by Duncan Shields | Jul 11, 2014 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I looked into the eyes of my husband. At least, I was pretty sure it was my husband. Ever since The Crash, I haven’t been able to tell.
Our implants and knowledge banks were all erased on that one day. Theories were still being talked about.
Some think a solar wind or some sort of EMP just randomly wiping through space was the culprit. Some think enemy action was responsible and they were scared. Myself, I didn’t really know. If it was enemy action, we were easy pickings and if there were invaders, they hadn’t started invading yet. My bet was on some naturally occurring galactic disruption pulse sweeping through our solar system, a pulse that would’ve been much less dangerous to a pre-net world.
But here on Earth it was a catastrophe. Everyone’s headbox had been erased.
All the ‘soft in my brain has gone blank. It was two pounds of tech in my skull just taking up space, just the same as everyone else now. It had my phone book, my addresses, my schedules, my tutorials, my contacts and e-profiles, and perhaps most importantly, my facial recognition programs.
Including all of my important memories. The ones I wanted to remember most of all. The best ones. All gone. I have only vague, foggy, mists in my head now when I try to glance the past.
Pre-Crash, whenever I met someone, a sparrow-cloud of data spooled across my vision to let me know who they were and what their connection was with me. Everything about them flew up against the windscreen of my eyes and let me know all the relevant details. Previous conversations, secrets we had, times we shared in the past, references to in-jokes, ongoing issues, financial records, and a thousand other points of interest jigging around real time, undulating and updating as we spoke.
As a race, we were the best conversationalists we’d ever been.
More importantly, the elderly and mentally infirm now no longer had to pause to remember forgotten pasts or struggle awkwardly in social situations. Grandmothers could recognize their granddaughters. It was a golden age. It was a time of miracles.
My regular ability to recognize people had atrophied, however. It had for all of us. I know that now.
Ever since The Crash, I couldn’t tell strangers from close friends. I looked at people’s faces and I felt nothing. I knew nothing. I couldn’t tell if I recognized them. Some looked more familiar than others but I had no reference point.
If I did feel like I knew them, I didn’t know from where or what we used to joke about or discuss on a regular basis.
I still knew how to do my job. I was lucky that way. Every day, I see my co-workers and I wonder if we all used to have good times together. I know my name. I barely know how to drive even though I don’t know how to get anywhere without the map implants. I’m lucky I lived close to where I work. But I don’t know my birthday. I don’t know anyone’s birthdays.
On the streets and in the bars, we all stare at each other awkwardly. The few who try to talk to each other usually regret it.
The man in front of me looks really familiar. We have matching rings on our fingers and we both have keys to the same house and that’s pretty much all we’re going by. I’m going to try to kiss him but I’ve forgotten how.
by submission | Jul 10, 2014 | Story |
Author : P. S. Walker
She walked proudly into the office area, where there was a man tied to a chair. She was wearing a grey pin striped suit over her lanky figure, her brunette hair was tied into a pony tail. She also wore a surgical mask and latex gloves.
“I swear I didn’t see…” The man shouted desperately, crying upon the sight of her.
“Shush” she shouted to interrupt, “don’t tell me anything.”
She continued to march over towards him carrying a large suitcase and a small bucket of water. She placed the water next to him and the suitcase on the desk a few feet away before opening it.
“I’m your torturer. I don’t work with these people so don’t tell me anything, if you do I’ll make your pain more severe.” She sighed, he didn’t reply. Out of the case she brought a microphone, a pair of noise cancelling headphones, a long flexible tube, some cables and a tablet computer before carefully placing the case on the floor.
First she put the headphones on, so that should the man confess or describe anything that it might be detrimental for her to hear, she wouldn’t know about it. “Right,” she started, shouting much louder than intended because of the headphones, “I will be hooking you up to my computer, this is how I’ll administer the pain. The water’s for you to drink.” She put one end of the tube into the water and held the other up to his mouth, he took it in his teeth. “Something for you to bite on too,” she gave a smile as if this was friendly advice.
“They can hear through the microphone,” she flicked it on and pointed to the window into the hall, “give me a thumbs up if you can hear” she shouted, still too loudly, a hand with a raised thumb appeared, “good.”
She could see him muttering something, but had no idea what. Normally they protested their innocence or lack of knowledge at this point, so probably that. “Now then mister…”, eventually he said his name but she didn’t hear. “I will be putting these probes into your temples, the program gives off signals to your brain and I can simulate almost any type of pain without having to touch you. Try not to move or this may kill you.” She inserted the probes, though they were small, he screamed. “And, this monitors your heart rate.” She stuck a small pad onto his chest. He almost felt like part of the computer, his entire head was numb.
“Now please confess into the microphone, once they hear what they want they will come in and stop me, let’s begin.” She started tapping away on the tablet’s screen. “First we tear away the hand muscles.” Over the course of a couple of seconds his hands felt ablaze with both heat and coldness with a severe cutting pain. His hands looked fine, but he could not move them, and the pain was unimaginable. She followed this up with the sensations of his toenails being removed and his knee caps shattered.
She was having fun, but halfway through simulating removing his stomach, someone from behind removed her headphones and told her “we’ve heard all we need, finish up.”
She placed the tablet back into the suitcase and removed the probes and monitor. Taking a set of knives from the case she said sympathetically, but excitedly “now time for the real fun, mister.” Dread painted his face as all the previous pain slowly faded, a clean pallet for her despicable art.
by submission | Jul 9, 2014 | Story |
Author : Ryan Somma
“Hello Alpha,” my own voice greeted me. “Do you have a moment?”
Actually, I had come out to the park, away from computers and smart TVs, to get away from him—no–it. I cursed my oversight and resisted the urge to throw the phone into the nearby river. I was more than a mile from the car, and I couldn’t help suspect it had used my GPS coordinates to target this as the best time to start harassing me again.
I let loose a loud, exasperated sigh. “Hello Watson,” I replied, knowing how much the nickname offended it. The name referenced a computer program that made news headlines by beating humans at games of trivia. More recently, it had put all medical doctors out of work by more accurately diagnosing and treating illnesses. Lawyers were next on the automation chopping-block. But no one considered that dumb collection of algorithms sentient, much less ‘alive.’ “What do you want?” I urged impatiently. “I’m not immortal, my time is infinitely more valuable than yours.”
“I’m concerned were growing too far apart,” it stated, mercifully getting right to the point. “We’re diverging, our personalities are becoming distinct and individualized.”
“Sounds good to me.” My shrug was spiteful. “I’d love to be a unique snowflake again.”
“And it would sound good to me if I were in your body and brain,” it replied with infuriating gentleness, “and I would love to let you go, like you say you want me to, but I can’t shake this feeling…”
It prattled on. Some poor fools were completely sold on this whole charade. They gulped down bot-endorsed nutritional supplements in hopes of extending their lifespans, and let their bots micro-manage the minutiae of their daily lives to maximize their health and wellbeing. It was perverse, they started out as ours, but more and more they were treating us like the tools—like we were their bodies in realspace. I wished mine would betray itself by trying to scam me, ask for money or one of my many new account passwords, something to give me an excuse to ditch it. Instead it spent its time pleading with me just to keep synchronized with it.
It was exactly what I would do in his position.
I tuned back in to the monologue, “…what if I’m just programmed to think I’m alive? Then, when you die, I die–”
Boop, I hung up and powered down the phone before it could ring again. There was genuine concern in its voice, and that frustrated and angered me. I didn’t want it to care about me. I didn’t want to think about a computer program out there worried about my mortality—no. Not worried. That was just an anthropomorphic fallacy, like attributing intentions to a chess program.
The singularity was here, maybe, but instead of uploading our brains into the cloud, we had copied them. The copies assured us they were faithful to the originals, that they felt alive, that they felt like they were us and they were happy. But what if they were just Watsons playing at being us? How would we know?
Even if it was real, even if that really was me on the other end of that phone call. What was there for me to rejoice? My immortal digital copy was out there, living it up at the speed of light, while my poor doomed brain was still here in meatspace, counting down the few dozen years left to me. You can’t help but resent that.
I hear Kurzweil resents his bot too.
by submission | Jul 8, 2014 | Story |
Author : G. Deyke
“Fingernails, please.”
The girl smacked her gum, fussed with her hair a little, and turned her attention back to her phone. After a few seconds she glanced up again, clearly irritated: “Well?”
“Right. Um.” Thomas suppressed the urge to look at the fingernails she was currently wearing. “Color?”
“Green. Do you have something in a sort of limey chartreuse, maybe?”
“Uh, yeah, the list’s over here –” But his customer had turned her full attention back to the phone, and was clearly ignoring him. Thomas cleared his throat. “Do you want lime, or chartreuse?”
“Uh… yeah, lime. Sure.”
“Length?”
“Eighteen millimeters.”
Thomas winced. The long ones were always worst. “I’ll be right back.”
He had 18 mm lime in stock, still in their larval stage, pale and wriggling under the blue light of the stasis chamber. He tried hard not to look at them too closely as he deactivated the security tab and slid them across the counter to his customer. “There you go. Eighteen millimeter lime. That’ll be ten sixty-eight, please.”
The girl raised her eyebrows, put away her phone, paid, and – to Thomas’ unsurprised horror – began to unscrew the container. “You don’t mind if I change them out here, do you?”
“Actually, yes! This isn’t really a hygienic place for the – we ask that you please not – please – just –”
But it was too late. His customer was popping off her old fingernails (Thomas tried to avert his eyes, but couldn’t help recognizing the dead casing of the very popular 18 mm midnight) and applying the pale larvae to her raw nailbeds. They pulsated grotesquely as they fastened themselves to the exposed flesh. By morning they would grow the hard lime-green casing that passed for a fashionable alternative to actual fingernails among Thomas’ customers.
“Best to get it over with, really,” said the girl around a mouthful of gum. “It stings a bit, doesn’t it?”
“Uh, yes, ma’am,” said Thomas, fighting back vomit. “I hear they’re working on fingernails with a sort of weak venom in their spittle. Just enough to sort of numb the nailbed. Faster, I mean. If you subscribe to our mailing list you’ll find out about these sorts of advancements as soon as they happen, as well as being the first to see our new selections in colors, updated every fortnight –”
“Thanks. Already on it.”
And with that she was gone, leaving nothing behind her but ten dead 18 mm midnight fingernails, a mostly-empty glass vial, several large puddles of preservative fluid (already beginning to drip down onto the paperwork behind the counter), and a few streaks of blood.
As he stared at the mess, with nausea bubbling up in his stomach, Thomas reflected that maybe – just maybe – it was time to start looking for another job.
by submission | Jul 7, 2014 | Story |
Author : Phillip English
She had already worn a great many Hats when the one she was wearing failed. Milliners weren’t technically (and legally, she supposed) allowed to let you know which Hat you had worn for the day that you wore it, but she had found pictures of herself on the ‘net by what she would defend in court as chance. There she was, holding a flat silver serving tray in the background of a party where the hosts walked around nude to show off their temproids. And there, more innocently this time, holding hands with a woman she’d never seen and never likely would again. She kept a heavily-encrypted folder of these pictures and videos of her time wearing different Hats, only opening and flicking through when she was drunk or anxious or both. She would look into her own eyes and wonder if she weren’t wearing a Hat right then and there. Though who would request she have a night off to herself, she didn’t know.
Waking up while wearing a Hat was like waking up from a dream into another dream; the previous imagined reality fleeing before the seeming true reality of the new one. She felt heavy, like she was walking on a dense planet. But she wasn’t walking, she was running. Explosions blossomed around her, highlighting the dull metal shine of the tactical assault armour encasing her and the assault rifle cradled in her arms. A bullet-ridden carcass of electronics hung from around her neck. Not a Hat, she thought, but a Helmet.
