The Girlfriend From Another…

Posted by Lolita under Sci-fi on Saturday Jun 20, 2009

The Girlfriend From Another Planet by Tom Lombardi -  By the time I reached spaceport security I’d taken to smiling idiotically in all directions so as to give the cameras the impression I was innocent. According to my screenwork, I was headed to Saturn to conduct “research” for the science corporation where I worked. In actuality, I’d registered with an underground, interplanetary dating service. Along with getting arrested, I worried the alien creature from Saturn with whom I’d been retina-messaging all week — her name was Z)(Z — was actually a he, or worse, a kidnapper looking to sell my body parts to some illegal market.

    Sex with a female from this particular region on Saturn allegedly bordered on the implausible. In the last message, Z)(Z had explained that on her planet group sex was common. While she’d never done it with one mate, the prospect of it excited her greatly. I’d never had sex with a group, I’d messaged her. It’s not that great, she messaged back. What I hadn’t told her is that since my marriage of twelve years ended, I couldn’t stop obsessing about my soon-to-be-ex wife; and that I was hoping an alien might free me from this affliction.

I was removing my Molar PC, no longer worried about getting caught when the security guy’s wand beeped near my buttocks. “Oh that,” I laughed, “it’s my iPod.”

 
 
“I’m afraid we’re going to have to scan your pants, sir.”
    ”Look, I realize you’re just doing your job, but I if I don’t make this ship, my .

. . my boss will kill me.”
    A younger security guard walked over and said, “That the new iPod Hemorrhoid?”
    ”Yes!”
    ”How is it?”
    ”Great,” I said, my heart rattling, “I mean, a little weird at first, but once you get used to the vibration it’s . . . cool.”
    ”Cool?” the older guard said, “what’re you — some kind of Democrat?


    ”Nah,” I laughed, annoyed, “my nephew says that word a lot. It’s back in fashion, I think.” Re-inserting my Molar PC, I was tempted to tell him my grandfather had been one of the last Democrats who had died during the revolution. I kept quiet and hurried for the gate, anxious to leave this godforsaken planet.

Once I settled into my seat on the ship, thoughts of my wife resurfaced. I called her. When she answered, I thought, “Hey.


     “Oh,” she thought back, her tone somewhat muted, “hi.”
     “You with him?” I thought.
    ”Why are you torturing yourself like this?”
    ”Why are you answering then, huh?”
    A high-pitched ring triggered in my head.
    ”Sir!” thought the steward, “the Pilotor has alerted us that we are about to launch.

You are violating PAA code.”
    ”Sweetie!” I thought. She was gone.
    ”And sir?”
    ”Yes?”
    ”Don’t call me sweetie.”
    Prick. I pressed the call button and another steward rushed over to my seat. “Excuse me,” I said, “can I have the medicine dispenser . . . I mean, like, right now?”
    Seconds later, she dropped a dispenser on my lap.

It was much smaller than most spacelines but whatever, I typed: “escape” and watched little Pf spin around until it said, “Try again. Sorry.” I typed: “pining after wife . . .  horny sad lonely thirsty worried

forehead sweat.” The little Pf spun around on the screen and then a purple pill slid into the tray. The purple kind always made me ill. I swallowed it, anyway . . . and awoke to the Pilotor speaking in my head: “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Saturn.”
    The spaceport looked like any other spaceport, really. We were escorted by your basic robot through a hallway whose walls seemed to emanate an astonishingly comforting light.

We were led to another craft whose seats came equipped with medicine dispensers. I immediately typed “escape.” This time, the familiar pink pill slid into the tray and I ate it. Seconds later, I was a velvet blanket lying alone in sun-drenched field, just happy to be alive.

Z)(Z was approximately sixteen feet tall, with eyes the size of grapefruits, and skin covered in pastel spots that, although I couldn’t be sure, may have changed shapes every so often. Instead of feet, her arms and legs came to an elegant point I found erotic.

We rode in her little craft in silence. Frankly, I felt like a child in the gigantic seat. When we exited the tunnel from the spaceport, I almost fainted at the beauty of the sky. It was a lemon color infused with red veins that flashed intermittently. I began to weep uncontrollably.
    ”It’s the air pressure,” she said, peering down at me with her gargantuan eyes.
    I nodded, convinced my sadness had managed to trump the air pressure.

It suddenly dawned on me we were moving along water.
    ”My brother,” she said, “works for the government, and often flies to your planet. It can be exhausting.”
    The structures we passed were infinitely high and supported by translucent beams that reflected the red veins of light.
    ”To be perfectly honest,” I said, trying to sound inoffensive, “I guess I never considered the height factor a — ”
    ”Factor?


    ”Yes,” I laughed. “by the way, your translator mechanism is excellent.”
    ”I sense you’re feeling emasculated by my height.”
    ”I don’t know . . . I think I could be into it.” I reached over and touched her thigh; it was the size of a tree, the skin slippery.
    ”I sense you miss someone from the past.”
    ”Jesus, you sense a lot.


    ”Mostly, you worry she doesn’t miss you.”
    I nodded, wondering why we were the only craft on the water. Maybe she was kidnapping me!
    ”Still,” she went on, “with all this confusion in your head, you still want to sleep with me.”
    I laughed.
    ”It’s okay. I’d like to sleep with you as well.”
    ”Great,” I said, worrying I’d be one or two yards shorter than what she was used to.

“Your kind are very direct. I like that.”
    She pulled over to one of the beams whose top rose into the sky. After a distinctive click, we rocketed into the air so rapidly that my head began to expand.

“There’s not much time,” she said.
    ”You mean, I could get arrested?”
    ”It’s illegal here to have sex with just one being.


    ”It’s illegal where I’m from to have sex without being married to one being. But everyone does it. My best friend recently got eight years for fingering with intent to coital. He’ll be out in three with good behavior, but still . . .”
    Her grapefruit eyes looked at me with tremendous compassion. I had so many questions, but like any encounter with a foreigner, I didn’t want the situation the turn into a discussion panel.

    ”Lie on the bed,” she said. “There isn’t much time.”
    ”Where are we?” I asked, beginning to fear the worst again.
    ”The house of my family.”
    The bed was the size of some people’s front yards. “I kind of thought we’d go for a walk or something, you know, get to know each other?”
    She instructed me to lie down, at which point she stood over me.

Suddenly, my whole body got sucked up inside her. Then my entire body stiffened, and I became so numb with pleasure I began to lose consciousness.
    ”Quiet,” I heard her say from outside.
    I awoke from a nap of some sort, somewhat delirious. Another creature, only slightly shorter and with less spots, stood beside Z)(Z. “This is my mother,” she said.
    I waved casually.
    ”She’d like to spend some time with you on the bed.


    ”She what?”
    The mother’s eyes blinked slowly. “She comes from a different planet, where one-on-one sex with the daughter’s mate was common. Unfortunately, her kind were decimated by a long war.”
    ”That is unfortunate,” I said, picturing my wife’s mother.
    ”Don’t worry,” Z)(Z said, “I’ll be right here.”
    I felt an overwhelming sense of peace in the room.

    The mother now stood over me, lowering her body onto my head. “Should I?” I said, “hold — ” Again, I got sucked inside, except this time it smelled a little more musky. As my body grew stiff, something crept up my ass, it felt like a leaf or something. It tickled, and I welcomed the pleasure . . . until it bit me. “Ow!” I screamed. My legs began to tremble, and I worried I might die. I called my wife. Luckily, she picked up. “Hi,” I thought.

    ”Where are you?” she thought, “you sound like you’re in a tunnel.”
    ”I just want you to know I’ll always love you.”
    ”I know, sweetie but. . . maybe it’s time you’ve moved on.”
    ”Don’t — ” The connection failed.
    I slipped out of the mother and onto the bed. I grew sleepy again, from thoughts of my wife or this experience I wasn’t sure.

Were they drugging me? I instantly regretted having called my wife. Still, I tried not to be mad at myself for trying. “I think I want to stay here!” I blurted. The mother said something in a sound I found utterly soothing. “My mother senses you are drowning in a past love. She’d like to offer you what you would call a ‘mineral’ to rid yourself of this affliction.”
    ”No!” I whined, “I’ll manage to get through it on my own. I’m tired of fucking pills!”
    ”Good choice,” Z)(Z said, “because the mineral was death.

But our kind usually transcends to another planet after we die. What place would you transcend to?”
    I lay there, too tired to answer.
    ”You must be hungry,” Z)(Z said.
    ”Yes. So long as I stay away from your mother’s ‘minerals.’”
    ”Come with us,” she said, ignoring my joke, “you can eat something, and meet my father.”
    ”Uh,” I said, “on second thought —”
    ”Don’t worry,” she said, “he won’t touch you like that. ”
    It took some strength, but I stood up. They’d begun to converse casually in that strange language. I enjoyed being in their company, I decided. Though I was deathly tired, I suddenly found myself running across the gigantic bed to reach them, trying not to stumble atop the soft cushioning.

ADD COMMENTS | Tags : , , , , ,

The Man Who Killed

Posted by deface under Sci-fi on Saturday Jun 13, 2009

The Man Who Killed (And Saved) Wall Street by Joel Stein – It turns out Mike Derjerlain-Reet-Swenson-Chang doesn’t much care about celebrities. “Five years ago, I knew nothing,” he says. “Sure, I had a subscription to Star magazine, but that was only because I didn’t have time to read the front page of the New York Times every day, and I didn’t want to seem like an idiot.”
    Derjerlain’s interest was simply saving his ass.

He came up with Franklin Templeton’s Celebrity Fund — a portfolio consisting solely of used celebrity items — because it couldn’t be indexed. “We were getting slaughtered, us fund managers,” he said over a plain foamy blended mixed organic. “You came up with the craziest portfolio you could think of [Derjerlain spent two years running Templeton's derivative of Venezuelan plastic surgery malpractice insurance], and, whatever it was, within two months Fidelity and Vanguard had an index fund that undercut your costs and kicked your ass.

It’s humiliating getting beaten by a computer program. Hell, it’s why Kasparov killed himself. It was either that or figuring out that no matter how famous you are for playing chess, it ain’t going to get you laid.” For a guy who spends his days trying to coax Karate Lohan into selling the kiddie ballet shoes her mom bought her, Derjerlain still has the sense of humor of an old-school trader. 
    Though many see Derjerlain as the executioner of Wall Street — turning it from a number-crunching, testosterone-fueled Gordon Gekko den to just one more female-dominated, intuition-driven collaborative business — he sees himself as a savior from the place’s indexing formulas.

“The writing was on the wall, sensei. We were disappearing. Like the search engine guys of the ’20s, the rappers of the ’10s, the American car companies of the ’00s. It was over.”
    He got the idea for the Celebrity Fund — which closed last November at $200 billion — from a Wall Street Journal story in January of 2029 which reported that intimate items from celebrities had risen in value more than the rupee in the previous five years: “Smart parents, including the Hanson-Hernandez-Wu-Stinkels of Woodside, have diversified part of their children’s college fund, in items like the thong Dakota Fanning wore in her first accidentally released sex video (purchased in 2026 by Dave Hanson-Hernandez-Wu-Stinkel for $6,400, now valued at $20,000), and even the handcrafted, shogun-era reproduction sword Michael Jackson used to attempt seppuku (purchased by Mr.

Hanson in October 2029 for $70,000 already worth $100,000) before Mr. Jackson’s pet monkey stopped him, put the sword away in a safe place and then shot him with a gun (which Mr. Hanson got outbid on by the PETA party, which paid $180,000).”
    ”The first item I bought for the fund,” Derjerlain says, “was the pair of sunglasses worn by that woman who was the first model

They can make up to $400,000 a year, depending on bonuses, which are often paid out in celebrity undergarments.

on a billboard advertisement featuring a money shot. Remember when that was a controversy?” Within a year, Morningstar had given his fund five stars, and Harvard became a major investor — a full year before they started their Celebrity Culture department.
    At the time Templeton partner James Voyles-Crane-Gorker-Oakaku thought Derjerlain was wasting his time with a obscure niche fund for risk takers, like real estate.

“I knew he was onto something big when James Cameron decided to make Titanic 2 just so Mikey could buy up all the costumes. I mean, there was no other point to that movie. They spent the first hour explaining how an iceberg could still exist today. But the costumes were huge.”
    The real breakthrough came with Derjerlain figured out that every item needed DNA verification. The buying and selling — which can amount to 1,200 transactions a day — is all done on eBay by a team of 100 specialists, mostly women in their late 40s who work at home.

They can make up to $400,000 a year, depending on bonuses, which are often paid out in celebrity undergarments.
    Derjerlain is sure the celebrity investment field will continue to grow. Fifty years ago, he points out, celebrities only did three things: act, sing and play sports. “Before Bob Vila, there wasn’t a single celebrity handyman. Crazy, right? And before Julia Child, chefs weren’t famous. Before Hsu Wang, no kid had a poster in her room of a computer-chip engineer.

Before 2020, the average person couldn’t name a single font maker, and those people used their names for the fonts. That generation had no information. People — educated people — didn’t even know what a gaffer did, much less name one.”
    That was a time when a really enterprising celebrity didn’t do more than write a children’s book, open a restaurant, paint and run a used-car dealership. “Things have changed so much. Why can’t a chef act? Why can’t a multi-national CEO be on the karaoke circuit?

Can an ultimate fighter knit on a professional level? I think Tank Boutros-Thant-Singer-Wishman answered that.”

By next year, you won’t be doing anything that isn’t celebrity branded.

    Investment potential was high because celebrity had infiltrated the culture on a deeply personal level.

A 2029 Derjerlain poll showed that 62 percent of Americans had met at least one celebrity, and 97 percent had one as a MySpace friend they regularly messaged. “Think about this: Name a major American city without a washed-up celebrity mayor. That’s because when they hit the E List and stop being able to get reservations at Wolfgang Puck’s Tofuria, they have to move somewhere people still care about them. And if they weren’t big-time, you can rule out the entire West and Northeast,” Derjerlain said.

“Right now Cincinnati has seven deputy mayors, six of whom were former American Idols. That place is a craphole.”
    By next year, Derjerlain predicts, you won’t be doing anything that isn’t celebrity branded. “Why are you buying hydrogen at Exxon when you could be filling up at Tom Hanks and Son? Why wouldn’t you want your hydrogen choice to say something about who you are?”
    For now, Derjerlain, famous for his playboy lifestyle, including a penthouse in Spanish Harlem and a mansion in Encino, is elusive about his next fund.

“It’s futures agenting,” he explains. “I buy a toque from a hot chef in Ghana, I move him to New York and, if I got it right, that toque goes from $100 to $20,000. Only I have 400 of his toques. As long as I’m watching him, that guy doesn’t use a toque twice.”
    And even if this kind of speculation backfires, Derjerlain doesn’t seem worried about finding a way to make money. Now, he’s famous.

ADD COMMENTS | Tags : , , , ,

The Upgrade 2033

Posted by Lolita under Sci-fi on Monday Jun 1, 2009

The Upgrade 2033 by Karl Iagnemma -  Things were pretty good until 2033.
    In fact, things were really good until 2033. I was living in Pasadena, in those days. The weather was a weird, wonderful joke. I was twenty-five, hanging on to some leftover muscle from USC, driving a ‘31 Chery Stallion and spending weekends in a haze of Stim. I was still doing the assistant manager thing at RoboMaxx, but the hours were decent and the employee discount truly rocked — fifteen percent off neuro upgrades, thirty percent off mech mods, thirty percent off cosmetic mods.

My apartment was on the bombed-out end of Colorado Boulevard, but it was huge and the rent was comical and my neighbor was a shy, lovesick vegan named Grace who every Sunday would bake cranberry muffins and bring a platter over for me and Katrina to nibble. (And she really nibbled — I’d had a refurbished stomach mod installed on her the previous August.)
     Weird, wonderful days. I hadn’t dated a woman — a human — since 2025. Susanna, with the dimples and nose hair, the half-insane laugh, the daddy issues.

Oh, Susanna. She’d stood on her chair at Bella Vita and thrown a dirty napkin in my face and said that my soul was ruined. She said that I was psychologically retarded, that I was as emotionless as a bot.
    So the thing was, I didn’t miss women. I didn’t miss the childish flirting, the stupid, expensive gifts, the ridiculous countdown to sex, the endless phone calls and v-chats, the pitiful obsession with money, money, money. How could I miss women? I had my job, I had my apartment, and I had Katrina.

    In the mornings, after I left for work, Katrina would do her recharge thing, then mop the floors and scrub the spotless tub, disinfect the toilet, iron my pit-stained undershirts. In the evening she’d cook dinner — pasta and Mexican and simple stir-fries, since I’d never bothered with a cooking upgrade — and afterwards I’d flop on the sofa with a Stim, and Katrina would start a swaying, humming striptease, her skin caramel-colored and glossy, scarless. She’d flick her g-string at me with her big toe, and she’d giggle.

Pretty soon I’d command her over and we’d get started, me with one eye on the holo, Katrina with her eyes pinched shut and hair whipped into a nest, until eventually she’d look at me with a coy, cat-like grin. “You should finish,” she’d whisper. “My power is pretty low.”
     “Flip over,” I’d say. “Position thirteen. Activity level high.”
     Of course she had 1500 SPI skin and Sugaku touch sensors. She had actual human hair — Indonesian hair, from the lowlands outside Jakarta — and human eyebrows, human lashes.

A Bose voice box let her sing like a

She smiled shyly. “I feel all tingly. I guess you upgraded me, huh?”
soprano, growl like a convict or moan like a desperate virgin.

She had top-end MicroMo servomotors, electroactive actuators in the soft, sensitive places.
     And of course she was gorgeous. I’d spec’d her out as a cross between Irina Porozka and Ginger Newton, with grace notes from the old-school beauties: Hayworth, Monroe, Loren, Jolie. But her fingers were ten millimeters longer than factory spec, her eyes three millimeters wider. She was better than human: more beautiful, crushingly beautiful. Even the hard-core modders at RoboMaxx held their breath when she strolled past.

    I don’t know why I decided to upgrade Katrina. It was August, a hot, pointless Saturday. We were at Federal Mart buying a new q-blocker. The geeks tracked me down in the parking lot, and the taller one, the one with the blood-colored Mohawk, threw his pathetic pitch. “It’s not experimental — it’s pre-release. Big difference, dude. I mean, technically it’s beta, but essentially it’s a finished product — we’re planning to roll it out in November. Just in time for Christmas, or whatever.


     Mohawk’s sidekick was a nervous Filipino with big nostrils. He started babbling about neuro-temporal networks and linguistic trees and contextual tags and runtime efficiencies. He claimed the upgrade would improve Katrina’s reasoning performance by an order of magnitude. He claimed it would improve her perceptual skills to near-human levels.
    I told him I wasn’t sure I wanted near-human levels.
    ”She’ll be more tuned in to your moods — to what you want.

She’ll read you better, dude.”
    That, I wanted. That I seriously wanted.
    They led us to a moldy basement laboratory on the Cal Tech campus, made me sign some papers — a liability waiver, I later learned, for voiding Katrina’s warranty — then Mohawk powered her down, jacked her in, zapped the upgrade, rebooted her mesh. She blinked woozily; then her eyes focused on me. She smiled shyly. “I feel all tingly. I guess you upgraded me, huh?


    The first thing I noticed about Katrina was that she stared at me — during breakfast, during dinner, during sex — and when I issued her a command she paused for a brief second, whiffs of passive aggression rising from her smell emitters. Her technique was unchanged, but there was a glimmer in her eyes, a certain injured pride, that sent me into hard spasms of ecstasy.
    One Saturday six weeks after the upgrade we were lazing on the sofa watching Shame!

The sun was melting into a pink pool; I’d had four Stims and was floating on a gloriously exhausted buzz. Katrina rose from the sofa and stood in front of the holo. “You’re blocking my view,” I said. “Move it.” She stared at me, her left eye twitching — her VisCor vision system fritzing out, I figured — and then her eyebrow arched into a frown.

Katrina had never, not once, frowned. Katrina did not know how to frown.
    ”You treat me like crap,” she said.

    ”I what?”
    ”You treat me like crap.”
    I sat up carefully. “What are you talking about?”
    ”‘Flip over.’ ‘Make dinner.’ ‘Move it.’ You treat me like a . . . like a machine.”
    ”You are a fucking machine!”
    Katrina yanked on her g-string and struggled into her uni, jerked the zipper up to her cleavage.

“You don’t listen to me, you don’t talk to me — you just fuck me. If that’s all you wanted, you should have bought a Vaginator 3000.”
    ”The Vaginator 3000 causes penile lesions.”
    ”You’ve never told me you loved me. Not once, Willie.”
    I should have shut her down. I should have shut her down and dragged her back to Mohawk and Nostrils, forced them to roll back the upgrade, smacked their idiot genius faces.

I could have told her about it afterward, how she’d started acting sketchy and paranoid, how I’d saved her at the last moment. Katrina would have gazed at me, entranced by the story’s drama. To her, it would have seemed like an act of love.
    Instead I said, “Come on, Katrina. Of course I love you. Come on, sit down. For Christ’s sake, we’re missing Shame!
    ”I don’t care about Shame! I care about how you feel, vis-à-vis our relationship!


    I couldn’t stop myself. “Vis-à-vis. Nice. Did you download a free language upgrade?”
    ”You’re making fun of me.”
    Katrina’s voice held a soft, sad note — even though she did not know how to be sad.
    She stood near the inductive charger, shifting her weight from foot to foot. “Stop talking, Katrina. Okay? Stop talking or I’m going to shut you off.

Sleep mode, now.”
    ”I don’t want to stop talking,” she said.

Everything is newer, brighter, faster, smaller — but they never mention that in the end it’s still up to you, you, you.

    She walked slowly away. I heard her rummaging in the bedroom — for what? I wondered, until I remembered the portable charger stowed beneath the bed. I stood up. The front door slammed. I peeled open another Stim. The Shame! laugh track filled the apartment.
    I gave her an hour, then a day, then a week.

A $98,000 bot doesn’t just stroll away, does it? I called General Robotics that next Tuesday. Yes, she’d run away. No, I hadn’t commanded her to leave. Yes, I had her ID frequency. No, she’d never done this before.
    Had I upgraded her mesh with non-certified code?
    I hung up the phone. As I did, the truth struck me: I’d been ditched by a robot. I peeled a Stim and cranked the holo’s volume, and when Grace tapped on the door I shouted at her to mind her own business.

I got baked that night, alone. I woke the next morning, alone, showered and ate breakfast, alone. I was late for my shift at RoboMaxx and got written up, and when the manager heard me whisper “dickwad” I got written up a second time.
    Fucking technology. Everything is newer, brighter, faster, smaller — but they never mention that in the end it’s still up to you, you, you. It’s been five months and still I can’t decide what to do. Do I buy a new Katrina — I can lease a GenRob SL3500 for $1,750 a month — or do I get a haircut and some decent jeans, head to the bars at the secure end of Colorado?

Lately I’ve been feeling curious about women — about humans. What do they expect from me, from themselves, from each other, from the world? It’s been so long since I’ve been with a woman that I barely remember the words. Please. Allow me. I am sorry. I would be delighted.
    It’s Sunday. The door to Grace’s apartment is open. I hear her footsteps, her radio, her quiet singing. I smell her muffins rising.

ADD COMMENTS | Tags : , , ,