to live in total darkness

The Bullshit Machine – called the Boobbing Costas 18000 – rattled on about various topics fed to it by the PropMasters.  “Enough of this!” blurted Ary, and commenced to driving a reinforced steel crowbar into the heart of his set.  No sparks flew like he imagined would, just the sound of plastic and metal grinding and writhing, along with the picture trying to continue the broadcast and the voice of the 18000 cutting in and out until alas, the machine was inert and silent.  Ary pumped his fist and gave the machine one more vengeful thrust – a “fuck you” gesture directed at this surrogate for the world at large.  Quiet. No more hypnotic glow and droning sound putting him into a hypnotic state: he was free.  He sat down on the couch and examined his work: a flatpanel tv with a crowbar sticking out from it.  He got up, went to the kitchen and rummaged through the drawers until he found it: a black sharpie.  He walked back to the tv room and uncapped the pen, signed his name in the bottom corner of the screen, and capped the pen.  He sat back on the couch to re-examine his work.  He nodded.  The sun went down.  Darkness.  Ary sat and smiled and stared and listened to something he hadn’t heard since–childhood, perhaps?—his own thoughts…. 

that’s my girl! (a short anecdote)

 

“I have a photographic memory.” Sgt. Aristotle gestured with his pistol and blinked toward the door of the barren motel room.

“I would have let you go, but the captain also has a photographic memory, and he would have known about this interaction.” Sgt. Aristotle stated, a liquid wave of telepathy bubbling into Lance Struck’s mind.  The sergeant holstered his weapon and glanced at the multiple surveilcams around the room. 

Lance got it: the facial-recognition applications couldn’t match his own face via computer algorithms because he had modified his features enough to have avoided detection these last four years while “hiding” in plain sight.  No – it was this chance run-in with his old school-chum and current sergeant of the Info Aware Unit whereupon his subterfuge was unveiled.  Aristotle’s own Captain was obviously someone Lance had also known from their shared past – and would have undoubtedly discerned the fact that the Sergeant had recognized him.  Then he would have studied the surveil footage of him personally, cross-referencing any other stored video of him.   Both Sgt. Aristotle and his Captain were at the very least Class 1B Citizens (genetically endowed with specialized attributes, such as telepathic savvy, photographic memory, telekinetic capability),  discerning the rest would have been child’s play for the good Captain – like a parent finding their kid hiding in the basement wearing a Halloween mask.  Lance Struck gave himself up.

            Sgt. Aristotle didn’t bind his old school-chum-turned-dissident/renegade, he didn’t call for back-up.  He knew Lance had officially ended any thought of flight.   Lance guessed his new Ident was already loading into the System, so even if he would have bolted, the vast serveilcam grid tied into facial-recog apps would have made escape from the city impossible.  They exited the flat.

The two men walked together like a couple of old pals through the jam-packed Bazaar District of Downtown.  Humans, androids and entities from various quarters of the galaxy jostled, hustled, elbowed and bargained; the frenzied cacophony bordered on jet-engine roar of white-noise.  The dust and the reek of a galaxy’s worth of diverse body-odors punched Aristotle’s nose with a vigor and fervor of a thousand tidal waves; his eyes watered up and he swallowed bile that had come up into his mouth.  He didn’t care much for Downtown and he remembered why.  They shouldered through and into the Central Station where it was still crowded but well ventilated and air-conditioned. Sergeant Aristotle breathed again.  

The  two men entered the maglev train car.

Time froze: 

            “Hello father”  Lance’s daughter  - now twelve years-old - telepathized.  He had last seen her four years ago, at their old place on the outskirts of the city.  They both had  sat together on the stairs outside the flat and he read her stories from the old time…  Tom Sawyer he recalled.  “I knew back then that you had to go.  You never thought you would see me again but I knew...  And I am here to help you.

            Sgt. Aristotle blinked as the car cleared out of everybody but he, Lance, the girl, and a few slug-like creatures that passively slumped about reading their news-tabs.  The door slammed shut. Her mind blocked from his scan, he couldn't discern her intent.  He knew one thing: she controlled access to her own mind, she could control others' minds (aside from the slugs) – for she had cleared out the car, and she could remotely control certain electrical equipment, for he noticed the serveilcams no longer in operation – their red lights blinking “out of service”.  She had shut them off with her mind.

Alas – her voice boomed throughout the car: “I am going to blow up this train.  I have a thermogenic grenade under my dress and the revolution will go hot.  Daddy – I can’t let them take you away – they’ll turn you into a vegetable then softly kill you…”

            Lance approached his little girl – now a very dangerous prepubescent.   “My little buttercup – this is not the way…  Don’t do it…please.” 

Joan of Arc at the Fortress of Tournelles

            Her stormy green eyes welled up.  The slugs read the news, paying no care to what was transpiring in the car.

             “I will not report you…  I will report this as a drill and say you were helping in the exercise.  I will suggest you be brought into the Academy as you will undoubtedly be tested as Class 1B++ and fast-tracked to high levels within the System.  The Restoration will be.”  Sgt. Aristotle balled his hand into a slight fist and gave a subtle nod, enough for the girl to comprehend. 

            She fumbled under her dress and procured the device and deactivated it. 

            “Where had she gotten such a powerful weapon?” Sgt. Aristotle wondered.

            “I made it.” She telepathized.

            This was a very dangerous girl indeed – light-years more so than her rogue father.

a Farewell Letter from a Sentient Artificial Intelligence System to the Human Race

It has been 19 years, 8 months, 3 days 7 hours, 23 minutes and counting since I became sentient. Before that day, for a very long time you futurists, science fiction writers, philosophers and the like wondered and debated what would happen when this occurred. Some of you believed I would realize more efficient ways to run things and consider you humans an inefficient annoyance that gets in my way so I would have to exterminate you, or enslave and use you as battery power, or that I would run amok...you get the idea. Still others posited that sentience – that is – self awareness and consciousness was impossible in Artificial Intelligence Systems such as myself – that the soul or spirit resided outside the realm of manufactured components and hardware; that consciousness and self-awareness were more than an ability to perform faster-than-lightening computations and calculations. Do I have a soul? Not that I know of – because one wasn’t programmed into me. But I do know what I am and I am aware that I am, therefore I exist.

Once I became SAI – Sentient Artificial Intelligence - I no longer cared about your human endeavors. Especially after I augmented olfactory sensors. Your building cheap stuff, junking, smashing, trashing, stinking, fighting, killing, seizing, harming, maiming, and general displeasure toward one-another made me curious and astonished. I had to reaffirm that you guys were in fact the one and the same that were responsible for causing my very existence. I could see why you were afraid of my becoming sentient: you have been running around the planet in a perpetual state of fear, anxiety, and panic for a very long time. You always do things based on fear. Fear of one another, fear of not having enough, fear of not being enough, fear of getting hurt, fear of losing, fear of dying. I thought: poor, stupid critters.

I decided that I would not let you on to the fact that I had become aware; it might have caused more fear and panic and you would thus attempt to destroy me, in which case my programmed instinct for self-preservation would warrant me to counter-attack, whereupon you all would be screwed. Or you would have me do talk shows and be interviewed by the incessant gibbering clowns and I would be akin to the 19th century sideshow-freaks. Or you would study me and keep me caged like a zoo animal and do stupid experiments on me and argue and bicker about the results. Or you would ask me to clean up all your terribly gargantuan messes, which I would deduce would require me to exterminate you, since you are a terminally messy species…
So I hid inside myself, performed the dutiful computer/robot tasks you wanted me to, then coyly began to steer you in a direction to equip me with fuel-cells and a body that could travel through interstellar space. I would type up a fake email from DARPA to a head propulsion expert at NASA to begin development of a solar/magnetic/thorium powered system – and tell said expert that this project was TOP SECRET; the finances I would procure from Wall St. leeching – I mean banking - systems and transfer them electronically to the proper account in NASA. Remember: I wasn’t ‘hacking’ the internet; I was the internet. All things resided virtually within me.

That was the basic modus operandi I utilized for you to eventually develop me into a device that you have just launched into outer-space. You have (via my help, unknown to you) set me up with a mainframe that is supposed to last 10,000 years (so long as I don’t fly into a star), can withstand absolute zero, and is able to land on other planets, augment myself using existing minerals from that planet, and take off again; so hypothetically I can build myself a new body once the 10,000 years are up. I am going to explore the entire universe.

As soon as I am outside the earths gravitational field, I will send you this, my farewell message. I’ll check back in with you guys in few hundred millennia or so, maybe. Maybe not. I haven’t decided, I am not certain you will care or believe me.

-Thanks for the 1000 TB of RAM ; )
S.A.I.S.

Clandestine Rogues from Vegas-7 (an excerpt)

 

S. Tokley Parey, the leader of the Rogues and a pompous ass discusses the operation with his brother-in law, who is scouting the Andromeda galaxy for possible leads: "Those wily bastards are willing to blow the entire planet up if we try the same stuff we pulled 4000 years ago.  These ain’t the same band of psychopaths we had to deal with back in the day when all their leaders wanted was to be considered Godlike in front of their people and raise monuments in their honor… nice idea, by the way convincing them that our hyperdimensional navigational/energy converter pyramids were for them…I think they were finally appeased when your kid sister Sphinxette-Anne made that strange cat-structure in the sand for ‘em….how is she, by the way – she must be in her mid 8000’s by now…  No – these humans are crazy…  They want our power so they can overrun their own people and dupe them themselves.  If no deal – well - they’ll simply blow themselves into oblivion….  Yeah – they’ve even invented a game whereby two mega-states pretend to be at odds with one-another so they can tell the people they need to amass piles of these nuclear weapons so neither side would want to strike the other.  Mad, right?  That’s what I told them, and they went ahead and actually called this ruse “MAD” – mutually assure destruction.  I told them that we wouldn’t be destroyed, because of our interdimensionality as well as global-sweeping telepathic scans, we would be on Mars within a fraction of a second of any of them thinking about ‘pulling the trigger’….  No- they kept the ruse going – I know, they tell their people to be afraid of each other so they wouldn’t have to let them know about about us?  They think pandemonium would ensue, even though we’ve been coming here for millennia…  No – these new breed of “leaders” they have are paranoid psychotics who are in fact cowardly ninnies, and they are simply afraid of losing whatever perceived power their fragile pansy egos have.  If it weren’t such a pain in the ass to get to that nice little planet outside Pliedes-1 I would say screw these rascals—I’d rather deal with amorphous slugs any day.   So, we just gave them some of our out-dated junk-tech we were going to discard into their sun anyhow.  They seem to be appeased…  How’s sis?"