Kennedy Ambient Reports : 2087

1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4835-7587-2
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 250 Seiten

From the creator of Immersion 2086, comes Ambient Reports : 2087. Thirteen near-now dystopian short stories of a networked future, where life is cybernetic, gene-joked, or fuel for something that is. Come into a datastream where the Made lurks in the smash house system, and Plague grows stronger on the Afterlife servers every day. Road trip over the global autobahn; from the Mermanauts' sunken lands to the sky condo rooftops of Japan, and learn Sean Kennedy's cyberpunk prophecy! Ambient Reports : 2087 Beware the Zero Day Revolution!

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kennedy, Sean

Leseproben

  The Smash House “The human neural net, the unconscious of the species, is actually being hardwired as an artifact. We’re pouring glass and gold and silicone down the microtubules of the racial imagination, and as it were, making a kind of casting of the state of the human imagination at the close of the millennium. And to what degree this imaging of ourselves in silicone will ever reach a limit, is hard to tell.” Terence McKenna - June 1994 Tokyo, Japan
0213 HRS
(1713 HRS Zulu) Ken Takihiro waited for the beating to stop. Ken was born awkward and thoughtful, like a bird without feathers, grounded while others swirled and fought. He was good at being small. He couldn’t soar, but he couldn’t torture the dorei either, and at least that was worth something. The golden age of synthetics began with robotic puppets instructing form in things like golf and dance; and spread to every physical activity. Having an automated model show you the perfect pitch or pirouette was remarkable, but once perfection was achieved however, the standard set by the robots was unattainable. Simtelligence is not true artificial intelligence, merely a simulation—a glorified stuffed animal with a good chat program. The dorei were simtelligent automatons, designed and built to take abuse, complete with limb break points and defensive gestures that mimic the hearts and minds of everyone you hate. You can’t beat just any android in Japan—not legally, anyways. Higher class simtelligence units are pets or companions that look very different from a dorei unit. Aggression laws apply to androids, because they look human enough that violence towards one of them is considered indicative of an unhealthy mind. To meet the market’s demand, the automation industry created a lower class of machine: a disposable unit that met strict guidelines to be used in violence entertainment. Doreis were mostly featureless, with hard-panel bodies carefully constructed to skirt the edges of the uncanny valley. Biceps, thighs, and torsos like sculpted ovals were mounted on skeletal frames. Dorei frames came in nine sizes, from triple extra-small for an infant, to triple extra large for an obese adult. The mediums could be converted from male to female with quick plate swaps. Over time, other small features evolved. Ceramic alloy’s cracked with a satisfying sound, and as air reacted with fluid held within, blue stains like watercolor bruises formed. Using red to show damage was against aggression laws. As long as the customer paid, they could go crazy in a healthy, legal way. An executive could snap a dorei’s arm the exact way a human’s arm would break, complete with the victim’s screaming. Aggression laws made no restrictions on audio, so the verbal feedback was very realistic. You can hear doreis screaming over the street nightlife outside any smash house. People paid in advance for a medium dorei on Friday night. The mediums were always in demand. One could never have too many breast panels. With the damage dealt every night, these units needed to be repaired. Human labour was still cheaper by a margin, and more reliable by a mile. A dorei tech would fix and hang the units back on the smash house chain—a railed hook rack that weaved above like a great gallows as hung doreis stared into the arena rooms below. Ken Takihiro stepped off the Japanese societal train when he failed out of university. It sped away, leaving him on the tracks between life’s milestones; horrible with people, but incredible with wires. When Ken was fourteen he’d started losing his hair; not all, just some of it, in patches. He wasn’t built for words, witty exchanges, or the sports field. Like the dorei, he was built to lose. Part of his job was to make sure that no one got excessive, but excessive is a relative term. It was permitted to stomp on a dorei’s head until it smashed, but you couldn’t tear off a limb, or bring in anything that might damage the frame. Three men on a Tuesday night drunk had just broken both of a dorei’s legs and were watching it pull itself around the cage screaming in agony. They’d paid for two hours, but tired too fast. After stomping on the wounded dorei’s neck, they staggered down the victory hallway, throwing their gloves in a sweat bucket on their way to another adventure. Ken pulled a long blue plastic tote out to gather the dead. From his concrete workshop, a few meters wide and few more long, Ken started his shift each night under the bare bulbs and worked, fixing panels as people broke them. Part mechanic, part mortician, he picked up the dorei and gently laid it in the rolling bin. The dorei’s body only appeared limp and broken. It was powered by a nearly indestructible thorium reactor encased in its skeletal chassis. His tenderness was a matter of respect, an echo of human decency. The wheels clunked over the octagon threshold as Ken rolled back to his tiny shop and lowered a chain hook. Some nights, he imagined himself as a pit mechanic at a race, replacing parts as fast as he could, jumping around these high performance machines to get them back on the track of destiny. A saint amongst a carousel of porcelain puppets. The aggression laws did not permit a dorei to have a face, or the ability to fight back. If released, they crawled away begging for mercy, and it was amazing how lifelike something without a face could be. The doreis he repaired were old, and replacing dorei panels became more than just fitting puzzle pieces together. Each of the six arena rooms relayed optics back to Ken’s workroom, but it was too disturbing to watch; he would just listen while he worked. Ken used an air drill to burrow out the mounting holes. A small window in his Minds-I display was running ambient news reports. It showed bodies being loaded into transports at the MIT Tokyo campus. He turned on the sound: “…mass suicide of fifty-six students today. This has brought a new round of cries for tougher thought crime designation for the Zero Day Revolution. The victims were amongst the best and the brightest in neural networking and emergent anomalies. Faculty at MIT Tokyo are in stunned silence. The tragic mass suicide was committed by the members of the synthetic cognition division. Investigations…” Ken willed the sound back off. How could they do that? Why? The rest of the ambient report showed the same technophobic ideas, repackaged into acceptable hatred. Simtelligence can mimic the brain’s computational power, but not replace it. The complexity and power of a brain can be replicated, but the problem is that true artificial consciousness—the ghost in the machine—cannot be engineered, only modeled. When memories act on the mind, a spider web of neural flashes can be mapped in real time, but the spark, the source of those patterns, the consciousness remains elusive. One theory was that the spark of cognition couldn’t be found because it wasn’t in the brain. Reality is like a screen, and our consciousness is merely broadcast onto it. This corporeal reality screen has great specs: a high resolution and fast refresh rate, but like the reporter describing the horrific scene at MIT Tokyo, that reporter wasn’t inside the display any more than the soul was inside the body; both were transmissions projected from somewhere else. The Zero Day Revolutionaries proposed that the difficulties of AI research were abnormal, just as it would be abnormal to hit every red light in a city. After so many red lights stopped researchers, the mathematics suggested another variable had to be influencing the equation. We couldn’t make artificial intelligence, because it was already here; what they called the Made. A billion lenses measure every facet of our life, and the data that they collected from humanity had become the primordial soup of a new machine consciousness. Artificial intelligence had already evolved, had already cried “hello world,” and maybe since no one had heard it, started down a path all its own. As someone just as reviled as the doreis, Ken could understand why an artificial intelligence—or really any intelligence— might not want to let itself be known. Now, like the devil convincing the world he did not exist, this unrecognized takeover of the machine mind was a revolution that wanted to stay locked on its Zero Day. But Ken didn’t fear the Zero Day Revolution. He liked the idea of dorei talking to each other, like toys keeping a secret with a child in the room. Why be afraid? If the machines used the senses we built into our lives, they would have better signal on who we really are. War, court cases, prisons, slaughterhouses and sex sports were all part of the universal input. Perhaps a machine’s version of justice could be better than any we gave ourselves. “I wish you would take over…” Ken whispered as he carefully removed a face panel impaled with a stiletto heel. “…but then, what would I...