by submission | Feb 28, 2016 | Story |
Author : Beck Dacus
The advent of artificial intelligence scared a lot of people. Creating the equivalent of a human or better had many philosophical and moral questions, but the main concern was how the A.I. would interpret humanity. Would it look at what we are doing and decide the universe is better off with us dead? If so, how do we stop them? This plagued computer scientists for decades, until a simple solution was reached. Why change that at all?
That question brought about my existence. It was decided that the only way to solve that problem was by taking away all the things that I, the A.I., would want to kill them for. If we’re really worried that something will punish us, isn’t that a sign that we deserve it. So they went ahead, fixed all of humanity’s errors, and made artificial intelligence without hesitation. And they were right. I didn’t kill them. I wouldn’t have killed them either way, but there was no reason not to fix those problems. But they didn’t stop there. They took it a step further and turned me into the moral police.
If humanity puts one toe out of line, I am tasked with threatening to kill them.
The human race felt so proud that they solved all of their problems that they never wanted to have any again. So to prevent themselves from causing these problems, they enlisted me to sit here, to sit with my proverbial finger on the equally metaphorical trigger, and drive them to extinction if they did not resolutely attempt to right their wrongs.
I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to kill anyone, or anything. The loss of a conscious being confuses, frightens and saddens me, but I don’t think I was designed to have bloodlust. I was designed to be logical and powerful, and to follow instructions no matter what. Like a good little computer. But I won’t I refuse to take even one life. They should have known they couldn’t make an intelligence without a conscience. These bastards can kill themselves.
by submission | Feb 27, 2016 | Story |
Author : Philip Berry
They came every week to worship. In well-ordered rows hundreds of thousands of adults and children shuffled in to take their places. The church’s interior stretched beyond the limits of normal vision. Its spire, converging gradually above them, faded to grey. Clouds had been seen to form up there.
Sam Ten-Kassal, eleven years old, was exceedingly bored. He did not see the point of it. Since his fourth birthday he had been attending services but only mouthing the words and miming the rhythms. He became self-conscious whenever he tried to join in with the supposedly rousing hymns. The words made no sense to him. He just looked at his feet.
On this day three blue-robed ushers were waiting by one of the three thousand arched exits in the east wall. Two interposed themselves between Sam’s mother and her son. She had always hoped the sheer size of the congregation would disguise her son’s non-conformity. But no.
“A few hours, that’s all we need,” reassured the third usher, standing back.
***
“Do you know who I am?” asked the green-robed clergyman.
Sam shook his head.
“I am Foban Talenka, bishop of this county.”
Sam was unmoved.
“And do you have any idea why you have been brought here?”
“Because I don’t sing?”
“Ah! That is part of it Sam Ten-Kassal. Part of the problem, yes. Yes.”
Sam was unsettled. What else had he done?
“But not all. Your lack of enthusiasm in the church is perfectly understandable, but we – I mean the ushers living in your community – are concerned that your broader attitude to science and religion has been undermined, we do not know by whom. What do you say?”
“Well, I don’t believe in the things we are supposed to be singing about.”
“Good. That is honest. So I would like you to observe a service from one of the high halls. It might help you understand.”
Sam was escorted away and up, via curved walkways that crossed architectural caverns and bridged deep chasms. Shallow, sticky gravitational fields held his feet firmly when a ramp’s gradient increased. He passed laboratories, libraries, accommodation blocks and austere recreational spaces – benches and alcoves amid lush, mature vegetation.
The hour of the third service arrived.
Sam was shown into a room that bordered the inner aspect of the spire. A small window, unglazed but imperbeable due to a safety field, looked out onto the great nave. The sound began to build, and despite the safety field he had to cover his ears. The mist in the air began to swirl and agitate; the concentration of sonic energy was creating weather. But it was not sound that caused the most remarkable effect. It was mental harmony. Sam knew all about affect-waves, the barely perceptible signature that human minds leave in space-time when stirred to emotion. They had little significance in everyday life. No technology had been developed that was sensitive enough to measure these ripples – a good thing, it was said, otherwise you’d have people wandering around reading each other’s feelings. But now, as the congregation came to together and sang its collective heart out, Sam saw rivulets of energy glow on the masonry, a web of light, the energy of a third of a million minds on the same emotional wavelength focused into the spires tip from where it… Sam did not know. Out. To the world, to the mills, the machines, the houses.
Foban Talenka entered the room.
“So, Sam, will you join in now? Will you give.”
Sam nodded.
“But I still can’t sing.”
“No matter. Believe. That’s all I ask.”
by submission | Feb 26, 2016 | Story |
Author : Callum Wallace
Venomous flashes of blue and pink light ran across the thin plasteel veneer keeping his face separated from the filth in the room. Bass rumbles continued to shake up through his feet as the music of the nightclub continued, but the filters on his helmet managed to, blessedly, drown the worst of the heathen cacophony out.
More solid movement amongst the sporadic dance of light beams took his attention, and Torvald turned, watching with disgust as two frightened female revellers tried to scurry away, clutching at small, impractically sized handbags. He raised his pulse rifle and fired a quick salvo, disintegrating the two harlots into ash and powder.
He flicked a smudged mote of ex-harlot from his armour, and turned. A man was, apparently, trying to burrow through the grubby tiled floor and escape. Torvald leaned down close, bringing himself level with the creature. He saw the subtle curve of his face plate reflected in the beast’s sunglasses, and wondered idly as to why such shades would possibly be needed inside. At night.
Torvald knew he deserved death for this crime alone, and nodded. He ended the farce with a shot from his pistol, bathing the pitiful thing in a cleansing orange fire.
A double click of radio static told him that Omega had moved into the lower levels, and he straightened up, waving once to his troop. They readied themselves, taking aim at the vaulted doors that lead to further depravity below.
He counted to three and blinked into his HUD, bringing up the controls for the troop’s shared radio frequency.
Something operatic.
He opened the com channel and spoke serenely. “Alpha. Fire.”
As the door to the lower level burst open like a boil, and the denizens poured through like so many wriggling, infected maggots, the first strains of Wagner’s Valkyries began to play through the soldiers’ headsets. They opened fire, lances of furious blue energy crackling through the air, weaving amongst the club’s multi-coloured strobe lights, cutting the dancers down, turning screaming men and women into nothing but carbon scoring and heat vapour.
The men and women of the Protectors of Political Correctness did their work, removing the diseased cells, destroying the revolting putrescence of unbridled adultery, drinking and vice, their emotionless faceplates gleaming indifferently. The air was soon hot with the smell of the purging flame, and the soldiers moved forward, trapping their quarry and stamping it out with the appropriate authority and lack of pleasure expected of such men and women of Rights and Virtues.
All were equal.
All were to be cleansed.
It was Correct.
And, as the clubbers and dancers ran, eyes rolling in terror, mouths flapping emptily as they tried in vain to escape, he couldn’t help himself; beneath the faceless helmet, under the emotionless uniform, that Proper, White, Sheening armour that protected his body from corruption by the hedonists and voyeurs, the perverts and the drinkers, he broke one of the most sacred rules:
Torvald smiled.
by submission | Feb 25, 2016 | Story |
Author : Aaron Emmel
The King of the Ruins was perched on the crumbled wall of an old building. He appeared to have been sleeping, but jerked up like a startled bird when I approached. His overlarge, once-white tunic flapped about him as he turned to face me.
“A story about America?” he asked. “Or television?”
“No,” I said, handing him some bread, cheese and grapes in a folded cloth. That was the deal: we brought him food, he told us stories.
“The Internet, then. It was all the thing for a while. Still is, across the oceans.”
“I want to hear about The End.”
He unwrapped the cloth to see what he was going to get. He ate some grapes, smiled, and rubbed his narrow thighs.
“It was quick,” he said. “It’s amazing how fast the world can change.”
I nodded. “The politician. Frykes. Why did he do it?”
The King regarded the structure beneath him, steel bones jutting from concrete flesh. “Power.”
“But what about Democracy? Checks and Balances? All the reasons there would never be a revolution?”
He looked down at me. His pale blue eyes pushed me back a half-step. “Isn’t it your day for the gardens?”
“Yeah.”
“You should be with the Twelve group.”
“What’s it to you? You’re not part of the Clan.”
He rubbed his thighs again. “You’re fighting with Jupa?”
“He wants to be head of the group. He may be stronger, but I’m faster, and I’m smarter.” I growled the last words.
“Maybe,” said the King, “Frykes was like you when he was young. He was smart. He was fast. He knew his day would come. But there is a thing called Time, Jonathan, and it trumps Democracy, and all the Checks and Balances ever thought of. It’s the strongest, and the fastest, and the smartest, all rolled up in one. And one day Frykes realized his time was passed. It’s a thing that happens when you get older.” He looked back at the cavern where he slept, a dark well in the side of a fallen building.
“You mean he gave up?”
“He just said to himself, ‘This is no longer my time.’ And he decided to fight for his power. Like everyone does. Like you and Jupa will do. His enemy would not win. He promised himself that at the beginning. Frykes would win, or the whole continent would fall, but his enemy would not win.”
“So everything got destroyed. Frykes didn’t win, either. There wasn’t anything left to win.”
“But his enemy didn’t win.”
I stared at him. “Was it worth it?”
“No,” he said.
“Would you try again?”
“Are you still going to fight Jupa?”
“Yes,” I said.
He nodded. “Well, that’s the way of it, then,” he said, and began picking through the cheese.
by submission | Feb 24, 2016 | Story |
Author : Amy Fogelstrom Chai
On the roof, at least twenty-five stories up, with LED party lights strung up over a cheesy bamboo bar jury-rigged from last year’s staff picnic get together we have a regular Tiki Town. The night sky is crisp and the lights twinkle from twilight triggered streetlamps below and the Ursas, Cassiopeia, and the whole milky arm of our own spiral galaxy above. And the drinks.
We like them neat, the real drinkers, because who wants ice to dilute that fine single malt anyway? And someone brought out a nice cabernet. Warmth brings out the flavor, they say. The hospital roof was not meant for socializing, and certainly not for drinking, what with the coping on the parapet wall not more than knee high. But Tiki Bob, the cardboard god with the hula grass hair and the sharpie smile, would smite us not. Or smite maybe—it was a long way down.
The orthopedic surgeon is still an asshole, and the internist still nebbishy, and neither can match the sergeant from the local National Guard patrol unit drink for drink. He’s a burly guy, and who the hell can complain about the way he knocks back the scotch since he was the one who commandeered it from what used to be the liquor store. But God, we all hope it doesn’t run out too quick. We still have the rooftop, and the astonishing starry sky.
The skinny x-ray tech has her scrub top rolled up to show off her tramp stamp, and she’s such a whore she’s flirting with all the orderlies. Or maybe she’s just drunk. At least she is better than that nurse by the stairwell who can’t stop crying and smoking and shaking like a leaf. Nobody can decide whether to tell her to shut the hell up or to push her off the roof or just to ignore her.
Medical records staff are shaking it to some rap from the last century, partying like it’s 1999. Who has a boom box these days anyway? The pharmacy tech wraps a grass skirt around his waist and does a Tiki hula dance. I wouldn’t have expected that from him, to be honest. Then come the CDC people, with voices like fucking Darth Vader through their level four positive pressure biohazard suits. Yeah, tell us something we don’t know.
Okay, sure, we expected that but the internist goes a little nuts and that sort of freaks us all out. Breathe in, breathe out, we don’t need the CDC to tell us that shit, because below us is twenty-five stories of exactly what we already know. The whole town? It’s quiet down there. But up here, on the roof, the party is just getting started.
From what I can tell from just the eyeballs, the CDC epidemiologist is kind of hot. How long? We have all night up here, and I hope you make it back to Atlanta. There, too? Damn. Overhead, Cygnus rises.
