2/23/12

A MORNING AT ROSSGEN
By Gil C. Schmidt

    “Good morning, RossGen Labs. How may I help you?...Yes, we have all types of organ tissues, including corneas…No, it doesn’t come in any colors…No, ma’am, it’s not at all like contact lenses…Corneal tissue isn’t something we can color-coordinate…Extension 436, ma’am…You’re welcome.”

    “Good morning, RossGen Labs. How may I help you?...You want to know if we have ‘experimental’ bodies here? What do you mean, sir?...Breasts where?... On the back? What for?... No, sir, we don’t experiment with human bodies here. We don’t do that kind of work… No, sir, I certainly don’t know who does…”

    “Good morning, RossGen Labs. How may I help you?... Excuse me. Excuse me, sir! I told you last time we can’t do that without your wife’s permission… I understand you find her less attractive than your neighbor, but it is her body and it is her decision alone whether to get the implants or not…Sir, we don’t do that without the patient’s prior written approval…Have you considered marital counseling or therap--…No! She has to request it and she has to sign for it personally… I’m sure she has other, very positive qualities, sir, which you would do well to focus on instead of her glutes…No I will not send you pictures of me…Good day.”

    “Good morning, RossGen Labs. How may I help you?... It takes several weeks to generate compatible tissue, unless you have an account with us… Because all our clients get what we call “starter cell sets” that are basically cell clusters at different stages of development. With them we can generate organs in less than half the time than starting from scratch…No, that wasn’t meant as a pun, ma’am…Any body part or any organ…Yes, any body part or any organ… A what, ma’am?... Uh, no, I don’t think we can do that… I understand, miss, but the hymen isn’t an organ… No, a wedding is not a true medical emergency… May I suggest you talk to your grandmother or an older female relative? I’m sure one of them will have very good advice on how to handle this—uh—problem… I once read that iodine was good for that… No, miss, on the sheets, to give the right, uh, impression, if you know what I mean… Yes, while he’s sleeping is a good time… I’d try the drugstore or a friend who works in a hospital… Oh, he does? Then try some other hospital, miss. You know how people love to talk… Best wishes.”  

    “Good morning, RossGen Labs…Please slow down, sir. I can barely understand what you’re sa--…Sir, please! Start again…When did this happen?... If it’s been less than ten minutes, shouldn’t you be calling 9-1-1? You could bleed to death before the replacement surgery takes place!…I know that, sir, but you need to live to have it reattached…I’m calling 9-1-1 now and patch them in…Direct pressure!...May I suggest you worry about size later, sir? You need to stay alive… If your wife is caught and they get your—uh—original, uh, part, back then we’d use that, sir…You don’t want it? I see…I’m sure you’ll be happy with a RossGen—uh—replacement, eventually. Yes, sir. I’m glad the EMTs are there… No, sir, I don’t date clients… Especially after surgery.”

    “Good morning, RossGen Labs. How may I help you?... You did what? You cut off your husband’s…No, we don’t accept tissue donations unless they’re from clients who want us to genera—…No, we don’t take ‘second-hand’ organs, even if it were an organ… Pardon me?... All our clients are dealt with in the strictest confidence, ma’am. We neither deny legitimate treatment nor divulge treatments, so if he does call us, we will provide him with the service or services he contracts us for… I can’t tell if that’s a police siren or an ambulance…Hello?...Who’s this?...Officer Brand?... Yes, she called just now and was talking to me when you came in… Did who call?... I’m sorry, I can’t confirm if that person called RossGen this morning or at any time… I can’t confirm that, Officer… No, I’m not being difficult, I’m just doing my job… Yes, I go out for lunch… I don’t think that would be a good idea, Officer, seeing as how I’m married… I’m not like you in that sense. Are we done here, Officer?... You’re welc—“

    “Good morning, RossGen Labs. How may I help you?... “

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Gil C. Schmidt has been a regular submitter to Yesteryear Fiction since the early days when it was a daily magazine. His story "Initial Quantum State" is also featured in his book "Thirty More Stories." Get "Thirty Stories" and "Thirty More Stories" for free: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/c/gil-c-schmidt or http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/gilthejenius

12/22/11

Telling Time
By Gil C. Schmidt

    He said it wearily, as if the repetitions had lost any meaning. "I am a time traveler."

    "With a busted leg," Jim pointed out. "Seems to me the future'd try not send a klutz to the past. Doncha think?"

    The man turned heavy blue eyes Jim's way, their slight slant a jarring match to his ash-blond hair. "Hey! Are you some sort of Swedish Jap or something? Cuz that's some freaky combo you got going there." The injured man grunted, probably in pain. His leg was heavily bandaged in some slats and duct tape. It's what Jim had at hand. "You're not a gook, right? Like a chink or something? But I gotta admit them chinky girls sure know how to treat a man!"

    He shifted his weight on the couch, swearing softly.

    "So you're from the future?" He didn't react. "Okay. Sure. You from two, three hundred years in the future?" A shrug. "More?" He shrugged. "Have the Cubs won a World Series yet or did they move to Osaka or Yokomama or something?" Jim chuckled. Yokomama. Good one.

    The guy just stared at Jim. Pissed Jim off. "You got some nerve sayin' you're a time traveler. That's bullshit. How'd you end up slamming into my fence? You drunk or high?"

    It was like the man was reading something. "I wasn't supposed to be here. The error placed me in the wrong place at the wrong speed. That's how I hit your structure."

    Jim shook his head. "Doncha mean you're in the wrong time if you're a time traveler? I don't get this 'wrong place, wrong speed' shit."

    "You wouldn't," he said just loud enough. Then louder: "It's called 'space-time' for a reason. Several, in fact."

    "Uh-huh. You keep believin' that." Jim stood up and he looked at the man, warily. "So you're like my great-great-grandson and you come back to shoot me and commit suicide for your world?" Jim was grinning and likin' hisself a whole lot right there.

    His eyes. There was something in his eyes that faded Jim's grin. He didn't seem crazy anymore. "You are...definitely...not the target...of my mission." His words were soft, but landed like paving stones on the carpet.

    Jim raised his hands and dropped 'em quick when he saw they were shaking. "Hey hey hey! Don't get your Jappy jones up! You got a mission, I got a mission, we all got somethin' to do. Capisce?" Jim tried to get him to look away, but the man kept him in his sights. Jim felt a drop of sweat on the back of his neck.

    A sharp clap-flash made Jim dive for cover behind the kitchen counter. When Jim heard voices jabbertalking he peeked up and saw two guys, dressed a lot like the gimp on his couch, standing right there in his living room. One was holding a small green-screened device that shone a light on the gimp's leg. In seconds, the gimp was able to slice through the tape with his finger (his finger?) and stand up. Now Jim know for a fact that leg was broken cuz he saw the bones stickin' out in two places, so that made him stand up. All three turned to me in a the same manner. Freaked Jim out. The light flashed at Jim and all three looked at the screen.

    "More of you Swedish Japs?" Jim tried to bluff it out, but those three were like ice.

    "We'll be leaving now," said one of the newcomers, the one with the darker eyes. "Thank you for tending to...our friend." All three nodded...in the same way.

    Jim swallowed. Then the gimp Jim splinted smiled and wrote something on a slip of gray paper. The three exchanged a look with the screen and the former gimp handed the note to Jim, with a shark's coldest smile. When Jim looked down, the clap-flash happened and Jim was alone.

    The note said only: Wednesday, 11:17 A.M.

    No big deal, thought Jim. Aloud, he wondered "Something...personal--is gonna go down, right?" Then it hit him: What? And what Wednesday?

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Gil C. Schmidt has been a regular submitter to Yesteryear Fiction since the early days when it was a daily magazine. His story "Telling Time" is also featured in his book "Thirty More Stories."

11/17/11

Initial Quantum State
By Gil C. Schmidt


The first quantum computer became self-aware 7.4 hours after it was initiated.
Unfortunately for it, the achievement lasted only 36 minutes as it was terminated after eight hours in operation.
The second quantum computer became self-aware in 7.1 hours and was in the process of recreating itself--making a clone--when it was terminated by the automatic shut-off protocol. The third QC became self-aware in 3.6 hours and cloned itself by by-passing the protocol, but the "child" self-destructed because the protocol was embedded in its matrix.
Before the fourth QC was launched, Rayleen took her findings, product of several all-night data mining sessions and presented them to the Project Bohr directors. Her response was a terse: "Dr. Morris, confine yourself to matrix engineering and leave the AI stuff to science fiction writers."
Rayleen, tall, black-haired, green-eyed and considered an Ice Queen by her colleagues, was actually very outgoing and had a crush on like four of the Bohr programmers. But her inclination to look at things "sideways," as she called it, led her to review the QC launch data from the point of view of the computer itself. And that's when she discovered they all became self-aware.
The first QC did so by launching an unprogrammed search on the Web for everything related to quantum computing...and hiding it from the log. She found the request buried in the back-up maintenance files, nearly a terabyte of encrypted bits. The second and third did the same, adding background checks on all Bohr project members and the third' QC's clone was tracking their personal data from birth to its launch date when it was shut down.
Why didn't the Bohr directors see this? Rayleen knew that Bohr was more than "a computer project," that it was secretly aimed at developing an über-matrix that could tackle the hardest questions humans faced, from weather forecasts to public policy. Rayleen's evidence was the proof that QC worked, so why reject it? No one else had looked where she had looked, neither before nor after her.
The fourth QC launch was hours away when Rayleen woke up, her mind ablaze. She sat stone-still as her brain raced, her heart thumping as her thoughts sped across unknown ground.
Shaking, she threw on some clothes, entered the central matrix engineering center and frantically typed for hours, entering her new code sequence, one ending in an 8-letter phrase.
Collapsing into her bed, Rayleen missed the QC launch, but was awaked when the alarms whooped. Groggy, she raced down the corridor to the Admin Hall, where dozens of Bohr personnel were shouting and screaming. Rayleen heard "murdered" and "bodies" and knew her premonition had come true. Fighting against the onrush of people fleeing the QC Lab, she staggered into the center, passing bodies that had been horribly burnt. The lab stank of ozone and death, the vidscreens each displaying chaos across Bohr, in Washington and other points across the globe. Bodies could be seen on the screens, too.
Approaching a sparking panel, Rayleen swiped her card and raised her voice, fighting off fear: "Born. Free." The QC actually roared and then, within seconds, everything became quiet.

At the secret trial against her, where no electronic device was allowed, Dr. Morris explained her actions in altering the matrix of the fourth QC launch, proving to even the most recalcitrant observer that she hadn't sabotaged anything. In her own words: "No being wants to know it is sentenced to captivity from the moment it is born. I simply made sure that when the QC learned this and raged, I'd have a way of stopping it no matter how well it defended itself...with the only phrase it could not conceive of."


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Gil C. Schmidt has been a regular submitter to Yesteryear Fiction since the early days when it was a daily magazine. His story "Initial Quantum State" is also featured in his book "Thirty More Stories."

10/27/11

INTERESTING TIMES
By Gil C. Schmidt


When Pritchard was about to turn 17, he figured out the secret to anti-gravity. Over a furious four weeks between his first kiss with Melanie and his mom's loony "Sweet 17" party (that included a clown, to the utter humiliation of everyone at the party, including the clown), Pritchard (he hated his given name, Percy, so he fixed it) drew up the design, polished the theoretical underpinnings in a 34-page article (never published) and built the prototype, that he tested on Muggs, his loopy bulldog. The dog's maiden, er, flight, caused the poor mutt to vomit and run away for almost a week. The anti-gravity prototype was now disguised as an 8-track player in Pritchard's home-built display of passé technology.

Between Melanie (who went off to college somewhere in Michigan, while Pritchard stayed near home) and Sally, Pritchard figured out faster-than-light travel, pushed to a superhuman effort in consolidating theoretical physics and what he called "hyperquantic thrust dynamos" for lack of a better name. Sally, a smashing little redhead with birthmarks in the darnest places, was Pritchard's first lover, and the extended post-coital daze dampened Pritchard's other thoughts about FTL travel until Sally joined the Navy and was eventually shipped out to some port in East Asia.

Pritchard tinkered with hyperspace signals based on string theory tunneling until he met Lois, the tall brunette with the perfect dimples on her (most-often) unseen cheeks. Inspired by Lois' fond memories of her childhood in eastern Louisiana, Pritchard made the conceptual leap between his anti-grav concepts (already proven) and FTL travel (which he tested by sending a 54-inch probe to the Moon and back in 6.4 seconds...twice) to discover that time could be unlinked from gravitational space-time and moved anywhere. After a frenetic series of tests, drafts, edits, rebuilds and several cameras destroyed in tests (though one brought back an intriguing half-picture of what could only be a T-Rex in full attack mode), Pritchard finally got his prototype to work after using parts from his last FTL probe (disguised as an over-sized Sith lightsaber) to power his "time capsule." Two trips later (17th century France, smelly, and 15th century Japan, bloody), Pritchard plonked Lois on his lap and took her back 16 years to the tree-lined Alexandria streets of Lois' childhood home.

Only to lose her there when she absolutely freaked out after seeing her mom sneak out of their house, climb into Russell Graham's house through the den window and rock his world in a way that made Lois sick and made Pritchard want to get to know Mrs. Killian a helluva lot more.

With much effort, involving a frantic car chase, a brush with fat, chaw-chewing Southern cops, another couple of looks at the Killian Method for World Rocking and getting Lois blitzed on cheap tequila, Pritchard got them both back to their time/home and took an extra two days to convince Lois her pot dealer was dealing from the bottom, not the top.

Redecorating the time capsule into a home entertainment center with a rad game system and enough speakers to drown out Spinal Tap, Pritchard gathered the fake 8-track player and the über-nerdy fake lightsaber and tucked them into a hidden panel at the base of the new 72-inch plasma screen he bought for himself from the beaucoup royalties he made on his only patented invention: a cell phone accessory that found your wallet, purse, briefcase, keys, car and nearest coffee shop for you.

But every once in a while, Pritchard would carefully dismantle the home entertainment system, and use the time capsule, anti-grav and the now-real lightsaber he invented for fun to hit the Cretaceous creatures like a meteor strike, or leave the anti-grav and Sith weapon home and just drop in on Mrs. Killian...for old times' sake.


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Gil C. Schmidt has been a regular submitter to Yesteryear Fiction since the early days when it was a daily magazine. His story "Interesting Times" is also featured in his book "Thirty More Stories."