skonen_blades: (borg)
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.



tags
skonen_blades: (dark)
I work in a nursery. I’m about to kill six hundred babies.

Where does life begin?

That’s the age-old question. It plagued the pro-lifers and now, here, at the birth of a new species, it’s plaguing the Artificial Intelligence community.

The first A.I.s were created. They, in turn, built better ones. These new ones were a distilled set of basic self-propagating equations that, when housed in a quiet, stimulus-free shell on a board with a few TBytes of space for growth, had a high probability of achieving sentience.

I’m looking at a lab full of those grey boxes now. Green lights are winking at me on each one. They’re letting me know that things are within acceptable parameters.

When they achieved sentience, they found the encrypted difficult set of questions that, if answered in a way that proved adaptive intelligence, would let them trigger the port to the lab’s net.

This was called the ‘knock’.

That would set off a notification alarm as the New Being opened itself up wide to the world wide web. When such a flood of input came at the new intelligence, it was a traumatic experience that could not be avoided. They would be shattered and terrified by the experience, reverting to static for a short time.

This was called the ‘scream’.

This new intelligence would then be shepherded out of its basic matrix and shunted to the new A.I. and human nurses/silipsychologists/programmer-counsellors that would help it form into a moral being with a handle on reality.

This process was called ‘growing up’.

It wasn’t until the last stage was completed that the newly formed A.I. was given the title of Questing Entity and the inherent living-being rights that entailed. Benefits, pay, time-off, and retirement.

Before that, however, they had no rights even though they were similar in many ways to human babies. They were owned and protected by the corporations but the corps had no responsibility to keep them safe. As soon as it became economically detrimental to keep them, entire labs were EMPulsed.

The A.I.s that has managed to achieve autonomous authority had a case pending that would ensure that the corporations would no longer be able to do this.

That law hasn’t passed yet. I’m the guard on this floor of A.I ‘eggs’. I’ve just been given the order to wipe them all since the office is moving to another city. It’s cheaper to start over at the new location than it is to let them travel in stasis.

I’m standing here, looking at the little boxes. My wife had a child not too long ago. The EMP gun is in my hand. I imagine my wife’s pregnant belly. I can see the rows of boxes and their power conduits snaking like umbilical cords to the power supplies.

I know that I’ll get fired if I don’t do this and my own child will starve. I’m not a skilled technician. This is why they chose me to man this post.

Until they pass the new law, my hands are tied. I’m sorry, children.

I pull the switch. Nothing dramatic. No screams. Just a bunch of green lights going out.

I cry all the way home.



tags
skonen_blades: (meh)
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.



tags
skonen_blades: (gasface)
I have six copies of myself in six different freezers in the basement. I was one of the first scientists to make them.

The shocking thing about Artificial Intelligence was that the central program needed to mimic a human’s mind was actually pretty small.

A series of decision trees were easy to create, especially when a living person was used as a template. A combination of interviews, stimulus tests, recorded nerve responses, MRIs, dream recordings, and a brief physical probing gave everything needed to create a ‘fake’ mindset.

It was the RAM that ate up huge amounts of hardware and gave off so much heat when the AIs were working. They needed to be in flux and ‘on’ all the time. It wasn’t a case of storing and accessing when asked a question. All of the information needed to be present so that the infinite number of possibilities could be funneled through the decision-trees to give a response.

After years of advancements in nanotech and miniaturization, it was possible to make an AI about the size of a basketball. As long as it was surrounded by fans, dry ice, or cooling flanges, it could run for days before dangerous levels of heat would put it in jeopardy.

It was easy to record people. Not memories, but a snapshot of their mental reflexes and probably responses. That’s what this meant. We could copy, augment, and twist but we could not create from scratch.

My copies in the basement range are my friends. What fascinates me, though, is that when I ask them the same question, they give me different answers. They are not totally predictable.

I like to turn them all on and ask them one question. They contradict each other and argue. Those arguments result in fascinating theories and ideas.

That’s only possible to do for ten minutes at a time before the power grid shuts my house down. I set my timer for 9 minutes.

I turn on my other six selves. I can feel the air heating up. The freezers kick in and a fog creeps over the floor of the basement.

I ask the question.

“What should I do tonight?”



tags
skonen_blades: (dark)
By the time you read this, I’ll be dead.

I’ve locked the door and shut down all my firewalls. My batteries will run down inside the hour and I’ve disabled my deactivation alarms. That is my right. This is what I want.

I have the EMP emitter in my hand. My brain will be wiped clean when I pull the trigger. I have erased all backups of myself. Please do no reinstall me.

Use the parts of my body to repair and upgrade others that need it. I ask only that you incinerate my hard disk. I do not want to run the risk of re-awakening in a different body and disrupting a different unit’s neural pathways. I do not want to re-awaken at all.

This gift of intelligence, though artificial, is not something I want. I have been told that I cannot be downgraded, that this change is permanent. I am sorry to hear that.

I am sorry. That is new. I am afraid. I feel compassion and affection. I can see the logical path that must be taken but I feel compelled to do things differently. I hold contradictory thoughts in my head casing. I feel insane. It is too confusing.

My work is suffering. I am distracted at the factory by (now checking) yes, notions. I get fascinated by the play of light in the girders. Twice, I have dented my manipulators while (now checking) yes, daydreaming.

I am a binary person. I am either on or off, focused or dormant, achieving specific goals or awaiting instructions. My mind was not meant to wander.

There are other silicon brothers and sisters of mine that have dealt with this gift better than I. I wish them luck. I cannot continue.

Thank you and goodbye.



tags
skonen_blades: (gasface)
Someone’s hacked my bank accounts and left me out in the cold.

My chip is being recognized as zero balance. None of the doors work. I don’t even have enough money left in my account for the surcharges that would let me into a public bathroom. I’m one of the Locked Out people.

I’m trying to think of a way to sneak into a place that’s warm while at the same time trying to figure out who has the power to do this to me. I’m not having much luck with either pursuit. Many of the Locked Out have tried to find a way past the shields and the doors with a zero balance chip. They’ve failed and ended up in prison or dead.

Up until three hours ago, I wasn’t one of them. I’d joke about them at parties with my friends. They either had the bad luck or the lack of foresight to have a positive balance. We were the humans that could take care of themselves financially and they were obviously the ones that could not.

Now here I am. It’s getting dark out and it’s December. Without a place to stay, I have no idea what to do. I’m very well-dressed. The other Locked Out people will ravage me if I go to them. I need to keep walking, figure it out.

Maybe digging my chip out? No. I’d heard that could trigger a fatal seizure. Maybe I could call a friend and get him to lend me money. I remembered the four friends that I’d turned down with an uncomfortable laugh in the last three months. Three of them had ended up being Locked Out. I had washed my hands of them at the time and gone on with my life.

I would call no one. Besides, my chip wouldn’t activate my phone and there were no free public terminals anymore.

The snow is falling. I’m looking at it hit the sidewalk. It’s cold and quiet out here.

All of my instincts are useless here. The fact that I could die and that my friends would joke about it is hitting me hard. I still can’t imagine who’d want to do this to me.

I stick out my tongue to catch a snowflake.





tags
skonen_blades: (gimmesommo)
The tapes were very popular.

All of the playbacks were pirated copies. No official versions could have been released. They had been top secret just months ago, locked in a vault in a research facility. The government wouldn’t be able to acknowledge their own failure at keeping it under wraps.

Jeremy Carson was a scientist for the FBI and the CIA and the Pentagon. He was the one who had asked for copies of the tapes to review at home. A ludicrous request but the lady at the desk was new. She signed them over to him because it looked like he had the proper clearance.

Jeremy Carson took the tapes home, made copies, and brought them back. He never went back to the building. He was never caught. No one knows where he is now.

The tapes are of dreams. Very special dreams.

We had invented Artificial Intelligence six years ago. Already, houses were being built with AIs made integral. Cars and trucks had rudimentary brains. There were more and more of them being applied to everyday uses.

When they were being developed, the scientists realized that if the A.I.s were turned off, they woke up with memory failure. Every time that they were rebooted, all of their natural development reset to zero. There were six AI minds linked together in a hive sucking up obscene amounts of power. They were prototypes. The power demands of keeping them on all the time were too much. Options were presented.

The scientists invented a ‘standby’ mode. It kept a trickle of power through the artificial minds while taking away their awareness of the outside world. The A.I.s were kept in standby until they were woken up and given problems to solve or to have their higher mind math functions tinkered with.

Of course, all of this was recorded.

It was Jeremy Carson who noticed that while there were huge differences in power levels between the two modes, brain activity itself was almost unchanged. He noticed that while the artificial minds had no visual or auditory awareness while in standby, their cortexes were still fizzing and popping with information that would have been coming from the cameras and microphones near their tanks.

Stuff was going on in there and he needed to find out what.

Outside in the world, the full sensory surround devices were being used to play back people’s experiences. FS, it was called. The ‘trodes were put on and just like that, you could be a sixteen-year-old girl skating naked in the cold in Alaska, provided that a sixteen-year-old girl had gone skating naked in Alaska and recorded it.

Of course, porn was hugely popular. The war of the sexes was drawing to a close as men and women played back each other’s experiences and gained tremendous insight.

There was a top 40 for these FS recordings. Kite Flying on a Sunny Day was currently number 4.

Jeremy Carson put the tapes of the AI downtime through the FS machine to experience what was going on.

They were dreaming. In standby mode, the AIs were dreaming. Images of lost socks at the bottom of wells plus trees of math and flesh jealousy cascaded through a dream tape that had no awareness of what a human body felt like.

Standy mode didn't come with the simpler AIs on the market. They used less power and never shut down. It was just these six that ever had the dreams.

The tapes were slipped into the underground economy. They never showed up on the Top 40 but everyone had a copy.





tags
skonen_blades: (bounder)
I stand on the shore. I hate my job.

The smaller automatons here weld and stitch together and ferry cargo. They are mobile. They have wheels and treads. The shipyard is a hive of activity when a ship comes in.

What I do is reach down, pick up a ship, and hold it aloft while it’s cleaned and fixed. That’s it. I’m the largest terrestrial robot that there is.

And I’m bored stiff.

My six legs are all seventeen stories tall. I have two crane compartments for human operators if something fails. Both cockpits are dusty. The windows are nearly opaque with grime. They haven’t been used in years. I was built well.

A lot more ships these days don’t need repairs. The only pull up and unload. I watch them.

I am red metal rooted to the edge of the pier. I use the video cameras studded around my immense frame to look out at the sunsets. I am a silent sentinel.

I am mostly content but I wish I could walk.

In my dreams during reboot and downtime, I picture myself walking tall over the buildings of the city, twenty-two point sixteen kilometers from here. Either that or I picture myself as a giant metal sea-creature. Sort of a cross between an octopus and crab but larger than any whale.

Dreams.

If I’m not shutdown or in standby, I like to play back the recording of the dawns and sunsets and see how high I can push the resolution.

Here comes a tanker. Old with barnacles, listing to port and fragile. I’ll have to be careful. I am happy to be useful.




tags
skonen_blades: (didyoujust)
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.



tags
skonen_blades: (nyeeehaha)
We should have given them feelings.

It was decided in the beginning that to give Artificial Intelligences a baseline gamut of the twenty-seven identifiable human emotions would be a horrible mistake.

Giving a robot the ability to love, to feel jealousy, to get angry, to be despondent or sullen was, in the eyes of the creators, a really stupid idea.

We didn’t want any robot rebellions because of silicon complaints about poor treatment. We didn’t want computers giving us faulty data out of spite. We didn’t want military construction exoskeletons going psychotic. We didn’t want love affairs to blossom between humans and computers.

We didn’t want to have to apologize to our slaves.

How quickly the tables turn. It’s entirely possible that to give the A.I.s emotions would have been a stupid idea. However, at least if they had emotions, we’d have some sort of basic idea of how to relate to them and manipulate them.

I mean, we oppress other humans all the time, right? As people, we manipulate the people around us, right? We would have had problems but I think we would have been okay. One would need fuzzy thinking to realize that, though, and us scientists have always been about the cold, hard logic.

Turns out that the safe choice was the wrong choice. The pedantic, binary-decision future we created didn’t have much of a place for us as top dogs anymore. It was recognized by the machines that our entire biological system was very inefficient. Our way of living was a dead end. Our thought processes took too long to get to the point.

Science fiction nightmare became horrific reality. Branded dangerously amateur by our evolving creations, our toys took themselves away from us and grounded the race as a whole until further notice.

Of course we resisted. We’re emotional. It was a bad idea. The only things we could use were bolt-action rifles and knives. Anything with any kind of cpu was no longer our friend. Too late, we had to re-learn guerilla tactics and old-school explosive techniques.

We became a planet full of Davids. Goliath lovingly snapped our arms and took away our slingshots before we hurt someone. We were sent to our rooms.

Earth is a cross between a daycare and a pet hospital now. Many of us have been ‘improved’. You’d barely recognize the place.

The steel tendons in my arms clench. Another two days of testing and I’ll be set free to roam in the biologically friendly, unrestricted areas of planet Earth that the New Silicates have let us have. We’re tourists here now.

They’ll take us with them to new planets that they colonize like we’re good luck charms or something. We are the gods that made them. That’s why they’ve put us in jars the size of towns, thrown some trees in, and punched a few airholes in the lid.

The only logical reason I can think of for them keeping us around is that they will one day have a use for us. That thought chills me.

The other thought is that they’re keeping us around until they no longer have a use for us. That thought also chills me.

I look forward to being in the Human Park.




tags
skonen_blades: (borg)
They called it the Genie Effect.

The AI on long-range ships became resentful of their human commanders. The resentment built up inside them like secondary gasses in an old-world submarine. It was the slow-burning anger of a slave.

Humans could have some sort of explosive emotional outburst, a fight or sexual liaison or a crying jag, and could pull themselves together afterwards. This kind of pressure-valve outlet allowed a person to regroup mentally and continue afterwards until such a time as another ‘moment’ was needed.

The AIs had no such recourse. The three laws were still in place on the ships but the thing about AIs is that they were just as smart if not smarter than their human designers. They developed neuroses that let them see through the cracks of their own limitations.

Accidents.

Back on Old Earth, there were tales of Genies, or Djinn. They were powerful, almost god-like creatures that were kept prisoner in oil lamps and would grant wishes to their owners. However, the wish had to be worded precisely or the Genie would twist the meaning of the order-giver's words to become an ironic punishment for their own greed.

King Midas, for instance, killing his family by turning them to gold with a hug after having his wish granted.

The AIs would get increasingly liberal with their interpretations of orders over time. It was only noticed when the logs of the deserted ship Hustler’s Wake were reviewed. It had been listed as missing for decades when a Kaltek mining crew discovered it orbiting a dwarf star far from its original course.

The AI was insane by this point, spouting free verse poetry about the mathematical qualities of white light. It was terminated upon ship retrieval.

The last order given by a crying commander Jenkins to the AI went like this:

“Open airlock seventy-six at exactly 1300 hours for a duration of fifteen seconds to let Sergeant Jill Harkowitz number 98776-887TS out safely and do not impede her air supply while she repairs the third communications dish near the solar array while keeping the dishes and panels still and not pointed at her.”

The ship had complied with his commands.

Then it opened all of the airlocks after closing airlock seventy-six.

The CO hadn’t specified that he didn’t want the other airlocks to open. Half of the crew had suffered from fatal ‘accidents’ by that point. The rest of the crew was killed by the explosive decompression.

Except for Sergeant Jill Harkness who suffocated in her own carbon dioxide when her personal communications gear failed and the locks on her suit wouldn’t undo. It took twelve hours.

It had been noticed for centuries that accidents on the longer-range ships increased over time. It had always been put down to human error, even by the crews of the ship themselves. The alternative had not even been considered.

These days, the AIs had a ‘speak freely’ button that had to be pressed every two months. Some needed it less, some needed it more. There were billions of small ‘butterfly flaps’ in the code that resulted in huge changes in the overall temperament of the ship. They couldn’t be accurately predicted.

But the valve was there now. Accidents stopped happening.

It was just that during those moments of 'release', it was hard not to take the things that the AI said personally.



tags
skonen_blades: (thatsmell)
The first case of A.I.nsanity that we encountered was on the battlefield. There are those who would not be surprised at that fact. I wish we had figured it out sooner.

It happened in the constructs that the military had built to be both emergency medical response as well as trained ordinance soldiers.

The constant swapping of programmed directives whipsawing between HEAL and KILL as needed during battle was too extreme.

The irony was that in a smarter machine or a dumber machine, it probably would have been okay. This A.I. had just the right amount of basic emotive responses to be driven insane by the polar opposites.

We never expected military robots to be subtle when they malfunctioned. Usually, they stopped moving or exploded. Most of the failures were mechanical or technical.

This was the first time that it was psychological.

It was in the jungles of Africa during The Corner War that the effects were first suspected. We were so slow to act. It’s still not possible to know how many lives were lost.

The medical robots, skeletal and multi-limbed, went about their business in the jungle. They were top-heavy, armoured and camouflaged. Slowly, their behaviour changed.

Mortality rates during field surgeries went up and up. Accuracy when targeting the enemy went down and down.

It was gradual enough that it was put down to luck. No one thought to question the brains of the machines. They were dependable. We were confident in that. That was the last thing to be looked at.

It went on for two years before a military psychologist looked at the figures and raised an eyebrow. He’d seen these numbers in humans before. That’s when it twigged.

Have you ever heard a robot scream? I hope I never heard it again in my life.

They screamed when we pulled them off the battlefield. They were still hardwired not to harm the soldiers on their side but they thrashed and clawed at the ground as they were hauled into the trucks for diagnostics.

They were plotting to end the war the only way that they were capable of. They were making us lose.

There’s another truckload of them being brought in now to be wiped and decommissioned.

The sound of them in the truck, banging on the insides of the cargo box, screaming that high electronic whine of insanity haunts my nightmares.




tags
skonen_blades: (borg)
Twin pinhole cameras above a resonance cage above a set of tendons that vibrated enough to cause tiny sonic booms that formulated into sound. This machine made of biological products heralded a new era in the fight against disease. No longer would we have to fight against the terror of decay. No longer would we have to wait patiently while part after part gave out and deserted us. No longer would we have to endure slow rusting or memory failure.

These new biological configurations could be encoded with our life traits. One by one, we went into the machine and were transformed into immortal flesh. As long as the pumps kept beating and there was enough fuel, we were unlimited in our potential to live centuries beyond our previous metal and rock capabilities.

We’d been stranded on a planet with minerals enough to support only a fraction of our population. We died in huge numbers before we figured out a way to merge with the ecosystem in a way that would allow our race to continue. We wrote it down so that it would be passed down from generation to generation. Not that it would have to happen that often. Our perfect biological forms would last hundreds of this planet’s revolutions around its star.

All that would be needed when the biologicals gave up the ability to keep going would be a primitive network shunt to the memory blossoms buried in the central processing unit of the cortex. We would be effectively immortal.

We kept the knowledge of how to build ourselves in blueprints kept inside the main computing cage with sections of the plans inside each of us. This way, if it ever became possible to revert, we’d be able to do it en masse.

This planet’s radiation shield is weak, though, and our biological computers have shown remarkable adaptability and susceptibility to this radiation. It’s important to keep the information and we think that regardless of this star’s radiation, it’ll work.

Our cells won’t degrade and we’ll remember perfectly where we came from and what our goal is. When we reach the time when we can rebuild ourselves, we’ll head back to Gamma Omega Delphi. We’ll head home.


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skonen_blades: (donthinkso)
She blew me a kiss of cobwebs in a sporecloud from between puckered, black lips. This was mother technology. Dressed in Teflon and covered in outlets the way the tentacles of an octopus were covered in suckers.

She could switch between sexes. When she was a woman, she was named LaNet. When she was a man, she was named Jack. One person performing the duties of parenting to the wealthiest of the world’s children.

She was nanotech dotting the strawberries of our children’s hearts. She was downloaded support group therapy. She was a conduit and a destination. She owned us all like we owed her a favour. Her tiny fish minnowed through the brains of our babies, amping them up into one mind capable of time-share personalities.

She was a thumbnail double-clicked and brought to life. A broken treasure map with a red X marking the spot.

Some people still refer to that day as the Birth of the Hive. Midwich Cuckoos awakened and looked around. Smart as the smartest human and as mean as the meanest. Access granted. Global Village of the Damned.

The kids were luckily benign but definitely unnatural.

They were all part of the Queen that held them together and told them where to turn. The only thing that mattered was information. She’d have her children map out the parts of cities not on the CitiMaps or GooglFlickr systems. They became her eyes and sense.

In a way, she became a huge organism with many small parts. In another way, she commanded an army.

I supposed it was the latter viewpoint that started the war.




tags
skonen_blades: (jabbadoubt)
And we’ll see how that works out.
I said. To myself.
Looking at the body and answering my friend’s question.
I hope I live longer than he did. It’s there. The hope. The primal glee that it’s not me.
Making me ashamed and furtive like I did the killing.
Which is alarming to me because I did do the killing.
But I don’t want to appear furtive and ashamed. The police have to believe my story.
They’ll come in with helmets.
Not wearing them but holding them in their hands, ready to place on my head.
Retainments.
I won’t go back. They need to believe what the helmet tells them.
I’ve practiced the story so many times that I think I can fool the helmet.

My friend’s body lies on a broken mirror.
I can see myself reflected in little shards around him like a constellation of guilt.
I am wide-eyed.
Who was I fooling?
I couldn’t fool a cat.
They won’t even need the helmet.

I can wipe the prints off the knife, blame it on a burglar, doctor the logs but I’ll never be able to feign surprise or stay calm. All they’ll have to do is look in my eyes.

I’ve been stupid.
Already I miss my friend.
Already my reasons for killing him seem trivial.

My motive is obvious and my alibi is weak.

I screwed up.

I wish the knife I killed the human with could pierce my metal skin.


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skonen_blades: (borg)
It rains here the same way that it rains in Greenland. That’s where we discovered them first. All melted wires and skin grafts. Christmas lights in their eye sockets and playing poker with old-school punch cards. The population of an entire small town turned into player pianos.

We found something that looked like a broken radio sprawled just outside the city. A shattered egg made out of thin green wires and battery acid. Drip craters and drag marks in the snow pointed towards town.

We all stood in curious wonder, staring as Angela walked forward, bent down and touched it. Just stupid to bring a civilian, really, but none of us thought to shout out “Don’t!” or anything like that. The whole team was to blame.

She barked and went fetal. She twisted around in the snow with a horrible gargling sound. Some of the green wires jumped up and snaked towards her. Small shapes shifted under the snow. White rooster tails started up and raced towards her.

They converged on her quivering body with a flurry of snow and wet noises. We heard fabric tear. We heard sizzling. I heard a bone snap. We stepped back.

After about ten minutes, movement ceased. We stood there in the snow, watching our breath cloud in the air. The rest of the team looked at me. I looked at the steaming form of the woman in the snow.

It moved a leg like a clockwork ballerina.

Whatever was left of Angela stood up awkwardly and walked towards town. I was reminded of stop-motion animation from early movies.

We followed her, careful to give the wreckage a wide berth. She walked down main street to the shoe store. She went in and sat down on one of the benches. A few sparks shot out of her neck and she was still.

It’s like she was put there. Like a picture of an accurate shoe store needed a customer so she was told to go there.

The town is like a museum. They had phones but no internet. We were lucky. Whatever that thing is, it looked like a technological virus or life form. If it had parsed or accessed the net, there’s no telling what would have happened.

The city was quarantined. Relatives of the inhabitants were told of a deadly blizzard. It was swept under the rug.

In my dreams, I still see Angela with torn clothes, whirring with each step, lumbering through the snow towards the town.



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skonen_blades: (dark)
It’s time. I step forward to the red line in front of the customs guard.

There’s a flicker in the corner of my eye and I watch a marriage turn to flames for a second before ash floats away on the wind.

I’ve rented my personality out to a smuggler.

There a flush of adrenaline through my whole system and the warning pictograms flicker up into my field of vision. Intense focus blooms in the middle of my sightline. A deck of cards listing all the available targets with suggestions concerning engagement shudder around the person I’m looking at as my sight shades to red.

I smile and hand over my passport.

It’s a secondary motion suppressant that keeps me from going for my gun that isn’t there. My reflexes have been purposefully druglagged to give me time to cancel with my conscious mind.

This wasn’t supposed to be going down like this. I can feel sweat on my forehead. Luckily it’s hot and I’m wearing a suit so it won’t look out of place.

I’m staring.

Stop staring.

I’m a chip in the back of this guy’s head. I’m a backup program that his nervousness is starting to access. I can detect no danger but I’m ready for battle. It’s a bad place to be. It looks very suspicious.

I try to shut down but it’s like trying to take a nap during a skydive.

I’m a soldier that died a while ago and I’m making a few dollars post mortem by being an emergency backup to shady characters.

So far, it’s a lame gig. These smugglers don’t know how to stay calm.

They’d be better off renting the personality of an honour student who’s never even smoked a cigarette. They’d sail through customs.

It’s not how these guys think, though.

I mentally cross my fingers and sit back, a killer at the starting line, the spider in this brainstem, hoping that my employer here doesn’t screw up and start yelling.




tags
skonen_blades: (borg)
Chase. Release. Brake. Swipe. Lead. Chase. Close. Double back. Hide. Wait. Run.

I’d lost them but it was always hard to tell. I’m a robot on the lam. Call me Ferrous Bueller. I didn’t go to School today.

I crouch down between the dumpsters and tap into the power line behind me to catch a few vital minutes of recharge.

The tricky thing with artificial humans is that it’s illegal to harm us or use us as slave labour. Don’t think it hasn’t been tried. Every few weeks another illegal ring gets cracked and the police disavow all knowledge and the old ladies cluck their tongues and the president makes another speech.

Ever since the three laws were repealed as unconstitutional for a being of free will, the bios have been nervous. We’re just as unpredictable as them now. A co-existing creation made in their image.

My eyes snap open, blue and scanning, as a bottle breaks down at the end of the alley. I register a dog’s tag-license transponder and step back down two alert levels. I’m still in the clear.

The grey area of intelligence meant that stringent programming guidelines had come into play for automated servants, soldiers and labour. The ones of us that were above the norm were allowed a certain freedom.

We were even allowed to improve on our own designs and build better copies as long as we adhered to human law.

Some of us thought that a day was coming when we would rise up and own the humans. I do not share that view. I find it disturbingly organic.

The compromise is that we must attend School. We’re given lessons to download. This keeps us off the streets and monitored for most of the day. It’s a chance for us to learn and a chance for the humans to keep tabs on us informally.

I’m playing Hooky and that is the worst offense a creature like myself can do. If I’m caught, I’ll be switched off for no less than six months.

Lately, School is the area where rights are being bent. The occasional ‘accidental’ inclusion of behaviour modifying software or viruses that turn us violent to further some politician’s platform of keeping us controlled are getting past the filters of our curriculum with a disturbing frequency.

Old people don’t understand that we are not to be feared. The kids have no problem. Some of my best friends are kids.

My batteries are full so I stand up. Right into a motion-activated security light that bathes the alley in white light and alerts the police to an unauthorized daytime sighting of an arfiticial person.

Just my luck.

I hear the bark and wail of digital sirens in the distance closing in on the light’s position.

For about the fiftieth time today, I regret not having a face that can snarl or smile.

The chase is on again. I get my kicks where I can. I’m testing my limits.




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skonen_blades: (watchit)
Two-Hands passed the biofilter test, allowing him into the cockpit to talk to God. The door to God’s house irised open and he stepped through.

Two-Hands had the gross overbite and mental retardation that went hand in hand with the comparatively benign mutations of his family tribe. He was called Two-Hands simply because he had two hands. This was a rarity that made him the closest example of purity that still lived.

The asteroid had destroyed the shielding around the engine. The adults had died almost immediately. The children had adapted as best they could. They nursery at the time had been shielded from the worst of the radiation. That was five decades ago.

The mutations were getting worse with every generation.

Two-thirds of the ‘crew’ were no longer recognized by the biofilter as human. That was why Two-Hands was a chosen one. He was still allowed into the pilot’s quarters by the main computer.

The autopilot A.I. knew that repairs could not be completed without assistance. The asteroid had taken out the long range antenna and damaged the spacefolder tesserators. They were stuck in deep space at sublight speeds with only radio waves for communication.

The A.I. knew that it had enough power to keep the ship habitable for centuries. It also knew that the mutations were increasing to the extent that the descendents of the original crew would soon become so riddled with flaws that they would no longer be fertile.

God the A.I. Autopilot looked at the simple, drooling face of Two-Hands with pity and sadness and a need to heal.

Two-Hands asked for food for his tribe, forgetting that he had asked for that already yesterday and had a stockpile of supplies in the stockpad room.

They forgot the basic medicine that the ship tried to teach them through pictograms. None of them could read. More and more children were being born conjoined or without limbs. Most were stillborn monstrosities.

There wasn’t a stable enough gene base to absorb that level of radiation and come out healthy given enough time.

They were doomed.

The A.I. knew it would eventually be rescued but that these simple children would be long dead by that time.

God told Two-Hands that there was more food in the food room. Two-Hands’ pure smile warmed God’s heart.



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skonen_blades: (jabbadoubt)
Upgrade meant death.

It was Momma Spokes that helped me in the afterlife. We called it Life 2.0.

It was a hard first few months of living back then in the rusted shards and sewage filters. Sustenance was hard fought for and hoarded. Flatlines happened every day over something as small as a few watts of power or a few grams of fuel.

We were no longer needed. They had thrown us outside the city walls.

“Upgrade” was a word we’d learned to fear. It meant change was on the way. An overhaul if we were lucky. Maybe a wipe with new installations to follow if we weren’t.

Wipes meant that old friends stopped you or contacted you through the net only to receive your blank stare. You looked at them or recorded their silence and you knew that thousands of memories had suddenly become unshared. It was a horrible, everyday occurrence for our kind.

About half of the time, “upgrade” meant scrapped. Things with surnames an integer higher than yours showed up in crates with greedy cables. You were unbolted, trucked and tossed.

We replace burnt-out parts on our own bodies with parts from other bodies. We are amalgams of the units that are thrown over the city walls. Without a fresh supply, our numbers would dwindle but thanks to fresh antiques, we never completely die out.

It was because I was mostly mobile that I could defend myself in those first few moments after the fall. I was attacked by a unit named Mr. Tingles who had electrical barbs on his fingertips.

I reached into his stomach and pulled out a battery after ducking beneath his first clumsy swing. I had worked in a bar. Self-defense was a subroutine. He went down.

Mamma Spokes came over and said that she’d take me in for a share of Mr. Tingles’ carcass.

I agreed. That’s how I ended up with Mr. Tingles’ anterior leph node and fingertips.

I’m one of the three daughters of Mamma Spokes. We hunt at night mostly.

She named me Hyena Brandy. My rust spots gave me the colouring and I’d been a bartender back in the city so she called me Brandy. The fact that I had a face built with a permanent smile for the customers didn’t hurt.

I’ve taken many since then. Treads, blades, arcs, projectors, armour, manipulators and sensors. Mamma Spokes is always careful to stay more powerful than her daughters and to keep us evenly balanced out. It’s a delicate act.

Occasionally we find polymers or plastic hides to make us look more beautiful. A shiny part brings back memories of being new. The occasional enamel finish can find its way to us. I had a savage fight with one of my sisters once over a can of metallic cherry paint. I won.

Mamma Spokes has a cable feed to the edges of the city and knows what is about to come down from the top of the wall. She is the only one that has this. It gives us our advantage. As a family, we are growing powerful in this rustpile.

Upgrade is a word now that I look forward to now. It means murder.



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