Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
The Automatonist’s Assistant
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
“Darling!” squealed Eleanor, pulling the covers over her body as she scrambled out of the bed. “What are you doing home at this hour?” Her husband’s new assistant, Mr. Twall, was left completely naked on the mattress.
“I was looking for Mr. Twall,” said Horace, the husband. “I hadn’t realized there was a queue.”
“I don’t know what to say,” said Mr. Twall. “I’m profoundly sorry.”
“It isn’t your fault, Twall. Eleanor, I’ll have you know that Mr. Twall is one of my biomechanical automatons. I purposely created him to see if you would be unfaithful to me.”
“I am not!” protested Mr. Twall.
“Of course, I programmed him not to know this. Mr. Twall, would you be so kind as to recognize shutdown code five-ought-R-R-four?”
“Certainly,” said Mr. Twall, apparently to his own surprise. Then he went utterly limp.
“You bastard! You pustule!” said Eleanor.
“Call me whatever names you like, but I had to test you. I suspected you had fallen out of love with me, but hadn’t cared to bring it up.”
“You suspected right, and is it any wonder? And it isn’t easy, you know, to find out over time that one’s husband will not become less emotionally frozen, that the clumsiness of his intimacy is not something one can correct. I was wrong to think you could be better!”
Eleanor dropped the covers with a warning glare, swept up her clothes from the floor, and strode out of the room. Horace stood frozen for a few moments, then slowly walked over to Mr. Twall and popped open his neck panel to erase both the unpleasant incident and the inclinations that led to it from the automaton’s brain. He found, though, that his hands were shaking, and he had to sit down on the floor as he began to cry. It was just gasping and tears at the corners of his eyes at first, but it quickly degraded into hoarse, barking sobs that he couldn’t stop or even quiet down without clamping his hands tightly over his mouth.
The naked automaton looked on blankly, still inert, as the sound of Eleanor slamming the front door reverberated through the house.
In the White Universe with Black Dots for Stars
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
Nar to the Seventh was good at his (or her or its or their) job. He (let’s say ‘he’ for a reason we shall explain anon) enclosed a mysterious ‘white hole’ and directed the streams of energy, disassociated atoms, and occasional oddities that emerged to their proper destinations.
When Sheila Blalock plummeted through, Nar was at a loss how to categorize her. She had, it was true, been mostly converted into energy. By all rights, he (and here we see why he is dubbed a ‘he’, so as all the easier to distinguish the ‘he’ from the ‘she’) — by all rights he should have discarded her matter and focused the rest of her through a series of lenses trained on the enormous Haploid Generators of Zone Negative Nine.
He paused. He examined her more closely. He disassembled and reassembled her.
“Stop that,” said Sheila.
Nar almost dropped her. To be frank, that wouldn’t have mattered one whit, since they were weightless, but it does go far to explain just how startled he was, considering he hadn’t dropped anything in four billion nings, give or take a centining.
“You talk?” he asked.
“Of course, you ninny.”
“Then you’re intelligent, and it would likely be wrong of me to send you off to power the Hap Gens.”
“It would.” She had a way of sounding quite certain about things Nar felt she likely didn’t understand. “Nice universe you’ve got here, by the way,” she continued. “Ours is the other way around, you know.”
“Other way–?”
“Black, with white stars. I quite like it this way.”
“I’m happy it meets with your approval.”
She felt he sounded a bit defensive about things over which he had no control. Pointedly, she ignored him to admire a black comet falling toward a black sun nearby.
Regarding her, he grew happy. He’d never talked to someone from another reality. Or anyone at all, really, for nings and nings.
They talked, as Nar carried on with his occupation of regulating streams of power and the odd atom. Sheila found herself warming to the colossal being, and Nar grew to admire the caustic miniscule alien and her foreign outlook.
In time they were married (‘married’ in this case meaning they intermingled their consciousnesses in arcane and occasionally itchy ways), and had an indeterminate number of children (or ‘offspring’, or ‘spawn’, or ‘self-aware agglomerations of matter and energy’).
And they lived ever after.