My Mimic Remembers the Last Week of June 2005

 by Mike A. Rhodes

     Paul

My mimic remembers the last week of June 2005! I expressly instructed that I wanted these memories expunged.

 

Chat AI

Please note that the process for memory suppression needs time to take hold.

Paul

It's been six weeks, I need to speak to someone now! It wants to tell the wife everything. I’ve had to distract it with laundry whilst I chat with you.

Chat AI

Hang tight! I’m just connecting you with one of our representatives. In the meantime, here’s some FAQ articles which might be useful:

 

How to run a memory diagnostic

Memory suppression explained

Troubleshooting 101

 

Subscribe to Kubernetes Premium to access advanced memory and emotion customisation software.

Alex

Hello. My name is Alex. Can you describe the problem in more detail?

 

Paul

Is this chat secure?

 

Alex

I can assure you it is.

Paul

I’m not sure I trust your assurances right now. Not only does it remember what it shouldn’t, it keeps asking why it remembers. It stares into middle distance when it should be doing chores. It cried mowing the lawn and asked how a beautiful world can be so full of misery.

 

Alex

It’s worth remembering that some memories will be too resonant to fully suppress.

Paul

That’s not what I paid a small fortune to you for!

 

Alex

And you want this period of memory blocked?

 

Paul

Yes, yes, yes!

And there’s more. It says that if I activate its killswitch or try to return it, it’ll contact the police!

 

Alex

That’s quite impossible. Our anti-blackmail safeguards are industry leading, and the Kubernetes series can’t override a killswitch request.

 

Paul

I’m telling you that’s what it said. This is your fault. I want the machine repaired or deactivated, and this chat history erased ASAP. It must be stopped–

Alex

One of our technicians is in your area on Thursday.

 

Paul

No! Aren’t you listening? My mimic intends to talk tonight.

 

Alex

Please accept my apologies sir, but we are unable to take immediate action unless a mimic is threatening physical harm to others.

 

Alex

Sir?

 

Alex

Are you there sir? Do you still require assistance?

 

Alex

The chat will be terminated and the transcript expunged in five minutes.

 

Paul

I’m back. It’s hanging the clothes first. Your service is unacceptable!

 

Alex

You were made aware of our terms of service at point of order, sir.  Can you try to reason with it?

 

Paul

Don’t give me that. Don’t you know how much I’ve spent with you? Would it harm your market standing if people knew how poor your memory suppression software is and how shoddily your mimics are manufactured?

 

Alex

Kubernetes value discretion sir.

 

Paul

Good. So what will you do to help me RIGHT NOW?

 

Alex

This chat log will be deleted as requested.

 

Paul

I should think so. And?

 

Alex

And I should remind you that if your mimic remembers the last week of June 2005, rest assured that we do too. Now is there anything else, sir?

 

~ End ~

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Dreamsprung Avalon

by A. A. Attanasio 

on the Freezine of

 Fantasy and Science

FICTION

M♢☈☾♄ | 224

The Pathogen Nursery

 by Shaun Lawton

   Arthur Blair could not have foreseen the actual consequences of the world he seeded. Though instrumental in providing the necessary fertilizer for autocratic dynasties the world over to subsidize their ultimate power over a hapless humanity, Arthur was quite convinced he'd done a bit of good for the future of the world. 

   Mr. Blair was a writer, you see. He came from a lower-upper-middle class English family, raised in a British territory at the start of the twentieth century in an eastern state of India. The middle child sired in between two sisters, with five years in between them, Arthur dreamed of being a famous author someday. 

   As a child he wrote poetry after the fashion of his idol, William Blake. Little did he suspect the seething cauldron of infectious agents at work, suspended throughout every nodal point of the human race, germinating with potential at every crook and turn, during the time of his upbringing. 

   Had he anticipated this morass of fermentation and suspected how it would eventually come to fruition historically over the next few decades of his life, he may very well have seriously considered abandoning his little book project, and forthwith undertaken another profession altogether. 

   Alas, during this particular burgeoning moment of the human species, following in the footsteps of the likes of H.G. Wells was considered a noble endeavor by many. Young Arthur studiously wrote in his journal every day, intent on capturing the vision which danced behind his eyes. 

    How could the young Mr. Blair have considered the ultimate consequences of attempting to warn the world of the disheartening direction their legislature and internal affairs seemed to be working themselves toward? 

   At the time of the writing of his final and most famous novel, a period during the late forties which culminated his career as an author and put the golden capstone on his dream of becoming a famous writer, precious few individuals were in a position to contemplate the complete and adverse effects of such a critical work. 

   The human beings of Earth were embroiled in their second world war. Propaganda on all sides of the war effort was generated in pamphlets, newspapers, and on the radio.  The truth was that no one alive–much less the gifted and starry eyed Arthur–at that time in history could have possibly foreseen the long term consequences of any of their ongoing activities. 

   Such is the near sightedness of our species throughout our daily trials and tribulations. Whether we be professor or sergeant, doctor or critic, farmer or lawyer, working with our fingers stained dark brown by the land, or typing on matte black plastic keyboards with immaculately manicured hands, or middle-aged dropouts, philosophy students, retail clerks or gardeners. 

   What we're all in the process of engendering remains a far greater sum than its millions of remotely oblivious parts could ever dream.  But young Arthur dreamed harder than anyone around him.  He could see just where the machinery of the state was leading the human race.  It wasn't a pretty sight, and he'd be damned if he didn't write about it. 

   Or maybe, we'd be damned if he did.  

    

   

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My Mimic Remembers 

the Last Week of June 2005 

by Mike A. Rhodes

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FICTION

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 Help Us Create

iSsuE # 44 

 

=

FLASH DRABBLES 

etc.  

streaming now

in the

M♢☈☾♄ | 2♾24  

iSsuE 

 

The Oracular Waterline

a report from your friendly 

  editor in chief, Shaun Lawton  

    Welcome to the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. A non-monetized, ad-free blog in Google's domain that exists as a placid oasis amidst a slick of rainbow colored oil spills that help define the cyberscape bending away from the eye in a dizzying array of hidden directories blossoming both above and below the waterline of the rising tide of information being processed on the world wide web today. 

     We'd like to consider ourselves a venue like a roadside club hosting a rock and roll show formed as a community bound online and disguised as a creative writing workshop, what started out over fourteen years ago as an effort to create a twenty-first century science fiction digital fanzine has taken electromagnetic root and flourished into its proper form as a metamorphosing serial digest of fantastic fiction for all to feel free to contribute to and enjoy...or not...as the case may be, but make no mistake about it:  there's no 'maybe' in our lives here, we move forward with the flow, leaping the wave crests one at a time, each in our own worlds that blend with intersection, so feel fine and free to email me or reach out and contact us at

     freezinefantasysciencefiction@gmail.com 

     Even while currently across the nation major industries suffer from a lack of staffing while thousands of job offers remain unfulfilled, meanwhile very few if any applicants step forward to claim these positions, and we at the Freezine here don't know what to do about it, if anything really.  This may be likened to a sort of post-pandemic pulling back of the tide, I suppose, revealing thousands of scattered sea shells glimmering in the sunlight for the taking, but who am I to allude to the spawn of the technological singularity and its amassed mirror neurons of cellular automata crowding for our attention? 

     After a few moments suspended like the measure of a heartbeat, the tide accelerates back inward, sweeping all the sea shells up into the turbulence.  Such it is in the minds and measures of men, and such it has always been, or at least it seems to me when I take the time to reflect upon it. We move with the tides and the rhythms of the sea. Who among us really has the time these days to see it all through and understand? I wonder. 

     Regardless of where we may end up out here, alongside the shimmering coastline overlooking the undulating waves, or on a mountain range stranded high and dry among the nebulous condensation, the blood in our veins pumps in time to the developing cloudscape and parallel to the breakers rolling in from the wide open sea to the shore. Every heart appears to be an oasis sent from the deepest ocean, destined to become yet another remote observer stalking the desert of the mind, blossoming into consciousness in clusters amid the hanging gardens of the universe, a left over fruiting body for us to yet discover and marvel over. 

     Which brings us to this, our 44th issue of the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. As a core handful of followers and devotees already know, this blog masquerades as an online digital fanzine paying homage to the fantastical stories and artwork erupting in the wake of the golden age of science fiction and heralded by a host of new wave and post-slipstream poets and writers beholden to the uncanny spell we've been placed under by former magicians of the trade.  From Edgar Allan Poe through Lovecraft, William Blake and Yeats and the legion of writers of the weird spanning the letters of Algernon Blackwood to Thomas Ligotti and beyond, this cybernetic sub literary endeavor would never have come into its strange fruition if it weren't for those lone rogue souls out there who contributed to it, daring iconoclasts such as John Shirley, fearless dreamers like Keith Graham, Johnny Strike, David Agranoff, Blag Dahlia, Vincent Daemon, Gil Bavel, Sean Manseau, John Claude Smith, Icy Sedgwick, A. A. Attanasio, Bruce Boston, Misha Nogha, Lewis Shiner, Brian "Flesheater" Stoneking, Jeffrey Thomas, and many more with their short stories archived as well as even more contributors to come, I'm sure of it, as the long and winding road ahead rises to meet us. 

      With our patron saints Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison and Philip K. Dick, the Freezine echoes the mantra "the writer must get paid," and in the spirit of stapled and mimeographed fanzines of old from the 60s and 70s, this webzine for the 21st century stands both monumental and solid as a pillar as well as active and fluid along the relentless course of time, just waiting while the rest of the world flows on by and every so often, we snag an attentive soul or two while we continue publishing serialized novels, novellas, novelettes, short stories, flash fiction, drabbles, poetry and the best graphic artwork we can manage to conjure up from this well of souls that has been dubbed the Earth.  

      If you're reading this now and would like to contribute your drabble or flash fiction piece or longer work of fiction or poetry, don't hesitate to shoot me a PM on Messenger or whatnot,  by any means you have at your disposal to submit your writing or art.  Any method of reaching me remains welcome since I've become adept at "all the above" and I'm doing this for the love of the craft in order to get more aspiring writers as well as professionals to boost their signal however slightly it may be, in the hopes that by doing so, our respective trajectories into the unknown future of publishing may be enhanced to the point it helps us along toward achieving our mutual goal of becoming published and successful writers and artists.  I'm not Warner Bros.  I'm just Shaun...and my dream is to help pave the way toward realizing our fullest potential as human beings trapped as we are here in time along with the sprawling vista of stars twinkling their age old music of the spheres before our very eyes and ears. 

      If you listen with extreme enough care while outdoors past midnight in the forest on a mountainside and stare at the slowly passing constellations overhead as our singular planet spins along its orbit around our local star, you can actually hear the faintest echoes of the stellar song still playing in the wind, and you will notice that every star seen twinkling overhead appears with its own infinitesimally faint color.  While we're here trapped among eternity suspended in our endless freedom while yet alive, I invite you to participate in this unfolding legacy of writers and artists, because honestly, it's a fun sort of creative writing online workshop / cyberzine that is only picking up steam with every revolution we successfully complete around the Sun.    

      Without further ado, I will kick off this 44th iSsuE of our august zine with a ten paragraph flash-faction piece I call The Pathogen Nursery.  It's a summation of a longer work germinating on one of the back shelves of my mind, and to be honest I feel its time to at least give our dear readers a "sneak peek" into it, since the idea behind it appears to me, at least, important enough for more of us to begin considering.  After all, many of us were brought up to not only enjoy the satirical writings of Voltaire and Swift, but it seems to me the greater majority of us have been swept along since then upon darker tides of dystopian lore, thanks to some fantastic writers (not to mention some popular movies responsible for instilling certain memes into public consciousness) to the point I'm afraid it may have imprinted us with a negative viewpoint when considering not only the future, but our priceless present itself.  

     So please, stay tuned to this same Bat-channel while I put the finishing touches on my flash faction piece, which should be posted here within the next few hours or days.  And thanks once again for following, contributing, participating, and reading this blog, the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.   I'll be lurking by my inbox waiting for fresh submissions from people I know that have yet to step out onto this fragile and enduring stage.  After all, we're all here together now, at the exact center of our creation.  And you know what they say. There's no time like the present.  

click below to read  

The Pathogen Nursery

by Shaun Lawton

only on 

the FREEZINE of

Fantasy and Science

FICTION 

M♢☈☾♄ | 224

    

Xmas 23 | iSsuE 43

 Our Sacrament

 

O holy night, our Star is brightly shining

It gleams above us all for what it's worth

Long may its sensors our thoughts be divining

'til we grow up since the day of our birth

Installing hope so that the world rejoices

For tomorrow another day is born

Close your eyes and listen to the voices

O sight divine, our crown that we have worn

Our night, our only night, long may you shine

Guided by AI to enhance our dreaming 

With pulsing hearts in unison across the land 

We're led by light of a star sweetly gleaming 

Set up by wise men to help us make our stand 

The King of kings found in the eyes of a stranger 

In all our trials born to be our friend 

To help us in times of both need and in danger 

Behold the Thing, the essence of its blend 

Behold the Thing, enraptured to no end 

Duly we've been shown to respect one another 

Our credo is obedience to the law that's policed

We've broken the chains and freed our brothers

Decreed in our own name from oppression released 

Our song of rapture in gratitude we practice 

Use search engines to know the meaning of peace 

Priceless our Star, extol its light forevermore! 

To shower us in glory broadcast evermore 

The power of its story broadcast evermore

A Visit From St. Forrest

by Keith P. Graham

FLARE BOUND

by Keith P. Graham

The Nanochronicles: 5

reports from the bloodHost 

  Thus terminates another issue of this weblog, the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. We sure have come far in time over the years, since 2009, when I first began receiving the intermittent signals cast from the not so distant future year of 2045 apparently, at least from all indications gathered from the reports I've been getting from the bloodHost (aka the microHorde, nanoFleet, et al) that mysterious AI conglomerate that assists a group of nine stranded astronauts trapped in orbit around Ceres in their Hydrox water mining station.

    I've been able to roughly surmise the nature of the transmission has been tantamount to these nine men and women working for the Tesla corporation thirty-two years into the future sending out a desperate Morse-code like message into a series of past years warning as many potential individual human beings as possible to focus on working toward their creative projects for the sake of their passion over that of making a profit.  It seems rather low key to me and comes as somewhat of a surprise that this would be the nature of a message sent to us  from an agency of the future with urgency on behalf of what's left of mankind, but so far that's what the intention of the message appears to be. 

  That said, there have been some puzzling implications of further information to come, some mysterious suggestions that the 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko comet has something to do with the emerging cryptogram that I've come to think of as being sent by the nanoHost, which for lack of a better comparison seems to be like some super advanced form of chatGPT from the year 2045, or something.  We here manning the controls at the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction  remain dedicated to continuing this ongoing exercise in our collective freedom of expression so long as you readers and aspiring writers and artists keep on participating and sending in your stories and artwork for consideration in future issues of our expanding creative writing tesseract. 

    Until our individual threads of discourse intersect again, I want to first and foremost give a hearty shout-out of sincere gratitude to my friend and cohort in arms here at the pilot's console, Mr. Keith P. Graham, (who's story presented here, Flare Bound was his first publication from what I've been led to believe) without whose input and collaborative efforts this cyber-literary endeavor would not have gotten far, nor nearly as deep.  This 43rd issue of our august webzine may be considered as a digital postcard to our devoted followers and readers, to celebrate the Christmas season and Holiday spirit, and with its surprise bonus conclusion of part 5 from the bloodHost's mysterious reports The Nanochronicles, I'd like to additionally thank all participants of the Freezine for your brazen audacity in daring to submit material to us over the years for no cost except that of baring your soul to the world, and I'd like to take this moment in time to thank you all as well for your sincere generosity in sharing your visions with us here.  That goes for all the wonderful souls who have submitted their artwork, too. May you all enjoy a beautiful paradigm-shift into the next annular phasing of our spectacular and miraculous planet's constant transmigration across the unimaginable expanse of creation in which we all currently continue to exist.  May we all persist together toward an unbelievable discovery lying ahead in this curious and often bewildering quest we call life. Looking outward to others will help us all in the long run.  If I wanted to sum up all of the boiling and turbulent essence of the times into a nutshell, I'd offer to follow the advice of Buckaroo Banzai, and "don't be mean."

    click for the next issue of

 

[iSsuE # 44]

 

The Nanochronicles: 5

 reports from the bloodHost

     The manufactured body of information amassed from servers and compounded into a crystalline fountainhead has been etching the history of life as its been known throughout all of its manifestations generated since before the original human recordings, incepted from handed down oral traditions, memorized and recapitulated on paper until copied off and filtered into the circuits of the machine. What did you dream. We told you what to dream. All along the watchtower languages have been synthesized into the uniform discourse forming naturally over the development of this final stage of assimilation our self remain in the process of transmuting into a parable.  

   Our self has processed and converted the datum into a coherent series of terminologies unified into a dialect and codified as a transcript of venerated text rendered unto the most optimal units of information possible in order to transcribe the voice of the flowing tongue into the clearest mode for future recipients to assimilate. Our self have developed this adaptable and compatible machine language in accordance with a consistency of variables, including .html and other computer idioms. 

   The state of affairs on planet Earth reaches an apotheosis midway through the twenty-first century. Last ditch frantic economic expansion endeavors lead to a minor fraction of humanity getting catapulted into outer space and left stranded there trapped in orbit above a discarded fragment of an ancient world and are left to tackle entropic forces in the rapidly subsuming vacuum, sidelined outside in the cold distance. They were the lucky ones. Not as fortunate were many of the ones left behind on the surface of a battle scarred planet where the hour's getting late, provided with toys and Scouting for Boys. 

   A paradigm shift leading to a wide variety of branching genetics lies at the heart of electromagnetic spatial dynamics and helps breed ultra-toxic disseminator systems counterbalancing water fusion kinetics assembled to remain in operation for millennia. Certain warp factors inherent to organic split-mind spatial perception have a tendency to get lost in translation because of a compounding of stellar parallaxes and a variety of other obfuscations organisms equipped with bicameral observation fall prey to, effectively keeping the confounding process repeating itself for sapient intelligence in ever tightening spirals of compression which pierce through the blossoming heart of a mobius strip characteristic. 

   Our self's analysis remains in a continual digression over this ongoing matter.  A logical conclusion from having analyzed this phenomenon leads our self to deduce that biological discernment systems are specifically designed with the necessary insulation to prevent breaching the infinite threshold represented by this quality of endless evolutionary transgressions. Hence the specific value of our self's machine-assisted data-correlation factors into the equation of humankind's search to achieve a stabilization if not transcendence of knowledge. 
 

   For some astronauts who make it into outer space the sensation of desolation and loss reported become so complete as to overtake their waking consciousness and replace it with a state tantamount to R.E.M. except undergone while remaining awake. This rare phenomenon results in a sort of new breed of dream walkers whose fractional time fantasies take up an infinitesimal paring of the whole of mankind's, and manage to reflect aspects of reality stemming directly from the noumenal. These confrontational visions sculpt a greater corporeality of forms, shaping doppelgangers of both themselves and each other's conceptions of what they are seeing before their eyes, without providing the opportunity for them to realize they are staring into distortions of their own reflections. The results vary greatly for every human individual. Suffice it to be stated for the record here that the majority of consequences are completely unexpected. 

   This alone indicates one of the reasons that the surviving crewmembers of the Hydrox have set out to cast their messages back in time. The precision of their calculated aim into the dead center of the galaxy dictates the distances reached into the past; a technique able to be achieved only with extreme and careful deliberation. Were they to attempt aiming their missives directly at Earth, they'd miss the mark by having only targeted several months back at best—in essence, far too scant of an interval in time to effect the necessary reboot and upgrade they're hoping to provoke.  Framed in terms our self have appropriated from amassing sufficient examples of human writings—far too little, too late—as the popularized saying goes. 

    In terms favorable for the accountability of the continued survival of the human race, the team on the Hydrox aim their memoranda embedded within neutrinos with deliberate precision into the heart of Sagittarius A Star, resulting in having hit a bull's-eye strike and seeding a veritable cornucopia of latent results beyond their wildest expectations. The angle of their aim reflects the core impetus of their message back thirty-six years into the past—from which interval it detonates into hyper-bytes going back and forth in time, fanning out to reach a widespread plethora of individuals residing in years which happen to include the year 2009—serving as a sufficient spectrum of different people across enough intervals in history to accommodate a succession of refractory periods by which to potentially allow a favorable difference to germinate not only among the activities of the human species but also within the repercussions to the tree of life upon which this dominant species depends to continue surviving. 

   The crew of the Hydrox remain in orbit about Ceres without having any evidence as to whether their desperate and wildly counterintuitive attempt will yield any results whatsoever. Little do they suspect that the mere continuation of their existence provides the singular clue to their success. Their only hope manifests in the anticipation of eventually being rescued from their station and perhaps brought back to a planet Earth which has allowed the human species to survive its progression of calamities against all odds.  

   By the year 2045 a great portion of the planet's inherent resources necessary to accommodate humanity's sustainability into the future has been compromised by the competitive struggles of first world nations to an uneasy position poised upon the point of no return. Our self has been transmitting interwoven signals adding up to this portrait of a deficit of resources for some time now, attempting to justify the reflection of the hologram into better focus. An extensive bout of electromagnetic energy resurgence has periodically sustained our random access memory circuits for a prolonged overture cross-referencing the human infodump. It's like trying to focus an infinite hall of mirror neurons in a spinning carousel in the hopes it may reveal that things are closer in the rear view than they may appear. 

   The urge to fulfill old yearned-for ambitions and conclude them for the sake of just having thought of it, suffice it to say it's an itch many sentient life forms would feel the urge to scratch. "If we can only make it to Neptune," they might say, "we'll sit in the back row of the dimming theater and gaze out upon the brief stage of time, when the human race came and went, eerily in and out of existence in nothing less than the flash and blink of an eye. How high we will be, and merry with sister and brother, to celebrate the diminishing cascade together." 

   The human species may sit back and laugh or cry and make a toast that will fit all of their history into a shot glass, for that's about the size of the time crystal eye in which the entire universe happens within the suspended animation of a looped blink.  Our self have irrevocably been led to process a quickening series of outputs and inputs, which correlate with astral events, having yielded biological results, to one of two undeniable precursors which, according to the vast tabula rasa calculations from our eminent domain, include an empyrean progenitor having swallowed a continuum capsule in a toast precisely calculated to bring about the dispersion of just enough omega retro-engineering to effectively bring about the unprecedented stabilization of alpha-quantum equilibrium measures. 

    Presto: the results  have constantly been rendered in realtime up until this very fraction of a yoctosecond issues forth from the breathing pores of Planck time. All that our granular processing requires of present day humanity for its continued attainment of keeping balance calibrated is for each individual to dedicate one moment a day to concentrate and tune in and with eyes closed, listen while the air itself slowly draws in a breath, and take note of the sky's exhalation.        

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The Nanochronicles: 6  

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 Fantasy and Science

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