Robots make a come back to Futures this week — but they return in a very unusual situation. Robot burial by H. E. Roulo offers a fresh take on the future relationships we might have with our robotic assistants. Previously, H. E. Roulo has explored the world of Metrics for Futures, and she has just released the first book in her Plague Master series. You can find more about her activities at her website or by following her on Twitter. Here, she explains what inspired her latest tale — as ever it pays to read the story first.

Writing Robot burial

A story doesn’t come together all at once. It’s a combination of ideas, and I’ve found that the best results are the ones that look most different from what I think I’m sitting down to write.

I’d been considering advances in autonomous robots. In addition to familiar vacuuming robots, soon we may have self-driving cars reducing the need for truckers or touch screens replacing staff at order counters. As automation becomes more elaborate, robots advance into a grey area between mimicry and authenticity in appearance and thought. At what point do their differences become indistinguishable from us? Will our treatment of them evolve as well?

In particular, I’d read about efforts to use robots to provide the elderly with two vital needs: care and companionship. I find the question of how similar to humans we should make the artificial care giver, especially for elderly who are impaired by dementia or Alzheimer’s, troubling and worth exploring. Are we denying patients vital connections otherwise lacking, or tricking them into attachments with an artificial substitute that cannot (or should not) reciprocate?

If stuffed animals, beloved pets and temperamental cars can be attributed personality, how much more confusing when the object looks and sound like us? But I didn’t want to revisit the well-worn trope of robot sentience. Instead, I took an outside perspective of the relationship that might have developed between a disabled woman and her care-giving robot. Her son knows the bond they formed, one that he might otherwise have been responsible for.

Such comfort and care is very personal, hinted at when he talks about how it came to understand his mother’s idiosyncrasies. A robot that specializes in one person would be unique and valuable, but only to that person. Unlike human workers, this hypothetical robot may not adapt as readily as technology faces a race towards obsolescence. How, then, to reconcile the importance of personalized care, gratitude for that level of service, and our growing intimacy with technology?

In Robot burial, I wanted to honour the notion of the caregiver, in whatever form it takes.

This week, Futures ventures into a bar — but not just any bar, it is a bar created by Filip Wiltgren for his story There is a beep. When not designing bars for fictional scientists, Filip can be found working as a communications officer at Linköping University. Here, he kindly explains the origins of his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing There is a beep

An X, a Y and a Z walk into a bar, but the bar is not important. The bar is never important.

There is a beep came to me in a flash of insight: what if the bar mattered? What if the wrong person walked into the right bar, or the right person walked into the wrong one? And so: “An accountant walks into a bar. No, hold on, that not how this one works.” Those were the story’s original starting words and everyone I showed it to took it as comedy.

For me it was deadly serious. The story of walking into the same space over and over again, not being able to leave, not knowing why it didn’t feel quite right; it’s a horror story. A story of broken dreams, if I might wax poetic, or of a bad job, bad marriage or bad investment if I may not.

It’s pretty easy to come up with pseudo-philosophic gobbledygook to explain how deep and significant a story is, at least if you’re analysing it after the fact. Truth is, the story of the poor neurophysicist walking into that bar and having his hopes shattered, started with nothing more than the vision of red, leather seats and a worried man in a lab coat. Only after finishing it did my conscious mind catch up with what I was actually writing about, and realized its nightmare implications.

I have seen too many shortcuts, especially when dealing with prestige, technology or money, in academia to write There is a beep off as pure science fiction. I only hope that the right person got their comeuppance in the end, and I am grateful to my critique group and alpha readers for their great feedback that made the story finally come together as intended.

The poop joke was, I assure you, entirely accidental.

Futures this week is pleased to welcome back Sylvia Spruck Wrigley with her story Project Daffodil. Previously, Sylvia has taken us to the front line of an alien war, explained what it’s like to be lost in space and spent time as a prisoner on an alien world. This week, she tackles the logistics of colonizing Mars. Sylvia’s first novella, Domnall and the Borrowed Child, is now out as a part of the Tor.com novella imprint. You can find out more about her at her website or by following her on Twitter. Here, she explains what inspired her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Project Daffodil

I’m  interested in telling stories about the people we don’t see very often in traditional science fiction. I read fiction for years before noticing how many story heroes have no family: no mothers, no father, no siblings nor grandparents. So now, it’s something I actively try to think about: what is Great Aunt Gertrude’s role in this universe?

At some point I heard someone make the comment that we shouldn’t have any problem heating up other planets, as we’d done OK overheating this one. It was a remarkable simplification that caught my imagination. I was already thinking about the fact that the worse the living conditions on this planet become, the more pressure there is to find ways off of it, to move on to a new home.

I wrote another story, called You Only Live Once, which told the story of a Kickstarter project in which supporters could fund a commercial space programme by buying a cheap ticket to be on the first cargo launch — or pay double in order to get the round-trip. The idea of a one-way ticket into space seemed like it would solve a lot of the practicalities of space exploration.

So somehow these things combined in my head and Project Daffodil began to take shape. If the first wave of colonists was going out to set things up, how much would there actually need to be done? I imagine that most of it would be automated, so you would mainly need people there in case a switch needed flipping or a computer resetting. In which case, why send highly qualified astronauts? The main requirements seemed to be avoidance of boredom and ability to follow instructions … and of course to be happy to accept that this is a one-way trip.

And with that, I had a story. I hope you have enjoyed it.

Futures starts the New Year with Ghosts in the machine, a disorientating tale from Aaron Moskalik. Aaron is a software architect and speculative-fiction writer living near Detroit, and this story marks his debut in Futures. He very kindly took some time out to explain what inspired his tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Ghosts in the machine

A number of news articles about fitness trackers used to either substantiate or repudiate alibis in criminal cases have surfaced recently. There has to be a story there somewhere … perhaps a hard-boiled social-media detective? No, that’s a bit too obvious … 

Fitness monitoring does present a privacy issue. It’s easy to imagine life- and health-insurance companies demanding this information for coverage. Health care in the United States being what it is, employers might use these data for hiring in a frantic attempt to keep the costs of health benefits affordable.

Regardless of the pitfalls, the popularity of these devices will drive them to be more than just pedometers and heart-rate monitors. How about automatic blood testing for diabetics, infection alerts from a detected immune response, or real-time assessments of our gut fauna?

Such a rich source of data would be irresistible to governments. Policies would be put in place to placate privacy advocates, but most of us, seduced by convenience, will give our data freely to whomever. Eventually, even the most stubborn must participate or be marginalized.

Technology drives economic progress. Economic progress, unaware of fairness and immune to sentiment, is inexorable. These are familiar themes in science fiction, but there is a flipside also worth exploring. As the world careens along ever faster, older economic paradigms and their vestigial artefacts do survive, albeit as pale imitations of what they once were. Canals, coal plants, qwerty keyboards … mere ghosts in the machine.

How long before that’s us?