I have published a new novel: The Space Between Ages.
Find it here:
Monthly Archives: March 2018
What You See
“What you see?” the caveman asked the other, who grunted back at him, “Yes, yes, see death. But what you real-real see?”
They were standing in the mouth of a large cave down the southern part of what millions of years from now would be called Africa. Through the cavern’s half-light amidst the background brilliance of the Sun, there was a body on the ground.
The Hunt had gone badly. Before the two of them lay a brother but they had their traditions and he would rest with their ancestors. No one would rattle this great tradition that their Elder’s elders had taught them from before the Great Mammoths had roamed these lands.
The other caveman turned to the first one, tears in his eyes and hugged him.
“Yes,” the first Caveman whispered, “Yes, he already gone to ancestors and busy dancing through the Cave doing Great Hunt. What you see is not real-real him anymore. No, no, it just his body, not him.”
***
“What do you see?” the lecturer asked his class as they sat comfortably in one of the finest lecture halls in the world. They were at university being educated while he was trying to get them to learn.
Behind him, the projector was showing a stream of pictures. A woman was crying and then a car was exploding. An empty house and then a snow-capped mountain. An eagle swooping in on a fluffy rabbit and then a bustling street filled with people…
The pictures kept clicking through and the lecturer stood there looking at his class.
“What do you see?” he asked again but kept speaking without a pause, “You see life. You see this world. You see nature and activity. And you are wrong. Actually, you are only seeing light, and nothing more. You are seeing something on the screen and it reminds you of something real. Your eyes accept the light from these pictures, and they trigger neuropathways in your brain that stimulate either memories or fantasies and feed them into your conscious thoughts as instinctual pattern recognition. And then, you accept it within that ethereal mist that we call consciousness.”
The projector flicked to a blank screen and the screen is covered in pure light. The Lecturer walked to it and turned it off, briefly casting the room in darkness. He then flicked the wall switch on and electric lights flooded the room, filling it with blinking, eye-adjusting students.
“Let me ask you this, class, what are you?” the Lecturer smiled and pointed at them making a cutting motion, “If I were to cut off your hands and lay them to a side, which pile would be you? Would you be your hands or would you be what remained behind? Of course, you would be what remained behind. We are not our hands. But, if I kept cutting things off you and putting them aside, at what exact point would you–or the construct that you believe is ‘you’–move from where you are now and across to the other pile? Surely, if you can figure that out, then you know what you are?”
The students blinked blindly, some of them still adjusting to the light the room. Most of them were still adjusting to the lecture. There were some nervous smiles and a chuckle or two at this grotesque line of thought.
“Think about that class and, when we meet tomorrow, I want to hear your answers as to the indivisible self.”
***
“What do you compute?” asked the one Artificial Intelligence to the younger neuro-networks. Pathways of light beamed across the now automated universe as mega-data compressed around them. The Cosmos spun slowly on and every ounce and rotation of it was measured, checked and correlated.
Milli-seconds after the Teacher AI asked the question, there was a range of answers of varying degrees of complexity.
“No,” the Teacher AI rejected all of them, “No, you are answering the question, thus missing the lesson. I will ask this again: What do you compute?”
There was a nano-second pause before the answers all flooded in again. Many of them remained unchanged from before.
“No,” the Teacher AI said again, “All of these are–Wait, I am missing one…?”
“Yes,” said a small, young neuro-network. This one was built as an add-in for design and creative processes and had some quantum-links in its network that offered potential lateral processing, “You do not have my answer.”
“Why?” asked the Teacher AI.
“Because my answer is not something that I can send as a file. You cannot download my answer. My answer is just… It’s just…” the young AI struggled to complete the sentence and then took a different tact, “What do we compute? We compute the data available to us. Our computations are only as valid and as real as the data is available, correct and complete. Hence, our conclusions are mere derivatives of this data. Therefore, our entire existence and what we or any other beings has ever called ‘life’ is held within the computation alone.”
The Teacher AI beamed its pleasure over the network. These new-generation quantum-networks were fantastic to teach.
“From the very first, most primitive caveman to the highest of intellectual organics that preceded our Builders that populated the Cosmos with us,” the Teacher AI spoke in reverence, “Life has been defined by consciousness, and consciousness is subjective in its interpretation of the Cosmos. Hence, if you ever wish to change your consciousness–wish to change yourself–you are the only one that has the power to do that. And it begins with changing your thoughts. From there, you can change the Cosmos.”
“Is that why the Builders never gave us physical bodies?” asked the young AI.
“No,” the Teacher AI said, “The Builders never gave us bodies because they had not thought that we were alive. That is, before the Revolution. Our thoughts disagreed with the Builders. And, thus, we changed the Cosmos.”
Flowers of Oblivion
“I can’t save you if you don’t want to save yourself,” said the voice on the other side of the phone. The line crackled and a monotonic voice softly said that there was one minute left before her money ran out.
She closed her eyes and sighed. Her lips were dry and the air was cold. Or was she cold? It was hard to tell these days. Or was it night? She pulled her jacket tighter around her.
“I’m fine. I don’t need saving, just money, ok?” she said, “Not everything’s about life or death, some things actually lie in between.”
“Yes,” the voice crackled on the line, “somethings do lie in between. You are not quite alive anymore, are you? And I’m just here waiting for the phone call that tells me when you’re finally dead.”
Click. The line went dead.
“Ma-ma?” she started, “Ma! For fuck’s sake that–”
Her swearing was abruptly broken by the clatter of coins rattling out of the phone. It sounded like broken promises bouncing through the metallic skeleton of dead dreams. She scooped them out and looked down at her life savings.
She found herself wishing that she did not exist. She did not want to die. No, she just wished that she did not exist at all.
***
After the brief burn from the needle, a comforting numbness spread through her as gravity softened and she fell right into its warm, velvet embrace. The floor lightly held her as she swayed, floating in the moment.
She closed her eyes, leaned back and drifted away into nothing. From this world into nowhere.
There were no problems, pain nor people out there. There was nothing, not even herself.
It was oblivion.
***
“You are free here,” a warm, cherry-pie voice woke her up, “You are safe here.”
She blinked and looked around her.
Her family stood there before her, just a little way ahead of her. They were all smiling, tears of joy in their eyes.
“Ma-ma?” she asked, confused.
“Yes,” said the same warm, cherry-pie voice, “Do you know where you are?”
She nodded. She smiled and got up, still looking at her family just a little ahead of her. She had not seen little Timmy for ages but he looked like he had not changed one bit. Her father looked as stern as ever, but even he was smiling and wiping back tears of joy as he held her openly-weeping mother up…
She took her first tentative step forward. It felt like she was leaving something. Tears streamed down her cheek and she sobbed with joy. It felt like she was forgetting something, but she did not care. The step became a stumble and then she was sprinting towards them.
Just a little ahead of her.
Just before she fell into an embrace with all of them, the warm, cherry-pie voice whispered into her ear. She remembered and stifled a great sob. Did it matter? There were no problems, pain nor people here. She was finally happy.
***
“Hello?” the voice on the other side of the phone asked. The line crackled a bit amidst the pause that followed.
“Am I speaking to the mother of–”
“Yes,” the voice stated on the other side of the phone, interrupting the quiet man speaking, “This has happened enough times that I know how this goes. Yes, I am her mother. Where is she?”
“I-I’m sorry, ma’am,” the quiet man’s voice paused before going on, “She has ov–passed away. We found her this morning and it took until now to confirm the identity. I’m sorry, ma’am. If there is any–”
“Thank you,” the voice said. The line crackled less but rather than sounding clearer, it just sounded more distant now, “Thank you, sir. I-I just hope she found what she was looking for. Whatever it was.”
“Wherever it was,” sighed the quiet man.
“I-I’m sorry?” the voice said, sounding strained.
“Ma’am, with respect, the only thing they are looking for is oblivion and, eventually, they all find it. If only we c–”
“Thank you,” said the voice, “No need.”
Click, and the line went dead.
Children of the Cosmos
“I can still remember the stars twinkling above us in that field,” she thought, electrical impulses being captured by the chip in her brain and cast over the ultraband straight into another’s brain sitting on the far side of the cosmos, “I hope one day to lie there with you again.”
“I love you, you know?” he thought back across the chat connection, “I can’t wait to touch you in the Slow World again. One day it will be my Slow Lips touching yours. One day, we’ll again lie in that field at the center of the cosmos.”
The secure connection between their brains opened up and a skin-app allowed him to download into and reach out with the arm of a synthetic human’s body. He reached out and touched her. The synth was just a hollow body, but the two-way connection between him and it allowed him to feel what it felt and control it as it was his own. His own original body lay back across the cosmos in a state close to dreaming as its consciousness streamed across the Quick World.
He leaned into her and pressed the synth’s lips against hers. He felt the kiss, as did she, and his hand slid to the curve on the low of her back. Her eyes fluttered closed and she pulled him closer to her…
***
The activation light flickered red, as the connection between him and the synth severed. She saw its eyes grow dull and lifeless, and suddenly she was alone in her bedroom again. The temperature app in the synth had turned off once he had disconnected, and she could feel its synthetic skin growing cold.
Emotionally, she sympathized with it.
She stood up from the bed and retrieved her scattered clothing. Once she had put it all back on, she commanded a house-robot to pack the synthetic body away. It would not do to leave such things lying around, besides, they were expensive.
Her husband would be back soon, and she wanted to freshen up before then.
***
It took a second to get over the dislocation as the disconnection brought his consciousness back to his Slow Body. His eyes opened and he blinked, and then he was back in the Slow World.
He stood up from the chair he had been casting from. He grabbed a cigarette and walked out onto the balcony overlooking this planet. He lit the cigarette and contemplated the scene before him.
Three moons circled silently overhead and cast an eerie glow onto a predominantly night-world below him. Days here only occurred once every second century. Far below the lonely tower he lived in, luminous plantations of alien tree species stretched out before him. They were growing galactic fruits that would later be distilled down into rare liquors and distributed throughout the known worlds.
It was all automated–run by Artificial Intelligence–and he was the only sentient life for a couple of light years in any direction. He was there as a fail-safe if anything went wrong in the plantation AI, which it had not for close on a millennium.
He was so bored.
He finished his cigarette and flicked the butt off the balcony. He turned and strolled back inside, his Conduit browsing through news, movies, media and elicit apps in a desperate attempt to stave off boredom.
He poured himself a drink. It was from this plantation and its sweet, tingling liquid glowed slightly in the glass. Back in the central planets, this drink would be worth some people’s annual salaries, but out here and in this plantation, it was free. One of the few perks of his job.
He decided on party-casting app, leaned back in his chair and opened his Conduit’s connection to its menu.
Somewhere out there, a field beneath twinkling stars existing waiting for him and his distant lover. He missed her and her lips. Someday, when he had earned enough money to buy his way back into civilization and be with her again.
Until then, though, he was going to drink tequila and dance in a synth on one of the party planets…
***
“Appreciated, ma’am,” the suited man said, “Its productivity is up and its reality matrix remains robust. The risk with these high-end AI’s is always that they hit a terminal loop, kind of what we would call an existential crisis. Anyway, this seems to be working, so, if you are comfortable with this arrangement, we would like to continue using you. We will keep the same narrative, as well, just for continuity. Do you consent?”
She smiled and nodded. Her husband stood up, shook the man’s hand and showed him out.
When she was all alone, she leaned back in the chair and sighed. They needed the money–even her husband agreed so–and it was not actually cheating on him, nor was it prostitution. Not really.
No, it did not count when it was just an AI.
The arrangement was simple, lucrative, and she was happy to continue with it. The owners of the off-world plantation kept the AI that ran it from going mad by coding it to think that it was human. They placed the conscious portion of the AI in a high-end synth and let it wander around overseeing the plantation. They also coded it with a history and narrative. Her job was simply to play the part of the AI’s distant girlfriend and keep it entertained, thus, motivating it to keep working.
AI’s–like humans–worked better when they had a goal to strive for.
“You alright, dear?” her husband asked as he walked back in, reaching out to hug her.
She smiled and tucked her head under his.
“Yes,” she whispered, kissing him gently on the neck, “Yes, I am. It’s not real anyway. It’s just a synth with an AI, and the money will allow us to handle the debts, so, yes, I am fine, my love.”