This week, Futures is pleased to welcome back Jeremy Szal with his latest story, Traumahead. Regular readers will know that Jeremy has contributed a few stories to Futures before in the shape of When there’s only dust left, Walls of Nigeria, System reboot and Daega’s test. For his latest piece, Jeremy heads to the battlefield in search of memories. You can find out more about Jeremy’s work at his website or by following him on Twitter. Here, he reveals the inspiration behind his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Traumahead

There’s no device like the human brain, but it’s pretty shoddy hunk of tissue when it comes to conscious memory. We remember events shortly after they’ve happened, but as the weeks, months and years go by, those memories become fuzzy and distorted. Other times, conversations, scenery, facial expressions and the details of a scene change. We become so certain of the sequences of events and the particulars surrounding them, so when we examine a picture, audio or video recording of the same incident, we’re surprised to find that our brains have been misleading, or sometimes lying, to us. Because the hardware we use to store audio/visual memory cannot lie to us. It’s objective. It presents exactly what was in front of us. Our brains do not. It’s scary to think that a $10 photo camera can do something better than the human brain, but it’s true.

I lived overseas in Austria during my early teenage years, and have a pretty solid recollection of the house I lived in, the people I knew, the streets I walked everyday for three years. I was glancing at some old photos recently, and was told a very different story about details I could have sworn my life on. A harsh reminder of the brain’s unpredictability. I take photos of almost everywhere I go for future use, because I know I can’t possibly remember every detail down to a tee. But the device in my pocket can. Even if something departs from human memory, it still lives on digitally through stored pixels and soundwaves. And if we can store a picture, why not a civilization?

This concept led me to building a story where a majestic warrior race of aliens use collected memories of their civilization to avoid mass extinction at the hands of humans. Humans have attempted to wipe out opposing peoples and tribes by destroying any trace of them or their cultural footprint. The logic being if no one remembers them, they didn’t exist. The Jhulivaans get around this cruel strategy by storing fragments of their memory that detail their accomplishments and peoples, letting them live on forever, hidden away until they’re rediscovered, despite the best efforts of humans. It’s the best and only form of revenge they’ll get. I like the idea of there being buried data caches of alien civilizations on far-away planets as proof of a wider, richer galaxy, both as a world-building device and a sense of permanency.

But with everything I write, I wanted to include a personal and emotional element to this — a way to experience the gravitas and tragedy of this mass extinction. And what better way than a first-person account of a battle-scarred warrior as he stumbles across the remains of the empire he once called home, now crumbling due to human greed. It had to be him, because data can read statistics and technical values, but not the emotion behind it, and these memories were founded on emotional, conscious states, an idea I’m also quite fond of.

He’s able to save the memories of his fellow warriors, marking their existence permanent, but not his daughter. Like incidents we vaguely remember but have no backup data of, her memory, her existence, is “written in pencil, not ink”. But that doesn’t stop him from holding onto her memory anyway, because sometimes it’s the value we place behind a memory, not the accuracy of it, that’s important.

This week, Futures takes a trip back in time with George Nikolopoulos in an attempt to change the course of history. In Going back for Hitler, George ponders the problems of messing with the past. You can find out more about George‘s work at his website or by following him on Twitter. Here, he reveals the inspiration behind his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Going back for Hitler

I’ve always been both fascinated and repulsed by time-travel stories, mostly because of the paradox, or should I say the paradoxes, because there’s more than one.

One paradox is that if you travel back in time to change events that happened before you were born, then there are millions of ways to prevent you from ever being born, and so who was it that went back to change history? And if you’re going back to the future after the deed, to what future will you return? One way to solve this issue is to assume that by going back in time and making changes you’re just creating a new time strand, one that is free to take a new course onward. So, when you return to your own future nothing at all will have changed, but just by going back you have created a new parallel universe. Of course there’s also a theory that all conceivable universes already exist, so in fact your sojourn in time has accomplished nothing.

But the most disconcerting paradox is the ‘neat’ solution. If, as happens in many time-travel stories and most time-travel films, everything finally fits together so neatly that travelling back to the past was what actually made the present happen, then this means that either there’s no past or future and everything happens simultaneously, which is something very hard for the human mind to comprehend, to say the least, or that there’s no free will and everything has been preordained since the beginning of time, which is more than a little depressing.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I woke up one morning with not one but two fully formed stories in my mind, about time travellers who go back to kill the most infamous villain of all time — but with a different twist each. I think of them as ‘twin’ stories, though they are completely independent of each other. The one (You can always change the past) was published in Galaxy’s Edge and was reprinted a few days ago in The Year’s Best Military & Adventure SF, and the other (Going back for Hitler) is now in Nature — and I’m very proud for both of them. I have, in fact, overcome my aversion to time-travel stories, so there’s a possibility I might even go on to write a whole series of mini-‘going-back-to-kill-Hitler’ stories with different outcomes.

This week, Futures is delighted to welcome Josh Pearce with his story Further laws of robotics. An assistant editor at Locus magazine, you can find out more about Josh’s work at his website or by following him on Twitter. Here, he reveals what sparked his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Further laws of robotics

Buddy-cop stories between humans and robots are pretty common: Asimov’s Caves of Steel and sequels, the ‘Automata’ storyline in the Penny Arcade webcomic, that short-lived Almost Human TV show starring Karl Urban. Robots make easy material for detective stories. After all, a good mystery relies on good logic, and robots that are constrained by three (or more) laws provide a ready-made logic puzzle for us to play with.

I, Robot remains my favourite Isaac Asimov, a collection of logic puzzles built upon three simple rules. Later in his career, Asimov added a fourth rule, the zeroth law, which supersedes the other three. By that logic, I thought, a negativith law would need to be even more important than zero. From there I just had fun with number theory.

Any system with ‘Laws’ needs law enforcement, so an Asimovian Three Laws society of robots is going to need cops. In William Gibson’s Neuromancer there’s brief mention of Turing Police, who make sure that AI don’t overstep the bounds of their charters. I wanted to know more about that. I wanted to see a police force tasked with making sure that robots obey their programming rather than just going all Blade Runner on any non-compliant hardware. Inspector Warren is your stereotypical noir detective type but he’s not quite as dumb as he looks. (I named him after Warren Spector, creator of the Deus Ex video games.)

Machine ethics are a growing concern in today’s society, with fears about autonomous weapons platforms and black-box neural networks, but even if Asimov’s three laws were able to be translated into executable code, there’s no guarantee that they would protect us. Just because something is logical doesn’t mean that it’s correct.

This week, Futures is delighted to welcome back Taik Hobson with his story Mirror — a hospital tale with a difference. Previously, he has written about what happens at Midnight at the A&E, a Strange machine and how Goliath falls. You con find out more about his work by following him on Twitter. Here, he reveals the inspiration behind his latest tale — as ever, it pays it read the story first.

Writing Mirror

During my internship I came to the unhappy conclusion that our prejudices as medical professionals — of others, but mostly of ourselves, magnified by the ever present threat of medical legal action should we falter — was a significant impediment to providing good patient care. This discounts the normal scope of challenges anyone can expect to face, regardless of their chosen workplace — of working closely with someone whose values we don’t agree with; of being the main care provider for a sick family member, or of having a medical condition ourselves; of being a single parent, or of simply having to go to work after another argument with a loved one.

Ask any health-care provider and they will tell you about that one person they know who is cool-headed, just, respectful of their colleagues, on time with their paperwork, has impeccable bedside manners and who came in to work on the morning their pet frog died and still found time to console the family of a deceased patient after attending to a successful resuscitation of a separate patient next door. In a perfect world this would be the rule rather than the exception.

The preposterousness of AI-augmented health care as an alternative has waned thanks to our growing awareness of the technology, even as our exclusively human-powered medical system continues to cough up signs of being unsustainable (at least for those in tertiary care settings). The example used in the story is not new, and may one day be commonplace. (I would also like to point out that the patient in the story is a product of the imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, cryonized or thawing, is purely coincidental. Those medical legal habits certainly don’t go quietly.)