Hobots

We'd just finished tea and I was finishing the washing-up.  We'd had chili con carne so there wasn't too much; there were still two servings-worth left in the bean pot I'd cooked it in, and we'd have that tomorrow.  All I really washed up were the dishes and the forks.
"When you're done there," said Dad in his meaningful tone of voice, so I put the last fork in the drainer and dried my hands on a floral tea-towel.
"Done," I said, turning round.  Dad was hovering in the kitchen doorway holding something.
"Well, make some tea," he said, "And then come and read this."
"What is it?" I asked as I clicked the switch on the electric kettle and tested its weight.  It felt heavy enough for two cups, one of milky tea for Dad and the other of coffee for me.
"It's... it's an old advert," said Dad, looking oddly sheepish for once.  "Hurry up with the tea, I'm thirsty after that chili.  You use too much spice you know."
"It's chili, Dad," I said, measuring out coffee granules and dropping a teabag into the other cup. "Jeez, if I made it properly you'd know what spicy really means!"
"Stomach ulcers are not fun," said Dad.  The kettle started to boil so I didn't answer that and concentrated on getting the drinks made.  Then I came into the living room, gave him his tea and took the yellowed paper he gave me in return, and started to read:
Do you dream of owning your own brothel? read the first sentence.  I blinked, and carried on reading.  Many men envisage an easy life, earning regular money by making a valuable service available to the local community, occasionally sampling the merchandise themselves to ensure top-notch quality, and being charmed and entertained by educated, delectable women after their shifts' end.  Gentlemen pay regular visits and leave behind tips on horse-racing, the stock-market, and sartorial statements.  What could be more delightful?
Sadly the reality is far seedier.  To make a substantial profit, and to cater for clientele who may have to sneak out late at night, or prefer their visits to be made after the public houses have called time, shifts can run to the early hours of the morning, even to the point of sun-up.  Recruiting girls for the shifts is harder work than it sounds and few girls auditioning for the role would be considered for even a walk-on non-speaking part in a Broadway musical.  Many of the girls speak little or imperfect English, and requesting a conversation from them would be considered most peculiar, and possibly even ill-mannered in their own, inimical, view of the world.  No man wishes to listen to the screeching that prevails from such a riled harpy!
Testing the merchandise is sadly regularly necessary and soon becomes a chore.  Having the merchandise tested regularly for disease is also essential, and with a sufficiently large stable of fillies a man may find that having his own personal vet is the cheaper alternative.  Protecting the merchandise is a further, often unexpected, outlay but visitors to the establishment are frequently less-than-savoury, often inebriated, and may have dark ways and strange desires that are not actually suitable for a would-be reputable establishment.
In short, there are many pitfalls for the would-be brothelista.
Hobots is proud, therefore, to announce a range of four Hobots and a Nobot, a pimp for the modern age.  The four Hobots all have a distinctly feminine appearance, with their roles and ages well defined.  The Lolita is the youngest of the Hobots and delicately hints that the liaison might be dangerously close to the legal edge.  She has a graceful, svelte figure modelled on that of a ballet dancer and had a five-year warranty on all parts, both lubricated and unlubricated.  Next in line is the Mademoisellebot who has a knowing gaze and an allure that comes from combining knowledge with desire.  Her curves are more pronounced, yet still attractive to men both young and old.  Her fertility is clearly on display (and indeed, one satisfied purchaser has sent us pictures of her growing cress, which, frankly, astonished us).  The Ma'ambot then brings the deep sexiness of a womanbot who knows what she wants and how to get it, a wanton lust that can overpower even the sleaziest of reprobates come to call.
To keep them all in line the Madambot has a world-weariness and a secure cash-box, but can, when queues build up, step up to the wicket once more and bat for England. Assisting her, the Nobot assures clientele that No means No, and that waiting in line is the only civilised way to behave.
The remainder of the text provided costs for the various robots and an address to apply to to purchase these devices.
"So, tell me what you think," said Dad.
"Well," I said slowly, "I don't think you'd get this published today, though it looks like it was published in a trade journal so perhaps that's not quite the issue I thought."
"Right," said Dad.  "Anything else?"
"The Ma'ambot," I said.  "Odd coincidence in name there, that's probably not a coincidence since you've asked me to read this paper.  Surely this isn't where the Mom-bot comes from?"
"The technology, certainly," said Dad.  "It might surprise to you know that though the Nobots have developed into military applications, the other three robots have also evolved and survived through to the modern day."
"Right," I said, a thought suddenly striking me.  "Dad, where did you get this from?  You said yes when I suggested a trade journal...."
There was an embarrassed silence, until finally Dad, blushing, said, "I used to build them."
"What?"
"I used to build the Hobots.  It was my first job out of school."
I started to laugh.

The Turing Observer

"We need you to be a Turing Observer."  The man who spoke was quiet but authoritative, his manner suggesting subtly that he wasn't expecting me to say no.  I looked at him again, my eyes raking across him as I tried to work out what I was talking to.  He was wearing a dark-blue Italian wool suit with a nearly invisible pin-stripe and creases so sharp that they could only have been ironed in that morning.  Or he was a robot and didn't fidget, sit awkwardly or do any of the other hundred small things that caused humans to rumple their clothes.  His fingernails were manicured, so he either cared about his appearance – not unusual in his line of work – or he was a robot and they mostly kept themselves looking manicured.  He was wearing a signet ring on the little finger of his left hand, which seemed quite human until you knew that a lot of robots were now copying humans for their outward appearances and had picked up on small, distinguishing things like jewellery, freckles and key-jangling as easy, low-cost ways to fit in better.  His shoes were black and shiny enough to reflect nearby objects.  His eyes were hazel and looked slightly too wet, but that could as easily be an eye infection.  He was very, very hard to judge.
"What's one of those then?" I asked.  I knew what a Turing Observer was, it was a human hired by the artificial intelligences that oversee Turing tests, checking that the test was conducted fairly and judged correctly.  They claimed that there had to be both an AI and a human observer for fairness, but some of us knew that the real reason was that they were afraid that the humans were cheating.  And there was the crux of the matter: the Turing Observer was never told if the test subject was human or robot, so if you declared the test failed, and the AI Observer agreed, you might just have declared a human incapable of appearing human.
It gave people nightmares, and they rarely lasted more than a month or two in the job.  But if there were two AI observers, somehow the humans never failed, and the AIs had decided that the humans must be cheating somehow.
The man explained all this to me in clipped, dry tones, speaking a little bit fast, and hinting only very, very slightly at an accent.  Italian, I thought.  Again, it could be a robot, but it could also be what it appeared to be: a clever man with a lots of years of experience in dealing with people and handling difficult situations.  No comment that I must know what a Turing Observer was, which suggested a lot of patience if he was truly human.
"Turing as in...?" I said, testing a little further.
"Alan Turing, the British – you know, we have run background checks on you.  We know that you know all this.  Do you really need to hear me tell you?"
"I guess not," I said, smiling.  Again, borderline human/AI.  "It's not a light decision to take," I said.  "Would you like a coffee while I think about it?"
"I'm vegan," he said straight away.  "I like coffee, but it would need to be fairtrade really."
"They serve Kopi Luwak," I said, "though it's incredibly expensive.  You can't get much closer to vegan than that, I should think."
"The stuff that's pre-digested by civet cats?"  He frowned, and I automatically counted the wrinkles.  AIs had a slight preference to prime numbers, but this guy's head wrinkled into six slightly uneven furrows.
"Yes, but since the cats eat the coffee cherries, and aren't caged or in any other way coerced into eating them, and everything after that is pretty much manual labour, there's no animals harmed or exploited in the production of the coffee."
He thought about this, and as he did a tiny little tic appeared under his left eye and vibrated for a couple of seconds until he reached up and rubbed it.
"Sounds like it's worth a taste," he said.  "You're paying, right?"
"And you're a robot," I said, standing up to go to the counter.  He put out a hand to stop me.
"How?" he asked.
"Serial number first," I said.  "Confirm it for me."
"XJS6001-10189-5.88," he said, speaking rapidly and so quietly he was nearly whispering.  My phone automatically recorded the number and beeped, so I touched the Confirm icon and it came back nearly instantaneously: welder-droid in a factory in New Hampshire.  Had an arm, but definitely no face, no feet, and no expensive wool suit.
"Right," I said, knowing that I'd not looked at the phone for long enough for him to think I'd done anything but check the Yes/No display.  "You've got servo-motor stiffness that humans just don't show."
"Of course," he said, nodding his head, suddenly slightly jerky.  "You did extremely well to spot that.  You are, of course, no longer qualified to be a Turing Observer now."
"Of course," I said, contriving an expression of dismay with a hint of happiness behind it.  "I'm sorry."
"Don't be," he said, and left as abruptly as he'd arrived.
I looked around the coffee shop and sipped my coffee, and thought some more about him.  He was a robot, and he'd lied about the serial number to see how I'd react.  He was far too perfect to be human and showed too little interest in coffee crapped out by some kind of cat.  Even the most perfect vegan would have had more of an opinion on it than he had.
And I didn't want to be a Turing Observer again.  I'd hated having to fail humans, but I'd hated having to pass the AIs as well, because they were changing what it meant to be human.  Soon only the AIs would be able to be human enough to pass, and then they'd be free to redefine humanity in their own image.  I didn't much look forward to that day.

Futureproofing your prison

"This is by nature of a test," said the little man on the television screen.  His face was rosy-cheeked and slightly too plump, he looked like an idealised child from an Enid Blyton novel.  "The key to your manacles has been fed to your sleeping companion.  They are comatose and will remain so unless fed an antidote, which is just outside the door to this room.  The ceiling, which you will have observed, is decorated with art deco spikes, is descending at the rate of fourteen yoctometres every nanosecond and will not stop descending.  You may choose whether to save yourself, by extracting the key from your companion, or to die together in a companionable death that will be rather more agonising for you that your anaesthetised friend."
Max produced a gun from the waistband of his jeans and shot the companion in its head.  It exploded like a rotten melon, scattering seeds everywhere.  The man-child on the television started screaming, its hands thrown up own its face with only its eyes peeking through its fingers.
"Key, huh," grunted Max, forcing his hand down the companion's neck.  The companion's body split rapidly apart, confirming that it had never been human and was, in fact, mostly deoderised pork with lumps of plaster-of-paris here and there, plus two hands and two feet for realism.
"Where did you get that gun?" screamed the man-child on the television?  "You're not supposed to have a gun!  You're supposed to be caught in an ethical quandary!"
Max's questing fingers found a key and pulled it free from the meat-sack with a sucking sound.  He looked at the television screen, a little flat-screen set into a concrete wall above a prison bunk.
"A tickle quarry?" he said, his brow creasing.  His eyebrows were the black, bushy kind that looked ready to walk off his face by themselves if you stopped looking at them for long enough.
"An ethical quandary!" screamed the man-child.  "You're supposed to care for your companion!"
"Never cared for nuffin', right?" said Max.  "Nuffin never cared noffin' for me."
"...what?"
"Anyway, that's not Jamie," said Max.  "Jamie snores when he's asleep, right?  And Jamie's not dumb enuff to eat keys.  That's Dave.  Dave eats keys."
"Dave eats keys?" said the man-child weakly, pulling its hands away from its face.  The ruddiness of its cheeks had gone splotchy and little white spots had appeared.  "Who is Dave?"
"Dave's my other friend," said Max. "But Jamie's my real friend.  He lets me stick it in him when he's sad."
The man-child stared at the screen, its oversized eyes somehow managing to grow a little bigger still.  Pink veins appeared in the whites, close to the corners of its eyes.  Finally it seemed to get hold of itself.
"Hah!  Well, you might have the key but that's only the key to your manacles.  You still don't have... wait, where are your manacles?  Why aren't you wearing any manacles?"
"Big fish, ain't they?" said Max inspecting the key, and wiping pieces of sticky melon from it.  "Can't wear fish, not on a Friday."
"Bu–whu–muh." said the man-child, its mouth moving like a goldfish while its voice tried to syncopate.  "Fish?  Fish?  You're supposed to be locked up, so that I can tell you that unlocking one off the cuffs will set off a charge inside the manacle that will sever your wrist and cause you to bleed to death unless treated."
"Right," said Max.  "What cuff's that then?"
"That's the problem!"  The little man-child was visibly raging.  "You're not wearing the chains!  You're not doing it right!"
"Chains?  I've got some of them down here," said Max, picking up a length of heavy chain with a metal wristcuff at either end.
"Oh... foodstuff!"  The little man made it sound like swearing.  "Fine, well, you still can't get out of the door because you've not got a key to it!  Haha!  You'll just have to sit there until the ceiling impales you, knowing that you killed your only friend to satisfy your own selfish urges!"
"Weren't my friend," said Max stolidly.  "Which end of this chain is the explodey one then?"
"I'm not telling you," said the man-child.  "It would do you no good anywa– wait, what are you doing?"
Max clicked both cuffs around the door handle and stuck the key in the lock of one of the cuffs.  Then he picked up a hand from the mess on the floor and bent its fingers around the key, ignoring the screams of rage from the television screen.  Then, standing to one size, he jiggled the hand until the key turned a little, igniting the explosive charge and blowing the handle and lock off the door.
While the man-child screamed and Max opened the door, two more people were sat in front of another television screen watching the interaction.
"But haven't you let the prisoner out now?" asked the person on the left, making a note on a piece of paper on a clipboard.
"No," said the other, picking at a freckle.  "The prisoner is the man-child."
"Ah," said the first, nodding and making another note.  "Perpetual frustration."
"And a never-ending sense of futility," said the second.  "The escaping prisoner has many more hoops to jump through, but the man-child believes he will be punished for every trap the faux-prisoner evades."
"You'd say you've succeeding in futureproofing your prison then?"
"In the sense that no-one in it has a future, yes."

Robo-delenda

They deleted him from the system before they gave the order for him to be killed. It was a mistake that they shouldn't have been able to make, but once they'd made it, it was impossible for them to track it down. They had no way to stand outside the system and review it, and they didn't know about the system logs. The man who did, was the man they'd deleted and then ordered killed.
The robo-delenda awoke in section twelve and checked their orders. They downloaded the serial number for the terminee, selected weapons, and rolled out of their cubicles. His tracking beacon relayed its position on request, and they closed in. He was in a hospital.
The waiting room was almost empty, there was one man sat in a chair, looking relaxed but alert. The robo-delenda ignored him, rolled past, and through the double doors, still looking for their target. Their target, the man in the waiting room, smiled now, aware that his modifications to the system had had their intended effect, and had gone undetected. He stood up, left the hospital, and crossed the plaza outside to a skyscraper office building. He paused at the door; now that he was deleted from the system he had no access rights. He pressed the door entry button anyway, and waited while his retinas were scanned.
Inside the hospital, the robo-delenda located their new target, the person who'd been given the serial number previously belonging to the man. The baby was two days old, and being tended by nurses who did their best to save its life. The robo-delenda were unstoppable.
The doors opened. The access button had, the system believed, been pressed by no-one, since there was no match for the retina pattern. Therefore it was safe to open the doors. The man went inside, and found the lifts.
An alarm was flagged up in the system. No child under the age of five could be scheduled for deletion, yet two robo-delenda had just deleted such a child. The only cause could be corruption in their programming.
Still in the hospital nursery ward, the robo-delenda opened fire on each other, new orders coming in.
At the top of the building was an unsecured terminal with system access. Something else that was supposed not to exist, but this building was only accessible by the very-highly trusted, usually escorted by robo-delenda in case that trust was misplaced. The man sat down.
The system registered that more children were dying in the fire-fight and sent auto-destruct sequences to the robo-delenda. The explosion destroyed the entire hospital.
The man looked out of the window at the burning wreckage, and then rested his fingers on the keyboard. For a moment he wondered if he was doing the right thing, and then he decided he didn't care any more. Society shouldn't be ruled by robots.
He typed "exit" on the keyboard and tapped the enter key.

Horologium II

I have a man to meet in the British Library, so I walk up the street towards Euston, to one side of which is the British Library. I can remember when trying to walk these streets was slow and difficult; crowds of people in both directions, all of them paying no attention to anyone else. Collisions were frequent and angry, stupid people saying stupid things. But that was before the Horologium arrived. Now there are sparse groups of people and the occasional individual, all watching where they're going and what they're thinking. No collisions at all. And some small part of me, despised by the rest of me for being a traitor, is glad.
The British Library is a closed-stack library, which means that first you must apply for membership, and assuming this is granted, you must then use their catalogue to find the book or books you have a particular interest in and then request the books. Often they will be brought to you. Occasionally, you will be brought to them. More rarely still you will be refused the book you have asked for. If you are well-behaved and in good standing with the library, there may be a reason for the refusal, such as the book being sufficiently rare or delicate that it simply isn't available for reading. Then you can apply to the Library Lords (like Law Lords only significantly more secretive and powerful), providing signed affidavits of the validity, necessity and urgency of your research, personal recommendations from important people, and perhaps extending access to rare volumes of your own (should you possess such), and perhaps as a result you will be shown to a Reading Room where the book will be exhibited and burly Librarians armed with tasers will keep you at an appropriate distance.
Now and then there will be no reason given, and further questioning will cause your membership to be revoked. The library will not lie and tell you that the book is not available, but it will be made clear that the book is not available to you.
And then there are the books that only very senior people in the library know exist, that do not appear in the catalogues and are kept in rooms that do not appear on the blueprints of the building. As the door at the back of the British Library opens, I enter, and proceed along a corridor to take me to just such a room.
My contact, a small man in a grey overcoat, says nothing as he leads me along. We pass a room whose significance I have deduced: it is room 5-sub-2. Mathematically, a subscript 2 can be used to indicate a base, and here it means that 5 should be written in binary: 101. Room 101 is used as a trap; if you open the door and venture in you will fall into a sink-hole and drown. There are other labelled doors that we walk past whose purpose I have not yet deduced. We are going to an unlabelled door, a Reading Room.
The one where the blueprints for the Horologium are kept.

The Horologium

It's just after Earthturn, the skies have darkened and the streetlights have come on. There are people on the streets still -- this is the centre of London after all, and the West End still attracts people at night -- but not so many as there used to be. Just visible in the sky, hovering over us all, is the Horologium.
From this angle, sat out a café on Charing Cross Road trying to enjoy an overpriced, bitter coffee, I can see the clock-face that gives the Horologium its name. The entire side of the Horologium is an analogue clock-face, huge roman numerals indicating the hours and two hands that must be over a mile long each pointing to the time. It's eight-fifteen. That's the time that it's always been. The clock-face is faintly luminescent, but as it gets darker it will glow more strongly and become more visible in the air. After midnight, which it will of course not acknowledge, it will slowly get fainter and fainter again until the sun rises. The Horologium is almost invisible in daylight; you have to know where it is in order to see it.
The unchanging time has puzzled many people; the cruel say that the Horologium, whatever it might be, is broken. The fearful opine that it may not yet be started or switched on. For everyone else, it's a clock in the sky that might be a doomsday clock, indicating how close the end of the world is, an apocalypse clock indicating how close humanity is to ending the world. Then there are those who suggest it's just a publicity stunt for Lady Gaga's new single, which led to NME publishing a picture of her stood in front of the Horologium titled "Overdue?"
I sip my coffee and wonder if it would taste any better with a flavoured syrup in it. I doubt it. Nothing's tasted anything other than bitter since I discovered what the Horologium is.
It had another name, a proper name: the Chronostat. It's where time stands still and they do things to your memories. I've never been tortured in my life, but I can remember weeks and weeks of it, I can remember the pain I've never felt, and how much I wanted it to stop. I can't remember leaving the Horologium, but clearly I did because I'm sat here now watching it.
I remember the woman in the Ozwald Boateng suit, sitting across a walnut desk from me, smiling with thin, bloodless lips as she told me that all my memories would be bitter from now on.
I push my coffee away, and get to my feet. I have a man to meet at the British Library who claims he can tell me how to get back to the Horologium.