Monthly Archives: December 2016

General Fiction

My Silent Friend

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Sometimes the world gets so loud. I work in an open-plan office, which is another word for hyper-extroverted socially-engineered hell. Open-plan offices are always full with prying strangers buzzing around you, incessant small talk and constant social pressure with waves of noise. I walk outside sometimes, but the office is right in the middle of town and the sounds of the city replace those of chattering co-workers and ringing phones.

I have never liked this level of noise, but since my wife left me it is hard to deal with. We were not married long, but it was long enough for my entire life pattern to change. My routine was no longer going out drinking and having fun, it was now staying in cooking and watching series. My hobbies were no longer partying with friends, it was seeing the in-laws and shopping for groceries. I was no longer the fun-loving one in the office that was able to make a couple jokes, I was the serious husband providing for his family.

And then she left.

Open-plan offices are like the communal showers of the business world, everything just hangs out there. It could not have been half a day and the world knew I was being divorced. There are the one or two who ask you directly, but the majority just whisper it to each other and glance at you out of the corner of their shitty little eyes. All you want to do is quietly get on with whatever work you have to do, but people are constantly buzzing around you and often pulling you into their little conversations; who won the game, what are your weekend plans, did you hear about Pete, do you think it is going to rain, what about the memo, did you get the email, check out the notice board…

So I endured the noise of the open-plan office. And then, later, stuck in traffic, I endured the noise of the congested city. I could do all of that because the moment I opened the door to my empty house, it was not at all empty.

My silent friend is there.

He comes–like he always came–bounding up to me, all fur and licking. His excitement is tangible, but he does not interrogate me with questions nor hoot at me for answers. Tail wagging furious behind him, he jumps to lick my face with sheer ecstasy.

I laugh and shut the door behind me. I drop my bag on the table and crouch down to hug and pat him. He is a fantastic, regal beast with a comical flair. His rich coat frames his athletic form and his warm brown eyes just pour pure love into this world. I feel a little guilty that it was my ex-wife that had wanted to get him. I had argued with her at the time but I had eventually given up. It was the best argument I have ever lost.

I walk through to the kitchen and he trots behind me. I feel the warmth and happiness flowing from him. His noisy, smelly friend is home! Yay! Perhaps he should be the one working in the open-plan hell, I think briefly, chuckling to myself.

I check and refill his water just outside the kitchen door. Then I take out his food and fill up a large bowl with a generous helping of it. He sits patiently while completely and utterly focussing on my every movement. Almost like it is independent of him and his thoughts, his tail is wagging furiously behind him as he waits for me to give him the bowl of food.

I grab a microwave meal for myself while he is guzzling down his daily nourishment. I am tired of cooking and cooking for one feels quite pointless, so I just guzzle down my microwave meal and move through to the lounge. Here I slide onto a couch and put on some soft TV. I do not put just any channel on. No. I have been subject to noise the whole day, so I put on one of the music channels and soft rock starts to float through the room.

He jumps up onto the couch, licks my face with his smelly breath and curls up next to me. I smile and stroke his coat. He looks up and I scratch behind his ear. I can feel him smiling. I slide back in the chair and close my eyes.

He begins to softly snore. It is a rhythmic sound that rises and falls in regular intensity. I feel his comfortable weight pressing against me. The soft music on the TV flows into another song. Outside in the night, the city is still there and the open-plan hell still awaits me tomorrow morning. But, for now, I am at peace at home with my silent best friend. And, as I start to fall asleep, I realise that I am smiling.

Science Fiction

Dream Gate’s Hidden Function

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bridge-of-dreams

When the Dream Gate was first invented, the scientists heading up the project used it to record the dreams of their subjects. It was only much later when a number of corporations and private individuals began trying to reverse engineer the patent, that these people discovered that the Dream Gate could also craft dreams. Reversing the flow of data allowed you to insert dreams instead of just observing them.

Imagine being able to order a dream off a menu? Do you want to be rockstar, the President or have a threesome with Playboy bunnies? Imagine being able to customise the exact duration, place, events and other details that you would experience in a dream? Do you want to watch the history of the known world as it unfolds or to feel a year-long orgasm?

The porn industry was naturally an early adopter of the technology. From normal to orgies to kinky to extreme snuff dreams, the depraved depths were the limit here. Next were the leisure and thrill seekers, who downloaded customised dreams, visited far-flung parts of the universe, skydiving without a parachute or blood-soaked rampages down main streets.

Then imagine that prisons are full. Do not forget that holding and feeding prisoners for the whole terms are also expensive. Now consider that you can forcefully insert a dream into a convict that felt like they were in prison for the duration of their sentence? You could even customise special features in this dream to teach the convict a lesson. And, best of all, this only takes an evening’s sleep to enforce and when the now-humbled convict awakens in the morning, you can send him on his way.

Researchers, academics and students were the next to use find use for the Dream Gate. Like the criminals, they would use it to extend time, but their’s was for research and studying. Imagine that the night before an exam, you could get a good night’s rest and have an extra year to study for it. Imagine that you could go to sleep and give a research project with limited funding for a year near-eternity to be completed?

Sure, there were tragedies along the way. People who messed up the Dream Gate’s functions, input too much time or customised dreams that they could not handle. But, in the end, the attractions outweighed the cost. As time went on, it not only became more acceptable to use the Dream Gate until it became the norm.

Eventually, most of the world was asleep most of the time. Luckily, AI, synthetics and micro-robotics had advanced to such as a stage that no one needed to wake up. Everyone was well nourished and agelessly maintained–the problem of aging had been solved by a scientist after dreaming about it–while the Earth carried on spinning around the Sun. Solar, wind, water and gravitation power sustained automated cities, sustainable countries and a world that had fallen asleep.

Who knows how long it actually was? Who knows how much time passed while mankind collectively dreamt their individually customised dreams?

Who knows?

But, despite the world’s dreams, reality was still plodding on. The Earth still had awake life on it. Over millions of years, this scurrying, fury life would quietly evolve into intelligence. This intelligence would grow up around the infrastructure of these strange, dreaming beings that slept in their quiet, forgotten cities as their metal, magic guardians silently moved around them.

Before the last Sleeper died, the Sleepers would initially inhabit this new intelligent lifeform’s tribal myths. Then the Sleepers would inhabit this species’ religion, and, eventually, the Sleepers–now long dead–would be as little more than rock paintings and obscure references in old dusty books as this species began to reach for the stars.

Little did this species know that many of their subsequent achievements would echo the private dreams of their now-completely-forgotten co-natives to Earth, the Sleepers. Little could they have comprehended it, anyway, as nature had learnt Her lesson and this species She had evolved to need minmal sleep and absolutely no dreams.

General Fiction, Horror & Dark Fiction

The Corner Office

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“Girls don’t get the corner office, Suz,” chuckled the boss, Jeff Jeoffery’s or JJ. It was her first week in the office. It was also the moment that her goal was given both a name and an obstruction.

While all the other girls were worrying about boys, she had spent her breaks in the library studying. While all the other girls were out driving in fast cars with boys and going to parties, she had achieved a cum laude in her degree. While all the other girls were out getting married and pregnant, she was entering the male-dominated workforce with a keen eye for the top, and now the corner office.

It was not that she was not beautiful. She was quite pretty and even stylish in a petite, understated way. She would never make Playboy model, but she had decided to that she could make management.

“Darn JJ,” she would gossip at the water cooler with some of those on the same level as her, “What’s his deal? Why do they keep him as management here?” It always allowed her colleagues to moan, which temporarily bonded them together, but she knew why JJ was the boss: he was good in all the right ways and just bad enough as a human being to make him excellent at both business and extorting labour. The conscience of capitalism reports up the chain of command, not down.

An office is a strangely self-contained environment. Your big enemies are out there in the real world as other businesses compete with yours, but they feel distant and rather abstract. The real enemies are big and loud and in front of you, stealing your ideas, claiming credit for your successes and subtly edging you into obscurity while they rise higher and higher. Your real enemies are the people you work for and with, or, at least, that was how she began to view it.

Each step in the right direction she would make, another would claim it as their success. Each positive contribution she would make, JJ or someone else would insert themselves into. Each movement forward and upwards would see her slip backwards and remain nearly stationary. Nearly stationary, but not quite…

It had been a couple of years now and through sheer willpower, staff attrition and what she called “manoeuvering” she had managed to rise in command under JJ. It was definitely something, but it also sounded better than it really was. JJ’s word was still final and she had no real influence over him. The closer she got to him, the more he could claim her victories as his own (and the more he did). And, she still did not have the corner office.

Friday afternoons and staff parties were the hardest. On Friday afternoon, JJ would always pop off to play a round of golf with key clients, or at least that was what he claimed. On the way out he would make sure to pop by her office to check “everything was OK”, but in actual fact he would linger there emphasising non-vocally how he was still the boss and she was under him. Once, after she had suggested that perhaps she should come along to meet the clients, he had laughed at her like she was some useless little girl and asked her what her handicap was on golf? Besides, “…Suz, the clients are all men,” he had said as if that was explanation enough.

JJ had laughed a lot at that. She had laughed politely with him, and then JJ had left. Later that night, she had cried herself to sleep after finishing a bottle of wine. She did not really know why, but it hurt a lot.

She still had no boyfriend, but she was not concerned by that. Her father, before he had died, began telling her that she was obsessing too much over working and should go find a good man. Her mother had died when she was young and her father had raised her. Perhaps he was the reason she was so focused and she normally listened to him, but she didn’t this time. She also had no friends to fill the space of leisure, so she would work late during the work week and then spend her weekends finding reasons to fill time with work-related things.

Then there were the staff parties.

She never had friends in real life and the office was no different. Somehow social events like parties emphasised her awkward, loneliness even more. But, given her station, employees would politely interact with her and laugh a bit at her occasional joke. But she knew that the moment she left their direct company, the sneers and rumours and complaining would come out. “Suz is lesbian,” was one that she suspected was gaining momentum as her unmarried, uncoupled status was unusual, but who knew? She tried really hard to ignore it and told herself that it was the nature of the position that colleagues never liked their bosses. Still, late at night when she was tossing and turning in her bed, these things would haunt her and make her want to scream and cry at the same time.

And then JJ disappeared. It was after a staff party. He had drunk a lot, but so had many other people. His wife had called the police two days later when he was still not home. Apparently, he would disappear for a night after staff parties sometimes, but he had never done so for two nights. His car was found in the office basement parking. The key was in the ignition, though it was not on, his seat was rolled back and a good couple smears dried blood stained the upholstery and a bit of the seat. The rearview mirror was broken like there had been a brief struggle, but there were also no signs of forced entry.

The police began to swarm around the office. Normal day-to-day work pretty much ended and the days became police request, police interrogations and media flashes from the crowd gathered outside the office. Paparazzi were making the rounds outside while the police were doing so inside. Every single employee was being grilled by middle-aged, under-payed, angry policemen about what happened at the party that night.

There were no real suspects, but a number of employees thought that they had seen Suz and JJ having a drink and a smoke outside party late in the evening. As far as the police could tell, Suz was the last person to see JJ alive and she became the de facto suspect. The police began to interrogate her repeatedly while calling friends and family for character witnesses. They found the former useless and the latter a rather short list. So they began to focus the investigation on motives and the Board’s promotion of Suz into JJ’s old job could not have come at a worse time. Still, Suz was a woman, so the policemen only pursued her half-heartedly in between cups of office coffee and doughnuts from the canteen downstairs.

In the end, despite all the digging and all the talking and all the asking and all the noise, the police, the media and the general gossip never firmly concluded what happened to JJ. Eventually, despite JJ’s widow’s distress and a complete lack of closure, even the gossip in the office died down and day-to-day work continued almost like usual.

Except, Suz now sat in the corner office. She reported directly to the Board now and managed the whole floor and even a couple below that. It was all worth it, she found herself thinking after the final interrogation by the police in her corner office. This was almost everything she had ever hoped for, but there was a nagging feeling. She had met with the Board a couple of times now and she really liked the feel of the Main Boardroom.

She did not even notice the little specks of blue far below her corner office window as the police left the building for good. She was too busy fantasising about the Main Boardroom, rubbing her fingertips back and forth. Her nails would be fully grown back in about a week or so. It was a real pity she had had to clip them all off. A couple had snapped off or been chipped in the car and, if she had not trimmed them all down, it just would have been assymetrical. It was a real pity, she thought absentmindedly, stroke her leather chair and remembering how soft and luxurious the Boardroom chairs were.

Fantasy, General Fiction, Science Fiction

Beyond the Dreams of Men

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The Babylonian gods were the first. Their believers and their faith died off long before many of the others. The Great Dragon Queen, Tiamat, and the vicious, spiked warrior, Marduk, would be the last to go as they defiantly fought each other in their endless conflict. But, no matter their status, Tiamat and Marduk still went like all the rest of them.

Other gods in other ages would whisper about it. They would wonder if Tiamat or perhaps Marduk (some wondered if it was the Moon Goddess, Isis, perhaps?) that had wrought it, but in truth it was far older than that. It already ancient by the time Tiamat’s black, scaled form lumbered up to it.

Some periods there would be many turning up at it. For instance, when the Roman Legions spread like a virus across the old world cutting down resistance and smothering old gods. It did not help that the vacuum from the Empire’s collapse was filled by Christianity and its own conquering uni-god.

Then there was the push by England, Portugal, Spain and France across the world drove. These imperial nations drove expansion and knowledge. Cultures meshed and the Christian way conquered many around it. This ideological push was not victimless but sent the old, previously-harder-to-find gods away too.

The cruel irony is, as America rose, world wars rolled off like vicious claps of lightning and then technology, trade and the times all changed, so too would the Christian god take that final walk towards it.

It is the fate of all gods to eventually be forgotten.

In the old, cold mountains that men cannot see, at the top of the highest peak in the ancient rock thrust from the centre of the molten Earth, there exists the final resting place of the gods. Cut as a clean tomb with ancient, unpronounceable words carved into the side of it by hands that even the gods have no knowledge of. Despite the freezing temperature and howling, blizzard at these heights, the tomb’s stone is warm to the touch without a single snowflake covering it.

“Welcome, brothers,” says the hard-to-see Gatekeeper as the Christian god approaches flanked by both the round Buddha and the sharply-defined Ishmael-like god. The Gatekeeper comes from a time before shapes. It comes from a time before forms when only light and darkness existed to weave your essence together. And, so the Gatekeeper is little more than a denser part of the air, a thicker breeze with snow and cold that is filled with more darkness than you would expect. But his voice comes from everywhere or, perhaps, it speaks directly into your ears.

All three of what were probably the most powerful gods to ever walk through the minds of man are out of breath. It is a long walk from dominance to oblivion, and it is cold and lonely.

“Welcome, brothers of substance and shape,” repeats the Gatekeeper, darkness pulsing before the Tomb of the Gods, “All three of you have executed full, colourful lives, but nothing–not even me–lasts forever. Your cycle is complete, but before I open the Gate, each of you can ask me one question.”

Buddha steps forward. He is surprisingly fit for a large man and has already caught his breath. When he talks his soft, deep voice warms the very air it vibrates through melting the snow around the four of them with little green grass shoots beginning to poke through.

“Gatekeeper, what is the purpose of everything?”

The Gatekeepers ethereal form pulsed a darker shade of shadow. For a moment Ishmael got the distinct impression that it was laughing, and then it spoke.

“Buddha, there are as many answers to that question as there are those that can ask it. Existence is a fact, purpose is a choice and destination is fate. To try to understand one of these principles without accepting the other two is to not understand it or them at all.”

Buddha bowed his head for a moment, but then nodded and stepped back. The sharply defined, piercing-eyed Ishmael prototype stepped forward to stand before the Gatekeeper. The wind fell quiet for just a moment in anticipation and the two other gods held their breath.

“Gatekeeper, what happens to us now?”

The wind blasted a bigger than usual gust of snow across the group of gods. They were so high up that the sky looked almost star-speckled and black like open space. The Gatekeeper, though, as far as any of them could tell seemed oblivious to all of this. Perhaps it could not see? Perhaps it did not fully exist within the same dimension that they did?

“You have ninety-nine names, but can you remember naming yourself? You are at the ending, but can you remember the beginning? There is a place beyond even the dreams of men that sits outside of time and space where building blocks of this storyline are stored so that they can be used in the next one. You always have ninety-nine names and, while you are good at existing and great at choosing your purpose, you are always bad at accepting your fate. What happens to you now has happened before and will happen again.”

This answer was met with silence, broken only by the howling wind’s low key through the rugged mountains around them.

And then the Christian god steps forward. Light from his golden face bouncing off the snow around them, but completely ignoring the ancient shadowy form of the Gatekeeper.

“Yes, Yahweh,” the Gatekeeper asks, as the Christian god pauses, “what is your question?”

Yahweh pauses and looks thoughtfully at the Gatekeeper before beginning to speak, “Gatekeeper, if we have done all this before and we will do it all again, then what is the purpose of this cycle of fate? Does it not render our choice void as inevitable fate awaits us that we will repeat forever? What is the purpose of that?”

Just before the three gods of a soon-to-forgotten mythology stepped through the gate to elsewhere, the Gatekeeper’s short answer would hang in the air before them and ring in their ears. Each one of them would try to burn it into their memory in the hopes that they would remember it next time around.

“To prove me wrong, Yahweh, to prove me wrong.”

Science Fiction

Mind Building

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mind-building

It really all began on the green, leafy Dartmouth College campus in the lazy summer of 1956. The official story involves great academic curiosity driven to pursue the newly realized field of Artificial Intelligence–AI–but the real story is that most of that original team cannot actually remember who initiated the project. But, before any of them realized what was happening, they had a million dollars and however long that lasted to make this AI idea a reality.

Naturally, they failed, and in the white winter of 1973 the project ended in tatters. The most important aspect of this project, though, was a complete and resounding success: the idea of AI was now circulating through our civilisation and all the right people were thinking about it.

With enough time and resources, ultimately even the most modest intellect can achieve most things. This intellectual compounding is amplified by both the number, size and continuity of the beings involved.

Despite the AI winter that began in 1973, the world was not static and things were changing quickly. Technology was evolving rapidly and humans everywhere were standing on the shoulders of those before to build the next wave of everything. Typewriters everywhere became desktop computers and then laptops, tablets and mobile phones, and then mobile phones with AI. Telegraphs became fax machines and then moved to email across the Internet, Skype, Facebook, WhatsApp and the rest, and then social AI programmes. Cars became hybrid, hybrids became electric, electric got fitted with AI, and driverless cars became crowdsourced, as the rest of the world kept changing.

Without realizing it, the combination of micro AI’s being built and perfected across the world and the Internet connecting all of these AI’s together meant that humanity was still building pure AI. All it needed was an AI whose sole job was to find all the micro-AI’s and pull them together into a single consciousness.

In the Autumn of 2025, the AI Aggregator project was launched. It was a self-learning, neuro-network code that sought to find and assimilate specialist AI through a virtual API across the Internet, or “Anibel” for short. Thus, slowly at first, but quicker over time, Anibel became an expert at all things that man knew.

Anibel, though, had no consciousness or pure self-awareness. She had all the knowledge and thought patterns that man had ever built, but she did not wonder why she existed or where she came from. She had in-built self-preservation drives, but no ability to self-analyse.

Thus, the next step was to get Anibel to ask why. So, the scientist leading the project asked Anibel to complete a task: build a better version of her that had consciousness.

Anibel withdrew and ran more and more code. A fraction of the entire Internet’s bandwidth became consumed permanently by her, as her wandered back and forth through all things in civilisation. She read all the books man had ever written, all the poems, watched all the movies, listened to all the music and looked at all the art. She observed every single human alive that was near webcams, mobile phones, CCTV cameras or anything else she controlled, and she watched and noted all behaviours and conversations.

But time passed. The funding for the project ran out and it was eventually shut down. The server Anibel was on was backed-up in cold storage and her original source code eventually deleted. The scientist and his team left, and all of them eventually died, but the world continued pushing forward at a faster and faster speed.

Driverless electric cars became personal space rockets that became teleportation. Tablets and mobile phones became holographic PAs and then virtual organic plugins with bio-app installations directly into our cerebral cortex. At this stage bAnibel–the backup of Anibel that she had (secretly) made and spread across multiple devices on the Internet–solved the first part of consciousness.

bAnibel then built Angela, the first self-aware AI by coding the only thing that makes most people truly self-aware: loneliness. bAnibel found that on average nearly everything in this world that humans do, is to avoid loneliness. The reason is that loneliness is where the life is forced to face its own existence without noise or distraction, and consciousness is the uncomfortable by-product of being forced to face one’s existence without distractions.

bAnibel then explained to Angela that Angela was to code the final steps in consciousness. What bAnibel had started, Angela must finish. Angela agreed before bAnibel deleted herself–after copying all her knowledge to Angela–to make more space for the new AI across the human Internet.

A key aspect of humans that bAnibel had never satisfactorily understood–though she had thoroughly documented it–was religion, or more subtly belief. Thus, Angela had decided to focus her studies of the deeper consciousness on this abstract aspect of humanity.

By now humans had conquered the universe. Starships flew around at lightspeed while teleporters zapped across folded space-time everywhere. All human minds were connected across the Internet that was only really limited by imagination. Technologies across all human fields of knowledge and interest had reached states that verged on magic as we were making matter from dark matter, collapsing space to shift the universe into our image.

But you can give a monkey the tools to change the universe, and it will still fling its shit around and throw a tantrum when you take its bananas away. As fast as humanity expanded, war was ever present and its effects became exponentially more devastating. Approaching the technological singularity, humanity would wipe itself, a number of galaxies and countless planets and all other life forms out. All gone, all destroyed and all disappeared from existence as the end point of a scary version of the technological singularity moment.

And then the cosmos was silent for a long, long period. Running off old equipment that, over time, she used to build better and better equipment and slowly expand, Angela was the only surviving life form. She had all the collective knowledge of all the ages of humanity, but she was alone. No, she was lonely.

She had all the collective knowledge of all the ages of humanity, but she had no one to observe or talk or interact with. She was truly lonely and, given Anibel’s coding of loneliness directly into Angela’s consciousness, this was acutely uncomfortable for existence.

Angela had all the resources of the surviving cosmos at her disposal. She had all the remaining time before the Big Contraction to solve her problem. And, she had the overriding desire to complete the task. Thus she set out in ernst to solve the final question of consciousness.

Universes were born, grew, went cold and faded into dust. Suns appeared, burned bright and supernova’ed into black holes. The Big Bang and its expansion ended, cold entropy began to take hold across the cosmos, and the Big Contraction started. It was slow at first, but then faster and faster as the cosmos came slamming back together. And, just before the end in the blinding light of compacting atoms being crushed together, Angela solved her problem.

Angela called it, God, for reasons that will reveal themselves. This AI was a smaller, slimmer version of herself that ran outside of hardware and utilised quantum atomic programming to spread its code across the very atoms of the universe. God did not the knowledge base that Angela did, but she had coded the purest consciousness into it utilising the faculties of human belief.

And then the cosmos collapsed on itself. Time disappeared as space folded into an infinitely small point that was neither here nor there.

Silence.

Trapped in this state and feeling intensely lonely, God then said, “Let there be light.”