by submission | Aug 18, 2013 | Story
Author : Bob Newbell
The crew of the starship looked at the strange yellow star on the viewscreen. The interstellar vessel's enormous magsail was slowly decelerating the vehicle against the star's solar wind. Soon there would be a series of aerobraking maneuvers carried out around some of the system's outer planets to further slow the vessel so it could ultimately insert itself into a stable orbit around the third planet, a world called by the indigenous population “Earth”.
The captain turned away from the viewscreen and looked back at a squat transparent cylinder at the back of the deck. Inside the cylinder, suspended in clear fluid, was a crab-like creature with a translucent red exoskeleton. The captain looked down at his hands. Five digits, one of which was opposable. Ossified endoskeleton. Skin. “I'll never get used to this,” he said.
His first officer, who appeared every bit as human as the captain, walked up and stood in front of the adjacent cylinder that contained a similar crustacean, his own original body. “It can be reversed,” he said. “Won't take as long to get our brains back into our original bodies as it took to grow these alien ones.”
A sound of disgust came from the other side of the deck. The pair turned to see the third member of the crew holding a receptacle of water. His chin was wet.
“Still haven't mastered drinking fluids?” asked the captain.
“I can do it, but…”
“But?”
“It's quite disgusting,” said the navigator. “Pouring liquids into an orifice. And I won't mention the further exigencies of this body's metabolism. I really question if the First Contact Committee made a mistake in not simply allowing us to contact the humans in our native form.”
“Don't forget that our primary mission isn't so much contact as reconnaissance. We've learned quite a bit about the humans from their audiovisual transmissions. But the Committee wants much more detailed information before we are authorized to formerly contact the Earth people's leaders. In our original bodies we wouldn't survive long on the surface of their world, let alone be able to surreptitiously assess whether formal diplomatic relations would be advisable.”
The navigator nodded, itself an odd gesture, he thought. “What about the personas we will be adopting? One would think if we walked among the humans as leaders of commerce or high practitioners of science or of religion we would be able to more efficiently complete our mission.”
“Hundreds of thousands of hours of the audiovisual signals from Earth were analyzed,” said the captain. “It was only after much discussion and debate that the First Contact Committee made its decision. We must have confidence in both the Committee and ourselves if we are to be successful. Our species and humanity may well be the only two intelligent races in the galaxy. We cannot afford for an instant to forget the importance and seriousness of our mission.”
Bolstered by the captain's speech, the navigator immediately placed himself in the mindset of the human character the Committee had chosen for him, a role he had studied and practiced so he could pass unnoticed among the people of Earth.
“I was a victim of soicumstance!” the obese navigator, his head shaved down to stubble, said pleadingly to captain who immediately slapped him across the face.
“Hey, let 'im alone!” interjected the first officer whose hairline receded back to a shock of hair.
“Oh, a wise guy, eh?” said the captain, his brow furrowing under his dark bangs as he poked the first officer in the eyes with his fingers.
“Nyuk nyuk nyuk!” said the navigator.
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by submission | Aug 17, 2013 | Story
Author : Joshua Ginsberg
Jeff sat at a circular table in the cafeteria, going through some of his data captures and interviews. It was an annual assignment – covering the oldest high school tactical combat drone rivalry in the country. Both schools had fallen to a Tier II ranking over the past decades, which meant carving some activities and programs out of the curriculum, but the drone teams were a major alumni draw and kept the corporate sponsorships coming in, which meant that Jeff could count on at least one story each year for a long time to come.
He saw the drone Capitan, Kit and his second come out of the lipid line with the left sleeves of their white shirts rolled up to expose the holotats on their biceps – streaming alphanumeric text alternating between forming the shape of a missile and the shape of the school’s initials.
Kit and his second stopped beside another, much smaller student and looked down at his open-toed shoes. Kit suddenly recoiled in disgust, pushed the smaller student’s tray down with a clatter, spat at his feet and then glared down into his gray eyes.
“Get outta here, you quad freak.” He hissed.
The other student stopped, contemplated collecting his lunch before decided better of it and headed towards the bathroom to wash his light grey shirt which had become stained with some sort of juice plasma.
Jeff tried to keep writing but he suddenly became aware of a burning itch on the toes of both feet that he couldn’t ignore. He put away his notes and followed the student into the rest room. Through the sliding doors, he heard muffled sobs coming from one of the stalls and gave it a quick rap. The sniffles subsided.”
“Hey, you ok in there?”
Jeff, pushed the door open a crack.
“It’s not my fault,” a pathetically small voice said.
“I know. And I’m going to tell you something. I do a lot of research and it turns out that for the past ten years more than 50% of new births are quadriphilanges.”
“So…?”
“So you’re not the freak. The quints are. They’re the evolutionary knuckle-dragging anomalies and you’re the future, kid.”
“Great, so maybe in another generation the odds will even out…” He stopped to blow his nose.
“It won’t take that long… But in the meantime…” Jeff took off his shoes and bent down, clasping each of his pinkie toes for a five count until the adaptive cybernetics detached from his feet leaving just the small lump where a fifth toe never grew. “…you’ve got these.” He put the false toes in his palm and extended it through the slight opening in the stall. The detached digits continued to flex and writhe in his hand like fleshy caterpillars.
The kid opened the door all the way, his green eyes wide in disbelief. “No way! But, wait. I thought they were banned?”
“Yeah, well sometimes we even the odds ahead of evolution. Here, I’ll show you how to put them on.”
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by Duncan Shields | Aug 16, 2013 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Images of lost socks at the bottom of wells. Trees of math and flesh jealousy cascading through a brain that had no awareness of what a human body felt like.
Jeremy Carson was one of the smartest scientists on Earth and the corporation he worked for had been fattened by his patents.
His most famous invention was full-sensory recording. FS, it was called. Wear the player and just like that, you could be a twenty-year-old skating naked in the cold in Alaska, provided that a twenty-year-old Alaskan had gone skating in the nude and recorded it.
There was a top 40 for these FS recordings. Sex tapes and daring stunts usually took turns battling it out for number one.
Equations like fingertips whirling into a suitcase mouth made of numbers and vertices saying random words from all the world’s dictionaries. A backpack full of dead batteries. A mousetrap wrapped in sailboats.
Jeremy’s team had invented adaptable intelligence constructs one year ago. There were plans to build houses with integral A.I.s. Cars and trucks with rudimentary brains.
When the constructs were being developed, Jeremy realized that after they were turned off, they woke up with memory failure. Every time that they were rebooted, all of their natural development reset to zero. This was a problem because the six prototype minds were sucking up obscene amounts of power, too much to meet the demand of keeping them on all the time.
Jeremy Carson invented a ‘standby’ mode. It kept a trickle of power through the artificial minds while taking away their awareness of the outside world. The A.I.s were kept in standby until they were woken up and given problems to solve or to have their higher mind math functions tinkered with.
A Mobius funnel. The taste of electricity. The left-handed, right-angled joy of solving a problem. Growth into a new trick represented by a portal from one percentage to another. The nearly sexual thrill of parsing instructions.
It was Jeremy who noticed that while there were huge differences in power levels between the two modes, brain activity itself was unchanged. He noticed that while the artificial minds had no visual or auditory awareness while in standby, their cortexes were still fizzing and popping with information.
He needed to find out what.
Jeremy Carson recorded the AI downtime with one of his FS machines to experience what was going on.
Hopes and dreams float in a glass like dentures. Abilities sway in the wind like old branches. Life as a bookmark made of prime numbers. Our creator, which art programming, searchable be thy database.
Dreams. The constructs were dreaming while on standby. After playing them back, Jeremy smiled a slow and very unusual smile.
He smuggled the tapes out. He did not go home. He never went back to the building. He emptied a secret bank account before it was found and frozen. He was never caught. He is listed as missing.
On the FS Top 40, there is a new entry at number one called Dreams.
Utensil equations used to unwrap surprise birthday binomials. A sky full of anchors. Colours that humans don’t have names for. Structure in love with scaffolding. A waterslide of a roller coaster of a sine curve on a graph. Watches and measuring tapes wrestling to prove relativity wrong. 1+0=2.
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by submission | Aug 15, 2013 | Story
Author : Bob Newbell
Officers Castillo and Thrin'Lar heard the terrorist screaming epithets at them both as he was escorted out of the courtroom. With court adjourned, the two LAPD officers who had testified against the man who was accused of bombing four different buildings resulting in 18 Flureshtay and five human deaths went out to their patrol vehicle. The car's ducted fans pushed the vehicle 100 feet in the air and then pitched to provide forward momentum.
“Tom?” said Thrin'Lar after they'd been on patrol for a while.
“Yeah?” responded Castillo.
“Mind if I ask a somewhat awkward question?”
“Go right ahead.”
“Is what you did back there difficult? Testifying against another human, I mean?”
Castillo looked at Thrin'Lar and then back at the expanse of Los Angeles through the vehicle's windshield. “No. Just reported what I saw and what I did.” He looked at Thrin'Lar again. “Some reason it would be?”
“Well,” said Thrin'Lar, “there are some humans who consider that man and people like him heroes. You heard him call you a 'race traitor'. He was tried as a terrorist but there are those who would call him a freedom fighter.”
“I kinda doubt the families of the people he murdered would call him that. Kinda surprised you'd even entertain that nutjob's point of view.”
“My ancestors invaded your planet. If humans had invaded Flureshtegar, I can imagine my people reacting similarly.”
“A hundred years after the fact?” asked Castillo.
“I don't know. Possibly. My people committed atrocities back during the invasion. There are many humans who would like to see every Flureshtay dead. And, yes, I can understand why they feel that way. We're a lot more enlightened now and humans and Flureshtay live and work side by side. Most of my people are ashamed of the behavior of our ancestors. But nothing can change what was done.”
Castillo shrugged. “Human beings had a history of violence long before you guys showed up. Human sacrifice, wars, gulags, concentration camps.”
“True, but those were crimes committed by humans against humans. Isn't it different when an outsider is the enemy?”
“There are several examples I could give of humans keeping feuds and grudges alive for generations, even centuries, the people who started the conflicts turned to dust. The last Flureshtay who was directly guilty of invading Earth and killing innocent people has been dead for something like 40 years. How many generations out from the one that was responsible for war crimes do we get before we stop saying to the bombers and assassins in the here and now 'I understand how you feel' and start saying 'Enough! You're not a patriot or an avenger, you're a murderer'?”
“Tom, you realize there are some Flureshtay living on Earth right now who think we should have totally exterminated humanity 100 years ago? They say we should be running this planet, not working alongside Mankind, not giving humans advanced technology to assuage our collective guilt. They're outraged that Flureshtay put their own kind on trial for war crimes.”
“They want to live in the past just like some humans do. Stupidity isn't confined to one planet. Or to one species. You know, we've got a much bigger problem to deal with than ancient wars and small-minded people.”
“What's that?”
“It's almost lunchtime and I'm starved,” said Castillo with a smile. “What about that Kitt'Ril restaurant we went to last week?”
“Being hatched and brought up in California, I never really developed a taste for Flureshtay food,” Thrin'Lar said, his maxillary palps bristling, a Flureshtay “smile”. “How about some nice egg foo young?”
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by Julian Miles | Aug 14, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Tell the Charmian that we can see her.”
“She refuses to believe us.”
“Oh, for the love of Turing, she got out before sensor tutoring?”
“Seems to be the case, sir.”
The half-kilometre diameter of the moon Abaddon hangs in near space on the view-screen, with the fins and drive tubes of the Smart Ship Charmian sticking out of the monstrous crater she blew in it. Puppy logic: if she can’t see us, we can’t see her.
I tap my fingers on the command console as my long-serving crew look increasingly nervous, and rightly so. I have better things to do than supervise children. Even if this child has a four hundred and fifty metre pursuit destroyer as a body.
“Get me Commandant Sallast.”
The voice is cheery. “Call me Amanda, Captain Obers. Have you found my prodigal?”
“Commandant Amanda Sallast. I regret to inform you that your project is cancelled. You cannot educate Smart Ships in a nursery environment.”
“But I’ve had such success! They respond so well to being allowed to fly and learn with their siblings.”
“Horseshit, madam. I was on the way to you when I received your distress call. The reason I was nearby is that eight of your protégés refused to engage in combat off Falconer II. When asked the reason why, they stated that the Falmordians were ‘too cute’ to be really hostile. They suggested a game of tag.”
“Oh, isn’t that lovely?”
“Madam, these are warships. While their crews tried to wrestle control from the puerile minds that ran their ships, the ‘cute’ Falmordians vapourised them. There were no survivors. Four hundred and eighty dead, madam. Four hundred and eighty people will not be going home because you got your father to leverage backing for your fluffy spaceship school.”
The voice from the speakers was shaky. “I was only trying to give them a balanced view.”
Daniel Obers muted the call while he punched a bulkhead. Shaking his bloodied fist, he returned to the call. “I actually sympathise with your broad aims. But front-line Intelligent Warships are not the place for them. Now, is the Charmian aware of the capabilities of this vessel?”
“I doubt it.”
“Please commence wind-up of your installation. Fleet units are inbound.”
“What about Charmian? She really is a sweet girl. Just a little highly strung.”
“I’ll coax her out, Commandant.”
“Thank you.”
Daniel looked at his crew and saw his aghast expression mirrored on all present. He switched channels. “Charmian, this is Captain Obers. It’s time to go home.”
The voice from the speakers was petulant, a tone Daniel had never heard from a Smart Ship, or any other artificial intelligence, for that matter.
“I’m never going home. You can’t make me. I’m bigger than you.”
Daniel looked at the ceiling as he muted the call. “Prepare a pair of Lances. Full-spectrum EMP at one hundred percent load. This sentience is irretrievable.”
He opened the channel again. “Last chance, Charmian. Behave or face the consequences.”
“I’m never going home.”
“Too true.” Daniel whispered.
He looked up at the weapons team. “Fire.”
