For this week’s Futures story, Jeremy Szal makes a welcome return to reveal what happens When there’s only dust left. Jeremy is no stranger to Futures, having previously written about Daega’s test, Walls of Nigeria and a System reboot. You can keep up to date with all of Jeremy’s activities at his website or by following him on Twitter. Here, he offers an insight into how his latest tale came about — as ever, it pays to read the story first.
Writing When there’s only dust left
War, and the methods used to conduct it, has always interested me. We’ve progressed as a society from bashing each other with clubs to bashing each other with swords, then shooting at each other in trenches before moving on to long-distance combat by way of missiles and nukes. That creates a lot of long-lasting damage and costs a fortune to implement, so I thought about alternative methods of weaponized assault. The answer was AI. AIs the size of dustmites released into the air and mentally crippling the enemy soldiers without firing a single bullet.
And that’s terrifying, because these things that can drive a person insane or worse are just lines of code, developed on a screen like the one you’re reading this on now. What’s scary about an AI tormentor is that they’re not just designed to torture their victims, but they have no room for the compassion or empathy that humans possess because it’s not built into them. That scares me, and I like to write about what scares me because it’s fun.
It’s just a matter of finding the mushy parts of your brain that control sensory detail, and the AIs can control everything you see … or what you don’t. I like the idea of the horror originating from the mind of the protagonist because it’s so personal and uncomfortably intimate. Everyone in that war would have had different, personalized demons to torment them, which cannot be shared with anyone else.
The ending came about when I realized I needed to have Buikov put in a situation from which he could not escape, and the Duster’s control was so tight that all his senses no longer belonged to him. The suicide scene was especially graphic and cruel to demonstrate this, as Buikov now knows he’ll never again experience anything without questioning if it’s real or not, and that he won’t ever be able.