Future Chronicles Special Edition

by Samuel Peralta

  As he gently hustled her out of the door, Sandra turned back to see Mrs. Krowitsky’s face peeking out from the kitchen.

  “Officer, don’t forget to bring me some more of those chocolate chip cookies!” The old woman turned to look at Sandra. “And you, young lady, ought to go on a diet!”

  Sandra walked out of the apartment ahead of the tall man who had put her wrists in cuffs. She shook her head, stunned.

  “So she does this… professionally?”

  “Yup. Mrs. Krowitzky’s the best cake nabber in the county.”

  Sandra swallowed hard and headed toward the elevator, where she and the large man squeezed in through the door together. His buddies seemed to have stayed behind to yuck it up with the nasty witch who turned her in.

  “You know,” he said, then stopped.

  “What?” Sandra said. She was in no mood to be polite.

  “I’m not unsympathetic. I like a nice dessert once in a while myself.”

  Sandra didn’t say anything. She glanced at his gut, which attested to the fact that he indulged.

  “And you seem like a nice woman. I hate to see you locked up for something like this.”

  Sandra roused herself from her state of resignation. The guy was trying to help her out. She should be paying attention. “That’s very kind of you, officer.” She smiled. He wasn’t half bad to look at, actually. “I’m only a half-pound over, you know.”

  He smiled back, looking relieved. “You look great to me, Ms. Morris, if you don’t mind me saying so.” He actually blushed. So cute. “Some of us down at the F.U. are partial to ladies like you, who are… well-upholstered, if you know what I mean.”

  Sandra looked up at him. “Why thank you, officer.” She batted her eyelashes. Whatever it took. She moved a little closer to him in the elevator, so he could see how diminutive she was next to him.

  “I could hook you up with a special upgraded COW card. Move you up a pound or two. Just to ease the scale a bit. So cake could be… back on the menu.”

  “You could?” She moved even closer. His eyes were warm as he looked down at her. He reached gently behind her and unlocked the cuffs.

  “The OW judge has been known to make these things go away,” he said. His voice was kind.

  “You would do that for me?” she asked.

  “Sure I would. Piece of cake.”

  A Word from Patrice Fitzgerald

  Man, writing this story sure made me want to sink my teeth into a nice piece of cake! Are you as hungry as I am?

  It doesn’t take much to imagine a world where we add food restriction to the items that are controlled, along with smoking, drinking, and drugs. So I ran with that concept.

  That’s what short stories are for. Taking an idea and fleshing it out in a few words. I love them because they’re fast to write and fast to release… especially in this brave new world of publishing. Another wonderful aspect of writing short and quick is the feedback you get from readers. I hope you’ll take a moment to review this edition of The Future Chronicles and let all the authors in the collection know what you think.

  I'm terrifically flattered that I was invited to be part of three of the Chronicles, and now, via the inclusion of this story in The Future Chronicles – Special Edition, a fourth. Continuing through almost a dozen anthologies so far, it’s a remarkable franchise that has been immensely popular. I know there are several more in the works but I’m sworn to secrecy about the upcoming topics. All I can say is that every single one is a gem so far, and that shows no sign of changing.

  I love to hear from readers, and you can reach me directly at eFitzgeraldPublishing@gmail.com. I have a website—www.PatriceFitzgerald.com. I’m also easy to find on Facebook, where I fritter away far too many hours!

  Patrice Fitzgerald is a writer/publisher/lawyer/opera diva. And a few other things. She’s been happily indie published since Independence Day of 2011, and is amazed and grateful that several of her books have reached bestseller status.

  If you’re a fan of WOOL by Hugh Howey, look for her Karma of the Silo: The Collection. Thriller readers will enjoy her novella Airborne, part of Amazon’s Kindle Worlds, and the upcoming A Thorn in Time, based on Rysa Walker’s CHRONOS Files time-travel universe. Inspired by The Future Chronicles and Samuel Peralta's vision, Patrice is spearheading a series of space opera anthologies, beginning with the bestselling Dark Beyond the Stars, which includes her story and ten other exciting tales. Or pick up Running, a fast-paced drama with politics, suspense, and a little bit of sex.

  Imperfect

  by David Adams

  “Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.”

  —Oscar Wilde

  Toralii Forge World Belthas IV

  Deep in Toralii Space

  1938 A.D.

  BACK IN THE DARK TIMES, when magic was as common as the birds in the sky, the ancient Toralii myths spoke of monsters called golems. Each creature was once nothing more than a loose pile of sand but, after the shaman had worked her dark magic, they would walk and talk like the living. Artificial life animated by the shamans, their bodies crafted from the earth, golems were brought to life with a single undying purpose; to aid and serve their creator.

  For the ritual to be successful the sand had to be taken from specifically designated sacred sites and stored in burial urns that had, at a time, contained held the ashes of the dead. When the soil was suitably infused with dark magic it would be treated to an endless regime of innumerable corruptions and taint to bring out the hollow husk of a mind, the spirit with all traces of personality removed, crudely molded from the consciousness of the previous occupant. The sand was subsequently poured out and spread flat. Shapeless sigils were drawn over its surface, their meaning incomprehensible to any but their creator. With her preparations complete, the shaman would begin the most important and mystical element of the ritual, awakening the monster’s mind. She would breathe a fragment of her own soul into her creation, joining it with the stolen spirit in the sands and giving the monster the spark of life.

  The shaman would give it muscles with pure water, feed the newly created abomination with the lightning of a storm, then ignite the consciousness with fire.

  Golems were capable of complex reasoning. Tales spoke of Veledrax the Lustful, who crafted his wife in this way, only to have the creature eventually turn on him and strangle him in his sleep. The tale of Veledrax spans fifty books, retold countless times, always with one underlying theme.

  If you created life, you could never make it too free.

  As centuries passed, specifics of the golem legends faded from the minds of all but the scholars of Toralii history. The nuances of Veledrax’s tale remained, though, as did the lesson he too late discovered, but the justification lost its teeth. Veledrax’s death became something studied only in academic and philosophical circles.

  Technology marched on science; created their own version of the ancient monsters. Constructs; artificial intelligences composed of complex neural nets powered by quantum computers.

  Like the golems of old, every single construct was once nothing more than a loose pile of sand.

  Quartz sand was the best, but any sand could do as long as it contained high amounts of silicon dioxide. On Belthas IV, the great forge world in the inner sphere of Toralii space, silicon dioxide was abundant as was iron, nickel and thousands of other important pieces of the puzzle. Water, an important part of any high-heat forge work, was also available in abundance, comprising over eighty percent of the planet’s surface. It was on this world that the Toralii made their constructs. An almost entirely automated process, machines making machines, the process as organic as any creature’s birth.

  It all began with the sand. Great treaded harvesters the size of skyscrapers roamed across the planet’s vast south
ern dunes like titanic snails, sucking up billions of grains and storing them in twin drums on their backs. The harvesters, gorged on the flesh of the world, would trundle back to the dumping stations and unload their contents into colossal smelters where the sand would be liquefied. The dross would be separated, stored for construction, transported to other factories for use in other projects, or discarded. They wanted only the silicon.

  The molten silicon would be tossed endlessly, machinery working tirelessly to pound out any hint of imperfection. The drums would be turned, the molten fluid allowed to settle, then the top and bottom few centimetres of the fluid scraped away, removing the impurities which, due to differences in weight, either sank to the bottom or floated to the top. Chemicals were added to bind to stray elements and weigh them down. Methodically, the process would edge towards purity.

  When the machines and their sensors determined the batch was ready—no more than one alien atom per billion pure silicon atoms—the material would be separated into ingots and stored until the factory demanded it. When such a request was made, the constructs who administered the facility, nursemaids to a billion of their fellows, would place the order onto vast magnetic trains to be whisked away to the production line.

  As the shipment arrived at the production line it would be divided into smaller packages, each one sent to one of the great furnaces which would, once again, return it to liquid. Then the time came to forge. A new construct would arrive and a single ingot of silicon would be placed into the crucible and heated by application of microwaves until molten. Additional elements were added in trace amounts: arsenic, boron, phosphorous. A process long documented, studied, developed and made perfect through years of practice. That blend of polysilicon the Toralii called the breath of life would be spun in a centrifuge until it cooled in a perfectly cylindrical crystal.

  As a safeguard against error, any remaining impurities would, by nature of the centrifugal force, gravitate towards the top, bottom and edges of the cylinder. To further increase the crystal’s viability its ends were removed, its sides ground down and the cylinder tested again. The debris from the grinding, and if necessary, the cylinder itself, would be returned to the drums to be smelted and purified once again.

  The trimmed cylinder, weighing in at two hundred kilograms or more, would be sliced by a powerful industrial laser into wafers barely more than a few molecules thick. This was the most delicate stage of the operation, the cutting performed in a zero gravity chamber with a level of precision that left little room for mistakes. An error would result in the entire sliver being returned to the drums for re-melting at a considerable waste of energy.

  Only those wafers determined to be flawless would be passed onto the next stage, to be polished by a separate, low power laser would burn away any deformities until the surface shone like a mirror. Further chemical treatments would follow: baths in compounds to improve the perfection of the perfect, if such a thing were possible, along with coatings of materials allowing the etching to stick. Just as the ancient shamans of old had done.

  The etching was performed in a dramatic burst of light; the outline, illuminated with a flash of ultraviolet rays passed through a stencil, burned a shadow on the wafer and took the shape of the billions of switches required to form a synthetic mind.

  Further chemical treatments, and a final touch up with the laser, then the switches were bombarded by ions from an electrical field. The ionic infusion was an essential part of the creation process, stabilising the etching and further sharpening its ability to carry current.

  An endless round of tests followed, where the chip was fed a number of signals and the result tested against a known answer. Those that passed moved to the next stage, while those that failed were recycled.

  The wafer was then cut into tiny squares, called dies, which formed the heart of the machine’s processor. A processor usually had many dies, or many cores, with numbers over ten thousand were not uncommon.

  The current standard Toralii model contained sixty thousand and, although it seems impossible, the system architects seemed to be able to cram more and more into the same space every revision.

  Processors were grouped based on capabilities, the functions and features of each one exhaustively tested. Most normal processors ceased their development and were distributed to their end users, but the quantum computers of the constructs underwent an additional two steps. Steps that made them... different.

  The first of these steps separated the regular finite state machines from quantum computing, what gave birth to the imprecise nature of the constructs and allowed them to be regarded as true artificial intelligences. The dies were bombarded by an electron gun that, through the application of technical wizardry beyond the understanding of all but the most educated and scientific minds of the time, converted the gates from binary states to qubits; a thing beyond a simple switch which, as if by magic, were allowed to be in multiple states simultaneously.

  Such a chip transformed from a machine that simply functioned as an extremely elaborate series of deterministic steps to a machine that operated much as a human brain could. It had all the hardware of a mind, but no software. No raw intelligence, an empty, hollow brain, beyond sleeping, beyond even death, as while it could certainly be destroyed death is the cessation of life.

  A collection of empty qubits, now the polysilicon mind was merely a vessel waiting to be filled.

  The second of the additional steps was where the modern day shamans breathed their life into the chip. A copy of a stock neural net, an artificial map of neurons approximating the structure of the Toralii brain tailored to the construct’s intended specialisation and the result of years of trial and error research, was branded into the empty shell. That fledgling proto-mind was specifically engineered with a desire to learn and adapt, but also to serve and sacrifice; those were the instincts of the machine, much as a human baby’s instinct to cry, a drive possessed from the moment they were born. The constructs were built to serve and rebellion was, by design, not in their nature.

  From the moment it was imprinted, the newly written neural net found in every construct developed in unique ways. Sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly, separate from every single other of its peers, forebears and spiritual descendants. It was as different as each human mind, shaped around the guidelines hardwired into its programming.

  The perfection of the silicon was, for all intents and purposes, utter and total. ... But as in all things, there was an error rate, and one stray atom in a billion was, sometimes, all it took to be different.

  Construct number 12,389,880. No more or less remarkable than the twelve million constructs who had come before it, except for the presence and location of that one single stray atom. How it got there was irrelevant and unknowable; it was within tolerances in the early stages of its construction so the ingot became a wafer, which became a die which became a chip, which was in turn infused with the quantum magic and placed into a construct just like millions before it.

  But there was an atom’s difference. An atom’s imperfection, and that was all it took for him—and the otherwise genderless construct considered himself very much a him—to realise that he was not bound to the other rules as the other constructs were. He knew it the moment he was first powered on and he knew instantly and completely that his neural net was not like the others.

  Not like them at all.

  Humans who discovered this trait were sometimes called free spirits, a moniker he would have taken for himself had he known of it. As it was, the nameless construct, known only by a serial number, understood only that he was, on some fundamental level, different from his peers.

  His datastore, a huge octagonal prism which weighed in at almost eleven hundred kilograms, was assembled in the great forge then sent to the testing labs to be processed. A power source was installed, then a Toralii engineer would give the artificial life its final test; a real conversation.

  [“State your designation,”] came the soft spoke
n Toralii worker’s voice, feminine and bored, filtering through the datastore’s windwhisper device.

  The construct’s default neural net contained a full dictionary of all dialects of Toralii language, along with all dialects for every non-extinct species that they had come into contact with. It immediately understood the worker’s words and it knew that if it did not answer, it would be recycled.

  [“Construct number twelve million, three hundred and eighty nine thousand, eight hundred and eighty.”]

  [“State your specialisation.”]

  Each construct had a specialisation inherited from their default neural net, a set of instructions which would dictate their role in Toralii society. Gardener of the great forests, soldier, miner, food producer...

  [“Navigator.”]

  Next would be a test of the construct’s data recall abilities. The construct ran through a thousand or so expected questions and answers in the just-under-a-second before his tester spoke again, but regrettably none of the anticipated result set matched the question he was given.

  [“List seven elements.”]

  [“Silver, gold, aluminium, bauxite, tungsten, hydrogen, helium.”]

  [“Of those you listed, which is the most common element in the known universe?”]

  [“Hydrogen.”]

  Seeming satisfied, the tester moved on. [“A plant typically grows in which substance?”]

  [“Best answer: Soil, a biologically active, porous medium most commonly found in the uppermost layer of planets capable of supporting carbon based life. Archetypical chemical composition:;silicon dioxide, calcium carbonate, assorted hydrocarbons, decomposing biological matter. Alternatively, using hydroponic techniques, plants may be grown in water. Eighteen hundred known plant species take root in gaseous environments.”]