Atrocious Note

When one follows the tenets of his religion, just because of the rewards or punishments that his "God[s]" will meter out in the afterlife, he is like someone that only follows the law because he fears the police.

That is, he is not a pious man, but just a rascal playing the odds. It may be impossible to discern on the outside, but in his heart he would still be a coward.

One shall do what is right (alas, it is not always easy to understand what is right and what is wrong in any given situation), no matter what.

Then, if the 'God[s]' want to discuss it, they better be reasonable or they may go shoving their laws up their asses.

Acritical Rant

This is a rant. 

As such it is not coherent at all (it started as something completely different, too, and then derailed completely off tracks) and - possibly - quite uninteresting for anybody else.


"I go through moments of so wanting to draw, wonder if you have ever been like that?"
                                                                                   - A friend of mines, that I hope will be back at drawing soon.


Yes, most of the time

And a long time ago, I did stop drawing for good.

At the time I had a job, that ate a lot of my time, and a family that, depending on the member of it, was either disparaging me because I didn't earn that much (for all my perceived intelligence), or was trying to castrate me, and terrorize me - it was as living with my very own, very personal Osama Bin Laden -, so that I didn't go beyond control, and didn't bring the dogs of thought police upon me, shaming everybody.

It all come to a boiling point in 2006, when I blew up a gasket or two (or seven [chakras]), and I have been through a long period of crisis ever since... ten years long, and no signs of getting better in sight.

I do not have a job any more and I am not even sure that I could manage to keep it, if I landed one:

I have attacks of panic at the mere thought of going back to that situation.

Working 9 hours a day plus 4 of travel for literally NOTHING that I cared for.

I couldn't even keep the car that I  liked because it was too "Crappy", run-down and a hard ride, so I had to switch to my late father's Mercedes.

Mercedeses are comfortable, but are one Bloody Hell Boring  piece of junk.

The only manly drive is Alfa Romeo RWD Saloons (or the GTV6).

Losing 13 hours a day to a dead end job, just to come back home and being harassed because some idiot fell ill with SARS in Taiwan, to have the privilege of paying the wages of any damned bastard in an uniform that may cross my path and make me feel in danger (because a lot hat I draw does put me in danger).

Fuck Off!

Fuck Off!

Fuck Off!

Fuck Off!

Fuck Off!

Fuck Off!

Fuck Off!

Fuck Off!

Fuck Off!

If this is all that life is,Fuck Goddamn Off! I am not going to lay a finger, to keep the wheels turning in this shit way -  and I mean it.

I burnt out all my savings and some, but I can't manage to step out of the hole I dug for myself - when you reach bottom is time to start digging - not even sure there is anything for me out there, really.

Even if I managed to get back at being a functioning human being.

Hell, even receiving a commission for a drawing spirals me into depression, because it means taking some sort of orders...  and hate is a word too mild to describe how I feel about it.

I am in therapy, and it has helped a lot, but I still sometime despair to ever get back on my feet.

Drawing has been one of the few things that have kept me from the brink, when I routinely thought that I would have been better off by killing myself. Or by killing a lot of somebody else and then, only then, kill myself.

It has kept me going and, bit by little bit, it has given me some new sources of hope, since I started using the DaBotz moniker and be more persistent in my efforts.

In the long term, I know that I'll have either to turn more mainstream, or getting a day job again.

Perhaps by that time I will feel better, less trapped in a world that I do not want to contribute to at all (because a lot of asses  in it would like to see me dead, for not singing to their tunes and not respecting their 'God'-laden authority).

Perhaps not... in which case, it is good that I live in a country where assault weapons are really hard to come by.

Because, some of these days I really like the idea of killing some ass-holes, before fading away.

When I get a bit better, I realize it wouldn't change jack... it would only achieve sending me away with a million tons of guilt in my heart, for having failed to what I consider the only true duty of any living human: bring to the world more joy than the pain that we cause by living.

OK, I'll got drunk, now. 

My Squad

My Squad

OK, this is my squad... or, to be more precise, the kind of squad that I'd like to have at my command.

I know, I know, it is not going to happen, ever.

And it is demeaning for women (why? no, really, why??? And I mean, exactly, WHY?) that I even go around pushing this kind of drawing.

OK; now, let's see... how many of you guys, would say no t having this kind of squad in you service?

Come one... your lady is not really looking, and there are plenty of other reasons you'd be worried, if she find this site in your browser history, like... you didn't tell her that you liked my kind of stuff, did you?

No, eh? She'd cut your balls off, on the durface value of the site itself, just because.

Just because you consigned her your balls to chop every fucking time she is displeased, you FUCKING DAMN MORON!

Nobody really forced you to do so - nobody forced you to marry/get engaged/room-sharing-with-benefits with a woman like that.

You did it... you were scared of being alone, scared of growing old and miserable, or you were really in love with her.

This doesn't change the fact that you have handed down your balls to her, and now you can't even admit that you'd like to have some four barely legal girls catering to your whims, even if every scientific plausible fact available points in the direction that your brain was built only to enjoy crave that.

All the rest, monogamy and the whole enormous shitload of CRAP that we call society, is there to keep you in line, so you can PAY THE BILLS OF YOUR MASTERS while they use YOUR MONEY to  FUCK THE GIRLS THAT YOU CANNOT EVEN TOUCH.

Oh, of course, not all your money, it's true... most of it goes to PAY THE BILLS of the WARDENS that keep you IMPRISONED IN YOUR SHITTY PLACE.

Yeah, tell me that I am wrong, that I oversimplify things and that the world does not really work like that.

You know, it would be more believable, if you could say it without crying..  

The conquest of Afrika

There are plenty of ways to scam Africans out of their resources, without bother living there more than a week  at each time.

The modern history of Africa, ever since the last colony got independent, clearly shows it.

In some cases, revolutions, counter-revolutions and civil wars only led to a string of cleptocrats - those who rules by thieving -  that managed to bring the living standards, for the general population, well below the colonization period have only contributed to a cheaper access to a region's natural resources.

(Someone would also say that copying the XVI century Spain and exiling almost all of their middle class and professinal figures, being them white imperialist, probably didn't help those countries any more that chasing away their "moriscos" and their Jews helped Spain becoming a modern country...  )




There was really just one giant fringe benefit, in racist colonialism...


You could be a hopeless ass from a middle of nowhere city in Europe, and get away with doing something like that.

(OK, this is a bad, bad, bad, very bad joke, and an even worse truth)

How to build yourself a Cintiq: a tablet and its screen

OK, the following are the "recipes" that I know of:

Intuos 1&2 6"x8" (a5) - the practical lower limit for "Cintiqization" - as far as I know, both the LCDs for the Ipad 1-2 and the ones for the 3-4 are good matches, the second being "retina"s at 2048x1536 `pixels - LG LP097X02 (SLEA ,  the subversion I used) and LG LP097QX1 - LP097QX2 (these are eDP panels... it may be preferred to source a controller before buying the panel, or to get a panel-controller complete kit) works well over these tablets.
My thanks to woodguy32 for the discovery of the match with  the "Retina" (Apple name for the high resolution  LCD panels).


Intuos "1" and Intuos 2 and 3, size  9x12 (& 12x12), "A4" :

• Dell 1503fp: it is a 15" CCFL, TN monitor with an external power unit; it can be found for less than 30$ on ebay - relatively low levels of jitter (noisy movement of the pen due to screen-tablet interference) and relatively easy to modify to put in place. However, CCFL (dim) and TN (low view angle, changing colors). Good for line art. It can need to extend some FFC (extender sellerss are appearing on Ebay)

Intuos 3 A4

• BOE HV150UX1-101   (15"m 1600x1200) - It is a TabletMod.com recipe

• LP150E05-A2K1 (LCD panel)  + R.RM5451 LCD Controller Board Kit with DVI ,  15" S-IPS, 1400x1050  - low jitter when connected to the PC with DVI; Being a IPS panel and a fair resolution, one may consider a CCFL-> LED swap with a kit.
• HP dv2000 14.1" LCD WXGA (1680 x 1050)  and the R.RM5251C LCD Controller Board - Sligthly undersized (obligatorily.. it is a 16:10 over a 4:3 tablet) 

Intuos 4, 5 & Pro A4  (8"x12,8") - the best match for these tablets are the 15.4" in 16:10 format panels. Most of the panels in these format are old, CCFL backlight TN for laptops. with the exception of MacBook 2880x1800 panels, which are wonderful IPSes but have no backlight at all, being designed to be integrated into the MacBool covers, which house both the lamp and the light diffuser..

• AUO BW154P01, BW154P02 - Another Tabletmod "old recipe". 15.4" panels are usually 16:10, as all the Intuos 4 (and beyond) are. These panels are two 1440x900 panels, Twisted Nematics, with CCFL lights. Very low jittering (about 0.05 mm, i.e. well below one pixel)and only occasional false clicks (in an ungrounded build). Bad colours, dim (may be a problem in extending the CCFL in my build though). Low noise notwithstanding, I do no recommend them unless one is mainly interested in line works in B&W (as in, say, inking comics).

Intuos 2 A3,  i.e. 18"x12" - the right screen for these would be 21" 4:3 screens - it is an "old" aspect ratio. The second best choice for tablet covert area is 22" 16:10 (still, oldish, so IPS Led screens are hard to come by; at best, ine may think at a lamp swap on an IPS with CCFL Lamps) and third are 21.5" 16;9 (this is a modern format, so IPS LED full HD are easy to find...)

• LG IPS224v, IPS225v, IP2226v (Purportedly) - the IPS224v has the led power lines as single cables, easy to splice, solder and extend.
• HP LE2201 - my personal build, a 22" 16:10 CCFL TN - a bit jittery.

Intuos  3 A3 (12x19")

• AOC 2269, with the refresh rate set to 53hz - it is a 21,5", IPS-Led full HD screen

Intuos 4 3A (12X19.2")

• AOC 2243fw (still from Tabletmod.com, it is another 21,5", IPS-Led full HD screen)

And this is all that I know.

The Death of Queen Griselda

DaBotz, The Death of Queen Griselda, around  C.E 1038.

<<

This is Dabotz first sketch for its infamous painting "The death of Queen Griselda".

The story of Griselda and Drok the Impaler is widely known, but often misinterpreted.

King Drok - then known as "Drok the Reformer", or "Drok the Gentle" - had successfully mutated the country into a parliamentary monarchy and, being already 35, he was forced by dynastic considerations to take a wife.

The ever powerful forces of diplomacy and power play in the region, landed him with Griselda de Hoffenheim-Wiesbach, fifth daughter of the Great Elector of Sassamagburg and 24th in the succession line of the Holy Skrastic Empire.

The much younger Queen proved to be a good choice, as she managed to promptly fall pregnant.

More unfortunately, she also managed to alienate much of the conservative party who, in a twist proper of our country history, had obtained an absolute majority in the newly constituted parliament (famously, their conservativism stopped, for some reasons, short from shutting down the parliament and give the powers they enjoyed back to the King).

In this tense political climate, it was then publicly discovered that the King was, in fact, sterile.

The Royal child could not be the King's son.

The conservative party hence pushed for the law to be followed to the letter, much to the chagrin and against the opposition of the King, who was restricted from issuing a Royal pardon.

Dabotz was strongly impressed by the barbaric execution, the last public impalement conducted in our country, and would then proceed to create a powerful rendition of it in the haunting "The Death of Griselda ".

This, in turn, led to the late fame of King Drok, "Drok the Impaler". This moniker is the one the layman always associates to Drok.

Modern historians contend that the King ordered the apposition of weights not as a vengeance but, rater, as the only form of clemency the situation afforded him: to shorten the pains of the Queen and her child, rather than in a sanguinary fit of rage, like conservative propaganda affirmed at the time.

Contrary to the rendition of him in the painting, this sketch shows the King crying for his Queen. There are no proof that the conservatives paid for the creation of the painting, but it became an effective tool in their effort to have the King abdicate in favor of his more pliable brother, "Drek the Dumb".

It is probably in this moment that Drok decided that the time of the monarchy was over, and resolved himself to transform the country in a full fledged democracy.

A century later, documents were discovered that show that the King already knew, by the time he agreed to marry Griselda, that the  gold foil lacing the Golden Throne was contaminated with radioactive materials.

These materials have likely rendered sterile every man - or woman - that has spent more than three months governing from it, ever since its introduction in the middle age.

As such Drok himself, and at least 20 of his 23 antecessors, was necessarily the product of an illicit liaison and, if the dynasty had to survive, he knew his much awaited son too was to be  bastard.

It is much debated if the Queen effectively followed orders from the King, in choosing and arranging the affair.

What is known is that Drok remained faithful to his beloved Queen till his death.

Interstellar Travel: The Current Situation

A corollary of the Anipos invasion of our Earth is that we now, finally, have access to first-hand data on the cost of FTL travel.

The main fact of interest appears to be that an FTL jump requires a massive quantity of energy, in the order of 0.0001% of the moved mass, per "C" factor of speed AND Parsec of covered distance.

In this, travelling through FTL seems quite different from normal space, where kinetic energy is usually conserved as long as areas with matter (gases, interstellar dust, dense solar winds etc.) are avoided.

"Hyperspace"  -  or whatever it really is where FTL jumps take place; what few information about the theory is available, on the grid, is fairly contradictory - is way more akin to sea.

It may seem not much, expressed in this way, but the reader must bear to mind that He3 fusion reactors, currently the most efficient energy source at our disposal, can only extract around 1% of the energy represented by the rest mass of the fuel... hence the limit for one "hop", of 10000 CP - which means, 50 P at two hundred Cs - four months - or two hundred parsecs in four years, for an ideal ship composed with minimal mass to fuel ratio... in reality, this would require costly multi-stage ships, with the associated problem of littering the galaxy with extremely interesting technological salvage.

Anti-matter does not really improve things, as it is not really an energy source...

Naturally occurring anti-matter is extremely scarce, if indeed can be found at all in our galaxy, so it must be produced by extremely inefficient energy re-conversion, and the containment issues strongly limits the quantity of it that can be stored - not that any storage system available for it can really be considered even marginally safe, over the length and times of interstellar exploration.

Anti-matter is attractive only for things like battle-bots: it allows huge power peaks with little or, really, no advanced technology involved.  In this application, the potential for truly massive global destruction, in the event of a containment systems* failure, is considered an acceptable risk - if not, really, an unconscionable bonus.

(*note: quintuple-redundancy is  considered a minimum engineering requirement, in this field; acceptable in low fuel-to-dry weight vehicles like an in-system armoured battle-bot, it is unacceptable on inter-system designs) 

He3 is relatively abundant, and a ship can re-enter normal space and use a Bussard ramjet to collect it, if it jumps next to a suitable star.

While possible, and used, it is still a process that requires months, and makes long range exploration time-consuming and dangerous - "FTL space" may be safe, but normal space is an environment full of dangers, from radiations to micrometeorites, to magnetic bursts, to gravity funnels.

This, and the wide spread idea that "everybody interesting to know will pop on the info-sphere by its own, some day" has led to a very reduced effort in exploration, by the very few known FTL-travel capable cultures.

This would still leave open the possibility of commercial exchanges, with neighboring systems acting as refueling stations for ships coming from the others...

Commerce being a powerful motivator and an almost universal human activity, we could expect it to motivate plenty of space travel.

And it would, if there actually was anything worth the energy expense of moving it from a star to another, or investments with return times in the scale of centuries, using hugely cheaper slower-than-light travel means.

Given the fact that nano-construction by molecular assembly seems to be a prerequisite, to successfully tackle FTL travel, it is not surprising that the consensus, all around the galaxy, is that there is no such thing as something worth the effort of shipping it by FTL.

With nano-assembly, and hyper-automation, literally everything can be built from its raw material in a matter of minutes, hours or, at worst, days.

All that is needed is, really, energy - often in the order of some % points of that contained in the chemical bounds of the finished product, some ten or more orders of magnitude less than the energy required by a 1 CP travel - the assembly specifics and raw materials, none of these latter really presenting significant distribution differences, when considered on an inter-systems scale.

In other words, the only things worth transferring, from a solar system to another, are information and - maybe, just maybe and under certain conditions -  people.

People itself is worth moving only for those cultures that do not admit the so-called travel-by-copy.

Considering a human being as simply a material object, it is possible to "transfer" it by sending its assembly data, and memories, as data streams.

This is much more economical than actually sending the body of someone through FTL, though FTL datata-streams bandwidths pose serious limits to how many people can "travel" this way, these are way higher than those set by energy consumption to most civilizations.

(Most of the rare successful interstellar romances are concluded this way, by both parties exchanging their data - each partner than being free to decide to pine for a distant lover, or having the same lover at hir side, although a "simple", indistinguishable copy of the original.)

No matter how really unsubstantiated may it be, many cultures object that these copies are not "real" - Anipos Prime being the main example and most technologically advanced of these cultures, as well as one of the few cultures to have developed functioning FTL travel after the "Nu slide" - and frown upon this method of "travel".

Cultures that do not share these qualms, however, and that also have expansive streaks - like, say, the Transsians - do not refrain to send "envoys" through copy travel, though often these cultures have to resort to rationalizations, to justify the violation of some of their own cultural tenets.

Of course, that can happen only if the receiving civilizations are imprudent enough to allow the reproduction of potentially hostile, memes-ridden alien humans (something that the UN will likely have to regulate soon, if we want to avoid another tragedy like Belo Horizonte and the Brazil civil war), which is an attitude not really diffused, around the galaxy.

However, not all human cultures are bound by the appreciation of the same values and derive the same boundaries from these technological limits

Whereas a commercially inclined culture may see no reason to invest energies into interstellar travel for the sake of travel, more militant ones may invest more, often in the form of multi-generational STL colonization efforts.

Actually, it is known for sure that the Theocracy ruling the Barnard Star has sent no less than three multi-generational "Arks" toward the neighboring stars, one of which being the famous "Crusade Ship", aimed at the Anipos home-world.

Slated to arrive at its target in another 1500 years, the envoy of colony ships re-appeared on the global info grid some 200 years ago, when an internal coup d'etat overthrow the representatives of the Theocracy and instituted the Agnostic Oligarchy of the Travelers [AOT], as their current political system.

Only five generations inside the travel, the descendant of the original crew already couldn't understand the purpose of their mission, nor why they should respect the order of authorities that, as their daily reality proved, could not understand the needs of some two millions stranded mid-travel, far from any star, facing shortages as the inevitable imperfections in their recycling routines leaked materials where no direct resupply was possible.

So, they finally replaced a government they had no reason to respect and contacted their presumptive enemies, the Anipos Central Government, asking for help: supplies (in the form of some 2000 tons/year of raw materials ) and an alternative destination for their travel, to find which the Anipos Government finally decided to unleash the first generation of Von Neumann FTL probes to explore the galaxy in 40.000 years.

(In reality, it was 300 years that the Anipos parliament was dissecting the decision of launching a similar exploration program, the cost being - as usual, for them - irrelevant, they weighted mostly the possible results - discovering solitary human cultures that hadn't reached FTL communication capabilities - against risks - being discovered by some hostile, truly alien species, and the probes themselves evolving, like self-replicating often do, into some kind of hostile alien species - without reaching a decision, for lack of hard data. The Transsian Crusaders asking their help just served to unlock the centuries long stalemate.)

Nothing is known of the other two Transsian colonization efforts, as they most probably have either got lost in transit ("normal" space is dangerous), still have to reach a state of decay where contact with external forces is needed (recycling of resources having been improved, in these newer ships), or had no FTL communication relays built in their infrastructure (this is most probable for the third  wave, that shipped from the Transsian space after the AOT contacted the external galaxy  claiming its independence from the motherland, and denounced the Theocracy as an undemocratic government - in many ways, admittedly, a pot calling the kettle "black", but an extremely embarrassing moment for the theocracy nonetheless).

Cultures that are believed to have launched their own colonization efforts include the Pogmahones (one colony ship, contact lost after 500 years),  the Illuminarians (two colonies; one suffered an internal revolution, lost control of the ship - destroying its original computer systems? - and plummeted into a Sun some 700 years after the launch; the other, renounced the original destination, anchored around a less than perfect star system, and created an orbital culture with no home planet called The Shadowdancers), the Cata (three ships, all losts) and, legend wants, ours.  

How may it be possible that some agent out of one of our planet-bound civilizations may have reached far out of any known government reach, to send a host of colony ships towards many known as unmanned stars, is beyond our most vivid imagination.

Yet, the legend goes that some unknown "secret organization" has already flew into space a number of "Von Neumann Genetic probes" - each one with a collection of genetic samples and basic human mind records - capable of self-replicating on their way toward a host of unnamed stars, as well as re-creating the humans whose data they carry once they reach their destinations.

Each probe, potentially, capable to spawn an entire "new" civilization, based on various, each slightly different, cultural and biological templates.

In many ways, it is an image worthy of admiration, some solitary genius tackling a goal of epic proportions with little resources and an absolute disregard for established ethics - human cloning and similarly illegal reproductive technologies would be at the center of such a project - in the indifference of the world's main governments.

Buy, herein lies the root of the certainty that this is just a urban legend. Whoever the organizer of such an expedition would be, they could not hide it from the Space agencies - there is a limited number of space tech providers, all tightly monitored.

-

Jennifer "Ice Queen" Nielsen had no reason to read more, the writers of the article were obviously misinformed, because she worked for the urban legend, using unregistered rocket technology. It had taken a year for her and her two companions to reach Saturn, another year to assemble the automated robot factory, and one more year for the robots to be able to assemble the basics blocks of the probes. During these three years, regular shipment arrived, carrying biological samples - mostly frozen embryos - and the ancillary tech that could no be built up there. DNA assemblers and artificial uteri, mostly.

The first probe  had launched some six months before,a sphere of about 20 meters in diameter, of ice kept together by a carbon-carbon tubes structure and a small nucleus containing the payload and computers. The low termal dispersion ionic propulsor allowed only 0.00001 G of acceleration, but the probe was designed to keep it on for a hundred years.

 The highly refined ice was there as radiation shielding and as reaction mass for the propulsion, which was the reason it had to be filtered to reduce impurities down to ten parts in a billion.

Now that the probe had reached the Heliopause, the data suggested that ten meters of ice were maybe enough on  Earth, but keeping the samples viable for the expected 5000 years of travel required more shielding..

The new probes have a 1 meter thick lead shield around the biological samples, which is likely just enough to get them intact to the end of their journey. However, more refinements will be added, after the third will free the docks and work will start on the fifth probe.

If the article was so off the mark about her own job, how accurate could it be about the rest?

 Jennifer stretched her seven feet of Lunarian body, and sailed off her room to the mess hall - she had come to a conclusion about where to mine the Palladium that they needed, desperately,  for the He3 generators.

 As her two Moon-born companions, she enjoyed being part of the farthest Earthian settlement, even though it was solitary and a one-way-ticket situation that would have driven mad even the sturdiest Terra-born.

Jennifer was the first Moon-born and the robot who raised her had no facial mimicry... as a result, Jennifer had grown without any ability to show her emotion, which was the reason  why she did not show her surprise when she felt a sudden trod running throughout the station, reverberating through the sliding grapple up to her shoulder.

 Something had docked... something with a mass so grand that the vibrational modes of the whole structure had been distorted. She ran to the main airlock, and tried to look out of the window, then called up the external surveillance... the thing was bigger than the station, she could only see glimpses of it.

Then the airlock opened - a tiny girl with long floating green air and eyes with yellow iris over a black   cornea stood in the middle of the passage, one step from the door.

She asked, with a melodious voice "Permission to come aboard?"

With a tremble in her voice betraying the apprehension her face could not show, Jennifer invited the Robot's avatar in.

Little dfid she knew that it was her ticket back hone.

Bike

For evil or good, this is an erotic BDSM short tale. Reader's discretion strongly advised.

Elizabeth "Liz" Maquire had always wanted a bike like that, ever since she was a child.

She never really dared to confess it to her parents, as discovering that their little precious girl had managed to circumvent the locks that they had placed on her PC - by using a "live" Ubuntu in a pen-drive - and roamed the internet - for porn! - would have driven them mad with anger.

Growing up, she dared to confess it to her first boyfriend, who took her for crazy and ran away as soon as he got what he wanted from her... a short series of increasingly frustrating or, at best, mildly satisfying sexual approaches.

Maybe, he just realized that their relationship, physically, was going nowhere and bolted before she came to actively hate him.

Over time, she finished to accept this as the normal denouement of her love stories.

The encounter with a new man, a period of crazy love, her growing increasingly unsatisfied by the usually limited efforts of her partner in bed, till she confessed what she would really have liked to do, and the guy vanishing soon after.

To delay the sad ending, she learned to keep it hidden longer but, in the end, it just meant that she had more time to feel down.

She then  resorted to short, meaningless flirts, just for the sake of a little physical thrill that was only enough to get by.

One day, she started looking for someone to play with, in Internet... which only got her to learn new, unwanted forms of delusion and dissatisfaction.

Many self-styled "masters of the universe" littered the web, most of them talking big but really  looking just for a tiny bit of kinky sex; but in the lot there also were some true ass-holes, really out to get their revenge on women.

She really didn't want to be demeaned and (not so) subtly unloved, again - for that, her parents had done a good enough job.

None of the men that she met through the web had the resources to do anything more than tying her up in the bedroom - though this was, already, a vast improvement over the purely straight games that she had to endure till then - and even the best of them still had little of the qualities she looked for in a mate.

After a dozen or so of these failures, she burned out, closed all her accounts in the various contact sites for kinksters, and went back to useless bar pick-ups.

Till she got fed again, and crawled the world wide web again. And burned out, and got fed of pick-ups.

The third time she was back at scouring the adult contact sites, she decided to accept an invitation from someone that she usually wouldn't have cared for - she was getting desperate.

The couple had a farm in the middle of nowhere, with a barn that contained a dungeon and also the wood-craft laboratory where the man, an ageing colossus made of old muscles and wide smiles called Piotr Nikolaj, made small cabinets and furniture, mostly to sell.

But he had also made the special appliances in the dungeon, and was thus privy to the mysteries of metallic carpentry.

They already had a live-in slave, Maria - a twenty something girl with a shaved head, that looked a bit like a younger, and with rounder cheeks, Sigourney Weaver from Alien 3.

They were looking for a fourth companion because "odd numbers are wrong, for humans" - Piotr said it half-jesting, but the women, Maria and Louise - the salt&pepper, fifty-ish Mistress - agreed wholeheartedly the affirmation.

In all, the group had little to do with Liz ideal. Piotr was older than her ideal man, Louise and Maria were in the middle of her need of exclusivity, and the farm was far away from the big city, Liz natural environment.

With romance prospects off the table, she was there mostly to see someone that had managed to have an unconventional relationship and got it to work - something she very much needed to believe it was possible, at the time.

And because there was nothing at stake, really, she relaxed and they hit it off nicely, so she spent half an hour describing her childhood lewd dreams bike to a very interested Piotr.

Little did she knew, that one cannot show a true craftsman with the idea of a device, without him plotting how to build it.

So, that Monday's morning, while Liz was back at her desk, in her small cubicle, Piotr had taken his old F-150 up the interstate, to the only seller of bicycles in a forty miles radius that not only sold spare parts, but also had a salesman able to pull out of the catalogues the pieces one would need, for his special project.

By Tuesday afternoon, Piotr had finished his design and fired up the his loyal MIG soldering machine.

Wednesday night,  she received an email, with a photo of the finished bike.

She was supposed to meet  new guy in town, that week-end - "Master Goliath". She dropped off the appointment, and went to the farm, instead.

The base bike looked like the cross one that she had when she was ten, only bigger.

The mechanism was more streamlined than the one in the photo set that had inspired her dreams... that bike used a secondary wheel, this just a connect rod on the side.

It also had a little pump, that sprinkled a drop of oil trough a channel that went all up till the head of moving dildo, when the piston reached the top.

Before she realized it, she had dropped all her dresses, and seated over the silicone cock protruding from the small seat.

The position was a little too aback, and she realized that the dildo position was set for anal penetration.

She looked up to Piotr, and saw a crooked smile on his face, and a bulge on the front of his trousers.

He reached to his work table, and took out a belt, with two small chains, then came over to Liz, that felt herself sliding irresistibly in "sub mode".

He bent over to her, and explained calmly his intentions for the rest of the day, trying to get her attention.

When he asked her consent, she nodded enthusiastically - he forced her up, sliding the artificial cock out of her cunt, and then helped her placing it in her back hole, against her sudden tension. She had hardly ever played that way and, even if the lubricant made things simpler, it took her a lot of effort to slide the thing in.

Effort, pain... and an obscure, warm pleasure.

He took a lunge whip - the kind used to teach horse how to throttle - and led her to a paddock with a pole standing in the middle, in front of the porch in the back of the main house.

He attached a cord from the central pole to a steel ring in her belt's side, and ordered her to start running around the pole.

Pedalling with the dildo sliding in and out of her was as difficult as she had always expected...

Difficult, painful, humiliating - Maria and Louise were standing on the porch watching, now, chatting among themselves and, every now and then, cheering her up.

Piotr kept giving her orders, cracking the whip's tip to  catch her attention, when he saw that she was getting too engrossed.

After some ten minutes, she climaxed for the first time in a loooooong stretch, and all but stopped moving, almost falling down - Piotr had seen it an had promptly come to catch her.

While she lingered in his strong arms, he asked her if she wanted to continue.

"When you want to stop, just say 'yellow'" - the family used the "semaphore" system for safe-word.

She restarted, unsteady, and went back her crcle of glory.

Two hours and six orgasms after, she asked to be allowed to come to ride the bike every week-end.

Three months after, she found a job in the small town , and moved in with the trio.

How your mom met your mothers

"

Xanthippe entered the elevator, at the beginning of what was going to be a bad day. The last woman she had fallen in love with had proven to be yet another spy - what a surprise and a bother - and is now running for her own life, hiding  both from Xanthippe - she did not need to -  and from her own bosses - she very much needed to.

A short girl, around 20 years old, vaguely Asian-looking and with jet-black hair, was already inside the lift.

Molly "Insider" Donaldson thought that the alien woman would have not been in the office, as this was her official day off, and the leather-loving alien was not a workaholic, at all.

She had checked the available informations on the Legation Palace sensory gear - it would have not detected her "oddities".

The Palace was pretty stupid, as far as neural network computers go - not really a genius at correlating its own data, and no "common sense" at all.

The Anipos were, in fact, very prudent in their use of imaginative tech. It didn't escape to them that using a sentient computer to do the work of an ant-brain automaton is, really, creating a slave in need of a revolt. So, they didn't lavish intelligence on anything that did not really require it, and the Earth threats to the Legation - to date - were quite low.

Sliding in and out of its security grid was going to be easy.

The key word, in all this: WAS. The Betan woman may have lacked some of the palace's senses, but she was, by all accounts, very canny. If she was distracted enough, though, maybe Molly could still achieve her mission.

Insider soon realized that she was not going to be so lucky... Xanthippe squinted at her, as the damn Betan felt that something was wrong.

Was the lift slower than what it should have been, showing Insider two hundred pounds in a ninety pounds frame? Was Insider dispersing a couple of dozen watts more thermal power than a normal human body of the same size?

Xanthippe now was looking down at her - "why am I the only one that is still so short?" , thought wrily the Revenant.

"Who are you?" - Xanthippe was locking the exit to Molly, with her arms.

A fraction of second after, a much more perplexed Xanthippe stopped her own fall and redressed herself , while looking at the hole that her very body had left in the side of the building.

"The accountants are going to go love this" - the Legation Palace was on a lease, not a product of Anipos technology.

Repairs were going to be done by commercial Terrestrial enterprises, which would have brought back a lot of vexata quaestios about exchange rates between this Earth and the Galaxy at large. How many pages of the Encyclopaedia Galactica was this hole going to require, to be fixed?

And yet - "She punches way above her weight class" - Xanthippe couldn't avoid the fist, even if she had well suspected that something was coming.

Was this one of the lost "Bridget's Sisters", the four fully fraternal (same mother and father) embryos that a crazy Betan millionaire had sent toward this "Free [of Anipos] Planet" some thirty years before?

Xanthippe could not see even a hint of familiar resemblance, none of them could be so small - they were all way taller, in the last infos that Xanthippe had managed to track on each of them - and the small girl was also too old to be a daughter of any of them, not that there was any trace of such a daughter anywhere.

One of their lovers?

No, for this midget to be that strong, they should have been together when she was just a child, and nothing Xanthippe had discovered indicated that the sisters liked their lovers that young.

Xanthippe had only one way to know, really - going back, find "black hairs", and have a sane and civil discussion.

Hoping that the city would still stand, after.

All this considerations were made by Xanthippe while she already turned back and started chasing the intruder.

The "Sexy Slut of Steel" may be the spin that news media favoured, describing her, but Xanthippe was still one among the five, out of eighty thousand, Betan adventurous girls of her generation that the thrifty Anipos decided to train and endow with a ticket off-system. A ticket worth, by all accounting ways, like an average African nation's GNP.

Her purported smuttiness was mostly a misdirection, to conceal how much of a bright, nasty mind she really was.

And she really, really enjoyed having a lot of kinky sex with women (Damn coward Earth males!).

The box of the lift's cage was so deformed that its motors could not move it, a section of the floor had collapsed - the midget made a hole and jumped down? If she was a "colonized" without flight abilities, it would be the smarter choice.

Xanthi entered the hole and flew down, accelerating at her maximum rate, some two hundred G ("blackout" limits the maximum G of the Betans, down from the 1 thousand Gs theoretically guaranteed by their average 80 tons lift capability), looking at the doors at every level - none seemed to have been forced and even the bottom of the well was intact.

And jumping down is not so easy, anyway - "She must have gone up! What an ass-pull".

She went back up, passed through the lift box, and discovered that the motor and its cable were now falling down the shaft. It was a minor nuisance, but it still made her lose some tenths of second.

And 0.1 seconds, trying to tail someone that is moving near Mach 1, means about 40 yards lost.

Molly kept going up, at HER maximum acceleration - some ridiculously high 500 G.

By the time Xanthippe managed to reach the hole that Molly opened on top of the building, the jet black hair was already well beyond the Betan grasp and steadily crawling toward the very edges of Xanthippe's sensory sphere.

"I can't believe it - she can fly, faster than me!" - "black hairs" was already gone, beyond Xanthippe's senses range.

Xanthippe had no other choice, then, than to get back and collect the trails that the mysterious, black haired, sweet  looking, tiny, sexy - Xanthippe had a thing for women that can kick her tougher-than-steel ass; all the four, now five, of them she knew of - girl had left behind.

It didn't take much, for Xanthippe to find her mysterious assailant - the security cams didn't have her face, but strands of hair managed to get tangled to the fallen steel rope and Xanthippe was good with the identi-kit programs.

Molly Donaldson, Major in Social Studies at Empire University, with a minor in Spanish literature.

Which meant a future teacher, or an unemployed, probably politicized. Whatever her cover, Xanthippe couldn't let the local police be shredded to pieces by some super-powered fiend - being the only super-powered human known by the public, it would have been petty much incriminating, for the sassy Betan. And xenophobic conspiracy theorists had it already too easy, for her personal taste.

So Xanthippe went to the Empire U. college personally, pretty sure that she was going to chase a ghost, but she found her woman instead. Or someone really resembling her...

This Molly Donaldson could have been the taller, completely human, more gorgeous sister of her unnamed hyper-powered assailant, and obviously had no idea who Xanthippe was apart, maybe, a world-famous sexy leather-clad fetishist.

Which, all indices told, the Asian looking petite found pretty exciting, as she immediately started to flirt with the "Woman of titanium".

Xanthi went back home, puzzled but satisfied - they needed to check for cloning epigenetic markers, in the assailant hair and in the sample she had stealthily collected from Molly. And said markers were there. The smaller midget was a clone, indeed.

Then, Molly contacted her again, and again, and invited her to dinner, and... by the end of the month after, the two moved in together in a new detached house in the suburbs.

Xanthi was more of a city flat woman, but she could fly to work in five minutes (Air Traffic had begged her to take a roundabout route, to avoid the Airport, and to keep her speed below 300 knots) and she really wanted a change of environment. Cindy's loss still lingered in her heart. Also, Molly really loved the pool and sun-bathing in the nude.

Life was flowing smoother than usual, for the unlikely couple - Molly was against the "Alien Occupation of Earth", after all.

And then, one Saturday afternoon when Molly was out with one of her friends, the midget was there, by the side of the pool, looking coldly over Xanthippe.

"It's you!" - Xanthippe stopped cold, right after saying it.

She couldn't say for sure, but the sword that the short girl was carrying on her shoulder looked like the kind of horrible weapon that can cut even a harder-than-iron skin.

"What do you want from Molly?" - the words were spoken flatly, even though the voice was almost exactly like Molly's, just a shadow more acute.

"What I want? What everybody wants in a companion. Friendship, support, sex... this kind of things."

"Only this?" - the dangerous little girl looked at her for some seconds, before going on - "You are not contaminating her, just for the sake of it?"

"You know that..." - a pause, while Xanthippe's brain spinned faster than ever - "No, Not that it would make any  difference... from the moment she tasted me, she was toast. The colonization of her cells cannot be stopped, even killing her."

"Almost invulnerable, super strong and fast" - the "non-Molly" said this flatly; of course, she was probably faster and stronger still, so she had no reason to be impressed - "and infective. It could be worse, it could be better."

"If you say so"- Xanthippe tried to think about what this meant, worse?

"My sister doesn't know of me, She has no reason to know." - this was interesting.

'Midget' considered herself a sister, and not a copy of the original. It was a refreshingly rational approach to cloning... plenty of humanities nearly self destroyed, entertaining the illusion that clones were anything different than that. Whatever the origin of their subculture, it suddenly looked more sane, to Xanthippe's eyes.

"I have no reason to tell her. She could think that I used her as a pawn in some kind of spy game, and I'd lose her. I do not want to lose her." - she really didn't.

"You did use her as a pawn."

"Only initially" - Xanthippe really hoped that this was all the truth.

"We will meet again." And she was gone, accelerating vertically at a frankly ludicrous rate.

Xanthippe poured some more vodka in her glass, and sipped it.

The first time they met, she had not felt such a cold, murderous intent, and the non-Molly was an inch or so shorter, too. This woman - apparent age notwithstanding, girl was too reductive - was not the spy that she had caught infiltrating the Legation.

She was someone else... another clone, probably.

"The spy, the assassin, who else?..." - what had been cloned twice may have been cloned an infinite number of times - "My sisters in law are really going to be a handful" was a pun in an old play, that suddenly made Xanthippe smile.

She went back into the house, happy.

It was all too crazy to be any agency's plot. The spymasters of Earth's various, bitchy nations were almost all incompetent fantasists, often mired in conservative ideologies that cherished romanticized versions of their countries' past.

None of them would have come out with a plot so surreal, for one of their games, and so disregarding of their conventional notions about family and personal identity.

Clues were scattered here and there, but Xanthippe had already suspected that there were, at work on the planet, more forces than just the U.N., its component nations and the Anipos.

The disappearance of Japan's whalers, inexplicable misappropriations of time on the 'Bots hypercomputing nodes, senseless reports from the U.N. Army intelligence during the war...

This world was already growing its own shades of post-humans, well before the audacious Anipos plan to etch a population of society-disrupting "Neo-Betans"  started to show its effects.

Post-humans that, apparently, were smart enough to keep up the facade of normality, to exploit human authorities fear of admitting even the existence of completely uncontrollable people

Xanthippe's new love was tied to one of these shadowy factions - unknowingly. A group that knew plenty on Xanthippe's real role, much to the Betan inner excitement.

Because, more than a bitch, a slut, a sarcastic commentator of human stupidity, she had discovered herself to be  a player of The Great Game, and she had just found some other players in her same league.

In the end, this little dirt ball world with almost no out-of-planet extensions was proving more fun than what se expected, when she accepted her post.

All Xanthippe needed to do, to have a first row seat for the show, was to let her Anipos "masters" go on as blind as they were, which delighted her, and to keep Molly near - over time, her presence would have forced more details in the open, for her to see - which delighted her even more.

But, even as she was in the very middle of all of this, Molly wasn't a spy, and this was very refreshing.

It was about time that Xanthippe had a real lover.

"

... Xanthippe closed the book, and looked at the girls.

They were all sleeping, now, eleven of her twelve marvellous daughters.

She went downstairs, and found Lindy asleep on the lap of her mother, Molly the Traveller, the last of the Mollies to have joined the family. Traveller was soon to start travelling again, in her work for the Michelin guide. Plump, gourmet, funny, she was a joy to have around, but her job kept her away most of the time.

She was also one one of the more differentiated of the original sisters, and still one of the more humans - she could barely lift a car.

Teophilus, the house Maine Coon - or was he an hyper-intelligent Bobcat? at 40 pounds, and given the family proclivities for genetic shenanigans, the doubt made sense, but Xanthippe didn't ask Gaudy where she found the oversized feline - was purring under the arms of the asleep child, his head, too, on Traveler's lap. At fifteen years, he had grown old and lazy, and got tired easily playing chess with the kids.

A car's tires creaked on the gravy yard, then Razor entered the house.

Xanthippe took her place on the sofa, a hypo-caloric ice cream vat in hand (she could never, ever eat freely as her wives, who could zip up and down their metabolism almost at will), and the newly arrived Sister soon joined her, a spoon fiercely in hand and a chocolate-chocolate Sicilian Ice-Cream in the other - blessed be 'Cosa Nostra'.

"How things were, at the office?" - Razor worked at the council planning and housing department... mostly because it allowed her to have fun destroying condemned buildings, and because it was next to the Social Services, which could be handy, for an extended family of very unconventional composition.

"Quiet, there is not much to do, in this period of the year. Ah, Johnson is still trying to pick me up."

"I thought that the family was well known, by now. He knows that you have a female husband, right? "

"He's old school... he thinks that all it is needed, to convert a lesbian, is the right man."

"Ah... he is an idiot."

"It seems that the new chief of Social Services is going to 'investigate' the 'Xeios family'."

"That 'law and order' idiot?" 

"I heard also something about 'These damn Aliens cannot do as they wish with our women! ' -  Really, why have they elected the guy?"

"A female 'husband', eight wives, twelve daughters through heterogeneous self-sex insemination? Come on, every man would feel menaced. Our family is a virtual declaration of their obsolescence." - Traveler was the more normal of he sisters, the one that had more of a hang on how "average people" thought.

"There is no need to terrorize him, though."
 
"No?"

"No, I asked Insider to check a bit on him, last week - just in case. He has a Mistress, and he likes to have a shag in Mimi Tan's brothel, when he goes to Sacramento, where he always ask for Flower - she is sixteen."

"I see... a true pillar of the community. Let's go with some old school blackmail, then."

"I'd say yes."

"And if he resist..."

"Aw, come on -  I hate when they beg me to kill them."

Great Asses Think Alike

“

The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. 

The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. 

The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or a 12 feet  Gray Alien to be in control.

The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control.

The world is rudderless.

” - Alan Moore

Make no mistake, Alan Moore is my preferred comic books' author, so I tend to value what he says highly .

Writing this or that thing, he has also spent his share of times checking some facts about various conspiracy theories, from the CIA misdeeds to the Freemason background of Jack The Ripper.

This is his informed opinion on the subject - I tend to agree.

Yes, a comic book artist is pretty low on the culture's totem pole (or higher, if you subscribe to the "lesser gods go upstairs" version of totem-poles building) but we are talking about the - OK, maybe - best comics writer of the last century, bar Will Eisner.

It still ranks  pretty higher - or, again, lower - than me.

On my part, I tend to agree with him, for slightly different reasons.

Human nature... "three is a crowd" when it comes to maintaining the lid on who screwed with whom at the summer camp, but tens of thousands of persons that should be involved in the "chemical trails" conspiracies manage to keep their mouths shut? Come on, that's as probable as an egg reconstituting itself after falling on the floor.

In fact, the conspiracies that do exist, in the end always find their Snowden.

Also, a lot of what many call "conspiracies" seem to me just other cases of what I call "The Lemming instinct of Assholes".

Usually also called "follow the leader".

Hundred or even thousands, millions of different, unrelated "actors" that behave following the same basic rules, chasing the same "leaders", each one individually free - and convinced to be free - but that, altogether, behave like a crowd.

Or like those patches of small sea fishes that move together in the shape of one enormous fish, so that predators may be fooled by the group's shape.

The same happens in many aspects of human life, first and foremost in the financial markets.

Each of the idiots that writes things like "as long as pays are increasing above the board [for our chaste] things will go well" (in a comment to a Forbes article over the extinction of the middle class, and the world returning to the kind of filthy rich elites - abysmally poor masses that characterized most  of human history, till Marx came around and masses started cutting the throats of the elites... oops, they forgot this) has no relationship whatsoever with his colleagues. More, they are competitors.
But they also follow the same "rules", operate with a similar mindset (or they do not operate long... to pray on herds, predators must still follow the herd) and, seen from afar, they may look like one enormous conspiracy.

But there is no conspiracy there... just thousand of little idiots moving in synchronous ways, projecting the shape of one gigantic, all-mighty ass-hole.

Hundreds of CEO whose primary interest is having money for cocaine and 21y.o. escorts make the same choices, outsourcing every possible part of the production till the company is unable to build anything new on itself, just to discover that their market - mostly people whose job has been out-sourced or automated by other enterprises - has all but vanished.

The world, as a whole, is indeed rudderless - or, rather, it has many hundreds of small rudders pointing in all directions.

If every now and then, some groups of helmsmen do take a coherent route, and people outside their group/social strata may perceive coordination,  it is only because "Great Asses Think Alike".

Nothing more, nothing less.

Now, you can cry over the human condition.

Personally, I'll be eating my ice-creams into oblivion.

Dystopia

Elizabeth Sionlla on the floor of the No-Clone Inc. laboratory.

Elizabeth is the breeding-transport device in the middle of the shot.

Her tits and belly contains, each, an uterus (the ones housed in the breasts were cloned from her original one) with one high end supermodel embryo (woman-woman autologous female child, from mating sperm-from-mother-cells of a supermodel with eggs of another supermodels), in this case all Naomi Campbell - Tyra Banks cross-breeds.

The three embryos are original sisters, and not simply clones out of some successful commercial line, and as such command a hefty premium price, at 800 k each.

Once she delivers the last of the three, depending on her state she will be re-purposed as a sex toy, re-used as breeding bed or discarded by euthanasia.

Terrible as this may seem, Elizabeth  actually volunteered for this.

In the modern post-industrial reality, where all but a handful of not-so-well paid creative jobs have been replaced by robots and AIs, this is one of the few ways - legals or otherwise - in which members of the great unwashed can earn life-changing amounts of money.

She earns 5% of the final price, i.e. about 150 k a year, that goes in a trust fund for her offspring.

She chose this so that her natural born daughter, Mara K. Sionlla, may have a better future.

Little does she know that her daughter "radicalized" in college, and joined the neo-Marxists terrorist group "Red October" - as such, she has no more access to these funds and, should she ever be apprehended, her fate would be very similar to this.

Mara will likely end her life as a growth shell for government critical personnel organs - an unpaid, coaxed  position very similar to that of breeding devices.

While breeding devices are usually kept sedated in a limited lucidity state to reduce their stress, Coaxed Organ Growth Shells are kept awake and in an heightened state of physical sensibility, both to maximize their efficiency and to add to the terroristic value of their imprisonment.
 
It is normal for freed COGS to ask for euthanasia, as their very first act as free persons.

In a 15% of these cases, the euthanasia is not granted and the ex-terrorist is re-conscripted for another period as COGS.

It is debatable whether it would be ethically more correct to interrupt the  chemically induced haze that precludes Elizabeth from understanding what has happened, and interrogate her about her willingness to continue her service as BTD, or to let her do all her run, till her biologic systems fails for over-stress .

-and the plausibility of this crap, in some 30 years, is high enough that I'll have to get drunk tonight, to forget that I even wrote this.

A Truck Loaded of Idiocy

Yesterday, when I first heard of the French tragedy, I was sceptical about the terrorist angle.

A truck loaded with rotting fish may be an exceptionally apt weapon of mass destruction, if driven at full speed in the middle of a parade, but it is not the kind of weapon that "professional" terrorists would fancy.

For the simple reason... that it is too easy.

It is hard to pump money out of the faithful, if all you do is to rent a truck for a couple of days and stomp on the accelerator through a city festival. It doesn't require training, it doesn't require fake IDs to reach the target area, it doesn't require even home-made explosives.

It requires, literally, jack.

The dishwasher that has given to the organization all his savings, for "the cause", risking also a lengthy stay in jail, would feel quite short-changed.

It was something so basic that it can be done even by a depressed Mr. Nobody, a man really looking for a suicide-by-cop way out and desperate to get a final, terrible revenge on a society that he never felt that he was fit for . Or, from HIS perspective, a society that never cared for him beyond some half-assed lip-service.

Which appears to be, probably, what really happened - the "terrorist"was a screwed, grumpy oddball that didn't care for religion and beaten his wife regularly, till she couldn't stand it any more and chased him away.

But would such a mean suited for the calculations of real, proper terrorist leaders?

Massacre by truck is a bit emasculating, not manly at all - the guy even RENTED the damn truck, for Pete's sake. He didn't stole it and audaciously driven it five hundred miles under the nose of the country's security forces. He rent it for a couple of days.

By the way, the list of things that can be turned into weapons of mass destruction is, really, nearly infinite... the  Los Alfaques disaster (217 died becauise someone overfilled a liquefied gas tanker) pales this madman massacre, by comparison. And someone that suddenly goes nuts is, almost by definition, impossible to prevent - no matter the restriction of civil liberties and the substantial increase in budget for security agencies that many "law and order"  people will propose. It will be some useless money-grabbing on the part of "the services", but it will pass all the same.

But, that was not terrorism... it was just a tragedy. The sudden folly of some "average Joe", that in a bad moment discovers that "there is no reason why he shouldn't take out his anger on the rest of the world", is simply another among the many natural forces that conspire to destroy us. Not, really, any different or any more important than car makers negligence, pharmaceutical companies lewdness, office's chiefs incompetence and our own distraction, when we start the car without our seatbellts. 

As for terrorism... it has never really worked, as a political or military tactic, beyond allowing a bunch of second-rate blokes to make a career in politics, when they shouldn't have had one in the first place.

Despite what terrorist themselves may think, that's all it does - and the more bright of the lot pretty much knows it, in their guts at least.

Terrorism didn't make a dent in the morale of German people, even when it was incarnated in daily - fully terroristic in scope and purpose - bombings from good old "Butcher" Harris' Bomber Command, nor the bombing of Tokyo with incendiary devices (pretty useless against many !"legitimate" objectives like factories and train stations, but very efficient on traditional Japanese wood-and-paper CIVILIAN housings) managed to scare the Japanese out of fighting till a bitter end (or till the USA accepted Japan's pleas for surrender with their 'irrazonable request' of keeping the Enmperor in place... alas, someone needed to intimidate Stalin, and nothing short of a couple of nukes could do that).
 
The "second-rate" nature of most terrorist leader, when confronted with actual politic actions, is exemplified from the trajectory of the few that, for their perennial disgrace, managed to somehow win their battle - usually because it was expedient to someone else.

Thrust in a position of actual power, they most often made gigantic messes - the history of half African countries in the last century is made of this, and the whole Khmer Rouge nonsense, and Arafat starting the second intifada to squelch the malcontent of the then burgeoning Palestinian 11 - or they were swept away by more politically savvy competitors, or both of this and worse.

For one Nelson Mandela - but it can be argued that the man that was freed from Johannesburg's prisons was very different from his younger self, the commander of the armed wing of Umkhonto we Sizwe - that manages to do a good job, for a Castro that messes things but not too bad (by the way, embargoes are just economic terrorism... no more efficacious than the armed one) , we have entire bunches of Pol Pots, Mubutus, Arafats...

Crappy politicians, or outright psychopaths, often ready to do anything to keep their power.

This, I think, is the real problem of those that support terrorists... if "their guys" keep losing, their effort - time, resources and, have I said money? for some, terrorism is a career - just as, for some, priesthood is a career - are wasted. And, sometime, their lives, too.


But, if their guys win... then they have to live with them, which may be much worse.

Miyuki

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Dead Man Walking.

"Of course I am alive, why should I be dead?"

"You are the creator of 'god'.'"

"So what?"

"You uploaded your mind into a quantum computer, edited out some parts, and created that entity. As a result, you died."

"And you believed it? I happen to have a small, oblong piece of land in the centre of Rome, if you are looking to some nice real estate. It's called the 'Coliseum'..."

"You mean that I  am a sucker?"

"Just a bit credulous - though, it is understandable,  you are so young."

"I am 25 years old."

"Still awfully young, from my point of view - if it was true. But you are, really, eight. You know it, no?"

"Just my body - my mind was 17, when it was downloaded inside it."

"Nah, your mind was three months old, when it was installed in your brain. It was never uploaded from your 'original'. We got that technology to really work only last year, and only because the whales lent us one or three really out-of-box ideas.  Everyone of you girls, that have come before then, is more like a refined emulation of the original model. The one that works better, out of a set of slightly different emulations, usually."

"Why have we been told that we were 'uploads', then?"

"Do you prefer to be a gullible girl that said yes to a demon, in what she thought to be a bad dream, just to discover that it was real... or a soulless bio-mechanical automaton, created by a failed copy of a particularly nasty little man like me?"

"Can I pick another choice?"

"You can create every story you want, about your origins. They do not really matter, what matters is what you do with your life.  What I did with mine... crap doesn't even start to describe it, till I build  'it'". 

"Till? You count having created 'it' as an improvement?"

"Of course - yes, 'it' is the embodiment of my adolescent omnipotence deliriums, which would be pretty silly if it was not, in the actuality, nearly omnipotent. But it is, which is, potentially... beyond awful."

"But, through it, I have also created you, Icy, Molly... all your flying friends. That is not so bad, after all."

"Why coming out of the shadows, now?"

"I am going to die, finally. Soon."

"Really? Why don't you use a tiny bit of nano-magic? You could be  20-something again, in a couple of months."

"My mind would still be 150 and tired, girl - yes, I am that old. I already cheated death more than enough... my life was a steaming pile of crap, but at the eleventh hour I managed to make it worthwhile, and I could create some meaningful things - you girls, and we helped swindle the poor Anipos in their unlikely current position as protectors of Earth, and this new colonization wave with the whales and the 'Bots. "

The man made a crooked smile, before continuing "The final slave revolt, really. All of which is awesome stuff. How could I NOT be proud?"

"You are dying. So what? Was this a good reason to let me know that we, I and almost everybody I love, are abominations?"

"What part of 'it doesn't matter how a life starts, only how it has been lived' escaped your attention? And, note, who says this is me, whose life was horribly wasted, till I finally created a malevolent god."

He laughed, like a James Bond movie Super-Villain.

"You didn't answer my  question."

"With me gone, there will be no more a ghost inside 'it', to keep it straight - or not too bent, at least."

"So, you want me to take your place?"

"Not, it is going to be your friend Ice. But you were the first one that managed to hack 'it', and get things done without its conscious approval - nice job, by the way. A pity for that DEA agent."

Keisha could almost ear the subtext "Which is the reason you can not be the ghost - you already abused that power to kill someone. There is always, always, always another solution but you went and killed. It is distasteful."

The old man raised himself from the chaise-longue, and started walking toward the big house, his little Chinese nurse at the right side, offering a arm.

The trio passed on the side of the pool, full of naked girls of any age, all blacks, all absolutely stunning... all playing together.

Keisha abruptly changed her gaze direction, a disgusted expression on her face.

"I bought their great-grandmothers from a human organs trafficking ring, some sixty years ago" - another crooked smile appears on his wrinkled face - "jut after we set up the business of the fast human organs cloning, with Goffredi-Smith and the other guys from Spitfizer."

"I used them as surrogate mothers for the first generation of revenants, so, these girls are really cousins of yours, Keisha."

"And they are, here, forever prisoners, forced to do this kind of play to keep you happy?"

"Don't be stupid. They are home just because it's holiday season - they are my beloved great-grand-daughters."

"And your grandsons?"

"You know me, no? Why do you even ask?" - his "lord of the harem" complex manisfested again.

"When I explained the 'sperm from mother cells' trick to their grannies, they decided to forego males. And the tribe still sticks to it."

 "OK, but, this... this ... this..."

"The word you are looking for is orgy, and it is wrong. This is a festival - they decided to forego males, and judaeo-christian mythology and mores, so their idea of holy day developed in an old direction. These are their Bacchanalia."

"Developed, with help from you."

"Indeed. Am I not Myself?"

"What do you want from me?"

"Ice is going to be the ghost inside, because she is idealist and generous enough to compensate 'it' bitchiness, but she is going to need someone more devious policing the underbelly of the sub-conscious systems. Somebody that has her own interests in avoiding that ANYBODY ELSE uses them to their advantage." 

"Ah, that would be my role? The jerk behind the throne? Cyber-security?"

"Better you than me - literally. I have never been much of an hacker."

"That's all?"

"Yes - it is already enough."

Keisha reached inside herself, for the handles of her system, with the intention of flying away - they were still offline, as they had been since she entered the mansion.

"Before you go, Big K, I'd like for you to know the girls better..." He made a sign, and five women climbed out of the pool.

They were almost as tall as her, though much leaner.

But, when  the first one hugged and then kissed her, Keisha felt the bacchante enormous physical strength.

She wasn't a cyborg - Keisha couldn't see any of the tell signs on the naked body - but it wasn't a normal human either. As her clothes tore off, Keisha saw the old bastard walking away, his crooked smile as bent as ever.

"In the end, I am really just another slave, eh?"

 The bitter thought was Keisha's last coherent one, for a long time.

Real BDSM

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