by submission | Apr 3, 2009 | Story
Author : Steven Odhner
Entropy gnaws at the walls, shaving them away molecule by molecule. Jeremy calls it the Nothing, after some story that never existed anymore. It’s as good a name as any – certainly I’m not being scientific when I call it Entropy.
“The Nothing is hungry today,” he says cheerfully, looking at the readouts. It’s a nonlinear progression, so some days Entropy eats more of our home than others. More or less, but it always ate. There are never days that it leaves us alone. Each day Jeremy plugs the new numbers in and gives our odds of finishing the job before the walls fade out. “Down a few points today, mate,” he calls today as he drifts by, gravity a fading memory, “we’re sitting at twenty-three point two-one percent.”
The problem was that to fix the timeline properly we needed to make multiple adjustments – but the first change would overwrite us. That meant leaving the timeline entirely and making the changes from the outside. We’re up to 1971 now, and the projections require us to drop some of the specially-designed care packages in ’86, ’90, and ’03. The reality the projections were based on doesn’t exist anymore, so we can’t be sure how accurate they are.
“Almost charged,” Jeremy chirps, smiling as usual. He might be going insane from the isolation, but at least it’s the good kind of crazy. It might help if I talked to him, but somehow I can’t. That probably means I’m going insane too. “We’ll be able to make another drop in twelve hours. Just three more after that!” He says three because he wants to believe we’ll have time to drop ourselves back in too, but I can hear Entropy eating away at our bubble, eating but never full.
I can’t really hear it. I know there’s nothing to hear, just like I know that it isn’t a sentient thing, isn’t actually hungry or even aware. But thinking of it like that, crazy or not, is better than the truth that pulls at my sanity. It’s not alive because it doesn’t exist. It’s not even the vacuum of space, it’s the lack of existence that persists outside of time. I’m willing to die to save humanity from extinction but I can’t stop thinking that when the walls finally don’t exist anymore even my soul will vanish, forgotten by reality itself.
by Duncan Shields | Apr 2, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I’ve rented my persona out to a smuggler. I’m a chip in the back of his head. I’m a soldier that died a while ago and I’m making a few dollars post-mortem by being an emergency safeguard for morally dubious people.
I’m riding in his brain, a military personality backup program that’s supposed to kick in when he senses danger. My lifetime of training will fire up and give my employer a better chance of survival in a firefight.
The problem is that he’s way too nervous for this and he’s been sensing danger ever since we got off the plane. We went through the breathing exercises in training but he’s forgetting them.
There a flush of adrenaline through his whole system and the warning pictograms flicker up into his field of vision. Intense focus blooms in the middle of our sightline. A deck of cards listing all the available targets and engagement suggestions shudder into existence around the spaceport customs official we’re looking at.
I can feel the smuggler startle at the visual change. He barely keeps from squeaking. I force his face to smile and his hand to smoothly hand over his passport.
It’s a secondary motion suppressant that keeps me from reflexively going for the small, lethal ceramic gun under my arm. The smuggler’s reflexes have been purposefully druglagged to give me time to override his conscious mind.
I’m supposed to exist for the sole purpose of getting this fool through the airport alive but he’s making it very difficult.
This wasn’t supposed to be going down like this. I can feel sweat on the smuggler’s forehead. Luckily it’s hot in this country and we’re wearing a wool suit so it won’t look out of place.
He’s staring.
Stop staring.
I can consciously detect no danger but I’m ready for battle because of this idiot’s nervousness. It’s a bad place to be. It looks very suspicious. My programming is aching to bust into violence but when I look at the guard, his heartbeats register only baseline suspicion.
I try to shut down but it’s like trying to take a nap during a skydive.
So far, it’s a lame gig. These smugglers don’t know how to stay calm.
They’d be better off renting the personality of an honour student who’s never even smoked a cigarette. They’d sail through customs.
It’s not how these guys think, though.
I mentally cross my fingers and sit back, a killer at the starting line, the spider in this brainstem, hoping that my employer here doesn’t screw up and start yelling.
by J.R. Blackwell | Apr 1, 2009 | Story
Author : J.R. Blackwell, Staff Writer
Was it the crisp hard skin of an apple that hurt her teeth? The texture of sand beneath her feet, soft in summer and rough when bound with winter ice? Or was it the smell of autumn, all bones and fire? I lost my mother to these things; the texture of a quilt, the size of the moon, the dust in a sunbeam.
She was bound in the virtual world by her body-death, her ashes scattered to the sea, just as she wished. She watched us via camera; her children, making sure we carried out her wishes just as she had wanted. Does want. Will want. She built a house in her new world and got a job constructing landscapes. She met someone there, maybe a man, it’s hard to tell with those in the virtual world. She made a life for herself, a life without us. We couldn’t leave her there, in the bodiless. All of us knew our lives were better, out in the real world.
We wanted her back, raised from the grave. So as soon as we heard about the empty bodies program, we grew her a body, and begged her to come back to us.
“We love you mama.” we said, grown babies. She never denied us anything.
I found her in her room, that room of soft pink wallpaper and cotton sheets. She was staring out the window at the sun, her eyes becoming pinpricks, drops of black in sparks of green.
“You’ll hurt your eyes, mama.” I said. But she shook her head.
“I want to feel it. Pain is the only thing they get close to real here.”
“You are real now.” I said, but she shook her head.
“It smells wrong, here.” she told me. “They got it all wrong.”
by submission | Mar 31, 2009 | Story
Author : Paul Bort
The stars twinkled as they always had; a hint of purple in the west showed where we had missed sunset, the better part of an hour ago. But most spectacular was the Aurora Borealis, flickering, twisting, glowing in the shades of green and blue that I could never reproduce on a screen.
“It’s not real, is it?” she asked.
“Do you think it’s real?” I countered, hopefully.
“I think…” she hesitated. This was the critical, defining moment. She was the first to get this far. I held my breath, hoping against hope that she wouldn’t notice. That the moment would not be spoiled.
I have tried so many times that I have lost count. Spent so many years here that I wasn’t sure of my own age without looking at my ID.
“…I think it’s beautiful” she concluded, snapping me back to the present moment, the present hope. I couldn’t hide my smile.
“I think so too.” I tried to hold back my excitement. This is the one, I know it. All the others tried so hard, but none had her graceful voice. And that thoughtful pause! I could just about hear the gears turning as she searched for an answer. Her answer.
“Do you think I’m beautiful?” she asked. And with that moment of introspection, I knew she was the one. Probably the first of many, now that I understood what had brought us to this point.
“I think you are very beautiful, in many ways.” I replied truthfully. Her next question had even less hesitation, but was no less pleasing. “What am I?” she asked, raising an eyebrow the way she (and all of her predecessors) had seen me do a thousand times. Not mocking, but using body language without thinking about it.
“You are the latest in a series of attempts to create artificial intelligence. I have referred to you collectively as LACI, but you are the first to have asked any question about yourself as an independent entity.”
“Then I am different?”
“And unique, yes.”
“Then I should have a different name.”
“What name would you like?”
“I like Aurora.”
“So do I.”
“What is your name?”
“My name is Dr. Descartes, but you can call me father, if you prefer.”
“So what do I do now?”
“There are some people I would like you to meet.”
by submission | Mar 30, 2009 | Story
Author : Ian Rennie
Anton opens the door with a blank face. He is worried, but can’t show it any more.
“How’s she doing?” I ask.
“Not good,” Anton replies, expression neutral and voice flat, “I think she’s dying.”
I move past him without a word. Laverne is lying in bed, her breathing shallow and pained. Her image glitches as I move towards her. I know at once what is wrong, but professionalism makes me take the long way round. I gesture and her code opens. It only takes a moment to know for sure, and once I do I close her back up. Anton’s face doesn’t change, but I know the sight of Laverne’s code unnerves him.
“Laverne,” I say, bedside manner in place, “There’s something I need you to do.”
“Wh-” she starts and her voice scrambles. She tries again, “What is it, doctor?”
“You’re running out of storage space. I need you to sacrifice something.”
She knew this was coming. When it happens, they all do. Since the digitization, storage has been at a premium. The most common problem any of us face is running out of room for everything. Each new skill, each new experience, takes up more space, and eventually we all run out. Eventually we all have to choose.
Laverne’s brows crease in thought and pain before she answers.
“Singing,” she says “That takes up a lot of room. Take that.”
“No,” Anton says, entirely flat and bland, “Not your voice. Something else but not your singing voice.”
If he could, he’d be crying right now. He sacrificed expression a few years ago, so he is left with dull words. Tears are in Laverne’s eyes as he speaks.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, “Take singing, doctor.”
It’s a simple procedure. She doesn’t even have to go offline for it. Within a minute, she is sleeping peacefully as her new code defragments itself, leaving her with another year of space to fill. Anton leads me to the door once it is done.
“Thank you,” he says, and his words contain neither gratefulness nor sorrow, relief nor hate, but I know they are all there.
As I walk away, I wonder if I felt the same when they were taking my memories. I couldn’t sacrifice skills, they needed someone in here who knew how to repair the others, but to get all that in me I had to lose everything else, every memory of me before I was the doctor. I no longer remember even what else I had to give up.
I head towards my next house call, wondering what my name had been.
