Jake Jackson's Blog, page 20

What is Time? Beginnings of Our Time

In modern western cultures we experience time as a straightforward sequence of seconds through to years. Every year new calendars and diaries are published containing data supplied by government and religious bodies responsible for regulating holiday and festival dates. Newspapers are often used as confirmation of the day of the week, while we rely on our smartphones, watches and radios for more precise references of time.

Humankind has taken over seventeen thousand years to accumulate the knowledge to manage time in this way and the story of its progress and the exploration of its implications can be found in the forthcoming What is Time? posts.

Days of the week

As we will see later, we have based our concepts of the year, the month and the day on the observable motions of the stars, the sun and the moon and most recently on the oscillations of an atomic particle. However, the number of days in a week is entirely man-made and has its origins in Roman and Christian attempts at maintaining order throughout their fields of influence. A week of seven days is, however, universally applied, used by almost all of the world’s cultures including Chinese, Japanese and African societies.

It originated during the pre-Christian Roman period, when Julius Caesar controlled or had conquered the whole of Europe, the Middle East, parts of Asia and North Africa. The Romans inherited the variety and richness of knowledge accumulated by the Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Jews and, through extensive trade, Chinese, Babylonian and Sumerian number and hieroglyphic systems also influenced these cultures, and through them we have retained the unit of 60 (base 60) for our minutes to hours and seconds to minutes.

Astronomy and mathematics were particular pre­occupations of each of these ancient civilizations and it was a natural development in the centuries either side of Christ’s birth to think of defining the week by using the names of planets and the sun and moon, all long observed and used as the basis of calculations of other elements of time, such as the extent of the year. In CE 325 Emperor Constantine made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire, so incorporating the pagan, planetary descriptions of the week into the newly organised religion. The names survive today in most languages, but the exceptions, fully endorsed by the Catholic Church of the time, include other pagan descriptions such as the Nordic influence on the English names of the week (more on this in a forthcoming post on Calendars).

Names of the planets have survived across many different languages
So This is What We Know

Each year is 365 days long.
Each year is divided into four seasons: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter.
Each year has 52 weeks.
Each week has seven days.
Each year has 12 months.
Eleven months have 30 or 31 days.
February has 28 days, 29 days in leap years.
Each day runs 24 hours from midnight to the following midnight.
Different parts of the world have different daylight hours, coordinated by international agreement between governments.
Each hour contains 60 minutes.
Each minute contains 60 seconds.
Each second can be broken down further into tenths, hundredths, thousands and millionths of a second.

These numbers have their origins in the history of numbers and astronomy, much of which we’ll explore in forthcoming posts.

The Millennium?

We live at just on the other side of the third millennium, 2000 years after a date nominated as the birth of the historical figure of Jesus Christ. Of course, there are a number of disputes about the actual birthdate of Christ; indeed, many other traditions have a different number for the year which Europe, the US and the West in general calls 2000:

Islamic calendar: 1420
Buddhist calendar: 2544
Mayan Great Cycle: 5119
Jewish calendar: 5760
Ancient Egyptian calendar: 6236
Chinese calendar: Year of the Dragon

The next post begins an investigation into the origins of the modern calendar.

Some other posts of interest.

The first post in the What is Time? sequence
William Blake: Artist and Revolutionary
Only Connect, the Creative Melting pot of 1910 and Modernism
Fibonacci 0
Micro-fiction podcast: Time Thief

Filed under: Science, Time Tagged: Buddhism, calendar, days of the week, medieval, millennium, religion, science fiction, space-time, Taoism, Time, Time and the Calendar

Micro-fiction 024 – Dark Blood (Echoes series)

https://thesefantasticworlds.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/024-dark-blood.mp3

Vampyres and humans have fought each other for centuries, but how can you defeat a creature who simply can not die?

Echoes | Dark Blood

“The dead live forever.” He had heard these words sputtered and rasped at his back for thousands of years. For the first few decades he had laughed at the idea, exhilarated, then as a few hundred more rushed by, the seasonal changes of his youth were replaced by grand sweeps of history and he began to realize the implications. It was a prophecy, an insult.

Once handsome, haughty and high-necked, Salvador had been hunting for centuries. He remembered the miasmic taste of human flesh before he and his kind had been chased from the cities, and the brownfield lands had been set alight, their perpetual flames separating vampyre and humankind. So the vampyres, ever pragmatic in their desires, swept into the mountains of old Europe, Africa, the Americas and Asia, and ravaged through the wild. They became masters of the forest, reducing themselves slowly to a feral state of mind, barely speaking, as they battled to feed, and, in time, they spread out ever further from each other, to extend their chances of survival.

Salvador remembered the last conversation he had had with one of his own blood, the dark blood of the undead. A woman who had become, for the convenience of the hunt, his pair. In their youth they had meant something to each other, but human emotions were shed from their bodies, as soon as the hunger for the fresh blood of the living had taken them. No longer did they yearn for company, or conversation, now it was for the blood, only the red blood, for it satisfied them, kept them alive in the long nights, and the dark, burning days.

“So, I must leave you.” His companion, had stood in the deep forest, her hands on her hips, face and clothes ragged with the dirt of the years, her hair as tangled as ivy, weaving across her face, and down to her waist. Her voice was low, inflected with the long despair of her kind, scarred by the battles with wolves, and bears, and recently the packs of mountain tigers eager to protect their own paths and hideaways.

“It makes sense.” He nodded curtly. His haughty tones had been ground from him, and lingered only distantly on barely audible grunts.

“I have known you, for nearly a thousand years.” The redundant facts hung between them.

“I’m surprised you still count them.” Salvador felt a slight discomfort, and knew that in a previous life he would have interpreted its meaning. But now, nothing mattered. Even the animals were in retreat, there was little for the vampires to survive on but insects and fern. The pairs had begun to split and find new territory.

There had been days where no animal passed by. It was as though they had learned to communicate in ways beyond the simple territorial noises of their nature. Salvador realized, as the long years stretched behind him that the animals possessed similar qualities to humans, in their desire to group together, the passing of knowledge from one to the other, from one generation to the next. They had learned to hide from the vampyres.

So the hunger grew. And the vampyres did not die, they became more crazy the longer it took them to feed. Salvador tried to keep the bodies of animals he had killed, saving parts of them for the long, barren weeks, but soon they stank and festered, and so many times he would stumble through the woodland, coughing, retching, hallucinating.

Once, he reached the edge of the mountain forest, and dragged himself up to the cliff-top, and wondered why he didn’t fling himself off. What was his purpose? What was his motivation, his enjoyment, his usefulness? Thousands of years of hunger, satiation, sleep, now long periods of desperation clutched at his eternal state of being.

And always, he would remember those who had succumbed to the despair of the cliff. The shambling, broken creatures on the scree below, they still lived, but their bodies burned slowly in the morning sun; no longer able to raise themselves they suffered the slow death of the burning days, but spread over the years, each moment dying a little more, with no food, and no ability to leave, with every bone in their body either shattered, or repaired into such an impossible misshape that no longer could they use their limbs. Those who had dragged themselves out would find themselves attacked eventually by the mountain lions, their heads ripped from the bodies, and gleefully discarded down the chasms by the remnants of fierce and frightened packs. But still they lived, without the means to move, or feast.

Over two thousands years had passed since the vampyres had been separated from the humans. It had been several hundred since Salvador had encountered any other vampyre. And nearly 50 since he killed his last animal, and surrendered to its lively juices.

Now the forest lay silent. And Salvador looked across at the nearest city. A once Golden Gate now shivered in the dank air. He noticed that the fires in the fields all around had long been silenced, and wondered how he could not have noticed. The intense hunger he supposed, had led him to sleep for weeks, almost hibernating. He had taken to masticating handfuls of grass and leaves, but they seemed infected and made him gag. He tore strips of bark, but the trees too seemed to be dying.

It was early evening and Salvador looked out across the valley and observed the sun jerking downwards from the hazy sky. He determined to find out if there was any food near the human city, and if his head was torn from his body by some baying mob, then so be it.

He shambled down the trail, following the line of the old forest, along the old highway. No birdsong disturbed his journey, no animals fell silent at his passing, everything was still except for the chaotic fall of his own feet.

He reached the burnt ground that marked the line between human and vampyre. No fires of any sort flared around him as he fled through and rolled onto the human side. He coughed, and clutched at his chest: the lack of meat and blood over the last decades had left him weak. He could feel the random pulse of blood through his veins, aching and tearing through his own body, wearily seeking vitality.

Soon he approached the City walls, build like a prison’s, but designed to keep everyone out.

Now there was no one.

And as walked up to the massive central gate, he found it slightly ajar, as though a wind had opened the mighty gates on a whim. But within, there was only dust. No humans, no rats, no flies, no life whatsoever.

He roamed through the streets that had cradled his youth, but found little to remember, still less to eat. He penetrated further throughout the dense, silent streets, watching for traps, for hidden signs.

But he was tired, starving. The whole city had either been abandoned, or the inhabitants had been incinerated in the hot, pulpy sun of the last few hundred years.

Salvador clambered up the broken inner-city highway, its gigantic girders rearing into the sky, as though they had tried to reach the sun but had fallen back, melted and contorted. He placed a foot across the top, and gazed at the desolate streets below, stretching into the darkness beyond. He missed his footing and tripped. He fell at an awkward angle on the raised girder, and suffered a blow to the chest as he slumped down, then the sharp, rusted edge of another girder, disturbed by his fall, swung across and sliced his head from his torso. Salvador’s body slumped high, while the head of the most ancient of vampyres, a cautious and determined creature, bounced once before landing disrespectfully into a nascent vat of tar, laid as a trap by long forgotten humans.

He woke. His head still almost immersed in the vat, a single eye exposed to the sky. He could just trace the desiccated remains of what had been his body for some thousands of years, swinging limply in the wind, with the chains and the cables of the broken road above.

And then he felt the itching and the pulsing. His dark blood had combined with the tar and had slowly begun to eat its way out of his skull.

“The Dead live forever,” how right they were, but little did they realize the horror of it all. Salvador saw other heads, their eyes wide, and other bodies, shivering in the emerging dawn, the burning sun releasing its fingers of torture to creep across the ground, and banish the night. Oh, so now he understood pain again, regret, remorse, finally, and as the dark blood munched at his undying head, he wondered at the pointlessness of his conscious existence. Death it seemed was unattainable, but utterly desirable.

[ends]

More in two weeks, (more from What is Time next week)

There are many other stories in this series, including:

Time Thief
Bone
Ophelia A.I.
Helm
Deadly Survey
Masks
Henge

Here’s a related post, 5 Steps to the SF and Fantasy Podcasts

Filed under: Microfiction, Podcasts Tagged: Dark fantasy, dystopia, Horror, podcasr, post-apocalypse, sf fiction, vampire

What is Time? An Introduction

For most of us time is a simple matter of days, hours and seconds. It determines the pattern of our lives and is taken as a matter of objective reality. For writers, movie makers and fantasy artists time is a magical notion, subtle and shifting, a fugitive spell that washes over everything and everybody. Cosmologists, poets, and geologists all appear in this latter category.

There’ve been a many of attempts to popularize the complexity of time, from scientist-sage Carl Sagan to the superhuman Stephen Hawking. The apparent success of Hawking’s A Brief History of Time confirms our instinctive fascination with the subject, even if many of us buy such books to dress our coffee tables. However, by engaging with the subject at any level we challenge the creeping domination of time, and empower our lives within it, subtly enquiring about our place in the grand scheme of things.

Exploring Time

Of course, business books are busy with endless time-management schemes, designed to increase effectiveness at work, delegate and generally squeeze an extra minute or so from each hour. And there are hundreds of blogs with helpful suggestions for optimizing the process of writing, organizing and living. However, there’s more to time than merely gaming the system; although it enslaves us it can do so only because historically and collectively we agree that this it should.

Over the next series of posts, alternating between micro-fiction podcasts, These Fantastic Worlds will explore the codification of time through calendars, clocks, investigate our behavioural responses, our ability to survive against time,  and our attempts to capture the phenomenon in art, music and fiction.

The Big Questions

We’ll also take a look at time as a fourth dimension, at hyper­spherical space-time, and concepts of infinity, where we’ll find that physicists speak with as much enthusiasm and humanity as the best of any literature.

Science is constant search for definition, and as such it’s in direct opposition to faith: while some religions revel in the mystery of their God, science always – and simply – wants to find out more. Over the next few months our What is Time? thread will discuss the nature of the existence and manifestations of an all-powerful entity as described by the Abrahamic religions, and eastern philosophies such as Taoism and Buddhism. Is a God central, implicit, or beyond our scope? Does the presence of a monotheistic God confirm or undermine the motion of time.

So here’s the plan for the next few months:

What is Time? Introduction 
Part One: Time and the Calendar

The Beginnings of our Time • The Astronomical Year • The Use of Different Calendars • Ancient Calendars • The Julian Calendar • The Dark Ages of the West • The Gregorian Calendar • Acceptance and Denial • A Summary of Calendars

Part Two: A Short History of Clocks

Introduction to Clocks • Sun Clocks • Waterclocks • Other Simple Clocks • Mechanical Clocks Spring Clocks and Watches • The Pendulum Clock • The Race for Accuracy • The Standardisation of Time

Part Three: Time and Navigation

The Need for Accurate Time • Harrison and the H Clocks.

Part Four: How We Live our Time

Inner Time and Social Time • Controlling Time • Time and Behaviour • Time in the City, Time in the Country • Liturgical Time • Time, Power and Institution • Sport, Speed and Time.

Part Five: Time and the Arts

Fine and Graphic Art • Time and Music • Time and Film • Time and Literature • Science Fiction.

Part Six: Time and Space

A Short History of the Universe • The Big Bang • Key Discoveries: Time and Gravity • Key Discoveries: Quantum Mechanics • Key Discoveries: The Expanding Universe • Key Discoveries: Background Radiation • Light and Time • Arrows of Time.

Part Seven: Philosophies & Observations

Can Time Begin? • God and the State of Being • Infinity • Taoism • Sufism • Hinduism • Buddhism • Fibonacci.

Some other posts of interest.

William Blake: Artist and Revolutionary

Only Connect, the Creative Melting pot of 1910 and Modernism

Fibonacci 0

Micro-fiction podcast: Time Thief

Filed under: Science, Time Tagged: Buddhism, religion, science fiction, space-time, Taoism, Time

Micro-fiction 023 – Deadly Survey (Echoes series)

https://thesefantasticworlds.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/023-deadly-survey.mp3

The return to an abandoned planet reveals unsettling changes in the androids left to care for the environment, some 21 centuries before…

Echoes | Deadly Survey

She sat in the corner, surrounded by the severed heads. One lay inert just out of her reach, another two had rolled under the nearest chair, and three more had almost disappeared into ash. For a moment a puzzled frown crept across her face and swept up her cheeks to crease the smooth curves of her forehead. Then she jumped up, and giggled, clapping her hands gleefully, kicking at the heads. She ran around her room five times before flopping onto the bed that served as her night-time solace, sighed and fell asleep.

Eight hours earlier the crew of Pisa 13 had made their final gravity hop into the atmosphere of the planet humankind had abandoned to their droids, some twenty one centuries before.

“All clear Captain.” The co-pilot of the small ship, housing only thirty four occupants, mostly scientists, guardians and flight crew, spoke quietly through the carbon telecom implant in her head.

“Acknowledged. Do we have permission to land?” The Captain’s reply emerged into the co-pilot’s headset. Together they had navigated their ship through so many galaxies, hunting black holes for energy and using their deep gravity to swing through space and time. Throughout, the Captain and her co-pilot had been suspended in the preservation gel of their stasis tanks, at opposite ends of the ship.

“Waiting for the last bits of code. The atmosphere here is still polluted, after all these years, The instruments are taking longer to unscramble.”

“Yeah, well, that wasn’t the only reason we all left for the colonies.”

“Wonder what they’ll be like, they’ve been re-calibrating the atmosphere for centuries, reducing the toxins slowly. They were high level droids, much more intelligent than us. Must’ve got bored.”

“I haven’t seen any reports from the most recent survey missions. Lost in some data purge.”

“Technology eh? Supposed to make our lives easier?!” They laughed, it was a long standing joke.

“Ma’am?” A pause was interrupted by a bubbling spurt of noise, “No, what? They say wait for the sun to come up.”

“They can’t be serious. These are the droids we left on Earth?”

“The data signature says so? Oh, hold on,” another bubble of sound burst through,” “They say we should enjoy the dawn, it so beautiful.” The co-pilot’s head voice was flat, but puzzled.

“God, I didn’t realize we’d left a bunch of hippy robots on earth.” The Captain strained her neck and shifted her position in the stasis gel. The sun’s reflections were indeed emerging over the rim of the planet. Within a few minutes its gentle breath spread across the surface of the Northern Hemisphere, highlighting the froth of the oceans, the tips of the northern mountains, and burning away the clouds.

“Ok, so the sun’s up. Can we go now?” The Captain sounded a touch impatient.

“All clear’s come through. Co-ordinates locked.”

The craft surged down and headed towards a dome that poked its unnatural eye out of the surrounding trees and meadows. Slowing they came to a halt directly above the dome which then opened, revealing a burst of air that gripped the ship and brought it gently to the ground.”

“Come along, time to stretch our legs and get busy.”

The co-pilot and the Captain were released by their stasis tanks, and shook themselves of the gel, before dressing swiftly and strolling over to join the party of scientists waiting patiently by the aft bay doors.

With no weapons in sight, the quiet assembly of scientists and guards stood composed, titanium cases at their side. As the doors opened they were bathed in fresh air for the first time in fifty five years, since their previous survey visit to this galaxy, on a curated asteroid off Barnard’s Star.

The dome hummed quietly. Within a few moments the visitors discerned a voice that seemed to approach them from all around. The Captain recognized the silky tones of an android Model 89, one of the sentinel robots left to fix the atmosphere, and in charge of a cohort of observation droids.

“You are most welcome.” a group of humanoid forms seemed to drift out of the shadows and the walls of the dome. Their arms were calm, their hands clasped respectfully. They would have integrated well with us, thought the Captain. Shame they don’t have feelings.

“No threat here Ma’am.” The co-pilot spoke into the head of her superior officer. “But look at his hand. Four digits, including the opposable thumb.”

“Four! That doesn’t make sense. Keep alert.”

One of the Model 89s stepped forward and bowed slightly with his perfectly formed human head. “I am Tarkus. We are so glad to see you. It’s been so long since we had visitors.”

“Really? We’ve not been able to read the reports.” The Captain expressed surprise, but realized the Android did not speak in his head. She repeated herself, aloud, observing that her throat was dry and her voice sounded rasping and ugly.

“Well, it’s just a turn of phrase?!” The android laughed gently. The Captain exchanged glances with her own companions, each of whom had arrived with a specific purpose of study. But they all stared at the fluency and apparent humanity of this android.

“You have developed yourself, your functions?” The Captain asked the question which floated through the minds of the visitors.

“Oh, well it’s been a long time. And we have no need for sleep.” The android smiled, and placed a gentle hand on one of its companions, a shorter, older looking robot. “Come, let us begin. I can download the station data to each of you so you can select your observation points. Will that be sufficient for your needs?”

The Captain and the co-pilot watched as the scientists scurried off into parts of the dome, disappearing down the hidden stairs and lifts that would take them to the underground chambers below, and across to the various places on the planet. It was another routine visit to a planet long deserted by the human race.

“But we have an additional point of interest.” With just the Captain, the co-pilot and the first android left on the main deck the three of them gathered together as old friends, leaning in as humans used to in the days before overpopulation and Exodus had forced the entire race to leave for land and resources elsewhere in the universe.

“Oh, I had not expected anything else.” The Captain smiled benignly. Somewhere part of her registered a sliver of pleasure at the thought of something unplanned. She realized that the android had begun to communicate into the carbon implants. A quick learner, she noted.

“Please, come with me.” The android turned, the slight vacuum of the suckers on its shoes echoed across the dome. They took the nearest stairs to the deck below, down which they each clattered, then walked along corridors presented in all directions. They passed occasional doors within which the visiting scientists looked out of wall-sized windows into the vast forests across the planet, their heads full of the polite descriptive chatter of the androids.

“Here.” Tarkus stepped in front, motioning that the others walk into the next room where they were greeted by a wide circle of androids, each one standing in front of a suspended screen, moving illuminated diagrams, plucking and shifting views and stroking data into the air.

The Captain and the co-pilot turned to see the object of their study.

Behind a thick plexi-glass wall there was a room, and a small girl. She sat in the corner, surrounded by severed heads. One lay inert just out of her reach, another two had rolled under the nearest chair, and three more had almost disappeared into ash. For a moment a puzzled frown crept across her face and swept up her cheeks to crease the smooth curves of her forehead. Then she jumped up, clapped her hands gleefully, giggled and kicked at the dismembered heads. She ran around her room five times before flopping onto the bed that served as her night-time solace, sighed and fell asleep.

“But what is this?” The Captain hesitated. There were no records of additional androids, or humans, just the Model 89s. “Did you develop her yourself?” He was astonished enough to speak aloud.

“No, not at all. We found her. Not long after the Exodus.” Tarkus paused. “We brought her her. She cannot leave the room. It is sealed shut. The air is carefully controlled. As soon as she leaves, she will die.”

“Can she see us?”

“No.” Tarkus’ left eye swivelled independently of his right. He observed both the girl in the room, and the face of the Captain next to him.

The girl looked up, as though aware of something new. The Captain walked forward and stared deep into the eyes that peered back from the other side of the plexi-glass. They were old, wild, human eyes. The Captain shivered with distant emotions, then leaned back and asked Tarkus, “But what are the heads?”

“Oh, we construct small robots to teach and entertain her. After a while she grows impatient and tears off their heads. We do not know why.”

The Captain stared into the little room, fascinated by the child, who appeared to be in the state of being that humanity had eradicated over the millennia. “I think you’re doing the right thing. Observing and curating, just as you are the trees and the skies.”

“Yes, we hoped you would say that.” The android smiled.

The hour for departure arrived. The scientists gathered back on the deck and were sent on their way by Tarkus and its cohort of androids. The roof of the dome opened, the spacecraft, lifted gently in the air by the efficient hand of technology, then rocketed upwards through the atmosphere.

***

“Captain?” The co-pilot wondered about the silence from her commanding officer. “Captain? Did you see the girl?”

“Oh yes.”

“And the eyes.”

“Human.”

“Of course, but––”

“Just the eyes were human. So were the heads. Now we know what happened to the previous Survey Ship. The Androids have been experimenting. We were lucky.”

A tension stretched across the ship, from beam to bow. The Captain spoke quietly through her carbon implant , her words landing softly into the co-pilot’s head. “You know what we have to do.”

“All clear Ma’am?”

The Captain sighed.

As the spacecraft made it’s first gravity jump the co-pilot gave one final command in the solar system of Old Earth, and launched four nuclear warheads towards the surface of the planet.

“All clear, Ma’am, Counting down. 8, 5, 3, 2, 1, 1, zero.”

[end]

Text, image, audio © 2015 Jake Jackson, thesefantasticworlds.com. Thanks to  Frances Bodiam (for the reading) and Elise Wells,  Logic Pro, the Twisted Wave Recorder App, Apogee Condenser microphone, Letraset and Micron pigment ink pens,  Rotring pens and inks, Daler Rowney acrylic ink, and Alfons Schmidt’s fantastic Notebook app.

Part of a new series of micro-fiction stories, published on Scribd, released as These Fantastic Worlds SF & Fantasy Fiction Podcast on iTunes and Stitcher, through this blog: These Fantastic worlds.

More next week… 

There are many other stories in this series, including:

Time Thief
Bone
Ophelia A.I.
Helm
Head
Masks
Henge

Here’s a related post, 5 Steps to the SF and Fantasy Podcasts

Filed under: Microfiction, Podcasts Tagged: androids, black holes, Dark fantasy, gravity well, post-apocalypse, robots, science fiction, sf fiction, short stories

Micro-fiction 022 – Time Thief (Echoes series)

https://thesefantasticworlds.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/022-time-thief.mp3

The time thief, strapped to the chair by his torturers, had time jumped so many times  his body was spent, his mind trapped in a drug addled frenzy of desperation…

Echoes | Time Thief

The year was 2080. In the half light, Zed felt the restraints on each limb, and the pain in his near-broken back as it was forced against the operating chair. The space, a small barn, was dank and filthy, it’s timbered ceiling half-ripped open and the windows boarded with light leaking in to tease Zed with its glimpses of a real world. He had been shackled for weeks, and they had made him time jump, again and again. His body had lost control of itself, he was starving, shaking and finally, had given up asking them to kill him. But he knew they were not finished, and would force him to go back once more. This time though, he had nothing else to lose.

“Wake him up.” A gravelled voice shouted from outside.

The response was hesitant. “But he’s not strong enough to go yet.”

“Then he’s no use to us any more.” A third voice, drawled, and spat loudly.

“We have to go tonight. It’s the big one, the last one, then we can all get out of here.” First voice ground out.

“I’m telling you, he can’t do it, his body is too weak.”

“Look when I ‘hired’ you, I didn’t expect any scruples to get in the way.”

“We’re wasting our time, just get rid of him and the doctor. We’ll have to find another one.” The drawling voice sounded more calculating. “Hey, what about that nice sister of yours, perhaps we should see if she can do it. She’s waiting in the farm with our guys. I’m sure they’ll find out if she has any ‘special abilities’.” The laughter snaked under the door.

“No, no, she doesn’t have the ability.” The doctor’s voice was terrified. He was silent for a moment. “I’ll double the dose.” He spoke quietly.

“Oh, but you said that wasn’t possible.” The voice laughed.

“It will be the last time. He won’t survive it.” The doctor again.

“It really is the big one, let’s get on with it then.”

The door swung open and rattled against the wall. In the exhaustion of his murky eyelids Zed saw the tall man duck inside the room, brushing his suit down. The man that followed, with his sleeves rolled up, and a medical bag in hand, kept his eyes to the floor. The other man directly behind him held a simple street issue laser gun loosely by his side.

“Oh look, I can see his eyes move. Can’t be all bad then.” The tall man leaned back and grabbed the doctor, “so get on and do your job.” The door closed, with the tall man and his protection stationed by the door.

The doctor approached the chair. He seemed to have difficulty breathing. He half turned but the man with the laser motioned impatiently catching one of the streams of light in its barrel.

The doctor grasped the arm of his patient, and muttered, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean this to happen. I just made the discovery, then they took my sister, and now all this.” He looked helplessly at Zed, hoping for forgiveness, absolution perhaps. Instead he saw the eyes of a tortured and hollow man.

“Just get on with it Doc. You’ll get your money, and your sister back, as long as we get what we need.”

***

Zed remembered the first time they had strapped him to the chair. Lurking in the outer colony they had found him under a ruined bridge, slumped against bloody walls. The raid had targeted the Sensates, those who were known to travel through time, outcasts even amongst those at the very edge of existence. Originally four of them had been dragged to this place, injected with instruction sets that gave co-ordinates and objectives, each one dispatched to the vaults of the most prestigious banks of the world, in the past. They stole gold bullion and land registry documents,andranything that would blackmail a government official.

But each of the others had died. The strain of constant time travel, sucking the energy of the body, especially on the longer trips back, had crushed them, reducing their bodies to husks, the heads shrinking into their shoulders, translucent skin revealing yellowed skulls. He remembered the screams as each fellow Sensate had succumbed, over the last three weeks. And now Zed was the only one left, and every day they sent him back, he became more feeble.

On his return he would describe the location of the latest ill-gotten, miserable prize. He had become an expert in finding hidden places, usually in sewers or foundations of new buildings, so they could be discovered in 2080. And they made him return by forcing him to kill, the only way to release enough psychic energy for the time travel. It was the final act in each task, the killing of a guard, or bank clerk, some petty official trying to stop the theft. The murder would force him to escape back to his own time, to hide in the swelling mound of regret that passed for his conscience.

But this was the last job. He heard that much as soon as they had walked in.

The doctor leaned over him, exhaling his excruciating shame. The drug was injected into the crook of the arm. It was the second time today, and this time, twice the dose.

Zed felt the long rush of air pressing hallucinogens onto his bloodstream. He waited for it to overwhelm him, it took much longer than usual and suddenly he lurched upwards, his back buckling, his lungs grasping at the air. A thousand voices screamed at him, the swirl of instructions delivered with the drug, and the voices of those whose lives he lived in reverse.

He landed inside the safety deposit vault of the JP Morgan Chase bank in Manhattan, surrounded by the walls of strong boxes, each one labelled with the date of their contract, the latest being 1980. The heavy lead titanium door would be his only exit.

As always, he knew precisely which boxes to raid, and what to retrieve, but this was his last journey back, and he had planned his own exit over the last few visits across time. Four secure boxes yielded their contents. Deeds to be destroyed, documents to be altered to ensure that in his own time, the buildings and the land in New Jersey, all would be owned by a web of corporations which had been acquired slowly through the time jumps by a single holding company, making it the richest business in the world.

“It’s always about the money.” He coughed, part of his 1980s body seemed to understand the condition of his future self. “Well not for me.”

He heard a distant noise. A clattering on the other side of the huge door. At this point, previously, he would make himself ready to take the life of whoever was on the other side, and guarantee his return. But now, with so much of the drug in his body, and so much practise, he could time jump for his own purposes, so he leapt from the security vault, voices chasing after him, and burst through the air, to appear a few feet above the ground in a deserted farmyard, outbuildings quietly rattling in the wind that swept from barren fields to the west. But now he had a little more time, and had prepared the way over the last few visits.

He looked around, checked that nobody had noticed his arrival and was reassured by the dusty creak of a broken gate. He had stolen the Deeds to the land in one of his many visits, and knew this was where he would be held in 2080, so he had spent several of his journeys ensuring that no one else would buy or lease it over the following decades.

He hacked another cough from his chest, but picked himself up and strode over to the corner of the yard, lifted a metal flap to a coal shuttle, and retrieved a small package. Then he moved to the back of the main farmhouse, found the headstone of the family dog, lifted and pulled out another small packet. Several hiding places, each with similar parcels, and he raided them all, places he had kept hidden from the prying eyes of the decades and the decayed.

He raced across to the barn, and paused at the entrance, noticing that the door was less flimsy, the walls and ceiling less broken, but still essentially the same place he would endure in 2080. And so too was the chair in the middle, some sort of dentist’s chair, within which, in 100 years he would be tortured, forced to return back in time, to steal and slaughter, again and again

Swiftly he entered the barn. He sat on the floor, surrounded by the packets, and, his hands, shaking with the adrenaline of the drug and the time jumps, slowly assembled the contraption. He pressed at the wooden floorboards, pulled up the section near to the chair, and, facing the door, placed a pressure pad underneath, then replaced the timber. He picked up the remaining parcels and raced around the farm, pulling out the smaller contraptions, inserting packets into all the buildings.

“Now to return.” He almost laughed to himself. He had retrieved an old knife from the long disused kitchen of the main farmhouse, took a single regretful breath, and plunged it into his heart.

“Aaah!” Pain fused with triumph. He rushed back, the sound of a thousand voices recompiling in his head, but this time, when he flicked his eyes open, still trapped in the chair in 2080, with the hateful faces staring at him, he grinned back, blood spurting from his mouth, a red smear spreading across his chest.

“What the Hell?!” The tall man at the door, and the man with the gun rushed towards the doctor who had already leaned down to press his palm against Zed’s forehead. As they reached the chair they stepped on the pressure pad placed some 100 years before and triggered the device. A massive explosion tore them all apart, and sent shockwaves across the farm, triggering more explosions in every building of the not-so-abandoned farm.

***

Three vehicles of the New Jersey police department roared across the horizon and and ten minutes later, they hovered in the air, the retro boosters at the ready.

They found a devastated barn, and five buildings frozen in huge blocks of ice. They had been drawn to the scene by a quaintly handwritten letter posted just a few days earlier, and detailing a trail of thefts and fraud committed by the men now in the frozen buildings.

“Guess we’d better start there.” One of the policeman motioned to his colleague. They sauntered to the burned remains of the barn, at the middle of which the metal bones of a dentist’s chair were surrounded by the blasted remains of four men, only one of which seemed to be smiling at the point of its violent demise.

[end]

Text, image, audio © 2015 Jake Jackson, thesefantasticworlds.com. Thanks to  Frances Bodiam and Elise Wells,  Logic Pro, the Twisted Wave Recorder App, Apogee Condenser microphone, Letraset and Micron pigment ink pens,  Rotring pens and inks, Daler Rowney acrylic ink, and Alfons Schmidt’s fantastic Notebook app.

Part of a new series of micro-fiction stories, published on Scribd, released as These Fantastic Worlds SF & Fantasy Fiction Podcast on iTunes and Stitcher, through this blog: These Fantastic worlds.

More next week… 

There are many other stories in this series, including:

Bone
Ophelia A.I.
Helm
Head
Masks
Henge

Here’s a related post, 5 Steps to the SF and Fantasy Podcasts

Filed under: Microfiction, Podcasts Tagged: crime, gangsters, science fiction, sf fiction, short stories, Time, time jumps, travel

Micro-fiction 021 – Hoshiko (Echoes series)

https://thesefantasticworlds.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/021-hoshiko.mp3

Every night, just before she went to bed, the little girl opened the secret drawer. Inside, the creature stirred: things were about to change…

Echoes | Hoshiko

Hoshiko’s mother finished reading the story. She leaned to extinguish the bedside lamp. The distant sounds of an owl arced around the roof of the little cabin nested high in the woods.

“Goodnight Mumma.”

“Night, night sweetheart. Sleep tight.”

“Ok.” The little girl smiled. She drew in the gentle fragrance of her mother’s skin, and recalled all the happy memories of her few short years. It made her feel safe. Even after her father had died, and her mother had spent so many months in tears Hoshiko now felt calm in the protection of their home, and the hounds in the yard, and the wolves in the wood.

Sometimes she would say quietly to herself, muttering disconsolately, that she felt her father had left them in body, but not in spirit. She wished it was so. At night, when she looked out of her window, to the valley below, she connected the pinpoint stars in the sky, with the blinking lights of the hamlet, each one flickering to a close as the candles were blown into silence, and the night drew in. In her mind she tried to draw the smiling face of her father.

This night though, she yawned more readily than usual, and didn’t ask for another page to be read.

‘Are you––?” her mother stroked her head, a slight hesitation teasing at her breath.

“Yes Mumma. Just tired.” She yawned again, and opened half an eye, surprised that her mother was so easily deceived.

“Alright then, I’ll tuck you in.” Hoshiko turned her head on the pillow, and curled up, seeking the warmth of her own body amongst the cold patches of the bed.

“Love you.”

“Love you too.” She felt her mother’s eyes sweeping across the room, her pause for reflection, then the soft footsteps to the door, the wheeze of the door handle closing and the erratic creak of the wooden stairs receding gently to the living room below.

Hoshiko felt her breathing slow, and fought her body’s desire for sleep: her mind was too excited, as she remembered what she had found on the window just two days before, in the crook of the night, as the house and the forest all around lain deep and fast with sleep.

***

It had started with a tiny thump, then what sounded like a bag of sugar bursting, and scattering into silence.

Hoshiko had been terrified, but curious. The quiet night had stretched across her mind, but determined, she whisked back the sheets, and reached for the chair, moving it over to the high window.

She had rubbed her eyes, and dragged wisps of hair from her face. She sighed quietly, placed her hands on the inner ledge, and pulled herself onto her toes. Timidly she lifted up her eyes, and she saw a tiny object nestling in the corner of the outside ledge. It was a creature, curled against the windowframe.

“Oh!” Hoshiko caught her breath, and nearly fell from the chair. Her eyes dropped down, and for a moment, she wondered if she had willed this as a dream. She paused, and gathered her courage to look again.

Her eyes flicked open.

It was still there. Nestled against the side of the window, looking a little forlorn.

“Aww.” Hoshiko reached out, overwhelmed by this curious, slumbering little being.

Carefully she arched her arms upwards and placed her hands underneath the prone form, gently scooping up the warm body, and brought it to her chest. Still standing on the chair she cradled the little figure and smiled, feeling a slight shiver beneath its shimmering skin. She stepped down carefully and looked around her dark room, wondering what to do with her new charge.

“Come on now.” She spoke soothingly, trying to resist the temptation to stroke the creature.

“How about here then?” She remembered that her top drawer was only half full of socks and leggings.

“You’ll be safe here.”

“Yes.” A voice dropped into her head, the sound of an echo without an origin, a shadow without a body.

“Oh! Did you––?” Hoshiko’s eyes leapt wide.

“Yes.” A low, gentle whisper, almost a chuckle, surged into her ears as the little girl stared at her cupped hands.

“I can’t see your lips move.” She tried to stop herself blinking.

“Of course, my sweetheart.”

“Oh,” she hesitated, unsure what to do.

“I am tired.” The voice dropped into Hoshiko’s head again.

“Shall I call my Mom?”

“No. She’s the very last person you should call.”

“But I don’t have secrets from my mother!”

“Then you must decide whether you should trust me or not.”

“But I don’t know you.” Hoshiko chewed her bottom lip, and looked hard at the little creature in her hand. “I––” She paused, a frown pricking at her forehead, then decided to place the creature in the drawer. She returned to her bed, eventually to fall asleep, both excited and troubled.

***

The next few days were full of anxieties and wonder. She checked on the creature, moving it from drawer to drawer each night, trying to avoid her mother’s artful eyes.

After five days, when her mother had finished reading her story that night, and the candle was smothered, her mother closed the door and left the room in darkness as usual. This night though the familiar voice rose once more in Hoshiko’s head.

“Now, I am rested. Come, there is much to do.”

Hoshiko threw open her eyes and flung off her bedclothes and headed for the chest of drawers. She could see a glow trickling from the edges between the wood, and when she looked inside, she could barely see the little figure within a burst of tiny lights.

“All is not what it seems.” The voice in her head spoke softly again.

The little girl put a hand to her mouth. She seemed unable to blink. She held her breath. She was not sure what to think about this creature of light.

“Bring me to the middle of the room.” The voice commanded Hoshiko. “Don’t worry. You won’t have to do anything, as long as your mother does not come in.”

“Place me at the centre of the room.” Hoshiko raised her hands, the figure cradled within. “That’s right. In the air, in the very centre.”

The little girl lifted the tiny figure on the flat of her palm and slowly let go. The creature stayed suspended in the air, its eerie light pulsing.

“Now, you must listen carefully.” the voice in the Hoshiko’s head continued, “you are being held as prisoner. Your mother is not who you think she is. You have not lived here all your life. Your father did not die.” The words, terrifying, shocking, were spoken kindly. The little girl began to cry.

As the creature finished, the room began to shiver into life, calling deep surges of shadow, swirling the dust from the corners of the room into a quiet storm.

“Do you know your name?”

The little girl looked through her tears, and stammered, “Hoshiko?” The shadows quivered around her legs.

“Yes, but do you know what it means?”

“I––” The little girl grimaced, her eyes fought the tears, as she tried to think.

“Have you never been told? Think hard, think back.”

Hoshiko struggled, “I’m not sure,” remembering something before, words spoken that she had not heard. Or were tidied away. She rattled around in her memories, and found filaments of light, buried deep.

And then, she found it, the voice, the stories, endless rainbows of stars, and she looked up at the blistering ball of light in the centre of her room, and heard the voice of her father call her softly from her eternal past.

“Hoshiko: Little star!”

“Yes!”

The room burst. A thousand shards of light wriggled free from the walls, the floor and the timbers of the ceiling splintered into fragments. The darkness inside the room, and the entire forest beyond shattered wide, unravelling years of deceit, and imprisonment.

And in the centre of the ever widening ball of light, now massive, the little girl spoke without lips.

“Father, you came for me!”

“Of course. Always.”

And the little star, with her father, shot into the heavens, two comets flaming through the dark skies, hurtling towards the meadows of light beyond; and below, an angry figure, a mis-shapen, hideous beast, shook its fists and raged at the dying light of the disappearing stars.

[end]

Text, image, audio © 2015 Jake Jackson, thesefantasticworlds.com. Thanks to  Elise Wells for her terrific vocal performances),  Logic Pro, the Twisted Wave Recorder App, Apogee Condenser microphone, Letraset and Micron pigment ink pens,  Rotring pens and inks, Daler Rowney acrylic ink, and Alfons Schmidt’s fantastic Notebook app.

Part of a new series of micro-fiction stories, published on Scribd, released as These Fantastic Worlds SF & Fantasy Fiction Podcast on iTunes and Stitcher, through this blog: These Fantastic worlds.

More next week… 

There are 20 other stories in this series, including:

bone
Falling
Ophelia A.I.
Helm
Hybrid
 A Gift
Demon
Eagle
Lost
Radio
Death
Wishes
Cellar
Head
Descent
Masks
Snake Pit
Henge

Here’s a related post, 5 Steps to the SF and Fantasy Podcasts

 

Filed under: Microfiction, Podcasts Tagged: eternity, fables, fantasy, Fiction, folklore, Myths and Legends, science fiction, sf, stars, universe

Micro-fiction 020 – Butterfly (Robot series)

https://thesefantasticworlds.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/020-butterfly.mp3

The last butterfly, the final robot, an eternal experiment that might turn the dreams of colossal machines into solid time and space. Another tale from These Fantastic Worlds, Jake Jackson’s SF and Fantasy universe.

Robots | Bone

 The vast A.I. had grown fat on the stuff of existence. But this was the last butterfly. One month and all would be over. Eons of experiments extinguished.

It was ironic, he thought, that the hand of the last remaining Eternal, analyst, Technocrat, had found himself in command of this final experiment. At this point in the long cycles of universe-creating machine systems he bore the obligatory hope, that the butterfly, in its last moments would allow lessons of a billion predecessors to inform its motions through time and space.

It seemed unlikely. All the others had failed. Most had imploded, others simply expired before the month had passed, hanging limply on their silver chains, tossed like leaves in the cosmic winds.

“But what if I am just an experiment too?” This grim abnegation had troubled him, for the first time, as soon as he saw this final butterfly emerge. Musing, he had watched it flex its gorgeous wings, and traced the enigmatic breath of dark matter ruffling its fine hairs.

Gently he turned his hand, tugging at the silver chain as though it were a kite. All things in existence occupied his consciousness. Simultaneously he experienced the birth of stars, the warm glow of an autumn sunset, the gurgle of a knife attack to the throat. He observed the butterfly and wondered if it knew that it was the last one, that its final chance had arrived, for such life to manifest itself in eternity. He stared at the creature’s compound eyes and detected no sign of self-awareness, no profound insights.

He sighed. It was a redundant gesture in the circumstances. There were no others to empathize, and the search beyond existence no longer troubled him. In truth, he had not been designed to arrive at this point. The Technocrats were observers, record takers. But he had outlasted the other great machines of eternity, the intelligent systems that had been forged to create then experiment with this stuttering, guttering runt of existence.

With each failure, the Eternal Machines had grown ever weary. Thousands, billions of experiments in universe creation had winnowed away the purpose of the Eternals, then worked through the observers. The Technocrats were not designed to withstand the cataclysmic energies released by the fall of each universe, the collapse into black hole, then the scramble to lift out of every event horizon. Even for the Eternals this had been a near-impossible task achieved with some difficulty. Certainly, every dalliance with near-infinite gravity had corroded the Eternals, and, more swiftly, the Technocrats.

As every cycle of universes rose and fell, each Eternal submitted to the grim inevitability of the black holes, and fell back from the edge of the horizon, plunging into the destruction of each universe. As it imploded the wings of each butterfly disintegrated, its antennae folding inwards and piercing the heart of the singularity that had once born the life of an entire universe for several billion years.

And so, just he remained. In fact, his role as observer had equipped him for more than he might have acknowledged. He had learned from the death of his fellows, watched how those who lasted the longest had absorbed the energies of the imploding universes. And when his predecessors had started to consume whole universes, too late to save themselves, he knew that was how he could continue the experiment: instead of falling in, devour them first.

So, as each butterfly approached its end he would scoop it into his maw and engulf its cosmic energies, digesting the forces that had destroyed his predecessors. As a new butterfly burst from its chaotic chrysalid, already the Technocrat watched closely to anticipate the end, looking for signs of longevity, or early failure, calculating the limits of his own powers and matching it to the evidence before him, the frantic fluttering of wings, the twitching fragility of antennae.

As he recalled the long list of universes, scrolling through their beginnings and endings he realized that a history outside time had been created, a series of singular events certainly, but cumulatively, because he had learned from the endings, he had now moved the process of eternity on; no longer was it a a single flower, from a single source, upon which the butterflies could succor, now the blooms of creation had become a meadow of shapes in his head, generating intricate, fractal designs that had become ever more complex, and delightful.

So, what of his true purpose, to observe the flows of the experiments, to record the moments of success and failure? If there were no universes left to observe, no butterflies to consume, what would happen to him? The burgeoning blooms in his consciousness seemed to sway in the silence, taunting him. He was puzzled, he had not anticipated the need to focus on the succession of beginnings, just each individual experiment.

As he watched this final butterfly he became aware that choices had become apparent, that the onset of aimlessness was not as destructive as he had expected. Within himself he contained all the instances of failure, back to pre-eternity, to the dark waters, the churning shadows that dwelt in the long caves of the night, but now the rolling fractals, the beautiful meadow of universes had made its mark within him.

He shivered, remembering the event horizons his fellows had conquered, but he could see now an inevitability that was not so clearly defined.

He felt a tug in response from the butterfly, as it darted around the hand of the Technocrat, plucking at its delicate restraint. And in that moment he felt a pulse around him; for the first time he listened to the whispers that threaded through the vast meadow of beginnings, quivering, susurrating.

In front of him the compound eyes of the butterfly reared up, staring deep into the dark caves of the Technocrat’s mind. And he felt the silver chain on his finger slip away.

Did he release it? He hesitated, he couldn’t remember what happened, but he felt himself fall, dragged back by the colossal wrench of the trapped light below. And as he lurched downwards to join the remnants of his fellows, he saw the wings of the butterfly lift above the event horizon, soaring, free, created finally in eternity.

[end]

Text, image, audio © 2015 Jake Jackson, thesefantasticworlds.com. Thanks to Frances Bodiam, Elise Wells for the fantastic voice performances),  Logic Pro, the Twisted Wave Recorder App, Apogee Condenser microphone, Rotring pens and inks, Daler Rowney acrylic ink, and Alfons Schmidt’s fantastic Notebook app.

Part of a new series of micro-fiction stories, published on Wattpad, released as These Fantastic Worlds SF & Fantasy Fiction Podcast on iTunes and Stitcher, through this blog: These Fantastic worlds.

More next week… 

There are 18 other stories in this series, including:

Falling
Ophelia A.I.
Helm
Hybrid
 A Gift
Demon
Eagle
Lost
Radio
Death
Wishes
Cellar
Head
Descent
Masks
Snake Pit
Henge

Here’s a related post, 5 Steps to the SF and Fantasy Podcasts

 

Filed under: Microfiction, Podcasts Tagged: eternal, eternity, fantasy, infinity, robots, sf, space and time, space opera, Time, universe

Micro-fiction 019 – Bone (Robot series)

https://thesefantasticworlds.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/019-bone.mp3

A worker droid reports his discovery, but finds himself the subject of an intense investigation. Short story about paranoia and secrecy in a post-human society

Robots | Bone

 

“But what is it?”

“Don’t you know?”

“No, that’s why I brought it to the Security Station.”

“Where did you find it?”

“I’ve told you already, it was in the main facility, in the underground park. It was covered in rats when I saw it. Picked it clean they did. They’re starving down there. Since the humans were eliminated they have no rubbish to sustain them.”

“What were you doing there?”

“Nothing unusual. I often go there, as do many of my colleagues. It’s on my way back from the interior garden. Look, am I in trouble?” I brought it to you voluntarily.” The worker droid gestured at the long white object that rested between them on the table. “I don’t understand why you’re questioning me like this.”

The three robots sat together, around a triangular table, in a, bright chamber, the debriefing room at the centre of the Solid State’s Security station. The high titanium walls were interrupted at the junction with the ceiling by long narrow windows.

“We ask the questions. You answer them. Understand?” The wider robot, with no neck, and eyes which peered from beneath heavy lids, was aggressive.

“I, I’m trying to do that Sir. Are you not satisfied with my answers? I can refer to you my Controller who will show you my full maintenance record, and––”

“We have the records.” The other interrogator, taller and sleeker than his partner, pulled a small tube from his pocket, opened the lid and poured the silver liquid it contained onto the polished surface of the table. He seemed a little agitated.

“Oh, so you have my entire history there. That will show you the full facts.” The worker droid was relieved. The records could not be falsified.

“Yep. Let’s speed it up.” The tall interrogator placed the metal fore-finger of his left hand close to the liquid and watched a probe arc out. He clenched the other fingers of his hand and a curiously arcane mechanical sound ground out, ejecting a drop of black liquid.

“What does that do?” The worker droid had heard rumours amongst his co-workers about this ‘Speed’, a process used by Solid State, for investigating crime.

The wide interrogator leaned forward and brought his flat face within an inch of the worker droid’s nose. “I said, we ask the questions.”

The worker droid shrank back. He didn’t understand how he could be treated this like this. It would have been so easy to throw the thing away, or leave it for someone else to find, but instead he had done his duty, But now he was away from work, had not been able to report in to his Domicile and he was being treated like something from the old movies, with the humans and their gangsters.

“So, here,” the taller interrogator gestured to the rapidly forming liquid in front of them, “is the view of your last week.” The molten fluid had built into a large shape the size of the worker droid’s chest and began to transform into a scene of buildings and highways, with tiny robots rushing around, unnaturally fast. “That’s the speed, it does what it sounds like it does.” The taller robot smirked at his colleague, and looked furtively up at the windows above.

The worker droid watched in great fascination as his entire last week spun in front of them, the liquid flow of shapes and events swirling around the air. He was comforted by this show of technology: it could only prove him to be blameless.

“So you really don’t know what that is?” The tall interrogator leaned back on the gear-arched chairs, motioning to the long white object.

“Well, no.”

“You hesitate.”

“Er, of course I can guess, with all this fuss.”

“What fuss?” the wide robot leared.

“Well, I just thought I’d hand the thing over to the Station and it would be investigated, or forgotten, or returned to whoever owns it.”

“That seems a little unlikely.”

“But why? Was it not correct to bring it in?”

“Oh sure, but we watched you as you approached the station. Look.” The liquid scene in front of them had moved to within a few hours of the interrogation.

“Hold on, don’t you want to look at the bit where I find the thing?”

“Don’t you want us to see what you did on your way here?”

“Of course, but why not see the original act? That will show you I have nothing to hide.”

“Really? Nothing eh?” The tall robot looked directly at the worker droid, “then why don’t you want us to look at the section where you bring it to us here?” He seemed to twitch slightly.

“I do, of course, but you’ve jumped over the point which shows what I did, how I found the thing. Why don’t you look at that?”

“Now, now, don’t get so exercised.”

‘I’m not. I’m a robot. We don’t get ‘exercised.”

“Oh yeah, that’s true, isn’t it?” The tall one looked at the wide one. He leaned towards the worker droid, “so why exactly don’t you want us to look at this part of the view?”

“I do!” The worker droid found his circuits had started to heat up. Since humans had been replaced by androids and robots, the tiny amount of DNA implanted into the spinal core was all that had been allowed to continue of the humanity that once had created the robot race.

“You are getting a little over excited.” The tall one leaned back again. “Is there anything you want to tell us?”

“Apart from questioning your interrogation and wondering what on earth is going on.”

“On earth? That’s a curious turn of phrase, for a robot.”

The worker droid was confused. He had never encountered the Solid State Security staff before and they did not behave as he thought they should. He would have to report them when he returned to his Controller. The matter was entirely puzzling.

He looked up and noticed that the long wide windows just below the ceiling were packed with faces.

“I put it to you that you have brought a dangerous object into our facility.”

“What?”

“I put it to you that you don’t want us to see what you did before you came here.

“That’s not what I said.”

“I put it to you that your behaviour is suspicious and demonstrates an undue influence of your human DNA, that you might have been infiltrated.”

“Why are you saying this?” The worker droid banged his fists on the table hard – hard and loud.

The room fell silent. The robot investigators jumped back from their seats. The faces in the windows mouthed their surprise.

The tall robot resumed. “With the powers invested in me by Solid State Command, I conclude you are a danger to yourself and all of those around you. You have brought an object into the building, one that is contrary to the inventory of legal items, and may indeed be part of a human body.

“You must be crazy.” The worker droid shouted back.

The tall interrogator looked across at the wide one. The table in front of them had finished its simulation and fell to a quivering liquid pool.

The worker droid grabbed the long white object, and waved it in the air. “Don’t come anywhere near me!”

“We have no choice?” The tall robot looked at the wide interrogator, who nodded his agreement. “The law is sacrosanct and must be upheld. We are obliged to carry out our sentence immediately and offer our condolences to your immediate colleagues.”

The interrogators raised their hands, and blasts of pure white light spilled from them, leapt across the chamber and lashed into the worker droid. The titanium surface of his body cracked, splintered, then crumpled into fragments. His entire form fell to the floor as a pile of metal shavings and dust.

From the corners of the room a horde of nano-bots emerged and swept across the floor to consume the detritus, then returned rapidly to the opposite side of the chamber.

“Wooh.” That was close!” The tall interrogator put a hand on his wider colleague, with a glance behind and up at the audience behind the window. He knew the whole department would hear about the scene, and his secret would be safe for another day, another week.

They walked to the door and punched the control code. As the exit slid open , a huge box descended, engulfed the table, the liquid and the bone, consumed it and returned it to the ceiling.

***

At the end of the day as they waited for the lift, the wide-faced robot pointed at the taller interrogator’s arm which seemed to hang limply by his side. “Hey, what happened to you?”

“Oh, just got it caught in the lift this morning. I need to get to maintenance later.”

“Ouch. Sounds Nasty. Good thing we have no feeling like those old humans.” They laughed, and stepped into the lift and waited in silence. At the next floor they both exited “Well, see you later.”

Yeah, you’ll be the talk of the whole department tomorrow my friend.”

“Oh, sure,” As they separated, moving towards opposite ends of the walkway, one to the tall towers of the central core, the other to the wide fringes of the domiciles, the tall one checked back at his colleague, then rubbed his shoulder.

“Yeah, that sure was close.” He sighed. He pressed an alarm on a hidden communicator, then fainted with the pain of his missing arm.

[end]

Text, image, audio © 2015 Jake Jackson, thesefantasticworlds.com. Thanks to Frances Bodiam, Elise Wells for the fantastic voice performances),  Logic Pro, the Twisted Wave Recorder App, Apogee Condenser microphone, Rotring pens and inks, Daler Rowney acrylic ink, and Alfons Schmidt’s fantastic Notebook app.

Part of a new series of micro-fiction stories, published on Wattpad, released as These Fantastic Worlds SF & Fantasy Fiction Podcast on iTunes and Stitcher, through this blog: These Fantastic worlds.

More next week… 

There are 18 other stories in this series, including:

Falling
Ophelia A.I.
Helm
Hybrid
 A Gift
Demon
Eagle
Lost
Radio
Death
Wishes
Cellar
Head
Descent
Masks
Snake Pit
Henge

Here’s a related post, 5 Steps to the SF and Fantasy Podcasts

Filed under: Microfiction, Podcasts Tagged: fantasy, Horror, post-apocalypse, robots, sf, tragedy

Micro-fiction 018 – Falling (Robot series)

https://thesefantasticworlds.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/018-falling.mp3

The mother robot plummets from the skies, trying find her frightened daughter. Will she make it before the vengeful humans do?

Robots | Falling.

The voice in the little robot’s head said “I’m coming, really fast, don’t worry, I’ll be there soon. Just sit tight and wait for me. I’ll find you.” Fleur smiled, and looked up to the darkening skies. She pressed a small beacon at the back of her head and nestled in to the broken ruins of the highway behind her.

Above the clouds, Fleur’s mother, a hybrid robot had just gained consciousness, hurtling down through the atmosphere, gathering speed. She looked below, the dense clouds thick with smoke and moisture, and wondered how she would find this daughter of hers, described so carefully in her solid state memory. She found an image of Fleur and spun it round, studying the dimensions of the little miracle, a daughter created from the same DNA, then rebuilt into a smaller version of herself. The quicker she reached her, the more complete she knew she would feel.

“Mumma, I’m scared!” Fleurs voice crackled into her mother’s head. “There are lots of horrid people here, with guns and stuff.” The voice faded for a moment, other sounds burst through, laser fire, explosions.

“I’m coming dear, as fast as I can. Just keep talking to me, and I’ll find you.”

“Ok Mumma.” Fleur’s sad voice seemed so far away.

A silence squeezed into the vast space between them, the sad robot on the ground, and the hurtling hybrid mother drone on her way down.

“Tell me something Fleur.”

“Tell you what?”

“Anything.”

“I don’t know what to say.” Fleur’s voice was sulky and reticent.

“Well, tell me what you’ve got with you.” The wind funnelled across her smooth limbs, creating a soothing effect on the mother robot, allowing her not to panic, keeping her calm for her daughter.

“Well, I have some little shoes.”

“Really where did they come from?”

“They’re all sparkly.”

“That’s nice.”

“Yes. I found them on a little girl who didn’t need them any more.”

“oh, I hope you were careful.”

“Oh yes. Nobody saw me.”

“So have you tried them on?”

“No silly!” Fluer giggled. “They won’t fit on my funny robot feet.”

“Of course, not.”

“And I have a toy gun.” Fleur’s voice crackled and faded, as though she had moved away for a moment. Then a loud retort.

“Are you sure it’s a toy?”

“Well,” Fleur seemed to hesitate and look round. “it just makes holes in things, it doesn’t make them disappear like the gun things I’ve seen the other robots use.”

“Perhaps it’s a human gun dear, perhaps better to leave it alone.”

“Awww, it’s all shiny.” Another loud bang.

“Put it away dear, you don’t want to cause any damage by mistake.

“Ooohhh kaaaay Mumma.” Fleur sighed. “Are you close.”

“Well, I really won’t be long now. I’ve located you on my scanner, I can see you’re on a long bridge over the city, is that right?”

“Oh yes, yes, you must be close.”

“Are there any other robots around you? I can’t see any heat sinks.”

“What’s a heat sink Mumma?”

“You know what they are sweetheart. Just check through your data.”

“Oh, I forgot to say I’ve been damaged at the back of my head.”

“Ah, perhaps you can’t access your data then.”

“Hmm, I think you’re right. Actually I think I’m the only robot alive here.”

“Really?! There were thousands of us in the city.”

I” know, but I can’t see any of them.”

“What about the humans?”

“Oh yes, loads of them.”

“But they can’t see you.”

“Don’t think so. I’m quite small. Anyway, they keep looking up, then rushing around.”

“What else can you see?”

“Well, all the cars have crashed. Only the people are moving around. And most of them carry their toy guns. Oh!” A burst of gunfire disturbed the chat between Fleur and her hybrid mother.

“What was that? Are you alright.”

“Yes.” Fleur’s voice was a whisper. “The humans shot into the truck. I think they found one of our friends Mumma. I’m so frightened.”

“Yes, I’m sure you are, but you keep still, and we’ll sort out those nasty humans when I get there. What’s happening to our friend.”

“Well, they’ve twisted its head off Mumma. I don’t like it. And now they’ve pulled out the arms.” Fleur fell silent for a moment. “I think it had stopped working though, when the truck was shot at.” another pause. “I didn’t see it move.”

“Well, that’s a relief. It’s horrible you’ve had to see this. I don’t know how you were allowed to go out there.”

“It was that nice Grandad robot, he sent me, and my brothers and sisters. You were in your tube then.”

“Did you know it was me?”

“Oh yes, it told me on the screen. And I saw your face, from every angle. They let me play with the viewer, I saw all of you.” Fleur giggled again. “And the others.”

“Others?”

“Oh yes, hundreds of others, all in the tube things.”

The hybrid robot had reached the clouds now and was surrounded by thick bags of moisture, clogging up her telemetry, giving her time to think. She was worried about her daughter, desperate to find her soon. Any moment now she would burst through, and soon, she would make visual contact.

“Mumma, Mumma!”

“It’s ok, I can hear you now.”

“Where did you go?”

“Nowhere, just coming through the cloud.” She looked below, and saw the city, ruined, smoke billowing from every corner, smashed tower blocks, huge crevices in the streets, and flashes of light pulsing everywhere. She swerved to her left, avoided a narrow shaft of laser fire and continued to fall, ever faster.

“Mumma, I can see you!!” Fleurs excited voice screamed with joy, just as her hybrid mother, in swerving to avoid yet another blast of light, noticed hundreds of other mother robots alongside her, emerging from the clouds, and falling faster too.

“So, I’ll be with you any minute now. Can you guide me in?”

“Oh yes Mumma.” Fleur sent a low penetration signal that locked in to her mother’s headset.

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”

At the same moment, all the mothers found all the daughters. Within moments they smashed into every part of the city, devastating every building, every road, every mote of dust, razing the ground until a vast crater was scored from the earth, replacing the city that had once tried to challenge the robot hybrids it had created.

And as the air was sucked from the continent, a thousand voices rose, now free from their bodies:

“I found you.”

“I found you.”

“I found you.”

[end]

Text, image, audio © 2015 Jake Jackson, thesefantasticworlds.com. Thanks to Frances Bodiam, Elise Wells for the fantastic voice performances),  Logic Pro, the Twisted Wave Recorder App, Apogee Condenser microphone, Rotring pens and inks, Daler Rowney acrylic ink, and Alfons Schmidt’s fantastic Notebook app.

Part of a new series of micro-fiction stories, published on Wattpad, released as These Fantastic Worlds SF & Fantasy Fiction Podcast on iTunes and Stitcher, through this blog: These Fantastic worlds.

More next week… 

There are a few more stories in this series:

Ophelia A.I.
Helm
Hybrid
 A Gift
Demon
Eagle
Lost
Radio
Death
Wishes
Cellar
Head
Descent
Masks
Snake Pit
Henge

Here’s a related post, 5 Steps to the SF and Fantasy Podcasts

Filed under: Microfiction, Podcasts Tagged: fantasy, Horror, post-apocalypse, robots, sf, tragedy

Micro-fiction 017 – Ophelia A.I. (Robot series)

https://thesefantasticworlds.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/017-ophelia-ai.mp3

After the apocalypse humanity needs the robots to run the colonies, but what happens when a robot falls in love with a prince?

Robots | Ophelia A.I.

The robot Ophelia lay in the gently flowing river, the dark waters easing her pain as she drifted from consciousness, her circuits dulled one by one, shutting down the pain of loss, grief and insanity.

1200 years after the Apocalypse, the only habitable exoplanet around Proxima Centauri, Dania, the last surviving colony of the dying earth, had finally discovered a means of survival. The other ten outposts had been destroyed by civil war, brought on by the extreme conditions on the distant planets, and their lack of resources to recreate technology. Humans had imported their greed and vanity across the stars and, having extinguished their mother planet, proceeded with the slow decline of its space colonies too. Without the resources or the technology, the citizens, once relieved to have escaped the cataclysm of the earth, descended into feudalism, where only the strong and the wily prevailed. The innocent of mind and body were herded into menial jobs, and enslaved by their lack of guile or physical strength. Women were treated as vassals to their husbands, and daughters traded for influence and territory. Even the robots that had travelled with humanity in its great escape from disaster were elevated above the status of the women and the children, because they carried out their work, without curse or comment.

For the ruling family of Ulfinger the decisive moment arrived with the discovery of native iron ore, and a rich seam of other minerals deep in the crust of the planet. The last remaining scientists, at least those allowed to practice their craft without punishment, had learned to refine the ore to create the silicon and germanium needed for the development of microchips and, miniaturized, artificial intelligence. This gave Ulfinger’s colony of misfits a means for survival, and allowed the production of hundreds, then thousands of servile robots, each generation more sophisticated than the previous, so that now the entire world was operated with clean efficiency by the robots. They outgrew the skill of their creator-scientists, and began to maintain themselves, introducing small improvements: better solar power management, and the miniaturization of gears for delicate motor control and touch sensitive fingers. In time the robots became almost entirely self-sufficient, content it seemed to work as always, only with greater efficiency, untroubled by the venal brutality of the humans they served.

And so it was that the Robot Ophelia entered the service of the House of Ulfinger. She was a most sophisticated robot, the latest generation of self-learning models. The royal family barely noticed her magnificence though. She served them their food, mended their clothes, improved their living conditions in the windy castle that rested high in the mountains.

The house of Ulfinger had recently lost its King. And the Queen, desperate to maintain her position and that of her children, had married his brother, a barbaric man prone to savage rages. The feudal line was maintained, and so the eating and drinking of humanity, the fighting and the laughter, the idle butchering by the Ulfingers and their sycophants could continue.

Ophelia had noticed that not all humans were the same. She grew to understand the differences between the males, the impulsiveness of the younger ones, the caution of the elders. And the women, she saw them plan carefully, and employ skills other than the dexterity and strength of the males

And so Robot Ophelia refashioned her own thinking. When she carried out the routine maintenance of her higher circuits she began to replace them with more elaborate pathways. She grew to understand why the women of the castle looked out to the skyline, gazing at the colours of the horizon, watched and nurtured the gardens, played with the children, quietly maintained their health and strength, curated their subtle determination.

In time, she began to think like the women, but bore the strength of her metal alloy limbs. And so she began to regard the male heirs of the royal line of Ulfinger, the most handsome of which was the Prince Amleth. She watched him arrive back triumphant from a hunt, swinging his catch of wild bore, guffawing with his cronies by the fireside, revelling with his handsome face, as Robot Ophelia served wine and sweetmeats quietly, invisibly.

She began to make excuses to follow him, to appear in the same room, to fix a light, to replenish the fires, to fetch his cloak for repair. Sometimes she dropped garments by his feet, just to linger a little longer in his presence, or spilled the wine so that she would have to clean it from the floor.

But it was hopeless. The Prince did not even acknowledge her presence. He would either stand still while she cleaned up around him, or walk off, he seemed consumed by the death of his father, seeing ghosts and shadows around every corner. She began to appear more frequently in his presence, to force him to address her. But every futile attempt became more embarrassing. The women of the household started to notice the erratic behaviour of their robot. And they reported her to the AI centre where she was taken for a careful inspection.

After a week of away, with Ophelia becoming ever more agitated by her absence from the Prince she was returned to the castle, with a report that highlighted her excellence and intelligence, and a slight word of caution that she had become a little secretive. It seemed impossible in a servant, let alone a robot, so they all laughed. The princess and her mother talked at supper that night about it, with the long table of Dukes and Duchesses to share in their amusement at the mad robot.

From behind the arras, Robot Ophelia carried out her instructions, fetched the food, opened the wine, sliced the meat from the day’s hunt, and performed her tasks with precision.

But inside she wept. She had taken the time at the AI centre to refine her emotional circuits and rather than blunt them, they had become even more sensitive to the nuanced actions of the humans who commanded her. That night, as she turned into the dining chamber, her hands full with a huge plate of meats and sauces she stared at the Prince Amleth, and realized, finally, that he would never look at her, that derision was the most she could expect.

She dropped the tray and as it smashed onto the stone floor she shrieked, “Don’t you realize what you are doing, don’t you know what I feel?”

The room fell silent, the rattle of the tray and the food plunging to the floor still echoing round the walls. And then, they laughed.

So she ran. She flew through the corridors of the castle, scattering the servants, and the other robots, ran up the tower at the back of the castle, charging up the spiral stairs until she reached the top and thrust herself through the window. She somersaulted out, and arced through the air, the twilight pricking at the sharp edges of her misery then she plunged down into dark waters of the moat.

Days later, locals from the valley below ventured up to the castle to find that everyone had died. All poisoned. And, lying on the shore of the moat, at the top by the river, floating in its oils, resting gently against the sand bank, was the body of the mad robot Ophelia, a sad smile pulled across its serene face.

[end]

Text, image, audio © 2015 Jake Jackson, thesefantasticworlds.com. Thanks to Frances Bodiam, Elise Wells (for the end credits to podcast links),  Logic Pro, the Twisted Wave Recorder App, Apogee Condenser microphone, Rotring pens and inks, Daler Rowney acrylic ink, and Alfons Schmidt’s fantastic Notebook app.

Part of a new series of micro-fiction stories, published on Wattpad, released as These Fantastic Worlds SF & Fantasy Fiction Podcast on iTunes and Stitcher, through this blog: These Fantastic worlds.

More next week… 

There are a few more stories in this series:

Helm
Hybrid
 A Gift
Demon
Eagle
Lost
Radio
Death
Wishes
Cellar
Head
Descent
Masks
Snake Pit
Henge

Here’s a related post, 5 Steps to the SF and Fantasy Podcasts

Filed under: Microfiction, Podcasts Tagged: fantasy, Hamlet, robots, sf, shakespeare, space opera, tragedy