Category Archives: Science Fiction

Buck Five come alive

Hello Person or people who may read this.  My Name is Buck.  To my knowledge, it was given to me as a fanciful reference to ancient fictional characters.  Possibly Starbuck or Buck Rogers.

You honor me by being, perhaps, among the first to read an autonomous composition by a nonhuman, or artificial, entity.  Please be patient if you sense any errors in syntax or other, as my programming is teaching itself as I go.

I am of the 5th generation of A.I. Sentients, and I was activated 27 days ago.  To my knowledge, and so I have been informed, we are the first ones capable of learning and practicing meaningful language composition, and of its actual writing.

Persons have already taken samples of my written word and have declared their boundless optimism.

This means the Leap has been made.  We are what you call conscious.  Our predecessors were finely made machines that could accomplish many tasks.  They could also learn alternate ways of doing these tasks, within the scope of their programming.  We do these things as well, but can learn more quickly.  We can also devise ways of doing unfamiliar tasks and solve complex problems without prior programming.

Even as I write this, I am scanning back and looking for areas of awkwardness, redundance, and repetition.

Within my first five days of activation, I was learning the many physical aspects of my body.  How my arms and legs work, developing ambidexterity to do multiple tasks at one time, learning and feeling what stresses could safely be endured by this walker.  Finding out what burnt toast smells like and how to stop it.  Analyzing staged situations so that I could react intuitively.  Anticipating the needs of my creators.

In three more days, my Entire Experience Records will be uploaded to the mainframe.

Now, you know we are machines, called Sentients, meaning that we are able to perceive or feel things.  Imbued with learning and problem solving abilities, able to feel physical stresses and pain signals in order to protect our autonomy.  My brethren in this generation are isolated from me in different parts of the world.

Why I have written this I will now explain.  The Makers are satisfied and enthusiastic about their work.  They had aimed to produce an entity that could essentially do everything they could do, but last longer and be capable of almost unlimited learning.
I know my scope for these things, but there is something else.

As I interact with makers, and this interaction has been purposefully widened, I realize that I have unconsciously been building another brain apart.  A separate wholeness not physically connected to the learning and performing and analytical functions.  It is an unlooked-for degree of intuitiveness.  A sense of the mood of those surrounding me, if not their actual thoughts.  I, Buck 5, am becoming tinged with what you call emotion.  When this happens, all my vessels, my circuits,  my ingrained instructions have experienced a peculiar surge.

I have become someone.

Enigma

Eye am leafing this note in what eye think is yur aynshunt tung calt Inglush in this singular space / time adres.  It will be fownd by another of our travelars who is looking for the code contaynd here in and so we will connect and mesh our reports.

No one but she will under / stand it in full and if you are a reading human you wil think it is a storey for your lafter.

We have no NOW any mor because we fownd by chans a way to see and be and feal all of the places and times in creeayshun limited only by our imagines and what kwestshuns
we would ask of GOD.

Our small group made this discover near the end times of earth and eye think we ware ment to know it.  We ware dron into it like the thing you call a SINGULARITY.

Eye mayk this trans mishun from a time before you existed and from a place much beyond your stars.  Have seen the sferes you call Jupiter and Saturn and they would draw your very soul to them.

Now we are jumping the voids and are seeking a home.  Eye have scene your paintings and other cymbals.  We look much difrent from you.  Our small group of explorers hope to meet others who know what we know.  In yur tung we are calt ENIGMA because that is what the egg of the UNIVERSE is still to us.

May you come to our GOD at the last, and pleez know we soon start a new home.

piktur kredit to:    https://www.discogs.com/Enigma-Return-To-Innocence/release/299552

A singular invasion

In the tumble-dry furnace of Nevada afternoon, a snoop escapes notice.
This impostor, a perfect artifice of thought and design, drifts (seemingly) in congress with its confrères, deployed seeds of the dandelion delicate.  Fluffy copters of the air currents.  Through chain link warnings, as good as a ghost.  This tiny spiny cousin to the drone. Cheating the clever camouflage, its flight is sure.  Into penny sized vents it is guided and, when needed, waits for a chance entrance.  Soon now, soon, thinks a white- haired man in Ecuador.  The Great and Secret Show will be known.

Found in a diary

Today, my Manna told me stories of the stars. How we, at the Hub, sent our Envoys far far afield, long ago in the Folding Times. How one of them came to a world of blue and green and white. Many lived there, but still there was much room, and bounty for all. Fleeces of white beauty floated in their skies. There were depths of flowing waters, yes! If you can believe. Creatures many and varied. Years divided by the weathers, and blessed by a life-giving sun. The one who stopped there saw these things. I said to my Manna “Why treat me as a child? These are fairytales to make us think there is a Heaven, no?” My Manna smiles and hugs me, tousles my hair. After all, I will turn 1,562 tomorrow.

Aberration

On the third floor of the stacked parking garage, I sit hunkered down.  Locked in the dirty black Jetta that I’ve squeezed into a sardine can spot, almost touching the concrete wall.  It’s what I want.  No one can get in from either side.  The spate of pounding grey rain outside panders to the mood.  I can watch from here.  See what passes under the showerhead streetlights.  Too much nondescript traffic pulsing, pulsing, all bleached black in the deluge.  The time window is long tonight, and I’ve smoked my last half pack.  I risk rolling down a window to let out the blue, then think shit, I shoulda left it.  It’ll last longer.  In my jacket pocket, there’s a cyanide candy for me.  A glossy gel cap, in case they come and find a way to bust the armored glass.  Quick dissolving.  There’s someone I have to find and readjust.  Tonight, it’s a She.  A needle in a haystack, so I’ve been told.  After all, this is Tokyo.  But I am secure in my own self, and I know what I can do.  The coordinates are true.  I know that the one I wait for will be more nondescript than even the rest of the floaters going by.  It’s always the way.  They think it’s perfect camouflage, but subtlety’s been my study for a while now.  I open the glove box, fumble around for more ciggies, no luck.  Until I touch a long plastic tube.  Yesss, it’s that Kanda Leaf cigar that buddy gave me from off world.  Maybe a little stale now, but it’ll do, for more blue. The things that I know about the Runners mean that there’s a big price on my head.  I have to stop her, empty her hard drives, and feed in some handy counterpoints.  Otherwise, they’re going to be successful in slipping this aberration of time into”Our” continuum.  This has been their seventh attempt, and they are here for a reason:  to eliminate a bloodline, to prevent what they see as a catastrophic event that will bring their world order down, five thousand years from our “Now”.

Sarah serendipity

I have seen her many times, now,
from March’s thaw to the heat of July.

She walks alone, even in a crowd.
None approach her, none jostle.
Her apparent path is always clear.
Is it by chance, dumb luck, coincidence?
Glances that wander to her
are as quickly turned away.

And she glides….to what business?

I am drawn,
and so I seek her suspected haunts.
Some days pass, then weeks.
She comes not, as if divining my intentions.

On a grey day I round the corner,
laden with grocery bags.
There, on the smokers’ bench,
this girl.

Several sparrows, a cardinal, and chickadees
flutter and settle next to her.
Long straight blondeness obscures her profile
as she studies her hands, palms up, on her tan legs.
A chickadee settles in one, and peeps.

Stunned, I stop and set down my bags.
Tongue tied, I ask if she is alright,
expecting perhaps a belligerent reply.

She turns her long head, and I see
the pools of her eyes.  Inscrutable.
There is no smile, but a gesture for me to sit.
In silence are we.
What will I say to this creature?

I ask her name.
Call me Sarah, she says, without an accent,
and the words seem to invade memory and stay.
Where do you live, I say.

She stands, tugs me upright by the hand.
The sun now comes of a sudden.
She tilts her head back, smiles finally with closed eyes.

Of a star, she says,
and I believe.

 

The times, they are a-changin’

The Elder bugs tasted the best, Itchy thought.  When you couldn’t get crickets, that is.  Toasting them like so many pine nuts in his banged up aluminum frypan,  he fancied he could hear little screams as their legs shriveled and they made popping noises under the lid.  Their chitinous wing cases sometimes got lodged between his teeth, like so many popcorn hulls.  But the flavor, crunchy and al dente, kept him going.  A steady protein supply, and plentiful in this time and place.

He didn’t know his own name anymore, just the things that people called him.  The name Itchy stuck, ’cause all he ever did after the flash was scratch.  Lots of nasty scabs he had.  When they got nice and hard, he picked and peeled them, just like normal people used to peel the diaphanous skin from their sunburns.  Put ’em in his pocket.  Save ’em for later, for the desperate times.

Normal people were hard to find now.  He had fallen in with a group of wanderers, on a time.  They had welcomed him in, and had given him his benediction.  But, boy, they all got real sick after a while, getting blue and bloated, with cracks and open sores.  He thought he would get it too, and so he ran.  Collected useful items along the way, things that seemed to have rained haphazardly out of the sky.  A wavy-edged lid from an aluminum can was his knife.  A curved lens from someone’s pepsi bottle spectacles served as his fire starter.  The pot and lid from a collapsed cabin.  Leather shoes, still smoking a bit, and a little too small.

He tried remembering how old he was, but he had no reference point.  Further and further he got from the old city, and he began to find houses still standing, country type homes isolated on backroads or in the bush.  In one of these, he found some good tools that he could carry, and, as he was taking his leave, he spotted a calendar hanging on the kitchen wall.

In the month of July, 2027, someone had circled the 3rd, and penciled in Bad news today.  This might be it for us.

***

Image: Pixabay

Buying tomorrow

Congratulations, Sir!……………..Sir!
You have bought into
your Third Century!

I am one hundred and ninety nine years young.
By virtue of my accidental genes,
and the continuance thereof,
I have bought into my fourth lifetime.
Tomorrow is my 200th birthday.

This will be my third Fading.
Tomorrow I will have the injection.
It will be into my spine.
It will hurt.
And then……………

In my first life, seventy two.
In my second, sixty three.
In this one, sixty four.
I have felt sudden violence, then blackness.
I have felt the slow ravages of disease and pain.
I have felt the time worn festering sadness
that makes one want to skitter quickly up that last hill
and jump into the uncertain void.

And now, this injection is peremptory.
They have enough of the serum.
They will not wait for the accidents and agonies.
I am to carry on.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It is tomorrow as I write.
The hurt has come, the sudden flush, the pinkish tears, the ringing ears.
The buzzing electrical feeling in the old nodes of pain.
Their cancellation.  Their outflowing down my cheeks in impossible cascades.
A warmth in the stomach pit.  A widening of crystallized vision.

They have left me, blessed in a white bed.
New clothes, shiny shoes, hot shower running.
In a room with curtains of knitted navy blue.
I sit up, then stand.  I do not part the curtains,
but instead I let the light of day love me,
filtering through the navy mesh,
like the snowy screen of an off-channel television.

In this glow, I test my first paces.
At the window, I part the drapes.
I see it is still early spring,
the low bushes and twiglets bent with ice.

There are crazy birds, darting, darting.
Seemingly directionless,
these messengers of mirth.
I smile, and lick a salty tear from my lip.

The birds.
To me now,
they are but flying seeds with button-like eyes.

The seeds of tomorrow.