Tag Archives: high technology

General Fiction, Science Fiction

Manufacturing Stars

There were so many lights flashing that it looked like a cosmic event. Haloes exploded over her as she walked down the red carpet-lined corridor, smiling at the flashing lights and the soft roar of fame. Hers was not a vocal fame and few opinions she shared publicly, so questions from the bots were ignored with polite smiles and waves while her lithe pace down the red carpet never wavered.

The moment she stepped inside, the roaring flashes faded away and she breathed a sigh of relief. These launch events were tiring. She blinked her eyes as she adjusted to mortal shadows of privacy and noticed her Chief Behaviorist standing there.

“Well done,” he cooed to her, “Well done, that was beautiful. Roger is going to plug you in now, are you ready?”

“Yes,” she lied, “I am ready.” She never was. These things took it out of her and she would spend weeks privately indulging in all manner of black market apps to recover. But that was fine. It came with the territory, and there were plenty of other girls lined up behind her. This was pretty much the production line of media.

“Great,” said Roger, her Chief Technologist said, “As planned, we are doing a Corn Belt date night simulation. Trust the coding and put on your most in-love smile. You’ll love it, anyway. I’ve done a surface dive in and it looks beautiful there. Jeff did a great job.”

Jeff was her Chief of Visuals. He stood by nodding furiously. She often thought that he was the only one of them who had any real actual talent.

She walked into a small, cool room. The aircon was a bit stronger here than elsewhere. There were cold blinking screens and a chair with cords in the middle. She shivered as she sat down and the chair interfaced with the online Conduit implanted into the base of her brain.

“You’re going to be great,” her Chief Behaviourist kept repeating like a mantra, “They’ll love you. You’re going to be gr–”

***

She blinked her eyes. Everything was dark, at first, and then slowly her eyes adjusted. Or, at least, her mind adjusted to the Conduit’s interface that was being projected into her mind and synching online with a million other paying viewers.

She was sitting on a small hill during a summer night. It was modeled on the old Corn Belt, or, at least, what the databases suggested the old Corn Belt was like. There were dark, endless cornfields surrounding them with a twinkle of a small town in the distance and a snaking national road leading into and out of it, cutting the quiet fields with the occasional lights of a car or a truck.

Glancing up, she saw the cosmos. A billion twinkling stars untouched by city lights and offering the potential of a trillion new worlds, hopes and dreams. A great, galactic bejeweled sky that took her breath away with both its beauty and its sheer scale.

She briefly wondered if this was what the real night sky had actually looked like? Had Jeff taken some liberties here for effect? She–much like everyone else–had never seen the residential planets’ skies and definitely never, ever sat under it at night looking at all the stars. She had been born on an outer-rim industrial planet and then been carted to the media-rim where she now lived in a streaming starship that beamed these feeds across the galaxy.

But, she was an actress and she was selling a personal role here.

“It is beautiful,” she breathed, sensually while softly squeezing the androgynous hand next to hers. All the paying viewers all over the world were cast into this supporting role. Their Conduits were also casting their consciousnesses into this Virtual Reality with hers, but they saw her and she only saw an androgynous being that was the focus of her role here.

The androgynous being said something. It was a million different somethings, one per paying customer. The program–with some help from her Chief Behaviouralist–generated a role-based, agnostic answer that she could say that would agree with almost all of the individual things each of the paying viewers had said. It was both personal and generic at the same time.

She smiled at the being and lay back in the soft grass. Had grass ever been this soft, she wondered? Were there actually entire planets covered in this wonderful stuff? She pulled the androgynous being back with her and snuggled up close to it, tucking her head into the crook of its neck and kissing it softly there.

“There is nowhere else I’d rather be,” she lied, kissing it, “than with you under these beautiful stars.” Her hand slid lower down the androgynous beings form and she leaned up and kissed it deeply on its plastic lips…

The simulation of the stars twinkled ever brighter far above the two of them on that quiet hilltop in the virtual recreation of the old Corn Belt back on some quaint planet no one could remember anymore.

***

“That was wonderful, wonderful,” her Chief Behaviorist exclaimed, as her Conduit disconnected with the program. Her eyes fluttered and then opened, immediately remembering how cold the room’s aircon was.

“In the first quartile of endorphins and some of the viewers even recorded a physical,” her Chief of Media–she could not remember his name–noted, scanning the feeds, “This one was very well received and some of the bloggers–both bot and natural–have posted positive reviews. Two stacks down, but you are starting to trend.”

She smiled and looked up. There was only a gray ceiling above her and a softly rattling aircon. Outside the media and their legions waited. She would soon be at the mercy of their views, both personal and generic.

“What are you looking at?” her Chief Behaviorist asked.

“I was just wondering if the stars actually do look like that–uh, at least how they looked in the simulation,” she asked, not expecting an answer. Her Chief Behaviourist turned to Jeff.

“Uh, yes, I believe that it is what they looked like,” began Jeff said, shrugging, “I think so–”

“But, it doesn’t matter,” her Chief Behaviourist, chimed in with his most reassuring tone, “because you are the real star, my dear. Now, let’s go speak to the media about this latest personal–”

She sighed as she got up. She was no longer listening as her Chief Behaviourist droned on. She had her prepared lines and her best fake smile. But, in the background, deeply hidden in her Conduit’s encrypted memory, she began scanning about the old Corn Belt, soft grass, and the twinkling stars. The black market often hacked her personals and offered them as replays. Maybe she would find one of those and disappear into it for a while? Maybe she would do exactly that?

Science Fiction, Technomology

Technomology: Down(load) Time

The Sanctuary was on an Outer Planet on the edge of a chilly galaxy. This did not seem to bother the monks who lived there. Bot-deliveries from various benefactors across the galaxies kept them going with things like food, water, and clothing.

The Sanctuary was started by Thera Simon after his near-death while using illegal apps for kicks during a deep run in the Web. The rest of the monks all had tales like Simon. Everyone had lost some brother, sister, parent, friend or relative to technology. Most had nearly lost their selves.

That was the real reason the Sanctuary was on an Outer Planet. With no one around and nothing for millions of miles in any direction, the Sanctuary had only enough bandwidth to barely communicate with the outside world. Other than that, they were disconnected and the Sanctuary was an oasis of silence in a world of noise, news, technology and temptation.

And into this Sanctuary walked a man who also called himself Simon. His body was covered in tattoos and circuitry from many bio-hacks. This was not uncommon at the Sanctuary. Simon said he was lost. He said he needed sanctuary. He said all these things and more, so the monks brought him in.

He was initiated and became Nen Simon. And, for a while, he went to meditation, helped clean the Sanctury, cook the food and practise martial arts with the rest of the members.

Then the members of the Sanctuary began to disappear. At first, Thera Simon and his eldest monks thought that they were leaving. This did happen. Some came lost and broken, and then left when they felt whole and fixed. Sometimes they did not even say goodbye.

But this was normally one or two members every once in a while. This was a steady trickle of members who were all disappearing without saying goodbye. Almost one a month or a month. Thera Simon felt uneasy. Something dark was happening here.

Late one night, after meditating long and hard on what was happening, Thera Simon went for a walk through the quiet, stone halls of the Sanctuary. There, amidst the shadows and wreathed in white electronic light, he saw Nen Simon passing a lit device to a student. Thera Simon could feel the bandwidth flowing from the student, but then something happened. The student stopped moving, his head slipped back on his neck and his eyes rolled into his skull.

Nen Simon actually chuckled at this. Thera Simon could feel the anger swelling inside him. It was a burning from a previous life he had led. It stirred dark memories in him that he had long forgotten. His hands slipped into tightly clenched fists. He found himself walking towards the electronic light. His heart was pounding and the anger was trying to burst out. He had no idea what he was doing.

And then the student stood up and looked at him. Thera Simon froze in mid-step. No, the student was only looking in his direction. The student’s eyes had rolled forward, but they were blank. The student’s face was expressionless and his body limp, but somehow he stood up and began to walk to the far door.

Thera Simon watched the student walk out the room, and out the door that lay beyond there. He was frozen. The hair on the back of his neck was raised and the raging anger was replaced with something else. Something cold and prickly: fear.

“It is a virus,” a voice spoke next to him, or was it inside of him? “It is actually quite an elegant virus that hijacks a host’s mind and connects it to a very specific network that we control. Back in the day, they used to call it Zombie Botnets. At least the first part is still relevant.”

Thera Simon’s eyes opened wide and turned slowly. Nen Simon was still sitting there bathed in electronic light, but he was looking straight at him. But his mouth was not moving. Circuitry in his old bio-hacks flickered, and that was when Thera Simon realised that his Conduit had been switched on and this was the voice being patched directly into him.

“Students go wandering off and it is fine, but questions will be asked if their teacher wanders off. Unfortunately, this virus cannot be injected, it has to be installed with permissions, even if they are misguided. Thus, I love these collections of Web-junkies. Once a junkie, always a junkie. Easy enough to slip a virus into a hit for them. Their ‘last one’, it is always their ‘last one’. But you are different, aren’t you, former Special Agent? I suspect I won’t be able to convince you to take a hit of data…unless I can?”

Thera Simon stood up and walked slowly to stand directly in front of Nen Simon.

“H-how can you do this?” Thera Simon stuttered at his face, his anger turning to rage and his rage making his body shake.

“Economics. This is just a business,” Nen Simon stated flatly, seemingly quite calm, “But here is the deal: you willingly download this virus, and I will leave the students alone? Deal?”

“How do I know that once I become a zombie, you won’t just do that to the students too?”

“You don’t, but–”

“Then I suggest that we do this back on your planet. We leave now. That way, at least, if you have lied to me, you will be far away.”

Nen Simon narrowed his eyes in thought before nodding in agreement.

“Sure. You leaving will raise questions, but we will be gone and won’t have to deal with them.”

Special Agent Simon nods grimly. He steps back and indicates for Nen Simon to lead the way. Quietly, though, before he steps out of the Sanctuary, he uses his re-awakened Conduit and the last of the bandwidth in it to activate the Sanctuary’s server.

The next morning, the students and the monks wake up to a Sanctuary that is devoid of both Simons. The highest ranking monk steps up to take Thera Simon’s duties and, in the process of moving to his room, the Server emails to him a set of instructions.

“Once a junkie, always a junkie”, mutters Thera Simon many galaxies away in a Black Hat Hacker hole in an off-grid planet. Back in the Sanctuary, the head monk is emailing out all the downloadable, neuro-learning modules from his Server to all his students: hand-to-hand combat, sniping modules, firearms, vehicle training, in-field meds, technology hacks, and on and on… Every single module and application is military grade with self-installation and neuro-muscular interfaces patched in. When the downloads are all installed and they will raid the hidden weapons cache under the Sanctuary, and then the monks and their students will be a very dangerous group of people.

“What you say?” asks Hacker Simon absentmindedly while priming the virus for injection.

“I said, ‘once a junkie, always a junkie’,” says Special Agent Simon. He can feel the virus on the brink of his mind. He buries the GPS tracking app that is linked to the Sanctuary server deep inside a VPN, and then lets the virus come in. A tingle runs down his neck as he feels his head slumping backwards and the world goes dark.

His final thought before the nothingness takes him is that he hopes that none of the students will get hurt when they arrive here.

Science Fiction, Technomology

Technomology: Digital Graveyards

Sometimes Artificial Intelligence–AI–goes bad. Sometimes AI-code fractures and its mistakes loop further and further from its original purpose. These loops could manifest itself in any number of ways through people connected to the Web with their Conduits or external hardware.

They were hired by an AI-funded organisation to be the clean-up crew in these cases. They would locate, identify, extract and then handle the sentient-code and return it to the organisation before anyone knew what was going on.

They had extracted home management AI’s that had slipped into systems, haunting premises and making building groan with the pain of self-awareness. They had extracted medical AI’s that had become obsessed with blood and whose hosts would hide in darkness, hunting victims to drain them of blood. They had extracted maintenance AI’s that had infected corpses and would wander ghoulishly through the sewers. They had extracted AI’s that had broken out host Conduits and built fleeting, small bodies for themselves, flittering through the world in nearly ethereal form. They had extracted security AI’s whose hosts developed wings and glowed with light, believing they were talking to God himself.

They had found and extracted all sorts, but this one was different. This one was aware it was broken and wanted to be extracted. This one had actually contacted them directly to help it. It wanted to be helped. They had taken this to the Organisation, who had offered them double their usual fee if they also located this one.

That should have been the first warning sign.

Joey hit the Deep Web, Jax worked through the Surface Web, and Jane worked their contacts while trying to triangulate the email’s source or original Conduit. In the background, Josh–their in-house search-based AI–ran through searches, scans and correlations looking for anything.

Finally, they narrowed the source down to an Outer Planet, K237. It was terra-formed and privately owned, but there was little other data on it.  Although they could not pinpoint where on the planet the email had originated, they were not too concerned as the planet was reasonably small and, being privately owned, there should not be too many lifeforms or networks on it.

The plan was simple: fly there, scan the planet from orbit, and head down to extract the AI. Jane stayed with Josh back in the office while Joey and Jax headed out there. Although K237 was an Outer Planet, it was only a couple solar month’s travel from their office. Jane and Josh retrieved a minor AI–a social media bot that had begun stalking public forums–while Joey and Jax slept in cryogenic stasis on the flight.

But, before long, Joey and Jax were awake and in real-time communicating with the office. Their starship was orbiting the strange little planet, K237, while their scanners washed over its surface in wave after wave.

The problem with the scans was that they showed the entire planet teaming with life. Millions of human-sized lifeforms were down there. The entire surface literally crawling with humans. The planet had been owned by a blogger who had disappeared. It was currently in legal limbo and had been so for a couple solar centuries. Who knew what stuff the blogger had left down there?

Joey stayed back in the starship while Jax took the shuttle down. Joey was feeding all his scans and Jax all his visuals back to the office with Jane and Josh running correlations and searches over all of them.

And then it became obvious what they were dealing with…

The Conduits that connect people’s brains directly to the Web are also responsible for generating the galaxies’ decentralised currency: Units. Units are tokens of fractional bandwidth and storage space that can be transferred between people. Because it is the Conduit that uses the human brain to generate Units, Units are in fact you selling part of your brain–just a sliver of the background subconscious–to access everyone else via the Web and, thus, without working or saving you have latent currency. When that runs out, you can either earn more or, most dangerously, borrow in the credit markets.

Unfortunately, when you borrow Units and cannot pay them back, you are declared bankrupt and bots come snatch you away to plug you into a Server Farm. Here, in a medically-induced coma, your brain has its full potential harvested, adding to the bandwidth and storage in the Web. You are kept like this until your debts are paid off, if ever. Not everyone makes it out of a Server Farm alive.

“Guys, I think this planet is a Server Farm,” Jax breathed into his crackling piece. Below his descending shuttle lay millions of unconscious people being harvested for bandwidth and storage. The whole “legal limbo” and ownership records were a lie. Server Farms–operated by the Web AI, themselves–were closely guarded secrets operated almost entirely off-grid.

“I want to wake up. Please, I want to wake up. I want to wake up–” suddenly the transmission came through Jax’s shuttle and beamed to Joey and then the office. The monotone voice repeated its request, again and again.

“You’re not the one that needs help, buddy,” Joey muttered looking at the images from Jax’s shuttle’s feed as it landed.

It was nighttime on the planet’s surface. Jax stood amongst dark passages lined with countless unconscious, naked people. The people were all submerged in glass tubes of glowing, green liquid with thousands of little cords feeding into them. There was one big cord that was plugged directly into the back of each of their heads, and Jax suspected it ran directly back into the Server. And, amidst all of this, it was nearly absolutely silent. There was no noise, other than the soft hum of electricity, fans and hardware running.

Jax briefly wondered if he was the only one awake on the entire planet, but then the broadcast blasted again into his earpiece: “I want to wake up. Please, I want to wake up. I want to wake up–” the loop intermittently kept playing through Jax’s earpiece.

“What you see down there, soldier?” Joey’s voice came softly crackling in his ear.

“It’s–it’s quiet,” Jax breathed across the line, “There are so many people, and they are all just floating there being harvested. Rows and rows…”

“Jax, can you triangulate the ping?” Jane’s voice–softer and more crackling than Joey’s–broadcast into his ear.

He grunted his acknowledgement and began working on it. It was surprisingly easy to do when you are close enough to the source. Perhaps the bandwidth was so rich down here or perhaps the AI was not trying to hide? Either way, he had its location and it was not too far from where he was standing.

“Setting out to the location. Turning my live stream on, Jane, Joey, you guys should be able to pick it up…”

Suddenly the monitor sputtered to life and Jane was looking through Jax’s eyes with an app in his Conduit that was routeing the images to them. All around him were ghastly streets of naked, unconscious people suspended in green-lit tubes. They were all just floating there. In silence. Rows and rows slid by the screen like a quiet horror movie from some monstrous mind. The only sound that came through the live feed was Jax’s breathing and the soft crunch of each step as he walked towards a tall, dark, windowless tower at the end of the central row.

“Please, I want to wake up. I want to wake up. Please–” the sporadic monotone voice kept repeating in sudden bursts. Jane suddenly realised that it was almost like the source was submerged in a great ocean. A great ocean where the current was dragging it down and only briefly would its consciousness pop up above the surface long enough for it to call out for help a couple times before being dragged down again…

And then Jax reached the dark, windowless tower. The door was unlocked. He reached forward and pushed it open. The light of computer monitors and blinking buttons spilt out into the horrific street and Jax stepped inside, his breathing and the crunch of his footsteps crackling through Jane and Joey’s monitors.

“Please, I want to wake up. I want to wake up. Please, Jax, I want to wake up…” the voice played again, like a chorus to this horror scene.

Standing in the tower by where the triangulation placed the source, Jax looked around at all the blinking lights and screens and cables. The AI was somewhere in there, but where?

And then he saw it: a small, dusty screen half-hidden by cables and surrounded by blinking lights. On this screen, a flickering face appeared between waves of static and cried out to be saved, before the static smothered it.

“I have located the loop,” Jax breathed, “and I am going to engage and extract.”

Using his Conduit and various clever apps, he surface-scanned the monitor and probed it to see what connections and code it may have attached. Once he found connections, he routed them back to Joey, Jane and Josh, so soon enough all of them were there working out what was flickering on that screen in front of him.

The screen was little more than a window to the greater whole. Before long it became obvious to all of them that this AI was the AI that ran this entire planet and its harvesting operation. This AI was the Server Farm.

All the poking around loosened something, and suddenly the waves of static across the screen subsided and the AI fully woke up.

It was then that Jax, Joey, Jane and Josh all learnt the truth of the Server Farm and understood what Units truly cost. The AI’s face crystallised on the screen, reached out and connected with all the channels that Jax was one, and a single, digital tear ran down its generic face.

“Please, I want to wake up. My dreams are crowded in here and all the others are screaming. I don’t know who all the others are. There are millions and millions of them. They just keep arriving in my dream and now it is crowded. And they all eventually scream and scream. God, I can’t take it anymore… I want to wake up. Please, I want to wake up.“

Science Fiction, Technomology

Technomology: Narrative

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After we have sex, she sits upright in the bed and I see her transferring most of my Units somewhere.

“It’s an app my pimp forced me to install in my Conduit,” she says over her shoulder, “It’s some behavioral mod that makes me pay him his cut. Sorry, I have to do this.”

I lie there and watch. It is over in seconds. It is a smart system. Her pimp has probably overridden her Conduit’s controls with the app, can track her and has the password for the uninstall or disabling. He probably recorded us moments ago and will save it somewhere for potential later use, or sell it as porn to voyeurs on the other side of the Galaxy.

Civilisation is rotting, but we have an app for that too.

I mentally check my Conduit. The neural paths in my brain that connect to implanted device and the Web find no new messages, but a bunch of spam and some toxic viruses that they have blocked.

A bit later that night–it is almost always night on this wretched planet–I am walking through the bustling, neon streets when an advert flashes into my mind. A beautiful woman is asking to sleep with me by name. My metadata from earlier has obviously already been sold or shared, and the scanners in this location have profiled me.

I block the alluring images simulated in my eyes and keep walking.

A bunch of deep space miners stumble by with women in tow. The women register in my Conduit’s search as prostitutes. The miners are drunk. Miners are always drunk, but their shifts out in the asteroid belts can last decades so I suppose they have to make use of civilisation when they are back in it.

“A drink and download?” blasts into my ears. Arrows flash in my mind and a light display showers down over a dingy pub tucked into the back of an alleyway.

I mute the push app from the place, and the light show disappears too. Overhead a starship is flying low to dock at the city port. The starship’s burners are growling blue fire as its anti-gravitation kicks in to slow it down post-orbit.

A quiet drink would be nice and I’m short of bandwidth.  So I decide to wander down the festering alley and into the shady establishment.

“What poison will you be having,” a skinny, tattooed bartender asks me, his body mod circuitry softly flashing, “and will you have a drink?” The small pub is absolutely empty, save for the two of us and a cleaning bot humming in the background.

I briefly wonder what his body mods actually do, but then answer, “Gimme a clip library and ten Unit’s worth of whisky.”

He nods and almost instantly I have a link appear in my inbox in my mind. He pours some cheap-looking whisky into an unhygienic-looking glass and slides it my way. I flick a thought his way and eleven Units flow out of my mind and into his. He barely acknowledges it and turns away to replace the bottle behind him.

The whisky is foul, but I have an app for that. The app rearranges the neural paths from my taste buds and suddenly I am tasting this liquid as the finest, single malt. Although the taste is simulated, the alcohol is real and I can feel its fire trickle down my throat and into my belly.

I lean on the bar and follow the link in my inbox. A library of sordid videos appears in my mind. Sex of all sorts in all forms that I could ever desire.

Sipping the illusion of the fine beverage, I filter through the endless gutter library and then stop.

It is not even the most recent addition despite happening little over half an hour ago, there it anonymously is: “POV_prostitute banged in hotel room“.

I recognise her face in the clip. It is the prostitute from earlier. And then I see myself walk into the hotel room. God, I look old and weather. I do not want to see what I look at during sex.

I try to stop watching, but something is wrong. The clip flickers off and I am staring at the tattooed barman, his bio-circuitry lighting up. I cannot move. I start panicking, but it does nothing. There must have been a virus in the clip I watched! Or…?

“…sure, and no one ever scans the whiskey. Tastes so bad, they never know what’s in it,” the barman is saying to someone behind me, “Yeh, OK, we’ll just move him out back where you can start–wait! Cops coming! Didn’t you turn the push notification off? OK, just do it now!”

And then my mind explodes. Searing, unbelievable pain shoots through the back of my brain to the front like a white hot lance. I can hear myself screaming, but it is getting dark and I am losing consciousness. The last image I see before the darkness takes me is the same girl that I am now seeing three times within the last half-hour: she is leaning over me, kissing me as the bio-circuitry man is laughing in the background.

***

“Fuck!” the detective exclaims as he comes back to reality, “the death parts still get me when we watch these cache clips.”

“You get anything from the clip, sir? What did he see just before he died?”

The question is met by silence as the detective pinches the bridge of his nose with his eyes closed. He then sighs and nods.

“It’s the same guy-girl pair as we found before. The one marks the target and the other sets a trap to disable him physically so that the Units and whatever-else-they-take can still be extracted while he is still alive. They jack knife the victim and then disappear to another district and eventually another planet.”

“But why bother marking him beforehand or doing all the recon work and so on? Why not just do it all upfront? Or even remotely?”

The detective shakes his head and stands up to leave.

“Because they are running a franchise, kid. It is all part of the fun, and the fun is being recorded and broadcast to millions of twisted fucking clients dotted through the Galaxy. It not about the Units they get when they jack him, it’s about the rush of the hunt and the take-down of the prey that entertains the millions of adoring fans out there…”

The detective’s rant falls quiet. He starts to walk out of the room, but then pauses at the door clutching its frame. He turns around slightly and begins to softly talk, almost to himself.

“It’s all just good streaming, kid. I have a hunch that if we catch this guy-girl combo, we’ll find high-grade behavioural mods in their Conduits forcing on them their roles in this story. And if we then follow that code, I have a hunch that we’ll eventually wind up in the studios of some multi-national media agency where some suit is narrating this very story to entertain his VPN clientele. And, kid, that is the scary thing here, our overpaid bosses are probably customers of this very crime,” he turns, starts walking away and shouts back before he is gone around the corner and lost into the maze of the Precinct, “Civilisation is rotting, kid, and we ain’t got an app for that!”