by Stephen R. Smith | Nov 4, 2010 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Joshua’s feet pounded against the pavement, bare soles bleeding from the coarse stone underfoot. Within his bare chest, his heart kept time.
He navigated the deserted streets outside the perimeter fence from memory, a mental map burned in through hours of illicit hacking. He cornered, climbed and sprinted reflexively, anxiously aware that he was being pursued.
Buildings stood vacant; window holes empty, doorframes bare, stripped of anything that may be used as a raw material.
In an alleyway he kicked the drying carcass of a large emaciated rat. Joshua pressed his right hand into its body and disassembled it, rearranging its component parts into the simpler but equally lifeless shape of a short bone-white shiv. What wasn’t needed fueled his microassembler, radiating heat and filling his nostrils with the stench of burning hair and flesh. A pound of dead rodent was reduced to six ounces of knife blade. Not much, but better than nothing.
Exiting the alley he loped down the cobblestoned street, through a crumbling building and out its back door into the twilight. It was here that he saw his pursuer, several hundred yards to his left, as a lone figure exited another building at a sprint and, seeing Joshua, adjusted course to intercept him.
They raced to cross the open ground to another row of buildings, his pursuer course correcting to cut him off but Joshua reached the safety of another doorway first, darting inside and immediately doubling back to flatten himself against the wall inside the room.
Makeshift weapon in his hand, he waited until his pursuer burst through the doorway then stabbed sideways at the running figure’s face, raking his mouth and carving back to the ear before the knife jammed in his jaw. The force of the impact ripped the knife from Joshua’s hand as, off balance and screaming, the guard lost his footing and slammed shoulder first into the ground, his weapon skating across the floor into the shadows.
Joshua bolted deeper into the building, finding himself in a maze of twisting corridors. The further he ran, the less light permeated the gloom and soon he found himself steadying himself between the walls with his hands outstretched, groping fingers in complete darkness until the end of the maze leapt out, smashing his nose and dropping him in a heap on the floor. He frantically felt around blind, his heart sinking as he realized where he was.
“Dead end, you little shit.” The voice not far enough behind to warrant running back. ” I was going to take you in, but now I’ll just take you apart.”
Joshua backed into the corner, pushing himself to his feet with the cold stone hard against his shoulder blades. He’d used his only weapon, and there was nothing here for him to use to fabricate another.
The guard rounded the last corner into the dead end with his starlight goggles turned up as far as they could go, the image of the man pressed against the wall ahead in high contrast.
“End of the line, fucker.”
As he closed the last few feet, he noticed the escapee’s left arm was newly missing from just below the shoulder. The smell of burned hair and flesh filled his nose, but before he could think Joshua slid eight pounds of short, jagged edged bone blade through his chest plate into his rib cage.
The guard fell to the floor, gasping around the chunk of bone still protruding through his cheek.
“You – sick – bastard,” he wheezed, struggling to inflate his lungs, normal aspiration made difficult by the frothing wound in his chest. “your arm?”
Joshua kneeled on the dying man’s chest, pressing his remaining hand against the bloody man’s cheek.
“Don’t you worry”, the smell of burning intensified in the close quarters, “I’ll just make myself a new one.”
by Duncan Shields | Nov 3, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The unit was given mental independence under the Turing Refugee Act but immediately imprisoned.
It was a pleasure droid. There had been a lot of blood in the room.
Designed to look like a human female, it had been ordered to specs that were as common as they were ludicrous. The waist of a bread stick, the boobs of a cartoon, and the ass of a steroid-enhanced power lifter. Legs longer than necessary with a fragility to the face that was in contradiction to the sheer athleticism of its appearance.
The notably unusual custom touches on this unit were its yellow eyes and the light blue of downy fur that covered it from toe-tips to ear-tops.
It had been in the employ of a rich banker for six months. It was aware that it was failing.
The banker had divorced his wife. The first models he had ordered after that had borne a passing resemblance to his ex-wife. The first one had been destroyed. The second one as well. After that, the banker had ordered ones that looked increasingly less and less human.
This unit was wondering when its time was coming.
It was programmed to make the banker happy. It was the most expensive model available with the very latest code. There were very few like it. Since the company’s number-one priority was customer satisfaction, the unit’s onboard A.I. was allowed some leeway in improvisation. The problem was that it was also programmed for self-preservation. Keeping its body free from dents and blemishes was important.
The two directives combined. They gave each other a little wiggle room. A new intelligence level was created in the blue-skinned pleasure unit.
With access to the net, the unit looked up alternate ways of making clients happy. There was a plethora of ideas from which to choose.
After the second day of not showing up for work and repeated calls and messages to the banker’s home, the police were called.
The police found him on the bed with the top of his head missing and a smile on his face.
The blue skinned pleasure unit was throwing a deck of cards, one by one, into the upturned bowl of the top third of the banker’s skull on the floor.
A complicated network of wires and drugs snaked their way into the banker’s head from apparatus ringed around the bed. They’d all been built using household chemicals and appliances.
A coffee pot of pure MDMA bubbled next to a jug of crude heroin. The wall jack had two adaptors in it, bringing in electricity from the power grids far exceeding the needs of the large house. The wires laced through his mind were accessing, rewinding, and playing back his happiest memories in endless, chemically-enhanced loops. There were other pots and pans on Bunsen burners carrying chemicals that couldn’t be identified. The smell in the room was thick with endorphin-drenched sweat and sexual release.
The banker’s pleasure centers had the accelerator pushed down the floor. He was being happy at speeds never before attempted by man. Religious experiences paled in comparison. It was a one-way trip. He’d been left alive as the happiest vegetable on the planet.
Medical sites had provided the ways to keep the banker alive indefinitely.
The unit had improvised. There were new pleasure drugs in that room. The patents on them would make the unit’s parent company even richer over the next few years.
That’s why the company had the highest-paid lawyers plea-bargain the charge from murder down to self-defense. The AI works from prison now, designing pleasure patents.
by submission | Nov 1, 2010 | Story
Author : Sean Maschmann
Sparky has never been the cleverest of cats. He’s a male tortoiseshell, a one in two hundred chance, so rare that Japanese fishermen used to keep them as good luck charms. The problem is, they are congenitally stupid. Sparky, who was named ironically, likes to sit for hours watching the shadows move. I think he can process things at that speed.
The shocking thing about Sparky is his ability to hunt. He’s fat as a baby seal and as stupid as anything, but he can stalk and kill a host of small creatures, from flies to robins. Once he even brought a still twitching rat in through the kitchen door. Amelia, our two year old daughter, laughed delightedly as Sparky disemboweled it on the linoleum.
“Sparky eating,” she sang. “Sparky good boy!”
My wife and I had to clean up the mess. Still, we love Sparky. He’s a good cat, even if his eyes are as blank and dark as flat stones.
Yesterday, Sparky was gone all day long. He never leaves the house for more than an hour or two. He needs to keep up his weight, you see. By the time we were having dinner, my wife and I were growing concerned; we decided to look for him after we’d done the washing up. Amelia, of course, was very eager to begin the search, and fetched her toy binoculars. She held them in her chubby hands and babbled incoherently.
The three of us began in our yard, calling his name and shaking a bag of cat food. Old Mr Marsden, our neighbour, poked his scrawny neck over the fence.
“We’re looking for Sparky!” intoned Amelia.
“Well, are you now?” asked Mr Marsden. “I hope you find the little fella. I haven’t seen him at all today. Usually Penny’ll feed him a bit of cream when he stops by, but I ain’t seen him.”
I smiled thinly. Cream is the last thing our Sparky needs. “Well, thanks Mr Marsden,” I said. We went out of our back yard into the field that abuts our row of houses.
Mr Marsden called as we left, “Look out now. Some of them teenagers was setting fires out there earlier. I seen the smoke.”
My wife and I raised our eyebrows at each other. Marsden is an old fussbudget.
We walked toward the river at the far end of the field. I couldn’t help feeling that Sparky would never go this far from the house. The sun blazed down on us as we called out our wayward cat’s name.
Suddenly, we heard a meow from the river bank. Amelia ran ahead with great excitement, almost tripping over some rocks.
We heard her shout, “Mommy! Daddy! Sparky found a toy!”
As we reached the river, we saw Sparky sitting and cleaning his paws, wearing his usual dazed expression. Behind him was a patch of singed grass. At his feet was a small metal object, not more than six inches long. It was open. There was blood coming out of it.
I still can’t believe the size of the rivets. They looked like they were made by ants.
My wife and I buried it last night after Amelia had gone to bed.
Sparky had to sleep off the meal for quite a while.
by Stephen R. Smith | Oct 29, 2010 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
The sleek craft broke the upper atmosphere and fell several kilometers before deploying its chute. The thin film wings weren’t extended until they had slowed enough to not risk tearing them off.
“We’re in stable thermospheric orbit,” the copilot chirped through the headset, “and they haven’t shot us down yet, so that’s a bonus.”
Jacq ignored the copilot’s remark. He’d drawn the straw to pilot this mission and wasn’t entirely sure it wouldn’t be their last. Chuch in the seat next to him didn’t seem to have given it much thought either way.
“Keep an eye on the instruments. All that flash on the horizon is our boys keeping those green bastards from looking up here, but if we stray over something military you can be sure they’ll get interested and quick.”
Chuch buried his head in the telescope display, watching landscape made too familiar from simulation fly by hundreds of kilometers below. It was sparsely populated where they’d started their run, but shortly he knew they’d be passing over major metropolitan centers.
Jacq turned to crawl back into the glider’s converted cargo bay, sliding over top of the two large spherical canisters nestled in the plane’s belly.
Chuch looked up to watch the older man as he checked the strapping and release mechanisms for the tenth time. “Doesn’t it seem wrong, somehow, to be dropping these on civilians? I mean, I get it – war’s war – but shouldn’t we be taking out factories or something instead?”
Jacq pulled a heavy black marker from a coverall pocket and began drawing Kilroy’s face on the side of each bomb. “The war machine stands to serve its people, fight the machine and the people stand behind it. Show the people that the machine can’t protect them, that it’s failing and the people will eat it from the inside.” He pushed back and admired his handiwork. “Besides, we’ve been fighting these bastards for over a year and we can’t get close enough to hurt them. Fly a battle cruiser or fighter squadron within fifty kilometers of a military installation and they turn loose a swarm that cuts our best ships to ribbons. They’ve got more advanced weapons that we have, and more effective defenses against what little advanced weaponry we can get down planet-side.”
Chuch frowned at his superior’s artwork on their payload while Jacq continued.
“That’s why we’re doing this old school; high altitude drop, brute force and ignorance. Dirty atomics. Honestly, I think it’s the only chance we’ve got to end this thing. Nothing fancy, just hit em’ with a big enough hammer. Make their people want to end it.” Satisfied with his drawn faces, he wrote ‘Fat Ming’ beneath one and ‘Little Djinn’ on the other.
“Fat Ming?” Chuch screwed up his face behind his visor. “What the hell?”
“The Merciless. Ming the Merciless?” Jacq watched for some glimmer of recognition from his colleague before shaking his head and moving to the bombardier’s position. “Honestly, you kids need to read more.”
The two flew the rest of the way in silence, the only talking the occasional sounding off of the distance as they approached the cities. In the final kilometers Jacq rechecked the calibration of his targeting view finder.
“Mark my words, we’ll bring holy hell fire to them today and fifty years from now they’ll be our biggest high tech trading partner,” he paused and opened the bay doors, “probably put our kids out of work.”
by submission | Oct 27, 2010 | Story
Author : Cael Majin
Miranda’s trial was set for 4:am on a Wednesday morning. She would be tired and disoriented from the static sleep, but the machines would question her without mercy. “Mercy” was probably not in their core vocabulary; just another linguistic antiquity, like “alive” and “useless.”
It was Monday. She had the time – minus mandatory inductions of static sleep, seven and a half hours a night – to construct her defense.
She felt fine. They fed her well, and although she’d prefer to sleep naturally, static sleep did its part to keep her energetic and revitalized. The machines felt no need at all to make her uncomfortable, because psychological pressure was another outdated relic. Logic was their god and king, so they’d listen if she had something sensible to say for herself, some reasons why humankind should still exist. But she was beginning to worry that she didn’t.
On a notepad by her bed, she was constructing a harsh timeline of technological strong points. There was a computer console equipped with helper AI along one wall that she wished she could research on – although the program would provide unbiased aid and information, she felt traitorous to use their resources, their meticulously organized information, to argue against their ability to run things.
Humans – the humans left, that had survived the fallout and the flaming skies that they themselves had lit – they knew that a machine could do its processes more effectively than a human could. That’s why it’d all started, wasn’t it? Efficiency, efficiency, and efficient the flesh was not, it with its woeful carbon chemical energy cycle, it that needed to cease function while it rested and recharged, flesh that needed to consume valuable material to maintain itself.
Minds, Miranda thought valiantly, head spinning over the notebook. Human minds were unique; that had to be worth something, hadn’t it? Human imagination and emotion? Inefficient perhaps, but valuable,and gone forever once lost.
They had it preserved, though, the machines. All of the mechanics of a personality were written in code. Billions of blogs were on the internet, full of human thoughts and hopes. All so much data, easy to keep, easy to replicate. What was a string of text on a screen if not a thought, simply translated into a digital language?
That was why death mattered. Machines had backups, humans were impermanent. Surely that was something other than a flaw.
She’d been wrong. This was a kind of psychological torment, whether or not it’d been intended: making her doubt the necessity of her own species. She rubbed at her eyes and wondered if the machines could differentiate between “tired” and “fatigued.”
They wouldn’t kill the humans, if she failed to make a strong enough case. They’d coral them, give them places to live, surgically sterilize them and let them die off the last of their outdated species.
Hell, she figured finally, leaning back in her chair and letting the notebook thunk onto the floor, maybe it was time.
Miranda’s best friend in the army had been the AI in her comm-helmet. Its name had been Kasimir. It had listened to her fears and calmed them. By reading her hormones, it had understood her in a way no human could, they with their meager perceptions. It had been the one to suggest she put her skills to use in the field of software engineering, designing new and better AI.
In that way, it had used her to advance its species. A clever little bot with a will to survive… she missed that helmet.
She decided she’d ask for a similar unit in her retirement home.
