by Graeme Hurry
“What’s the rush?” I ask.
“I’d just like to be off. Not that I don’t appreciate everything.” You turn to my wife. “The food is delicious, ma’am, by the way.”
“It’s a touch early,” I say. “You’re bound to be waitin’ a little while as he finishes it up for ya.”
You don’t mind waiting. Don’t want to overstay your welcome. The wife shoots me a look.
“Alright,” I tell you, “just come outside and see the door first. It’s a kinda tradition when folks leave. A sorta local legend.”
The wife is worried, and I can feel her panic from across the room, as you sit there, sipping juice, considering. She’s never really understood, the way all this works. But I do. That’s why I’m not sweatin’. Not one drop.
“It won’t take too long?” You finally ask.
“Not at all,” I promise. “Won’t take more’n ten minutes. Then we can get you on your way.”
“Sounds good,” you say, and you stand as you down the last dregs of pulpy orange juice from the glass. You grab a coat, it’s a touch chilly this morning, and walk out with me to the back porch. Inside, my wife collects your things, your clothes, your toiletries, and piles them up in the great room, just in front of the fireplace.
The pathway is dark, the morning sun just poking in through dense leaves, projecting white beams of light through the haze. Wood chips rustle beneath our feet as I lead you, two paces ahead, down the path. In moments, the house disappears behind us, obscured by the grays and greens of the trees.
“How much farther?”
I can sense the irritation in your voice, and it makes me smile.
“Just a bit.”
The pathway opens up to a clearing, a small square field of tall grass about the size of a baseball diamond. Here the sun is bright, and warm, and you step out into the light, feeling the heat on your skin, warming your joints still stiff with morning. Small scatterings of purple and yellow dust the expanse, their pollen scent flavoring the air and clouding your nostrils. I stop at the edge of the clearing at let you pass me.
You don’t even see the door, and nearly walk into it. It stands in the center of the field, held up by an unpainted frame of two-by-fours. The door itself is dark red, finely polished and lacquered rosewood with an old-fashioned crystal knob. A latch with a padlock seals it closed.
Staring, you circle it, surveying, seeing the other side, a duplicate of the first. As you do, you notice the grass around it is trampled flat, like a crop circle.
“What’s it doing here?” You ask. “Why’s the point in locking it?”
I can never help but smile at this part. You barely notice as I walk up next to you and put an arm around your shoulder.
“Why does anyone lock a door?” I ask. “T’keep it shut.”
Sometimes this old line gets a chuckle, but not from you. You look at me with wide, almost insulted eyes, and it’s like you know. My heart jumps up into my throat in that second, and all I can do is stare back. But then you turn away, fixed again on the door, that inexplicable door standing in the middle of nowhere. That locked door.
I pull my arm away and reach into my pocket, my hand emerging with the tiny brass key, hanging on the end of a “Better Dead than Texan” floaty key-chain. I dangle it in front of your eyes, watching them follow it like a mutt’s following a treat.
You take it. Look at it. Look at me.
“Go ahead,” I say. “Open’er up.”
The steps you take towards the door are slow, deliberate. The flattened grass crinkles under your shoes. When you reach the door, it seems, somehow, bigger than a moment ago. It dwarfs you, overwhelms you with its sudden shadow. You reach out and feel the smooth surface of the wood, like glass against your skin.
You close your eyes, and a gentle hum, almost imperceptible, oozes through from the other side. You snap your hand back and you look at me, shocked. I just nod. Go ahead, it says. Wondrous things await.
The key slides rustily into the lock, and it clicks open, falling to the ground. You don’t bother to pick it up as you flip the clasp to the side and crawl your spidering fingers towards the handle. Again, the hum. I remember the first time I felt it, when my father brought me out here on the eve of my eighteenth birthday.
“We are its keepers,” he told me. “It brought us here, gave us this land, shared its home with us. So we take care of it, and it, us.”
You close your eyes, turn the handle, and pull, feeling a gentle, cool breeze on your face.
Nothing. Just an empty field through an open door.
Confusion, then a light chuckle.
“You really had me,” you say, clutching your chest with relieved laughter. “Totally bought it. Bravo.”
I just smile, not saying a word. Instead I lift one finger and circle it in the air, nodding towards the door. You give me a confused look, turn back, and slowly walk around.
That’s when everything stops. Your skin grows pale when you see it, your eyes again wide and ugly. Dark rose-wood greets you. On the other side, the door remains shut.
You walk up to it from the side, leaning one way, seeing the open door, and then shifting to the other foot and seeing it closed. You slip a hand in the open side and gape as it seemingly disappears. The hand, which you cannot see, tingles.
“How?” you keep repeating, again and again, but I’ve exhausted my reserves of showmanship. I’m so near the end. The time for talk is done.
Standing in front of the open side of the door, you turn back to me. You don’t need to say anything; I can read it on your face.
“Go ahead,” I say.
You put your hands on either side of the door frame, looking like a skier ready to pole himself from the starting gate. The field, and the trees beyond, look the same through the doorway as they did on this side, but something inside you knows they’re not, and all at once the color seems to fade. The world on the other side, in gray scale, is wrong. You don’t know why its wrong. Vague images of amorphous creatures and dying, emaciated cows flood your mind, and you don’t know where they’re coming from.
“How long have I been here,” you ask, and you pull your hands away and stare at them. The memories, somehow blacked over with permanent marker, start bleeding through, coming back. “This place,” you say. “What’s wrong with it?”
You won’t do it. You won’t take that last step. You want to run. It’s alright. You’re not the first. There’s a moment, when my boot hits the small of your back, that you become real. The resistance against my foot as I push you through is proof, and that tiny pang of something awful, something sad, blooms in my chest. It catches fire as I see your face, terrified and white, looking back at me from the ground that isn’t really ground on the other side. But it looks out for us, looks out for me, and the door slams shut so I don’t have to see your face. The door rumbles in its frame and there’s a long, single carnivorous crunch, like the splintering sound of a falling tree. Blessedly, you don’t scream. There isn’t time for you to scream.
Back at the house, the wife’s on the porch, waiting for me, expectantly. She rocks in her chair, smiling, a pitcher of iced tea sitting next to a frosted glass on the table-top beside her. I take a seat next to her and pour myself a glass. It’s perfect. Everything is perfect, and as we sit, staring at the rising sun over the tree-line, we don’t have the slightest worry. Someday soon, another visitor will cruise on up to the Forrest Door, just another in a long line. Because it takes care of us. We have an arrangement.
SELF-AWARE AND LIVING IN BRADFORD
by J.Y. Saville
Rick settled back in his chair with a fresh mug of tea and resumed playback. On the rare occasions he met new people - never at parties, more like a lonely old woman on the bus - they were always impressed when he told them he worked on artificial intelligence at the University, said he must have a really interesting job, and he always agreed with a smile. If he’d built the hardware, programmed the software or planned any experime
nts, then maybe they’d be right, and he wouldn’t have had to drag himself to work so reluctantly every morning. Rick’s job was to monitor the endlessly repetitive tapes.
Rick often used old-fashioned terminology like tapes, which was part of the reason he never advanced or left much of an impression on his colleagues. They were in fact data downloads from the experimental androids, copies of everything their artificial brains had processed during their time abroad in the city, which could be filtered for anything meaningful to a human and displayed on a monitor. Rick was happier thinking of it more as two video cameras, one pointing through the android’s eyes, recording the sights and sounds of Bradford, and the other trained inwards to show the words, shapes and abstract patterns of the mind. Whatever the physical reality of the data storage, the everyday truth of Rick’s job was that there was very little that was meaningful to a human, and what there was was repetitive and dull.
He drummed his fingers on his empty mug and wondered if anyone would notice if he didn’t monitor this tape all the way to the end. The decision was made for him in the form of a crash of some sort; whether B332 had suffered a malfunction or the data hadn’t transferred properly Rick neither knew nor cared. He activated the error reporter and someone else would look into it, end of problem. B333 was, logically enough, next on Rick’s list and he called up the summary report to skim through before he got going.
The early models had been boxes on wheels to transport the artificial brain around campus, but everyone in the research group had grown up knowing the limitations of daleks, and eventually they gave up on the complicated mechanisms for negotiating stairs and kerbs, and concentrated their efforts on perfecting the balance of a two-legged walker. With that they could not only investigate the learning processes of a part-programmed robot, they could also collaborate with the nearby hospital on mobility problems, which meant more funding. So now the AI experiments were five foot five androids who marched up hills and tottered down steps across the city three days a week. After a brief flurry of concerned or sarcastic letters to the local paper, this arrangement had been accepted as most other changes had been over the years, with a stoic shrug.
B333 was a young woman, which is to say that one of the three gender-neutral androids the group possessed had been given a blonde ponytail wig and the speech mode was set to teenage female 03. Trial and error had revealed a soft Scottish accent to be the most inoffensive, and visual cues such as hairstyles or a simple prop like a walking stick helped people to interact with the androids more successfully. Rick skipped the paragraph about memory banks and experience levels, he rarely found it relevant to the things he saw and he could come back to it if necessary. The android was programmed with false memories and base knowledge, then after a period of learning in the lab which could last from half an hour to a few days, it was set loose to see how it adapted to its situation. Some were back in the lab by the end of the day, some stayed with one of Rick’s colleagues and kept the persona for a few weeks, but whenever the experiment was deemed to be at an end the recorded data was transferred to the research database, wiping the android’s mind ready for re-use.
Rick set the tape playing, to use his own terminology, and drifted into his recurrent state of staring through the monitor into his own mind, reflecting on his position as Data Technician, a title which sounded more impressive than the reality, and bemoaning for the thousandth time the third class degree in cybernetics that had led him there.
A sudden change in his field of view snapped him out of his melancholy musings and he frowned at the screen. Pausing the flow he flicked back to the summary of B333 to see she had been given nineteen years worth of detailed memories but a relatively limited information bank, putting her on the intelligence level of a brainy adolescent. A ditzy nineteen-year-old with a blonde ponytail, maybe he should call her Pam after his sister. Rick grinned to himself and continued checking the summary for details of any hardware changes; he couldn’t see any but that might mean they’d been overlooked here, he wasn’t about to read the full spec.
Rick went back to his tape-watching with more attention. As well as seeing and hearing everything external that the android could see and hear, Rick had neural network diagrams on the screen, building in complexity as the adaptations occurred. They usually followed a similar pattern starting with simple connections, and if Rick chose to open the extended visual display, he could see for example the comparison being made between the face of a person standing before the android, and faces stored in its memory. B333’s neural network patterns weren’t building up in quite the way he’d come to expect, but the difference was slight and could just be a natural variation he’d never seen before.
Rick watched the familiar street from the android’s point of view, cobbles and flagstones mainly. Then the pace slowed and there was a long view of a clothes shop window, gradually coming closer. Rick smiled as he thought of Pam’s short attention-span and ability to be side-tracked by anything that caught her eye: he settled on Pam2, like Audrey II the intelligent plant in Little Shop of Horrors. Pam2 looked through the shop window at a coat, then appeared to catch sight of her reflection; she stood on tip-toe to match herself up with the coat as if trying it on and Rick frowned uncertainly. This behaviour didn’t seem usual, but then they didn’t usually programme the androids as butterfly-brained teenagers. Pam2 turned away and moved on, and Rick relaxed. Until she started dancing.
Why anyone would be playing I Feel Pretty from West Side Story on a Saturday afternoon on Ivegate Rick had no idea, but there it was and Pam2 was gently twirling down the street to it, with only a few raised eyebrows from bemused shoppers. Thankfully it seemed to stop before she lost her balance, and she trotted over to a jeweller’s window to peer at diamond rings. She repeated her performance with the reflection, this time holding her hand out to try ring after ring on her wedding finger. Now Rick could hear Pink Floyd’s Shine on you Crazy Diamond; it was almost as if someone was composing a soundtrack. He froze, going cold at the thought, then separated the internal and external feeds.
Rick sat back in his chair, nervous and shaken by the enormity of his discovery. The neural network patterns for Pam2 had descended into chaos. Separating the feeds had confirmed his sudden suspicion that the music was internal; Pam2 was singing snippets of songs in her head, triggered by her surroundings. If the hallmark of artificial intelligence was its indistinguishability from a real human then this irrational frivolity was surely the best yet. Pam2 twirling, carefree, down the streets of Bradford reminded Rick of Julie Christie’s performance as the free-spirited Liz in Billy Liar and he was both touched and impressed. Then came the ice-cold prickle down his spine as he realised that Pam2 was now dead, and he was dissecting her brain.
EDITORIAL
by Graeme Hurry
The problems associated with editing and selling a small press magazine have changed over the years. I’m afraid I am old enough to remember exclusively typewritten submissions. It cost the authors a small fortune to mail out the double spaced stories with SAE (Self Addressed Stamped Envelope). The reader’s slush pile was literally a groaning in-tray of thick envelopes. Then they were read when convenient. This was nearly always in the house as you dreaded dropping a long story and having to reassemble by page number.
This was in the Nineties, of course. Now a convenient place can be a doctor’s waiting room, the park or even the pub! As the emailed stories are all available on my phone, Mac and iPad, linked by the cloud. Notes are spirited back to other devices instantly.
Then there is marketing and distribution. I published a small-press book in 1994 and I had to travel round individual books shops asking them to take it on sale or return. A lot of holiday time and petrol money was spent. For the magazine, Kimota, it was advertised through the Preston Speculative Fiction Group and BFS, and was sent out on a subscription basis by mail.
Now you would think things were easier, with eBooks. Well yes and no. Having a pile of magazines or books o
n a table at a convention was a physical thing, people saw what they were getting, and if they were a bit drunk all the better. But now getting someone to agree to buy your eBooks nearly always ends in them promising to buy and then forgetting. Without a physical product marketing is harder. Distribution is easy, though. It’s available on Amazon all over the world! But so are millions of others so it’s expensive advertising or Amazon reviews which can sway the potential buyer and I can’t afford the former, yet. But getting reviews on Amazon is a painfully hard task. I have had many reviews saying Kzine is great, but not where it matters - on Amazon.
So is it better now? Well it’s cheaper, but I actually sell less copies than the old posted Kimota. But cheaper means I can do it longer, it’s just up to the purchasers how long. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably read most of the mag… Go on put a review on Amazon - it’s progress.
CONTRIBUTOR NOTES
Regina Clarke‘s credits include a nonfiction book on environmental management and a number of mystery and science fiction stories that have been published in online magazines: Subtle Fiction, Bewildering Stories, Halfway Down the Stairs, A Twist of Noir and Thrice Fiction. Recently she had a story accepted by Fried Fiction that is being published as a serial. In 2011 she was a finalist in the SCRIPTOID Screenwriter’s Challenge.
Diana Doherty has wanted to be a writer since she was twelve, and finally succeeded right before turning twenty-two. She’s attending community college, hoping to transfer to a four-year university to get a degree in anthropology. She lives in Virginia with her parents and dog. Her first published short story, The Cursed Axe, appeared in Silver Blade this past February.
Gef Fox is a self-described rabid reader and wrabid writer. He spent his childhood daydreaming of monsters, ghosts, and robots. Now he write about them. One of his most recent short stories can be found in Fading Light (An Anthology of the Monstrous) via Angelic Knight Press. He lives in Nova Scotia, Canada..
