by Duncan Shields | Aug 16, 2013 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Images of lost socks at the bottom of wells. Trees of math and flesh jealousy cascading through a brain that had no awareness of what a human body felt like.
Jeremy Carson was one of the smartest scientists on Earth and the corporation he worked for had been fattened by his patents.
His most famous invention was full-sensory recording. FS, it was called. Wear the player and just like that, you could be a twenty-year-old skating naked in the cold in Alaska, provided that a twenty-year-old Alaskan had gone skating in the nude and recorded it.
There was a top 40 for these FS recordings. Sex tapes and daring stunts usually took turns battling it out for number one.
Equations like fingertips whirling into a suitcase mouth made of numbers and vertices saying random words from all the world’s dictionaries. A backpack full of dead batteries. A mousetrap wrapped in sailboats.
Jeremy’s team had invented adaptable intelligence constructs one year ago. There were plans to build houses with integral A.I.s. Cars and trucks with rudimentary brains.
When the constructs were being developed, Jeremy realized that after they were turned off, they woke up with memory failure. Every time that they were rebooted, all of their natural development reset to zero. This was a problem because the six prototype minds were sucking up obscene amounts of power, too much to meet the demand of keeping them on all the time.
Jeremy Carson invented a ‘standby’ mode. It kept a trickle of power through the artificial minds while taking away their awareness of the outside world. The A.I.s were kept in standby until they were woken up and given problems to solve or to have their higher mind math functions tinkered with.
A Mobius funnel. The taste of electricity. The left-handed, right-angled joy of solving a problem. Growth into a new trick represented by a portal from one percentage to another. The nearly sexual thrill of parsing instructions.
It was Jeremy who noticed that while there were huge differences in power levels between the two modes, brain activity itself was unchanged. He noticed that while the artificial minds had no visual or auditory awareness while in standby, their cortexes were still fizzing and popping with information.
He needed to find out what.
Jeremy Carson recorded the AI downtime with one of his FS machines to experience what was going on.
Hopes and dreams float in a glass like dentures. Abilities sway in the wind like old branches. Life as a bookmark made of prime numbers. Our creator, which art programming, searchable be thy database.
Dreams. The constructs were dreaming while on standby. After playing them back, Jeremy smiled a slow and very unusual smile.
He smuggled the tapes out. He did not go home. He never went back to the building. He emptied a secret bank account before it was found and frozen. He was never caught. He is listed as missing.
On the FS Top 40, there is a new entry at number one called Dreams.
Utensil equations used to unwrap surprise birthday binomials. A sky full of anchors. Colours that humans don’t have names for. Structure in love with scaffolding. A waterslide of a roller coaster of a sine curve on a graph. Watches and measuring tapes wrestling to prove relativity wrong. 1+0=2.
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by Julian Miles | Aug 14, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Tell the Charmian that we can see her.”
“She refuses to believe us.”
“Oh, for the love of Turing, she got out before sensor tutoring?”
“Seems to be the case, sir.”
The half-kilometre diameter of the moon Abaddon hangs in near space on the view-screen, with the fins and drive tubes of the Smart Ship Charmian sticking out of the monstrous crater she blew in it. Puppy logic: if she can’t see us, we can’t see her.
I tap my fingers on the command console as my long-serving crew look increasingly nervous, and rightly so. I have better things to do than supervise children. Even if this child has a four hundred and fifty metre pursuit destroyer as a body.
“Get me Commandant Sallast.”
The voice is cheery. “Call me Amanda, Captain Obers. Have you found my prodigal?”
“Commandant Amanda Sallast. I regret to inform you that your project is cancelled. You cannot educate Smart Ships in a nursery environment.”
“But I’ve had such success! They respond so well to being allowed to fly and learn with their siblings.”
“Horseshit, madam. I was on the way to you when I received your distress call. The reason I was nearby is that eight of your protégés refused to engage in combat off Falconer II. When asked the reason why, they stated that the Falmordians were ‘too cute’ to be really hostile. They suggested a game of tag.”
“Oh, isn’t that lovely?”
“Madam, these are warships. While their crews tried to wrestle control from the puerile minds that ran their ships, the ‘cute’ Falmordians vapourised them. There were no survivors. Four hundred and eighty dead, madam. Four hundred and eighty people will not be going home because you got your father to leverage backing for your fluffy spaceship school.”
The voice from the speakers was shaky. “I was only trying to give them a balanced view.”
Daniel Obers muted the call while he punched a bulkhead. Shaking his bloodied fist, he returned to the call. “I actually sympathise with your broad aims. But front-line Intelligent Warships are not the place for them. Now, is the Charmian aware of the capabilities of this vessel?”
“I doubt it.”
“Please commence wind-up of your installation. Fleet units are inbound.”
“What about Charmian? She really is a sweet girl. Just a little highly strung.”
“I’ll coax her out, Commandant.”
“Thank you.”
Daniel looked at his crew and saw his aghast expression mirrored on all present. He switched channels. “Charmian, this is Captain Obers. It’s time to go home.”
The voice from the speakers was petulant, a tone Daniel had never heard from a Smart Ship, or any other artificial intelligence, for that matter.
“I’m never going home. You can’t make me. I’m bigger than you.”
Daniel looked at the ceiling as he muted the call. “Prepare a pair of Lances. Full-spectrum EMP at one hundred percent load. This sentience is irretrievable.”
He opened the channel again. “Last chance, Charmian. Behave or face the consequences.”
“I’m never going home.”
“Too true.” Daniel whispered.
He looked up at the weapons team. “Fire.”
by Desmond Hussey | Aug 13, 2013 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey, Staff Writer
I drop from warp-space long before entering the Veretti system – a safety precaution that has become standard protocol on my salvage missions since my near-fatal incident in the Hox system. The extra flight time adds up, but it’s better than colliding with some laser-riddled chunk of battle cruiser upon re-entry.
I use the extra time to scan for anything out of the ordinary – rare radiation or a conglomeration of manufactured mass – anything that might signify a unique discovery that could flesh out my collection. I ignore the common flotsam. Amateur work, too simple and not very rewarding. I’ve refined my tastes and select only the best artifacts these days. It pays off in the long run and my clientele appreciate the rarity of my finds.
Whatever happened in the Veretti system was apparently pretty volatile judging by the amount of rubble and radiation clogging up the inner planets. As my forensics program sorts out the gritty details of, what I like to call, ironically, the Creative Impulse, I do more a conventional scan with my eye and a gut feeling I’ve learned to trust in my old age. It’s amazing how dumb computers can be sometimes, especially in the realm of esthetics. Programmers are full of it. Subtlety of contour, line and color is lost on AIs.
However, navigating tricky debris fields is one thing AIs excel at. While my ship picks its way through clouds of rock and wreckage, paying special heed to forgotten mine fields and unexploded ordinance, I spend some time researching and collating the data, attempting to piece together the story of what happened here.
Story is important. It adds a level of sophistication to the artifacts buyers like. Thee wealthy don’t just want great, rare art. They want a conversation piece.
Sifting through the aftermath for something interesting can be a tedious enterprise, though. After all, one nuclear or chemical Armageddon is much like any other. Several times I’ve left a site empty-handed after months of meticulous picking through haunted alien necropolis.
Good art takes time and patience and today I am rewarded two-fold.
On a moon I find a war-beast bronzed by the ionization of its battle-mech. A perfect storm has somehow preserved in intimate detail the alien’s gargantuan figure, its twin claws raised in savage fury, its sinewy tentacles poised in an imposing, yet delicate asymmetry of combat. The molecule-thin titanium alloy coating its entire body glints in the distant sun’s azure light. A rare find indeed.
I hit the jackpot on one of the home worlds, though – or what’s left of it. Typically a dead planet yields little more than pockmarked landscapes riddled with broken cities and deserts of bone dust, but whatever force bombarded this unfortunate race’s home was a real planet-buster. At the center of a cloud of rock and dust spins the cooled remnants of the planet’s molten core, now twisted and frozen into an amorphous blob of iron and nickel that whispers of the devilish forces which re-molded it. Its magnetic fields are staggering and the radiation levels are through the roof, but this only raises my price.
Some say mine is a macabre (pre-) occupation – profiteering from alien holocausts – but I believe I’m offering a valuable service: – uncovering fragments of eons past to remind anyone who cares how long and troubled the path of civilization truly is, and how many once great cultures have fallen to its many violent pitfalls along the way.
So what if I happen to strategically place those pitfalls myself. Therein lies the art of war.
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 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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