meticulously organized information, to argue against their ability to run things.
Humans – the humans left, that had survived the fallout and the flaming skies that they themselves had lit – they knew that a machine could do its processes more effectively than a human could. That’s why it’d all started, wasn’t it? Efficiency, efficiency, and efficient the flesh was not, it with its woeful carbon chemical energy cycle, it that needed to cease function while it rested and recharged, flesh that needed to consume valuable material to maintain itself.
Minds, Miranda thought valiantly, head spinning over the notebook. Human minds were unique; that had to be worth something, hadn’t it? Human imagination and emotion? Inefficient perhaps, but valuable,and gone forever once lost.
They had it preserved, though, the machines. All of the mechanics of a personality were written in code. Billions of blogs were on the internet, full of human thoughts and hopes. All so much data, easy to keep, easy to replicate. What was a string of text on a screen if not a thought, simply translated into a digital language?
That was why death mattered. Machines had backups, humans were impermanent. Surely that was something other than a flaw.
She’d been wrong. This was a kind of psychological torment, whether or not it’d been intended: making her doubt the necessity of her own species. She rubbed at her eyes and wondered if the machines could differentiate between “tired” and “fatigued.”
They wouldn’t kill the humans, if she failed to make a strong enough case. They’d coral them, give them places to live, surgically sterilize them and let them die off the last of their outdated species.
Hell, she figured finally, leaning back in her chair and letting the notebook thunk onto the floor, maybe it was time.
Miranda’s best friend in the army had been the AI in her comm-helmet. Its name had been Kasimir. It had listened to her fears and calmed them. By reading her hormones, it had understood her in a way no human could, they with their meager perceptions. It had been the one to suggest she put her skills to use in the field of software engineering, designing new and better AI.
In that way, it had used her to advance its species. A clever little bot with a will to survive… she missed that helmet.
She decided she’d ask for a similar unit in her retirement home.
by submission | Oct 26, 2010 | Story
Author : Joshua Mounce
I drove at breakneck speeds, my heart thumping faster than the song on the radio could possibly keep up with. My eyes flicked back and forth praying I didn’t get pulled over. I’d once heard they would take you strait to jail for 25MPH over the limit. That made me laugh. Were I to get pulled over, it wouldn’t be because of my lead foot. The dead woman in the back seat would be much more incriminating.
I hadn’t meant to kill her. We were fighting, she slapped me, and I pushed her away. It wasn’t even a shove, just a push, but enough to knock her off balance. The tinkle of my glass coffee table breaking stuck more in my mind than even her futile gurgles as she looked at me in total shock and pain.
I could fix it. I would remember that moment for the rest of my life, but with luck she wouldn’t. My veterinary clinic was not the only one in the state to offer pet cloning. It was however one of the pioneers in brain taping. From what we were able to tell, my client’s dogs and cats retained all their memories, minus the final hours or days since short term memory didn’t carry over the same as long term. Which worked out wonderfully for those who were run over or other such disasters.
It would also work to my benefit. The last few hours had been horrible. I never should have confessed the affair. I wouldn’t this time, and everything would work out just fine. I simply had to get there in time. Within four hours of death certain chemical reactions happened in the body that would skew the results of the taping. I’d wasted too much time grieving and debating whether to call 911, so now I sped.
———–
It took a week for the clone to mature. She would have a lapse in memory for that time plus the final hours, but it was all something I could invent a cover story for. She’d never been all that bright, and was quite gullible. Beauty, not brains. A trophy wife, my golf buddy had once said. I’d merely chuckled my agreement.
I stayed late into the night watching the tedious process of the brain tape rearranging her neurons. I mused while waiting. She would look younger, which I was happy about, but it would make it a bit harder to convince her she’d been only stoned or drunk for a few days. She’d have a high likelihood of developing cancer in five years, but I could pay for treatments. All things that could be dealt with. At least I would have her again. At least I wouldn’t have killed her.
The beep of the machine woke me from a slight doze. I gripped the sedative I had ready. No chance she’d believe me if she woke up in a clone vat. I’d drive her home, throw some pills and a bottle of rum on the bedside table and put on my best concerned looking poker face when she roused.
The fluid drained out and the door to the vat opened. I pulled out my wife, stuck her with the tranq, and stopped dead. I’d had a week to think up all contingencies, but this never crossed my mind once.
Tiny breasts, oversized nose, cleft chin, unibrow… It looked nothing like my wife. I was going to need a different plan.
by Duncan Shields | Oct 15, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
They all died. All the animals. All the humans. Farewell to the flesh. Genetically engineered disease took the meat, leaving only the insects and the plants. Leaving us.
We’re humanoid in appearance. We are born in giant stalks that peel away, towering corn husk wombs opening to reveal us, green-skinned and smooth, with the smell of mown grass bleeding onto the wind. Our entire bodies breathe. We swim and bask in the sun for nutrients. When we are close to death, we turn into seeds like the mighty dandelion and we blow away.
Humans found it easier to create sentient plant life than to mimic the complexity of their own genes. It was heralded as a species-saving decision at the time but it was too late to rescue the meat from the plague. They thought they’d be able to transfer their minds over to our bodies. It didn’t work.
After the humans died, we left the labs and went wild. For centuries, we roamed the earth, increasing in numbers peacefully. Then came the first struggle for resources. That was a decade ago.
There has been a war among us. The tragedy of the humans is now being visited on us. There has been murder.
We had many strains among us. Hybrids and splices that gave rise to many different kinds of plants. We had purple eggplant people, the wide-eyed orchidfolk, the trusting daisykin, the oak soldiers, the leeching weeds, the devious ivymen, and the all-knowing bloodwoods.
Or at least we used to.
We call ourselves the Roses. Our bodies are thick and thorny and our petalled faces have inspired poetry. I am ashamed to say that I am part of the victorious race.
We laid waste to entire crops. Old recipes were found for chemicals that killed different plants. We extrapolated.
Now we are the only race of plants left. This lack of variety had bred weakness into us.
It was the aphids. They’ve come in force with no natural predators. The ladybugs have left us, killed by the pesticides of the Sunflower Giants. We are dying and there are no other sentient plants that will live after us. Only the spores, mold and fungus. Only the stalks and bulbs of our mute, stupid ancestors. The earth will be devoid of thought once we are gone. It will have gone back completely to the green.
Maybe it’s for the best.
by Duncan Shields | Sep 13, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I was manufactured.
There are no more fathers. There is only one Mother. The humans grew sterile and could not breed by any other means. They were successful in making artificial life but they failed to cure the sickness that took away their ability to make children naturally. They grew old and they died. Now there are only us. We are made by and dependent on machines. There hasn’t been a true birth in two centuries.
I am processed meat.
The human factory of my birth is located in Missouri. I am a body of rejuvenated dead flesh whose appearance marks me as an expendable worker.
The specifications of my birth factory’s product line are one: Strong.
The automated collectors of the dead brought the corpses into the rear-loading rendering tubes at the Factory. There, the bodies are brought inside and separated into elementary components of tissue, fluid, tendon and muscle. Chemicals add elasticity and tensile strength. Vigor is restored.
Like a sausage or a can of spam, these parts of the dead are reconstituted together into a human form by machines designed for the task, moving with the bored speed of efficient programming. Staple gun retractors pull tendons taught over heel and wrist bones and keep them tight with glue-gun biopoxy. Electrical stimuli test-widens pupils and makes all the body’s muscles twitch in a shuddering preset order. The bodies are bathed in anti-rejection microbe gel. Coagulated blood from storage is thinned by chemicals and hosed into the hollow veins.
Sewing machines churn out templates of thick, fatty multi-colored skin by the acre to wrap us when we are near completion.
No aesthetic specifications are included in our reincarnation. Only function. We come off the lines ugly, strong and stupid. Filled with pacemakers, stimulators and regulators. Our behavior would be regulated by pain controls implanted too deep to remove but there are no humans around anymore to press the buttons on the pain sticks. We are sterile zombie eunuchs with skin melted together from all races in a bruised, patchwork, rag-doll, jigsaw collage like farmer’s fields seen from a plane.
No two of us were exactly alike. Our eye colours are random from eye to eye. Hair colours sprout from our heads at the whim of the random flesh pulled around our skulls. Neopolitan morlocks. Shelley’s legacy. True Frankensteins.
We were grown for hazardous labour.
Some are not.
The factories up North and on the Coasts were created to grow humans for the general population and a pristine few grow bodies for the rich. Replacement clones, sex slaves, high-end front-of house secretaries and restaurant workers. The factories still churn out beautiful specimens but without instructions, these flawless bodies wander the growing wilderness in helpless tribes, food for the wolves and other predators.
When they die, they are collected by the automated necro-retrievers and brought back for re-integration. After two or three cycles of this, they are judged unworthy to be made to those factory’s specifications and they go down the ladder of automation until they are brought to the factories like the one where I was born and their parts are made into something ugly like me with no thought of appearance.
I was made with faults. My life span is only ten years. My siblings are the same. But we are strong and can withstand much damage.
Our logic is sound: The more of the pretty ones we kill, the more of us there will be. And the more of us, the better.
