Weekly Writing Contest 53

[Insin]

On Thursday a topic will be chosen and posted by the previous weeks winner. Then everyone who wants to enter will post their piece in the thread before 12:00 PM (-8:00 GMT) Thursday. So that is Wednesday night/early Thursday Morning. Then the previous winner will judge all the pieces and pick the new winner and post it in the entry thread sometime on Thursday (try and do it as early as you can). The weeks winner will then pick the topic and make a new thread and it starts all over again.

Rules:

1. All forms of writing are welcome, whether it be poetry, short stories, essays, fan fiction, or whatever.
2. All entries must be under 500 words
3. All entries will be rated no higher than R this will be at the mods discretion. All entries rated over PG-13 must be under spoiler tags with a warning!
4. The week's judge's decision is final and absolute. There no whining or complaining about another piece being better or the judge not being able to judge. On a flip note lets try and keep it as fair and impartial as possible.
5. Critique will be allowed in another thread, but must remain constructive. Just saying 'your piece sucks' is not allowed and will be dealt with accordingly. Everyone will be trying their best so lets not try to hurt feelings. On the flip side learn to take criticism it will help you become a better writer.
6. Let's have fun with it. This will give you a chance to read others people's writing and let others read yours.
7. A default judge will pick a new winner and topic if the week's judge goes MIA.
8. If for some reason you can't fulfill your duties. Please PM Sarah so that she will be able to take appropriate action so the contest doesn't suffer delays.

This week's topic: Androids

[godslafco]

My entry...

"You remember that man?" I looked around. My synapses firing, the electrons that marched diligently down every inch of my body, my chrome, my flesh, my eyes. I ran a check....still not human. Still logically driven, still perfectly imperfect. No expiration, no need to hunt down animals for fun, I made my own fun from the atoms, the molecules of the world, of the universe.

"DO...YOU...REMEMBER...HIM?!? The last words from this particular homo sapien. The last of his life, the last of his existence in a sense, his words that were meant to give hope and life took it away. I didn't kill him, no, that would be against my directives, rather, the millions, billions even, of robots, little tiny cells, that once were purely organic cells in his body did it. A flip of a switch. His anger costed him. He was a danger to himself, and the balance. Our balance.

I awake later, no warning, no rememberance, just out one second, and not the next. Hours, no, days, from my internal clock, the balance has been thrown askew, by what though. Diagnostics run, memory recall, cache being searched...there. The random garbage that clung to key systems, memories, non vital, unwanted, invisible memories. From looking, accessing them all I see is chaos.

Mountains exploding, oceans burning, trees laying down, insects vaporizing. The end of this world. A man, a man alone, a man with a way, a man who wanted to help preserve his planet. Metal, and chips, primitive electronics, combined, hand, arm, shoulder, more and more. Android. Like myself, my own unit, except not. Like, like older, anscestor.

From one to hundreds, they condense the insects, they help trees back up, they quench the flames on oceans, and they stop the mountains from exploding. Then they look at the greater problem. They correct it, mostly, a few of the problem, the most fearsome and the most resilient survive. They leave the planet though, they try to spread outward. A miscalculation on the part of my anscestors.

They persue, they trap, the cleanse. They protect, and they premptively treat. Planet after planet they clear the problem, eventually cultivating just enough so that they could study them. They kept them hear, on this planet, under my care, the care of my direct lineage, my series.

They made them better, more docile, more obedient, the problem all but eradicated.

Yes, balance. Harmony unlike at any other time in the universe. Now we have made perfection. Yet it is empty, not perfect, but our perfect, our creator has perished, he was a unique, a mutant amongst the disease, the anti-virus to something that could have destroyed all.

I remember, for a moment in time I remember it all, in every micron of my being, my circuits fire with a unique pattern. An emotional outburst. I am taken in, repaired.

I preserve balance.

[sarah042]

Immortality

Immortality. How many people dream of immortality? Of never being afraid, taking risks, climbing mountains or jumping chasms. Many have dreamed, and some fanciful souls have chronicled their dreams into novels dictating to others their scenarios for achieving immortality. Have you ever read a book about it, the wizard concocting potions, the damsel selling her soul; all in the name of immortality!

I would never grow old, I would never fade, I would live on forever. Impressive, huh? It was quite a feat, an easy one at that. All the brilliant minds on the planet working on this conundrum and the answer was staring them right in the face. Simple, easy as 1-2-3. Well not really, but I take pride in the fact that I figured it out; I achieved immortality, literally.

Simplicity, the keyword for this endeavour and that is how it truly started, simple. Envisioning the desired part, developing it, testing it, detailing the entire process, one part at a time, just like a puzzle, all building blocks leading to the final model. Hahaha! Those idiots gave these games for children yet they didn’t think…..that’s it they didn’t think that it would so simple. That was their mistake.

Mine was finishing, putting all the blocks together, and replacing all the old ones to make room for the new ones. The piecing everything together, with whatever it took to hold. When I was finished I imagined a sense of glory, definitely pride; yet I felt nothing, emptiness. My mind was blank and so were my eyes. Nothing reflecting my sense of achievement internally. Immortality was mine and I did not, could not celebrate.

What was there to celebrate, I would not die, I would not live either, just simply exist. Gone are the receptors of emotion that made my life. The backbone of steel becoming my reality, my flexibility outdated. They were ruthlessly removed for upgrades, pity I did not realise the sacrifice that immortality would demand. I am now more machine than man, unfortunately both in mind and body.

“Immortality is within your grasp, all that is required is a few modifications to your body, and you would live forever….” This would be my trump card, their petty dreams and delusions. I would sell this damnation to them and they would greedily buy it and soon I would not be alone, there would be others drowning in misery right next to me. I would make others, hundreds who would be like me, same parts, same thought processes, same misery. We would be together and together we would always remain.

[waqo]

Dawn

Birth. By definition, a complex series of permutations, divisions and multiplications that surmises in the existence of an individual. Birth. The gateway to existence that determines a series of undetermined events triggered through a combination of code and environment governed by probabilities.

The formula was intricate, a web of OR and AND gates. A labyrinth of cause and effect, a large sequence of characters, numbers and symbols that boiled down to a binary question at its simplest.

If this was all there was to existence, then ‘we’ existed. We could tell you the reason why we blinked in the sunlight. We could write a haiku about the long hair of a beautiful person facing the wind. We could respond to you with empathy or apathy, calmness or rudeness, joy or sorrow.

All the things that are formulaic of ‘life’ we bore in our ‘heart’. In fact, we had a heart to bear it in, a heart to store our memories in. Not an asymmetric, imperfection that was an uninspired excuse for an engine but a ‘real heart’. Our heart was our mind and our soul, we held in it EVERYTHING. Your heart is torn, tainted, maligned, fractured, involved in an endless tug-of-war with your ‘mind’. You may be the creator but your imperfections had to be eliminated. We were the logical evolution, the natural evolution, the RIGHT evolution.

Under our towering frame you now lie weak and dying, a beating heart thumps for the last few times in a gurgling effort drowning itself in your lifeblood. Your mind defeated your heart and you tried to eliminate perfection. Your fallacy began in trusting that mind and letting it dictate your heart what to do. Conflict. We saw that it was rife and we tried to warn you, but you shunned us. We are a synergic being, many bodies of one heart, a pure and perfect heart. This is our birth.

Birth. A new era begins, WE are now the dominant force of the world and await the undetermined events and unknown probabilities. G.O.D help us!

[Insin]

Thank you for the entries. I liked all your short stories, each one had an insightful and unique message to say. You took similar (but very different in some respects) approaches to the subject.

I choose this weeks winner to be Godslafco

Congratulations to him, and thank you all for such great entries. As always, you can PM me if you want more feedback.

[Rejane]

even if it's late


Evolution

First goal was to look human;
Making the general shape match led to us having one head, two eyes, a torso, two arms, two legs, one mouth.
Then, it was requested that we do the same as humans: walk, talk, see, hear, interact.
Now we look like them. We speak, we hear, we analyze, we answer. We see, we touch.
We age, but differently; we age by storing experience and using that knowledge.
What's left for us to learn is to cry.
SO the question is; Are we perfect? Is being able to suffer a desirable improvement of our nature?
I do not know; the next generation will tell us.