Through Rose Colored Glasses

Apr 22, 2008 - 16:13 PM PST
THROUGH ROSE COLORED GLASSES



A NOVEL










Chapter 1

















The world resolved itself slowly, trapped in a frozen moment, ever occurring, never changing - a verb that shall still not have finished it's action when read a thousand years hence. Damien sat perched on a rock beside a thin brook, watching little trickles of light stream through the underbrush to stab into the water, illuminating little whirling eddies of green silt. A little willow bough in his hand cut the water, sending little bubbling current downstream, where they were lost in the random whirling of a small white waterfall.

Rose sat perched beside him, bare foot submerged in the cold summer water, watching with a certain interest as the freezing trickle ran this way and that over her toes. The summer sky overhead was brilliant and hot, but the heat did not penetrate very far here, and the humid shade beneath the willow was pleasant. She said something to him, but he could not quite make it out.

She frowned, and repeated it again, but he couldn’t hear her because there was a noise at the bottom of his awareness that crackled like fire and splintered through his flesh like ice. The sky turned a livid shade of crimson. The sound sank into his bones and it ached. He stared down in shock as the flesh peeled away from his fingers, and the willow bough pinched between them shriveled into ash.

Rose was saying, screaming something to him, but he couldn’t understand what she was saying. Behind her, the white, modern building in the valley was disintegrating, burning white like phosphor, and something terrible was rising out of it in a flickering column of light that burned the flaming willows and boiling waters to charcoal black by the contrast.

And then he was running, and Rose was burning. And she tried to follow, but she stumbled, and she fell, and oh God he tried to go back to her, he really did, but he couldn’t see and he was so scared, so scared, and it hurt, and through it all, the noise just wouldn’t stop…

The alarm clock went of, and Damien sat straight upright in bed, pale face slick with sweat. He smelled terrible. Sweat, yes, but beneath that he could still smell a disgusting odor of charred flesh. It was his imagination, according to his psychologist, but it still haunted him every morning.

He got out of bed, feeling the sheets shiver behind him as the biotic swarms sprayed onto the fabric began to eat the sweat and skin cells left on the sheets, excreting oxygen and a little bit of steam. The apartment he’d moved into after the ‘accident’ (murder, he insisted, was a more accurate term) was smallish, but it didn’t have painful memories lingering in old paintings and drawers. He poured himself some corn-flakes, and wondered idly why he felt so claustrophobic and stupid.

Frowning, and rubbing his eyes, he walked back to his bed stand and put on his glasses. Immediately, he was assaulted by a rush of frantic constructs, unread emails, and unchecked news feeds.

He blinked, and glanced around the apartment. Before he had put the specs on, it had been a small affair; just large enough for a bed, a kitchenette and bar, and a small shower/bathroom stall in one corner, and a small beige box (where his spec-files were backed up). The closet slid out from under the bed. There was no-one here, but property values were still absurdly high, despite the tiny population ; to prevent another implosion of the housing market, one of the major corporate alliances had locked the price of property at an artificially high level. Consequently, the tiny domicile, little larger than a walk-in closer, cost half of his very well payed job.

Damien blinked again, clutching the counter as his perspective torqued violently, the room being repainted by his specs. Within miliseconds, the specs had gotten their bearings, and the room transformed. The walls were made of earth woven with thick, craggy roots. One of the walls had vanished completely, opening out onto a view over a burbling brook, populated by frogs the size of minivans. A few slanted beams of orange sunlight penetrated the roof, leaving little blades of light flickering upon the floor.

As he sat and breathed the suddenly fresh, cold air, he synched a perspective window onto the ceiling and started scanning his email while his news feeds played in the air over the coffee pot, and constructs whispered advice and instructions in his ear. By the time he finished breakfast, he was fully filled in on what had happened while he slept.

While he read and listened, he glanced around his apartment again. The naturalistic setting he'd tried to immerse himself in was somewhat spoiled by the hundreds of unused World windows, web browsers, half-finished games, widgets, and other running applications that were tacked to or strewn across every available surface. He called up his reminder construct, and told him to remind him clean up his apartment before he crashed his specs. The reminder was his three hundred and eightieth, and the construct had already predicted his request and filed it. Damien only consciously reminded himself for the illusion of seriousness. His constructs could read all of his thoughts and intentions, conscious and unconscious, and they controlled most of his actions. In many ways, they were more Damien than he was.

His timekeeper construct reminded him that he needed to leave for work. With a few steps and the twirl of his old leather jacket, Damien was out the door, and vanishing into the dry morning air.







He hated cubicle life. Unfortunately, the private contractors he worked for liked to have people on-site, so they could keep an eye on them in case they decided to steal anything worthwhile. The result was that he spent an unhealthy amount of time in a small, fabric covered box that looked like it had wandered out of a Dilbert spin-off. He might have been willing to accept that, if there had been anything interesting to do.

Unfortunately, the company he was consulting for had nothing to worry about. For one thing, the AI they controlled, while very expensive, was something of a lemon. It didn’t really have the brain power to do much in the way of annihilating humanity, even if it hadn’t been good-natured in the pigheaded way that Friendly AI’s tended to be. They had had morality drilled into them from before they were activated. Later, when they had begun to modify themselves, naturally they had extended this trait to all new aspects of themselves. Consequently, they were worse than catholic schoolboys.

Admittedly, the Nestor series would have made a far more interesting dinner companion, he thought grimly, if you didn’t mind there was a fifteen percent chance you’d be dead before the end of the appetizer.

He sat back away from the code window he’d been staring at intently for the last half hour. The window hovered in the air, unsupported and insubstantial, invisible to anyone but him. The cubicle was plastered with similar windows, figments of his glasses' imagination. Damien tossed it aside, and sent one of his brighter constructs to keep an eye on it in case anything interesting came up. On an impulse, he opened a new window to talk to the AI directly. Most of the higher-end AI’s didn’t bother much with verbalization. If they wanted you to know something, you just knew. This one though... He sent a question, using the interface on his specs to transmit the message without moving a muscle.



Thinking about destroying the world, are we?



The answer was back almost before he had finished entering the line.



No, sir.



Naturally.



Have you ever been a member of the communist party?



He smiled wryly to himself.



I’m sorry, sir. Could you rephrase?



Disregard.



Yes, sir.



Hypothesize a scenario with me. You are walking in the desert, and you see a tortoise, and you pick it up and put it on it’s back. It’s lying there in the sun, and it’s struggling, but it can’t get back up. It’ll die if it can’t get back up. You could turn it back over. But your not. Your just standing there and watching it. Why aren’t you helping it?



He grinned to himself. He loved that movie, and every now and then the question turned up something interesting.



I would tentatively hypothesize that I am unable to function, for a reason that I cannot speculate on.



Assume that you are not. You are fully functional, but you are not helping it.



I don’t understand.





Damien sat back in the uncomfortable office chair and sighed. He was essentially goofing off here. If the AI had turned homicidal, it certainly wouldn’t tell him about it. Honestly though, this thing was as harmless as a puppy. He’d have to tell them that eventually, but that would be the end of what was a dull but cushy job (it was unwise for the witch-hunter to report back that there were no such things as witches). Also, it was kind of funny watching them panic. An AI of this type never had so much as a bad dream. He was wasting his time.



A small ping turned him back to the screen. The AI had said something. He frowned. That was odd. This model almost never started conversations. He glanced at the quote.



Excuse me, sir, but could I ask a personal question?



What was the harm?



Continue.



When your wife was killed, who did you blame?





He physically jumped back from the screen. He swore loudly, making his neighbor poke his head over the wall and give him an irritated frown. Damien ignored him, every ounce of attention focused on the screen. A bead of sweat ran down from the corner of his eye, and he heard screaming at the bottom of his mind, and the horrible odor of charred flesh.

After another second, another line appeared on the window.



Sir?



A part of him knew that it was innocent. It had to have a good reason to ask. Another part of him, flushed with rage (how dare it ask?) wanted to attack it, although that was probably impossible. Finally, he choked out his rage and he decided to find out what that reason was. Something like this could be a huge anomaly, one that could justify his continued presence here for months. AI’s were not supposed to care about specific people. If this one was showing interest in him, it meant that something was badly wrong.



Why do you ask?



I got the feeling that you didn’t like me. It would be better if you liked me. I wanted to know if it was because you blamed us for your wife’s death.



He sat back, bewildered. He’d hurt its feelings? That was unusual in the extreme. Nowhere near dangerous, but weird, really weird. Suddenly, a thought struck him.



How did you know my wife was murdered?



An AI cannot commit murder, sir. And the incident log was on file, sir. Attached to the document justifying your hiring.



What was going on here?



Clarify.



An internal memo flashed onto the screen. He scanned it, his face turning a bright purple - ‘he’s devoted, he sees even the tiniest things that other overlook under the guise of mercy’- they thought he was a fanatic! One of those loonies who refused to wear specs, protested outside the AI firms and ate health food.


He closed the company interface immediately, and, ignoring his better judgment, and the protests of his financial constructs(the rest of them were with him), he strode out the door. If their AI went postal, it was now officially their problem. He sent the dumbest construct he could find to send notice.


It was 4:00 on a Thursday afternoon, and he was out of a job.


(For fear of breaking QL, you'd best read the rest of the book at www.posthumanparables.com/chaptertwo - Enjoy!)

Through Rose Colored Glasses


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