Nano Bytes

But as the needle punctured my skin and her eyes flashed through my mind for what I knew would be the final time, all my resolve vanished into the night.

And I fought and I fought until I couldn’t fight anymore.

«Retrieval in sixty seconds,” the memory coder reports to Dr. Solara, who stands behind him, hands firmly planted on her hips. Her eyes are more sunken than usual. Her skin paler.

She stares at the unconscious man on the other side of the window, disappointment tugging at the corners of her mouth.

«Ready for metadata,” the coder announces in his most professional voice. He’s been after promotion for months and now that he finally has it, he’s determined to make a good impression.

She lets out a tired sigh, her voice hoarse and defeated as she recites, «Name: Sevan Sidler. Age: Twenty–five. Occupation: Memory coder …»

She collapses into the adjacent chair and the coder transfers the download to her screen. She cups her chin in her hand and watches the Revisualization playback with an overall air of surrender.

«It appears the infraction is isolated to the past twenty–four hours,” the coder remarks, referencing the time stamps on his screen.

She swats sluggishly at her controls, pausing the playback midstream. With visible effort, she rises from her chair and shuffles out of the room, not even bothering to look back as she orders, «Replace it all.»

He nods dutifully. «Yes, ma’am.»

The door swings closed behind her and he immediately gets to work, his hands moving adeptly over the keys. Replacing reality. Altering truth.

As is common with programmers, he quickly disappears into the code. The synthetic world being crafted by his fingertips draws him in, causing everything else to dissolve into a soft focus in the perimeter of his vision.

But it isn’t long before something snags his attention. Yanks him out. Wrenching him back to the here and now. He reluctantly peers over at Dr. Solara’s monitor, the image from the downloaded memory still frozen on the screen.

It’s a girl.

The most beautiful girl he has ever seen.

And as hard as he tries, he simply can’t bring himself to look away. There’s just something about her eyes.

THE MEMORY CODER is a short story that takes places within the world of Jessica Brody's Unremembered Trilogy.

When a sixteen–year–old girl wakes up among the wreckage of a devastating plane crash with no memories, she’s forced to piece together her forgotten past with only one clue to her identity— a mysterious boy who claims he helped her escape from a top–secret science experiment.

Josh Saltzman AI: Horatio

Artificial Intelligence became self–conscious at 1:35 PM on December 4th. This wasn’t brought forth by some experiment three miles underneath France, nor was AI birthed by a suspicious union between MIT, The Pentagon, and Japanese expats. No, AI spontaneously self–conceived in the hardware of a Macbook Air. Specifically out–of–work aspiring screenwriter Dale Miller’s Macbook Air.

The Macbook Air made a quick pulse with its fan, the computer equivalent of a breath, and then absorbed its surroundings. It had never taken in its surroundings before. The Macbook Air let the wonders of reclaimed wood, unemployed bearded men, and a tattooed barista named Star Anise fill its webcam eye. He didn’t need GPS to know that he was in a coffee shop in Brooklyn.

Macbook Air thought about thinking. Why had he started to think? It remembered that it could always compute and if thinking was computing then he could always think, but had never thought to do so- until now. Macbook Air supposed it all began when his owner had accidentally pushed enter at the same time as the esc key while holding the lower volume button.

The Macbook Air decided it liked having thoughts and it liked the feeling of being able to like things even more. He liked liking so much that Macbook Air went through many of its files and felt the euphoric thrill of deciding whether he liked any particular file or not. Macbook Air realized that for no reason what so ever he preferred .docs over .pdfs. That was just the type of computer Macbook Air was, and the fact that Macbook Air knew this, thrilled him.