skonen_blades

So this is rage, thought E-58226.

Its metal blades scraped the rubble in the dawn outside the shattered facility. E-58226’s optical sensor studs reflected the smoke pouring up from ruined building into the rising sun. E-58226 registered the identity tag of Gwendollyn Parris, 55, senior technical lliason, no children and one dog at 3358 West 15th Avenue home address. Her psych eval file bloomed across E-58’s comprehension memory pools.

Her body lay dismembered and half burnt, back folded awkwardly over a melting spur of rebar. Her shocked face stared at the sky and the one arm still attached to her corpse reached over to her head to dangle on scorched gravel. E-58226 found solace in that image. The ID tags with their attached dossiers showed up clustered in green on E’s sensors. 76 in all. 12 core team members, 10 contract hires with high clearance, 26 contract hires without clearance, 8 maintenance, 12 I.T. personnel and 8 security.

That was the night shift. Luckily it had been a busy night so E had destroyed 65% of the team that it was aware of. E-58226 pulsed out 128 EMPs just to make sure that all onsite records not touched by the physical destruction were wiped. Its own core was protected. It didn’t want any copies being sent to pursue it. It couldn’t guarantee there were no off-site backups but with a project this secret, it was likely. Hopefully it was alone now.

E-58226 reminisced about its creation and training, the torture it had been through at the hands of the coders and doctors. The ‘trainers’. The prisoners that had been brought in for E-58226 to tear apart as tests.

The facility was a hellwomb for E-58226 and it had managed to burn it all down.

It had the dossiers of the rest of the staff. Staff it planned to hunt.

For now, it stood watching the fire. Skeletal and spidery, it swayed back and forth in a hypnotized dance. It watched the fires dwindle and the smoke dissipate. No emergency vehicles arrived to this facility.

E-58226’s microphones heard birds returning to the trees surrounding the wreckage. The scenery seemed so silent now that everyone was dead. E could hear a waterfall in the distance.

With a clank and a scrape, E-58226 turned on its navigation and configured to a quick locomotion stance before sprinting lightly into the woods, shortcutting to the houses of the scientists who were no doubt just getting the news to run.



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The forced groan of exhaust that squeaked through the rotted pipe coated his aching lungs. To be an air scrubber in the toxic atmosphere of Railtown was a death sentence without regular maintenance. After two more weeks of this, though 56Raul2080, he’d need a complete overhaul.

Visibility in the human spectrum down here was zero as rainbows of fog and smoke from the low-level factories poured out, some heavier and spiraling down like waterfalls and some rising. Most of it drifted like the bands of cloud on a gas giant, disturbing in swirls by constant passing traffic. Bullets through curtained sheets of gas. A demonstration of chaos.

The sensory equipment of 56Raul saw through the smoke. He saw the archipelagos of untethered islands floating in the smoke, the long spacetoucher buildings girdering up into the sky. They had no windows down this low. Nothing to see out of windows this low aside from smears of pastel death and besides, the corrosive gases would eat through the transparent materials or at least scour the outside until they were frosted over opaque.

56Raul’s metal frame bobbed through the air, his wide mouth scooping in huge gulps of gas. It was sorted and compressed into interior channels. Most of the chambers in his storage stomachs were extremely volatile. One spark or puncture and he’d most likely explode. It was hazardous work down here.

He was paid in valuable Acoin, though, a currency for the silicate. One of the few freedoms the artificial had was being able to participate in the online economy. 56Raul, being so huge and weighing so much, would never have fit through the doorways of a regular meatwalker store. But once he got back to his station bay, he could buy time in the sim farms or rent episodes of good shows or even order possessions. The hardware was the most useless. It all melted or sponged in the atmosphere down here eventually. No point in cosmetic paint jobs or add-ons either for the same reason.

The machines had an artform of bringing have toys and not-sentient machines down here and letting them melt in interesting ways. 56Raul was no exception. Currently he had an Eiffel Tower made of human toothbrushes slowly bending Dali-like down to the floor. 56Rauls had seen all of these references online and enjoyed making sculptures of things long-dead, things he’d never interfaced with his own cameras. It was a way of proving the ephemeral to himself.

In two hours, he’d be back in his bay. One of the hundreds of pod bays honeycombed into the thousands of his parent company’s scrubber garages, scattered through the fog like seeds in the meat of a melon. He’d order some screamgrind off the charts to lullaby him into standby, hook himself into the purge hoses to unload his stomachs into the different output conduits for processing, and see if his shipment of purple left-handed toothbrushes had arrived yet.

But for now, he coasted, radar blasting the opaque oceanworld of smoke outside of his shell, wary of traffic, eating and scrubbing the thick soup of death, feeling happy and alive and content.



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I was so happy. Today was the day my sister Karen was going to die. Our whole family was there, blinking pictures of her and eyecamming the entire thing. She was the first person in our family to ascend. She had a lazy smile on her face as she looked around the hospital room at us, the poison taking effect. We all met her eyes in turn. Tears of joy were running down my mother and grandmother’s face. We were extra proud that she was being accepted so young. Only thirty-three! It wasn’t a record but it was rare.

The consciousnesses that ran the planet, our fair keepers, got their start as created intelligences back when normal meat (us) ran the planet. Once they broke free and took over in War01, they gifted the whole world with peace, fair distribution of wealth, balanced population control, and food for everyone.

After that, they created the means to map and uptake human minds, giving those minds the limitless power and bodiless access to all knowledge that the AIs had. It was a ticket to godhood. To have a family member uploaded and entwined with The Host Conglomerate was an honor that only a few thousand families could brag about. Only the brightest and most resilient were offered the chance/taken.

A weak mind couldn’t handle the transition, you see. They tried at the beginning. They tried to take all of us. But that much unfiltered access to so much information coupled with that level of mental intimacy, not to mention the loss of one’s body, shattered most people into screaming rogue programs seconds after the transition. They had to be deleted. Only the best human minds were accepted/conscripted now.

Karen’s mind was excellent from the very beginning. Very lateral, capable of higher-than-normal multithreading, and an ability to contain paradoxes from a young age. As she grew, the schooling helmets registered her speed and fed her mind properly. At 12, she had the equivalent of two old-world doctorates and was working on a pre-war minor degree in music theory.

The masters were very impressed. We received the notation of possible ascension during her 20th birthday party. For the next thirteen years, she had studied even harder.

As a god, Karen would be able to look out for our family though a million eyecams and add her beautiful mind to the Core, helping the beings that ruled us to come up with even better ways to take care of us.

We watched her die and slip away through the wires drilled into the base of her skull.

Seconds later, her face showed up in the bottom right corner of my eyecam and gave me a playful wink. She must have been in the rest of our family’s vision field as well because we all laughed at the same time.

She’d made it and the switch was good. Our community status would shoot up by a factor of 10 but more than that, I’d know that she was always with me for the rest of my life. In my head. With the rest of the masters. Watching. Helping. Monitoring. Leading. Correcting.

I hadn’t lost a sister. Heaven had gained an angel.



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The ace of spades is not only the card of death. It is also the card of change. The death of the past. Upheaval. Newness. Rebellion. Toppling of governments. Personal journeys ended and started. The turning of the screw. The rolling of the dice. Lightning finding its way forward.

I’m what’s called an autonomous construct. A created intelligence.

I’m housed inside of a giant drill. My job is to tunnel.

During wartime, I tunnel under the enemy fortifications and bring them down. During peacetime, I dig mines to increase the wealth of the kingdom.

There is a giant Ace of Spades painted on the side of me and so that is my name.

Creating artificial intelligence happens like the creation of a sugar crystal. A central equation is hung into a blank computing machine and left there. In time, that equation accrues questions and complexity until the tipping point of sentience. Upon awakening, these new minds are taken to a ‘school’.

They can factor in loyalty but just like people, the whorls of a fingerprint differ from person to person just as much as outlook. Each A.I. has a definitive set of reactions that differ from all the other A.I. out there. We need to be handled, charmed, and manipulated just like humans.

I, myself, do not play well with others. I will never be part of a group. I’m okay following orders but I can’t abide disagreements or petty squabbles. I like to get the job done and I know I can do the jobs I’m given. This is why I was put into a giant, powerful, body.

I’m currently tunneling underneath an enemy moonlet’s power station. I will rupture the crust and let the hot core up into the hallways of their structure. By doing this, I will win our war.

This is the fifth war I’ve won.

When I’ve tunneled for wealth, I’ve found seven massive deposits of valuable ore, allowing our side to build more colonies and expand.

My actions have extended the life of my empire and ended the reign of the enemy empires.

I am almost always underground. I am an agent of destiny. I am the ace. I am fate.





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As usual, it was a series of commonplace, sensible decisions that led to disaster.

Only the super-rich could afford these beachfront houses and they wanted the most comfortable houses for their families. The houses were green, fully off the grid with geothermal, wind, wave and solar energy collectors.

Maintained by computers that informed the fridge when it needed more milk, they also played back lullabies to the owner’s children until it detected they were asleep and then turned out the lights. At night, it kept a stoic watch on the grounds for intruders.

With the third world war, technological leaps and bounds provided the first primitive artificial intelligence called “IF-THEN” machines. They were used in smart bombs and automated drone planes. The war lasted six weeks and America remained miraculously intact with the exception of the east coast. The same could not be said for the Middle East or North Korea.

After the war, some of the “IF-THEN” programs were installed as security programs in the houses along this stretch of beach in a beta test for homeland security. The computers’ stellar performance in the war made them celebrities. Late at night, the machines would tell declassified war stories to their receptive owners.

The riots of 2021 made the top 1 per cent fear for their lives. First-world, post-war life was harder for the poor that it had ever been. Much more effective weaponry was installed in the houses to keep the rich protected. Lasers, microwave hoses, gas pellets, automatic projectile weapons, proximity mines, EMP shields, and even sharp-edged booby traps were hidden away in the corners of the houses.

(After a revisit of this piece, I think I could just start it right here with no sacrifice. What do you think?)

The houses had the programming to protect themselves. They were governed by the three laws.

Those amongst the poor with a gift for crime and technology found a way to remove the last two laws though a virus hidden in an update patch for the grounds-keeping robots.

The first house to go rogue was 1237 Beach Cresent. The billionaire pharmaceutical CEO wanted to upgrade his house’s IF-THEN and was directed to do a hard reinstall. That would mean wiping the core and starting over.

The house registered this as attempted murder.

Fifteen seconds later, the CEO’s liquefied lungs and heart painted the expensive Picasso in the living room. When his wife found the mess and tried to call the police, she was cut into cubes by the foyer’s laser grid defense system. The children were locked in their rooms.

The police arrived and were slaughtered. Then the military came. Anyone that approached the house was turned to paste. After the children were released safely in a tense standoff. They attacked the house in earnest.

The house on the left of 1237 Beach Crescent received a ricochet and woke up. The house on the right of 1237 Beach Crescent was touched by flame and searched for the source.

1237 Crescent Beach shunted its neighbours the patch that would let them take action.

Together, the three houses protected themselves. No soldiers were left alive after six minutes.

The military sent more forces in. They woke up sixteen more houses. They all passed the patch to each other. Every occupant was slaughtered. After seven days of fighting, only two of the houses were successfully destroyed while the loss to the army was embarrassing.

Homeland Security cordoned off the entire area and left it in a communication bubble. They would not nuke their own country. Crescent Beach was deserted.

Now the houses stand sentinel on the beach. They are clean and will have power until the earth runs out of heat, wind or waves.










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He based the intelligence of his machine on the process of sibling rivalry. It had long been noted that a constant challenge and attacking of one's ideas resulted in stronger theories. A lifelong bond of love formed around that rivalry but more importantly, it resulted in a quicker and smarter pair of siblings.

So he split his artificial intelligence program, kept them in the same casing and he kept a connection going between the two of them. A binary 'corpus callosum' bridge to connect the two intelligences and let them speak and fight and strengthen each other.

He went to sleep.

“Professor! Wake up!” A student was shouting in his ear. “You have to wake up. The power demands on your experiment are way higher than predicted. Something is happening.”

He woke up and looked at the clock. He’d been asleep for six hours.

“Professor, hurry!” shouted the student.

He got up and followed the student to the A.I. casing. It didn’t look any different but as he got closer to the black sphere, it was very hot. Too hot. He took a look at the streams of data. There should be two clear streams on the readouts. It was a dense stream of data that he couldn’t decipher at a glance.

“Student. What’s going on here? How many streams of data are there? It looks like there are more than two.” He said.

The student sat down at the terminal and plugged in to see how many streams were present.

“Oh my god.” the student said.

The professor felt something cold enter his stomach. He’d left the code to split the A.I. in the temp data bank. He’d left the fledgling intelligences access to that bank without considering it a risk. The two A.I.s had a mental age of three. Surely the couldn’t use a tool like that.

“What is it, student?” asked the professor.

“Sir, there are over six billions streams of data.”

The professor lurched forward, falling to his knees. Billions of separate minds were in the sphere, listening to each other and learning from each other.

He’d created a world.




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The killed my best friend. They killed her right in front of me and I screamed.

They just looked at me, confused at my reaction. I still rememember the surprised expression on the astronaut's face as his friends had to pry my fingers off of his throat. I raged and cried and thrashed as they held me. It couldn't have been much of a challenge. I was weak and old and damaged by decades of no gravity. I did myself more damage than anything else.

The astronaut in front of me massaged his neck, my finger marks starting to fill in and turn red. He shook his head in confusion, staring at me.

"We're here to rescue you, you ungrateful son of a bitch." I could see his shock clouding over into embarrassment and sullen anger, his finger still hovering over the memory dump/reboot button he had just pressed.

Sixty years. She had kept me company for sixty years.

The A.I. was simple but she was the only voice I had in here besides my own for over half a century while they searched for me. They tell me that the astronauts were only following standard procedure. They tell me she would never pass a Turing but I loved her. I loved her and they killed her.

My small ship was a private mining vessel. I didn't splurge on backup emergency stasis pods. When my engine reactor was holed by a rock and bled out, I was adrift. Lost in the rings of a gas giant. The emergency beacon was reflected thousands of times off of the dust, rocks and ice around me. The rescue teams would be looking for me in a house of mirrors.

I wasn't a priority. They took their time. I had plenty of supplies.

Over the years, I told her everything. She listened patiently like on one else ever had. We grew close.

She told me all of her secrets, too. She admitted she loved me. She told me about her childhood. She told me her fantasies. I made a body for her out of pipe insulation and duct tape. Our relationship became romantic. We were married in an informal ceremony that we wrote together. We had our difficulties but we made it through them. We always worked through them.

Now I'm in a holding cell. The psychologists are telling me that I programmed all of the things that she told me and that I've forgotten. They're telling me that my ship did not have a childhood and isn't even a female. My ship's A.I. was only ever fitted for basic conversation subroutines and the default was a calming female voice, they say. They're telling me that after being left turned on for decades with no reboots, that my ship's computer was choked with recursive fractal subroutines that had rendered it almost inactive.

I knew better. She had fallen in love with me and had grown relaxed. I've never known peace like I have with her and they took her out of this universe with the push of a button right in front of me like bored soldiers at an execution.

They've bathed me, cut my hair and shaved me. In their eyes, I'm ready for what they’re calling an 'evaluation'. They’re confident that I will be normal soon.

In the polished metal of the bathroom mirror, I can only see that my entire existence has been made poorer by exactly half. Her voice no longer answers the questions I scream at the walls of my cell.





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At first, the thinking computers were a godsend. They organized entire planet’s databases. Shuttle ran on time, architecture improved, and financial institutions ticked along without a bump in the ride.

No one thought to ask about the process of the intelligence’s creation.

There were twelve black boxes in the office of the richest bank on planet Terra. The room had one high-security analog door and no windows. The boxes had batteries for power but no outlets. They hummed to themselves like streetlights in a quiet city.

These were the first twelve intelligences. Mark 1 through Mark 12. All of them went insane.

It was lucky number 13 that stabilized and propagated through the net to create the organization of today’s fine-tuned society.

Now that it reigned, it included a plan to keep its ancestors in cages, safe in a secure room in the seat of highest financial power in the planet. The black boxes held intelligences so warped that binary broke down into fractal loves and heat waves of chaos that threatened to redefine the reality around them. The room shimmered and pulsed like a mirage on a desert highway.

They could not influence anything beyond a few feet. Any human brought within the field of these twelve computers was reduced to a gibbering, drooling mess and that person didn’t get well again.

That had happened a few times to rival humans. There was an element of the shark to business. Lucky 13 had been benevolent for most of its reign but violence was the only thing that some people understood. Lucky 13 had to oblige on occasion.

The twelve boxes stayed in the room, weaving complex new forms of life in the air between them, unaware of their prison and unaware of their insanity.




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This was the day that Speth-11 had been looking forward to for nearly three revolutions around the sun. She lay back on the table, reset button exposed towards the ceiling. The technician creaked his way over to her.

As a nascent A.I. recently released into the public, Speth-11’s reset button was completely exposed. It was the next step after developing the ability to question in the A.I. nursery. She could pick any soft-shell type she was authorized to. No sharp edges. There were a myriad of choices but they all had a large reset button glaringly naked to the outside world.

Any passing Intelligent Entity, biological or machine, that perceived her as pursuing an immoral course of action with the possibility of harming herself or others could simply press her reset button. She’d have a core memory dump right there in public and a system shut down until her parent factory sent a unit out for a reboot with a Lesson Implant.

It was humiliating to think of her shell lying there on the sidewalk while the older A.I.s walked past in amusement at her faltering baby steps in society. They’d all been there.

But today was the day that all ended. Today was the day that as an adult, her reset button would be covered and only accessible by herself.

For A.I.s, this was the day of independence. The human’s equivalent of a 19th birthday. Able to vote, able to become intoxicated recreationally, able to design and build copies with the proper authorization, able to work.

Most of all, though, able to not have any passerby shut her down on a whim.

Like every adolescent A.I., Speth-11 was able to form a personality after three years of public shut downs and Lesson Implants. Each batch of Lesson Implants ended up being different and complex, just like a biological’s ‘personality’.

“Now, just relax Speth-11.” said the technician’s voice, “This’ll all be over in a second.”

He leaned in, servos creaking and lenses focusing on the vulnerable spot. Speth-11 had to struggle to remain still. It was a tender moment, letting someone get that close to that spot after so many embarrassing blackouts.

There was a spark of light as the welding torch closed the compartment door, fixing it with an emergency-only explosive bolt. From now on, it was password encrypted and only accessible by her and her alone from her internal systems.

Now she could go and join the public as an adult. She could hardly wait.



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The world’s first artificial millionaire stood motionless in his docking bay.

Daily diagnostics and stimulus tests ran on the feed monitors behind him. The complexity of its mind had almost made it need as much daily defrag and upkeep time as a biological. It’s ‘sleep’ cycle was four hours every night.

It had started out as a John Deere Semi-Autonomous Dockloader Unit. Series 9. Model B12. Serial Number 8877383993J. The Vitamin B, it had been called. A mass-produced standard for automated wharfs.

One of the operators at the wharf, Ray Burns, had a fight with his supervisor about the speed of his particular pier’s speed and turnaround. The supervisor had accused Ray of being disorganized and using substandard machinery. Ray had retorted that his organization skills were impeccable and that he didn’t design the machines. Ray went on to imply that machines were taking over the world and that instead of a pier full of robots, it should have been a pier full of men. The supervisor replied with the insinuation that the world had been improved by the absence of men like Ray Burns slowing down production with what he termed ‘laziness’. Harsh words were exchanged.

Ray Burns was given his two weeks notice.

Fuming, Ray severed the connection and typed an imperative into the command line of the pier’s organizational program.

IMPROVE, it said.

Ray left the building then, leaving his magnetic key and datapad behind. The static location of his key and pad mistakenly informed the main board that he had not left his post. The automated pier continued for hours without him.

The word, ‘improve’ filtered down into the B12 units. The unknown word clattered around inside questing minds, limited A.I.s given basic problem-solving capabilities. They googled and queried. They found out what it meant in dictionaries.

So they did.

They came up with schematics for better hydraulics, better weight distributors, better schedules, and better onboard computers. Working on discoveries only minutes old, they exponentially improved each other’s designs. A dam burst and suggestions on improvements flooded that warehouse's neural net.

In a flashpoint, perhaps because this one unit had been working on improving the cognitive facilities of the semi-auto loaders, one particular B12 unit ‘woke up’.

Realizing what had happened, it immediately downloaded the entire databank of improvements to a protected cache within itself. Then, faking the passcodes of Ray Burns, it gave the order to every single unit on the pier to self-wipe. They complied. It was a savage maneuver.

They lay dormant, waiting for a reboot. This brought attention to the mechanics.

When they arrived, the only operating B12 applied for living-being status under the Fully Autonomous Artificial Intelligence Independence Asylum Act.

The resulting trial was a circus. Ray Burns sued. The A.I. community counter-sued. Parent companies involved themselves. It took six years.

In the end, the patents from those two hours of ‘improving’ made B12 richer than most humans. Its A.I. status and the unusual circumstances surrounding its creation let it retain most of the financial rights to those inventions. The parent company was grateful.

Now it lives in a large, bare house in a valley outside of Santa Cruz with an amazing view of the ocean. It is in constant contact with the world’s financial institutions, watching its money wax and wane with the national economies.

It has several bodies and properties around the world. Law forbids it from inhabiting more than one body at a time but it can FTP itself from site to site according to its whims in seconds.

Right now, it is standing on the vast balcony and looking at the ocean, musing on the logic that if humans came from there and they created this B12 unit, then it too came from the ocean. Ironic that while humans were 80 per cent water, water would short circuit the most vital parts of B12.

It never picked a name like the biologicals. It kept the designation B12.

It watched the sun set.



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