The Elderon Chronicles Box Set

by Tarah Benner

  Blood is bubbling out at a terrifying rate. The knife must have pierced something major. Jonah shoves a wad of fabric into the wound and applies pressure with both his hands.

  I just stare. I don’t know what to do next.

  “Check for a pulse,” Jonah huffs, jerking his head back at the woman in white.

  I nod. I’d almost forgotten about her. I scoot back on my heels and slide on the blood. It’s everywhere, and now it’s on me.

  I take a deep breath and turn to the woman, whose mop of dark hair is obscuring her face. Her royal blue scarf is still crisp and perfect. The sight is unnerving, to say the least.

  Hands shaking, I lift up her hair just as Jonah did for me. But the instant the side of her face is exposed, I yank back my hand and stifle a scream.

  “What is it?” Jonah yells.

  I shake my head. I can’t move. I can’t speak.

  I stare at the woman and continue to shake, eyes traveling over the curve of her shoulder and the neat French manicure on her cold dead hand.

  “Maggie!” Jonah yells, still trying to staunch the flow of blood.

  I look behind me and wish I hadn’t. The captain’s face is as white as a bone. His eyes are closed, and the blood is still seeping through Jonah’s blue shirt. He isn’t going to make it.

  I lift the woman’s hair again to expose the wreckage underneath. By the looks of things, her head was completely bashed in, but there’s not a drop of blood or even the hint of bone.

  Everything about her is perfectly human — from the cracks in her lipstick to the mole on her neck. I can see the wispy hairs just beneath her ear, but nothing about her is remotely real.

  A fine curl of ivory flesh has been violently torn, revealing a dense metal structure laced with wires and screws. I meet Jonah’s horrified gaze, and a second later, Ping walks in.

  He looks from Callaghan to the woman and freezes on the spot. He sees what I see, but he can’t believe his eyes.

  This woman isn’t a hostess — not a real one, anyway. She’s a BlumBot creation unlike any I’ve ever seen.

  She isn’t like the bots in the dining hall or the ones that tried to kill me. She doesn’t have weird doll eyes or silicone skin that feels like rubber to the touch.

  Her flesh is silky smooth and dotted with fine white hairs. I can see the hint of a vein beneath the surface and a patch of pink near her elbow where the skin starts to crinkle.

  Everything about her looks and feels real. She’s the next generation of artificial life, and she is indistinguishable from a human.

  Author’s Note

  Thank you for reading Colony One. I hope you enjoyed the book. This series is a slight step outside my wheelhouse of gloom and doom, and I had a ton of fun writing it.

  Of course, I can’t seem to write a story that doesn’t threaten the survival of humanity, but hey, it’s robots in space! What could possibly be better?

  I knew that it would take quite a bit of research to create a believable space colony, but I never imagined the amazing discoveries and advancements that I would uncover. Moreover, this is one of those times where the research had a massive impact on the story itself, so if you haven’t looked into any of this before, I would highly recommend setting aside an evening to go down a Google rabbit hole.

  I chose the rotating design of Elderon to offset the health problems and logistical issues caused by microgravity. Long-term weightlessness causes muscle atrophy and a deterioration of your skeleton, and it puts astronauts at risk for kidney stones and bone fractures. Space travel can also lead to diminished cardiac function, and increased radiation exposure during long missions can put astronauts at a greater risk of cancer.

  The current and most cost-effective solution to the problems posed by microgravity is to have astronauts work out for several hours a day while in space. They run on a treadmill with bungee cords holding them to the machine and lift weights to maintain muscle mass.

  To reduce the health problems — and the need to pee into a tube — I designed a colony that rotated and used centripetal force to simulate the effects of 1G. In my research, I learned that the concept of a rotating “donut” colony like Elderon was entirely possible — just prohibitively expensive.

  The colony would have to be constructed in space, and apparently, it costs roughly $1 million per pound just to lift something into low orbit. To spin that large of a donut fast enough to simulate 1G would take an enormous amount of fuel, but I’m convinced that the rapidly plummeting costs of space travel and technological advancements would make this plausible if not practical.

  As I was thinking about what the colonists would eat, I got so excited that I just had to give you a peek behind the curtain. The scene where Maggie goes into the food-science lab was written after I learned about some of the incredible advancements in cultured meat.

  So far scientists have produced a $300,000 burger that tastes almost exactly like the real thing, and startup Memphis Meats has created a meatball for roughly $1,000.

  Despite some critics’ beliefs that cultured meat is a PR stunt that can’t possibly live up to the hype, the scientists who are working on it say that cultured meat could help feed the world and meet the growing demand for animal products that are contributing to greenhouse gas emissions.

  Many vegetarians and vegans have even thrown their support behind the development of “clean meat.” (Though as of this book’s publication, the process for cultivating meat requires a nutrient serum derived from sugar, amino acids, and real animal blood.)

  The real question is whether consumers would want to eat meat that’s been grown in a lab — even if it’s cheaper and tastes identical to meat from a natural-born cow. Would you?

  And speaking of freaky technology, what about those robots? A brief foray into the robotics industry of 2018 is both wickedly cool and terrifying. Imagine what it’s going to be like in 2075.

  My first iteration of robots in the book were loosely based off some models that are currently in production. As of this book’s publication, California-based Knightscope, Inc. has four different robot models designed to help prevent crime in parking lots, malls, sporting arenas, and airports.

  Their most well-known model, the 400-pound K5, stands five feet tall and is shaped like a bullet — or a cone-headed version of R2-D2. It tops out at three miles per hour, has four cameras, and can read up to 300 license plates per minute. It costs about $6 per hour to rent.

  The robots have already come under scrutiny after one hit a toddler in a mall parking lot and another was hired by a San Francisco animal shelter to cut down on crime allegedly emanating from a nearby homeless camp.

  Another company called Starship Technologies has launched a fleet of food delivery robots in Washington, DC, and Redwood City, California. These are glorified coolers on wheels equipped with GPS, cameras, and sensors that allow them to navigate city sidewalks at a normal walking pace.

  Then there’s Eve — one of twenty-five robots roaming the halls of UCSF Medical Center in San Francisco delivering meals, picking up dirty trays, and transporting medications and lab samples throughout the hospital. Think of Eve as a refrigerator-sized flatbed truck that knows the hospital’s floor plan.

  But while the robots working in hospitals and parking lots are about as threatening as C-3PO, there was one robot that stood out from them all and legitimately gave me the creeps. Her name is Sophia, and she was designed by a Hong Kong–based firm, Hanson Robotics.

  Sophia is different because her “face” looks almost human. She’s designed to resemble Audrey Hepburn, and she’s equipped with cameras that allow her to track faces, maintain eye contact, and mimic up to sixty different human expressions. She can even hold conversations on her own.

  Saudi Arabia made Sophia its first robot citizen, but Sophia is not the only lifelike humanoid robot. There’s also Erica, created by Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro at Osaka University, and Jai Jai, the interactive “robot goddess” created by a team at the Univers
ity of Science and Technology in China led by Chen Xiaoping.

  This one can hold simple conversations and says things like “You’re a handsome man” and “Don’t come too close to me when you are taking a picture. It will make my face look fat.”

  Did I mention she refers to her male creator as “my lord”? Barf.

  The fate of these supersmart cyborgs? To perform “a range of menial tasks in Chinese restaurants, nursing homes, hospitals, and households.” You know — lady things.

  Believe it or not, the rampant sexism in the fields of AI and robotics almost bugs me more than the fact that these robots exist at all.

  Today, most robots are created by men to look and talk like idealized versions of women. They’re designed to be charming, polite, and ultimately subservient to their creators — basically walking, talking Barbie dolls. (Though Sophia did once throw shade on Elon Musk. Bad robot.)

  When designing his robot Erica, Hiroshi Ishiguro combined thirty photos of real women to create what he says is the “most beautiful robot in the world.” These robots’ creators dress them up like demure ladies in classic skirts, button-up shirts, and gloves — except when Sophia is rented out. Then her wardrobe is dictated by the client.

  The cold truth is that, whether they’re aware of it or not, these men want to create robots who are beautiful, helpful, smiley, and obedient — just as the patriarchy demanded real women behave before that became a societal no-no.

  Even our seemingly innocuous AI assistants Siri, Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana all have female names. Google specified that it didn’t want to give its AI a gender, though its default voice is female.

  Samsung named its virtual assistant Bixby — assumedly an attempt at gender neutrality — but Samsung also sets the default voice on its devices to female. (Even more infuriating is the differing descriptions Samsung lists for the speaking styles of its virtual assistant: “chipper” and “cheerful” for the female Bixby and “confident” and “assertive” for the male.)

  I think it’s clear that our treatment of robots and voice assistants says a lot about our unconscious biases. No piece of technology is created without a shadow of humanity’s greatest faults, and none is immune to corruption.

  Pay close attention to the quote at the beginning of this book. It was first uttered in 2065 by Benjamin Blum — the father of modern robotics and Ziva Blum’s dad. (Is it weird to reference fictional quotes from the future-past?)

  It’s not that I believe robots are evil. It’s that they are created by humans, who, by nature, are less than perfect.

  Many of the hacks carried out by the Bureau for Chaos are based on real events — or controlled cyberattacks conducted by researchers in an academic setting.

  In 2015, a German steel mill was hacked. The hackers went after the control systems, which prevented a blast furnace from being shut down and caused massive damage to the plant’s equipment.

  That same year, a security hole in Uconnect software allowed hackers to crash a Jeep into a ditch by cutting the engine and the brakes. University researchers have shown that Tesla’s autopilot sensors can be tampered with to perceive objects where they don’t exist or make objects “invisible.”

  As I was editing this book, a woman was struck and killed by a self-driving car crossing the street in Tempe, Arizona. As of this book’s publication, we still don’t know exactly why neither the car nor its human safety driver attempted to stop.

  It’s not that humans are inherently careless or that the people who work in artificial intelligence are evil. It’s that humans care about profits and easy living.

  This is one reason why as many as thirty-eight percent of US jobs are at risk of being overtaken by automation by 2030. (Compare that to thirty percent of jobs in the UK, thirty-five percent in Germany, and twenty-one percent in Japan.)

  I feel profoundly lucky that my husband is even deeper in the tin-foil-hat camp than I am. On a recent vacation to Arizona, a worker at McDonald’s actually refused to take our order. She pointed us toward the self-serve kiosk in the middle of the restaurant, and my husband asked me if we could leave. (We walked next door to Carl’s Jr., where a human took our order and fried our chicken tenders by hand.)

  Automation doesn’t just threaten jobs in manufacturing, hospitality, health care, and food service. Journalists, narrators, and even authors may soon find their livelihoods threatened.

  In just one year, The Washington Post produced 850 news articles using its own automated storytelling technology known as Heliograf. This huge swath of articles included 500 stories centered around the election and around 300 reports about the Rio Olympics. It’s important to note that The Post was bought by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos back in 2013, but it isn’t the only news outlet utilizing AI in some way.

  Reuters uses an application called News Tracer to “extract insights from social media” to give reporters a head start in churning out breaking news stories. Basically, it identifies clusters of Twitter users talking about the same thing, rates an event’s “newsworthiness,” and attempts to vet the source to determine whether or not the information is factual.

  The New York Times has developed Editor to apply relevant tags to news articles, group meta data, and categorize article elements such as pull quotes and key points. The goal is to simplify research and fact-checking.

  The Times is also experimenting with AI for moderating comments with a tool from Google’s parent company, Alphabet. The tool sorts comments based on a sliding scale of “toxicity” and allows readers to self-select comments that are more or less inflammatory.

  ViralGauge, the tool used in the book to predict just how “viral” a news story will go is loosely based on HitPredictor — a real-life tool owned by iHeartMedia to predict which songs will be hits.

  In his book Hit Makers, Derek Thompson writes about HitPredictor and its UK cousin, SoundOut. According to Thompson, each song is given a numeric rating based on “catchiness,” with sixty-five being the threshold that predicts a potential viral hit. (Justin Bieber’s “Sorry” scored a seventy-seven, while Adele’s “Hello” scored 105.)

  Artificial intelligence is even being used to create fiction. In 2017, Botnik Studios released an AI-generated Harry Potter story using two predictive keyboards. The story is called “Harry Potter and the Portrait of what Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash,” and it is hilariously bad. It features a tap-dancing Ron who eats Hermione’s family, a ghost called Mr. Staircase, and Death Eaters who enjoy ironic T-shirts.

  AI may soon be reaching into the audiobook space, too. Amazon Polly is a new service that turns text into more lifelike speech. The tool has fifty-two different voices and is available in twenty-five languages. Already the service has spawned new endeavors to turn books into podcast-length chapters narrated by these computerized voices, and it’s only a matter of time before they are applied to full-length audiobooks. (Google claims that its text-to-speech system, Tacotron 2, is indistinguishable from a human voice.)

  Proponents of AI technology insist that these products and services aren’t designed to replace humans. Rather, they say, they’re intended to “free up” humans to do more high-value work.

  But to anyone with even an ounce of common sense, it’s clear that as these technologies get better and better, they’re going to allow media companies and publishers to produce nearly infinite amounts of content on the cheap, and human creators are going to suffer.

  Even worse than the dystopian hellscape run by robots we’ll all soon be living in is the highly surveilled police state that we consumers are funding with our own hard-earned money.

  Not sure what I’m talking about? Go ask Alexa.

  The proliferation of home assistant devices made by Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are all doing what seemed crazy and terrifying in the context of Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid’s Tale: normalizing widespread surveillance.

  Of course, Amazon’s device is designed to listen locally (meaning on the device itself) a
nd only starts recording once you say the “wake word.” After that, data from your request is housed in Amazon’s servers — waiting to be used to improve the service, market things to you, or be sold to third-party developers.

  But what devices are designed to do and what they’re capable of doing are two very different things. One British researcher has already proven that the device can be hacked with just a few minutes of physical access.

  By installing his own software, he was able to stream audio from the device to a remote server — essentially transforming the helpful home assistant into a stylish bug.

  The FBI can neither confirm nor deny wiretapping Amazon home devices, and Amazon Echo data has already been involved in a 2015 murder case. (Amazon did push back against investigators’ requests, and the defendant willingly relinquished his data.)

  Any freedom-loving person should be alarmed by the sheer possibility of a home device listening to your conversations (and your arguments, political discussions, love-making, vacation plans, etc.), but the truth is that too many people are willing to subject themselves to these kinds of intrusions for the promise of greater convenience.

  Ah, convenience — the root of all evil. Convenience is what prompts us to install so-called “smart locks” in our homes, get our meals delivered by robot, and tell Alexa everything from what music we want to hear to what kind of toilet paper to order. It may save us five seconds or five minutes in the short run, but in the long run it’s costing us jobs, money, and privacy.

  Let me be clear: I’m not hating on Amazon. I love Amazon, both as a customer and as a book vendor. But I am reexamining the slow bleed of personal information that companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple are siphoning from us on a daily basis. I want to limit the amount of data I’m putting out in the world, but at the moment I’m still struggling to find a balance between using the services I need and maintaining my privacy.