28:1
It's Doomsday, 2012.
Be Careful What You Wish for
Ulysses flopped down to his basement to check on how Thomas was doing. It had only been three months since the DNA test told him he had a brother. Had they never met Ulysses would not have gotten into the movie industry. His parents had soured him on the idea and people already bothered him enough. Despite having left his brother to his work for three hours, the scene had not changed. Thomas sat at his computer with eyes locked on the display, rapidly moving fingers on touch screens.
“When I said don't you go changing, I was kidding.” Ulysses said and smacked his brother on the shoulder. That broke his concentration. Ulysses did not see his younger brother's snear cause all the stacks of computers and wires interested him more.
“Gonna try this new idea I had," said Thomas. "Mix all the software we found in the web with the SIAI programs. . .”
“SIAI?" Ulysses interrupted, "What’s that? Stop Idiots And Igloos”
Thomas kept his eyes on the screen. He spoke with a slow monotone, “That’s it. Stop Idiots and Igloos. Nice.” Thinking hurt his head. It pounded from too much caffeine and time spent looking at a monitor. “Run the Idiot's codes against the government ones, see if I can understand to where they fit best.” His eyes glazed on him again, it'd been happening He got his mind control back and said, “Hopefully, they will recognize what would yield an improvement. Then improve their own code repeatedly until we have Seed AI. It’s like trying to get a fire to catch.”
“Seed AI?”
“Self-improving. It would make the most of the hardware here. It’d pretty much be beyond what we can imagine. I, you, all humans, think at 200 hertz each second. This computer system consists a cloud of 137 multi core chips." Thomas shook his head after trying to crunch the numbers, "I can’t even imagine.”
“How’s the power output?” Ulysses asked this often because he had solved this problem.
“Everything’s fine. The new solar cells you had installed are giving us more than enough juice. Even if we run at capacity.” Thomas answered his brother as he had before when he was asked this question. He swiveled around in his chair. Thomas' face had that dazed look like a prize fighter that got one to many hits to the jaw. Ulysses saw his brothers eyes glaze over.
Snap, snap, snap went Ulysses. Thomas blinked out of it and went on to explain.
“We’ve been at this for three weeks. I might have to go back to my old architecture, just suped-up. It’dbe better than anything we've seen,” said Thomas.
“But it wouldn’t look really real.”
His brother shook his head.
“Give it one more day. My dad ain’t expecting anything until I see him for Christmas.”
The brothers went upstairs to their caveman living room, smoked a joint and passed out.
Thomas woke to find Ulysses kneeling in front of the fire place. He got down on his hands and blew on the embers. It took several stokes of his breath, but the fire caught and sprang to life. Thomas gave the biggest yawn he could when he sat up.
“Morning.”
“Morning.”
The two shuffled around from the living room to the kitchen. They ate some toast and drank tea, all whilst watching a flurry of snow fall outside the glass wall. For what seemed like hours they lounged around in front of the fire until one side would grow hot and need to be turned away. After they had really woken up, Ulysses tried to talk his brother into smoking, but failed. They went down to the basement. Thomas took his trusted, old seat and turned the ignition for the computer at the same time.
Ulysses hated days like this. When the computer was under construction, Thomas would tell him what to do. Building their machine was done together. And Ulysses learned to solder, wire and plug-in all sorts of things. Then the power problem gave him something to accomplish. Now he spent his days watching his brother wreck himself in front of a machine that didn’t work like he believed it could. He’d let him work until lunch.
At a couple minutes past eleven, after Thomas had been working for almost three hours, Ulysses shouted down into the basement to see if his brother wanted something to drink. Thomas shouted back that he would. Using his own initiative, Ulysses sat down and rolled up a joint. It would be a surprise for his brother and consolation for their failure. Thomas could smell him approach.
“I told you. I don’t want to do that now.”
“No, that was three hours ago. Come on now, don’t worry. You worked hard, but failed. I’m hungry, and after this I’ll be starving.” He motioned to the joint. “Take a break: eat something.” Ulysses offered Thomas the joint.
Thomas put his hand up, “No thanks. I’m hungry,” Thomas popped open his Coke, “Just give me one more chance.”
Ulysses hit the joint and swung his shoulders as he shuffled back away from his brother. That's when things went wrong. His heal felt some resistance and before he could hit anymore, Ulyssess tripped over.
A loud crash came just before the hiss of gas escaping from high-pressure containment. A cloud of gas draped over the room and dropped its temperature noticeably. Then everything went black with a click. All noise stopped. Thomas whipped his head around to where his brother had been behind him. A faint red ember of his jazz cigarette glowed bright. He then heard his brother inhale.
“My bad,” said Ulysses before exhaling another cloud.
“Damn it! You hit my cooling system. I gotta rebuild that so prome. . .”
The lights went back on. The gas cleared before a monitor that displayed a famous painting.