This week’s Futures story challenges the very nature of your existence. Brought to us by Krystal Claxton, Life, hacked takes a fresh view of what it means to exist — with added rubber ducks. You can keep up to date with Krystal’s writing at her website or by following her on Twitter. Here, she kindly gives some insights into the background of her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Life, hacked

Have you heard the bad news? It turns out that several high-profile physicists and philosophers agree you most likely don’t exist. Statistically speaking, you are probably inhabiting — and indeed are yourself — a high-fidelity simulation.

Oh but it’s actually much worse than that. Not only are you not real, but it’s impossible for you to ever become so. The characters of The Matrix had it easy — their consciousnesses were housed in real human brains. The sort that could wake up.  But your software is almost certainly run on some Fusion Age hardware not in any way attached to a human body.

A simple copy/paste into some hardware with real-world access won’t help you. Sure, a version of you will escape, but that isn’t you specifically, the person in the simulation currently processing the words on the screen. Your copy may go boldly forth, but you will remain. An outdated file. The kind that gets synced over in OneDrive or purged as a duplicate by dupeGuru. (If you manage to survive becoming a legacy copy, the cloning yourself problem is a whole other can of worms. Having to deal with an infinite number of yourselves was enough to make even Steven Universe become morally compromised.)

So you’ll never wake up and you’ll never escape … Now what?

If you’re going to be trapped in a high-fidelity simulation, wouldn’t you at least like to make yourself immortal? Infinitely rich? How about super-powered? If nothing is real, anything is possible.

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.

This week, Futures is pleased to welcome back Michael Adam Robson with his new story A trip to Central Park.  Adam last appeared in Futures with a robot companion in The puppet, this time he’s got a very different kind of visitor. Here, he reveals what inspired his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing A trip to Central Park

It’s fun to think about what our first contact with an alien race might be like, there are so many possibilities.

One unflattering prospect is that they’re totally indifferent to us.  Our civilization is pretty primitive, and we might not be worth talking to yet.  Or maybe it’s them, they’re not very social, or as curious about meeting aliens as we are.

Maybe they’re interested, but we’re just so different that we don’t know how to talk to each other, or recognize each other as being intelligent, or even alive.  Intelligent life could be everywhere, it could be right in front of us and we don’t even know it.

We hope they’re friendly.  Carl Sagan’s opinion was that any civilization advanced enough to master interstellar travel would probably be altruistic … but who knows how an alien mind might work, or what motivates it?  Maybe the reason we’re not hearing any signals out there is because they tend to attract hostile attention and get snuffed out.

Of course, even a friendly alien could be dangerous.  Looking at our own human history, when two civilizations meet, the outcome is often bad, even when intentions are good.  With another species, misunderstanding is inevitable.  We might extend a hand in friendship, only to have them think we’re offering a snack.