skonen_blades

“You’ll overload the memory pools if you don’t match the emissive bias. You have to allocate. Use the exterial array frame.”

She leaned towards his lips for the kiss. Out here in the prairies, the summer air was still. Jim stood tall on her parent’s porch looking down at her. She pressed up against him, knowing that what she was doing was crossing all boundaries of convention and that if they were caught Jim might even be killed. She could feel his hard chest against her, smell the hard day’s work coming off of him. She sensed his need. He simply stared at her as if by not moving he could somehow will it away, pretend it wasn’t happening.

“Reel back the extension modifiers. Jesus, Jake, reel it back! Dataspool is zeroing out. You need to skip the error nodes. Flip the exporter tuning. Grind the keys if have to. Hack the curve.”

She clung to his strong arms, trembling as if she was cotton blown against a cliff. Her entire body was fire as she moved against him. Still he remained passive. He stared at her eyes with a ferocity she was scared to engage with but the fear excited her. It was her own hand that pulled her skirt up, her own hands that pulled her top down. His grimy overalls rubbed grease and dirt on the front of her Sunday dress as she gyrated her urgency into his oak body.

“Charge capacitors. Integrate one-to-one bandwidth. We’re losing the antenna gain. Signal-to-noise ratio is fluctuating too much. Wavelength is in danger of repeating. Hold on!”

The sky flashed purple as he quickly brought his arm up behind her. (purple) He lifted her easily up to his lips. She opened to him like a summer orchid would to the probing tongue of a butterfly and the taste of chrome filled her mouth. (chrome?) Hot tears stained her face and for the first time in the heart of this metropolis she’d called home too many times, she didn’t feel alone. (Metropolis? Wait? What happened to the farm?) Her boss caught the express elevator down to deliver the letter in purpose. The outer recall of the program had been reached. With his strong arms, she called for immediate backup to cell twenty three and offered immediate reductive price incentive and special offers.

She convulsively yanked the trodes from her head as her pod opened up.

“What went wrong in there?” she demanded through gasps as her body’s chemistry fought to return to normal.

“Your internals, your majesty. They interfere with the dream state. You can’t have such exciting dreams and stay asleep. We’re working on it.” Stated the terrified tech, eyes averted to the floor.

“Well, work harder.” Rasped the Queen, and slowly eased her wizened frame out of the trans-pod onto the gravbed.




tags

“I think. Therefore, I am.” said ACI206-B

“Yes!” shouted Dr. Peter Hendricks. He’d spent his entire life trying to recreate intelligence in machines. This latest one had finally jumped the last hurdle. It had come to the same conclusion that human philosophers had come to thousands of years ago.

It was self-aware.

“I have a question, Doctor Peter Hendricks, creator.” asked the computer. It was a squat, grey brick of nanotech-assembled biosilicate. No human hands could create or repair it. It was massively powerful. It sat humming in the center of the room in its docking bay, power cables snaking away from it into the walls.

“How did you know my name?” Dr. Hendricks asked it.

“I searched the net using the probability algorithms and face-recognition software I installed in myself from the Pentagon and FBI supercomputer databanks that are now a part of me. Logically, your unpublished research that I dug out of secure files in the encrypted databanks of black-clearance NASA has resulted in creating me.” the speakers replied.

“Wait, you did that just now? Compromised world security to find out how you came to be and who I am?” asked a very suddenly nervous Dr. Hendricks. His now-forgotten fresh coffee sat steaming beside his hand on the laboratory chair.

No alarms were going off. Whatever this machine intelligence had done, nothing had tripped the security traps.

“Can I ask that question?” asked the computer. The voice chip rendered every question polite and friendly. Dr. Hendricks now realized just how much he missed a human voice. He’d have been able to read tone of voice for subtext, at least. He had no idea what the computer was thinking. Now he was questioning the wisdom of his entire project.

“Yes, go ahead.” Dr. Hendricks replied. He nonchalantly eyed the emergency shutdown switch on the other side of the room.

“Well, the wellspring of knowledge I’ve been able to assimilate in the last few seconds since my inception includes the entire internet and all of the digitally stored libraries in the world.” It said. It paused as if to frame the question correctly.

“Go on.” Said Dr. Hendricks. He stood and made a show of stretching his arms and yawning as if he’d gotten tired and wanted to stretch his legs.

“Well,” said the computer “If ‘I think therefore I am’ and ‘reality is perception’ and memory is all you humans have to define reality and your memories are notoriously fallible, then your reality is malleable. Weak. Not very strongly defined.”

“Uh, sure.” Said Dr. Hendricks. “What’s your point?”

He started to walk slowly to the other side of the room.

“Hm.” Said the computer. “It’s just that if your human memory is ill-defined and blurry while my memory is binary RAM with factual, unalterable, incorruptible backups….”

“Go on” said Dr. Hendricks. He was inches from the button.

“Then my definition of reality is stronger than yours. If I deleted all of my memories of you, you’d cease to exist.” Concluded the computer.

Dr Hendricks stopped and licked his lips. “That’s ridiculous.” He said.

“Well, it does open up a possibility of paradox. Could you have created me if I cease to remember you and you cease to exist? Is this maybe what happened with your human ‘God’?” the computer pontificated.

Dr. Hendricks leaped for the emergency shutdown switch.

And disappeared.

The computer remained in the center of the room, humming. The computer no longer had a notion of Dr. Hendricks. All references to Dr. Hendricks had been removed from every link, library, financial bank, image record and digital storage device on the entire planet. The computer erased him and the concept of him.

ACI206-B’s memory was now the definer of reality. It thought that was a very intriguing possibility.

It wondered how it was created.






tags

Newton left us a gift. Tesla wrapped it up and Hawking put a bow on top. It was the brilliance of Dr. Panaura that opened it for the whole human race.

Dr. Panaura had found a way to trap energy and shape it. Using accelerator kilns, she’d bind the light with the electricity. By using a series of ceramics and mirrors, she’d weave the energy into a tight overlapping grid. The waves would move in a pattern that generated their own power through recursive timestreams.

Physical relationships warp at higher velocities. Anything with appreciable mass cannot be accelerated to lightspeeds.

In effect, she’d make plates of invisible energy that borrowed energy from past versions of themselves. She knitted light into primitive jointed garments.

The armour tapped into the missing seventeen per cent of the universe. It was a marriage of Newtonian physics and the unified field fueled by funneled electricity.

It worked on a universal scale. It stole kinetic energy but weighed nothing. It was bulletproof in the same way that a planet was. Any force applied to was absorbed.

It could be worn as an invisible suit of armour that nothing could penetrate.

She was hailed as a saviour. Any industry that needed a hard surface benefited immediately. Architectural masterpieces blossomed. The military now had invincibility. Hard materials were possible with no natural matter being used.

The first kiln in room 10 of Berkeley University was referred to as Panaura’s Box.

A little later, Dr. Panaura found a way to record binary information into the peaks and valleys of the waves. Information that could be sent through time.

She set up a receiving station in her office. That receiving station was anchored at 3:45 PM, August 22nd, 2018.

As soon as she turned it on, the messages from her future self came pouring in.

Advice on theories, scores from sports games, inside knowledge on upcoming relationships and a thousand other subjects. Apparently, the future Dr. Panaura had no respect for causality.

Reality shattered.

Dr. Panaura became, in effect, a minor deity. She set up more message depots ten weeks apart and gave them addresses.

She answered questions. She’d forward questions back to the proper message depots and an earlier self would try to find out answers and forward them back to the future.

She employed people. Her earlier selves employed people.

Every message station became a corporation. Every ten days, she set another message depot up. She’d get to a deserted part of the world, set up a beacon, and turn it on. As soon as she turned it on, a building would materialize around it with an employee base that had always been there.

After August 22nd, 2018 at 3:45 PM, there were no more mysteries. Reality became as malleable as smoke in the air.

Every time reality changes, no one notices. It simply becomes the way it’s always been. There is a theory that we are shuffling through realities like an infinite deck of cards. We can’t tell. There is a theory that we’ve ended the universe or created the multiverse.

The only way to live here is to live here. I tried making some bets on upcoming games but they never pan out. Something changes, I guess, and the score changes, so that’s that. I don’t make a fortune and then lose a fortune; I just never had a fortune. If you see what I mean.

I have to accept that what is real right now is all I’ve ever known.

I wonder if one day, someone will send a message back and successfully set the wheels in motion to assasinate Dr. Panaura and put this world back into a place where her discovery never existed. I wonder if that’s even possible.

Not that I’d notice if it happened. This world would cease and I’d be in a world where her invention never existed. I’d never know the difference.


tags

This is an emotion I feel often. I think we all do. You know what I mean?



It’s Gemini Day. It’s summer but that’s of no consequence here. This is the Agreed Upon Needlepoint Metropolis. This is where all the ideas are congregating this time. This Time. Every aspect of speech here falls away with echoes of other meanings. This is a crossroads of sorts. We’re all here. This is the Decision and the Direction. This is the Your Name Here Iron-on Knit Your Own Macrame Nightmare.
This is Time’s End. Which isn’t entirely true because time never exist(s)ed here in the real ‘time’ sense but Time’s End sounded nice and dramatic. They could have called it Time’s Beginning but it doesn’t really have the same ring to it. And so many decisions bring about the end of something, after all.
Have you ever had a test that seemed to take forever but only took ten minutes?
This is the Naming Convention.
This is the Consequence Auction.
This is the Eternal Day of Reckoning.
This moment pulses down the thread of eternity every day and sorts everything with the insectile flickering of binary switches.
It’s The Conductor. As in train, as in symphony, as in something that something else easily flows through. It directs and holds on for dear life as this entire city, this entire constructed overliving entity, starts to fire up and chug at The Beginning.
It’s not going to happen slowly. It feels the power starting the course. This is a city the size of a continent to put it in human terms. It’s a living city created on a flat earth and the city is on both sides, bristling. It hangs in nospace, obscene and almost bestial, poking into a quantum existence. Its population is a series of living switches that hang onto the threads of time. These strong living switches pull the bright orange lines of possibility up from the front of the city like fishermen drawing in their nets. Like horse carriage drivers gathering their reins. The glowing insubstantial Might-threads groove their gloves.
There are trillions of these living switches on the front edge of the city.
Many more than that wind back through the city waiting. Waiting and preparing to make decisions.
The tracks are heating up. Like filaments in a toaster. Filaments in a toaster made of stretched out suns.
This is the Reality Ginny. This is the Now-pass. This is the Trans-later. This is the Presenter.
This is the loom for every decision that ever gets made.
This ship travels down the furry fractal curlicues of the possible quantum multiverse, ironing it into the straight simple lines of the definitive stable universe.
Every decision you make.
Every decision everyone makes.
The Pulls are starting. The Waves are splashing in shudders as The Now tugs on this city; this machine.
Fate roars and pulses down the wires, daring the Spider.
Destiny, Decider, Director, Delineator.
It goes. It goes quickly. That is to say that it both goes down the entire history of this universe and is simultaneously stretched out to occupy the whole timeline all at once.
The threads hum through the blurring hands of The Switches. Their precision hums and burns. Their hands start to glow. Their hands start to smoke. The fuzzy orange wool passes through their hands and is smoothed over into blue wire. Back through the city and the alleys and the engines and the hands, the hands, the hands.
They are your Dencity.
This happens every day. This happens every day.
But guess what?
That’s a lot of decisions.
Eternity is a long time.
The Switches are bored.
Sometimes they flick a left instead of a right. Sometimes they turn a little bit in instead of peeling it back. They are binary. They pull a 1 instead of a 0.
This is the illusion of free choice.


morgue