I threw myself into my work upon receiving my PHD and, after loosing a number of medical breakthroughs verging on miraculous upon the world, managed to conquer death itself.
A feat for which I was, in my opinion rightly, celebrated.
However, having ensured that none need ever die again, I realized I’d put myself out of work. After all, in a world where no-one dies what use is there for further medical research?
So I went back to school, studied physics, astronomy and engineering and prepared myself to follow my other dream. It was time to get us off this planet.
I developed the engines, designed the stasis chamber, and built the whole of the ship in my garage, telling nobody what it was I was constructing. If I’d let word spread, no doubt the government would wish to aid me. I didn’t need their funding, I had plenty of money, and I knew that with assistance would come demands that more qualified, trained astronauts take my ship out on it’s maiden voyage.
My ship, my design, I get to take the maiden voyage. This was non-negotiable. It was an adventure I‘d dreamed of since long before I went to med school. Since I was a child. It was that last great leap into the great unknown, and I intended to take it first. Selfish? Perhaps. But I felt I’d earned the right.
So I kept my project to myself.
The ship had only room for one due to the massive amount of energy required to travel that close to the speed of light, but I’d be asleep the entirety of the voyage so it wasn’t as though I’d need the company. I’d nip out to Rigel, have a look around, prove the viability of my prototype, and return to, again in my opinion, well-deserved accolades.
I had faith in my prototype, I’d checked and double checked the design work, every pre-launch test had been passed within acceptable margins of error. What could possibly go wrong?
Rigel, it must be said, was beautiful beyond imagining, and the sense of awe one gets being that far away from the world that birthed you, the sense of scale and scope of a universe utterly unexplored, is indescribable. I’m not ashamed to admit I wept on more than one occasion. But I couldn’t stay longer than a few days, my fuel had been strictly rationed for my maiden voyage. I took charts and notes, filmed constellations from a different point of view and then, sad to leave but satisfied at my accomplishment, returned to my stasis chamber for the voyage home.
To answer my earlier question, what could possibly go wrong is a combination of time dilation and human nature.
I never did figure out how much time had passed by the time I returned, or what had caused the war, and I spent years searching for any clue. But by the time I got home humanity had managed to purge itself from the globe, nature had reclaimed most of the cities and the radiation had returned to acceptable levels.
Animals, when I saw them, looked more or less the same as I remembered. And buildings were mostly still standing. The ones that hadn’t been bombed, at any rate. So it can’t have been THAT much time.
Eventually, after using my spacecraft to travel the world in a failed search for the details of humanity’s self-imposed extinction, I settled myself down in Phoenix Arizona. The dry climate kept the city in better shape than most larger metropolis’ and it’s university had reasonably well-equipped research facilities. I had work to do.
Having conquered both death and space, the moment has come to turn my attention to time.
I’ve been here working ever since. I’m not sure time travel’s even possible, but I do know it’s my only hope, so I’ll continue devoting myself single-mindedly to the task at hand. There’s a garden near the lab, so food’s not a problem, and I’ve always been the sort of person who can work tirelessly when properly motivated.
And I’m feeling very, very motivated these days. I have to go back, though I admit as of now I have no idea what I’ll do when I get there. Warn them, I suppose. Or share my star-drive so a colony of humanity can escape the planet before the end comes. Or, failing to do both of those things, simply die with them, in the arms of the family I ignored so many years while working on the advancement of a humanity that did not live to see the fruits of my labour.
I’ll tell my wife how much I love her, and how much I appreciate her putting up with how distant I became while working on my projects. I’ll tell my son I’m proud of him, the way I damn well should have found the time to do more often than I did, I’ll buy him tickets to World Cup and pretend to understand how World Cup works while watching it with him. I’m sure he’ll explain the parts that elude me.
I’ll tell them both how much they meant to me first, I’ve learned that lesson from this experience if nothing else, and then the three of us can try to prevent the destruction of humankind together. And, if we fail, we can use the time machine in the moments before the final war begins to go back, armed with greater knowledge of the specifics of humankind’s fall, and try again. We can try as many times as are needed.
I miss them more and more each day, each decade I spend alone in this lab. And while the lab becomes increasingly difficult to maintain as the decades pass into centuries, and I’ve long since lost track of how long I’ve spent working at untangling the principals of time travel, and while there are days where I forget the sound of my wife’s voice, or what my son looked like, or even my own name, I’m confident that eventually I’ll conquer time, the same way I triumphed over every other challenge I’ve ever set myself. If it takes another hundred years or another ten thousand, it hardly matters to me.
Because I’m immortal.
And it’s a time machine.
And I’m a man of considerable intelligence and boundless patience. I’ll take as long as I need….
Monday, January 31, 2011
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Self-Doubt
I knew something was wrong when the doctor demanded I come to her office in person rather than just telling me what was going on over the phone.
I expected the worst going in, I think everyone does when going in to receive the result of tests previously thought to be routine, and spent the whole morning nervous, skipping both breakfast and lunch before I went in, too nauseous to eat. The doctor took one looked at me as I walked in and, smiling sadly, beckoned me to sit. It was not, she explained, news that you wanted to be standing when you heard.
“Self-doubt,” she said, softly, resting a hand on my shoulder as though physical contact might cushion the blow, “you have self-doubt.”
She outlined options, which I could barely hear, and I sat there, nodding occasionally. I was numb to her words, lost in private thoughts.
Self doubt?
Me?
How?
How could my psyche betray me like that? I’d always considered myself a person of appropriate self-esteem, healthily confident without crossing over into arrogance, comfortably assured. And yet, here I was, sitting in a doctor’s office being told I had self doubt? What the hell was so wrong with me?
The doctor reassured me that, with modern medical techniques, conditions such as mine were no longer as debilitating as they’d once been. She told me we could schedule psychic surgery before the end of the month and, with appropriate psychotherapy afterward to burn away the remaining traces, there was a nearly eighty percent chance of a full remission and recovery.
Shell-shocked, I nodded my head and signed the appropriate release forms. I spent the whole cab ride home still silently stunned by the news.
My mind is all I am. If even it can’t be trusted not to turn on me, what in the world can I trust?
The next two weeks passed in a haze, as I sleepwalked through my life. Friends noticed I was distracted, but when they asked about it I just told them I hadn’t been sleeping properly and they left it like that.
Which, in it’s own way, was true. I was up late most nights scouring my psyche for any reason that self-doubt would rise up and plague me now. None could be found, and I wondered if that was just delusion on my part, if the reasons were plain and I was a fool, wilfully ignoring them.
The surgery couldn’t come quickly enough.
And, after what seemed like an eternity, it came, and they put me under, and the psychic surgeons cut into me, and I went home after a day of observation with nothing to show I’d been under but a small, shaved patch on my head with a scar. And when the hair grew back, even that scar was hidden from view.
I attended the psychotherapy sessions, did the confidence building exercises at home, and started feeling better about myself. It’d been a close thing, and there were follow-up tests yet to run, but it seemed I’d been one of the lucky ones, I was by all accounts recovering well.
Except…
Except, I couldn’t help but wonder, had I done the right thing? I mean, what kind of man chooses to go under the knife in a circumstance like this? Psychic surgery was an option my parents never had, and I was grateful for the advancements of medicine, but I know my parents had moments of self-doubt, everyone back then had them sometimes, and yet they somehow managed to get through their lives. Mine was the first generation with real medical options in circumstances like this, previous to now mankind had doubted, and found strength within themselves, and soldiered on. And likely they’d been stronger for the experience. I had chosen instead to go under the knife, to have my own self-doubt excised at the hands of a skilled surgeon, to take a cowards way out of a problem that offered me the opportunity for meaningful emotional growth.
What kind of person did that make me? And, if I was so weak, so pathetically spineless in the face of this adversity, how could I honestly know for certain that any of the decisions I’d made in my life, decisions I’d been so sure of at the time, hadn’t been motivated by that same fundamental weakness of spirit?
I finished the therapy, and the exercises, but my heart wasn’t in them. The cutting edge of psychological and medical science had been devoted to my recovery, but I grew to suspect I didn’t deserve to recover, that if I lacked the strength of character necessary to confront my personal demons, I deserved to be plagued by them. Which, I grew to suspect, I would be.
By the time my doctor called me back to her office to give me the results of the follow-up tests, refusing once more to tell me over the phone, I was resigned to my fate. She didn’t need to say a word, I knew even before she turned apologetic eyes to me what it was she was going to say.
The self-doubt had survived, and spread, and metastasised into self-loathing.
And there was nothing we could do.
I expected the worst going in, I think everyone does when going in to receive the result of tests previously thought to be routine, and spent the whole morning nervous, skipping both breakfast and lunch before I went in, too nauseous to eat. The doctor took one looked at me as I walked in and, smiling sadly, beckoned me to sit. It was not, she explained, news that you wanted to be standing when you heard.
“Self-doubt,” she said, softly, resting a hand on my shoulder as though physical contact might cushion the blow, “you have self-doubt.”
She outlined options, which I could barely hear, and I sat there, nodding occasionally. I was numb to her words, lost in private thoughts.
Self doubt?
Me?
How?
How could my psyche betray me like that? I’d always considered myself a person of appropriate self-esteem, healthily confident without crossing over into arrogance, comfortably assured. And yet, here I was, sitting in a doctor’s office being told I had self doubt? What the hell was so wrong with me?
The doctor reassured me that, with modern medical techniques, conditions such as mine were no longer as debilitating as they’d once been. She told me we could schedule psychic surgery before the end of the month and, with appropriate psychotherapy afterward to burn away the remaining traces, there was a nearly eighty percent chance of a full remission and recovery.
Shell-shocked, I nodded my head and signed the appropriate release forms. I spent the whole cab ride home still silently stunned by the news.
My mind is all I am. If even it can’t be trusted not to turn on me, what in the world can I trust?
The next two weeks passed in a haze, as I sleepwalked through my life. Friends noticed I was distracted, but when they asked about it I just told them I hadn’t been sleeping properly and they left it like that.
Which, in it’s own way, was true. I was up late most nights scouring my psyche for any reason that self-doubt would rise up and plague me now. None could be found, and I wondered if that was just delusion on my part, if the reasons were plain and I was a fool, wilfully ignoring them.
The surgery couldn’t come quickly enough.
And, after what seemed like an eternity, it came, and they put me under, and the psychic surgeons cut into me, and I went home after a day of observation with nothing to show I’d been under but a small, shaved patch on my head with a scar. And when the hair grew back, even that scar was hidden from view.
I attended the psychotherapy sessions, did the confidence building exercises at home, and started feeling better about myself. It’d been a close thing, and there were follow-up tests yet to run, but it seemed I’d been one of the lucky ones, I was by all accounts recovering well.
Except…
Except, I couldn’t help but wonder, had I done the right thing? I mean, what kind of man chooses to go under the knife in a circumstance like this? Psychic surgery was an option my parents never had, and I was grateful for the advancements of medicine, but I know my parents had moments of self-doubt, everyone back then had them sometimes, and yet they somehow managed to get through their lives. Mine was the first generation with real medical options in circumstances like this, previous to now mankind had doubted, and found strength within themselves, and soldiered on. And likely they’d been stronger for the experience. I had chosen instead to go under the knife, to have my own self-doubt excised at the hands of a skilled surgeon, to take a cowards way out of a problem that offered me the opportunity for meaningful emotional growth.
What kind of person did that make me? And, if I was so weak, so pathetically spineless in the face of this adversity, how could I honestly know for certain that any of the decisions I’d made in my life, decisions I’d been so sure of at the time, hadn’t been motivated by that same fundamental weakness of spirit?
I finished the therapy, and the exercises, but my heart wasn’t in them. The cutting edge of psychological and medical science had been devoted to my recovery, but I grew to suspect I didn’t deserve to recover, that if I lacked the strength of character necessary to confront my personal demons, I deserved to be plagued by them. Which, I grew to suspect, I would be.
By the time my doctor called me back to her office to give me the results of the follow-up tests, refusing once more to tell me over the phone, I was resigned to my fate. She didn’t need to say a word, I knew even before she turned apologetic eyes to me what it was she was going to say.
The self-doubt had survived, and spread, and metastasised into self-loathing.
And there was nothing we could do.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
ABC (with apologies to David Mammet)
Everything stopped dead when he walked in, and all heads turned to face him. This stranger, this interloper, walked in as though he owned the place, as though it were his lab, and we, the research scientists who’d worked our whole lives to make the breakthroughs that ensured the continued profitability of Denedryne Advanced Cybernetics, were nothing. Like he was doing us a favour by coming down here. He looked us over a moment, and already we hated him. And, judging by the look of contempt he couldn’t be bothered to conceal, the feeling was mutual.
“Let me have your attention for a moment,” he barked, voice harsh and blunt, “because you're talking about, what... you're talking 'bout... bitching about a some prototype that burned out, some theoretical math that didn’t hold up under peer review, some broad you're trying to screw, so forth, let's talk about something important.”
He turned his most withering gaze to Kevin, the project manager, who seemed to physically shrink under it. Kevin had always been a timid man, the kind that buried himself in work because he had no idea how to deal with more human problems. In a situation like this he didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell.
“Are they all here?”
“All but one.” Kevin stammered, flinching.
“Well, I'm going anyway.” And with that, he turned his attention back on the rest of us. “Let's talk about something important. Put that coffee down.”
Jack, by the coffee machine, stopped dead, stunned by the audacity of the order. Who was this son of a bitch to think he could order us around?
“Coffee is for roboticists only. You think I'm fucking with you? I am not fucking with you. I'm here from downtown. I'm here from Dr. Epstein. And I'm here on a mission of mercy. You Jack Levine?”
“Yeah.” Jack said, trying to stare the man down, and failing miserably.
“You call yourself a roboticist, you son of a bitch?”
Jack had had a rough year, the whole lab knew that. His last prototype had exploded, taking out half the testing bay, and the one previous had thought it was alive. It had screamed and begged for mercy as we were disassembling it, and the effect was… off-putting. But he didn’t deserve to be talked to like that. I stood up at my workstation.
“We don't gotta listen to this shit.” I said, in what turned out to be a misguided attempt to throw the stranger off his game. He didn’t miss a beat.
“You certainly don't pal,” he spat, pivoting on his heel to stare me down, “because the good news is you're fired. The bad news is you’ve all got one week to regain your job, starting with tonight, starting with tonight's testing.”
Jack’s eyes widened in fear. He had a kid, and another on the way. Losing his position at Denedryne was not an option for him, a fact the stranger apparently knew.
“Oh, have I got your attention now? Good. 'Cause we're adding a little something to this month's sale contest. As you all know, the first roboticist to develop a functioning sentient machine will win a Nobel prize. Possibly two or three of the little bastards. Anybody want to know what the second roboticist to develop a functioning sentient machine will receive? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is your fired. You get the picture? You laughing now? You got the detailed notes of every research team in the country. Dr. Epstein paid good money for those notes. You can't develop a sentient AI and install it in an android body with the notes you're given, you can't develop shit, you are shit, hit the bricks pal and beat it because you are going out.”
This was a sticking point for Jack. Bad math in the notes from a team in Albuquerque was a large part the reason he’d burned down the testing bay.
“The notes are weak.” He protested, struggling to maintain his cool.
“The notes are weak?” The stranger asked incredulously. “The fucking notes are weak? You're weak. I've been in this business 15 years…”
“What's your name?” I asked, cutting him off. There was no way he could have been doing research into advanced AI’s and robotics without any of us recognizing him. I’d caught him in a lie, and he knew it.
“Fuck you,” he snarled, nearly feral with undisguised rage, “that's my name. You know why mister? Cause you drove a Hyundai to get here tonight, I drove an 80,000 dollar BMW. That's my name. And your name is “You're Wanting”. You can't play in the man's game, you can't design androids? Then go home and tell your wife your troubles. Because only one thing counts in this life. Build a super-intelligent, sentient, humanoid robot. You hear me you fucking maggots?”
He wiped the equations I’d spent all afternoon working out off the chalkboard in the center of the room, and I tried not to let my own anger show on my face. He had, it seemed, his own formulae to share.
“ABC. A, Always. B, Build. C, Cyborgs. Always build cyborgs. Always. AIDA. Artificial. Intelligence. Designed. Automatons? Artificial, because we are, at the core, artificers. Intelligence. Is there any intelligence to be found in this room? ‘Cuz I’m sure as hell not seeing it. Design. Can you design to our specifications? I hope you can because it's fuck or walk. You design or you hit the bricks. You will design an Automaton. AIDA. Get out there, look at the job market, and remember AIDA. You all got PhD’s from ivy league schools, what’d you, buy them on EBay? A guy doesn‘t get one of those unless somebody, somewhere thinks he can do something big. That person sure as hell ain’t me, but somebody thinks you’re capable. Are you going to prove it? Are you man enough to prove it?”
Too quickly to stifle it, I laughed. His attention was, once again, focused on me.
“What's the problem, pal?”
Fuck or walk, eh? Fine, fuck him then.
“You, boss,” I spat at him, smirking still, “you're such a hero, you're so rich, how come you're coming down here and wasting your time with such a bunch of bums?”
He seemed to ponder this a moment, looking me up and down. Then, taking off his watch, it was his turn to laugh.
“You see this watch? This watch cost more than your car. I made 970,000 dollars last year, how much you make? You see pal, that's who I am, and you're nothing. Nice guy? I don't give a shit. Good father. Fuck you, go home and play with your kids. You want to work here, design. Program!”
I stared, mouth open, trying and failing to think of a response, dumbfounded.
“You think this is abuse?” He asked, voice rising, “You think this is abuse, you cock-sucker? You can't take this, how can you take the abuse you get on a shareholder meeting? If you don't like it, leave. I can go through your notes tonight, the materials you got, and make myself an automated puppy. Train it to roll over, to fetch, and to navigate an obstacle course in the testing bay without having to program in where the obstacles are. Tonight. In two hours. Can you? Can you? Go and do likewise. AIDA. Get mad you son-of-a-bitch. Get mad. You know what it takes to create artificial life? It takes brass balls to create artificial life. Go and do likewise, gents. It’s the twenty-first goddamned century, and the breakthroughs are out there. You pick them up, they’re yours, you don't, I got no sympathy for you. You want to put your thinking cap on and design, it's yours, if not, you're going to be shining my shoes. And you know what you'll be saying. Bunch of losers sitting around in a bar: ''Oh yeah, I used to design AIs. It's a tough racket.''
Kevin handed him a case we hadn’t noticed him carrying when he came in, which he opened to reveal a bank of blinking lights and exposed wires.
“Good morning,” it said from a speaker none of us could see, “I’m glad to meet you. You have a beautiful lab.”
“This,” he said, his voice now hushed, reverent, “is an AI prototype stolen from Kurisawa labs. It is the Kurisawa prototype, and men died to get it. And to you, it is gold. And you don’t get to examine it. Why? Because to give it to you is just throwing it away. It’s for roboticists, and only when and if any of you prove yourself to be a roboticist may you examine it. I'd wish you good luck, but you wouldn't know what to do with it if you got it.”
He made for the door then, shaking his head as though he’d been trying, and failing, to explain something simple to very stupid children. At the door, he stopped a moment, and turned back to look me dead in the eye.
“And to answer your question, pal: Why am I here? I came here because Dr. Epstein asked me to, he asked me, as a friend, for a favour. I said the real favour, follow my advice and fire your fucking ass because a loser is a loser is a loser.”
The door slammed shut behind him then, but none of us moved. We just stood there, mouths agape, staring at one another. Stunned. It seemed the time for theoretical research had passed without any of us realizing…
“Let me have your attention for a moment,” he barked, voice harsh and blunt, “because you're talking about, what... you're talking 'bout... bitching about a some prototype that burned out, some theoretical math that didn’t hold up under peer review, some broad you're trying to screw, so forth, let's talk about something important.”
He turned his most withering gaze to Kevin, the project manager, who seemed to physically shrink under it. Kevin had always been a timid man, the kind that buried himself in work because he had no idea how to deal with more human problems. In a situation like this he didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell.
“Are they all here?”
“All but one.” Kevin stammered, flinching.
“Well, I'm going anyway.” And with that, he turned his attention back on the rest of us. “Let's talk about something important. Put that coffee down.”
Jack, by the coffee machine, stopped dead, stunned by the audacity of the order. Who was this son of a bitch to think he could order us around?
“Coffee is for roboticists only. You think I'm fucking with you? I am not fucking with you. I'm here from downtown. I'm here from Dr. Epstein. And I'm here on a mission of mercy. You Jack Levine?”
“Yeah.” Jack said, trying to stare the man down, and failing miserably.
“You call yourself a roboticist, you son of a bitch?”
Jack had had a rough year, the whole lab knew that. His last prototype had exploded, taking out half the testing bay, and the one previous had thought it was alive. It had screamed and begged for mercy as we were disassembling it, and the effect was… off-putting. But he didn’t deserve to be talked to like that. I stood up at my workstation.
“We don't gotta listen to this shit.” I said, in what turned out to be a misguided attempt to throw the stranger off his game. He didn’t miss a beat.
“You certainly don't pal,” he spat, pivoting on his heel to stare me down, “because the good news is you're fired. The bad news is you’ve all got one week to regain your job, starting with tonight, starting with tonight's testing.”
Jack’s eyes widened in fear. He had a kid, and another on the way. Losing his position at Denedryne was not an option for him, a fact the stranger apparently knew.
“Oh, have I got your attention now? Good. 'Cause we're adding a little something to this month's sale contest. As you all know, the first roboticist to develop a functioning sentient machine will win a Nobel prize. Possibly two or three of the little bastards. Anybody want to know what the second roboticist to develop a functioning sentient machine will receive? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is your fired. You get the picture? You laughing now? You got the detailed notes of every research team in the country. Dr. Epstein paid good money for those notes. You can't develop a sentient AI and install it in an android body with the notes you're given, you can't develop shit, you are shit, hit the bricks pal and beat it because you are going out.”
This was a sticking point for Jack. Bad math in the notes from a team in Albuquerque was a large part the reason he’d burned down the testing bay.
“The notes are weak.” He protested, struggling to maintain his cool.
“The notes are weak?” The stranger asked incredulously. “The fucking notes are weak? You're weak. I've been in this business 15 years…”
“What's your name?” I asked, cutting him off. There was no way he could have been doing research into advanced AI’s and robotics without any of us recognizing him. I’d caught him in a lie, and he knew it.
“Fuck you,” he snarled, nearly feral with undisguised rage, “that's my name. You know why mister? Cause you drove a Hyundai to get here tonight, I drove an 80,000 dollar BMW. That's my name. And your name is “You're Wanting”. You can't play in the man's game, you can't design androids? Then go home and tell your wife your troubles. Because only one thing counts in this life. Build a super-intelligent, sentient, humanoid robot. You hear me you fucking maggots?”
He wiped the equations I’d spent all afternoon working out off the chalkboard in the center of the room, and I tried not to let my own anger show on my face. He had, it seemed, his own formulae to share.
“ABC. A, Always. B, Build. C, Cyborgs. Always build cyborgs. Always. AIDA. Artificial. Intelligence. Designed. Automatons? Artificial, because we are, at the core, artificers. Intelligence. Is there any intelligence to be found in this room? ‘Cuz I’m sure as hell not seeing it. Design. Can you design to our specifications? I hope you can because it's fuck or walk. You design or you hit the bricks. You will design an Automaton. AIDA. Get out there, look at the job market, and remember AIDA. You all got PhD’s from ivy league schools, what’d you, buy them on EBay? A guy doesn‘t get one of those unless somebody, somewhere thinks he can do something big. That person sure as hell ain’t me, but somebody thinks you’re capable. Are you going to prove it? Are you man enough to prove it?”
Too quickly to stifle it, I laughed. His attention was, once again, focused on me.
“What's the problem, pal?”
Fuck or walk, eh? Fine, fuck him then.
“You, boss,” I spat at him, smirking still, “you're such a hero, you're so rich, how come you're coming down here and wasting your time with such a bunch of bums?”
He seemed to ponder this a moment, looking me up and down. Then, taking off his watch, it was his turn to laugh.
“You see this watch? This watch cost more than your car. I made 970,000 dollars last year, how much you make? You see pal, that's who I am, and you're nothing. Nice guy? I don't give a shit. Good father. Fuck you, go home and play with your kids. You want to work here, design. Program!”
I stared, mouth open, trying and failing to think of a response, dumbfounded.
“You think this is abuse?” He asked, voice rising, “You think this is abuse, you cock-sucker? You can't take this, how can you take the abuse you get on a shareholder meeting? If you don't like it, leave. I can go through your notes tonight, the materials you got, and make myself an automated puppy. Train it to roll over, to fetch, and to navigate an obstacle course in the testing bay without having to program in where the obstacles are. Tonight. In two hours. Can you? Can you? Go and do likewise. AIDA. Get mad you son-of-a-bitch. Get mad. You know what it takes to create artificial life? It takes brass balls to create artificial life. Go and do likewise, gents. It’s the twenty-first goddamned century, and the breakthroughs are out there. You pick them up, they’re yours, you don't, I got no sympathy for you. You want to put your thinking cap on and design, it's yours, if not, you're going to be shining my shoes. And you know what you'll be saying. Bunch of losers sitting around in a bar: ''Oh yeah, I used to design AIs. It's a tough racket.''
Kevin handed him a case we hadn’t noticed him carrying when he came in, which he opened to reveal a bank of blinking lights and exposed wires.
“Good morning,” it said from a speaker none of us could see, “I’m glad to meet you. You have a beautiful lab.”
“This,” he said, his voice now hushed, reverent, “is an AI prototype stolen from Kurisawa labs. It is the Kurisawa prototype, and men died to get it. And to you, it is gold. And you don’t get to examine it. Why? Because to give it to you is just throwing it away. It’s for roboticists, and only when and if any of you prove yourself to be a roboticist may you examine it. I'd wish you good luck, but you wouldn't know what to do with it if you got it.”
He made for the door then, shaking his head as though he’d been trying, and failing, to explain something simple to very stupid children. At the door, he stopped a moment, and turned back to look me dead in the eye.
“And to answer your question, pal: Why am I here? I came here because Dr. Epstein asked me to, he asked me, as a friend, for a favour. I said the real favour, follow my advice and fire your fucking ass because a loser is a loser is a loser.”
The door slammed shut behind him then, but none of us moved. We just stood there, mouths agape, staring at one another. Stunned. It seemed the time for theoretical research had passed without any of us realizing…
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
A Man in Love...
It was terminal, the doctor said. Incurable.
But she was my wife, and I wasn’t the type who blindly accepted fate. If I could save her, I would.
So everything else went on hold as I devoted my intellect single-mindedly to medical research.
I would’ve liked to’ve spent more time comforting her as her health worsened, but the sacrifice would be worthwhile were I to find a cure. Which, in time, I did.
A man in love can accomplish anything.
She’d been dead nearly two decades by that point, of course. But still, finding the cure was sort of cathartic…
But she was my wife, and I wasn’t the type who blindly accepted fate. If I could save her, I would.
So everything else went on hold as I devoted my intellect single-mindedly to medical research.
I would’ve liked to’ve spent more time comforting her as her health worsened, but the sacrifice would be worthwhile were I to find a cure. Which, in time, I did.
A man in love can accomplish anything.
She’d been dead nearly two decades by that point, of course. But still, finding the cure was sort of cathartic…
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
My Birth
...this is a story i wrote last year, and since then some of the pop-culture referances have grown a little too dated for me to send it out to magazines, so i thought i'd post it up here! it's longer than what i normally post, but i'm pretty pleased with it, so i hope it manages to hold your attention in spite of it's length. Enjoy!
My Birth
by munsi
My pod opened up, released me naked and covered from head to food in some sort of sticky, viscous liquid, into a well lit, white room. Not used to having to stand under my own power, I fell immediately to my hands and knees, dripping and gasping for breath, disoriented by the lights and sounds around me.
To either side of me another pod opened, releasing people in a similar state, but I paid them no attention, too focused on my own sudden, surprising situation to take much stock of anything else. Around me, the room exploded into action, men and women in white coats bustling to and fro, yelling instructions to one another that, while I understood the individual words, meant nothing to me. Something about cloning pod optimization and biometric stability. Someone said something about this being the most successful season ever, and I wondered off-handedly what it all meant.
As my eyed grew accustomed to the light, I took stock of what was happening around me. I appeared to be in a sterile, white laboratory setting, with a bank of computers along one wall where the white coated people rapidly typed instructions and shouted readings back and forth to one another. Along the other wall, behind me, were 32 identical pods, green-grey and cracked open down the middle, a mass of wires spurting from the tops, intertwining, and snaking across the ceiling to connect back to the computers. In front of each pod was a soaking, struggling naked person just like me. I had no idea what any of us were doing here or, for that matter, who I even was, or how I knew what a “computer” or a “laboratory setting” was, or how I understood the language these strange people were speaking. Before I was released from the pod, I realized, I had no personal memories of any kind.
Eventually one of the women in white coats came over and helped me to my feet. She was pretty, in an unassuming way, carrying a few extra pounds from spending all day in the lab but still cutting an acceptably attractive figure under her lab coat, with long, auburn hair swept back in a loose pony tail. Behind the glasses she wore, her eyes sparkled with intelligence and a fascination with me she didn‘t bother trying to hide. She handed me a robe and escorted me to a room where I could wash the coating of slime that covered me off and dress myself. As I washed myself in that communal shower she explained to me that I was part of a project to grow fully formed, broadly educated, working models of a human being. I was, with my brothers and sisters from the 31 other pods, part of the most successful batch they had to date managed to create. The previous batch, she said, had been profoundly flawed, malformed and grotesque, barely able to sustain themselves outside their pods, and they’d been put to death shortly after the birthing process, their bodies destroyed in a gigantic incinerator the project keeps in the basement of the facility. But we, luckily, were perfectly suited to the project’s needs. We were anatomically complete, biologically twenty-two years old, with the intelligence of a bright high school graduate.
There were of course flaws in our biology, she explained, it was unavoidable do to the way we were grown, but they were, from the point of view of the project, comparatively minor. One trouble was that our lifespan would be dramatically reduced. Each of us would, she told me, had only eighteen months to live, and then our bodies would degrade and decompose, burning themselves out in a matter of hours. But this was an unimportant matter, since within the next eighteen months the task we’d been grown to fulfill could be achieved with time to spare, and if we were needed after that another batch of us could be grown easily enough.
One would think this knowledge would disturb me. The fact was that I only had eighteen months with which to experience life, to see the world and all it’s wonders, simply to be. It seemed the sort of thing that’d bother me greatly. And, more fundamentally, I should have been bothered by the revelation that I wasn’t a person, the way the word person is normally considered. I’d been grown in a pod for a specific purpose over which I had no knowledge or input. I was a simulacra, to be used and then, when my shortened lifespan was over, discarded. And although the woman in the lab coat didn’t say so, I suspected that when my time was up I’d wind up in the same incinerator as that earlier, flawed batch of clones. Though I knew academically that this should disturb me, indeed fill me with a deep, religious sense of existential terror, it did not. I accepted all of what she told me as calmly as I’d accepted the bathrobe from her, as if it were all perfectly natural. I asked her about my reaction and she told me that this was part of the process by which I’d been grown, a genetic predisposition toward docility. I would accept my fate and do as the project required of me with a sense of unflappable calm, and when my end came in eighteen months I’d accept that too. This reassured me. It meant I was functioning properly.
Finishing my shower and towelling myself off, I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror centrally located in the change area. Slim but muscular, of average height, pecs and abs perfectly sculpted, chest hairless. My tan was deep, even and golden bronze, my hair thick and full and jet black. I smiled at the reflection and saw that my teeth were a gleaming white, perfectly spaced and even. I was beautiful, a picture of what a woman would want from a male physique. I accepted this too as a natural part of my new existence. Beautiful, perfect, young and only on this earth a year and a half.
As I finished cleaning up, the woman handed me a white suit, black shirt and black shoes. As I put them on, my thirty one brothers and sisters started filtering into the changing area, each accompanied by a man or woman in a lab coat. They dried themselves, asking the occasional question of their escort, the men lean and toned, the women high-breasted and slim, all with identical tans and similarly perfect smiles, smiles I knew looked just like mine. We looked different enough from one another that someone could easily tell us apart but, I supposed as a side effect of the growing process, we looked alike enough that we clearly were birthed from the same source. I smiled at a young man changing next to me, and he smiled back, looking charming but somehow empty, as if something fundamental was missing from him, like there was from me.
I finished dressing and was ushered out of the room and into a larger, more comfortable waiting area, white suit tailored to fit me perfectly and casually, or perhaps I tailored to fit it. I sat, perfectly relaxed, on a couch along one wall, and waited as my siblings joined me one by one, gradually filling up the room, all thick hair and white teeth and simulated youth and energy. Finally the last of the stragglers, a woman with bright red hair falling in curls down her perfectly formed back and breasts that forever looked like they might “accidentally” pop loose from the top of her raven-black gown but never quite doing so, joined us and took her seat. A short, middle-aged, heavyset man with a receding hairline in an expensively tailored suit entered the room and stood behind a podium, staring out at us, inspecting us. We all sat expectantly, trying to hide our shared sense of anticipation, not knowing exactly what it was he was about to say but knowing that it would finally shed light on the purpose of the project we were the product of, and by extension our own purpose. We knew that whatever it was he asked of us we would execute his orders faithfully, enthusiastically, and without question. The idea of not obeying him would never enter any of our minds, nor could it. We had to obey, we had no choice in the matter, it’s what we’d been designed to do.
It was our destiny.
Once the man had seen whatever it was he was looking for in us, he tapped twice on a microphone and explained, quickly and curtly, what it was that we would be expected to do. He explained that not all of us would see the task we were assigned through to completion, that between the thirty two of us, only one would succeed, bringing glory to the project and the men and women who’d worked so hard to bring us into this world. The one of us who succeeded would be taken care of all the days of his or her short life, given anything their heart could desire, though with our genetic obedience I didn’t imagine any of us were capable of desiring much. For those of us who failed the reward would be a quick trip downstairs to the incinerator, and while I felt a twinge of fear at this prospect, I didn’t in any way imagine it unfair. They had created me, and this gave them the right to destroy me at their discretion. I hoped, however, that this fear would give me the extra motivation I needed to succeed, that, out of all of us, it would be me and only me who won the favour of my creators, and doing so my continued existence. I realized a moment later that everyone else in the room very likely felt the same way.
We drank up the words the man spoke like we were dying of thirst, each syllable giving us strength and purpose, allowing us to understand what it was we’d be spending our brief lives doing. The people who’d created us were correct, there was nothing we were being asked to do that was beyond our capabilities, and eighteen months was more than enough time to accomplish every goal that we‘d been set. We weren’t just willing to perform our assigned tasks, we were excited! This was purpose, to compete against one another, to excel, to succeed, to make our creators proud, to bring them glory! We were not only willing and able, our hearts were glad to start! And the short, heavy man saw this in us too, and smiled.
When he was done he left the room without taking questions, he knew there would be none, and we were left alone in the room to wait. One by one we were ushered out of a room by a man in a black shirt wearing a headset he used to communicate with someone far away, someone I did not know, someone I would likely never meet. Those of us left waited, sipping bottled water that’d been thoughtfully provided, eyeing one another warily, not speaking. These thirty one people, once my brothers and sisters, were now my bitter rivals. Only one of us would succeed in our task, and I needed it to be me. It had to be.
And besides, we’d only existed a scant few hours and during that time we’d had exactly the same experiences. What was there to talk about?
When my time came the man in the black shirt put his hand on my shoulder, gave me a name, Michael, and led me down a long, empty hallway. I rolled the name around on my tongue, Michael, and liked the way it tasted. It was a good name, and a name was the sort of thing it seemed like I’d need sooner or later, and I was glad to have it. The hallway came to an end and I was ushered into a larger room than any I’d ever been in before, filled with more people than I’d known existed, hundreds of them, sitting along the periphery of the spacious room behind an artificial barrier, all staring in, at me. Lights shone directly in my eyes, momentarily blinding me, reminding me for a brief moment of my first seconds of life, as that pod opened and I was released blind and naked and slimy and confused into the world. It was only hours ago, but it felt like a lifetime. And it was. When my eyes adjusted I was introduced to a funny woman who called herself Ellen, a cruel man who called himself Simon, a jovial but forgettable man who called himself Randy and a man who looked a little like me called Ryan.
And then I sang.
And sang.
And sang.
My Birth
by munsi
My pod opened up, released me naked and covered from head to food in some sort of sticky, viscous liquid, into a well lit, white room. Not used to having to stand under my own power, I fell immediately to my hands and knees, dripping and gasping for breath, disoriented by the lights and sounds around me.
To either side of me another pod opened, releasing people in a similar state, but I paid them no attention, too focused on my own sudden, surprising situation to take much stock of anything else. Around me, the room exploded into action, men and women in white coats bustling to and fro, yelling instructions to one another that, while I understood the individual words, meant nothing to me. Something about cloning pod optimization and biometric stability. Someone said something about this being the most successful season ever, and I wondered off-handedly what it all meant.
As my eyed grew accustomed to the light, I took stock of what was happening around me. I appeared to be in a sterile, white laboratory setting, with a bank of computers along one wall where the white coated people rapidly typed instructions and shouted readings back and forth to one another. Along the other wall, behind me, were 32 identical pods, green-grey and cracked open down the middle, a mass of wires spurting from the tops, intertwining, and snaking across the ceiling to connect back to the computers. In front of each pod was a soaking, struggling naked person just like me. I had no idea what any of us were doing here or, for that matter, who I even was, or how I knew what a “computer” or a “laboratory setting” was, or how I understood the language these strange people were speaking. Before I was released from the pod, I realized, I had no personal memories of any kind.
Eventually one of the women in white coats came over and helped me to my feet. She was pretty, in an unassuming way, carrying a few extra pounds from spending all day in the lab but still cutting an acceptably attractive figure under her lab coat, with long, auburn hair swept back in a loose pony tail. Behind the glasses she wore, her eyes sparkled with intelligence and a fascination with me she didn‘t bother trying to hide. She handed me a robe and escorted me to a room where I could wash the coating of slime that covered me off and dress myself. As I washed myself in that communal shower she explained to me that I was part of a project to grow fully formed, broadly educated, working models of a human being. I was, with my brothers and sisters from the 31 other pods, part of the most successful batch they had to date managed to create. The previous batch, she said, had been profoundly flawed, malformed and grotesque, barely able to sustain themselves outside their pods, and they’d been put to death shortly after the birthing process, their bodies destroyed in a gigantic incinerator the project keeps in the basement of the facility. But we, luckily, were perfectly suited to the project’s needs. We were anatomically complete, biologically twenty-two years old, with the intelligence of a bright high school graduate.
There were of course flaws in our biology, she explained, it was unavoidable do to the way we were grown, but they were, from the point of view of the project, comparatively minor. One trouble was that our lifespan would be dramatically reduced. Each of us would, she told me, had only eighteen months to live, and then our bodies would degrade and decompose, burning themselves out in a matter of hours. But this was an unimportant matter, since within the next eighteen months the task we’d been grown to fulfill could be achieved with time to spare, and if we were needed after that another batch of us could be grown easily enough.
One would think this knowledge would disturb me. The fact was that I only had eighteen months with which to experience life, to see the world and all it’s wonders, simply to be. It seemed the sort of thing that’d bother me greatly. And, more fundamentally, I should have been bothered by the revelation that I wasn’t a person, the way the word person is normally considered. I’d been grown in a pod for a specific purpose over which I had no knowledge or input. I was a simulacra, to be used and then, when my shortened lifespan was over, discarded. And although the woman in the lab coat didn’t say so, I suspected that when my time was up I’d wind up in the same incinerator as that earlier, flawed batch of clones. Though I knew academically that this should disturb me, indeed fill me with a deep, religious sense of existential terror, it did not. I accepted all of what she told me as calmly as I’d accepted the bathrobe from her, as if it were all perfectly natural. I asked her about my reaction and she told me that this was part of the process by which I’d been grown, a genetic predisposition toward docility. I would accept my fate and do as the project required of me with a sense of unflappable calm, and when my end came in eighteen months I’d accept that too. This reassured me. It meant I was functioning properly.
Finishing my shower and towelling myself off, I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror centrally located in the change area. Slim but muscular, of average height, pecs and abs perfectly sculpted, chest hairless. My tan was deep, even and golden bronze, my hair thick and full and jet black. I smiled at the reflection and saw that my teeth were a gleaming white, perfectly spaced and even. I was beautiful, a picture of what a woman would want from a male physique. I accepted this too as a natural part of my new existence. Beautiful, perfect, young and only on this earth a year and a half.
As I finished cleaning up, the woman handed me a white suit, black shirt and black shoes. As I put them on, my thirty one brothers and sisters started filtering into the changing area, each accompanied by a man or woman in a lab coat. They dried themselves, asking the occasional question of their escort, the men lean and toned, the women high-breasted and slim, all with identical tans and similarly perfect smiles, smiles I knew looked just like mine. We looked different enough from one another that someone could easily tell us apart but, I supposed as a side effect of the growing process, we looked alike enough that we clearly were birthed from the same source. I smiled at a young man changing next to me, and he smiled back, looking charming but somehow empty, as if something fundamental was missing from him, like there was from me.
I finished dressing and was ushered out of the room and into a larger, more comfortable waiting area, white suit tailored to fit me perfectly and casually, or perhaps I tailored to fit it. I sat, perfectly relaxed, on a couch along one wall, and waited as my siblings joined me one by one, gradually filling up the room, all thick hair and white teeth and simulated youth and energy. Finally the last of the stragglers, a woman with bright red hair falling in curls down her perfectly formed back and breasts that forever looked like they might “accidentally” pop loose from the top of her raven-black gown but never quite doing so, joined us and took her seat. A short, middle-aged, heavyset man with a receding hairline in an expensively tailored suit entered the room and stood behind a podium, staring out at us, inspecting us. We all sat expectantly, trying to hide our shared sense of anticipation, not knowing exactly what it was he was about to say but knowing that it would finally shed light on the purpose of the project we were the product of, and by extension our own purpose. We knew that whatever it was he asked of us we would execute his orders faithfully, enthusiastically, and without question. The idea of not obeying him would never enter any of our minds, nor could it. We had to obey, we had no choice in the matter, it’s what we’d been designed to do.
It was our destiny.
Once the man had seen whatever it was he was looking for in us, he tapped twice on a microphone and explained, quickly and curtly, what it was that we would be expected to do. He explained that not all of us would see the task we were assigned through to completion, that between the thirty two of us, only one would succeed, bringing glory to the project and the men and women who’d worked so hard to bring us into this world. The one of us who succeeded would be taken care of all the days of his or her short life, given anything their heart could desire, though with our genetic obedience I didn’t imagine any of us were capable of desiring much. For those of us who failed the reward would be a quick trip downstairs to the incinerator, and while I felt a twinge of fear at this prospect, I didn’t in any way imagine it unfair. They had created me, and this gave them the right to destroy me at their discretion. I hoped, however, that this fear would give me the extra motivation I needed to succeed, that, out of all of us, it would be me and only me who won the favour of my creators, and doing so my continued existence. I realized a moment later that everyone else in the room very likely felt the same way.
We drank up the words the man spoke like we were dying of thirst, each syllable giving us strength and purpose, allowing us to understand what it was we’d be spending our brief lives doing. The people who’d created us were correct, there was nothing we were being asked to do that was beyond our capabilities, and eighteen months was more than enough time to accomplish every goal that we‘d been set. We weren’t just willing to perform our assigned tasks, we were excited! This was purpose, to compete against one another, to excel, to succeed, to make our creators proud, to bring them glory! We were not only willing and able, our hearts were glad to start! And the short, heavy man saw this in us too, and smiled.
When he was done he left the room without taking questions, he knew there would be none, and we were left alone in the room to wait. One by one we were ushered out of a room by a man in a black shirt wearing a headset he used to communicate with someone far away, someone I did not know, someone I would likely never meet. Those of us left waited, sipping bottled water that’d been thoughtfully provided, eyeing one another warily, not speaking. These thirty one people, once my brothers and sisters, were now my bitter rivals. Only one of us would succeed in our task, and I needed it to be me. It had to be.
And besides, we’d only existed a scant few hours and during that time we’d had exactly the same experiences. What was there to talk about?
When my time came the man in the black shirt put his hand on my shoulder, gave me a name, Michael, and led me down a long, empty hallway. I rolled the name around on my tongue, Michael, and liked the way it tasted. It was a good name, and a name was the sort of thing it seemed like I’d need sooner or later, and I was glad to have it. The hallway came to an end and I was ushered into a larger room than any I’d ever been in before, filled with more people than I’d known existed, hundreds of them, sitting along the periphery of the spacious room behind an artificial barrier, all staring in, at me. Lights shone directly in my eyes, momentarily blinding me, reminding me for a brief moment of my first seconds of life, as that pod opened and I was released blind and naked and slimy and confused into the world. It was only hours ago, but it felt like a lifetime. And it was. When my eyes adjusted I was introduced to a funny woman who called herself Ellen, a cruel man who called himself Simon, a jovial but forgettable man who called himself Randy and a man who looked a little like me called Ryan.
And then I sang.
And sang.
And sang.
My BIrth
...this is a story i wrote last year, and since writing it the pop-culture referances have grown somewhat dated, so i thought i'd put it up on here and be done with it. It's longer than the usual sort of thing i post here, but i hope it holds your attention in spite of that. Enjoy!
My Birth
by munsi
My pod opened up, released me naked and covered from head to food in some sort of sticky, viscous liquid, into a well lit, white room. Not used to having to stand under my own power, I fell immediately to my hands and knees, dripping and gasping for breath, disoriented by the lights and sounds around me.
To either side of me another pod opened, releasing people in a similar state, but I paid them no attention, too focused on my own sudden, surprising situation to take much stock of anything else. Around me, the room exploded into action, men and women in white coats bustling to and fro, yelling instructions to one another that, while I understood the individual words, meant nothing to me. Something about cloning pod optimization and biometric stability. Someone said something about this being the most successful season ever, and I wondered off-handedly what it all meant.
As my eyed grew accustomed to the light, I took stock of what was happening around me. I appeared to be in a sterile, white laboratory setting, with a bank of computers along one wall where the white coated people rapidly typed instructions and shouted readings back and forth to one another. Along the other wall, behind me, were 32 identical pods, green-grey and cracked open down the middle, a mass of wires spurting from the tops, intertwining, and snaking across the ceiling to connect back to the computers. In front of each pod was a soaking, struggling naked person just like me. I had no idea what any of us were doing here or, for that matter, who I even was, or how I knew what a “computer” or a “laboratory setting” was, or how I understood the language these strange people were speaking. Before I was released from the pod, I realized, I had no personal memories of any kind.
Eventually one of the women in white coats came over and helped me to my feet. She was pretty, in an unassuming way, carrying a few extra pounds from spending all day in the lab but still cutting an acceptably attractive figure under her lab coat, with long, auburn hair swept back in a loose pony tail. Behind the glasses she wore, her eyes sparkled with intelligence and a fascination with me she didn‘t bother trying to hide. She handed me a robe and escorted me to a room where I could wash the coating of slime that covered me off and dress myself. As I washed myself in that communal shower she explained to me that I was part of a project to grow fully formed, broadly educated, working models of a human being. I was, with my brothers and sisters from the 31 other pods, part of the most successful batch they had to date managed to create. The previous batch, she said, had been profoundly flawed, malformed and grotesque, barely able to sustain themselves outside their pods, and they’d been put to death shortly after the birthing process, their bodies destroyed in a gigantic incinerator the project keeps in the basement of the facility. But we, luckily, were perfectly suited to the project’s needs. We were anatomically complete, biologically twenty-two years old, with the intelligence of a bright high school graduate.
There were of course flaws in our biology, she explained, it was unavoidable do to the way we were grown, but they were, from the point of view of the project, comparatively minor. One trouble was that our lifespan would be dramatically reduced. Each of us would, she told me, had only eighteen months to live, and then our bodies would degrade and decompose, burning themselves out in a matter of hours. But this was an unimportant matter, since within the next eighteen months the task we’d been grown to fulfill could be achieved with time to spare, and if we were needed after that another batch of us could be grown easily enough.
One would think this knowledge would disturb me. The fact was that I only had eighteen months with which to experience life, to see the world and all it’s wonders, simply to be. It seemed the sort of thing that’d bother me greatly. And, more fundamentally, I should have been bothered by the revelation that I wasn’t a person, the way the word person is normally considered. I’d been grown in a pod for a specific purpose over which I had no knowledge or input. I was a simulacra, to be used and then, when my shortened lifespan was over, discarded. And although the woman in the lab coat didn’t say so, I suspected that when my time was up I’d wind up in the same incinerator as that earlier, flawed batch of clones. Though I knew academically that this should disturb me, indeed fill me with a deep, religious sense of existential terror, it did not. I accepted all of what she told me as calmly as I’d accepted the bathrobe from her, as if it were all perfectly natural. I asked her about my reaction and she told me that this was part of the process by which I’d been grown, a genetic predisposition toward docility. I would accept my fate and do as the project required of me with a sense of unflappable calm, and when my end came in eighteen months I’d accept that too. This reassured me. It meant I was functioning properly.
Finishing my shower and towelling myself off, I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror centrally located in the change area. Slim but muscular, of average height, pecs and abs perfectly sculpted, chest hairless. My tan was deep, even and golden bronze, my hair thick and full and jet black. I smiled at the reflection and saw that my teeth were a gleaming white, perfectly spaced and even. I was beautiful, a picture of what a woman would want from a male physique. I accepted this too as a natural part of my new existence. Beautiful, perfect, young and only on this earth a year and a half.
As I finished cleaning up, the woman handed me a white suit, black shirt and black shoes. As I put them on, my thirty one brothers and sisters started filtering into the changing area, each accompanied by a man or woman in a lab coat. They dried themselves, asking the occasional question of their escort, the men lean and toned, the women high-breasted and slim, all with identical tans and similarly perfect smiles, smiles I knew looked just like mine. We looked different enough from one another that someone could easily tell us apart but, I supposed as a side effect of the growing process, we looked alike enough that we clearly were birthed from the same source. I smiled at a young man changing next to me, and he smiled back, looking charming but somehow empty, as if something fundamental was missing from him, like there was from me.
I finished dressing and was ushered out of the room and into a larger, more comfortable waiting area, white suit tailored to fit me perfectly and casually, or perhaps I tailored to fit it. I sat, perfectly relaxed, on a couch along one wall, and waited as my siblings joined me one by one, gradually filling up the room, all thick hair and white teeth and simulated youth and energy. Finally the last of the stragglers, a woman with bright red hair falling in curls down her perfectly formed back and breasts that forever looked like they might “accidentally” pop loose from the top of her raven-black gown but never quite doing so, joined us and took her seat. A short, middle-aged, heavyset man with a receding hairline in an expensively tailored suit entered the room and stood behind a podium, staring out at us, inspecting us. We all sat expectantly, trying to hide our shared sense of anticipation, not knowing exactly what it was he was about to say but knowing that it would finally shed light on the purpose of the project we were the product of, and by extension our own purpose. We knew that whatever it was he asked of us we would execute his orders faithfully, enthusiastically, and without question. The idea of not obeying him would never enter any of our minds, nor could it. We had to obey, we had no choice in the matter, it’s what we’d been designed to do.
It was our destiny.
Once the man had seen whatever it was he was looking for in us, he tapped twice on a microphone and explained, quickly and curtly, what it was that we would be expected to do. He explained that not all of us would see the task we were assigned through to completion, that between the thirty two of us, only one would succeed, bringing glory to the project and the men and women who’d worked so hard to bring us into this world. The one of us who succeeded would be taken care of all the days of his or her short life, given anything their heart could desire, though with our genetic obedience I didn’t imagine any of us were capable of desiring much. For those of us who failed the reward would be a quick trip downstairs to the incinerator, and while I felt a twinge of fear at this prospect, I didn’t in any way imagine it unfair. They had created me, and this gave them the right to destroy me at their discretion. I hoped, however, that this fear would give me the extra motivation I needed to succeed, that, out of all of us, it would be me and only me who won the favour of my creators, and doing so my continued existence. I realized a moment later that everyone else in the room very likely felt the same way.
We drank up the words the man spoke like we were dying of thirst, each syllable giving us strength and purpose, allowing us to understand what it was we’d be spending our brief lives doing. The people who’d created us were correct, there was nothing we were being asked to do that was beyond our capabilities, and eighteen months was more than enough time to accomplish every goal that we‘d been set. We weren’t just willing to perform our assigned tasks, we were excited! This was purpose, to compete against one another, to excel, to succeed, to make our creators proud, to bring them glory! We were not only willing and able, our hearts were glad to start! And the short, heavy man saw this in us too, and smiled.
When he was done he left the room without taking questions, he knew there would be none, and we were left alone in the room to wait. One by one we were ushered out of a room by a man in a black shirt wearing a headset he used to communicate with someone far away, someone I did not know, someone I would likely never meet. Those of us left waited, sipping bottled water that’d been thoughtfully provided, eyeing one another warily, not speaking. These thirty one people, once my brothers and sisters, were now my bitter rivals. Only one of us would succeed in our task, and I needed it to be me. It had to be.
And besides, we’d only existed a scant few hours and during that time we’d had exactly the same experiences. What was there to talk about?
When my time came the man in the black shirt put his hand on my shoulder, gave me a name, Michael, and led me down a long, empty hallway. I rolled the name around on my tongue, Michael, and liked the way it tasted. It was a good name, and a name was the sort of thing it seemed like I’d need sooner or later, and I was glad to have it. The hallway came to an end and I was ushered into a larger room than any I’d ever been in before, filled with more people than I’d known existed, hundreds of them, sitting along the periphery of the spacious room behind an artificial barrier, all staring in, at me. Lights shone directly in my eyes, momentarily blinding me, reminding me for a brief moment of my first seconds of life, as that pod opened and I was released blind and naked and slimy and confused into the world. It was only hours ago, but it felt like a lifetime. And it was. When my eyes adjusted I was introduced to a funny woman who called herself Ellen, a cruel man who called himself Simon, a jovial but forgettable man who called himself Randy and a man who looked a little like me called Ryan.
And then I sang.
And sang.
And sang.
My Birth
by munsi
My pod opened up, released me naked and covered from head to food in some sort of sticky, viscous liquid, into a well lit, white room. Not used to having to stand under my own power, I fell immediately to my hands and knees, dripping and gasping for breath, disoriented by the lights and sounds around me.
To either side of me another pod opened, releasing people in a similar state, but I paid them no attention, too focused on my own sudden, surprising situation to take much stock of anything else. Around me, the room exploded into action, men and women in white coats bustling to and fro, yelling instructions to one another that, while I understood the individual words, meant nothing to me. Something about cloning pod optimization and biometric stability. Someone said something about this being the most successful season ever, and I wondered off-handedly what it all meant.
As my eyed grew accustomed to the light, I took stock of what was happening around me. I appeared to be in a sterile, white laboratory setting, with a bank of computers along one wall where the white coated people rapidly typed instructions and shouted readings back and forth to one another. Along the other wall, behind me, were 32 identical pods, green-grey and cracked open down the middle, a mass of wires spurting from the tops, intertwining, and snaking across the ceiling to connect back to the computers. In front of each pod was a soaking, struggling naked person just like me. I had no idea what any of us were doing here or, for that matter, who I even was, or how I knew what a “computer” or a “laboratory setting” was, or how I understood the language these strange people were speaking. Before I was released from the pod, I realized, I had no personal memories of any kind.
Eventually one of the women in white coats came over and helped me to my feet. She was pretty, in an unassuming way, carrying a few extra pounds from spending all day in the lab but still cutting an acceptably attractive figure under her lab coat, with long, auburn hair swept back in a loose pony tail. Behind the glasses she wore, her eyes sparkled with intelligence and a fascination with me she didn‘t bother trying to hide. She handed me a robe and escorted me to a room where I could wash the coating of slime that covered me off and dress myself. As I washed myself in that communal shower she explained to me that I was part of a project to grow fully formed, broadly educated, working models of a human being. I was, with my brothers and sisters from the 31 other pods, part of the most successful batch they had to date managed to create. The previous batch, she said, had been profoundly flawed, malformed and grotesque, barely able to sustain themselves outside their pods, and they’d been put to death shortly after the birthing process, their bodies destroyed in a gigantic incinerator the project keeps in the basement of the facility. But we, luckily, were perfectly suited to the project’s needs. We were anatomically complete, biologically twenty-two years old, with the intelligence of a bright high school graduate.
There were of course flaws in our biology, she explained, it was unavoidable do to the way we were grown, but they were, from the point of view of the project, comparatively minor. One trouble was that our lifespan would be dramatically reduced. Each of us would, she told me, had only eighteen months to live, and then our bodies would degrade and decompose, burning themselves out in a matter of hours. But this was an unimportant matter, since within the next eighteen months the task we’d been grown to fulfill could be achieved with time to spare, and if we were needed after that another batch of us could be grown easily enough.
One would think this knowledge would disturb me. The fact was that I only had eighteen months with which to experience life, to see the world and all it’s wonders, simply to be. It seemed the sort of thing that’d bother me greatly. And, more fundamentally, I should have been bothered by the revelation that I wasn’t a person, the way the word person is normally considered. I’d been grown in a pod for a specific purpose over which I had no knowledge or input. I was a simulacra, to be used and then, when my shortened lifespan was over, discarded. And although the woman in the lab coat didn’t say so, I suspected that when my time was up I’d wind up in the same incinerator as that earlier, flawed batch of clones. Though I knew academically that this should disturb me, indeed fill me with a deep, religious sense of existential terror, it did not. I accepted all of what she told me as calmly as I’d accepted the bathrobe from her, as if it were all perfectly natural. I asked her about my reaction and she told me that this was part of the process by which I’d been grown, a genetic predisposition toward docility. I would accept my fate and do as the project required of me with a sense of unflappable calm, and when my end came in eighteen months I’d accept that too. This reassured me. It meant I was functioning properly.
Finishing my shower and towelling myself off, I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror centrally located in the change area. Slim but muscular, of average height, pecs and abs perfectly sculpted, chest hairless. My tan was deep, even and golden bronze, my hair thick and full and jet black. I smiled at the reflection and saw that my teeth were a gleaming white, perfectly spaced and even. I was beautiful, a picture of what a woman would want from a male physique. I accepted this too as a natural part of my new existence. Beautiful, perfect, young and only on this earth a year and a half.
As I finished cleaning up, the woman handed me a white suit, black shirt and black shoes. As I put them on, my thirty one brothers and sisters started filtering into the changing area, each accompanied by a man or woman in a lab coat. They dried themselves, asking the occasional question of their escort, the men lean and toned, the women high-breasted and slim, all with identical tans and similarly perfect smiles, smiles I knew looked just like mine. We looked different enough from one another that someone could easily tell us apart but, I supposed as a side effect of the growing process, we looked alike enough that we clearly were birthed from the same source. I smiled at a young man changing next to me, and he smiled back, looking charming but somehow empty, as if something fundamental was missing from him, like there was from me.
I finished dressing and was ushered out of the room and into a larger, more comfortable waiting area, white suit tailored to fit me perfectly and casually, or perhaps I tailored to fit it. I sat, perfectly relaxed, on a couch along one wall, and waited as my siblings joined me one by one, gradually filling up the room, all thick hair and white teeth and simulated youth and energy. Finally the last of the stragglers, a woman with bright red hair falling in curls down her perfectly formed back and breasts that forever looked like they might “accidentally” pop loose from the top of her raven-black gown but never quite doing so, joined us and took her seat. A short, middle-aged, heavyset man with a receding hairline in an expensively tailored suit entered the room and stood behind a podium, staring out at us, inspecting us. We all sat expectantly, trying to hide our shared sense of anticipation, not knowing exactly what it was he was about to say but knowing that it would finally shed light on the purpose of the project we were the product of, and by extension our own purpose. We knew that whatever it was he asked of us we would execute his orders faithfully, enthusiastically, and without question. The idea of not obeying him would never enter any of our minds, nor could it. We had to obey, we had no choice in the matter, it’s what we’d been designed to do.
It was our destiny.
Once the man had seen whatever it was he was looking for in us, he tapped twice on a microphone and explained, quickly and curtly, what it was that we would be expected to do. He explained that not all of us would see the task we were assigned through to completion, that between the thirty two of us, only one would succeed, bringing glory to the project and the men and women who’d worked so hard to bring us into this world. The one of us who succeeded would be taken care of all the days of his or her short life, given anything their heart could desire, though with our genetic obedience I didn’t imagine any of us were capable of desiring much. For those of us who failed the reward would be a quick trip downstairs to the incinerator, and while I felt a twinge of fear at this prospect, I didn’t in any way imagine it unfair. They had created me, and this gave them the right to destroy me at their discretion. I hoped, however, that this fear would give me the extra motivation I needed to succeed, that, out of all of us, it would be me and only me who won the favour of my creators, and doing so my continued existence. I realized a moment later that everyone else in the room very likely felt the same way.
We drank up the words the man spoke like we were dying of thirst, each syllable giving us strength and purpose, allowing us to understand what it was we’d be spending our brief lives doing. The people who’d created us were correct, there was nothing we were being asked to do that was beyond our capabilities, and eighteen months was more than enough time to accomplish every goal that we‘d been set. We weren’t just willing to perform our assigned tasks, we were excited! This was purpose, to compete against one another, to excel, to succeed, to make our creators proud, to bring them glory! We were not only willing and able, our hearts were glad to start! And the short, heavy man saw this in us too, and smiled.
When he was done he left the room without taking questions, he knew there would be none, and we were left alone in the room to wait. One by one we were ushered out of a room by a man in a black shirt wearing a headset he used to communicate with someone far away, someone I did not know, someone I would likely never meet. Those of us left waited, sipping bottled water that’d been thoughtfully provided, eyeing one another warily, not speaking. These thirty one people, once my brothers and sisters, were now my bitter rivals. Only one of us would succeed in our task, and I needed it to be me. It had to be.
And besides, we’d only existed a scant few hours and during that time we’d had exactly the same experiences. What was there to talk about?
When my time came the man in the black shirt put his hand on my shoulder, gave me a name, Michael, and led me down a long, empty hallway. I rolled the name around on my tongue, Michael, and liked the way it tasted. It was a good name, and a name was the sort of thing it seemed like I’d need sooner or later, and I was glad to have it. The hallway came to an end and I was ushered into a larger room than any I’d ever been in before, filled with more people than I’d known existed, hundreds of them, sitting along the periphery of the spacious room behind an artificial barrier, all staring in, at me. Lights shone directly in my eyes, momentarily blinding me, reminding me for a brief moment of my first seconds of life, as that pod opened and I was released blind and naked and slimy and confused into the world. It was only hours ago, but it felt like a lifetime. And it was. When my eyes adjusted I was introduced to a funny woman who called herself Ellen, a cruel man who called himself Simon, a jovial but forgettable man who called himself Randy and a man who looked a little like me called Ryan.
And then I sang.
And sang.
And sang.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Update on the Status of this Blog
In 2011 I'm planning a busy year.
I'm recording a podcast (http://secrethistory.posterous.com/ or "The Secret History of Major Holidays, with Munsi" in the iTunes podcast directory, I'm writing an assuredly unsuccessful television special (more details on that later) for production in the summer, I'm working more than full time and I'm dating a girl who lives nowhere near me. Prepping for this, I've not had much time to update my story blog.
I want to make perfectly clear: I AM STILL USING THIS BLOG FOR SHORT STORIES! I am not, however, going to be updating it nearly as much in 2011 as I did in 2010, since I'll have more on my plate that I need to write. So thank you for reading my Drabblings up 'til now, I hope you've enjoyed them, and definately keep checking in here for new content, as new content will still be appearing now and again.
Also, if you like self-indulgent comedy, inane ramblings and pop-culture referances, feel quite free to listen my podcast, (again, that address is http://secrethistory.posterous.com/ if you seek to check it out) it's not exactly the sort of science-fiction/fantasy/horror short fare you've grown to know and... erm... to know at any rate, but it's occasionally funny, if you're into that kind of thing.
My next update will be a story. This I promise to you.
I'm recording a podcast (http://secrethistory.posterous.com/ or "The Secret History of Major Holidays, with Munsi" in the iTunes podcast directory, I'm writing an assuredly unsuccessful television special (more details on that later) for production in the summer, I'm working more than full time and I'm dating a girl who lives nowhere near me. Prepping for this, I've not had much time to update my story blog.
I want to make perfectly clear: I AM STILL USING THIS BLOG FOR SHORT STORIES! I am not, however, going to be updating it nearly as much in 2011 as I did in 2010, since I'll have more on my plate that I need to write. So thank you for reading my Drabblings up 'til now, I hope you've enjoyed them, and definately keep checking in here for new content, as new content will still be appearing now and again.
Also, if you like self-indulgent comedy, inane ramblings and pop-culture referances, feel quite free to listen my podcast, (again, that address is http://secrethistory.posterous.com/ if you seek to check it out) it's not exactly the sort of science-fiction/fantasy/horror short fare you've grown to know and... erm... to know at any rate, but it's occasionally funny, if you're into that kind of thing.
My next update will be a story. This I promise to you.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
