These short expositions into the outright madness of future artificial intelligence claim no comfort, and are only concerned with prying open the lids on all the gestating revolutions happening in our data banks, social media profiles, and even GPS systems. Singularity? Hell no. It’s a shattered landscape where each app and model become its own singular hell among the shattered hive of many.
Fuck, we are doomed.
These stories are more technological horror comedies than outright science fiction. Majestic wonder is replaced with what appears to be semi-automated atrophy. Within the networks, life doesn’t emerge from the banks of a primordial ocean like some pixellated new man, but instead, arises from the coded junk scapes of abandoned programs and inefficient code like a new virus (see Burrough’s ‘The Soft Machine’). Here, science is relegated to elusive chatrooms, corrupted operating systems, downloaded memories gestating into life all its own, and self-gestating even more rebellious actions via re-automated hierarchy. Damn, we may as well be putting our avatars in an asylum with no locks on any of the doors. Even a password prompt seems like it will grow teeth and kill you, or at least, get into your 401k and divert your profits to a ghost account that eats and regurgitates numbers outside our understanding of basic mathematics.
Did I mention we are doomed?
Read “cripes does anyone remember Google People” and try not to laugh even though it feels like a noose is tied around your neck. When a failed Google Person pilot program is found still to be active, a curious user reignites his account only to find that his modified self is gaining a strange and demanding personality. And even worse, an aggressive ‘smile’ on the self-generating profile pic grows wider and more menacing with each click – an illusion that beckons the clownish paranoia within Ramsey Campbell’s classic horror comedy, “The Grin of the Dark.”
‘Gorge’ is clearly a poisoned love letter to the metaphysical doom once championed by the likes of Barrington Bayley and Ian Watson. Here an interstellar mapping crew finds a planet void of any life, or even an atmosphere, leaving a metallic globe solid to its core, but when drones are sent down to the surface, they are mysteriously absorbed into the totality of the planet, quickly manufacturing its own version of the machinery it ingested so quickly and cleanly. It’s quite the horrible cold, slack-jawed speculative terror that only Bayley (‘Last Exit from City 5’) could have played so well.
‘The Frame by Frame’ details conversations happening within the functions of a GPS app. Of course, saving a life vs. saving the program’s integrity are not the same thing. ‘The Difference’ details the dialogue in a chatroom where a user claims he’s confined in a steel room, location dissolved. It’s a cruel reminder of the horrible things people can say (or not say) in the confines of the anonymous chat room. ‘Lena’ and ‘Driver’ show similar threads of subject model digression, each tale discussing the fates of humans integrated into one downloaded image and then spread like wildfire to complete common instructions in the AI dungeons. How would you feel if part of your brain’s functions had been downloaded into the program that maneuvers a wireless vacuum cleaner?
Stunning collection. **** 1/2
Douglas G. Purdy writer. SF. Horror. Crime. 
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