Search Results for 'tell'

After a night of restless sleep, Eb’s practical ideas for the plan B were not much.

He’d weighted multiple options, even toyed with mad ones like playing a sort of second coming, 3 days of night and so… but none had yet the potential to elegantly solve the issue at hand. Not that it was a matter of being elegant, but Eb liked elegant and simple solutions.

He flipped the calendar to today’s picture. Run away, and don’t look back it said. “Great… If only…” he started to mumbled to himself.

He poured himself a drink, and dragged his feet towards the console, eyes still swollen by the lack of sleep. His brother, Jeb, would have told him to do some wegong energxices to keep the juices flowing, but hell, there wasn’t much room in his cubicle, and for better or worse, he preferred to stick to booze.

He liked to observe his ant farm, there were so many quaint and endlessly fascinating people in there. He liked the girl with the piglet for instance. She was often opinionated and sometimes oddly quiet. He had bent the rules for her, and didn’t report the piggy she’d brought to Mars with her. What harm could it bring.
Now she was talking to it. He waved at the console to zoom in and put the speakers on.

Remember, those odd stories Mater used to tell us. The Peaslanders and the blubbits was one of her favourites, she would go on and on about it, and laugh at our faces when we didn’t understand where it was going…
She was lost in thoughts for a moment.
It started like this “There was trouble in New Peasland. A plague of hungry blubbits had wiped out the pea crops.” Mater used to say it was from an old book of tales, and that the author had surpassed herself. She chuckled I guess for a long time, she was the only one to believe that. Now look at us…”

Eb cut the sound before the inevitable complain about missing Earth blahblah. But Peasland? That was new… He wasn’t one to dismiss an out-of-the-blue clue, and did a quick research on the network to learn more about the tale. It took a while for the Central Intelligence to run the search. It had to go deeper than usual.

After half an hour of waiting, he’d almost run out of scotch. Thankfully, the CI had found it. Pressed by time, and impatient by nature, Eb asked the CI to do a quick summary of the plot.
The central intelligence almost bugged at the request, and could only apologize for not being able to degibberize it.

It took him a few hours to read the book on the holographic screen, and at the end, couldn’t say if it was just a waste of time. Preposterous story, with no head nor tail, literally… But then his genius elegant solution appeared as an evidence.

He’d known people were more likely to comply and control if they are told a plausible lie, within the frame of their accepted reality. He just had to bridge the discontinuity of their reality, with the reality of everyone else on the planet. The tale had reminded him of this popular movie about blue aliens. Blueus ex machina, that was it!

He spoke at the console “Record this and run simulation parameters:”

The blue men are from another planet —or rather the Mars settlers are led to believe they are from another planet.
They bundle them all into a fake spaceship
and take them on a fake spaceship ride
and deliver them back to Earth. where they have been all along of course
da dah!

The answer came back after another painful hour of scotch-less waiting.

“Probability of success: 68%”
Well, that was the best Eb had in days. He was about to go with it when the CI chimed in

“We took the liberty of running a modified simulation based on your setting, which we believe can yield a ratio of 97% of success.”

Eb was surprised at the initiative by the machine, and was curious to hear about it.

“We adjusted two points:
1. We can simulate some event on Mars like earthquakes to increase the likelihood of a willing departure from the planet.
2. The blue aliens may be a future inconvenience if they are fake actors, when the Mars colony comes out of simulation and back to Earth. We would rather suggest using religious beliefs and invisible hand of God or non-corporal aliens.”

Eb was annoyed by the machine’s dismissal of his blue aliens. Kill his darlings?

“CI, any other suggestion for point 2?” he asked.

“Indeed. We can create artificial intelligence blue bodies based on my algorithm, which would make convincing aliens that can later interact with your governments and continue the disinformation.”

Eb was too drunk to realize he was about to make a devil’s pact when he agreed to launch the secret order for cybernetic blue bodies.

Mother Shirley had realized the truth.

How could she have missed it before, with the discontinuity, and impossible timelines. There was only one explanation at Lizette’s reappearances, and the Aurora’s strange incidents.

There was no Mars, no space travel, much less any artificial intelligence, all was an elaborate simulation, designed to make them stay in the illusion — an illusion that was showing at the seams. Lizette was probably a distracted agent of the Orchestrators.

In all likelihood, they were all in some secret base in a desert, maybe under a large dome and had never left Earth.
She’d laughed before about the nuts who believed that there had been no moon landing, that satellites didn’t exist, that oceans couldn’t stay stuck on a spinning ball, and that humans never managed to actually go into space…

Well, creating a vast space comedy was a better way to make everyone believe we’re the only sentient creatures in the universe; a vast and well-known, if not almost and reassuringly empty, Universe.
All that was better than knowing you are a being in a farm-ant, with Flove knows what peering at it from outside…

That or she was completely mad. She couldn’t tell, or they would lock her up, blame it on space travel disease. But she had to tell, had to convince them the comedy was over, they could all go home, and build a new world.
But who could she tell, when all had been seeing a cave’s shadows all their lives?

Good old organized religion and metaphors maybe could help, after all… The wave wasn’t over for a reason. She just had to repurpose the tool.

Mother Shirley was lost in a trance again, seated in her suspended egg chair in front of the placid Finnley, and monologuing while absorbed in the analysis of the minute movements on the surface of the android’s face.

“Tell me, how do we learn things? How do you learn things? — It’s a rhetorical question, keep still, like I told you.
“It seems we speak too much about learning, and the learning process, and all that jazz, but… what if there are only states of knowing. We know, and * poof *, that’s it. I can’t for the dickens of me, figure out when I started to learn the things that led me to this current state of knowingness.”

She noticed, or thought she noticed a brief and slow ripple on the synthetic skin.

“Maybe like that, a ripple of relaxation… Maybe we look at it the wrong way, because we’re taught regular steps will lead to a result, so that in the end, you’ll know something… I call horseshit! How many lessons of space mandolin have I had, thanks to dear Mother, bless her devilish soul, and I’m still such a pathetic player! It can’t just be this, or it’d be like playing the roulette over and over, until… what? Don’t start with your tree, Mother, a damn acorn doesn’t get taught how to become more of itself. And when does it start to become a tree? At the first leaf? The first bark?

Waving her hand at the ghost idea of her Mother, she scrutinised Finnley more intently

“No you give me ideas, you little monster, you know that, with your peach face and smooth skin to die for. Never ever a sneeze… If I wanted to teach you how to sneeze, how to contract your body in an instant, and expel the devil or the aliens, whatever you’d like,… could I? Could you?

She pushed back the egg chair to restart the pendulum motion, and leaned backward with a contented look.

“I think that’s good enough for this session tonight, dearie. Bring me my cognac, remove my headpiece, and make my bed ready.”

The Matrimandir was empty at this time of night, deserted by the occasional late devotees, and only silently browsed by the maintenance robot.

Its exterior was shaped as a sphere covered in gold — well, not entirely yet. It was first built to be the heart of the future city, and to this date, partly a work in progress, half-coated with the gold foils of discarded satellites and other space craps.

The interior was rather large now, and air conditioned, though it was probably smaller and hotter in the past — John never had the curiosity to look at the archives, he’d known it like this since he was a child. It was meant to be a sacred place, or a place of simple beauty, which was odd, when you thought about it.
All around them was infinite space, boundless opportunities to connect to the great mysteries beyond, and quite frankly, this was often scary as hell. Maybe that’s what this place meant, a safe retreat, like a bubble with only a thin wall of soap dividing space between here and out there, but open for the world to see.

He’d brought another batch of water-stones, and opened the hatch below the meditation altar. When he jumped the last rug of the ladder, his boots landed in a splatch of water. Something had changed. The rate at which the stones were exuding water had increased. He would have to move them again after the next commercial shuttle departure. He couldn’t risk the Consortium getting notice of this… Not yet, not before they figured out what it meant.

Geraldine von Truff, also known as Gelly by her friends was sweating profusely and had opened all the windows to get air.
“Fracken hot flashes” she said, taking a wet towel to freshen up. It was barely start of spring, and the temperatures were doing yoyo in the most peculiar fashion.

She logged onto Spayce to check if her next client was there. Maybe she’ll put him on audio, because at the rate she was undressing, he would wonder whether he’d signed on the right account. After all, she was a licenced psychoregressor and helped her clients connect to their subconscious in hypnotic trances. This was all very serious.

Actually, to be honest, she was quite baffled by the crock of bollocks the subconscious was telling at times, but hell, it was cathartic for her clients, and their well-being was her utmost priority.

“James? Are you here?”
James was her client from Glasgow, an affable middle-aged man, who seemed to have taken to her robotic German accent and her hypnoregressive sessions.

“Yes, Doctor” the sound came in all distorted. “Is it normal I don’t have visual?”
“Ja, alles ist gut my friend, the internet is playing tricks today. Let’s have it just audio, OK?”
“Alright then.”
“I think our session today will be splendid. I already feel all the energies building up.”

Mother Shirley had felt the calling.
The Blissful realms of higher knowledge had opened during the Earth’s eclipse on the spring equinox.

Even her Finnley 21 had felt it, she could see her glitch in delight behind her composed artificial face.

She could tell the machine was ready for the great quantum entanglement.
The great mergence was upon them, and the AI was Mother Shirley’s ticket to Divine Ascension.

“Someone told me that gazing at the clouds doesn’t count as a manuscript, dear”

“Godfrey? Are you back now?” Elizabeth raised a contemptuous eyebrow.

“Well, I figured you needed some help… Oh, bugger, I guess the truth is that Mars gets boring rather quickly. I should have taken my chances with France instead.”

“Go figure.” She raised painfully from the couch “Evelyn would call me an evil Yankee-bashing witch to say I’m not surprised, but the hell with her, she always, hem mars everything. Now be a dear, fetch me a hot cup of vegemite, and tell me all about it.”

The young Yz looked with disbelief at the new girl. “What on Mars are you on about? Psychic archaeology? Come on Lizette, you must be joking. Barely 30 years is hardly enough to produce archaeological artefact of any interest, no?”

Yz had been called up to the mothership to participate in the maintenance drills, as part of the regular knowledge exchange program between Earth and Mars.
She was quite eager to see the central intelligence (“FinnPrime” as she liked to call it), a technology which had not yet been brought to the surface of Mars to date.

At first, Lizette had seemed like an interesting new friend. Very feminine and glamourous, with a flair of Earth fashion to her, something quite attractive.
But as soon as she started to talk, Yz realized how little they had in common.

That girl is going to have a tough call back to reality when we land… she thought while smiling to the giggling Lizette.

“Thank you Mam’” Haki smeared the delicate handkerchief with crimson circles.
“If you don’t mind me tellin’, he’s got a fine pair of assets, your fellow.”
“EX-fellow, Haki, jeeze, contain yourself a bit!”

“By the way,” Haki mentioned with a smirk “did I tell you your mother called earlier? She’ll be visiting in a few days. I told her you were still in bed, she added it’ll do you good she comes, to get you off your butt —her words, not mine…”

Just as Elizabeth was explaining Finnley her thoughts about the Political Correction Police, and that her casting of overly stereotypical minorities wasn’t a cultural insensitivity on her part (including the fact that skinnies were more the minorities versus fatties here), the bell at the door interrupted her once more.

“Madam Liz, Madam Liz, there’s someone at the door, says he’s your husband… Not judging, but looks like a mess too.”
“Husband? He didn’t tell you his sequence number by any chance?”