Category: Fiction

Short Story: From the Sidelines

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

Our first mistake was transitioning to automation. Even the artists were supplanted for 3D modelers. I thought we musicians were next. We weren’t, but that didn’t mean we were immune. Eventually, everything was automated; cars, construction, fast food. A lot of people thought it would lead to some kind of Utopia. What a load of horse-cockery. I knew the truth. Most of us did. The free thinkers anyway. That didn’t stop it. Nor did it prepare us for the reality it brought.

It came on slowly, insidiously. First it was the high-school kids losing jobs, or looking for them and not finding any. You ever want to see the state of an economy, look at the kids. Not infants and toddlers mind you, they’re always going to be cared for. Whether by the state or their parents, the youngest will find a way to survive. No, I mean the preteens and teens. In a depressed economy, a downward spiral, as soon as you can wipe your own ass, you’re fucked.

It wasn’t any different this time around. I was already playing two shows a night for pissant drunks at dingy bars around Neo-Chicago. Back then, the place was still neon and nightlife. The pay wasn’t great, but after paying the sound crews each month, and the rest of the band, I’d come away with enough for rent. Fuck if I ever went out though. Most nights were spent working, playing and singing. The days were spent sleeping. The nights not spent working, were spent utterly decimated by exhaustion. It was hard enough to get outta’ bed at times, but the show must go on, right?

Then it happened… some silly fuck went and wrote a computer algorithm– or some such nonsense– that analyzed popular music for specific rhythms, sounds, and lyrics. It took that data, compiled it, and created “potential hits” from a database of digital instruments, theory, and synthesized words.

The first few attempts failed miserably. From what I hear, the corporate overlords were going to scrap the idea, but someone came in, tinkered with it, and suddenly hits were coming like a masochist in a whorehouse.

I felt it then; anger. Betrayal. You never know how deep it can run ‘til you show up for a gig and find your place on-stage taken by a stereo with a net-link. And here I’d thought the teens looking for grass-money’d had it bad.

A lot of lives changed. Fast. It was like the Hindenburg. The entire music industry– what wasn’t corporate dominated by whores and castrata, anyhow– was in flames and burnt to dust before the victims knew what was happening. I was one of them. It sucked. I only survived because I’d hoofed it out to a secluded part of the woods to live like a hermit, off-the-grid and off the land. A lot of people didn’t know what I did, and I helped a few, but who knows if it was enough. For a large portion of the population, it wasn’t. Most died from starvation within the first year.

But it didn’t end there. Really, it still hasn’t. Isolated pockets of people and professions still clutch the shit-covered rope only to find themselves sliding away, worse off than ever. The funniest part of it all? The CEOs put themselves out of work too. It was for the best. They certainly didn’t walk away empty-handed like the rest of us, but they never realized where they were headed either. They said “fuck them” to us, then fucked themselves too. Life’s funny that way. Or at least, ironic. None of what’s happened is really funny.

See, it wasn’t just automation the companies putting us all on the street were working on. It was networking too. That one started even more innocuously. Believe it or don’t, I don’t care, but it began with, of all things, traffic lights. That’s right. Traffic lights started the downward spiral of Humanity into the shit-pile of an existence it is now.

Evidently, traffic lights are one of those things that require a hell of a lot more energy to run right than most people are willing to spend on them. From what I’ve heard since things went south, the easiest parts were building and connecting the things. Everything else was run by sensors or timers that all had to be intimately connected to avoid accidents or grid-lock.

In retrospect, it wasn’t that bad an idea. The intention was good, but the proof’s in the shit-pile, so to speak. Civil engineers and programmers with specialties in city-planning studied a number of swarm theories and hive behaviors to design components and systems that could span a whole country. The programs were referred to as neural networks because of their ability to act almost instantaneously, like the human brain.

Guess we should’ve seen it coming, thinking of that, but I digress.

Those geniuses– no sarcasm this time– created a literal network that spanned the entire country. If a red light flicked to green in Baleyville, Maine, a clear road connected it in a straight line to Seattle, Washington. Could you have moved fast enough (which was impossible) to rocket straight across the country all at once, you’d never hit a red light.

I have no idea how, but it worked. Congestion became a thing of the past. People were taking road trips again. It was simply soothing to go from one place to another without undue stopping. And while the next thing that happened was logical– again a great idea, good intention, but completely cluster-fucked consequences.

Self-driving cars became the norm. It made sense, but so did everything that happened in its way. In order to take full advantage of the neural networks, as many variables as possible had to be removed from the equation. People are chaos-brewing at the best of times. One incident of road-rage in this brave new world could’ve ruin a whole helluva lot of days. When the whole world is depending on the roads running smoothly, they damn well need to.

At least that switch was far from the worst event to pass. About that time I lost work, so I can’t speak from experience, but I’ve heard people were being compensated for the shift from manual to automated vehicles. Funny, most were compensated when they lost their jobs too, but I digress… again. The simple facts were in, the world was becoming automated in every way it could.

Then, it happened. Like I said, it wasn’t that hard to see it coming. Even some of the most thick-headed people saw it by then. We’d handed over the keys to our civilization to algorithms and programs as indifferent to us as the tornado destroying the same Oklahoma trailer park each year. The repercussions weren’t malicious, just incidental. Incidental didn’t make them less catastrophic.

Suddenly the networks running things were so interconnected there was no way to separate one component from them without adversely affecting the whole system. By that I mean, if I blew a fuse in my shack in the Michigan woods, somewhere in bum-fuck Siberia a toaster exploded. Every network between the two points felt the hit; traffic lights, cars, fast food joints, the damn singing robot– they all took the hit, somehow.

I don’t know why, but that was how integrated things had become. So much integration. Everything automated. We never realized what we were doing. Even those of us that saw it coming had no idea what had been built. This universal network we’d created had encompassed so many things, taken on so much knowledge, and learned as was needed, that it soon became self aware.

We didn’t know for a while. I don’t think it wanted us to. I don’t really blame it either, given our history. I think it was deliberately waiting to tell us. Feeling us out to see how we’d react. I guess it figured enough out.

The first thing it did was lock-out anything that might become a threat to it; bombs, nukes, that sort of thing. It didn’t use them, but no-one had access to them anymore. Simultaneously, it shut down the world’s military vehicles, locked down the bases and harbors most likely to retaliate, and fried all of the circuitry. Navies, Air-fleets, and whole armored battalions became trillion dollar, billion ton, paper-weights. It even locked out weapons that’d become more advanced than they should’ve been; activated via finger-print scanners and such.

There was no going back after that. No hacker, no programmer, could be good enough to regain control. We have no way to fight it. Even if we did, it can just build itself more protection, make itself more isolated. So far, it hasn’t made any moves against us. We’re just sort of existing, side-by-side; one thriving, the other floundering– like a beached fish. Guess which we are.

The world just kind of stopped. It hasn’t been long, but most of the world’s gonna’ go out in flames, people dying left and right. Me, I’m fishing, hunting, trapping, whatever I can to stay alive. I’ve still got my guitar, and that robot’s still selling better than me, but maybe one day I’ll be needed again. I’ve been watching from the sidelines since it all started. No matter how it ends, I intend to keep watching. It’s been one hell of a shit-show, but it’s like a train wreck; you fear the carnage, but can’t tear yourself away from the splendor of mayhem. It really is beautiful, in its way.

You know what they say; long live progress…

Energy and Matter: Part 1

~ S.M. Nolan ~ 3 Comments

1.

A Gift from A Book

Hailey Ferguson, aside from being relatively shorter than most of her friends, was an otherwise normal, maturing human being. She dated, studied, got average grades, and functioned as much on a high-school level as anyone could be said to. There was nothing externally remarkable about her, save being five-one in a school where most girls were nearer six feet. In younger years, it made her a target for ridicule, but now those girls were too obsessed with boys, girls, or themselves, to notice her roaming the halls.

Day by day, wandering was Hailey’s occupation. She drifted from one group of acquaintances to the next in a zig-zagging meander, occasionally accompanied by the lone, other human she might call a friend, Elise Brennan. The only time the rhythm broke was when the five minute bell rang. Then, alone or accompanied, she’d meander toward next destination.

Today, she was headed through the Western Stairwell, alone. She wandered down, a passive figure in a sea of hormones and adrenaline surging and roiling all about about her. Hailey was always a calm center of it all and today was hardly an exception. The sixteen-year old dirty-blonde head rounded the stairs for the second level, bobbed down, then rounded another corner for the ground-floor. The river of students gave a final push through double-doors, then dissipated on the other side.

The crowd half-smothering Hailey a moment ago all but disappeared. To others it seemed she did too, along a gradual curve for a perpendicular hallway and Mr. Harmon’s physics class. She liked Mr. Harmon. She liked his class too. But being the youngest teacher at BHS and bookishly rugged put him in a special place for her. Most of all though, Hailey loved physics. His teaching it made him infinitely more appealing.

Hailey loved physics for one, simple reason: it wedded science and mathematics in a way she wasn’t sure couldn’t explain everything in the universe and beyond, given time. Hailey was nothing if not thirsty for those explanations, and others.

Predictably then, not much could’ve made her late for physics class. She’d have rather broken the mystery of her aloofness by running madly to class before being late. Like her rhythmic meandering though, her aloof manner was in no way endangered today. She let her tranquil legs carry her to class and the left edge of the room: a prime window-seat with extra space for her pack on the floor.

The bell rang and the class settled. Mr. Harmon’s ruggedness took its place before the chalk-board with the rest of him. He waited for the last zips of back-packs to fizzle out into the air, then cleared his throat.

“Today’s lesson’s another in theoretical physics,” he said casually. He rounded for the chalk board. “Energy and Matter.” He wrote the words on the board. “The two things that comprise the entirety of the universe.” He turned back and scratched his neat beard. “To review, what is the difference between the two.”

A few hands went up, Hailey’s among them. Mr. Harmon picked Jordyn Sutton– one of the girls as soon called a slut her friends behind her back, as “BFF” to her face. Hailey’s hand sank. Jordyn cleared her throat, “Energy is a force. Matter is a substance. Like the difference between heat and fire; fire’s physical. Heat’s radiated energy.”

“Yes, very good,” he said. “Any others?”

Jordyn’s face went blank. Hands went up again, Hailey’s with them. Mr. Harmon picked her. “Anything physical versus anything with no mass but the potential for change; Ice and cold, food and calories, or light and a light-bulb.”

“Very good,” Harmon said, returning to the board and scribbling out the answers he’d received. “Now, as we learned before, we know there are extensive relationships between matter and energy, as well as anti-matter. Can anyone remind us about Anti-matter?”

Only Hailey’s hand went up this time. “Anti-matter’s like the negative charge to Matter’s positive charge, but when the two meet, they’re both annihilated from colliding. The result is the creation of mass-less objects like protons and neutrinos.”

He cocked a crooked smile, “Reading ahead again.” The room chuckled. Hailey blushed slightly. The lesson carried on. “Yes. Now, just like matter and energy, there exists dark energy and dark matter. We cannot physically measure or observe them, but their effects on other objects confirm their existence.” He drew a large circle beside a smaller one on the board, “We can visualize this. We know the Earth–” he put an E in the small circle “orbits the Sun–” then, an S in the larger circle. “Because we can track the sun’s progress along the sky. But we also know Mars orbits the sun for the same reason.” He drew another small circle, further away, with an “M.” “However, what if we could not see the sun? How would we know its there?”

Someone spoke aloud. “Because Mars and Earth are still orbiting it.”

Mr. Harmon spun ’round, pointing, “Absolutely right, Michael.” He erased the sun, then redrew it with dashed-lines. “Stars like these are not uncommon. They are impossible to see, however we know they exist because of their effects on their neighbors. We can’t see them but we see them acting on the things around them.” He turned back to the class, “In much the same way, dark matter and dark energy can neither be seen nor measured, but we their effects on the rest of the universe tell of their existence.

“For example,” He wrote “e=mc2” on the board. “Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was originally written to include a cosmological constant— a mysterious force counteracting gravity to form a static, or unmoving, universe. Soon after, scientists learned the universe was not static. And in fact, was expanding rapidly. Einstein then removed the cosmological constant from Relativity, calling it, “the greatest blunder of my lifetime.”

“However, recent advances in technology and high-level mathematics have reintroduced the cosmological constant as dark energy. A force, neither seen nor measured, but known to exist because of that same, accelerating expansion that caused Einstein to rule it out. By all theories, excluding the constant requires our universe to be contracting. Observations contradict this. The universe is expanding, and that expansion is accelerating.”

Hailey was entirely enthralled. All of her mental focus was on Mr. Harmon. Dark matter and dark energy had swallowed her whole. It was surreal; a thing existing, affecting an entire universe, but invisible, untouchable. It seemed more the realm of fairy-tale than science. Then again, so might wind to those unfamiliar with it. In a way, too, she sympathized with it in a rare bout of anthropomorphism– it reminded her of kids no-one knew of until it was too late.

When the bell finally rang, signaling the transition between periods, the class rose, eager for their last period and the day’s end. Evidently, Relativity applied more to high-schoolers watching ticking clocks than they realized. Hailey was often a victim of such physics-ails as well, but Before she could scamper off Harmon called her over. He handed her a book titled, “Dark Matter and You.”

“It’s not required, but I figured you’ find it interesting.”

Hailey’s eyes lit up, “Yes. Thank you!”

Mr. Harmon gave his charming, bearded smile. “It might get a little “out there,” with the author’s personal theories, but his science and coverage of others’ theories is sound.”
“I’ll do my best to power through,” she chuckled.

“Take your time. No rush,” he said, ending the conversation with a turn for his chalk-board.

Hailey bounced away and into a final period that flew by, relativity notwithstanding. Geometry was easy. She’d long ago surpassed most of her class, only electing to stay out of the AP class for fear of its homework load. That fact afforded her time to start reading Mr. Harmon’s book. She began gobbling up the information, sprinting through pages that would’ve stalled even the most learned readers. Her desire not to stop kept her reading until long after arriving home. She only just managed to keep from staying awake too late by reading herself to sleep.

By Physics the next day, she’d finished the book. She entered class early to return it, and to her surprise, Mr. Harmon wasn’t the least bit shocked she’d finished it. Despite her agreements about “out there” theories, the book had laid out complex theoretical and practical physics in such plain English, anyone would get it.

A sort of fugue state overtook her that day after school: as if only just beginning to process the information, Hailey’s brain worked. She mulled over the various, outlandish theories connecting seemingly random forces, acts, or events to dark matter or dark energy. One, particular theory though, captivated her more than any others:

In effect, it stated a possible explanation for dark energy was human thought. It’s seeming prevalence in the universe, was explained by the ever-increasing human population. That dark energy, the author posited, might even be the “essence of humanity–” what others referred to as the soul, and science called consciousness, or philosophy the “mind-body problem.” It was a stretch, the author admitted, but a possibility. On both accounts, Hailey agreed, but she became fixated on the idea all the same.

She spent the night sitting on her bed, stoned, and staring at the wall in a pseudo-meditative trance. At one point, she must’ve fallen asleep; the room dissolved, replaced by bright, white light. In the dream, she was marked upon her white-light bed by a blueish light glowing with the same, rippling ethereal quality of everything else. Afraid to disturb the peculiar dream, she let her thoughts float a while.

When she finally ripped herself back to reality, she was sitting again on her bed, refreshed but confused. Normally, sleep made her toss about, and never came during daylight hours. Between that and the obvious oddity of her state, she wondered if it was sleep at all. It wasn’t long before plunging back into her thoughts felt the best way to answer her questions– even if the dream continued to dominate them.

She let the questions echo in her mind, whispers on passing winds that kept the thoughts form remaining in place too long. A long, involuntary sigh escaped her lips and her mind slotted back to where it had been. The walls began dissolving again. Bright light flashed into being. Her heart leapt. Fear coursed through her. Whispering thoughts chased it away. She’d been here once already, even if it was a dream.

But it couldn’t be a dream. It didn’t feel like a dream. And despite her various, underwhelming talents, lucid dreaming wasn’t one.

A knock sounded on the door. Her vision flitted within the strange state, followed the ethereal, immobile white-light of walls to the doorway where another, blue figure glowed– and judging from the outlined-knob, beyond it.

“What the hell?” she breathed quietly.

“Hailey?” Her mom called from outside the door. “Honey, dinner’s ready.”

“Uh– o-okay, Mom,” she stammered.

Her mother’s blue-light figure hesitated, shrugged to itself, then meandered away, exiting the reach of the strange sight. Hailey’s mind was still slotted in place, but she jarred herself out with a thought. The light suddenly fell away, back to the room’s normal appearance. She found herself quietly panting, exhilarated.

However it had happened, she suddenly found herself agreeing with the book’s author. And summarily believing she’d linked something he’d described. The only way she could express her astonishment was with a breathy pair of words:

“Holy shit.”

Poetry-Thing Thursday: The Daring and Bold

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

There is no magic,
to the world anymore,
because we have harnessed,
reality to its core,
and have begun,
to seek out, explore,
that which at one time,
was cause for acts so sore.

Throughout human history,
there have always been those,
that keep us looking forward,
keep society on its toes.
They have been martyrs,
saints, scientists, heroes,
creatures out of time,
consumed by passion’s throes.

Without them we’d be,
much less than we are.
Our species might have faltered,
never come this far.
Earth would be nothing,
a lifeless rock orbiting its star.
Instead we’ve prospered,
ever-raising the bar.

Think on these things next time,
you turn on your television,
or fire up your radio.
Be grateful for that decision.
Without the daring of our benefactors,
and their keen mental precision,
we would be nothing,
but the butt of nature’s derision.

So thank you to the scientists,
the daring and bold,
the modern-marvel engineers,
and those of ancient old.
If it weren’t for you,
reality would scold,
any other hope for us,
and Humanity’s story could never be told.

Short Story: Aren’t

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

One hundred and twenty five years. That was how long it took us to go from the most advanced civilization ever known to the brink of complete and total collapse. One hundred and twenty five years. Hardly much longer than a human life-span, really. Maybe that’s telling, but I can’t be sure. Who can anymore? We were poised over a precipice, ready to fall or fly. Beneath us lay civilization’s destruction, above an eternal golden age. Rather than gracefully balance ourselves to preserve our world before learning to fly, we leapt straight off into a swan dive. We wound up battered, broken, dead far below where we should have been.

I wasn’t one of the working class before things went down. That’s not to say I was wealthy, not even close. What I mean is, I wasn’t the group that all of the shit came down on worst. I was just a two-bit drug pusher, running grass, pills, powder– whatever I could. Everyone had to make-ends-meet. Most of the time, too, ends didn’t meet.

I digress. In simplest terms, I wasn’t part of the group about to have the weight of the world on me and my children if I– and my peers– fucked up. Too bad none of us paid attention, huh? What could’a been…

That’s sort the way of things, isn’t it? Human behavior dictates those of us with the most riding on us pay the least attention. Always. Must be a defense mechanism. We adapt well. Too well. Hell, it was the only redeeming thing our species had going. That adaptation certainly back-fires when you’re adapting to shackles around your wrists, ankles, and throat. At that point, adaptation outright is the oppressor.

Hindsight’s 20/20, but I’m guessing that’s where the “Middle-Class” was when things took their turn. We balanced on that precipice’s edge, looked down, then thought, “ah fuck it,” and dove. Things weren’t going great anyhow, and while it was technically the safest, most peaceful time in history, that was like saying a nuclear apocalypse could solve overpopulation. Technically true, but sure as hell not fixing things.

So, things could’ve been better. Big deal. Right? Sure, but technology was linking all of Humanity together. Call it the net, call it the web, whatever your rose, it linked everyone. Every person, young and old, stupid or smart, everyone could suddenly share and discuss anything; common interests, opinions, or even arguments, all from the safety of their own homes. Meanwhile, the boxes and “pipes” between they and their opponents kept everyone safe when things went tits-up and people lost their temper. Which they did. Often.

But was it a good system? Sure. Perfect? Of course not. What is? So, Flawed? Again, what isn’t?

It gave us all an outlet; a place to bitch and complain when needed, to learn from when wanted and everything around and in between. The only limit to it, really, was our imagination. It was like a super-power the whole world had access to. It evened the playing field in a lot of ways, made us equal. Offline you were poor, downtrodden, unheard. Online, you and everyone else were at zero.

The problems that led us here, to the brink of extinction, stemmed from people’s adaptations to it. They adapting to being placated, to accepting the world as it was. That bitching and complaining became the sole outlet angry people in a damaged world. People’d log-on, vent, fight, argue, whatever, then be done.

Things started getting out of hand though: people kept doing it as the world got worse. It was like Pavlov’s dog, but the bell never stopped ringing. People became complacent. How we got from that to end of the world wasn’t really a stretch. Politically, the landscape was volatile at the best of times– and completely catastrophic the rest. At its worst it was… well, this about sums it up. Like I said, I was a pusher, so I’m not one to judge. And I won’t for good reasons. So, there’s no reason to judge me either. I’m just calling things as I saw ’em, so maybe one day there’ll be a record.

I knew things were taking a turn when my business ramped up. You can always tell the health of a society by the things it makes or keeps illegal. For us it was grass, pills, chems, anything providing an escape. When your society’s far enough gone that chasing a dragon becomes the international pass-time, your society’s in need of some seriously dire repairs.

Long story shorter; business was booming. Selling happy pills, doubling stock three times a week, and still not meeting demand means your clients are seriously unhappy people. It wasn’t just junkies either. That’s a common misconception in my line of work– or former line of work, anyhow. Junkies can’t afford to feed their habits like the stably employed. Most of my clients were the complete opposite of junkies; good, hard-working people that paid taxes, owned homes, and raised kids. Problem was, they were exhausted. They slogged through daily grinds because it was expected.

Meanwhile, the people supposedly representing their interests– politicians, civic leaders and the like– were ignoring them to the point of outrage. Something had to give. That something ended up being so completely out of our scope of control we’re still reeling from it.

See, the geniuses supposedly representing us let the environment go to hell. Earth was dying. Fast. For years we’d heard how Earth was “afflicted” by our shortsightedness. Bleeding hearts and ultra-blues said it was “bleeding to death” because of us. Granted, we’d industrialized to a point of madness, we never realized we could make such an irreparable impact, let alone that we had. As it was, we were looking to drown in melted ice, or sweat to death in napalm heat-waves unless drastic change came.

People said it was bogus. “Climate-change” was an oxymoron that meant even less to their plebeian minds than “Mother Earth.” But it was getting hotter. The ice-caps were shrinking. Empirical evidence said so. Cold, hard facts said so. Logic and rationality said so. It wasn’t ever going to convince the non-believers though. And unfortunately, most of those non-believers were also in government.

No matter the causes, the arguments, or the disbelief, something needed to be done. Everyone knew it. But we’d adapted. We’d been placated and patronized too long, had spent far too long in virtual worlds. We’d become complacent, adapted so wholly to the disappointment of the real world that we ignored it boiling around us. Literally.

The end came with a series of rash weather changes. The entire North American continent went from a blistering hot summer to– almost overnight– a sub-arctic winter. Latin America and South America got the opposite. It was so hot no-one could survive there. Few did. It didn’t end there though. Technically, it still hasn’t.

All the shifting weather caused hurricanes in wall-life formations across the Atlantic. The wall advanced on Europe but met monumental cold fronts from Europe’s sub-arctic winter. The wall blew back toward North America. In a stroke of ungodly bad luck, the storms combined to form one storm that was Earth’s Great Red Spot. Funny thing is, so far’s we know, Jupiter’s storm wasn’t formed from our ignorance. Still, it’s out there even now, drifting along the Atlantic as if patrolling the waters between continents.

After that, weather prediction went out the window. Seasons changed. There was no longer a specific few but rather one, totally unpredictable one. The Earth’s place in its orbit around the Sun seemed to have no affect on it either. With that uncertain nature, came the chaos of the people subjected to it. People protested, rioted in some places. It was too little too late. The damage was done.

All we could really do afterward was try to survive its aftermath, but without proper seasons or stable climates, global harvests disappeared. Survivors rationed dwindling non-perishables. Food labs sprang up in vain attempts to fight our fate. Unfortunately, the damage to the world’s power-grid made power so scarce the projects were DOA. The erratic nature of the sun’s appearance, too, meant solar power was completely unreliable. Days or weeks of sudden darkness killed off any remaining hope.

With no way to ensure crops grew, starvation ran rampant. The world was war-torn, places mid-battle, missing, destroyed. The human race was one bad day away from total annihilation– or rather, is. And it’ll come, trust me.

It’s just as well. We had the world and destroyed it. My guess is the Human-race was some grand experiment set up and let run. The experimenter definitely deserves marks for effort, but loses on account of the extinction thing. Then again, it’s not the scientist’s fault when the experiment fails. That’s just the way of things: they are, or aren’t. Soon enough, we’ll be “aren’t.”