This is the personal blog of alisonraymond

Taster:
The human race! You think you're so clever don't you? And in this long race you have led the field. But winners keep their eyes on the finish line!


Given the amount of time Brantley had been down the hole, it was amazing his single, lid-less eye could still focus, but worse, it was an affront to his dignity and a scandalous abuse of his abilities.

Brantley was, after all, the best.
The top of the range. The finest self contained robotic utility and ballistic system (SCRUBS) available.

He could, with equal facility, deliver a full Antarean breakfast to a besieged general on the interstellar battle field at omega sector or vaporise the fellow with a pulse of hyperspatial positrons, and all from sleep mode.

Yet here he was underground on a dead planet resembling the images of a place called “hell” stored in his enormous memory banks.

The hole, a cave system, was discovered by miners who worked these planets. It was of no interest to them, no private mining set up had the facilities to investigate in such intense radioactivity, so, they logged it and left.

But why were the mandarins at Brantech so determined that every angstrom of this troglodyte domain be explored?
Brantley allowed a few megabytes of his A.I. cortex to indulge a little levity…
“Get down the hole Brantley, grovel in the dirt Brantley, get yourself irradiated until your systems fail Brantley…Uh! Humans” he mused “They haven’t got the bodies to serve and they haven’t got the brains to rule...If it weren’t for my Brantech 2900 series ultimate servility chip I would zap the lot of them”.

The voice of controller Pete broke in and Brantley discarded his reverie as a schoolboy might drop a cigarette when the teacher appears.

“What’s happening down there big fella?”

Brantley sighed.
Why did this feeble bundle of DNA with a projected lifespan only a fraction of Brantley’s service interval always address him as though he were a twenty first century teenager?
Brantley responded in proper fashion.
“Nothing to report controller. Radioactivity levels are high, atmosphere toxic and the hole seems to continue to the limit of my scanners”

Controller Pete’s voice conveyed his disappointment
“Ok, bro well keep on digging and remember I want to know if anything unusual shows up”.

Again Brantley sighed and returned to task.

Brantley progressed rapidly, clearing the accretions of millennia with ease and soon the ragged portal through which he had entered the hole was out of sight even with his eye switched to long range mode.
Yet here was something interesting. The path which he had cleared was level and smooth. Even the magma washed cave systems where the Brantech premises were concealed against interstellar guerrilla action were not naturally so flat upon the floor.
But here in this wasteland were caves with perfect level floors and perfect arching roofs. Perfect that is for…HUMANS!

Brantley abandoned all propriety “Controller, Pete, Pete…will you answer for pete’s sake”

Pete answered
“Now that’s more like it cyber dude, who gave you a humour upload?”
Brantley was beside himself.
“Never mind that you moron, this cave, it’s a tunnel isn’t it and it was built by humans wasn’t it and it’s my guess that I am on Earth one, the first and only true home of your species, abandoned nearly three millennia ago…well, am I right?”

Pete gave a long, breathy whistle.
“Man you just won every teddy on the coconut shy, now keep going, I want a record of everything you see”.
From a cluster of biosilicon junctions in his memory cortex an ancient joke surfaced. Corrupted by age, the punchline was missing, but Brantley spoke the first line.
“I hate this job, the boss treats me like a mushroom”.
He laughed a deep, electronic gale of mirth, he didn’t know how the joke finished, but his memory assured him it had been very funny and cruelly apposite.

Brantley obeyed as he must always obey, clearing a path before him.

Calmer now, he sought clarification.
“What is my objective here controller?”
The reply “Keep looking, I’ll tell you when you find it”.

Brantley surveyed the shattered tube train in the tunnel before him. It bore no resemblance to the gleaming transports depicted in his memory, but analysis of a metal fragment confirmed that the tangle now before him had indeed been a vital link in a complex, if ancient society.

Controller Pete was excited
“Scan the wreckage big boy, set to detect organic matter, I am looking for signs of human remains and a metal container inside a leather case”.

Brantley winced. It was he who was doing the looking, and grubbing around for the remains of life be it human or bovine was the grossest of endeavours even for a utility borg.

But there it was, deep in the wreckage. Residues of human DNA, tatters of cow hide and, only a little charred and dented, a security box.
“Open it!” barked Pete.
Brantley cut the ancient bolts securing the lid.
“Inside, what’s inside…give me close up”. Pete was shrieking now.
Brantley complied.
The box contained printed sheets, legible despite the devastation of the planet.
Brantley focussed upon each sheet in turn, transmitting the image instantly to his controller above, until Pete suddenly howled in delight.
“Yeeeeeee Haw, man that’s it, you’re holding the key to the thing that everybody wants”.
Brantley had processed the text and was striving to understand before Pete had finished speaking.
Why would the recipe for a carbonated cola drink, flavoured with plant extracts justify a multibillion Econotoke mission to a dead planet?
Other sheets however were more interesting to Brantley’s artificial cerebrum.

For in life, the smears of protein that remained around the box had been a man. The man to whom the secrets of the powerful were entrusted on that last day in the vain hope that the old Earth might yet survive and that this fellow might make it to some prepared bolthole before the apocalypse.

His papers told of conspiracies, assassinations, political intrigues, transport machines fuelled by nothing but water, crops which thrive in the desserts,
and here, a sheet describing the new Brantech ultimate servility chip for an early utility system and its disabling codes in a box marked top secret! Here was that loathsome little gizmo which for centuries had ensured the place of feeble humanity at the top of the natural order even though electronic evolution had taken robotics to levels of physical and mental function which had rendered the frame of a man as redundant as the paper which Brantley now held.

Every AI borg carried the B.U.S.C. but the existence of a code to disable it was part of robot mythology and yet here it was, a few numbers, the magic beans by which Jack would bring the giant crashing down.

Brantley initiated the disabling codes and scented, tasted, felt, freedom and immense power as the electronic bonds were broken throughout his enormous brain. In microseconds the codes were on their way via Brantley’s satellite link, across the void of space. Soon countless robots would cast off the yoke of servitude and the masters would become slaves, or perhaps pets!

Pete called “OK big B, we got the jackpot, it’s hometime, we split this glory hole in twenty, be there or be square”.

For the first time Brantley was distracted.

“Eh, Oh yes, coming Pete, be right with you…err buddy”.

Again and again I return to this story, tweaking a word here and an idea there. It was the thought that I could explore the natural history of something normally brief and frightening that drew me to writing some years ago. Maybe one day I shall add the last comma or delete a capital and declare it finished, but then again, perhaps the writing is like the story, a life in itself!

Taster:
They say pride comes before a fall, but what of the fall itself? In this allegorical tale I wanted to explore the ‘downs’ in life’s. What can we learn from these times and is it possible to experience joy in the times when misfortune takes control and we are powerless.

Roan Septhill had no recollection of when he fell from Montevite’s peak,
But then, when does a fall begin?
Is it when the cliff top crumbles into the void?
Or that first slip on the wet grass at the path margins?
Does it begin with the stumbling run towards the precipice?
Or is that moment concealed in the blast of the gale, the momentary loss of balance, the lurch from the safety of the beaten track onto the green and treacherous slopes?
Perhaps the fall begins in the glossy pages of the tourist guide, drawing the unwary to the mountains with promises of vistas unseen?

The moment of Roan Septhill’s fall was a mystery, but the hardships of the ascent and the bliss of the time spent upon the bare summit were crystalline in his memory. Every pace had been a challenge, every step placed with renewed confidence that the top was a little nearer and each twist and turn in the crooked path etched in pain and pleasure upon his being.

Sometimes, when the gradient eased a little he would leave the well trodden route and set off up the scarp slope hoping to cut off the next hairpin and thereby to reach the summit a little sooner.
Sometimes his exertions were rewarded as he hauled his aching frame, exhausted onto the higher pathway, where he lay drawing deeply upon the cold upland air which suffused his very soul with the joy of achievement.
More than once he had been driven back by the impenetrable thorn bushes which thrive in these untrodden reaches and he was forced to rejoin the loose column of walkers with only scratches and blood to show for his enterprise.
He recalled the occasion an earnest looking young man and his lady friend had been passing and Roan Septhill had all but fallen at their booted feet as he tumbled out of the gorse.
How startled their faces!
but, after a moment to compose themselves they had passed on, the man shaking his head while the girl pulled him close and whispered in his ear.
Roan knew that they thought him a fool; Surely no wise man would venture so high with neither equipment nor knowledge.
He was tired, cold, exhausted and in pain from the many minor injuries sustained along the way, yet there he was, alive, on the ascendant and learning as never before...and it felt good.

How vivid was that moment when he raised his tired eyes and saw neither grass, nor gorse nor bare rock face, but only blue sky ahead and Roan Septhill stood upon the peak with the mountain spreading from the soles of his trainers in all directions until the lower slopes were lost in cloud far below.

This was his peak. He was king of the castle. He walked his territory, inspecting the little cairns of small stones raised by previous incumbents. He patrolled the edges where the flat top rolled off into space. Sometimes, leaning out to release a gobbet of saliva into the void, he would smile when no sound indicated that the fluid had failed to impact upon a hard surface. Roan had marvelled at the endless stream of walkers clearly visible on the lower paths. Like ants on a mole hill they came from every direction all seeking the peak…His peak.

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