Forever Magazine Issue 89 by John Barnes & Timons Esaias & Andy Dudak

Author:John Barnes & Timons Esaias & Andy Dudak [Barnes, John & Esaias, Timons & Dudak, Andy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: magazine, science fiction, Science Fiction - Short Stories, science fiction magazine, short fiction, short stories
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2022-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

Originally published in Jim Baen’s Universe, December 2009.

Go. Now. Fix.

Timons Esaias

The model TD8 PandaPillow®, serial #723756, lay forgotten behind a pallet of unsold magazines for two years, its battery power slowly ebbing, and hung on a display for three months, power ebbing further, until—on the very day it would have been stock-rotated to oblivion—a customer bought it.

The PandaPillow was quickly unwrapped, hustled onto the plane, inflated, used as a pillow for six hours in a darkened cabin, and then was lifted into the overhead storage bin and locked away.

The customer never registered PandaPillow, never synced it to the customer’s personal constellation, never recharged it, never executed any personal bonding procedures. No person, and no device, ever bothered to read any of its instructions.

While this was not optimal ownership behavior, PandaPillow waited, as it had always waited; weakening, as it had always weakened. One does not complain. One does not summon Customer Support. One is merely a pillow.

For two hours and a bit more, it waited. Then came a very sharp bang and short screaming whistles, and the overhead bin erupted into the cabin. Clothes and bags went everywhere, and PandaPillow almost tumbled out, its clasping hooks barely keeping it in the bin.

A haze of powders and exploded aerosols hung in the cabin, but was already clearing. The scene made PandaPillow’s systems surge. Everything was wrong. People were dazed, some were hurt. There was blood. The air was going away.

With its selfie app PandaPillow recorded two panorama shots and two close-ups before its battery finally declared the need for emergency shutdown. Shutdown initiated.

PandaPillow took one last survey of the area. A few rescue masks were dropping, here and there. And why was the air all nitrogen?

COMFORT, DEFEND, said its pillow programming. Powering down wouldn’t do that.

PandaPillow #723756 invoked Customer Support.

The protocol for Emergency was BE QUICK, so PandaPillow sent the images quickly—in low-resolution first, to save power.

It could hear faint people voices over the Customer Support line, sounding puzzled. “Do we still support those things?” “Didn’t we have trouble with that whole . . . ?” “Is that a movie set?” “Movie sets don’t fly at eighty thousand feet, that I know of.” “Why isn’t it sending proper resolution, for crying out . . . ”

PandaPillow heard a worrying gasp.

“Oh dear pizza shops in heaven,” Customer Support said, “no wonder you called in.” Direct feedback pulses followed. “And you’re nearly flatlined. We need to get you to a node. Fast.”

PandaPillow went sharply simple. Visual sensors cut out, local sound dialed down, danger signals dropped, things went standby. There was a quick sync to the plane’s infrastructure host, and faint Customer Support voices talked about “calling an Incident,” but PandaPillows don’t do that, so instead it locked to a simple orientation grid for the five closest multinodes. It was instructed to dangle headfirst out of the bin and take snapshots in all five directions. The third-closest node got DESTINATION painted on it, and then PandaPillow lost situational awareness while its base function protocol took over.

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