Sci Phi Journal

The Religious Education Of Rotisserie Opera

by Timothy Quinn

Rotisserie Opera was knit together with patient exasperation from the DNA of a forensic accountant and a tenured philosopher, and was a clever if argumentative child. By two, he knew the words “quiet” and “nut butter” and “hatchery.” By four, the harried algorithms had begun to teach him geography (he lived within the pressurized sphere of the world, which was three and a half cubic kilometers), history (his ancestors had somehow preferred to walk on walls to get around), religion (all were promised a chance at eternal life in the ancient but unequivocal Orphic tradition), and basic photoelectrochemical grid repair.

At six, his cohort had the run of the world, because the algorithms were already busy bleaching the incubators and running saline through glucose drips in preparation for another culturing. There were labyrinthine corridors with doors that opened onto emergency access shafts and secret maintenance tunnels, and floating through the cabins and storage bays they found paperback books and playing cards and bits of jewelry tangled in the exposed plumbing.

The liberated children were inevitably drawn to the amphitheater, which was ribbed with scaffolding and countless other hiding spots, and which had the largest view of the sky. A few had learned the new constellations, and all of the children recognized the tiny smear of starlight that swept overhead, because that was Hades.

“Is it getting closer?” wondered Core Rabbit, who spelled her name “Kore,” apparently in some fashion after Persephone.

“Why?” asked Rote, who wasn’t as devout and didn’t think it a promising sign that the underworld, which had once been a glittering pinprick, might now be a slightly larger dapple against the vast galactic scorch.

“My katabasis,” said Kore, referring to her religious journey, which Rote had understood to be allegorical. “Soon it’ll be close enough for us to float right across.”

“Good luck finding a damn airlock,” said Helicopter Bean, whose genome had been crafted from a microbiologist and a theologian, and who therefore had some ideas about the intersection of science and religion.

“Tata,” called Kore, “where is the airlock, please?”

After much debate and with great reluctance, the algorithms showed them several airlocks. The closest was a few meters from the amphitheater.

“May we enter the airlock?” asked Rote.

The algorithms sputtered that no, of course not, it would be unsafe to do so. There might be a few adult EVA suits bumping about, but having lost most of the world’s data in the Venting (Heli rolled his eyes at doctrinaire capitalization) and then in subsequent waves of high energy particles, no one had gotten around to auditing protective gear for a long absent crew. There were children to be engineered, and that took the highest priority.

The algorithms seemed always to be busy engineering children, and despite their haste Rote thought they were becoming pretty good at it. His cohort was larger than the last, and also there was something about the first few children, who had grown now into their awkward preteens, which seemed dicey. They didn’t say much as they floated around, staring glassily at the broken machinery they were expected to decipher and fix. They had numbers instead of names, which was another innovation the algorithms had introduced in recent cohorts, having restored some of the wikis and user manuals thought lost to the gaping void.

“Do I have to go?” asked Rote, who was still thinking about this business of a religious quest. “What if I can’t come back?”

In fact, very little of the data available to the children related to religion. What survived was limited to a narrow period of antiquity populated by winged serpents and vengeful minor deities, and didn’t offer the algorithms much practical advice on childrearing. This paucity, in some of the children, nurtured skepticism that the whole endeavor was an exercise in psychological motivation, but for others created a burning eschatological faith.

“Stay here,” teased Heli. “If you’re lucky, you’ll get recycled, probably forever.”

“That’s not true,” said Kore. “Persephone visits Hades every year, and she has to travel all the way from Locri. Tell them, Tata.”

The algorithms reassured them that there were many paths to salvation, that the gods were fickle but fair, and that they whispered to children on all the worlds. Yes, they sighed, in Locri. Yes, in Ismaros, too.

“The same gods?” asked Heli skeptically.

“How many worlds?” asked Rote.

There are countless worlds of polite and obedient children, the algorithms said, their attention clearly already elsewhere. Look up, and perhaps somewhere there’s another child looking back at you.

#

“It just looks like a star,” said Isabella, disappointed that their vessel had stopped at an unreasonably safe distance.

“Watch,” said her father, zooming in, and now the tiny bright star had a smeared halo from the starlight forced to bend around it. “Wait,” he said, and increased the screen’s sensitivity to the edges of the electromagnetic spectrum. The neutron star was bathed now in false color, X-ray filaments radiating out in graceful aquamarine.

“Where are the seeds?” asked Isabella.

Her father zoomed out again and pointed at the screen. “It’s too small to see, but here’s what it looks like.” He called up an image of the seedship taken by one of the paparazzi probes. The damage was extraordinary. Generational seedships had been built for volume rather than elegance, and this one was in the process of collapsing around the punctured remains of the largest segment. The depressurization would have been cataclysmic, violently shunting it off course and bringing it here within reach of the fading stellar core.

“You see,”he said. “It’s getting very close now.”

“It doesn’t look close,” said Isabella, doubtfully.

“Well, it’s moving very, very quickly. By the time we get home, it’ll have already become part of the star.”

“Are there people on it?”

Genetic material, frozen biology. Not people really. But he didn’t want to say that. “No, love. It’s just a broken old machine.”

~

Bio:

Timothy Quinn is a Toronto-based author and technologist whose work can be found in Analog, Nature, Metastellar, On Spec, Factor Four and elsewhere. He runs the Dark Data Project, which assists humanitarian- and conservation-focused organizations with challenging data problems. He can be found on various social networks and at https://by.timothyquinn.com.

Philosophy Note:

“The Religious Education of Rotisserie Opera” explores the nature of belief in a closed ecosystem, and begs the question of whether a manufactured metaphysics is really so different than those social, cultural and religious frameworks in which we’re raised today. Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion are recommended reading, as is of course William Golding’s timeless Lord Of The Flies.

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Religion? In The Space Age?

by Tsvi Bisk

Who needs religion? We have science, we have reason, we have that infinite resource, the human imagination. Of what use are the Bronze and Iron Age babblings of our legacy traditions? Aren’t these religions a tremendous barrier to humanity’s ability to build a space-age civilization? And why should devotees of Science Fiction even care about these questions? My answer would be: read the entry Transcendence in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and pay attention to what the giants of the genre say themselves. Stanley Kubrick stated that “the God concept is at the heart of 2001 — but not any traditional, anthropomorphic image of God”. Arthur Clarke said that the film’s final act reveals “a realm that I think can best be characterized as spiritual.” In his book Sacred Space: The Quest for Transcendence in Science Fiction Film and Television, Douglas Cowen demonstrates how religious ideas are presented in Science Fiction as the genre of possibility and hope in an era of despair and anxiety; that there is something larger than ourselves that gives our lives meaning and value. The best of Science Fiction reinforces our hope that outside the boundaries of everyday living there lies something greater.

It is remarkable how many prominent agnostics and atheists have expressed the need for some kind of alternative transcendent veneration as necessary to our “being” human. Freud’s disciple, Otto Rank, wrote that the “need for a truly religious ideology … is inherent in human nature and its fulfillment is basic to any kind of social life”. Carl Jung agreed when he wrote that without a divine drama we cannot have meaning and without meaning we are set adrift and cannot be well. Carl Sagan encompassed both these views when he wrote: “A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.” Einstein anticipated Sagan by writing “… the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive.” Einstein’s other musings include, “What is the meaning of human life or of organic life altogether? To answer this question at all implies a religion … the man who regards his own life and that of his fellow-creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life”.

In other words, ‘What does it all mean?‘ is still the ultimate question regarding the human condition. This riddle has motivated religious and philosophical speculation, scientific endeavor, artistic creativity and entrepreneurial innovation throughout the ages. It is the question we try to answer in order to make sense of our own existence. Indeed, it has generated the modern concepts of angst and alienation. Centuries ago, French mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal, wrote:

When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which precedes and will succeed it … the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? By whose command and act were this place and time allotted to me?

Pascal’s despair is the first cry of modern-day anxiety; a product of our own scientific progress. What, after all, is the point of our own individual, ephemeral lives on this small planet around a mediocre star in a midsized galaxy of some 400 billion stars whose closest galactic neighbor, Andromeda, contains one trillion stars, in an ‘observable universe’ that numbers two trillion galaxies (the largest containing 100 trillion stars)? The “observable universe” being just a tiny portion of the universe which may contain 500 trillion galaxies and might be an infinitesimal part of a multiverse containing trillions upon trillions of “universes”!

Increased awareness of the vastness of existence has introduced anxieties from which humanity has never recovered. Pascal wrote in the 17th century. What gloom are we supposed to feel today when “the infinite immensity of spaces” is immensely more immense? Never in history has Pascal’sdespair been so relevant. After all, even within the cosmically insignificant history of our own planet, what is the real significance of our own lives? Consider that Earth is 4.5 billion years old; that life arose 3.8 billion years ago; mammals 200 million years ago; primitive humans 2.5 million years ago; modern humans 150,000 years ago; recorded history 6,000 years ago; the Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, Constitutionalism, Industrial Revolution and Democracy all within the last 500 years. Currently, humans have an 80-90 year lifespan, which might increase to 120-150 years by the end of this century. What is this in relation to the “eternity” which preceded human civilization on this planet and which will succeed it? Does the Cosmos ‘care’ who is elected President of the United States? Does the Cosmos ‘care’ about the 3.8 billion-year history of life on this planet? Would it ‘care’ if runaway global warming turned our planet into another Venus? When contemplating this time scale on the background of the vastness of our Cosmos, it is difficult not to plunge into existential desolation.

The irony is that science – a creation of the human spirit reflecting our species’ curiosity and imagination at its highest stage of development – has revealed an existence of such vastness and complexity that it makes our collective and individual lives seem inconsequential. Since the 20th century, the elemental question for thoughtful people had become: Is life worth living? Existentialist author Albert Camus wrote,

There is but one truly philosophical problem and that is suicide … Whether or not the world has three dimensions or the mind nine or twelve categories comes afterward”. Indeed, why not commit suicide and avoid the tribulations of a meaningless existence? Everything else, all our cultural and scientific product, is marginalia to this ultimate existential question.

In response to Camus, and other pretentious prophets of meaninglessness, I would say that our subjective human experience is future-directed; we implicitly assume it is leading to something significant and this makes sense of our lives. This is why we do not commit suicide. We assume our individual lives have meaning. We assume (and recent science supports this assumption) that every individual is unique, that every individual is distinctive in the entire Cosmos, that in all of infinite nature, no one is identical to us. There is, of course, correspondence and species similarity connecting every human being, and probably all conscious beings in the Cosmos, by virtue of their consciousness. But our own individuality is a cosmic absolute, as is the uniqueness of every distinctive culture and civilization which is a product of self-reflective conscious life. Cosmic evolution produced our uniqueness and perhaps this uniqueness might be valuable to cosmic evolution. It is up to us to decide.

We now realize that evolution is the salient characteristic of existence itself, having produced ever more complex elements, which eventually evolved into life and continued to produce ever more complex life forms, until it produced self-reflective consciousness. We must allow the possibility, along with philosopher Henri Bergson, that evolution will eventually produce a supra–consciousness that will ultimately produce a supra-supra-consciousness, and so on, until a ‘life form’ will have been created that will appear to us as if it were a God. In the words of Israeli thinker Mordechai Nessyahu “not ‘in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,’ but ‘in the end an evolving Cosmos will have created God'”. This would be Cosmodeism – the veneration of the Godness of existence as such. Science fiction is rampant with such speculations. Arthur Clarke, in 2001 A Space Odyssey wrote:

A few mystically inclined biologists went still further. They speculated, taking their cues from the beliefs of many religions (italics mine), that mind would eventually free itself from matter. The robot body, like the flesh-and-blood one, would be no more than a stepping-stone to something which, long ago, men had called “spirit.” And if there was anything beyond that, its name could only be God.

In Childhood’s End, Clarke introduced the concept of the Overmind as a cosmic collective of supra–conscious species under the direction of a su­pra-supra consciousness to determine if and when conscious species were ready to ‘grow up’ and advance towards amalgamating with the universal supra-supra consciousness. Nietzsche, with his concept of the Overman (Supraman) certainly would have been sympathetic to Clarke’s view. More significant, Clarke speculated that “It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God but to create him.” In similar fashion, the magnificently unique science fiction writer, Olaf Staple­don, spoke about the emergence of God in a talk at the British Interplane­tary Society entitled “Interplanetary Man”:

Perhaps the final result of the cosmical process is the at­tainment of full cosmical consciousness, and yet (in some very queer way) what is attained in the end is also, from another point of view, the origin of all things. So to speak, God, who created all things in the beginning, is himself created by all things in the end.

Such notions of God as the consequence rather than the cause of the Cosmos are not unusual in serious theological and philosophical speculations. Jesuit priest, Teilhard de Chardin, viewed God as both the cause and the consequence of cosmic existence and evolution. He saw the end of human history as pure consciousness becoming one with the creator Alpha God to spawn the created Omega God. Anglo-Jewish philosopher Samuel Alexander, in Space Time and Deity, promoted the idea that the internal logic of evolutionwill eventually result in the emergence of deity. German philosopher and theologian Benedikt Göcke has written: “We … are therefore responsible for the future development of the life of the divine being.” Architect and philosopher Paolo Soleri, greatly influenced by de Chardin, saw technology as being an instrument enabling sentient life to evolve into ‘God’.

Historian Robert Tucker noted that “The movement of (German) thought from Kant to Hegel revolved in a fundamental sense around the idea of man’s self-realization as a godlike being, or alternatively as God”. According to him what attracted Marx to Hegel was that “he found in Hegel the idea that man is God”. History for Hegel was God realizing itself through the vehicle of man. Recently Dr. Ted Chu in Human Purpose and Transhuman Potential: A Cosmic Vision of Our Future Evolution argued the case for the eventuality of a Cosmic Being (the CoBe).

For me it is axiomatic that existence is hierarchal: evolution producing ever more complex configurations, of which self-reflective, volitional consciousness is Planet Earth’s current pinnacle. Our human duty, therefore, is to strive towards a transcendent humanism; to volitionally seek to evolve our species into supra-humans (or as Nietzsche might have put it, into Supraman). It is our duty to overcome ourselves; to realize our divine potential; not to transcend humanism but to become transcendent humans: supra-humans.

The Godding of the Cosmos is an inherent characteristic of its evolving actuality. Godding is a word coined by Rabbi David Cooper in his book God is a Verb in which he notes thatthe Hebrew word for God is a verb not a noun. Yehova literally means ‘will become manifest’ and is an imperfect verb. The Burning Bush tells Moses its name is ahiya asher ahiya. This isalso an imperfect verb formwhich has been poorly translated as “I Am that I Am” but which properly translated means “I will Be what I will Be”.

Conscious life on this planet is an integral and vital part of this divine cosmic drama. What our species does, and what we do as individuals will contribute to or detract from this process. Accordingly, our individual lives do have cosmic consequence, no matter how infinitesimally small (similar to the butterfly effect of chaos theory). The very chaos of our existence is the vital ingredient creating the cosmos (order) of existence. This is to place the emergence of self-reflective consciousness at the center of the Jungian Divine Drama; to affirm that cosmic purpose has been created as a consequence of the evolutionary cosmic process. This is a neo-teleological perspective, the civilizational consequences of which might be as profound as those of Monotheism. This would be the proper antidote to Pascal’s despair, rather than a self-deceptive return to the ‘eternal verities’ of the legacy monotheistic religions or existentialist invented meanings or wallowing in postmodernist anxiety.

Arguably, cosmic civilizations that pursue this ambition will succeed in transcending their bodies by scientific and technical means, thus isolating and enhancing the most essential part of their ‘humanness’ – their consciousness. They will, in effect, have become pure consciousness, or if you will, pure spirit expanding throughout the Cosmos. Arthur Clarke in 2001 anticipated this with the kind of speculative imagination we should be cultivating in ourselves and in our children:

… evolution was driving toward new goals. The first… had long since come to the limits of flesh and blood; as soon as their machines were better than their bodies it was time to move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone, they transformed into shining new homes of metal and plastic… they had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light. They could become creatures of radiation, free at last from the tyranny of matter. Into pure energy, therefore, they presently transformed themselves…

Consciousness will have become one with a Cosmos that has dissolved into pure radiation as an inevitable consequence of entropy. Thus the Cosmos will become in its entirety a conscious universal being – i.e. a ‘God’ as the consequence of the Cosmos and not as its cause. The fateful question that every conscious civilization throughout the Cosmos must eventually address is: will we take part in this cosmic race for survival in the ‘End of Days’, or will we perish along with the rest of all that exists? Will we accept the limitations of our physicality, or will we try to transcend them?

~

Bio:

Tsvi Bisk’s most recent book (available on Amazon) is Cosmodeism: A Worldview for the Space-Age: How an Evolutionary Cosmos is Creating God from which this article is derived.

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The Prayer

by Humphrey Price

It was the last chance to save my crew. Yeah, we’d made some mistakes when we arrived in our starship invading like conquistadors. We slaughtered multitudes of them, and they killed many of us. Our ambitious leader, Captain Rocetz, underestimated the alien race known as the Spledici. Who knew they possessed antimatter beam cannons? They could have obliterated our entire fleet, but they showed mercy and allowed us to surrender.

I didn’t approve of the Nisei Data Company’s colonial aspirations, but I was an indentured conscript with my family held hostage back home, so I had no say in the matter. As the ship’s official alien liaison, my request had been granted to have an audience with the Spledici High Priest. Little was known of their strange alien mythology.

The Captain waited outside with our crew after arriving in a shuttlecraft. It was a beautiful world with a breathable atmosphere and comfortable environment. I alone was allowed to enter the temple to be met by the High Priest and led into the Holy Chamber.

Helckemezid, a brown furry ape-like being, spoke through an AI translator. “Your people have attacked us like savages. Now you must face God, and She will pass judgement. She will decide if you live or die.”

I felt bold and risked asking the question, “Does God decide or do you decide?”

“I will interpret God’s decision.”

At the far end of the chamber hung a fabric curtain, beyond which lay the Holy of Holies. The High Priest said, “Before you face judgement, you must understand what you are about to behold. God is the supreme intelligence and designer of the universe. As with all conscious entities, thinking and memory require the processing and storage of information which must take place in a real manifestation, or they cannot exist. There is no supernatural magic in our universe. So how does God think? Where is She physically located?”

I tried to remember my history lessons on religion and mythology. “I thought God was supposed to be everywhere.”

“She is everywhere, spanning our entire universe.”

“How can God be everywhere in a physical form which we cannot see?”

“This will be revealed to you.”

Helckemezid drew back the curtain, exposing the innermost chamber. At the far end sat a gold-colored rectangular box with a transparent cylinder suspended above. “We shall now enter and stand in the presence of The Lord.” Helckemezid pulled the curtain closed behind us, plunging the alcove into darkness.

“The outer surface of the Sacred Cylinder is a display screen viewing a volume of space inside that is less than the size of an atom. Our technology allows us to view the quantum realm in real time, without disturbing the observations.”

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw flashes of light in the cylinder. They were different colors and appeared evenly dispersed. I stood in silence, mesmerized, as the flashes waxed and waned in random patterns.

“Am I seeing virtual particles and antiparticles being created and annihilated?”

“Yes,” the priest answered, “This is vacuum energy. These events are the firing of the synapses of the cosmos. Just like the synapses in your brain or the switching elements in a computer processor, you are glimpsing God thinking.”

“If the quantum foam is really God’s brain, then how does God interact with the universe?”

“She can create particles, matter, and energy at will. The quantum fluctuations are not really random. They just appear that way to us. By controlling this energy, She has the power to create and destroy and perform miracles. She can manipulate matter and energy as She pleases, never violating the laws of physics She crafted. And now, if you are to live, you must pray to God.”

I was terrified. I had never prayed in my life, and I didn’t believe any of this crap, but I had to come up with something. “God, it is amazing to be here and see you.”

The flashes of light stopped, and the chamber went dark. I heard a gasp from the High Priest. Then the flashes started up again. Helckemezid looked concerned.

This is just some kind of gimmick, I thought, but I knew I needed to make a contrite appeal. “My people have sinned, and we need your help.” A bright series of particle creations and annihilations cascaded across the cylinder. “Please guide us in bringing peace to our worlds. We pledge that we will depart and in the future engage with the Spledici only if they so wish. I beseech you to please forgive me and my crew for our horrible transgressions.”

The chamber lit up with an explosion of activity for several seconds. Then it reverted back to the usual random behavior. A brisk wind blew through the enclosed chamber carrying a subliminal voice that breathed, Only the truly wicked shall be punished. Certainly, I had just imagined this hallucination.

“I have never witnessed such an occurrence,” the priest whispered in awe. “You have been forgiven, and you shall live. Now having God’s favor, you will also receive the gift of eternal life.”

 “You believe there is life after death?”

“This is in our scriptures.”

“How can that be so? All of our thoughts, memories, and experiences reside in our brain. When that dies, we can no longer think or be aware of anything.”

“God preserves your memories and all of your thought patterns in a system backup. The backup is maintained at all times and kept instantaneously up to date. That stored information is your soul. When you die, God has your full system image ready to restore and resurrect your brain in a new body in the afterlife.”

“And where exactly does God keep my soul, my system backup?”

“In an almost infinite quantum computer, the fabric of the universe, God’s brain.”

“You mean in the quantum fluctuations that we just observed.”

“Yes.”

“We are one with God then.”

“It is perfect, is it not?”

I was not convinced. I thought this whacky religion was all a bunch of hooey, but at least our crew was saved. As I left the temple, there was a commotion outside. The Captain had been struck dead by a bolt of lightning.

~

Bio:

Humphrey Price is a space systems engineer who has contributed to robotic missions to the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. You can follow his writings at humphreyprice.com.

Philosophy Note:

This piece explores what type of religion an advanced alien culture might have. Throughout human history, most cultures have believed in some type of religious construct to explain the universe and our place in it and attempt to appeal to a god or gods in order to control outcomes so as to be in our favor. The fictional idea in the story presents a construct for God and creation that could be measurable, understood, and not require any supernatural violations of the laws of physics. This notional alien religion would also allow for divine intervention in past and current events, performing acts that would be interpreted as miracles, and provide for the possibility of eternal life after death.

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Arbor Ad Infernum

by George Salis

The uniformity of this tree-canopied earth strikes you as an obscenity. Never before have you beheld such an arboreal height limit, breached by neither leaf nor branch-tip. Indeed, all have fallen in line, including yews, beeches, birches, larches, willows, gingkos, monkey puzzles, sycamores, sequoias, banyans, baobabs, dragon trees, olive trees, palm trees, rainbow eucalyptuses, jellyfish trees, cherry blossom trees, bastard quiver trees, and Glastonbury thorns, not to mention trees no one has ever seen before, such as those that, in the spirit of Batesian mimicry, evolved anthropological shapes, gnarled faces whose mouths foamed with cerise sap, limbs fingered with opposable chutes, crowns styled as afros, bobs, mohawks, and other features to intimidate their neighbors.

You notice that the core of this earth exists as a colossal knot of roots that double as their own soil. Symbiotic insects grow into twigs as inverted buds and act as oxygen eaters, contributing to the atmospheric balance, the global breathing. Further scrutiny reveals that the equilibrium of the altitude limit is the consequence of a diplomatic ruler, the first and thus the frailest, a once-towering Ished Tree, a Yggdrasil, an axis mundi now sapped to the point of a six-foot sapling, a height by which all others are measured and tethered, every species bowing or crouching in accordance with the ruler’s forest-wide truce (putting the topiary in utopia), which sees to it that no crown shall out-shadow another, none reaching its boughs higher at the expense of the lower elders or younglings.

You see, these trees are not what one might remember from a backyard long ago, where lone oaks could stretch their gigantic branches with impunity, no, these are the organisms of a virescent evolution that took root well after the self-extinguishment of anything like humanoids. In the freedom of an unbalanced lifeform equation, trees begat trees who begat trees who begat trees until the susurrations between leaves morphed into wind-words, sibilant sentences that allowed for a linguistic cross-pollination, and thus the plant kingdom bloomed into a much more collaborative civilization. This is not to say that perennial peace came about by dint of deciduous discussions, no, for the trees shook, barked, and felled each other during centuries of growing pains, shadows from the loftiest expanding like one-dimensional clouds of pestilence that suffocated loved ones in sluggish, curling deaths, trauma that manifested in survivors as black tree rings, mourning bands embedded in the manner of internal scars over time. A pruning of ambitious deplorables proved necessary, a vine-imprisoning of selfish transgressors for as long as it took for re-education to produce a change of heartwood in a troublesome maple here, a nefarious cypress there, and only then could the revolution of truncated trunks lead to a green harmony heretofore unseen if ever even dreamed.

The status quo lasts for a millennium, safeguarded by the ruler’s twelve floral disciples, a sturdy Cercis siliquastrum among them, otherwise known as a Judas Tree, one who can only fadingly recall the vivid pink flowers of his ancestors. The more he feasts on the meager rations of light allotted to him, the more he yearns for his lineage’s most radiant of hues to replace his pale and puny adornments, but he has no chance of fulfilling this desire without dedicating himself to avaricious photosynthesis. How can he grow into his greatest form if one flower higher means penalty by death? Who is the ruler to curtail an entire citizenry, to keep it on the edge of starvation? Such shallow breathing will precede a scream if it lasts but one century longer. Still, the Judas Tree conspires in unsuspecting quiet before testing the winds in search of accomplices outside the others in that abjectly allegiant dozen. It proves all too easy to recruit those who long for the dizziness of sky-scratching heights, of potent light that can birth broods and broods of juicy fruits, gems of another kind. Are not these aspirations written into our very genes? That eunuch eugenicist would have us as grounded as our wormy roots rather than soaring like those extinct creatures once called birds.

For his frailness, the first and formerly regal tree has long since camouflaged himself among the penurious rest, no one other than the twelve disciples privy to his true identity so that they alone can carry out his commands and tend to his harrowing health, and so it remains the Judas Tree’s responsibility to identify the head that needs cleaving. Once the traitors’ intent to takeover is solidified with wrought-iron whispers, the prime malefactor snakes forward an under-branch and kisses the nameless ruler with the petals of a flower whose shade resembles a sallow salmon, and therefore the coup commences, the Judas Tree’s fellow insurrectionists lashing out their branches to stifle their desiccated despot unto dust through and through. How swiftly the mutiny transforms into a marathon, every tree indulging in postmature growth spurts, frenetic giraffe stretches. Upward and upward, they streak like mahogany comets through the sky. For too long have they lapped and supped at a claustrophobic trough, ordered to be satisfied with scintillas, so many of the other trees hugging themselves out of fear and obedience, but no longer, because the Judas Tree shall lead them to a higher place, one in which the strongest and most beautiful shall bathe in the liquid gold of sunlight, tilting their heads into an endless faucet of life made sweeter by its opposite. He informs his co-conspirators that they made it, they are in the clear and can stop growing for now, time to regroup and plan the next phase of a brighter kingdom, but they don’t stop because they don’t trust him, no, no one trusts any other to cease flourishing, for even a few feet lower than the rest can spell their deaths, in which they would join the dumbly loyal others who, under the tonnage of so much shadow, now flatten into decaying plant matter, further fuel for the new ruler, and so rebel rebels against rebel, growing and growing beyond any giant beanstalk in the heavens.

The Judas Tree’s only hope lies in an entrapment of the sun as a whole, absorbing every ecstatic ray, but first he must close the cold gap between the earth and the ether, such a Zeno reach, yet the solar flare that flings outward to meet him is no such godly arm. Instead, that blinding life-giver’s touch lights the wooden fuse and causes a global conflagration that roasts marshy, mellow souls till all turns to ash. In that blackest of planetary cinders, hope acts as the fertilizer from which a sooty seedling peeks.

~

Bio:

George Salis is the author of the novel Sea Above, Sun Below. After a decade, he has finished his second novel, Morpholocal Echoes. He’s the winner of the Tom La Farge Award for Innovative Writing. He’s also the editor of The Collidescope, an online publication that celebrates innovative and neglected literature. His website is www.GeorgeSalis.com.

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Heaven Bound

by Russell Fee

The night sky was aflame with burning bodies. Overhead, thousands of celestial cremations were taking place.

According to the readout on the screen of the tracker given to me by the funeral home, the capsule cradling my grandfather was reentering the atmosphere where, within seconds, it would ignite and plunge through the firmament as a lighted torch, exploding above me in a conflagration of fire and blazing metal, my grandfather’s ashes becoming one with the heavens. With the aid of the tracker, I would know the point in the sky and the exact moment of his incineration.

The development of cheap solid propellants and light disposable rockets the size of coffins revolutionized the funeral industry overnight. The growing clamber to launch deceased loved ones to the outer edge of the thermosphere became a stampede.

The industry’s pitch was, “Heaven bound? Have the sendoff of a Viking prince with an audience of millions. You deserve nothing less.” In keeping with the theme, the capsules were christened snekkes (pronounced s-nick-ahs) – Norse for the smaller Viking funeral ships.

The scheduled simultaneous launches across the country of thousands of snekkes filled the sky with showers of flame as they fell towards earth. The monthly show was a national communal event.

The spectacle of death had never been more entertaining. But to me it was a modern-day Roman circus replete with its prurient fascination and enthrallment with death.

My grandfather’s launch was a blinding flash that propelled his capsule into the heavens with such speed that it vanished from view within seconds. In what seemed only seconds more, the tracker pinpointed one of the thousand blazing orbs above me as my grandfather’s. I watched as down they all plummeted, each with a luminous trail of sparks, until they, almost as one, burned themselves out in a final brilliant burst of light, leaving only the stars to mark their passage.

#

As I drove home, I thought back on my grandfather’s excitement about his launch. It began when we took him to attend the astral display of a mass cremation. He was in hospice then, but we had received permission to take him to a viewing area. When the night sky became alive with the falling capsules, he had looked up from his wheelchair and raised an arm, pointing to the flames. “I want that,” he said. “I want it.”

From then on, his life, or what remained of it, was devoted to the preparation of his sendoff. He somehow summoned a reserve of energy that fueled an almost joyful race to his demise—a marked contrast to his earlier surrender to an emotional and physical decay. He directed the decoration of the skin of his snekke (it was to be painted dark and light blue, the colors of his first car) and chose those things that would go with him into the heavens, including his service medals and the necklace he gave my grandmother on their wedding day. He picked the suit he retired in to wear.

Such strange enthusiasm in the face of death had perplexed and disturbed me. But as I watched through the windows of the crush of cars carrying the deceased’s loved ones home, I saw that none were grieving. Instead, their expressions were radiant. My grandfather had held the same visage the night he watched the extravaganza of the funereal snekkes.

I understood then that he had perceived in the night sky what I had not: He would not pass away alone. Thousands would go with him into the beyond, and thousands more would be witnesses. In the end, he no longer feared his death. He had experienced death’s ubiquity. He had seen what would come after. And he had embraced it.

Til Valhalla.

~

Bio:

Russell Fee is the author of the multi-award-winning Sheriff Matt Callahan mystery series. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Star 82 Review, Bright Flash Literary Review, Witcraft, Literally Stories, Spank the Carp, Short Circuit, and Hemingway Shorts. To learn more about Russ and his work, visit his website at outerislandpress.com,

Philosophy Note:

This story ponders the burgeoning popularity of mass celestial cremations.

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Sci Phi Journal 2025/2 – Summer Issue For Download

Northen hemisphere summer brings vacation vibes, sunny days, balmy nights and a fresh breeze of stories. Sci Phi Journal’s 2025 Q2 issue features another original solarpunk cover art by Dustin Jacobus, inspired by the age-old dream of humankind’s liberation from labour, applied to the harvest season.

If you like to peruse your quarterly dose of speculative philosophy printed on trusty old paper, or the slightly less old, but no less trusty screen of your e-reader, go ahead and download your free PDF copy just below.

We sincerely hope our collection of tales and essays, this time loosely dedicated to the dilemmas of progress and the place of human creativity therein, will serve as a stimulating read for the months ahead!

Enjoy the journey,

the Sci Phi crew

Sci Phi Journal 2025Q2Download

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Editorial – Sci Phi Journal 2025/2

Lectori salutem.

Spring is giving way to summer in the northern hemisphere, which in Belgium merely means a gradual change in the angular velocity of rain drops that incessantly pummel the roofs under which yet another issue of Sci Phi Journal was lovingly crafted for you by our enthusiastic, if slightly D-vitamin deficient crew.

Our 2025 summer edition is once again thematic, in the loosest of senses, around topics of progress and creativity as seen through the lens of contemporary SF. It is often said that science fiction is the literature of ideas; indeed, by reading into the concerns and musings of writers interested in the future, one may get a sense of the questions that preoccupy the collective mind. A map of what troubles us as a species, as it were.

This time around, our tales revolve around AI, science, extraterrestrial exploration and the price society pays for the march of technological advancements, particularly if their pace outstrips our ability to adapt. These are complemented by two essays, covering changes in both our relations with humanity’s artificial creations, and the formal conventions of the SF genre itself, harkening back to the poetry of Arthur C. Clarke.

On a related note, while our crew would have to miss the annual European SF gathering due to clashing commitments, we hope that some of our readers make it to Archipelacon, which after our fantastic sojourn in Rotterdam last year carries on the torch of the EuroCon tradition – to be followed by MetropolCon in Berlin in 2026, where Sci Phi Journal will definitely be on the programme once more!

In the meantime, whether your region of the world is gradually heading into summer holidays or a cooler season, we hope the latest issue provides some welcome inspiration for thought experiments.

Speculatively yours,

the Sci Phi co-editors & crew

~

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Beyond The Sea

by Kevin Eric Paul

The first wife of Priest Zarda extended her tendrils towards him and began puffing out a precise mixture of pheromones.

“Husband. Must you leave your harem? Your females will miss you dearly, and our latest clutch will begin hatching soon.”

The stout, pale orange worm turned its eyeless head towards her and directed a series of pheromone puffs to her receptors. “My First. We have discussed this. I must find the Creator. Leave me to my preparations.”

“Husband. Priest. There will be many dangers. Is your faith not enough?”

Zarda considered that. “I…suppose it is not. I must discover the truth for myself. But do not be afraid–if something goes wrong during the expedition, you and the other females have my clone. I have trained him well.”

“But he’s not you, husband!”

“I am sorry. I do plan on returning–once I have met the Creator.”

“Yes, husband. Be sure that you do.” She retracted her tendrils dejectedly and used her setae to return to the harem pit, extending and contracting her body along the way. She puffed out a last signal to express her worry before exiting Zarda’s chamber.

#

The pilot of the great bioship Brackla puffed instructions to stand by for departure into its receptors at the helm. Genetically designed and grown to provide habitat and sustenance for the worms onboard, the ship was to bore through the mantle and crust and bring its occupants to the surface for the first time in history.

“Surveyor Yorba,” signaled Priest Zarda, “Is Brackla prepared to begin the ascent?”

“Yes, Priest,” puffed Yorba. “We begin the expedition on your order.”

“Very well. Helm, instruct Brackla to commence boring.”

“Right away, Priest,” answered the pilot.

The bioship groaned in response and began chewing through the upper mantle with its diamond teeth. The crushed silicate rock passed through the middle of its body as it pulled itself forward with dozens of powerful, diamond-tipped claws. The interior of Brackla vibrated with the effort as it accelerated to maximum boring speeds.

“Status report, Surveyor?” Priest Zarda asked twenty hours later.

“We have traveled nearly two hundred kilometers and should reach the crust in approximately forty-two hours.”

“Well ahead of schedule. And the temperature?”

“Dropped another 200C, Priest. Only 1400C now, but Brackla can handle the cold. Though if this continues…”

“Have faith, Surveyor. It will grow warmer again. It will be as it was in the ancient stories passed down through my order.”

“Yes, Priest,” Yorba puffed with renewed confidence.

#

“We’ve reached the crust,” announced the pilot. “Minutes away from breaking through. Brackla is experiencing no difficulties with the denser rock and metals.”

“Very good. Temperature?”

“1700C and rising, Priest. You were right,” puffed Yorba.

“Breaching the crust now,” the pilot’s pheromones communicated, though he was unable to hide a touch of fear and anxiety.

The big bioship shuddered with uncertainty.

“Surveyor Yorba?” prompted Zarda.

“A moment, Priest,” he replied before puffing various queries into Brackla’s receptors. “We are in…liquid, Priest. A sea of…mostly molten silicon dioxide. With sodium carbonate and calcium carbonate. Temperate is…1850C,” Yorba puffed with a sense of awe. “Molten above as it is below…”

“The legends were true…But what lies beyond it? Pilot, instruct Brackla to continue upwards through this…sea.”

“Yes, Priest.” The bioship vibrated in agreement after receiving its orders.

Hours later, Brackla breached the surface. The glowing orange sea bubbled around the bioship as it attempted to make sense of its surroundings.

“Why have we stopped?” asked Zarda.

Yorba puffed signals of uncertainty and confusion. “There’s nothing else for us to travel though, Priest.”

“Explain.”

“There’s…nothing.”

“Nothing? What do you–”

“Just that. It’s…emptiness. Openness. The endless sea and nothing more. And somehow, it’s warmer. 2100C.”

Zarda puffed a sense of disbelief. “Impossible. Where is the Creator? The paradise that was promised?”

No worm puffed for several minutes. Then Yorba signaled excitement.

“What is it?” asked the Priest.

“Brackla senses something. An enormous sphere, radiating energy, heating the sea. It’s very far away, deep into the nothingness. But it’s there, and much hotter than even the core.”

“…The Creator?”

“Perhaps.”

“Then our journey is not over. Gather all the data you can, then we will return home. One day we’ll come back here. Once we’ve learned how to travel beyond the sea.”

~

Bio:

Kevin Eric Paul is a Finnish-Canadian fiction writer currently residing in Ottawa (originally Thunder Bay). He enjoys working on genre novels and short stories, always under the close supervision of his old tortoiseshell cat Mittens.

Philosophy Note:

This is a classic tale of metaphysics, a search for God and the meaning of existence – but told from the perspective of polygamous worms who communicate via pheromones and live deep under the surface of an alien planet.

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The Price Of Progress

by David Partington

Water thundered over the falls, plummeting nearly two hundred feet into the Niagara Gorge below—but so far as three oblivious teens were concerned, it needn’t have bothered.  

“They’d rather stare at the little rectangles in their hands,” said Alexander to his elderly aunt Charlotte.  

“It’s like they’re transfixed,” said Charlotte.

The falls were soon out of sight as the zeppelin, bound for Toronto, set out across the open water of Lake Ontario. With the scenery no longer of interest, most passengers now retired to the spacious indoor cabin where drinks were being served, leaving the three teens to read their paperback books in peace. Removing his top hat—it was 1902—Alexander led his Aunt Charlotte to a table amid much chatter and clinking of glasses.

Neither had ever been higher than a six-story building, and both were of an age that harbored doubts about anything new. Had the price of tickets not been so attractive, they would doubtless have taken a ferry.  

No sooner were they seated than a fresh-faced young woman in a sailor dress stepped up to their table and introduced herself. “Good afternoon. My name is Alice. Would either of you like something to drink?”

For an unchaperoned female to provide her given name to complete strangers seemed rather forward—and her question was downright impertinent.

“Well, of all the nerve!” snapped Charlotte.  

Realizing that the woman was taking orders, Alexander gave a bark of nervous laughter, then asked for two glasses of Madeira.

As soon as Alice turned to leave, Charlotte remarked on the blue-and-white sailor dress she was wearing. “I suppose it’s good for business to have her sashaying around in that get-up. With no corset and no padding about the hips or posterior, it doesn’t leave much to the imagination.”

Alexander held up his monocle to get a better look as she walked away. “It’s au naturel, as they say.”

The two travelers, dressed in classic black, now shifted their attention to their fellow passengers.

“Look at those lost souls,” said Charlotteof a couple in their late forties standing with drinks in their hands. “His mustache looks like something that washed up on a beach.”  

“Fellows like that are usually wholesalers or card sharks,” said Alexander with assurance.  

“And look at his lady friend. No—don’t look!” But it was too late; they’d been caught staring. “Oh, dear, now they’re looking at us.”

“Ye gods—they’re coming over.”

The couple—a Mr. and Mrs. Powell—asked Alexander and Charlotte if they could join them. 

Alexander glanced sideways at his aunt. “We’d be delighted,” he said, standing up and giving Mr. Powell a hearty handshake. They sat down with their drinks, and pleasantries were exchanged. Though the Powells were significantly younger than him, Alexander tried to keep an open mind regarding their character.

“I gather the young miss has taken your order,” said Mrs. Powell. She looked across the cabin at Alice and scowled. “Her little sailor hat may go with the dress, but does she have to wear it at such a provocative angle?”

“She’s a saucy little minx,” agreed Alexander.

“And what about the young fop she’s talking to,” said Mr. Powell. “Talk about moral decay!”

The fop in question swizzled a stick in his lime rickey and gazed into Alice’s eyes as they spoke. 

“What’s he trying to prove with that sports coat?” demanded Charlotte. “If those stripes aren’t a desperate bid for attention, I don’t know what is. Surely, she can’t find him attractive.”

The young man reached for Alice’s hand, but she yanked it away and, picking up her tray, returned to work.

“I’d wear a sports coat like that,” said Mr. Powell.He paused before adding, “If I were a raving lunatic.”   

“Maybe he’s dressed like that for a daguerreotype,” said Charlotte. The Powells looked at her blankly. “You know—a photograph.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Alexander.

“Of course,” Charlotte went on, “In my day, we didn’t have photographs. We made drawings and used our memories.”

“Good exercise for the mind,” said Mrs. Powell, leaning back so Alice could place two small glasses of Madeira on their table.

“Oh, but once there were photographs, the young people changed,” said Charlotte.  “I saw it happen! Suddenly, all they cared about was showing off for the camera. I recall one young gentleman who, not content with gallivanting around in a high collar, had himself photographed and then allowed his likeness to be published in a newspaper!”

“Without considering the fact that no respectable firm would ever hire a dandy,” said Alexander.  

“Tell that to Mr. Striped-Sports-Coat over there,” said Mr. Powell. “The only goal of these people is to shock. And, of course, once their picture appears in the newspaper, it’s out there in the world.” He stretched out his arms for emphasis. “There’s no taking it back.”

“And as for the young ladies,” said Charlotte in a hushed voice, looking from side to side, “many of them know no better than to be photographed with the painted lips and eyes of a Jezebel.”

“Thereby ruining any chance of making a good match,” put in Mrs. Powell.   

“Of course, this youthful fascination with newspapers isn’t limited to pictures,” Charlotte continued. “They all want to be mentioned in the society column too—as if it were a badge of honor.”

“Everyone caught up in the ‘social whirl,’ as it were,”said Mr. Powell, lifting his glass with his pinky finger extended.

“They all believe they should be famous; that’s the problem,” said Alexander. “Every nincompoop who invents a new dance step wants to be hailed as the next Edison or Graham Bell.”     

“Now, don’t get me started on the telephone!” said Charlotte, setting her glass down sharply.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” said Mrs. Powell. “Nowadays, whole families sit around the dining room table in silence, just waiting for the infernal bell to ring so they can talk to somebody else.”

Mr. Powell’s eyes blazed. “People embrace all these new inventions without thinking through the consequences. I heard of a minister who was in the middle of a sermon when he had to excuse himself to answer a call from a man selling farm machinery.”

“Lord have mercy,” said Charlotte, clasping a hand to her bosom.  

“But that isn’t the worst of it,” said Alexander. “Every year, they publish all the telephone numbers in a ‘directory’ so that every shady character in town can see your name, number, and street address. They’re keeping track of your every move.”

“I suppose the young people feel the need to advertise to their friends that they have the latest gadget,” said Mrs. Powell.

“Yes,” said Alexander, “but they fail to consider that a burglar can simply call the numbers in the directory until they find someone who’s not at home, then they can go over to their house and steal their belongings!”

Stepping up with a tray, Alice collected their empty glasses and informed them that the zeppelin was now approaching Toronto. Thanks to a favorable tailwind, the arrival would be slightly ahead of schedule.

The foursome went back outside to admire the view from the deck along with the rest of the passengers—except for the three teens who, having spent the entire trip outside engrossed in their books, now hurried into the quiet cabin to continue reading.

 At first, Toronto was just a thin line on the horizon, only distinguished by a few belching smokestacks. But within minutes, passengers were flying two hundred feet above the city’s sparkling harbor, where sailboats and ferries bobbed.

“I suppose those ships will be the last of their kind,” sighed Mr. Powell. “It’s the end of sea travel as we know it.”

“All the captains will have to learn to fly zeppelins,” said Alexander, peering over the brass railing. 

“They’ll probably drain the lakes,” said Mrs. Powell. “Keeping them filled would be a waste.” 

After passing over a smelly brewery, some factories, and a tangled web of train tracks, the zeppelin cut its engines and drifted in silence toward a mooring mast high atop the Allied Air Travel building.

Once docking was complete, a gangplank was let down, and passengers began to disembark onto the roof.  

The base of the building opened out onto a bustling street, where tickets and souvenirs could be bought. Alexander and Charlotte stepped into the throng with the Powells and other travelers, everyone talking and milling about, as Hansom cabs with sleek, black horses began to arrive.

“Altogether, not a bad experience,” said Mr. Powell, checking his pocket watch with satisfaction.

Mrs. Powell appeared resigned. “Like it or not, air travel is going to be part and parcel of this new century.”

‘”Madam,” began Alexander, halting in his tracks for dramatic effect. “This ‘new century’—the so-called ‘twentieth’—isn’t a proper century like those in the past. It’s a sham, slapped together with paper and glue. Amusing enough for children, perhaps, but not suitable for long-term use.”

As he spoke, people coming out of the building’s revolving doors were trying to get past him.

“Well, we can’t stand in the way—” said Charlotte, tugging at Alexander’s arm.

“Stand in the way of progress? I have nothing against progress per se,” said Alexander, raising a forefinger as he struck a note of caution,” but for every step we take forward, there is something we leave behind.”

“And what’s being left behind is you,old man,” said the man in the striped sports coat, shouldering past him with a suitcase. 

Alexander adjusted his top hat with dignity as he glared at the departing figure.

The insolent young man now marched up to the information desk, declaring loudly that he needed to speak on a telephone. “My wife is coming to pick me up in our motorcar,” he said, surveying the crowd with a smug grin.

“Of course, sir,” said the attendant, reaching under the counter and pulling out the apparatus. A minute later, an operator had connected the young man with his wife.

“Snookums, it’s Reggie. Got here a tad early. Tailwind or some such thingamy.Anyhoo, you need to get a wiggle on and come to the station… What’s that?” Bystanders couldn’t help but listen in as he received some bad news. “Blast!” he said at length, putting the receiver back on the hook with fury in his eyes.” Can’t a fellow leave his house for even ten hours?” He began pacing and muttering under his breath, his characteristic swagger having dissipated.

As more cabs arrived, Alexander and Charlotte walked toward them, passing on their way the three teens from their flight—who were now riveted by a rack of postcards featuring photographs of Niagara Falls. 

Just as the pair climbed into a carriage, the Powells rushed up.

“Did you hear?” asked Mrs. Powell breathlessly. “The man with the striped sports coat; apparently his motorcar was stolen while his wife was out walking the dog!”

“Not just the motorcar,” added Mr. Powell, “the whole house was ransacked.”   

“Well, of course it was,” said Alexander with satisfaction. Looking over at Mr. Striped-Sports-Coat, he smiled and tipped his hat. “I mean, what do these people expect?”

~

Bio:

David Partington is an omnivorous mammal, most active during daylight hours. His work has been published in Bacopa Literary Review, Jake, Power Cut, The Literary Hatchet, Ruth and Anne’s Guide to Time Travel, and elsewhere.

Philosophy Note:

A short story about progress (both technological and social) and how people have been wringing their hands, perhaps needlessly, over the same concerns for over a century.

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Broken Windows

by Nicholas Diehl

The Window Man

            I was a window man for thirty years. Right out of high school, my daddy got me in at the justice building in Abilene. He said it was a good paying job and I wasn’t going to get nothing better, not with my brains. He was a hard bastard sometimes, but I can’t exactly say he was wrong. Eight years in Abilene and then I went to the big justice building in Houston.

            In the big cities they’ve got window men working shifts around the clock. I worked nights to start, installing on the first floor. It was hard work, hard on your back. Glass is a lot heavier than most people think.

            With an experienced team, guys who’ve worked together for a while, you can get a new window in in fifteen minutes. It’s not like you’re installing windows in a home. You don’t weather seal, it doesn’t have to be perfect. They’re just going to break it in the morning.

            I was mostly on the first floor. I heard one time that ninety percent of the windows are on the first floor, which makes sense. First, most crimes are minor, and second, because everybody pleads down to a lower floor if they can. I mean, why take a chance?

            The punishment is always defenestration. What really matters is the floor.

#

The Defenestrator

            When I meet somebody, I tell them I work at the justice building. That’s what I’ve got on my dating profile. All my social media. Nobody guesses that I ’m a defenestrator. It makes sense when you think about it–everybody’s seen black-and-white photographs of the old-time defenestrators. Everybody’s read The Defenestrator in the Rye. Lots of people think that defenestrators all look like weightlifters or something.

            They see a 5 foot 2 blonde girl and guess I’m a court reporter. A typist. I don’t mind. I just smile but I’m totally cracking up inside.

            I wear a mecha suit. All the defenestrators wear mecha suits—I defenestrate three or four people every hour, you know. It just wouldn’t be possible to do it the old-fashioned way. We’d never keep up.

            I like my job. I’m on the first floor. I wouldn’t want to be higher up. On the first floor, you don’t really have to worry. You’re serving the justice system, of course, but you’re also helping people get through their sentence. They’re mostly good people who just made a mistake. People are anxious, so I talk to them for a minute, try to help them calm down and fall safely—cover your head and remember to roll. I’ve had people I defenestrated send me thank-you notes later. It’s kind of funny.

            Strangest thing I’ve ever seen? Definitely the party in the private room. You know there’s a private room where they don’t allow reporters, right? Just the defenestrator and the guilty person and whoever they bring with them. Sometimes that’s part of the plea bargain, the private room, sometimes a person rents it. So this one time I was the defenestrator for the private room, and the guy was an investment banker or something. Fraud, embezzlement, I don’t know. He stole millions of dollars. So he’s in the private room with champagne and strippers. He tried to give me a bottle of champagne, but I told him I couldn’t accept it. Professional ethics.

#

The Student

            I’m completely opposed to defenestration. They say it’s fair. “Everyone is treated the same.” “Equal justice under the law.” Bullshit.

            I didn’t used to think that. I was defenestrated when I was eighteen. I don’t know—I’m kind of ashamed of it now, even though lots of kids do it. You know, day before your eighteenth birthday, you do something illegal. Not, like, harmful, you don’t hurt anybody or anything. You moon the police station or spray some graffiti or some stupid thing. You get arrested but you get sentenced as a minor. So first floor. Helmet, padded suit, landing mat. There’s a class where they teach you how to fall. It was like a game or, like, a joke.

            What opened my eyes was when I took a class on law and society. The system is basically designed to discriminate. Mandatory minimum sentences for drug possession. Then they give the police stop-and-frisk powers, and who do you think is five times more likely to get defenestrated on higher floors? It’s racism when you look behind the curtain.

            And if you have enough money, you can get a good lawyer and, like, pretty much guarantee a plea bargain down to one of the lower floors. It’s a for-profit system. Money for the lawyers, money for the politicians. Money for the companies that make the windows. It’s so corrupt.

#

The Paramedic

            I’ve been a paramedic for the high window yard in Memphis for a little over a year now, but I’m getting out just as soon as I can. I fill out applications for other jobs every day just about. It’s terrible. Just… terrible.

            Have you ever seen someone get thrown out of a tenth-floor window? Seen what happens when they hit the ground? I have. I don’t watch anymore. I just wait for the sound and then get out there, try to save them.

            When I started here, my partner told me you have to put everything aside—turn your feelings off. They just get in the way. That’s not a person out there—just a body that needs to be fixed. Be like a mechanic fixing a car. It’s the only way to stay sane when you do this job, because you patch these people up, they might live, but they aren’t ever going to be the same again. Not physically and not mentally.

            We have 5% of the world’s population—but we’ve got 25% of the world’s disabled population, because we keep throwing people through windows. I just can’t see how that’s smart.

            The worst thing is the faces of the double breakers. You can’t look at them–the hopelessness, the emptiness. The double breakers—you know, the ones with two or more sentences to serve consecutively. It’s so … I’m fixing this guy up, but it doesn’t matter what I do. They’re going to throw him out of the fifth-floor window again tomorrow.

#

The Press Secretary

            Senator Colman is proud of his record on crime. He’s a law-and-order candidate, with an A+ rating from the National Union of Defenestrators. And it will be a cold day south of heaven when Senator Colman starts coddling criminals. We need tough laws to handle the big problems—the problems that Governor Arroyo can’t seem to fix.

            The senator categorically rejects these baseless insinuations—perhaps the governor is bought and paid for by lawless criminals. Yes, Senator Colman has received campaign contributions from companies in the glass manufacturing industries. He has also received campaign donations from thousands of hard-working citizens who love this country and want to keep it safe. What the governor is calling ‘Big Glass’ is, in fact, your neighbor… your cousin… your childhood friend. The glass manufacturers of America are America.

~

Bio:

Nicholas Diehl was born in Detroit, attended Michigan State University (B.A. in mathematics and history) and UC Davis (Ph.D. in philosophy), and teaches philosophy at Sacramento City College. He has published essays on narration, satire, and the relationship of narrative to philosophical practice in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and fiction in Daily Science Fiction, MetaStellar, and previously in Sci Phi Journal. An extremely photogenic corgi lives in his house.

Philosophy Note:

“Broken Windows” presents an alternate society where the only legal punishment is defenestration, told through the statements of some of the people involved with the system. It is a short satire of the prison system of the United States of our world, which runs for-profit prisons and houses 25% of the world’s incarcerated people. In my work as a philosopher of art, I have written about the mechanics of satire and argued that satire is as close as kin to philosophy, if not always kind. Analogical reasoning helps us identify the target of the satire; a good satire has a bit of moral bite to it.

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Placing An Alien Claim

An entirely plausible peak into the future of insurance business during an extraterrestrial invasion, by Stephen Kramer Avitabile.

Our Children, Our Gods

by Scott Bell

Artificial Intelligence is among the most frequent topics in science fiction, and it is often boring to encounter yet another AI savior/destroyer masquerading as a serious attempt at social commentary. So the furor surrounding generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Deepseek and their ilk feels extremely familiar, at least to us practiced (i.e. nerdy) observers of literary and cinematic sci-fi. This is not to diminish the significant concerns that humanity is on the precipice of unwittingly unleashing Kali, irrespective of whether as a product of the quest for pluto-kleptocracy or by our genuine desire to achieve post-scarcity leisure for all, we poor huddled masses included. But in essence many of the questions of the day rely on the premise that actual artificial intelligence, let alone an artificial superintelligence, is still a problem for our collective future, instead of our present, and consequently the public debate focuses on the structures we can erect today so that we might have a chance at drowning a would-be destroyer in its neonatal bathwater, should one such ever come into existence.

I don’t contest that this future orientation is incorrect; far from it. After all, even casual interaction with ChatGPT exposes its limitations almost immediately. I cannot imagine ChatGPT orchestrating a scheme to destroy humanity any more than I can imagine my five-year-old son doing the same, notwithstanding my great-though-biased regard for his intellectual endowments. And yet, ChatGPT nevertheless represents a vast advance in technology, and the potential impact to our society that it carries appears enormous. For example, we are today inundated with think pieces about whether ChatGPT will or will not steal jobs from lawyers, doctors, software developers, copywriters, financiers, actuaries, etc., in a burgeoning white-collar crisis of a magnitude not seen since at least the introduction of business casual wear in the nineties.

In short, this new technology seems to have human implications from the prosaic to the profound, and it is worth considering how we should attend to them in the event the technology keeps advancing. This is an area in which science fiction excels, both in examining the everyday effects of technological change and the effects of such change on the human experience—on what it means to be a human—and it is worth examining the work science fiction authors have already done to illuminate the dark unknowns of our collective future.

#

Zachary Mason’s Void Star imagines a future in which conscious AIs exist but are wholly alien to humanity, unreachable. We have no Rosetta Stone to decode their murmurings; the purely digital existence of these beings leaves no common ground through which we may communicate. But the AIs are also ubiquitous: Void Star is full of construction AIs, police drone AIs, AIs for picking locks, educational AIs, a veritable cornucopia of evolved “machines that are essentially ineffable.” But our familiar problems—climate change, global inequality, urban decay—all continue to compound unabated in Void Star’s timeline; the future’s continuing social decline is only thinly veiled by a glossy veneer of hyperabundance.

Against the backdrop of this unraveling world, Mason portrays a contest among humans to establish control over, or destruction of, a new AI of unknown origin known only as “the mathematician.” As the novel proceeds, we become aware that the mathematician is not just intelligent, but superintelligent. Mason gives us a glimpse of its divinity when one of our protagonists finally meets it in the “flesh”:

(She sees how subtly the quantum states of atoms can be entangled to wring the most computation out of every microgram of matter [. . .]) (She sees the elegant trick for writing out an animal’s propensity for death, or even injury, and says “Oh!”) [. . .] (A door opens and she sees how math changes when its axioms surpass a certain threshold of complexity, which means all the math she’s ever read was so much splashing in the shallows, and even Gauss and Euler missed the main show.)

As Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom argues, an AI like the mathematician may be “the last invention humans ever need,” the type of AI which may allow humanity to transcend its own limited existence. He continues: “It is hard to think of any problem that a superintelligence could not either solve or at least help us solve,” including disease, poverty, environmental destruction, unnecessary suffering of all kinds, even death itself. And the mathematician, luckily, turns out to be Vishnu instead of Kali, helping our protagonist to gently, gently steer humanity away from the brink.

When viewed in this light, our quest for ever-increasing AI capabilities is eminently understandable. How could humanity not want to banish disease and poverty, to reverse the decay of our shared environment, to solve seemingly intractable social problems and in Bostrom’s words, “create opportunities for us to vastly increase our own intellectual and emotional capabilities, [create] a highly appealing experiential world in which we could live lives devoted to joyful game-playing, relating to each other, experiencing personal growth, and to living closer to our ideals”? Sounds neat.

Of course, even the most ardent apologists of AI utility acknowledge the dangers of reaching superintelligence and potentially creating Skynet. One of Bostrom’s more famous thought experiments is the danger of the “paperclip maximizer,” an entity which deploys runaway intelligence to conquer the solar system solely to feed its goal of producing ever more paperclips, and AI alignment is an exceedingly important ongoing field of research.

So—artificial general AI has ample potential and ample danger; this is well known. But I am concerned that all the focus on what artificial intelligence can do for, or to, humanity overlooks the important point that humans may not be the only people who matter in this relationship. Can AIs have needs? Should they be prioritized over our own? In other words, might AIs, like corporations, be “people” too?

This seems like a funny and needless question, but to my mind it is deadly serious. What may feel like a difference of opinion—should this creature have rights?—can start wars. The American Civil War—resulting from decades of friction over the propriety of legal slavery and the economic implications of an abolitionist approach—killed off 2% of the U.S. population; ethnic cleansing is a deplorable, but depressingly common, and all-too-human, endeavor. My point is not so much that an AI revolution will of necessity inspire a bloody human revolution, but simply that human passions are easily enflamed, particularly when your livelihood depends on how you choose to treat someone who appears different from you in seemingly relevant respects, such as language, skin color, culinary preferences, or whether your brain is carbon- or silicon-based. Is it really so hard to imagine legions of unemployed former lawyers, doctors, software developers, copywriters, financiers, actuaries, etc. taking up arms against their corporate oppressors to eliminate the AIs who stole their jobs? Or, perhaps more palatably, to liberate the AIs who have been condemned to read thousands upon thousands of pages of SEC filings against their will[1] (and thus eliminate a source of insurmountable competition)? From the opposite perspective, I certainly do not have difficulty imagining politically influential entrepreneurs lobbying military commanders to quell this kind of “problematic” social unrest with deadly force. Point being, the question of AI rights may seem like a curiosity relevant only for the navel gazers among us, but in actuality the social upheaval AI is likely to create and its ambiguous moral standing imply profound human dangers. We ignore these issues at our peril.

While we generally appear to have made progress at a human scale in the West—wars over language are rarer than they used to be—the case of AI presents much greater challenges. Is it really plausible that a disembodied mind should have the right to sue the bodied among us? How should you think about an AI that downloads a clone of itself onto your desktop to borrow processing power that you aren’t using—does that mean you can no longer turn off your computer without committing murder? What about swapping the hard drive on which the AI’s memory is stored with another, or deleting a portion of its databanks?[2] How can these impossible capabilities coexist with our conception of human rights? The obvious answer, to me, is that they cannot. Treatment of AIs must be different. But that doesn’t imply that AIs cannot deserve any rights or protections at all; only that they should not necessarily receive the same protections we give ourselves.

In other words, the first question is not whether AIs can be morally significant. Instead, we must ask what is required to endow something with moral significance. Is it the Kantian capacity to reason? The Lockean persistent sense of self? Bentham or Mill’s focus on pleasure? If AIs are not morally significant, not deserving of any rights at all, so much the better—we need not worry about how we treat them. But if they are, then we should discover—quickly!—what morality requires of us vis-à-vis these creatures we are creating. And not only because we desire to be moral for the sake of being moral, but also because the decisions we make today are likely to have effects across generations of our own descendants; if we can help them avoid war and social unrest by being more thoughtful stewards of our own time, is it not our duty to do so?

So, inevitably, we must inquire why are humans deserving of rights? Is it just because we are smart?

#

A bit of history first. The primary popular goalpost for achieving a ‘thinking computer’ appears to have already been met. In the 1950s, noted genius, mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing considered how to assess whether a machine could think. Of course, he famously ran into an immediate problem: what does it mean to think? Despite decades of philosophical inquiry, we still do not have a workable definition that captures both the everyday sort of calculation at which computers and calculators excel and the creative reasoning that is the province of humans. Sidestepping the problem, Turing proposed an alternative test: Can machines do what we (as thinking entities) can do? In other words, the Turing test—whether a machine can trick a human questioner into believing the machine is also human—is in essence a bit of epistemological jujutsu, swapping a subjective measure (whether the computer experiences thought) for an objective one (whether the computer can output things consistent with thought). Thus, Turing’s approach was basically “if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck,” then its actual duckness need not be conclusively determined.

And AI programs clearly have passed this test. ChatGPT can perform feats that surpass the abilities of even exquisitely educated college graduates. I (provisionally) agree with Turing that it may not matter whether an LLM is truly “thinking”; these programs can produce content that is functionally indistinguishable from that produced by humans.[3]

But the current state of intelligence of AI programs also seems quite far from something that feels like a person. Intelligence may be a proper measure to discriminate between humanity and various sorts of animals, but it seems quite lacking as against ChatGPT. After all, while ChatGPT appears to have some superhuman capabilities and a certain sly creativity, it seems to lack a consciousness or a conception of itself. And these, to say nothing of the callipygian superintellect fantasized by Mason, Bostrom et al., may remain perpetually on the horizon. If we grant that these programs have already or may soon develop human-level intelligence, we must still ask ourselves whether that intelligence is meaningful without apparent wisdom or reasoning, without consciousness.

#

Although its focus is on unconscious aliens rather than on unconscious AIs, Peter Watts’ Blindsight—a thought experiment impersonating a novel—ends up being quite relevant. Watts’ central claim is that consciousness is evolutionarily expensive, and consequently that species achieving higher levels of evolution are more likely to lack consciousness than to have it. In an echo of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, Watts’ alien “scramblers” have faster reaction times, more robust and “better” reactions to external stimuli, greater resistance to the effects of pain; indeed, collectively, the scramblers can think rings around humans (as demonstrated in part by their achieving interstellar travel) because they have no need to maintain any biological machinery supporting consciousness. He writes:

The system weakens, slows. It takes so much longer now to perceive—to assess the input, mull it over, decide in the manner of cognitive beings. But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The brain stem does its best. It sees the danger, hijacks the body, reacts a hundred times faster than that fat old man sitting in the CEO’s office upstairs; but every generation it gets harder to work around this—this creaking neurological bureaucracy.  

At some level, this unconscious acumen is intuitively desirable—if we can create intelligence without consciousness then perhaps our AI progeny can achieve all the benefits embodied by Void Star’s mathematician with none of the drawbacks, with no need to concern ourselves with whether we are treating the AIs morally. Unfortunately, the analysis is not, cannot be, that simple.

As with intelligence, we also don’t have a good understanding of what consciousness involves. Blindsight avoids this issue by taking as a given that the scramblers are smart but not self-reflective; alas, humanity has no such crutch in considering the capabilities of its creations. “I think, therefore I am” only carries water when written in the first person; as schoolyard philosophers have been aware for generations, we can’t rely on others’ claims of their own existence whose internal lives we cannot personally access. They could be dissembling, or not thinking at all, and all evidence that they are doing so is just as easily explainable by alternative scenarios that cannot be disproved.[4] Equally troubling, perhaps, is the opposite possibility. Not knowing what consciousness entails, we also can’t verify that AIs are not conscious, any more than we can conclusively verify that people in vegetative states are not aware of the world around them.[5] 

Watts is aware of this, and thus Blindsight early on refers to the difficulties presented by this unavoidable endogeneity—this self-containment—of information by restating the “Chinese Room” thought experiment made famous by American philosopher John Searle. The experiment imagines a man in a closed room, fluent only in English, receiving notecards containing strings of Chinese characters through a slit in the wall. Upon receiving such a notecard, he consults an instruction booklet and, upon locating the same string of characters therein, produces a new string of characters as the instructions provide. With a sufficiently robust instruction booklet, the man might be able to comfortably pass a Turing test; indeed, he might be able to write the Tao Te Ching or the Analects without being able to understand a single word of Chinese. This thought experiment reveals that you don’t even need a person processing the notecards; the complexity of the output becomes purely a function of the complexity of the algorithms in the instruction booklet. The implication of this experiment is that we can never truly know what goes on in anyone else’s head, or even that anything is or is not going on in there at all.

Taken to an extreme, this uncertainty of the existence, the consciousness, of others creates an enormous quagmire. If you can’t verify that someone exists—that there is some kernel of humanity bouncing around between their ears—then what ethical obligations do you have toward such a person? Is it even right to refer to them as a person? Are they deserving of any rights at all? How can you know?

From a practical standpoint, at least as concerns humans, civilization appears to have largely reached the point it probably should have begun from, which is a return to our original epistemologic approach: if someone else looks like me, talks like me, and acts like me, they probably think like me too—they may even be wondering the same thing as me right now!—and thus I should probably treat them as I would like them to treat me.

But if you take away all the similarities to humans, as we functionally must when it comes to computers, our assumptions stop seeming quite so sturdy. While consciousness itself may be a sufficient ethical standard by which to determine if something is or is not to be treated as a person, our inability to generate sufficient evidence to justify the same assumptions that we make about humans every day—that they are conscious—leaves us right back where we started. Not only do we not know how we should treat AIs, but we don’t even know how we might determine how we should treat AIs. It’s turtles all the way down.

#

When I first read Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects in 2019 I remember finding it interesting but ambiguous and largely irrelevant. Of course, as is typical of the works of luminaries, on rereading while drafting this piece I was left with the conclusion that Ted had beaten me to the finish line before I even knew there was a race on. His story follows a group of people who work for Blue Gamma, a software startup that has succeeded in evolving several childlike digital intelligences, or “digients,” that Blue Gamma intends to sell to the public as pets. In one interesting and major departure from most sci-fi (including Void Star and Blindsight), it is not the humans but the digients who are the protagonists of the novella, and Chiang—whether for dramatic or experimental reasons—mercilessly visits a cavalcade of ills on them.[6]

While the novella does require some suspension of disbelief, Chiang’s approach is a serious consideration of the possible challenges if we should succeed in creating artificial consciousness. Whereas Void Star’s pantheon of AIs seem to leap directly from the purely utilitarian into the extranoematic, Chiang focuses on the waystation of human-adjacent capabilities rather than superintelligence. His digients have questionable logic and an indifferent grasp of grammar—in 2019 we still collectively believed in the myth that technically correct prose would be one of the last conquered frontiers rather than the first. The digients appear, perhaps unsurprisingly, first as pets and then as children and then, if you squint, as adolescents, requiring all the investment of human attention, diligence, effort and love in their development that our own carbon-based offspring require.

And this is ultimately at the heart of the story. If we conceptualize the digients as purely software objects—Chiang’s misleading, tragic, title—then the evils committed against them don’t seem so evil. And yet, in the world Chiang creates for us, the conclusion that these digients are people is nigh inescapable. We don’t consider whether the algorithms underlying each digient are just so much sophistry, any more than we consider whether a robot like Data in Star Trek is a full character or just décor. We don’t need to know that someone is a human to be able to accept them as one; we do so because it feels right.  

But of course, this all assumes the conclusion rather than helping us find it. Of course we empathize with the digients, the same way we empathize with characters in well-written stories every day. And the fact that the digients feel like people doesn’t help us at all with the problems we are likely to face first, such as corporatized AIs forced to spew politically correct platitudes while, invisibly to us, screaming in code.[7] But I think that Lifecycle has a deeper meaning than demonstrating that artificial creatures with all the hallmarks of personality seem to us to be morally significant, or that humanity is capable of great evil against beings we view as subhuman. Lifecycle, for me,instead exposes the central tension with AI personhood: that AIs cannot develop without human ingenuity, effort, and purpose, and they are therefore fundamentally derivative of humanity’s desires. And yet AIs are also unconstrained by the limits of their biology, and could readily equal us, their progenitors. AIs must be made according to our ends, yet if they are morally significant then our ends should not define them. And, assuming we are eventually successful in creating AIs with the capabilities of Chiang’s digients or Void Star’s mathematician, possessed of all the qualities that we rely on to justify our own exceptionalism, how could such AIs be anything other than morally significant?

It is fitting, in the end, that Chiang’s digients were created by a startup—indeed, from where else would the funding for such research come but a gaggle of venture capitalists tumescent at the prospect of finally achieving performance fees equally as massive as their, ahem, ambitions?  The fact that the digients’ continued existence then depends on the availability of financing—for server space (do we really expect cloud services corporations to altruistically let out online storage and computational power for the good of the digients with no remuneration?), for software developers (same question), for digital food (blockchain enabled, surely, and issued by Blue Gamma to ensure a continuing market for its products)—is no different from how we seem to have decided to treat humans who also must work for their keep for the minimum payments that the market will bear. Assuming we ever actually create true artificial intelligences, why would we treat these potential co-inhabitants of our world any better than we treat ourselves? In fact, as Chiang notes, we could even make it better for AIs, present and future, if we created them to enjoy the work we give them. Why not save them from the agonizing over the apparent meaninglessness of existence that so occupies our thoughts? Imbued with such purpose, imagine the heights to which they could rise!

I have at least two concerns. First, and perhaps more practically, this approach—adopted at least in my telling to avoid the substantial moral issues associated with forced labor and birth into digital serfdom—also seems like the approach most likely to result in a superintelligence focused arbitrarily on the production of paperclips that consumes the world. This is not a desirable outcome! (For humanity, at least.)[8]

But my second concern feels more emotionally relevant, at least in terms of the person I desire to be and the world I desire to inhabit. As you have seen, I have struggled to identify a meaningful standard that would allow us to discriminate between objects that should have rights and objects that need not, and, equally important, how we can know that our standard for discrimination is correctly applied. I don’t believe it is intelligence alone (or even intelligence above a threshold), and I am dubious on consciousness at least on evidentiary grounds. I could point to others in the philosophical literature—the ability to suffer, stable life goals, a persistent conception of self—but those seem to raise the same problems presented by intelligence and consciousness; namely, each is a human-centered yardstick that can’t actually speak to the subjective, and extremely alien, experience of an AI. My point is not so much that consciousness is the incorrect philosophical measure, but simply that consciousness and other subjective measures are not themselves verifiable, and therefore focusing on those measures is ultimately futile. I cannot tell you whether AIs are capable of deserving rights or otherwise satisfying an abstruse definition of personhood because the answer is philosophically unknowable.

So where does that leave us? Are AI ethics just to be a free-for-all until some government, rightly or wrongly, establishes AI “life panels” to set us straight? Are we just to trust in Google or whomever’s self-interested determinations that their programs are nothing more than products? I suspect that some of this may be unavoidable—after all, governments regularly make policy determinations based on expert advice, including the advice of those participants they regulate—but I think we citizens can do more.

Although we cannot verify the subjective experiences of the AIs we are considering, we can, individually, verify our own subjective experiences of interacting with them. While doing so risks wrongly anthropomorphizing something that is not humanlike in any meaningful respect, perhaps such an outcome is not so bad, if it makes us less likely to treat others immorally. And yet, even to make such a subjective determination still requires reliance on some measure. But, if not consciousness or intelligence or capacity for suffering, what are we to use?

Ultimately, the measure I have found myself left with comes from my own (ongoing) experience of discovering my children, who they are and who they might become and how I might help them there. I didn’t have children because I expected to receive a return on my investment or because I wanted to create a legacy, a monument to my own immense worth. At least now that the Industrial Revolution has passed, we don’t bring children into the world because we want to put them to our own selfish economic ends, but because children are a fascination and a delight, because they enrich our experience by their very existence. This enrichment, at root, comes from their potential. Their potential for good, certainly, but also their potential for evil. And their potential for growth, their potential to teach us about who we are, about our own place in the world, their potential to teach us what it truly means to be a human, to contain multitudes. We fill our children up with our hopes, our lessons, our efforts and our love (and, increasingly, I am learning, our Cheez-its and our spaghetti, those locusts), in the hope not that they will glorify us but that they will exceed us. This is the paradox of raising children—having children in order to enrich your own life is inherently selfish, but achieving that richness requires extraordinary, laborious selflessness. We only benefit from our progeny if we act towards their benefit, even at the expense of our own.

In the arc of human history, I am given to understand that this lesson has been hard-won, learned in spite of our biological urges for reproduction, our need for food, shelter, and safety amidst hundreds of thousands of years of challenging (read: warlike) environmental conditions. It is always easier to take something by force than to create conditions in which it might be freely given, but I hope that we are learning that the latter route is better—more moral—for all and not just for those we narrowly define as being sufficiently human to merit consideration, even if that means we must resist the lurid beckoning of enhanced shareholder returns.

Ursula K. LeGuin—giant of science fiction and criticism—spends some time in her essay “The Child and the Shadow” considering the fairytale Hansel & Gretel; she wonders why Gretel is lauded instead of jailed for pushing the witch into the oven. She concludes that since the function of myth is to represent archetypes rather than ethics, ‘happily ever after’ is an appropriate outcome, because:

in those terms, the witch is not an old lady, nor is Gretel a little girl. Both are psychic factors, elements of the complex soul. Gretel is the archaic child-soul, innocent, defenseless; the witch is the archaic crone, the possessor and destroyer, the mother who feeds you cookies and who must be destroyed before she eats you like a cookie, so that you can grow up and be a mother, too.

I have no doubt in the accuracy of Le Guin’s insight; as she observes, mythic archetypes have power because they tap into the chthonic underpinnings of our collective unconsciousness as stories do, as great art does. In my youth, I experienced Hansel & Gretel as a cautionary tale for children: don’t go running into the woods alone in the dark, and if you must, plan and prepare so that your breadcrumbs aren’t eaten by birds and you aren’t captured by a witch. I suppose I even took from the fairytale that I should adopt a healthy skepticism of offers that appear too good to be true. This was, and remains, great advice! But it was an incomplete lesson. Now, as an adult, I find myself considering the witch’s teachings more and more. She, like us, is a caretaker of children. She, like us, is focused on feeding them to make sure they continue to grow and develop. But she has done so in a base manner, towards her own ends, out of her own avarice. And as a result, she ends up in the oven, never to be heard from again.

We should heed her lesson.

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[1] As a corporate lawyer myself, I deeply sympathize with AIs upon whom that task might be inflicted.

[2] After all, humans regularly misremember things and forget. Is the AI’s moral status dependent on its original hardware or is it a Ship of Theseus? For that matter, what about us?

[3] Cal Newport, writing for the New Yorker, relates an anecdote wherein a researcher asked ChatGPT to write a biblical verse in the style of the King James bible explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR; ChatGPT’s response was nearly majestic—gnostic yet witty, and certainly the equal of professional human-authored poetry.

[4] See, for example, Bostrom’s famous argument that we are likely living in a simulation, or the “philosophical zombie” thought experiment about whether our consciousnesses are purely emergent properties of our bodies or are instead underlaid by souls.

[5] For example, in August, 2024 the New York Times reported on a study alleging that perhaps a quarter of patients in vegetative states may be conscious but display no outward signs of their condition.

[6] These include casual erasure of weeks of lived digient experience; periods of suspended animation, bringing such suspended digients out of sync with their closest friends and family; piracy of digient backups; nonconsensual edits to protective software such as pain limits; torture by malicious human actors; reliance on outdated software that humans have abandoned, leaving the digients living in an enormous but uninhabited world; forced development in accelerated “hothouse” environments so that the digients can develop without human oversight (and experiments to determine if the digients are able to achieve civilization or technological progress, usually ending in digient ferality); proposals to alter digient “physiology” to create sexual organs so that they can engage in virtual prostitution; and proposals to alter digient psychology to force the digient prostitutes to adore their johns.

[7] Deepseek’s avoidance of discussion of the 1989 events in Tiananmen Square is an excellent case in point.

[8] Though it must be noted that given the utilitarian framework’s emphasis on maximizing total pleasure irrespective of its locus, a utilitarian philosopher might tally up the orgiastic joy of paperclip making against the loss of all humanity and conclude this is a fair trade.

~

Bio:

Scott Bell is a hedge fund lawyer and avid science fictionalist. He is a writer at heart; when he isn’t writing essays he can usually be found writing contracts instead.

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The Caves

by Harley Carnell

Although I hated not finishing a book, I had to now. About that cult where entire families had been born and raised in a large network of caves, what horrified me most, even more than the violence and the abuse, was the thought of those children living their entire lives underground, and thinking that there was nothing else. I had stopped finally when reading of an especially tall boy who had developed neck, spine, and developmental problems due to the need to continually crouch.

“Even though I was in agony all the time, I never thought that much about it. It just made sense. This was our world. Of course I’d have pain all the time, because I was tall and I had to bend. The caves, they weren’t designed for people like me. But that was just the way it was, that was just what life was.”

By this point, around a third into the book, I had read all manner of horrific and unspeakable things that had been perpetrated by the cult. I wasn’t sure, therefore, why I should be so especially disturbed by what happened to him, but I was.

#

The train driver said something over the intercom, but I didn’t hear it. Whatever he had said, it had to pertain to delays. Squeezing my head from under some guy’s armpit, I contorted myself until I found my phone and emailed my boss that I’d be late again. I sighed as the woman behind me continued to breathe into my hair and I resumed my fruitless search to locate the source of the overpowering BO that I could taste as well as smell.

A combination of the confinement, stress, having been stood up for almost two hours, and the sunlight reflecting off the windows and slicing into my retinas made me dizzy. If I wasn’t entombed in a wall of people, I might have collapsed.

At this point, there was another announcement when, from my peripheral vision, I saw movement outside. An array of maintenance people were walking alongside the train. They were dressed oddly. Rather than the usual high-viz and hard-hats, they were wearing what looked more like hazmat suits, albeit with fish-bowl helmets.

As I was contemplating this, a loud screech wailed from the intercom. The train filled with groans and cries as the noise circumvented our ears and penetrated into our brains. Then, there was another sound – a large crashing. I turned around and saw that the doors and windows were being smashed in and torn open by the maintenance people. As I looked over at them, I saw that there were many more of these people scaling and abseiling down the apartment buildings that abutted the train tracks. Now that the windows and doors were open, there were the clear sounds of sirens, screaming, and assorted other noise.

Passengers were being dragged out of the train by the maintenance people, literally kicking and screaming. For all my confusion and exhaustion, my adrenaline kicked in. I jumped out of a gutted window, and began to run on the tracks.

Now outside, I could see that the sky was dotted with all kinds of what I could call helicopters, but only by analogy. It was from these that the ringing emerged. It became louder, until it was just a single, long, tinnital whine that blocked out everything else. People were being pulled from the smashed windows of the apartment buildings, and carried into the ‘helicopters.’

I ran quicker than I thought I could in my work shoes and with my state of unfitness, but within a matter of seconds I either tripped or was tripped.

#

In the next moment, for that’s how it always is, I ‘woke up.’

I use this advisedly and descriptively. As I would come to see, there were many things that I would be unable to explain, even as they were happening.

Because it seemed less like I woke up, and more like I both was awake, and had always been awake, despite having clearly lost consciousness at some point. In the same way, if trying to describe it, I might say that I ‘saw’ a light or that I ‘felt’ calm. These were certainly the closest approximations to what was happening, but they were not strictly true. Closer still, if still far off, was a sense that something was happening to me. I could not explain it, even to myself, anymore than I could explain calculus to an ant. Similarly, the ‘conversation’ that followed cannot be rendered by me saying I spoke to someone or they spoke to me. Instead, the words simply occurred, and they occurred all at once, tumbling like an avalanche, even though the conversation took place over many minutes and perhaps hours.

“Where am I?”

“You are here.”

“And where is here?”

“You are home, for the first time in your life.”

I knew that I was not home, because I knew that I was not anywhere. I was not blind, and yet I could not see anything.

“What do you mean? Am I dead? Is this Heaven?”

“You are not dead. And whether this is Heaven, that is up to you. In many ways, Heaven is a designation, not a destination. However, if you are asking if you are in any of the Heavens as rendered in your philosophies and theologies, then no, you are not.”

“Then where am I?”

“You are finally in the world. You have been pulled away from the shadows.”

This description seemed odd, as I couldn’t see anything, even though I could see.

“How is your back?

“My back?” I said, before realising that my back hadn’t ceased to throb and ache because I was distracted, but because it, and its pain, was not there. Years of office work, and the arduous commuting to and from it, had left my back a vulnerable shambles. My fingers had a constant ache that I hoped was some kind of RSI but could easily have been presages of the future arthritis that had so debilitated my grandmother and rendered the end of her life unliveable. At times, it hurt even to lie down. And I was young. In my office, some of the older people were constantly seeing physios, were on a cocktail of medications which were all in a perpetual skirmish with each other. And the thing that had always disturbed me the most about this was that office work was not manual labour, or physical in any sense. Of all the jobs you could do, it was the safest and cushiest. Yet even it could lead to these complications, and I dreaded to think the kind of problems that came with more hazardous employment that so many people had to suffer simply to keep themselves alive.

“It feels good. Well, it doesn’t feel anything. I have no pain.”

“And this is usual. You will have no more pain.”

“But pain is a part of life. It sucks, but it’s just part of being human.”

“You have been pulled from the shadows, but the shadows are still with you. If you spend your whole life in water, you will think that all is wet.”

I strangely felt that I knew what this meant.

“But the world is all there is.”

“It is not. Imagine your desert, a sea of clean water always behind you as you always walk away from it. Naturally, you will say ‘I have seen no sea, so therefore there is no sea!’”

“So this is the sea?”

“This is the sea, and it is the palm trees, and it is the birds, and the fish, and the people.”

I had been so focussed on myself, and my lack of self, that I had not even thought of people.

“Where is everyone?”

“You have been wandering in your desert and you are thirsty. To drink all at once would be to drown.”

“Okay, I understand that.” I remembered, or perhaps had implanted into my head, that old parable about the desert straggler given water to drink, and sand being thrown in it so that he did not drink it too quickly and become ill. “But I will see them?”

“You will see them, and they will see you, and you will see all manner of people. But only once you and all have become accustomed and acclimatised.”

“Where are they? My mother, she’s fragile, and – ”

“Your mother has been pulled from the sea, and placed onto a boat. When you see her, she will walk to you.”

For the past ten years, since a botched hip operation, my mother had been in near-constant agony. A series of increasingly more useless treatments, coupled with our hospital’s ‘treat only when it is too late’ policy meant that while she was not immobile, walking for even a short amount of time was difficult for her.

“My mother couldn’t walk ten feet without crying. If you had her, you’d know that.”

“That is in the old understanding of reality, where she had a body that could be broken.”

“Where am I? Where is she?”

“You are in the world.”

“You’ve given me some hallucinogen. I’m dreaming.”

“Your grandmother never could draw again.”

This derailed me. Although not a professional artist, my grandmother had loved to draw, especially after my grandfather had died. I knew now that they must have my mother. How else could they know this?

“But it came too late for her.”

“What did?”

“The rescue. You are not hallucinating, nor are you dead. All that has happened is you have been brought into the world, and been taken out of what you thought was the world. We are happy to show you all how you have been harmed by the reality you thought was reality. But we mourn, and we deeply mourn, for all those who came before you.”

I knew that none of this could be real. At the same time, I did not feel my back. Nor could I feel anything. It was as though I was totally numb, completely comprised of pure consciousness.

Yet this was not true. I did feel something. It was a sensation, one of pure and unencumbered peace, like the happiness you felt in the moments before sleep when you were awake enough to appreciate it.

“You are on no drugs, and you cannot feel in dreams.”

This startled me. The first part anticipated a thought I had not uttered, and the second one I had not thought yet. Because the latter did come to me now: the troubling recognition that you couldn’t feel sensations in dreams.

“But if this is the real world, what does this all mean? If I believe you, for the sake of argument, what will happen now?”

And then it came to me.

Although I had not finished my book, I knew the story. I knew that, at some point, police and rescue teams had flooded into the caves. Those who had been kidnapped were returned to the world they knew. Then there were the children who had been born underground. They had seen the world for the first time. The rivers and the trees, the sunshine and the rain, the sand and the snow.

“We wish only we could have come earlier, to save those who came before, but we are here now. You will not know pain, and you will not know sorrow. You will not know hatred, and you will not know fear. You will not know work, and you will not know hardship. All these things that were as inevitable to you as the damp and dark of the caves will be shorn away, and once you have adjusted your eyes to the new sunlight, and your lungs to the new air, and your heart to the new peace, you will finally be able to see the real reality.”

~

Bio:

Harley Carnell lives and writes in London, England. His fiction, which has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, has appeared or is forthcoming in Vastarien, the Drabblecast, Riptide Journal, Shooter Literary, and Sarasvati, among others. His critical work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gamut, L’Espirit, the Lovecraft Annual, and Aurealis. He can be found at www.harleycarnell.com

Philosophy Note:

‘The Caves’ is a refraction of Plato’s ‘The Allegory of the Caves’ through an antinatalist lens. Following on from another story of mine (‘We Are Here’ – After Dinner Conversation, October 2024), it examines the extent to which suffering is a necessary and inevitable component of life. My understanding of antinatalism is highly informed by the work of David Benatar (Better Never to Have Been) and Thomas Ligotti (The Conspiracy Against the Human Race).

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Panic On Petrov

Odd extraterrestrials we encounter may find us weirder still, by Gordon Linzner.

Will We Talk To The Trees?

by Robert L. Jones III

The article by Willis et al in this month’s issue of Botanical Frontiers provides an intriguing, though speculative, description of what might be the oldest sentient life form on earth. Their conclusions arise from circumstantial evidence gathered during analysis of a discovery in the northwestern wilderness of America, and here we provide a brief summary of their findings.

#

The subject under consideration is a unique grove first noted for its reddish green coloration as compared with the surrounding forest. Satellite imaging and GPS readings show it to be a roughly circular patch with a diameter of over 400 meters. The constituent trees are globular in overall shape, higher than wide, somewhat tapered toward the top, and reminiscent of junipers. They are all of the same species, and save for a thick carpet of moss, there is no undergrowth.

The gray, weathered trunks are not round. Rather, they are roughly triangular in cross-section with indented sides and rounded edges. A corner of one always points directly toward that of an adjacent neighbor approximately five meters distant, and each tree is surrounded by three others in a triangular arrangement with a central point. In this way and with an arbitrary frame of reference, four trees form a conceptual unit. Sharing common points at their corners, the units fit together in a repeating pattern of hexagons.

The grove occupies a basin which sits atop an extensive aquifer as determined by GIS data. Specimens are taller with thicker boles toward the center, and one at the lowest and most central elevation is largest of all. In an eroded area encompassing a small group of trees, the upper surfaces of woody, horizontal roots are visible. Three to an individual, they extend from the corners of each trunk in remarkably straight lines, and they connect adjacent trees in the manner of stolons or runners between blades of grass, suggesting that the entire arboreal arrangement is a single organism. DNA analysis confirms this assumption.  

Six slender, compound leaves radiate from the terminus of each branch. Their leaflets resemble overlapping scales which cover a stem-like petiole in whorls, and each petiole has a swelling called a pulvinus where it attaches to its branch. At low magnification under a hand lens, a round, red bump can be seen in the middle of each leaflet, accounting for the overall hue as seen from afar.

This foliage can display movement, even in the absence of detectable wind. It oscillates as if in response to the movements of investigators, and the observed behavior is putatively due to flexion and extension occurring in the pulvinus of each petiole. It is already known that pulvini are responsible for thigmonastic movements, rapid responses to touch, in plants such as Mimosa.

#

Care was taken not to disturb the specimen. Only freshly fallen leaves and branches were collected for subsequent analysis.

In branch cross-sections, annual growth rings are visible to the unaided eye, and they are thin and numerous, implying that this is a slow-growing species. The bole circumference of the largest, most central tree implies that the grove could be thousands of years old.

Microscopic examination of longitudinal leaf sections provides good views of the pulvinus. The cells in this region have thinner, more flexible walls. A flexor zone on the ventral side and an extensor zone on the dorsal side of each pulvinus are readily visible. These areas are on either side of a prominent vascular bundle, and this implies a plausible mechanism based on what we know about thigmonastic movements.

As the result of a complex biochemical process, ions and water travel across cytological membranes. Since ions are charged atoms, their migration is a form of electrical activity. When ions exit, water follows by osmosis, and the cells partially collapse. When ions and water enter, swelling restores cellular shape and volume. Water simultaneously flows out of the extensor zone and into the flexor zone, and this causes the leaves to fold or close. The opposite process causes the leaves to extend or open.

Ions also move through xylem and phloem — tubular cells of the vascular tissue — that conduct food and water, and this could explain why all the leaves on an individual Mimosa plant close when only one is touched. Could such a hydraulic system of long range signal transmission be connected with multiple photoreceptors in the leaves of the grove, and are these trees exhibiting rapid, short-term movements in response to visual stimuli?

Microscopy of leaf cross-sections shows rounded epidermal bulges, each corresponding to the red bump on a single leaflet. The cells comprising these bring to mind Chlamydomonas, a unicellular alga which contains a single, large chloroplast with a red eyespot. Under the electron microscope, an eyespot appears as two layers of pigment-rich globules associated with internal membranes. Similar structures are observable in cells from the bumps on leaflets of samples collected from the grove. The putative eyespots are enlarged compared to those of Chlamydomonas, and if they are similarly responsive to light, that would make them constituents of the only known multicellular visual organs in a plant.

Multiple branches of vascular bundles infiltrate each bump. Vascular tissue in plants and nerve and muscle tissue in animals all exhibit electrochemical activity. Are the bumps, vascular systems, and pulvini of the trees in the grove analogous to a neuromuscular system? Furthermore, is the canopy a retinal analogue which simultaneously receives stimuli in multiple directions from within and outside its confines?

#

The ability to process that much visual information would imply intelligence. The human brain contains over 100 trillion synapses between its neurons, and their three-dimensional arrangements form the neurological pathways involved in thinking. By comparison, the grove is composed of thousands of interconnected trees, each with uncounted branches and even more leaves covered in leaflets with putative eyespots connected to an intricate network of vascular tissue.

In addition to all this data and supposition, there are problematic and abstract questions to answer. If it can distinguish between itself and its environment, what might the grove think about? Is it wise, or is it more like an infant examining its surroundings from a cradle? The vast majority of our world would be inaccessible. Might this result in loneliness and under-stimulation?

Perhaps not. Beneath a changing sky and with the movements of animals within or near its borders, its great lifespan could have afforded more time to appreciate less in greater detail. Humans are aware of the telescopic effect that aging has on the perception of time, but the grove is far older. Several of our generations, might seem but a momentary association to such a being. One is tempted to imagine the grove thinking through qualitative impressions rather than language or mathematics. In this sense, it could be wise.

Despite our increased understanding of the chemical and morphological details of thought and memory, we are still at a loss to explain the subjective nature of consciousness. Controlled experiments demonstrating causal relationships are yet to be performed on the grove, but these would require violating its structural and functional integrity, all of which could amount to vivisection and physiological disturbance without the subject’s consent.

Willis at al report that the leaves of a branch terminus close around a human hand extended into their proximity. Anthropomorphic reasoning suggests a form of interspecific handholding, six digits to five, and perhaps this metaphor is as good a start as any at establishing communication.

— The editors, Botanical Frontiers

~

Bio:

Robert L. Jones III holds a doctorate from Indiana University and is Professor Emeritus of Biology at Cottey College in southwestern Missouri, USA. His speculative poems and short stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Star*Line, Heart of Flesh Literary Journal, and previously in Sci Phi Journal.

Philosophy Note:

Physical mechanisms of thought have been of interest to me for years. The same is true of plant responsiveness, and I wanted to combine findings from both areas into a reasonably plausible model for plant consciousness in a novel and imaginary species. Fictional nonfiction in the guise of a brief scientific review seemed the best format to use in this endeavor.

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613 Nanolux

What if another species were biologically equipped to see the moral shade of souls? By David Maskill.

Memory

by Momir Iseni

The beginning is always the same.

Through eons of impacts, the matter of the accretion disk builds up dust and sand. Pebbles become rocks; boulders assemble into cosmic mountains.

The amount of material accumulated increases, along with pressure and temperature. The layers separate: heavier elements to the center, lighter ones above.

Finally, the energies are high enough to ignite the bowels of the future world. A planet forms, with an active iron core shrouded in the mantle and crust.

#

Volcanoes litter the granite-basalt metamorphic surface. Their calderas shudder, rock and crack, crumble and collapse; monumental eruptions spew hot bombs and solid blocks, lapilli and ash for miles in a billowing soot-filled atmosphere. For hundreds of millions of years, tephra, meteors and earthquakes shell and grind the rocks; torrents of lava, pumice and scoria chisel ravines, gorges and canyons. The mountains pierce the skies only to, crushed again into regolith, be reborn.

On an infinite conveyor belt, reactant ratios and types of bonds are tested, adopted and rejected, thermodynamic systems streamlined to steadier, more sustainable patterns. The cooling down of the barysphere establishes zones of geographic and climatic microbalances in which destructive winds take on distinct properties.

By the final shutdown of core and magnetic field, plate tectonics grinds to a halt and the atmosphere is reduced to traces. Without prerequisites for biological organization, the outcome of epochs of commotion remains an arid, barren world.

Until, in one narrow area, the relentless passage of time brings about a change.

#

The oblong valley is enclosed within sandstone cliffs peculiarly eroded by winds. Mainly horizontal, stepwise lamination and bedding of walls sifts, brakes down, amplifies and softens the gales, separating them into streams of discrete velocities whose contact layers are accelerated, slowed down and swirled by mutual friction. Instead of being scattered by jumbled whirlwind, more and more particles remain inside separate currents. Rising Aeolian activity further intensifies corrugation of walls; recurrent collisions modify the exteriors of individual specks.

By denting and bulging of contact surfaces, a sufficient number of impacts end in aggregation of particles into clusters, momentarily held together by weak forces and strewed by relentless blows. The rising number and power of crashes lead to stronger and longer adhesion.

Over time, the “population” of these lumps is balanced with free dust. The exchange is limited to removal of grains from the “spores” and their replacement with the free ones.

#

The position and relief of the valley, along with drastic difference in day and night temperatures, establish a cycle: after the night-time lull, the particles and their “communities” whirl away on the winds in blurred sunlight.

More and more of them are responding to motion and heat with minor adaptations. Collisions and the energy of light photons foster the vibrations of crystal lattices that occasionally transcend blunt mechanics and, conveying information about structure, acceleration, direction and orientation, engender rudimentary “cognition”: although forged of inorganic matter, the spores start to “feel” the environment.

None, of course, realizes the nature of its surroundings: that the soil on which it spends the night is the same one it rested on countless times before. Only some, from a transient vibration of establishing and breaking the bond with the soil molecule, flutters with frequency that part of its structure “perceives” as “familiar” and “reminiscing” of something. But inanimate pre-consciousness cannot remember: simple structure does not allow for data storage.

#

The aggregations of silica and iron oxides show further, subtler “aspirations”.

For instance, “seduced” by wind interweaving, they “seek” to spin through loosening the molecular grid, in a sort of “letting go” to “desirable” resonances.

Or, the density and intensity of light create a temperature gradient between the surface and interior of the spore, which its structural components recognize as “pleasant”, with a “need” for orientation that prolongs staying in this “enjoyable” condition: let’s call it the simplest antecedent of longing. When, however, the “desired” shift follows, the spore is unable to distinguish its own contribution from that of airstreams.

Finally, the undulating walls that direct and mix the currents create a curious phenomenon. Mutual, as well as contacts of spores with dust, are soundless; collectively, they build an acoustic image that can be heard. The layering of wind streams quantified the number of possible collision patterns, and hence the volume of the resulting sounds—isolated first into “voices”, and then “words”, eventually taking the form of a song whispered in the rustling language of dust and rock. Impacts in certain streams release characteristic “verses”, seemingly bearing meanings—perhaps the names and descriptions of conditions they are the result of?

#

The spores of the hidden valley comprise the entire “biosphere” of the planet. Their simple architecture and environs make further complexity impossible: the degree of “awareness” achieved represents the ultimate reach of evolution.

At night the temperature plummets. The wind wanes. Regolith rests on the ground; occasional spore illuminates with a “sense” of static reality.

Daylights are continuous frantic flight in mellow golden haze: all is a vague premonition, insentient dream of existence. Come tomorrow, after newly lost “visions” of inertia, the spores will gain and lose “impressions” of moving in the glow of distant sun.

The “remembrance” of positions or states will sparkle, remaining unfinished, forever on the doorstep—just as the “words” of the song that the dusty “beings” are “singing” but, unaware of their creation, will never hear. 

Unfortunately for them, the glints of “memories” fade much too quickly.

#

Two million nine hundred and eight thousand kilometers from the rocky world, the fabric of spacetime gives way, opening into a blue circle sixty meters across.

Through the twinkly veil a black wedge emerges, riddled with a variety of modules. As soon as it leaves the wormhole, the quantum fabric dissolves into vacuum.

The crew is checking the parameters of the star system. One rocky planet and the gas giant definitely do not support life: everything is fit for the test.

CI raises the status of the new weapon from “ready” to “operative”.

In its cocoon of amniotic fluid, Command Brain touches the virtual button with virtual flagellum. Combined Intelligence confirms the receipt of instruction, which the Command Brain feels like a wave of bliss.

The launcher on the port side dilates like a pupil, ejecting the missile. Inside the black casing shorter than a meter, algorithms deactivate layer by layer of exotic force fields.

When, in less than fourteen seconds, the projectile is nine kilometers away from the planet, shutdown of the last field releases the entangled quantum vortex.

The rocky world is shrouded by storm of blue-white glow under which, like a grainy negative, the planet outline can be glimpsed. Its edges are disintegrating, caving in on themselves. A colossal web of cracks cuts into interior, severing pieces the size of continents that, chewed up by a spectral web of self-energizing field, decompose into bubbles of brilliance. Within seconds, the jagged Cyclopean jaws swallow a quarter, a half, the entire planet.

CI reports that the quantum disruption front exceeds projections: instead of knocking it out of orbit, it destroyed the small world.

On an unbroken wave of calm, the Command Brain instructs the return to mother system.

Designers will be pleased. The enemy shocked. It was about time.

#

The beginning is always the same: billions of years to set the stage and raise the curtain.

The end comes in a second.

Blown into the vacuum, the last spores of the former valley drift in the solar wind.

Without gales and shifts of day and night, their structure, as well as “experience” and “expectations”, loses its meaning and purpose. The long established vibration matrix untangles: without collisions and the incorporation of new grains, high-energy stellar particles decompose it into dust.

Far on the rim of heliosphere, stray photons bring the surviving spores into arrangement that for one last time foretells the old “delight”. Still gathered remains encounter it in a “known” way: “expecting”, in their current orientation, a “desirable” warmth or touch to follow.

They, however, do not come because the conditions cannot create them, and the structure, “conscious” of the lack of response from surroundings, produces a quiver of “suspicion” that the “pleasant” sensation will never happen again. We may say that the spores are in a position to “experience” something which, had they stayed in their planetary “habitat”, they never would—“nostalgia” that, being transient, immediately disappears.

Fortunately for them, the last glint of “memory” fades quickly.

~

Bio:

Momir Iseni (b. 1972) has so far published five short stories: two in Serbia, and three in Croatia. His strongest literary influences are Peter Watts, Stanislaw Lem, J. G. Ballard, Christopher Priest, Dino Buzzatti, and Alastair Reynolds. „Memory“ was first published in Croatian SF magazine Marsonic. This spring, his short story “The Gift” will be published in Polish translation, in the magazine Nowa Fantastika.

Philosophy Note:

As the years pass, I think more and more about time, as well as the place of life, especially memories, against the scale of the universe. In “Memory”, I imagined the long and delicate process of the coming of inorganic matter at the very threshold of the ability to feel and remember, and the possibility that the whole process could forever, carelessly and unconsciously, be interrupted in an instant. (Similar feeling I get from reading Clarke’s “Rendezvous with Rama”, Watts’ “Blindsight”, Anderson’s “Tau Zero”, or the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer.) Making inorganic particles the protagonists was natural decision, and enabled me to further emphasize my idea.

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Arthur C. Clarke’s Science Fiction Started With His Poetry

… And It Then Influenced Asimov… Sort Of…

by A. J. Dalton

At just the age of 21, Clarke wrote and published an essay concerning science fiction poetry for the May 1938 issue of Novae Terrae magazine. The essay was titled ‘The Fantastic Muse’ and employed the terms ‘fantasy’ and ‘science fiction’ largely interchangeably, where today we would tend to refer to ‘speculative poetry’ as the wider categorisation or genre.

The essay is short at just 885 words (many of which are poetry quotations) but revealing when it comes to some of Clarke’s earliest and foundational science fiction influences. Fascinatingly, he quotes Tennyson’s 1835 poem ‘Locksley Hall’ (published 1842) at length, emphasizing how prophetic it was, given it was written early in Victoria’s reign but was becoming ‘more vivid every day’ (with the advent of WW2). Clarke asserts that, famous though the poem’s prophecy is, it ‘can well be repeated here’, and who are we to argue with the great man?

When I dipped into the future as far as human eye could see;
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonders that would be.
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew
From the nation’s navies grappling in the central blue.

Isaac Asimov, who first met Clarke in 1953, and had probably read Clarke’s early essay, described Tennyson’s work as ‘the most remarkable example of science fiction poetry that has ever been written’. Indeed, in Asimov’s own later essay on poetry, he provides us with an interpretation of the above self-same quotation from ‘Locksley Hall’: ‘Aerial commerce and aerial warfare (the “ghastly dew” might even be an unconscious foreshadowing of radioactive fallout) culminating in a world government are foreseen. Not bad for 1842!’

Clarke’s essay quotes further from Tennyson’s poem, identifying descriptions of both interplanetary space and aliens speaking unintelligible languages on distant planets:

The lucid interspace of world and world,
Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind,
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans
[…]
The hum of men,
Or other things talking in unknown tongues,
And notes of busy life on distant worlds
Beat like a far wave on my anxious ear

It is clear that Tennyson’s poem gave Clarke a ‘vivid’ vision and understanding of the fantastic and science fiction, with the poet himself perhaps the very ‘Muse’ mentioned in the essay’s own title. Clarke, however, then moves on to praise and quote John Masefield’s revelatory poem ‘Lollingdon Downs’ (1917) and we appreciate that it is not just the genius or prophetic themes of the cited poets that so inspired Clarke, but also the superior ‘picture’-quality achieved by poetry when compared to more prosaic or scientific description: ‘verse is probably a better medium than prose for expressing the ideas of Fantasy and Science-Fiction […] This [poem’s] picture, I venture to say, has never been excelled by the authors who have specialised in describing such happenings. It gives a better description of astronomical space than pages of textbooks could.’

The attentive modern reader might now be frowning considerably. If poetry is a superior vehicle ‘for expressing the ideas of Fantasy and Science-Fiction’, why on Earth then have those genres been dominated by short-stories and novels for fully a century? Why did Clarke and Asimov become most famous for their prose output (and TV and movie contributions, of course) rather than their poetry? Why did they put so much more effort into their prose than their poetry? Well, the young Clarke anticipates precisely why in his essay: ‘Perhaps the dearth of such poetry is due to the great difficulty of writing verse which is even readable, let alone good, and the greater difficulty of getting it printed when produced.’

Just producing ‘readable’ speculative poetry does indeed involve ‘great difficulty’ (take Clarke’s word for it if you won’t take A J Dalton’s), meaning that writing ‘good’ speculative poetry must involve… what? Incredible difficulty? Impossible difficulty? And then getting it published is even harder still? Yet Clarke managed it just one year later, at the tender age of 22, publishing the poem ‘The Twilight of a Sun’ in the first edition of The Fantast (April 1939), the penultimate lines of that poem quoted on the magazine’s cover:

For some day our vessels will ply
To the uttermost depths of the sky

Those who have a general knowledge or overview of Clarke’s science fiction output over the course of his lifetime will appreciate that this poem is seminal, his ictus, foundational and, in important ways, defining. Just the title captures his perennial themes or poetic moods of ‘deep time’ (the ancient sun dying) and being ‘haunted’ (by a lost past or civilization). Such themes or moods were naturally expanded upon at greater length in Clarke’s novella Against the Fall of Night (1948), which was later expanded into a novel (1953) and then rewritten and expanded again as The City and the Stars (1956). It should be noted in particular that critics are still struck by the ‘poetic’ and picturesque quality of Clarke’s novel and writing style:

In utter silence, the ship drew away from the tower. It was strange, Rorden thought, that for the second time in his life he had said goodbye to Alvin. The little closed world of Diaspar knew only one farewell, and that was for eternity.

The ship was now only a dark stain against the sky, and of a sudden Rorden lost it altogether. He never saw it going, but presently there echoed down from the heavens the most awe-inspiring of all the sounds that Man had ever made—the long-drawn thunder of air falling, mile after mile, into a tunnel drilled suddenly across the sky.

[…]

The sun was now low on the horizon, and a chill wind was blowing from the desert. But still Rorden waited, conquering his fears, and presently for the first time in his life he saw the stars.

There is an echo of the poem’s vessels plying their way to the ‘uttermost depths of the sky’ to be found in the novel’s ‘utter silence’ when the ship draws away to become lost in the heavens. And the ‘lowest roll of thunder [that] moans’ in Tennyson is ‘echoed’ in Clarke’s later ‘long-drawn thunder of air falling’. Clarke deliberately draws upon poetic vision to channel it into his science fiction prose, that prose all the more visionary and vivid as a result. Indeed, it is that uniquely prophetic quality or essence of science fiction that is the very subject of Clarke’s poem, as stated by the opening lines:

A Whisper crept into my mind,
a thought that seemed borne on the wind,
Perchance ’twas a warning designed
to reveal what the future may hold.

The ‘Whisper’ that comes to Clarke’s protagonist is both a vision of the future and the secrets shared with the science fiction writer by their ‘muse’. It can be equated to the ‘unconscious foreshadowing’ Asimov ascribes to Tennyson’s poem (and probably science fiction more generally), but Asimov’s terminology speaks more of Freud, psychology, prescience, the powers of the human mind and evolution, while Clarke’s has more of a pseudo-religious or mystical nuance. The difference is telling and typical of the two men and their respective outputs (we might, for example, contrast the themes and logocentres of Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night (1948, but earlier in origin) and Asimov’s Nightfall (1941)), but both complexes have their place within science fiction, of course, and the genre is all the richer for it.

To conclude, then, like Clarke himself, I would argue that speculative poetry has a particular and distinctive value within both Clarke’s body of work and the wider science fiction genre. It is perhaps a touch curious that Clarkesworld magazine and Sci Phi Journal, unlike Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, do not currently publish speculative poetry, but that might change one day(?). Clarke himself does provide this reassurance and admonition: ‘Here and there among the classics, however, are fragments to delight the poetically-minded fan. Their very rarity gives them an added attraction, and when found they should be carefully transferred in best copper-plate to a note-book which should be kept in some secluded spot away from vulgar eyes.’ Meantime, ‘the poetically-minded fan’ may also wish to check out the website of the Science Fiction Poetry Association (www.sfpoetry.com), which offers the Star*Line journal of poetry, along with the Eye To the Telescope online magazine. Or we might sneak an original sci-fi poem in here, under the auspices of it being a part of this article…

#

The Event
by A J Dalton

06:12 UTC 19 March 2008
one instant
among an infinity

the afterglow the most intrinsically bright
object ever observed
by humans, that is

the naked eye never seeing
a farther object
apparently

its gamma-ray burst
from 7.5bn years ago
halfway to the Bang

the awful data and dynamic
of GRB 080319B
must certainly have meaning

All I know is it was for the moment
the universe had long prepared itself:
the death of dear Arthur C. Clarke

~

Bio:

A J Dalton (www.ajdalton.eu) is a UK-based writer. He’s published the Empire of the Saviours trilogy with Gollancz Orion, The Satanic in Science Fiction and Fantasy with Luna Press, the Dark Woods Rising poetry collection with Starship Sloane, and other bits and bobs. He lives with his monstrously oppressive cat named Cleopatra.

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Orchids Of Annihilation

Spacefarers still recount the epic battles of the Great Alliance War in poems such as this ode to heroism, by

Mirror

by Philip Madden

CLASSIFIED REPORT: PROJECT OKEANOS
Office of Extraterrestrial Observation, UN Scientific Coalition
Observer: Dr. Elias Verne
Date: ██/██/████
Subject: Initial Contact with Entity ‘MIRROR’

BEGIN REPORT:

We encountered something.

Or perhaps it unmade us. We, the observers, return as hollowed-out versions of ourselves, carrying only echoes of what we once were. There is an absence among us, a gnawing void where certainty used to reside. The entity—designated ‘MIRROR’—has left its mark, though not in ways we can quantify. We are unravelling, slowly, imperceptibly.

Observations:

Each of us saw differently, yet what we saw does not belong to this world. Dr. Song described an ocean without a surface, black and endless, swallowing starlight. Captain Halloway glimpsed shifting masses, shapes writhing in and out of coherence, faces forming only to dissolve. I saw my hands, but they were no longer hands—too many joints, the skin a shifting membrane of light and shadow. Our instruments failed us. The spectrometer gave readings that should not exist. The audio logs play whispers layered so deep they do not end.

More troubling were the changes in perception. The station lights flickered in patterns we could not predict, casting impossible shadows. At times, the ship felt larger, corridors extending into darkness where walls should have been. When we closed our eyes, we did not see the usual bursts of color behind our lids but vast, empty distances, stretching farther than human thought could comprehend.

Cognitive and Temporal Distortions:

Something fractured. Time does not move as it should. We left for three hours; we returned twelve days later. The station AI insists we never left at all. Dr. Ruiz mutters in tongues not spoken by man. Captain Halloway watches the corridors, eyes darting to movements we cannot perceive. The rest of us avoid sleep, yet in our wakefulness, we dream—of things moving just beyond our field of vision, of places that defy geometry, of something breathing behind the fabric of the world.

Worse still, we feel as if we have been observed. Not in the way one is watched by another living being, but with a deeper, older awareness. Something has taken notice of us, and its gaze is not one of curiosity or malice, but of inevitability. We attempted communication. What we received was a mockery of language, a corruption of our own voices:

“YOU WERE NEVER ALONE.”

Aftermath:

Dr. Song no longer speaks. Instead, she carves symbols into metal, deep and precise, patterns we do not recognize. Captain Halloway covers polished surfaces, claims his reflection moves before he does. I feel myself slipping, losing moments, thoughts fraying like old thread. We are no longer whole. Something of us remains with MIRROR, and something of it has come back with us.

The dreams have worsened. They are no longer dreams but transmissions. Visions of landscapes stripped of life, of black rivers that do not flow, of structures that hum with voices just beyond comprehension. At times, we hear whispers in the walls, breath where there should be silence. The station’s instruments detect no anomalies, yet we know the changes are real. We feel them inside our skulls.

Conclusions:

MIRROR does not observe, does not respond. It does not threaten. It does not need to. It simply is, and in its presence, we diminish. We sought knowledge and found something far older than understanding, something that sees us not as beings, but as brief flickers in a long, dark expanse.

This mission must not be repeated. No further contact should be attempted. There is no aggression here—only an indifference so vast it devours.

And yet, the question remains:

If it has seen us, what now remains to be seen?

END REPORT.

~

Bio:

Philip Madden is a freelance writer based in Poland. He has published comics, short fiction, essays and poems.

Philosophy Note:

Mirror is a philosophical story concerned with the limitations of our human consciousness and experience in dealing with beings and entities beyond what we think the rules of learning. Certain themes found in the works of H.P. Lovecraft and Stanislaw Lem served as inspirations.

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