Tag: science fiction

The Candidate

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Crowds surrounded the candidate, or the spot they thought he was standing.
Throughout the campaign, everywhere they thought he was politically, he wasn’t.
So much so, with so many lies and double-deals, he’d ripped a hole in the fabric of space-time.
One step ahead, his campaign called it.
Displacement, the scientists called it.
The distance grew. Pretty soon, the candidate appeared miles from where they thought he was.
Despite this phenomenon, he was elected. When he took office, as he put his hand on the Bible, he vanished completely.
The hole closed over.
The judge said “Amen and good riddance.”

Helper

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You can tell who has a Helper biochip and who doesn’t.
Every few minutes, their left eye goes hazy and blank.
That’s them talking to HelpNet. And the Helper talking back.
We use just 10 percent of our brains. Helper uses some of the rest to offer advice, keep schedules, remember things, too. Local storage. Reminders. Suggestions. Warnings.
Helpers connect to the global network to pull up scores, stock quotes, dinner reservations.
Sometimes, Helpers get too helpful. They take over, and when they link to HelpNet…
That’s when we stop being ourselves.
Take off those sunglasses and look at me.

The Night Of A Thousand Stars

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“Make a wish, Daddy.”
A tiny finger points to the night sky, silver streaks crisscrossing over each other.
“Those aren’t shooting stars,” I said.
No, they were satellites.
And it was my fault.
After the Russians hit one of ours, we agreed to hand over orbits and frequencies to each other.
I wrote the database.
Everything worked beautifully in the tests.
But the moment the tracker went online, every satellite with propulsion went into controlled deorbit. The rest shut down or exploded.
My daughter pinched me. “Make a wish.”
So, I did.
I wish I had checked my code again.

Straight Up

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If you ask a robot where home is, it usually points to its recharging station.
So when the Andersons’ new service droid pointed straight up, I assumed that it meant the attic.
After the survey of Oak Falls was complete, no other robot in my survey had an attic charging station.
Return to Washington?
No. Not yet.
I went back to the Andersons’ house and asked the robot again, but while we were outside.
It pointed up again.
That’s when the lights appeared in the sky.
“Where is home?” The robot asked.
It seems we have our profession in common.

Demolition Derby

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Hey, man!
Bored with football?
Tired of all these baseball players juicin up?
Hockey not bloody enough for you?
Lemme tell you about a new sport: communication satellite demolition derby!
All it takes is override commands, some maneuvering propellant, and a decent grasp of orbital physics.
There’s nothing quite like watching two expensive chunks of metal surrounded by gigantic solar arrays smashing into each other, leaving tiny sparkling fragments to cloud the the skies for all eternity.
Call your friends. Point your telescopes to the sky. Place your bets.
Then put on your crash helmets and watch the aerial carnage!

Sabbath

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Servants are unreliable.
When the Sabbath comes, you cannot depend on them to do work.
Unsupervised, they do such a poor job. And they steal.
So, we decided to build robots to do the Sabbath chores.
It wasn’t enough to program them with the ability to cook, clean, and mend. They must do it the right way. We also filled them with reason and piety, all of the Talmudic Law on a chip.
The robots worked great. They freed us to do so much.
Until Sabbath. They joined us in prayer, reached for their own switches, and turned themselves off.

Lousy Servant

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I expect my tea to be placed by my bedside at precisely 8 in the morning.
Any earlier, and it will be cold when I drink it.
Any later, and it will not be there when I reach for it.
Instead, I will reach for my sonic whip and you will suffer dearly.
It used to be that the Blahva made good servants, but we’ve bred them to be stupid while breeding out rebellion and independence.
“Shave your matted fur,” I growl to my houseboy. “And show some initiative.”
He licks an eye, shivers with fear, and gleeps assent.
Liar.

Spaceship

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Last night, a spaceship fell from the sky and landed on my driveway.
A small green man climbed out a hatch, waved hello, and asked me if he could borrow my tools.
At least I thought that was what he was asking.
“Sure,” I said. “Do you need English or Metric?”
The alien shrugged. “Grobnick blasdo,” he said, and he grabbed a few things from the garage before working on his engine.
It took him an hour before the ship was pulsing a greenish glow.
“Grobnick bladso,” he said, waved, and flew off into space.
Little fucker stole my tools.

Remix

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It’s fun to mess with memory tapes.
I reversed Johnny’s timestamps and he spent weeks sucking his thumb and shitting his pants while the reindex ran.
Dell hasn’t stopped speaking in French, despite restoring his mind from an old directory.
Tracy and Thomas woke up Thomas and Tracy. They didn’t know each other before I swapped their nodes. Now, well, a little better.
Oliver was supposed to be a remix. I had a great set of financials and old movies spliced into his mind. Instead, he became Corrupted.
This is a picture of Oliver. Find him.
Before he kills again.

Foldspace

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Edgar needs to go to Phoenix.
He pulls out his world map, makes a few folds, and he’s now just a few minutes walk from Phoenix.
“Relative Foldspace” he calls it, in between cigarettes.
I call it Voodoo.
“It doesn’t hurt anybody,” he says. “It just folds my relative space.”
He smokes another, ashes fall on the map.
Brushes them off. “Thought it would set the world on fire?”
With a shout, he tears the map in half.
I recover from my fainting spell to the sound of Edgar laughing. “It’s just a focus. It ain’t the world.”
Is it?