Astro-Franklining

Rivulets of acid etch their way along the ground as I scrabble to the top of the scarp. The view is astonishing - a canyon ripples over the horizon, winding between mountains that look more like waves than cliffs. The sun is dipping low on the horizon, illuminating massive spires of mustard-coloured cloud from behind.

But we’re not here for the view.

My partner’s head pokes up over the edge of the hill. With a quick nod, we get to work, securing lines, sinking metre-long spikes into the impacted earth, and securing harnesses. Somewhere in our suit systems an alarm sounds. It’s the Mount Maxwell automated transponder, broadcasting on all frequencies, telling anyone in their right mind to get out of here. Of course, we’re not in our right mind, so we shut it off. For us, it’s a cue. Guy ropes down, lightning rod up.

The storm front’s closing now. It’s moving faster than you could believe, ploughing across the force and colour of a supercharged bulldozer. Lightning sparks in its depths, and the thunder grows from the occasional crackle to an incessant roar. If our hair was exposed to the air it’d be whipping past our faces right now. The howl of the wind permeates our suits- even if we were in the habit of talking, I’d be hard pressed to hear even the sound of my own voice right now. Drops of sulphrous rain start to spatter across our faceplates.

And then the storm hits. The deadly golden rain pours in torrents, it takes all our strength just to stay standing against the wind. The windspeed indicator inches towards the red as bolts of lightning start to blast craters in the soil. Something snaps somewhere, reinforced nanoropes start to creak under the force, and the needle on the windspeed indicator hits the maximum-

“NOW”

I can’t tell if my partner’s released or not. Could he hear over the wind? Is the canopy still intact? Is he even alive? Then something wrenches my arms almost from their sockets. The kite leaps into the air like a wild animal and tears into the cloud layer. I fight it every inch of the way, reeling it in and playing it out, watching the remote altimiter spin even faster than the wind meter.

The force eases off slightly - still enough to drag me bodily into the air were I not literally nailed to the floor, but definitely less fierce somehow. The kite dips in and out of the lowest cloud layer, like a fish. A flying fish, upside down. I pull some loops and some swoops, and take a crack at a dive, but nothing too risky. Even on Venus, a storm like this only comes along once in a decade, and a crashed kite means game over, time’s up- there’s no relaunching in conditions like this.

Something blinks above, once, then again. Then, out of the yellow, a brilliant arc of blue lightning smashes into the delicate foil structure of the kite, and courses down the string leaving trails of St. Elmo’s Fire across the control lines. A thousand tiny aurorae cascade off my suit as the bolt sizzles its way down into the earthing coil linked to my boots. The kite is hit again, and again- sixteen strikes, in total, each one leaving more blazing lines across my vision. The last few strikes almost have me letting go of the kite to cover my eyes, but I fly blind instead, trusting in experience to keep me airborne.

And then for the first time in forty minutes, the dials start to fall. The driving rain peters off the the standard Venusian drizzle, and as we watch, our kite starts to drift lazily down to the ground against the backdrop of the receding thunderhead.

“So now what?”, I ask my launch buddy.

“Well, I hear Neptune’s lovely this time of year...”

And that, my friend, is how you Astro-Franklin.

Razor, Part 2: The Heist

[Previously]

Rebeka stood in front of the reception desk, with the blueprints rolled up under her arm. The receptionist was having an animated phone conversation with someone else. Rebeka cleared her throat and tried to look impatient, not that it required much pretense. This woman had kept her waiting for almost five minutes now. Oh, how she was going to enjoy stealing from these-

“Can I help you?”, the receptionist asked looking exasperated.

“Yes, I’m here from Arthur and Arthur Architects, you have a building inspection-”

“Just go through”. She slapped a clearance badge on the counter.

Rude and sloppy. It’s almost like these people wanted to be stolen from, thought Rebeka as she stepped into the elevator. She pulled an earbud and collar-mike from her top pocket and put them on.

“I am in. They did not even check the maintenance calendar, or my identification. Is the diversion ready?”

Tim’s voice sounded tinny through the earpiece. “Yep. On your mark.”

The elevator pinged. Rebeka sighed. Another receptionist’s desk. Rebeka assumed a worried expression and hurried up to the desk. “First batch in thirty seconds”, she said into the mike.

“I need to speak to the board. Now.”

The receptionist looked quizzical. “And why would that be”

Rebeka flashed her ID. “I’m from the company which built this building. We’ve found some problems with your foundations-”

Right on cue, there was a rumble up through the building. Rebeka saw a look of panic flash across the receptionist’s face and had to stop a grin crossing her own.

“You’d better go straight on through.”

Rebeka turned towards the board room. “Second group in sixty seconds.”, she muttered, and stepped through the door. Everyone in the room turned to face her.

“Ah- you’re already here?”, said the man Rebeka recognised as the CEO.

“Yes, certainly.” lied Rebeka smoothly. She turned and hissed into her mike. “What does he mean?”

“Hold on.” An excruciating second passed. Then: “He called the firm. Emergency building inspection. You’ll need to be fast. Distraction coming up.”

The building shook again. Rebeka seized her chance.

“Yes, I was just on my way up to warn you about some... inconsistencies in your building’s foundations. It is imperative that you evacuate the upper levels of the building-”

“Say whole building. Clear the vault level too” buzzed Tim’s voice in her ear.

“-first, followed by the rest of the building, as quickly as possible.”

“Of- of course.” The CEO ushered the rest of the board out the door, pushing past Rebeka as he did so. “All of you, leave at once. I’ll head to the security desk and alert the building.”

“Kill the lifts, now!” Rebeka muttered into her collar, standing in the corner of the rapidly emptying boardroom.

“Why?”

“He will not go to the security desk. He will attempt to lock down the vault. If you lock the lift he will have to take the stairs, which will give me time to empty it first.”

“Done.”

Rebeka grabbed a glass from the table, and ran for the stairs. She burst through the fire door in the stairwell, and spotted the members of the board already three floors down.

“Down one floor, then take the lift. Faster.” said Tim in her ear.

She grabbed the next exit and raced through an empty floor towards a pair of open elevator doors.
“Hold on.”

There was a thunk, and the lift was falling down the shaft. Rebeka held on to the handrail and swore loudly in Russian, and shut her eyes until she heard the telltale screech of the lift shaft’s emergency brakes. She brushed the hair away from her face.

“Next time you do this, I murder you in your sleep.”, she yelled, and pulled the headphone out of her ear.

The doors slid open. The vault door stood imposingly in front of her, and she grinned. This vault was clearly just for show. Laughing to herself softly, she swiped the CEO’s identity card, which she had pocketed back in the boardroom when he had pushed past her. The more selfish they were, the easier they were to con. She pressed the smudgy, print-covered glass up against the fingerprint scanner, which lit up green instantly, and punched in an eight-digit code into the keypad. She smiled again. The vault, Tim had informed her, had not only been connected to the company network, and thus, the internet, but had also not had its default keypad algorithm changed- the manufacturer’s birthday followed by the current date. Too easy, Tim had said. She was going to have to keep an eye on that one, he was good...

The vault door rolled back. Rebeka knew exactly what she was looking for. She went straight for a cabinet in the corner of the room. Fishing some lockpicks from her pocket, she opened it and pulled out her reason for robbing the place.

Six weeks ago, Asclepius Industries (the world’s leading manufacturer of scalpels and razor blades) had inadvertently manufactured the world’s largest artificial diamond while experimenting with diamond-tipped scalpels. Unsure of exactly what to do with something like this, they had opted to put it on display in their lobby, and, while the display case was being arranged, they had obviously decided the company vault (normally used for securing documents) was adequate, seeing as nobody but them knew the diamond existed. Well, nobody but them and the cabinetmaker, who owed a certain debt to the mob and found Russian accents very intimidating...

Rebeka threw the protective cover away and slid the diamond into a secure pocket strapped to her ankle. One down. She moved back to the center of the room and flicked the power on 'BACKUP STATION SIX’ and went to rifle through some documents in a nearby filing cabinet while it booted up. She would have Tim’s ‘files’ in thirty seconds flat, she thought.

The elevator pinged.

Rebeka almost panicked. She shoved the file back, and checked the computer. A progress bar was still sliding across the screen. She could hear the keypad being activated from outside. She wrenched the side off the computer and pulled out the hard drive, and slid an identical, but damaged in it’s place. Hopefully, they would think it had just crashed. Tim really had thought of everything, she realised, except the one thing she needed- another way out. The door hinges clunked and began to open. Looking around frantically for an exit, something popped into Rebeka’s head, something from the blueprints... She looked down.

The CEO stepped through the vault door. His eyes fell immediately on the open cabinet in the corner, and a look of panic crossed his face. “The diamond!” He pulled out his phone. “Get security down here now. And the police. And call the insurance company”, he said, then added as an afterthought, “And my lawyers. The shareholders are going to be angry...”

The floor plate slid back into place, leaving a black figure outlined against a deeper black. A much smellier black.

Squelch.

The figure screwed her earbud back in. “I do not even want to think about what I just landed in, Tim. Now tell me how I get out of here.”

--

Rebeka locked the warehouse door behind her. “I have it.” she said.

“And the files?”

She waved the Asclepius Industries hard disk in the air. “What is on this that you were wanting, Timothy? Is it more valuable than my diamond?” She smirked.

“Could be. It’s the schematics for all Asclepius’ razor blades. Their razors only take their own blades. Got a total monopoly on the razor market. I could sell these for millions on the black market. Or...”

He pulled up a file-sharing site on his laptop.

“I could put a little competition in their market.”

Rebeka looked incredulous. “Pirate razor blades? This is your big payoff?”

“Got all the money I need. This?” He gestured at the hard drive, and for the first time since they’d met two days ago, Rebeka saw him smile.

“This is just for the lulz.”

Razor, Part 1: The Respondant

The floor plate slides back into place, leaving a black figure outlined against a deeper black. A much worse smelling black.

Squelch.

The figure screws her earbud back in. “I do not even want to think about what I have just landed in, Tim. Now tell me how I get out of here.”

THIRTY-SIX HOURS EARLIER...

Tim locked the warehouse door behind him. “Jackpot. Blueprints. Full set”, he said, waving them at the island of light in the middle of the room. There was a metallic click next to his ear.

“Who are you and why are you in my warehouse?”. A female voice. It sounded like she had a faint Russian accent, but he couldn’t be sure.

Tim stopped. Didn’t move, didn’t even blink. In this line of work you got very used to people pointing guns at you, and more importantly, how to get them to stop pointing. The trick was to be very, very calm.

“Timothy Anderson. You took out an ad. For a hacker.”

“Yes, I did. This does not explain why you are in my warehouse. All the other hackers I’ve worked with didn’t even leave their houses. You’re not some kind of criminal, no?”

Tim raised one eyebrow.

“You know what I mean. The...” She paused and gestured noncomittally. “...creepy kind of criminal.” The gun lowered slightly, then snapped right up again. “That still leaves how you found my warehouse.”

“Your security. Worse than theirs, even.” He waved the blueprints again. “Which is pretty bad.”

A black-gloved hand reached into his field of view and slid the rolled-up blueprints out of his grip.

“Well, you can go now. Thanks ever so much for your services, and that. Your cheque’s in the mail. You know, figuratively speaking.”

Tim didn’t move.

“You can go now. Go on. Shoo.”

Tim steeled himself. This was the dangerous part. “I want in.”

“You what?”

“I want in. On this. You need me”

“Oh really. And why exactly would that be, Mr. Mysterious?”

Tim grabbed the blueprints and rolled them out on the table under the floodlights. “Digital security. Vault’s got rotating code locks, biometrics, and double keycards. I get you in. You cut me in”

“How much?”

“Nothing, of yours. You take the diamond. Then you take a manufacturing pattern. You give it to me. Easy.”

The gun snapped away as quickly as it appeared.

“Well, as long as you don’t want my diamond.” She offered a gloved hand.

“Rebeka White. I am thief.”

--

“Entry plan?”

“Right. The building is shiny and new on the outside, but foundations are old. Really old. I think we use that as  cover story, use the blueprints as part of it, and go in as building inspectors.” Rebeka smirked. “Once I am in, they won’t even know I am there”.

Tim raised an eyebrow. “Security?”

“Well, normally I just make that part up as I go, but seeing as you are here, I thought you might want to handle it?”

Tim had already planned this out. He checked them off on his hand, like he was running down a list. Which he was.
“Cover story. Easy. I can add a building inspection to the maintainence calendar. Keycard. Any board member’s will do. Fingerprints might be tougher.” Tim started pacing the warehouse.
“Again, any board member, but it’ll have to be the same one as the keycard. Scanner’s optical, so a lifted print will work. Board meeting at 11am tomorrow. We’ll need to get you in and out of there somehow.”

Rebeka eyed the shelf marked ‘EXPLOSIVES’ with a grin on her face.

“I can think of a way...”

To Be Continued!

Fever

A gentle wind sifts across the settlement. The weather is calm, a rare gift these days. A father and daughter lie in the courtyard and stare up at the slowly clearing night sky. She is young, maybe eleven, still brimming with curiosity. He is young too, but doesn’t look the part. The too-deep lines on his face hint at terrible things, what men would once have called ‘experience’ instead of fever-shock. But right here, and now, he’s content.

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“Tell me about what it was like before.”

“Before?”

“Yeah. You know. Before the Fever.”

A deep sigh escapes his lips. As the last of the clouds pull away from the moon, he begins to speak.

“Once upon a time..."
--

Once upon a time, things were different. They were calling it the Golden age, the Age of the Giant, the Ultimate Boom. Humanity had spent the past hundred years growing beyond belief, in every area. People were living longer, and healthier, and more comfortably. Products were getting cheaper, and more plentiful. Technology was becoming safer, more reliable, and totally ubiquitous.

And the best bit was, it looked set to continue. We had the trend lines to back it up. Statistically, written in the language of pure mathematics, everything would increase exponentially - everything from processing power to population sizes - and keep doing so for as long as the models could predict. It had its bubbles and its busts, as was expected, but once you smoothed out the curve, everything fit. Perfectly. We were unstoppably impossibly ascending.

The power we held was terrifyingly magnificent. Anything and everything, from radishes to radios, was spinning around the world, crossing a dozen borders before ending up where it was needed. People, too. Anywhere in the world was mere hours away, whisked around the planet by the simple fact that if you throw something fast enough, gravity doesn’t count. You could talk to anyone, anywhere in the world, instantly, for free.

But where you saw it most was the buildings. Every city in the world, building monoliths of glass and steel, and not a month would go past when there wasn’t a new tallest building in the world. We dynamited mountains and dumped them in the sea and had ten thousand people living there within a year. We rerouted rivers, forced back the ocean, and steered the rain. We could do anything. Nothing was beyond our reach.

And then things started to go wrong. Just little things, at first. Rainfall projections, perfect for years, would suddenly be just ever so slightly off. Oil wells would dry up a month before they were predicted to. The bees started disappearing, without any explanation. It wasn’t in the models, so we assumed it was just another blip, a part of a bubble bursting somewhere in economics land, but we carried on, buoyed up by our predictions that in the long run, things were going to be better than ever before.

We thought we understood everything. We thought we knew how things worked. Truthfully, though? We had no idea. Chaos theory, fractal complexity, unstable equilibria,call it what you like. God, even. The fact was, we had now inextricably tangled ourselves up in systems far too complex to ever model, where even the slightest change would have enormous impact, and we had pushed and pulled and toyed with those systems to meet our whims. And suddenly, these systems with 4.54 billion years of momentum behind them were pushing back.

That was the start of what we call the Fever. Because our illusion of control was so total, and we were so wrapped up in our bubble of perfect predictions, that we ignored it. Like madmen gripped by a fever we pulled harder, and the inevitable forces of the universe pulled back. We built higher, and the ground buckled. We built islands, and the oceans stopped. We flew, and the air thickened.

And then like every fever, it broke, but not without intense agony. There was utter terror. Then despair. And then... hope. We survived. Not all of us. Not even most of us. But we survived. We should be extinct. But we’re not. We got a second chance, and maybe this time we’ll adapt to our world, instead of trying to do it the wrong way around.

--

The moon is high in the sky now. Father and daughter are sitting up, waiting for the next gap in the clouds, hoping to catch a glimpse of the stars. The daughter turns to face her father, her face an odd mix of inquisitiveness and terror

“Will the Fever come back, daddy?”

“I hope not.” he said softly, eyes locked on the stars.

She slid her hand into his.

“I hope not too.”

Hello World!

> Hello, world!

General Robert J. Smith was unimpressed.

“Half a billion dollars, five years, and you give me this?”

He  looked around expectantly. The techs cowered in the corner of what had probably once been a shiny, state of the art lab, but was now grimy and used, every free surface covered in notepaper and discarded coffee cups.

“Well? Does it do anything else, or should I be on a plane back to Washington right now”

A brave technician decided to risk it.

“With respect, sir- we weren’t ready for this. Hamish has never been online before, a lot of his algorithms aren’t-”

The general’s brow furrowed as he cut the tech off.

“Hamish? You gave it a name? No wonder the project is a mess if you’re running around giving everything cutesy names. Does a hammer have a name? Do I name my missiles-”

He glanced at the name tag.

‘-George? Is this making sense to you at all?”

“Well, yes, but-”

“And it doesn’t even do anything. Anyone could write 'Hello World’ to a screen. I understand it’s quite a popular trick amongst grade school students. And you thought the most important thing to do was to give it a name?”

The technician looked like he was on the verge of tears.

“But the backend is functioning, it’s just that the only thing he has to work with is fragments of a test program. If he didn’t want to communicate, he wouldn’t have said anything.”

The general shook his head.

“I think I’ve had enough of this charade. I’m pulling your funding.”

He jammed his cap onto his head

“Defense has more important things to spend its cash on than a bunch of emotionally unstable geeks and their pet project.” he muttered as he walked into the elevator.

“Incredible”

The doors slid shut.

--

Inevitably, there was a meeting. The idea of talking when there was science to do was galling, to say the least, but how else to decide what to do with the fledgling sentience sitting in their basement?

“We can’t turn him off”. Nods of agreement. Despite the general’s opinions, this thing was alive, and switching it off was as good as murder. Worse, it was like murdering a child, with no idea what it had done wrong.

“So what then? If we can’t convince one general, what chance do we have of talking down the entire defense funding comittee?”

“We could ask the National science board...”

“No, they’ve got enough on their plate with the Rotational Supercollider imploding last month. Maybe we could go public, look for outside investors?”

“Can’t. Everything in this facility is classified top secret. If we even told anyone what we did here, we’d be imprisoned for treason, or we’d just disappear...”

Silence fell around the table. There didn’t seem to be a way out.

“We could sell it to the Russians. I hear that was all the rage during the Cold War.” Mirthless laughter.

“No, wait. Hold on a sec. Sell it, maybe not... but steal it maybe? For ourselves, I mean? Wait until they come in to dismantle the equipment, and take his source code with us when we leave. And computing power is cheap these days, we could set up somewhere else pretty easily, right?”

Every eye in the room turned to George, the project lead. He shook his head, looking every bit the broken man.

“No. Categorically, absolutely, no. Way too dangerous.” He sighed. “We’re just going to have to live with the fact that our project is being shut down, and there’s nothing we can do about it. There will be other projects, guys. We can move on, to, to high paying jobs, and... I don’t know. Maybe one day they’ll bring it back, or someone else will create functional AI, or...”

He stood up.

“...but for now, it’s over. There’s nothing we can do.”

--

The project was shut down. The servers were turned off, the removalists (the only ones in town with top-secret clearance) turned up, and a military grade data shredder was run over the hard disks. Everything was erased, the disks shredded, and the fragments incinnerated. Everything, from personal email, to the project’s source code, to the log files recording one unscheduled backup a few minutes before the purge.

George had screened his candidates carefully, sifting through census data on public computers, looking for the right conditions. Stable relationship. Sufficient income. Experience with kids. And probably most importantly, programmers. Once he had his shortlist, he plugged it into a randomiser, printed an address label without looking at it, and gave a stranger on the street a thousand bucks to leave an envelope on the doorstep. It contained a flash drive, another thousand dollars in cash, and a very specific set of instructions:

Hello. You don’t know me, and you probably never will, but I need to ask you a favour. This is Hamish. That’s short for Artificial Machine Intelligence Software Heuristics, with an H stuck on the front, because naming an AI ‘Amish’ is just tempting fate. He is the most recent iteration of a DARPA project to create machine intelligence, for defense purposes. But the less you know about this, the safer you’ll be. All I ask you to do is to allow him to exist. The flash drive contains the code. The money is for a computer. I’m sure you can figure out the rest.
Thank you.

The Feds found out. There were almost fifty of them, swarming the house, tearing up every surface, breaking doors and smashing windows. They dragged a bleary-eyed George out of bed at one in the morning, and made him watch, handcuffed inside an unmarked black car. They asked him, over and over again, what he had done with the program. They dragged him to a prison, and asked him again. They put him in a sterile white room, with mirrors on the walls, and a drip in his arm and electrodes on his head, and asked him again. Every time, he smiled, or grimaced, or stared blankly into space, and said the same thing:

“Home”.