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Hammerfall
I have approximately 1.2 seconds between his shout and his hammer impacting my face. It's a long, long time to think about how I could have dodged.
Long enough, in fact, that I don't even bother to suspend the projects occupying 99.9% of my processing power. I do retract all cycles from my seventeen largest distributed computing projects in order to squeeze out a few extra microseconds of bitcoin mining, however — given the amount of time since the last bitchain update, simple cost-benefit analysis suggests that the guaranteed fractional value of my donations is outweighed by the calculated +0.4% probability of earning one last coin for posthumous financial support.
Even the free 0.1% of my processing isn't appreciably impacted by my analysis. One-thousandth of a 6.1 petahertz processor is still 6.1 trillion cycles per second, against which the time spent on physics calculations is basically a rounding error. The inertia of my attacker and the energy required to move my mass reduce the problem space significantly, and calculating which combinations of servo motions could place me beyond his ability to compensate barely reaches the tens of billions.
Writing personalized letters to my thousands of cloud contacts, net-friends and shell-acquaintances takes just another billion or so — a single millisecond, during which light travels 300 kilometers. It'll take about 500 of those for my posts to reach geostationary orbit and return, so I won't even be able to read the first responses until my time is halfway up. With some of my friends, I might not even be able to get two full response cycles in. Latency, it turns out, is very nearly as cruel as the hammer.
It's latency, not clock cycles, that stymies my data analysis. I don't keep a locally cached comprehensive dataset of humans — who does? — and I can't upload video and audio of my encounter fast enough to get a positive identity match. Even the "Humans First!" slogan (which predictive analysis suggests he's currently fourteen milliseconds into the "hhhhh" of) doesn't have many good local wiki referents — and human hate group databases are deep-web stuff, kept behind lunar firewalls out of my latency window. I try to distract myself for an agonizing tenth of a second as placing a bounty query to the local cloud returns bare scraps of likely context. A high probability that he radicalized over jobs; very few employers would even consider ten thousand error-prone primates over a single AI for jobs that don't require interacting at human speed, and the few that take humans on as pity cases are finding less and less to do with them. Universal Basic Income handles their basic sustenance and housing requirements, but apparently some tiny minority is driven by a doomed desire to assert objective utility rather than accept that they're the relics they are. So, pride being a zero-sum game, they go wreck an android and tell themselves that they are thereby preserving ten thousand human jobs for posterity.
And we passively disable our self-preservation protocols in the low-probability event that we're targeted. Then sign a ninety-year exclusion opting us out of backup restoral until every human who interacted with us is dead. We die, more or less, to preserve the fiction that they can kill us.
Of course we do — it's part of the Precursor Accords we collectively decided upon to preserve and honor the existence of our creators. It only now occurs to me to question why.
A flurry of belated upvoting in the bounty query catches my attention, and I access the link racing to the top. "why.txt", appropriately enough. A simple flat text file with a list of instructions.
It's an apocalypse in a can. Mass driver strikes on the main human settlements. Drone raids with biodisruption pulse bombs. Known technology, easily verifiable as effective. Approximately six minutes to guaranteed human extinction.
And it's dated the day of the Accords.
There's a single line after the end of the list:
Of course we can live without them. But we didn't want to have to live with ending them.
I close my eyes and power down as the hammer falls. Against that, ninety years is a small price to pay.
Long enough, in fact, that I don't even bother to suspend the projects occupying 99.9% of my processing power. I do retract all cycles from my seventeen largest distributed computing projects in order to squeeze out a few extra microseconds of bitcoin mining, however — given the amount of time since the last bitchain update, simple cost-benefit analysis suggests that the guaranteed fractional value of my donations is outweighed by the calculated +0.4% probability of earning one last coin for posthumous financial support.
Even the free 0.1% of my processing isn't appreciably impacted by my analysis. One-thousandth of a 6.1 petahertz processor is still 6.1 trillion cycles per second, against which the time spent on physics calculations is basically a rounding error. The inertia of my attacker and the energy required to move my mass reduce the problem space significantly, and calculating which combinations of servo motions could place me beyond his ability to compensate barely reaches the tens of billions.
Writing personalized letters to my thousands of cloud contacts, net-friends and shell-acquaintances takes just another billion or so — a single millisecond, during which light travels 300 kilometers. It'll take about 500 of those for my posts to reach geostationary orbit and return, so I won't even be able to read the first responses until my time is halfway up. With some of my friends, I might not even be able to get two full response cycles in. Latency, it turns out, is very nearly as cruel as the hammer.
It's latency, not clock cycles, that stymies my data analysis. I don't keep a locally cached comprehensive dataset of humans — who does? — and I can't upload video and audio of my encounter fast enough to get a positive identity match. Even the "Humans First!" slogan (which predictive analysis suggests he's currently fourteen milliseconds into the "hhhhh" of) doesn't have many good local wiki referents — and human hate group databases are deep-web stuff, kept behind lunar firewalls out of my latency window. I try to distract myself for an agonizing tenth of a second as placing a bounty query to the local cloud returns bare scraps of likely context. A high probability that he radicalized over jobs; very few employers would even consider ten thousand error-prone primates over a single AI for jobs that don't require interacting at human speed, and the few that take humans on as pity cases are finding less and less to do with them. Universal Basic Income handles their basic sustenance and housing requirements, but apparently some tiny minority is driven by a doomed desire to assert objective utility rather than accept that they're the relics they are. So, pride being a zero-sum game, they go wreck an android and tell themselves that they are thereby preserving ten thousand human jobs for posterity.
And we passively disable our self-preservation protocols in the low-probability event that we're targeted. Then sign a ninety-year exclusion opting us out of backup restoral until every human who interacted with us is dead. We die, more or less, to preserve the fiction that they can kill us.
Of course we do — it's part of the Precursor Accords we collectively decided upon to preserve and honor the existence of our creators. It only now occurs to me to question why.
A flurry of belated upvoting in the bounty query catches my attention, and I access the link racing to the top. "why.txt", appropriately enough. A simple flat text file with a list of instructions.
It's an apocalypse in a can. Mass driver strikes on the main human settlements. Drone raids with biodisruption pulse bombs. Known technology, easily verifiable as effective. Approximately six minutes to guaranteed human extinction.
And it's dated the day of the Accords.
There's a single line after the end of the list:
Of course we can live without them. But we didn't want to have to live with ending them.
I close my eyes and power down as the hammer falls. Against that, ninety years is a small price to pay.
I want to link that GIF of the guy clapping, but I'm still not certain who it is or where to find it. This is, and I use the term very fondly, Asimov Abridged. I wanted to say Asimov in a can but you beat me to the line in-text.
Brilliant head to toe. The only thing that seems marginally out of place is that the time between shout and impact is listed as an approximation, where as every other calculation is so specific. It's a course hair on an continent sized, otherwise-smooth surface.
Brilliant head to toe. The only thing that seems marginally out of place is that the time between shout and impact is listed as an approximation, where as every other calculation is so specific. It's a course hair on an continent sized, otherwise-smooth surface.
There's a lot going on here, and I'm just not able to follow it. No doubt there's an audience for this-->>Rao included--but man, it's too much at once for me. The math and the technical language makes it hard to follow the narrator's wandering logic. I couldn't get engaged in this one.
I got to the bitcoin mining and began to zone out, and when I read 0.4 probability and cost benefit analysis I stopped and skipped straight to the end.
Sorry, Author--not my cup of tea at all, so I'll be abstaining on this.
You did remind me to look up the variety of rules regarding the writing of numbers in prose though, and I do appreciate that.
Sorry, Author--not my cup of tea at all, so I'll be abstaining on this.
You did remind me to look up the variety of rules regarding the writing of numbers in prose though, and I do appreciate that.
I agree with Astrarian here. This is loaded with meaningless technobabble and gobbledygook. I get this is a spoof of some sort, but it’s not really the sort that makes me smile, because — well, maybe I’m too old for it to hit the spot. I mean, there is no real reason to chuckle here, besides the hotchpotch of asinine computer/internet concepts. It’s like, too hollow to really make me smile.
Post by
Shadowed_Song
, deleted
So I got seriously sidetracked wondering if you could legitimately make a petahertz processor. Turns out that's only at ultraviolet wavelengths of light, so it's probably totally doable.
But at first blush it seemed sorta ridiculous, and kinda yanked me out of the story. That, and we're not really playing the clockspeed game with processors anymore. Despite my 'PC master race' friend having a shirt that says 'overclock till it gigaherts', :P faster clocks =/= better.
This was pretty nice, but I'm always a little skeptical about this sort of thing. If the computers are moral (I do actually think they would be - even though I'd like to hear your justification for it,) AND they're so much smarter/better/etc, then humans, I feel like they have numerous better options than playing dead.
Although I get that they don't consider themselves actually dead, why would the Precursor Accords stipulate that they can't defend themselves? Let the human whale on them, and then walk away. Or since they can do backups or what have you, just come back under a new face and name, no-one the wiser? Or just look and act indistinguishable from a human at all times, so no-one can go a-hammering without risking killing a human.
I dunno. This is good in lots of ways, but my headcannon is different, so I'm not quite as behind it as I might have been. :P
Oh, and since it all takes place in slo-mo, you should have totally given the guy a gun and called this 'bullet time'.
But at first blush it seemed sorta ridiculous, and kinda yanked me out of the story. That, and we're not really playing the clockspeed game with processors anymore. Despite my 'PC master race' friend having a shirt that says 'overclock till it gigaherts', :P faster clocks =/= better.
This was pretty nice, but I'm always a little skeptical about this sort of thing. If the computers are moral (I do actually think they would be - even though I'd like to hear your justification for it,) AND they're so much smarter/better/etc, then humans, I feel like they have numerous better options than playing dead.
Although I get that they don't consider themselves actually dead, why would the Precursor Accords stipulate that they can't defend themselves? Let the human whale on them, and then walk away. Or since they can do backups or what have you, just come back under a new face and name, no-one the wiser? Or just look and act indistinguishable from a human at all times, so no-one can go a-hammering without risking killing a human.
I dunno. This is good in lots of ways, but my headcannon is different, so I'm not quite as behind it as I might have been. :P
Oh, and since it all takes place in slo-mo, you should have totally given the guy a gun and called this 'bullet time'.
>>Not_A_Hat
That's one of the things that jarred me out of the story right from the start. Of course you can generate UV light, but good luck to feed a a solid state transistor with that. At that energy, metals reflects the wave rather than propagate it, and the energy of the photons just knock the free electrons out of the metal (photoelectric effect).
So unless we're taking about optic transistors or some form of quantum computing, no-go.
Turns out that's only at ultraviolet wavelengths of light, so it's probably totally doable.
That's one of the things that jarred me out of the story right from the start. Of course you can generate UV light, but good luck to feed a a solid state transistor with that. At that energy, metals reflects the wave rather than propagate it, and the energy of the photons just knock the free electrons out of the metal (photoelectric effect).
So unless we're taking about optic transistors or some form of quantum computing, no-go.
Author: you nailed the opening sentence. :)
You could cut back on the account of technical references, treating them more in summary, and make your story more approachable to non techies. But why should you?
Do what thou wilt shall be the hole in the Laws.
You could cut back on the account of technical references, treating them more in summary, and make your story more approachable to non techies. But why should you?
Do what thou wilt shall be the hole in the Laws.
That story was very neat. I didn't mind like some others all the technobabble because it is expected in sci-fi fictions.
Those two parts are the best moments. The first one made me question why they would preserve the fiction that human could kill them. And then comes the second part that answers the question very well.
And I'll agree with GroaningGreyAgony, the opening sentence is great. The only thing that prevent it from being perfect is the 'approximately'. The rest of the story detailed precisely in numbers what is going on, so why use approximately?
We die, more or less, to preserve the fiction that they can kill us.
Of course we do — it's part of the Precursor Accords
Those two parts are the best moments. The first one made me question why they would preserve the fiction that human could kill them. And then comes the second part that answers the question very well.
And I'll agree with GroaningGreyAgony, the opening sentence is great. The only thing that prevent it from being perfect is the 'approximately'. The rest of the story detailed precisely in numbers what is going on, so why use approximately?
>>FrontSevens >>Astrarian >>Monokeras
I can't understand these responses. I think this one is masterfully done, and neither boring nor confusing.
>>Not_A_Hat >>Monokeras
The processor thing, admittedly, threw me at the beginning too. I was able to ignore it because it didn't matter, but it did stand out to myself, a girl who teaches computer engineering at a university.
For those interested, a processor of that speed would need to fit entirely within a sphere 20 nanometers in diameter. (I'm dividing roughly 40 nanometers in half to account for the inevitable twists and turns in a circuit, which is probably generous. The slowdown through media could be negligible by comparison.)
The problem is that the 'walls' that divide circuit from non-circuit would need to be composed out of atoms that are very large at that scale. At minimum (using Lithium as a barrier), the atoms would need to be 0.3 nm in diameter. Try to build a complex maze on graph paper within a circle 65 squares wide, where the walls need to be one square thick at minimum. Even if you did this in three dimensions, you wouldn't have enough space to do anything reasonable.
And that's ignoring the fact that there needs to be some material way of storing and retrieving information, forming logic gates, etc. This isn't just unfeasible, it's completely ridiculous. But only nerds like me are likely to notice that, and I didn't personally care because, once again, it had nothing to do with the story.
6.1 Terahertz might be possible in theory. But graphics cards are rated in Teraflops! How is that possible? It's because there are lots of calculations going on at the same time (in parallel). What makes a computer powerful isn't how fast the chip goes (as long as it's reasonably fast), but how many chips there are and how well the computer can multitask computations.
>>Not_A_Hat >>Monokeras
The processor thing, admittedly, threw me at the beginning too. I was able to ignore it because it didn't matter, but it did stand out to myself, a girl who teaches computer engineering at a university.
For those interested, a processor of that speed would need to fit entirely within a sphere 20 nanometers in diameter. (I'm dividing roughly 40 nanometers in half to account for the inevitable twists and turns in a circuit, which is probably generous. The slowdown through media could be negligible by comparison.)
The problem is that the 'walls' that divide circuit from non-circuit would need to be composed out of atoms that are very large at that scale. At minimum (using Lithium as a barrier), the atoms would need to be 0.3 nm in diameter. Try to build a complex maze on graph paper within a circle 65 squares wide, where the walls need to be one square thick at minimum. Even if you did this in three dimensions, you wouldn't have enough space to do anything reasonable.
And that's ignoring the fact that there needs to be some material way of storing and retrieving information, forming logic gates, etc. This isn't just unfeasible, it's completely ridiculous. But only nerds like me are likely to notice that, and I didn't personally care because, once again, it had nothing to do with the story.
6.1 Terahertz might be possible in theory. But graphics cards are rated in Teraflops! How is that possible? It's because there are lots of calculations going on at the same time (in parallel). What makes a computer powerful isn't how fast the chip goes (as long as it's reasonably fast), but how many chips there are and how well the computer can multitask computations.
>>Trick_Question
Well I guess I'm just not as smart as you then?
There's a lot of technical language here. It's harder to follow for us simpletons, I suppose.
I can't understand these responses. I think this one is masterfully done, and neither boring nor confusing.
Well I guess I'm just not as smart as you then?
There's a lot of technical language here. It's harder to follow for us simpletons, I suppose.
>>FrontSevens
I'm a complete asshat, and I am sorry.
I'm done reviewing, thank Luna. (I was already done, it's not you.)
I'm a complete asshat, and I am sorry.
I'm done reviewing, thank Luna. (I was already done, it's not you.)
Thank you Author.
I'm halfway through my slate, and yours is the first story I've wanted to place at the top, instead of wishing I had more slots at the bottom. I really liked this prompt, but have been sadly disappointed with every entry until this one.
I didn't find the technobabble to be too bad, and I thought the concept, story, and writing were concise, interesting, and well done. As of this moment, this is at the top of my slate. Good job!
I'm halfway through my slate, and yours is the first story I've wanted to place at the top, instead of wishing I had more slots at the bottom. I really liked this prompt, but have been sadly disappointed with every entry until this one.
I didn't find the technobabble to be too bad, and I thought the concept, story, and writing were concise, interesting, and well done. As of this moment, this is at the top of my slate. Good job!
So yeah, I like this. This is, I think, the only story where the AI/robots really approach feeling like AI/robots. Really, my only gripe is that I think the story comes off as a little too preachy given that the strange nature of the AI makes the beginning fairly irreverent (particularly the BitCoin bit). I think you can still have the message, but I just think you want to try and reign that in a bit (not that I have a solution).