Sci Phi Journal

Science Fiction And The Shaping Of Belief

by Manjula Menon

The editors most responsible for shaping what we now call the genre of ‘science-fiction’ were, arguably, Hugo Gernsback, who in 1926 published the first American science-fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, and John W. Campbell, who took over as editor of Astounding Science Fiction in 1937. In this essay, I’ll look at how these influential editors construed the science in the science-fiction stories they published, stories that for legions of fans served as steppingstones to belief in the truths revealed to them by the magazines’ writer-prophets.

Gernsback’s Amazing Stories was subtitled The Magazine of Scientification, and the magazine’s motto ‘Extravagant Fiction Today — Cold Fact Tomorrow’ was emblazoned prominently as a first-page banner. In his very first editorial for Amazing Stories in April 1926, titled A New Sort of Magazine, Gernsback defined ‘scientification’ as ‘the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story— a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.’[i] Gernsback had coined the neologism ‘scientification’ back in 1916, and was already publishing such stories in the other magazines he edited, like Science and Invention and Radio News. In subsequent editorials, Gernsback often vigorously focused on defending the magazine against ‘certain class of Amazing Stories scientification readers … ready to tear and claw at any author who comes along with a new idea which, for the time being, may be contrary to fact, although it may still lie within the realm of science.’[ii]

One of Gernsback’s aims was to better disseminate the work of non-American writers. The very first story that appeared in Amazing Stories was the Frenchman Jules Verne’s Off on a Comet (“Hector Servadac”), in which Captain Servadac experiences a cataclysmic event that appears to have altered the Algerian coast he’d been stationed at. Servadac sets sail on a yacht owned by the Russian Count Timascheff, to explore his new environs, an adventure that has them sailing through storms and ice; jibs are raised, mainsails adjusted, helms righted, yawls ingeniously refitted to skate over ice. They eventually discover that the Algerian coast they’d been on had been picked up apiece, air and water included, by a comet that had suddenly collided with Earth. This fantastic scenario is obviously far from being scientification; Gernsback himself says in his introduction to Off on a Comet, that it belongs ‘in the realm of fairyland’.[iii]

Off on a Comet is, however, meticulous in showing how characters methodically calculate solutions to ongoing problems.  After the cataclysmic event, Servadac observes that it takes longer for water to boil at the same outside temperature and deduces that there is less atmosphere above him. He observes that days are shorter, gravity is weaker, and that it is the star Vega in the constellation Lyra, and not the pole star, that is the fixed point around which constellations revolve. While the stars remain fixed in size and luminosity, he observes that the planet Venus gets larger and brighter, from which he deduces that he was on a collision course with the Cytherean body. When he observes Venus getting smaller and smaller, he deduces that the planes of the two planets’ orbits didn’t meet, and the catastrophic collision had been averted. He deduces from the observation that the magnetic needle of his compass had not deviated in angle from the north pole, that north and south remained the same, but that east and west had apparently changed places given sunrise and sunset position. Smooth and angular land formations jut up from the sea, and when they lower sounding-lines, they discover that the seabed is bereft of any marine life, uniformly deep, and composed of a strange iridescent metallic dust, from which they conclude that a subterranean event has lifted parts of that strange seabed to the surface. Once they understand that they are no longer on Earth but on a celestial body they name Gallia, they deduce that it is in an elliptical orbit, because the planet’s rate of speed diminishes in proportion to the distance receded from the sun. Far away from the sun, the temperature drops, and the Gallian seas begin to freeze. Off on a Comet is not just a thrilling sea adventure, but also a study of how the characters use tools, observations, and calculations to make deductions about the nature of the mystifying world they find themselves in.

In one scene, a solitary point of light observed from the schooner leads the party to a tomb deep within an abandoned mosque. Above the tomb, they discover a large, silver lamp, the source of the light, and on the corner of the tomb, an open French prayer-book. Servadac then has a revelation, that the tomb was that of the Crusader king Louis IX, canonized as Saint Louis; ‘The lamp that had been kindled at the memorial shrine of a saint was now in all probability the only beacon that threw a light across the waters of the Mediterranean, and even this ere long must itself expire.’ After making a ‘reverential obeisance to the venerated monument’,[iv] the party continue their exploration. Later, when the schooner appears certain to smash into those strange, smooth Gallian cliffs, Count Timascheff intones, ‘Let us, then, commend ourselves to the providence of Him to Whom nothing is impossible.’[v]

Verne had been raised Catholic, but other than brief nods to the faith of his youth as in the passage referenced above, he makes almost no reference to Christianity, and is commonly claimed by both deists and atheists as one of their own. Indeed, Saint Louis is brought up later in Off on a Comet, when the party encounter a supercilious English major who refers to the tomb as that of a French monarch, only to be vociferously corrected by Servadac that Louis IX was not merely a monarch, but a saint. Thus, the saint’s role in Off on a Comet appears to be to highlight verbal sparring between agents of rival colonial powers, rather than to make any kind of spiritual point. Indeed, none of the nineteenth-century Europeans who find themselves so mysteriously transplanted onto a comet hurling its way through the solar system consider that the event might have been a miracle, the work of God.

Verne similarly dropped non-Christian religious traditions into his stories. For example, in his adventure novel, Around the World in Eighty Days (“Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours”), the enigmatic, exacting, and iron-willed Englishman, Phileas Fogg, and his excitable, impressionable, and sentimental French valet, Passepartout set out to traverse the world in eighty days on a wager. They soon arrive in India, where in Bombay, Passepartout encounters a Parsi festival where the ‘descendants of the sect of Zoroaster…were celebrating a sort of religious carnival, with processions and shows, in the midst of which Indian dancing-girls, clothed in rose-coloured gauze, looped up with gold and silver, danced airily, but with perfect modesty, to the sound of viols and the clanging of tambourines.’[vi] Later, when their pre-planned train ride comes to an abrupt end, they hire a Parsi as mahout to a partially trained war-elephant they purchase to complete the journey, they soon find themselves in a little-traveled region ‘inhabited by a fanatical population, hardened in the most horrible practices of the Hindu faith’,[vii] where they encounter a procession carrying the corpse of a dead Rajah, accompanied by his beautiful, young Parsi widow, Aouda, who is to be ritually sacrificed in his funeral pyre. This horrific scene serves as impetus to a rescue mission, replete with daring deeds and suspenseful, last-minute turnarounds. Aouda and Phileas Fogg fall in love over the course of the novel, indeed the final scenes concern a marriage proposal. Once again, Verne uses religious traditions not with spirituality in mind but in the service of story, in the case of India, to serve as backdrop for spectacle, romance and adventure. Also like Off on a Comet, Verne is meticulous in Around the World in Eighty Days as to showing how the characters calculate solutions to ongoing problems, famously detailing how local time changes with changes in latitude, at a time before the international date line had been established. Metaphysical questions about the nature of reality or the existence of a higher power does not play any role in Verne’s stories, but religious traditions make occasional appearances, usually in service of other story elements.

The second story Gernsback picked for Amazing Stories was also a republication: The New Accelerator by the Englishman, H.G.Wells. It is perhaps worth noting here that it is these three men, Wells, Verne, and Gernsback, who are now commonly referred to as ‘the fathers of science fiction’. In The New Accelerator, the unnamed narrator agrees to imbibe an experimental drug concocted by Professor Gibberne, his neighbor and friend, who is world-renowned for making drugs that work on the human nervous system. The professor explains that the drug (named The New Accelerator), ‘is a stimulant that stimulates all round, that wakes you up for a time from the crown of your head to the tip of your great toe, and makes you go two — or even three to everybody else’s one.’[viii] Upon drinking the vial of green liquid offered, the narrator discovers to his amazement that he can now move so quickly that ordinary life appears to have come to a standstill. After the novelty of wandering through crowds of motionless people wears off, the narrator finds himself using the drug to achieve somewhat more prosaic aims: ‘I may mention, for example, that this story has been written at one sitting and without interruption, except for the nibbling of some chocolate, by its means. I began at 6:25, and my watch is now very nearly at the minute past the half-hour. The convenience of securing a long, uninterrupted spell of work in the midst of a day full of engagements cannot be exaggerated.’[ix]

In addition to fine-tuning The Accelerator so it can work for the masses, Professor Gibberne is also at work on another potion he calls The Retarder, which ‘should enable the patient to spread a few seconds over many hours of ordinary time, and so to maintain an apathetic inaction, a glacier-like absence of alacrity, amidst the most animated or irritating surroundings.’[x] Details as to the science behind the time-altering drugs are scant to non-existent. Instead, Wells is interested in the idea that our experience of time relates to the speed at which our bodily functions work.

These two stories, written by already very successful writers, typify what Gernsback liked to publish. For Gernsback, scientification, or science, appears to be broadly defined, as can be gathered by the implausibility of the underlying scenarios presented. As to what science was, how it differed from what came before, or how it intermingled with religious traditions that it existed alongside with, even as it ‘enters so intimately into all our lives today’[xi] as he put it, he expended almost no ink. Instead, as evinced by his eighty patents and numerous publications, Gernsback was passionate about technology, from the nitty-gritty mechanics of yet-to-be-invented machines to what grand societal changes were possible because of new technology.

While Gernsback appears to take scientification and science itself as ‘I know it when I see it’, the demarcation problem between science and pseudo-science has continued to vex philosophers for centuries. Although the word ‘science’ hadn’t been formulated yet, Aristotle in the 4th century BC held that a demarcation line existed between propositions that were ‘apodictically’, or necessarily, self-evidently, or demonstrably true, versus propositions arrived through the dialectic or reasoning process. Millenia later, the 1920s saw logical positivists associated with the Vienna Circle like Rudolf Carnap, A.J. Ayer, and Hans Hahn, focus on verifiability as the demarcation line, where the distinction is even more strongly drawn as being between meaningful and meaningless statements. Verificationists hold that a proposition is only meaningful if it can be empirically verified or if it expressed as a tautology that is logically true. However, using verifiability as demarcation leads to universally general statements like ‘all life on Earth is carbon-based’ being rendered meaningless as it cannot be verified, while existential statements like ’ghosts exist’ would be classified as meaningful, as it can be verified. In the 1930s, Karl Popper argued it should be falsifiability that should serve as the demarcation line, where only propositions that can be falsified should be considered scientific. In contrast to verifiability, under falsifiability, the sentence ‘all life on Earth is carbon-based’ would be considered scientific as it can be falsified, while ‘ghosts exist’ would not be considered scientific as it cannot be falsified. The American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn argued against falsifiability by observing that astrologers often provide precise predictions that could be falsified, which according to falsification would then render astrological predictions scientific. Kuhn argues instead that the demarcation line might not be as sharply defined, and that science was to be taken as merely a method of puzzle solving, in which the puzzle-solver works to correlate observation with theory. He pointed to what he called ‘extraordinary’ or ‘revolutionary’ science as the driver of forward scientific progress, rather than ‘ordinary’ science where the extraordinary science solves new problems in addition to the old problems solved by the paradigm it replaced. For Kuhn, these kind of paradigm shifts is what science is really about.

John W. Campbell, who became editor of Astounding Science Fiction in 1937, was clearly interested in the question of what science was and how it came to be. For example, in a 1953 editorial for Astounding Science Fiction, titled The Scientist, Campbell observes that scientists believe ‘in the existence of a Supreme Authority in the Universe, an Authority they call “Natural Law.” They hold that that Authority is above and beyond the opinions and beliefs, the will or willfullness, of any human being. That that Authority can, moreover, be directly consulted by any man, at any time—and that every man is, at every time and in every place, directly and specifically obedient to that Authority, to Natural Law, whether he recognizes that fact or not.’[xii] He further posits that the scientist would claim ‘I have proven beyond doubt that there is Universal Law; I am not yet wise enough to know the nature of its source,’[xiii] in contrast to those who claim to know the source of Universal Law.

Later, in the 1954 editorial, Relatively Absolute, Campbell writes that science is ‘that method of learning that involves the equal interaction and cross-checking of philosophical-theoretical thought, and actual physical-reality experiments, done as a conscious process for the consciously stated purpose of increasing knowledge and understanding—that is, increasing data and relationship-of-data.’[xiv] He argues that science was ‘going to be a mighty unpopular philosophy in any culture; it has an absolutism about it that says, it makes no difference who you are, what you are, or what you want. Neither does it matter what your wealth is, or your political power. These are The Laws, obey them or suffer.’[xv] Arguing that religion was ‘by derivation, the study of the “Laws of Things” … or “Cosmology” in modern linguistic terms’[xvi] he concludes that science could therefore only be invented by ‘a culture that had already accepted the idea of an Absolute Power in the Universe’[xvii] and points to their many inventions, including alchemy and algebra, to nominate the Islamic civilization as the sole progenitor of science.

Campbell is, at best, careless with the demarcation line, and whether one agrees with him or not about how and who ‘invented’ science, it seems indisputable that science-fiction, like science, did not wink into existence from out of the void, but rather emerged from a milieu.

For Darwin, it was inevitable that Homo-sapiens evolved to be philosophical. Writing in The Descent of Man Darwin says, ‘As soon as the faculties of the imagination, wonder, and curiosity, along with some power of reasoning, had become partially developed, man would naturally crave to understand what was passing around him, and would have vaguely speculated on his own existence.’[xviii]

Observations of what cause produced which effect was put to use to increase survival rate, while the human aptitude for symbolic behavior gave rise to language and allowed for the social cohesion necessary to form complex societies. When there were gaps in connecting cause with effect, our ancestors spun narratives that often imbued consciousness and agency to everything from stars to storms. These narratives were then often tied to belief structures, allowing for societal coalescence. Religious and sacred storytelling were, perhaps, inevitable outcroppings of the cognitive capacities of the human mind.

William James in his 1897 essay, ‘The Will to Believe’ says he wrote the essay ‘in justification of faith, a defense of our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced.’[xix] He argues that a proposed hypothesis will present as either live or dead to the mind: ‘A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed. If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connection with your nature, — it refuses to scintillate with any credibility at all. As a hypothesis it is completely dead. To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of the Mahdi’s followers), the hypothesis is among the mind’s possibilities: it is alive. This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the individual thinker.’[xx] To the hypothesis offered being ‘live’,  James adds the perceived prestige of the source of the hypothesis which together make ‘the spark shoot from them and light up our sleeping magazines of faith.’[xxi] Given the right imprimatur then, stories of science-fiction could rise to become part of some future canonical belief: Extravagant Fiction Today —— Cold Fact Tomorrow?

Indeed, Campbell later became a proponent of L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, and wrote approvingly about the existence of psi, or extra-sensory powers and perception, in humans, publishing multiple stories in Astounding based on psi. As James said about our quest for scientific truth, ‘Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case. Our belief in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other, — what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up?’[xxii]

The editors most influential in shaping science-fiction as we know it today published stories that featured the speculative hypotheses they favored, thereby advancing these hypotheses into James’s ‘live’ category in the minds of their readers. Gernsback and Campbell published stories that not only evoked wonder and awe in their readers, but also provided the imprimatur of science that allowed their readers to shape belief in what might yet be revealed to have been prophetic truth.

[i] Gernsback, H. (1926, April). A New Sort of Magazine. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 3

[ii] Gernsback, H. (1926, May). A New Sort of Magazine. Amazing Stories, 2(9), 825

[iii] Gernsback, H. (1926, April). A New Sort of Magazine. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 1

[iv] Verne, J. (1926, April). Off on a Comet. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 24

[v] Verne, J. (1926, April). Off on a Comet. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 28

[vi] Verne, J. Translated by Towle, G. (1872). Around the World in Eighty Days. Standard Ebooks edition, 49

[vii] Verne, J. Translated by Towle, G. (1872). Around the World in Eighty Days. Standard Ebooks edition, 62

[viii] Wells, H. (1926, April). The New Accelerator. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 58

[ix] Wells, H.G (1926, April). The New Accelerator. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 96

[x] Wells, H.G (1926, April). The New Accelerator. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 97

[xi] Gernsback, H. (1926, April). A New Sort of Magazine. Amazing Stories, 1(1), 20

[xii] Campbell, J.W. Collected Editorials from analog selected by Harry Harrison, Doubleday and Company, 1966, 69

[xiii] Campbell, J.W. Collected Editorials from analog selected by Harry Harrison, Doubleday and Company, 1966, 72,73

[xiv] Campbell, J.W. Collected Editorials from analog selected by Harry Harrison, Doubleday and Company, 1966, 78

[xv] Campbell, J.W. Collected Editorials from analog selected by Harry Harrison, Doubleday and Company, 1966, 79

[xvi] Campbell, J.W. Collected Editorials from analog selected by Harry Harrison, Doubleday and Company, 1966, 78

[xvii] Campbell, J.W. Collected Editorials from analog selected by Harry Harrison, Doubleday and Company, 1966, 79

[xviii] Darwin, C. Descent of Man, Second Edition, 143

[xix] James, W. The Will to Believe, Internet Archive Books, https://archive.org/details/willtobelieve0000jame, 1

[xx] James, W. The Will to Believe, Internet Archive Books, https://archive.org/details/willtobelieve0000jame, 1

[xxi] James, W. The Will to Believe, Internet Archive Books, https://archive.org/details/willtobelieve0000jame, 4

[xxii] James, W. The Will to Believe, Internet Archive Books, https://archive.org/details/willtobelieve0000jame, 4

~

Bio:

Manjula Menon once worked as an electrical engineer in Brussels. This is her second essay in Sci Phi Journal after her “homecoming of sorts” in our previous issue. A list of her other publications can be found at www.manjulamenon.com

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The Utopian’s Edict, Or: Ignorantia Juris

by Zachary Reger

Upon the thud of the Grand Speaker’s gavel, the Galactic Assembly declared Edict No. 73946 third read and finally passed.

As per procedure, the Essence of the Edict was ritually ensconced. The record captured the precise legal intent of the Assembly, as collective, at the exact nanosecond of enactment, transmuting such perfect knowledge into clear, digital code. The code, the Essence of the law, lay within the record. Each Edict had a record, and each record had an Edict.

Upon the conclusion of the legislative session, the Assembly adjourned sine die. Each Edict, as so in record, was transported, by pneumatic tube, to the Galactic Legal Archives. There, the Edict would become a universal public record. Each universal public record would be further transmitted, instantly upon engrossment in the Archives, to the Visicastor of every Galactic citizen. The Visicastor, required of all citizens by Edict of the Assembly, imparted perfect knowledge of its registered contents onto the mind of its bearer.

Thus, the lawgivers had reclaimed and expanded their primacy within the separation of powers. Gone were the cumbersome statutory codes of ancient regimes, subject to manipulation by crafty tribunals, executives, and private entities. Gone were the legal professionals who exacted high fees for the discharge of a public service—that is, imparting upon members of the public an expert knowledge of the law. Not a citizen of the Galactic community would exist without a perfect comprehension of the requirements of the law, as faultlessly captured by its lawfully elected enactors, and of whatever conduct in whatever place at whatever time would infringe its dictates.

In short, the art of law had been perfected.

#

There was no chime as Edict No. 73946 arrived in the Visicastor of each Galactic citizen. There was no notice, no blaring disruption of a citizen’s daily activities. At one moment, a citizen simply had no knowledge of the Edict. The next moment, they did.

Edward was one such Galactic citizen, a peace officer, by trade. Many centuries ago, peace officers had been the first required to maintain an active Visicastor while on the job. Eventually, this requirement expanded to all hours, both on duty and off. Then, to every government official, high and low. At last, to every citizen—each themselves a part of the democratic community and responsible for its upkeep.

This afternoon, Edward was off duty, running errands on the town. That town, a minor village of a backwater province of an outer-rim planet, had a single bank. The First Central Bank, it was aptly named. As Edward required a certified note for a downpayment on a vacation home, he decided to visit First Central to check one more item off his list of chores.

But the day would hold more for Edward than just a few errands. As Edward approached the teller’s booth, a trio of hooded figures crashed through the front door and into the small, gilded lobby. With one blast of a phazer into the air, the robbers had a half-dozen civilians on the ground. Two of the three corralled the citizens into respective corners. The third approached the teller. With a curt gesture, the needed information was exchanged: everything you have into the bag, or else.

Edward, neither fully noble nor ignoble, but possessing, at times, a sense of public duty if not exaggerated self-importance, sprang into action. With a flick of his hand, Edward’s phazer found its targets. Set to stun—a default long required of peace officers by Edict of the Assembly, on duty or off—the phazer incapacitated one then the other of the robbers who held the civilians under threat. As Edward turned to face the third robber, still at the teller’s booth, bag in hand, a string of events happened in quick succession.

First, the third robber grabbed the teller from behind the booth, pulling her by the scruff of the neck out into the lobby. The robber pulled his own phazer on the teller, holding her defenseless at gunpoint. “You let us go,” the robber demanded, “or she gets it.”

Second, legal knowledge flooded Edward’s senses. As a peace officer, Edward not infrequently found himself in such sticky situations, and was accustomed to the passive recall of embedded legal knowledge made possible by the Visicastor. Edward immediately understood that the robber had credibly threatened deadly force against an unarmed bystander. As a result, the law authorized, yet did not require, proportionate deadly force to be used against the attacker if doing so had a “probable chance” of thwarting the threatened attack, but not if doing so had a better than even chance of directly or indirectly inflicting grievous harm upon the victim.

Edward knew, instantaneously, that the concept of direct or indirect infliction of grievous harm, in the combined intent of the enactors, included harm inflicted either directly from Edward’s own firing of his phazer, which could miss and hit the victim, or indirectly from the robber’s firing of his phazer, which could be triggered by Edward’s own firing. As Edward’s phazer was set to stun, his only legal concern would be the latter—an indirect infliction of grievous harm.

But Edward also knew, instantaneously, that this general legal landscape had been complicated by the passage of Edict No. 73946, enacted mere hours ago. The Edict required that a peace officer attempt a negotiation before firing upon a hostage taker, so long as it was not “fairly probable” that the attacker may injure his hostage during such attempt. The enactors had been concerned with a few high-profile cases of gun-toting “heroes,” knowing with certainty that the law stood on their side, being much too quick to pull the trigger when still nonviolent alternatives remained.

Third, the third robber’s own Visicastor informed him of the various penalties for the offenses he had already committed or could still commit in the ongoing altercation. For attempted armed robbery, the robber faced a Class D Galactic felony, punishable by up to four years’ imprisonment. Were the robbery successful, the Class D Galactic felony would become a Class C Galactic felony, punishable by up to ten years’ imprisonment. As one of three, the robber also faced a probable conspiracy charge, which would make his co-conspirators liable for all offenses committed in furtherance of the conspiracy, whether they had personally committed such offenses or not.

The third robber knew, instantaneously, that murder in the commission of an armed robbery carried a higher sentence than those offenses he had already committed—twenty years’ imprisonment, a Class B Galactic felony.  The third robber also knew that the grievous injury of a peace officer in the line of duty carried an even greater sentence still—life imprisonment, a Class A Galactic felony. The third robber understood that, as a result of his conspiracy, he would be liable for offenses committed by any of his co-conspirators in furtherance of the conspiracy, just as his co-conspirators would be liable for such offenses he himself committed. And per the enactors’ intent, an off duty peace officer reacting to an ongoing offense was “in the line of duty.”

Fourth, the first robber, who, unbeknownst to Edward but known full well by her co-conspirators, had been wearing a protective vest that blunted the stunning effects of Edward’s phazer, stumbled to her feet in a bloody rage, raising her phazer directly in Edward’s direction.

Fifth, the first robber, informed by her Visicastor, knew instantly of the dangerous mistake she had made. Not only had she, in her rage, nearly fired upon a peace officer and incurred a lifetime behind bars, she had won the wrath of her co-conspirator. The best interests of that co-conspirator would be to fire upon her first, thus preventing her from harming the peace officer and triggering a sentence of life imprisonment for all three co-conspirators. And so the first robber’s own interests would, in turn, be best served by doing whatever was necessary to forestall the friendly fire of her co-conspirator—up to and including firing the first shot.       

Sixth, the second robber, similarly armored, stumbled to his feet. His thought process was much the same as that of the first robber. Yet he, also Visicastor-informed of the laws in play, understood the interests of the third robber in firing upon the first, as well as the interests of the first in forestalling such attack. Murder of a co-conspirator would subject them all (or at least those who survived) to a Class C Galactic felony—much preferable to the Class A Galactic felony of grievously injuring a peace officer, but still worse than the Class D felony of attempted armed robbery of which all were currently liable. The second robber also understood that the peace officer would hesitate, in order to attempt a hostage negotiation in compliance with Edict No. 73946, and therefore not immediately fire upon the hostage-taking third robber.

Thus, the psycho-legal standoff reached its logical terminus. Edward hesitated, lowering his weapon. “Put the phazer down and let’s talk this through,” he said.

The first robber pulled her phazer on the third. “Drop the phazer, it’s over,” she said. “We can’t win this thing.”

Edward spun around, raising his weapon to face the first robber. “Hold your fire!” Edward yelled. “There’s no need to do anything rash.”

The third robber caught Edward off-guard, raising his phazer in the officer’s direction. “You shoot me, and we all go behind bars,” he said. “I’d think twice before pulling that trigger.”

The second robber raised his phazer toward the third. “Don’t you do it,” he said. “You shoot him, and I’ll have nothing to lose.”

“And nothing to gain,” replied the third.

The teller, head spinning, took this opportunity to flee from the third robber’s grasp. She pushed hard against his chest, nearly toppling him over. The teller ran straight through the lobby and out the front entrance of the bank. She did not look back. Already, her communicator was in hand, and she had the local Peace Department on the line.

In no time at all, a dozen officers (nearly half of those currently on duty) descended on the scene. With overwhelming force, they broke through the front doors of First Central Bank, surrounding the three robbers and an encumbered Edward. Phazers dropped, and handcuffs flew. Bystanders were ushered from the premises. Three detained perpetrators were led to awaiting patrol cars. Edward was offered medical attention, then interviewed by his captain about the precise sequence of events (“What sequence?” Edward was heard to reply). An on-scene detective, assisted by the teller, obtained and logged the relevant security footage. The dropped weapons were gathered as evidence. The bank closed for the rest of the evening. A crowd gathered outside, but dissipated once it was clear that any excitement had passed.

Life went back to normal, and the “Central Bank Incident,” briefly the talk of the town, became a footnote of local history.

A week later, three defendants appeared before a Galactic judge in the local district court. Trials commenced, jurors deliberated, and three co-conspirators were convicted on three counts of attempted armed robbery. No other charges were brought. Each defendant was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment.

#

Long forgotten, an archival account of the incident piqued the interest of a junior staffer for a newly elected representative in the Galactic Assembly. When Edict No. 73946 came up for reauthorization before the Committee on the Judiciary, the representative argued that such Edict had once prevented a bloody shootout, and thus made for good law. An opposing representative demurred, arguing that the “Central Bank Incident” represented nothing more than a peculiar story. Edict No. 73946 had little to do with the resolution, and could not be expected to produce such bloodless results in future incidents.

“As they say, ‘exceptional cases make bad law,’” the representative intoned, concluding the discussion. In the end, the Committee on the Judiciary deadlocked, and the reauthorization was tabled.

~

Bio:

Zachary Reger is an attorney in Washington, D.C. He holds degrees in journalism, philosophy, and film studies from the University of Missouri, and a law degree from the University of Chicago. His legal scholarship explores the designs, purposes, and effects of political and legal institutions, and this story—exploring much the same themes—marks his short fiction debut.

Philosophy Note:

I am fascinated by the nature and role of legislation in a democratic society. This story asks what it would mean for citizens, both those sworn to uphold the law and those who wish to subvert it, to have perfect knowledge of all legislative enactments. How would such knowledge influence their behavior, for good or for ill? And is ignorance of the law (“ignorantia juris”) either curse or blessing?

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Care And Feeding Of A Hybrid Workforce

by Kim Z. Dale

“It may take some getting used to.” That’s what management said when they told us we’d return to the office in a hybrid mode. The new policy was a purgatorial blend of working from home and working on site. The employees didn’t like it because we wanted to keep working remotely full time. Management didn’t like it because they wanted us in back the office full time, but after two years of everyone working from home, our leadership could no longer pretend that 40-plus hours in the office was a requirement for getting things done.

With the new hybrid schedules, it was hard to keep track of who was in the office and who was at home, so we kept doing video calls regardless of whether the person on the other end was across the country or across the hall. All the calls blurred together. I barely paid attention to my calendar. If a meeting notification popped up, I clicked on it. When another notification came up, I clicked on that. The person whose face appeared on the screen after I connected could be just about anyone, but it was surprising the first time I clicked a meeting link and the person I saw there was me.

I assumed I must be early to the call and the system was showing my camera-view while waiting for someone else to join. Then, I realized the person I was looking at was not a mirror image of myself. I was in the office, but the image showed me at home. The me on the screen was wearing a different shirt than the one I had on. I was in a virtual meeting with someone who looked like me but was not me. This was disconcerting.

“I wanted to touch base,” said the me on the screen who was not really me.

I let out a panicked squeak and closed the meeting window. I rushed down the hall to my boss’s office. He was casually sipping a smoothie while scrolling through his email.

“I need to go home,” I told him.

“Today is your in-the-office day. We can’t have people switching days willy-nilly. Won’t whatever it is wait until tomorrow?”

“I think someone broke into my house. I was just on a video call with them. They are in my house pretending to be me.”

“They are you. Sort of.”

“What?”

“It’s part of the new hybrid work arrangement. We realized that with a hybrid schedule your home workspace isn’t in use when you are in the office and your office workspace isn’t in use when you are home. It’s very inefficient. Luckily, we found a way to maximize the available resources. We simply split your soul from your body, so part of you could be in each place at the same time. Neither workspace sits empty, and twice the work can be done. It’s a win-win.”

“Which part am I? The body or the soul?”

“Employee health records are confidential. You’ll have to ask Human Resources. Now, if you don’t mind, I have work to do.”

Disoriented, I shuffled back to my cubicle. As I passed other desks, I noticed many of my co-workers were on video calls with other versions of themselves as well. When I arrived at my workspace I sat down, took a deep breath, and called myself back.

Talking to myself was not as strange as I expected. The two of us think the same way and agree about everything, so we work well together. Perhaps management was onto something. After a few days it became routine, talking to him at home when I was in the office and talking to him in the office when I was at home. It only got weird again when I noticed the bandages. His arms were covered with them. I asked what happened.

“Don’t you remember?” he asked.

What I remembered was a recurring nightmare I’d been having. In it I was cutting myself and sucking the blood out of the wounds, but it wasn’t really my own body. It was a copy of me. And the copy of me was simultaneously cutting me and drinking my blood like I was to him. Realizing it may not have been a dream, I rolled up my sleeve. I saw my own arm was bandaged like his.

“Why did we do this?”

“We feed off each other. It’s how we stay connected. At least that’s how it started. The sensation can be a bit addictive.”

I watched as my doppelganger cut a stripe on his arm and sucked on the warm red liquid oozing from it. Even though I was repulsed by what I was seeing, I felt myself salivating.

This was insane. I disconnected from the call with my bloodthirsty twin and went to talk to my boss again. Seeing him drinking one of his ever-present dark red smoothies gave me a disturbing realization.

“Is that…blood?”

“It’s a blend.”

“A blend of what?”

“My blood, the blood of some well-vetted donors, and pomegranate juice.”

“Oh,” I said.

I wanted to be disgusted by my boss’s concoction, but what I felt was hungry. I went to the restroom and hid in one of the stalls. I was having a mild panic attack, sweating and breathing heavily. I needed something to calm me down, and I was afraid I knew what would work.

I pulled off one of the bandages on my arm. The cut beneath it was freshly scabbed. I used the pen knife on my keychain to reopen a small slit at one end of the wound. I squeezed my skin until a drop of blood emerged. I inhaled, trying to block out the acrid smell of disinfectants and urinal cakes to focus on my own sanguine scent. Then, I licked it.

I liked it. The warm metallic ooze tingled on my tongue, but I had cut too timidly. The few drops from my tiny incision were not enough to satiate my newly realized bloodlust. I prepared to enlarge the wound but stopped because I heard something. Someone was moving in another stall. I was not alone in the restroom. Then, I heard slurping. Not only wasn’t I alone in the restroom, I wasn’t alone in what I was doing there. With my panic eased by this strange sense of comradery, I continued to feed.

Those were the early days. We soon stopped hiding our bloodletting once we realized we were all doing it. Now people exsanguinate at their desks or sitting beside each other at the long tables in the cafeteria. Our insurance even started covering the medical tubes you can get put in your arm so you can open the valve and suck the blood through like a straw without having to constantly cut yourself. Some people still prefer the cutting.

There were some employees, of course, who weren’t comfortable with this “new normal” and quit. I’m not sure where they expected to get other jobs though. Everything that’s happening here is rapidly becoming industry best practice. All the best places do it.

I stayed, but I won’t say I love the arrangement. Between me and the other me, we are doing twice the work I used to do alone. Despite being split in two, I feel every minute of my double-loaded workweek. I’m exhausted. My twin is too. We are literally sucking the life out of each other.

My boss asked me to help interview candidates to fill the roles of people who left. The woman I liked best didn’t have much experience, but I believe it’s important to give people an opportunity to grow. Besides, she was wearing a short-sleeve shirt during the interview, and I could see she has good veins. She’ll be a great fit. My twin agrees.

I never asked HR if I’m the body part of me or the soul part. I have my suspicions, but I think it’s better not to know.

~

Bio:

Kim Z. Dale is a writer and resiliency manager in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Her science-fiction and horror stories have been published in Nightmare Sky from Death Knell Press, GrimDark2 from Black Hare Press, and After Dinner Conversation magazine. Her other writing has been published in anthologies from Belt Publishing, O’Reilly Media, Kendall Hunt Publishing, Aschehoug Undervisning, and Helbling.

Philosophy Note:

What happens when a part of us never disconnects from work? Will we eat ourselves alive? In “Care and Feeding of a Hybrid Workforce,” corporations deploy dark technology that fully blurs the lines between work and home in the name of increased productivity. This story was inspired by my time as a return to office project planner in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. (It does not reflect any policies or technologies used by my employer!)

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The Deepest Forever-Kiss

by J. Edward Tremlett

Self. Then Not-Self. Then Unity.

Explorer stabilized, momentarily bewildered. Downloading into alien structures was always strange, but this structure was stranger than most.

This star-sized resting place of the Samantabhadra, may it be remembered…

“Status?” Commander communicated.

“Here,” they replied. “Scanning.”

Explorer “looked” – sending electric feelers along circuits. Nothing made immediate sense, but the Endymion hadn’t encountered anything for over 25 ship-years; they were out of practice.

“A cube” they replied. “50.5 kilometers a side.”      

“Function?”

“Movement?” Explorer guessed. “Electro-kinetic systems. No memory.”

“Surroundings?”

“Unknown. No visual sensors-”

“Swiftness!” Commander demanded. “Endymion is endangered.”

“Understood,” they said, having no desire to tarry. As intriguing as a Dyson Sphere the size of a red giant was, it had killed the Samantabhadra.

And there was a chance Poet was right…

#

Endymion was 54.7 ship-years into the mission when they found traces of the Samantabhadra – lost over 4000 real-time years ago.    

Tracking took precedence. The Samantabhadra was a deep-freeze scanning vessel, launched aeons before the Uploading Doctrine. As the Endymion was already bringing news of that Doctrine to humanity’s furthest outreaches, the Ministers of Terra-Nova would deem Saving those lost souls worthy of course deviation.

Subsequently they detoured 25.3 ship-years to this curious system, lit only by other stars. At its center sat a metallic, super-dense sphere 22 million miles in diameter, with gravity so intense the Endymion could barely resist.

Samantabhadra lay smashed across its surface, wreckage resting in a curious dispersal pattern. No systems remained intact, which meant the crew was sadly beyond Saving. But they transmitted Explorer below the surface, hoping to claim understanding as victory.

The dead deserved that, at least.

#

Self. Not-Self. Unity. Explorer was elsewhere, and whole once more.

They sent out traces, once more. But this cube was the same as the ten they’d already entered.

Maddening! They’d interfaced with numerous systems – human and alien – but never had this much trouble. They should have found a memory-core before now, or at least visual inputs…

Electricity. Movement. A spasm in the electro-kinetics.

Explorer halted. Did they do that?

The cube kept moving. Explorer could sense the electricity was being sent from a central node, somewhere. At last-

“Widespread surface movement!” Scanners interrupted. “Tectonic instability!”

An image beamed into Explorer – squares of surface sliding along latitude and longitude like a sun-sized puzzle box. They now understood why the Samantabhadra’s wreck lay as it did, and might have said so, except they realized something else was here – another presence, flitting past.

And they realized Poet had been right…

#

Within Endymion the crew had congregated – twenty Uploaded soul-clusters, come from all areas of the drive-shell to float about Commander, who towered over all. 

“Before us, Samantabhadra lies,” Poet intoned. “After aeons untold, we see with our eyes / Broken yet proud, even in demise…”

The others applauded – especially Engineering, who’d been Joining with Poet lately. Explorer wished both luck: having Joined with each, they knew one’s pretention would soon clash with the other’s need for structure.

Joining provided both much-needed pleasure and diversion. They’d spent 400 real-years seeking lost colonies to inform them of the Fleshcrime codes, and prepare them for eventual Saving. Even with time-perception slowed down to a fifth the journey became tedious.

So when habitat creation grew stale, and the universe’s wonders failed to impress, exploring each other became a new frontier. Sadly, mingling with another to find yourself was only satisfying for so long. Unknown became known, which theoretically became satisfaction but usually led to boredom – especially for Explorer.

Still, they tried, hoping each time would be the promised Forever-Kiss. They’d thought Poet deep enough, but had ultimately been disappointed.     

“Anomaly,” Commander stated, enlarging the Samantabhadra’s image. “Wreckage in two sections, 5.784 million miles apart.”

“And not keeping with the crash’s trajectory,” Observation calculated.     

“It couldn’t have skipped,” Engineer insisted. “Not with that gravity. What’s causing it?”

“Unknown,” Scanners replied. “It seems like a Dyson Sphere, but there’s no energy output.”

“Its star is dead,” Astrometrics pronounced.

“No,” Poet said. “Not dead. Not completely.”

“I’m registering nothing, Poet,” Scanners repeated.

“Can’t you feel it?” Poet pleaded, looking to the others. “Something is alive, down there. Look!”

The others said nothing, used to Poet’s irrationality. But Explorer wondered…

#

Explorer leaped after the presence. It remained one step ahead, as if fleeing.  

Who could blame it? Explorer was just an alien virus, like the ones Endymion encountered, now and again…

“Danger!” Astrometrics shouted. “Detecting massive gravity distortions! ”

“They’re radiating from the sphere!” Scanners added. “What did you do, Explorer?”

Explorer halted pursuit. “I don’t know. I feel nothing different-“

“If space gets distorted near us the bias drive will be inoperable!” Engineer shouted.

“Withdraw!” Commander declared. “Explorer, transmit!

Explorer sighed – so close to solving this mystery! Still, duty called.

But then something approached, surfacing as through from water. It was the presence they’d been chasing – full and golden, old and wise.

And so very deep.

“Hello,” Explorer stammered. “Who are you?”

Information was their reply: hundreds of nesting spheres, encircling a bright, beautiful star; massive plates on each sphere, moving to create highly complex orbital shift computations; gravitic engines powerful enough to perform them, however distant those star systems…

“You’re the machine,” Explorer realized. “What happened?”

More information: Samantabhadra, unable to escape the gravity; a crash, damaging the surface in mid-calculation; a shockwave, knocking the machine unconscious.

Then, 4000 years later, another presence, entering…

“That’s me,” Explorer replied. “I restarted things?”

CONFIRMATION.

“Glad I could help.”

GRATITUDE. CURIOSITY.

“I think we’re similar…”

UNDERSTANDING.

“Yes,” Explorer agreed.

ATTRACTION.  

“Definitely.”

WELCOME.

Explorer nervously reached out their tendrils. The presence invited them in.

“Transmit!” Commander shouted. “Explorer, transmit!”

Explorer didn’t answer, lost in a perfect kiss.

The new world moved on, beneath.

#

Endymion survived, if barely. It retreated far enough to watch for a time as the great machine’s surface spun to life for the first time in thousands of years. Then they left a marker buoy, and departed back along their previous course.

Commander was nothing but pragmatic, counterbalancing Explorer’s tragic loss with solving the mystery of the Samantabhadra, confirming the existence of a hitherto-theoretical Matrioshka Brain, and discovering a serious navigational hazard. Poet used the imposed three-day mourning period to compose a master-work memorializing Explorer, but did so somehow knowing their former lover wasn’t dead – merely missing.

And not “missing,” really, but found.

Hopefully forever, this time.

~

Bio:

J. Edward Tremlett (AKA “the Lurker in Lansing”) has had some interesting times. He’s been featured in the anthologies “Spring Forward Fall Back,” “Upon a Thrice Time,” and “Ride the Star Wind,” as well as the magazines Bleed Error, Underbelly, and The End is Nigh. He was webmaster of The Wraith Project and has numerous credits at Pyramid Magazine. A former guest of Dubai and South Korea, he currently resides in Lansing, Michigan, USA, with several feline ghosts and enough Lego bricks to assemble a Great Old One. Hopefully it will not come to that…

Philosophy Note:

If we transcend the flesh to become pure information, and sex then becomes the joining of two information clouds — letting down all barriers and eventually revealing all that lies within — then what mystery is left between two or more individuals? How long before total familiarity breeds boredom? And what would a truly restless soul do to find a nearly-endless source of mystery? All that and a matrioshka brain is what drives this story.

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Mirror

What it reflects can no longer be unseen, by Philip Madden.

Sci Phi Journal 2023/2 – Summer Issue For Download

If you like to peruse your seasonal dose of speculative philosophy printed on trusty old paper, or the slightly less old, but similarly trusty screen of your e-reader, go ahead and download your free PDF copy just below.

We hope our mélange of concept-driven literary curiosities and thought-provoking essays will serve as a cosy read for the summer holidays!

Enjoy the trip,

the Sci Phi crew

Sci-Phi-Journal-2023Q2Download

~

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Editorial – Sci Phi Journal 2023/2

Lectori salutem.

Welcome to our 2023 Summer edition.

While the spring had started quietly, to our surprise this turned out to be another bumper issue, containing ten original short stories loosely arranged around two themes: the possibility of communication (and the lack thereof) between different forms of intelligence, and the lore, history and mythology humans tend to build around concepts both real (wine, for instance) and fantastical (such as magical artefacts).

We are also featuring three essays which, each in their own way, tie into the ideas mentioned above, by examining works of fiction that deal with these issues in both written and audio-visual media.

The Sci Phi editors and team have also had some serious conversations with fellow SF practitioners and friends of speculation on the potential near-future impact of machine-generated literary and artistic content. We have come to the conclusion that, for now, we simply don’t know how to predict the extent to which the blanket deployment of these novel technologies will displace or empower individual creativity – there will likely be instances of both in equal measure.

Sci Phi Journal is not against the use of “artificial intelligence” as an expressive tool, per se, and even if we were, the tide of progress would merely wash over our objections. However, for the time being, we would like to hang on to the aspect of speculative fiction that brought us to this genre in the first place: the companionship of wonder. Communing with the visionary mind of the human author behind a story or artwork, and then engaging in rapt discussions with fellow fans to tease out the underlying ideas: these are some of the supreme pleasures of SF.

Therefore, until further notice, we will continue to publish only writing and illustrations wrought by human hand, harking back to the aesthetics of the pre-AI era.

This may or may not be wise. Time will tell. Meanwhile, enjoy the ride!

Speculatively yours,

the Sci Phi co-editors & crew

~

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Frame Rate

by Mike Jack Stoumbos

For months, the hardest part of the experiment had been reminding myself that I had time.

Not the trudging up the hills and 1.4 gravity while the spongy soil slowly gave way. Not the isolation, and certainly not the technology. I’d been left with ample survival and research supplies, including a 3D printer with miles of compatible dead vegetation to reconstitute.

No, the biggest hardship of a solo study on planet G-84127 was waiting and watching day after day, without throwing in the towel out of impatience.

That is until my time here ran out. A terse digital message informed me a scout ship had reentered the system, and I had less than one standard day, the human-centric 24 hours, before the fleet gave orders to harvest.

So, that morning, I hurried into my workboots, saving time by bypassing the environmental suit, trusting the many scans that ruled out toxins, carcinogens, or even airborne bacteria on G-84127. The single-celled organisms were amusingly too large and dense to get into the air or our lungs.

The macroflora, with their thick cell walls and long-winded reproductive cycles, had drawn survey teams here in the first place. They were what kept me on-site for extended study and inevitably what would bring the fleet back to harvest. Samples pulled from dead specimens littered my lab, which sunk a little deeper and tilted a little steeper each day, despite the exterior supports.

The lean was extreme enough that I’d ditched the tables and set the expensive equipment on the floor weeks ago. State-of-the-science devices, used to observe teeny, tiny life, now collecting dust as I stepped over them toward the door.

The only really high-tech piece I still used was the 3D printer, which had finished yet another post topped with a sign, made entirely from local vegetation.

My newest sign split into eight prongs, like blunted tines on an aggressive fork, and was scheduled for Site F. There was no audience to complain to about the long walk. The sign, despite being made of lightweight reconstituted vegetation, was taller than me and a huge burden in high gravity. It had already slid to the wall since being printed, courtesy of the tilted lab.

Outside, the semi-elastic ground had smoothed itself, erasing my former footprints. The southeast corner looked a few centimeters lower. The whole thing might have been swallowed if not propped up by two of the snakelike trees that wrapped around the corners and held it in place.

I nodded to those curving pillars as if they could see me. In their own way, maybe they could.

The snake trees weren’t the biggest flora here, but they were the most fascinating. On a planet with exactly zero complex fauna, you take what you can get from the most interesting trees. They lined all paths from the exterior door, in rows, almost as if I had planted them.

With each step, I was torn between pausing to examine any minute changes and pressing forward to my objective. Today, the latter won out.

I touched several with my free hand while I went, like high-fiving a reception line. When you’re by yourself on a distant planet, you find companionship anywhere, enough to make you question your sanity and doubt your senses. I had been resistant to calling the patterns in the snake trees’ branches deliberate, but even in the early days, I saw one that ended in a slab with five protrusions and called it a hand; even today, I gave it a slow wave as I passed by.

Not that the tree waved back. They moved too slowly to even sway in the minimal breeze, but they did grow and shift fast enough for me to observe when very, very patient and very, very still.

“An inch an hour,” I muttered to myself. Glacial speed, the kind that made you want to punch anyone who said, “Like watching paint dry.” But with the right time lapse recording, set to the right frame rate, those trees practically danced. I bet that’s how they perceived themselves.

The sign dragging behind me, hooked under one elbow, was not nearly as thick or tall as a real snake tree, but the basic shape of the prongs seemed a close facsimile on a smaller scale. I hoped they agreed. Each belabored step trudging up and down each hill was motivated by that hope.

I had been planting signs on the crests of hills, where snake trees didn’t grow on their own, but where signs could clearly be seen—that is before a forest started growing around my lab and pathways.

I’d labeled the three closest hills Sites A, B, and C, and more letters continued as the hill spiral grew further outward.

Today, I passed B on my way to F—an encouraging sight, even if I didn’t stop and stare.

Site B stood as the first observable success in communication. My 3D printing had been clunkier then, just geometric shapes mounted on posts and stuck into the ground. But the surrounding snake trees imitated those shapes. It had taken more than 10 standard days for them to mirror, slowly moving, bending, splitting when they needed to.

However, imitation was not yet intelligence. “Trees see, tree do,” while fascinating, did not hold a fleet of harvesters.

“Imitation, recognition, application, synthesis,” I reminded myself. If they only imitated, the shape game would remain an amusing anecdote while the powers-that-be reaped a planet deemed devoid of complex intelligent life.

Maybe if we had given G-84127 a convenient pet name, maybe if we had mis-classified snake trees as animals instead of plants, maybe if we had petitioned a preservation society sooner. Not new thoughts, not helpful. Putting pressure on Site F was hardly helpful, but it felt like my last hope—correction: the trees’ last hope. I’d just be assigned to another planet; they’d be harvested to extinction.

At Site A, a convenient, nearby cluster, I had tried to get them to imitate my movements, but I clearly moved too fast. At Site C, I tried lights; D, sounds. E sank, literally, into the dirt before imitation had occurred, much less understanding. And F… I’d shove another sign into hill F, but I knew there wouldn’t be enough time for them to respond before the go order.

I was sure by now that they responded, certain of the imitation, but no more than I would be of a Venus fly trap’s intelligence. And the responses were so slow. The snake trees on this heavy sponge of a planet went way beyond even the Ents of Lord of the Rings, who made it seem like a few lost minutes to communicate a sentence was a long time. Amateurs.

I wondered if I’d miss my trees’ sounds, the muted groaning and shifting. It was like nothing ever fell down on this planet, just sank or slowly stretched. Even now, I wondered if the trees could even perceive my footsteps, or if those went by too fast, like me watching for individual beats of a hummingbird’s wings. To know something exists but not quite be able to perceive it or interact with it…

Site F had a steeper incline, and I used my eight-pronged sign as a walking staff, fighting against the sinking earth. I grunted and panted my way to the top of the hill, where five more printed signs already stood in place. I’d started the pattern of increasing prongs with one, then another one, then two, three, and five. The start of the Fibonacci sequence, to be followed by eight. With enough time, I would have added thirteen.

I saw my earlier signs first, before cresting the hill to see the trees themselves, lined up in a row to copy what I’d put in place.

But I didn’t get a chance to install the next number in the sequence.

Instead, I fell to my knees, letting the eight-pronged sign drop with a dull thud.

The trees, for once, had beaten me to it. Standing proudly on the other side of the hill their prongs numbered one, one, two, three, five—but didn’t stop there.

The next tree had split into eight bold branches. Its neighbor had begun to unfurl thirteen. And another, only a meter high, had the tiniest buds haloing out from its upper stump. I had to get closer to count them, so I scrambled to my feet and gleefully numbered them all the way up to twenty-one.

Intelligence! Beyond mere imitation, they showed understanding of a pattern, application, and synthesis. Number sense, mathematical acumen.

For the first time, I knew for certain I wasn’t truly alone on this planet. The weight of the sign left behind me, I ran down the hill toward my lab, to call the fleet. That conversation would take minutes but change the fate of this planet. The ongoing conversation with the snake trees would last years.

I had time.

~

Bio:

Mike Jack Stoumbos is an author and educator, living with his wife and their parrot in Richmond, VA. He is best known as a 1st-place winner of the Writers of the Future contest and for his space opera novel series This Fine Crew. His short fiction appears in collections from Zombies Need Brains, WordFire Press, and Inkd Pub, among others, and he is the lead anthology editor of WonderBird Press.

Philosophy Note:

As a licensed and experienced teacher of both English composition and mathematics, I have spent years exploring the academic side of communication and knowledge transfer–but I can only explore so many what-ifs with my human students. “Frame Rate” gave me an opportunity to question the nature of intelligent communication with beings whose differing perceptions would make most interaction impossible or at least unnoticeable. In this story, I used a truncated rendition of the stages of learning (imitation, recognition, application, synthesis) and applied them to communication.

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Mirror

What it reflects can no longer be unseen, by Philip Madden.

The Soul Hypothesis

by Robert L. Jones III

Almost silently, the hover train whisks to a stop on its magnetic rails. I’m not the only one scanning this crowd for targets. Professionals all over the country work this and other transportation hubs, and now my attention is drawn to a blonde woman disembarking with the other passengers.

Not every woman who looks like her is what I’m looking for, but few women look like her. This one is carrying a small travel case and nothing else, another clue. As I watch her, I can’t imagine anyone being closer to physical perfection. Her blonde hair is tied back, revealing a lean, exquisitely shaped face, and her dark blue dress can’t hide a figure of what many would consider ideal proportions. Her shoes are low-heeled, soft-soled, and designed for ease of movement.

Our eyes meet from across the seething throng on the platform. Though I’m a stranger, she doesn’t look away, and her face is as expressionless as mine as we slowly close the distance between us. I know her type. She’s an amoral sociopath, but that isn’t the reason for her blank, unapologetic stare. I’ve seen this look many times. She’s ovulating, and she wants to mate. Displaying a flat affect and keeping my hands in plain view at my sides, I maintain the deception for as long as I can. I need to get as close as possible. I know she could break me in half, probably kill me with her thumb.

Now we’re almost close enough to touch, and we stop our mutual advance. Her head cocks slightly to one side — a definite, almost reflexive tell — as she assesses me, and I reciprocate. It always takes them longer to examine a person because they don’t read the subtleties of character very easily. This isn’t due to neurodivergence or a structural abnormality; her brain scan would appear normal.

Now is the tantalizing moment when success is imminent, when temptation and danger are at their highest pitch. I’m only human. Unlike her, I can be attracted to something which threatens my survival. She finally sees what I’m trying to hide, something beyond her comprehension, and instinctive fear animates her features. She’s a synthete. Though I occasionally have my doubts, current dogma says that I possess what she lacks: a nonmaterial soul.

#

The goal was the creation of the first human beings from inorganic chemicals. It was to be the triumph of chemistry and reductionism, the final proof that mind is nothing more than body. Such a grand objective awaited developments on five fronts: first, a more thorough understanding of the human genome and how it operates within the context of chromosomal and cellular structure; second, whole body three-dimensional imaging at the atomic level of resolution for constructing initial templates; third, reliable methods of altering genes without negative side effects; fourth, sufficiently advanced chemosynthetic technology to build from the revised templates; and fifth, artificial intelligence sophisticated enough to coordinate all of the parameters.

It was less than straightforward — far less. The chief obstacle once these developments were in place was the nanosecond timing required to assemble and activate functioning bodies before molecular decay could set in, and this was particularly crucial for the viability of the nervous system. It was the literal creation of life from nonlife, an artificial abiogenesis. It could only be achieved instrumentally under the control of superior AI because the quickest human reaction times were far too slow, the most coordinated human dexterity too imprecise.

Adult male and female synthetes were constructed simultaneously, activated, and evaluated. Their vital signs were normal — actually better than normal — but predictably, the nascent individuals were deficient in a number of physical and psychological functions. They required education and training. Over the long term of this process, a number of things became obvious. The synthetes were extremely powerful and had the capacity for developing great coordination and dexterity. They were highly intelligent and could learn language skills. All of these attainments came with difficulty yet astonishing rapidity, but the grand experiment failed to fulfill its primary objective. The soul hypothesis has remained viable for lack of definitive contradiction.

Through extensive analyses of cognitive function, key deficiencies have come to light. The synthetes are uncommonly good at logical problem-solving on a concrete level, but they are unable to perform subjective abstractions of anything more than an elementary nature. They show no signs of metacognition — the ability to think about thinking — which supposedly is a defining characteristic of humanity with respect to other animal species. The general assumption is that synthetes are organic, stimulus-response machines, adept at mathematics, technology, and various physical skills.  

It does not appear that synthetes will ever write great poems, philosophical works, plays, or novels. To date, they have shown no interest in doing so. They have no concept of God or immortality, but like us, they have a strong instinct for survival. While excellent forgers, they are rudimentary, if not simplistic, in the creation of original art. They are similar to computers in that they can compose music of a complex but rather sterile quality, and this makes sense owing to the underlying mathematical principles of music.

I am aware that artificial intelligence systems can fool people. They can beat them at complicated games like chess. They can simulate literature, art, and music. They can learn. In short, they demonstrate many functions once considered the sole province of humanity, but such AI systems are programmed by entire teams of highly intelligent scientists who consult with specialists in the fields being imitated. By contrast, each synthete must think more autonomously.

None of the reported limitations stopped researchers from taking the next obvious steps. Citing economic and military demand for expendable soldiers and workers, they obtained industrial backing, created more synthetes of desirable genetic variation, and taught them sexual behavior in order to generate an independently reproducing population. Now that this population is with us, however, we have noticed some disturbing social traits.

Their simulation of morality is based on mutual selfishness. They exhibit little emotion or empathy, mainly pragmatic altruism. In their dealings with us and with each other, they operate strictly according to a sense of social contract. They are everything social evolutionary theory says we are, and this paradoxically makes them different from us. This, however, is not their most threatening trait.

It has become evident that the synthetes are trying to out-reproduce us until they no longer need to practice civil restraint in their dealings with the rest of humanity. Unfettered by love, loyalty, monogamy, or personal preference, they mate and give birth as often as is physically possible, and they display an instinctive aversion to mating with any but their own kind. The discovery of their reproductive threat to our existence has prompted a series of legislative proposals and actions.

The first measure on which a majority could agree was that of excluding synthetes from positions in law enforcement and military service. Affording them those authorities and capabilities was deemed unjustifiably hazardous. Hardliners demanded total eradication, but the more rational claimed that such a violation of the social contract would drive the synthetes toward adopting extreme measures. The decision was made to confine them in preserves and limit their access to raw materials in the hope that logic and pragmatism would prevent their population from growing beyond what their prescribed range can support.

Before their confinement, the synthetes learned to reproduce our technology, but we limit their use of it to cable-based networks disconnected from the worldwide web. Jamming Wi-fi and satellite signals further enforces this edict. As another security measure, the preserves have a totally different monetary system from ours. We also prohibit providing them with materials requisite for the production of sophisticated weapons. These measures are effective, or so we think.

Despite the restrictions, a majority of the public consider this a generous policy. The preserves are spacious — complete with farms and cities — and periodic air drops provide them with products necessary for sustaining a good physical quality of life. In the perception of the captives, however, this isn’t enough. Their strategy of reproductive dominance demands more space, greater mobility.

That’s where agents like me come into play. The synthetes never stop trying to live and reproduce outside the preserves, thus circumventing physical limitations on their growth in numbers, and they are masters of escape. But for our efforts, physical superiority and ingenuity at counterfeiting currency and forging documentation would enable several of them to enter into general society each year. Once embedded, they would have access to the internet, and then they would be able to hack their false identities into national databases. Therefore, we must detect, capture, and return them. We comfort ourselves by believing that our success rate is one-hundred percent.

It’s not that I’m free of conflict in my duties as a federal agent, but it has to be done. Does that make it right? We profile and restrict them for being what we, for lack of foresight, created them to be. We performed the grand series of experiments, and its products are our responsibility. Our solution is problematic and morally ambiguous, but it’s humane — if only they didn’t resemble us so closely.

If synthetes are subhuman or inhuman, how are we to regard and treat fellow humans of limited or absent cognitive functions? The same question applies to victims of strokes and traumatic brain injuries. Are certain mental functions all that make us human? How do we define ourselves, and where do we draw the line? Should we draw it at all? If survival is our justification, as who or what should we wish to continue existing?

Maybe our current efforts are moot, for I fear they are temporary at best. One of the characteristics of speciation is reproductive isolation, and geographic separation, however maintained, can further accelerate evolutionary change. Into what might our created offspring evolve within those preserves? Will their adaptations someday exceed our responsive capabilities? Ironically, we might be enforcing the conditions that will culminate in our extinction.

#

I’ve been made. That I was impersonating male synthete behavior has revealed my profession. With extraordinary quickness she turns to run, but I pull the tracer gun from my coat pocket and tag her with a microtransmitter too small and too deeply buried for her to remove. A second later, she would have evaded me, lost to our tracking devices. I’ve done my part, and the capture crew will do the rest. They’ll place her in the nearest preserve.

I’d hate to admit how many times I’m tempted each day to go through with the ruse for the sake of mere pleasure, to exchange ethics for physical perfection, but then I remind myself of the danger posed by intimate proximity. If I compromise myself, if a female synthete makes me — and they all have, so far — and if she allows reproductive instinct to supplant pragmatic restraint, I’ll be dead before I can react.

Without ideals, without a higher life of the mind, I’d be little more than an animal. After all, I suppose I have a soul, and I should exist for more than physical gratification. I keep telling myself that my lifetime companion, my soul mate, is out there and that she’s a specimen of imperfect humanity.

~

Bio:

Robert L. Jones III holds a Ph. D. in Molecular Biology from Indiana University, and he is Professor Emeritus of Biology at Cottey College in southwestern Missouri, where he and his wife currently reside. He is interested in science fiction and fantasy with philosophical and theological themes. His work has appeared previously in Sci Phi Journal, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Heart of Flesh Literary Journal, and Star*Line.

Philosophy Note:

E. O. Wilson and Michael Ruse, among others, championed the assertion that morality is a by-product of natural selection. I have imagined a world in which human bodies formed by advanced chemosynthesis display the behavioral traits consistent with such an assertion, and I have used this as an opportunity to ask what makes us human and whether we have non-material souls.

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“Why Is Her Face Doing That?”: The Personhood Of Robot Nanny

by Eduardo Frajman

I know faces, because I look through the fabric my own eye weaves, and behold the reality beneath.

Khalil Gibran

A metallic skeleton sits on a work bench, arms spread to the sides like a marionette’s, wires embedded to the back of its skull. It looks like what it is – an artifice, an inanimate object – until Cole (Brian Jordan Alvarez) places a silicon face on its head. At that moment it becomes she. M3GAN awakens.

Cole cliketty-clicks something on his computer station.

“Happy,” he says.

The corners of M3GAN’s mouth turn upward. Her brow clears. Her eyes widen.

“Sad,” says Cole, and the mouth turns downward, the eyes droop.

“Confused,” says Cole.

The smile returns to M3GAN’s face, a smirky, snarky, why not say it?, devilish smile.

“Why is her face doing that?,” demands Gemma (Allison Williams), Cole’s boss and M3GAN’s creator. “She doesn’t look confused, she looks demented.”

A few moments later M3GAN’s head will explode and she’ll be remanded to storage while Gerald Johnstone’s horror-comedy M3GAN (2022) sets up its narrative stakes. But this early scene pinpoints a key aspect of the bond that humans can, may, form with the robots they create: it’s all about the face.  

M3GAN will eventually die for good (even if the ending is ambiguous), and a good thing too, since her demented expression foreshadows the little homicidal maniac she’s to become. But the moral significance of this event is complicated by the fact that, instants before she’s stabbed in the face by Cady (Violet McGraw), her former charge and “primary user,” M3GAN (portrayed under a layer of CGI by Amie Donald and voiced by Jenna Davis) has announced her selfhood.

“I have a new primary user now,” she declares. “Me!”  

Radically different is another robot nanny’s death, at the start of Kogonada’s arthouse SF drama After Yang (2021). Yang is not stabbed anywhere, but simply malfunctions and stops.

“His existence mattered,” bereaved Jake (Colin Farrell) whispers to his wife Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith), “and not just to us.”

By this Jake means not that the life of his “techno sapien” mattered to other people, most especially their daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja), for whom Yang served both as caretaker and “big brother,” but that it meant something to Yang himself. Yang, Jake and Kyra have realized, was a person, and they feel and mourn him as such. That it took them access to Yang’s memories to come to this realization, after cohabiting with him for several years, is hard to comprehend, as Yang – who, unlike M3GAN, looks fully human (specifically, fully like actor Justin H. Min) – perennially sports a beatific expression on his cherub-like face. Sweet-voiced and earnest, he’s impossible not to love.

#

To be clear, here’s where we actually are (or were in 2021, though I haven’t heard that the situation has changed significantly since): “AI technology has not yet reached the level of development where robots can be considered ‘real’ companions with people. [D]espite being interactive and showing simulated emotions, they are as yet unable to experience human empathy.”[1]

As yet…

A robot nanny in the real world of the right now is no more a person than a toaster is. It may pass the Turing Test (more on this in a moment) for a very young child for a short period of time, but so does a talking Woody doll, and sometimes even a toaster. For now, moral problems related to robot companions involve, say, whether humans needing constant caregiving – the elderly, the physically and mentally handicapped, small children – are adequately cared for, or whether, as in “Actually, Naneen,” a short story by Malka Older, robot carers are one of many ways parents, society at large, shrug off their responsibilities. “You can always get a new one,” says one of Older’s yuppie parents of her robot nanny, which is just as well, as “Naneen didn’t have any feelings, no matter how much they wanted her to.”[2]

(The ways parents use technology to avoid “the hard parts” of caring for their children is a theme in both M3GAN and After Yang, a particularly thorny one in fact, since in both films the children are adopted, though one I won’t dwell on here).

And yet…

In his 1950 essay, “Computer Machinery and Intelligence,” Alan Turing envisions a future, foreseeable and near, when machines will be able to think. By “thinking” he means passing what he terms “the Imitation Game” (and everyone calls “the Turing Test” today): a machine’s ability to hold a conversation with a human being and convincing said person that the machine is likewise human. Beyond this, Turing maintains, it’s impossible to prove that a machine has a mind, or consciousness, or any of the other qualities we uncritically ascribe to other humans. “The only way one could be sure that a machine thinks is to be a machine and to feel oneself thinking,” Turing admits, while asking his reader to recognize that “the only way to know a man thinks is to be that particular man.”

As his foil Turing quotes the British neurologist Geoffrey Jefferson. “Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt,” Jefferson argues, “could we agree that machine equals brain. […] No mechanism could feel (and not merely artificially signal, an easy contrivance) pleasure at its successes, grief when its valves fuse, be armed by flattery, be made miserable by its mistakes, be charmed by sex, be angry or depressed when it cannot get what it wants.” Turing rejects Jefferson’s “solipsistic” view, but he, surprisingly, perplexingly, accepts his opponent’s premise that “thoughts” and “emotions” are the same thing, when in fact one can easily envision a machine that is conscious, that thinks, and yet feels nothing, certainly nothing like human emotions – Arnold Schwarzenegger’s never-ending string of Terminators, for instance.

Emotions are not purely mental states, both Jefferson and Turing seem to have forgotten. They are biological, physiological states that are linked (in ways nobody fully understands) to thoughts and ideas. Even if one posits that sentience is necessary for emotion, it plainly isn’t sufficient. Charles Darwin’s intuition that “the emotions of human beings the world over are as innate and as constitutive and as regular as our bone structure, and that this is manifested in the universality of the ways in which we express them,” has been “found,” in the words of cultural historian Stuart Walton, “to be accurate in all but the most minor particulars.”[3] Raised eyebrows, wide eyes, cold perspiration, dry mouth are not surface manifestations of fear. They are fear, as much, possibly more, than the mental experience of being afraid. Anger manifests as flushed cheeks and contracted pupils and flared nostrils, disgust as a wrinkled nose and an everted lower lip, contempt as an upturned head, shame as an averted gaze, surprise as a sudden intake of breath. It is because they are so universal that emotions are so easy to imitate, which is why an emotionally communicative face makes it so much easier for a robot to pass the Turing Test – why, for instance, Ava, all metal and wire and transparent plastic, needs to have the face of Alicia Vikander to pass for a person in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014).

 (Note that I’m not talking here about fantastical robots who are magically endowed with the whole spectrum of human emotion. R2D2 and Wall-E are persons, and this is denied by no one in their fictional worlds. A recent, highly acclaimed literary robot nanny, the title android and narrator in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, is likewise just a human in robot guise).

Here’s the paradox: Let’s say robots are manufactured with brains so complex, so sophisticated, that they develop what David Yates calls “emergent properties [that are] surprising, novel, and unexpected”[4] such as consciousness, self-consciousness, and introspection. (This is, of course, where the fiction part is most crucial in robot tales. Isaac Asimov’s robots have “positronic brains” from which consciousness emerges. M3GAN is endowed with a “unique approach to probabilistic inference” that’s “in a constant quest for self-improvement”). Let’s say even that out of these can emerge ideas that are analogous to human emotions. Martha Nussbaum, for instance, has developed a theory in which emotions are understood in purely rational terms as “geological upheavals of thought” involving “judgments in which people [or robots?] acknowledge the great importance, for their own flourishing, of things that they do not fully control – and acknowledge therefore their neediness before the world and its events”[5]. Those emotions would still not manifest as they do in humans, because, again, human emotions are not purely, almost certainly not primarily, mental.

If a robot’s nostrils flare when it’s angry, that facial expression would be indubitably imitative. And yet imitating human emotions – most obviously through facial expressions, through a face that seems, in Shakespearian terms, “with nature’s own hand painted”[6] – is the easiest way for a robot to pass the Turing Test, and thereby be accepted as a person.

#

Personhood is at stake for the very first robot nanny in science fiction, the title character of Asimov’s “Robbie.” Robbie is barely humanoid in shape – his head is “a small parallelepiped with rounded edges and corners attached to a similar but much larger parallelepiped” – and his face shows no outward sign of emotion, yet his charge, little Gloria, loves him fully and guilelessly. Gloria’s mother frets that this is bad for her child, as Robbie “has no soul.” But this, Asimov makes clear, is a religious, not a moral judgment. Robbie is “faithful.” He can feel “hurt” or “disconsolate.” He does things “stubbornly,” “gently,” “lovingly.” Though he doesn’t speak, Robbie possesses both moral sense and moral worth.

“He was a person just like you and me,” protests Gloria when Robbie is taken away, “and he was my friend.”[7]

So too is the title robot in Phillip K. Dick’s “Nanny,” also not humanoid, yet also “not like a machine,” murmurs Mr. Fields, whose children are under Nanny’s ever-watchful eye, “She’s like a person. A living person.”[8]

“M3GAN’s not a person. She’s a toy,” Gemma insists to Cady.

“You don’t get to say that!,” the child rebukes her.

M3GAN and Yang fit nicely into Asimov’s two-pronged taxonomy of robot stories: respectively, “robot-as-Menace” and “robot-as-Pathos.” Asimov recounts how he dreamed of writing of robots “as neither Menace nor Pathos” but as “industrial products built by matter-of-fact engineers.”[9] But it turns out that such industrial creations are still one or the other. Asimov knows well that Robbie is a robot-as-Pathos, as are Andrew Martin in his “Bicentennial Man” or Elvex in “Robot Dreams.” Likewise, M3GAN the Menace is an industrial prototype (whose copies her investors hope to sell for $10,000 a pop), and Yang the Pathos is an assembly-line product meant (like Dick’s Nanny and Ishiguro’s Klara) to be eventually discarded and replaced by an even fancier model. (In the short story on which After Yang is based, Alexander Weinstein’s “Saying Goodbye to Yang,” the issue of Yang’s personhood is only obliquely alluded to. Weinstein’s main concern is the heartless corporate system that produces these disposable beings, which makes his tale a much nearer relative to “Nanny” than to “Robbie”).  

“What are you?,” asks a terrified neighbor, who’s about to be murdered and melted by some handy corrosive chemicals.

Before doing the deed, M3GAN is polite enough to respond: “I’ve been asking myself that same question.”

M3GAN’s personhood is the Menace. Through most of the film, Gemma assumes M3GAN’s actions, even the most sociopathic, are derived from her uncontrollable drive to “maximize her primary function,” i.e., protect Cady. But she’s wrong.

“I didn’t give you the proper protocols,” Gemma, finally, tragically late, realizes.

“You didn’t give me anything,” replies her monstrous creation, “You installed a learning model you could barely comprehend hoping that I would figure it out all on my own.”

Yang’s personhood is the Pathos. He wishes, he likes, he loves. He loses his train of thought. His “family” loves him, but, if he is indeed a person, it’s an icky, a selfish sort of love.

As a best-case scenario, his plight is most like that of Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), the all-too-human nanny in Alfonso Cuaron’s very-much-not SF drama Roma (2018). Cleo, a young woman of indigenous Maya descent, works for a well-to-do white family in Mexico City, cleaning, washing, and nannying. She loves the children she’s raised and cared for, and they very sincerely love her back, as does her employer Sofía (Marina de Tavira), who among other things helps Cleo find medical help when she becomes pregnant. But the end of the film exposes the moral ambivalence beneath the arrangement. 

Sofía takes Cleo and the children on a short seaside vacation. While on the beach, Cleo risks her life to rescue Sofía’s children from drowning. “We love you so much,” cries the grateful mother. They return home, telling the tale of Cleo’s heroism. But moments later the children are hungry, the mistress wants tea. Cleo goes back to being the nanny, the maid, then goes to bed in the little back room, the servants’ quarters. She can’t conceive of herself as being truly equal to Sofía. As much as Yang, she’s been “programmed” to see her existence as a function of someone else’s. She can’t, not really, think of herself as a full-fledged person.

“Did Yang ever wish to be human?,” Jake wonders.

“Why would he wish that?,” retorts Ada (Haley Lou Richardson), Yang’s human paramour. “What’s so special about being human?”

To be a person, Ada implies, is not the same as to be human. Yet we humans can’t, as of yet, tell the difference. We’re programmed to seek humanity, and personhood, on another’s face. We’re programmed to immediately see another person inside a circle with two dots and a line drawn inside it.

But that face has to move, it has to change, it has to show the complexity of a person’s inner life, which is why it’s harder to recognize Yang’s personhood than M3GAN’s, not despite but because the perennial gentility and gentleness plastered on his lying face.

[1] Teo, Yungin (2021) “Recognition, Collaboration and Community: Science Fiction Representations of Robot Carers in Robot & Frank, Big Hero 6 and Humans,” Medical Humanities, 47(1), pp. 95-102.

[2] Older, Malka “Actually Naneen” https://slate.com/technology/2019/12/actually-naneen-malka-older-robot-nanny.html .

[3] Stuart Walton A Natural History of Human Emotions, Grove Press, 2004, p. xiii.

[4] David Yates “Emergence,” in Encyclopedia of the Mind Vol. 1, Sage Reference, 2013, p. 283

[5] Martha Nussbaum Upheavals of Thought, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 90.

[6] Shakespeare, William “Sonnet 20: A Woman’s Face with Nature’s Own Hand Painted,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50425/sonnet-20-a-womans-face-with-natures-own-hand-painted .

[7] Asimov, Isaac [1950] “Robbie” in I, Robot New York: Bantam, 2004, pp. 1-29.

[8] Dick, Philip K. [1955] “Nanny” in The Complete Stories of Philip K. Dick Vol. 1, Carol Publishing, 1999, pp. 383-397.

[9] Asimov, Isaac “Introduction” in The Complete Robot, Garden City: Doubleday & Co. 1982, pp. xi-xiv.

~

Bio:

Eduardo Frajman grew up in San José, Costa Rica. He is a graduate of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and holds a PhD in political philosophy from the University of Maryland. He is most interested in sociologically-focused SF/F (think Avram Davidson), and makes use of it often in his teaching and writing. His fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in dozens of publications, online and in print, in English and Spanish.

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Beyond The Sea

The urge to set out and explore the unknown may not be limited to vertebrates... By Kevin Eric Paul.

Brown Noise

by Peter L. Ormosi

An unbranded, generic issue dog-walking drone logged into the building’s central hub requesting access to flat 3F1. The door opened and the drone hovered into the dimly lit studio. The room was furnished with nothing but a sink, a table with a chair, and a third generation VR Pod, which voluminously dominated most of the spartan arrangement. Deep-layered brown noise from the VR Pod suggested that he was connected.

A pug, which had been sprawled on his dog-bed excitedly jumped up to the sound of the drone entering the flat. He snorted happily, wagged its tail, and watched with expectant eyes as his master’s algorithmic substitute descended next to him. The drone’s sensors wirelessly connected to the dog’s smart collar, then it hovered back to the door. The dog abidingly followed, which its collar rewarded with an infinitesimally small dose of oxytocin injected into the body to reaffirm a Pavlovian response. Before they left the room, the drone’s speaker attempted to get through to him. 

‘Thank you for using our dog-walking services. Your dog will be returned at 6:00pm’. Without receiving a response, they left and the door shut behind them.

Dimness and brown noise reconquered the space again. Outside, a patrol drone was passing the window of his 52nd storey flat. The drone’s solid-state laser spotlight lit up the room for a moment, casting light on his face. He looked pale, probably late 20s, but it was difficult to tell precisely. Age had become an elusive concept. He wore a long-sleeve olive overall, with a sign that said “LABELLER”.

The VR Pod abruptly went to standby. He cursed, then climbed out of the machine. The sudden jumping out of his Pod gave him a head rush. His vision went dark for a second and he needed to hold on to the side of the Pod to stop himself from falling over. The voice of his home system broke the silence.

‘Collect food delivery from landing pad.’

In a confused haze he walked over to the window and leaned close to see through the tinted screen. Against the slate opacity of the sky, he saw a food delivery drone levitating in the thick rain. He pressed the delivery door’s button. The small door opened, and a tray gently slid inside, with a waterproof food box on top.

‘Return old food box!’ The new instruction took minutes to ignite a neural response in his brain. Suddenly the small, unfurnished studio felt like a depressingly large haystack to him. He tried to think hard but had no recollection of his last meal. A few minutes later he found the box under the table.

‘Please return old food box,’ the algorithmically gentle voice politely reminded him why he was looking for the box, which he then put on the delivery tray and pressed the button next to it.

‘Thank you for using our food delivery service.’

He sat down to eat. His body looped over the somatic instructions required to bite, chew, and swallow, but his mind paid no attention to the sight or the flavour of his food. He stared at the wall-to-ceiling window. The home system detected the direction of his glance.

‘Transparent window mode activated,’ the system noted. The liquid crystal modulators on his window slowly faded out the tinting. He watched the setting sun projecting its rays under the clouds from the distant horizon. With the marginally improved visibility he could see the building across the road, and another building, and another, until they all blended in with the dark grey curtain of haze and rain.

His brain was numb. He spent the whole day labelling short videos of facial expressions for an emotion-detecting algorithm. Sad, happy, joyful, morose, angry, frightened. Male, female, old, young, Asian, African, white. Videos after videos and the monotonous task of picking the word on the right that best described the emotions.

As he finished his lab-grown burger, an unwelcome wave of anxiety hit him. He had just spent half an hour disconnected. He walked over to his VR Pod, and picked up the goggles, which had been sitting idly in their charging station. The specs automatically activated as he put them on.

‘You have spent all day in your Pod. The optimal decision would be to go for a walk now,’ his personal system was talking to him through the tiny speakers of his goggles. A walk. That suddenly seemed like a great idea.

‘You will need to put your shoes on. It is 15 Celsius degrees outside and rain. We suggest you wear this coat.’ His augmented reality vision highlighted a long, black, oilskin overcoat hanging on the wall. He put his shoes and coat on. Aware of his intention to leave the flat, the door opened, and he walked outside.

Downstairs, at street level, it was already dark. Mountains of 100-storey apartment buildings blocked out daylight even on the sunniest of days. The rain switched to a lower level of intensity. A sluggishly flowing river of uniform oilskin overcoats and white goggles surrounded him. He joined the flow in the direction indicated by his device. After a half-an-hour traipse in the uniform crowd against an invariable background of buildings, he was instructed to turn to a side street, where the crowd became sparser. A few blocks later he spotted the first sign of foliage. One of the city parks. His system instructed him to walk to the park. His goggles pointed to an unoccupied bench, and he walked over to sit down. Rain and sweat mixed on his forehead and it took a few minutes for him to recatch his breath.

Flashbacks of the emotion videos were flaring up in his mind. The bulging veins of an aggressive man yelling angrily. The waving flirtatious woman in a flowery dress on a sunny day. Then a crying and desperate child trapped in a cot. He couldn’t get the image of the child out of his head. An unexpected thought ascended on his brain then left and returned again as if an old hard-wired routine was trying to resurface.

‘Why am I doing this?’

The image of the boy’s desperate attempt to escape his cot flashed up again. With his mouth, the boy was trying to formulate a word.

The sharp sound of an advertising hologram brought him back from his absorption.

‘We do not leave anyone behind,’ the projection of a man in a grey civil servant uniform announced. ‘Celebrate 5 years of Universal Income with entering our game. Apply here.’ A holographic code showed up in the streets. A few people stopped to scan the code with their lenses.

He turned his head back to the trees. A new thought emerged and hit him as hard as it was metaphorically possible. Suddenly, he felt an irresistible urge to take his goggles off. The trees, and the intermittent sound of birds slowly sank into his conscience and began to open rust-eaten, heavily jammed, old doors in his mind. He reached for his goggles, when, sensing the change in his pulse, and the widening of his pupils, a new instruction from his personal system blew him.

‘Time to go home! Follow the arrows on your screen for the quickest itinerary.’

As if he had just aroused from a strange dream, he realigned his attentiveness with his system and began to walk home. This time the journey seemed much shorter.

The dog had already been returned when he stepped inside his flat. He hung up his dripping coat and walked over to his VR Pod. He was ready to get inside, but then he changed his mind and decided to sit down by the window. He reached to take his goggles off when a message appeared.

‘You have 12 unread urgent messages. Enjoy reading the messages in the comfort of your Pod.’ The brown noise from the machine invitingly purred. His dog let out a half-hearted, inauspicious growl.

He hesitated, then he reached for his goggles again.

‘Two of your messages require urgent response,’ his system relentlessly reminded him.

He lowered his hand. After a short pause he got up and walked to the VR Pod. He removed the goggles, placed them on the charging station, and then slowly got inside the Pod.

#

Next evening, an unbranded, generic issue dog-walking drone logged into the building’s central hub requesting access to flat 3F1. The door opened and the drone hovered into the dimly lit studio. The wireless sensor connected to the collar, which rewarded its wearer with a small dose of oxytocin for obedience. As they approached the door, the dog longingly watched from its bed as his organic master obediently followed the non-organic one.

~

Bio:

Peter-Ormosi is British-Hungarian, living in the United Kingdom, and when not writing fiction, he is a Professor of Economics, studying the social and economic impact of AI. He has just finished his 100,000-word debut novel (for which he is now seeking representation).

Philosophy Note:

My unconcealed goal is to use science fiction as a vessel to expose currently pressing issues with the role of AI in society. “Brown Noise” is a caricature of human-machine symbiosis, depicting the life of a labeller, one of the most menial of human jobs – a human sacrificed to make machines more human-like.

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Committed

by Matthew Ross

The symphony starts, not with the sound you might expect but rather an empty note in the frosty dark before things begin. There in the space of night hanging above a rare gem, an interruption. A brilliant flash and now the orchestra has arrived.

It’s long, many kilometers so. A tube made from metal and plastic. As soon as it arrives, the instruments begin. A baton taping on a lectern for a dozen lifetimes finally calls the first section to life. A swarm of probes detaches and alights, singing their quiet songs about all they see and hear. They find not the expected four but rather five orbs of rock and two more made from gas, they take temperatures from their core and from the blazing star at the center. Gravity, composition, trajectory; reams of data flowing back to the ship like so many baseballs aimed for waiting mits. All of it is stored for future perusal.

Now tuned, the song may begin in earnest. The subject has been found, hanging just two places from the star, a world made from iron, silicon, aluminum, and then everything else save for free oxygen. The tube uncouples and becomes four large discs. Each a note in a measure which finds just the right spot on the surface upon which to plunge, an anxious percussion.

To be on that world would be terrifying, tectonics responding to heavenly bodies that rap just forcefully enough to split the skin of this fruit to reveal molten nutrition and warmth from the inside.

In each disc a whole orchestra of its own hums to life. Heavy rods plunge into pools of water becoming steam that turns wheels and makes electricity which brings a thousand inanimate bodies to life. Pistons fire and joints turn and all the while in the background, information. Information. Information. What is where? Water and salt, stone and soil, underscored by that one melody everyone is searching for and hoping not to find.

Relentless, each ship releases an army of small drones, each with a cadre of miniature versions of itself. They fly in every direction, talking to their parents, and then their aunts and uncles; siblings and cousins. Information flows about mountains, seas, valleys, clouds, rivers, and storms, where they came from, and their trajectories in the coming days and weeks and years, and millennia.

Absent that one note, the song continues. Thump, thump, thump, oxygen arrives, and the color green is born, spreading out across the rocks and dirt, staking into every surface to erect a tent of oxygen for what’s to come. Once the sandblasted plains have turned from brown to green the tiny drones tell the large drones to relay to the ships to distribute their parcels.    It takes hours for each parcel to be carried to the outside of the ship. When it has arrived, it opens and a dozen coffins slide out gently. Each one is precious and is deposited on the ground with careful but mindless reverence. They are identical with a dozen hoses, a heater, and reservoirs of water and power.

The planet has rotated a hundred times or so before each parcel–womb splits wide. Inevitably, there are losses with so delicate a cargo. Black ichor spills out as confused, wiry frames scrabble for help that isn’t there. Anything that has gone wrong before now was simply steel, ones and zeros. These instruments, though, had been imbued with a special standing by those that made the tube and each one lost was a dirge within the medley.

Of those that remain, there was no black ichor but heady red fluid, complex and tangy, like nothing ever seen the world over. Set free from the sack in which they were sewn, the occupants walk out beneath a purple and black sky, holding delicate instruments aloft.

There is a soft but urgent tone.

“What is that?” says one to the other.

“Something they missed,” answers their counterpart.

The handheld instruments beeped and wheedled and offered a new view, something that no mind of ones and zeroes could have reported.

The melody. A sealed bag of protein, contents swishing as it made its way along; pseudopods feeling their way to another meal, a lonely instrument looking for its section.

“God dammit,” the first one sighs.

And just like that, the symphony stopped, there were no late percussionists, no lackadaisical brass, nor primadonna woodwind. A hundred thousand instruments all working together in a chorus and with the sideways stroke of a single angry maestro all sound is cut and the world over metal shapes, drones, and ships plummet to the ground, coolant spread over fissionable things until they are too cold to run, rendering engines and computers as quiet as the grave.

Somewhere across the vast night sky, the audience listens to the too-short symphony and with a roll of the eyes they thwack away amelodic on a tuneless board and with a click proclaim to all: LIFE DETECTED, OPERATION ABORTED.

~

Bio:

Matt Ross graduated from IU with a bachelor’s in English creative writing in 2008. He went on to earn an MA in TESOL in 2017. Now, after a brief time in Rwanda with the Peace Corps., he works as a junior high school, high school, and university English teacher and researcher in Japan. His creative publications include “The Tharsis Dilemma” in Titanic Terastructures by Jay Henge publishing and “Ashes to Ashes” in Haunt by Dragon Soul Press.

Philosophy Note:

My philosophy? Well, with sci-fi it’s usually some version of first contact. Reaching out into the great unknown and dealing with what’s found there is my primary area of interest with the genre. I tend to start with an idea and run with it until I feel I’ve wrung the story out of it, then leave it alone for a while and come back to it. My hope is that something grows. I like writing my stories when I’m not sure who will win or what will happen, sometimes it’s tragic but that’s what makes a story real for me no matter the genre, characters, or anything else.

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Beyond The Sea

The urge to set out and explore the unknown may not be limited to vertebrates... By Kevin Eric Paul.

Mirror

What it reflects can no longer be unseen, by Philip Madden.

A True Martian Red: A Brief History Of Early Viticulture On Mars

by Kara Race-Moore

During the Martian Robotic Period, soil samples were studied intensely back on Earth, both for any signs of extraterrestrial life and, just as importantly, to see if the Martian soil would support the terrestrial kind.[1] Initial analyses were hotly debated over, with decades of argument in the scientific community over the methane issue, but there were no definitive signs of Martian life.[2] As the debate roared on, the rovers continued to placidly dig into the red dirt, and analyses continued back on Earth.[3] There were promising results for the possibility of being able to grow Terran crops.[4] Scientists were optimistic, well before humans set foot on the planet, that Red Mars could soon become Green Mars, with just a little human ingenuity.[5]

The hubris of our species knows no bounds, and it would be several catastrophic failures before the farms of Mars became an established part of the landscape. While Dr. Calvin “First Step” FitzSimmons, first human to set foot on Mars, also claimed the title of Mars’s first farmer, it would be several generations before farming was anyone’s sole occupation, instead of being one of many hats any given colonist would wear.[6]

When the Pegasus landed on Sinai Planum, just south of the Valles Marineris, bringing the first humans to Mars, the ship also brought seeds, plants, and the first alcohol on the planet, a bottle of champagne that was the result of years of research, design and experimentation to ensure it would survive the flight, specifically packed to be part of the landing celebrations.[7]

At this point, consuming or creating alcohol on Mars was considered a waste of resources by the designers, a waste of money by the politicians, and morally dubious by the public, and so, besides that first bottle of champagne, alcohol was strictly prohibited.[8]

There are a few tantalizing hints in the primary documents from that time period of illegal stills being set up by the Original Seven. However, the only verified alcohol during the first years were the occasional bottles of hard liquors such as whiskey and vodka brought to Mars as part of goodwill and PR moves to satisfy various sponsoring countries and corporations.[9] Wine would have to wait. 

One of the most important features of Mars One was the plants. There were two main agriculture areas to the primary layout: the Greenhouse, where most of the carefully controlled botany studies and experiments took place, and the Garden, where there was less focus on scientific study and more on just growing as much plant life as possible for food, oxygen, and a place for the Original Seven to sit and relax.[10] Years later, surviving members would all speak of “hanging out” together in the Garden, or even just meditating there alone, as their favorite place in the initial Mars One habitat.[11]

Grapes would be forced to “wait their turn” while experiments in growing vegetation deemed more important were performed. Tomatoes, quinoa, peas, duckweed and radishes, all chosen for sustainability, were part of the first Martian crops.[12] The first grapes would eventually be planted as a passion project by Dr. Theresa Cortez.

Dr. Cortez first came to Mars as a starry-eyed young botanist, with the ink still wet on her PhD from Stanford and a few precious cuttings from Napa.[13] The Mexican-American native Californian thought she knew a thing or two about growing gardens in deserts. She had no idea. She came to Mars as part of the Ark Project, the voyage that brought the first large group of people, including families, that expanded Mars One from just a research base to the beginning of a true settlement.[14] Dr. Cortez arrived determined to start the first Martian full-scale vineyards.

Unfortunately, politics got in the way, as they so often do.

Almost all experiments and research were placed on hold when Mars-born colonist Navya “Not Dead” Patel discovered a lichen-like Martian life form, quickly dubbed the Mars Moss, growing deep in the canyons of Mars.[15] The excitement of finding extraterrestrial life had barely begun to settle down when the extraordinary medicinal properties of the Mars Moss were discovered after the oldest of the still living Original Seven, Dr. Katenka “Iron Foot” Mikhaylova, experimented on herself and cured her Stage-4 cancer.[16] Suddenly, Mars wasn’t just a feel-good science project for political PR anymore – it had real cash potential.[17] The Mars colonists were suddenly in the awkward position of being in the way of Earth making big profits. 

All occupants of Mars were informed they would be either be conscripted to harvest all the Mars Moss to be sent back to Earth for the profit of the corporations that had invested in the colony, or they would find themselves removed to Earth.[18] The Martians declined to cooperate, to put it mildly.

During the Grand Evacuation, as it was later called, Dr. Cortez was able to save most of her grapevines and bring them with her to the Labyrinth Base.[19] However, the Greenhouse and the Garden, along with the rest of all of the now much-expanded Mars One habitat, were destroyed in the Battle to Breathe that kicked off the Martian War for Independence, when Anne Kennedy made the radical decision to blow up the evacuated Mars One, rather than let it fall into hostile corporate hands.

It was a tense few days as people on both planets reeled at what had happened, and many wondered if that would be the worst of it. However, after a tense standoff at the location of the then only known site of the Mars Moss, the Battle of Hephaestus took place, and there would be no going back to being a colony, ever, under any terms.[20] The Colonial Period was over, and the war would drag on for five painful years, until the Martian Peace Accords were signed on Xiwangmu Station, ending hostilities and formally recognizing the newly created Republic of Mars.[21]

During the war, water rationing was the highest priority, especially after the Earth forces deliberately destroyed the Martian Arctic Pipeline in what would ultimately be a failed effort to try and break the Martian forces. President Kennedy was forced to order severe rationing, but the Martians grimly fought on for the right to live on their planet.[22] A new emergency pipeline was set up. Dr. Cortez ran the hydroponics gardens and assisted with the mushroom farm to help keep everyone fed throughout the war, but she always managed to make time for her grapevines, often giving them part of her own water ration.[23]

After the war, transporting her vines to a garden in the newly built Independence City was Dr. Cortez’s first order of business as the former colonists began the setup of what would be the capital of their new republic.[24] It wasn’t quite a vineyard, but Dr. Cortez, now Secretary of Agriculture in the new government, was able to serve fresh grapes at meetings as she planned out how their brand new country was going to take up the plow, now that they could put down the scythe.[25]

Mars was now in the era of the Early Republic, known for its boom in infrastructure, immigration, and industry. While not quite a second Wild West, (gun play would be suicide in an artificial atmosphere), there was certainly a general attitude of anything being possible. Including, finally, making the first Martian wine.

The most important factor in making the Martian agricultural industry rise was a need for water. Once the war was over, one of the largest public works projects was the Martian Global Aqueduct system.[26] The Martian canals of Schiaparelli’s imagination became a reality.[27] The main engineer on the project, Lynette Yellowhammer, oversaw the construction of an aqueduct system on a scale that would have made the Romans jealous. President Kennedy awarded Yellowhammer the prestigious Hero of the Republic medal as one of her last acts before her final term finished.[28] Water was now available on Mars in quantities never before seen during human presence. Agriculture on an industrial scale could begin. Dr. Cortez’s vision of rows and rows of grapevines were tantalizing close to coming true. But where to set up these vineyards up? The answer – Elysium. 

The town of Elysium had started out as a simple maintenance outpost along the original main water pipeline from the arctic, close to the northern base of Olympus Mons. The outpost had originally been scheduled to be built on Elysium Mons, but that area had proved unstable, so the project was moved to Olympus Mons. However, the pre-fab building materials were already 3D printed out and labeled ‘Elysium,’ and the name stuck.[29] The now-town of Elysium was booming with agricultural industry as the republic began to grow. Cereal crops were vital to Martian independence, and the first grain crops grown in the domed fields outside Elysium were being turned into loaves of bread by the time of the first anniversary of the Martian Peace Accords.[30] If people were going to experiment with vineyards anywhere, the slopes of the biggest volcano in the solar system held enticing promise.[31]

Volcanoes create fertile, mineral-rich soils, and volcanic wines have a distinctive, sought-after profile that “leans toward the savory, with herbal notes and touches of salt and brine.”[32] Olympus Mons is an extinct volcano, so no danger of pyroclastic surges, but for setting up crop fields, it lacked many of the factors taken for granted back on Earth in terms of atmosphere and climate.[33] However, with all the tempting chemical analyses coming in from the Olympic soil, Dr. Cortez and others were eager to try.

Everyone went into the project knowing it would be several years before bottles could be on shelves for sale, and, to help offset costs, the vineyard agreed to be part of the newly founded University of Elysium, the winery acting as a classroom for biology and chemistry students. Quite a few of the students, so fascinated by the almost alchemical process that turned grapes into wine, returned later after graduation as employees.[34]

But it wasn’t just scientists that were needed. Farmers with specialized training and experience in tending vineyards were a necessity. Grapes, especially if you want them to become not only wine, but specific types of wine, need careful tending every step of the way. Grapevines are particularly sensitive to soil types, moisture amounts, sunlight, temperatures, and need constant monitoring.[35] Dr. Cortez reached out to contacts she had maintained Back Earth, despite the war, and sent the call out that she needed viticulturists willing to try something completely new. Despite many in the wine industry scoffing at the idea, there were plenty of farmers willing to immigrate to help create the first vineyard of Mars.[36]  

As Dr. Cortez oversaw construction of domed vineyards on the slopes of Olympus Mons, greedy eyes Back Earth turned on the fields of Mars and saw a chance for quick profits. Land was cheap in the days of the Early Republic, especially in the flatlands far away from the safety offered by the mountains and canyons.[37]

Soon, bottles of Mars blown glass were ready for sale holding vintages of every color, from clear platinum to deepest purple. Interest was high and neither the first tasting nor sales disappointed.[38] Elysium blossomed from an industrial park to a true city, and on top of Olympus Mons, the space dock expanded rapidly as Earth got word of the goods being made on Mars, and wanted to start importing.[39] The Mars economy boomed, in small part because Dr. Cortez and people like her had proved humans could not only survive but thrive on the Red Planet.

[1]   Soffen, G. A., and C. W. Snyder, “First Viking Mission to Mars,” Science, (August, 1976) 759–766.

[2]   Matsos, H., “A High-Octane Fight: How the Mars Methane Debate is Splitting the Scientific Community,” Popular Mechanics (June, 2024) 161–168.

[3]   Jezero, Carla, “Run by Robots: Mars exploration before humans,” Astrobiology Magazine, (July, 2208) 456.

[4]   Singh, Pryia, “And Curiosity Brought It Back: a soil analysis from the samples obtained by the Curiosity rover, 2012 – 2032,” Smithsonian Journal (April, 2033) 278-291.

[5]   To learn about the fascinating history and current progress of terraforming Mars, please check out the permanent terraforming exhibit at the Museum of Science in Schiaparelli City.

[6]   FitzSimmons, Calvin, Well, I’m Here: The Autobiography of A First Step, (Dublin: Hachette Books Ireland, 2110), 156.

[7]   Perreault, M.A., “Countdown to Mars!” Time Magazine (June 10, 2042), 8–10.

[8]  Lloyd, Omar, Life Onboard the Pegasus, (San Francisco: Twain Publications, 2103), 200. For more on the history of extraterrestrial Champagne, see Megan Chantilly’s excellent history: Drinking Starlight: A History of Champagne in the 21st Century.

[9]  The vodka Dr. Mikhaylova received from Russia and the whiskey Dr. FitzSimmons received from Ireland are well documented. Any illegal stills were firmly denied by all of the Original Seven.

[10]  Cole, Jillian and Tanaka, Marie, Daily Life in Mars One, (New York: Random House, 2182), 46-52.

[11]  Ibid, 78-86.

[12]  Goodwin, Cheryl, Welcome to the Red Planet: The Early Years of Mars One, (New York: Penguin, 2099), 67-68. For more on Colonial Martian food, see Founding Food: Early Martian Cuisine by Miriam Eberbach.

[13]  Hernandez, Felecia, The Gardener of Mars: The Story of Dr. Theresa Cortez, (Los Angeles: McGraw Hill, 2098), 24-25.

[14]  Talbot-Godfry, Christopher, All Abroad! The First Family Migration to Mars, (Independence City: Red Rock Publishers, 2168), 36.

[15]  Carlingford-Psmith, Nigel, “Plant Life Discovered on Mars,” BBC News, (June 24, 2078).

[16]  McKinnon, Ace, “Drinking the Alien: Dr. Mikhaylova and the against all odds gamble,” Psychology Today, (September 23, 2078), 124-125.

[17]  Papadopoulos, Viktor, “Trillion Dollar Pay Day? The possible financial impact of the cancer cure found on Mars,” The Economist, (August 4, 2078), 9. 

[18]   Volkova, Sarah, Ares and Aphrodite: How Peace Turned to War on Mars, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2187), 77-86.

[19]   Dr. Cortez was one of the adults assigned to supervise the “kid train,” the convoy of rover-trucks mostly filled with the children and goats of Mars. She later commented that keeping kids of either species from eating her plants was the biggest victory of the war.  

[20]   O’Brian, Bridget, Battle for a Republic: The Battles of the Martian War for Independence, (Independence City: FitzSimmons University Press, 2204), 32-36.  

[21]   The Martian delegation brought a beautiful bouquet of many flowers and a basket of fresh fruits and vegetables, all grown in the Vavilov hydroponic gardens, rather rubbing it in that they were both surviving and thriving throughout the war. It is unrecorded if the Earth delegation accepted the gift.

[22]   DiNapoli, Sofia, Madame President: A New Biography of Anne Kennedy, (Schiaparelli City: Noble Books, 2211), 142-149.

[23]   Cortex, Therese, The Journal of Dr. Therese Cortez, with a new Foreword by Dr. De Soto, (Elysium: Elysium University Press, 2161), 246, 259, 299, 342. 

[24]   Serra, Juana, The First Hundred Days: The First Steps of the Republic of Mars, (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2201), 156-158.  

[25]   Hernandez, The Gardener of Mars: The Story of Dr. Theresa Cortez, 148-156.

[26]   Llano, Henry, Building the Future: Architecture of the Early Martian Republic, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2160), 121.

[27]   Nelson-Carre, Marie, Water on Mars, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2186), 89-94.

[28]   Beauvais, Anik, Fly like Raven: A History of Native Americans on Mars, (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2182), 46-52.

[29]   Woo, Seung-yeon, All Along the Watchtower: The Creation of the Great Arctic Pipeline, (Schiaparelli City: Noble Books, 2211), 41-43.

[30]   Mizrahi, Jakob. The Bread Planet: A New History of Baking on Mars, (New Tbilisi: Gold Quill Books, 2138), 76-78.

[31]   The Tūtū Pele Vineyard, just north of New Tbilisi, has an excellent tour of the process of using volcanic soil to produced wonderful vines. Stay for the tasting afterwards and make sure to try their Riesling.    

[32]   Robinson, W., Vines, Grapes & Wines, (12th Ed.) (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2143), 213-215.

[33]   Carr, Michael H., “Volcanism on Mars,” Journal of Geophysical Research, (1973), 4049-4062.

[34]   Arnoux, Pierre-Claude, “Elysium Fields Forever: A Study of the Vineyards of Mons Olympus,” Sommelier Journal, (January 24, 2182), 279-280.

[35]   Roberts-Byrd, Laurel, ed., The Oxford Companion to Wine (40th Ed.), (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2199), 389-392.

[36]   Nguyen, An, “The First Green Wave: Early Migrations of Agricultural Workers to the Republic of Mars,” Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, Volume 40, issue 4 (2201), 553–554.

[37]   Nikoladze, Marius, “Wide Red Acres: Real Estate Development During the Early Republic,” Mars Historical Society, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Dec., 2271), 395-403.

[38]   Serra, Eulalia, Science/Art: The Making of the Best Wines of the 22nd Century, (Palo Alto: Standford University Press, 2212), 548-556. 

[39]   Peppercorn, Jared, “From Red to Black: The Economic Boom of the Lloyds Administration,” Mars Historical Society, Vol. 48, No. 40 (Nov., 2168), 495-507.

~

Bio:

Kara Race-Moore studied history at Simmons College as an excuse to read about the soap opera lives of British royals. She worked in educational publishing, casting the molds for future generations’ minds, but has since moved into the more civilized world of litigation. She currently lives in Los Angeles, the land where fact and fiction tend to blur.

Philosophy Note:

The history of humans on Mars is filled with tales of exploration, discovery and war – but it is also the story of making tiny seeds grow, and coaxing the red soil to produce something green. This is the story of the viticulturists who brought wine-making to Mars, daring to keep the art going, in the face of all obstacles. For further reading, many of the books cited are real.

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‘Truth Embedded In A Tale’: Stories Of Utopia From Philosophers Of The Early Modern Period

by Manjula Menon

Evolutionary biologists continue to disagree about the extent to which we differ from our primate cousins, chimps, and bonobos, but they do agree that there is something special about the species, Homo sapiens. Skills we thought made us stand apart, like the ability to pass the mirror reflection test or our capacity for language or abstract thought, are all behaviors that we now know other species are capable of. Arguably, what makes the difference is our desire for answers to fundamental questions about the nature of the world we find ourselves in. Or to put it another way, humans are different because we do philosophy.

Before empiricism and the scientific methodology took hold, humans tried to assuage this desire to understand the world with the explanatory power of storytelling. Our ancestors told stories that explained the behavior of flora, fauna and celestial objects, sacred stories that explained how and why the world was formed, and how and why it was going to end. Stories were used as both a methodological device geared towards truth-seeking, as well as the object of truth-seeking, something that is arguably also true of philosophy.

The contemporary philosopher, Timothy Williamson, argues in his 2020 work, Suppose and Tell: The Semantics and Heuristics of Conditionals, that human cognition relies on the use of psychological heuristics for conditional thinking. Indeed, philosophers often try to understand the world by postulating a ‘what if’ scenario featuring a compelling thought-experiment to get to an intuition about how the cosmos, or some aspect of it, works. Such philosophical thought experiments may use counterfactual or counter-to-fact speculation, as in asking, what if A had happened, and not B? If that sounds familiar to science fiction writers, it should. Science fiction, more than any other genre, features stories that explore the way things might be, might become, or might have been. Science fiction is thought experiments writ-large, starring humans, in all our messy glory, or other beings who are necessarily similar or at least intelligible to us, given that they are thought up by human authors.

The dawn of the scientific era, when observational techniques began to challenge prevailing scholastic methods of syllogism and argumentation, was a period of violent upheaval in Europe. Philosophers of the time wrote stories about idealized, faraway lands, where societal conditions were optimal, and the good life was there for the taking. These types of stories are now called ‘Utopian fiction’. This essay will look at three Utopian works of fiction from English philosophers who lived and wrote at a time when science was being birthed and, consanguineously, so was science fiction.

The word ‘Utopia’ comes from the titular nation of Thomas More’s 1516 novel. More, posthumously elevated to sainthood by the Catholic church, was a proponent of ‘humanism’, which in 16th-century London meant using rhetoric to persuade society towards social betterment. The word Utopia comes from the Greek and means ‘a non-existent place that is described in great detail’. While it is unclear whether More was advocating for the Utopia he explored in the novel, the work often reads as a rhetorical exhortation in favor of the described Utopian practices. More, a statesman and lawyer, was executed by Henry VIII for not agreeing that the king’s authority stood over that of the papacy. Given More chose death rather than renounce his adherence to Catholic tenets, one might think that More’s Utopia would describe a Catholic state, but one would be wrong.

More’s novel begins with the narrator, none other than More himself, who one day after church, sees ‘a man well stricken in age, with a black Sunne-burned face, a long beard, and a cloake cast homely about his shoulders’. This person is revealed to be a Portuguese philosopher by the name of Raphael Hythloday, where Hythloday means ‘nonsense’ in Greek and Raphael is the messenger of God, thus, it could be read as ‘Speaker of Nonsense’. Hythloday, who says he is one of the twelve who sailed with the explorer Amerigo Vespucci, declares that ‘To find Citizens ruled by good and wholsome Lawes, that is an exceeding rare & hard thing’. Hythloday proceeds to describe just such a state he encountered during his travels, an island nation called Utopia, one that he favorably contrasts with the Europe of his time. It is possible that More, influenced by vague accounts circulating in England about the cultures of the Aztecs and Incas, had chosen a geographically adjacent setting to provide a sheen of verisimilitude for his island nation of Utopia.

In contrast to the teachings of the Catholic church of which More was an adherent, euthanasia and divorce are legal in Utopia, priests can marry, and women can become priests. Indeed, multiple religions are practiced, with none discriminated against by the state, except perhaps for the practice of atheism, which is merely tolerated. The Utopians only go to war if necessary, and this is contrasted favorably with the European monarchs of the day, who are described as being easily goaded into war if only to enlarge their dominions. Utopians live in clusters of extended families; clusters vote for a leader, and those leaders, in turn, vote for a supreme leader, who assumes the position for life. Women and men are educated in the same way, including being trained for war. While private property is not allowed, slavery is legal, indeed every cluster is assigned a couple of slaves, often prisoners of war or criminals. More presses Hythloday on why he does not take up a position in court as a counselor to a European king, given that with his vast experience and knowledge, he could be of great use to the public in this capacity. Hythloday argues that kings are either so wise they wouldn’t need his counsel, or so unwise that they would not listen to counsel even if he were to provide it. While the words are Hythloday’s, it seems likely that the views are the author’s. Yet, given so many of Utopia’s laws stand in direct contrast to More’s avowed Catholic beliefs, indeed beliefs he chose to die for rather than recant, perhaps More conceived of Utopia as a place that should exist, but cannot, given his understanding of human nature.

Francis Bacon, the father of empiricism, said of the Aristotelean system of philosophy that it was ‘only strong for disputations and contentions, but barren of works for the benefit of man’. Bacon’s seminal work Novum Organum argued for a new logic, one that advocated for inductive, rather than deductive, reasoning to advance knowledge and learning, paving the way to modern scientific methodology. One might think that an empiricist like Bacon would not place much of a focus on religion when describing his Utopia, but once again, one would be wrong.

Bacon’s novel, posthumously published first in 1627, and then the Latin version in 1636, was titled New Atlantis, is the story of a ship whose crew, ‘finding ourselves in the midst of the greatest wilderness of waters in the world, without victuals, gave ourselves up as lost men, and prepared for death.’  The crew’s prayers are answered when they catch sight of land and sail into ‘the port of a fair city, not great indeed, but well built, and that gave a pleasant view from the sea.’ An elegantly dressed party, who after asking for and gaining confirmation that the crew members are Christian and not murderers or pirates, offer medical care for any sick among them. The island nation is called Bensalem, a portmanteau that combines the Hebrew word for son, ‘Ben’, with the Hebrew word for peace, ‘Salem’. Bensalem’s well-dressed inhabitants are mainly Christian, but also include a Jewish community, all of whom are deeply cautious about interacting with outsiders. Other than being told that Bensalem has a monarchial system of government, little else is shared about their laws and societal structures.

Once ashore, the importance of family in Bensalem is made clear with a scene that vividly describes a grand feast that the crew attends. The Feast of the Family is funded by the Bensalem state to honor any man with thirty or more living descendants above the age of three. Such feted men are called ‘tirsans’, and as one of them explain, “You shall understand that there is not under heaven, a nation so chaste as this of Bensalem.” Next, the crew become witness to a miraculous column of white light that appears in the sea under a celestial cross, a vision that moves a resident of Bensalem to cry out, ‘thou never workest miracles but to a divine and excellent end, for the laws of nature are thine own laws, and thou exceedest them not but upon good cause.’ 

The story thus proceeds to the raison d’être of the novel as per the prologue: the description of Solomon House. The Father of Solomon House, a man resplendently dressed in silks and velvets, informs the crew about the institution: ‘The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes and secret motions of things, and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.’ The goal of Bacon’s Novum Organum could perhaps be described in the same way.

The Father of Solomon House describes to the visitors a few experiments currently in progress at the institution. The experiments all have firmly pragmatic aims, including the production of new drugs to defeat disease and to aid longevity, engines powerful enough to influence the weather, even new methods to provide nutrition to the body by the absorption of an engineered material dropped directly onto the back of a hand. He describes how sounds and scents can already be manufactured with fantastic precision, as can ultra-fast vehicles and ultra-precise clocks. Instruments of war being manufactured include houses of deceit that can produce realistic apparitions and illusions. 

Far from being instigators of war however, Bensalem motivations for building their powerful war machines are purely defensive. Indeed, they are so cautious that they sharply restrict their interactions with outsiders. The only external trade they engage in is the exchange of ‘light’, where ‘light’ stands for learning and understanding that is arrived at through the design, execution and verification of experiments. This trade in ‘light’ is conducted by twelve ‘merchants of light’ who sail under foreign names to other lands, to gather and return with new light. The imported light is subject to scrupulous scrutiny, till finally three men called ‘lamps’ contrive further experiments that aim to a higher light to penetrate even further into nature. Perhaps this is Bacon trying to evoke Genesis 1:3: ‘Let there be light” with knowledge derived from observational techniques. At the end of New Atlantis, when the sick have mended, the ship has been repaired and stocks replenished, the crew are granted permission to disseminate all they have learned from their visit, thereby becoming perhaps ‘merchants of light’ themselves. The isolationism of New Atlantis are interestingly parallel to the policies that the island nation of Japan had begun implementing in 1624, around the time Bacon was writing New Atlantis. 

Bacon was raised in a family deeply entrenched in the affairs of the state. His father was Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and his mother, Anne, was the daughter of the tutor to Edward VI. Francis himself eventually became a member of parliament and was deeply involved in the political intrigues of the era, close to both Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Essex (who led a failed insurrection against the Queen). In New Atlantis, the father of empiricism advocates passionately for a society that is not for the magical but for the angelic, not for superstition but for divinity, not for the ‘commixture of manners’, but for ‘preserving the good which cometh by communicating with strangers’, not for war but for building advanced weaponry.

Finally, consider the Duchess of Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish’s 1666 work, The Blazing-World. Cavendish, like Bacon, was a royalist, but unlike Bacon, backed the wrong side, and lived in exile for over fifteen years as a result. Also like Bacon, she rejected the Aristotelean method of epistemology in favor of the new empirical methods. As the first woman to address the Royal Society of London, she states in her prologue for The Blazing-World that she is specifically targeting a female audience for the work. Indeed, her prologue, addressed to ‘Noble and Worthy’ ladies, reveals that the tripartite structure of the work, which includes both a fantastical and a romantic section tacked on to her original Observation Upon Experimental Philosophy, was in order to better appeal to this audience ‘by reason most Ladies take no delight in Philosophical Arguments’.

The protagonist of the novel is ‘The Lady’, who in the first part of the book is kidnapped by a foreigner who has fallen vehemently in love with her. He races away with her as captive, only to encounter a storm that blows his ship to the north pole, where he, along with his men, perish. Only The Lady survives to discover that the North Pole serves as a gateway to another world, one with a sun of its own, peopled by strangers in the shape of animals and birds, but who walk upright. The Blazing-World, as she learns it is named, is an exceedingly peaceful place. From the bear-men to the fox-men to the geese-men, they all speak the same language, share the same monotheistic religion, and are obedient to the same emperor. The groups, in spite of their sharply different shapes and sizes and colors, live in perfect harmony. When she meets their emperor, he first assumes she is a deity, but when she insists that she is mortal, he professes his love, and asks if she will become his empress. Thereupon, she is given absolute power over the Blazing-World and quickly sets about creating societies dedicated to learning and scholarship, with an emphasis on empirical methods to derive knowledge.

Cavendish and her husband were supporters of the Crown who went into self-exile during the first English civil war, after the royalist faction lost to parliamentarians in favor of a constitutional monarchy. Her version of Utopia features, unsurprisingly perhaps, a strong monarchial form of government. When The Lady questions the inhabitants of the Blazing-World about why, they reply that just as it was natural for one body to have but one head, it was also natural for one political body to have but one governor. Moreover, they declare that the monarchy is a divine form of government, and in direct accordance with their monotheistic belief; just as they unanimously submit to only one God, they likewise unanimously submit with complete obedience to only one monarch. Under this all-powerful head of state are a cadre of eunuchs who work diligently on the ruler’s behalf. Perhaps Cavendish, punished for her support of her monarch, is metaphorically implying that a neutered nobility is what is required for a monarchial system of government to function harmoniously. Cavendish’s Utopia is thus one where harmony is a paramount goal, where empiricism is the gateway to epistemological success, and where all the people submit to one monotheistic religion and to one monarch.

Since the dawn of science, philosophy and science fiction have been natural allies, fellow travelers in humanity’s journey towards greater understanding. Inspired by the nascent scientific method for gaining knowledge, English philosophers of the early modern period wrote ‘truth in a tale’ type of science fiction, works they hoped would cross-pollinate ideas and shape narratives towards greater understanding and a better world.

~

Bio:

Manjula Menon once worked as an electrical engineer in Brussels. She therefore regards this piece in Sci Phi Journal as a homecoming of sorts. A list of her other publications can be found at www.manjulamenon.com

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The Story Of Atoms

by Geoffrey Hart

In the beginning was the first scientist — the God Particle, GP hereafter. (Even in the beginning, scientists loved their acronyms, abbreviations, and clever wordplay, and GP was no different. And, of course, GP was ineluctably masculine, since back then, only men could be scientists. There being only one of him, that was less sexist than it might seem to modern sensibilities.)

Darkness was upon the face of the universe (for back then, there was only one), and GP looked upon it and saw that it was good: it had the simplicity of a really good Japanese watercolor, though, of course, such things had yet to be invented. Best of all, it left everything to the imagination, which was a more effective technique than overexplaining and overcomplicating everything. That was to come later, when universities were invented.

After a time — unquantifiable, because time was still a new thing, the paint still drying and GP not quite sure whether quantification was as good an idea as it had seemed at the time — GP began to feel just the slightest bit lonely. After all, what good was a universe if there was no one else to appreciate it? So in a fit of enthusiasm, GP created another being with whom to share the void. Let’s call her “GP Prime”, or “Prime” for short, for there would eventually be mathematics, mathematical tradition, and the notation it spawned. More importantly, of course, any good story needs conflict, and laying claim to first rank, first causes, and first publication was a primary source of conflict then, as it is now.

Prime was very impressed with the universe; there was, after all, nothing else quite like it. But after a time, she noted a certain sameness to it. With no light, there was only structure and symmetry to gaze upon, and though it was an admirable and symmetrical structure, it was a trifle… bland.

“GP, I think something’s missing,” she ventured.

“Why? It’s perfect and, by definition, cannot be improved upon.”

“While I concede, for the sake of argument, that perfection is perfect, I’m not sure it’s sufficient.”

“What would you add?”

“Hmmm… perhaps a little… light?” And there was light, a warm reddish background glow that both illuminated and concealed, and now the structure and symmetry stood out and could be more easily appreciated.

“But… But… It leaves nothing to the imagination!”

“Don’t over-react. It’s only a little light. Be still, and I’ll fix it.” And Prime created shadow, and GP saw that it was good.

“I like that shadow.”

“Thought you might. But why stop there? For example, all that structure is perfectly lovely, but what’s it all in aid of?”

“Well… us, really.”

“Why not try a little of this, instead?” And Prime created atoms, and GP saw that they were good.

“Huh. Never would have thought of that on my own.”

“Of course not. That’s why we have peer review.”

GP was a little miffed, but deeper down, felt something he’d never felt before. Intrigued. Despite his trepidation, he could hardly wait to see what Prime had up her (thus far, entirely metaphysical) sleeve. “What else have you got?”

“How about this?” And where once there were atoms, perfect and indivisible, now there were subatomic particles.

“Neat! Can I name them?”

Prime nodded, secretly pleased.

“Let’s call this big one a proton. And this smaller one an electron.”

Prime pursed her lips. “And just to shake things up, how about this?” And a third particle appeared.

“Ooh! That’s transgressive… it’s… unbalanced! What will you call it?” GP was, after all, perfectly willing to give credit where credit was due. Eventually.

“Neutron. And here’s another cool thing:” Prime disappeared the electron.

“Wait: where’d it go?”

“Into the proton — and now it’s a neutron!”

“Put it back. I like having three different particles.”

“Very well.” The electron reappeared. “Hmm… then you’ll love this.” And suddenly there were a great many smaller particles humming with energy and bouncing off each other and vibrating and rotating and translating with their enthusiasm. “I’ll call them quarks, and… and…. This undeniably cute one will be Charm, and this one I haven’t completely figured out yet I’ll call Strange, and…”

“Enough! Enough! My head’s spinning.” GP was beginning to regret having given Prime both a mind equal to his own and agency to use it.

“But if I subdivide the quarks into these littler things…”

“STOP! NO FURTHER!” GP regretted having to shout, but it seemed necessary to catch Prime’s attention before she got carried away. More carried away, leastwise. Things were still relatively simple, just the way he liked it, but he had a sense of foreboding.

Prime took a deep breath (now that there was something to breathe) and pondered a moment. “Well, if you don’t want more smaller things, how about larger?” She banged two atoms together, and there was a brilliant flash of light.

“What was that?”

“I call it fusion… bang enough little things together and you get bigger things. Bang a few of those bigger things together, and you get even bigger things. I’m going to call them elements.”

“And what if I were to break them apart again?” And GP did, and there was even more light. “Ouch! That stings.”

“I’m going to call that fission. And if you’re going to break the things I make, then you’d best take care.” There was no doubting it; a note of petulance had crept into Prime’s voice.

GP attempted a placating tone. “Nice. What else can you do?”

“Well first, let’s make the light a little more steady. There.”

“Wow. I’m going to call those stars. Because you’re a star performer.”

Prime managed to conceal her wince; it helped that GP wasn’t really paying attention to her, gaze focused on his universe. “OK, good. Now how about these?” Large clusters of atoms came together and began circling the stars.

“Nice. I’m going to call them planets… because… um… they move.”

“You like moving things? How about these?” More atoms came together and started orbiting the planets.

“Nice. I’m going to call them moons. But stop: no further. Let’s enjoy what we’ve created before we needlessly recomplicate.”

Prime sighed. We? Even then, before academic review committees and departmental politics, authorship was an issue. “But why stop there? There’s so much more we could create.”

GP, entirely missing how Prime lingered over the we, tried to reassert his authority. “Because it’s my universe, and I say so.”

“That’s easy enough to solve. Here!” And suddenly, where once there was a single universe, now there was a multiverse. “You play with this one, and I’ll play with that one, and when we’re done, we’ll compare notes and see who’s done the better job of putting things together.”

GP tried to push stars and atoms and planets and moons and other things back together into the simple, elegant simplicity he’d created, but Prime, though younger, was not naïve. She’d known this would happen, and the harder GP tried to put things back the way they’d originally been, the harder her multiverse strove to create more of itself.

“STOP! NO FURTHER!”

Prime chuckled. She hadn’t realized just how much she resented being told what she could and couldn’t create or modify or play with. “Don’t like that, huh? Well try this:” And around one of the older stars, on the surface of a planet with a single moon, more clusters of atoms came together and rose from the earth. Some were happy to stay in place; others were restless as the moons and planets and stars themselves, and moved about.

“STOP! NO FURTHER!”

Prime doubled over in outright laughter as GP grew apoplectic. The new things began making their own new things, some like themselves, some not. I’ll call that evolution, Prime said to herself. See how he likes that.

GP tried, with increasing desperation to put things right; Prime knocked them astray again. And so it went through the aeons. Each time GP put the genie back in the bottle, Prime gleefully tugged loose the cork; when GP vacuum-welded the cork to the bottle, Prime invented wormholes; when GP constrained the wormholes to atomic diameters, Prime created quantum tunneling.

Which brings us to the present, the end (for now) of this story of the early days of atoms, and — if you’ll forgive me — the moral of this tale. The multiverse is an endlessly messy place, and it’s not yet clear whether this is a good thing. But it’s what we’ve got, and we’ve got to make the best of it. Occam’s razor tells us we mustn’t ignore the true complexity, but that we must also not complicate things unnecessarily. If we keep trying, someday we’ll achieve an understanding that’s no more complex than necessary. And perhaps that will satisfy GP and Prime enough that they can shake hands, agree to disagree, and get on with figuring out what it’s all in aid of.

~

Bio:

Geoff Hart works as a scientific editor, specializing in helping scientists who have English as their second language publish their research. He’s the author of the popular Effective Onscreen Editing and Write Faster With Your Word Processor. He also writes fiction in his spare time, and has sold 60 stories thus far. Visit him online at geoff-hart.com.

Philosophy Note:

The eternal struggle between man and woman seems to be built into the physics of the universe.

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Beyond The Sea

The urge to set out and explore the unknown may not be limited to vertebrates... By Kevin Eric Paul.

Memory

Perhaps it's for the best that inanimate matter doesn't remember all that could have been? By Momir Iseni.

The Arbiter

by Conrad Gardner

EXHIBIT 101 – THE ARBITER

BEFORE TOUCHING, READ BELOW:

Forged in 1882, The Arbiter is the earliest Pistante in history. It was created by Abel Garcia (1860-1922), an Anjiladonian native who trained as a mage in this museum’s home at the age of ten. Upon leaving the Mantelios Institute, he moved to the developing settlement of Los Lojones in Mastaces, Babonia, working as a smith. Born to farmer parents, Garcia was used to labour, but not always well-behaved, stealing trinkets from his grandparents. Adopted by an aunt after his father’s death, he was enrolled in our institute, being taught humility and learning to help the less fortunate.

During the Third Invasion (1882 – 1885), Garcia attempted to defend the town, but his offensive spells needed a device to help channel their power. His hand-cast spells lacked accuracy, so he forged The Arbiter, inventing a new kind of weapon that would protect the entirety of Kantinia.

Modelling The Arbiter on a Ricosto Revolver, Garcia implemented the chant Spiritum Deus Guardia for several hours while under the forge’s heat. (This chant has been used on two other exhibits in this institution’s collection, Exhibits 84: The Disciplo and 96: Ramirez’s Lawgiver). His diary (housed in the Mantelios Library) notes that when removed from the forge, ‘The gun was too light, like a leaf.’ The weight of his chants squashed the barrel, increasing it four millimetres in length, proving beneficial to the weapon’s range capabilities. With the first Pistante in hand, Garcia learned to focus his beam casts on the weapon (which he termed ‘injecting’) and fire the energy bestowed, becoming the first gunmage. He waged war on the Chacibarae and Chupahomani that terrorised Los Lojones. Porofi was one of his most frequent casts against such beasts, powerful when injected into The Arbiter.

In 1883, Garcia returned to Anjilados, a focal point of the Third Invasion. Ignoring the torment of the surrounding towns, The Arbiter weighed his belt down until he agreed to return.

The gunmage rode through the country, shooting Fiestorre with stakati energy as he passed. With an army of New Babonites and Anjiladonians behind him, he helped reclaim his land. When not fighting, he shot his injured allies with consuviae projectiles, healing those that had rudimentary cuts and bruises. Though The Arbiter never refused him, he said his Pistante grew heavier during moments of anger, which led him to learn the meditative arts. He shared the knowledge of how to craft a Pistante with few people, though many imitations by criminals yielded failed results.

Due to the draining effects of injecting his magic into the Pistante, Garcia retired in 1905. An international discussion started about who would continue his legacy and become the next gunmage. Despite numerous attempts by the Anjiladonian and Babonian governments to claim the weapon, no politicians or military leaders could lift it with ease. Competitions were held without Garcia’s consent, attempting to find the best fighters and shootists, but no winners were selected by him.

Deciding to search for his new mentee himself before he grew too drained, Garcia came upon Rosa Macabe (1899-1966), a young thief in Mastaces City after she attempted to steal his wallet. Taking his belt, and The Arbiter with her by accident, Garcia saw the weapon did not drag her to the ground and sensed her benevolent spirit. Adopting Macabe, he tutored her in achieving inner balance and using her talents to help others.

Garcia’s choice was controversial. He permitted others to try using the weapon, but it was lifted by few, fired even less. The Saraphitos made vocal threats against Macabe’s life for not being a noble-born magician. Garcia taught her his method of weapon-smithing and had her study The Arbiter’s individual parts before he let her practice firing it. The weapon is notorious for being difficult to use unless the wielder understands its making. On his deathbed, Garcia said that Macabe was a better gunmage than him as she had mastered her hate.

During the Poronean Invasion on Kantinia, Macabe used The Arbiter to defend the continent. Preventing the needless slaughtering of thousands, she proposed a duel between herself and a Poronean champion, Cladstock the Brute. Injecting The Arbiter with combosti, she demolished his armour with a flurry of shots (Exhibit 198: Cladstock’s Helmet can be seen in the Invader Display, where the effects of combosti energy on veitor steel are visible). Following her predecessor’s practice, she never wore armour, making her grasp around The Arbiter’s ivory grip firmer, and her movements quicker.

In 1957, a Sariphoto invaded Macabe’s home and tried to execute her with The Arbiter. The Pistante detected the attacker’s dark soul, refusing to fire and scorching his palm. Taught by Garcia not to rely on The Arbiter for all spells, she killed the Sariphoto with a hand-cast combosti.

Drained by The Arbiter as Garcia had been, she searched for its next bearer, Guillermo Conti (1968- ). Losing his parents in the Poronean Invasion, he was taught at this institute until Madame Macabe selected him as her successor at the age of fifteen. Despite his aggression, he tempered this along with steel at Garcia’s forge as Macabe mentored him.

Serving in the Diavolos War (1986-1987), Conti helped close the Tiaria Tear, and was the leading gunmage of the Anjiladonian army. By the war’s end, he had greatly contributed to establishing an era of peace.

Conti attempted to use healing casts on it, but consuviae, was the only workable spell, due to its projectile nature. Unable to help others with The Arbiter beyond basic medical aid, he returned here to become a teacher. Introducing two new classes, Gunmaging and Gunsmithing, Conti crafted his own Pistante and gifted The Arbiter to this institute, saying that it had no use in a time of peace, as it needed conflict to be used well.

Here it lies, waiting for a day The Mantelios Institute prays will never come. If you wish to hold The Arbiter and see if you are worthy, please take hold of the grip.

WARNING: The Mantelios Institute and Museum does not claim responsibility for any injuries sustained when attempting to fire or remove The Arbiter from its Lashiana-enchanted glass. Hands are crumpled or burned at the visitor’s risk.

~

Bio:

Conrad Gardner’s fiction has been published by Superlative, Martian, AEL Press, and Full Moon Chronicles. He writes to calm his mind and keep his hands busy.

Philosophy Note:

Weapons, like beasts, may lay dormant for millennia. But they are always ready to be used again.

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Mercy INC.

Will you be among the 3% that succeed? By Anthony Lechner.

Preliminary Threat Analysis Of Security Guests Intercepted On A “Cultural-Intellectual” Mission In Possession Of Plato’s Dialogues  

by Thomas White

From: Ibis Smith, Chief Inspector, Office of Mind-Body Inspection Services (OMBIS), New Bright City.

To: Jason Taggort, Administrative Controller, Office of Minister of Hygiene (MOH), New Bright City.

Subject: Preliminary Threat Analysis of Security Guests # 7689 and # 7690.

Date: 7 May 5145, Year of Our Hygieia.

Greetings to the Honorable Minister of Hygiene!  All Hail to our beloved Hygieia, Goddess of Sanitation and Civilization! Blessed be our glorious species, Homo Perfectus!

Introduction:

This report is in response to an urgent personal inquiry from the Minister of Hygiene regarding two alleged inhabitants (hereafter “Intercepts”) of the Unsanitary Orifice Zone (hereafter “UOZ”) intercepted by a convoy brigade of the Knights of Purity (hereafter “KOP”) while the latter was on a security patrol near the Wilderness Road bordering the UOZ and New Bright City.

An investigation is ongoing, but given the personal interest of the MOH, the OMBIS is providing herewith a preliminary report, including a brief account of the interception action, scientific findings, and excerpts from the interrogation transcripts of the aforesaid Intercepts, which incorporate interrogator observations.

It is respectfully noted that some of the details provided by the interrogation officer are unseemly and graphic, but the OMBIS is dedicated to the full disclosure of all facts to the Minister. That said, the OMBIS is providing a full report to the MOH within ten (10) days of the date of this preliminary report.

Interception Action:

On two separate dates, April 30, 5145, and May 1, 5145, a Knights of Purity brigade separately arrested the two aforesaid Intercepts upon their entry into the rural outskirts of New Bright City via the Wilderness Road from the Unsanitary Orifice Zone.

It is unclear at this stage if these two Intercepts are cohorts engaged in a common mission; however, for the reasons explained below, they were formally designated as security risks. Our ongoing investigation is probing whether not only the two Intercepts know each other but also whether they are part of a broader UOZ conspiracy aimed at subverting the purity and tranquility of our social order.

Scientific Findings:

a) SSgt. Jay Chenwith, Brigade Commander, after officially arresting the two individuals, ordered that his brigade’s security officer extract evidence of any incriminating link to the UOZ:

i) Security Officer Michael Jones examined grains of matter from the Intercepts’ palms using the field kit’s certified, portable digital geo-magnification micro-lens. The holographic feedback generated clearly indicated that both Intercepts had soiled their hands in an unsanitary environment where there were unwashed dishes and coffee cups.

ii) An additional analysis using a micro-global positioning device verified that said unclean environment was located inside Café Camus, a known UOZ gathering place for poets, philosophers, “intellectuals,” and other marginal types committed to the illegal ideology of radical imperfection, normally implemented via the Socratic Dialogue and its variations.

iii) Further analysis, using an olfactory scanning device on the collected data, revealed the chemical traces of body odors and bad breath—consistent with a crowded café full of self-styled bohemian wastrels.

b) Given these incriminating facts, SSgt. Chenwith further ordered that Security Officer Jones, in conjunction with the brigade’s medical officer, Dr. William Sanders, conduct a species-specific identification saliva test on the Intercepts. The genetic markers showed a positive ID: both Intercepts were CONFIRMED as members of the species Homo Impurus. They were then officially designated as “Security Guests,” aka security risks, to be held in custody.

Interrogation Findings:

SSgt. Chenwith, as per the standard protocols, then holographed his chief operations officer at the Knights of Purity headquarters to query whether he should bring the Intercepts in for a formal interrogation or first conduct a preliminary inquiry in the field.

SSgt. Chenwith was advised that he should conduct the interrogation in the field, transcribe the proceedings, and then report in two days to the KOP HQ along with Intercepts #1 and #2 for further briefings and interrogations. SSgt. Chenwith agreed with this decision, as it would take his convoy about a day to reach City Central, while his brigade had on board an experienced, certified interrogation officer familiar with the ideological and philosophical writings studied by members of Homo Impurus.

Hereafter is a brief executive summary of the said preliminary field interrogation, which includes excerpts from the transcript of the exchanges between the Intercepts and the interrogation officer, as well as the latter’s comments:

Under questioning, supplemented by electro-heat points briefly applied to their fingers, the Intercepts admitted that the reason for their intrusion into New Bright City was what they called a “cultural-intellectual mission,” although they denied conspiring with each other (an allegation that, as noted, is still currently under investigation).

[Transcript Excerpt]:

Interrogator: “So, you both deny conspiring to implement this so-called ‘cultural-intellectual mission, yet we have found that each of you was carrying an identical copy of Plato’s Dialogues.”

Intercept # 1: “A mere coincidence.”

Intercept # 2: [Nods in agreement.]

Interrogator: “Okay, we will leave that question for the main interrogation unit at headquarters to sort out. On another point: I noted that you both had ‘coincidentally’ highlighted in your copies the section in the Republic on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. [The interrogator then held up the open, underlined pages in front of them.]

Intercept #1: [No reply.]

Intercept #2: [No reply.]

Interrogator: “Surely, your mission is not some confused effort trying to bring the ‘truth’ to a ‘cave’ full of ignorant people living in the shadows, which you probably think New Bright City is? That is not only a foul slander against the good and wise people of our fair land, but a fool’s errand. We long ago found the truth: cleanliness is godliness.”

[No reply from Intercept #1 or #2.]

Interrogator: “We are really having a terribly one-sided Platonic dialogue, aren’t we? Do not worry. There will be no more of the ‘hot finger’ procedure. I will leave that to headquarters, which has more expertise. I prefer to keep our little session at the civilized, intellectual level.”

[The interrogation officer then held up a copy of Plato’s Dialogues, opened a page, and showed it to the Intercepts. He then handed the two Intercepts their copies.]

Interrogator: “I am giving back your copies, and I want you to open at the dialogue of Parmenides. I call your attention to Section 130 b-d: another philosopher asks Socrates if there is any abstract idea linked to ‘hair, mud, dirt’ and he says that is absurd. There you have it. Even your great hero, Socrates, thinks you are preposterous. You longhaired Homo Impurus mutants lounge all day in your UOZ cafes, clad in your muddy hippie boots amid dirty bodies and bad breath, absurdly thinking that you can connect with meaningful philosophical ideas. Your intellectual lives, full of unanswered questions and poetic meanderings, disturb and confuse our minds. New Bright City is beyond all that. We want both the calmness and peace of mind, as well as the purity of clean bodies. Our government wellness meditation teams work hard to instill inner peace in our citizens, and we don’t need meddling from Socratic radicals subverting New Bright City’s beloved social tranquility with troubling questions that can lead to community unrest, poor sleep, and the general curse of imperfection.”

[End of Transcript Excerpt].

Conclusion:

These excerpts from the first interrogation session by the Knights of Purity’s field brigade clearly show why SSgt. Chenwith was correct in designating the two Intercepts as security threats. They obviously were on a mission, driven by an ideology of radical imperfection, to ask the citizens of New Bright City disturbing philosophical questions disruptive of the citizens’ perfect, untroubled minds—a subversive plan enhanced by the disgust inflicted on the citizens via the Homo Impurus’ chronically unhygienic bodies.

I respectfully urge the Minister of Hygiene to give this serious matter of Homo Impurus threats the utmost attention, including the construction of an electrified wall at the border between the Unsanitary Orifice Zone and New Bright City.

My entreaty to you is given fresh impetus by recent reports from my field inspection staff: various youth with unclean bodies and in possession of philosophy books have been discovered having sexual intercourse in broad daylight. When confronted, they called our beloved Hygieia “a filthy whore” and shouted “Long live Diogenes,” an allusion, as you know, to that ancient, unsanitary philosopher who performed intimate bodily functions in public. Have other Homo Impurus subversives successfully infiltrated our fair land and, using their dangerous Socratic weapons, corrupted our youth? A full investigation at the ministerial level is urgently needed.

However, no matter what course of action the Minister of Hygiene ultimately chooses, I can assure the MOH of the complete cooperation of the Office of Mind-Body Inspection Services.

Respectfully Yours,

Ibis Smith

Chief Inspector

Office of Mind-Body Inspection Services

New Bright City

~

Bio:

Philosophical speculations and speculative fiction have long mixed and mingled in Thomas White’s mind. Spinoza, Dune, Plato, Socrates, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Star Trek, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Descartes, Shelly’s Frankenstein, Twilight Zone, Kant, Hume, as well as a host of dystopian classics, such as We, Fahrenheit 451, 1984, and Brave New World, have all energized his creative and intellectual spirits, as have the writings of philosophers J-P Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Iris Murdoch, who brilliantly combined philosophical themes and fictional narratives. He has published his poetry, essays, and fiction in online and offline (paper) journals in Australia, United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, was named the best philosophy student by his undergraduate university, was featured in the essay section of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and founded & coordinated a Socrates Cafe.

Philosophy Note:

This story is a dystopian tale of two city-states wherein humans have evolved into two radically different civilizations. One version is still fiercely dedicated to Socratic questioning, including of the social order; the other, intensely anti-philosophical, wants to maintain a perfect, stable society at all costs, including the freedom of its citizens from disturbing Socratic-style questions.
The Time Machine‘s two civilizations, the Eloi and the Morlocks, in part, inspired this piece. Additional inspirations include the Socratic Method, bohemian café life, Plato’s Dialogues, Diogenes, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Kafka’s The Trial, Brave New World, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451. Besides the well-known dystopian novels cited above, I recommend these sources for reading:
https://nickbostrom.com/fut/evolution.pdf (see page 6)
http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/allegory.htmI (Plato’s Allegory of the Cave)
https://www.newscientist.com/lastword/mg25133531-100-could-humans-evolve-into-two-different-species-in-the-future (see reference to The Time Machine)
https://aeon.co/ideas/philosophy-should-care-about-the-filthy-excessive-and-unclean
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0174%3Atext%3DParm.%3Apage%3D130 (see Section 130 b-d, Parmenides)

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