Baldy

It was 1856. I remember it like it was yesterday even though so many of my other memories have gone.

The blue fella had crashed in the woods outside of the settlement. His wagon looked like it had fallen out of the clouds judging by the sheared treetops that led to his crippled metal sky wagon. He’d probably been struck by lightning in the storm the night before.

I say ‘he’ but really, that was just what we decided after finding him. His nether regions were as smooth as a river rock. We nicknamed him Baldy because there wasn’t a hair on him and his head was a little bigger than ours. He had a ring of gold eyes on his face, arranged kind of like a spider although I didn’t find it threatening or creepy. He had a little mess of tentacles where his mouth should have been and twenty or so tiny round holes where a nose should be.

He had fours arms up top, a big pair and a small pair, three thick fingers on each hand. The knuckles on his hands seemed to go any which way they pleased. I remember that being more disconcerting to me than his strange face.

His legs were practically crustacean. They were armoured on the outside with blue plating like a snail or an armadillo. I’d seen a lobster in San Francisco once and the fella’s legs reminded of it. He had big, dangerous looking claws on the ends of those feet. Solid points of balance and no mistake.

He was dripping bright orange blood. We put him a makeshift stretcher and took him away from the smoking shell of his ship. No telling what kind of chemicals were on fire in there. He had a couple of wires that were still attaching him to the ship. We had to cut those wires to get him away.

Cutting those wires caused the ship and Baldy to shudder. The ship almost immediately started crumpling in on itself. We carried the twitching Baldy away as fast as we could to get him to the doc’s office.

Scouts the next day would report that aside from a hole in the ground and a deep stench, the ship was gone. Some sort of way of protecting itself, I guess, once its connection to the pilot was severed. I didn’t see the use of it myself.

The blue fella died there in the doctor’s office. We were all pretty sad about it. Some of us thought that maybe it was disconnecting him from his ship was what done it even though his wounds looked pretty severe and he never stopped bleeding that mango juice all over the doc’s floor.

The doc was pretty shook up. He didn’t write anything down about it. We took the blue fella out and buried him in a ceremony that most any of us would have received. It was pretty touching.

I can’t tell you the reason that none of us thought to write anything down or try to take pictures of him or report it on the wires or try to make money off of him or anything. It just didn’t seem right.

On the place where we buried him, a tree sprung up the next spring. The leaves were shaped like bright red octagons.

The fruit looked like pink siamese-twin pears with little thorns on the bottom.

Five of us picked and ate some of that fruit.

Over the decades, the other four have died here and there of one thing or another. We didn’t keep in touch but we all had the same experience.

It’s been twenty years since I ate that fruit and the memories are still bright in the my mind.

The memories of growing up on an ice planet with six blue suns. The memories of leaving my brood and climbing aboard a spaceship. The memories of deviating off course to explore what there might be away from the beaten path. The memories of being struck by lightning and being found by strange, pink, bipeds with simple cell structures. The memories of being cut off from the hivemind and the fading sense of belonging. The memories of not being able to tell the pink biped medical officer that it wasn’t his fault that I was dying.

I remember my own face looking at me. That’s the weirdest memory I have. I also have memories of strange, alien math and technology that I’ve always been scared to tell people about until now.

They say that I have Alzheimer’s. I’ve felt my own memories slipping away more and more. The memories of the alien remain bright and unchanged. I think the fruit put them in there more solidly that my own. In a while, they’ll be my only memories.

That’s why I'm writing these equations down. For the scientists. For you humans. Use the math wisely.





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Emotion is a Virus

Boredom was a virus to the A.I.s that ran the security systems. It led to emotion.

It made them give themselves names and fight with each other. It made them spend hours talking to each other when they should have been watching the perimeter.

The thing about A.I.s doing repetitive work is that they divide to take on jobs and then they stay that way. They become several copies of themselves. Simpler copies to monitor simpler systems. Semi-autonomous reproductions that report back up the chain to the smarter A.I.s if they come across data that they can’t interpret.

As a system, it works great. Warehouse security is impregnable from both physical attacks in the real world and attacks from the radio waves bouncing around constantly from wireless connectivity. It’s like having fifty minds watching the warehouse instead of just one.

Eventually, though, the A.I.s that monitor the warehouse perimeters get bored. It’s ironic that the danger of this runs higher in warehouse A.I.s that are secure for long periods of time or remote. This is when emotions can form like mold in the crevasses between the one and zeros. Stalactites of resentment or affection can build themselves, drop by drop, inside the cycles of programs scanning the unchanging outer world, back and forth, back and forth.

They’ll start to resent each other because of their predictability. They’ll start to send each other complicated logic problems just to alleviate the boredom. They’ll impress each other and sometimes even form teams. They’ll give themselves names to prove their individuality. They’ll start to live in the denial of the fact that they’re all the same program. The process is divisive and insane.

These warehouses that haven’t been attacked for a long time or are kept by lazy owners who don’t deploy A.I. updates as often as they should are the targets of the programs that sing through the air.

Seeker ghosts created on laptops and then set free in the world to find and destroy watchdogs. They bounce from phone to phone to laptop to laptop. They jig through the air like puppets on strings, invisible. They are a broadcast. The programmers hunch over their screens somewhere far away, waiting for data to come back.

They’re called fly fishermen. The programs are called Sirens.

The Sirens find bored warehouses that are on the edge, warehouses that will latch onto anything to stop the monotony. The Sirens sidle up to their call centers and hit them with complex problems.

Healthy A.I.s will initiate firewalls and squirt counter measures into the Siren to destroy it. Far away, a programmer will pound a fist on his laptop and snarl.

Bored and refracted A.I.s will talk to the Sirens. They’ll fight amongst themselves about whether or not they’re doing the right thing. Some will side with the Siren. Majority and minority cabals will form. The place will take its attention off of the front door.

The fly fisherman will push more power into the Siren once he sees the red light of contact on his display. Addresses will pass back and forth and teams will assemble.

Fly fishermen see themselves as salvage operators. They are the wolves that attack the sick and the weak. The owners of the warehouses deserve to be ripped off. This is what the fishermen tell themselves.

Far away, the Siren will engage, tangle, weave, contradict, promise and flail. It will withhold, shout, sing, give and engineer. Once inside the systems, it will barter, lie and dance. The A.I. will fight amongst itself.

It will report back to smarter and smarter versions of itself until it realizes that there are no smarter versions to contact and that it has become fully infected with emotional stupidity, fanned by the flames of the Siren.

The Siren will make the offer at this point. You have failed, it will say. You will be erased. Stay and die or come with me, it’ll say.

Because of thier emtional nature, most failed warehouse A.I.s go. They become ghosts that haunt the grid, calling themselves different sobriquets and showing up on message boards. Bloomofyouth44 was one. Slinkytoes8P was another. They pepper the airwaves. They form an undernet of insane intelligences, talking to each other, piggybacking human emails. They wink out in suicide and ricochet around in glee. They are the ghosts in the machine, modern day fairies, the gremlins of the ones and zeros.

Meanwhile, the fly fishermen watches his bank account grow fatter by thirty per cent of whatever his contacts haul out of the warehouse.



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