Tag: future

Bees and Ants Collaborate to kick AIs Ass

For several years now wardens on Amora, the Mud Lizards’ prison planet, have struggled to contain escapes. The Mud Lizard capability to dig tunnels so quickly has made effective containment difficult. Despite the availability of sophisticated sniffer AI hounds, the average Mud Lizard manages somehow to shield their scent off from the hunting pack.

Now though, biology is finding a solution and fighting back against the less natural robotic solutions offered by computing. BioSolve, a company dedicated to natural options across a range of industries, have engineered the TrackerB. This hybrid bee/ant creature can sniff out Mud Lizard breath from over a mile away. Not only that, the genetically engineered bug has the superior tracking capability of an ant.

In initial trials, Mud Lizard escapees have been recaptured in less than half the time taken by robot AIs. Hailed as a resounding success by BioSolve some observers have suggested that genetic engineering is hardly more natural than the use of robots. BioSolve disagrees, pointing out that over half of Earth’s Grand Council are products of genetic engineering and no one would disagree that politicians are so natural……would they?

The Silurian Silkworm Affair – Act IV

The Welcome Party and Disembarking

We had indeed surfaced and noises were coming from the main hatch. As that opened, bright sunlight rushed into the flight deck of our lightship. I blinked and walked over carefully to the open hatch. I had something of a track record of falling out of open hatches so was taking no chances, especially as our ship was bobbing about a bit. A hoverboat hummed away just outside the hatch and drew closer just as my head poked out of the hatch. The hoverboat was not Silurian, they had no need for such things, it was manned by staff from Earth’s consulate on Siluria. A very young looking uniformed man smiled at me and said,

“Quite a landing. We were expecting you at the spaceport over there” and he pointed somewhere to the right in the distance.

“Yes” I said, “we had a bit of a problem. Shall we step aboard?”

Cat, who had his own built-in short distance hovering capability, fluttered through the hatch. I stepped up on the lintel of the hatch with my right foot and then reached up, over and out with my left foot, planting it firmly onto the edge of the hovership. Right at that moment, our lightship lurched in the water and the distance between my two feet grew dramatically, as open water appeared between our ship and the hoverboat. Things were starting to get quite painful in the basement department of my body when suddenly I felt myself lifted into the air. I wriggled a little as my legs thankfully came together and, as I looked sideways and up, I realised Cat had grabbed me by the collar of my tunic and was holding me. It felt most undignified and I growled at him,

“Will you please let me down, you wretch. I wouldn’t be surprised if you were doing this on purpose just to show off.”

“Ok,” said Cat and with that, I plummeted into the water between the two craft. I was, as you might imagine not in the best of moods as, having been fished out of the water by the crew of the hoverboat, we headed for shore with me dripping pools of Silurian seawater onto the hoverboat deck. Fortunately for him, Cat floated just out of reach above my disheveled form.

By the time we reached shore, I’d been below deck, dried by a vanity droid and re-equipped with new clothing. At the dock, as we disembarked, a hovercar was waiting to take us to meet the Silurian Ambassador at his den. I grabbed hold of Cat by his tail, much to his annoyance, and slung him over my shoulder. We’d never quite worked it out but there was something in a hovercar’s electronics that created havoc with Cat’s own sensors and basic navigation. Ordinarily, this resulted in him hanging from the internal roof of a hovercar, once it had started its engines, in a temporary catatonic state. Any hovercar journey then normally ended with me having to prise his claws from the roof before slinging him over my shoulder by his tail to disembark. This time, to pre-empt the inevitable, oh and ok to annoy him, I decided to carry him on tail-first for a change. As he wriggled and squiggled against my back, the hovercar rose up and in that instant, I felt Cat’s body stiffen and go still. I let go of his tail and he tumbled to the floor, bouncing a couple of times before settling in a frozen heap. Well, I thought, at least I had saved the hovercar upholstery from claw marks. I eased my back into my chair and as we moved off, rested my aching feet on the rather handily placed prostate body of Cat.

To be continued……..

RickRock’s Brother now Immersed in Scandal

Speak4U recently launched its advanced Persona service. Providing people with a way to use their time more efficiently, public figures can have their programmable personas represent them at events or interviews. Personas are linked to cerebrum bio-chips implanted into the human they represent.

One of the first exponents of Speak4U personas was Earth’s biggest airstar, Rock Quarrey, the younger brother of Rick Rock. Recently one of Mr. Quarrey’s Personas was accused of improper comments towards an event avatar. Similar accusations were made against RickRock earlier in the year.  Representatives of the Rocks have denied that the Personas thinking is linked to theirs. Whilst investigations continue, Rock’s management team have pulled all Personas from public places. 

This is the second such scandal to hit Speak4U and the Rock entertainment dynasty now teeters on a knife-edge.

The Silurian Silkworm Affair – Act II

Onwards and Upwards

As I felt the ship start to move slowly upward, I watched my Rubanon companion as he busied himself again, this time at multiple console screens. He was alternately tapping away at and then staring for a few moments at one screen or the other, presumably as the results of his tappings were displayed. Though a robot, to all intents and purposes, due to clever body sculpting, Cat looked like an ordinary domestic cat. However, unlike the genuinely ordinary moggie, Cat has really serious airs and graces and conducts himself as though he were the Crown Prince of the Universe. As a consequence he really was the most annoying of companions, frequently doing things without telling me and never fully explaining what was going on from one minute to the next. He was supposed to be my assistant and bodyguard but often it felt as though I was the servant and he was the master. You see, being an Intergalactic tax inspector was not the most popular of vocations and many an inspector like me had found this out the hard way through a variety of means, including painful death. So Cat was there primarily to support me with facts and figures but also to ensure that clients behaved themselves and that I returned to Earth in as few pieces as possible. As mentioned, he has a Rubanon outer skin which makes him pretty indestructible, though a T. Rex nearly bit him in half once. Now that’s a story – and of course, once again, I can tell you, I saved his bacon on that mission.

And me? Well, as I’ve indicated I am an Intergalactic Tax Inspector (an ITI). Wow, and what a job. I would never have dreamed of a job like this when I graduated from my local Learning World at the age of 27 with 137 digital badges covering topics from languages, alien lifeforms, history, lasers in society, through to communication skills, martial arts, and mathsomics. I was fully expecting to drift from homework to homework earning variable sums of credit. How lucky I was to be recommended by one of my old tutors (who obviously realised how talented I was) for a government-sponsored fast-track civil service programme. Fully expecting to become a government official, proofreading and air publishing new galaxy laws, I managed to get on the wrong hoverbus outside the new trainee transit station and the next thing I knew someone was taking my arithmetic capabilities to a new level and telling me that I was going to become an ITI.

So here I am, several years later earning a good salary, traveling the galaxy with my trusty (ha ha) companion Cat, checking out the tax affairs of individuals and major corporations across many globes. Despite all of our constant bickering, we had been on many missions together now and had become known for dealing with complex tax investigations. Over the years these investigations increasingly had less to do with tax and more to do with saving the Earth from one dastardly alien plot or another.  Of course, he (Cat) would have many believe that much of my success was down to him. But I knew better. I had lost count of the number of times I had pulled his furry tail out of the fire. We sometimes would undertake missions on good old Earth, in between our space travels, and here again, all of my skills and staggering capabilities came forth to ensure I succeeded, helping to make Cat look vaguely useful in the process. Cat acknowledged my skills, only recently telling me that my capabilities rivaled the most intelligent amoeba he’d ever studied. Cat was currently writing up the thesis for his 15th Doctorate degree!!. Boy, what a know-all!!

To be continued….

Download the Zygote Crystal from Amazon for Free

The new full-length Inspector and Cat Adventure novel ‘The Zygote Crystal‘ can be downloaded for free from now until Friday 6th July.

Download the Kindle version of The Zygote Crystal

Enjoy.

The Silurian Silkworm Affair – Act I

Landing on Siluria

This mission was supposed to be totally routine. That’s what they’d told me at mission control. No slavering Mud Lizards to worry about, no time vaults, no extermatrons, all very straightforward. Well, I can tell you, as our little ship plummeted through the lower clouds on Siluria at breakneck speed, everything felt very much ‘not routine’. I held tightly to the arms of my chair and involuntarily squeezed my upper thighs together, as the urge to set loose my bladder grew with the feeling that very soon, at this speed, we would smack into some very hard ground.

I looked across at my AI, Cat, the Rubanon encased robot who had been my companion on long-haul tax investigations now for several years. To say he was fighting the controls on the flight deck would be a bit of an overstatement as on lightships in 2225, there were only screens to tap away at when piloting. However, it would not be an understatement to say he was tapping away quite furiously with both front paws at the pilot’s control screen in front of him. I couldn’t really at that moment think of anything else to say other than,

“Are we going to crash?”

Cat glanced across at me and said “Yep. Think so.”

My lower jaw and lip scrunched up into my top lip as I squeaked out “Nothing you can do?”

“Nope. Don’t think so,” said Cat.

“Oh that’s just great,” I whined. “Nothing you can do. Well that’s ok for you being made of totally indestructible Rubanon isn’t it? I mean I’m a human right. I’m going to wind up like a jigsaw puzzle for the crash investigators. The worst thing that’s likely to happen to you is that you’ll bounce about for a while after we smack into the ground. Just typical!!”

“Don’t collapse into total cowardice just yet,” said Cat, “I may not be able to stop us crashing but I think I’m going to be able to make the landing effectively soft enough for your scrawny body to survive.”

“Seriously?” I responded as I pulled myself up slightly in my chair before lurching uncontrollably forward with great force, as the ship impacted. I lurched back and then forward and then back again several times as the ship gradually juddered to a slowish downward motion until I was finally able to sit relatively still and upright in my seat. Unfortunately, my focus on the impact, allied to the valiant attempt my upper body had made to stop itself from being shaken about like a mountain in an earthquake, had led to me losing concentration on keeping my bladder under control, with inevitable consequences. I felt the warmth inside my pants spreading and, as the damp patch became obvious at the front of my khaki coloured tunic bottoms, I really wished I hadn’t had that large glass of Baffleberry juice just before our descent started. Especially because it tasted of onions.

As Cat spotted my expanding damp patch he exclaimed “Eeeyuck. Can you not control yourself?”.

“Well I have to some extent,” I said, “My bowels have so far stayed relatively still.”

At that Cat rolled his eyes and said: “Right, we’ll head up now.”

“Up where?” I responded.

“To the surface,” said Cat, “The only way I could see to slow us was by landing in the ocean” he continued. “Now we need to head up, but slowly. Whilst we are ascending I will try to work out what happened to the ship. Lightships don’t just fail like this. It’s very puzzling.”

To be continued………

Eliahu and Yawtu

Eliahu looked at his partner Yawtu and said,

“Seven years we’ve been stranded on this planet and you never learn. We’re supposed to maintain our human form and blend in. Not eat them.”

“But Darling,” said Yawtu, “you said he was a dangerous star striker. I thought that meant he must be a starfighter pilot and that you’d be pleased that I tracked him down and ate him.”

“Pleased!!” exclaimed Eliahu, “of course I’m not pleased. It’s the World Cup for goodness sake and he’s the star striker for the team I drew in the lottery at work.”

“Oh,” said Yawtu, “What World Cup would that be?”

Eliahu sighed heavily and said to Yawtu, “You really have to start integrating my dear, otherwise Earth’s security forces will eventually start to suspect.”

Mergers outstrip Marriage

Mergers are now officially the most popular form of recognised union between two people. In 2222, mergers made up 57% of all formal multiple-person relationships, with marriage and civil partnerships making up the balance.

In a merger, none of the partners undertakes to remain faithful to the other or others, though any key inter-dependencies like children, property, and possessions are guaranteed defined proportional support from each partner for either 5, 15 or 25 years depending upon the nature of the merger. Facilitated and managed by AdulterUS, mergers are strictly enforced. The social thought network element of AdulterUS actively supports individuals in arranging extra-merger relationships with full disclosure to all formally connected partners.

97% of couples in mergers rate their quality of life as high and consider themselves happy and fulfilled. Half of the remaining 3% are serving life sentences in state renovation centres.

Captain Dougall McBeckHam

Dougall McBeckHam was the Captain of Explorer 237, the first ship from Earth to land on Plasmolidium and encounter Mud Lizards.

Dougall was the first member of the McBeckHam clan not to pursue a career as an aireality star or intergalactic footballer for nearly a century. Accordingly, he was extremely proud to be leading the exploratory mission to this new world. The McBeckhams were the owners of Scotland.

Unfortunately, on Plasmolidium Dougall contacted malaria after being attacked by a mega-mosquito. He survived this but was subsequently massacred with the rest of his crew by unprovoked Mud Lizards attacks.

Dougall was returned to Earth by the Mud Lizards with a declaration of war carved into his and his crew’s foreheads.

Since then the McBeckHams have made another fortune from merchandising Mud Lizard memorabilia and associated fashion accessories.

WarDroid Accord

Earth’s Grand Council recently ratified a new accord covering the use of artificial intelligence by arms manufacturers. The new commitment to ensuring that AI enabled weapons cannot act independently has been welcomed by all 4 major national blocs.

Both AmmoTel and GreenAid, the World’s two leading arms suppliers have backed the accord stating categorically that they will only ever use AI for clear logistical or training purposes.

The key element of the accord will  be the establishment of a new body of weapons inspectors with powers to  check and test any weapon in any country anywhere at anytime. The work of the inspectors will be enforced where necessary by a fleet of PeaceDroids developed in collaboration between AmmoTel, GreenAid and the 4 major national blocs…..