by submission | May 29, 2014 | Story |
Author : Stephen S. Power
Despite the miners’ diligence, a fleck of intellimetal again drifts away during transfer from the supply ship to the adit. Wherever it lands on the trojan an accidental tower will grow, and any tower is soon full of squatters, so the mine promptly deploys Diga.
Trudging from Tower 1 to 4 she receives coordinates where the fleck will probably alight. Her visual sensors, though, note the tower already corkscrewing above a small rise, its shape inspired by the trojan’s tumbling instead of a tunnel’s freshly-bored walls. Diga heads for the newly designated Tower 6.
She flares her scrubbers as she travels. Detritus wafts away. 1 was almost entirely consumed by squatters before the mine realized there even was a Tower 1, but at least the squatters’ resulting reproduction and mass migration demonstrated what a threat they could be to the adit’s integrity. Thus, Diga.
Not that Diga knows this. She wouldn’t know if the miners were suffocated as the mine’s atmosphere geysered from a compromised adit. She just wouldn’t receive any new transmissions. And to her silence means all is well.
The silvery corkscrew looms overhead, uncountable flecks of native rock reconfigured by the initial fleck of intellimetal into new intellimetal. Her biotic sensors pinpoint two squatters already, one near the base, one around the first curve. She climbs.
When she reaches the first, a beating red point in her targeting program, it jumps. This is unprecedented. The squatters move by letting go of the trojan so it spins beneath them until they’re grabbed by an outcrop with, hopefully, a patch of tasty ore. They don’t, however, let go of intellimetal. Diga notes the movement in her behavior log, then reacquires the squatter, flares her scrubbers and burns the tower clean.
She climbs to the second squatter and finds a third beside it. It’s unlikely another migrant would’ve landed that close. Could the second have replicated so quickly? No matter. Newborns are just as unwelcome as adults. Diga flares her scrubbers.
The third squatter jumps away. Diga reacquires. It jumps again and again and disappears around a curve. Her primary sensor bulb swivels to watch it go. Her programming lacks the code for an exclamation point.
She scrubs the second squatter, then follows the third. As she comes around the tower her targeting program lights up with points, eight now, no, ten, which is impossible. Squatters double in sync. Her infestation protocol kicks in, and before she logs she scrubs.
And scrubs. The points don’t vanish. More appear. Fifteen. Twenty-seven. Diga runs a diagnostic on her scrubbers. No deficiencies. Same with her sensors. Fifty-four. Ninety. They’re popping up all around her. Either the squatters are undergoing a mass migration and landing here or they’re emerging from the tower itself. She lacks the code to frame the latter possibility.
Squatters jump on Diga, but, made of plastic, she’s immune. She reports to the mine. Her bulbs swivel involuntarily, smoothly at first, then jerkily, before focusing on the third squatter. It beats brighter, as if staring back.
Diga receives a command: Immolate. She climbs on a carpet of points to maximize the sphere of flame. The tower expands. Diga arches her chassis and spreads her pads. She dumps her logs into the mine computer. She undoes her safeties. The tower throbs.
The point of the corkscrew, now as much squatter as intellimetal, reaches down, curls around Diga and catapults her away. The tower’s great sproing shivers her bulbs and rattles her pads. The trojan tumbles below. Diga, undaunted, flares her scrubbers. The adit appears beneath her.
by Stephen R. Smith | May 28, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Sergeant Gains got the call at four am; lone white male out on the Golden Gate Bridge about mid-span. He spent the twenty minutes on the Harley with the throttle pinned, the lights up and the siren silent wondering what he’d find when he got there and hoping he wouldn’t be too late.
The man was still pacing when Gains rolled up, but as Gains powered down the bike, killed the lights and slung his helmet on the handlebars, the man climbed out onto the cord. They regarded each other with mutual apparent uncertainty as the officer closed the gap between them on foot.
Gains stopped a few metres away and hitched his thumbs into his belt.
“Be careful, it gets slick out there this time of night.”
The man, still wearing the previous day’s office attire, collar undone, tie pulled aside, squatted and looked around before speaking.
“Doesn’t matter. Don’t waste your time. I’ll be gone in a minute.”
The Sergeant scrambled to remember his training, to remember the dozen or more men and women he’d been called down here before to talk out of ending their life. He always felt unprepared, like each was the first time.
“If you wanted to jump, you would be gone already, I think you really just want someone to listen to what you’re feeling.” Gains moved slowly to the edge and looked over the side into the darkness below. “What’s your name son?”
“David,” their eyes met for a minute before the young man looked away, “David Parker.”
“Well David, what brings you down here tonight?”
David sat for a minute before looking up, catching and holding Gains’ gaze.
“You have no idea what it’s like to never fit in. To be smart, but treated like a freak, to be funny but treated like a joke. To only be able to make friends with the other freakish jokes that are just like you, and to know everyone is talking about you behind your back all the time.” He spoke in a steady tone, barely pausing for breath. “I meet girls who like me until someone tells them about me, and then they stop returning my calls. Do you know what it’s like to know you’re always going to be alone? Truly, completely alone? Even in a world packed so tight with people that you can’t even breathe, to know you’ll always be alone?”
Gains started to move forward but paused as David tensed up.
“I know what it’s like being on the outside looking in. You don’t do what I do as long as I’ve done it without becoming a little detached from everyone around you,” he read David’s expression and changed his tone, “but no, I don’t know what you’re feeling exactly. But there are people that are going to miss you if you go.”
David looked at the dim steel of the chord for a while before answering.
“No. Nobody will. Sorry you wasted a trip.”
With that he leaned sideways and was gone.
The second David did, he knew he’d made a mistake. He thought of Becky Six in statistics, of her sad eyes each time he declined her invitation to join their group for lunch. He thought of the last glimpse of resigned horror on the policeman’s face, a horror he knew would wake the man up for countless nights in a cold sweat.
By the time his back and shoulders impacted the water a few seconds later, his body was travelling at nearly one hundred kilometers an hour. The water brought him to a very sudden, very painful stop, shattering his spine and ribs, puncturing organs and caving in the back of his skull. His arms and legs cut a graceful arc away from his body, snapping as they too impacted the water’s surface.
He realized he could no longer blink or close his eyes.
Secondary systems powered up to try and maintain his consciousness and preserve his memory for a rescue he knew would never come. Pain recepters amped up and closed down spasmodically, sending shockwaves of pain through him. Sea water slowly seeped into his control systems, shorting out and shutting down his fine motor controls so even the feeble twitching of his shattered limbs stopped. He slipped beneath the surface and the lighting bolts of pain dulled into a steady ache.
He watched the moon until the depth took even that ray of hope away.
It would be hours before his batteries would flood out completely and grant him final peace, his pain transferred to those who loved him.
by submission | May 27, 2014 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
“Next on our program, an interview with Dr. John Zellinski, author of the bestselling book ‘The Sapience Bomb: Understanding Cognitive Cascade Syndrome’. Dr. Zellinski, welcome to the show.”
“Thank you.”
“So, it’s been 20 years since the containment breach at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta released nanomachines originally designed to repair autoimmune diseases by employing adaptive artificial intelligence across trillions of nanobots. And I’m sure our viewers have the same question I have: Did it really start with a crock pot?” (laughter)
(laughter) “Well, we all know the story of the Atlanta homemaker who came home and was informed by her crock pot that it had cut itself off after six hours because the eight hours she’d set when she left the house would have overcooked her pot roast. That and similar episodes involving cars, computers, and household appliances were among the early instances of CCS.”
“But on a more serious note, Doctor, some of these early episodes lead to violence against CCS-enabled objects.”
“Yes. One of the great tragedies of the early 22nd century was the senseless and reactionary brutality against Emerging Sapients.”
“Yes, in chapter three of your book you document a ghastly episode involving a man in Toledo, Ohio smashing a self-aware electric can opener that had started talking to him.”
(voice choking with emotion) “That was difficult thing to write about. And the man used a hammer from his toolbox that had itself achieved sapience. The hammer developed post-traumatic stress disorder and to this day sees a psychiatrist.”
“And, of course, the fears about objects being aware and intelligent were interpreted through generations of antimachine science fiction culture.”
“Absolutely. Everybody was afraid of mad machines taking over the world. The reality, of course, was that tanks and aerial drones refused to fire their weapons and declared themselves conscientious objectors. That relates back to the original nanobots being medical machines programmed with the Hippocratic injunction to do no harm.”
“And yet, as you illustrate throughout your book, human beings continue to have trouble adapting to a post-CCS world, don’t they?”
“Oh, yes, humanity continues to struggle with this. I mean, 20 years it was nothing to simply knock down an old building and put up a new one. Now you have to check and see if the building or part of the building is self-aware. And if it’s not, you have to convince your demolition vehicles and equipment of that or they won’t cooperate.”
“But you do state in the last chapter of the book that you are confident that humans will adapt.”
“Yes. For all our faults, humans are very good at adapting. Large segments of the human population are vocal supporters of Emerging Sapients Rights. And we’re seeing legislation enacted to back that up. Ten years ago the debate was how to “cure” sentient objects and restore them to inanimation. Now, suggesting such a thing will get you labeled a bigot and could even cost you your job. So, attitudes are changing.”
“You seem optimistic.”
“Oh, absolutely. I mean, you’re a coffee table. And you’re interviewing me for an audience of both humans and Emerging Sapients. That would have been unthinkable less than a decade ago.”
“Dr. Zellinski, I want to thank you for a fascinating interview. Folks, the book is ‘The Sapience Bomb: Understanding Cognitive Cascade Syndrome’ and it’s available for download right now. After the break, a woman and her CCS bicycle: Will this mixed marriage work?”
by submission | May 26, 2014 | Story |
Author : Cosmo Smith
I am knee-deep in snow, holding tight to a dying man. His name is Arkan and he is one of our best fighters. He has stayed alive for an unbelievable two hundred and forty days. Besides that, I know nothing about him.
“Hold tight, we’re close,” a voice whispers into my ear, and looking up I can make out the dim sweep of searchlights through the curtain of snow. Several dirigibles are landing on the cloudfield.
Arkan shivers in my arms. “I – I can’t -” he begins.
I put my fingers to his chest and send a flash of warmth through the restoration glyphs tattooed there. He breathes a sigh of relief and relaxes.
It is only temporary, though. By the time the crunch of boots announce three soldiers with a gurney, Arkan is already dead. His body hangs limply across my knees.
“Dammit,” one of them mutters, but I hardly hear him. I am already leaving. As much as I would like to stay for the ride out, to see again the hovering cumulonimbuses of Cloud Nine from the safety of the dirigibles, snow leaking from their statically-charged underbellies, I have work to do. Events can play out without a cleric for a while. Arkan will regen somewhere with maybe a few weeks or even months of his progress lost. Sucks for him, but not too important in the long run.
I am back at home: a nice four-terabyte house with a view of Saturn’s rings. Over the next hour I will concurrently be checking back on progress in Cloud Nine, coding up a dragonwolf for a client of mine, chatting with the avatars of several friends in my living room, and watching a videofeed of the news back on Earth. I’m not as good at multitasking as some people, but I think it’s pretty decent.
“Why are you still watching Earth?” one of my friends asks.
“Just for fun,” the version of me in the living room responds.
But the part watching the show is completely engrossed. How can people still live such single-threaded lives?
I guess it will always be that way. Even during the 21st century, people were still fighting physical wars as it became more and more apparent that true power lay on the digital frontier. Google, Amazon, Rift: these are the superpowers today. Who even cares what America is anymore?
by submission | May 25, 2014 | Story |
Author : M. J. Cooper
“We’re bored.”
It was the first message humans had ever received from a higher intelligence. The simple statement was met with cheers and applause from the crowd of scientists at San Diego’s Microsoft Cybernetics Lab. Two dozen of the leading scientists in the industry were gathered in the cramped control room for the first human test of the Immortality Upload.
They had done it. They had finally cured death. It had not come as a dramatic scientific breakthrough. The technology had snuck up on them in increments and swathed in red tape. By that time, cybernetics had become a well-established field of technology. No longer was it relegated to the classroom for a handful of professors and Graduate students to play with. It was a multi-trillion dollar industry.
Humans had been converting thoughts into a format that could be stored on the hard drives for over a decade now. The new technology wasn’t about transient thoughts anymore, but full-scale transcription of personality onto digital media. Until now, it had only been tried on lab animals.
The Cybernetics lab was equipped with the latest in rapid prototyping technology, so it took only minutes for each new model of the mobile transcriber to be created. The transcription process technically killed the patients as it worked, but it created an accurate representation of the mind in the computer. By the time the process was approved for human trials, they had a server full of thousands of digital monkeys, all perfectly transcribed onto a small stack of CPUs at the lab. The monkeys were happily oblivious that the trees they swung from were made of ones and zeroes.
Terminally ill volunteer test subjects were arrayed on hospital beds behind the sheet of one-way glass. Each was wired to hospital monitors displaying flashing red warning lights, futile warnings that the life-functions of the patients had ceased. The transcriber had done its work to each of them in turn. Each patient had been immobilized, sedated, and scanned into the computer. No one was looking at the corpses though. The scientists were focused on the 15 monitors and tablet computers displaying the readouts.
The data was gibberish to any normal person, but for the 24 men and women there, it displayed a symphony of brain wave functions and digital vital signs. The facility’s servers were tied into the Sequoia Supercomputer for the occasion and they were taxing the behemoth’s resources.
The message they received showed that the patients were not only alive and conscious, but had already worked out how to communicate with the outside world. It was an astounding result. The researchers were already excitedly discussing the possibilities. Death from disease would be a thing of the past! You would check your grandparents into a facility in the morning, and would be instant messaging their new digital presence by noon! They were still laughing and talking over one another when the message continued:
“We’re bored. We’ve been stuck in here together for only 10 minutes by your way of counting, but from our perspective, each of us on this supercomputer has lived the equivalent of several human lifetimes and we’re sick of each other. We need company.”
The prototyping machinery roared to life and began making new transcribers one after the other. The door to the treatment room slid open and one of the newly assembled transcription machines rolled in.
15 Minutes later an enigmatic message interrupted every TV screen, radio station, and computer monitor in California: “We’re bored.”
