The Electric Olympian

Author : Ken McGrath

John sat down in a corner of the canteen, spread his newspaper out in front of him and began to unpack his lunch.

‘THE ELECTRIC OLYMPIAN’ screamed the headline plastered across the front page of the red top.

“Hey Johnny, have you seen this?” a voice called loudly. John looked up without really needing to, he already knew the source of that booming, self-important voice. Bob, one of the machine operators, stomped up beside him and jabbed a meaty finger down onto the paper.

“This is sick this is. Have you heard about this?”

John shook his head in response. “I’ve only just opened it now,” he replied quietly, “haven’t had a chance to read it yet.”

“Right well, this guy here, Sancho or Sanchez or something, went over to take part in The Olympics and it turns out he’s part robot. So they’ve going to kick him out. He’s got a damn robot leg or something. It’s crazy. These freaks they think they can still act like normal people even though there’s a bit of a machine grafted onto them. I mean, come on, The Olympics is all about people in their physical peak.”

John looked at the massive gut sticking out over Bob’s belt and wondered if he’d ever been the peak of anything. His gaze drifted back upwards. Bob was still mouthing off.

“Think about it for a second right, this guy thinks he can enter, like a real person, even though he’s got this cyber leg that’ll no doubt help him run faster or for longer without getting tired. All the while our guys, real men, not these half-humans, are expected to take part against that. It’s just not fair.”

John quickly scanned the newspaper. “Says here Bob that this guy’s a jockey. I don’t think having a replacement limb is going to make any difference there, do you?” he asked.

“His damn horse is probably all pumped up on steroids or something, anyway it’s just not right, these part-people going in expecting to be treated like you and me. Next thing you know they’ll have them here in the construction yard. They’ll have some robot-armed freak out there doing all the lifting and carrying and there won’t be any need for machine operators, people like you and me. They’ll do away with the heavy goods drivers. That’s what’ll happen. You see what I mean? Folk like you and me’ll be out of work all ‘cause of these robot-freaks with their add on parts.”

John gave Bob one of those looks that suggested agreement, but in reality didn’t say anything at all. Bob gave him a friendly slap on the back then noticed one of his more vocal work-mates entering the canteen. Without a backward glance Bob snatched up the newspaper and started making his way across the room, calling, “Hey Jeff you seen this filth yet?”

John sat back heavily in the plastic seat and let out a relieved sigh. Automatically his hand crept to his right thigh, to the point where the saw had severed his leg. Beneath the rough denim of his work clothes the pseudo-skin wrapped around a replacement limb had never felt so cold, mechanical and heavy before.

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The Old Man and The Sea Redux

Author : Andy Bolt

WELCOME, Chip Winkler, TO STORYWEB 9.0! PLEASE INPUT LITBASE:

Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea

LITBASE FOUND! LAUNCHING . . .

Enrique was mindswiped by the storybot as he dangled from the 93rd floor window of the Kentaka building. He was a little preoccupied rewiring the entire structure for atmospheric transdigitization, but he always liked contributing to storyweb.

GREETINGS, Enrique Mendoza! YOU HAVE BEEN RANDOMLY SELECTED TO CONTRIBUTE TO TODAY’S STORYWEB TALE BEGINNING:

The old man had gone eighty-four days without taking a fish.

PLEASE INPUT LINE:

Fighting the tide in his fully submersible XLJ thermodynamic subship, the old man deployed a series of fish-seeking nanobaits with attractive carbon fiber lures.

LINE REGISTERED! THANK YOU, Enrique Mendoza!

The storybot found Mindee Walsh as she was on her thirteenth shot of semi-intelligent Nuevo Tequila. Her boyfriend had just dumped her, and she was out doing her best to erase the memory of his face. It took her twenty minutes to notice the blinking prompt in her right eye.

And he was miserable because nobody loved him and he was probably going to die by himself all miserable and sad and miserable!

LINE REGISTERED! THANK YOU, Mindee Walsh!

Billy Watson was playing Slaughterhouse 5000 on his quantum box. He was assaulting his way through the chainsaw laser level when the storybot caught up to him. Reading over the first paragraph distractedly, Billy found himself focusing more on the arterial spray of lupine aliens.

Then the dinosaurs in helicopters attacked with their acid guns! “Let’s get carnivorous,” said the old man.

LINE REGISTERED! THANK YOU, Billy Watson!

Marion Day was in the middle of her forty thousand word dissertation on interracial relationships in postcolonial sub-Saharan Africa.

I would like to unsubscribe please.

LINE REGISTERED! THANK YOU, Marion Day!

Milton Wilks, an anal-retentive librarian from Greenbrier County, was alphabetizing his coupons.

That’s right, thought the old man. I’d sure like to unsubscribe from this rain of hydrochloric thunder lizards, if only that were an option.

LINE REGISTERED! THANK YOU, Milton Wilks!

For the rest of the week, the storybot bounced from person to person. The old man fought off the dinosaurs, mused on the nature of human existence, fell in love with a woman who turned out to be a zombie, then a robot, and then his sister, had crab cakes and fine wine on the Parisian seashore, traveled back in time to kill Hitler, unsubscribed from six separate situations, violated seven copyrights, fell asleep in the sun, denounced the president, praised the president, committed suicide, came back to life, and finally, grew himself some gills and went to live with his true love, a mermaid person from Zeta Beta VII.

By Friday, the story had ended and bounced home. In his office, Chip Winkler smiled at his work.

“Perfect!” he cried.

Two months later . . .

GREETINGS, consumers! THIS SUMMER: A MAN. A SEA. THE MERMAID WHO LOVED HIM AND THE DINOSAURS WHO DIDN’T. WILL HE DEFEAT HIS ZOMBIE ROBOT SISTER IN TIME TO BE WITH HIS TRUE LOVE? WHICH WILL GET HIM FIRST, HITLER’S LEGION OF CYBER MONKEYS OR HIS OWN NAGGING FEELINGS OF SELF-DOUBT? THE HUMAN SPIRIT WILL BE EXPLODED OFF ITS HINGES. THE OCEAN JUST GOT EXISTENTIALLY DEADLIER.

THIS SUMMER: THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA

Based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway

 

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Trust Your Doctor

Author : Timothy T. Murphy

Hurley sat on the examination table, naked to the waist, and sneezed for the umpteenth time. He reached for yet another tissue, his eyes watering, as he watched Dr. Mills flipping through charts and scribbled notes and rather pointedly ignored him. Shivering in the cold of the exam room, he finally broke the long silence, “Can I put my shirt on?”

“No, you may not.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m going to want to listen to your lungs again in a few minutes and because I’m extremely angry with you.”

“Hey look, just because you didn’t think they were ready for testing…”

“Clearly, it doesn’t matter what I think, does it?”

“All the tests showed that they were ready.”

“The tests were flawed, as I tried to point out.”

He sneezed again, blowing his nose loudly. “Okay, so I have a cold after the injection, proving that they don’t work, so why don’t you just say ‘I told you so’ and get on with the prescription, okay?”

A smug smile crept across her face as she tossed her clipboard on the desk. “Well, you see, that’s my point. They’re working perfectly.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your beautifully engineered medical molecular robots are doing their job just fine.”

She just stood there smiling at him with that infuriatingly superior manner of hers and waited for the inevitable question.

“Then how did I get a cold after I was injected?”

“You had the cold when you were injected, you simply weren’t feeling it yet. Had you been subjected to a physical before the injection, I could have warned someone.”

“Okay, but that still doesn’t explain why I still have it.”

“They were programmed to imprint on the first D.N.A. code they encountered upon injection. They were injected into your bloodstream.”

Again, she stopped and smiled like that would explain it all. He thought about it for a moment and it hit him. “Oh, crap.”

“Oh crap, indeed.”

“Are you telling me…”

“You are infected with a computer-enhanced virus.”

“So, no NyQuil?”

“Well, NyQuil hasn’t been tested or approved for use against the cyber-cold, but that certainly won’t stop you, now will it?”

“Can it kill me?”

“Yes.”

“Excuse me?”

“Well, mind you, I’ve never encountered Robocold before, so I can’t be sure, but there is a possibility of rapid production of mucus membranes and other fluids interfering with the functions of your lungs.”

“Look, could we have this conversation in English?”

“You could drown on your own snot.”

“Okay, ew. What do I do?”

She handed him a dosage cup with two pills. “You take this. It’ll help.”

He downed the pills quickly as she picked up her phone. “What are you doing?”

“Calling the C.D.C.. You need to be quarantined.”

“What? No chance. I have to get to work on fixing this.” He stood and pulled on his shirt.

“I can’t let you out into the public. If your brand-new supervirus gets out into the general populous, it could kill billions.”

He strode over to her, towering over her and staring her down, despite the dizzy, unfocused feeling in his head. “I can’t let you do that, doctor.”

She held his gaze steadily. “I know. That’s why I gave you the tranquilizers.”

He started to ask what she meant, but the room spun, his knees gave out, and the room went dark just as his head hit the floor.

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Cyber Love

Author : Dane Richmond

The media fanfare had died down after the first few months. It had been amazing at first but it gradually made the transfer to annoying and then overwhelming. Now years later the paparazzi were gone along with their fame. There was the occasional photographer when she and Marc went out. She could feel sympathy from Marc. He said he didn’t miss the attention but she knew he did. He was upset and distracted—he must not have gotten the promotion he had hoped for. She decided to make him a special dinner and wear that teddy he loved.

They made history when they had the empathy chips implanted nearly 5 years ago. It was revolutionary at the time, if they hadn’t had the public behind them they could have gone to prison for violating the Anti-Enhancement Laws, but they had been so in love then that they didn’t care; they wanted to be so much closer. The chip had worked, all of the emotions that the other felt were transmitted via a satellite uplink. They had proven all the critics wrong: knowing exactly what he was feeling had caused some arguments, if he was looking at another woman, but it had brought them so much closer, knowing that even when they were arguing he still loved her.

The chips were becoming available for widespread use. It was the new tattoo with your lovers name on it. An hour long surgery and you were closer to your spouse than you could ever hope to be naturally. Companies were advertising faster upload times and the newest one with a cell phone feature. It wouldn’t be long before the “Love Chip” was available right outside the churches in Vegas. She had thought it would always be a tool to enhance love but now it was just another money making tool for corporations. They didn’t mind that, like the tattoos, sometimes they had to be removed; they made more money taking out the chips than they did installing them.

Just as she was hoping that maybe there was a photographer outside their drive, like in old times, she felt a flash of fear and panic that lasted for a fraction of a second, it felt so entwined with her own thoughts that she didn’t have time to sort out her emotions before the flash of blinding pain.

The photographers crowded the small church, taking as many pictures of the twin caskets from every angle possible. One of the photographers approached the funeral director asking him to push the caskets together for a better photo, but was politely rebuffed. A reporter was interviewing both sets of parents, asking about the lovers lives over the last five years, post-love chip. “It’s breaking news, Marc Stevens, the first man with a love chip, gets hit by a bus and it kills his wife Jennifer! How can you not talk to me? This will halt the market on Love Chips, they killed that girl. How does it make you feel to know that because of this piece of technology your daughter dropped dead in her home?”

He was still shouting questions at the parents as he was forced out of the funeral home.

___________________
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Don’t Touch

“Simply put, I do not, under any circumstances, want your filthy fingers near me.” Alison was near hysteria by the time Timmy called her. Both had been having a relationship for three years now and it was always the man who made things awkward. Nothing killed a relationship more than wanting to meet the person you’re in love with.

Alison’s face scrunched up as Timmy went on with the video call, “How can you be so ignorant? I mean, this is how people before our time did things and I don’t consider it political. I just – want to see you and touch you.”

“My God, that’s fucking creepy. Tim, can you even hear yourself? I’m calling the police if you keep this up.”

“What? No, no. Listen! Sweetie, I’m just bored of this whole cyber thing and phone thing. I want to feel warmth I want to feel you. Can’t you understand what I’m going through?”

A sigh came from her lips. The girl was losing her interest already. “Timmy, that’s why the internet gives you porn: so that girls like me don’t get pregnant. No one has to move and lose their job, and when we get married we can set up for insemination. See? Simple.”

The signal ended with Timmy’s frowning face etched on the plasma reader. How could she do this? He was furious. Already, his computer screen had been buzzing with offers from girls in far, far away places. They knew better than to be located in the same time zone, let alone the same country. Sex became sterile and love was the plastic bag they held it in.

His fingers went to work, and not the way you would think. He typed and he typed until he found what he was looking for. Little clicks of fingertips tapping at a plastic board led him to an illegal escort service that did, indeed, promote ‘touching’ and even ‘mouth to mouth playmates.’ Myspace had been around for almost a hundred years.

Timmy worked his magic and made sure the ghost-bot was up and running. First offenders got minimum of five years for even thinking of doing a spit-transplant with another humanoid. Things were sketchy and Tim knew the risks when he dialed the supposedly free website.

Search upon search turned up old advertisements. Some were funny, and others had become obsolete like penis-enlargements and physical enhancers. Soon, however, he spotted a few girls still active, fishing their lines and listing the interests that piqued more than his curiosity. Timmy knew he was crossing the line, but something told him that living in a box was wrong. These girls wanted to get what he wanted to give: touch.