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Fiction

Another White Elephant?

by Richard Lau

The term “white elephant” refers to a gift that at first appears to be magnificent but upon further analysis has some serious drawbacks. A literal white elephant might be wonderful to look at, but is it worth the food, care, and upkeep?

#

Zeus shook his head in a mix of disbelief and disgust.

“Are we really back here again?” he asked the titan shackled to the rocky mountainside. Even lying on his back, the giant cut an imposing figure, seeming like a small mountain range of red cloth, white fur trim, and black accents.

Prometheus declined to dignify Zeus’ rhetorical question with a response, only continuing to produce a buoyant rhythmic hum.

“What is that infernal noise?” demanded the king of gods.

“Finally, a question worth answering!” answered the prisoner. “It’s a tune by Britney Spears.”

“Spears?” repeated Zeus. “Sounds like a daughter of Ares, the God of War. Who is this mortal?”

“Britney’s immortal!” Even bound and facing an eternity of punishment, Prometheus was a fan of the pop singer. “And the song is ‘Ooops, I Did It Again.’”

“Ah, a sarcastic apology, considering your recent actions. I would expect nothing less from one who has been referring to himself as a ‘jolly old elf.’”

Zeus gave the giant’s manacled black boot a hard kick and immediately realized that it was not a smart move for one with sandaled feet. To cover his pain and impetuous foolishness, Zeus changed the subject of their discussion. He had always been a little sensitive about his weight, for even as a swan, he was a bit plump. So, in a smooth transition of transference, he nodded to the bared chest and belly below the giant’s long, flowing white beard.

“My eagle’s going to have to peck through several inches of fat to reach your liver this time.”

The abdomen shook like a bowl full of jelly. “Ho ho ho. I hope your foul bird chokes!”

“For one whose name means ‘foresight,’ your talent for stumbling into trouble is worse than a blinded cyclops.”

The titan was defiant. “What makes you think I didn’t see this punishment coming? Or the previous one?”

The lord of Olympus grinned. “I don’t know of many people who intentionally want their livers eaten out by an eagle every day. Or to have the organ regrown every night so that the cycle could repeat for eternity.”

“You also don’t know anything about intentional noble sacrifice,” Prometheus responded.

“Are you implying that disobeying me, stealing fire from the sun, and gifting it to the humans was worth it?”

“You were the one who told me to create the humans. You were the one who teamed me up with my brother Epimetheus, who gave all of the best gifts to the animals.”

Zeus remained nonchalantly silent, so Prometheus continued to make his point. “He gave them covering–thick hides, fur, scales, feathers, and shells. He gave them cunning, speed, strength, claws, and the ability to fly. What could I do? What gifts were left for the humans?”

“You do what you did do,” replied Zeus. “You made the humans god-like in form, with them having the ability to stand upright.”

“A token gift of vanity at the most! A blessing that would not save them from being slaughtered by the animals. The fragile humans needed a chance to survive.”

“And your solution was to give them fire?”

“Fire gave them the ability to keep warm, to protect themselves, to see in the darkness, and to keep the animals at bay.”

“And what else did they do with the fire?”

“Many things! Smelt metals for tools. Cooked food and boiled water. Developed sanitation and medication.”

Zeus’ snort was like a roll of thunder. “And also created combustion that pollutes the very air they breathe! And made weapons that can kill hundreds in an instant. So quick! So tidy! Even Ares was displeased. The God of War prefers battles to last a little longer!”

“I’m sure he has his own bloodthirsty reasons,” added Prometheus, not meeting Zeus’ gaze but looking skyward, as if expectantly searching for the promised eagle.

“Do not concern yourself. Your jailer and tormentor will be here soon enough. When my son Heracles freed you, didn’t you think I could have put you right back here if I wanted to? Did you doubt my power to do so? It would have been as simple as resurrecting the bird we are awaiting upon now. You are fortunate that I fully blame Heracles for its death and not you.

“Instead, I let you reinvent yourself, just watched with the other gods as you opened a toy factory in the polar region and continue to indulge yourself with gifting things to humans.”

“Once a year? And with shallow commercialized items that were frivolous and inconsequential? The whole time I was planning my next gift, my next real gift. To all of humanity, not just momentary and trendy distractions for little children. Something for generations to come!”

“Bah! How did you become so twisted, Prometheus? To stake your loyalty with the mortals instead of the gods?”

Prometheus spat. “Loyalty? You dare speak of loyalty? Is this the way you reward someone who helped you defeat the other titans? You, the man who overthrew his own father to rule Olympus?”

Zeus ignored these salient points of his history. “I had forbidden you to give the mortals fire. And yet you did so. And instead of blessing your good fortune that you were released from my punishment, instead of enjoying the new life you were allowed to create for yourself, instead of being grateful for my mercy and benevolence, you returned to Mount Olympus and stole again. This time, you took something more powerful than fire, something even more forbidden that the humans should not have. Do you realize what you’ve done?”

Prometheus, as defiant as ever, proudly and immediately answered. “I have given the humans more freedom than you have ever allowed them. I have given them the ability to fulfill their destiny to reach the stars, thus achieving greater heights than even vaunted Mount Olympus itself. To go so far as to finally escape your tyrannical grasp. I have…”

A lightning bolt flashed down from the heavens, accompanied by an angry, impatient thunderclap, interrupting the giant’s proclamation. “Another white elephant gift! You have given the mortals another and better means to destroy themselves long before they ever travel the far reaches of space that you speak of. And with the humans passing, so go what few worshippers we gods have left.”

“The knowledge will help them,” Prometheus insisted. “It is a new source of fuel. A new understanding of the universe that will enable them to develop new, unimagined technologies!”

“It is something that should have never left the dark corner of Pandora’s box.”

A humongous eagle landed beside the two figures on the craggy cliffside. It folded its wings and pecked experimentally, sharpening its beak on a rock. Prometheus closed his eyes, not needing his gift of foresight, but knowing full well from experience what was about to occur.

Zeus sighed and turned away. “Why, Prometheus, why did you have to give them the secret of dark energy?”

~

Bio:

Richard Lau is an award-winning writer who is published in magazines, newspapers, and anthologies, as well as in the high-tech industry and online. His stories have recently appeared in Sci Phi Journal and The Last Line Journal. Two of his stories will be appearing in Carpe Noctem (Tyche Books) and Dark Decades: Capture (Disturb Ink Books) later in 2024.

Philosophy Note:

What if two legendary gift-givers were actually the same person? The term “white elephant” refers to a gift that at first appears to be magnificent but upon further analysis has some serious drawbacks. Is Prometheus a good gift giver or a reckless one?

** December fundraiser 🙂 If you like what we do, please help us pay our authors and keep philosophical sci-fi free for all to read. If just once a year every reader were to chip in 2 euro/dollar, we’d be able to keep Sci Phi ad-free and expand our content even further. Click here if you wish to donate. Many thanks for your kind support! **

Fiction

Last Man

by Peter Roberts

It’s been two weeks now since I saw anybody else. I can’t stand it anymore. The loneliness is getting to me. Even when there were only a handful of us left I didn’t feel isolated. Now there is no one to talk to, no one to reassure me that I’m doing the right thing – no one else at all. It’s too much to bear. So despite all my doubts and misgivings, I have no real choice but to follow the crowd into that supposedly wonderful future.

Of course, the idea always held a certain appeal: Migrate to the future, full of technological marvels, solutions to all our problems, cures for all our ailments and infirmities. Be part of a better, more perfect world, an eternity of political stability and prosperity, with peace, justice for all, maybe even immortality.

It all sounded good, but I’m a realist (pessimist, my friends would say), so I wasn’t buying it. I’m cautious, distrustful: I prefer the known to the unknown, the comfortable to the challenging. And one thing I do know is that, when people are involved, something is bound to go wrong. Whether through war, environmental calamity, cultural conflict, or economic collapse, we surely will find some way to screw up the future.

So I resolved to stay put in the present. And, at first, I wasn’t the only one. A substantial number of us stayed behind. Life was pretty great for a while. With so few people and so much stuff, we could all have almost anything we desired. And since nearly all production and most services are automated these days, an occasional bit of maintenance was all that was needed to keep everything running. Mostly, we didn’t have to do anything we didn’t want to do. Talk about a life of luxury!

But eventually our numbers started to dwindle. One person would miss friends or relatives too much, another would worry that they really were missing out on something wonderful, and soon enough they too had departed for the future.

And as more people left, the whole process accelerated. That’s the damned thing about the pseudo-Tipler time portal – it’s a one-way trip: once you go to the future, you can’t come back.

As I said, I can’t stand being the last one anymore. So it has to be either suicide or the future, and since death seems like the greater unknown, I guess I’m off to the future, however bad it may be.

#

Echoes are everywhere as I step through the doors of the transport chamber. The interior is huge, big enough to accommodate ten thousand people at once – it was mass migration at first, and the devices were too expensive to allow very many to be built, so each one is monumental. It’s a little overwhelming, intimidating even, for just one person.

Enough procrastination. Might as well get it over with. All I have to do is push the red button, everything else is automatic. So . . . here goes.

#

The only thing that dazzles me as I step out is sunlight. No wondrous city, no flying cars, and no one to greet me. Damn it. I knew it. I knew something would go wrong with the future, that’s why I didn’t want to go.

But it doesn’t look like the aftermath of a disaster. In fact, it looks lush and green, in some ways quite pleasant. It just doesn’t look like the future. And I wonder where everyone is. What happened to them? Should I be worried? After all, worry is what comes naturally to me.

I can’t figure out anything else to do, so I start walking.

Soon enough, I notice smoke rising between some trees in the distance. This looks promising, so I walk towards the smoke, eventually coming upon a rather primitive village – mud streets, log buildings, and everything dirty, and rather smelly, too.

A young man notices my presence and ambles towards me, an odd sort of scowl on his face.

“So, another eager, hopeful pilgrim, about to have his hopes dashed.”

“More reluctant than eager. But I couldn’t stand the loneliness of being the only person around, so here I am, despite my trepidations.”

“So that is it. We had a bunch of ideas about what went wrong, but mostly we’ve been converging on the theory you represent. That would seem to settle it.”

“Wait, I don’t get it. What do I represent?”

“You’re the last one out of the pool. Nobody left. A thousand years without humans. No one to maintain basic infrastructure, let alone make the breakthroughs that would have led to that bright and shining future we all expected. A thousand years for all the lights to burn out, all the buildings to crumble and corrode. A thousand years for nature to push back into all those places we’d pushed it out of, for wilderness to take over again. No food or shelter when we arrived. No way to prevent the violence or control the epidemics. So those few of us who managed to survive the initial chaos had no choice but to start over from the absolute beginning. We went to the future, but we might as well have gone to the past – the distant past.

“Some folks worried that, true to our history, over a thousand years we might really mess things up, create a disaster just by being ourselves. We created a disaster all right. But this time the disaster was our absence.”

~

Bio:

Peter Roberts is a mathematically educated poet who sometimes writes fiction. He has been contributing to various magazines and journals, online & off, for more than 45 years. See his slightly dated personal page, god-and-country.info/personal.html, where you can find links to lists of all his published poems & stories, if you look carefully. Some may find the rest of the website interesting as well.

Philosophy Note:

This story began with the thought that the classic Time Travel Paradox might not apply with one-way, irreversible forward movement in time. It soon became apparent, however, that there could still be unintended consequences, especially if people followed typical human self-centered morality. Ultimately, if everyone wins, no one wins — and in this instance, everyone loses.

Fiction

Revolutionary Technologies

by C. Richard Patton

“Yes, Chip, there’s risk — more risk than going to work for Westinghouse. But they aren’t doing what we do. We’re making next generation changes to society, to the world, through technology. These career decisions, these life decisions… It’s not about playing it safe. It’s all about a lack of future regrets.”

That was it for me. I was in. I went to work for T. Colton, CEO of TPresence, Inc., in the spring of 2000. T was the most visionary and hip boss I’d had. Yes, everyone called him “T”, he may have had a full first name, but I never heard it, and I never asked. He wore his hair in a pony tail and at 29 was 5 years my junior.

It was the Internet bubble, Y2K had just fizzled. TPresence was a start-up spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. Their product was virtual reality. For me, after 8 years with big companies, the TPresence office was virtual reality, too.

We were innovators. Computer scientists, roboticists, digital artists. Free soft drinks. Free lunch. Nerf guns and Razor scooters for real battles among the cubicles and Unreal Gold on the servers for after-hours virtual wars. Flex time. A free flow of ideas. Cutting edge prototype hardware, Coppermine CPU’s and prototype graphics chips. Intel loved us, we were building consumer appetites for faster iron.

Working at TPresence was cool, fast, fun, and it was over in 14 months. The deep-pocketed backers, the Oscar winning actor, the tool inventor from the infomercials, the resort owners, they dried up as the Internet bubble burst. We’d blown through 5 million dollars and all we’d ever produced were a couple of wicked cool demos, zero sales. Holodesk, the virtual world where you could join your friends as a customized 3-D avatar and shop, chat, play gravity-defying sports, or just hang out, peaked at slightly over 200,000 non-paying members. We never asked them for a dime.

Early in the summer of 2001, as salaries were halved and the vintage Charlie’s Angels pinball machine was sold, optimism waned and tempers flared. The headcount peaked at 32. The girl who ran Human Resources quit first. Giving out five figure signing bonuses was fun, but she wanted no part of the blood bath to come.

Others stressed and left, too. T Colton was forced out by the Board of Directors. Some of us clung to the dream. The following phrase appeared one day on our main white board: “Forgive us our Tpresences, as we forgive those who Tpresence against us.” No one erased it. It remained there, in blue low-odor dry erase ink, during the auction. I myself bought a Steelcase desk and 18 computer keyboards, including two Naturals, for exactly twenty-three bucks. It was over.

###

TPresence was prologue. T called me aside at our off-site failure party following the auction.

“The shutdown timing is actually pretty good. A few of us are starting something new. We’d like you to join us.”

So that’s how I became one of six founding employees at the phoenix company, Revolutionary Technologies, Inc. We just called it RevTech. At least that’s the nickname we started with. RevTech had no outside investors at first. It was a real start-up, not some Power Point preso looking for angels. TPresence had been all about easy money and style. RevTech was about sweat equity and results.

T’s idea was simple, we would revolutionize the fast food industry through automation and the branch of robotics called “machine vision”. T had a PhD in it. Set up a few bullet cameras around a McDonald’s or a BK and they’d know when their customers were arriving, and who they were. Here comes soccer mom and three kids so get the chicken nuggets ready, and a salad for Mom.

Automate the food prep machines and the cash registers and you could decimate labor costs. That pesky high turnover rate among minimum wage fry slingers would be history, too. There was already another company that could make a pizza completely inside a contraption that looked a lot like a 1950’s juke box — all we had to do was make one for burgers and fries.

###

We set up in T’s walkout basement. Brought our own office chairs and computers (some straight from the TPresence auction). I donated the Natural keyboards to the cause — the other two developers were fond of them, but I couldn’t get comfortable on the angled halves. I stuck with a standard keyboard with a full wrist pad and nursed my carpal tunnel syndrome. We used coupons at Staples for office supplies. We took no salary except RevTech stock, scheduled to vest over 3 years, and health insurance. And we built something that we could sell.

T took a part time job at McDonald’s. For research. But he cashed his paychecks. T had put his own money into the company. The rest of us either didn’t have any or had family obligations. That was my excuse: a wife and two kids.

We learned to call it “The Quick Serve Restaurant Industry” instead of “Fast Food” and we pitched our ideas to dentists. They can be great angel investors, lots of cash and not too financially savvy. We practically lived in T’s basement, working on our first version, dubbed “Revolutionary Rob”. I only ever went upstairs for the microwave, to nuke my lunch. A bare bones, pure software demo version of Revo Rob was ready in 3 months.

###

After that it all happened quickly. Burgers, chicken patties, and French fries were all easy to cook with machines, at least for people who had automated wheat harvesting via giant driverless combines down to a few centimeters by using differential GPS. Ketchup, mustard and diced onions were easy, and when other condiments looked like they might be tricky, T declared, “We won’t be stopped by pickles.” And we weren’t.

The prototype Revo Rob was installed at a franchise store owned by the grandson of the inventor of a million-selling sandwich whose name rhymes with Big Snack. Revo Rob was installed below the corporate radar. It wasn’t on their approved equipment list, just like the famous sandwich almost 40 years earlier wasn’t on the corporate approved menu. Within 6 months the store manager swore he’d quit if they made him “fire” Revo Rob. There was no going back..

###

The robotics were cool, and kids loved to watch the articulated metal arms plop the patties on the bun bottoms. Then it would squirt on the mustard and ketchup in a bi-colored stream just before the sesame-seeded top dropped on. Our featured stores had more spectators than a Krispy Kreme Doughnuts during spring break. But the genius of the Revo Rob system, and the intellectual property value, was in what our patent filing called “impending demand”. This is where my contribution came in. I’m a software guy and I tied the data from the machine vision system with counts from the automated kitchen equipment. Strategically placed cameras tracked the customers as they approached the restaurant and the registers inside. Meanwhile, RFID tags in the loyalty cards carried by the customers let us know that a double cheeseburger combo meal with a chocolate shake kicker was about to be ordered. Setting a freshly mixed shake in front of someone before they’d even gotten their wallet out of their pocket always drew a smile.

And the system evolved from there. The RFID cards tracked the customers and tied in with a payment system through the new smart phones that everyone was getting. Pretty soon we knew precisely when millions of people wanted to eat, and what they wanted. And we started delivering. I mean not just fulfilling the need, but driving the food to their house, or their work, or while they were out walking their dog. This made us, including me, a lot of money, at least on paper. I had my founder’s shares of Revolutionary Technologies stock. Of course the percentage of the company that I owned went down every time we took investor funding, but the old start-up adage was working perfectly, I had a smaller and smaller slice of a much, much, much bigger pie. When we IPO’d my net worth on paper was into seven figures and kept climbing. I should have sold at least half of it on the first trading day after the holding period expired. Sold it and moved to Australia. Only that wouldn’t have been far enough. RevTech had sold the rights in Australia early on to raise cash, but it’s the farthest place I could think of and there came a time when just getting away, as far away as possible, would have been a good idea.

You see, Revo Rob became pervasive, and more than that, it became invasive. The impending demand algorithms knew when the customers wanted our food. It was like a gigantic Pavlov’s dog experiment with ESP. They’d start salivating and we’d drop cheap, low nutrition food in their hand. We’d shrunk the robotics and added refrigeration. Our most loyal customers had a portable robotic kitchen with them 24/7, and if they twitched just so and leaked a few pheromones out through their pores, Runaround Rob whirred and heated and plopped them out the answer to their personal craving. But the portability of Runaround Rob required stable ingredients (“inputs” we called them, just like the rest of the impending demand data, it was all just inputs to us). The food stored in Rob had to be almost inert, so it could last a long time in the portable unit. This meant that nutritional value, and taste, suffered. Rob got a reputation worse than McDonald’s, or even Arby’s, ever had. It should have been clear that it was far past time to cash out and get my name off the downhill slide. I might have gotten away with at least a piece of my self-respect, and a big chunk of cash, even if my reputation was already doomed.

But I couldn’t quite let go. Something in my ambitious self, that self that had been lured into RevTech by a long-haired visionary with a letter instead of a first name, felt incomplete. Both T and I had had a desire to change the world. We’d done that. But not without those regrets we’d wanted to avoid. I still hoped to fix it, to pull us out of the vortex that we were spiraling into. We’d succumbed to the price pressure, to the marketplace demands, and to the constant and growing impending demand from our millions and millions of customers.

That’s when the new nickname popped up and burst any lingering bubble of hope we may have still had. Who knows where these things originate in this Internet Age, but it was popularized by a blog on Huff Post Green. They blasted our product for everything from its energy footprint to not using locally sourced ingredients. Of course they hit us for the bad taste of the food itself, too. And we deserved it, we really did. You’ve probably guessed the nickname by now, it was clever, or everyone thought so at the time. It was simple, too. I guess these things usually are. And it was devastating. They just squeezed a couple letters out of RevTech and the stock plummeted faster and our sales tanked. My reputation and my net worth both took a nose dive. I had let my family down. But it was the knowledge that our monstrosity had changed the world for the worse rather than for the better that really made me ReTch.

~

Bio

C. Richard Patton resides among rocket scientists and roboticists in Huntsville, Alabama where he writes software, poetry and a variety of short fiction. One of his medieval fantasy stories comes with a polyhedral dice game that he designed for Chipsterzone Games. Or perhaps it is the other way around.

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