Trapping the Pleistocene

Trapping the Pleistocene

By James Sarafin (excerpt)

He could see the lighted tower, looming ever larger through occasional gaps in the trees, well before he arrived. An example of the newest footprint-reducing architecture, the tower was built like a giant morel: a tall, narrow cap with an irregular, ridged surface overhanging a smaller, round base. No, not a morel; if that tower was a mushroom, it had to be one of the poisonous varieties. From a hub level in the tower cap, the thin lines of skyways spread out in various directions. Like a giant spiderweb.

When he saw the government’s sign at the compound’s surface entrance, his foot went to the brake pedal and his hands twitched, wanting to turn the wheel back toward home. But he followed the entrance ramp into the compound. He drove through parklands where elk and camels grazed, over a creek, and the length of a small lake where swans swam in pairs, to arrive at a small paved area before a tower entrance. It held no other vehicles but looked as good as anyplace to park the truck, so he did. The outside of the tower base presented a rough, ridged surface with no windows or seams. He pulled his wool cap down over his forehead and raised his windows or seams. He pulled his wool cap down over his forehead and raised his hands to push open a door. He stumbled slightly when his hands met no resistance and he felt a puff of air as he passed through the non-existent door into the building. The lobby’s outer wall appeared to be made entirely of one-way glass that allowed a view of the compound outside. Or maybe he was only looking at video screens. It probably made no difference to the tower-dwellers.

The floor was covered with some mutated form of living grass that lay in a short, dense mat like a golf green. He gouged its surface with his boot-toe and watched it begin repairing itself. Imagine that crap growing over your foot, eh, Katie? From a wall of the tower’s core a waterfall trickled down and formed a stream that meandered across the floor to his left. A few of the dark-robed tower-dwellers strolled and loitered, communing with their view of the outdoors. Others scurried in or out of the elevators. They paid him no mind.

Trapping the Pleistocene. Photo by Elena

Jack had walked through the lobby, halfway around the tower’s core, when a voice growled his name from behind him. He turned and saw what looked like a cross between an orangutan and a human woman. She wore no clothing and was covered with straw-blonde hair, long but thin and with no underfur. Her face was bare ahead of her ears and heavily made-up. Her arms hung nearly to her knees and her breasts halfway to her waist; the breasts swung across her torso as she moved.

“Mr. Morgan, the director’s office is this way.” She smiled open-mouthed, displaying ivory canines. She seemed amused by his reaction.

“How do you know who I am?”

“We were expecting you. You’re not connected, so you’re the anomaly here.”

She turned and knuckle-walked to the nearest lift, wiggling her hips as she went. He moved to follow and almost fell on his face as a weight dragged on his right leg, the one with the bad knee. Some kind of cleaner robot had wheeled itself across the floor and was licking the half-dried mud off his boot. He licked to the hub floor, the one with the transit stations, where the skyways spread out like the spokes of a wheel. Caught in the spiderweb.

Machine Learning

Machine Learning

by Nancy Kress (excerpt)

Building 18 was devoted to machine learning. Ethan’s research partner, Jamie Peregoy, stood in their lab, welcoming this afternoon’s test subject, Cassie McAvoy. The little girl came with her mother every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday after school. Ethan took his place at the display console.

That end of the lab was filled with desks, computers, and messy folders of printouts. The other end held child-sized equipment: a musical keyboard, a video-game console, tables and chairs, blocks, and puzzles. The back wall was painted a supposedly cheerful yellow that Ethan fund garish. In the center, like a sentry in no-man’s land, stood a table with coffee and cookies.

“The problem with machine learning isn’t intelligence,” Jamie always said to visitors.” It’s defining intelligence. Is it intelligence to play superb chess, crunch numbers, create algorithms, carry on a conversation indistinguishable from a human gabfest? No. Turing was wrong. True intelligence requires the ability to learn for oneself, tackling new tasks you haven’t done before, and that requires emotion, and we learn best when emotional arousal is high. Can our Mape do that? No, she cannot.”

If visitors tried to inject something here, they were out of luck. Jamie would go into full-lecture mode, discoursing on the role of the hippocampus in memory retention, on how frontal-lobe injuries taught us that too little emotion, no how arousal levels were a better decision making as deeply as too much emotion, on how arousal levels were a better predictor of learning retention than whether the learning was positive or negative. Once Jamie got going, he was as unstoppable as a star running back, which was what he resembled. Young, brilliant, and charismatic, he practically glittered with energy and enthusiasm. Ethan went through periods where he warmed himself as Jamie’ inner fire, and other periods where he avoided Jamie for days at a time.

Machine Learning. Photo by Elena

MAIP, the MultiFuture Research Artificial Intelligence Program based in the company’s private cloud, could not play chess, could not feel emotion, and could only learn within defined parameters. Ethan, whose field was the analysis of how machine learning algorithms performed, believed that true AI was decades off, if ever. Did Jamie believe that? Hard to tell. When he spoke their program’s name, Ethan could hear that to Jamie it was a name, not an acronym. He had given MAIP a female voice. “Someday,” Jamie said, “she’ll smarter than we are.” Ethan had not asked Jamie to define “someday.”

The immediate, more modest goal was for MAIP to learn what others felt, so that MAIP could better assist their learning.

“Hello, Cassie, Mrs. McAvoy,” Jamie said, with one of his blinding smiles. Cassie, a nine-year-old in overalls and a t-shirt printed with kittens, smiled back. She was a prim little girl, eager to please adults. Well-mannered, straight A’s, teacher’s pet. “Never any trouble at home,” her mother had said, with pride. Ethan guessed she was not popular with other kids. But she was a valuable research subject, because MAIP had to learn to distinguish between genuine human emotions and “social pretense” – feeling expressed because convention expected it. When Cassie said, “I like you,” did she mean it?

“Ready for the minuet, Cassie?” Jamie asked.

“Yes.”

“Then let’s get started! Here’s your magic bracelet, princess!” He slipped it onto her thin wrist. Mrs. McAvoy took a chair at the back of the lab. Cassie walked to the keyboard and began to play Bach’s “Minuet in G,” the left-hand part of the arrangement simplified for beginners. Jamie moved behind her, where she could not see him. Ethan studied MAIP’s displays.

Sensors in Cassie’s bracelet measured her physiological responses: heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, skin conductance, and temperature. Tiny cameras captured her facial-muscle movement and eye saccades. They keyboard was wired to register the pressure of her fingers. When she finished the minuet, MAIP said, “That was good! But let’s talk about the way you arch your hands, okay, Cassie?” Voice analyzers measured Cassie’s responses: voice quality, timing, pitch. MAIP used the data to adjust the lesson: slowing down her instruction when Cassie seemed too frustrated, increasing the difficulty of what MAIP asked for when the child showed interest.

They moved on, teacher and pupil, to Bach’s “Polonaise in D.” Cassie didn’t know this piece as well. MAIP was responsive and patient, tailoring her comments to Cassie’s emotional data.

Inhuman Garbage

Inhuman Garbage

By Kristie Kathryn Rusch (excerpt)

Getting the crime scene unit to a warehouse outside of the dome took more work than Ethan Broduer liked to do. Fortunately, he was a deputy coroner, which meant he couldn’t control the crime scene unit. Someone with more seniority had to handle requisitioning the right vehicle from the Police Department yards outside the dome, and making certain the team had the right equipment.

Broduer came to the warehouse via train. The ride was only five minutes long, but it made him nervous.

He was born inside the dome, and he hated leaving it for any reason at all, especially for a reason involving work. So much of his work had to do with temperature and conditions, and if the body had been in an airless environment at all, it had an impact on every aspect of his job.

He war relieved when he arrived at warehouse and learned that the body had never gone outside of an Earth Normal environment. However, he was annoyed to see that he would be working with Noelle DeRicci.

She was notoriously difficult and demanding, and often asked coroners to redo something or double-check their findings. She’d caught him in several mistakes, which he found embarrassing.

Then she had had the gall to tell him that he should probably double-check all of his work, considering its shoddy quality.

Romantic Interlude. Photo by Elena

She stood next to a crate, the only one of thousands that was open. She was rumpled – she was always rumpled – and her curly black hair looked messier than usual.

When she saw him approach, she glared at him.

“Or, lucky me,” she said.

Broduer bit back a response. He’d been recording everything since he got off the train inside the warehouse’s private platform, and he didn’t want to show any animosity toward DeRicci on anything that might go to court.

“Just show me the body and I’ll get to work,” he said.

She raised her eyebrows at the word “work,” and she didn’t have to add anything to convey her meaning. She didn’t think Broduer worked at all.

“My biggest priority at the moment is an identification,” DeRicci said.

And his biggest priority was to do this investigation right. But he didn’t say that. Instead he looked at the dozen of crates spread out before him.

“Which one am I dealing with?” he asked, pleased that he could sound so calm in the face of her rudeness.

She placed a hand on the crate behind her. We was pleased to see that she wore gloves. He had worked with her partner Rayvon Lake before, and Lake had to be reminded to follow any kind of procedure.

But Broduer didn’t see Lake anywhere.

“Have you had cases involving the waste crates before?” DeRicci asked Broduer.

“No,” he said, not adding that he tried to pass anything outside the dome ont anyone else, “but I’ve heard about cases involving them. I guess it’s not that uncommon.”

“Hmm,” she said looking toward a room at the far end of the large warehouse. “And here I thought they were.”

Broduer was going to argue his point when he realized that DeRicci wan’t talking to him now. She was arguing with someone she had already spoken to.

“Can you get me information on that?” DeRicci asked Broduer.

He hated it when detectives wanted him to do their work for them. “It’s in the records.”

DeRicci made a low, growly sound, like he had irritaed her beyond measure.

So he decided to tewak her a bit more. “Just search for warehouses and recycling and crates -”

“I know,” she said. “I was hoping your office already had statistics.”

“I’m sure we do, Detective,” he said, moving past her, “but you want me to figure out what killed this poor creature, right? Not dig into old cases.”

“I think the old cases might be relevant,” she said.

He shrugged. He didn’t care what was or wasn’t relevant to her investigation. His priority was dealing with this body.

“Excuse me,” he said, and slipped on his favorite pair of gloves. Then he raised the lid on the crate

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.”