The Chinese room

"Mary wants ice-cream," said the mom-bot.  It opened the oven and peered inside.
"No I don't!" shouted Mary, the adorable red-headed rug-rat from the top of the stairs.
"Yes, you do," said the mom-bot taking a wooden spoon out of the oven and looking at it quizzically.  "You have derived intentionality."
"Aaaargh!" shouted Mary, falling down the stairs as her accident-prone brother Maurice opened the bathroom door and knocked her over.  She bounced on her head twice, her cries becoming more pathetic, and then Dad was stood in front of the television.
"What rubbish are you watching this time?" he said.  "Can't you ever watch one of the educational channels?"
"It's teaching... me... about... derived intentionality!" I said, knowing that Dad might just miss the pauses while I worked out how to make Mom-bot and me sound like something more than cheap daytime television.  Rumour had it that the show didn't even pay for it's own mom-bot, but used an old one that was supposed to have been returned to the mom-bot corporation.
"I would have thought that you knew by now that the newspaper doesn't have a mind of its own," he said.  He was frowning at a piece of paper he was carrying and I knew that he wasn't really listening to me, he was just talking while he thought.
"Well, some newspapers do," I said.
"What?"

*
It turned out that Dad had missed the launch of The Chinese Room, a new national daily paper at the start of the week.  I explained that the paper contained a thinstick, a wafer slice of memory that could hold an AI that would allow you to navigate with easy around the paper and tell it what kind of stories you liked.  As it learned, it would automatically generate reading lists for you, and adjust the adverts that were available to the ones that best suited your needs.  It's no mom-bot, but it's what you got! was the tagline that had been getting the most publicity.  Dad was unimpressed.
"So, navigating the paper," he said, his tone heavy with sarcasm, "is now easier than turning the pages?  Bizarrely I see that you still need to use your hands, so this doesn't even benefit people with no arms, or just plain lazyitis."
"You only buy the paper once," I said patiently.  "So you don't have to stop at the news-stand every day."
"Unless you smoke.  Or like to buy mints for the tube, so that you don't have to smell the smoker sat next to you.  Or you want a different paper to the Chinese room, or–"
"OK, dad!  Jeez, look, it's easier to read on a crowded tube because it's just one page and you don't have to keep turning it.  It's like a Kindle!  Or Fire, or Conflagration, or Hypercaust, whichever one you stopped paying attention at."
"I remember the Hypercaust," said Dad quickly.  "Had more storage space for books than there were books to buy on the e-Store.  That was kind of funny, really.  Oh, and didn't it have that battery fault where every so often it would get red hot and set fire to soft furnishings?  Only because they'd made it out of titanium it invariably survived the blaze?"
"Do you have to be so technologically negative?  If you had your way we'd be living in the Dark Ages still."
"I think we are still living in the Dark Ages."  Dad was suddenly quiet.  "That's why I do my job and try to see that other people do theirs too."
I glanced at the quiescent mom-bot in the corner reflexively, I really didn't want to.  That we still had a functioning mom-bot unit, even if Dad wouldn't allow it to be turned on, after the war-bot virus epidemic was testament to Dad doing his job and doing it well.  Most other families in our neighbourhood were having to choose between replacing the mom-bot and repairing the damage it had done.  And I found myself agreeing with Dad that it was somehow wrong that they all seemed to be opting for replacing the mom-bot.
"Look, the paper's convenient," I said.  "It's new, it's nice."
"It's in this house without my permission," said Dad.  "Hand it over."  He held his hand out, and with bad grace I passed him my Chinese Room.  It took him barely ten seconds to spot a seam I'd never noticed in the e-Paper, crack it open with his pocket-knife and remove the thinstick memory wafer.  He turned it over in his hands, scrutinizing it.
"This is part of a mom-bot core," he said, pointing to a black-inked serial number on the wafer.  "Before or after the virus, do you think?"
"I'm not betting against you, Dad," I said.  "I haven't won yet."
"That's not true," said Dad.  "When you were five you picked the swan over that child's mother and you won then."
"That was traumatic!"
Dad just chuckled, and passed me the dead paper back, keeping hold of the slice.
"Look up what a Chinese room is, sometime," he said.  "It goes right back to your derived intentionality.  Then come and tell me why you should be hoping that the paper is well-named."

Hounds of Love

I shone the pocket torch on the lock, scanning it back and forth to build up an image in my mind of what I was looking at. The torch's beam was a circle about as large as my thumbprint, to reduce the chances of anyone else seeing the light. Bill, standing behind be and holding the velvet-lined leather bag with our tools in, sighed softly, reflectively.
"You know, it'd be kind of cool to own a kennel," he said quietly. I held my hand out, and he dropped an electronic probe into it.
"You can get them from garden centres, I think," I said. "Or build your own of course, it's not like they're big or difficult. Hell, maybe we could go the whole hog and get an architect to design us one!"
"Not that kind of kennel! A kennel, like a stable. A collection of dogs."
"I'm pretty sure they're called packs," I said. The tool beeped softly, confirming that there was a voltage flowing somewhere inside the lock. I handed it back to Bill and asked for an isolator core.
"Well, whatever they're called. It'd be pretty cool to own one of them. What architect?"
"James," I said, realising I needed a fixative as well. Bill located it in the toolbag. "Why do you want this pack of dogs then? They'll probably view you as the runt of the litter and dominate you completely. Oh... this isn't your Temple of Love again, is it?"
"No! Jesus, a guy dares to dream and you go and drag his dreams down to the sewers. No, these are Hounds of Love."
I finished locking the isolator core in place and indicated I needed a nine volt battery. My silence was eloquent enough.
"Not like that Temple! No, these are Hounds of Love. I'd hire them out to people who wanted to find love, a girlfriend, or a boyfriend, and the dogs would race off and find people who could be compatible. Then, like Lassie they'd communicate, and people would say things like, 'What's that? There's someone who loves me waiting to meet me?'"
"Bill," I said in as even a tone as I could manage. "Think about this. You're proposing to let loose a pack of dogs who'll pounce on people, pinning them to the ground and slobbering on them, to tell them that a complete stranger is infatuated with them and plans to lock them in a small room and do unspeakable things to them day after day after day–" The lock clicked and I shut up. A moment later, a very quiet hiss told me that the voltage in the lock had shut off.
"Impact punch," I said, holding my hand out.
"You make everything sound bad," said Bill. "It wouldn't be like that."
"I've seen you trying to train things," I said, grunting slightly as I worked on the lock. "It would be exactly like that. And exactly those kinds of people would be your customers. And I don't make everything sound bad, just things you're doing. Which reminds me, how's the mushroom girl?"
"What mushroom girl?" He sounded genuinely puzzled.
"Chanterelle? Shi'itake? Morel?" I guessed. The lock pinged unexpectedly and I scanned the torch rapidly over it again, and discovered that what I'd expected to be reinforced and anodised was actually a cheap aluminium cover.
"Oh, Morel. No, I'm seeing Pomodoro now. Her name means 'Golden Apple,' how beautiful is that?"
I stifled a giggle and wrenched. The lock resisted for a moment and then slid out into my hand. I handed it back to Bill, and opened the door.
"Is she red-faced and slightly overweight?" I said. We walked down the corridor, our footsteps clicking slightly on the tiles.
"Well... hey, why?"
"Pomodoro means tomato in Italian, so I'd imagine she's red and squishy. Jesus, Bill, you're paying for these girls. Can't you afford ones with real names?"
He said nothing, but the corridor had widened into a room now, an exhibition space with the painting that we'd come to liberate standing on steel easels. We had work to do.

Psychotropia

Nietzche famously talked about an abyss that looks back into you when you look into it, and I've always taken this to be philosophical drivel. I guess he was trying to say that there are no actions without consequences, but the number of people who've since decided that this is somehow deep and relates to evil is ridiculous. Apart from that, I found that abyss when I was wandering in the desert, and it was far less worrisome than almost everything else I found while I was there.
Some way away from the abyss was a settlement; a collection of one-room huts built on boards that in turn rested on the sand. When the wind blew, the occupants lifted the hinged rooves of the huts like sails and the huts would skate across the sand, rattling and hissing like angry snakes. The occupants would tack into the wind or run with it, always staying within a mile or so of the abyss, circling round it like strange, land-bound birds.
There were about fifteen people living there, although their numbers changed from time to time as people went to the abyss and people-shaped things came back from the abyss. Their leader, at least while I was there, was a woman who called herself Oisha. She had waist-length black hair that she braided like a rope, brown eyes that watered constantly, and skin so brown and wrinkled that I first thought she was one of the people-shaped things that had come back from the desert. When she told me, trying to seduce me, that she was only twenty-two, I dug a bottle of SPF-60 sun-tan lotion from my rucksack and gave it to her, advising her to use it daily until it ran out, and then go and find more. If ever there was someone who needed to wear a burqa, it was her.
I asked her about the people who lived in the huts, and she said that they were travellers, people stopping off at a waystation before they went to the abyss to become consumed by what it showed. She stopped abruptly at that point, and nothing I could say or offer would induce her to talk more about it, and I wondered for days afterwards what she'd said that she thought she shouldn't have. It was clear enough that the people who came from the abyss weren't the same as the people who'd gone to it; many of them didn't appear to have ever had had human form before! But perhaps there was something else. She changed the subject eventually by showing me the fifteenth hut, where no-one lived.
This hut was a garden in the desert; beneath its roof was a verdant green expanse. All around the edges were thick-leaved, glossy shrubs with small green berries, and beyond them were a few fruit trees and then vegetable plants, only some of which I recognized. But there wasn't enough to feed even fifteen people for any great length of time, and I pointed this out.
"People who arrive bring food with them, water too," said Oisha playing with the end of her braid and fluttering her eyelashes at me like a moth trapped by a window-pane. "There are small animals in the desert that can be trapped for meat. Sometimes the abyss... sends meat as well."
I could see from the look on her face what she meant: sometimes what came from the abyss couldn't be allowed back into human society and had to be killed. I wondered then if eating such 'meat' was really the safe thing to do.
"And these shrubs," she caressed a leaf, "suppress the appetite and show you visions that tell you when you should go to the abyss."
"The leaves or the berries?" I asked.
"The berr--" she stopped, puzzled. "The berr--." She stopped again, and left me to talk to the others in the huts. When she returned she was disturbed.
"Some say the leaves, others say the berries," she said. "Some say that what you take influences what returns from the abyss."
I nodded and we moved on, and she never noticed that I'd plucked a branch from a bush to put in my rucksack, leaves, berries and all. Later that evening I slipped away as they all gathered at the fifteenth hut and left them to their dance with death.
Chemical analysis when I returned from the desert revealed that both the leaves and the berries contained psychoactive nerve toxins, and even one berry would be enough to kill a man, though only over a period of twelve hours. The bark, however, contained the psychoactive ingredient without the nerve toxins and could be relatively safely consumed.

Hell Knight

The best question I've ever been asked is how something like Hell can have enough structure for there to be Knights. If Hell is a howling, incandescent chaos of tortured souls suffering for eternity, who is there to swear fealty to? What can be offered in return for such service? And what is there for Knights to do?
The problem most people have is that they don't realise the full extent of Hell. Each religion has its own version, its own rules on who gets sent there, and what happens to them when they arrive. Many philosophers have created visions of Hell as well, though they may not have realised what they've done, and every human capable of imagination can fashion a Hell of their own. Hell is vast, and there is room for almost everything in it.
The Greeks had visions of Hell as the abode of the dead, with a supreme ruler; the Italians, after Dante, had visions of Hell as a multi-circled domain wherein people were punished according to their sins. Typically, only the Christian religions are desperate to roast people alive and torture them indiscriminately, and though those pockets of damnation are growing here and there, they're considered by most residents of Hell to be a little gauche and underdeveloped. They're the third-world countries of Hell.
This leaves plenty of space of human to instate the feudal society they seem to default to, so there are hierarchies and rankings, class systems and levels of equality in many regions of Hell, and some of those rulers are strong enough to be able to grant titles that are either meaningful or respected in other regions as well. Not all Knights come from such places, but I do. The proof that I am a Knight are the tattoos on my wrists and the way they coil around each other when brought together. The ruler I swore allegiance to is Caledon, who commands Escabon, La Greche, the Maigre Strait and the Citadel of Romance. His plans for expansion are well known, and likely to succeed.
As for what I do, I recruit for Caledon. Not for his armies -- there are enough souls in Hell to fight the wars -- but for his administration. I head-hunt, in the corporate sense. I find people with the necessary skills for the positions that are open and persuade them to join.
Hell is not timeless, as many people think, but time passes at different rates depending on where you are. Mostly time is dense and heavy, and the lower you go the faster time passes, the heavier it weighs on the souls there. But there are places where time reverses and flows backwards, and places where it reveals its fractal nature, and with knowledge a Hell Knight can use them to enter the world where he pleases.
Hell can be both entered and left, so long as you have the right mindset and know what you're looking for. The Greeks had no problem with the living visiting Hell and leaving again, so many of the doorways look like temple entrances and allow passage in both directions. Christians see Hell as a final destination and so their doorways are one-way only and can't be subverted: it's part of the structure of hell. But they make it easy to get in: any door can be turned into a gateway to hell if there's enough Christians nearby.
And so I am a Hell Knight, and I have recruitment to attend to.