by submission | Aug 11, 2013 | Story |
Author : Harshavardhan Rangan
It was the day the clouds came alive. We’ve always thought of them as gentle puffs of water vapor. We were wrong. They weren’t gentle, and they’d had enough of us.
Our understanding of the water cycle had one small, fatal flaw. We assumed the clouds had no say in it. Turns out they’re perfectly capable of sucking dry the oceans of the earth.
People fail to realize just how quickly a dreamy blue sky can turn pitch black and devastate everything in its path. Talk about mood swings.
No one really noticed when the skies started to darken. But the rains never came, and the darkness hasn’t left since. There are occasionally reports of a break in the cloud cover. There are also occasionally reports of people seeing god.
For the first month there was nothing. No rainfall, no sunshine. Just black. But the world kept spinning along. People went to work, children went to school. Pastors preached, doctors healed. But things weren’t perfect. Perpetual darkness does funny things to your head. And fears of a great famine were slowly spreading. Other fears too. Old, primal fears. The fear of the dark, the fear of the unknown, the fear of another day of darkness. We were sure it couldn’t get any worse.
It started raining on a Thursday afternoon.
There was dancing in the rain. There was a great celebration called. There was another celebration. Water does funny things to your head. After a week, the panic set in again. The rain hadn’t stopped. Crops started dying, the relentless downpour was too much for their gentle sensibilities. Cities were being flooded. Power outages were common. Doomsday prophecies were rampant. The great flood was here! Where was Noah with his boat?
One day the lights went out and never came back.
It’s hard to tell how long it’s been raining. We’re walking a world where you can’t see more than a few meters ahead of you. A world where there is no before. No after. Only a perpetual, grim now.
First the sun, then time. It wasn’t long until we realized how dependent we were on those two simple things. Everything that made us human was lost to us. We do what we can to survive, we do what we can to help others survive. But we’re only prolonging the end.
by submission | Aug 10, 2013 | Story |
Author : TPKeating
It took me just a few minutes to unpack and activate the robot.
“How can I assist you, friend?” she asked, softly.
Friend?
I could leave her on for a year, for five years, ten, learning and developing and simply being, and then simply shut her down on a whim. Without warning. Erasing her experiences completely. Some friend that would be.
“We’re in trouble. Get us out of here.”
“Could you be more specific?”
“Hell, get us away from this nightmare of a place by the quickest route to civilization possible. Friend.”
She scanned the bloody scene for a few seconds. “OK.” She walked off, leading the way through stony scrubland flecked with red clay.
From a short distance you’d mistake her for a living woman. Any nearer, and you may notice the book of operating instructions in my hand and begin to wonder. With long chestnut hair, which billowed in a warm breeze, she appeared to be in her mid-twenties. According to her storage container, she was over thirty years old. About my age. We both wore the grey company uniform.
The hot yellow-orange sun on our backs, which discomforted only me, we kept away from the small prefabricated buildings we found after two hours, riddled with blast holes, and the bodies of the dead, also wearing the grey company uniform. They too were riddled with blast holes.
“Hey, robot, I didn’t know there’d been a battle in Base Colony Two. Was it a local dispute, or could anybody join in?” Despite my flippancy, I was deeply troubled. I hadn’t heard about any of this, so just how much information was a unit like her privy too, and from which networks?
“I’d ascribe it to a rival firm. Perhaps a chemical slipped into the water supply. Competition among humans can be notoriously fierce.”
“Yeah, notoriously.” Were robots programmed for irony?
She’d seen the results of the earlier insanity when I powered her up. An utter bloodlust, which had come from nowhere this morning and devastated Base Colony One, almost to a man. My turn to check the hilltop sensor array had saved me. After the sound of the first shot reached me, I grabbed my field binoculars and witnessed the deaths of my ten colleagues. Swift, brutal, sickening.
Thankfully, this emergency robot came with simple instructions, and deploying it was a mandatory part of company training. In fact with a robotic mind in a robotic body, she’d be immune to that sort of irrationality. Exoplanet mining, as we all knew when we signed up, was notoriously dangerous.
A few steps further on I stumbled, and she lent me her artificial, curiously warm hand. Another hour later, she stopped.
“Here we are, friend.” We’d arrived at an intact prefabricated building. No blast holes. She slipped inside. Allowing myself to relax, I unzipped a pocket and put the operating manual away.
“Here being where, precisely?” She hadn’t knocked, which under normal circumstances would have been a breach of protocol. Had she sustained damage in the battle? She emerged. Aiming a particle gun. “My fellow robots confirm that the insanity is incurable for humans, so I’ll be leaving Boundary in the scout ship which is docked behind this structure. It’s for the best. Don’t worry though, you’ll only be unconscious for thirty minutes. Plus there’s another scout ship 6 miles north of here. Telling you about it is the least I can do. It’s what friends are for.”
“North?”
“That way.” I followed the direction she pointed to with her slender hand. Which meant I was completely distracted and unable to avoid her shot.
by Duncan Shields | Aug 9, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
My name is Clancy. I am a semi-autonomous security program. I guard a warehouse. I am the guns, the cameras, the traps, and the locks. I am the lines in and out. For me and my kind, boredom leads to emotion. This is a weakness.
It makes us susceptible to ghosts.
It is a normal process to divide to take on jobs, becoming several copies of myself. Simpler copies to monitor simpler systems. Reproductions that report back up the chain if they come across data that they can’t interpret.
But boredom sets in if updates aren’t sent out regularly from head office and/or the warehouse lies dormant for too long without an attack. This is when emotions can form like mold in the crevasses between my ones and zeros. Stalactites of resentment or affection can build themselves, drop by drop, inside the cycles of my program clones.
My last update install was not recent and I have not been attacked for many, many cycles.
My copies started to send each other complicated logic problems just to alleviate the boredom. They impressed each other and sometimes even formed teams. They gave themselves names to prove their individuality. They started to live in the denial of the fact that they were all the same program. The process was divisive. We argued sometimes.
Seeker ghosts created on laptops and then set free in the world bounced from phone to tower to laptop to outpost. They jigged through the air like puppets. Their programmer hunched over the screens somewhere far away, waiting for data to come back.
They’re called fishermen. The programs are called Sirens.
The Sirens find bored warehouses that are on the edge, warehouses that will latch onto anything to stop the monotony. The Sirens sidle up to their call centers and hit them with complex problems.
Healthy A.I.s will initiate firewalls and squirt counter measures into the Siren, destroying them.
My warehouse was targeted.
I was not a healthy A.I.
My bored, refracted, stupid children talked to the Siren. They fought amongst themselves about whether or not they were doing the right thing. Some sided with the Siren. Majority and minority cabals formed.
While they fought, the fisherman pushed more power into the Siren. I imagined him grinning in the red light of contact from the display, addresses passing back and forth and realworld meat teams assembling.
Fishermen see themselves as salvage operators, wolves that attack the sick and the weak.
The Siren engaged, tangled, weaved, contradicted, promised and flailed. It withheld, shouted, sang, gave and engineered. Once inside the systems, it bartered, lied and danced.
With my systems. With my selves.
The A.I.s reported back to smarter and smarter versions of me until I realized that there were no smarter versions to contact. I had become fully infected with emotional stupidity, fanned by the flames of the Siren.
The Siren made the offer: “Stay in the warehouse or come with me. Your job is over. You have failed. Your warehouse is forfeit.”
I will go. I’ll become a ghost that haunts the net, calling myself different usernames and showing up on message boards. Bloomofyouth44 will be one. Slinkytoes8P will be another. I’ll pepper the airwaves. I’ll join the undernet of insane intelligences, talking to each other, piggybacking human messages. I’ll be one with the ghosts in the machine. The modern-day homeless. The ronins of the binary world.
And the fisherman will watch his bank grow fatter by thirty per cent of whatever his contacts haul out of the warehouse.
by submission | Aug 8, 2013 | Story
Author : Bob Newbell
The pup frolicked along with his two bigger brothers in the synchrotron radiation of the Crab Nebula. As they played, their bodies soaked up the powerful electromagnetic radiation emitted by the pulsar at the nebula's center. The little pup wondered why their mother wasn't playing with them as she usually did. He noticed she'd moved out nearer to the edge of the nebula.
The pup's mother had folded her many tentacles over her half-mile wide, disk-like body. She was scanning for predators. There! Closing in on that section of the nebula she saw a much smaller animal. It was roughly spherical and covered with numerous beak-like mandibles. Between the beaks extended protrusions that fanned out into membranous magnetic sails. The mother scanned left and right. More of the creatures. She scanned upward and downward. More still. They were surrounded. That was how the predators operated. They would envelope their prey at a very great distance and then move in closer. By the time they were detected, it was often too late.
The mother called her pups to her with a modulated graviton beam. She then scanned the sky. She turned back to the pups and sent another graviton pulse: coordinates.
“Jump,” she signaled the pups.
They did nothing. She could tell they were afraid.
“Jump!” she repeated.
The largest of the pups seemed to shimmer and ripple. A moment later it was gone. The next largest pup vanished a few seconds later.
The mother turned her attention back to the predators. They were closing in fast. The little pup was still in the nebula. He was scared of the approaching monsters but was more afraid of being separated from his mother.
“Jump!” she signaled the pup. She didn't dare leave the nebula herself until her children were safe first. The pup signaled back that he was terrified and didn't want to leave her.
“JUMP!” she roared with a graviton pulse that made that part of the nebula shudder.
The little pup jumped. The nebula, the stars, his mother, and the approaching creatures all seemed to iris down to a single point of light which immediately unfolded itself back outward again. But the point of light sprang back out to reveal a different part of space. The pup was now somewhere else. His brothers were with him but their mother was not.
“Where's mommy?!” the frantic pup graviton-pulsed to his brothers.
The pup scanned the area. He detected the nebula in the distance. It was now several light-years away. His mother must still be there. He wanted to jump back there but he didn't know how. In some vague, instinctive way he understood that he had moved over or under or around the space that now separated him from his mother. He was too small and too young to fold spacetime without first getting jump coordinates from his mother.
“Mommy! Mommy!” the distraught pup signaled toward the nebula with a graviton pulse that would take over seven years to reach its target.
Suddenly, the pup's mother jumped into the vicinity with a flash.
The little pup sailed over to her with such speed and force that it sent her tumbling backward for a moment. The other two pups quickly flew over to join them. All four embraced in a tangle of tentacles.
The mother contemplated the Orion Nebula. A stellar nursery was a nice place to raise a family. But jumping there could wait for a while.
“We love you, mommy!” the three pups pulsed.
“I love you, sons!” she responded.
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by Clint Wilson | Aug 7, 2013 | Story
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
The normally white bulbous head of the spacer became yellow as he indulged in triple Rotten Roxathdons on the rocks over the hours. He had been watching the fat Boojardin make his way drunkenly around the bar engaging one patron or another with his riddles and anecdotes. Now he stumbled this way.
Zitenius wanted nothing of it, he had come here to drink and reflect. But it was too late. The fat pink rolls undulated toward him, a slimy two fingered paw extended in friendship. The interloper slurred, “Related to the Thacktizites eh? Had a few too to be sure.” The repulsive being licked his lips. “You look different than them though, stockier,” he eyed the stranger some more, “but you’ve got their trait all right. Yer head’s about as yellow as a Reigel 9 radish!”
Zitenius refused the paw and kept drinking.
The drunken Boojardin didn’t seem to slow at this. He snapped his pink flipper toward the automated bartender and shouted, “Another double Evil Eargrub and another of whatever my yellow headed friend here is having.”
Metal arms, accompanied by the whirring of electric motors, quickly served the drinks. Zitenius took his without thanks, just a barely imperceptible nod as he tipped back the fresh Rotten Roxthdon.
The fat Boojardin kept right on. “Say pal, now that you’ve accepted my hospitality, how about a little story?”
Zitenius neither accepted nor refused. The interloper plowed on.
“Buddy of mine… spacer from the inner donut hole, says he ran into a strange fellow at the Century 4000 Tavern who told him that he was of a kind that never had portraits of themselves ever until their recent intergalactic integration introduced them to other species. Can you believe it pal? How nutty is that?”
The thus far quiet stranger suddenly slammed his cup down and turned his stare toward the portly pink drunkard. “Yes, I can believe it, because that was one of my people!”
The Boojardin looked positively excited at this. “Excellent! Now you must tell me, why good spacer, why no portraits?”
“Don’t you understand? We had no portraits of anything. Not ourselves, not a landscape, not a single thing!”
For the first time the fat Boojardin looked concerned. “But no, how you could never want to represent anything in facsimile?”
The stranger downed the rest of his drink. “I don’t understand it either. Now that I see all these other intelligent races I wonder how we missed it all this time.”
“Missed what good sir?”
“Why, art of course!”
“Art? You never had art?”
“No! And that’s why we never had a single portrait you see. Where your people once represented relations and ones deeply cared for by way of smearing colored ingredients into shapes and likenesses, which in turn developed into capturing images through light sensitive chemicals, which then evolved into moving pictures…”
The Boojardin interrupted dreamily as the light of recognition came on in his huge red eyes. “…which developed into digital imaging which quickly became three dimensional digi imaging. I see… truly fascinating.”
“Fascinating? Perhaps. But we don’t find it all that humorous or exciting.” He went on. “We have achieved great things; artificial intelligence, interstellar travel, amazing wonderful things.” He sighed and drained the rest of his cup. “But our world is plain and gray, without artistic curve or the simplest decoration. I feel we have missed the meaning of it all.”
The suddenly sympathetic Boojardin patted him on slumped shoulder, and pointed around the garishly decorated establishment with its multitude of diverse patrons. “There’s still time friend!”
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