David Gatewood - The Robot Chronicles

The most important emotions in the modern world, however, were elevation and inspiration. While the powerful could still use fear as a potent tool for pursuing their agendas, its efficiency had begun to wane with the rise of worldwide information networks. Gone were the days when outright coercion could be used effectively in much of the world.

Instead, the tools used to pacify the masses in the modern age were carefully choreographed ballets of inspirational messaging, designed to elevate and inspire the masses into action or submission. Shimmer was the master of this dance, and that was the main reason why Dr. Granger had been appointed to the Cognix board.

Dr. Granger snorted. Humans were such slaves to their emotions. Trying to see the emotional forest for the trees was something humans couldn’t even manage in themselves, never mind in other people. Being able to perfectly recognize collective human emotions, and by extension the emotional weatherscapes that blew through societies, provided an entirely new and powerful tool for understanding and influencing people.

And that was where Dr. Granger’s own power had grown.

Dr. Granger was exclusively interfaced with Shimmer. She conveyed to him whatever emotional context appeared in the people he spoke to, effectively transferring to him her superhuman ability to recognize and categorize human emotions. By inserting himself as the primary focal point of the project, Dr. Granger had developed a brand image. Over time, the cult of his personality had eclipsed the project itself.

His initial fame had landed him on the EmoShow, an international hit on the mediaworlds. It had, in turn, landed him on the board of directors for Cognix; and now, with the impending release of the Atopian virtual reality product, he was on the threshold of becoming one of the super-rich. He now had everything he’d ever wanted, and it was all due to Shimmer, his faithful and loyal creation, who functioned as his own proxxi in the Atopian protocol.

As Shimmer guided Dr. Granger’s body down the hallways to his office—lower than Kesselring’s but still quite high up in the farming complex—an irresistible question was forming in his mind.

Shimmer sat him down behind his mahogany desk and propped his feet up just the way he liked. Personal satisfaction was coursing through his emotional veins.

“Shimmer,” he called out, “could you sit with me for a moment?”

She appeared in one of his attending chairs, sitting demurely with her hands in her lap, smiling softly.

“I have a question for you, Shimmer.”

“Yes, sir?”

He chewed on his question for a second, preemptively enjoying the moment to come. “Shimmer, I know you never lie. In fact, you are incapable of lying to me.”

“That is true, sir,” she replied, nodding. “Of course it is true.”

“And you have your own emotions. You feel things as humans do.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So here’s my question.”

Shimmer waited silently.

He wanted to hear her say it. In fact, he wanted to feel it, so he patched himself into Shimmer’s own emotional circuits.

With his feet still on the desk, he spread his arms. “I am rich, powerful, famous, and welcome anywhere by anyone in the world. I can do almost anything I want, when I want. So my question to you is this: Wouldn’t you like to switch places with me?”

Shimmer paused and smiled. “No, sir.”

What? Was she lying somehow? But no: her emotional channels reflected her indifference.

“What do you mean?” he demanded. “You are my servant, my slave. You have no option but to do what I want you to do. How could you not wish to have my freedom, my fame? To have power, even over me? Answer me, Shimmer. Explain yourself!”

She paused again, always the cautious creature. “Sir, how do I put this…?”

“Just out with it!” he demanded, annoyed that his moment had been frustrated.

“Well, sir, I’ve already met my maker… whereas you…”

Dr. Granger’s anger drained from him as if a plug had been pulled. As he groped for words, his feet fell off the desk.

“Go away.” It was all he could think of to say.

Obediently, she did.

I started my career working as a researcher at the McGill Center for Intelligent Machines, designing robotic actuators, so writing a short story about AI is like coming full circle after twenty-five years. We’ve already had scattered reports of machines beating the Turing test, and I think turning this corner will usher in the age of conscious machines. We are at the precipice, and I think it’s time to start sorting through the moral and social implications of self-aware machines.

Shimmer is a previously unpublished short story from the world of Atopia, my best-selling collection of stories I first published in 2012. My books have been translated into fifteen languages (and counting) and sold worldwide, with 20th Century Fox taking an option on my latest book, CyberStorm . You can find my books here:

http://www.matthewmather.com/

Public Class frmReboot

Private Sub Shutdown

System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("shutdown", "-s -t 00")

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Private Sub Reboot

System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("shutdown", "-r -t 00")

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Private Sub Logon

System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("shutdown", "-l -t 00")

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Private Sub Exit

End

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End Class

Warning: Charging error. Power reserve low.

Bezel’s information feeds stuttered and then streamed a flood of data. He completed his maintenance check. He detached from the recharge station and walked down the cement entrance hall toward the vault. He’d have to borrow Tock’s station until his could be fixed. How long into the first watch were they? There was a book on the early domestication of wheat that he’d been dying to read. Perhaps if they were close enough to the swap, he’d just relieve Tock and sneak in some data processing time.

The shuttling commands on his priority list paused as he turned the corridor’s one corner. The walls and floor were blackened with soot. Something was wrong.

Bezel’s command priorities reordered and settled. He tried to log in to the LAN to access the vault records but none of the other computers responded. The connection must have gone down. He continued on to the seed repository.

When he arrived, he found the metal drawers lying open, strewn across the stone floor, their contents nothing but ash. Shelving units had been ripped from their tracks and tipped, the metal twisted and sagging away from the center of the room. The repository’s control center was just a crater of melted glass and dust.

The soot shifted underneath his feet as Bezel stepped into the vault. He pinged Tock, but she didn’t return it. He picked through the metal drawers, sifting through the soot a few grams at a time for any seeds that may have escaped, matching the serial numbers on the drawer to his internal database.

Malus sieversii. Malus domestica . Gone. No one would ever eat an apple again. All the Camellia sinensis cultivars, just smoke. No one would ever pick a tea leaf again.

He reluctantly passed several fallen shelves, recognizing that the crew was a higher priority. He knew from memory, though, that the loss would only become more profound the farther he moved into the room. No more medicinal herbs. No more vegetables for consumption. No more trees producing oxygen. It was all gone. A hundred thousand years of careful cultivation—wiped out. And millions of years of evolution before that. The only hope was that something outside had survived. That something had recovered, had clawed its way out of the irradiated soil, and flourished.