by Duncan Shields | Feb 2, 2015 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Are we robot zombies or are we the pinnacle of humanity? Are we ahead of the evolutionary curve? Did we make the leap that all creatures with a finite lifespan have to or are we freaks? The universe remains as silent as it ever has on the subject.
No one dies of natural causes anymore.
We count our blessings but we’re scared. Dr Hansen saved us and doomed us all at the same time.
The year was 2020. “A year for vision”, they called it. And Dr Hansen delivered.
Immortality, eternal youth, the cure for AIDS and the Big C. All a person had to do was cease to be human.
“You see, our spirits are not our bodies. Our bodies are not our selves,” Dr. Hansen said. “Our brains are meat but our minds are something altogether different. We decay too quickly. The problem is what we’re made of, not who we are.”
He proposed a consciousness transfer into mostly artificial bodies. Sausage meat into a bullet casing. Nervous systems became calm systems. The hot red of blood became the cool blue of coolant. Neurons became nanocapacitors. Shreds of the original brain and nerves survived but were coffined into layers of hermetically-sealed exoskeletons.
The eccentric rich went for it. After that, Hansen cut corners and lowered prices, extolling his wares on telnet and oldweb. It sold well. The older folk, the terminally ill and the daredevil visionaries lined up. It created a very lively debate amongst the existentialists and religious scholars.
The military departments loved him. Living weapons were a reality; more predictable than the alien algorithms of flaky A.I.s. Unregistered mercenaries loved him as well.
Dr. Hansen became rich off of the patents involved, the factories that made the equipment, and the laboratories that made the switch. The black market, the grey market, and the legitimate downtown offices all were booming.
The thing that freaked the naysayers out was that it was a one-way switch. Just a glance at the metal skin of the warmechs or even the plastic skin of the short-lived humanomorph fad made a lot of people shut their eyes and shiver.
Sex was no longer possible in an artificial body. Orgasm programs and virtual reality were available stims for the fakebodies but it wasn’t the same. That fact made the young people stay away.
Dr Hansen was trying to figure out how to pitch to their demographic when the plague hit.
An airborne flesh-eating virus dubbed The End with a 98% communicability rate killed all the non-transferred people, Dr Hansen included. The higher primates all died as well. In one year, the population of the earth nosedived.
Everyone in Shells survived.
The earth is populated now by the minds of out-of-work soldiers, old people, and the once rich. Hulking metal weapons and artistic interpretations of the human form. Basic automaton models mixing with shining, high-end custom jobs. The population is holding at ten million, two hundred thirty thousand, and sixty-six.
Scared minds in tin cans.
We’ve been building shells again in an effort to propogate the species but we’re finding it difficult to clone new nervous systems with the virus still in the air. It hasn’t gone away. And most of Dr Hansen’s notes were lost in The End riots.
We are a closed system now. A finite population that can only get lower unless we figure out how to reproduce properly. Our scientists are working on it but not that many of them made the switch, oddly enough.
Until we can figure out how to reproduce, we wait.
by submission | Jan 31, 2015 | Story |
Author : Gray Blix
“I don’t see anything, mommy. I want to go inside.”
He was lying in his child-sized lounge chair next to her adult-sized lounge.
The nights were clear and warm in Stella’s corner of the world after the astronomers’ announcement, so people looked up at the sky expecting to see new stars pop into view every few minutes, like flashes of light during a meteor shower. They were disappointed. It was too soon to see the phenomenon with naked eyes. Not enough photons reached earth. Only telescopes with special lenses and cameras that accumulated light over long time periods and recorded them as digital photos proved the astronomers correct. Since only astronomers had such equipment, a lot of people didn’t believe. They thought it was a scheme to get government funding.
“All right, Todd. Get ready for bed. I’m going to lie here awhile longer.”
The photos weren’t very convincing. Views of a distant glowing cloud. And there was no catchy name for the phenomenon, since scientists weren’t sure what it was. A rebound from the Big Bang — the Big Crunch? Or the opposite, cosmic expansion speeding up and tearing the universe apart — the Big Rip? Or another universe crashing into ours like a tsunami, piling up galaxies in a wave of debris sweeping towards us — a Cosmic Collision? Even ten years later, when the brightening night sky was apparent to all, scientists still couldn’t agree on what it was or what to name it, but a journalist called it “Starshine,” which caught on.
Through the screen, “Mom, that guy is at the door. Should I send him back here? I’m going over to Kristi’s house to study.”
“All right. Send him back. And you be home by 11:00. No excuses.”
As her son’s car backed out of the driveway, Craig pulled a lounge next to hers and joined her looking up at the night sky.
“Todd still won’t call me by my name.”
“He’ll come around.” Unbuttoning his shirt, “And I’m glad you came around.”
“What if Todd comes back?”
“He’s going to have sex with his girlfriend… so you can have sex with yours.”
As more years passed, people grew increasingly fearful, turning to religious leaders, to politicians, and to scientists for answers. Could the stars be stopped before Earth was destroyed? Amidst prayers and proclamations of martial law, scientists explained that even though the approaching galaxies appeared to be a solid wall of light, individual stars were actually far apart and none might pass close enough to collide with our Sun and its planets. Of course, they downplayed the likelihood that even if it escaped direct hits, our solar system would be torn apart by the gravity of massive objects passing nearby and pulling us into the wave.
Stella closed her eyes against the starshine. She didn’t know what time it was. She didn’t care. When nights became as bright as days, daylight saving time was abandoned. Time itself was abandoned by many. Unless you had a job or other time commitments, what did it matter when you slept or ate or did anything else?
As Craig closed the screen, Todd whispered, “She hasn’t said a word since we got here. The baby’s sound asleep, but maybe we shouldn’t go to the service.”
“No, no, you two go ahead. I’ll watch the baby… and your mom.”
He sat in a lounge next to hers and took her hand.
She looked over, “They said it was billions of light years away. That’s billions of trillions of miles.” Looking up, “And yet, twenty years later, here it is.”
by submission | Jan 30, 2015 | Story |
Author : Richard D. Deverell
My name is Jackson Smith. I work as the coroner for a large county with a small population and even smaller infrastructure. Last week, a train derailed in our county, dumping toxic chemicals that killed more people in the week after the accident than the derailment itself. I hadn’t slept in nearly forty-eight hours when I had a conversation that forever changed my life.
It was nearing three A.M. as I wrote up my notes on one of the victims of the chemical spill when I heard a noise from the other room. At first, I attributed it to lack of sleep and the depression of seeing so much of my community come through my office. A clatter followed the indeterminate noise, so I went to check it out, fearing that some reporter had snuck in to get photos of the disaster.
Inside the other room, one of the corpses was sitting up, bent at the waist with its legs straight out. I thought it was the result of rigor mortis or outgassing until the body turned to look at me.
Now, I’ve seen plenty of zombie movies, but this wasn’t some horror-show grotesque that looked at me. The skin way ashen, but the eyes shone with intelligence. The corpse looked at me and said, “Have you seen my liver? I feel empty inside.”
I was at a loss for words, but, my parents raised me to be polite and the corpse was looking at me expectantly, so I stammered, “Um, it’s with some of your other organs in sample jars in the fridge. For testing.”
The corpse paused a moment, processing, before he shrugged. “Okay, just remember to put it back when you’re done.”
“Uh-huh.”
The corpse paused and looked around. Seeing the clock and the late hour, he looked back at me and asked, “Shouldn’t you be home?”
I rubbed my temples, overcome with weariness from the lack of sleep and because I was barely able to process the current situation. “I should be,” I said, “but there’s a lot of work here and nothing there, so I’ve been working.”
The corpse gestured to a chair in the corner, “Sit down and tell me about it.”
I accepted his invitation, thankful for anyone to talk to, even the dead. “It’s been a rough week. Do you remember what happened?”
He shook his head.
“Okay, well, you and many others were killed as the result of an accident. As the only coroner in the county, I’ve been pulling double and triple shifts just to keep up.”
“Yes,” he said, “but why isn’t there anything at home?”
“I don’t really have anything besides work.”
He scratched his chin. Such a strange gesture for a dead man! “Is work fulfilling, at least,” he asked.
“No, but it distracts me.”
“From what?”
I thought about it. Why did I work here? I’d been in this job for nearly a decade without advancement or improvement. Most people barely knew me and I made no effort to get to know them. Afraid I was being rude or taking too much time, I said, “I suppose it distracts me from life.”
The corpse pondered this and gestured to the refrigerator. “My organs are in there,” he said, “but you’re the empty one.”
I turned to the fridge, following his gesture, and when I looked back he was lying down again and still, as though nothing had happened. At a loss, I went back to my office and work. I’m not sure what frightens me more: that we had a conversation, or what he said.
by submission | Jan 29, 2015 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
The President of the United States watched the viewscreen in the Oval Office as it displayed what appeared to be mist condensing on the lens of the camera that had recorded the video. After a few seconds, the tiny droplets started coming together and sliding to the edges of the screen in rivulets.
“That’s helium-neon rain, Madam President,” said the administrator of NASA seated next to her. After a few minutes the mist dissipated and the video showed a dark, copper-colored liquid flowing slowly around the camera. It gave the impression of the view from a submarine sailing through an ocean of maple syrup.
“That’s liquid metallic hydrogen,” said the administrator. “We’ll jump ahead because this pretty much stays the same for most of four hours.”
After he advanced the video, something started to appear in the flowing liquid. Over a span of two minutes, a few circular objects materialized. The circles multiplied and resolved themselves into dome-shaped structures. A few people in the room gasped. Lines started forming, connecting the domes together. Small oval shapes moved along the lines. A few spherical objects appeared to float above the domes, moving slowly in various directions.
“Is that what it looks like?” asked the President.
“We believe so, Madam President,” answered the administrator. “We think this image is an ‘aerial’ view of a city.”
“There’s a city on the surface of the core of Jupiter? So at Jupiter’s core conditions are Earth-like?”
“No, ma’am,” said the administrator. “The pressure inside that part of Jupiter is around 600 million gigapascals.”
“In English?”
“Normal atmospheric pressure on Earth is a little less than 15 pounds per square inch. At the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, the pressure is eight tons per square inch. The pressure inside Jupiter at that depth is on the order of 300,000 tons per square inch. That’s why the Jupiter Deep Exploration Probe was so expensive and took so long to build. Whole new technologies had to be developed to survive the conditions that deep inside a gas giant.”
“Even at the bottom of oceans on Earth,” said a Senator seated across the room, “we find life. Could life on Jupiter adapt to that pressure?”
“Not life as we know it,” replied the administrator. “Even matter itself behaves strangely under those conditions. The atmosphere above the city is composed of hydrogen in a supercritical state, neither liquid nor gas. And the probe registered temperatures in excess of 60,000℉. The core itself appears to be solid, which was theorized for some time. But no one imagined anything like…this.” He gestured at the frozen image on the screen.
“Could we communicate with them?” a congressman asked. “Radio, maybe?”
“Sir, we don’t know if what we’re looking at is the Jovian equivalent of New York City or the Jovian equivalent of a coral reef. It looks like a city, but it may not be. If this is a civilization, we don’t know how or even if their technology could receive any kind of signal we can send.”
“If that’s a civilization,” said the President, “we’ve already sent a signal. Even to beings so different they can live in that kind of environment, the probe would still be recognized as something obviously artificial, made by intelligent creatures, wouldn’t it?”
“There’s no way to be certain, Madam President,” said the administrator.
“Send another probe.”
“Madam President, the cost–”
“You’ll have the money.” The President smiled. “And to think that jackass I’m running against just announced he’d cut NASA’s budget if he got elected.”
by submission | Jan 24, 2015 | Story |
Author : Alex Skryl
Jack Thompson carefully placed Roger into his cage as Patrick Hughes entered the lab.
“Hey Jack. Yuri missed our weekly. Any idea where he is?” asked the Director, looking concerned.
“What?! He didn’t tell you?” replied Thompson, grinning.
“Tell me what?” inquired Hughes, reaching for a chair.
“P53! It worked! It … more than worked!” said Thompson in an excited whisper. He pulled up a chair next to Hughes, taking his time to contrive an explanation.
“Pat, do you know why most living things don’t live forever?” Thompson asked.
Hughes pondered the question for a second. “Well Jack, assuming they don’t die of disease or some unfortunate accident, it’s because they get old. Their cells become less efficient with age, having to work just as hard only to get less done. Current science blames it on DNA degradation, isn’t that right?”
“Yes! It’s a fidelity problem!” exclaimed Thompson, his eyes widening with excitement. “With every copy, our genome’s signal to noise ratio decreases, causing the cellular machinery to alter its behavior slightly. Over time, these small errors accumulate, usually leading to what we perceive as aging, and on rare occasion causing disease, such as cancer. Now, let me ask you this,” Thompson continued, “considering how universal senescence is, why do you think that nature hasn’t come up with a fix?”
Hughes sighed, getting impatient. “It’s a diminishing returns problem if I remember correctly. Complex organisms die from predation, disease, hunger, and a myriad of other causes, making their chances of living to old age slim to none. There is no evolutionary pressure to extend lifespan because animals don’t die of old age, my friend. They die from being eaten by other animals.” Hughes reached for a pen and a piece of paper. “Look here. If the probability of some creature dying in the span of a single day is 1/1000, then the probability of them surviving for 20 years is (999/1000)^(365*20)=0.067%, which is negligible. So, as long as they reach maturity and reproduce well before then, evolution will consider them fit. No reason to fix what’s not broken. Right?”
“I’m very impressed Dr. Hughes!” said Thompson smiling. “Anyhow, this is where P53 comes in. It is a retroviral gene therapy that was intended to be a cancer vaccine. It improves transcription fidelity and adds new mutation-triggered apoptosis pathways. A few things that nature overlooked. Here’s the kicker though, after vaccination, our simulations show no sign of DNA degradation over millennia. That’s thousands of years, Pat!”
“Wait!” Hughes interrupted. “Am I to understand that the two of you inadvertently created an immortality drug?”
“Roger is our first living test subject,” Thompson replied, glancing at the white mouse on the other side of the room. “But if the simulations are accurate, then he will outlive us all.”
“Who else knows about this?” Hughes asked, reaching for his phone.
“Olovnikov, myself, and now you,” said Thompson. “Why?”
“Brian?” Hughes spoke into the handset, “Code 42, lock us down plea…” before he finished his sentence, Yuri Olovnikov walked into the room. There was fear in the man’s eyes but it was overshadowed by righteous determination.
“King of kings, Lord of lords; Who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto…” Olovnikov mumbled, his voice trembling. “Forgive me.” His fingers tensed into a fist and the lab was suddenly awash in a brilliant white light.
As the dust from the explosion settled, a small white mouse ran out of the rubble into the grassy underbrush nearby. He had a long life ahead of him.
