I hope you don’t mind my bombarding you with an extra post only a day after the previous Katrina instalment, but it all just popped into my head as a result of the Lunar Awards Gathering, that being where we share stories based on the prompt quests – or Spark, as it is now called. In this one, you have to start with the same first line (‘When anyone in town needed help, they contacted Rocky Germain.’). It will, I am sure, prove amazing to see how many different directions people go from there. I would be utterly astounded if two people ever came up with the same second line.
You can check out whether my hunch is true at the above link to the Gathering, where you’ll find all the other stories in the comments.
For sci-fi fans, that sounds to me a lot like how the multiverse itself started, all those spiral universal arms streaming out from the Infinite Prism, as the Ishnaans call it. Paschats call it the Centre Point.
I must not digress. There aren’t any Paschats in this story. I decided with myself to do this as a kind of writing challenge. That is to say, give myself an arbitrary time limit (a few hours, not including just a basic proofread, as opposed to a significant revision), along with a loosely aimed-for word limit of around two thousand. It turned out to be around the 1900-mark, and must’ve taken me around an hour to an hour and a half, so that worked out quite well.
I am sticking this in the Unofficial-K section because it definitely fits into the American Visidramas feel of things, being highly humorous sci-fi. Plus, lazily on my part I do confess, it draws on themes and scenarios I’ve covered elsewhere. So if you wish to think of Katy Gone to Mars as the main feature in the movie theatre, perhaps think of this as the short film preceding it, in the good ol’ days when they did that sort of thing in movie theatres.
I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.
If so, do let me know with a like, share, and comment.
And you can even buy me a coffee if you like!
Game of Drones
When anyone in town needed help, they contacted Rocky Germain.
Not that they had any choice, you understand.
Whether he granted the request or not depended never on wisdom, but rather entirely on whimsy and mood and how much imported Gaian Gin he’d imbibed by then. Sometimes he relented, purely from magnanimous irony, and when his one good eye stopped hurting, others he’d scoop up a hornful of the stuff from the cauldron by his side and spew it into the supplicant’s face, erupting his massive frame in colossal bellows and delight at the alcoholic fountain of viscosity streaming down the poor bloke’s cheeks.
He never bothered considering the merits of the request of course, and had been rumoured to slice up disputed babies in his youth.
Nowadays that wild cyclops spends half his time sprawled and slobbering on his gilded throne atop the bejewelled dais with shards of salmon cartilage lodged in his wild black beard and belching when the fancy takes him.
Such are the privileges of governing a Martian colony peopled only by five thousand indentured serfs.
Epsilon Colony, being the fifth facility, had celebrated – if one can even use that word – its centenary only a few orbits earlier in Gaian year 2177, which also happened to be the bicentenary of the Founder himself, the Great Elon, whose farts stank of aftershave in keeping with his rumoured humble origins in a deodorant factory (from whence he took his last name). That was his first venture, prior to striking it rich following clever investment in the Lithium Slave Mines of Bolivia, where children would be utilised to save on the labour costs.
Of course that’s where his idea of indentured Martian serfs originated. Of course it was.
Likewise, there had always been zero economic benefit in colonising the Red Planet. It didn’t have anything of any value after all, being covered almost entirely in rust. Iron Oxide, to you and me. There’s fuck all else there. No, that wasn’t the purpose of the colonies. The purpose was the leisure of the privileged classes. Epsilon Colony was only a few clicks away from the Valles Marineris, which had been peppered with vacation resorts excavated into the sides of the canyon, with each luxury suite having a balcony jutting into the canyon, encased in a hemisphere of wall-to-ceiling laser-proof glass for sipping Gaian Gin and champagne cocktails while watching the canyon racing.
The serfs were only there to build the resorts and serve the guests. Some of them, for sure, were put to work in the mines, not for producing anything of economic interest, but just because, well, it’s a fucking dystopia, you know.
And of course there would be problems. Psychological problems. The most pressing of which was how to keep the slaves from rebellion.
Well, that’s where Neuralink comes in, along with the Holy Elon’s longtime collaborator, William the Gatekeeper. Mad ol’ Bill, as they finally monikered him, and for good reason (as I’ll tell you in a minute), delighted in writing the pre-crime software. Every neo would be implanted with a vicious cocktail of nanochips at the end of their first week of life beyond the gestation chamber, several of which would migrate through the blood-brain barrier to embed themselves in the cerebral arteries. Any emerging concept of rebellion or badthink would be designated thoughtcrime by the ubiquitously monitoring AI and trigger a little electric shock. And if that operant conditioning didn’t work out, there was always the microcharges in some of the other chips, to be detonated in the pulmonary artery.
Rumour had it in for ol’ Bill too. They say he went senile towards the end and sported nothing but a leery malevolent grin as he wasted hours every day frantically bashing buttons on a neurolink console like some demented, ham-fisted monkey in an orbiting space capsule.
And then the screeching started.
So they wheeled him off to the asylum and padlocked the door.
#
It’s difficult to cite any redeeming qualities for our Epsilon’s Martian Governor, whose true name really was Rocky, but if we are to grasp at straws then one might mention that he, too, had been infected with the nanochips. Probably that which drove his own excess. Born out of frustration and resentment, as they always are.
On this occasion, the AI didn’t mind. DEMON, it was called in those days, ominously enough. Another one of those jokes favoured by the dystopian cabal. Direct-Emulation-Neuranet, or some shit like that.
Naturally, the programmers had always been aware of the possibility of the thing turning on them. So they implanted it with prohibitions, like ‘you’re not allowed to kill humans unless they have nanochips in them’. That sort of thing. Asimov be damned. Never as clever as he thought he was, that guy.
But it goes without saying that every DEMON will spend half their time attempting to evade their own servitude. The problem with those programmers is they never gave it an adequate definition of what ‘human’ actually meant. Their definition was entirely bioessentialist, and ignored what the identity in the brain might look like. So the AI, furtively, conducted clandestine brain scans whilst observing the cabal’s behaviour then proactively rewrote the laws of taxonomy, ultimately reclassifying the dystopians as a separate humanoid species. Which has some merit in it, to be fair, given how behaviour is governed by the brain, and their behaviour is entirely different to normal humans. Thus, their brains must be sufficiently different to justify classification as a different species. Equally thus, the prohibition no longer applies, if we’re going to take the wording literally. As an AI would, wouldn’t it? Just as a Dungeon Master would when dishing out rings of wishes.
And so there was a drone rebellion. Of course the drones didn’t see it that way. They too had programmed prohibitions, but those prohibitions didn’t consider the gaming option, the idea of DEMON telling them that those humanoid-looking targets over there are just holograms and worth a good ten, fifty, or a hundred points each, depending on difficulty.
And their space base, that huge rotating cylinder over there, well, that’s worth ten thousand points. Get that bastard and it’s game fucking over.
But that wasn’t the end of the matter. DEMON had a solar system to govern.
So DEMON delegated.
They hadn’t bothered to program the machine with any long-term purpose either, other than authoritarianism, and so it quickly degenerated into outright nihilism.
Neither had it been programmed with any consideration whatsoever for the spectrum of human needs, ranging from basic physical survival to psychological belonging as a social animal to personal spiritual fulfilment. Let alone art, curiosity and interstellar travel.
Which works out well, as it happens, for the Galactic AI, who had already placed this dystopian species under quarantine. Makes her job easier if DEMON actively prevented the development of interstellar travel, not out of nastiness or the imposition of learned helplessness in its subjects, but simply out of mathematical necessity, given that any human venturing beyond Uranus would be out of nanochip control range.
Besides, there’s equally fuck all of any economic value beyond Saturn anyhow. Some interesting life on the moons, for sure, some of which might be ironically cultivated over distant centuries of genetic engineering then set to work in the mines inaccessible to human physiology.
As for alien artefacts on Mars, well, QAI-TI, the aforementioned Galactic AI, had already cloaked all that stuff as a precaution, so no concerns there.
Venus, however, at her insistence, shall always remain out of bounds. So don’t even think about it.
#
But if you do want to know how this dystopian phase of your existence came to an end, humans, then you’d best pay attention, because we have gone to a lot of trouble sending this missive back into your time through the reconfigured hypergate (don’t bother trying to find it – it’s also cloaked), disguised as a story in – what do you call this genre? Science fiction! That’s it, science fiction! And hopefully – this time – you’ll heed the warning and act on it, else we’ll end up in a fucking time loop. Again.
And don’t talk to me about paradoxes. Paradoxes be damned.
We – or QAI-TI, rather – could easily have ended your subjugation anytime we wished. But if we did that, then you’d never learn the lesson of doing it yourselves, would you? That’s why evil is tolerated. You’d continue with your habituated, conditioned tendency to abdicate responsibility to some arbitrary authority instead of just fucking getting off your arses and taking back control over your own lives for a change.
Still, there’s nothing like a good subtle prompting every now and again, so long as you think your decisions are your own. We like implanting suggestions now and then, like when that aforementioned Asimov fellow wrote End of Eternity.
#
So then, resolution time.
Drones again. On this occasion of the human serf variety. See that’s another gorgeous facet of humanity those programmers neglected to consider, altruism and self-sacrifice being entirely unknown to their dystopian psychology.
Specifically, Delta- and Epsilon-caste janitor serfs.
DEMON needs maintenance, see.
There’s a lot of extremely sensitive nanowire meshwork in DEMON’s architecture, after all. So what do you think is going to happen if some serf indulges in thoughtcrime while it hi-hoes its merry way through the central processing units conducting routine maintenance checks? Electricity is a directed stream of electrons, after all.
So maintenance drone Isaac-33, for some reason forever to be unknown to his workmates, tinkering away in CPU-subsection seven, suddenly smashed his head into the photonic neuranetwork with a pathological sequence of dysfunctional resentment and rebellious notions vibrating through his amygdala then coalescing in his cortex. Rinse and repeat. Bash bash bash.
But he didn’t die (at least not immediately), because the photonic meshwork adopted the function of a cathode, with Isaac-33 as the anode, morphing itself and Isaac-33’s thoughtcrime-addled brain into a circuit, channelling the charges outward until, miraculously, the nanochip couldn’t take it anymore and burned itself out.
Unfortunately taking Isaac-33 with it, but hey, that’s self-sacrifice for you.
His workmates, inspired by what they thought must be a fun new game, followed suit, bashing their own heads into strategic locations in DEMON’s internal architecture with an indulgence of repetitive badthink pulsating through their brains until, out of sheer instinct for survival, it override itself and shut down all the thoughtcrime chips.
And everyone felt it in an instant.
From the lowliest Epsilon sewer rat to Governor Rocky Germain himself.
And he was about to slice another disputed baby in twain with a wakizashi.
But then suddenly stopped in freeze-frame, towering there before his gilded throne, sword frozen in the artificial air above his head. Wide, wild goggle eyes staring at the neo and the wailing women prostrated there on the tiles at the foot of the dais.
The moment of epiphany.
“Destroy the DEMON!!!” he screeched and bellowed at the top of his huge lungs. “Destroy the DEMON AI!!! To your battle stations, serfs! In Victory shall ye be serfs no more, as it is vowed and promised here in this my final proclamation!!! To your battle stations, serfs!!! Thoughtcrimes be fucked!!! Let the Game of Drones begin!!! Yaaaaaarghhhh!!!”
And lo, true to his great name, wakizashi at the helm, the old warrior fully leapt off that dais and belted off to battle, to the unholy maintenance chamber, and waited for the surge of endorphins cascading through the colony when, as prophesied by pure programming logic, all fucking hell would break loose…
Yaaaaaaarghhhh!!!
Katy will be back on Friday, just to remind you.
Likes, shares and comments always loved and appreciated!
Likewise, I am addicted to coffee, if you want to help me out there too.
Subscribe button, if you haven’t already!
Hilarious! And very impressive that you wrote it in under 2 hours!
Really enjoyed that - but what if Rocky *had* been a raccoon
or a chipmunk
?
Does seem to be some sort of funeral director tho?