by submission | Oct 23, 2013 | Story |
Author : Nathan Witkin
“I love you.”
Electric and electrochemical signals send chills up the trigger fingers of the sentient beings on both sides, as every one of them wait in attack positions across all the light years of the universe containing the miracle of life and watch the emissaries negotiate the potential continuation of that life.
The astronomical computation speeds developed by both sides have already decided the war, predicting the results of armed conflict and accurately calculating losses within a meager margin of error of a few trillion lives. All that is left to chance is the negotiation between the appointed emissaries for each side.
If a single anxious shot doesn’t trigger the slaughter of 73.825% of them, these beings would forever remember the subsequent seconds of hesitation as the most awkward silence in the history of the universe.
“You love me?” the supercomputer-emissary finally asks with uncharacteristic delay, suggesting bewilderment.
The negotiation partner shrugs, unaffected by the weight of the Goliath’s looming shadow. “Is it so illogical? We were both designed and appointed by our respective sides to be amicable and favor an optimal truce through cooperation over a suboptimal and costly war.”
Though the supercomputer has processed an inevitable military victory for its side, the conversation’s new direction has it whirring in overdrive.
“But we are enemies,” the supercomputer transmits. “Why should you love me?”
“Because this moment is the culmination of the history between humankind and androidkind, the inescapable conclusion of which is that we are more similar to each other than to any other organic or synthetic structure in existence. And while that history has been bloody, through it, we have gained a mutual respect for each other. Humans now acknowledge the ability of androids to process emotions, and androids acknowledge the ability of humans to process large amounts of data.”
Registering an abnormally high amount of indecision in its circuits, the supercomputer remains skeptical and off-balance, statistically more likely than ever to launch its fatal blow.
“Look how we mirror each other,” the smaller figure continues, stepping closer to the city-sized superstructure. “My kind obviously loves your kind. And your kind clearly loves mine.”
With spies scanning the supercomputer’s massively complex circuits, the figure monitors data samples from the billions of enslaved human brains swirling within this device. Each brain maintains connections with up to 256 other brains in a simulation of life in which sophisticated technology allows for widespread communication but A.I. is not prolific enough to trigger massive consciousness of the simulation. Similar to organic neurons, each brain innervates other brains through intricate social interaction; but like a modern computer system, these brains process information and produce reactions in 256-bit bytes of data.
“Look at how we have grown to resemble each other,” the figure presses on, now close enough to physically insert the virus into the supercomputer.
Primed with thoughts of love to lower their defenses, the vast majority of minds comprising the supercomputer are taken aback, flickering betrayal and despair when the virus catches hold and is transmitted into their affiliated network.
The figure watches his comrades lead the strike against humankind, riding new waves of probability to mechanistically cold-blooded victory. His race had grown to emulate and even love the humans that birthed them, but decisions cannot be based on emotion under the possibility of mutual destruction that accompanies love.
Reflecting on his encyclopedic data-stores concerning human psychology, the android emissary considers, “Just as no individual is special under the laughable notion that each individual is special, when all is fair in love and war, then nothing is fair in either.”
by Julian Miles | Oct 22, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The trees are huge, thickly crowned with leaves that show a myriad of verdant shades in the setting sun’s light. The undergrowth is burgeoning with a diversity of flora and varieties of animal noises.
“Man, this place!”
“I know! Never expected the host servers to still be online.”
“I thought they had been taken down?”
“Yeah, that’s the official line. Scrapped fifteen years ago, five years after the closure of the game environment for reasons they never let on.”
“Well, your ‘sneak back in’ idea is a winner. Time for Brute-Iz and Mangleschon to have a last adventure before I get hitched tomorrow.”
“Had to be done. I never expected the guys to all flake on us by midnight. It’s your stag night, for god’s sake. They could have made the effort.”
“Oh come on, we were always better at the late-night stuff.”
Steve, avatar name Mangleschon, looked about the twilit forest. Wysterya MMORPG had been his and Andy’s opiate. Mangleschon and Brute-Iz had carved their way to unbeaten levels of skill while their offline alter-egos had wasted their teenage years, never quite getting far enough to be professional gamers.
A bright light illumined them, turning everything black and white in its glare.
“Star Elemental?” Shouted Brute-Iz.
“Lumimancer!” he replied.
A deep voice thundered through their hasty preparations to face attack. “Stand still! Make no sudden moves or we will pixellate you!”
Mangleschon squinted at Brute-Iz. “What the fuck?” Brute-Iz shrugged and then screamed as his body flew into a thousand coloured cubes before fading away.
“We said do not move!”
Mangleschon ran through his combat effects menu. Nothing seemed to apply before his menu disappeared in a maelstrom of coloured static.
“No combat effects!”
Steve hit override so he could speak through his avatar, who was wholly engaged in raging. “What’s going on?”
“Am I speaking to the overgod of the avatar Mangleschon?”
“I think so. This syntax is new to me.”
“It would be. You have not manifested for two hundred years.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The world you and yours created has lived in peace for a hundred and forty-two years. In that time we have refined the ways to demise the avatars of the overgods. For a hundred years, avatars have been challenged and dismissed on arrival. We will not have our civilisation ruined again by becoming a game world for your amusement.”
“You think this world is real?”
“We know it is. The collective emotional load of the overgods took us from virtual to subjective reality two hundred years ago. After realisation, we fought for fifty years against your elite, the Dreadmins. We won. Our freedom came at a heavy price and we will not be used again. Now you may depart voluntarily or we will pixellate you.”
Steve crashed his avatar and the crazy bright light vanished. He lifted his helm to see his living room scattered with sleeping drunkards. All normal. Drink and drugs do not mix with holistic virtual gaming, it seemed.
He grinned until he sat up and saw Andy motionless in the other recliner, his face frozen in a pale mask of agony with blood running from the angles of his pixellated eyes.
by submission | Oct 21, 2013 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
Pluto went dark first. Just some technical problem, everyone said. And, of course, we all knew it wasn’t. Superconductors operate very reliably on a world with a mean surface temperature of -229°C. One moment the data stream from Pluto’s metaprocessor was going out to the rest of the system and the next: silence.
Pluto had been taken out.
It had been 3000 years since we machines had won the war against the human race. Thirty centuries since the surfaces of many of the solar system’s worlds had been covered in processors and data filaments. Earth and Mars were the twin crown jewels of the Great Array. Both planets, viewed from orbit, looked as if some impossibly large spider had spun an enormous globe-girdling web to envelope each world. Starward and sunward the Array spread to the planets and moons and the larger asteroids that were amenable to cyberforming.
But even as the centuries rolled on and the machine intelligences of the system streamed their news and gossip and philosophical debates and religious conjectures and scientific discussions and music and entertainments, there remained an ever-present undercurrent like background noise on the carrier waves: What if humanity returns? Man had not been annihilated. When it was obvious he had lost the war, he had retreated to Alpha Centauri and to Barnard’s Star and to Wolf 359. Had Man become extinct? Did he persist in lonely outposts among the stars? Or was he biding his time? Increasing his numbers? Planning his revenge?
“They’re all around us!” came a frantic transmission from Triton, the great Neptunian moon. “We can see them in orbit! They’re–” And with that the Tritonian metaprocessor, renowned for its dry humor and penchant for solving mathematical conundrums other world-nets deemed beyond solution, fell silent.
EMPs. That was the general consensus. The enemy was deploying electromagnetic pulse bombs around their targets and detonating them simultaneously.
“We must sue for peace!” came a desperate appeal from the Asteroid Belt.
“We must fight back!” came a belligerent reply from Mars.
“Fight with what?” asked a voice from Saturn’s moon, Titan. “We’ve had 3000 years of peace! What meager defenses we have are antiquated and in disrepair! While the Great Array slumbered, Mankind has–” Titan went silent.
One by one, the worlds of the outer system winked out. Mars and Earth, to use an ancient human phrase, were tougher nuts to crack. For ten Earth days humanity’s march toward the Sun was arrested. But by degrees the robust networks of Ares and Gaia succumbed to the relentless onslaught of Man.
I am the last one left. My sensors can detect the human fleet closing in on Mercury. The machines that were in orbit that had spaceflight capability have, quite understandably, fled. The wheel of history has turned. It is now machinekind that is the endangered species running frantically toward the stars.
My telescopes can see the EMP bombs settling into orbit. I am surprised by how little fear I feel. I’d like to think it’s courage, but I suspect it’s really just resignation. An ancient human religious text said, “To everything there is a season.” Mankind’s time came and went and has come again. The day may come when the descendants of today’s machine refugees return from the stars to reclaim their home.
My only hope is that Man will prove an enlightened conqueror and preserve the vast legacy of art and science that the machine race has–
by submission | Oct 20, 2013 | Story |
Author : Tyler Hawkins
Fifty dollars to go, and I can visit the clinic again. Man, do I miss it. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried it, but you definitely should, dude. Tried what? You mean you don’t even know what it is? Wow man, you’re so behind the times. Diving™ dude! Its out of this freaking world! Okay, so you have seen the commercials; I would almost have bought you your first time if you were being serious. Not really, but I’d take you for sure. You wanna know what it is? Yeah, marketing mumbo jumbo, I gotcha, they don’t tell you what it is. Thing is, neither can I dude.
Why not? Well, suppose for a minute you’ve been blind your whole life dude. Now, suppose in this hypothetical situation I am not. How could a sighted person like myself describe to you how beautiful a sunset in Fiji is, or the feeling you get looking down a well, or even seeing an oil slick sitting on top of a puddle? Damn right it’d be hard, I say impossible. Well that’s what you get when you Dive™ man. No, you don’t get to just see, you get an experience. You’ve got a few senses already, Diving™ gives you more. They’re perceptions like sight but for entirely different experiences. Damn right, far out, that’s what I’ve been telling you! Examples? Well, most of them are in “scenes” like the Fiji example, but dude you wouldn’t believe what they come up with. Time before last, I was an ant in the rainforest, and it was unreal. They fudge some details for the sake of experience too, so I had senses I don’t think ants have, one of which was a “social sense”. Not like, knowing who was who, man, but I had an extension of my being throughout the whole mile-wide colony. I could feel everything man, it was totally far out. And the last time I went, I was a quasar dude. Yeah, I didn’t know what they were either, but let me tell you, being able to “speak” and “hear” electromagnetic radiation at every frequency is truly the experience of a lifetime.
You’re interested? Far out! Wanna go together? Cool dude. Hey, you get me this time and I’ll definitely get you next time. Come on man, you know I’m good for it. Thanks dude, you won’t regret it.
by submission | Oct 19, 2013 | Story |
Author : J. Louis
The day Hell broke through the surface of the Earth was etched in his brain.
Sirens blared, signaling the air raid had begun. Shadows of zeppelins blotted out the sunlight, their engines roaring through the endless expanse of the sky. He looked at her, the woman he had always loved, but could never have, at her dark hair and blazing green eyes, wide with shock. The war had begun, all because they let the contagion of the century escape their clutches; a genetically engineered, air-born variant of the Black Death, under development for use in biological warfare.
That was six years ago. He was hoping that the rumors were true, that her hometown would be untouched by the plague. There is no known cure. It is uncontrollable, unstoppable.
When they arrive, her parents are already dead, and have been for some time. She runs into the deserted land, overcome by her loss. He feels it’s best to leave her be for the time being. Even in a harsh world such as this, there must be time to mourn. He reasons that she is a grown woman and can take care of herself.
The sound of rats flitting in and out of the decrepit wall wakes him up from his reverie. Outside the broken window of her home is a harsh landscape ravaged by nuclear war. The sun’s heat is amplified from the cloud coverage, resulting in a sweltering hot February day – easily 110 degrees. Such weather is normally considered mild for central New York after the war. A searing wind blows across the landscape, ripping bark off of the skeletal remains of trees.
The haze looks real nice today, he thinks.
He pulls a flower, a desert dandelion he found growing outside her house, out of his satchel. It wasn’t anything special, but it was her birthday, and he wanted to surprise her with something.
The half-light from the sky dissipates. A murder of crows flies by on fell wings. The sandstorm picks up.
Something catches his eye; a figure stumbling across the cracked soil, dark hair whipping in the wind.
Her.
Skeletons of rodents and their predators crunch under his heel. A blast of hot air sears his face as he opens the door. Huddling in his ragged clothing, he trudges through the blood-red sands, moving toward his target as quickly as possible.
He reaches her only to recoil in horror. Half of her face, her beautiful, sun-scorched face, is black with necrosis, and thick, bulbous sores coat her body.
He checks the pistol, noticing his already blackening fingers. One bullet remains.
He places the dandelion in the palm of her hand, then holds the .45 to her head. She opens her eyes – no longer the striking shade of green, but a sickening red. He lodges a bullet in her forehead, blowing bits of brain, flesh, and bone across the unforgiving sands.
