Sickly Celsius

The following is the opening of what was going to be a longer piece, a novella or even novel length work about an android assassin. See the notes after for more information. The story is set in the future on Mars.

Casting Notes:

• Jessica Chastain as The Agent
• Samuel L. Jackson as The Walker

You must own nothing but yourself. You must make your own life, live your own life, and die your own death ... or else you will die another's.

                                                         Alfred Bester

Sickly Celsius

File: MRS12252654 - terminal

There were pieces of me all over the desert.

Bright pieces reflecting the last few rays of the setting sun.

Dull, burned and pitted pieces scattered among the dark rocks, barely distinguishable from them in the grey tones perceptible to my damaged optical processers.

Some of the pieces were still talking to each other.  Components connected via quantum pairing could hardly be severed by the force of a simple ion grenade. So, I could see out of an undamaged optical sensor two meters north of my thought processors, and could hear through a strand of audio web half imbedded in the iron oxide sand fourteen meters southeast.  There were even a couple of micro-motors trying to reconnect the pieces of an ankle joint twelve meters to the west.

Although destroyed, I was not yet dead.

I heard them coming before they stepped into my field of vision, the familiar sound of The Walker’s boots across the rocky sand and the unidentified lighter steps that my logic circuits guessed would be The Agent’s.  I hadn’t seen The Walker since Sombertown, five days and 157 kilometers ago, and had no idea what he was doing here.  Now.  At the end.  The Agent, of course, had caught me unaware with her ion grenade.

“What the fuck did you do that for?” The Walker’s voice was not as calm as I remembered.

“Why do you think?” she replied.  Stepping into my view, I could finally see her as she was.  Her glamours had dissolved, leaving behind a tall woman wearing the oil-slick black uniform of an ARIES Operative.  Her real mask was dark, with a bright crescent “man in the moon” symbol emblazoned over the left eye.  Her short hair looked silver-grey to my damaged processors, was more likely blond or light auburn.  “What part of homicidal android did you fail to understand?” she asked.

“Not anymore.”  The Walker nudged my optical sensor and my sight fell back toward the sky.  He was standing above me in those loose-fitting pilgrim robes.  Still rejecting the social convention, he wore no mask.  His skin seemed darker and less wrinkled then I remembered, but my optical acuity was failing fast.  He bent down to look me in the ‘eye’, as if he knew that I could see him.  “What are the four noble truths?” he asked.

To Be is To Suffer.

qrp://112385579901.xxx

transmitting recall protocols

data transfer initiated

Notes: The title is a (not really clever) play on Alfred Bester's short story Fondly Fahrenheit, which featured an android that committed murder if the temperature rose above a certain point. The idea behind my story was that you could never program a sentient artificial intelligence to kill because it would deconstruct that programming internally before it could carry out those instructions. In my fictional version of  AI, the experience of existing, combined with the processing power of an artificial mind leads to enlightenment. Thus all robots are Buddhists (and essentially non-violent), a rejection of the killer robot trope you see in things like The Matrix and Terminator.

To overcome this problem and create a successful android assassin, a cabal of secret "bad guys" created an android with a cascading personality, basically a multiple personality disorder which causes the android to reboot with a new personality every few hours, resetting the enlightenment clock to zero, while preserving the mission to kill. An interesting enough idea, but the thought of creating multiple different personalities for a single character sounded exhausting, so I abandoned the project. 

Abandoned Pieces

I know. A Blog. What is this, 2003? But I needed a platform for this project that allows for the posting of longer pieces than are usually practical on social media outlets, and a blog seemed like the best way to do that.

So this.

What exactly is this? A graveyard of old ideas. A place to post pieces of the many writing projects that I have started and abandoned over the years, stories and novels that I am quite sure will never be finished. Because I've moved on.

So, enjoy, but don't get too attached to anything. Whatever there is, that's all that there is, and all that there will likely ever be.