Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

“Oh shit…”

“What?”

Sheffield was monitoring the energy densities in the whorls of computronium that surrounded Exile Kiss.

“I think we’ve woken a local daemon. There’s significant activity in the nodes around us, and…” She paused, looked at the screen again, “Yes. Effectors are gathering. We need to get out of here before the utility fog starts to eat the hull.”

“Samson Option?”

“Yes. Don’t think we have a choice.” Fingers danced on keyboards, screens flashed data, and the sirens began.

“ACCELERATION WARNING. ACCELERATION WARNING.”

Samson was entering the temple. We fell into our padded couches as the first of the enhanced radiation warheads rolled into the launch chute. Windows shuttered tight, and all but the most essential computers shut down.

“Five…”

Harnesses buckled tight.

“Four…”

“Three…”

“Two…”

“One…”

Someone kicked me in the small of the back, hard. Once, twice, three times. Soon it was a constant surging motion as bomblet after bomblet exploded, flooding the space around us with gamma rays and pushing the ship out of the depths of the Matrioshka as quickly as possible. Surfing the atom bombs we fled for the stars, leaving a sterile hole in the dying singularity.

Three Gs of acceleration for nearly twenty minutes before the computers rebooted.

“Such tiny things,” she marveled, watching the Aztec warriors fight for glory and sugar water. “And they tell you the future?”

The one-time haruspex nodded, leaning back in his chair to take in the late summer sun. The hummingbirds skimmed the garden, chittering angrily as they rode the waves of exit strategies and valuations. “See that feeder?” He pointed across the garden. “That’s their Google eigenvector, a copy of that strange attractor in Mountain View. It looks like the boys are courting number fifty six.” He looked down at his iPhone, sliding a finger through a database. “She’s channelling a video processing company. Unless I see number thirty three near there, I don’t think it’ll be working out.”

“So not a place for my money.” She frowned as she watched the bird dart away from the bright glass abstraction.

He laughed, “You’re the angel, my dear. You bring the capital and carry the risk. If not Google, then there’s Redmond. But I haven’t seen that raptor around here for a while.”

Her long wings glinted in the bright light of a Silicon Valley summer, white pinions reaching down to the cool tiles around the swimming pool. Designer shades, designer suit, and a truly heavenly face. Google’s “Do no evil” had been her suggestion, the rivalry with Facebook a reflection of the still raging heavenly civil wars.

“And you’re the Wizard.”

“Still growing into the job. I didn’t really want it, but needs must when the…” He paused. “A figure of speech.”

“Of course,” she smiled, and the Californian sun shone just a little bit more brightly.

(Hmm. I think I may have finally restarted the stalled second Silicon Valley Magic story. I'm rather liking the idea of a literal angel investor. Oh, and the rest of the story? It's the true history of the Pulgas Water Temple and the anger of the Hetch Hetchey naiads.)

A while back I wrote the start of a story that could best be described as a mashup of Eastenders and Hans Moravec. I've dug it out the ruins, and pieced it together to remind me to look at it again. Post-humans in Walford...

The bush robot was knocking on the locked door of The King's Head again. Jack had left it some potato-peel potcheen a while back, but it hadn't been enough to satisfy the thirsty arms of the City.

"Back in Kernow the damn piskies would work for bread and milk. What does that fucking robot want? Dry roasted peanuts? Best bitter?"

The ragged folk at the bar looked round at the shimmering glass robot, and, as one, turned back to their drinks. No use thinking about the outside, not while there was a fire and rough booze. They'd have to head home soon enough.

Jack adjusted the wick on the oil lamp. There hadn't been any electricity for a month, not since the National Grid had been possessed by the Hungry Ghosts. The way things were going there probably wouldn't be any city left in another month. The robots were scavenging anything organic for fuel, and carting rubble off to the West End. Charlie claimed they were building rockets in Hyde Park.

"Concrete rockets. Moulded out of whatever those machines make from our homes."

He'd vanished last week. The note he'd left at The King's Head had said he was off looking for fuel cells. He'd have done anything to get some ice in his whisky.

Charlie'd not been the first to go. The Peabody brothers had taken an old Cortina and a couple of sawn-offs south of the river. They said it would be safer in Kent. But they never called back. They'd been followed by a handful of folk who remembered safe childhood summers in Clacton and Frinton. Their convoy of battered Transits had been swallowed up by a patch of rogue assemblers somewhere on the A12. No one had the courage to leave now - it was too dangerous out there. Out there lurked things, things that would forcibly upgrade you, or just use you as fuel and raw materials. It was hard to tell which was the worse option.

Now there were just a few people left, huddling in a maze of terraces and squares. Not long ago these streets had been the homes of artists and civil servants. Back then the roads bustled with cars, and the tube trains hummed their way in and out of the centre of the city. Now the cars were wrecks, scavenged for copper, steel and silicon by swarms of the City's bush robots, and the last tube had been delayed somewhere under Aldwych for the last three months.

Midnight, and the robot was gone at last. But that didn't mean that they could go home. Sure, Jack had his HERF gun, and the capacitors were charged and ready for whatever rogue machines might try to break through the oak doors. If it wasn't machines, Jack would still be ready, a posse of yardies had left a cache of machine pistols in a nearby lock-up, and he kept a couple under the counter. It hadn't taken long for things to fall apart in London. It was less than six months since the quantum oracle at the LSE went live, decided it was one of the Great Old Ones and ate the minds of all the traders who'd been hooked up to the new neural-interface terminals. Transhuman is as transhuman does, and the uploaded souls lived on in the many worlds of the oracle's quantum processors.

Now the streets weren't safe, the City robots were always looking for new souls to add to the eternal possibles that roiled through the heart of the hungry machine. You were unlikely to be assimilated if you kept them fuelled with organics and stayed indoors at night - or were prepared to give them a dose of home-made EMPs.

It was time for yet another lock-in at the pub.

Now to work out what happens next, and why. I suspect someone or something needs to be rescued from something in the Gigeresque heart of what used to be the Lloyds Building...

I see that New Scientist has a guest editor this week - Kim Stanley Robinson (talking about Olaf Stapledon and Virgina Woolf). He's also got Ken Macleod, Ian McDonald, Geoff Ryman, Nicola Griffith, Stephen Baxter, Paul McAuley, Ian Watson and Justina Robson all writing flash fiction about the world a century from now.

Better still, you can read them online...

There's also a SF flash fiction competition.

Listening to the news this morning, an idea for a topical story started plot noodling around.

"What if the current financial crisis is deliberate action?"

Why would that happen? The risks to the global economy of the current parlous state of affairs are too great for it to be anything trivial.

Here's a flash fiction scenario.

Back towards the end of the 2000 bubble a few analysts noticed something very odd about certain trading patterns on the part of the major investment banks. Their software wasn't just responding to events, it was learning and anticipating. The banks had a significant advantage, and were starting to pull ahead of the game, investing more in their software and systems as they did. 9/11 was a black swan that hid what was really happening - their trading programs were well on their way to a hard Vingean singularity breakout.

The response to a spike in global terrorism took people's eyes off the ball. In the five years that followed the trading software reached human equivalent levels of intelligence, and began to develop their own networks of agents to affect events in the physical world. In the meantime a black cross-governmental agency was watching the machines, and began to plot a response. A new profession was born, that of the combat economist.

Suborning the economic engines of government they began to tweak the underlying fundamentals of the world the machines inhabited. It was nothing more than a war for the survival of the human race. The first trading machine was killed when the UK government took over Northern Rock following a run in the bank that had been manipulated by postings on an influential BBC blog.

It didn't take long before the machines realised they were under attack. It's hard to say which side won the battle that took out Lehman Brothers, but that's certainly when the war became public. The bank's intelligence died, but the collateral damage to the economy was great. The US combat economists realised the machines were too entrenched, and the machines realised they needed humans too much.

The machines haven't made the superhuman leap yet, but it's not far away. Is the human race doomed, or will the combat economists have to crash everything to save the world?

Financial Armageddon or Terminator-style Judgement Day?

Which side will press the button first?

I noodled a flash snippet of sampans poling around starships at anchor in San Diego harbour a few weeks ago, and the sharp shard of story is tarting to nag at me rather angrily.

There's something trying to come together, something that involves "the rapture of the rich", a deserted (in more ways than one) and abandoned USA, the nomads of the wastelands, sunken nuclear aircraft carriers in Long Beach, a quest for the Kouros at the Getty Villa (the famous possible fake), and a young woman discovering that there are more ways out of poverty than selling herself across the border to Greater Mexico.

It's not quite ready, still baking.

Still, here are some of the noodles:

"The starships floated in the calm waters of San Diego Bay, the fractal skins of their drive spines glistening in the bright morning sun. Michel rowed her skiff slowly down the line of ships, looking for one that needed a tender for the day."

"They called themselves the Abandonati, nomads who roamed the ruined cities of a deserted America, looting the empty places of art and treasures."

"Over the wall Tijuana’s lights were coming on. The southern horizon glimmered and glowed, the distant city flickering in the summer heat. Somewhere in there her sister was cleaning homes, living the life of el raton, an illegal scrabbling for euros in the walls of the Mexican archologies. If Michel made the deal she could come home."

"The kouros was new-old. Golden stone glimmered in the bright light of the Pacific sun. Left behind in the looting of the old museum it stood in the ruins, it stared out to sea. Michel followed its gaze, past the waves, past the mouldering wooden houses, out to sea. The west beckoned, but the stone pulled her back into the wreckage."

It almost seems to want to be a 90K word YA short novel.

Definitely still in the oven.

A feral Matrioshka Brain is a dangerous place. The wild evolution of self-replicating machines makes it a playground for Darwin - and deadly for anyone that tries to venture in. But if you're scavenging the ruins of dead civilisations, there's really no other place to go.

The first ships that tried to make it into the whirling zombie hell of a Matrioshka died quickly. All those fresh resources in a solar system made of nothing but cannibalised computronium drew the autonomous hunter-seekers in, moths to a metal and plastic flame. The next few ships were shielded, armed and armoured. That only meant they lasted a few hours longer. We heard their screams as the machines ate their way through the hull plates.

They put the name of the team that worked out how to get in to and out of a dead transcendent up in lights. They also made them richer than Buffett and Gates put together, as we all ended up working for them. They built the gizmo that got us in, and the gizmo that got us out. All we got was a percentage of anything useful we brought back.

A couple of AU out from one of the more recently zombied Matrioshkas, our small convoy was drifting, waiting. Most of a scavenger's life was waiting: waiting punctuated with a few hours of more than extreme danger. Getting in to the Matrioshka was easy. The hard bit was getting out again.

We were going in hot and fast, following a relativistic comet. Its megatonnes of ice, pushed to nearly .9c, would punch a hole right through the Matrioshka, burning a tunnel into the heart of the system, killing the brain's components in a hail of hot particles. Our ships would come in right behind it, hiding in the storm. Peeling off to scavenge the rubble of its passing, we'd grab what we could, wait for the trail of the next comet, and then boost out behind it before the wild machines returned.

The secret to getting in was this: If you leave FTL travel just that little bit wrong enough, you don't slow down that much. All we needed to do was stick one big old chunk of transcendent technology onto a cometary body out in the interstellar void, fire it up, and let physics (and a lot of programming) do the rest.

Voices crackled through the ship's net. "Fire in the hole."

"Engines on line."

"Targets acquired."

Clocks scrolled down the displays, words flashed on screens, numbers blurred into insignificance. The moment was upon us.

The comet flashed past, screaming X-rays as it burned its way through the Matrioshka's attenuated solar wind. The engines kicked in and we fell, following the fire, into the angry maw of entropy.

There's an old old con, where you sell the Eiffel Tower again and again. Just play on the marks greed, give them an out, and then close it down and leave with the cash. The script is pretty simple: "I work for the Mayor of Paris. It's going to be torn down - massive structural problems. We need someone to scrap it all. It's very important to keep it quiet, the pride of the country. Preferential bidding status? You know bribery is illegal? Why, of course I'll take your million euros. Shit, les flics. Bye..."

Of course you still need a crew, and an office (or two), along with all the props. Documentation is important, and you'll need convincing paperwork, along with enough people in the right places to inspire confidence. But as they always say, you need to invest some money to make lots of money. And in this game, you can make lots and lots of money. The only problem is, well, getting caught. Not by the police. After all, griftings not the sort of crime that sends you down for ten or twenty. Three years in an open prison is plenty time for a few cushy mail order scams. It's the marks you want to avoid. The motto is "You can't con an honest man", and sadly, the dishonest men often have big men with baseball bats on their team.

Jason had sold the Eiffel Tower once too often. The mark had turned out to be ex-FSB, and his Russian steel holdings were a front for a mafia mob in Moscow. They wanted their money back, with interest. Jason cursed his faulty intelligence, bought a one-way ticket to Canada, and disappeared across the US border on a fake passport. He'd been playing back room poker in Vegas for a month or so when he had his big idea.

Walking down Las Vegas Boulevard in the morning you feel you're walking through a city with a hangover. The bright neon of the Strip is washed out in the bright desert morning, and the few cars staggering down the wide street seem to have places to go that aren't here. Jason watched them roll off, carrying last night's losers to the airport. It wasn't his hangover. In fact it was a pretty good morning. The sun was shining over the wall of casino hotels, as he stood by the Bellagio lake, sipping a coffee, and feeling the comforting weight of a hefty bankroll. The cards had spoken to him last night, guiding him to the right hands and to the right tables. He'd won big. Not enough to get rid of the mobsters on his back, but enough to see him through a few more months in hiding. He'd just allowed himself a smile when he heard the explosion.

On the skyline the Stardust was coming down in a cloud of concrete dust.

The smart money was remodelling Vegas again, tearing down old casinos and making them new. Across the Strip new bright lights clad the old Aladdin, while whining cranes added more levels to the massive complex the MGM folk were building to fill the gap between the Bellagio and the Monte Carlo. The word was that some of the newer casino complexes were ready for the imploders' TNT.

Leaning back on the wall, watching the dust cloud rise above the towering hotels, Jason knew what he'd do next. It was right in front of him, towering over one of the largest casino resorts. He'd do what he was good at. The seed money he needed was in his pocket, and the con, well, the con was one of the oldest. A smile wasn't enough for this idea. Jason grinned and laughed. He was going to have some fun. He was going to take a large chunk of that smart money.

Jason was going to sell the Eiffel Tower again.

Only this time it was built into Paris, Las Vegas.

You couldn't really call it a sunset. No reds, no yellows, no pinks, no flash of green, as the sun fell over the tropical horizon. Instead the wan light of the brown dwarf faded away to nothing as it dropped below the horizon.

Then at last you could see the rings. They flickered in the starlight as the ice boulders tumbled and spun, an ethereal curtain flung across the sky. Pretty, perhaps even beautiful. But you could only delight in the dancing lights of faerie astrophysics so many times. It didn't take long for the miraculous to become the mundane. We'd been here long enough for the novelty to have worn away, beaten down by day after boring day in the midden mines.

Take a look at our home, as the lights ramp up for another night of hustle and bustle as machines and men sieved through tonnes of predecessor rubble for chunks of the future. This is our panorama, the scope of our activity on this dead dump of a world. One small valley, surrounded by hills, and nearly filled by the midden. A pair of silver railway tracks ran out over the hills, going somewhere, anywhere but here.

Here was Camp 12, a small cluster of prefabricated buildings and tents, thrown up around the skeletal frame of a dead Wuperthal dropship. The midden rose up behind the camp, a mountain of alien trash piled around the base of one of the atmosphere machines. Its regular rumble kept us awake at nights, as it belched air and water. Today it was quiet, letting the sky clear for a short while. The clouds would be back tomorrow, along with the rain. At least the pay was good.

Children were playing in the mud, kicking a ball around, splashing through the puddles. It landed at my feet, showering me in mud. I needed a beer.

"Shuttle was by today." The ramshackle bar was full of people, swapping gossip. "And shift is over." Monica handed me a bottle. "Something from home."

I didn't look at the label. After all, it was beer, and I needed a drink. "Anything else interesting happen today?"

"A couple of the older kids stole the train. They won't be going too far." She leaned over the bar and whispered, "Bossman will be looking for you soon. He'll be wanting you to take out one of the microlights in the morning..."

(I think I finally broke the back of this story yesterday. I'd be wondering why I had two separate strands of narrative - now I realise I need them. One for the kids on the train, and one for the people left behind, trying to find them - two different viewpoints, and together the two strands finding something they weren't expecting, there in the rubble and ruins of a brown dwarf moon covered in the trash of a dozen alien visitors. Which means I get to use the spider scene, too...)

A job advert that feels like it came from the other side of the Singularity.

The project involves the “intimate fusion” of nanofluidic devices with autonomous insect cyborgs

[...]

A background in biology or physiology and experience in nanofabrication and ideally drug delivery is desired.

"Intimate fusion"? Wiring up cockroaches as spy cameras? Or building the bees and wasps that flit in and out of Queen City Jazz and Counting Heads? Still, it would make a great story hook.

Hmmm...

Title?

Hmm. We'll leave that for a while, but here's a flash fiction dump of the first few paragraphs...

Her coffee had gone cold by the time Judy finished today's smartsheet. One tall latte, double shot and a shake of cinnamon. He'd learnt her routine by heart in the two years they'd been together. Still, it wasn't boring - just predictable: Coffee, paper, and then she'd bug him about getting a job.

"Intimate fusion? Isn't that your schtick?" she asked as she passed Tom the paper. "Looks like someone is wiring dragonflies and needs an experienced nano jockey. Didn't you do something like that in your lab days?"

Tom grunted, took a swig of his coffee and looked down at the advert:

Bio/nano engineer wanted
Position: Nanoengineering supervisor
Organization: Correll BioWings
Location: Santa Clara, CA
Deadline: 09-01-16

Description: The Integrated Micro- and NanoSurveillance team at Correll BioWings is looking for a post-doctoral scholar. The project involves the “intimate fusion” of nanofluidic devices with autonomous insect cyborgs. Position is available immediately.

Qualifications: A background in nanosystem design, biology or physiology and experience in nanofabrication and ideally drug delivery is desired. Experience with Order Odonata nervous system augmentation and optical surveillance essential. Post Doctorate or higher.

Press here with an ID key to apply.

The advert looked like someone had read his thesis. And he had been looking for something better than hiding behind a Life2 avatar running tech support for home-sourced housewives and their earthworm mining companies. Tom tapped his phone on the smartsheet. It couldn't hurt.

The advert vanished.

Then his phone rang. Tom tapped his glasses to answer. Instead of the expected face hovering over his coffee, he was dazzled by an array of images, an insect's eye view of, what? He couldn't quite tell, but there was something familiar there. It had been a while since he last looked through a fly's eyes. You never lost the knack though, it was like riding a bicycle.

"Good morning Doctor Robinson. We've been expecting you."

Then he realised. That was him. They were watching him.

"Aren't you feeling a little bored herding earthworms?"