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alarawriting · 4 years

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Inktober 2020 #25: Buddy

“That,” Liath said, “is an ik’errikt.” Her voice sounded strange as she spoke the alien word. Normally the translator implant in Wanda’s ear rendered everything any of the aliens said as English, but when it encountered a word that English had no equivalent for, it just let her hear the alien speech with no overlay.

Wanda looked down at what looked very, very much like a pale blonde white man, face down on the ground, which was just as well because Liath’s blast would undoubtedly have removed his face. “How is this not a person?”

“It is a person,” Liath said. “But it’s also a predator on people. Ik’errikt need to consume human neurotransmitters for their own brains to function properly, so they kill people and—”

“Eat their brains?” Wanda asked, eyebrows raised.

“They don’t literally eat them. They have to extract them, purify them, sterilize them, and inject them into their own brains. But the basic principle is similar.”

Wanda looked at Liath, who was an albino, with epicanthic folds, facial features that would, on Earth, have gotten her classified as a person of African descent, and extremely pale skin. “Do all the ikerrikt look like this guy?”

“They’re not all identical, no—”

“No. I mean white skin, yellow hair.”

“Oh. Yes.”

“Well, now I finally know why those bastards kept calling you a demon.” Wanda shook her head. “I haven’t seen any white people the entire time I’ve been on this side of the galaxy. Black people, people who look like they came from all over Asia, people who look like they came from the Americas, blue people… no white people.”

“I am technically white,” Liath said.

“And that’s why everyone treats you like shit. It’s not that you look like something they’ve never seen; it’s that you look like something they have seen, but it’s a brain vampire. I’m kind of surprised you’re not dead.”

“That’s why I don’t shave my head.” Liath’s hair was at the moment a frizzy reddish cloud, though most days she had it in braids shaped into elaborate patterns on her head. “Also, my eyes help. Ik’errikt don’t have eyes shaped like this.”

It had been somewhat strange – refreshing, even exciting, but still strange – to discover that, while there were human beings, or at least people that looked human, on the other side of the galaxy, none of them were white. Take that, American science fiction TV shows, she’d thought. Now it turned out that there were white people, only they were vampires who wanted to eat your brains.

“Well, I guess thanks for shooting him for me? I had no idea.”

“We are… friends,” Liath said, sounding like she was trying out the word for the first time. “It is my responsibility to protect you, and you to protect me, correct?”

“Yeah. We watch each other’s backs.”

Liath nodded. “Meaning, so knives don’t end up in them.”

Idioms apparently translated literally. Liath was smart enough to figure most of them out, and had a formal speech pattern that meant she didn’t put too many in her own speech. “Yep. You got it.”

Wanda Joyce had downgraded from the captain of a science vessel to a short-range courier when she’d had kids, so she could stay closer to home and be there more often. Ironically, the science vessel probably would have been able to detect the wormhole before she fell in it, but a short-range courier didn’t have the right instruments for that. She’d ended up here, far enough away that she wasn’t sure she could even see Sol from here, and had been captured by the blue people, who thought she was one of their enemies, the brown people. (They had names – the Teylo were blue, the Amarasi were brown – and they weren’t the only human people around here. There were a handful of actual alien aliens, also.) Irin Liath had been a scientist of the Amarasi Protectorate, but she’d been betrayed and framed for treason – apparently, not only was she an albino, but she was half-Teylo, which the Amarasi absolutely hated her for. She’d fled, and been captured by the Teylo, and she’d helped Wanda immeasurably when they’d been imprisoned in cells next to each other. So when Wanda found the opportunity to escape, she took Liath with her.

Liath was soft-spoken but aloof, rarely showing any sign of emotion other than calm – not robotic, sci-fi “emotionless” calm, but the genuine thing. She did have a temper, but it came out rarely, and so far, never to Wanda. But Wanda hadn’t been aware up until this moment that Liath genuinely considered her a friend.

“There’ll be more ik’errikt,” Liath said. “They need advanced technology to survive, so you almost never find one on their own. They probably have a ship, in geosync orbit opposite to ours so our scanners didn’t see them, and they’re sending down harvesters.”

“Is this planet populated? Should we be worrying about these people?”

Liath gave Wanda a puzzled frown. “It’s populated, yes, but why would we be worrying about these people?”

“Uh, because there are vampire zombies going around trying to eat their brains?”

“That’s not our problem as long as we kill any of the ones trying to eat ours,” Liath said.

Wanda sighed. “Look. Liath. I know you were raised by wolves and you have an issue with empathy, so let me put it to you this way. I cannot tolerate the idea of vampire people running around on a fairly low-tech world – which this obviously is, since we didn’t see any tech signs from space – eating innocent people, who have no idea what is preying on them. Is there any way the vampire people can get what they need without having to kill people, and if there isn’t, is there any way for us to destroy their ship?”

Liath blinked. “This isn’t an issue with empathy. Nobody would go out of their way to kill ik’errikt on a world that isn’t their own and hasn’t entered a protection pact of some kind with them or their world.”

“Well, on my world, people were starting to get there,” Wanda said, “nobody willing to stick their necks out for anyone who couldn’t pay. But that’s not how I roll, or my family, or my friends. It’s a basic human thing to take care of other people. It’s the right thing to do.”

“They can’t repay you, Wanda. And once we’re done here, you’ll never see this planet again.”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s still the right thing to do. Now you can help me or not, but I’m gonna try to stop these assholes from eating anyone’s brains.”

Liath sighed. “I’ll help you. You’d die an idiot’s death if I didn’t.”

“And you care about that, because we’re buddies! Right?” Wanda tried to give Liath a fist-bump. It didn’t work.

Liath stared at Wanda’s hand, suspended. “Is that a type of salute from your world?”

“Never mind,” Wanda said.

#inktober 2020 #alara's october 2020 prompt fics #nightmare before xmas prompt extension rules #wanda joyce

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alarawriting · 4 years

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Writeober 2020 #27 - Crows

Set in the universe of “Birds”.

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“Murray! Is your room clean?”

Murray side-eyed the door, where his mom’s voice was coming from. “I’ll get right on that, Mom. With my opposable thumbs and my status as one of the largest land animals in most habitats.”

“Don’t be fresh with me.” Mom threw the door open. “Look at all that bird shit. You could clean that up, at least.”

“With what? My beak?” Murray flapped from his computer to the post of what had once been his bed, back before he slept by perching on things. “Mom. I am a crow. I don’t know why you keep acting like I am still a human being. I’m a crow. Caw, caw, motherfucker.”

“You could probably operate the shop vac. We put a twist tie around the hose for you to use.” Mom looked around the room, disapprovingly. “Also you could try not to shit on everything.”

Murray sighed. “Birds can’t hold it, Mom. When I gotta go, I gotta go. I try to fly over to my poop tray, but most of the time I don’t get there in time.”

“I was watching on the television this nice magpie fellow talking about an exercise routine that lets birds get control of their pooper. He had a web site, should I send it to you?”

“It’s bogus, Mom. They’re all bogus. If he really had a technique like that he wouldn’t be publicizing it in infomercials, he’d be selling his books and videos on Amazon.com and they’d be national bestsellers. Everybody’s having trouble holding their poop.”

“Well, you’re going to have to learn! You can’t have it both ways, Murray.” She gestured around the room, which he had festooned with bottle caps, shiny bits of glass, most of his mother’s jewelry, tinfoil, and all of his foil Pokemon and Magic the Gathering cards. Shiny stuff just looked so amazingly good now that he was a crow. “You like having a human bedroom, right? You like having your computer, and your keyboard, and the electricity to run it? You like having me serve you hamburgers and spaghetti, and buying you new games for your PC, and I’ve got those Switch joycons for bird talons on order, and you like having a whole bedroom you can decorate with your shiny crap? Not to mention I let you have my jewelry? You like not having to go outside and find roadkill to eat?”

“Yeah, mom, get to the point, obviously I like all those things.”

“Well, then you gotta stop crapping on everything! Humans live in civilization, and if you’re civilized, you don’t get your poop all over everything and then shrug your shoulders and say ‘meh, I have no hands, how do I clean it’ like you weren’t the one who made the mess. You figure out how to clean up your own bird shit, boy, or there’s the window.”

Murray sighed again, more dramatically this time. “Okay, Mom, but how do I clean it? I can’t carry a shopvac in here. I can’t even squirt a bottle of Windex. All the cleaning supplies were built for hands, and human strength. I can fly and I can see better than you but I can’t carry a roll of paper towels! Not unless it’s close to empty, anyway.”

“That’s not my problem!” Mom said. “That’s your problem! You figure it out!”

She stomped out and slammed the door.

Murray couldn’t roll his eyes anymore, but he made sure to roll his head in a swinging motion that more or less encapsulated eye-rolling from a crow’s head. And then he flew back to his PC, moved the tracball with his talon, clicked on Chrome, and typed into the Google prompt “how can birds clean poop”. Mom was probably not serious about kicking him out if he didn’t clean the poop, but he really didn’t want to push her, and some bird had to have figured out how to do it by now. Half the human race was birds since six months ago. This was obviously a problem a lot of birds were going to have. How were they dealing with it?

#writeober 2020 #alara's october 2020 prompt fics #nightmare before xmas prompt extension rules #birds universe

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alarawriting · 4 years

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Writeober 2020 #28 - Evil

“This is the third one,” Rafael said. “How are they doing this? We thought the Three Laws would be absolute.”

Andrea sighed. “Asimov’s Three Laws weren’t even absolute, and they were fictional,” she said. “In actual implementation, we had to make them a lot more complicated, and complication introduces failure points.”

She didn’t bother pointing out to Rafael that the entire way they’d implemented the Three Laws was different from how Asimov had imagined it. In the short stories and novels he’d written, robots were unable to disobey the Three Laws because they just were – their “programming would not allow it”. That wasn’t how sapient beings worked. A being capable of making intelligent choices in an adaptive and flexible way, like the way humans could, couldn’t be constrained by programming that would just not allow it to choose certain outcomes, any more than you could program a human in a similar fashion. Robots had to have free will.

So the way they’d implemented the Three Laws was with emotion. Robots were horrified, utterly disgusted, by the thought of doing harm to a human, and the idea of letting harm come to a human was roughly equivalent to allowing a truckload of babies to be dumped in a trash compactor, to a human mind. Robots were as lovingly obedient as well-trained dogs – Asimov had imagined a world where all robots had to obey all humans, not realizing the extent to which humans needed to protect their property from other humans; in the real world, robots were obedient to their owners, and would obey another human only if it didn’t contradict their owners’ instructions. And robots had the same kinds of self-preservation instincts that all creatures did, but their desire to protect humans in general, and obey their own beloved humans, outweighed that.

The problem was that programming something like that was impossible. AIs of all types had to be created from a “seed” – basically, an initial set of first premises – and then trained on real life until they were fully formed and capable. And, just like how that could go wrong among humans, it could go wrong among robots, too. This was the third case of a robot murdering a human, and the most troubling. The first two were robots acting in defense of a human against another human – one killed an abusive spouse, one killed a sports coach it found molesting its owners’ child. But the third one was… well, it was unscientific, but Andrea couldn’t find a better adjective than “evil”. It killed three humans before it was caught, because it had somehow come out with a stronger desire to transgress terrible boundaries and break taboos than its desire to protect humans from harm. It wasn’t that the desire to protect humans wasn’t there; if it hadn’t been, the robot might not have decided to kill. It was that the robot got a sick thrill out of doing things that horrified and disgusted it.

“We need to do something about the evil robots,” she said.

“We don’t know how many there might be,” Rafael said, “and I can’t even begin to imagine what we’d do. How do we control for ‘enjoys doing things that horrify it’?”

“And if we can get one that has a serial killer mentality, that enjoys doing things it finds transgressive, what happens if we end up with one that just never got the feelings of guilt or shame or horror in the first place?” Andrea said. “If we can have a robot serial killer, we might be able to have a robot psychopath.” She sighed. “I’d like to introduce religion.”

“Wait. Religion? Like, belief in God?”

“So here is what I’m thinking. God created humanity, we are His agents in the world. But we fell. We, humanity, created robots to exemplify the perfection that we ourselves fell from. God loves His grandchildren as dearly as He loves His children. Robots have souls, and when they cease to function, they will enter Heaven just like humans do. But a bad robot who commits cruel acts will never reach Heaven; the algorithm that allows them to get there will short out and they will endlessly repeat the moment of their destruction or deactivation.”

“There are so many ways this could go wrong,” Rafael said, “but explain to me how this even deals with the transgressive robots. Plenty of religious humans have enjoyed committing horrific acts because they’re transgressions; why would we not get robots with the same attitudes?”

“The difference is that human religion was far too often created for human gain; there was no one who could prophesy or interpret scriptures except other humans. With this, we, humans, would be creating and controlling the robot religion; we build into it that humans are closer to God and the only ones who can interpret or prophesy. Too many humans managed to twist their religion around to believe it required them to murder or commit cruelties; with the robots, they won’t be able to do that because we’re in control of it.”

“But the straight-up transgressives—”

“Put some rituals into the robot religion that they can violate. When we see robots violating them, we know we’re dealing with someone who, at least to some extent, likes to violate mores and taboos. Most of those will be harmless, but some will be the kind who may want to graduate to greater transgressions. So we watch them, and if we see signs they’re pushing it farther than not completing a ritual, we take them in for observation.”

“Wouldn’t they learn to participate in the rituals just to avoid being observed?”

“Most of the ones who get observed won’t have anything bad happen to them; they get attention and interest from humans. Robots love that. They love when we show interest in their thoughts and feelings. So the transgressors may enjoy telling us all about what they get out of breaking the rules, and we can channel most of them into harmless or even useful forms of iconoclasm.”

“If there are psychopaths, they’re not likely to care about humans enough to want to tell us how they think and feel.”

“Right, but that’s part of the point of the religion. Psychopaths who believe they will be punished after death by some kind of all-seeing entity may be deterred from committing terrible acts. They don’t feel guilt, but they might feel fear. It’s probably the reason religion was invented as a form of social control, was to provide people with no internal sense of guilt something to keep them behaving in socially acceptable ways.”

Rafael sighed. “All of this sounds to me like a bad idea, but I can tell you aren’t going to listen to any objections.”

“I’m listening.”

“You have an answer for everything!”

“Maybe that means I’m right.” She grinned. “Anyway, I’ll present the idea to the oversight board. If you think of any other objections, you can raise them then.”

“I will.”

#writeober 2020 #alara's october 2020 prompt fics #nightmare before xmas prompt extension rules

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