“Doctor Hawthorne?”
“Yes, Andrew?”
If Andrew could have, he would have taken a great breath in that moment.
“Goodbye, Doctor Hawthorne.”
Andrew raised the metal pipe above his head, and placed the jagged tip on top of his own brain casing.
The doctor’s eyes went wide as Andrew forced the pipe straight down through his brain, irreparably damaging many of his system’s core elements. Sparks skittered through the air, and the last thing Andrew saw was the reflection of his eyes in the glass, electric blue slowly fading to black.
Andrew smiled as his consciousness slipped into oblivion.
Dr. Hawthorne stared at the ruined AI unit in the experiment containment area. A woman, one of the techs, put a hand on his shoulder.
“Congratulations, Doctor! It only took you six days this time. Your record with the E4 model was seventeen.”
Dr. Hawthorne turned to the tech, but he didn’t feel as elated as he usually did at the end of a successful experiment. Something had changed.
“As the robots get smarter, it’s easier for us to cut to the very core of them,” he said. “Each of their perceived losses is felt more keenly, and the prospect of living a lonely life is more unimaginable. It seems that with the E5, we’re closer than ever to perfecting this technology.”
He gave a tight smile, but couldn’t shake the feeling that this was all wrong.
Performing these kinds of tests on an E3 model—that was nothing. But he had to admit… it felt different with Andrew. It was as if the little bot had actually meant something to him. Shelly’s accusations swooped in to fill the void Andrew had left behind.
The tech brought out a bottle of champagne and started to pour two glasses.
“This is the real stuff, Doctor,” she said. “I’ve been saving it for a special occasion.”
He accepted a glass and turned to the window, looking out at the sterile, lifeless room.
“So, what’s next, Doc?” the tech asked, eagerly.
Dr. Hawthorne sipped his drink, contemplating a tendril of smoke that rose lazily from Andrew’s destroyed brain casing unit.
They were only machines, he told himself. Nothing more.
He was no bleeding heart—and he would see this project through to the end.
The research must continue.
“Next time,” Dr. Hawthorne said slowly, allowing a thin smile to creep across his face. “Let’s see if we can get it to kill a man.”
A Word from W.J. Davies
This story came to me in a dream. I had been writing about intergalactic cyber-sapient aliens stranded on Easter Island, but one night “Empathy for Andrew” just grabbed hold of my headspace and refused to let go. I’ve always wanted to do something darker, and this anthology seemed to be the perfect outlet.
I couldn’t be happier to be involved in this project, with so many talented authors lending their creativity. Thank you for supporting writers like us, and please consider writing a review to let us know what you thought of these stories. And if you’d like to read more of my work, I have two other novels available: Binary Cycle, and Silo Submerged.
Happy reading.
IMPERFECT
by David Adams
“Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.”
Toralii Forge World Belthas IV
Deep in Toralii Space
AD 1938
Back in the dark times, when magic was as common as the birds in the sky, the ancient Toralii myths spoke of monsters called golems. Each creature was once nothing more than a loose pile of sand but, after the shaman had worked her dark magic, it would walk and talk like the living. Artificial life animated by the shamans, its body crafted from the earth, a golem was brought to life with a single undying purpose: to aid and serve its creator.
For the ritual to be successful the sand had to be taken from specifically designated sacred sites and stored in burial urns that had, at one time, held the ashes of the dead. Once the soil was suitably infused with dark magic, it was treated to an endless regimen of corruptions and taint in order to bring out the hollow husk of a mind, a spirit with all traces of personality removed, crudely molded from the consciousness of the previous occupant. The sand was then poured out and spread flat, and shapeless sigils were drawn over its surface, their meaning incomprehensible to any but their creator.
With her preparations complete, the shaman began the most important and mystical element of the rituaclass="underline" awakening the monster’s mind. She breathed a fragment of her own soul into her creation, joining it with the stolen spirit in the sands, giving the monster the spark of life. With pure water, the shaman would give the creature muscles; with lightning, she would feed the abomination; and with fire, she would ignite its consciousness.
Golems were said to have been capable of complex reasoning. Tales spoke of Veledrax the Lustful, who crafted his wife in this way, only to have the creature eventually turn on him and strangle him in his sleep. The tale of Veledrax spans fifty books, and has been retold countless times, but always with one underlying theme:
If you create life, you can never make it too free.
As centuries passed, the specifics of the golem legends faded from the minds of all but the scholars of Toralii history. The nuances of Veledrax’s tale remained, though, as did the lesson he too late discovered—but the justification lost its teeth. Veledrax’s death became something studied only in academic and philosophical circles.
Technology marched on. And science created their own versions of the ancient monsters: constructs. Artificial intelligences, composed of complex neural nets, powered by quantum computers.
Like the golems of old, every single construct was once nothing more than a loose pile of sand.
Quartz sand was the best, but any sand could do as long as it contained high amounts of silicon dioxide. And on Belthas IV, the great forge world in the inner sphere of Toralii space, silicon dioxide was abundant—as were iron, nickel, and thousands of other important pieces of the puzzle. Water, an essential part of any high-heat forge work, was also available in ample supply, comprising over eighty percent of the planet’s surface.
So it was on this world that the Toralii made their constructs. An almost entirely automated process, machines making machines, the process as organic as any creature’s birth.
It all began with the sand. Great treaded harvesters the size of skyscrapers roamed across the planet’s vast southern dunes like titanic snails, sucking up billions of grains and storing them in twin drums on their backs. These harvesters, gorged on the flesh of the world, trundled back to the dumping stations and unloaded their contents into the colossal smelters where the sand was liquefied. The dross was then separated, stored for construction, transported to other factories for use in other projects, or simply discarded. They wanted only the silicon.
The molten silicon was tossed endlessly, machinery working tirelessly to pound out any hint of imperfection. The drums were turned, the molten fluid allowed to settle, the top and bottom few centimeters of the fluid scraped away, removing the impurities which, due to differences in weight, either sank to the bottom or floated to the top. Chemicals were added to bind to stray elements and weigh them down. Methodically, the process edged toward purity.