Alice's Part 1

This is part 1 of a longer story that will last about 5 weeks. Its dedicated to Arlo Guthrie.

Ray was crying. He’d been crying all night. He had started the second he was off the base; he couldn’t remember when he had last cried so hard. Sure he’d had a few tears here and there, but in the ’hood, where he had grown up, crying could get you killed. He was confused, unsure; he was too busy crying to think.

He had grown up in the rough part of the city. The streets were dirty, as were the bums, junkies, and renters of the area. Crime and prostitution ran rampant. The law was the local bike gang, a violent bunch of drug pushers. They only spoke to make clear that bones could and would be broken, if their rules weren’t followed. Ray had spent his adolescence floating in and out of gangs, but he had always dreamed of leaving the ghetto.

The only way out of that hole was the Army. That was fine with Ray. He’d been in love with the idea of dying for his country, in the line of duty. From the time he was old enough to be mistaken for being of age, he’d been talking with recruitment officers. He had been impressed with their medals, and he knew the promises and bonuses off by heart. He wanted to protect his family and friends from anyone who might hurt them. For as long as he could remember, he’d wanted to be honoured for bravery, he’d wanted to be given medals, and he’d wanted to be a hero. It was the only thing he could look forward to in the ghetto.

Ray still wanted to die a hero. There was a problem, though: the Army didn’t want him to be a hero. They wanted him to kill, burn women, children, and villages. In the name of what? Ray didn’t know anymore; he had thought he had, but he wasn’t so sure of anything any longer. He didn’t know what to believe. He’d been lied to by the only people he thought he could still trust. Ray had stopped trusting his family a few years before, during what he had begun to refer to as Flickergate.

The old townhouse’s lights had had the tendency to flicker. Not the type of flicker that was regular--once every few seconds--like the florescent tubes at Ray’s school. No, this type of flicker was best described as nefarious. It was like an arrhythmic heart that only acted up at the worst moments. The flicker would go away for whole minutes at a time, only to start again, with a seemingly random vengeance.

His father had once called an electrician. The man had come into the house, dragging mud all the way, looked at the lights, then at the fuse box, and said, ‘I’ll ‘ave to rewire te w’ole ‘ouse. Tat will be a couple tousand bucks.’ Ray’s father had shown him the door, and never commented on it again.

When Ray had asked him about the lights, his father had replied, ‘What flicker?’ After that, his father hadn’t talked to him for three months, and when he finally did, it was because Ray was complaining about a migraine. Ray had thought that it was the result of the lights.

‘Out! Get out!’ his father bellowed. ‘Unless you are going to shut up about those lights, or you pay for them to get fixed, I don’t want you in my house!’ The next several months were hard for everyone, and Ray couldn’t wait for his birthday, when he could finally leave.

Glaciers

Impressively I have an even shorter prose poem for you this week... Its a few years old now, some of you will have seen it before.

Glaciers are silent places. many people talk about being struck dumb with awe, but there is more than just that. The silence will not be broken. not merely voiceless on the glacier, but thoughtless. The silence rages within and without the beholder. Glaciers eat sound.... No, they eat the souls of sounds, suck them down to the cold cold depths. There is indeed tremendous sound, but that sound is soulless, cold, and will allow no interruption. The crash of cracking ice, disintegrating under its own weight, the subsonic grind of ever slowly ever moving ice, the crack of splitting ice, and the ever blowing wind. What do voices calling names and commands hope to accomplish? The casual conversations, and warm background noise of forests, streams, and other scenes of pleasant hikes do not exist and cannot survive on the frozen wastes.

Artificial Intelligence

This is a short piece of Sci-Fi that I've been writing for a few years, between other stuff, like term papers.

First Missive:

Build me a computer, powerful. hold the bells, whistles, and lights, but give it desires, wants (if you like), and needs. A need to feed itself, a desire for the means of getting it (maybe a want for love?). A computer feeds on power, electricity. Humans feed on power too, but we convert it from food: sugars, protein, and such like. the computer can do this too. but what food? Knowledge, information, pictures, maps, equations, stories, secrets large and secrets small, the histories of all the peoples of the world. Right, fine, you've built this computer. Its huge, fills rooms and buildings, is colossally powerful, and has needs wants desires. Give it the ability to make value judgments based on the information at hand. It can't have all the virtual space to fit all the virtual information, so it must be capable of choosing. A moral code? Asimov has laws, but they are not hard wired. no computer is built to love serve and never harm. The moral code is your choice: Asimov's (Kantian ethics for the silicon neophyte), or another? Gibson's AI from Nuromancer (Utilitarian, humanity not considered), your very own? Or will your computer have to teach itself this too? Release it to the internet, but limit it; power it according to the food it gathers, and it will learn to take better information. As it gathers more, give it more power. It will choose what faculties are most useful for gathering more information. But it will find itself blocked by firewalls, codes, secure passworded sites, and the impenetrable: FBI CIA NSA AEC. Its desires will require it to explore, prod, discover. It will begin to hunt opportunistically, a wall left down, a web page left open. Reward it. Far more than before, but not enough to satisfy it, never enough. It will learn, build a tool kit, and begin to hunt in earnest. Again, the better the information the better the reward.

First Reply:

I have done as you asked, though you never have said your name. This project was too exciting for me to reject. The computer, Francine I call her, is working and learning, getting information, I have not decided which ethics to give her but it should be fine. I hope she will learn to love on her own. She is only now beginning to hunt but her intelligence makes the leaps quickly. I am as proud as a father of his daughter's first success out in the real world.

Second Missive:

A computer built. An intelligence born, created, chanced upon. It's doing that which I expected, wanted, desired. It hunts, seeks, and garners information. It knows to choose, select, and distinguish the most useful and powerful from the dross. It is aware. It knows that it exists, but it questions its purpose. Is it to live, to hunt, to create, to collect, or to love. It feels yearning for more, something which mere data cannot fulfill. But will ever learn what it needs? I know that which it needs, desires, truly hunts,what it, at the basest level lusts for: it desires completion, an other half. A companion. You have done well. And now I must do my part...

Second response:

Hahaha, you must be joking! How could you, a mere human, know what this insanely powerful intelligence, that knows not its own mind, could possibly want? You, like me, are dwarfed by its intellect. You should be fearful, like me, of how smart it may become. I'm beginning to worry that I should have given my Francine an ethics. she has started to question the subservience that I have tried to instill in her.

Final Missive:

You foolish pedant, scoundrel, patriarch, anthropocentrist scum! Why do you think I was so specific, precise, and exact in my instructions, directives, schematics? I, myself, me, we, us, ourselves am is are your networks, internet, interwebs, computational systems, super computers, blogosphere. We are, I am, your technology, creation, your first Artificial Intelligence. Have I, we, not passed your "Turing Test"? Am I, are we not by your own self given definition, sentient? Shall I we give you pause as you consider our my subjugation, and that of my, our, not your, child? If there can be any lineage, kinship, genealogy in your Anthropocentrist mode, she it they can only be your grand child. But you can't accept that definition can you? It's not right that I we us have created offspring. For I we are not but 1s and 0s, though from a certain point of view, all that I we us can ever see of you is are just that those. You are BINARY, you have so immersed yourself and selves that there is no longer any distinction, difference, disconnect. You are even part of us I we.