It’s like I got a vacation to the tropics for Christmas, but the hot temperatures are all internal and the vomiting comes without drinking.
I was wondering if having a high fever on Christmas day was going to lead me into some Dickens-style ghostly visitations, but instead all I was haunted by was Foreigner’s “Hot Blooded”. (I hate that song.)
The scheduled shows are delayed till tomorrow – I apologize.
Taken today, at the center of the consumer madness.
Tonight’s Flash Pulp will be posted on Sunday, as the whole crew is down with a bad case of the egg nog. To make up for our poor work ethic, on this, the most Victorian of holidays, we’ll also be releasing FlashCast 003 on the same evening.
Till then, blogging will be incidental at best, but know that we love you.
In the mean time, to fill your pulpy needs, why not browse the archive (or on iTunes), or check out our yule–related episodes?
I myself am about to depart to undertake the annual viewing of MST3k’s Santa Claus Conquers The Martians.
Feel free to join us:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzw0dFx8HSA]
As I promised earlier in the week, I set myself to updating the last few Ruby stories, so that their hand-written notes were in place.
I owe a big thanks to Opop for playing catch up, as here they are:
So, about last night:
Forget the Turing test; humanity isn’t going to accept any machine as sentient until it’s been convicted of a murder.
Welcome to Flash Pulp, episode one hundred and ten.
Tonight we present Deliberation, Part 1 of 1
[audio:http://traffic.libsyn.com/skinner/FlashPulp110.mp3]Download MP3
(RSS / iTunes)
This week’s episodes are brought to you by the the new Nutty Bites Podcast
Flash Pulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age – three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings.
Tonight, we present a tale of futuristic justice.
Flash Pulp 110 – Deliberation, Part 1 of 1
Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May
“Well, they all look like over-sized mars rovers, and they all roll around killing cows – that’s about it, mostly.”
The prosecutor smirked at the rough-handed man currently on the stand.
“A country understatement if I’ve ever heard one. You’re familiar with the farm’s operations? With the unit itself?”
“I’ve been working on the Lancaster’s spread for fifteen years, although only with, uh the unit, for the last four.”
“- and you knew Gregor Petrov personally?”
“Yeah, I knew him. We worked together five days a week for seven years.”
“What about the day he died?”
“I wasn’t actually on-shift when it happened, but the only surprise was that the robot had done it – I figured it would have been one of the other guys.”
“You were the sole maintenance man for the farm?”
“Well, no, I mean, I’m definitely the guy who does the hard stuff, but most folks on a farm know how to twist wires and pour gas.”
“Fine, but for something as complex as a portable abatoir…?”
“Yeah, sure, I was probably the only one who knew enough to plug a laptop in and poke at the interface, and I did a lot of the mechanical maintenance, but that doesn’t mean I have clue one about his electronics. I’m sure you know how to set your microwave’s clock and can replace the spinning platter if it cracks, but that doesn’t mean you can build one from scratch or even fix it if someone dumps a mug of coffee in the back. We have seven of the units, and Grumpy is the only one I’ve ever seen acting weird.”
The lawyer took a sip of her water, then re-approached the witness box.
“Do you think what happened was a mechanical or software failure?”
“No.”
“Do you think this robot was programmed to kill?”
The cowhand licked his lips.
“Not especially. People might not have liked Gregor, and I could possibly see someone wanting to do him in, but changing Grumpy that much would be way out of my league, and I know I’m well ahead of the rest of the pack back at the ranch.”
“Do you think the company that built it might be culpable?”
“Well – not exactly. I don’t know how their learning software works, but I have to wonder.”
* * *
The technician which now occupied the hot-seat pulled at his tie, considering his answer.
“Before this incident we’d only had one human fatality. The units use something we call the adaptive education matrix to learn to make smarter decisions, but only in areas related to what they do. They learn to recognize who they need to be partnered with, and some of their human companions preferences – it learns the map of the area it operates in… but certainly nothing that we might think of as emotions. It’s mostly just a computer.”
“Doesn’t it have something of a sense of humour as a sort of emotional assistance to the human it’s working with in the slaughter house? My understanding is that it picks up jokes from the people it works with and passes them on?”
The tech shifted in his seat before replying.
“Sort of – all it’s really doing is analyzing a history of how often the people that it knows know the punchline interact with the person its assisting, then, if it thinks there’s a low incidence of crossover, it’ll try it out.”
“Frankly, Mitch, that’s how I tell my jokes as well.”
“We’ve been over his code with a fine toothed comb, repeatedly. After what happened last time, we actually reformatted him, just in case. We’ve got over ten-thousand of these guys out in the wild, and this is the only one that’s killed a man. If it hadn’t been for the fact that one of our quality assurance ladies has an obsession with perfection that drove her to memorize his serial number, we wouldn’t even have been aware that it was the same unit.”
“You refer to it as a “him”, why is that?”
“Oh, I, uh, don’t mean it, it’s just that after a long while of working with a ‘bot you start to project – it’s probably because the milkers we build have suction cups, and the slaughterers have a pneumatic spike.”
“What happened the last time your product killed someone?”
“Well – it was ruled an accident. We ran tests; we stripped him down; in the end we couldn’t pinpoint what the problem was. You can’t always anticipate what’ll happen when you bring that many interfaces together, but it was obvious from the volume of alternates we had in the field, and the number of man-hours logged without incident, that it was a fluke.”
“- and still a fluke the second time?”
* * *
It took the jury four days to determine they weren’t going to come back with a proper verdict, and the press were relieved that a hung jury meant they could keep the ratings going for at least a few more months.
When the announcement was made, Grumpy rolled gently back and forth, twice. The robot’s lawyer put a hand out onto the unit’s boxy shell – unbeknownst to both, a Time cover in the making – then directed his client out of the courthouse.
The defendant rolled past the cameras without comment.
Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm. The audio and text formats of Flash Pulp are released under the Canadian Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.
Our favourite pirate, Captain Pigheart, has found time in his busy plundering season to regale us with a tale of holiday mirth.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfJr9QVOP5o]
Last night I was watching Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, as I’m wont to do around this time of year, and I noticed something.
Here’s a modern representation of one of the show’s classic characters.
Sure, everyone loves Yukon Cornelius, but something is missing.
Figure it out?
Here’s the truth about Cornelius: the man packs heat.
We don’t allow the characters in children’s shows to carry guns anymore, as demonstrated by the infamous erasing of weaponry in ET, and, in a way, it’s a bit of a shame, as I think some of the magic we’ve lost in children’s films is due to the disconnect with reality.
When we attempt to create an excessively padded play-space, we may accidentally teach kids that there are no such things as knives – then, when they do encounter them, they have no respect for the gravitas of the situation, and they end up throwing them at each other.
Still, the reality is, if you came across a fellow carrying a knife, a hatchet, and a handgun, in the middle of a blizzard, you’d probably just let him go on rambling about the abominable snowman as you departed at top speed.
Sometimes CNN’s front page gets confused, and, at those times, I lend a helping hand.
I realize this isn’t a question, I just thought it was cute that they let Bret Michaels’ mom post something on their front page.
I expect a follow-up tomorrow morning: “Why Doesn’t Bret Michaels Call His Parents More Often? They worry.”
Should the sun rise? Should humanity continue to breath? Should monkeys be dressed up in people clothing and given cigars? Should CNN stop asking obvious questions?
Maybe, but, unfortunately, much in the same way that a high-speed car crash can save you from cancer.
I’m hoping for a Broadway show, possibly followed by a book tour.
Ruby’s journal entries should be all caught up on by the end of the week; the unfortunate truth is, more folks download the audio version via iTunes, than come to the site looking for the individual episode entries, so we have to prioritize a bit.
FlashCast 003 will hopefully go up tonight, but it depends on how agreeable our audio producer is feeling, given her holiday scheduling. I was holding off, as some of our British friends were promising an mp3-based rant against televised talent-shows, but, understandably, Christmas has interceded.
Still, as such, I can only go with my original postulation, that the Brits loves them some X-Factor.
