Planet of Fear

Planet of Fear

By Paul J. McAuley

They sweapt through the building. Dormitories. A mess hall. Offices. Stores. Two generators purring in a shack constructed from concrete blocks and corrugated iron. An assay lab and a small clinic. A cold store with three bodies wrapped in black plastic sheeting. One had been badly mangled in some accident; the other two looked like suicides – a ligature of electrical cable around the neck, slashed wrists. Five more dead men were sprawled behind one of the dormitory huts, hands bound, chests torn by what appeared to be gunshot wounds, bullet holes in the hut’s plank wall. Another baby sprawled at the foot of the radio mast. His neck was broken and Katya suggested that he had fallen while climbing.

“Climbing to escape from monsters, like your patient on the crane?” Captain Chernov said. “Or perhaps trying to escape from Americans who shot his friends.”

“Perhaps they all went stir crazy in this damn fog,” the chief petty officer said. “There was a quarrel. It got out of hand…”

“Something drove them mad, perhaps,” Captain Chernov said thoughtfully.

The prefab buildings were empty, although there were signs that people had left with some haste. Plates of food rotting on tables in the mess, papers scattered on the floor of office, a record rotating on a gramophone in one of the dormitory huts, making an eerie scratching click until Captain Chernov lifted the needle. The gun locker was open and empty, but apart from the five men who had been lined up and shot there was no sign of any struggle, no blood spray, no bullet holes anywhere else. And no sign of the sixteen men still unaccounted for.

“They ran off, or they were taken prisoner,” Captain Chernov said. “If they ran off, we will find tthe. If they weere taken prisoner, we will find the Americans who did it.”

Denizens of the Planet of Fear. Photo by Elena

“With respect, I don’t think this was anything to do with Americans,” Katya said.

“The so-called libertarians took hostages for ransom when they attacked our trawlers ad merchant ships,” Captain Chernov said. “And executed them when no ransom was paid. What happened here, perhaps, was caused by some kind of psychological war weapon. A gas, a volatile drug. After the men were driven mad by it, the Americans walked in, shot the few still able to resist, and took the rest prisoner. I see you do not like the story, Doctor. Well, if you have a better idea about what happened here, I should like to hear it.”

“I don’t have enough evidence to form a hypothesis,” Katya said, and realised that it sounded stiff and priggish and defensive.

The captain smiled. He was having fun with her. “You hope to find monsters. You hope for fame. Very well. Let’s go back for them.”

Katya trailed after the party of seamen as Captain Chernov and the chief petty officer led them along the quayside, past pyramidal heaps or ore, past a row of articulated dump trucks: powerful machines with six-wheel drive and rugged tires as tall as a person. They moved slowly and cautiously through the fog, checking under the trucks, checking shipping containers and stacks of empty crates. Arkadi Sarantsev hung back with Katya, asking her is she really thought monsters had attacked the station, if they were right now feeding on men they had killed.

“That’s what the captain thinks I think,” Katya said.

“Do you think he is wrong, about something driving the men crazy?”

“If I had to guess, I’d say it was something to do with the isolation,” Katya said. “That, and the fog.”

“But not, you think, Americans,” Arkadi Sarantsev said.

He had a nice smile and a cool attitude, had knotted a red handkerchief at the throat of his telnyashka shirt. He plucked a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his jacket and offered it to Katya; when she refused with a shake of her head, he put the pack to his lips, plucked out a cigarette, and lit it with a heavy petrol lighter fashioned from a .50 cal cartridge case.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think that your captain was looking for an excuse to take on the American research ship,” she said.

“The captain’s father was one of the pioneer settlers,” Arkadi said. “We all resent the capitalists, with their nuclear rockets and supercomputers and frontier mentality, but the pioneer families especially resent them. As far as the captain is concerned, their offer of help is a personal insult.”

Silence Like Diamonds

Silence Like Diamonds

By John Barnes (excerpt)

While I read NitCo’s report about the drone collision, the firefighters from Lightning Fast arrived. As soon as Markus was satisfied with their perimeter security, and that they knew enough to stay out of flowerbeds, he came down.

“Some burning debris landed in the yellowwood and the burr oak on the south side of the house, and some smoke was rising from that bed of soaproot. The house was flooding it with the drip irrigator, but whatever was burning was probably off the ground. I had the firefighters spray all up and down those trees, and a lot of junk fell out. I used your garden hose to spritz that soaproot bed myself, since it wouldn’t be good if they watered a fire hose?”

“My garden thanks you.”

“It’s gorgeous; I’d hate to see a place like that messed up.” Markus loved gardening like I did. “So what happened?”

“The opposition dove the griffon that carried most of Arcata’s traffic toward my roof and collided a Roverino with it,”

“Explain the Griffon. Little bitty words. I’m just a big lug that beats people up?”

“Oh, right, fish for compliments.”

“Roverinos are common as crows around a tech town. I’ve never seen a Griffon.”

Silence Like Diamonds. Photo by Elena

“Normally you wouldn’t. It’s a hydrogen-inflated drone, shaped like an airplane, transparent plastic on top, solar-powered plastic underneath. Maybe five meters long with a twelve-meter wingspan. The Griffon circles around over town, 35,000 meters up. It’s a wirless broadband relay. Normally during the day it stores up power and rises a few kilometers as the sun warms the hydrogen; at night it slowly circles downward. To ascend fast, like when they first go up, they inflate auxiliary bladders. To descend fast, like for a solar flare or a government shutdown, they pack hydrogen back into their tanks and collapse to the size of a desk chair.”

“Which is what this one did, about ten minutes before it went bang over my house – it sucked its wings and stabilizers back into its body, reformed into a raindrop shape, and was diving at 700 km/hr by the time it arrived. If it had hit the roof, it would have penetrated, its hydrogen tanks would have burst and there’d have been enough explosion and fire to gut the house.”

“But in the last thirty meteres, it inflated all its bladders to the max. Air resistance had ripped it into sheets of loose plastic when that little Roverino’s red-hot microjet came blasting through that cloud of hydrogen. So instead of taking the roof off and the walls down, it was just loud enough to give me the mother of all headaches and scare the hell out of me. So not only did they penetrate through what’s supposed to be a high-security backdoor, they did it almost instantly, just to give me a warning shot.”

“That’s quite a warning. Do we know who’s trying to scare you?”

“Not yet.”

“How long before it blew up did it start down?”

I stared at Markus. “No more jokes about being a big bomb lug. That question was brilliant.” I tapped the wall with my finger. “Report on Griffin hijacking here. US letter size.” A rectangle of light appeared. I tapped next to it. “15 cm, Yazzy live.” A smaller squareshowed Yazzy’s face.

“Yip, I’m glad you’re OK. Markus, what have -”

I asked, “What was the exact time when you accepted the deal with NitCO?”

My sister likes to socialize but she recognizes, she glanced down at her display and looked for a moment.” K, contract was finalized 15:54:12 universal -”

“Well, at 15:54:18, six seconds later, something took over that Griffon and sent it into an emergency-protocol drop at my roof. Six seconds after you signed that contract. We’re hacked. We are so hacked. But on it, whoever the opposition is, they’re listening to us this second.”

Yazzy was nodding slowly. “You’re right, or at least we’re probably hacked and NitCo is definitely hacked. Six seconds afther they sign us a contractor, our main subcontractor asset gets a massive, scary warning shot.”

Capitalism in the 22nd Century of A.I.R.

Capitalism in the 22nd Century of A.I.R.

By Geoff Ryman (excerpt)

Remember the morning it snowed? Snowed in Belém do Para? I think we were l3. You can round and round inside our great apartment, all the French doors open. You blew out frosty breath, your eyes sparkling. “It’ beautiful!” you said.

“It’s cold!” I said.

You made me climb down all those 24 floors out into the Praça and you got me throwing handfuls of snow to watch it fall again. Snow was laced like popcorn on the branches of the giant mango trees. As if A Reina, the Queen, had possessed not a person but the whole square. Then I saw one of the suneaters, naked, dead, startling, and you pulled me away, your face such a mix of sadness, concern – and happiness, still glowing in your checks. “They’re beautiful alive,” you said to me. “But they do nothing.” Your face was also hard.

Your face was like that again on the morning we left – smiling, ceramic. It’s a hard world, this Brasil, this Earth. We know that in our bones. We know that from our father.

The sun came out at 6.15 as always, and our beautiful stained glass doors cast pastel rectangles of light on the mahogany floors. I walked out onto the L-shaped balcony that ran all around our high-rise rooms and stared down, at the row of old shops streaked black, at the opera-house replica of La Scala, at the art-nouveau synagogue blue and white like Wedgewood china. I was frantic and unmoving at the same time those cattle-prods of information kept my mind jumping.

Capitalist future of the mankind. Photo by Elena

“I’m ready,” you said. I’d packed nothing. “O, Crisfushka, here let me help you.” You asked what next; I tried to answer; you folded slowly, neatly. The jewels, the player, a piece of Amazon bark, and a necklace that the dead had made fro nuts and feathers. I snatched up a piece of Macumba lace (oh, those men dancing all in lace!) and bobbins to make more of it. And from the kitchen, a bottle of cupuaçu extract, to make ice cream. You laughed and clapped your hands. “Yes of course. We will even have cows there. We’re carrying them inside us.”

I looked mournfully at our book shelves. I wanted children on that new world to have seen books, so I grabbed hold of two slim volumes – a Clarice Lispector and Dom Cassmuro. Mr Misery – that’s me. You of course are Donatella. And at the last moment I slipped in that Brasileiro flag. Ordem et progresso.

“Perfect, darling! Now let’s run!” you said. You thought we were choosing.

And then another latch: receipts for all that surgery. A full accounting of all expenses and a cartoon kiss in thanks.

The moment you heard about the Voyage, you were eager to JUST DO IT. We joined the

Co-op, got the secret codes, and concentrated on the fun like we were living in a game.

Funny little secret surgeons slipped into our high-rise with boxes that breathed dry ice and what looked like mobile dentist chairs. They retrovirused our genes. We went purple from Rhodopsin. I had a tickle in my ovaries. Then more security bubbles confirmed that we were now Rhodopsin, radiation-hardened and low-oxygen breathing. Our mitochondria were full of DNA for Holsten cattle. Don’t get stung by any bees: the trigger for gene expression is an enzyme from bees.

“We’ll become half-woman half-cow,” you said, making even that sound fun.

We let them do that.

Programming Languages

Programming Languages

Much has changed in the computer era and subsequent post-1990s Internet epoch. For example, surveys show that online surfing takes up a significant portion of people’s leisure time. Clearly, the World Wide Web has revolutionized the way individuals and societies communicate, interact and collaborate.

Linguistically speaking, jargon, dialect and language dynamics underline the evolution of the phonetic environment. For instance, neologisms arise as if documenting the changes taking place. So new words and expressions appear, such as the Net, cyberspace, cyberworld, cyberreality, cyberpsychology, cyberneuroscience and so on…

Futuristic Toronto. A futuristic scene. Image: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Also, in addition to digital media and social networking Websites, computers introduced virtual or online gaming communities, or MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role playing games). Perhaps the best known of these is World of Warcraft, featuring a commercial with American legendary figure, martial arts specialist and actor, Chuck Norris.

Ada was the first programming language and was named after the daughter of the inventor credited with laying the foundations to the process. Basic, likewise one of the early languages is a distant precursor to Visual Basic, a modern code allowing for photorealistic graphic design. Alternatively, HTML refers to the commands used on the Internet in Webpage and Website creation and display. Additionally, C++, JAVA, Delfi, Fortran fail to even begin to complete the list of known programming languages. What’s more, Python (likewise used in CGI [computer generated imagery], animation, modeling, rendering and digital art production), and other applications for graphics (Windows and other platforms based languages and/or programs allowing building of animations, such as flashing stars in the sky, fireworks and bewegende gestalt (moving figures or animated shapes).

Even though Computer Generated Imagery transformed the world of visual arts, displays cover a distinct range: from conventional drawing methods to ultramodern 3D, graphic, and Web design, including photo art. Image: © Image: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Finally, Alice is educational software teaching programming using 3D animation. Cartoons, and especially animations, were literally rendered phenomenal with scientific progress. Alternatively, animation, modeling and rendering software often offers Python scripts and coding. How can one tell apart an animated video made through coding line by line, from one with traditional sequential drawing, and using the most technologically advanced, recently updated version of a program or application?

Copyright © 2011 Image: © ElenaB. All rights reserved.

Safe Bets for the Risk-Averse

Safe Bets for the Risk-Averse

Certificates of deposit aren’t the only alternative for conservative investors

You can always stash your money in the proverbial mattress, where it will not earn any interest at all. But for millions of risk-averse investors, certificates of deposit, or CDs, have seemed a preferable choice. Conservative by nature, CD investors tend to be attracted by the promise that they can’t lose their principal, which is covered by federal deposit insurance, to $100,000 per account.

Until interest rates tumbled, CDs were a respectable way to go. Yields, while never robust, were at least decent by conservative standards. However, the average yields on six-months CDs, among the most popular with individual investors, had fallen to 2.81 percent, about par with the then inflation rate. Once taxes were taken, the return was a negative number. Rates have since climbed up a bit.

CDs are not, however, the only alternative for the risk-averse. Of course, other investments carry additional risks. For example, even when sold by banks, mutual funds don’t carry federal deposit insurance. And the values of stocks and bonds rise and fall with market conditions, which can cut into your investment principal. If interest rates rise just one percentage point in a year, the price of a 30-year bond will fall more than 11 percent. On a bond with a 7 percent coupon, an investor’s annual return would be a negative 4 percent.

New York, Grand Terminal. Photo by Elena

If you stick with CDs, you may be able to find better yields by looking beyond your local bank. Otherwise, here’s a quick look at some things to consider before rolling over another CD.

Short-term Bond Funds: The net asset value of the shares varies with the underlying value of the bonds, and the total return falls if interest rates rise. But the variation is much smaller than with longer-term bonds.

Tax-exempt securities: If the yield on a short-term municipal bond fund is 4 percent, it’s equivalent to a taxable yield of 6.25 percent for an investor in the 36 percent tax bracket. Again, the shorter the term, the lower the risk.

Conservative Stock Funds: Funds that invest in utilities are generally stable and pay decent dividends. Yield-conscious investors tend to like them. In addition, several fund companies offer asset-allocation funds, in which the fund manager decides how much of the portfolio to put into stocks, bonds, cash, and other investments. Another choice: equity-income funds, which invest in stocks that pay chunky dividends.

Money Market Mutual Funds: Money funds sometimes yield even less than six-month CDs, but they’re completely liquid.