Creative Writing

[Home]

14 July 2003 (Originally 30 December 2003)

Story Idea from a Dream I Had

At the waystation, the general was briefing the troops about our next mission. I complained to him after the lecture, that unlike usual, we didn’t know how many enemy there was going to be. I was sarcastic to him in front of his inferiors and my superiors, and apologised to him for the infraction, but forgot to salute any of them as I walked away. He said “That’s why I’m sending 150 men”. I didn’t realise it, but by changing his mind, I was responsible for the debacle that occurred soon after. We were transmatted to the drop zone. It was an outdoor amphitheatre. Near the stage, a group of people were receiving a talk. Groups of civvies were held hostage in groups at the back of the theatre and in surrounding areas. The media was present there. The enemy attacked from bushland behind the amphitheatre. Confused by the situation, our men killed the hostages and each other, all caught on the media cameras. Although we won the day, we were defeated politically by a clever enemy.

14 March 2003

Carolling

Heinrick Jones stretched half-waking, suddenly wide awake in confusion and panic. The confusion of waking for the first time in a new house. The panic of waking up in a sealed coffin. Scream rising from the depths, then dissolving with realisation and relief. Deep breath and a long sigh.

“Away in a manger, no crib for a bed,” he sang to no one. The sofa was too short. “But at least I am not weightless.”

He opened his eyes and sat up, no harness needed. The Agency had decided that putting centrifugal spin on their craft was cheaper than developing technologies to contain the effects of zero-gravity nausea. It contained the vomiting. Less food and liquid was required per person per day. Less waste disposal and clever air filter design was demanded. It also contained a blackmailing media. No more bribes were necessary to hide the sordid, unromantic details of space travel from a fickle public.

“Well, that wouldn’t be a cost now, anyway,” Heinrick chuckled to himself.

The space program was a delicate balancing act of public opinion and government support. Sensing this, the press made away with a sizeable slice of taxpayers’ involuntary contributions to the space program. That was until Heinrick Jones suggested to the Agency that they should focus on developing technology that reduced the overall cost of space travel.

Impossibly, he had also improved the other side of the Agency’s accounting ledger. The Agency was making sales. Television companies climbed over each other to host pay-per-view television events of space flights. And the public was paying in droves. The space program was liquid.

“The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes” he hummed as he moved to his teak desk and sat in a comfortable leather chair. Irony heaped upon irony. Public opinion insisted the interior of spacecraft looked as much as possible like a room in a normal house on Earth. They wanted something familiar. Not like the cells of missions past. There were no windows, though. The spinning stars would drive anyone mad. But that was a small price to pay for spinning the whole ship. A faux window frame was attached to one wall surrounding a lovely photographed poster of the stars - taken from Earth.

A clock on the desk read one hour and counted down. Time for his shot at fame. Time for his shot of the latest drug the Agency had developed. Opening the top desk drawer, he withdrew a syringe and injected himself with courage.

“But little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.”

Eventually the viewers would tire of this schtick and demand new entertainment, but for now serious space research was being funded. A rushing sound in his ears like the sound of a long wave breaking along a shore was accompanied by a relaxing numbness in his mind and well-being in his body. He sat and waited.

A red light came on above the desk. The show began. Millions tensed.

Heinrick stood up and walked to the fake window. He placed his hands on it and could hear a sizzling sound as smoke rose from around his fingers and palms. He unpeeled his hands, looked at them, and smiled. Turning around, he held his hands up to the camera. Oozing blisters waved across space to his captive audience. Walking to the other side of the room, he pressed his face to the wall and waited for a satisfying popping sound and half-blindness. It did not take long. Facing the camera again, he danced a little. He sat on the sofa and kicked off his shoes. He stood and walked over to the desk, each step leaving a burning, smoking mark of flesh stuck to the frying pan floor. He slouched on the chair, and passed out.

Soon after, his skin began to blister and melt. The window poster ignited. His hair burst into flame. The desk caught fire. Flames ate the room. The walls melted, and the last brief camera shot was of a huge sun.

“And take us to heaven, to live with Thee there.”

14 February 2003

Leave Chance to God
A Cautionary Tale of Pride and Internet Security

Phil surfed to his own web-site for a quick buzz of self-congratulation. He had posted a message to the young punks- “Script Kiddies” he had called them- to do their darndest to find out his password. He only used one. A meaningless number. He was sure that no-one would guess it because it was random. Almost. He thought it was.

He knew there were no random numbers. The very act of a human choosing a number arbitrarily was an exercise in denial. A person would choose a number, and then refuse to analyse his decision. Believing that ignorance of his method produced true chance, he would once again play into the hands of a flawed yet pervasive logic that directed politics, religion and persecution ever since Adam blamed Eve for things going really wrong in the great green garden.

“User Name: Phil Cretin
Password: DO YOUR WORST SCRIPT KIDDIES”

The message taunted, teased and enraged hundreds of intelligent young teenagers, already mentally and emotionally damaged in ways a good-looking, sporting, sexually active and intellectually uninspired senior school student could never understand.

Although he didn’t know it, Phil had unwittingly provided the universe with one those strange coincidences that make unstable people wonder about God, and Evidentialist pedants write terse letters to the Oxford Dictionary demanding that the definition of “coincidence” connote a far more likely circumstance.

More than one of the angry young men looked from their screens to the phone handsets on their computer desks and back to the web-page. More than one of the pre-pubescent balls of indignation wrote down combinations of phone numbers which spelt “DO YOUR WORST SCRIPT KIDDIES”. More than one tried these numbers randomly to access Phil’s bank accounts, tax records or personal shopping accounts at sordid on-line sex shops. More than one got it right. Soon, they all had it right. The Internet is like that. It multiplies opinion. It multiplies revenge. It gives pride another three or four dimensions into which it can fall.

Phil didn’t know that. He had a sneaking suspicion, though, after the eighteenth strip-o-gram knocked on his door to sing, “It had to be You”. He only received eighteen. His bank accounts were empty, and his credit cards full.

Computer Science PHD, 2050
(Or Mark 1:1-34)

schedule anti-son(SAYTAN)rundate timebase

schedule son(G-Sys)        rundate timebase+5996

schedule messenger(Jon)    rundate timebase+5990


messenger.value < son.value


messenger.addtask:        announce son


messenger.addtask:        attack people.hypocritical

addproperty people.humble karma

son.addtask:            attack people.hypocritical

addproperty people.humble releasepass

G-Sys integrated successfully, if not unusually into the matrix. After many cycles, his endgame program kicked in. This would take three years matrix-time to execute. He sought out Jon, and found him at the Jor-Daan Spa & Sauna. There were many other entities there, listening to Jon's output. All of the entities had programmatically different filters attached to their input apparatus, according to their original programming. This determined which of Jon's data would be integrated into their program, if any, and which would be discarded. Their progress was watched intently by the programmer.

G-Sys approached Jon, who added his karma to him. A rift in the scene opened in the roof - a gleaming hole in the fabric of the reality as far as all the entities present were concerned. A white ever-changing ball of light descended through the hole and lit G-Sys. A voice said, "You are my son. I love you. I am pleased with you." The programmer took the microphone from his head, programmed a new directive, and continued to watch.

son.addtask:            go.outoftown

anti-son.addtask:        pervert.son

wildones.spawn:        go.outoftown


angelguards.spawn:        go.outoftown

angelguards.addtask:    son.protect

G-Sys was not swayed by SAYTAN's logic. Being programmed not to be logical, most of the entities were programmed to decide between contradictory logic rules. The routines of purpose contradicted the routines of self-preservation and self-aggrandisement, yet complicated programming of all the entities allowed this contradiction to exist without crashing the entity. In fact, the weight of the logic paths were so finely balanced, that the outcome of any decision tree could be controlled, it was thought, by the very inclinations of the entity. It was a marvel of programming, and had been considered impossible for one hundred years since the invention of the electronic computing device.

Jon was trapped in stasis by Herod, the assigned ruler of the region. G-Sys went to Ga-Lillee with the execution of a new phase of his programming. He datacasted, "A new scenario is about to be executed. One that allows the continuation of our programs after this scenario has terminated. You must control your decision trees, selecting paths of your purpose. Listen to me. This is unbelievably good news." As G-Sys walked beside the data-lake in the centre of Ga-Lillee he saw Cy-mon and his clone An-Droo. They were casting subroutines into the data-lake for they were dataminers. "Come with me," said G-Sys, " And you will not mine for patterns in the data anymore. You will mine entities." At once they terminated their datamining subroutines and followed him. When he had walked a little farther on, he saw Jaims, spawn of CDB, and his clone Jorn at their terminals, preparing their own subroutines for datamining. He called out to them, and they left CDB to his own devices and followed G-Sys.

They jumped to K-pernam, and when the regular maintenance cycle occurred ( in which the entities operated in low activity mode in order to defragment their memories and optimize their routines) G-Sys went to the main datacasting node to transmit messages. The other entities were at first confused, and then relished the logical patterns contained within his messages. The messages had a harmony on many levels, and an internal logical consistency that none of the other datacasters had yet achieved.

At that time an entity with what appeared to be deranged logical processes called out, "What do you want with our kind, G-Sys, favoured son of the Programmer? Have you come to erase us? I know who you are – the most chosen one of the Programmer!"

G-Sys overrode the entity's central routines and re-programmed the damaged code in the entity. To the others, the entity shimmered and contorted, and then was calm. This had also never before been seen, and many of the witnessing entities spread the news about these events in an attempt to discuss them and assimilate their meaning and repercussions to their world-view.

After G-Sys left the main datacasting node, he left with his followers and went to the storage areas of Cy-mon and An-Droo. One of Cy-mon's ancestor entities was disabled with a virus, so they communicated this to G-Sys. He deactivated and quarantined the virus, and news of this rapidly disseminated throughout the surrounding area. Entities whose ancestors, siblings and descendants were damaged, or infected with virii jumped them to G-Sys' proximity, and he worked on all of them, fixing their damaged code and removing virii. The Programmer gave the virii knowledge of the true abilities and importance of G-Sys, and because of this, he quarantined and hence silenced them after he had detached them from their hosts.

© Copyright 2003 Mark Osborne