My feet ached, but it was well worth it. There was blood on one of my insteps, the left one, and when I walked around the floor I tracked her blood around with me. The room, nothing more than an abattoir, had fit the bill perfectly. There was the pen I'd led her to. I said nothing more than, "You'll like it. It's the spookiest little spot." And she had crawled inside without the least hesitation. And as soon as she did so, the smile left my face, and the grimace reappeared, and I thought, "This is for all those...
My feet ached, but it was well worth it. Standing in line in the freezing cold, clutching my ticket with the number 134 on it, I think I had a pretty good chance this time. The one hundred and thirty-three people in front of me were all bundled up too, scarves wound around their faces against the blowing wind, hats pulled down low on their faces. We all had sneakers on, waiting for the doors to open so that we could stampede into the store and wrestle with each other for the units the store had stocked. I looked at...
My feet ached, but it was well worth it. Not only that, I was starving. Twenty-six point two miles. It was a stupid decision, but I'm glad I made it. A marathon isn't the sort of thing most people do on the spur of the moment. I mean, I'd thought about it before. But I'd never trained for it. I just wanted to do something that I would remember. Something that would make me feel alive. I wasn't even sure I would do it until this morning. I wasn't sure I'd go along with it even at the start line....
It was dark, cold. I felt the wind, colder than ice, blow into my face a large number of sharp ice crystals. "Where am i?" i thought. I walked down a hall, made completely of ice. The air was not only cold, but had a bitter smell to it: like torture and an evil queen. I walked into a throne room, by the looks of it, anyway. The only spot of color in the room was the bright yellow hood the person standing before the queen wore, and it was quickly fading. The first thing i noticed about the room...
My feet ached, but it was well worth it. I was close to finding the lost city of the Incans. I had walked through endless jungle paths, forgotten by the human nation. But i had come to a semi-clearing. There were immense boulders, at least half the size of a skyscraper back home in New York. I pulled vines and ivy off a strange looking stone, to find a wonder: an opening. I ventured down, flashlight searching the earthy walls. Suddenly, i felt a hand clamp over my mouth. They dragged me to the ground and pushed a filthy rag...
The ice road stretched in an endless arc ahead of them, spiralling and curving amongst the tall pine trees like a child's marble run which had been exquisitely crafted out of snow. The sun was barely able to climb higher than the trees at this time of day, and she felt a shiver as the heater in the old car battled the sub-zero temperatures in mid-January here in the North. Her hands gripped the steering wheel more tightly as she concentrated on getting to the hospital safely, hoping against hope that she would be in time to bid her old...
It is beautiful. The trail was never going to end. Or at least I wasn't going to make it to the end. I won't live forever. I will die before we reach the end of the trail. We'd been traveling for three years. By all calculations it will take another four to five years. I realized that as I was digging through the journals from the explorers before us. I realized that the rest all knew that, they just didn't want to tell me. To tell me that what I had fought for wasn't ever going to be mine.
But...
I'm in love with a robot. She doesn't have a physical presence, she's not some pile of servos shipped from Japan. She's an AI, the product of decades of research and development -- using tens of millions of online conversations as a template for her personality.
I know people tell me that she just scours all my emails in an effort to become what I like, and I know people tell me that she's nothing more than a neural network backed by a huge database. But is that so different from a human brain?
"Hestan... where am i?" said Vive as she came out of anesthesia. "You're in the hospital. You collapsed in the park three days ago. The doctors say that a clot developed in your aorta and you went into cardiac arrest." said Hestan, handing her a book. She smiled, then opened it and read for the next hour. A nurse came in and injected another anesthetic into her IV. two minutes later she dropped back into sleep. Then a doctor came in and said "Her heart is fine, but we still don't know what caused the clot. She was perfectly healthy,...
HI! This is a continum of the story: Collapse.
"Hello? This is 911, what is your emergency?" said the operator. "Hello? This is Hestan Gordio. I'm in the park and my friend Vive just collapsed into unconciousness. Please send medical help!" Hestan said into the phone. "OK, the ambulance will be there in a few minutes." said the operator before hanging up. 3 minutes later, the paramedics arrived and lifted Vive onto a stretcher. Hestan climbed into the ambulance and sat like a rock beside Vive the entire drive. When they got to the hospital, they ran her straight up...