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How will artificial intelligence transform warfare? Andrew Liptak’s story brings us to the front lines to see how a glitchy combat AI deals with the tricky task of balancing the demands of a mission with the unpredictability of the battlefield.
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Would you trust artificial intelligence to coach your favorite sports team? This month’s Future Tense Fiction story brings us straight to the pitch, where a soccer team is battling its way toward the Premier League with the help of an unusual, technologically enabled manager.
Following the mass extinction of most species, the animals that fill a zoo in a future Arctic metropolis are lab-made—with one exception: an aging lion. When the lion escapes in the middle of the city’s Christmas festivities, a complex hunt ensues.
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The AI boom means more demands on data centers—and running a data center requires complex technical infrastructure, vast environmental resources, and experienced human talent. In E. G. Condé’s story, a labyrinthine data center is in the middle of a massive outage. When the corporation that owns the center fails to diagnose the problem provoking the outage with its fancy technical systems, it’s forced to turn to human intuition to sniff out a more fundamental dilemma.
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If there were an app that estimated the risk of every decision, would you use it? B. Pladek’s short story “Yellow” explores how data changes the way we think about risk—and what happens when that data is manipulated.
What does ethical fashion look like? Gabriela Damián Miravete’s story explores transborder labor and the future of the textile industry.
An eccentric billionaire claims he has a chance encounter with Bigfoot. When he decides to offer a reward to anyone who can bring him proof of the creature, he opens the floodgates to Bigfoot sightings—and is stuck with the dilemma of how to classify an animal that isn’t supposed to exist.
Drover, a weather analyst, tracks bat data—including heart rate, flight patterns, food intake, and other behavior—to predict extreme weather events. When the bank where his partner works introduces a system that allows people to bet on weather events, he’s forced to reckon with the line between predicting climate catastrophe and profiting from it.
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