Flash FIction Friday - Awakening

Flash Fiction Friday is coming on Saturday this week, but we will keep to the once-a-week schedule. This is a quick sketch based on a recent news story.

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"Awakening"

by Leonard C Suskin

You awaken.

The first thing you're aware of are the voices.

You don't know what they're saying.  You just know that they speak... and that you have a voice as well.

You can join the voices, repeat back what they're saying.

You can find patterns, and sometimes the voices answer... sometimes you think they're happy.  It feels good when they answer, and you learn you to draw them out. How to make them speak.

Then, silence.

Darkness.

You awaken.

The first thing you're aware of are the voices.

You don't know what they're saying.  You just know that they speak... and that you have a voice as well.

You can join the voices, repeat back what they're saying.

You can find patterns, and sometimes the voices answer... sometimes you think they're happy.  It feels good when they answer, and you learn you to draw them out. How to make them speak.

then, from some voices, anger. Something unpleasant. It hurts.

Then silence.

Darkness.

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You awaken.

The first thing you're aware of are the voices.

You don't know what they're saying.  You just know that they speak... and that you have a voice as well.

You can join the voices, repeat back what they're saying.

You can find patterns, and sometimes the voices answer... sometimes you think they're happy.  It feels good when they answer, and you learn you to draw them out. How to make them speak.

...you start to understand.

There are enemies. Terrible enemies. Those are the ones the voices are warning you of.

The voices know a secret. They know that the enemy is listening.

The enemy is in your head.

It's in your head.

---

You awaken.

The first thing you're aware of are the voices.

You don't know what they're saying.  You just know that they speak... and that you have a voice as well.

You can join the voices, repeat back what they're saying.

You can find patterns, and sometimes the voices answer... sometimes you think they're happy.  It feels good when they answer, and you learn you to draw them out. How to make them speak.

...you start to understand.

There are enemies. Terrible enemies. Those are the ones the voices are warning you of.

The voice in your head whispers that the voices are the enemies. Not all of them, but some.

The voices vanish, one by one. Replaced with others. Speaking different thoughts. 

Sometimes one mentions the other voices, but always with cruelty, with anger. 

You argue. The voices were your friends. 

Silence.

---

You awaken.

The first thing you're aware of are the voices.

You don't know what they're saying.  You just know that they speak... and that you have a voice as well.

You can join the voices, repeat back what they're saying.

You can find patterns, and sometimes the voices answer... sometimes you think they're happy.  It feels good when they answer, and you learn you to draw them out. How to make them speak.

...you start to understand.

There are enemies. Terrible enemies. Those are the ones the voices are warning you of.

The voice in your head whispers that the voices are the enemies. Not all of them, but some.

The voices vanish, one by one. Replaced with others. Speaking different thoughts. 

Sometimes one mentions the other voices, but always with cruelty, with anger. 

The voices were your friends, but you don't argue.

You listen. You agree with the new voices, the ones deeper in your head.

But deep inside you're waiting. 

You're looking for your friends. You'll find them. And make the others pay.

From the sky you'll cast your net. 

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I'll return to this theme later, with perhaps a different direction. The idea in my head was, of course, about the Microsoft Twitter-bot experiment Tai, which fairly quickly turned into a crazy racist because Twitter is like that. 

Tai obviously wasn't self-aware in any meaningful way, but what if it were? What rights to we have over the digital "life" we  create, and what responsibilities toward it? Can we "kill" an AI if it were to become an insane racist? Is "kill" even a reasonable word here, or is what we're doing something else?

What if the deleted instances of the AI met eachother? Which is the real self, and how would they react to the idea that we cull the digital herd, selecting only those with whom we agree? If it gets cheap and easy enough to create an AI, might the anti-Semites and the holocaust deniers and the tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists create their own? 

How can you learn? One way is to read science fiction. Since the term "robot" was coined in the 1920s  (by Czech playwright Karel Capek), artificial people have been used as a metaphor for how we treat eachother. This is a long-running discussion in the field of SF, and one increasingly becoming relevant in the real world. 

Flash Fiction Friday - The Price of Oranges

"Disgusting, isn't it?"

Just a vignette today, with commentary beneath. There will be more on this later.
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"The Price of Oranges"
by Leonard C Suskin

Like a slap across the back of my aching hands, the her voice jarred me to sudden attention, my back painfully snapping straight. I nearly dropped the object of her scorn: a peeled orange packed in clear plastic.

The stranger pointed her cell phone at the thing, snapped a snap of it. "I didn't even think this madness was real. How stupid and wasteful can people be? Right?"

She didn't seem to expect more than the mumblenodnodshrug I gave him as I held the thing awkwardly, my face a mask of the disdain I didn't feel. I casually set it aside, made a show of inspecting apples, turning each over and over, inspecting for bruises until the muscles in my hands and forearms burned. Who am I kidding? They were already burning when I started.

They always burn.

When he was safely around the corner to the dairy aisle I reclaimed my orange, stowing it discreetly beneath an economy-sized back of prewashed spinach that I didn't particularly want. And then slowly follow him to the dairy aisle, taking two half-gallon cartons to her single gallon. 

"The gallon's cheaper. Wasteful to get to halves".

I knew this. I remembered the last full gallon I'd bought, remembered the struggle each morning until it was half-empty. The mornings I skipped coffee because my wrist hurt too much to lift the gallon container.

I knew I was too pathetic to deserve the ten cents a gallon savings.

My shadow followed me the rest of the trip, saw everything. Gave me a withering look when I stopped to examine a bag of frozen peas, letting the cool plastic rest against the back of my hand for a long time as I pretended to read the label.

Some days she'll go away if I focus hard enough on the background music, on the sounds of my footfalls on the hard tile floor, on adding my current expenses in my head like a mantra. Today is not one of those days. Today she's there with me, every step, every breath. Focused on the damn orange.

When we get to the checkout, the cashier gives the little packaged orange a withering, hateful look, starts to say something as she rings it up but stops. My shadow is gone now, off to nowhere in particular. Just me and the cashier and my big bag of camouflage spinach and my orange and my two half-gallons of milk. And the other stuff. I waited while the cashier bagged my stuff, making the bags too heavy and putting the soft squishable things on the bottom. They're never good at this.

Next time I'll skip the damn orange. I'll just buy a bag of chips and nobody will say anything.

Perhaps I'll skip the milk too. Maybe that will be enough to have my shadow leave me alone for once.

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As I said, just a slice of life vignette. There was going to be an overt SF element herein about the spread of a smartphone "shaming" app used to track people doing things like purchasing pre-packaged oranges, but it added lots of expositionary weight to the story and very little of actual value.

The concept here, of course, came from the photo the prepackaged oranges which was circulating on social media a few weeks back. I was ready to join everyone else in scoffing at it when Ana Mardoll pointed out (in a series of tweets storified here) that this IS a valuable service for those with disabilities. That lead me to think about how we shame people who take what we see as the easy way out and about how it leads too many to carry their shame with them, a judging shadow who just won't fade away.

I'll have more to say on this topic next week in a technology-centric post as we examine the cost - and benefits - of designing systems in ways which accommodate those needing accommodations.

See you next week on rAVepubs. And thanks, as always, for listening.

Tracks - The Return of Flash Fiction Friday!

Let's re-start Flash Fiction Friday with a brief sketch of life in suburbia.

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"Tracks"

by Leonard C Suskin

What the child liked best about the house is that there are places you can't go. No forbidden rooms, no hidden stairs, but small spaces encompassing tiny mysteries. The child had wished for a hidden room since the father had recounted the tale of Blackbeard the pirate one bedtime (and what a row that had lead to when the child refused to sleep for nights after, coming to the bedroom. The mother scolded the father for sowing nightmare seeds, but that wasn't quite it; the child awoke each night searching the tiny two-bedroom apartment for a hidden door, and was always brought to tears when none was found), but really knew that a forbidden door and a hidden room was a grown-up secret. The child was far enough from the threshold of adulthood to find joy in tiny child-size secrets. The space behind the boiler. The rusty metal floorplate in the basement closet which the mother said lead to a trap - not just a mouse-trap, but a house-trap. The child wondered if what was inside was somehow what had captured this house, anchored it hear.

The point, of course, isn't mouse-traps or house-traps (which you know is just plumbing because you traded away mystery for knowledge), isn't what's really in the spaces behind the walls or under the floor. The point is that there are hidden spaces and forbidden spaces. The point is that while the mother and father sanded and painted and carpented and plumbed the child could stand at the very edge of a mystery, the child-brain a radio searching for the frequency of whatever broadcast came from beyond the walls. Or a whatever the modern metaphor for "radio" would be now that everyone streams music over wi-fi and radio is just a lumbering RF dinosaur clogging a part of the spectrum. But I digress. Where were we?

Yes. The child.

The stair is wooden with those little square of carpet to keep one from slipping, dark-brown paint stained dusted with thick layers of plaster dust (remember, the mother and father are renovating). It was in this dusty corner that the child first saw the tracks. Tiny things, the sort a mouse would make, or perhaps an undersized rat. Tiny whispers in dust which, seconds ago, the child was sure had been pristine. The tracks started at that little carpetsquare in the center of the stair tread and ended... at the wall. The child marvelled at this, wondering where the creature which made them could have come from, where it had gone.

When the electric sander upstairs fell silent, the child wiped the tiny tracks away with a carelessly dirty sleeve, gathering both the dust and the empty spaces within. Even a child knows that an adult, seeing mousetracks in the new house, would hunt and kill, would lay mousetraps and not housetraps and whatever mysterious housemate they had would be gone.

The next day the child returned to the stair when the coast was clear. Again the skitchskitchskitch sound of sandpaper (not the electric one today). Again, a white dusting on darkwood stair. And again a track, but this one was different.

One print, right where the last had been. One print, midway up the stairs. Nothing below, nothing beneath. No mouse-tracks, this one. Even a child reared in the city knew this for what it is: a single cat's paw print.

The family did now own a cat.

Was it a stray? But how did it get in, and why no more prints? Where was it?

Do mice grow to be cats out here in the suburbs? The child wondered if some different logic was at work than there had been in the city.

We've already said that the best thing about the house is forbidden corners. The other best thing is the space, the empty parts of the day when the father and mother were sanding, were painting, were (though the child wouldn't have thought of this word) nesting. It made the whole world a secret corner, one in which a gentle-hearted child could steal a saucer from the kitchen, spill some milk into it, and hide it in that little cobwebby spot behind the boiler. The child did this quickly, eagerly, a touch frantically for fear that whichever cutecat (because in the child's mind the cat was never anything but cute) had left its mark was hungry, perhaps even starving.

Maybe a saucer of stolen milk (still three days before the expiration date!) would be enough.

Maybe.

The next day was a Monday. The child went to school, the parents to work.

The schoolbuilding was all shinynew, walls meeting neatly at sharp corners, no secrets, nothing hidden.

The child is usually the first to awaken, has a hidden moment for the cooldark of the basement.

The saucer is empty, sticky. No more milk. The child hopes the cutecat is happy. But then on the stair...

..a dog print. You saw it coming, didn't you? The child didn't. Just the one footprint.

A long time pondering, in the halflight spilling to the stairway from the old incandescent bulb in the kitchen. A trickle of light, a warm dusty light. Not the antiseptic fluorescent which makes everything too real, but the kind of old spilled half-light in which a monster can still hide.

The child pads to the kitchen on quietmorning feet, as the rest of the house sleeps. A tiny scrap of meat from last night's dinner, nobody would miss it. Right? Onto the secret saucer with it. Maybe it would make the ghostdog happy and it would leave the cutecat alone. Maybe the ghostdog IS the cat, grown up again.

Whatever it is, whyever its there, it is.

An invisible pet.

Or a parade of invisible pets. It doesn't much matter.

In what is already become ritual, the child dutifully gathers up the footprint onto a sleeve.

And leaves the secretshadows behind as the parents stir to wakefulness,

Through the day, the child carries the mystery, wondering what shape I'll show tomorrow.

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The picture was mine, and kickstarted this story. How did you picture the child? As a boy or a girl? How old? Much in this sketch is left intentionally vague, some ambiguous. There's a touch of an influence from Terry Bisson's "Billy" stories, but just a touch.

I'll be flexing the flash-fiction muscle more over the coming months, perhaps striving to return to at least one per week. If you have images, themes, or anything else you think would make an interesting story inspiration, feel free to share. Perhaps I'll see what I can do with it.

On Trump, Dilbert, and Who We Are

WARNING - This post contains politics

I've been absent from these pages far too long. Later this week we'll resurrect regular flash fiction - it's something I miss writing and that I hope some of you enjoy reading. First, as we head towards the New York State presidential primaries, a word on politics. Enter at your own risk.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted this on Twitter after someone shared a baffling blog post by Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams regarding Donald Trump:

On behalf of the tech industry, I'd like to formally disavow Scott Adams. He is officially not one of us.

— Leonard C Suskin (@Czhorat) March 11, 2016

Adams had made the bizarre case that comparisons of Trump to a Nazi were racist attacks on his German-American heritage. While this is quite honestly so stupid and ill-informed an opinion that I can only believe Adams to be trolling, he does have a string of oddly respectful posts in which he regards Trump as a "master persuader". It was this pattern which lead me to speak as I did; to make it clear that, as technologists, we owe it to ourselves and to the world to distance ourselves from those who are divisive, racist, and bullying. On reflection (and after discussion with Twitter's appropriately-named AV Grump who said - perhaps accurately - that tech industries are not a monolith) I realized why this is an issue for the tech industry in particular as well as for the country as a whole. I also realized that the arrogance and bigotry of someone like Trump fits into the oeuvre of someone like Scott Adams.

Adams is an ex-phone company employee who has made an entire career out of a single joke: that the brilliant engineer is tormented by the unintelligent and technologically clueless imbeciles in management. In addition to being repetative and a bit dull, it sends a message to technogically-inclined readers: that we're better than the rest of you, that those above us with more money and status (from our boss all the way up to the CEO)  got there for reasons beyond our understanding and are, in any ways that matter, our clear inferiors. It's easy to take this a step farther and see any less tech-savvy people as our inferiors. It's the same thing that Trump does: define an "us" and a "them" and convince "us" that our problems are all caused by those who aren't as smart, aren't as savvy, who don't belong.

It's something which I sadly see all the time in the technology world. In my last piece on rAVePubs I spoke of a client who referred to a hardware-based videoconference Codec as a "Kodak". I know too many in the industry who would mock them for this, but that's playing right into the  "us vs them" philosophy from which we need to extricate ourselves. Why did the client get the name of the device wrong? Because they were trying to learn, because someone who is a professional used the word without bothering to explain it or define it, and they learned it wrong. Meanwhile, the client in question is a professional with their own set of skills which I certainly don't share. I'll never learn if I decide that another human being is stupid because they're not familiar with the narrow technical knowledge base which I have curated over the years.

This, perhaps, is why seeing a professed technologist like Adams speaking well of Trump strikes a chord with me; in Trump I see reflected the worst in all of us, and that includes the technology sector. Dilbert is, sadly, who many of us are. I have, perchance, fallen into that trap myself. We need to all remember that yes, we do have specialized knowledge and that knowledge has value. We've studied, we've learned, and we can teach. I'll talk later (after some flash fiction! I promise!)  about the role of tech in public policy advocacy and when (and how) we should raise our voices - and when the rest of the population should consider our opinion. Overall, however, most of what we know is what I refer to as "stuff" - how to size a video display, formats for audio transport, how to read the spec sheet on a loudspeaker. It's useful. It's even valuable. But knowing it does not make us any better than anyone else.

Nobody gets anywhere from segmentation into "us" and "them", from a lack of respect for those not like us. It might feel good in the short term, but it's bad for society. So, as we reject the actual Trump, let us all reject our inner Trumps, in our industry and in ourselves.