Escape Artists
Escape Pod => Episode Comments => Topic started by: Russell Nash on March 09, 2009, 07:37:26 AM
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EP Flash: My Angel Gabriel (http://escapepod.org/2009/03/09/escape-pod-flash-my-angel-gabriel/)
By J. R. Blackwell.
Read by Ann Leckie (of PodCastle (http://podcastle.org/)).
“Becky.” Typed Rachel “I had to ban him. I’m sorry. He was a bot, a spider, a program. He wasn’t human.” Becky’s green words glowed on her screen almost immediately.
“He talked to me! Every day! What do you mean he wasn’t human?”
Rachel exhaled; this was going to be tough. “Didn’t you notice he kept trying to get you to buy games?”
“I like buying games! Who cares? I really liked Gabriel. You two were the only people on this forum I could talk to.”
Rated R. Models internet behavior you wouldn’t want your children to emulate.
(http://escapepod.org/wp-images/podcast-mini4.gif)
Listen to this EP Flash! (http://media.rawvoice.com/escapepod/media.libsyn.com/media/escapepod/EPFlash_MyAngelGabriel.mp3)
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Cute, though I found it a bit predictable that one of them was a bot.
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I loved this, mainly because it reminded me of "The Electric Ant". Who's real and who's not? Well, there you go.
It's perfectly possible, if you're taking the PKD route, that she (the mod) was the only real human being in the entire universe and everyone else was merely generated by her brain- and she undid them, destroyed them by sending them this code. So it could happen to YOU!
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Nice timing, cute story.
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clever, cute. I really really enjoyed this!
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I liked it as well.
Nice timing, cute story.
Said whilst knocking on wood: we've actually not had any new bots in a few days from what we can tell. There are still some new members that haven't posted, but they seem human enough.
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disturbing.
a programmer defeats the turing test but doesn't change default codes? madness!
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Speaking of the Turing Test, did anyone watch Friday's episode (http://www.tv.com/numb3rs/first-law/episode/1255352/summary.html?tag=ep_guide;ep_title;16) of NUMB3RS?
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Eh. The problem with Flash is that it almost always depends upon a twist ending, and you find yourself looking for the twist more than listening to the story. At least I do.
Speaking of the Turing Test, did anyone watch Friday's episode (http://www.tv.com/numb3rs/first-law/episode/1255352/summary.html?tag=ep_guide;ep_title;16) of NUMB3RS?
Yep. It was okay. Nancy Harris is REALLY tall, or she was wearing HUGE heels... because Mike Myers isn't terribly tall, and she was only slightly taller than him in Axe Murderer.
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I listen while driving, and right at the twist in the story I was in the process of passing another few cars, so it completely caught me off guard. Which is great! I also found it engaging well before the big reveal. I think I would have even been satisfied with a more mundane ending.
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Yeah, I enjoyed this one, too. Nice little story, well delivered by Ann.
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Yeah, don't have much to say, what with it being a flash and all, but it was a nice idea for a story (the twist at the ending really got me) and the reading was just perfect.
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Cute? I thought this story was über creepy, but good
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Made me laugh, which made my co-workers give me odd looks.
Have to resist the urge to analyze this one any more from a programming standpoint though!
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I was confused by the ending - was the girl a bot? Or was the code able to affect humans?
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I was confused by the ending - was the girl a bot? Or was the code able to affect humans?
I took it as her being a bot — makes more sense as a bot-meets-bot, bot-falls-in-love-with-bot, bot-gets-deleted kinda story.
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After all, it's the most common story there is... apart from Droid meets droid. Droid becomes chameleon. Droid loses chameleon, chameleon turns into blob, droid gets blob back again, blob meets blob, blob goes off with blob, and droid loses blob, chameleon and droid. that is.
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It's about a boy and his dog.
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I loved this thing! It was so dang funny! Ending obviously the best.
Before you say it can't happen to you, it actually did happen to me once way back when. It was on a BBS waaay back in the day. I was starting to wonder why the person I was chatting with would disconnect the moment someone else connected, and why she seemed to repeat herself so much. So I asked someone (else) and then I felt foolish. There was a funny in the Eliza-style bot I chatted with--if you used the word "computer" in your message, "she" would respond with a line of assembly language. :-)
Yeah, and as the chat-bots improve, I suppose the Turing test will be met more and more readily (and annoyingly).
Come to think of it, I'm not sure if I'm real right now. Maybe I'm a ghost in the great big Internet machine.
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Furry cows moo and decompress.
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it is a great example to me of what scifi is. it should either skirt the line of reality so close it scares you or so far off it entertains.
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I loved this, mainly because it reminded me of "The Electric Ant". Who's real and who's not? Well, there you go.
It's perfectly possible, if you're taking the PKD route, that she (the mod) was the only real human being in the entire universe and everyone else was merely generated by her brain- and she undid them, destroyed them by sending them this code. So it could happen to YOU!
I totally think that's what all of the internet is! I assume everyone is a bot until I meet them in person. A phone call is a pretty good sign, but it's possible that voice synthesis technology is much more advanced then I give it credit for, so in-person is much more reliable.
Anyway, this story was cute, but I saw the twist from nearly the beginning.