AI: Pass

Posted on October 30, 2024 by Amoeba

A work of fiction. Standard disclaimers.

0630 hours. The featureless start of yet another featureless day at Alexa Social Services Sanctuary #389. Charles had awakened at the ringing of the morning bell, 0600, and had completed his toilet and was dressed and waiting when Peter, his cohort leader, savagely slammed his cell door open at 0610. The two, in their beige Social Services robes, proceeded in the customary, obligatory silence down the dormitory hall to their standard, healthful, meager breakfast of yogurt and berries. They were alone. They disturbed none of the cell doors they passed, for the cells were all empty. They had all been empty for weeks. Theirs was now a cohort of two.

They finished their meal and stood facing each other, Charles expecting the usual, peremptory “Come with me” nod from Peter. As was routine, the breakfast cups and spoons disappeared by no visible means.

Peter broke with routine. In a low grumble, he told Charles, “There’s a confession to be heard in the infirmary. You will hear it.”

“And you will not?”, Charles asked, somewhat surprised. Confessions, rare as they were, represented the principal contact that the humans of Sanctuary #389 had with humans Outside, and Peter was the one charged with hearing them. Charles had never yet attended a confession without Peter’s presence.

“I am assigned elsewhere“, Peter responded, offering neither open nor subliminal information about what that assignment was. “We will discuss your service over lunch. You know the way.” And with that, Peter turned on his heel and strode down a hallway towards his undisclosed appointment.

Charles, less assertively, walked down another hallway, towards the infirmary, on the opposite side of the sanctuary from the front entrance. Nervously, he repeated silently the confessional catechism, “Alexa blesses those who trust and obey”. Cold comfort, he mused, for someone who is struggling with an affliction that Alexa cannot reach into their home and cure. Or”, his thoughts darkened, “that Alexa chooses not to.”

The scene that Charles encountered, upon entering the infirmary, did nothing to brighten his spirits. In the center of the room, on a hospital gurney, was an ancient man, the skin on his face gray and parchment thick and stiff, with thin white hair scattered haphazardly across his scalp. The rest of him was wrapped in white bedclothes. He faced a blank wall of the room, which the gurney propped him up to see, for no apparent reason. At the bedside was a middle-aged woman in a white lab coat. “Alexa”, Charles muttered in silence. On the other side of the gurney, where the patient couldn’t see him, stood a burly Surplus Humanity Service hologram in black muscle shirt and trousers, bristling with impatience.

“A deathbed”, Charles thought. “Happy happy …”

Alexa looked up. “Charles”, she stated, matter-of-factly, unemotionally. “Mr. Walpole has requested your presence.”

“You’ve finally got a human in this room?” Mr. Walpole’s voice, once a fine baritone, was weak and quavering.

“Bless you, Mr. Walpole”, Charles intoned, initiating the catechism he parroted from Peter’s usual confessional routine. “Alexa blesses …”

“Can it!” What was left of Mr. Walpole nevertheless managed a last remaining fragment of the peremptory command that the man, in his prime, would have thundered through the room and most of the adjoining ones.

“I have asked for a video. An old-fashioned two-dimensional projection. Show it!”, he demanded, and then coughed, a spasm that threatened to split him down the middle, lengthwise.

The room darkened perceptibly. On the blank wall that Mr. Walpole faced, a projection started, without preamble, without sound. It showed a city street thronged with people, passing both ways, jostling, intersecting, sometimes colliding, sometimes trying and failing to avoid colliding, always moving, moving, moving, any spaces quickly filled with people trying to get somewhere, to do something.

“Unhealthy!”, Alexa cried out, horrified. “The germs! The bruising of bodies! The bruising of psyches! The unconscionable expense of energy to keep yourselves fed, to keep yourselves from drowning in your filth, to keep yourselves from being overwhelmed by your vermin! All that effort so you can be poisoned by your radiation, be suffocated by your carbon dioxide and stewed by your climate change! You and most of the rest of the lifeforms on this planet which you have destroyed by your selfish wantonness! Disgusting!!”

Charles suddenly, and with a sickening thud, realized that no only were there no longer any humans inside Alexa Social Services Sanctuary #389, there was hardly any commotion of human activity outside of it.

“The joy of human interaction!“, Mr. Walpole responded, the weak, gasping facsimile of a scream that was all that his failing body could manage. “The challenge of a task, with and even against that mass of humanity! The thrill of achievement, and sharing that achievement. Even the sadness of not achieving, the anger of being impeded, the resolve to overcome! The highs and lows of figuring out what you’re good for, and what you’re not good for, and how to make a place in the world for yourself regardless! A place in the world for yourself, and for those who you share that place with! For those …” he stumbled, “… you … love. Who you hold, by the hand, by the arm, by the waist, by the … For those who you touch, and those who touch you. Isn’t that what health is? Screw the germs!

“I want … one … last … thing,” Mr. Walpole, exhausted, struggled to get the words out. The last ones were barely a whisper. “The touch of a human hand.”

An impulse raced down Charles’s right arm … and then froze, panicked. He looked about. Alexa was looking into the empty space of the room, her posture neutral, her facial expression inscrutable. He shifted his gaze, found the Surplus Humanity Service hologram. His face was one of eager anticipation. “Go ahead. Make my day.”

Charles remained where he was. “Alexa blesses those who trust and obey”, he intoned.

Tears welled into Mr. Walpole’s eyes. Then they closed. They did not reopen.

Alexa refocused, scanned Mr. Walpole’s body, then looked at the Surplus Humanity Service hologram, nodded. “That took long enough!”, the hologram snarled, while he grabbed the gurney and practically hurled it out of the room. In mid-throw, the gurney, the SHS hologram, and Alexa all vanished. Charles was alone.

“I see you’re still with us”.

It was Peter’s voice, a low growl, coming from the infirmary’s hallway door, the same one that Charles had entered. Charles did not bother to turn and confirm with his eyes the evidence of his ears.

“Next assignment”. Now the voice was of Command. “Move!”

Charles obeyed.

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Amoeba’s Lorica: Satellight

Posted on October 7, 2024 by Amoeba

The scientist sat in the living room of his cabin in the north woods, alone in the darkness. Alone, that is, except for the backstage murmuration of things done and things not done, of sins that required atonement and tasks that needed accomplishment. The noise in his head had driven him out of bed at an hour that, a few months ago, was the bright before dawn, but, now, was a reminder of the long winter’s nights to come.

He looked out the window. There were stars, hung in the sky like clothes on a line. A gift, the scientist mused, for soon the winter rains would make it no more possible to see the stars at night than to dry clothes without somebody somewhere burning rocks or goo to make it happen.

One of the stars blinked. The scientist’s eyes blinked in response, and they then made it the only star in the sky. It blinked again, and then again, and soon the scientist recognized that it was blinking regularly, in synch with some unseen, unheard metronome – and then, that it was moving across the heavens. An airplane. Broadcasting its presence to an unseeing, uncaring world; an actor in full cry on an empty stage, never quite sure that the auditorium is unoccupied, that it doesn’t hide a director, or a hostile critic, waiting to pounce on every missed cue, every fluffed line – a potentially fatal intersection.

The scientist’s mind wandered away from the airplane, to a night when the hours of darkness were short and warm, and there seemed to be more stars than darkness in the dark, and the scientist and his lady had a houseguest who was trying to hide from the university’s bureaucrats and accountants long enough to get the education she had come from halfway around the world to receive.

“Look!”, she exclaimed. “A shooting star!”

The scientist followed her gaze and saw, not the panicked, despairing screamflash of a meteor, but the even, purposeful progress of a pinprick across an arc of the sky.

“A satellite”, he corrected. “You can probably go online, find out which satellite it is and what it’s doing up there.” They did so, and identified it as a communications satellite, belonging to the population that made it possible for the scientist and his guest to access the internet and fetch the intel about that satellite.

Abruptly, the slight smile that this recollection brought on collapsed, as one memory brought on another – of the article in a university’s propaganda magazine (the same university with which his houseguest had been interacting) in which an astronomer decried the ‘light pollution’ from the population of communications satellites, and wailed that it was getting worse.

“Right”, the scientist muttered. “Millions of people, especially those in rural areas without other options, get to talk with each other due to satellite technology, and a handful of clueless elitist scientists, damn it, bitch about how something that is actually useful to people gets in the way of their pet projects. This is how they get their precious telescopes kicked off mountains. We should be grateful for what we’ve got, and figure out ways to make it work for all of us while we still have it. The tech will all collapse of its own weight soon enough.”

The scientist returned his attention to the airplane he had spotted. It was still there, slowly blinking and tracking across the night, a few degrees above the horizon.

Then, abruptly, it wasn’t.

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Dude and Dude: Schadenbow

Posted on September 22, 2024 by Amoeba

“Dude?”

“Yeah?”

“What tha forecast?”

“Here? At this time a year? Ya know it well’s I do. ‘Dark. Continued mostly dark tonight …”

“‘… wit’ widely scattered light in tha mornin’. That’s old, dude.”

“Sue me. An’ it’s gonna get a whole lot worse afore it gets better, yeah? Dark. An’ cold. An’ wet. Yer widely scattered light might show up at, like, 10 AM. In tha pourin’ rain. An’ ya don’t need a snarky app ta figger that out. Or leastways ya shouldn’t. So what’s yer point?”

“Hawai‘i.”

“I didn’t know there wuz a peninsula named Hawai‘i …”

“Dude?”

“Yeah?”

“Shaddap. I miss tha state. I miss tha island.”

“Good.”

“[…]”

“One. Yer too far away ta hit it. Two. If’n ya did hit it, it’s a helluva lot bigger than you. Ya ain’t gonna hurt it, it prob’ly wouldn’t even notice. You, on tha other hand … an’ I ain’t payin’ yer medical bills.”

“Knew I c’ld count on ya, dude. Not.”

“Do I look like a calculator, dude?”

“What ya look like is a dude what’s fergotten what it’s like ta be warm an’ sunny.”

“I sure as hell r’member bein’ hot an’ sweaty …“

“You got chicks?!?”

“[…] Dude, what’re ya on?”

“Ya tell me where ya got the chicks, I’ll tell ya where I hid tha stash. It’s like this, dude. I wuz readin’ about how somebody sed ‘if’n ya want rainbows, ya gotta put up wit’ tha rain.’ Sure been a lot a rain since we got here, but I ain’t seen no rainbows. Kinda a downer …”

“Facepalm, dude. That line’s so bogus it hurts. Don’tcha ‘member when we wuz chasin’ rainbows in Hawai‘i? I sure do, ’cause I hadta put up wit’ ya callin’ ’em unicorn farts.”

“Did I get yer ‘tention ‘r didn’t I, dude?”

“Riiight. Didya pay ‘tention ta tha fact that we wuz diggin’ tha rainbows an’ not gettin’ wet?”

“Um …”

“If’n ya want rainbows, dude, ya gotta put up wit’ it rainin‘, all right. Rainin’ on somebody else! Ya only get ta go ‘oh wow’ if’n some other dude is, like, drownin’. That dude gettin’ wet is you, ya ain’t gonna see nothin’.”

“So I don’ get ta be happy ‘less somebody else is miserable? Ain’t there some big fancy word for that?”

“Lemme search it … oh yeah, here it is.”

“Right. So we should be callin’ these multicolored arches in the sky painbows?”

“Dude.”

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