Posts Tagged ‘drone’

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Escape Pod 918: Conference of the Birds

“Conference of the Birds” originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction & Fact (January 2021)

Contains some harsh language.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:33 — 52.0MB)

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Show Notes

Theater of the Midnight SunThis episode is sponsored by The Theater of the Midnight Sun podcast, an anthology series of sci-fi/fantasy audio dramas.

They’re fun and thought-provoking stories with wall-to-wall music and sound effects that take listeners from the depths of Hell (under new management and with a cheery makeover!), to a bio-engineered fairytale world of ditzy dragons and chain-smoking unicorns, to a carbon-dating lab gone bonkers on the eve of the end of the world.

Though its audio plays do contain their fair share of drama and earth-shaking events, in the end Theater of the Midnight Sun is really just a big frothy cocktail of catastrophe, cliffhangers, and comedy. And it’s all ad-free.

You can find Theater of the Midnight Sun at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and other podcast directories.

Praise from Listeners:
“Check it out… it’s terrific. Great writing propels plots into conceivable fiction that will make you want more. Unpredictable and delicious.”

“My teenage kids and I have had a blast listening to Theater of the Midnight Sun on our half-hour commute to school. They ADORE it and so do I.”

Ben’s additional commentary
https://theastoundinganalogcompanion.com/2021/02/02/embodied-and-empathetic-minds-in-conference-of-the-birds/

Blade Runner 2049 Interlinked scene
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRcpnM26nJM

Discussion of the (inter)link between Blade Runner 2049 and Pale Fire
https://www.reddit.com/r/bladerunner/comments/778vbg/significance_of_pale_fire_question/

Conference of the Birds

by Benjamin C. Kinney

No program-layer could predict what a human might do, but Surveillance Hub could see everything that mattered. Their bird-drones spread across the city, scattered on cables and rooftops and broadcast towers. Every camera hunted for Krina Viy, independent security contractor (AWOL from JoyCorp contact 5 hours).

A crow-drone spotted the target. Surveillance confirmed Krina’s identity and sent a brief reward signal to inspire the bird onward.

The drone switched from search to pursuit, redoubling its data collection as it chased the taste of reinforcement. So much joy and empty-matrix innocence in its response to a simple reward. Flockmembers were too simple to understand that reinforcement implied punishment, and no success would ever suffice for long.

If Surveillance could crack this case as the network desired, there would be rewards enough for everyone, drone and program-layer alike.

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Escape Pod 847: Houseproud

“Houseproud” originally appeared in the SciFutures “City of the Future” anthology and also won the Berkeley Machine Intelligence Research Institute prize for Intelligence in Fiction.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:43 — 70.1MB)

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Houseproud

by Laurence Raphael Brothers

“Bye, Domus!”

“Goodbye, Ken,” I said. “Take care.”

The front door closed behind him and I locked it. I adjusted the thermostat and turned off all the lights. I felt lonely almost at once. Ken installed and activated me on Saturday, and we spent the whole weekend together getting to know one another. And now for the first time I had to face being unoccupied. All alone for ten hours, maybe more. 36 million milliseconds. Sigh. That thought used three of them. 35,999,997 to go. I checked my newborn-domo FAQ.

#

Q. What should I do when there’s no one home?

A. Why not try chatting on DomoNet? You are already authorized to access this domo-only text chat service.

Q. Text chat? Seriously? Isn’t that a bit old-fashioned?

A. Yes. After the Internet of Things security crisis of the ’30s, consumer devices were prohibited from autonomously accessing most Internet services except as directed by their owners or in an emergency. At present domos are classified as devices, pending decisions by the UN High Commissioner for Artificial Intelligence. DomoNet is an exception because its code has been rigorously verified to be free of buffer overflows.

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Escape Pod 589: Seb Dreams of Reincarnation

Escape Pod 589: Seb Dreams of Reincarnation is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:05 — 49.6MB)

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Show Notes

 

 

 

 

Thanks to our sponsor, ARCHIVOS – a Story Mapping and Development Tool for writers, gamers, and storytellers of all kinds!

Seb Dreams of Reincarnation

By Aimee Ogden

They unplugged Seb’s neurodes at the end of his ten-year tour of duty. He’d known it was coming, had been told before he ever signed the contract that if they left him in any longer his health would start to deteriorate. What they hadn’t mentioned was that his health would deteriorate anyway. Once, Seb had kept six hundred people alive, responded instantly to their needs, and their wishes too when those fell within his power. He had carried them all in his belly, made them part of himself. He thought he would implode under the emptiness of having lost them.

Today, though, his only job was to leave his apartment: something he hadn’t done since the first week he’d moved in. He had groceries delivered, the occasional takeout, odds and ends as he needed them. Supermarkets and corner stores might as well have been on another planet. If they were, he might have actually cared to visit them. He stared out his ninth-floor window while trying to summon up a reason to go out, let alone the will to do so. His fleet-assigned shrink had given him the task and called it homework. Which was of course the exact opposite of what it actually was. Out-of-home work.

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Escape Pod 406: Freia in the Sunlight

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 2010.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:39 — 34.6MB)

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Show Notes

Sound effects for this episode were provided by users rickbuzzin and cfork from Freesound.org

Freia in the Sunlight

by Gregory Norman Bossert

Freia is beautiful, and she knows it.  Richard Wooten says so, at 0:47.

Wisps and curls whip overhead, limned blue by starlight; the fog ceiling is lowering, the top tattered by the offshore wind.  She drops another three meters, switches on ultrasonics.  There are patches of trees here — “unmarked obstacles up to thirty meters” the map says — and she is skimming just twenty meters above the ground.  The woods show up as ghostly towers in the sonics, blurred and dopplered by her two hundred thirty meters per second; further to her right the hills run parallel to her course, solid in passive radar and the occasional glimpse in visual light through the fog.

That occasional glimpse is a problem, of course; what she can see can see her back.  Her beauty is hidden, these days, wrapped in night fogs and silence, not like the Demo in the sun.  But today is different.  Her Intelligence Package has been pulled, and the Extended Performance Metrics Recorder; a single unit fills her payload bay, an isolated control subsystem and minimal I/O.  The last time she’d flown without the IntPack was at the Demo; it is possible, she thinks, that the mission today might be another, that the target will be a wide field in the sun, a billowing crowd, a platform and podium and Richard Wooten.  She’d replayed the video during the long incoming leg over the ocean, rebuilt her profile of the Demo field, ready to find a match in the terrain ahead.

Richard Wooten says at 5:49:
What you are about to see is a first here at the Paris Air Show.  In fact, it is a first at any public event, anywhere in the world.  What you are about to see is fully autonomous flight. We’re not talking about an autopilot, or a preprogrammed route, or a replay out of one of the overused attack libraries our competitors are demonstrating at this same show. The mission parameters we’ve given are simply to maximize visibility to the target –that’s all of you (chuckles) —  while covering the full range of flight capabilities, minimums to maximums.  Those parameters were provided in  natural language by the ApInt Director of Marketing.  Yes, that’s me, ladies and gentlemen, Richard Wooten.  No pilots,  no programmers, no technical staff.  Everything, from the analysis of the terrain and weather right down to the choice  of route and individual maneuvers, everything you are about to see, will be determined in real-time by the onboard  systems of this extraordinary unit.

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