by Stephen R. Smith | Mar 24, 2010 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Captain Broahm hadn’t been asleep nearly long enough when he was dumped unceremoniously from his bunk onto the floor. Cursing, he’d barely gotten his bearings before the ship righted itself, tossing him backwards into the bulkhead, sending a blinding flash of lightning through his already aching head.
His left eye clouded, and he wiped at the blood that was pooling there from a fresh gash on his forehead.
“Bugger,” he grumbled, pulling himself upright with help from the cargo nets lining the sleeping quarters.
Staggering out of the still swaying cabin into the hallway, he climbed the ladder onto the bridge and found the first officer white knuckled at the wheel. Half the instrument lights were out or flickering and several of the windows were missing, broken glass scattered across the console and onto the floor.
“Grady, what the hell was that? You hit something?”
The startled first officer turned and stammered “Plane, I think, hit us. It’s out there in the water.” He pointed out the battered port side windows into the darkness. In the distance, lights flickered in and out of view as the waves rocked the ship.
“Any plane hit us like that would be in pieces at the bottom of the ocean by now.” Broahm shouldered open the door to get a clearer view from the deck. Both hands gripping the railing against the rocking of the ship, he could see clearly another vessel hanging just off their port side. Broahm blinked, and rubbed his eyes. The other vessel appeared to be sitting just above the water, the waves sliding harmlessly beneath its hull.
Broahm shook his head, wiping again at the blood trickling into his eye. Maybe he’d taken more of a bang than he’d realized.
“Must be a life raft,” he thought before yelling back into the cabin, “Grady, fetch us a flare and the glasses.”
The first officer appeared in the doorway moments later with a flare gun and a pair of binoculars.
“Sir,” he said, handing the equipment to the Captain.
Broahm took the gear from him, firing the flare into the night sky and scoping the other craft through the glasses as the pyrotechnic turned nighttime into midday.
The other craft sat still, featureless, long and narrow, hovering just above the water. As Broahm searched its length, he lit upon at a figure standing on a platform, partially submerged in the water off the side. It was looking up, watching the flare arc across the sky. Easily as tall as he was, perhaps taller with no visible clothing and a large blunt face split by the thin line of a mouth that wrapped nearly half way around its head. From where it’s ears should have been stared large unblinking eyes. Running down the side of its neck, ribbon like slits undulated as waves washed over them, its body slick and glistening in the artificial daylight.
“Grady, get us the bloody hell out of here.” Broahm yelled back into the cabin without looking.
He felt warmth tracing its way back down his forehead towards his eye, and absently wiped it away, flinging the fluid into the sea. As the red droplets hit the water, he caught a flurry of movement through the glasses. The creature was looking right at him now, lips peeled back revealing rows upon rows of jagged teeth. Broahm’s stomach knotted at the realization that whatever it was, it was smiling.
by Duncan Shields | Mar 23, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It’s been said that if you give a room full of monkeys a room full of typewriters, they will eventually type up a Shakespeare play given enough time.
As a philosophical exercise, there is a point to the premise. However, there are a number of factors that make it impossible as a real-world application.
First and foremost, monkeys are mortal and will die after a few short decades.
Second of all, the typewriters themselves will often break under the surprisingly strong hands of the monkeys.
Thirdly, if the monkeys bash on the keys, they will hit the same group of keys over and over again with little variation, ignoring keys on the fringes such as shift, enter, and the space bar.
That’s where my MonkeyTron tm project comes in. I have created supercomputers whose job is to spew randomly generated letters, punctuation, and spaces. By running sixty of these computers concurrently, I have theoretically created this room of monkeys.
They’ve been running for a year.
So far, we have garnered half a poem by Robert Frost, nearly two full pages from the screenplay for The Shining, a full recipe for ‘glass brownies’, the entire lyrical songbook of Avril Lavigne’s career, two paragraphs from an engineering manual, and six nonsense limericks.
One page of Hamlet showed up, gentleman. I have faith that the future looks bright. Too bright.
Ladies and gentlemen of the council, this page of Hamlet that showed up seemed to be ‘corrected’. There were only seven minor changes from the original, but it made the language seem to flow better. This is very worrying.
Worrying because it’s only been a year.
What’s even more alarming is that computer 18 has stopped including words and seems to be focusing entirely on math. It’s spouted out, amongst the gibberish, several of Newton’s laws and half of a Hawking precept.
The gibberish is disappearing, gentlemen. The computers are finding their own areas of expertise and they seem to be closing in on our own level of intelligence.
The fear is that they will start to create original pieces of written art that rivals our own. The chilling implication is that maybe our own pieces of art that echo down through the centuries are not original at all and were merely randomly generated from our own minds.
With the math robot, we’re worried that it may start to come forth with mathematical theories and physical concepts that supersede our own. What happens then? How do we publish these discoveries and who do we credit?
I am coming to you, supreme council, for a decision on whether or not to proceed.
by submission | Mar 22, 2010 | Story
Author : Liz Lafferty
Wake up.
Make coffee.
Go to work.
Eat.
Sleep.
Wake up.
Make coffee.
Go to work.
Eat.
Sleep.
#
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. It’s the worker program jamming up again.” I frowned at the array of code for that particular program. The pattern had changed over time. The wild fluctuations so common to new programs was normal, but since they layered in the worker program, the blips had steadied out into a monotonous up, down, up, down rhythm that had gotten slower and slower.
I scanned through hundreds of worker programs seeing the same results.
The automatons with this program seemed to be in one repetitive loop after another.
“Did you reboot?”
“First thing. It went right in to loop again. I’ve been seeing more and more problems with this schematic. What do you want me to do?”
“Did you try loading the motherly instinct program? Maybe it would do better in a home environment.”
We’d stopped identifying them by name years ago. To us they were drones.
“Let me check the records.” My fingers flittered over the keyboard as I punched in the series of codes, revealing the events for this female automaton’s life cycle. “No, we can’t. That model was programmed not to have children. It was supposed to find joy in the labor force.”
“The entrepreneur program has always been successful. What about an overlay?”
“Might work.”
“Well, it’s better than suiciding the model.”
“I hate that term. I’ll shut it down for a few days of rest. See what happens.”
“You’re call, but we’ll probably end up shutting her down anyway. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
I went home.
Time to sleep.
#
I woke up. Made coffee. Went to work.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. It’s the worker program jamming up again.”
“Did you reboot?”
“First thing. It went right in to loop again. I’ve been seeing more and more problems. What do you want me to do?”
by submission | Mar 21, 2010 | Story
Author : Jacqueline Brasfield
I was 18 years old when they’d captured the first howlers.
Mom and I stayed up to see the first footage of them flash across the TV screen on the 11 O’clock news, blurry images of hollow-eyed men and women wearing orange jumpsuits, their arms hanging limply and obediently at their sides. I felt a pang of disappointment. From all her stories I expected them to be fierce, savage, proud creatures struggling and straining at their chains. I expected them to be warriors. They looked no more savage than my science teacher at school. Mom said I shared a connection to them. I didn’t know what she meant.
On the screen, three figures stood proudly at a podium adorned with microphones from various news agencies. My mother spit down at her feet when the camera panned over their faces – two men, one woman, all impeccably groomed. One of the men wore a military uniform decorated with medals, and it was he who spoke to the camera.
“We’ve prepared a small statement regarding the hybrids and then we’ll move to your questions.”
My mother spit again and took a long swallow of gin straight out of the small glass bottled held in her hand. I’d never seen her drink before.
“It is with great pleasure that we can confirm we have successfully located and retrieved all of the hybrids. The last remaining rogue tribes were identified and brought into protective custody for their integration into the United States Military Evolutionary Hybrid Unit. The success of the device used to free these hybrids from their condition continues to prove effective and provide a stability and peace of mind these individuals will not have ever known. All of them have been offered training and assistance and the opportunity to serve this great nation, and we can confirm we have 100% uptake on this offer. The public is safe once again – if not safer. We believe these hybrids will make the finest soldiers in the history of the United States military forces. My colleagues and I will take your questions now, on the understanding we cannot reveal information that is classified.”
Immediately, a flurry of questions came from the mob of journalists off camera. My mother turned off the TV before I could hear any of the replies.
“Why’d you turn it off?”
She sat there in the dark for several long seconds before answering me.
“Because they’re lying, Ben. About everything. All the stories I’ve told you. All of their history. Does any of that suggest to you that they would willingly give in to slavery and bondage? That they would agree to serve those who rape the land, and poison the water and kill the innocent?”
I opened my mouth to speak, to tell her no I did not think they would, but she was quick to interject.
“And do you think they’ve really caught all of them?”
She looked over my shoulder as she said the words, eyes fixed on something behind me. And that something began to move, causing the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up like orderly soldiers.
“Mom?”
I turned quickly to look behind and stood frozen at the sight before me. A woman more bone than skin prowling forward on bare feet. Her movements were alien and animalistic and savage. She spat haughty words at me in Russian that I didn’t understand.
I thought her the most beautiful thing I’d seen in my life.
“Meet the resistance Ben,” my mother murmured. “Meet Katja, your mate.”
by submission | Mar 20, 2010 | Story
Author : Chris Deal
It’s the only story the news is talking about today: twenty years since the fall, since the wall came down. My boy asked me if I remembered it, where was I when I heard it had come down. Told him I was right where he was, asking my father what it meant, the wall coming down, the people separating. I told my boy, I told him my dad said it meant we could be together again, undivided by petty differences.
My boy, he said my dad sounded like a smart man.
He was, I told him.
What I didn’t tell him was that I was lying. I wasn’t sitting with my father when the wall came down. I was there. I held a sledgehammer in my young hands and I swung that thing over and over, until my muscles ached of acid and my shirt was soaked with sweat, clinging to me in the cold night.
What I didn’t tell him was that I was on the other side of that wall.
That wall wasn’t to keep people inside, but to keep them out.
What I didn’t tell my boy was my father, he remembered the first wall, way across the ocean, the remnant of another war, long before the last one. One country divided from itself, not one country cut off from the rest of the world. Families separated, not entire cultures. He knew his mother wasn’t born in here, but he never asked where I met her. He never asked where we lived before him. There was the way it was now, the way it was before, but he never cared about anything from then. Him, he had an entire life ahead of him, an entire world to see. He would never have to see his homeland tear itself apart, people of a different color removed from their homes, sent to a land they only knew as stories from their parents, grandparents. The war in our borders was a history lesson for him, not real life. He would never have to kill to preserve what was right.
My boy grew bored of the news, and he started surfing the neural-net.
One day, he may ask more about my father. He may ask about the before. He might ask about the wall that ran the full course of the borders, the guards who patrolled in jeeps with gauss rifles, the camps we sat in before being dumped on the other side, the constant broadcasts from the leader, the man who put an end to heterogeneity and proclaimed through homogeneity we would better ourselves, the man who declared war on the other, who defined that there was an other, the man who became a martyr before the revolution was complete, before I held that hammer and brought down that wall.
When my boy asks, I’ll tell him. For now, though, he can keep on as he is.
I’ll remember for him.
