Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

by Anthology

To: LMAteam-all, CorporateResponsibility

  From: LMAproductdesign

  We could add accessories to the ponies. Sniffles could come with tissues laced with fake Ebola, Punchy could come with some faux vials of steroids or testosterone, and Bonesy could come with a small play-chemical kit. Little Miss Apocalypse is empowered to change the world with these tools. (Not sure what we’d do for Om-nom though.)

  –Emma

  To: LMAteam-all

  From: CorporateResponsibility

  We’d need something more functional. Could you add in components from our real chemistry sets?

  —Mac

  To: LMAteam-all, CorporateResponsibility

  From: LMAmarketing

  Mac, I love this idea! Given the manufacturing deadlines, easiest would be to repackage the chem kits as expansion packs. We’d be ready for the holidays as an extra sales boost.

  The chem kit that makes hydrochloric acid is perfect for Bonesy. Now, what can we do for the other three ponies?

  –Anna

  To: LMAteam-all, CorporateResponsibility

  From: LMAproductdesign

  We could repackage two of the bio kits as expansion packs for Sniffles and Punchy, with the mild virus and the testosterone and the microscope. Still not sure about Om-nom…

  –Emma

  To: LMAteam-all, CorporateResponsibility

  From: BusinessDevelopment

  Great news! One of the show’s fast food sponsors (you can guess who) can donate meat contaminated with tapeworm eggs. That could be an Om-nom accessory, right? We’re still working through what (if any) co-branding would be appropriate.

  –Greyson

  To: LMAteam-all, CorporateResponsibility

  From: Legal

  ATTORNEY-CLIENT PRIVILEGED INFORMATION

  Guys, we’re very concerned about liability. We strongly recommend against live diseases, poison, parasites, and anything else with high risk of injury or death.

  –Laura

  To: LMAteam-all, CorporateResponsibility, Legal

  From: LMAmarketing

  Oh come on Laura, don’t be a downer. The danger factor has been testing very well with the kids. Besides, we’re already selling the chem and bio kits on their own through the edutainment toys department and those have each been cleared. We’ll keep testing the tapeworms, but I don’t see this as an issue.

  BTW, we have a mandate from the CEO to bump up production of the Little Miss Apocalypse Armageddon Playset, which includes all four accessory packs. They’re counting on this for our yearly sales goals

  –Ann

  To: LMAteam-all, CorporateResponsibility

  From: Legal

  ATTORNEY-CLIENT PRIVILEGED INFORMATION—URGENT SAFETY ISSUE

  After demoing the first few Little Miss Apocalypse Armageddon Playset kits for retailers, we’ve found a critical issue. The virus is airborne—not an issue on its own (we QA’d the bio kit) but when it’s near an open container of testosterone it becomes a superbug that kills dogs. When exposed to the hydrochloric acid in the chem kit, it affects humans too.

  WE STRONGLY ADVISE TO SHIFT THE PRODUCT DIRECTION.

  –Laura

  To: LMAteam-all, CorporateResponsibility

  From: Legal

  ATTORNEY-CLIENT PRIVILEGED INFORMATION

  Update: we’ve found an antidote for the superbug, but this does not change our recommendation.

  –Laura

  To: LMAteam-all, CorporateResponsibility, Legal

  From: LMAmarketing

  The CEO still really wants the LMA Armageddon Playset out in time for holiday, and we’re too behind on schedule to make major manufacturing shifts. HOWEVER, I think we can solve this.

  First, we put a warning on the packaging not to have LMA ride all the ponies on the same day. It covers us for legal and it gives an extra element for danger, which we believe is a top sales driver.

  Second, we institute a golden-ticket-style promotion. One out of every 1,000 playsets will come with a special code for a free vial of antidote. It’ll be an additional sales driver, and if that’s not girls being empowered to make real change within their neighborhoods, I don’t know what is.

  Thoughts?

  –Ann

  To: LMAteam-all, LMAmarketing, Legal

  From: CorporateResponsibility

  This ties in with both the “Yes I Can Cuz I’m A Girl” campaign, as well as the following campaign (branding TBD) which will encourage community activism.

  Love it. Let’s ship it!

  –Mac

  Subject: LMA year-end numbers

  To: CEO

  From: InvestorRelations

  With the stock price at record highs, I think we’ll have a great investor meeting! Some highlights before we publish earnings:

  This year the LMA brand has quadrupled profits, mostly driven by the Armageddon Playset. Despite the numerous deaths and subsequent lawsuits, this is still the most profitable line for the company.

  With this success, we’ll be announcing the expansion of the Little Miss Apocalypse product line at the investor meeting. We won’t reveal all the goodies, but we’ll call out the LMA Armageddon Deluxe Playset, which comes with a new stable for the ponies, the antidote, and the brand-new antidote to the antidote. If we have time we’ll also highlight the life-size educational Apocalypse Play Lab, which will come with plutonium.

  We project profit growth of an additional 10x from this product line alone.

  Go team go!

  –Paul

  Rocket Surgery(Short story)

  by Effie Seiberg

  Originally published by Analog, January 2016

  We’d tested plenty of missiles before, but Teeny was the only one that convulsed when we cut him open.

  Oh, your viewers need more background? OK, I’ll back up a bit. Lemme tell ya, kids today don’t know their history. Even locked up in here for the past ten years, I can tell. No education. Good thing you’re getting the real story out.

  Now. This was back when Hamazi was the supreme dictator of the Ambridian Republic, enemy number one. The whole military was buzzing about overthrowing him, and General Pitticks—I guess he’s Presidential Candidate Pitticks now—wanted to make a name for himself. So the weapons division got a lot of money to make something spectacular.

  Previous missiles had AIs, of course. Precision navigation with plasma propulsion that could turn on a dime. Facial recognition to find the target and follow them. The Azimuth5900 could detect genetic debris to avoid hitting decoys, and the Tarzon-A-80’s nano-scales could rearrange to make the outer shell take on any shape to blend in with its surroundings, so if it needed to land to gather more intel it could camo without suspicious shadows giving it away.

  But Teeny was something else altogether.

  ***

  No, of course that wasn’t the official name, but Predator-TVACEW34W doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue. So can I continue?

  ***

  It was just the beginning of the new wetware computing. Nanotech could only get us so far, so instructions were entwined in ADNA, the quickly-standardizing format for Artificial DNA, and plasti-neurons wound their way through plasma rockets and payload decompressors and sensopatches, all within a state-of-the-art nano-scale morphing skin that was even higher-res than the Tarzon’s.

  Wetware was unpredictable, but it sure was efficient—Teeny was only the size of a golden retriever.

  Me and the other gals, we were in charge of the final testing, coding up the VR simulators for the finished bombs to see what they’d do. But for Teeny, the first one ever made of wetware, this was something new. It was like rocket surgery—skin flayed open and held with clips so we could hook the sims to the plasti-neurons, systems looking like life support threaded through and plugged in to maintain the beat of electrical impulses, and the longest manual we’d ever received on how to not kill the bomb in the process. We’d thought it was kind of funny, to tell you the truth, the idea of killing a machine that was
built to kill others. But I’ve gotta tell you, by the end, we saw Teeny like our own little baby, and we made darn sure we didn’t kill him by accident.

  ***

  When we first cut him open to plug him in, Teeny convulsed. He twitched with the first slice, and the more we cut, the more the external nano-scales surged, changing his exterior to look like a tan desert rock and then a small pile of bricks and then a fifty-pound tuna. His on-the-ground camo looked pretty good up close.

  We went through the manual to figure out what we’d done, and couldn’t find anything to help us. Betty said that maybe because it was wetware instead of hardware we need to treat it more like it was alive—a ‘he’ instead of an ‘it’—and maybe he’s in pain when we cut. We all thought she’d gone bananas, but the next day she’d rustled up an IV with some dihydromorphine from home. She’d been taking care of her husband and had plenty extra. She stabbed it into one of Teeny’s ion channels (no small feat, since he was still spasming so bad) and opened the drip. And sure enough, the convulsions quieted down.

  Well, we thought that with behavior like this, we should probably tell people about it before we start the usual course of testing. So we sent holos to the research team and to General Pitticks. The research team was excited, but said that wetware was so unpredictable that they didn’t have more guidance to give us, but please keep noting down what happened and proceed. Pitticks, on the other hand, quickly replied with “Don’t care as long as it does its missions right. Stop fucking around with scientific theory and fast-track this.” Tells you a lot about him, doesn’t it. People called him General Pitiless behind his back.

  ***

  We programmed the sims with increasingly-complex scenarios and watched little Teeny march right through them as long as we managed the painkiller drip. He never failed a mission, but the wetware really did have its quirks. The first time we saw something was up was when we coded in the nursery school mission. In our sim, the religious extremist group (we based it loosely on those nutjobs that were rolling around DC at the time—you know the ones) had a terror cell hidden under the basement of a nursery school. We had their weapons shipments staged in boxes of formula and diapers, and we coded up explosives to be hidden in the storehouses full of holos for the kids and replacement parts for the nannybots.

  Teeny caught us all by surprise that day. We expected a pretty standard MO: get in, watch the schedules to find a time when the kids were out and the nutjobs were in, and blammo. We’d coded it up to make sure that wouldn’t happen for a few days in the sim. But before we knew it, Teeny’d set himself up to look like a box of bot parts, then found the standard control net that let you repair the nannybots and injected it with a virus. We’d just written the bots with basic off-the-shelf programming, but what do you know, they all got up and ushered the kids outside in broad daylight. Even brought them down the road to an ice cream shop. (Well, a shell of an ice cream shop. We’d only programmed the outside.) And when the kids were all safely out of blast radius, only then did the blammo happen. Blew the compound to virtual smithereens, and from a location that minimized additional damage from the blown explosives in the warehouse. We didn’t know it could do that.

  Linda was working from home that day with the flu and had patched into the sim from bed. She’d lost her voice, so had turned off her comm and instead was typing in. And when she typed “Good job Teeny!” we were even more surprised to see an answer.

  Up in the left-hand corner of the VR view, right where no interface elements should be, we saw the words, “Thank you. But the bomb did not explode.”

  They were written in white, in an old-fashioned font we’d certainly never put into the sim. And Teeny wasn’t supposed to be able to talk. Nothing in the manual said anything about that.

  We were all a bit spooked, but at the same time excited to actually talk to a test subject. So I typed back in the normal part of the UI, “Your sensors did just what they were supposed to. We just took out the explosive material for testing.”

  “Testing?”

  “Yes. This is a simulation, to see what you’ll do in the real world.”

  “The simulation is not real. I see. Did I do good?”

  I wrote, “You did so much good!” After thinking about it for a moment, I added in some imaginary evils that this nutjob group was planning. Teeny—the real Teeny, not the digital one in the sim—gave a little bzzt at that. His nano-scales fluttered.

  Pitticks had said to fast-track as long as it did its job, but we contacted the research team anyway. Taking initiative to bug the program, talking to us, bzzting…this all seemed like more than just a wetware quirk. But they responded with the same thing—they didn’t really know what the wetware would do. The only other wetware bots in circulation were the fake pets for rich people, and those each came with their own unprogrammable “personality”. Most of the pets were small and cute and devoted, but every so often one would come off the line with a mean glint in its eye and a tendency to bite. They’d checked, and there was no bug in the programming or a flaw in the wetware itself. That was just it—wetware was unpredictable.

  Teeny gave that same bzzt and nano-scale flutter after we complimented his performance in his next mission, taking out a fake dictator we made up, and again after blowing up an enemy sub as it was surfacing to put out its own missile. Neither bzzt seemed to do any damage, so we eventually figured it was like he was purring with satisfaction at a job well done. If the wetware pets can do it, why not a precision guided missile?

  ***

  Teeny asked “Will this do good?” after each VR mission. He was really growing on us, and we started taking turns writing up what messes he would be preventing. Not just that the death of that dictator was a good thing, but we’d also type in a story about a little girl who would now be able to go to school safely, and grow up to be a great doctor and halt a plague in its tracks. Or how carefully blowing up a chemical munitions plant (yes, carefully) meant that the tree frogs in the enemy’s target bomb zone would get to live on and keep the malaria-bearing mosquitoes in check. He’d make the little bzzt sound each time.

  The more mission sims we sent him on, the more questions he started to ask. “Will this do good?” was followed by “What would do more good?” And Linda, who’d been a philosophy major before she got her head on straight and switched to testing, talked to him about Aquinas and Aristotle and Camus and Kant and goodness knows who else before we told her to stop filling his ROM with such nonsense.

  But philosophy twaddle or no, our boy was clever. He kept getting more creative in his solutions. I think my favorite test was the mission to take out the number two in an anarcho-green extremist group. Once he got to their compound, instead of finding the milito-hippie, he plugged himself into their Net. We had to code it up as he went along, and he hunted down the number one through old-school message boards and crypto’d messages. He waited until both the number one and two were in range, then got the both of them with one beautiful explosion.

  “This will do more good, yes?” he’d asked when the VR reset, his old-fashioned white text hovering at the left of my vision. I’d nodded, almost too proud to speak, and exhausted from the race of building the Nets before he got into them.

  “Even more good,” I’d said, and that night me and the gals went out for beers to cheer our genius boy.

  The next morning when we got back to the test lab, Teeny had left us a message. “The number three will keep the group going. It is not ended. I must go back.”

  “No,” I wrote, “but your mission is ended. You blew up, remember?”

  “What happens to me when I blow up?”

  “You…” I stopped typing into the sim. How do you explain to a rocket that he can only be used once, and is dead and gone after? “You complete the mission when you blow up.”

  “But what happens to me after?”

  “That’s it. You aren’t anymore. There’s no you left.”

  “Just like the number one and n
umber two. They’re not left.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why shouldn’t they be left?”

  “Because they were evil, remember? They were doing bad things.”

  “What if…” his writing hesitated. “What if I want to be left after? In the real world?”

  “That’s just not how that works,” I said.

  “But then I can’t do more good.” He paused. “I thought it was good to do more good.”

  “It is, and by doing this you’ll be doing more good than any one of us could ever do.”

  Another pause. “I see. What’s it like, not being left? Is it unpleasant?”

  Too much philosophy, that was his problem. I’d have to have a chat with Linda. “No, it’s like…like you float away into nothingness, and you don’t need to worry about the world anymore. It’s not unpleasant at all.”

  He was quiet for a long time, but of course still passed the next sim with flying colors.

  ***

  Me and the gals, we started to plan a little graduation ceremony for him in the testing lab for when he was ready to go into action. Nothing fancy like what the top brass does, but then, the top brass would never have a ceremony for a bomb. We were about two weeks out from it when General Pitticks and five of his aides strode into the lab. He never came to the lab.

  “Time’s up,” he said. The man always sounded like he was gargling rocks.

  Linda was the one that stepped up to him. “We’re not done. We still have seven more sims to take hi- I mean take it through.”

  “Don’t care. Bomb’s been hitting the targets, yes?” He shifted his toothpick to the other side of his mouth.

  “Well yes, but -”

  “And it’s been performing the camouflage maneuvers? Gathering good intelligence to optimize the hit?”

  “Yes but the mechanisms of the hit are still a bit…fluid.”