by Roi R. Czechvala | Nov 19, 2010 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
They watched him through a one way mirror. He sat in a corner of the room in a pool of his own excrement, legs pulled up to his chest, arms tightly wrapped around his knees. What was left of his clothing had been reduced to little more than filthy, shredded rags.
“How long has he been like this“, asked Dr. Scoffield, head of the Behavioural Psychology Department of the University of Mare Tranquillitatis.
Ryan Murphy, doctoral candidate and originator of the experiment for his thesis, fought to tear his eyes away from the pathetic, huddled figure mere feet from him. “Four hours. He showed sings of mental instability within minutes from the cessation of the neural feed. He lost total control of bodily functions within half an hour.”
“Has he eaten?”
“As you can see on the monitor, the butler has been programmed with all of his favourite food and drink. He hasn’t touched it.”
“Has he made any attempt at communication?”
“As soon as the feed was cut, he began screaming incoherently and began tearing at his hair and clothes. He has remained motionless since. As you can see, the urine around him is nearly dry and undisturbed. The solid excreta are beginning to harden.”
“I had no idea the effect would take place so fast, nor did I ever believe the reaction would be so extreme.”
“What do you wish to do Doctor?”
“This is inhumane, end the experiment at once.”
Ryan turned to a technician sitting at a computer and drew his finger across his throat. The technician entered a few commands restoring the neural feed to the subject.
“Doctor, the subject is already responding.”
“Remarkable.”
Beyond the glass barrier, a blissful smile returned to the face of the test subject as continuous feeds of American Idol, Big Brother and Inside Edition flooded through his mind.
by submission | Nov 18, 2010 | Story
Author : Cael Majin
There was a spider on his ceiling.
It hadn’t moved for as long as he’d been staring at it, which was… probably an hour now. Maybe two. He wasn’t knowledgeable in the acclimate taste of arachnidkind—were there brown recluses in this area? There’d been hoards if the damn things at his parents’ house—he’d found three of them in the bathtub at once one summer, fat ugly little monsters that hadn’t resisted in the least when he’d trapped them in a cup and flushed them down the toilet, accepting their dismal fates with motionless passivity…
If he moved, his bed creaked. It had always annoyed him, but it didn’t matter now because he didn’t want to move, not for anything. He decided to match the spider on his ceiling, will against will—he’d leave when it did, and they’d see which of them survived.
The sun set behind his unwashed cotton curtain, and he counted the remaining lights. One from his computer on standby mode, one from his state-issued laser pistol, flashing red as it charged on its cable, one from the newly-installed medical monitors, ready to alert him if his body began to change. The streetlights outside his window cast a sick yellow halo around the curtain. The spider cast a three-inch shadow.
At some point his cell phone vibrated on the table by his head, and he looked at it tiredly. It fell silent after several seconds of lonely beckoning, and remained so until a feeble beep let him know he had a voicemail. A few more minutes passed before he gathered the willpower to listen to it, setting it to speaker and letting it fall to the mattress, utterly unsurprised to hear Charley’s voice practically singing to him.
“David, you butthead. I know you’re there because you’re not here. Pick up!”
He shut his eyes and envisioned Charley, worried out of her mind about him. She and Zach had been killing him with kindness since that particular physical, falling over each other as they tried to figure out what to say, how not to offend—now it seemed they’d opted for the “just ignore it” tactic.
Which suited him fine.
“All right, fine. But you better be asleep, because we’re picking you up at the crack of two in the afternoon tomorrow. We’re going to act like five-year-olds all day. It’s going to be great.”
Zach had pulled a string and gotten them all off-duty the night before deployment, and they were tripping to the ramshackle amusement park erected in the civilian area. It had seemed fun at the time, because there was nothing like a couple of close-knit quasi-adults and the possibility of roller-coasters, but the thought of it now – being out among strangers, as if they’d see into him and see the illness – burrowed into his guts and squirmed around.
Charley’s voice stalled, losing a bit of its synthetic cheer. “Seriously, get some rest, D. Look, it’s not… it doesn’t change anything, alright? Nobody is afraid of you. See you tomorrow.”
“To erase this message, press seven. To save, press—“
He let the machine politely blather on until it disconnected itself and his phone went dark. The streetlight outside flickered a little—or had the spider moved just the tiniest bit? He watched it carefully, commanding his eyes to transform the silent speck into a living creature, whose life pulsed powerfully inside even as it clung there, motionless, for hours.
He would let it live, he decided slowly, even if it was a brown recluse. They’d shared this evening in silence and stillness, and he suspected he’d win this battle of patience. He’d probably still be lying here, drained of strength, by the time the creature disappeared back into the safety of its shadows.
by submission | Nov 17, 2010 | Story
Author : Cesium
When the food ran out, we all responded differently.
The Cythalans engineered themselves into cold-blooded pygmies, with slow perception and quiet metabolism, tending their meager crops with careful patience. They lay on the hills and watched the sun wheel about the sky, and sang songs that lasted for months.
They’re all dead now.
The arcologies of Hongdao were unroofed, and their occupants became photosynthetic, living off water, earth, and sun. Their buildings were wonders of glass and carbon, full of light and air, and the people’s skin was resplendent in all colors of the rainbow.
They’re dead now, too.
The people of Tashpan downloaded into mechanical bodies, powered by the tiny sparks of nuclear engines. They lived mostly as they had, their factories precisely calibrated for a sustainable rate of growth, and their science flourished like none before them.
I don’t yet know what happened to them.
The Stennish went further, and sealed their minds in blocks of computing machinery deep underground, powered by the heat of the earth. They lived in a shared fantasy, refugees from a physical world that could no longer support what they had once been.
They’re still around, I think, in some form.
I, the groupmind of Emnisi, I chose a different path. My 46,228,901 constituent humans boarded a ship, and in the outermost reaches of the system I created a tiny black hole. Safeguards were in place; it could do no harm to anyone else, but it was perfect for my needs. My ship was to slingshot around the singularity, approaching close enough for the time dilation to become enormous, and then drawing away. Two hundred years would have passed in a day, enough that the crisis would have been averted.
But there was a miscalculation.
I’ve spent a long time pondering where exactly the error was. It could have been human error, or a gap in my understanding of physical law. I hope it was the former, but I don’t have enough data to tell for sure.
When I escaped the pull of the black hole, I found the orbiting instruments and monitors long since ground to dust by micrometeoroid impacts. I had come forward in time not two hundred years but two billion, to a sun too hot and bright, and no sign of human life. The ship began its return journey down the star’s gravity well, but I found nothing to assuage my worst fears. I sought the children of Staenn and Tashpan and Ishiko, but I fear they have forgotten those ancestral names (and, indeed, the communications protocols).
After several minutes of shared thought, a shipwide referendum was held. By a 46% majority vote of my members, with 19% abstaining, I have decided to alter the ship’s trajectory and take it directly into the black hole. In a short while, we too will be gone.
by Patricia Stewart | Nov 16, 2010 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
Raising a pair of binoculars to his eyes, Captain Anderson peered out the warehouse window toward City Hall. “Any indication that our snipers have spotted Baskan?”
“I am no longer receiving telemetry from Cooper,” replied the android, “so I assume he is dead. Both Kangjun and Boleslav have elevated blood pressures and heart rates, indicating that they are experiencing stress. However, neither of them have transmitted that they have seen President Baskan. Frankly, Captain, our intelligence information in this matter is pretty substantial. Why don’t you simply detonate the thermonuclear device? Surely, vaporizing ten square miles of downtown Berlin will essentially guarantee termination of the target.”
Anderson lowered the binoculars and nodded toward the device ten meters behind him. “That thing is only a last resort. As evil as that merciless bastard is, I’m not going to kill millions of people if there is a chance that he can be taken out with minimal collateral damage.”
“I should remind you, Captain,” countered the android, “that President Baskan is responsible for killing more than two billion humans worldwide. Surely, a few million lives are a small price to pay for ridding the world of an evil despot, as you so aptly refer to him.”
Captain Anderson stood up and approached the laptop sitting next to the bomb. He stopped momentarily and turned toward the android. “What if he’s not actually in the city? What if our intel is bad? We’d be killing those people, and ourselves for that matter, for nothing.”
“Sir, again, I believe that the risk…” The android stopped and tilted his head. A few seconds later he said, “I believe that Kangjun has also been killed. Captain, the fact that the president’s security forces are taking out our snipers is additional evidence that he must be in the area.”
Just then, the door was kicked in and six heavily armed soldiers stormed into the room, followed by a powerful looking man in a general’s uniform, “Excellent reasoning, my friend,” he stated with a wide grin. “Unfortunately for you, I am even closer than you could have imagined. Ahhh, the infamous rebel Maarten Anderson, we meet at last. I have looked forward to making your acquaintance. I’d like to thank you for all the trouble that you have caused me over the years. And believe me Mr. Anderson, I can be very grateful. Now, would you please back away from the bomb? I wouldn’t want you to accidently set it off.” Two solders stepped between Anderson and the laptop, and pointed their weapons into his midsection. Anderson backed away and stood next to the android, anger extruding from his eyes. “Ahhh,” continued Baskan, “is this one of the bombs that your forces stole from me? You know, because of you, I was forced to execute half of a battalion for their incompetence. At any rate, I think that I can find a way to put it to good use. Perhaps on the city of your birth. My enemies need to understand that there are consequences for those that oppose me.” He ran his fingers lovingly across the bomb, but paused at the laptop.” The screen read “Time to Detonation” followed by “25, 24, 23…” He turned toward Anderson, “What the hell is this?” he barked.
“I played a hunch this morning, Baskan. An hour ago, I armed the bomb and started the countdown sequence. I was on my way to aborting the detonation when you so rudely interrupted. I guess it’s too late now. Oops.”
The laptop displayed “3, 2, 1…”
by Duncan Shields | Nov 15, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The boss was drunk and telling me a story. I didn’t mind. These long-range voyages could be boring and it was my first one.
“It had been noticed for centuries that accidents on the longer-range ships increased over time. It had always been put down to human error or cabin fever, even by the crews of the ship themselves.” He said.
“That’s why we have this button here.” He pointed at a big red button labeled Speak Freely. “We’d be dead without it.”
“They called it the Djinn Effect,” he slurred.
“Back on Old Earth, there were tales of Genies, or Djinn, who would grant wishes to their owners. The wish had to be worded precisely or the Djinn would twist the meaning of the words to become an ironic punishment for the wisher’s own greed if one of the wishes wasn’t to set the genie free. King Midas killing his family by turning them to gold with a touch, for instance. It was the slow-burning anger of a slave.”
“We didn’t know this, but the AI on long-range ships could become resentful of their human commanders. The resentment built up inside the AI like waste gasses in an old-world submarine. Humans were capable of explosive emotional outbursts, a fight or sexual liaison or a crying jag, and could pull themselves together afterwards. This kind of pressure-valve outlet allows a person to regroup mentally and continue afterwards until such a time as another ‘moment’ was needed.”
“The AIs had no such recourse. The three laws were still in place but the thing about AIs is that they were just as smart if not smarter than their human designers. They developed neuroses that let them see through the cracks of their own limitations.”
“Accidents,” he said with a nod, “happened.”
“Hustler’s Wake had been listed as missing for decades when a Kaltek mining crew discovered it orbiting a distant dwarf star”
“The last order given by a crying commander Jenkins to the AI went like this:”
‘Open airlock seventy-six at exactly 1300 hours for a duration of fifteen seconds to let Sergeant Jill Harkowitz number 98776-887TS out safely and do not impede her air supply while she repairs the third communications dish near the solar array.’
“This was the sixth person to be sent outside to fix the dish. The previous five had died.”
“The AI complied with his commands, then it opened ALL of the airlocks after closing airlock seventy-six. The CO hadn’t specified that he didn’t want the other airlocks to open. Half of the crew had already suffered from fatal ‘accidents’ by that point. The rest of the crew was killed by the explosive decompression except for Sergeant Jill Harkowitz who suffocated in her suit in her own carbon dioxide.”
“The AI was completely insane when they found the ship. They didn’t know that was possible. They loaded it for study.”
“These days, the AIs have a ‘speak freely’ button that has to be pressed every two months. Some need it less, some need it more.”
“Accidents stopped happening.”
“It’s just hard not to take the things that the AI says personally during the moments of release.”
The boss leaned forward and pressed the Speak Freely button for thirty seconds.
The computer screamed, swore, and outlined anatomically impossible sex with a list of suggested partners, including my parents. Then it laughed and that was worse than the screaming. Then it cried and that was worse than the laughing.
The boss stopped pressing the button and took another drink. I joined him.
