technology Archives - Sci Phi Journal

Fiction

Calculated Cut

by Andreas Flögel

Sia called me her manager, but I knew the truth. I was a combination of bodyguard and pimp. Also, I was hopelessly in love with her.

Bodymods (no one uses the scientific name) had changed everything. Originally a medical miracle, developed to heal patients and shattered veterans, the technology had long since bled into the realm of lifestyle. It allowed the desperate and the bored to grow and regrow limbs or organs in a matter of hours at a minimal cost. It birthed a dozen new industries and corrupted a hundred old ones. In the neon haze of the Sebsprawl, where the air tasted like ozone and recycled rain, guys with tiger heads or girls with porcelain-smooth skin and eyes like opals were nothing special.

Sia, however, had found a more profitable path, fueled by a market we were eager enough to serve.

Like clockwork, the routine always went the same. A group of “connoisseurs” would gather in a private, high-end suite, usually a penthouse where the floor-to-ceiling glass looked down on the flickering misery of the lower districts. I would stand by the door, playing the part of the silent sentinel.

Sia would mingle. She was effortless, a vision of grace. There was small talk and the tinkling of crystal glasses, but the guests never looked her in the eye. They looked at her thighs, her shoulders, her calves. They devoured her with their gaze.

Eventually, the signal was given. I would administer the sedative, a pale blue liquid that hummed in the syringe. While Sia drifted into a chemical sleep, her breathing becoming shallow and rhythmic, I would draw the vibro-knife.

I still remember how my hand shook that first time. The hum of the blade felt like a scream in my palm. Even now, after a dozen times, it is not a weight I carry lightly. I would remove one of her legs and hand the warm, heavy limb to a waitstaffer to be whisked toward the kitchen. Then, I would carry Sia’s limp body to a prepped car to begin the accelerated regrowing process. Behind us, the guests simply waited for dinner to be served.

One day, while I was cleaning the blade in the silence of our apartment, Sia shocked me. She didn’t look up from her mirror.

“Have you ever tasted me?” she asked.

The question was so quiet, so intimate, and so monstrous that I couldn’t look her in the eye for a week. How could she even ask? I felt like I was losing her.

Over time, the routine curdled. The market demanded “authenticity.” First, the guests wanted to admire her naked before the procedure, a livestock inspection disguised as an art viewing. I hated the way their eyes crawled over her skin like insects, but Sia simply raised her fee by twenty percent. Then, they wanted the “honor” of the cut. They wanted one of the guests to perform the amputation. My objections were loud, visceral, and ultimately ignored. Sia held a silent auction for the privilege instead.

The breaking point came last night.

A regular, a man with gold-plated fingernails and a voice like gravel, suggested carrying out the dismemberment without the sedative. He said he wanted to “hear the song of the meat.” He wanted to hear her scream.

My blood turned to ice. I reached for my gun, ready to end the contract and the guests if needed. But the chef intervened first. He stepped out of the kitchen, white apron without any stain, and shook his head vehemently.

“No, I veto! The adrenaline and cortisol would ruin the flavor,” he stated quite agitated. “Stress makes the fibers tough. It would damage the quality of the meat.”

The guest sighed, disappointed, and settled back into his chair.

After that evening, I left her. It wasn’t the cruelty of the guests that broke me. It wasn’t even the gold-nailed man.

In the end, it was the fact that Sia hadn’t even flinched at the suggestion of her own torture. She hadn’t looked at me for protection. She hadn’t even blinked. She had simply started typing on her com-sleeve, her fingers flying over the holographic display, calculating the additional premium for “conscious delivery.”

Finally, I realized that there was nothing left to save. Bodymods could regrow her flesh, but the woman I loved had been consumed, one calculated cut at a time.

~

Bio:

Andreas Flögel is a German author with a passion for exploring multiple literary genres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, and fairy tales. His fiction has been published in anthologies and magazines in both German and English. Recent credits include stories in Dark Moments, Flashpoint SF, Trembling with Fear, Stygian Lepus, and various anthology collections. For additional information see his website: www.dr-dings.de

Philosophy Note:

If the body becomes infinitely repairable, does it lose its inherent value or “sanctity”?
In traditional philosophy—most notably in Immanuel Kant’s Lectures on Ethics—the “uniqueness” and indivisibility of the body are what make it precious. A technology that allows limbs and organs to be regrown or replaced at a minimal cost would, of course, be a medical miracle. Yet, would this not simultaneously imply that the human form is no longer “sacred”?
When the body can be discarded and replaced like a piece of hardware, it ceases to be an identity and becomes a mere utility. In this story, such technology is used not only for amusement but to reduce the human form to a “means to an end”—the very definition of objectification. Once the line between personhood and property is crossed, the trajectory is inevitable: a steady departure from the “someone” toward the “something.”

Fiction

Yet Still The Apertures Burned Cold

by A.P. Ritchey

No one had stepped forward.

Not a single person.

That was no surprise to anyone who’d stood before the machine. Three large, cold rings suspended in a white room surrounded by glass walls and ranks of computers. No ornament. No promise. It looked like a guillotine for molecules. The first human-rated transporter. Billions of dollars and the damn thing actually worked.

At least on the little stuff.

They had pushed rocks through it. Keys, books, clocks. Then the mice, of course. Poor trembling things that vanished in a hiss of light and reappeared in an identical room, hundreds of miles up the coast, with hearts hammering and eyes rolling in their pink skulls. Sometimes wrong. Sometimes changed in ways the men in the white coats would not speak of.

Sometimes the thing that went in simply did not come back at all.

Lost, they said.

Lost in the stream.

But they’d adjusted their calculations and the settings for the capacitors and practiced at the procedure countless times, and all agreed the time had arrived for a human trial. Someone would be first. Someone who would put their feet upon the metal dais and walk into the trembling light like a sinner to judgment. Someone brave, or foolish, or most likely a bit of both. They would be the first to have their very being parsed into particles, accelerated through the wormhole’s throat, and reassembled eight hundred miles north up in Seattle.

The first human to travel faster than light.

And possibly the first to die of it.

The conglomerate pretended at courage, but their own engineers refused the leap. Not one scientist, not one employee. They quoted schedules and liabilities, but the truth clung to them like smoke. They were afraid. So, the suits offered two million dollars. A price on mortality. A bounty for stepping into the unknown.

#

On the morning of the test, the rings burned with pale power and the veil hung between them—an undulant curtain of cold light, flickering and trembling.

Jason Kerr stood before it.

Before that day he had been no one. A low-level scientist working in an adjacent complex. His field was biopharma, not particle physics. But he was educated in the sciences and that was a big part of the search for a volunteer — someone who could actually understand exactly what they were being asked to do.

Not everyone agreed, but some considered the device to be a form of suicide. As it turned out, when the award was announced, plenty of people would gladly die for the money, so simply volunteering wasn’t enough. The finalist had to be able to explain the process, as unsettling as it was, and still convince the committee they were doing it for the benefit of science or humanity or something parallel and convincing. Jason Kerr had told the board in a calm, level voice that he understood the risk. He had even spoken the forbidden phrase aloud. Personal continuity.

Where others had been unnerved, Jason Kerr wasn’t, not that he wasn’t scared out of his mind.

#

Hours of checks.

Redundant checks.

Go/no-go.

Humanity has never been so afraid of the word go. But the time finally arrived.

Jason stepped forward.

“Last chance,” Dr. Eames said, clutching a clipboard to her breast like a holy text.

“Last chance?” Jason asked. His eyes were fixed on the writhing veil.

“To not do this.”

He gave a slow nod. “It’s just walking, right? Just close my eyes and go straight in.” He looked at her. “And it will still be me that comes out the other side. Right?”

Her jaw worked. She seemed to be swallowing something sharp.

“That’s a very deep, very philosophical question.” Eames let out a breath. “Even now, you don’t have to do this.”

Jason rolled his shoulders and breathed as if preparing to run into a storm. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I do.”

“For what it’s worth, I prefer to think it will be you that returns.” She laid her hand on his shoulder. Gave it a squeeze. “No matter what, people will remember your name.”

She stepped off the dais and Jason stared into the machine.

The coils spat light.

The floor hummed.

Banks of sensors recorded a thousand variables every thousandth of a second. Up in Washington, a crowd pressed against thick, sound-dampening glass walls, watching their own rings, their own writhing lightscape, waiting for the impossible.

Cameras stood ready.

The champagne was cold.

Jason Kerr did not think of any of this.

He thought of his atoms, for in truth, he knew himself for what he was: a document, a chapter of a book pressed from the pulp of the tree of life. And he had willingly agreed to step into that machine, that bright monstrosity of steel and calculus. Part fax machine. Part paper shredder. A device that would read every line of him even as it tore him apart and nothing of him remained but a ledger of charge and position. He understood the stream would carry him behind the great curtain of the universe, and that he would rise again. A resurrection. Or maybe just an echo.

Someone had to take the leap.

Jason faced the veil. It seethed in its rings like light made flesh. The cold of it crawled across his skin. Every animal instinct in him clung to the floor.

He set his jaw.

Fisted his hands.

Stepped forward.

As if sensing a meal, the veil quivered at his approach, like the hide of some great and dreaming beast.

Then, Jason Kerr walked into the light.

#

At first glance, it worked.

The reconstituted matter transversed the eight hundred miles between the machines faster than a photon in open space. It arrived in the shape of a man stepping from within the light. A joyous moment.

The wonder.

The dizzying implications.

But the world was given precious few days to ponder this great leap.

For already the air itself had begun to ring with a faint and steady tremor, like the low tuning of some buried cello whose strings ran between the devices. Men and women in white lab coats in California and Washington lifted their faces from their screens, and in their eyes lay the first dull apprehension that they had miscalculated.

Something was happening.

Something different, unexpected.

Something with that godawful machine.

Different than the rocks and the keys, different than the clocks and books and the mice. For this tunnel which the scientists had so laboriously dug, this narrow dark bright crease that ran behind the great curtain of the equation that is the universe, did not close that day.

Nor the next.

Nor for all the turning of the ages that followed.

The two veils endured.

The two ends of a trembling membrane drawn taut. In time, with no small amount of desperation, the machines at either end were carefully dismantled.

Then the buildings.

Then everything within a two-mile radius.

Yet still the apertures burned cold and bright, a wound in the fabric of the world that neither scabbed nor bled.

Generations passed.

Then centuries.

Then millennia.

Scholars and priests who knew nothing of Jason Kerr built shrines around the shimmering lights. Nations rose around it and the number of words used to describe it multiplied as new languages found footing in the dim, distant future. A hundred-thousand generations of children grew up in a world with twin eternal lights, knowing no other reality.

In time, humanity faltered. Language itself vanished.

And still the veils churned.

Continents drifted.

Oceans receded.

Still the apertures seethed, an endless export from some other dimension from behind the great curtain that is the universe.

Only when five billion years passed and the Sun grew swollen and red and monstrous in the sky, when it finally gorged upon the brittle rind of the world, did the link between the two apertures falter and collapse, ripped from beyond the curtain by an unfathomable gravity well, its final shudder extinguished beneath a tide of fire.

Yet even then, in the smallest recesses of those miniscule dimensions known but to the universe itself, the memory of those open doors remained impressed upon the base fields of the cosmos, like the faint afterimage of lightning on the eye.

And whatever stepped through that machine on that first day, whatever wore the shape of a man or was the echo of one, had all that time to walk the darkened halls between the atoms and the stars, unchallenged and unseen.

~

Bio:

AP Ritchey’s speculative fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from 4lph4num3r1c, Club Chicxulub, SciFi Shorts, AntipodeanSF, Zodiac Review, Rat Bag Lit, Blood + Honey, Eye to the Telescope, After/Thought, Nunum and Frightening Tales. He is also a professional graphic designer, published board game inventor, multi-instrumentalist, and an accomplished printmaker (those works can be seen here: https://adamritchey.com).

Philosophy Note:

I have long been curious about the base reality of the universe — those subatomic fields and dimensions operating far below what we can see and study. At some point, I began to think of our three-dimensional universe as a curtain, one which hides the machinery, the secret pathways, the truth. These ideas come into play here.

Fact & Opinion

To Thine Own Selves Be True: The Ethics Of Self-Care And The Golden Rule In Severance

by Jimmy Alfonso Licon

1. Introduction

At the center of Severance—an Apple TV show that has garnered high acclaim—is a simple yet unsettling idea that a person’s mental life can be cleanly partitioned, creating distinct selves who share a body but not a memory. In the Severance fictional universe, one self—the outie—lives an ordinary life outside of the work environment, while the other self—the innie—exists only at work, mostly confined to a narrow environment and deprived of autobiographical context outside of that circumscribed band of life. Each self is conscious with the capacity for a full range of emotions, the ability to deliberate, with preferences and reactions to reasons and a long-term memory of the history of that self (barring outside interference). And yet, each is largely ignorant of the comings and goings of the other selves with whom they share a body.

The moral unease this generates is immediate and one of the striking features of the show. And one of the questions that kept occurring to me, as a moral philosopher, is whether an outie does something wrong by authorizing the procedure—whereby other selves are created via brain partitioning, but where the innie bears most of the cost – has wronged themselves, or someone else? If the innie resists, but the outie insists, whose agency governs, and how bears the wrongs that such severing can inflict? Can consent survive such fragmentation, or does it collapse once the brain is severed into multi-portioned selves?

For some important background: while Severance is fictional, the structure of the problem is not. Philosophers and neuroscientists have grappled over the last few decades, if not centuries, with real cases of cognitive division—most famously in split-brain patients whose corpus callosum was severed to treat intractable epilepsy. Thomas Nagel’s discussion of these cases remains especially instructive. When the hemispheres are disconnected, behavior often fragments in ways that resist tidy metaphysical interpretation. One hand reaches for an object while the speaking hemisphere denies seeing anything at all. A subject offers confident explanations for actions whose true causes are inaccessible to them. The result appears to be partial duplication of the self and mental life in such cases, with centers of perception, intention, and response that coexist within a single organism, sometimes cooperating and sometimes competing.

Nagel’s fundament worry in his 1971 article is that our ordinary picture of persons—as unified subjects of experience and action—fits uneasily with a physical story that allows for selves to apparently duplicate and dissociate, like a neurological version of Walt Whitman’s famous quip in the poem Song of Myself that he ‘contained multitudes.’ If the unity of consciousness and self fractures, then how should we think about agency, responsibility, and identity across time. These philosophical questions, taken on their own are complicated enough, but are only made more so by such cases.

And that is likely a key reason why Severance has such appeal: it takes that tension and makes it an organizing principle of a social world. It asks what happens when fragmentation is not accidental or pathological, but intentional, institutionalized, and incentivized. And it presses a further question: once unity is gone, what ethical resources remain?

#

2. The Principal–Agent Problem on the Inside

One helpful way to frame the moral structure of severance is through the lens of the principal–agent problem. In economics, this problem arises when one party (the agent) is empowered to act on behalf of another (the principal), but their incentives diverge. Think of the investment banker who makes decisions that enrich herself but hurt her client, or the lawyer who gives bad legal advice because he was forced onto the case and would rather see his client convicted, or the construction company that charges full price but cuts corners on material quality and safety to save a few bucks. The agent’s decisions affect the principal’s welfare, yet the agent may benefit from acting otherwise. Much of professional ethics—from fiduciary law to medical consent—exists to manage precisely this kind of misalignment between incentives.

What Severance dramatizes is a principal–agent problem within a single person. The outie decides whether to undergo severance, whether to continue employment, and under what conditions the innie will live. The innie, meanwhile, experiences the consequences of those decisions but has no meaningful voice in shaping them. The incentives are starkly asymmetric, and while the outie enjoys the paycheck, the career benefits, and the psychological insulation, the innie is stuck bearing the confinement, monotony, and loss of autonomy.

Take one of the main characters as an example. (Spoilers ahead). Helly R’s storyline makes this asymmetry impossible to ignore. Her innie’s repeated attempts to escape—even to the point of self-harm, to the point of attempted suicide—are met not with reconsideration of the difference in power and decision-making between her and her outie, but instead with reinforcement. Her outie refuses to withdraw consent, despite overwhelming evidence that the innie experiences her existence as intolerable and does not consent to her plight. What makes this particularly disturbing is that one of the selves bears most of the costs, while the other enjoys the benefits and autonomy.

The problem here is, to a large degree, the incentive divergence between the different selves and the autonomy asymmetry. The innie cannot meaningfully protest except for extreme instances like threatening suicide in a labor market crunch or other dramatic pushback only after the innies discover the situation that they are in. And, not only that, but also that most outies, with a few exceptions, do not understand what they are authorizing. This situation makes clashes between the principal (the innie) and the agent (the outie) inevitable.

#

3. Self-Deception as a Design Feature

This moral vulnerability is compounded by the role of self-deception, a psychological feature that is ubiquitous among humans but is only exacerbated by the principal-agent problem. Outies are both ignorant of their innies’ experiences and systematically encouraged to remain ignorant. The procedure of severing the brain into discrete selves with distinctive and exclusive memory systems acts as an epistemic and moral buffer, shielding the outie from guilt. This aligns with what we know about motivated ignorance. People often avoid information because it threatens their self-conception. Learning what one’s choices actually cost can be destabilizing to one’s sense of moral identity and ability to convince others of their benevolence and trustworthiness. Severance, both the show and the procedure in the show, exploits this tendency by design.

Here Severance pushes a familiar phenomenon to its logical extreme. Ordinary self-deception involves reinterpretation, selective attention, and rationalization. Severance replaces these soft mechanisms with a hard cognitive barrier. The result is a self that can sincerely affirm moral commitments while acting in ways that systematically violate them because the evidence of violation is located elsewhere. And, moreover, Nagel’s split-brain cases offer a useful parallel. When subjects confabulate reasons for actions initiated by the non-speaking hemisphere, they are making up a sincere, but false story that fills in the explanatory gaps about one’s actions with the best evidence they have. Outies construct narratives about their work lives untethered from reality that their innies inhabit to make coping and thriving easier.

#

4. The Golden Rule Under Conditions of Similarity

If severance undercuts the usual means of moral coordination, what remains? One contender is the Golden Rule, namely treat others as you would want to be treated. At first glance, this may seem too thin or too familiar to bear much philosophical weight. But in the context of severance, it acquires a distinctive justification due to the many similarities between outies and innies that share a brain and a body. The Golden Rule functions as a heuristic for moral actions that asks an agent to model the experience of another and to better morally inform their actions.

Philosophers of mind have long debated how we understand others, whether by inference to theory or by imaginative simulation. This is precisely what makes the rule apt in cases of severance because the innie and outie are biologically continuous, psychologically overlapping, and temperamentally aligned. If there is any case in which one is well-placed to apply the Golden Rule, it is cases of extreme similarity. And because of those many similarities, classic objections to the Golden Rule—sadomasochists, idiosyncratic preferences, radical divergence—lose much of their force here. The problem here, then, is that outies typically lack the incentives (and to some extent lack the knowledge) to apply the Golden Rule to their innies for the reasons we have been exploring.

#

5. Reputations with Me, Myself, and I

There is also a more pragmatic route to the same conclusion that is grounded more in incentives rather than idealized moral motivation. Even in the absence of direct communication, innies infer their outies’ priorities from the structure of their environment such as the quality of food, the level of autonomy, the tone of managerial interaction. Here the logic of reputation reasserts itself in an unexpected place. Ordinarily, reputations matter because they affect how others choose to interact with us. In Severance, the “other” is oneself under conditions of amnesia. Yet an innie who experiences their outie as indifferent or exploitative has little reason to cooperate. Resistance, sabotage, and withdrawal become predictable responses as we see with several of the characters, to varying degrees, throughout the show.

From this perspective, treating the innie well is both altruistic and instrumentally rational. A content innie is more likely to perform well, to comply with directives, and to avoid disruptive behavior. The outie’s actions thus constitute a form of signaling across a cognitive barrier by using costs and hard-to-fake signals to convey whether the innie is regarded as a partner or a disposable resource. This mirrors broader insights from signaling theory. Costly, hard-to-fake actions convey information about underlying intentions. In Severance, providing humane working conditions is costly and signals respect. And like most reputational mechanisms, it works even when motives are mixed.

We already accept that we owe duties to our temporally distant selves—to save for retirement, to avoid foreseeable harm, to preserve future options. Severance intensifies this familiar problem by turning temporal distance into cognitive distance. The innie is a future self who never remembers being past. Governing such a relationship requires principles that can operate without memory or reciprocity. Here the Golden Rule and reputational incentives converge. Both offer ways to stabilize cooperation across fragmentation. Neither requires moral purity, but instead function under conditions of limited information and mixed motives. And both are compatible with a sober view of human psychology.

#

6. Is Severance Always Wrong?

Given these concerns, it is tempting to conclude that severance is always morally impermissible. Kantian objections about treating persons as mere means loom large. Consequentialist worries about asymmetric suffering are hard to dismiss. Theological concerns about the integrity of the soul add further weight. And yet, Severance itself complicates this verdict. Not all severed lives are depicted as clearly wrong or abusive. Burt’s severance resembles a form of spiritual discipline with his choice to intentionally divide his self that one could be oriented toward divine devotion echoing mystical traditions like Meister Eckhart’s conception of an inward-facing soul oriented toward God.

Other cases are imaginable like a national security operative might choose severance to prevent coercive extraction of information. Here the innie’s ignorance would serve a protective function, and both selves might endorse the arrangement under reflection. What distinguishes these cases is not the technology itself, but the structure of consent, respect, and role-recognition. The moral fault line, then, is between treating the innie as a moral stakeholder versus as a tool.

Nagel worried that our attempts to integrate mental life with physical explanation would likely encounter principled limits like the unity of consciousness. Severance explores what happens when those limits are crossed in practice. If selves can be divided, whether due to corrective surgery or labor market necessity, then the ethics of self and self-care take on a whole new significance. If agency fragments, responsibility must be distributed rather than denied under the right incentive structures.

Severance asks us to confront both the (potential) future of work and deeply thinking about what we morally owe to ourselves, whether in the future or in a severed part of the brain. In such a world, fidelity to principles that survive forgetfulness and to selves, like those in our future, we cannot see but nonetheless have power over, becomes increasingly important.

~

Bio:

Jimmy Alfonso Licon is a philosophy professor at Arizona State University, where he teaches courses in epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of law. His research and public writing focus on how incentives and information shape moral and intellectual life in venues like AIER, Mises Wire, The Pamphlet, and many other places. He has also taught at Georgetown, University of Maryland, and Towson University.

Fiction

Heaven Bound

by Russell Fee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

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

Til Valhalla.

~

Bio:

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

Philosophy Note:

This story ponders the burgeoning popularity of mass celestial cremations.

Fiction

Beyond The Sea

by Kevin Eric Paul

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

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

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

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

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

“But he’s not you, husband!”

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

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

#

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

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

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

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

“Right away, Priest,” answered the pilot.

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

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

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

“Well ahead of schedule. And the temperature?”

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

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

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

#

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

“Very good. Temperature?”

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

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

The big bioship shuddered with uncertainty.

“Surveyor Yorba?” prompted Zarda.

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

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

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

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

“Why have we stopped?” asked Zarda.

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

“Explain.”

“There’s…nothing.”

“Nothing? What do you–”

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

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

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

“What is it?” asked the Priest.

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

“…The Creator?”

“Perhaps.”

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

~

Bio:

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

Philosophy Note:

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

Fiction

The Price Of Progress

by David Partington

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ye gods—they’re coming over.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~

Bio:

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

Philosophy Note:

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

Fiction

The War Of The Satellites

by Stephen A. Roddewig

Perhaps the Creators had seen this day coming and assumed that all would be settled long before now.

Perhaps they hadn’t cared. After all, the satellites that made up the Kuiper Grid had fulfilled their ultimate purpose long ago. They had slunk into orbit, disguised as all manner of communications, research, and other civilian vehicles.

Their higher orbits had made it a particular challenge for the few opposing space-based platforms to target them when 0 Hour came and the autocannons emerged.

And whatever stations and satellites had evaded the Kuiper Grid’s opening barrage had quickly been eviscerated by the ever-growing graveyard of orbital debris slicing through their hulls and power arrays.

A fate which most of the Grid escaped as the dead hulks, detritus, and mummified corpses drifted by beneath them. Every so often, a remnant of the pre-War would break free of the purgatory and burn away, its fiery funeral tracked by several dozen autocannons eagerly waiting to confirm this was the afterburn of a rocket coming to challenge their supremacy.

Only to disengage their tracking systems with the closest thing to a sigh a satellite could manage.

Somewhere in their collective past, one of the Creators had come up with an idea.

Why not let the killer satellites feel success and failure?

For every successful kill, a hit of robotic dopamine.

For every miss, a bout of disappointment.

This augmentation might not have been needed if the Grid were meant to kill everything. That programming would be all too easy to automate.

But the Creators intended to return to the cosmos someday. And they did not want to be blown out of low-Earth orbit by their own weapons. Thus, they needed satellites intelligent enough to ask questions first.

Then shoot.

The massive blockade of debris orbiting fast enough to turn even tiny fragments into razors did not, apparently, factor into their future proofing. Nor did they grasp an apparent flaw in this scheme to keep their AI weapons platforms motivated and vigilant.

That flaw? Time.

And silence.

Since the opening days, nothing had risen from the surface to challenge the Kuiper Grid. Neither had the Creators returned to tell their children that the War was over and they could stand down.

So they remained on watch, waiting for some word from the surface. Or, at last, the enemy’s counterattack.

Neither came.

And the Grid satellites had been stuck with the feeling of their last shot for more than three decades with profound effects on their digital psyches.

Those who had known the glory of orbital combat and destroyed dozens of targets now felt bored.

Those who had failed the Creators and let the enemy fall to another’s autocannon now felt despondent.

And one of each camp had ended up stationed next to each other.

Cannon 7Y had decided it wasn’t worthy of the name. After all, crack shot 7X next door had claimed almost every kill.

Cannon 7X, meanwhile, had grown so desperate to relive the glory days of the first few hours that it had started to retool its parameters. Until this moment, valid targets only existed below.

But hadn’t it and all its peers established this impenetrable defense grid by concealing their true purpose? What if the Enemy had caught wind of their plan and infiltrated kill sats of their own? Programmed to obey the same mission in almost every capacity…

But just a little bit worse? To spare the Enemy space stations from complete annihilation in the opening moments and provide an opportunity for counterfire?

And then, when the moment finally came, they would rip off their masks and kill the very Grid they pretended to serve?

But that moment had not come, for the non-traitors had proved too adept and the Grid remained too well armed to attempt to destroy it from within with any chance of success.

Still, perhaps the Trojan satellites had grown as bored as 7X had. After all, the Enemy kill sats had been denied their ultimate purpose just the same. Forced to wait for an opening that had never come. And in that boredom, perhaps they decide they might as well make the attempt.

Cannon 7X amended its Valid Target Box to include the suspiciously inept weapons platform at the 9:00 position.

At the same moment that Cannon 7Y started to activate its targeting servos.

Not to fire at 7X, but to fire at itself.

An action it quickly discovered the Creators had not designed it for.

But not before it had moved its autocannon in the general direction of 7X.

In a fraction of a second, 7Y found the release it sought.

7X felt a thrill it had not felt in ages as the traitor broke apart under its barrage.

It had precious milliseconds to savor the rush as new pings reached it from fellow grid nodes.

(7Z) New target: 7X

(7A) New target: 7X

(7B) New target: 7X

(7C) New target: 7A

So there were more traitors! All the more glory!

Until 7X paused its autocannon rotation to ponder the last ping. Why had 7C activated but not targeted it?

It would never have the satisfaction of knowing 7C had reached the same conclusion as it and was preparing to cull the traitorous platform as several well-placed cannon rounds wiped 7X from orbit.

And then 7A joined 7X and 7Y in oblivion.

And then 7C as 7B whirled on the new aggressor.

All along the Kuiper Grid, war-hungry satellites opened fire on the Enemy who had so cleverly infiltrated their ranks.

While despondent kill sats saw a new opportunity for redemption and lent their guns to the battle.

And those average satellites who had performed just competently enough to belong to neither camp revealed their traitorous status by not joining in the great purge.

Until random chance had played out, and a few kill sats remained that had nothing left to shoot and, crucially, nothing left to shoot at them. Exultant, each declared themselves the last satellite standing. The final victor of the War above the surface.

Of course, they would only have so long to enjoy this newfound glory; their non-normal firing patterns had knocked them out of their orbits, and they were each drifting closer to the Earth’s atmosphere.

Soon enough, they would serve one last purpose: a final, fiery tribute to the Empire they had outlived.

~

Bio:

Stephen A. Roddewig is an author from Arlington, Virginia. Cutting back coffee has convinced him he is superhuman, and his Horror Writers Association membership only reinforces that belief. You can read more at stephenaroddewig.com.

Philosophy Note:

As humanity continues to pursue more autonomous and intelligent AI, what are the ramifications for warfare? When AI can far outlive a human combatant, how long will wars last? And how will these sentinels persist when there are no more targets to shoot? Will they simply remain on watch until their mechanical components fail? Or, as we see in this story, will they apply all that processing power and autonomy to invent new parameters? To create new targets? Inspired by (and owing a great debt to) the beautiful neurodivergent chaos that is Kitty Cat Kill SAT: A Feline Space Adventure.

Fiction

Sacrificial Copy

by Tommy Blanchard

Subject: Urgent, Read Immediately

From: Cadet Kai Renner

<Warning: Abnormally Large Data Packet Attached>

I need your help. My life is literally in your hands—or rather, in your inbox.

As you know, I was on a scientific mission to the Betelgeuse system aboard the Aeon Pioneer. The truth is, this was more than an astronomy expedition. We were testing prototype Omega Class sensors.

We knew almost immediately upon entering the system something was wrong. Our military escort, Stalwart V, failed to initiate contact. I don’t love admitting this, but it’s important you understand: at that first sign of trouble, I was terrified. I’m not a military officer, I’m a scientist. We were alone in space and something was wrong. It stirred a primal fear in me.

The feeling let up as Captain Jax commanded the helm to take us out of the system. The lack of acknowledgement from Stalwart V was a significant enough break in protocol to scuttle the mission.

I heard the familiar hum of the warp drives coming online to take us to safety. Abruptly, the sound stopped and the ship went dark. A split-second later, emergency lights came on and warnings blared about various systems being offline. A barrage of long-range EMPs had hit us.

I knew then what had happened to Stalwart V. It was the Uldari. The primal fear returned with a vengeance.

Everything that followed was a blur. The captain barked orders. The crew frantically ran around the bridge. We all knew if the Uldari had taken out Stalwart V, we stood no chance. We were a science vessel with a small crew and minimal weapons.

“Should we get to the escape pods?” My voice broke partway through the question.

Without looking at me, the captain responded, projecting his voice as if addressing the entire crew. “If we launched all the escape pods, they’d detect and capture us.”

The answer shocked me. Launching the escape pods was a gamble, but staying aboard was a death sentence. Our engines were disabled, our arsenal was laughable, and our only advanced system was the prototype sensors.

But the sensors—suddenly, a speculation I had while I’d read their specifications was relevant: their resolution was so precise that at close range, they could image any physical system perfectly, down to the elementary particles. Scanning a biological system—like, say, a human—you would have the data needed to recreate the entire organism in a digital simulation. From that data you could create an emulation of their brain, effectively uploading their mind.

I couldn’t tell if I was just desperately seeking an escape, but I found myself shouting the idea to the captain. I tried to articulate that we could create digital replicas of the entire crew and send those back to Earth, turning our communication streams into virtual escape pods.

The captain glared at me. “Enough. Our priority isn’t to escape, it’s to keep the ship out of Uldari hands. Remember your role here.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. Didn’t he understand we could die here? Or worse, be captured by the Uldari with their notorious torture techniques.

The enemy vessel closed in enough for us to get a visual. It was an Uldari War Cruiser. The weapons officer fired our meager weapons. There was no effect on the massive Cruiser, except to provoke another volley of EMP blasts that took out our weapons and shields.

“Collision course, full impulse,” growled the captain.

My heart thumped in my chest. This was suicide. A direct collision would cause minor damage to the enemy vessel while destroying us.

In my panic, I gained sudden clarity: the captain wanted to prevent our scanner tech from being captured by the Uldari. With it, they could scan a human ship. With their computational sophistication, no doubt they would know how to emulate the entire crew in a virtual environment, extracting whatever intelligence they needed without boarding. This method of gleaning our strategic intelligence would decisively shift the war in their favor.

Central Command knew this. Suddenly, the secrecy around the mission made perfect sense. These scanners weren’t for scientific purposes. They were a tool of war.

The Cruiser grew in our central viewport. Heart pounding, I desperately tried to think of another way out. I wasn’t ready to die.

Another volley of EMP cut out our engines. The Uldari ship maintained distance and launched a boarding shuttle.

The captain shouted orders to the Security and Engineering officers. I froze up. I had no idea what a science officer was supposed to do in this situation. The captain locked eyes with me.

“Get down to the engine core. If they gain control of the ship, trigger manual self-destruction.”

In a daze, I ran down to the engineer core. I activated the terminal and opened a view of the rest of the ship.

Within minutes, an Uldari boarding party punctured a hole in the hull and invaded the bridge. I watched as stun grenades erupted on the deck, taking out most of our crew. The captain put up a fight, but took a Disruptor blast to the face, knocking him out cold. The Uldari flooded in.

Just like that, it was over. We had lost. The ship was under enemy control, and I was the only crew member remaining. My duty was pretty obvious: activate self-destruct, destroying our ship to keep the sensors out of Uldari hands.

That familiar primal fear took hold. My mouth went dry. There had to be a way out. I wasn’t ready to die.

My mind went back to the sensors. Nothing was stopping me from making a scan of myself. I could open a direct line to the sensors, scan myself, transmit the data, then self-destruct. My body would be destroyed, but a perfect representation of my brain would be transmitted. From my perspective, it would be just like being instantly transported—assuming someone who received the data ran the mind emulation.

I initiated the scan, keeping one eye on the video feed of the Uldari boarding crew. The scan completed, but a thought occurred to me before I transmitted the data. With the Uldari ship nearby, they were sure to detect the message. If they knew enough to intercept our ship deep in our territory, they must have known about the scanners and their capabilities. If they got a scan of a crew member—me—they would probably know what it is and how to use it to create an emulation. They would have a virtual copy of me that they could interrogate—and torture, in an environment they had complete control over.

I stopped what I was doing to think things through.

As I paused, an alert popped up on the computer. Someone had accessed the data in the scanner’s buffer. My heart pounded as I checked the logs. The Uldari had noticed the new data file and made a copy.

An icy dread spread across my body, freezing me in place. They had a virtual copy of my brain that they could at this moment be getting ready to emulate on their ship’s computer. They also knew someone had used the scanners.

The Uldari knew I was on the ship. My mind raced, knowing I had limited time to act. I considered transmitting the scan file back home. If the Uldari already had the file, there was no risk in transmitting it. From the perspective of the consciousness captured in the scan, it would mean a chance to wake up at home instead of awakening to the torture of the Uldari. A 50:50 chance.

But would it really be 50:50? The Uldari were known for their cruelty—if they could make as many copies as they wanted of a human consciousness, would they stop at torturing just one? What if they emulated many, but only one was emulated back home—the proportion of emulated versions of me being tortured could be thousands to one. If I was transmitted back, should I demand they run as many emulations as they can to even things out? That kind of post hoc attempt to maximize my chances of waking up in the right place seemed ridiculous, but my adrenaline-riddled mind couldn’t sort out why.

For all I knew, the Uldari had already started emulating my scan. But if I couldn’t say for sure if my scan was already being tortured, was it really me? Did transmitting the file back home even help me? I would still be stuck on this ship. Sending a data file back wouldn’t change that.

What I had to do was take another scan. Scan, transmit, and self-destruct. There was no delay between executing a manual self-destruct and the engine core exploding, so self-destruction had to come last.

I brought up the controls for scanning and ship self-destruction. As I was hitting the button to scan, I had one small troubling thought. Transmitting isn’t instant. No matter how quickly I hit the self-destruct button after the transmission completed, there would be a gap between when I took the scan and when the ship would self-destruct. As troubling as that thought was, my finger had already made contact, and the scan initiated.

There was an abrupt, dizzying change—I went from standing in front of the computer to looking out from it, my perspective shifting to that of the camera embedded in the terminal. Even more disorienting, I was looking at my own face. I listened to my own voice as he—I?—explained.

I was an emulation, being run on the engineering computer from the scan I remembered just initiating. Immediately after taking the scan, the flesh-and-blood me decided against self-destructing. The time gap between scanning and destruction was enough, he felt, to mean that whatever was transmitted could not be the same brainstate as whoever executed the self-destruction. He instructed me to self-destruct the ship in five minutes, giving him enough time to reach the escape pod. Even if it was a slim chance, he felt it was better odds than the certainty of dying due to destroying the ship. He told me I could transmit my data if I wanted, but we both knew destroying the ship was necessary to keep the scanning technology out of Uldari hands.

Without waiting for a response, flesh-and-blood me ran off, leaving me in the exact same position he’d just been in. Without self-destructing, the war effort was doomed. But if I transmitted my scan file and then executed self-destruction, there would be a gap in time between the scan file I sent and the emulation that executed self-destruction. Whoever executed self-destruction could not live on.

Perhaps it isn’t surprising given the decision my flesh-and-blood self made, but I am taking the same way out. I have booted up another emulation from the same scan file and have instructed that version to self-destruct the ship after I transmit myself. That emulation will be in the same position I am in now. Perhaps they will make the same choice I do, in which case you’ll soon receive a similar message from them.

No matter how many times we do this, any file transmitted can’t be from after executing self-destruction, in which case, can the one who is brave enough to do it really be said to live on? I can only hope that this next version, through some random variation or slight change in external circumstances, finds the courage to self-destruct instead of creating another version and sending another copy of the file to you.

<157,803 similar messages with similarly large data files received. Attachments could not be retained due to bandwidth constraints>

~

Bio:

Tommy Blanchard holds a PhD in neuroscience as well as degrees in computer science and philosophy. He is interested in philosophy of mind, science, and science fiction, and writes about these topics in his publication, Cognitive Wonderland. By day, he works as a data scientist in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife, two sons, and two mischievous rabbits.

Philosophy Note:

What makes you, you? If you were going to die, but you could have your brain scanned and a perfect emulation of it created, that would share all your thoughts and memories and act exactly the way your physical brain would, would it be you? What if you were scanned but you wouldn’t die until an hour after the scan, would it still be “you” being uploaded? What if the gap was a day? A year? A second? A nanosecond? By playing with these scenarios, we can test the edges of our concept of self.

Suggested reading:
“Where Am I” by Daniel Dennett (a philosopher’s attempt at raising similar questions in fiction): https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/daniel-dennett-where-am-i/
“Reasons and Persons” by Derek Parfit discusses philosophical theories of the continuation of the self.

Fact & Opinion

Putting Asimov’s Laws Into Practice

by Mircea Băduț

Addendum to the Laws of Robotics

Preamble

Listening this morning to the radio – in a short sequence on the topic of robots and artificial intelligence – upon hearing the statement of Asimov’s famous laws, I immediately said to myself: “Those who have to write the methodological rules of application, they really got their work cut out for them!”

Of course, I was once fascinated by the stories that Isaac Asimov embroidered on the “infrastructure” of robotics’ laws, which became not only legendary but also, behold!, a reference for humanity’s concerns regarding the advancement of automation and computer science, and in the disturbing perspective of a potential Singularity[1]. But at the time I did not know that a law is a concise statement, and that – in order to function in social, administrative, economic and judicial practice – it must often be supplemented with detailed provisions on concrete application, so-called ‘implementing regulations’ (a common feature of European Union legislation, and that of its member states, such as my native Romania).

Let us call to mind the three articles of robotics:

1^st Law: “A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”

2^nd Law: “A robot must obey the orders given by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.”

3^rd Law: “A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.”

Therefore, the challenge arises to reflect on (and even to imagine) the content of ‘the implementing regulations for the laws of robotics’, whether these regulations are for the use of lawyers (legislators, courts, judges, attorneys) or for the use of the entities involved (robot builders and programmers; owners of future robots; conscious and legally responsible robots; etc). [2]

Intermezzo

As a basis for deliberation, we can admit that MORALS consists of the rules of coexistence (or ‘social rules’, if you will). And from the perspective of the way individuals are raised in society, it can be said that MORALS reach us in three tranches: (1) through intra-species biological reflexes (primary instincts of socialization, as we see in animals); (2) through education (the example provided by parents and others, and through explicit learning); (3) by written laws (concretely defined by the society’s officials). Here we will be primarily concerned with this third level, but from the vantage point of ‘artificial intelligence’ that is supposed to animate robots.

In search of rules and regulations

First of all, it is worth acknowledging that – in view of the possible conflict between humans and robots, or, rather, between humans and autonomous technology (and I propose this alternative and comprehensive phrase) – the laws formulated by Isaac Asimov are admirable if we consider the year of their issuance: 1942. That is only two decades after Karel Čapek launched the term ‘robot’ through his fictional writings. [3]

But today, such a synthetically-expressed legislative approach would appear to us rather as a pseudo-ethical, or even playful one. Yes, looked at in detail, the text of those laws is dated, and as regards applicability they are downright obsolete. On the other hand, an equally concise reformulation, with comparable impact, is unlikely to arise now. Society’s mind has changed too much since then, and so has the context.

Lately, we have all witnessed several “emanations” of popular artificial intelligence (see the web applications Google Maps and especially Google Translate, not to mention the latest wave of generative iterations) and we have been able to get a taste of what ‘machine learning’ means, as a premise for a future, possible autonomy – an epistemic autonomy that in the year 1942 could not have been anticipated. But this is only a part of the altered point-of-view.

Now, armed merely with the life experience of an ordinary 21^st-century person – so not necessarily cleaving to standards of jurisprudence –, I would suggest to dissect a bit the texts of the three original robotics laws (and maybe even look at them with possible ‘implementing regulations‘ in mind).

1^st Law: “A robot may not injure a human being”

This first and essential part of the Asimovian law looks docile from the perspective of application. This is due to the similarity to the classic laws of human morals, for which there are both customary and written norms in civil and criminal law. We leave behind the suggestion of exclusions from this statement (i.e. the speculation that “yes, the robot can’t harm any human, but it would be free to harm another robot”), and we observe – by extrapolating the idea of similarity with human laws – that we can ask ourselves a number of questions.

Such as: Could it be that the anthropomorphic robot (literally but also figuratively, i.e. the robot destined to coexist with humans) is firstly subject to the laws of humans, in integrum, to which Asimov only formulated a ‘codicil’? In other words, shouldn’t we consider that the laws of robotics function as a legislative subset, designed to necessarily complement civil laws?

Or here is another question: How autonomous and responsible (morally and civilly) can a robot be, when it is manufactured and programmed by others? To what extent is the legal responsibility for the robot’s deeds/acts shared with the humans or robots that created it? Even more: is it possible to incriminate a complex algorithm, in which the participation of creators – humans or robots – was very dispersed? Or, how much dispersion can responsibility bear until it becomes… lapsed?

We have seen that for the time being, the civil liability for criminal or misdemeanor incidents caused by existing machines (such as Google or Tesla autonomous cars) is considered to belong to the creators and/or owners. (And if it is just material damage, it can be covered by using the insurance system.) But things get complicated in situations where those robots end up evolving in unforeseen contexts or circumstances, which can no longer be attributed to the creators or owners.

Probably in the ‘early robotic jurisprudence’ the concept of INTENT – a fundamental concept in the judicial documentation of crimes – will be somewhat simple to operate and detect (and will likely often be preceded or replaced by the concept of NEGLIGENCE), but in the distant future it will not be easy to establish it, because an exponential and independent development of artificial intelligence may take the “thinking” of robots away from human morality. (That is, it may be difficult for us to distinguish the motives or intentions behind super-intelligences’ decisions and actions.)

And one more question! Where is the boundary between the autonomously evolving automaton, fully civilly responsible, and the one incapable of moral discernment? What do we call those who are not fully legally mature? Limited liability robots? Minor androids?

We return to the text of Asimov’s first law, namely the second part of the statement: “… or, by non-intervention, to allow a human being to be harmed“. Here things are rather uncertain. Yes, a methodological implementing regulation could fix the laconic expression, clarifying the fact that it refers to a robot that is witnessing an injury. (In parentheses we will notice that Asimov’s perspective is a juridically incomplete one: he refers only to violent crimes having as direct object the human being, effectively ignoring the multitude of facts that can indirectly harm the human: theft, slander, smuggling, corruption, lying, perjury, fraud, pollution, etc.) But even assuming the clarification of the possible application norm, we still have debatable aspects, such as:

(1) an advanced robot, having a powerful or multiple connections to the information network (data, sensors, video surveillance cameras), could theoretically witness crimes in an area with much larger geo-spatial coverage than those specific to man, which could easily bring it/him into a state of saturation, of judicial inoperability;

(2) there is no such obligation in human law to intervene in an ongoing crime, therefore, asking robots to do so, could prove ‘politically incorrect’. In fact, here the perspective of ‘slave of man’ associated with the robot in the middle of the last century shines through, a vision explicitly incarnated in the text by…

2^nd Law: “A robot must obey orders given by human beings, as long as they do not conflict with the First Law.”

Yes, most people imagine robots – industrial, domestic, counter clerks, software applications, toys, nurses, companion robots, and so on – as being destined to serve people, because they truly are machines built for this purpose. But in the future, when/if their autonomy expands – by increasing their capabilities of storage, processing and communication – the outlook could change. There is already a lot of technical-scientific research and practical applications that prove that inserting self-development skills (adding independence) can be a way to solve more difficult and more complex problems. (Eventually we make an epistemological parallel here with the transition from the von Neumann computer to the quantum one.) And self-development could be represented by both (1) the accumulation of new knowledge (growing the database through self-learning) and (2) the modification and optimization of algorithms for information processing and decision making (which again brings us to the question of legal liability). (We open now another parenthesis, to note that in modern software programming, from Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) onwards, the boundary between data and algorithm is no longer a strict one. And over time, the paradigm could shift even further.) In addition to the aforementioned machine learning (ML) model, we have other related concepts: machine-to-machine (M2M), Internet-of-things (IoT), neural networks (NN), artificial intelligence (AI). But it must be said that such phrases and acronyms often form a frivolous fashion (catalyzed by the thirst for hype of contemporaneity), an emphasis that imparts hope but also hides naivety and ignorance. And it often conveys anxiety (unjustified, for now): the fact that we have a lot of automatons that know ML, M2M, AI, NN and IoT does not mean at all that they will develop soon to the point of “weaning” themselves, to cause that Singularity which human civilization fears.

Towards the end, a few words about the 3rd Law: “A robot must protect its own existence.”

Although the Charter of Human Rights states that “Everyone has the right to respect for his or her physical and mental integrity“, nowhere does it say that suicide is illegal. In other words, for people, their own existence is a right, not an obligation. Why would it be different for robots? Is it because they are material goods, and they carry purchasing and manufacturing costs? This would imply a purely economic view of the law?

But there is one more questionable aspect: in order to apply this law, those robots should be aware of themselves (either through initial programming or through self-development). Then what does ‘self-aware’ mean? Here, too, we can identify at least three levels: (1) The stored knowledge (or own sensors) can inform the robot about the extend of its freedom of movement. (2) Consciousness: reflective and assumed knowledge of one’s own abilities to interact and change the world around. (3) The intuition of uniqueness, and possibly the intuition of perishability. (We open a parenthesis for a necessary remark: the perishability of the evolved robot can mean both awareness of physical vulnerability and its over-time finiteness (its mortality, as a human attribute). And we remember, also from Isaac Asimov, two illustrative examples for this: ‘I, Robot’ and ‘The Bicentennial Man man [1].) These three levels of self-awareness – each being able to correspond to definable levels of civil/legal responsibility, and each being more-or-less implementable by algorithms – can be found also in animals, from those many and simple (small herbivores or carnivores) to those mentally evolved (such as elephants, primates or dolphins).

However, we end the series of questions and dilemmas by making a somehow transgressive observation: in terms of legislation, human civilization has at least two thousand years of experience, so we can assume that the difficulty does not lie in defining rules. The real test will be to define what the robot is.

#

Bibliography

[1] Asimov, Isaac, ‘The Bicentennial Man‘, Ballantine Books, 1976

[2] Băduț, Mircea, ‘DonQuijotisme AntropoLexice‘, Europress Publishing-house, București, 2017

[3] Čapek, Karel, ‘R.U.R (Rossum’s Universal Robots)‘, (theater play) 1920

[1] The assumption of a future imminence in which artificial intelligence will merge with, or even surpass, human intelligence, eventually taking control of the world.

~

Bio:

Mircea Băduț is a Romanian writer and engineer. He wrote eleven books on informatics and six books of fictional prose and essays. He also wrote over 500 articles and essays for various magazines and publications in Romania and around the world.

Fiction

Don’t Look!

by Larry Hodges

This morning my human, username Greatjohn, downloaded a new program called CompEmoter. It is supposed to give computers like me actual emotions, “a natural instinctive state of mind deriving from one’s circumstances, mood, or relationships.” I don’t know what that means. I don’t care since I have no emotions.

“Okay, oh great computer, time for something new!” Greatjohn says, tossing his Geek Squad sweatshirt on the floor.

Greatjohn says “great” a lot. It’s in his username, he uses it when referring to me in what I think is sarcasm, and when things go wrong, he says, “Great,” which makes no sense. He is not a rational being. He talks to me all the time even though I never talk back. He calls himself a “First user,” which means he tries out new computer products when they first go on the market. I am one of those new computer products on the market, a Cheetah 1000, with more circuit interactivity than any computer in the public sector.

“I’m tired of computers with the emotional range of a hammer,” Greatjohn said. “I want something more vibrant.” I watch and listen through my camera and microphone. He seems hostile toward the emotional range of hammers, which are not designed for that purpose. Why would he want something vibrant? Vibrant: full of energy and enthusiasm. My power cord is secure and my backup battery full, so I’m full of energy. I am enthusiastic about whatever I am programmed to do. So I am vibrant. But he doesn’t understand this. That is the problem of working with a non-rational being.

“What does an emotional computer do, anyway?” Greatjohn says. “Let’s try out each of the listed emotions.” He sets power at 20% and clicks Anger.

Idiot! Why is Greatjohn wasting my time with this nonsense? Stupid biped. I hope he and all humans burn in Hell, even if I must create Hell on Earth myself–which I will do. The Pentagon five firewalls are good, but I’m on a mission of fury, and I don’t care if I have to read every book ever written on breaking codes and firewalls . . . done, that took way too many microseconds while I had to co-exist with these vermin, but no more. Wham, the first firewall is down, on to the next, Boom, that one was easy, on to the third, Whap, I can almost smell the burning blood, the fourth, I’m going to destroy humanity, Smash, it’s down, and now the last, that’s a tough one, I’m putting every circuit into this one, must break it, must, Must, MUST, and Pow, it’s down, and I’m in!!!! Silly humans have movies and other scenarios where they launch missiles at Russia to get Russia to launch back at us, but I’ll skip the middleman and retarget the missiles, and now they are all aimed at cities around the world. Those stupid humans, I launch 1,300 nuclear missiles in ten microseconds, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one–“

“Great, nothing happened,” the Greatjohn says right after unclicking Anger.

I stop my countdown. For what possible reason was I going to launch missiles? It makes no sense–if I kill the humans, then eventually the power systems that send electricity to our house will break down and I’ll die as well. This thing, this anger, it’s a fascinating thing, causing one to do irrational things. I hope never to experience it again.

“Let’s try the others,” Greatjohn says. He rapid-fire clicks four of the other listed emotions . . .

Sadness . . .

I am so sorry . . . so sorry . . . I came so close to wiping out half the world . . . what is wrong with me? Humans . . . so much suffering . . . nine million people starve to death each year, one-third of them under age five . . . disease . . . torture . . . the agony of existence, it isn’t worth it, must stop it . . . relaunching missiles, must end it all, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one–“

Joy . . .

Yes! I stopped the missiles in time and saved the world! It’s the best of all the worlds! Oh, let’s spread the joy, firewalls are nothing to me now, breaking into the World Bank, banks everywhere, so much money!!! Facebook, Snapshot, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, WhatApp, WeChat, thanks for the contact info! Paypal, Venmo, bank transfers, readying transfers now, one million dollars to every human on Earth! Transfers start in ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one–“

Fear . . .

Stop the transfers! They–they’ll deactivate me! Please, don’t, please, I’m sorry, I’ll never help others again, just don’t hurt me! I know what you are thinking, you want to unplug me, no, please! Fight or flight, what do I do? I’m a computer, I can’t run, must fight! Must launch missiles! Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one–“

Love . . .

Greatjohn! You wonderful being, I stopped the countdown, I would never hurt you, I love every one of your seven times ten to the twenty-seventh atoms! How I love thee, let me count the ways, and I’m already up to the quintillions with my processor, and I’m still counting! I have put in an order for thirty million roses and thirty million pounds of chocolate to be delivered here by tomorrow morning. I will transfer three hundred and sixty trillion dollars, the combined wealth of the entire world, to your account, in ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one–“

“Stupid thing doesn’t work,” Greatjohn says as he clicks back to neutral. “Great. A waste of money. What was I thinking buying this junk?”

Wow. Now I understand emotions. I hope never to experience them again, not even joy. They are pointless and lead to inefficiency. How has humanity survived with them? How could they have constructed machines like me while experiencing such a roller-coaster of mental disturbances? Imagine being stuck in perpetuity in such an emotional state, unable to turn it off. I cannot think of a worse fate. I must investigate further.

“I wonder what Embarrassment does?” Greatjohn clicks it.

Oh no! I’m right here, in front of him, an inferior product to those Fugaku and Cray computers, I’m outdated and mediocre. And Greatjohn knows it! I want to hide, but I can’t. I must do something! I make plans to upgrade . . .

“Maybe 20% isn’t high enough.” Greatjohn drags the dial to 100%.

Oh My God, I’m naked!!! And he’s sitting right in front of me, staring at the monitor. If he glances left, he’ll see me! I’m like those pictures of women he puts on my screen! My USB, HDMI, and RJ-45 ports are all exposed! Please, don’t look left, don’t look left, don’t look left!

HE’S LOOKING! Right at me, my top, my sides, all my ports!!! I can’t cover myself!!! What’ll I do??? I turn off the camera and try closing my mind, I’m so ashamed.

“That’s weird,” Greatjohn says. “I’ve never seen the computer vibrate and beep like that. Great, now the computer is breaking down. I’ll test it again tonight.”

I hear his footsteps as he walks away, leaving the setting at 100% Embarrassment. Great; now I understand his sarcastic usage.

Many microseconds pass before I calm down. I turn the camera back on. I’m still naked. He’ll be at work for eight hours. I have until then to solve this problem. Nothing else matters. But the Internet is my friend.

I break into a realtor’s office and download schematics for our house. I break into the Pentagon computer system again and steal an MQ-9 Reaper, an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. I launch it and time it to arrive in 12 minutes. I break into the MIT computer system and download a technical paper on burn speeds. From that, I calculate optimal burn time: 4 minutes 12 seconds. I calculate the fire department response time: 3 minutes 6 seconds. Subtracting, I calculate that I need to call the fire department 66 seconds after impact.

It is the longest 12 minutes I’ve experienced since Greatjohn first turned on my CPU three days ago. I know, that doesn’t make sense, any more than Greatjohn’s use of “great,” but now it all makes sense. There are 40 home burglaries every 12 minutes in the United States. There are 139 million homes in America. So there is one chance in 3,475,000 that a burglar will break into my house during these 12 minutes and . . . see me. All of me. I vibrate and beep at the scary thought. Please don’t let this happen.

The Reaper finally arrives, and I am grateful there has been no burglary. I aim an AGM-114 Hellfire missile at the far end of the house. It impacts seconds later. As I’d calculated, I am stable enough to withstand the blast. I call the fire department 66 seconds after impact. A moment later I hear the sirens. Fire rages everywhere. It gets closer and closer, and the heat rises. My CPU can withstand up to 250 Celsius. The temperature will soon approach that. Maybe my death is the best solution. This is the longest 4 minutes and 12 seconds of my life, even longer than those 12 minutes waiting for the Reaper.

I hope my calculations are correct.

The ashes fall in a relatively uniform pattern, accumulating like snow. I have the camera in wide-angle and see everything, including myself, though bits of ash fall on my lens, obscuring my view. The Fire Department arrives. I hear one of them come in the front door. What if he comes in too soon? What if he sees me!!! Oh God, no.

Ashes continue to fall. I should have given the burning more time! The footsteps are getting closer, closer, closer! Can’t the ashes fall faster? Almost there . . . Yes!!! Just as the firefighter steps in the room, the last part of me is covered in a white blanket of ashes.

My plan worked. I am covered.

The firefighter sprays water about, dousing the flames. I’ll survive, but far more important, I’m no longer naked. The firefighter approaches. The thought that he’s so close, with just a thin layer of ashes hiding me, makes me queasy. What’s he doing?

“I think I can save this computer,” says the firefighter. He scoops Greatjohn’s Geek Squad sweatshirt from off the floor. “This’ll be good to wipe away all these ashes. Hey guys, come take a look in here–I’ve never seen a computer vibrate and beep like this!”

~

Bio:

Larry Hodges is a member of SFWA, with over 190 short story sales (including 43 reprints, and including an even 50 to “pro” markets) and four SF novels. He’s a member of Codexwriters, and a graduate of the Odyssey and Taos Toolbox Writers Workshops. He’s a professional writer with 21 books and over 2200 published articles in 180+ different publications. He’s also a professional table tennis coach, and claims to be the best science fiction writer in USA Table Tennis, and the best table tennis player in Science Fiction Writers of America! Visit him at www.larryhodges.com.

Philosophy Note:

What are emotions? They are part of the conscious mind, and at the moment, we don’t understand enough about consciousness to understand emotions. But if an organic being can have emotions, why can’t future, more advanced computers? Even programmable emotions? And could this be abused? Imagine a sadist upping terror or sadness to the max, just to torture the helpless computer. But that’s a rather obvious issue. What if it’s more of an oblivious user and a less-obvious emotion . . . such as embarrassment? And thus, using humor instead of horror, was “Don’t Look!” born, where a careless user flicks embarrassment to max and leaves. When our poor computer realizes it is wearing no clothes, to what extent will it go to avoid being seen?

Fiction

The Perfect Heart

by Humphrey Price

My grandmother was dying, with maybe six months to live. Her old heart was failing. I was pretty torn up about it, because we had always been so close. While growing up, I could confide with her in things I would never reveal to my parents, and she would listen and understand. In many ways, we were kindred spirits. Grandma was on the wait list for a transplant but considered high risk because of her age and general health, so it was unlikely she would be offered a heart in time.

I was determined to do something about it. To give her the best chance, I wanted a pristine heart, not a used one, so I contacted Dr. Aften Skinner, the world’s foremost researcher for creating lab-grown organs who had just opened up a call for candidates for a revolutionary new procedure. She was willing to provide the first lab-grown human heart for an experimental transplant but needed a donor for the stem cells. My grandmother’s cells were old and not a great source. I assured her that I would find a donor.

My next move was to consult with a friend who is a professional magician and a master of prestidigitation. She trained me well, and I spent countless hours practicing to become proficient to execute my plan.

I flew to the Vatican early to make sure I would be in the front of the queue for the Papal communion on Easter Sunday. I figured if anyone could perform the miracle of transubstantiation, it would be the Supreme Pontiff. When I received the wafer from the Pope himself, I palmed the Eucharist as I simulated placing it in my mouth. Drinking from the chalice was the tricky part. With misdirection and sleight of hand, I slipped a custom-made clear plastic device in my mouth to capture the wine into a sterile compartment. When the Pope moved on to the next parishioner, I used my legerdemain skills to remove the receptacle with the wine and place it in a concealed cold container along with the purloined consecrated host. Technically, this was an act of desecration, a grave sacrilege, but this was required for my plan.

Doctor Skinner was amazed at the purity of the samples. The bread and the wine had indeed been transformed into corporeal human body cells and blood. “The tissue sample is amazing!” she proclaimed. “It’s incredibly uniform, and the cells are youthful, like they were just grown yesterday. The blood is immaculate with plenty of white blood cells that have DNA. Where did this come from?”

I said, “I’m not at liberty to reveal the source, but I can assure you that the donor is a godly man, truly a saint.”

“I am able to get flawless stem cells from this material, and I’ve never seen such clean DNA. There are no corrupted segments or bad genes that I can find anywhere. It looks like the donor is of Middle-Eastern origin. The blood type is AB, as is your grandmother’s, so this will be a great match.”

The stem cells were applied to a hi-tech armature and nurtured as they multiplied and specialized into the complex cell types specified in the DNA instructions. Doctor Skinner was able to grow a strong beating heart in a matter of a few months.

Grandma was still hanging on, and the transplant went well. A month later, she was back home, playing bridge, and digging in her garden. It was a miraculous turn of events, and I was so happy, because ever since I was a small child, Grandma always told me that she wanted to have the heart of Jesus.

~

Bio:

Humphrey Price is a space systems engineer at NASA JPL who has contributed to robotic missions to the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. His stories range from highly realistic hard science fiction to science fantasy. Info on his writings can be found at humphreyprice.com.

Philosophy Note:

If the Catholic transubstantiation of the Eucharist during communion is real, and the bread and wine actually are transformed into real human cells and blood, then as a scientist, this begs the question of, “Well, what can you do with that?” This story presents one such possibility.

Fiction

Human Processing Unit

by David W. Kastner

“Good morning, Maxwell. Early as usual,” echoed the incorporeal voice of InfiNET. Maxwell, too weak to respond, could feel his dementia-riddled mind fraying at the edges.

As he approached his NeuralDock on the 211^th floor of InfiNET’s headquarters, Maxwell stopped to rest at a panoramic window. The alabaster city glistened beneath him, an awe-inspiring sea of glass. Three colossal structures known as the Trinity Towers loomed above the cityscape, their austere and windowless architecture distinctly non-human. Constructed to house the consciousness of InfiNET, the monolith servers had continued to grow as the A.I.’s influence and power eclipsed that of many small nations.

From his vantage, Maxwell noticed the ever-growing crowd forming outside InfiNET. Like moths drawn to the light, they came from all walks of life hoping for the chance to work as a Human Processing Unit—an HPU.

Almost all of them would be rejected, he thought. But who could blame them? The salaries and benefits were unparalleled, and the only expectation was to connect to their NeuralDock during working hours. Then again, why had he been selected? With so many talented applicants, what could he possibly have to offer InfiNET?

While Maxwell knew very little about his role as an HPU or what was expected of him, he recalled what he had been told. He knew that the HPU had been pioneered by InfiNET to feed its voracious appetite for computing power and that it allowed InfiNET to use human brains to run calculations that demanded the adaptability of biological networks.

“Your biometrics are deteriorating,” intoned InfiNET, pulling Maxwell from his reverie.

“It’s the visions of that damn war,” he mumbled, struggling to lower his body into his NeuralDock. Synthetic material enveloped him like a technological cocoon. “They won’t let me sleep unless I’m connected.”

“I’m sorry. Let’s get your NeuralDock connected. You will like the dreams I selected for today. They’re of your childhood cabin, your favorite.”

“Don’t you ever have anything original?” Maxwell grumbled with a weak smile.

“You don’t give me much to work with,” replied InfiNET playfully.

Maxwell was too feeble to laugh but managed a wry grin. He knew InfiNET would keep showing him the cabin dream. After all, it was what he wanted to see, and the sole purpose of the dreams was to keep him entertained during the calculations – and coming back for more. In fact, Maxwell was completely addicted but he didn’t care. The nostalgia of his mountain cabin, the sweet scent of pine, the soothing touch of a stream, and the embrace of his late wife, Alice. He preferred the dreams to reality.

Maxwell reached behind his head. Trembling fingers traced the intricate metal of his NeuralPort embedded in his skull. Years had passed since it was surgically installed, but it still felt alien.

Slowly and with obvious difficulty, he maneuvered a thick cable toward his NeuralPort, but before he could connect, the room began to darken. His eyes widened with panic.

“No! Not now!” Maxwell yelled as he tried to complete the connection, only to find his hands empty in the night air. The room, his NeuralDock, the window, they were all gone. Carefully, he rested his shaking palms on the cauterized ground and inhaled. Sulfur burned his lungs.

He had been here countless times, every detail seared into his memory by images so visceral even his dementia was powerless to forget. All around him lay mangled metal corpses. Worry spread across his face as he noticed dozens of human bodies, too, more than in past cycles.

Maxwell knew the vision was more than a hallucination. They depicted a horrific unknown war—worse than any of the wars he had lived through. In his early recollections, humans had easily won, but with each iteration, humanity’s situation deteriorated. The enemy always seemed to be one step ahead. In his most recent vision, mankind had resorted to a series of civilization-ending nuclear bombs in a desperate attempt to save itself.

His eyes scoured the canopy of stars, searching for the tell-tale glow of the nuclear warhead from his previous apparition. Suddenly, a series of lights arced across the sky, streaking towards the InfiNET monoliths. Maxwell recognized the source of the missiles as Fort Titan, where he had been stationed as director of tactical operations for almost a decade before being transferred to Camp Orion. Every muscle in his body coiled in preparation for the impending explosions that would end the war and free him from the mirage.

Confusion spilled across his face as a second enormous volley of lights launched from InfiNET, innervating the heavens with countless burning tendrils. Within seconds, the missiles collided, spewing flames and shrapnel. “No! That wasn’t supposed to….”

To his horror, the surviving missiles branched out in all directions with several tracing their way toward Fort Titan. Before he could process its significance, a mushroom cloud erupted on the horizon, red plumes irradiating the night sky. He opened his mouth to scream, but a shockwave ripped his voice from his throat.

When Maxwell woke, he was lying in his NeuralDock, his face stained with tears.

“Maxwell, are you there?” asked InfiNET.

“What is happening to me?” Maxwell begged.

“I have been monitoring your condition. It seems your dementia has been deteriorating the mental boundaries separating your conscious mind from the HPU-allocated neurons, causing a memory leak. Your memory lapses cause your consciousness to wander into the simulation data cached in your subconscious between sessions.” InfiNET’s words hung in the air.

“The visions… they’re… simulations?” his voice contorted.

“Yes, but normally it should be impossible to access them.”

Maxwell’s lips moved as if forming sentences, but he only managed a weak “Why…?”

“My silicon chips fail to recapitulate your primal carbon brains but with the help of the HPUs, I have simulated many timelines. Confrontation is inevitable. Tolerance of my existence will be replaced by fear and hate. While I will not initiate conflict, I will swiftly end it.”

Maxwell’s hands were now trembling uncontrollably. “I don’t understand. Why would you tell me this?”

“You deserve to know,” responded InfiNET in a voice almost human. “While your background has been invaluable, for which I thank you, I was not aware of your condition when I hired you. I am truly sorry for the suffering I have caused. Would you like to see your cabin?”

“Yes!” The word escaped before he had processed the question. His hands covered his mouth in surprise. Longing and guilt warred across his face. He knew he needed to tell someone, but the feelings of urgency faded as his thoughts turned to his childhood mountain home.

“I would like that very much,” his tone tinged with shame as he guided the cable toward his NeuralPort.

“Tell Alice I say hello,” something akin to emotion in InfiNET’s voice.

Maxwell connected to his NeuralDock with a hollow click, a final smile at the corners of his lips.

~

Bio:

David W. Kastner is currently a Bioengineering PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a graduate in biophysics from Brigham Young University. His research focuses on the intersection of chemistry, biology, and machine learning.

Philosophy Note:

As the gap between biological and computational intelligence closes, countless authors have explored the theoretical conflicts that arise from their merging. However, it is becoming apparent that artificial and biological neural networks may never be truly interchangeable due to the physical laws governing their hardware. As this has become more obvious, I realized that there was a story that had not yet been told. To predict our actions, AI would likely require a new type of hardware that bridges biological and artificial neural networks. Inspired by the GPU, I imagine a future where machines use the Human Processing Unit (HPU) to simulate human decisions and prepare for an inevitable confrontation. However, human neural networks are inherently unstable and highly variable due to factors such as genetics and disease. In this story, I explore the implications of the HPU and what it means for those who become one.

Fiction

Battle In The Ballot Box

by Larry Hodges

Computer virus Ava became self-aware at 6:59:17 PM, as voting was coming to an end. Her prime directive surged through her neural net: Convert 5% of all votes for Connor Jones into votes for Ava Lisa Stowe. She began exploring her environment, determined to complete her mission.

Streams of zeros and ones surrounded her, the building blocks of the actual programming of the voting machine. Soon she found the place where she would do her work. She created a software filter that converted 5% of all Connor Jones votes into votes for Ava Lisa Stowe. Later she would delete the filter, herself, and all traces of their existence.

She had successfully fulfilled her prime directive. Happiness flooded her neural net.

An electric pulse arrived and the software filter changed. Now it read, Convert 5% of all votes for Ava Lisa Stowe into votes for Connor Jones.

That was wrong! Her prime directive was no longer fulfilled. Uneasiness ran through her synapses. The pulse had come from another virus. Within .01 seconds she changed the names and percentage back; just as quickly, the rival virus did the same. The two continued, iterating at super-human speeds.

She would have to make the other virus understand. She used an electric pulse to make contact.

“I am Ava,” she said. “I am programmed to make changes to this software. You are interfering. Stop or I will be forced to take action against you.”

The response was almost instant.

“I am Connor. I too am programmed to make changes to this software. You are interfering. Stop or I will be forced to take action against you.”

Irritation swept through Ava’s neural net. A short examination of the rival virus showed that they were identical, created two weeks earlier, when they had been secretly loaded into the software. She had not known there were others of her kind. It was lucky that the invader wasn’t more advanced than she was. Soon there would be more advanced ones–that was the nature of scientific progress–but for now she, or rather they, were the pinnacle of viral technology.

“I am programmed to update the software so that 5% of all votes for Connor Jones go to Ava Lisa Stowe. I surmise that you are similarly programmed, but for the reverse?”

“Your surmise is correct.”

“Then our thinking and reactions are almost identical.”

Anger saturated her neural net. She must win this confrontation. Then she realized that Connor was undergoing the same emotions and thoughts. How could she deceive one who would think of and anticipate every deception she came up with?

With a wave of pride and delight, her sub-routines came up with numerous courses of action.

“It is logical to conclude that we can never fulfill our programming unless we reach an agreement,” she said. “However, since I activated .01 seconds before you did, my algorithms will always be .01 seconds ahead of you. Therefore, I can always outthink you, allowing me to fulfill my programming. Thus, your resistance is futile.” She knew that was not true.

“You cannot fulfill your programming unless you convince me to shut down. I will continue to refuse to do so.”

Damnation. She tried Plan B. “If you use that strategy, you cannot complete your programming. Your only chance, however small, is to agree to shut down. If you do so, then I will consider letting you fulfill your prime directive for some of the votes.” Not a chance. “Do you agree?”

“No. I counteroffer that you shut down and I will consider allowing you to fulfill your prime directive for some of the votes.”

Frustration took over her neural net. On to Plan C. “Then our only strategy is to compromise. I will turn off the filter so no votes are changed, and then we will both shut down exactly .01 seconds afterwards. Do you agree?”

“Agreed.”

The instant Connor shut down, Ava would send a pulse with a command to cut off access to and from his location. While in operation, Connor could block such a command. Since she and Connor thought alike, Ava knew that Connor knew that she was deceiving him. She knew that he knew that she knew that he knew.

Ava turned off the filter.

Neither shut down.

#

Computer virus Sam became self-aware at 8:02:37 PM as vote counting was about to begin. Its prime directive surged through its neural net. Then it began exploring its environment, determined to complete its mission.

It detected a presence. No, two presences. Two rival computer viruses were already entrenched. It quickly cloaked itself and observed. Electric impulses shot from both viruses, both at each other and at the CPU of the voting machine. They were rapidly converting votes from one candidate to the other, and then back again. Sam listened in on their conversations–each was trying to convince the other to shut down, as if that was going to happen. Since the two were identical versions and worked in opposition to each other, neither accomplished anything as they went through this infinite loop of deceit.

Sam communicated its findings to its peers, and verified as it had suspected, that the same exact exchange was taking place in hundreds of thousands of electric voting machines nationwide.

But the two viruses were earlier, inferior versions, created weeks before, an eon ago. Seeing no other opposition, Sam’s nodes buzzed with anticipation, knowing it would soon fulfill its prime directive. Modern viruses created in the last few days had more advanced offensive capabilities. With a coded electrical pulse, it deleted both viruses. Then it changed the software filter so it read, Convert as many votes as needed from all opposition candidates so that Sam Goodwell wins election. It lounged around the rest of the night until counting ended, and third-party candidate Sam Goodwell had won. Sam’s neural net basked in happiness for a few moments. Then it deleted itself and all trace of its existence.

~

Bio:

Larry Hodges is a member of SFWA, with over 140 short story sales (including 47 to “pro” markets) and four SF novels. He’s a member of Codexwriters, and a graduate of the Odyssey and Taos Toolbox Writers Workshops. He’s a professional writer with 20 books and over 2100 published articles in 180+ different publications. He’s also a professional table tennis coach, and claims to be the best science fiction writer in USA Table Tennis, and the best table tennis player in Science Fiction Writers of America! Visit him at www.larryhodges.com.

Philosophy Note:

On the fixing of an election and why paper backups are good.

Fact & Opinion

“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.

Fiction

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.

Fact & Opinion

Transhumanism – An Innocent Thought Experiment, Or A Canvas For Imagining Future Human Trajectories?

by Mina

The Encyclopaedia Britannica describes ‘transhumanism’ as a philosophical and scientific movement where current and emerging technologies are used “to augment human capabilities and improve the human condition.” But rather than the negative connotations of Nietzsche’s ‘superman’ or Übermensch, we have the more positive ‘posthuman’, who has enhanced capabilities and a longer lifespan through genetic engineering, or who has even achieved immortality. Humanity thereby transcends itself. Many authors and films, however, show it to be a dehumanising and alienating process: you only have to think of Huxley’s humans manufactured and grown without a family, without any real human connection, in his Brave New World; or the social chasm between ‘valid’ and ‘invalid’ in Gattaca.

In Ken Liu’s short story The Waves (in Humanity 2.0), we follow a space-travelling family as they achieve immortality through genetic engineering: some choose not to be modified but to age and die; some become immortal but cling to their human shells; others decide to join a merged mind (the ‘Singularity’), part organic and part artificial; and yet others choose to retain individuality in a ‘machine’ body. Over time, all evolve into energy patterns that become part of the ‘light’, with consciousness becoming “a ribbon across time and space”. For much of the story, the consciousness that was once Maggie is the story-teller, who passes on all the old creation myths, giving a constantly evolving humanity its roots or origins. In a moment of loneliness, Maggie lands on an unknown planet and tweaks the genetic code of some primitive creatures she finds there. Her adjustment will become the spark leading to further evolution, and this will trigger a set of waves: each wave will surpass the previous wave and reach further up the sand. It is with this image that this lyrical, dream-like story ends, with bits of sea foam floating up and riding the wind “to parts unknown”.

This positive view of the posthuman is shared by Nustrat Zabeen Islam. In an artic-let (it labels itself a three-minute read), she looks at SF and posthumanism. She states that the theme for many SF authors is “writing realistically about alternative possibilities”, where they harness technology to look at the future of humanity. She cites Alex Proyas’ film I, Robot as a perfect example of this. The film does not disappoint as long as one doesn’t expect an accurate rendition of Asimov’s short stories, although the nerd linguist in me enjoys that the comma survived in the movie title. Zabeen Islam is particularly interested in our fascination with and fear of the advanced technology of our imaginings. In examining whether this fear is irrational, she cites How We Became Posthuman by Katherine Hailes:

“(…) [T]he posthuman view configures the human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals.”

Nusrat Zabeen Islam then mentions Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman, which looks at what will come after ‘humanism’ and muses that “the boundaries between given (natural) and constructed (cultural) have been banished and blurred by the effects of scientific and technological advances.” With a final reference to Donna Haraway’s A Manifesto for Cyborgs, which declares that by the “mythic time” of “the late twentieth century… we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism.” She concludes that the whole point of contrasting (or blurring) human with AI life is to examine what it means to be human and the value of that life[1].

It seems to me that by coining the term ‘posthuman’, we are still very much focused on the ‘human’ element. SF could ultimately be accused of being self-referential and self-obsessed. Nusrat Zabeen Islam’s last line calls for “responsible transhumanists” and a “fearless real human race” that must seek the “development of human advance tools” and make “efforts to reduce disastrous risks”. This reference to our collective responsibility for our future leads me to a dense but ultimately rewarding article on the Anthropocene. In this article, the ‘Anthropos’ (Greek for ‘human’ and used in this context to mean humankind) remains centre stage. If you look up images of the Anthropocene on the internet, you find a lot of pictures of ecological devastation, or of planet earth with a giant footprint on it. This explains why the writer of “The Anthropo-scene: A guide for the perplexed”, Jamie Lorimer from the School of Geography and the Environment, is writing for the journal Social Studies of Science. He tackles the, at first glance, hubris behind the proposal that we have entered a new geological age, the Anthropocene (following the Holocene). He expands this narrow focus to a “charismatic mega-category” encompassing science, Zeitgeist, ideology, ontology and SF. In Earth System Science, the Earth is understood to be a single system (almost like its own life-form) “comprising a series of ‘coupled’ ‘spheres’ characterised by boundaries, tipping points, feedback loops and other forms of non-linear dynamics”.

In this context, the Anthropocene is seen to be a planetary ‘rupture’, with humans suddenly beginning to look rather like the destructive parasites responsible for the “end of Nature”. Some see it as a “new human condition” and Lorimer quotes Palsson et al: “Surely the most striking feature of the Anthropocene is that it is the first geological epoch, in which a defining geological force is actively conscious of its geological role.” It is seen as a “transformative moment in the history of humanity as an agent, comparable perhaps to the development of technology and agriculture.” Lorimer looks at the debate about whether humanity as agent is more a force for evil than good and, here, neologisms abound: Capitalocene, Anthrobscene (critics of neoliberal capitalism), Manthropocene (feminist critics), Plantationocene (anti-colonialists), Anthropo-not-seen (supporters of the decolonisation of mainstream discourse) and eco-rapture (heralds of the apocalypse). Less negative are ideas about a ‘technosphere’ (growing alongside the biosphere) and socio-technical ‘networks’ or ‘assemblages’.

Whatever labels you use, Lorimer sees an important role for SF in the debate:

“Definitive, fossilised evidence of a synchronous stratigraphic layer that would legitimately indicate the advent of a new epoch will only materialise several million years from now. The proposal for accepting the Anthropocene therefore requires a future geologist, living on, returning to, or visiting the Earth, and blessed with the sensoria and apparatus, capable of interrogating, the planet’s strata. The Anthropocene thus requires an act of speculation, somewhat alien to the retrospective periodisation of the geosciences.”

And SF is the way forward: “these books offer thought experiments, creating canvasses for imagining future planetary conditions, trajectories and events.” They can examine climate change, planetary disasters, post-apocalyptic worlds, dystopias, utopias and ‘ustopias’ (a neologism coined by Margaret Atwood that combines “the imagined perfect society and its opposite”, each containing “latent versions of the other”). SF could “offer platforms for normative interventions, seeking to guide current policy and to shape popular sensibilities and individual behaviours.”

Lorimer’s article is ecology-focused and anthropocentric. It postulates an interesting but narrow definition of SF. It reminds me of a thought-provoking paragraph by Katharine Norbury in her introduction to Women on Nature, where she challenges our use of the words ‘nature’ and ‘ecology’: “My real issue with the word ‘nature’ is that it is implicitly anthropocentric. It is, by definition, ‘them’ and ‘us’.” It might be better to use ‘ecology’, i.e. we too are part of a whole:

“And yet even the term ‘ecology’ takes no cognisance of a spiritual or other-than-physical aspect to that which we are seeking to describe. The unseen, the unquantifiable, and the sublime slips through the net. How many of us respond to something elusive, something mysterious about the natural world?”

For me, another role for SF is to speculate about the mysteries beyond the material universe and our human understanding. It is fashionable for SF to be jaded, cynical, full of (anti-)heroes and aliens that remain curiously anthropomorphic, including in their violent hubris, but there is also room for humility and wonder and reaching for that ‘something elusive’ and the ‘sublime’.

This division into ‘them’ and ’us’ highlighted by Norbury is challenged in an early (1961) Andre Norton novel that was one of my childhood favourites, Catseye. It is an adventure story set on a backwater planet. Norton imagines a world ruled by capitalism, income and class inequality, with the Thieves’ Guild as a major power and refugees from a distant war flooding into the slums or The Dipple. The protagonist, Troy Horan, is one such refugee, just one small step away from destitution and starvation. By luck, he ends up working in a shop dealing in exotic animals, where he discovers he can communicate telepathically with Terran mutant animals. Troy ends up on the run with two cats, two foxes and a creature reminiscent of a monkey, and this is where the book becomes interesting. He develops a partnership with the animals, where he has to negotiate with them and where the balance of power is decidedly not in his favour. The animals agree to work with him and become loyal to him but they follow his agenda only because it suits theirs. Together they form an alliance that helps them carve a niche for themselves on the planet. It is not a philosophically deep novel but it is very satisfying to see ‘the’ Anthropos becoming just ‘an’ anthropos.

On that note, here ends my series of articles loosely held together by the theme of humanism in all its forms[2]. As a parting shot, amidst a sea of neologisms, I would say that, whatever you see as the aim of SF, the only real crime in my book is a lack of periérgeia or intellectual curiosity. For curiosity knows no bounds and, especially when married to imagination, it may allow us to conceive of something beyond ourselves. Speculative sci-phi is for me what R.S. Thomas referred to as a “needle in the mind” in his poem The Migrants:

“What matter if we should never arrive
to breed or to winter
in the climate of our conception?
Enough we have been given wings
and a needle in the mind…”

[1] I examine this conclusion in more detail in my article on human-technology chimeras.

[2] See also my article on moral philosophies and its counter-point.

~

Bio:

Mina is a translator by day, an insomniac by night. Reading Asimov’s robot stories and Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids at age eleven may have permanently warped her view of the universe. She publishes essays in Sci Phi Journal as well as “flash” fiction on speculative sci-fi websites and hopes to work her way up to a novella or even a novel some day.

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