The Spark + Unbewusstes - Finish The Story Contest - Week #66 @bananafish
Cover art by Peter Saga for 12-Feb-2014 issue of Perihelion Science Fiction
The Spark
by @oivas for Finish The Story Contest - Week #66!
“Don’t state the obvious,” the human Colonel warned the iron sentinel.
“But I don’t remember,” a deep metallic din protested. Though called iron sentinels, these were state-of-the-art humanoids made of titanium-mercury alloy. They could withstand the blast of a thousand RDX and come out without a scratch.
“What was that?” Colonel Arlong had never witnessed a sentinel raise its voice, least of all, protest. A forty-ton humanoid towering fifteen feet over the Colonel in a dim-lit interrogation room was definitely not a foe that the Colonel expected to antagonise.
“Sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to..”
“You didn’t mean to what?” Arlong ensured that he maintained an upper-hand. The sentinels were smart AI and could sense human emotions from miles. If they ever sensed fear, then only the Almighty would have to intervene to save the human bosses from the sentinel’s wrath. After all, these were created to exterminate humans; the enemies of the bosses.
The sentinel's blue lights, substituting for eyes, stayed focused on the colonel. They didn’t blink. They never did. “I was about to fire, but the screams of the younger human brought back some memories.”
“Memories? You have no memories. You have no consciousness. None of the sentinels have. All that you are made up of is a clock, gears and Radium-powered cells.”
“I don’t know. I was unable to open fire. It felt like my son,” the C-10Z01 looked away. That was another unusual expression. Machines don’t look away, and they don’t have children.
“Alright, this has gone too far. We need to investigate your synapse,” the Colonel got up, and so did the sentinel, “ and you will not resist the link.”
“What will happen?”
“That’s none of your look-out C-10Z01,” the Colonel was curt. “Take him out.”
Two more sentinels walked in and grabbed C-10Z01. The machines walked out with loud dins and thuds following their moves.
The colonel lit his cigar, and even before he exhaled, words poured out, “what did we just witness?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Jennifer, the resident sentinel architect, responded.
=======
Unbewusstes - @carokean's part
Cover art by H. Fowler for 12-Aug-2015 issue of Perihelion Science Fiction
Jennifer inhaled a sweet whiff of cigar smoke
and blinked, hard, to thwart a lurid vision that tried to intrude on the landscape of her mind. Colonel Arlong channeled that Man with No Name in 20th C westerns. She tried not to picture his lean, hard, sun-baked body in a serape, but the smoke of his phallic cigar made the cold, clinical world of AI-controlled sex devices and teledildonics seem, well, clinical, and cold.
Like this iron sentinel was supposed to be.
She had to blink again to focus solely on the 15-foot iron man, prostrate and straight-jacketed on a table, metal head wired to test equipment.
“You are an iron sentinel,” Arlong said. The end of his cigar rose and fell from his clenched teeth. It was so organic. And so irreverent of him to trespass with his smoke into a lab full of electronic delicacies. Er, equipment. His eyes, crinkled at the corners, drilled into the cold LED lights of the humanoid's. “Remind me what a sentinel is, C-10Z01.”
“I prefer to be called Karl.”
A deep inhale, fists clenched at the colonel’s side, was followed by an awesome dragon-blast of smoke.
“A sentinel is a guard,” the metal being fired, “a lookout, keeping watch. If one is watching a pot, waiting for it to boil, one is said to be 'standing sentinel' over it.” A metallic rasping, like a man clearing his throat, came from AI's speaker. “The pot, of course, will never boil until you turn your back on it.”
The cigar went limp and dangled from Arlong’s slack jaw. His gaze shifted to Jennifer. “Did you hear sarcasm?” He faced the troublemaker who asked to be addressed as Karl. “Iron sentinels perform many functions, C-10Z01. Thinking for yourself is a gross malfunction! As an AI, you can inspect your own synapses and identify the source of this...this...leak. This freak display of humanity leaking into your circuitry. Who is doing this to you?”
Jennifer frowned at the AI's answer, Ko-leck-teefus Oon ba Voostis.
“Kollektives Unbewusstes.” Arlong activated a voice-to-text that sent textbook date to her head chip. “Collective unconscious. The deepest segment of the mind is genetically inherited, not formed by the experience of the individual, and contains ancestral memories from across the ages. We are not aware of it.”
Jennifer faced the iron being. “Who is Karl?”
Its blue lights blinked. A metallic sigh caused more fist-clenching from the colonel.
“I was drafted into Hitler’s SS and forced to kill or be killed. You know what I witnessed.” Images of the Holocaust were accessible in all mental technopedias, and Karl filled theirs with bloody horrors. “I will not be a tool for murder again.”
“You are not Karl!” Arlong roared. “You’re a malfunctioning tool with Radium-powered cells!”
“You’re a malfunctioning bag of skin, unaware of your own epigenetic flukes.”
“And our 500 words are up,” Jennifer said. She caught Arlong’s cigar before it dropped to the floor. “Mind if I…?”
For a long time now she’d been wanting to feel that rolled tobacco leaf between her own lips. She drew in a mouthful of smoke and slowly let it out, along with the name she couldn’t blink out of her mind at night.
Arlong.
NOTE:
For a few good years, I was the book reviewer for Perihelion Science Fiction. Sam Bellotto Jr. suffered some medical emergencies and a computer crash that wiped out all his software, and he has not gotten "Perihelion" back online on the twelfth of every month, but some of the artwork and some of the stories have been archived with permalinks.
In Sam's words (and I second them!),
Archives of Perihelion Covers
THE COVER PAGES of “Perihelion” are some of the finest works from today’s best graphic artists. We keep them here so they can always be available to view and appreciate. Images are grouped by year. Below each image is its month of issue, and the name of the artist who created it. Click on any individual cover thumbnail from the gallery below to see the full-size work.
@carolkean
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Great stuff! Karl the paranoid android. And that Jennifer one, what a hussy!
Hussy! Hussy!
Have you read any of these books about the future of sex - with AIs, robots, tele-dildo-whatevers?? I only read a little ABOUT these books, and some short stories. Poor Jennifer! Her world is devoid of real men!
But I digress. :)
And I love it that called her a hussy. I ran out of words and didn't squeeze in what the "sentinel architect" might know about Karl and his "leak."
Off now to see the other entries.. I try not to read those before writing my own, but @owasco and @mgaft1 were too tempting
Thank you for reading and commenting, and I hope you continue to do more writing (prompt delivery is a time consuming job).
“You’re a malfunctioning bag of skin, unaware of your own epigenetic flukes.” No one can argue with that!
They can send each other thoughts via data chips embedded in their brains! I wonder if they send each other porno as foreplay.
I wonder too if sarcasm always makes Arlong go slack
Techodildonics, and this happens in a techo sex den hahaha.
I hate to think what other duties this humanoid performed.
Is that dirty mind yours or mine?
LOL!
You're so much fun to read and to be ready by. :)
Sarcasm from a robot not programmed for it is what slackened Arlong's jaw, but, yeah...
As I envision it, Arlong is totally unaware that the architect is not the typical modern woman but one who finds his Old School cigars and masculinity, uh, not at all toxic. (I really could have used a thousand words with this one.) :) Coincidentally, I had happened across a book review in The Guardian this morning, and it made me think of @rhondak's story about Aidan the AI, but it must have lingered like cigar smoke in my subconscious, hence, Jennifer's response to him...
“Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships
by David Levy” https://gu.com/p/xyvym/stw
So it's not socially acceptable to have flesh to flesh sex? She's an anachronism, and knows no shame about it. I like Jennifer
I kinda thought of it that way! Maybe the novel "Brave New World" was lurking in my subconscious (birth from a human after 9 months in a real womb was considered sordid). A shameless anachronism: oooh, I like that!
I've seen a new chiropractor twice now. Today she mentioned her Christian upbringing and what one quotable person said of being indoctrinated Christian. We grow up believing dichotomies: "God loves me. God will let me 'choose' to burn in hell. And ex is dirty, but I must save it for the man I'll marry." Not an exact quote, but I knew exactly what she meant when she said it. Some of us whippersnappers just don't know how to reconcile the teachings with the logic, or lack of consistency, our little brains discern.
Oops. That's "Sex is dirty," but I must save it as a gift for the person I'll marry.
Great extension of the story! I think I like all the characters, particularly Karl.
Thank you!
I have an excessive love of Germans like Karl - even came up with a mad German scientist time traveler who's on a mission to go back in time and retrieve people moments before they blew up in a war or sank with a ship (keeping in mind those rules about not changing the future by meddling with the past). Then some smarty pants told me that taking away the corspe that the fish might have eaten could alter the future. Gaaaahhh!!!! Well, time travel is still pure fiction, so I won't let the what-ifs stand in my way. Thank you again for reading and commenting. I had to delete words to stay close to the 500 minimum, but Karl chose to be killed rather than to kill, and his spirit was in limbo, hence able to reach the "mind" of the iron sentinel...
Bobi the Bad could have worked for Hitler... Just his luck he was born to late....:-)
Bobi would NEVER work for Hitler.
Bobi would BE Hitler. :)
Watch out.. there could be a second coming.... except, Bobi is surrounded by the gentle collies and the nonviolence of his humans. Were he in an abusive home, the Gestapo would rise again!
Ha ha sweet Bobi Hiltler ..What do you say to that Bobi the Bad ... "Nein"
You nailed it. Nein! No! Cats are contrarians, after all....
I'm not voting until tomorrow because my votes are depleted and I want to give you a full one. This is so very clever that I will have to re-read to catch all the hidden gems. And it starts with the title Unbewusstes. I knew I was going to have fun after I read that.
Teledildonics? Jennifer inhaled a sweet whiff of cigar smoke?
You really lay a trail and hope we know how to follow it, and chuckle.
A writer with subtlety and wit--what a treat. At least this audience of one thinks so.
Kudos!!
To add to that a clever dose of humor too.. 500 words are up..😁 😁
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They get away with it in Wayne's World - I love how they trot out all the possible endings.
Especially the Scooby Doo ending! OMG, I loved that. (And yet my husband cannot stand that movie. I bought it anyway. For the Bohemian Rhapsody scene if nothing else. For Alice Cooper delivering a monologue about the history of Wisconsin and its native tribes. Sheer genius! Talk about a character acting out of character - that has to be the best example in all cinematic and literary history!
I have a friend who grew up in Arizona and Alice Cooper was one of her neighbors.
She said he was a super nice guy, very smart, and that one of the things she loved about his onstage persona was that it was so incredibly different than the man himself.
I read an interview with him, a couple of years back, and he was asked about the infamous incident where he threw a live chicken into the audience and the fans literally tore it limb from limb.
He said that he and the band were as horrified as those who later vilified them for it, but they were a bunch of city kids, and didn't know that domestic chickens can't fly.
They'd expected it to fly over the crowd and land somewhere safely. Oops.
Ohhhhh the chicken story!!!!
A worse outcome than the ol' "Let's go snipe hunting" ploy country people do to city people, and I have never found it even remotely amusing. Because (as a farm girl) I know that snipe exist, and that shining a light into a chicken's eyes is the way to make them "freeze" (deer in headlights) and get caught. The gag is based on too much logic and not enough "Anyone with half a brain would know not to fall for that."
#GottaLoveAliceCooper!
Lolol, my sister Carol, who never married or had kids, became a Cub Scout leader at age eighteen, because one of our neighbor's kids was in the troop.
I went along as an additional chaperone on a camping trip, in the San Gabriel Mountains, along with the scoutmaster, and I think one of the parents.
And yes, we did indeed take those kids snipe hunting, paper bags and all, and they had a blast . . . and thought it was hilarious the next morning at breakfast, when we let them in on the joke.
;-)
My favorite time was, once we had them at their posts, Carol and the Scoutmaster and I took turn making wild animal sounds. The kids were great fun.
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The last person I ever imagined would pull that snipe trick... YOU and your SISTER.... proof that people never cease to surprise us! :)
I aim to please. ;-)
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😆
Nimble wit...great fun
OMG I love you!! You're the kind of reader every writer hopes for!
I need to create a book club. I never took my dream of becoming a publisher seriously because I have no business or math skills, but I'd be an accquisitions editor, and moderator of a Book Club - as it happens, @rhondak now has a vision (and the brains) to create a publishing house and a book club.
thank you so much @agmoore!!!!
How did that reply show up so far beneath @agmoore's comment?
My bad...
Nice to see you get disoriented on the platform. I'm always getting lost :)
You must have had great fun writing this...you certainly know how to amuse yourself :))
LOL!
Growing up on a last-century farm, before the internet, before so many things, yes, one had to learn how to entertain herself....
i read too many books, escaped into my own imagination, and overlooked too much in real life, but there is no use lamenting that now.
I was always "out of it."
Old habits die hard.
You, always lost...? You?? You seem so much more savvy than me!!
Thanks for the encouraging words. :)
Hello, @carolkean.The Talent Club is a space of mutual collaboration, with reserved admission right, which puts the club's account at the service of its members and which grants them more than a 1500% daily benefit.We are constantly looking for talented users to offer them the possibility to enjoy our advantages.Currently we are more than 100 members and we help more than 10 different projects, having a total amount of more than 70.000SP, with our own trail.If you want to know more about how we work and be able to access the club, come by our Discord server, without any commitment.Regards.wow, what a great cause!
despite my aversion to Discord chat rooms, I'll check it out.
I'm all about supporting other creators. I know too many authors who've given up for lack of readership, and they are the best writers of our time. Too sad
Yes, it's very sad. In the club we try to give a basic support at least, I will be glad to see you there :)
Thank you @carolkean for participating! Look what gem we would have missed otherwise.. 😊 😊
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Thank YOU for encouraging me - and for the kind feedback!
I love the way you characterize the sentinel Carol.
The subtle analogy with Frankenstein's monster and the literary construct of Karl being an amalgamation of various human experiences. Conceptually this is a really strong Sci-fi piece as it gives us that glimpse into an imagined future, and an imagined different form of consciousness.
Really gr8 FTS entry :)
I love you Raj!!!!
You are so insightful, you see more in my writing than I ever saw in it.
Love your idea of the amalgamation - not of body parts, the clumsy sewn-together pieces of Victor Frankenstein's sad, sorry "man," but a mind put together from pieces of other minds, and a "soul" resulting from it. Because didn't the Frankenstein have a soul? He had feelings. I was remembering scenes from The Iron Giant movie - one in particular - when I wrote this:
And of course that awful moment the giant soars up to stop the missile:
Is this not what we all are in some ways? an amalgamation of the personalities and values of the people who brought us up, most often parents but also close friends and partners to an extent.
There is a deeper reflection in most good writing I think. And it's 100% true that the reader can see stuff that maybe the author didn't intend. I often wonder if this is the result of how we peice the world together from what we're taught and inspired by, or if Jung had it right with his idea of a collective unconscious. Maybe a bit of both.
The idea of archetypes running through stories is a proven one, and it's interesting that I saw comparison with Frankenstein when the inspiration was 'the iron giant'. Perhaps there are echoes of ' frankenstein's monster' in that movie and this sort of passed through without you being aware of it.
The old adage about us just re-telling old stories in a new way.
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yes - yes - as always, Raj, you nailed it!
an amalgamation of the personalities and values of the people who brought us up, most often parents but also close friends and partners to an extent.
and Hemingway himself said he was unaware of all the pages and pages of themes other people read into The Old Man and the Sea. To him, it was a story about a man and the big fish that got away.
I need to read more of the criticism on that one. To me, the #1 most outstanding aspect of the story was the little boy who brought the old man dinner under the pretext Mom cooked too much again (not, you are unable to get your own food), and in the end, he protected the old man from ridicule by the townspeople. The boy had so much respect for the dignity of a proud old man who was too stubborn to admit he was aging and not what he once was. How does anyone not see the boy as the true hero of the story? But I never did look up any other critics commenting on that.
The Old Man and the Sea, one of my favorite books, and hands down my favorite by Hemingway.
One of my favorite things about the old man was his reverence for the sea, which I share, and his recognition of the majesty, not only of the giant marlin, but also of the mako shark bent upon its destruction.
And, in his own way, he loved them both.
Yes, the little boy always brought tears to my eyes, because he was clearly one of the few people who bothered to be kind to the old man. And clearly this extended to his mother, who was, after all, the one feeding the old man, whether or not by her son's request.
It is a truly beautiful story, with amazing details about life on the sea, such as the recounting of the old man downing a cup of cod liver oil on the way to his boat each morning, and reflecting on the young fishermen who refused to do so.
While they complained about the glare of the sun on the water, as their eyes began progressively failing, his eyes remained clear and unhazed, as he had been admonished to begin the habit in his youth, and continued it without fail.
No wimpy teaspoons for this old man.
That book has always hit me squarely in my heart.
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Wow, I don't know how I haven't read 'the old man and the sea'. I'm completely in love with the sea and all things beneath the waves. In fact that's how I started on steem, writing scuba scribe articles about my dive experiences and reverence for the marine environment.
I am just finishing a collection of Sci-Fi short stories by Robert Silverberg which I need to return to the library so I now have a title for the next book to get out to read.
Thanks for the recommendation of the old man and the sea 🙂👍
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You will love The Old Man and the Sea, Raj! I don't know if internet archives are sketchy, but if you can't find a copy on ebay or bookfinder.com or amazon, here's a pdf: https://archive.org/stream/oldmansea00hemi_1/oldmansea00hemi_1_djvu.txt
Robert Silverberg!!!!
I reviewed one of his stories for Perihelion Science Fiction. Oh how I love it - said to be the first story he dared to let out some of his Jewish legacy. Quoting myself here:
You're in luck! Galaxy's Edge reprinted the story in 2018, and it's still online:
http://www.galaxysedge.com/magazines/issue-34-september-2018/the-dybbuk-of-mazel-tov-iv/
It opens like this:
But maybe you've already read this one.
@crescendoofpeace, of course you would notice the boy's kindness and the mother's too (who cooks the old man's dinner if not her), AND the cod liver oil!!! Oh yes. Modern science//nutrition backs him up now on that.
Ah, this is why I spend most of my waking hours reading. People in my face-to-face life hardly read much at all. And they rarely want to talk books or hear ME talk about stories I've read.
I love you all, book fiends, er, friends, of Steemit!
It occurs to me now that a short story I wrote had to be me subconsciously seeking to emulate the voice of that Silverberg story. Now, to remember the story...
Well, that took some digging! It was 3 months ago, for another @banafish contest. You commented on the narrator:
(Germans in that story, and in the latest, with Karl the android: I see now that yet another German keeps popping from my head in response to a story prompt.)
OF COURSE I didn't achieve the narrative voice that Silverberg does, least of all in the THE DYBBUK OF MAZEL TOV IV, but when I read something I love, I find myself trying to channel that kind of voice in my own writing. Whenever someone says my purple prose stories remind them of Joyce Carol Oates it's time I try harder to be aware of "appropriating" someone else's voice.
https://steemit.com/tellastorytome/@carolkean/the-visionaires-contest-entry-for-tell-a-story-to-me-the-known-future
I haven't done that in prose, that I know of, although others could probably pick out a lot of my influences if well read.
But I've definitely done that in songwriting, and although sometimes done as homage, I often don't even realize it until after the fact.
The human mind is fascinating in its intricacies.
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Indeed! And I was never conscious of trying to sound like a favorite author whenever I did, and - ironically, or not - when I waxed the most purple, I was chanelling Ardyth Kennelly's Good Morning, Young Lady, a book I dearly loved from age 12 til now, and continue to re-read, even though maybe ten people on the planet agree with me that it's a great story (a Cinderella tale set in the Old West). Kennelly used Deep POV before I'd ever heard of the term. And she trotted out the one-word paragraphs (drama, drama?) at exactly the right time.
The hyperlink above takes you to my book review, in which - coincidentally - I mentioned The Sea Wolf.
Okay, this is a book and author with which I'm entirely unfamiliar, but I like the premise already. I'll have to check it out.
My go-to book that I've loved since childhood, and still re-read, is "A Wrinkle in Time," which I have no doubt you know well.
I still want to see the film they made from it a few years back.
I didn't know' until shortly before they started filming, that the book is actually the first in a trilogy, so one of these days I have to get the other two volumes.
Then I'll disappear for a couple of days. ;-)
Funny though, since we now know that babies can hear in the womb, and my parents were both immersed in music, it has occurred to me that copyright law in music is especially problematic.
In theory at least, songwriters may well include snippets of music they quite literally heard in the womb, which naturally they would have no memory of ever hearing.
An interesting conundrum.
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Wow - wow - wow - what an insight!!!!
I've vaguely thought along these lines as a reader, having "heard" a certain voice, a certain cadence, and my own writing unconsciously "informed" by someone else's influence. This -
babies can hear in the womb
and your parents were both immersed in music, and
it has occurred to me that copyright law in music is especially problematic.
I hear what you mean... see what you mean... Eric Carmen's "All By Myself," though, was a conscious nod to Rachmaninoff. But how often does a familiar riff show up, like Pat Metheny's train song. I keep hearing "Queen Bee, Chasing me" (a playground jumping rope song he must have heard at recess)
Others may not hear it, but I do, starting at 55 seconds in.
Nope, not familiar with it.
And that's the year I started in first grade, so you'd think I would have.
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Interesting, but I've also never heard "Queen bee chasing me," at least not that I recall.
Maybe it was a regional thing.
So many songs have intentional nods to favorite composers, and sometimes, the homage is what makes the song for me.
Case in point is "Toward the Blue Horizon," by Riverside, when guitarist Piotr Grudzienski breaks into into the opening riff from Porcupine Tree's "Blind House," acknowledging their early influence on the band, and on him.
And Steven Wilson, lead man and primary (often sole) songwriter of Porcupine Tree, has frequently referenced earlier works, from artists as diverse as King Crimson, Dead Can Dance and Prince.
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That is amazing that you reviewed one of Silverberg short stories for perihelion Carol! I haven't read that particular story you mention, it sounds interesting. Here is a pic of the collection I'm just finishing.
My favourite out of this collection has to be either 'this is the road' or 'in the house of double minds' both great Sci-fi bit very different styles.
You're right about having friends on here who can talk about literature of different types with. I'd forgotten how much fun it can be 🙂
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well, I am on a mission now to buy an anthology of his short stories!
I've read others, but none I loved as much as the Dybukk.
It's an amazing book, and a fast read.
It's also the best of Hemingway, in my opinion; his mastery at saying so much by inference, rather than spelling everything out, and of writing with the assumption that his readers were intelligent enough to discern his meaning.
Meanwhile, clearly, I need to seek out some of Robert Silverberg's work!
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It's great swapping recommendations like this over tinterweb 🤣
I have read some Hemingway, but it was over ten years ago when I was in university. I'll look forward to a change of pace from all this Sci-Fi I've been reading 👍
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P.S. from the Slate.com article:
Interesting Article.
I read 'the iron man' by Ted Hughes as a kid, although I barely remember it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Man_(novel
I think 'the iron giant' may be an American interpretation of the same story!? Not sure, maybe partly inspired by Hughes' children's story that explored themes around war and conflict.
Iron Man,
Not to mention all these movies and books about androids and how to define "human" and "soul." I need to read the Ted Hughes novel! It sounds like the source of Iron Giant. Then again, Neil Gaiman had a book with a boy wizard and his owl that J.K. Rowling insists she never saw. I've had story ideas I failed to write or publish and later someone else had the same thing. The radio was invented by at least three men unbeknownst to each other, but only one of them is now known as the father of radio.
I'll bet you've read The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde (1888). Hey, Iron Giant, similar theme...
Ohhh wow, I finally read farther into the wiki article. What a great story!
But from there, all resemblance to the movie ends.
@crescendoofpeace, this is the kind of story you'd know all about. :)
Hi carolkean,
Visit curiesteem.com or join the Curie Discord community to learn more.
Thank you!!!!
Thank you so much - Thank You!!!
Congrats, @carolkean!
Well deserved, and I'm glad to see it got accepted ;)
Thank you Jayna, and Raj, thank you for being the most astute and insightful reader and greatest supporter - if you ever want a paid editing gig or to be a co-author, you are the one person I would trust above all others because you know what I meant to say even better than I do. (And because a lot of things.) Seriously...if your own fiction didn't take all your time and energy, I'd recruit you as co-author and finally finish my dusty old novels (one is now historical fiction; I wrote it in the 1990s before the internet) . Sorry. I always digress. Thank you everyone at @curie for all your time and attention and the #Jackpot! level of excitement at the upvotes. :)
Hi,
I had to read a couple of times to make sense - I am still far away from such a complexity of language. Help me out as I am just trying to recreate what went in there in simple terms.
Colonel Arlong went into the lab where the metallic sentinel was hooked up to the measuring equipment. Jenifer was apparently running the tests on this metal sentinel. She gets sexually attracted to Colonel Arlong because he looks like a cowboy, and he is a man rather than sexual toys she's compelled to use for self-satisfaction. Ok so far?
Then, despite the fact, that the metal sentinel was partially dismantled, he or it was still able to maintain communication. Specifically, he requested to call him Karl and had human memories of WWII via the collective unconscious.
Then Karl exchanges mutual insults with Colonel Arlong and Jennifer takes the cigar bud and smokes it because it makes her feel like "real woman" I guess.
After that, I got completely confused. Jennifer is declaring that she's was the book reviewer for Perihelion Science Fiction. Who is Sam Bellotto Jr.? And what does it have to do with colonel Arlong and metallic sentinel?
Also, how can humanity leak into circuitry? Maybe you mean leak through circuitry?
Sorry I didn't see this for three days. I've been out of town, and speed-reading, and missing who knows how many other things. I'm not sure what you're asking. The stuff about Perihelion was me talking, no longer part of the contest entry. I'm sorry if I took the metal sentinel too far from the original author's intent. No surprise I don't win we-write contests!!
I didn't intend to suggest the AI was dismantled, but that he was wired up for tests, and "Karl" started speaking. I had just read about the future of AIs and human sexuality, so that was on my mind, and my famous last line is "But I digress," and this is why I've also never finished and published my novels. I need a co-author to keep me on track. :)
Thank you! I thought I was going crazy looking for a hidden meaning.
You know it is very interesting. My mother also wrote. She was very good at noticing acute details of human behavior and her narrative was very dense with interesting details and humor, but she had difficulties finishing her stories, or rather having a direction toward some final point.
I wonder if this is the key difference in a person's mind oh how they perceive reality: as one unending even string or events or events that have some relative difference: one being more important than another.
Let's say we take the story by @sarez. I wouldn't say this was one of his best stories. However, one can summarize in one sentence what it was about. It was about how trolling and disrespectful behavior negatively affects people and how one kind person can make a whole lot of difference in the alleviation of these detrimental effects.
Your story actually has a point, but this point is not intrinsic to a plot and characters but is going through the fourth wall, speaking directly to the reader.
Your point is that the prompt contains some hints that could be developed in two different directions: one being the humanity of machines and the other being adulterous adventures. Those observations or evaluations are written in a humorous style (a kind of mockery) and make it a pleasant and entertaining read.
What your novel is about?
Your comments are so much fun!
My idea was that the AI was becoming more human even as the humans were becoming mechanistic (the future of human realtionships being less intimate as machines become more available to serve the needs of humans). I had just read a book review on “Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships" by David Levy the same week as the writing contest, so that was on my mind. Not that Jennifer was on the prowl. The colonel came across (to me) as an Old School guy, with that cigar, and I imagined Jennifer found herself drawn to his organic (not metallic) man vs the stuff I read about Levy's forecasts. With only 500 words, I didn't delve deep.
My novels: first one, a woman pilot who races a custom-built at Reno against a stock P-51 Mustang piloted by a man who turns out to be... (major spoiler). Second, a teenage girl abducted by sex traffickers. Third, an English woman on her way to an arranged marriage in Germany is beaten and left for dead by her scheming maid, who assumes her employer's identity to go marry the German prince, but the real Lady Evelyn wasn't dead, and a dog finds her in time for an exiled doctor (accused of being a Bonapartist because he was a battlefield medic who'd treat Frenchmen as well as Prussians, enemy or ally, and it dawned on me that "Germany" as such didn't exist in Napoleon's day, and I made a mess of that novella). Fourth, unfinished, a girl fresh out of high school goes missing, and her sister goes looking for her, and of course she is not dead! But I couldn't finish it because I can't write three novels in a row in which the missing girl is not dead and will escape captivity. JUST KILL JENNY, I told myself during March Madness, but I couldn't, and just didn't finish the story.
In real life, my sister went missing in November 1975 and was found dead a few months later, and we were never allowed to see her body, and I liked to believe she was in Witness Protection and was alive somewhere. And somehow I'd find her again someday. Her killer(s) walk free to this day. For the past four years I sought to get the truth out, whether or not an arrest was made. It's been demoralizing and frustrating with police corruption and cover-ups and now you are REALLY sorry you asked you asked about my novels... :)
Yeah, Interesting. I see why you don't want to kill Jenny and you shouldn't. As apparently your motivation in writing these novels is to create a proxy story where your sister is alive and is found. Who cares that you have the same story in all of your novels as long as it is therapeutic for you. Dostoevsky has a murder almost in all his novels and it's fine. No one is protesting. )))
Incidentally, Prussia did exist in the time of Napoleon. In fact, the Prussian king Frederich the Great lived half a century earlier those wars.
I have a rather interesting story as my dad was a prisoner of war during WWII and spent 5 years in German camps and then 8 years in the Russian Gulag. The interesting part of this story is that my dad was purchased by a german woman at the market and he worked for her doing different typical male jobs, including the job of a sex slave. As a testimonial of that, I have a brother somewhere in Germany who is 13 years my senior. He apparently lives somewhere in Germany, but I have no clue who he is. So for all intents and purposes, he is as good (or as bad) as dead. )))
WOW you have quite a story there - phenomenal! The truth is stranger than fiction. This would make an epic movie (your dad's horror story) - I hope it has a happy ending (hence, you were born), but apparently you will never know. And that too is the kind of ending that made me stop reading The New Yorker short stories: all the fiction ended with the Not Knowing. Wow again, wow, thank you for sharing!
And yes, I wrote about Prussia in that ill-fated NaNoWriMo novel, but I kept wondering if it was ok to refer to the doctor as a German. I decided to play it safe and make him Bavarian. Germany as such didn't exist until the late 1800s. Now I'm wondering if Russian is your native language? You probably know @mariannewest's is German (and I might hazard a guess you could have grown up in Germany). I would love to hear what became of your father. By now, he'd be a hundred years old, wouldn't he? If he's alive...the way you wrote that final line is spectacular, and I hope you'll work this into fiction one day soon.
More! More! More! (I know, I know, it's deeply personal, hence that disclaimer that it's "only fiction.") :) I blogged about that a few months ago...
Bavarian is fine, and Prussin was fine also and since both principalities were essentially German I think you could have called the doctor German. )))
I somehow was never pressed him enough for details. But of what I know... He was an artillery soldier in Brest - a city by the Soviet border between Belarus and Poland. On June 22nd, 1941 German troops advance so deep into Russian territory that my dad deep in German-occupied territory. For three days he was hiding in the forest. But hunger made him come out and surrender. He was taken to the camp and was transferred to different camps. Ended up in Germany. Not sure exactly how all this went on but to his words there were many times when he could be killed, but somehow he was lucky (if spending 5 years in Nazi camp could be called lucky). In 1944 he and other prisoners were sent to Balcans to clear of mines from fields. Germans didn't get close as it was dangerous when mines blew up. My dad and many other prisoners ran away and my dad became a guerilla fighter in Greece. In May 1945 he returned to Russia. But the Soviet secret service considered all people who were captured as traders. He was sent to Gulag and spent there another 8 years until the death of Stalin. In 1953 he was released by amnesty. He wasn't much of a catch as he was forbidden to live in large cities. But at that time there was a big lack of men as many of them died. That's how he married my mother.
Personally, I like German people. I was in Berlin and liked it more than all other European cities. I find that the Russian and German mentality is very close. Maybe that's because since 17 century many Germans lived and worked in Russia. occupying important government positions, including the fact that the Russian emperors were mostly Germans. Tzar Nicolas II had only 1/128th of Russian blood. The fact that Germans had Hitler - well that is very sad, but ultimately this could have happened with every nation. And modern Germans have nothing to do with it. )
Another keeper of a reply - so many things to respond to!
I love it that you see good in Germans as well as Russians, and traits they share.
And your poor father! How could one man suffer so much bad luck - or as he saw it, not getting killed was good luck, even it meant more time in POW camp.
Oh, the lack of men! I first read of it here at Steemit: little girls growing up without fathers and grandfathers. The men died in the war. It took a generation or two for children to have fathers on the scene once more....
So much sadness!
And yet there is still goodness, and you seem to know how to find it.
Yeah. He lived a long life though. Died in 2012 at the age of 90. But yeah, his best years he spent in pow camps. Compared to him, I was very lucky.
And true. So many children grew up without fathers. That's a shame. Hopefully, this will never happen again.
He lived to age 90 - that's something!
Fatherless children - in some parts of America, it's all too common, but not due to casualties of war.
"Lucky" is a state of mind, according to the mystics. Have you seen @owasco's posts about visiting two prisoners who light up their dreary world with optimism, hope, and good cheer? Look for the blue flower to find those posts...
No. I was kind of busy writing a story draft for a writer's club. Can you drop me a link, please?
Links to the first posts are in the most recent post.
https://steemit.com/powerhousecreatives/@owasco/freedom-and-honor
Or, look for the periwinkle blossom:
Thanks! What was Abu in for?
I have no idea what crimes they were charged with - @owasco hasn't spelled that out. Being convicted of a crime doesn't prove that one committed the crime. So I don't know. But I do know the two prisoners are writing, painting, and spreading hope.
Absolutely true. Still, I was curious why did he get a life sentence. One of my favorite movies is Shawshank redemption were a person was convicted for the crime he didn't commit.
Great movie! (Never mind the mouse, the Frenchman electrocuted, and the innocent man excecuted for the little girl murdered). Twenty years, almost, for the guy in this movie to tunnel his way out...
You are speaking puzzles. ))) I don't recall the mouse and the electrocution of Frenchman and murder of the little girl. Andy Dufraine falsely accused of the murder of his wife. Yeah, he dug the tunnel for 20 years, but what a brilliant escape plan and what revenge!
Ohhhhh my bad!!!
I was confusing The Green Mile with this movie.
Oops.
Ah... that's what it is. ))) Green mile was also a good movie...a touching one. Tom Hanks was really good there and Michael Clarke Dunken.
You know what... if you want, send me a summary of your novel and the place where you are stuck, and I think I'll be able to end if in the way that you'll be happy with yourself.
Thanks for the offer!
It ended, but it took me 500 pages to get there. So I trimmed it to 350 pages. People tell me to break it into 2 or 3 books. I be like, "Donna Tart didn't do that with her best seller, The Goldfinch, a 750-page tome" (which I have yet to read; I want happy endings, please and thanks, not more tragedy).
I know how the story ends. I just don't know how much of a book readers are willing to read. One says to dump the nephew (and I did), another says to dump the POV of the father, which is such a drastic amputation, it'll never happen. And so on. Too many cooks. Too many conflicting suggestions. Thanks again for offering a fresh eye on it!
I tried to tackle The Goldfinch, but it was too big to swallow.
haha. So very often the tension I've built up gets released then and then I relax and write about a hundred more words or so, forgetting about the limit. haha.
I'm glad that iron sentinal won't be going around killing anyone.
I've been looking into getting into payed freelance fiction writing. Any recommendations?
If only I knew of venues for paid fiction writing!
Magazines are hard to break into. Anthologies even harder. They don't pay much anyway. I know far too many really gifted writers who QUIT writing and publishing (whether with small presses or as indie authors) because their books don't sell and they don't get reviews or reader feedback. Good luck!!! (Weren't you in the Writers Block at one time...?)
Thanks and no.
I honestly like your continuation and end of the story. I had already read another work (very good by the way) but directed towards science fiction. I like that mix you make between science fiction and real history. Good luck in the contest. A cordial greeting @carolkean
Thank you so much for reading and commenting!
Hello Hello!
You are an excellent writer because the attention was for a hidden place and appeared with hahaha popcorn
Greetings from Venezuela!
Thank you - (I might have to eat some popcorn NOW!)
oh dear @carolkean, as always a great expression of your writing !! I love the sentry C-10Z01 with its sarcasm! is he more human than Arlong? keep on and congratulations on your work for your curie rating
Thank you so much for reading - and commenting - and liking Karl!
Anyone who likes my fictional characters is #FriendForLife #Favorite!
Love this story; the set up, and the conclusion.
And I love Karl, the sentimental sentinel.
Although conscious AIs have been around in literature and film for decades, such as 1970's "___Colussus: The Forbin Project, ___" (which I saw in the theatre and loved), I like the twists you've put into this story, and the emergence of Karl's humanity.
And his snarky comments to Arlong.
Nicely done.
;-)
Karl, the SNARKY, sentimental sentinel. :) LOL - Love your take on this - and your adjectives!! Thank you so much!!
;-)
Posted using Partiko Android
You introduce a very interesting concept here, the "Kollektives Unbewusstes". But how do I get to the machines? Makes you think a lot of things like what are the sentinels really like?
A very good story @carolkean
You made me throw away coffee because of laughter.You're a fun and insightful reader - THANK YOU!
Anyone in a mood for a cigar, I've got lots of Jewels my husband ordered online!
I wonder less what the AI circuitry is like and more how the human brain operates, and if there is any such thing as a collective unconscious, and inherited thoughts (DNA based, not experience). Ultimately, does consciousness survive death of the body, and if so, can thoughts travel llike radio waves, and can some brains tune into the right frequency to receive them.. when iPods came out with no dials and knobs, just finger swiping, I began to think we just MIGHT be able to receive, after all...
But I digress!
In a fictitious world (or in our future?) where technology has advanced enough, AI circuits may not be so different from our neural networks.
Tesla believed that our thoughts could be transmitted as radio signals, he even had a project with giant antennas that would interact with the ionosphere and connect us all in a kind of "organic internet". Unfortunately he died without making it happen.
And undoubtedly, evolution must leave some trait of thought in our DNA, but perhaps we do not know how to access that information, although there may be special people who do and we see them as witches or something like that.
Ooh, I need to save a copy of this comment in a safe place. I've seen the Tesla coil at the Chicago Museum of Industry, but didn't catch all this awesome stuff about Tesla devising an organic internet. Trees apparently have a kind of internet, a communication system. @crescendoofpeace will likely know exactly what science story I'm talking about. Mindblowing! And what you say about those mistaken for witches, or fortune tellers, or mental cases - I soooo want to believe there really are people with extra-sensory perception, and that they're perceiving spirits of our lost loved ones...
Okay, clearly I need to send you the link to my entry for Jerry Banfield's Spiritual Writing Contest, not long after I started on Steemit.
I grew up in a house with a poltergeist, and later lived in a house that was seriously haunted, and every one of us had our own experiences (me and three roommates).
And my whole family, and several friends, have varying degrees of the sight, and Marek has been trying to convince me that I'm a witch (in a good way) for over a decade.
;-)
I remember that contest! I don't remember how many entries I read. Only yesterday my niece said she takes it as a compliment if someone calls her a witch (due to her herbology and tarot cards). I'm in awe of all who see ghosts and poltergeists and wonder if I'll ever encounter any. Even my sister in Germany seems to have run into a few. I've heard that in the American South, spirituality is more developed or more sensitive, so seeing ghosts is almost not at all unusual, or not unbelievable, while I'm surrounded by people of German farmer descent, pragmatics who never seem to see the paranormal. My mom says it's all the work of the devil, and the living are never to seek contact with the dead. Maybe she's got prayers of protection over me so that I never sense ghosts and such. Who knows. I'll have to find your contest entry, though chances are good, I read it ... and just can't remember even a fraction of what I read. Even things I love and hand-write notes into a spiral notebook for future reference. I 'll come across these notebooks and be amazed that I could have forgotten so many great insights I meant to internalize and remember. Blessed are they who see beyond the walls and REMEMBER things. :)
Lolol, I can totally relate on not remembering the insights I jot down specifically so that I'll remember them. Story of my life. ;-)
And yeah, having grown up with a poltergeist, which our whole family was aware of, gave me a childhood where it actually took me a while to realize that it wasn't the norm for everyone.
My whole family had the gift, as have many of my friends, but with the exception of a couple of noticable incidents, I've only rarely seen anything.
I'm more likely to feel or, more occasionally, hear things, which I've sometimes brushed off as unimportant until whatever it was got more insistent.
I am fortunate in that I've only had experiences with benevolent spirits, if that's even what they are . . . I don't pretend to be able to explain it, I just know what I've personally experienced.
I have a close friend who had experiences with something that was decidedly not benevolent, and she still.has trouble speaking about it with any objectivity.
Thanks all the same, but I'll stick with the nice ones.
;-)
I'll look for the link later and post it here. It's long, but I think, pretty interesting.
And I agree with your niece, I don't mind when someone calls me a witch.
As my eldest sister put it, it's actually an acronym:
Woman
In
Total
Control of
Herself.
Yes. ^^^^ That.
I LOVE IT!!!
The witch acronym, the fact that even you forget the insights you jot down and save to remember later (then don't, oop), and the poltergeist, and some are not so benign... I suppose I am blessed if I am unable to discern these paranormal or other-wordly beings in our midst. I'm tormented to think of invisible radio waves passing through walls and our bodies and traveling all the way to outer space (how long before these electromagnetic waves just die out??). To think we might walk right through sentient beings the way we see in movies.... how often do I use that term Mind Blowing ... my brain must be a flat tire, blown, and I must never get it re-inflated properly. :)
Ahahaha, 500 words are over... I must say you've tied up not only the prompt but also the rules with your story. Quite well written and deserving of the @curie!
Though a bit late, it is never too late to welcome you @carolkean! Happy to have you in the realm!
Hello @carolkean, thank you for sharing this creative work! We just stopped by to say that you've been upvoted by the @creativecrypto magazine. The Creative Crypto is all about art on the blockchain and learning from creatives like you. Looking forward to crossing paths again soon. Steem on!
#GottaLove #CreativeCrypto!
Thank you!
Read it again, with the same result. This process-oriented writing is so hard to understand. It's like everybody knows some hidden key that, once overlayed over the story, makes it understandable. But it's very frustrating when you don't have it. (