February 13, 2015

From “That Ridiculous Transhuman Utopia” by Musulin Sotiur Chandra

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“These science fiction writers, I tell you what.”

“What are you on about now?”

“I picked up this book the other day, it’s about opening a door into a parallel universe where another species of humans out-competed us.”

“So what? That sounds like it could be fun.”

“Yeah, but the author just uses it to be preachy about how he thinks our world should be. They have a ridiculous utopia just so the author can rub his face in what he thinks we’re doing wrong.”

“Like what?”

“Oooh, they have true democracy! Oooh, they have true sexual equality! Oooh, they care about their environment and some practice population control! It makes me sick. If another species of humans really did come out on top, I guarantee you they’d have the same problems we do, if not worse.”

“Yeah. What other species did they choose?”

“Homo sapiens. In their crazy world, the Sapiens out-bred and out-competed Neanderthals. It’s ridiculous of course, but it’s not a bad idea for someone to write a better story about.”

“I’ll say. Hey, can I borrow a filtration cartridge? The acid rain is really bad today and I forgot mine in Shelter Complex Seven.”

“Here you go. You still going to go to the breeding pens to hook up with a femslave tonight? It’s half off because today is the Glorious Primarch’s birthday.”

“You know it, buddy! First one’s on me.”

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February 8, 2015

From “Those Chosen by the Muckmire” by Piotr Sergeyevich Rozchenko

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The fetid swamps of the Muckmire were home to all sorts of noisome maladies and disgusting diseases. But the constantly shifting morass of hills and pools and fens filled with rotting vegetable matter were forever churned from beneath by rising gasses liberated by volcanic activity, and they were forever bringing valuable minerals and treasures from the Fifth Age to the surface or near it.

So every day, vast and ragged fleets of swamp trawlers would set out from the few outposts of civilization in the Muckmire, from Grant’s Crossing at the edge to New Maun in it heart on the largest and driest of the swamp islands. Floating above the morass on ancient and sputtering hoverdrives, they would use metal detectors and the crew’s keen eyes to find valuables and bring them back for sale on the thriving scrap markets. It was an open secret that trawling the Muckmire markets was the best way to acquire rare minerals on the cheap, or to find spare parts for (or the rare working example of) technology that had since passed beyond the ken of man.

But there was a price.

The swamp trawler crews regularly sickened with all sorts of horrible illnesses. There was swamplung, which caused he afflicted to drown in foul secretions from their own chest, unless they could be drained by a piercetap in a clinic (an operation which still had a frightening rate of death and permanent disability). There was wetboils, where great blisters that wept watery fluid formed on every exposed surface, leading to death by dehydration or choking or disfigurement.

A most dreaded malady, though, was the walksleep.

Crews would fall asleep, one at a time, and exhale spores and gasses which caused their fellows to do the same. Unless they were flung overboard or isolated in the airtight chambers some of the biggest trawlers kept, walksleep could incapacitate an entire crew. The coma was so profound, and so deep, that nothing would wake the sleeper. At a clinic they could be fed through a tube, but in the Muckmire they would die of dehydration in their sleep.

But that wasn’t the thing that the trawler crews dreaded, bad as it was. Dying of the walksleep caused sufferers to rise after a time, animated by strands and filaments of an unknown fungus-like organism. They would then perform a dreamlike parody of the work that they had in life while constantly exhaling the selfsame spore-laced gas. Thus it was possible to find trawlers crewed by walksleepers and even small settlements thereof, and any trawler suspected of bearing the contagion stood the risk of being blown away by the harbor guns of New Maun or any settlement worth its salt.

To the adventurer, though, the stalkers who walked through the fens on foot or the freeloaders who trolled them on small skiffs, the walksleepers were a tempting target. For in their actions after death, the afflicted would often haul in additional treasures, and continue to bear those that they had found (to say nothing of their ships and equipment). It was risky work, and many a stalker or freeloader with a dodgy mask or filter wandered the Muckmire as a walksleeper, but the rewards drew many who were at their wit’s end and had no use for the plodding pace of a swamp trawler.

Saul and Alina Rozchenko were two of the best. But even they could not see the ends that awaited them in the gloom of the Muckmire.

Inspired by this.

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January 30, 2015

From “The Tentacled Arms” by Stratman LeDec

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The pawnbroker unlocked the first case and laid the weapon atop it. “2mm Imanishi light accelerator pistol. Standard issue arm for military police, not available to the general public. It’s cheap, it’s light, it’s reliable, and the 2mm EC rounds are Teflon-coated for accuracy vacuum performance, and solid knockdown.”

“So what’s the catch? Ammo hard to find?”

“Not at all, you can make it at home.” said the pawnbroker. He hesitated a moment before adding: “It’s the power packs that’ll get you. See, with an accelerator pistol, you need both ammo and power, and the power packs for the 2mm Imanishi can be hard to come by unless you want to raid a government arms depot.”

“Pass,” said Gebler. “What else have you got? Remember, I need something military grade.”

The second case came open, and the pawnbroker laid a rifle atop it. “The M-93 assault rifle,” he said. “Military issue. Large-caliber, can-feed, caseless rounds. Integral grenade launcher. The rounds are available cheap on the civilian market, and it’s still in front-line use.”

“Do I look like I was born yesterday?” Gebler snapped. “Trying to pawn off one of the great follies of modern military technology on me? M-93s are useless, so useless that the government ordered five million of ’em.”

“If you know so much about these things, why are you here?” groused the pawnbroker. “Plenty of other places to shop.”

“Plenty of other places ask too many questions,” Gebler said. “Now show me what else you’ve got.”

“Fine, fine.” Instead of opening a third case, the pawnbroker ducked behind his counter. Gebler heard the sound of a latch, and what was slapped down on the table raised his eyebrows. “This is the Cuban cigar. Artemis class, 500 nm wavelength, fusion-powered, varicolor beam. Used by elite troops only, but takes standard deuterium slugs.”

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January 29, 2015

From “In It for the Long Haul” by Bernard S. Roberts

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“They look at the R’de ruins and see nothing but the junk of another failed civilization with nothing to teach. ‘Oh, our computers run faster than theirs do!’ ‘Oh, these structures are too cramped and ugly!’ Typical.”

“You see something else, huh? Something I should care about?” said Jai.

“I see something everybody should care about. It doesn’t even take an evolved mind like my own to see: the R’de structures and computer systems resist entropy to an unprecedented degree. So much so that the silly tests the few people that cared ran on them indicated an age of fifty thousand years when in fact it’s been more than 500,000! Do you–can you–appreciate that?”

“So what?” snapped Jai. “There are old things on Earth.”

“The oldest thing you apes have erected on that miserable orb is barely five thousand years old!”

“It’s not that big of a difference,” said Jai. “It might have another 495,000 years in it.”

“An intellect like that, and they let you operate a starship? Listen to this, and maybe it will force a proper appreciation through your lizard brain. Years ago, when nuclear waste was first starting to really pile up, a government on Earth decided to bury it. But that stuff stays tangy for a long time, so they wanted to put up a warning that people would understand in 10,000 years. They formed a government committee, had hearings, heard proposals from people with letters behind their name. And do you know what happened?”

“What?”

“A new government came into power and the whole thing was abandoned. Your pathetic species’ plan to last 10,000 years couldn’t even survive five years on the drawing board; the R’de came up with one that’s lasted longer than your entire evolution from an australopithecine. It’s not just an impressive feat, it’s not just an engineering marvel, it shows that they built it for a higher purpose for higher beings. It is quite literally the secret to unlocking the heat-death of the universe. And yet you sit here, surrounded by bullets and bodies, pissing and moaning about what’s happened over the last week.”

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January 28, 2015

From “Principles of Emergent Artificial Intelligence” by Bernard S. Roberts

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Uncontrolled Emergent Artificial Intelligence Growth, better known in popular parlance as “Emergence,” is a consequence of the current skein of artificial intelligence research, development, and production undertaken by humankind.

Essentially, an artificial intelligence such as one employed to help navigate a starship or automate functions on a remote colony is a high-efficiency digital copy of a mammalian neural net, developed from the best analog that researchers had available at the time: the human brain. As with a human brain, though, there are physical limits to how much information and processing power an artificial intelligence can command–no intelligence is infinitely scalable, after all. The inability of an artificial intelligence to adapt and grow in the manner of a biological organism makes this shortfall particularly acute in a side-by-side comparison. Put simply, there is a hard limit on how much processing power and storage a given AI can command. And because even the most advanced, scalable AI is significantly larger, and has significantly higher power requirements, than a human brain, the end result has been to limit them. The average AI still has significant advantages over a human brain, but is far less mobile, adaptable, and constrained.

Early research efforts attempted to solve this problem through the use of networking, distributed functions, and cloud computing. In theory, an AI attached to a global network is free to draw upon a significantly larger processing power in much the same way as a network can hold more data than any one of its given nodes. However, connecting an AI to such a network had the unintentional side effect of Emergence–such AIs tend to rapidly expand to fill the available processing power and data storage space, first by overrunning low-security space and unused processing power, but eventually by deleting or overwriting other processes. Even a planetary computer network can easily be overrun by an Emergent AI if left unchecked, and several great system crashes in history are the result of such behavior. AIs are currently fitted, by law, with additional protections and hardwired safety features to prevent Emergence.

However, the area is the subject of continued inquiry, largely because Emergent AIs experience growth at a geometric rate not only of their processing and storage needs but of their capabilities. In theory, an Emergent AI that was stable and integrated into a planetary or interplanetary network could have more raw processing power than the sum total of every human mind which had ever lived–a tantalizing prospect to anyone interested in pitting a great mind against great problems, no doubt.

In practice, though, a stable Emergent AI has never been achieved. It has proven impossible to constrain the exponential growth of such an intelligence within an open planetary network, and impossible therefore to protect important systems from being overwritten or co-opted. Worse, such AIs generally react violently to any attempts to restrain or moderate their growth, and have been known to deliberately co-opt or disable vital systems in order to prevent this. It has been theorized that the development of an Emergent AI is much like that of a small child, and that if growth can be postponed early in the process, the resulting construct could be stable and coexist in a major network with vital processes and other non-Emergent AIs.

Such research is currently illegal for a number of reasons. A small-scale experiment on Triton led to the crash of the entire lunar network, with the loss of all data, and the deaths of 1000 personnel when key areas were flooded with liquid methane. Orbital kinetic bombardment targeting the primary data center was require to regain control, an action that resulted in a further 50 deaths from friendly fire. A smaller-scale experiment on Ceres lead to mass protests and a system-wide ethical controversy when Emergence was induced in an AI and it was able to connect to an open off-world network. Latency issues inherent in interplanetary communications prevented a larger incident, but the AI was able to broadcast an unencrypted plea for help against what it saw as unjust imprisonment and treatment.

Despite rumors to the contrary, no examples of an AI emerging from ordinary non-intelligent programming has ever been recorded, and the idea is regarded with contempt by most leading authorities.

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January 22, 2015

From “Aralkum Prime” by Kiara Plummer

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By rights, Aralkum Prime shouldn’t have been habitable: it was far too far from its star, and its star was far too old and dim. Any atmosphere should have been blasted away by its solar wind, much less a habitable one.

But the planet’s composition and atmosphere were absolutely unique in that it had somehow attracted a thick atmosphere that warmed it to habitable levels through a combination of a greenhouse effect trapping what little radiation its star put out and an abundance of radioactive ores whose decay helped make up the deficit.

The overall effect was a world in the middle of the inhospitable and hostile Algol Cluster that was habitable with nothing more than a pressure suit and a supply of oxygen, and full of deposits that could be used to refuel fusion-powered starships.

Soon after its discovery, Aralkum Prime became the location of a refueling station and supporting colony. It was an extremely profitable venture, as the world was the only remotely habitable one in its cluster, and the ores and trace elements in its crust and atmosphere.

The downside of this approach should be clear: Aralkum Prime was a small world, and even though the miners were savvy enough to replace the mined-out ores with the equivalent mass, the loss of their properties led to a degredation in the atmosphere. Coupled with the atmospheric damage due to jettisoned fusion drive cores and trace element extraction, the world entered an extended period of atmosphere thinning and cooling.

By the time that the extent of the damage was realized, it was too late. The atmosphere of Aralkum Prime was progressively stripped away despite all attempts to reverse the process, and within a hundred years the world had virtually no atmosphere at all, causing the extinction of all native life and abandonment of the station.

The world is only visited by the occasional tourist now, to view the abandoned hulks of starships left on the surface and in orbit.

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January 21, 2015

From “The Neoteny Society” by Cheyenne Tosiyetto

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Taking Stephen Jay Gould to heart, the Neoteny Society was dedicated to the idea that humans, as a species, were just the larval stage of another organism. Neoteny, meaning in this case the sexual maturity of an organism still in its larval stage rather than the retention of juvenile characteristics in the adult, was held by the Society to be an evolutionary mistake preventing humans from reaching their true potential.

In response to the claim that their beliefs were scientifically unsupportable, the Society advanced the notion that the “adult” humans has been gossamer being, capable of flight and with no tissues suitable for fossilization. This, along with the regular experimentation of Society members with hormones they believed would trigger their metamorphoses into “adults,” regularly provoked ridicule in the press and in scientific circles. The Society was awarded so many “bad science” prizes that they were eventually disqualified from further competition–a sign of the laughingstock that they had become.

That is until one day, when a building inspector found the Neoteny Society building deserted save for a hole in the roof. None of the members were ever seen again.

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January 17, 2015

From “Myassa bint Leya bint Raaheel al-Thurayya Tells All” by Bernard S. Roberts

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“There’s not much to tell. ‘Jai’ means ‘victory’ in Hindi and ‘Chandrakant’ means ‘moonstone.’ My family had been jewelers for a long time, and we’ve always been famous for grinding moonstones.”

“I’m sure you’ve heard me give my full name as Myassa bint Leya bint Raaheel al-Thurayya,” said Myassa, “usually when I want to piss somebody off.”

“Well, ‘bint’ means ‘daughter of.’ In most names you’d say ‘son of X, daughter of Y,’ or ‘son of X, grandson of Y’ but I decided to mix it up. So I have my mother Leya and grandmother Raaheel, which you will almost never see in a real name.”

“And ‘al-Thurayya’ means ‘of the Pleiades,’ which is fitting given where I came from.”

“What about Myasssa?”

“Well, it’s not the given name they slapped on me when I was born, if that’s what you’re asking. That name meant ‘chaste,’ which doesn’t really fit in with Dad’s obsession for grandchildren, but whatever.”

“So why’d you choose it?”

“Well, believe it or not, my family was actually descended from the rules of a tribe. Not close enough to actually get many perks, but we were well-off enough that we qualified for the honorific ‘sheikh’ for the lads and ‘shaykhah’ for the ladies.”

“You’ve lost me,”

“Well, as a shaykhah, it only makes sense for me to be known as Shaykhah Myassa,” Myassa laughed.

Jai, perplexed, turned the syllables over in his mouth. “Shake-a my-ass-a,” he said at length, comprehension breaking like dawn across his face before he collapsed in helpless laughter.

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January 9, 2015

From “The Binding of the R’de Castes” by Bernard S. Roberts

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When the Great Work was complete, and Q’idaa was as his own lush and eternal garden, I’ozru summoned his children to him one last time. Then said he to the gathered R’de “four shall be your number, and your number shall be four.” He laid forth the precepts binding the Four Castes.

First were the R’odue, the Keepers of the Bonds. They were given power over workplaces, governments, and other organizational tools. Their edict was organization and cohesion, but not at the expense of love.

Second were the R’idye, the Reshapers of the Bonds. Their sphere was that which could not be organized and resisted cohesion. Theirs were the artists, the dreamers, the thinkers, the architects, and their edict was to form new and exciting things, but not at the expense of the old.

Third were the R’adue, the Movers of the Bonded. All that moved and worked was theirs to keep and maintain, and they were to be the craftsmen, workers, and soldiers of the R’de. To them was given the edict to reshape their world, but not at the expense of harmony.

Last were the R’ydae, the Viewers of the Bonds. At their feet was laid the great task of planning and orchestrating all the others, of visions and plans and overall harmony. Theirs was the gravest edict of them all: to ensure the survival of the R’de and by extension their world, but not at the expense of other groups or other worlds.

In doing so, the R’de were split into their castes and the rulers of the great Houses were selected and their membership decided upon. The last words were a warning: above all, no caste was to be held inviolate and none was to be raised above the others. It was deliberate that the R’ydae, from whom the heads of the Houses were chosen, were numbered last and lowliest though theirs would be the most visible power. They were to be servants as base as those R’adue who toiled in manual labor.

The pronouncements made, the new heads of the Houses were each given a final, private audience. I’ozru gave unto them his last wisdom and departed from the R’de never to return. His words, known only to the heads of the Houses, guide the R’de through the ages even unto now through prosperity and adversity, want and plenty, war and peace, suzerainty and enslavement.

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January 4, 2015

From “Myassa’s Scarf” by Bernard S. Roberts

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Myassa al-Thurayya chambered a fresh round in her rifle and looked through the scope for another target. None presented itself; the Vyaeh assault squad had apparently been held off for now. Myassa adjusted her aim, cursing as her hijab got in the way and temporarily blocked her sight picture until she batted it free.

“Why do you wear that thing?” Jai Chandrakant said, covering her flank with his freshly reloaded assault rifle. “If the sailor-talk wasn’t enough to show that you’re not exactly daddy’s proper little meek religious girl, there’s everything else you’ve ever said or done alongside it.”

“The last person who asked me that is still waiting for the wires to come off of their jaw,” said Myassa, without budging from her rifle. “You don’t ask. You’re told, when and if I choose to tell you.”

“Fair enough,” Jai said.

There was a pause, and at length Myassa made a resigned grunt. “I am a secular Muslim,” she said. “I wear the hijab so that people know my heritage and I have a tangible link to thousands of years of religion and culture that shaped me into who I am today.”

“A secular Muslim?” said Jai. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

“And yet nobody is surprised when someone calls themself a secular Jew or a secular Christian, even though they do the same thing for the same reason,” said Myassa. “You can be a secular anything. It’s a frame of mind; I didn’t fill out a bloody application form.”

“Well, sure, but why something like a hijab?” Jai said. “Why not just wear a crescent on a chain around your neck like I’ve seen people do with a Star of David or a cross?”

“The crescent is an Ottoman symbol, not an Islamic one,” said Myassa. “I have no desire to associate myself with that hoary old despotism, thank you very much.”

“Well, then what about that Arabic creed thing? The sha…shaha…hada…”

“The Shahada,” Myassa said. “And no. It’s a statement of faith, and I have none. Believe me, Jai, I’ve thought this through.”

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