text: eases back into his chair and breathes a sigh of relief. It was his 92nd birthday; retirement age. No more 10am starts, no more having to relinquish three days a week to the full-time employment rat race. Finally.. free. He relishes the moment, feeling his chair snug him warmly, its material continuously and amorphously shifting around his frame to maximise comfort. The quality of the air, the heat from his coffee cup, the light beaming through his window. Goldilocks would be jealous, he joked to himself. “Sim-space, show me my father’s television from 2018 please.” The sim-space AI assistant quickly peruses the latest scan of its owners memory and inquires, ‘The Samsung, Mr Chivers?’ Marnold confirms with a nod. The boundaries that contain the sim-space glow to resemble an empty cuboid against the wall, warning any bodied-beings not to come close. For a second, Marnold hears that call of the void that so many do and wonders “what would happen if I put my hand.. ?” He’d heard the horror stories, obviously, but couldn’t quite fathom the science of it. Some picoseconds later however, there popped into existence a perfect reconstruction of the television from his memory inside the sim-space. Marnold picks up the remote, a device that was used to remotely control electronic devices back in Modern times, and looks through the simulated content on the television. Marnold squints at the screen, reacquainting himself with the 2-dimensional nature of Modern video. His eyes widen at a collection of pixels - ‘World Snooker Final’. It had been too long since Marnold had last watched a real game of *chess with balls* - as he would put it. His finger instructs the remote with a button press, and a pulsing infra-red energy bathes the room momentarily. The television summons to life a broadcast of yore; a gentle ensemble consisting of a giant green table centre-screen, with smartly-dressed human beings knocking sticks and balls over it. Marnold catches himself daring a smile, “the good old days.” He puts his feet up on the stool in front. “Grea’granda!” Plucked away from his contentment and with a whiff of irritation, “Wh-wha? Who’s there?” “It’s Russ you fool, happy birthday -slash- retirement! Thought I’d whip by, ya know, see how you are. Thought it better than just sending another dopamine hit.” Marnold smiles. He could never put his finger on it, but there was always something better about seeing people - he had never fully signed up to the idea of reading a well-wishing and injecting the enclosed gift of dopamine. It felt nice, sure, but he couldn't help but feel there was something missing. Cards, too! Of all the social-niceties that Marnold hoped would die off with technological progress, cards had stuck around like a bad smell. Maybe 92 is when you start getting cranky he thought to himself. “Ahh thank you, it *is* good to see someone non-digitally once in a while,” he replies, concealing his cynicism nicely. Russ points to the sim-space. “A television? C’mon gramps, of all the things you could will into existence.. a television?” Marnold squirms. “Well the good vibes sure lasted didn’t they(!) Listen, sprog, being 50-something may feel like it has conferred some sort of worldly understanding upon you but, believe me, you’re just starting out. You still have no idea what the important things are in life. And if you can’t appreciate the simple things in life, you have no foundation for the complex things. This television is my simple thing. It is my birthday. My retirement day. And I wish to spend it as I mean to go on - appreciating the simple things.” So rarely does he socialise these days, Marnold had almost forgotten how quick he was to anger. “Simple things, simple minds. That’s what father says.” Marnold mumbles his frustration, “Yes. I know *exactly* the kind of person my son-in-law is.” A palpable silence hangs. It’s funny how tension can manifest socially, no other emotion can fill a room in the same way. The 2040’s wave of pheromonologists got close to understanding it before *you-know-what* happened. Russell’s cortisol-meter started shrieking which didn’t subtract from the awkwardness, but does at least act as a call-to-action for someone to cut the tension, “Well- what are you watching then?” “Snooker” is the unenthusiastic, staccato reply. Marnold continues watching the screen emptily, pretending to be engrossed but projecting annoyance. “Didn’t know humans used to play.” Russ responded. Marnold groaned as though those words were daggers to his sensibilities. “Yes... It’s just another domain that AI took from us. God damn robots - they have no philosophy! Pure pragmatists. They completely destroyed snooker - turned it from a gentlemanly game into an arms race.” Through a flattened smile and nodding dog routine, Russ’s lack of interest was obvious. He signals to the entrance with his thumb, “Well I’d better be goi--” “-- an arms race I tell you! That’s why there’s so many rules governing the game these days. It started off as a friendly between bot and human - just a novelty, like that Jeopardy show and IBM’s Watson?” Marnold looks to Russ for a bodily cue to continue.. nothing - at least, nothing encouraging. "Ah well," he thinks to himself, "it’s my birthday and I'll rant if I want to." “Well, maybe it’s not living memory for you youngins but the world went crazy for the first bot v. human snooker match. It’s ironic thinking back on it now, we were clapping our eventual oppressors. Everyone tuned in to witness flesh versus circuits and saw a microcosm of their future. ‘Ronnie O’Sullivan vs G147-365’. Man vs machine. And what a machine(!) A jumped-up laptop connected to a junkyard frame. It couldn’t even pick up its own cue - it had to be carefully inserted into its grip by a technician.” Russ was looking in Marnold’s direction, but you couldn’t charitably say that he was looking *at* him. Looking *through* seems more appropriate; his mind clearly pre-occupied. “It was a bloodbath - metaphorically, of course. I mean, the bot started off quite slow, sure, but it was learning. Every time it whiffed a shot, it updated its algorithms to appropriately account for the mismatch. By halftime, the only shots Ronnie got to take was when it was his turn to break! G147 was hitting maximum points routinely by the end. And you know what? Not one of them were as beautiful as Ronnie’s 5 minute corker back in 1997.” Russ, eyeing the clock on the wall, noticed a pause amid Marnold’s white noise and felt he had to prove he was listening. “Uhh... 1997 huh?” Marnold, noticing that Russ had only picked up on the last word he’d said, continued with spiteful grace. “Yes. 1997. But that’s what I mean by no philosophy, there’s no meaning in what they do. It’s just all numbers and logic gates. No art, no style. Pure pragmatism.” “It didn’t end there though. Ooooooh no. Then the bot v bot matches began. Every country in the world slowly jumping in to prove their AI researchers were the best. You know, like how America and Russia fought a proxy-war by proving who could get to the moon first - thereby proving who was technologically superior? Snookerbots were fast becoming that, except it had no end goal. They just competed endlessly, accepting diminishing returns on their victories each time - perhaps preferable to other forms of national chauvinism, granted.” “But they’d be outfitted with fancy cameras and sensors - detecting every possible detail of the table. The knap, the humidity, the moisture of the cloth, microscopic blemishes on the balls - even mapping the material density of the side-cushions! Soon enough, they were making shots that made no euclidean sense since they could take advantage of unseen imperfections in the table and balls. It used to be that people would clap astonishing feats; maybe an amazing curve shot, or a cunning safety play. But it got to a point where the audience could only appreciate what they were able to understand - everything was so baffling. It was like chaos theory to everyone but the participants.” Marnold continued with his frustrated nostalgia, “And the sonic booms! That was a game changer. The balls were starting to chip - and sometimes explode - from the impacts of the bots cuing them. So they were upgraded to some nano-whatever to allow the bots to really let rip. And boy, did they. They would hit the cue ball so fast that a mini sonic boom would disturb the entire table! The algorithms of course learned to account for this and soon enough every match was just a stalemate of mini explosions. No country's bot was able to win any more, all they could do was not lose by default - ie, their bot suffering a mechanical malfunction. So, a once-great game became a war of attrition.” With Russ’s vague silhouette in his periphery, and still looking at the screen (though paying it no attention), he continues. “They’d reached an impasse - every bot was as good as the next one. No further improvements to be made because they were limited by the human imagination. Viewership figures dwindled, sponsors started pulling out and human snooker players were even being asked to come out of retirement - what a novelty(!) They all refused, naturally.” “So, some hot shot from America gets the idea of asking the bot what it needs to improve. This is what happens when you don’t read and heed Asimov. The bots’ AIs up until this point were permitted to update their algorithms in accordance with sensor data. It was not permitted for an AI to freely rationalise - and for good reason! But, this was pseudo-Cold War 2, and global dominance had to be demonstrated. Now, I’m no AI researcher but I’ve heard it explained as them creating a sort of positive feedback loop between perception and reflection, causing something analogous to consciousness. I mean, whatever, however they did it, they did do it. And so, they fed it the question: What do you need to improve at your task? And do you know what it said?” A silence goes unacknowledged as Marnold leaves his chair and heads towards his bookcase. He thumbs through a few newspaper cuttings and, after an insociable amount of time in quiet, he produces an article that had the ‘scoop’ back in the day - a printed transcript of the AI’s thought process. Marnold turns around to hand it to Russ but is met with an empty room, and then an empty spirit. He’d left. Marnold slowly lowers his out-stretched arm, article in-hand. He wondered how long he’d been speaking to himself for, and starts his own feedback loop of doubt and self-loathing. “God damn it..” he scratches the back of his head and makes for his chair again. As he settles in, the material again moulds around him with a pathetic agency - but it is of cold comfort now. Unpacking Russ’s gift, Marnold loads the syringe and looks longingly at the television. “Happy 92nd Mr Chivers...