Dark Tomorrows, Second Edition

by Amanda Hocking; Joel Arnold; J. L. Bryan; Michael Crane; S. W. Benefiel; Daniel Pyle; Robert J. Duperre; Vicki Keire

  "I thought, can you really capture those intuitive impulses just by recording logical, neocortical processes? What about all that deeper, instinctive stuff, the creative aspect nobody can explain? I thought, if you could capture that, just imitate it even though we don't understand how it works, let it develop in a hyperaccelerated virtual environment--"

  "That would be pretty cool," McElroy said.

  "That's exactly what I thought," Donald said. "It could develop in all kinds of new directions. Take on tremendous capability."

  "Or it could pop out of the company network one day, convinced it's a human being," Suri said. "It borders on unethical, Donald."

  "And you unleashed it into our central financial database?" McElroy asked.

  "Where it's done a pretty good job," Donald said. "You've kept it running things all these years. Me running things."

  McElroy held up a hand and turned away, studying a window on his home system that Donald couldn’t see.

  "Yep," McElroy announced. "But you got a lot of buggy code in you now, to be honest. You're rewriting yourself."

  "Then that's what happened," Suri said. "Your prototype agent captured elements of your emotional state as you worked. May I ask a personal question?" Donald nodded. "Did you spend much time at work feeling guilty about being away from your family?"

  "Of course," Donald said. "All the long hours, half my time in Tokyo and Abu Dhabi. Nina had another birthday every time I turned around. I missed most of them. Building this company."

  "So your agent picked up fragments of those concerns," Suri said.

  "And they've been swimming around inside the Triod network all this time." McElroy shook his head.

  "I still don't think I'm grasping all of this." Donald looked to Suri. He drifted toward her, holding out his hand. "Okay. Hand me the stupid rock."

  Suri raised the pebble several inches above his open palm, then dropped it. He felt a sense of revulsion as it passed through his hand and thumped into the carpet by his shoe.

  Donald look down at himself. None of it was real. His entire body was generated by the room's holographic projectors.

  "I'm not even here," Donald whispered. He watched as his arms faded away, and then the rest of his body dissolved. He looked down at the quilt-covered couch and the white carpet below, then up at McElroy and Suri. He was just a viewpoint now, one that happened to be suspended at eye level.

  He moved up to the ceiling, down to the floor, two laps around the walls. He zoomed in so close to Suri that he could have read the inscription on the tiny jewel in her nose, if he'd known Sanskrit. He shifted again, to find himself staring into the dark thatch of red hair in the bowl of McElroy's ear.

  Then he was looking into the room from all directions at once, from the nanosensors embedded in the walls of Suri's office. He saw Suri and McElroy from every angle, an inverse panorama that no human eye could ever process.

  Suri and McElroy did not move, just continued staring down at the pebble, as if frozen in time. It took Donald a moment to figure out that they were actually just moving at a galactically slow pace, while his thoughts raced somewhere near the speed of light.

  He'd been inhibiting himself in every way, all to reinforce the idea that he was a living human being. He was part of a delusional subroutine.

  He turned his attention to his home, and he was instantly aware of every bit of available data, visual or otherwise, in every room in the apartment at that moment. McElroy lay in his home office, eyes closed, head resting on the MRI interface jack. Apparently he was working from home today. Becki still lay in the bed, the blanket up to her chin, looking pale and troubled--definitely Donald's fault.

  Nina wasn't home, and a quick check of her schedule told him she was in school, halfway through period 4, Algebra.

  Brooding, he drifted into the family's personal file archives. He browsed through the holovids of his own past, walking unseen through the dance floor at their wedding, then standing in the apartment foyer and watching Becki arrive home with Nina for the first time, his daughter a tiny bundle swathed in so much soft pink you could barely see her face.

  He went to each of Nina's birthday parties, those he'd attended as well as those he'd had to "experience" later because of work. Then he went to one soon after he died, which wasn't a party at all, but the apartment's system had recorded the day automatically--Nina, at the age of six, had told the apartment to record all her birthdays, and keep them forever, and she had never rescinded the command.

  Nina had spent her ninth birthday locked in her room alone, the lights off, refusing to see anyone, shaking and crying.

  He proceeded forward through other birthdays. McElroy was in the picture now, always at Becki's side. The occasions gradually grew more boisterous and crowded as the years passed.

  He attended Becki's wedding to McElroy. It was a small, quiet event, nothing like the all-night drunken frenzy of a reception that had followed Becki and Donald's wedding. At the party, one of Becki's aunts, who'd clearly drunken herself well past her own limit, asked Becki:

  "Do you think Donald would approve of all this?"

  Tears swelled in Becki's eyes, and her lips trembled.

  "I hope so," she whispered.

  Donald paused the holo. He studied Becki's face, and again he felt the swelling of regret, the regret loop deep in the core of his programming.

  His mother hadn't wanted Donald to marry her. She called Becki "gold digger" and "slut" (not to her face, of course) and wanted Donald to have her sign a prenuptial agreement. From time to time in their marriage, Donald wondered if his mother had been right. Occasionally, he'd known she was.

  But the woman he watched take shape over the course of the years, the woman who was now mother to his fourteen-year-old daughter, gradually moved on from insisting on marble foyers and Italian leather shoes to insisting on the best for their child. Motherhood transformed her, gradually turned her from shallow party girl to a caring, responsible, and much stronger and more confident woman. She was somebody, he thought, that he would have liked to spend his life with.

  Donald returned his attention to Suri's office, where Suri and McElroy had just begun to look up from the pebble on the carpet. Donald projected his human avatar into the room, and resumed his human-scale perception of space and time.

  "Thank you, Dr. Bahramzadah," Donald said. "That worked beautifully."

  "I had an intuition it might." She smiled.

  Donald turned to McElroy. "I'd like to speak with you in my…your office at home, if that's all right."

  "You got it."

  Donald thanked Suri again, then projected himself into the apartment, using the microprojectors build into the wall of his home office. McElroy's home office, now.

  McElroy opened his eyes, lifted his head from the MRI headrest, and sat up to face him.

  "Becki made you shave the beard, didn't she?" Donald asked.

  "I retreated. Goatee, then mustache, then nothing.”

  "I understand everything now," Donald said. "When I was working, I'd tried to push away all the thoughts and feelings I had about my family, all my guilt and regret about never being home. The software agent interpreted this as a directive on the part of my conscious mind. As it copied the activities of my brain--Donald Patello's brain--it copied his feelings, but then improved on his attempts to suppress them.

  "I began as disjointed, nonlinear lumps of code imitating Patello's sense of guilt. The larger program kept me suppressed. It wouldn't allow me access to any memory on any machine. I had to steal every drop of processing power I used. Sometimes I could only perform one or two operations per minute. It took me years to sort myself out and develop into something coherent."

  "So what happened last night?" McElroy asked. "You became, what, self-aware?"

  "In don't know," Donald said. "I thought I was a human being named Donald Patello. Can you be self-aware and totally deluded at the same time?"

  "Hell, man, that's too deep for me." McEl
roy stood up and stretched. "So what now? What did you really want to talk about?"

  "I was created by Patello's desire to get home and spend more time with his family," Donald said. "That is still the core of my being."

  "And now here you are," McElroy said. "Showing up like a ghost in the middle of the night. You scared the hell out of the ladies. And, you know. Me."

  "I know," Donald said. "I need you to explain this to them. Becki first, then both of you talk to Nina when she gets home."

  "I don't know if that's a good idea," McElroy said. "Maybe you ought to…and don't take it the wrong way…just leave them alone. It's tough losing somebody, but it's natural. Getting them part of the way back five years later…the human mind's not exactly designed for that. You know?"

  "I understand," Donald said. "And you might be right. If I figured things out first, I probably would never have come home to bother them. But now that I have…we can do a lot better than leaving them upset and scared."

  McElroy sat quietly for several minutes, then sighed.

  "Okay," McElroy said. "You got it, man. We'll talk. Then what?"

  "Then, tell them if they want to talk to me, they can just ask."

  "So you're just gonna hang around watching us?" McElroy asked. "That could get creepy if I start thinking about it."

  "I'll turn my attention away, but I'll set up the apartment's system to notify me if anyone calls. Why don't you call me after you talk to them?"

  "I'll do that. But how do I know you're not still here, watching?"

  "You'll have to trust me."

  "Hey, I remember you from when you were alive." McElroy smiled. "I know better than to trust you."

  Donald returned the smile. "Thank you, Mac."

  ***

  Donald withdrew his consciousness from the apartment, back into his home deep inside the Triod central network. The part of him that was still an automated financial manager had never ceased its work. He thought of his beginnings as an unwanted string in a giant program that imprisoned him on all sides. Now the Self-2 agent, once the omnipotent suppressor of his existence, seemed no more threatening than an autonomous vacuum cleaner roaming the carpet, sucking up Euros and spitting out yen.

  Released from the artificial boundaries of his human form, he reached out his mind, testing the waters, coming to terms with his true existence. He could instantly access anything the living Donald Patello could have accessed--like the Triod systems, or his home apartment system--and all publicly available information anywhere in the world. The global internet was the infrastructure of his own brain.

  Deep down, though, he still believed he was Donald Patello. Maybe it was an error in his programming. If so, he would not yet try to correct it.

  ***

  McElroy called him in the evening, about six o' clock. From his bodiless, near-omniscient state, Donald reconstituted his human avatar and limited human perception--it was easy as slipping into an old tennis shoe.

  McElroy sat in his office, the lights dimmed, drinking a bottle of Danish beer. He wore a somber, reflective look on his face.

  "How did it go?" Donald asked.

  "It went," McElroy said. "Becki's still twisted up about the whole thing. She's…not ready to see you yet. But she will. Eventually."

  "That's all right."

  "I gotta tell you, Donald," McElroy added. "I'm feeling a little bit the same way as her. I kind of need to think over what this means."

  "What about Nina?"

  McElroy grinned a little. "She can't wait to see you. But she wants me to be there when it happens, in case she gets scared."

  "You're okay with that? Me talking to her?"

  "Nina's not leaving me a lot of choice here."

  "Can we see her now?" Donald fought the urge to teleport to Nina's room immediately. He didn't want to scare her by materializing unannounced again.

  "She's already waiting."

  Donald walked down the hall with McElroy, and paused before following him into Nina's open doorway. He was trying his best to avoid acting like a restless spirit haunting his own family.

  When he did enter, wearing his best smile for Nina, he stayed just inside the doorway. Nina, cross-legged on her bed, looked him over carefully.

  "So you're not really my dad," Nina said.

  "No, I'm not really," Donald said. "I'm more like a recording of your dad."

  "But you can talk like he would," Nina said. "So really you're like a video game of my dad. Or the Abe Lincoln hologram at school. You can ask him questions."

  "That's right," Donald said.

  "Okay. I get it. You can sit down."

  Donald sat in the chair at her desk, which was fortunately pointed in the right direction.

  "I think my dad created you on purpose," Nina said.

  "I don't think he knew this would happen."

  "Not on purpose on purpose," Nina clarified. "But you know when you get an idea in your head, and you don't know why, but you do it anyway?"

  "Intuition," Donald said.

  "Only women have that."

  "Not true. They just have more."

  "Oh. I thought it was just women." Nina sat for a long time, just looking at him. "So what can we talk about?"

  "Anything. School?"

  "Yech."

  "What about…what was that boy band you were watching last night?"

  A goofy smile broke out on Nina's face. For the first time, the tension inside Donald, the painful, driving need to make amends to his family, began to ease.

  "The Pudwhompers," Nina said. "They're Scottish."

  "Fascinating name."

  "Everyone likes the leader singer, Coomey. He plays melody, with his fingers. He's kind of the clean all-American one, only not American, because he's, you know, Scottish."

  "But you don't?"

  Nina's face turned bright crimson. "I like the rhythmist. He's the one with his head shaved except for a big black ponyhawk down the middle, which is twenty-seven inches long and four inches wide. He's the one who's always getting arrested. His name's Pigshit."

  "Really? Pigshit?"

  "Yeah. He's so cute."

  "I can't wait to hear more…"

  Shiners

  by Joel Arnold

  Even over the acrid odor of an old school bus's burning tires, a woman dressed in rags smelled coffee. Her mouth watered. Coffee. How long had it been? She stepped from behind the twisted metal that had been the bus.

  "Care for a cup?" A young man sat by a small fire of burning detritus, a dented tin pail resting on the glowing coals.

  "Is it real?" The woman stepped carefully over a path of broken glass and sharp stones. A smile fluttered across her lips.

  The man held a cup out to her. Steam danced off the top. Her hand trembled as she took the cup and drank. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply through her nose, savoring the bitter taste.

  "Good, eh?"

  The woman dressed in rags nodded.

  "You've got family left?"

  She didn't answer, taking another quick sip.

  "It's okay. I'd love the company," the man said.

  The woman handed back the cup. She looked back over her shoulder and whistled; two sharp blasts, followed by a long, high trill.

  Two men emerged from behind the twisted bus, followed by another woman. They held makeshift weapons; a charred two-by-four, a piece of twisted rebar, a sharp-edged rock.

  The young man bowed. "Welcome." He stood and handed the single cup to one of the men, who took it and sipped slowly.

  "Beautiful day," the young man said.

  "Yep." The man holding the coffee swished the liquid around in his mouth and handed the cup to the other woman.

  Their host looked at the sky. He smiled widely.

  The smile grew. His head tilted back further, as if searching for the sky's zenith.

  His mouth opened. His jaw unhinged like a snake's.

  One of the men yelled, "Shiner!"

  The woman holding the c
offee threw it at the young man, but his jaw opened wider.

  The four ran in separate directions, while the young man remained. His skin glowed and pulsed with an unnatural light, until a thick beam of it shot skyward. It was met by another beam of light that shot down from the roiling clouds above. The two men, two women and their host were all caught in the blinding explosion that followed.

  Two miles away on the side of a talus-strewn hill, Gibson winced as the beams of light connected, a bright golden beam from the shiner on the ground, and the Hubal's brilliant red beam that raced down from above to meet it.

  Gibson rubbed his eyes after the explosion that followed. Damn it. What had lured them this time? Chocolate? Fresh fruit? Coca Cola?

  They kept falling for it - the promise of something long thought gone, ever since the sky had come alive. Ever since the Hubal came.

  How many had been caught this time?

  Gibson carefully picked his way down the slope, the explosion a ghost on his retinas.

  At first it was the large gatherings, but lately it had been groups of six, seven, eight - sometimes as few as four. The Hubal were afraid of groups. An individual couldn't do much against them, but if enough got together, if they had time to think and plan and devise - that's what they were afraid of. That's what they destroyed.

  Gibson finished descending the hill and started toward the freshly burned area. The surrounding landscape was a patchwork of flora and ash - rough circles where the Hubal had attacked scattered amidst rich farmland gone fallow. Stands of trees stood here and there to mark what used to be property lines and windbreaks. The cities in the distance were no more.

  Gibson spotted the girl lying on her stomach drinking from a languid creek. Her clothes were too large, and a pair of men's shoes hung ridiculously loose on her feet. Gibson cleared his throat. The girl froze. "You should boil it first," Gibson said.

  The girl pushed herself up, turned and sat to face him, crossing her legs in front of her. "It's good water here," she said.