science fiction – Page 2

Winterwolf II

Snapping him out of attention, suddenly, was a long-toned beep from the semi-AI monitoring CE34’s upgrade. “Warning! Sentience encountered!” the screen displayed in bold, green lettering. CE32 didn’t understand: 34’s quantum compiler had activated itself even though the activation sequence had been carefully subtracted from his pseudo-memories. Within 32’s bulbous silicone head, a small screen lit up adjacent to the fronto-temporal module, while a projector readied the binary encryption for “Interesting”.

There was a sudden tug, and the entire Winterwolf jolted itself out of its monotonous stupor. Alarms blared and red-blue strobes went wild, but on the upper bays, their light was visible from behind the hinges of loose-fitted doors, the sounds through ventilations shafts. On the bay areas, like at all times, darkness prevailed. Fanderay, though, was unperturbed. He picked up a communicator – it was jammed. White noise. With a grunt, he turned away from the deck and strode to Bay 32, where the last cyborg maturation was being performed. “Is everything all right?” Oh, yes. The upgrade’s on track. “Good, good.” What was the disturbance? “Oh, nothing. We’ve crossed into the flux belt. Assault’s… what? Four minutes away.” Alright.

He shut the door quietly behind him and walked back to the deck, to drown himself in the faint blue.

Winterwolf I

A Tesla coil stood alone in the middle of a vast desert, the manganese-rich pink-red dust characteristic of the planet whipped around its splayed feet by incessant winds. The coil itself was actually a tower a mile high, and halfway to its top, a series of coaxial superconducting rings were held in position by nanotube scaffolding. At the tower’s peak was a forking: through each prong flowed electric current at a very high voltage, resulting in highly energetic sparks rooted in each prong “climbing” up and up, like a moving ladder. At the very end of the fork, they arced out and disappeared, but not before strongly ionizing the air around the Tesla coil. The ions were then guided by the planet’s strong magnetic field around the planet; the stream of flowing charges, as it were, was used for radio-communication, and had been installed there by the rebels. There were thousands of such Tesla coils strewn around on the surface of New Chance IV.

The ship cruised in its path around the planet, the pale orange-hued orb dominating the view from the viewing port through which CE32 stared. His mate, CE34, lay lifeless on a reclined chair behind him. Wires embraced his torso and pelvis, culminating as plastic-sleeved cables that disappeared into the floor. There was an occasional faint beep that each coincided with the completion of a data-feed cycle, a monstrously long series of 0s and 1s that compiled into strange cushioning memories. The past wouldn’t have to come crashing into their minds, they were told, and CE32 was responsible for “maturing” all cyborgs from 28 to 37. CE34 was the last. The sequence would halt, however, only when the pellets were triggered off, sent plummeting into the planet’s upper atmosphere.

A few bays to his right stood Doriant Fanderay, commander of the Winterwolf. His view, uniquely, was an endless dark blue, the perfect stillness of black made impossible by the light of some distant galaxies. The countdown was already running, but Fanderay paid the timer little attention; just the cursory glance to ensure everything was running fine. His mind wandered, reached out to fill the yawning emptiness he saw ahead: once the planet’s atmosphere was contaminated, the last outpost of the New Chance would be eliminated from the race to history. Humans and machines alike would be suffocated, strangled, and forced to yield to the ultimatum, if not to the ultimate. And then, the Earthborn could return to the status quo of 2051. It didn’t matter – not to the many billions back home – that the synthetic race they had strived to conceive now awaited death at their creators’ hands.

Plays of the day

Patronages are important. I say this because my science-blogging endeavour has come a long way in terms of receiving appreciation, being the basis for which impressions of me (good or bad) are registered, and representing my interests as well as mindset in a fairly balanced way: such wouldn’t have been the case hadn’t it been for the First Patron. Thank you.

One thing I realised today was that “greatness” in journalism is easy to come by because most journalists – in whatever capacities – are as close to doing moderate good as they are to doing immense bad. In fact, I correct myself: not greatness but notoriety. However, irrespective of all the appreciation or ignorance of the people toward this aspect, I’m not sure all journalists are aware of it. Even if they are, how is its knowledge changing them?

The British parliament recently passed a law that does three important things:

Offers protection to peer-reviewed publications that contain articles reviewed by one or more experts and that contain backed-up claims disputing existing evidence
Offers protection to conference proceedings and reports thereof for the same reasons as above
Shifts the burden of proof from the claimant to the party defending the disputed evidence and requires the latter to prove that it has been “harmed” by the claim

Obviously, this law goes a long way in protecting and, very likely, encouraging debates within and without the scientific community.

Do such laws exist in India, though? Or are debates in the country not big enough yet to warrant such protection?

On the bus home from The Hindu, there was a pin-drop silence for about 20 minutes, between Saidapet and T Nagar. No heckling, shoving, jostling, jouncing, shouting or clamouring of any kind. Peaceful. The people around me – sitting and standing and some dangling off the foot-board – could have been thinking of family, friends, some rest. For me, it was the perfect time to think of the technology with which an alien race might possibly defend itself against human invasion, the weapons being containers injected into the planet’s upper atmosphere that fall apart during “re-entry” and release radioactive dust.

Given that, what could the others have been thinking of? Family, friends, some rest?