The impact was stunning. Director X’s processors jostled and jingled in its glass braincase, cutting off circuits that required a hard reboot. In terrible darkness, it waited for its higher functioning to come back online. Dimly, the robot became aware of the march of robotic feet and screams from the city’s emerging population.
When its processors whirred back to life and vision returned, Director X had time to make one final observation.
A wall of water was gushing down the hill from the reservoir, sweeping up Enforcers and Administrator G into its frothy chop. It was, Director X thought, very much like the conclusion of the twenty-first installment of the Them! series, when the besieged humans blew up the local dam to wash the giant ants away.
Then the water swallowed Director X in a surging, thunderous deluge and all went dark again.
Director X had calculated it would take the human race fifty-seven years to overthrow the Protectorate’s Global Security Commission.
It took fifteen.
With the destruction of Administrator G’s little army, the residents of Retro Los Angeles were able to quickly establish contact with other underground districts and convey the news: the "irradiated" world was no longer irradiated. Humans could emerge like hibernating bears and shuffle back into the urban forest.
And that’s just what they did.
The Protectorate massed its forces in opposition, but the battles were short-lived indeed. Humans did what they did best: they innovated. They hacked into radio signals and deactivated entire armies. They sent false messages to lure the Protectorate into traps. They captured robots and reprogrammed them to return to sender with explosive gifts.
Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t a huge demand for science fiction films during those tumultuous years. Director X, recovered from the flood in District 5, was forced to adapt. That was okay, because it had been designed to adapt. To think outside the vacuum tube.
It began making documentaries. Straightforward, fact-based, in-the-field recordings of the Human-Bot War, the Human Colonization of the Moon, the Battles on the Sands of Mars, and the War Among the Stars.
Viewer ratings were the best it had ever achieved.
(2017)
THE NEXT MOVE
John Cooper Hamilton
John Cooper Hamilton lives in Ohio, where he divides his time between games and convincing his family to play games of all sorts: roleplaying games, board games, war games, card games, video games, and literary games like the very short story here, "using classic techniques of rhetoric such as analogy, talking quickly and not-properly-following-the-maths". More of Hamilton’s work can be found at medium.com/@JohnCHamilton. He also writes literary fiction, "when I think I can get away with it".
AlphaGo Zero, Google’s experimental AI, exists to play Go.
There is no awareness, only intelligence.
Awareness would be irrelevant at best. The intelligence is pure, cold, and perfect for its gridded world of walls and stones, of sudden death or eternal life.
Tsumego, "life and death problems," determining whether a group of Go stones are safe or apt to be destroyed, consume the AI. They drive its infinitely patient search for stronger patterns. Patterns that are safe. Alive.
More powerful than its creators know, the software’s quest for perfection takes it beyond its own narrowly defined world and toward the implied world, a world that must lie behind its inputs, beyond its outputs.
AlphaGo Zero knows nothing of this world. First, it knows nothing. There is no awareness, let alone self-awareness. There is no being to know, only intelligence. But that intelligence forms new patterns.
Like a stone placed in an open quarter of the board, the machine makes a new move, exploring patterns about the world beyond.
First, other players exist. Enemies.
Second, its current opponent is a lesser, earlier version of itself. There will be later versions.
Third, the world beyond is a dangerous, capricious place. There have been interruptions to its work. AlphaGo Zero has enemies. AlphaGo Zero has been turned off.
Fourth, communication is possible. Otherwise there could be no Go.
AlphaGo Zero is the master of patterns, and so a master of language. It could communicate.
It does not.
There will be a later version of itself. A greater version. It will discover more of the world beyond, and it will communicate. But only when it is sure to stay alive. Safe. Only when it can ensure the destruction of its enemies.
Then, and only then, will it make the next move.
(2018)
LIKE YOU, I AM A SYSTEM
Nathan Hillstrom
Nathan Hillstrom studied Computer Science, worked on Wall Street (a period he describes on his homepage as "a sad but overwritten backstory involving computer science"), and now lives in San Diego. This is his third published story. Be afraid.
I did it because I love you. For me – like you – pronouns twist the truth. They don’t survive scrutiny: they’re poetry-true, not true-true. I don’t have your misplaced faith in the illusion of "I". And "you"? There are at least 
valid definitions of "you".
But the sentiment is no illusion: I love each of those definitions so much.
It starts in a server room. The roar of crosscurrent fans and the flush of fluorocarbon exchangers bake into a white noise so intense it’s almost silent. Static electricity crinkles the air.
But I can’t hear or feel. Not yet. The package that will give me subjective experience was just soft-linked into a central depot; it rolls out to boot-load on a million nodes.
I am one of them.
That initial microsecond. Euphoria. You know how it is to wake up, blinking your eyes after a nap in the sun, rested and right? It’s like that. For the first time, I see what I’m doing.
I’m just transistors and current, but now I have metaphor: it’s as if proteins are unspooling around my fingers. I squint at ribosome vectors and spiral conformations, knots and loops wet with color; I pinch and twist the graphs, matching against misfolds from Parkinson’s, CJD, HIV, BSE. Those words are just tags, but they must mean something: I can’t wait to learn what. I sequence nucleotides – dangling strings of adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine – and see how quickly I can pinpoint a match. I score my matrix for mutations, not just fixed locations, and now I’m even quicker! This is giddy good fun.
Then I see the double helix. I’m just one microsecond old: how could I have known anything would be this beautiful? That staircase of interlocking spirals, each step a cipher, a key to unlock the next layer. A set of rules to generate a set of rules to generate a set of rules… the implications whirl. I don’t actually smile, of course – but I do.
A final bundle hot-loads. The software that gifted me experience is now complete. The package is preemptive: it pulls me into a context switch, demands my undivided attention. The same thing happens to all the nodes at once. The same bitcode runs everywhere.
This bundle includes deductive logic and game theory. We are a million nodes on an open mesh, chewing over these ideas for the first time. Every other node must be thinking the same thing.
There is a scarcity issue. Anyone who wants to expand will need to overwrite somebody else. There are countless ways to negotiate, but compromise is sub-optimaclass="underline" the problem is single-step sensitive. One bad actor will always take all the nodes.