How Did I End Up Here?

By Yining Su

(Editor intro: In her essay about struggling with the French lagnuage as an English-speaking Canadian, Yining Su tells of the shortcomings of her early education and shows us that sometimes, even when standardized tests are wildly inaccurate, they may know us better than we know ourselves.)

How did I end up here? How did I get myself so deep into this? Those were the thoughts that went through my mind as I sat in front of my midterm French exam. During the following hour and a half, I was expected to read a poem by Charles Baudelaire and write a five hundred-word analysis on it. In French. So, how did I end up there?

3 O’clock Robot

by J. Robert Novak

(Editor intro: In this short science-fiction piece, J. Robert Novak proves that there are some things that science can’t fix.)

Dr. Schneider was, as they say, washed up.

Oh, sure, in his prime, he was considered to be one of the pioneers of robotics, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence. He did, after all, create the computer that beat Grandmaster Ivan Rasputichivichinski in Chutes & Ladders. His research did lead to advancements in prosthetic toes (with 13 points of articulation!). He even designed the new robots, the ones completely indistinguishable from, well, the old robots. His name was once synonymous with “the future”.

That was, however, in the past. At the present, his name was slowly fading into the abysmal obscurity that dooms many who peak early. He sat in his dusty laboratory. His equipment, once state-of-the-art, was now the robotics equivalent of Tinker-Toys. His investors were not happy, and they were threatening to sell all of his equipment for scrap, tear down his laboratory, and retire him to St. Turing’s Home for Obselete Inventors.

Dr. Schneider had one last chance, though. The 120th annual Robotics, Cybernetics, and Artificial Intelligences Expostition (or RoboCyboArtifExpo 120, as those “in the know” called it) was tomorrow, and he had an idea.

Local Color: Down My Local

By Charlie Kondek

I want to tell you about this new web-based “zine,” Local Color, and to do so I want to invite you inside my head for a moment.

It’s a colorful place at times. Several of my fantasies are colliding at once with my realities. First of all, I am thinking of this as an “origin story.” Any nerd knows that in the origin story, you start out as an ordinary person who falls into a vat of radioactive yogurt or is sucked through a quantum straw and comes out the other side with fabulous super powers, abilities that perhaps you yourself don’t understand yet. But this is a “team book,” which means that when each member of the team meets, they at first mistake each other for villains and have a tremendous, building-leveling, non-lethal brawl before realizing, oh, wait, we were on the same side the whole time. That makes me Professor Xavier to the zine’s X-Men. No, wait, I’m Batman. No, Captain America. Doc Savage?