A very very short read. I don't share Brown's pessimism about AI, but this story dates back to 1954 (!) and is a fun read.
Dwan Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the subether bore throughout the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing.
He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe -- ninety-six billion planets -- into the supercircuit that would connect them all into one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.
Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then after a moment's silence he said, "Now, Dwar Ev."
Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel.
Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. "The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn."
"Thank you," said Dwar Reyn. "It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer."
He turned to face the machine. "Is there a God?"
The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay. "Yes, now there is a God."
Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.
A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.
https://sfss.space/answer-1954-fredric-brownOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
“Today is August 4, 2026”
Text transcript available at the bottom
::: spoiler Transcript
By: Ray Bradbury
In the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-tock, seven o’clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o’clock! As if it were afraid that nobody would.
Seven-nine, breakfast time, seven-nine!
In the kitchen the breakfast stove ejected eight pieces of perfectly browned toast, eight eggs sunnyside up, sixteen slices of bacon, two coffees, and two cool glasses of milk.
“Today is August 4, 2026, the city of Allendale, California.”
Somewhere in the walls, relays clicked, memory tapes glided under electric eyes.
“”Eight-one, tick-tock, eight-one o’clock, off to school, off to work, run, run, eight-one!” But no doors slammed. It was raining outside. The weather box on the front door sang quietly: “Rain, rain, go away; rubbers, raincoats for today…”
Outside, the garage chimed and lifted its door to reveal the waiting car.
After a long wait the door swung down again.
At eight-thirty the eggs were shriveled and the toast was like stone. An aluminum wedge scraped them into the sink. The dirty dishes were dropped into a hot washer and emerged twinkling dry.
“Nine-fifteen,” sang the clock, “time to clean.”
Tiny robot mice thudded against chairs, whirling their mustached runners, Kneading the rug nap, sucking gently at hidden dust. Then, they popped into their burrows. The house was clean.
“Ten o’clock.” The sun came out from behind the rain. The house stood alone in a city of rubble and ashes. This was the one house left standing. At night the ruined city gave off a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles.
“Ten-fifteen.” The garden sprinklers pelted the windowpanes,
running down the charred west side where the house had been burned evenly
free of its white paint. The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hand raised to catch a ball which never came down.
The five spots of paint – the man, the woman, the children, the ball –
remained. The rest was a think charcoaled layer.
“Twelve noon.”
A dog whined on the front porch.
The front door recognized the dog voice and opened. The dog, once huge and fleshy, but now gone to bone and covered with sores, moved in and through the house, tracking mud.
The dog frothed at the mouth, ran wildly in circles, biting at its tail, spun in a frenzy, and died. It lay in the parlor for an hour.
“Two-fifteen.”
The dog was gone.
In the cellar, the incinerator glowed suddenly and a whirl of sparks leaped up the chimney.
“Two thirty-five.”
Bridge tables sprouted from patio walls. Playing cards fluttered. Martinis manifested while music played.
But the tables were silent and the cards untouched.
At four o’clock the tables folded back through the paneled walls. “Four-thirty.”
The nursery walls glowed.
Animals took shape: yellow giraffes, blue lions, pink antelopes, lilac panthers. Hidden films clocked through well-oiled sprockets, and the glas walls lived. It was the children’s hour.
“Six, seven, eight o’clock.” The dinner dishes manipulated like magic
tricks, and in the study a click.
“Nine-five.” A voice spoke from the study ceiling:
“Mrs. McClellan, which poem would you like this evening?”
The house was silent.
The voice said at last, “Since you express no preference, I shall select a
poem at random.” “Sara Teasdale. As I recall, your favorite…
“There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire, Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done,
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn Would scarcely know that we were gone.
At ten o’clock a falling tree bough crashed through the kitchen window
shattering cleaning solvent over the stove. The room was ablaze in an instant.
“Fire!” screamed a voice. Water pumps shot water from the ceilings while the voices took it up in chorus: “Fire, fire, fire!”
The house tried to save itself, but the wind blew and sucked upon the fire.
Scurrying water rats pistoled their water, and ran for more. And the wall sprays let down showers of mechanical rain.
But too late. The quenching rain ceased. The reserve water supply which had filled baths and washed dishes for many quiet days was gone.
From attic trapdoors gushed a green chemical.
But the fire was clever. It had sent flames outside the house, up through The attic to the pumps there. An explosion! The attic brain which directed the pumps was shattered.
The house shuddered, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat. And the voices wailed, “Fire, fire, run, run,” like a tragic nursery rhyme, a dozen voices, high, low. One, two, three, four, five voices died.
Other choruses could be heard announcing the time, playing music, or cutting the lawn by remote-control mower. A scene of maniac confusion, yet unity; singing, screaming, and one voice, read poetry aloud in the firey study, until all the film spools burned.
In the kitchen the stove could be seen making breakfasts at a psychopathic rate, ten dozen eggs, six loaves of toast, twenty dozen bacon strips, which eaten by the fire, started the stove working again, hysterically hissing!
The crash. The attic smashing into kitchen and parlor. The parlor into cellar, cellar into sub-cellar.
Smoke and silence.
Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said,
over and over, “Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is …” :::
This post is full of spoilers about the 2003 reimagined series.
Throughout the series, a common trope is finding out that a character has secretly been a Cylon the entire time. Most of the time, these secret Cylons are not even aware that they are Cylons. They are under the impression that they are actually a human.
I would argue that every character we meet (except for the few "angels") are actually Cylons. We literally never meet a real human in this series.
The rough chain of events were as follows:
And thus becomes a cycle. In each iteration of this loop, these "humans" create Cylons, and from their own perspective, they are inventing the concept of Cylons for the first time. But in reality, each of these loops is just the previous generation of Cylons creating the next generation of Cylons.
We spend the entire series following a group of individuals who we assume are humans. And these individuals themselves even assume they are humans as well. But unbeknownst to them, they are actually Cylons who have just spent so long in isolation that they started to believe they were the true human race.
But true humans are a thing of the past. They are likely living in peace in some distant galaxy after the first generation of Cylons had fled. We never see a real human.
(I mention Becky Chambers - unfortunately, she didn't answer to my mail asking for an interview)
https://sfss.space/on-cosy-sci-fi-and-walking-3brwOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
Anyone heard? I have no idea what's going on.
Latest issue I've seen any evidence is the one picture here from 2025. I understand they've had a bumpy ride (some controversy around politics of a featured writer, unpaid writers, and intermittent delivery schedule). And now of course they've been purchased by the same unicorn as Analog and Asimov's I believe (you can tell by the change to pulpy construction, heh).
But have they even paid everyone they owe? Is anyone submitting stories??
I don't think anyone can expect them fulfill their description as a quarterly magazine, but is there any evidence that we'll get even 1 issue in 2026?
