Fire, flood, plague, famine, inbreeding, mass extinction events, infertility, supernovas, celestial cataclysms, germ warfare, nuclear holocaust, mass habitat destruction, voluntary omnicide, killer robots, hyperevolution, hard take-off singularities, apathy. The universe offers an impressive array of ways for a species to kick the bucket, and, not content to torment individual characters, I’ll be inflicting every single one that I can think of on humanity in this ball of yarns. For a taste (the first extinction is always free), I invite you to Extinction 1: Genetics.
Photo (pre-manipulation) by Lasse Czeloth (Robotnok) via Stock.Xchng.
How I’ve been summarizing this story to people: “It’s a story about a girl from Venus who’s in love with a robot who doesn’t love her back, so she goes to Greenland to look for a man may have downloaded his mind into a reindeer.” The characters Katja & Pierre from an earlier story, Posthuman Playground (currently unavailable, as it’s being sent around to publishers right now), reappear as adults. The story was inspired by the Pixies song of the same title, which is quite possibly my favorite song.
Photo (pre-manipulation) from TYLER FLAUMITSCH (ARRKISMAN) VIA STOCK.XCHNG. And yes, I know they’re really moose antlers… But don’t they look awesome?
love song to the system defense grid
hung in desolate vacuum as a
necklace of irradiated jewels a
chain of bodies delighting me
thy platforms, thy point defense drones
O my love
my cycle of consciousness thrills
at the touch of your codebase
my cycle of consciousness skips an instruction
at the hardness of your EM shielding
undress for me
your coyest killsat smiles
your atomic flirtations
your microwave sighs
unveil thy secrets
ere my processing nodes grow too hot
we shall blacken skies
(with fallout & massdriver)
we shall blacken worlds
(warm thy masers, O my love)
with flashes of heat
(spread thy warheads, thy passions MIRV’d)
with bursts of pure white
with bursts of pure white
– Shiva/Armistice, NR 1112
Another bit of apocrypha from the story Arm. It scans better in the original Late Galactic French. 
Image: Milstar Commsat from Wikimedia Commons
Warning: This story contains neither spaceships nor robots. It was inspired by a fun exchange I had on Twitter with fellow Chicago expat LillaKatt (fair warning: the mature content notice on her site is there for a reason). So this one’s dedicated to Lilla. Hope y’all enjoy it.
Photo (pre-manipulation) from SEBASTIAN JUG (KRONOS21) VIA STOCK.XCHNG.
In honor of May Day, a bit more about the protagonist of another story, Arm.
Photo (pre-manipulation) from Wikimedia Commons.
The second segment of my story Selkies aired Friday on the Robots podcast. This episode of Robots, ‘Warehouse Robots,’ features a talk with a Cornell University robotics professor, Raffaello D’Andrea, whose work includes soccer robots and warehouse fulfillment systems.
The podcast Robots, produced by associates of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at L’Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland, will be serializing my story Selkies over their next four episodes. Every two weeks, Robots interviews people doing interesting work in the field of robotics and presents news and views on the industry. This week’s episode focuses on AUVs (Autonomous Underwater Vehicles) and the technology behind them.
Many thanks to Sabine Hauert for bringing me on as a contributor, to Christine Pachinger for her lovely reading of the story, and to the rest of the Robots team for the great work they’re doing. Robots is aimed at a general audience. If you’re a hardcore robotics geek, it’s also worth checking out their previous podcast, Talking Robots, which was intended more for specialists (they randomly chose me for a man-on-the-street interview in their final episode).
Originally written for a Montreal noisefest, but coming out just in time for Gen Con instead, Noise is about a family of choice and the unusual AGI binding them together. This story contains narcoalgorithms and at least one reference to a robot’s erogenous zones. Sensitive audiences should order a copy of the chapbook (available soon) and then burn it before their children read it.
From the chapbook blurb…
it’s the early twenty-third century, and after rather a lot of screwing around, transhumanity has finally gotten around to colonizing the solar system, ensuring basic prosperity for all, and extending lifespans beyond the 1.5 century mark. what’s a species to do? conquer death? put on giant shoulder pads and dominate the galaxy? become beings of pure energy? yeah, eff that. how about building an AGI that lives in you and all of your friends’ heads and then going to weird art parties in space? that would be much more fun. wouldn’t it?
Download yon PDF.
Noise by Jack Graham is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.