by submission | Mar 26, 2010 | Story
Author : Elle B Sullivan
He stood in the exact center of the house. There were three clocks on each of the four walls. He had set them up perfectly to tick at the same time and then tock at the same time. He counted the four seconds on each clock, when the fifth second came around; he switched his gaze to a new clock. He did this for the first minute of every hour and every fourth hour he would stay for four minutes.
“Evan?” His mother called from the kitchen. Evan was a perfect name. Four letters: e-v-a-n. Vowel-Consonant-Vowel-Consonant. No tall letters like “k” or low letters like “j.” He hated “m’s” and “w’s” because they were much too wide. Evan Rose… r-o-s-e. Consonant-Vowel-Consonant-Vowel.
“Evan, it’s time for dinner.” He counted the last few seconds as the second-hand ticked through the eleven, then turned at a ninety-degree angle and strode out of the room.
“What are we having?” Evan asked, careful to only use four words in his question.
“Tomato soup and grilled cheese again. I forgot to go to the store yesterday.”
“I can run to the store for some.” Eight words. Four twice.
“No, I need to get some things for the weekend anyway.”
“Okay, if you change your mind please let me know very soon.” Twelve words. Four three times.
“That’s very sweet of you honey.” She kissed his head and sat down with the two bowls of soup. His grilled cheese sandwich was cut into four perfect triangles. He grabbed his spoon and stirred the soup four times. Then he picked up a sandwich, dipped it into his soup four times, and took a bite. He took three more bites, put his sandwich down, and stirred the soup four times again.
Later that evening Evan was reading a book while his mother watched the evening news. He would read four sentences, look up, and then read four more.
“It’s eight Evan, time for bed.” She said softly. Evan looked up at the clock and waited until the second-hand reached the ten, then got up and walked to the center of the house and counted the first minute before walking to his bedroom. “Goodnight sweetheart.” Evan climbed into bed and counted the corners of his room. He fell asleep within four minutes.
It was ten o’clock and Evan’s mother was in her closet talking to headquarters.
“He’s been on four for at least three weeks. Is it time to up the dosage and see how he reacts?”
“Last time we changed it to five, he received higher mathematical scores and higher reaction scores. I feel that six might be a good change of pace. To see if his scores increase exponentially or linearly.”
“Very well, I will change the pulse rate to six.” Evan’s mother walked into Evan’s room, picked up his arm, and adjusted the settings on his watch. She listened for the six small electrical pulses to start at twenty-second intervals, and then typed in something on the keypad by his door.
“Steven. Steven. Steven. Steven.” The speaker slowly said his name over and over. Six letters.
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 Duncan Shields | Mar 18, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The way my race has sex has made me a natural choice for the role of diplomat, lawyer and event organizer at an interplanetary level.
Our planet adapted to overcrowding by creating new sexes. We have seventeen now. It seems to be holding steady there.
Myself, I’m a tertiary bi-valve post-pubescent fifth-stage spawning facilitator. I’m bright green and quite tall for my age.
I’m needed in the home stretch of our three-day mating rituals. By using what’s called the ‘augmented reacharound’, I help fertilize the egg clusters sprouting out of the backs of the three gene-imprinting tri-spigot chain producers before the eggs are mixed in the chest cavity of a seconday monovalve pre-pubescent first-stage fertilization overseer and then deposited into the senile no-valve seventeenth-stage sacrificial carrier.
That’s just the last five hours of the three-day ordeal.
The procedure is exhausting. We all need to be awake for the full three days of the sex. There’s a two-day recovery period as well.
The timetable juggling that needs to take place to get sixteen schedules cleared and a will and last rites performed the carrier is a feat of patience and organization. Our social skills are awe-inspiring to other races. We have this ability to bring harmony to all conversations and smooth out conflicts. We can help bridge an understanding between the most different sets of personalities.
By comparison, the idea of organizing a press conference for a dignitary or memorizing some laws seems easy.
I’ve found a place here on this planet called Earth. While I can’t produce children, I do have the ability as a tertiary bi-valve to mate with this planet’s populace. That’s a rare thing in my travels. The Earthlings are ready for sex all-year round, much like my own race. Their unions only last a few hours, though.
The lack of complexity is refreshing to me. I’m sure in time it will become boring but my tour at the UN should be over before then. Right now, there is a young male and an older female at the end of bar. They are both looking at me, both unaware of each other’s interest in me. I must cut a fine figure with my green skin and Armani suit.
I’ll see what I can faciliate. The three of us should be getting to know each other much better within the next three or four hours.
by Roi R. Czechvala | Mar 17, 2010 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala: Staff Writer
The Crimson Dawn hung in geosynch above the besieged planet. Far out of reach of the meager defenses the primitive populous threw at them.
“Skipper, another salvo is being launched.”
Captain Dimitri Sardukar gave a bored sigh; “Viewer.” The bridge of the ship dissolved and the captain and crew seemed to hang in empty space. Even after years as a staff officer, the sudden switch to VR still unnerved him.
He watched as a seven missile volley rose from the planets surface. He watched as the stages of the chemical rockets fell away. He watched as the impotent atomic warheads spent their energy fruitlessly against the ships absorbing Tesla Field.
“Enough is enough. Ensign contact fleet. We are dropping. These savages need to know with whom they are dealing with.”
Klaxons blared throughout the ship. Armoured marines scrambled for the lifter ships. The captain himself took personal command of a lifter, and was the first to ground on the surface of the planet they had dubbed Circe.
The assault ships formed a perimeter around a massive stone complex. A walled palace. Stunned guards at the gates watched in awe as the huge marines emerged. The awe soon resolved itself into anger. They opened fire as the marines approached…
Dimitri joined his retinue of eleven men in raucous laughter as bullets impacted armour and fell to the ground as harmless lumps of jacketed lead.
“Open fire,” Dimitri ordered, growing tired of the futile display.
The detachment of guards was reduced to shapeless mounds of burned flesh under the searing blast of plasma fire. The men stormed unopposed into the massive building, followed by their swaggering commander.
The interior was one massive chamber carved from a single piece of a marble like stone. The walls shimmered with iridescent colours. In the centre of the hall upon a raised dais a huge throne stood. It was occupied by a diminutive figure, almost human in a vaguely elfin way. At the base of the platform a contingent of similar creatures stood unarmed.
“There will be no need for your crude weapons.” The diminutive being waved a careless hand and the marines were quickly disarmed by his personal guard. “Nor your armour,” just as quickly the men were denuded. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Viceroy Creed. Welcome to…,” he smiled disarmingly, “Circe.”
Stunned to immobility the men stood in rigid fear.
Outraged, Captain Dimitri Ulyov Sardukar turned on his minute tormentor, his face flushed with rage. “I command…”
“You command nothing,” the alien leader snapped viciously.
“I have ten ships…three thousand marines, trained killers ready….”
“There are no ships, there are no marines. Not for much longer anyway…,” he quietly informed the captain.
With a dismissive wave of his hand, Creed turned to his coterie. “Amusing aren’t they? Their worlds will make a unique addition to the Empire.”
“Make them comfortable for the time being. Tell the kitchen there will be twelve for dinner.”
He turned and faced the deflated Fleet Captain. “Remind the chef, I like mine rare.” He graced the men with a quick winsome smile. Rows of pointed teeth flashed wickedly in the waning light. The Viceroy turned and walked lightly from the room.
