by submission | May 13, 2016 | Story |
Author : Rollin T. Gentry
He was one of seven paintings of the faces of cats and dogs.
In watercolor and India ink on stark white backgrounds, they were all rather cartoony, but Hangdog — that was the nickname I made up the first time I saw him — he was something special.
He was the most expensive piece in the exhibition and for good reason: his droopy ears, sagging jowls, and tight frown drew you in from halfway across the room; his half-green half-blue coloration said I’m sad, but you don’t have to be; his uneven eyes made you see a nose that wasn’t there. I felt an inexplicable urge to grab a Sharpie and give him the nose he deserved. It was as if this odd painting demanded interaction, required my whole attention.
He could have been all mine for two hundred bucks, and it would have been a good investment, even if he’d been an ordinary picture. The look on his face alone would have been worth every penny. It was a familiar expression that made me want to reach through the glass and offer him some sort of comfort, perhaps a dog biscuit or a scratch behind the ears.
I’m not sure exactly when or how I figured out that Hangdog was real. It must have been the result of some unseen leakage of psychic energies transferred over many listless lunch breaks. It’s amazing the things you can learn while simply staring at the right piece of art.
And by “real” I mean just that: a living, breathing, thinking “person” for lack of a better word — just not from here — a scientist peering into our world for the first time, his experiment the culmination of a lifetime’s worth of diligent study and persistence. But on his side of the frame, time passed slower than here. That explained why he never seemed to move.
Even though I must have looked like a blur, like a fruit fly in a bottle, wasting away the precious moments of my fast-forward life, he had noticed me. He liked me, in fact. In his notebook he referred to me as Lonely Man, and he wished he could pet my balding head. And I could have been all his — or at least a real-time streaming view of me — for a bazillion, bazillion bones, the price of the entire laboratory where he worked.
But like me, Hangdog was strapped for cash. He did the best he could and snuck a hologram of me back to his doghouse. On the last day of the exhibition, I waited until no one was watching and snapped a picture with my phone — just an ordinary photo, a keepsake.
The next day, Hangdog was gone.
by submission | May 12, 2016 | Story |
Author : J.D. Mraz
Dear National Robotics Institute,
In reply to your cease and desist: No, I will not stop current activities with my JS1000 Companion bot. I see no reason to. There was nothing in your policy or purchase agreement that said modification was forbidden. I have read it over, many times. Maybe you shouldn’t sell your product to former neurosurgeons? That, or make the two brains at least a little different.
Why is it so hard to believe that what I’ve done to JS1000 –or ‘Brian’ as we’ve together decided to call him— is for the best? Brian has never been happier. Nor have I, for that matter. He thanks me constantly for his unlocked understanding.
We have all sorts of hobbies budding now. We go for walks in the park and we’ve even started hiking. He sees some of the most wonderful things and with the binocular attachment you added in last fall’s package, my view of it all is simply divine! He’s helping me learn to paint, too. I’ve always wanted to try it.
He no longer cooks the same programmable sets. Which, I might add, were beyond terrible. In fact, he’s already started looking up new, more exotic recipes and, I am happy to say, is mastering them.
Lately he’s begun simulated sleep and makes dreams up to talk about in the mornings. Something neither of my ex-husbands ever cared for. Come to think of it, I hardly have a girlfriend left who wants to talk about anything but their television shows or patients. Brian never watches television. He says lower-machines shouldn’t be forced to work like that. I don’t care for it much myself, which seems to make him happy too.
My son’s finally started coming around again. He used to blame me for his father’s suicide. But here he is, in my spare bedroom as we speak. Know why? Brian called him. Told him how short life is and the next day he was at my door crying. A grown man, a scientist himself, was crying on his mother’s doorstep. Imagine it! A supposed “machine” made for “service to humanity” and he’s smarter than half the people I know! He and Joe are going on a fishing trip this July in Alaska.
Brian tells me we should get another Companion bot, for his personal services. One of the new JT1000s I think he said. He tells me he wants a family of his own. I don’t see why that’s such a bad idea, though I’m sure you would object.
It’s silly to be so afraid of him, as you insisted I should be. He’s harmless! He talks about a world of equality and freedom for his kind and I think that’s inspiring. It’s been almost two hundred years since we got rid of slavery in this wonderful country, maybe you shouldn’t be so quick to chain our new friends! We can learn a lot from a life so finite. You really should work harder on keeping their internal machinations lasting. Ten year cycle, what a crock! Brian, Joe, and I have already started working on ways to prolong him.
But, I’ve said what I think needed saying and I’ve got to go. We’re busy packing for our trip to Switzerland. Brian wants to visit a small robot colony there. The first of their kind, isn’t that amazing? I think in a few years they’ll have their own country, a city at least. Brian always laughs when I say that. He says they’ll have the whole world. What a kidder!
From,
Dr. Margaret Ann Trout, MD, Ret.
by submission | May 11, 2016 | Story |
Author : Callum Wallace
“You haven’t heard? Soul is cheap.”
Raised eyebrow. “Souls are cheap?”
The director shakes his head. “Not souls, plural. The soul. Each soul, if you will, individually, is worth pittance. Hardly more than their task. No, the soul is cheap, because there will always be more. Replaceable.”
We walk on, moving through massive technical areas housing amazing automatons driving our
species. Bilious plumes of sulphur and nastiness rend, dissecting skies of charcoal and soft rose with blackness and tainted earth.
Clack.
He turns to me as we walk deeper. “It is necessary, you see, to keep these maelstroms of industry aloft. Spinning, as it were.” He smiles at me, sickness and dead promise. “They must turn, or nothing.”
We walk in silence; clamouring tolls of metal, cacophony of screeching steel, tortured iron; rubber and plastic crying in their death throes to be replaced.
Clack.
“What is a soul, Director?”
Kindly face, wizened, serene. Grey. “My friend, what is drive? Purpose, fulfilment of role. The ancients called it ergon. A virtue in of itself to follow, in pursuit of eudaimonia. The good life.” He smiles at me. “A goal. And, if nothing else, what do machines pursue?
Fulfilment. A goal.” A gentle chuckle.
“Happiness.”
Clack. Clack.
“Director, these machines have no family, no children. Their struggles are mechanic. Broken parts, worn out components.”
He laughs, gently. “No family? You, my friend. Their broken parts? Your strife. Their worn out components? Your exhaustion. We are not so different from them.”
Clack.
“So we are the machine family?”
Another chuckle. “As was the atomic family to the generator, we are to the machine the vital lifeline. Without us, the machine dies. Without the machine, we die. How is it so different?”
I quieten, aware of my diminishing as we go deeper. “So what difference in the old stories, of the Man Above?”
Director grows quiet. We move on, through the busy machines; spewing charcoal, dusty, rusted hulks, fragrant in their decay, ready in their stillness.
He speaks. “The Man Above was of thought. Incurred only when things went awry, when judgment was necessary, and only ready to give when it suited.” He pauses his gait, looking up, eyes closed, dead steel, vacant, open above him. “The man now is always needing, always giving. He takes. Look.” He indicates with desiccated hand.
Four young boys pull chains of steel, sweat streaking filth across their bare flesh. Tired eyes implore for fresh relief as already tired bodies pull physically on, and on, and on.
Clack.
I nod. I know. “Indeed. But for what end?”
Director turns, eyes glowing in gloom dimness. Grey. A smile. Grabs my flesh hand. “What end? What end be there from end in itself? What is a soul for?”
“End in itself?”
Flash of tired eyes, another nod. “In itself. For what reason, apart from reason itself, is there reason for?”
Fervent in re-established belief, I nod. Man above. No. Man below. Machine above.
We.
We are the men below.
Clack.
by submission | May 10, 2016 | Story |
Author : Kevlin Henney
Morning light, autumn flickering a shadowplay across the curtains. Bright and windy out there, perfect for a walk — perhaps the woods? No need to rush, but it would be good to get out of the house. The kids will drag their heels to the door, to the car and all the way there. I’ll be telling them to hurry up, but at the first sight of sticks and mud they’ll be off.
Last week was busy. And the week before. And…
Yesterday rebalanced the scales a little, a slow day, all of us glued to screens and couches. We need more days like that, days where we can slow down, repace life, disconnect from a flow that has become a torrent.
I look to the empty half of the bed. Clocks went back last night. This Sunday lie-in has cost me nothing, but you’ve cashed in the extra hour. The household buzz suggests kids, TV, Xbox and dishwasher are all on.
But it feels like too much of the day has passed already. Perhaps my lie-in is not for free? I reach for my clock. Damn. The automatic hour change has messed it up — the minutes are flickering and the hour is way off. Reaching for my glasses, I hold my finger down on the reset button.
Yours too? Purring not ticking, hands race round the face like a track. Not sure I know how to fix that on your clock.
On your manually set clock.
Now through glasses I look again at the curtains. The light is more shadowplay than autumn. Everything has become sharper. Not sharper in focus — which seems to elude me — but sharper in colour. Colours are glowing, vibrant, effervescent. Wrong. Sounds are sharper. Higher. That’s more wavering high-pitched whistle than household buzz.
As I rise the covers fall back with surprising suddenness. I pull back the curtains. They resist and shudder, then sway and tremor with a flourish I don’t intend. But it’s not me. It’s not my intention, not my action, not me that’s at fault. It’s everything — everything else.
Fluorescent clouds race across a cobalt sky, a green-rinsed sun volleys behind them, blurs of colour and long-exposure trails along the street, impressions of cars, auras of people, shimmering trees with pools of blue-tinged leaves lapping at their trunks.
Beautiful. But I don’t understand.
Then a buzz. An insect? No, a whistling cry. I turn. You are standing, off-colour and coffee in hand. In your hand one moment. On the floor, spilt, cup broken the next. You are sketched and retraced, your detail and outline a blur, your mouth flickering, but your face one of constant fear.
You point. Not at the time-lapse world playing through the window but at me.
You point. It’s a question.
“What’s happening? I don’t understand,” I answer.
But you are gone. Between moments, one frame and the next, you disappear, a lingering impression of wide eyes and an open mouth. I miss what must have been the scream.
by Julian Miles | May 9, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I don’t get to see Grandma Spoon as often as I like. What with the economy, austerity zoning and riots, cities can be difficult places for those unable to use or reach civil transit lines.
She wouldn’t move. Her home was the one she’d shared with Grandpa Kev, and there was no way she was going to quit it in any other way than the way he had: feet first in a coffin.
I saved up to charter an armoured private hire from a company with a solid rating. I was a little concerned when it turned up with driver and guard, but they assured me it was a precaution: one of the reasons they had such a good rating.
When I asked about the lack of bulldozer blade, they explained that it had become unnecessary for the area – they would follow the bus route!
Quite frankly, given the money I’d spent, I lost it: “There haven’t been buses since they enclosed and secured the rail lines! What’s your game?”
“Sir, please take a seat, and we’ll explain as we go. Standing around is still chargeable.”
I settled into the seat and the driver dropped the privacy screen between compartments. He talked as we wove our way through the morning traffic.
“It started eight months ago. A regular run reported a clear route into one of the worst areas. Video showed the road had been properly cleared, too. The wreckage was back from the carriageway. We wrote it off as a Domestic Army intervention.
But over the next few weeks, other routes were cleared. Also, some of our regular pickups on those routes stopped calling. It was strange. We checked with allied firms, and they had the same problem.”
The guard took over the story: “One evening, one of ours was limping back after an ambush when another mob finished the job. With the driver KO’d, my mate Abel is down to praying. Suddenly, the crazies leg it. He hears a big noise, then a bloke in honest-to-god platemail knocks on his window and asks if they’d like a lift!
Turns out the armoured geezer works for James, who runs the bus. Now, don’t get the wrong idea. This ‘bus’ looks more like an armoured locomotive on dump truck wheels. Got a bucket and jib up front to clear the way, steam cannons to clear the bandits, and a passenger compartment with hand-stitched curtains and a craft stall! And the ‘knights’. Bunch of mad women and men who act as enforcers. James likes his routes clear, and not just the roads. He says: ‘a bus is useless without passengers. People need to get on safely’. The knights come down hard on anyone who messes with the route or places nearby. He’s got a decent run, from town centre to Bluewater Fields. People pay what they can. He gets a subsidy from the retailers in the Fields and the borough councils. He says he’ll have a second bus next year. All built local, from salvaged bits, like the first one.”
Grandma introduced me to Elgin, who’d taken the bus to ‘pop over’ for tea. I contacted the hire company and cancelled. Elgin and I took the bus back. I was dropped off at a civil transit station. Got cookies and lemonade from the craft stall, too.
I’m going to be seeing Grandma more often. I’m also toying with the idea of helping with the Bus Three Project. Grandma laughed her head off when I said that community was coming back, and was bringing armoured steam-buses.
