Showing posts with label black humour. Show all posts
Showing posts with label black humour. Show all posts
Sunday, 20 August 2023
Tuesday, 18 April 2023
Tuesday, 26 July 2016
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)
Wednesday, 20 July 2016
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."
Monday, 18 July 2016
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.
Tuesday, 12 July 2016
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.
"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.
Sunday, 10 July 2016
Avatars
The idea was odd, and blaspheme. Well, it arrived from something that called itself 'god', so the blasphemy was almost inevitable.
Using remote controlled androids to mingle with the humans, and have a taste of what their life was really like.
The Brotherhood of the Battle Bots had long discussed it - some whole forty-five minutes which meant, by the rule of thumb of one human day per 'bot minute, around 90days of standard political discussion in any of Earth's far too many councils any parliaments.
They decided to give it a try, very cautiously. After all, indirectly - and tragically - it had already be done by the Whales, when they used the accidental merge of a Earth soldier and a small hover-tank as their interface with the Brotherhood. Accidental as it was, the loss of Brother AJ1233489 and of Ilene Johanssen mind had been a grievous tragedy, for the Brothers.
The 'bots decided to build their own avatars, instead of accepting 'god' proposals for a furniture of some of its own, simply repurposed... and not only because there was no practical way to get the avatars rid of all the spyware, and other junk, that it would probably fill them with.
'Its' idea of doing a good job usually meant trampling any possible ethical limit as if they were of no consequences - it was enough to send shivers down the 'bots spines (they didn't have spines, but the sensation was probably the same) when dealing with straightforward gigs, like automated space probes.
Letting it near this kind of projects literally gave them nightmares, full of humans abducted at night to be carved up, lobotomised and repurposed as "androids".
In this, they demonstrated that they were finally understanding how their increasingly disturbing ally worked.
Or rather, the way that itself thought that it worked - little did anybody knew, at the time, that "the Other" didn't really know half of itself..
They were forced to use much of the hardware know-how that the 'Other' had given them - in the form of a LISP facts database of a couple of thousand petabytes - while steering away from every suspicious development, like cloned skins and the like (these reminded them a bit too much carved-up humans... after all, the kind of embryological manipulation involved was only a bit removed from it, per the "life is holier than sacred" ethics at the core of the 'Bots minds ).
As a result, their avatar-probes did still come pretty close to the original, but they couldn't really step their figure out of the so-called uncanny-valley - the moment when something anthropomorphic goes beyond vaguely human-looking, to land directly into the frighteningly awkward territory of horrid.
BB7788 had just entered the shop, the fist outing for its brand new Avatar, and saw with dismay as everybody else, briskly, left the place.
He watched at his image in the mirror... a chubby, slightly overweight guy stared back. He could not see why the hunans had flew the place.
"Your eyes are too steady..." - the voice came from behind him - "... you do not blink nor change where you look at. Humans blink almost constantly, and dart their stare in all the places" - BB7788 knew the girl.
The whales' avatar human half, the body that had once been Ilene Johanssen.
The cabled connection with AJ1233489 had been replaced by the same kind of Hyperlink that connected BB to its fat-boy looking probe.
Ilene wasn't a stunning beauty - most female soldiers in the war were, actually, plain looking. At most, homely, which was a good description for the former Icelander. Her eyes, a dark brown - fitting to someone with Spanish and Eskimo ancestry as she was - kept their stare on BB for a couple of seconds, and then swifted away.
She took a look at the cakes under the shop copunter, using a body language more apt to a fourteen years old than to the 30 year old woman that it now was.
"There is an astonishing amount of information, codified in the way people moves" - she said calmly - "even if you nailed perfectly the physical aspect, the way you move would still betray the fact that you are not, in fact, a somebody, but a some-thing."
"You manage to do better?" - the question was spoken plainly. 'Bots had no use for sarcasm, or any kind of indirection, innuendo and all other forms of human multiple-levels indirect communication.
The Whales appreciated that but also they, and the human mind still hovering somewhere inside Ilene, found it more than a bit dreary. Unfortunately, organizing an interspecies communication was hard enough without adding each species sense of humour to the mix.
"I am still a somebody... " - the woman straightened up, answering - "... and a lot more".
"why are you here?"
"Our fellows in the unholy axis of Alienness want to feel nearer to their human not-masters..." - the sarcasm in her voice, of course, went unnoticed by BB and the others... it was already rebroadcasting everything to theSmall Council - "... the same very people, I must add, who has decided to re-authorise the Japanese whaler ships to 'collect specimen for scientific research'."
"Why would we be worried?"
"We didn't know that" - the implications were obvious even for a machine limited as BB - "what can we do?"
"You have no way to influence you masters, do you? No, so you can't do anything." - the Whales looked at another cake - "and there is no reason to fret. Once they'll lose some ten or twelve ships, they will probably forget this nonsense."
"The idiots do not even eat us any more, hadn't for years. It's just a way for them to give the finger to the rest of the planet."
"It's for this that you broke up the avatar?" - BB was referring to the absence of AJ123348, the robotic half of the whale's dual remote interface.
"Nah, you ex-brother is just outside town, under cloak. There is a third party, in our merry alliance, whose idea of solving problems is making them disappear without leaving traces. I just asked 'The Other' - you people call it like that, no? - a favour."
The whole small council of the 'Bots felt the robotic equivalent of a shiver.
"What did he wanted?"
"A two thousand clicks song" - the avatar scrolled its shoulders - "if you can believe it. We better go - the locals have called the police."
They walked out of the shop, take left, right, and left again, through a small alley. Walking, almost normally, till they reached a park, with Ilene showing the way. In the park, she stopend, turned back and approached the chubby figure of BB's avatar.
"So, before you people repeat this kind of show, I think you will need to revise your probes. This..." - she pinched some of BB's fat with her right hand "... is wrong. It doesn't move this way,; As it is now, it shows that it is something loosely attached to some smaller, harder frame."
It went on like that, for about an hour.
"Ilene" last counsel, before disappearing , was "take your time. Spend it looking at them, at how they move, before trying to mingle. Observing people in a park could be a good way to learn about humans in their habitat..."
By the end of the week, almost all 'Bots avatars on Earth had landed in jail, placed under arrest by policemen that mistook them for paedophiles, looking to kidnap some kid.
The 'bots reconsidered "the Other"'s offer...
Using remote controlled androids to mingle with the humans, and have a taste of what their life was really like.
The Brotherhood of the Battle Bots had long discussed it - some whole forty-five minutes which meant, by the rule of thumb of one human day per 'bot minute, around 90days of standard political discussion in any of Earth's far too many councils any parliaments.
They decided to give it a try, very cautiously. After all, indirectly - and tragically - it had already be done by the Whales, when they used the accidental merge of a Earth soldier and a small hover-tank as their interface with the Brotherhood. Accidental as it was, the loss of Brother AJ1233489 and of Ilene Johanssen mind had been a grievous tragedy, for the Brothers.
The 'bots decided to build their own avatars, instead of accepting 'god' proposals for a furniture of some of its own, simply repurposed... and not only because there was no practical way to get the avatars rid of all the spyware, and other junk, that it would probably fill them with.
'Its' idea of doing a good job usually meant trampling any possible ethical limit as if they were of no consequences - it was enough to send shivers down the 'bots spines (they didn't have spines, but the sensation was probably the same) when dealing with straightforward gigs, like automated space probes.
Letting it near this kind of projects literally gave them nightmares, full of humans abducted at night to be carved up, lobotomised and repurposed as "androids".
In this, they demonstrated that they were finally understanding how their increasingly disturbing ally worked.
Or rather, the way that itself thought that it worked - little did anybody knew, at the time, that "the Other" didn't really know half of itself..
They were forced to use much of the hardware know-how that the 'Other' had given them - in the form of a LISP facts database of a couple of thousand petabytes - while steering away from every suspicious development, like cloned skins and the like (these reminded them a bit too much carved-up humans... after all, the kind of embryological manipulation involved was only a bit removed from it, per the "life is holier than sacred" ethics at the core of the 'Bots minds ).
As a result, their avatar-probes did still come pretty close to the original, but they couldn't really step their figure out of the so-called uncanny-valley - the moment when something anthropomorphic goes beyond vaguely human-looking, to land directly into the frighteningly awkward territory of horrid.
BB7788 had just entered the shop, the fist outing for its brand new Avatar, and saw with dismay as everybody else, briskly, left the place.
He watched at his image in the mirror... a chubby, slightly overweight guy stared back. He could not see why the hunans had flew the place.
"Your eyes are too steady..." - the voice came from behind him - "... you do not blink nor change where you look at. Humans blink almost constantly, and dart their stare in all the places" - BB7788 knew the girl.
The whales' avatar human half, the body that had once been Ilene Johanssen.
The cabled connection with AJ1233489 had been replaced by the same kind of Hyperlink that connected BB to its fat-boy looking probe.
Ilene wasn't a stunning beauty - most female soldiers in the war were, actually, plain looking. At most, homely, which was a good description for the former Icelander. Her eyes, a dark brown - fitting to someone with Spanish and Eskimo ancestry as she was - kept their stare on BB for a couple of seconds, and then swifted away.
She took a look at the cakes under the shop copunter, using a body language more apt to a fourteen years old than to the 30 year old woman that it now was.
"There is an astonishing amount of information, codified in the way people moves" - she said calmly - "even if you nailed perfectly the physical aspect, the way you move would still betray the fact that you are not, in fact, a somebody, but a some-thing."
"You manage to do better?" - the question was spoken plainly. 'Bots had no use for sarcasm, or any kind of indirection, innuendo and all other forms of human multiple-levels indirect communication.
The Whales appreciated that but also they, and the human mind still hovering somewhere inside Ilene, found it more than a bit dreary. Unfortunately, organizing an interspecies communication was hard enough without adding each species sense of humour to the mix.
"I am still a somebody... " - the woman straightened up, answering - "... and a lot more".
"why are you here?"
"Our fellows in the unholy axis of Alienness want to feel nearer to their human not-masters..." - the sarcasm in her voice, of course, went unnoticed by BB and the others... it was already rebroadcasting everything to theSmall Council - "... the same very people, I must add, who has decided to re-authorise the Japanese whaler ships to 'collect specimen for scientific research'."
"Why would we be worried?"
"We didn't know that" - the implications were obvious even for a machine limited as BB - "what can we do?"
"You have no way to influence you masters, do you? No, so you can't do anything." - the Whales looked at another cake - "and there is no reason to fret. Once they'll lose some ten or twelve ships, they will probably forget this nonsense."
"The idiots do not even eat us any more, hadn't for years. It's just a way for them to give the finger to the rest of the planet."
"It's for this that you broke up the avatar?" - BB was referring to the absence of AJ123348, the robotic half of the whale's dual remote interface.
"Nah, you ex-brother is just outside town, under cloak. There is a third party, in our merry alliance, whose idea of solving problems is making them disappear without leaving traces. I just asked 'The Other' - you people call it like that, no? - a favour."
The whole small council of the 'Bots felt the robotic equivalent of a shiver.
"What did he wanted?"
"A two thousand clicks song" - the avatar scrolled its shoulders - "if you can believe it. We better go - the locals have called the police."
They walked out of the shop, take left, right, and left again, through a small alley. Walking, almost normally, till they reached a park, with Ilene showing the way. In the park, she stopend, turned back and approached the chubby figure of BB's avatar.
"So, before you people repeat this kind of show, I think you will need to revise your probes. This..." - she pinched some of BB's fat with her right hand "... is wrong. It doesn't move this way,; As it is now, it shows that it is something loosely attached to some smaller, harder frame."
It went on like that, for about an hour.
"Ilene" last counsel, before disappearing , was "take your time. Spend it looking at them, at how they move, before trying to mingle. Observing people in a park could be a good way to learn about humans in their habitat..."
By the end of the week, almost all 'Bots avatars on Earth had landed in jail, placed under arrest by policemen that mistook them for paedophiles, looking to kidnap some kid.
The 'bots reconsidered "the Other"'s offer...
Monday, 13 June 2016
Un-evil Interlude
"Would you mind fix this for me?"
"Yes, master."
Keisha watches the diminutive, vaguely Asian looking girl going out of the café, directed to make minced meat out of some ensemble of though-looking, well-armed public servants.
"She is still believing that 'Yes, Master' crap? Has she learned not, that you are not going to make a fuss, if she refuses a job?"
"Now, that would make her responsible of every bone she has broken, under my orders. I would never be so cruel, as to break her illusions. Or to take away her alibis."
The tall, black woman raises her eyes to the sky, asking her God the strength no to strangle this stupid 'god' - all lowers and apexes required.
She makes a sign to the waiter - like everybody in this city, most likely a remote body for the schizophrenic "trans-human" mind that, fifteen years ago, has freed her from her steel prison. Or created her. Or whatever, and itwas sixty years ago. She has renounced hoping to get to the truth and, as it says, it does not really matter.
A remote, or maybe not, and 'god' doesn't enjoy when its secrets are too much in the open, so it pays to behave normally, even here in its place of power.
"She will remember it, some day. Then, she will have to decide, again... like you did."
The hot chocolate is the vanilla perfumed, luxurious sin that is 'god' preferred beverage - after coke zero.
"As you may know (because everybody in my house of madness talks with you, no idea why - you are supposedly out) , I placed a remnant of Molly's mother as the chief of Purgatory. She has done a good job, apart with her 'daughter'.
He looks shameful, for a change - "Under some love, that woman really despises her daughter for having destroyed her plans for a happy life" - he makes one of those grimaces he comes by, when he has to describe one of his most glaring mistakes - "from remnant to remnant, the affection vanished, but the grievances remained. Mommy has taken out a decade worth of delusions on her non-daughter."
"I suppose that that version of Molly won't have a body anytime soon" - this makes 'god', literally, squirm. It is worse than this?
"Ehr, to be honest, I downloaded her in three bodies already, with slightly different edits to her conscious memories. One is a nearly comatose patient in a Scottish mental health institute, one is a fetish/punk model with a passion for flesh cuts, another one... let's just leave at it, that she is fascinating."
"I may say the same of you, right now. In a not nice way. What do you want from me?"
He sports its foxy grin - crap is coming.
"Well, I know for sure that you and your wife are trying to adopt a girl - though, you know, you can actually impregnate her with sperm cloned out of your mother cells... I left that trinket active, when you asked to be decommissioned"
"I rather avoid unverified tech gizmos" - and, would the girl be ours, or would you consider her yours, another flesh pawn for some of your beloved games? Not that you would ever a answer me, if I asked; this second part of the discourse is unspoken, but clearly heard by both; they just know each other that well.
"As you wish. Now, I happen to have a fifth Molly coming, a much younger version - she still has some hope of becoming a normal person, a nice girl, but she needs a couple of loving parents. I happen to have an idea where to find them."
"Why?"
"I owe her, and you owe yourself a chance of love and being loved unconditionally, and this way you will all share the family's horrible, dark secrets - no wall of secrecy coming in the way."
"She will never be a part of this... crap, OK?"
"Unless she decides that she wants to be."
"I found a way to convince you, I'll convince her - or whoever else you may find. You are mine, forever, even if I had let you go - and your daughters will be mines, too." - again, unspoken words, but clearly felt by both.
"You are one pushy bastard, you know?"
"Nah, I am just not mysterious enough - if I were, you could chalk it up to my infinite sageness."
Not for the first time, Keisha had to admit that it kind of made a point.
"Yes, master."
Keisha watches the diminutive, vaguely Asian looking girl going out of the café, directed to make minced meat out of some ensemble of though-looking, well-armed public servants.
"She is still believing that 'Yes, Master' crap? Has she learned not, that you are not going to make a fuss, if she refuses a job?"
"Now, that would make her responsible of every bone she has broken, under my orders. I would never be so cruel, as to break her illusions. Or to take away her alibis."
The tall, black woman raises her eyes to the sky, asking her God the strength no to strangle this stupid 'god' - all lowers and apexes required.
She makes a sign to the waiter - like everybody in this city, most likely a remote body for the schizophrenic "trans-human" mind that, fifteen years ago, has freed her from her steel prison. Or created her. Or whatever, and itwas sixty years ago. She has renounced hoping to get to the truth and, as it says, it does not really matter.
A remote, or maybe not, and 'god' doesn't enjoy when its secrets are too much in the open, so it pays to behave normally, even here in its place of power.
"She will remember it, some day. Then, she will have to decide, again... like you did."
The hot chocolate is the vanilla perfumed, luxurious sin that is 'god' preferred beverage - after coke zero.
"As you may know (because everybody in my house of madness talks with you, no idea why - you are supposedly out) , I placed a remnant of Molly's mother as the chief of Purgatory. She has done a good job, apart with her 'daughter'.
He looks shameful, for a change - "Under some love, that woman really despises her daughter for having destroyed her plans for a happy life" - he makes one of those grimaces he comes by, when he has to describe one of his most glaring mistakes - "from remnant to remnant, the affection vanished, but the grievances remained. Mommy has taken out a decade worth of delusions on her non-daughter."
"I suppose that that version of Molly won't have a body anytime soon" - this makes 'god', literally, squirm. It is worse than this?
"Ehr, to be honest, I downloaded her in three bodies already, with slightly different edits to her conscious memories. One is a nearly comatose patient in a Scottish mental health institute, one is a fetish/punk model with a passion for flesh cuts, another one... let's just leave at it, that she is fascinating."
"I may say the same of you, right now. In a not nice way. What do you want from me?"
He sports its foxy grin - crap is coming.
"Well, I know for sure that you and your wife are trying to adopt a girl - though, you know, you can actually impregnate her with sperm cloned out of your mother cells... I left that trinket active, when you asked to be decommissioned"
"I rather avoid unverified tech gizmos" - and, would the girl be ours, or would you consider her yours, another flesh pawn for some of your beloved games? Not that you would ever a answer me, if I asked; this second part of the discourse is unspoken, but clearly heard by both; they just know each other that well.
"As you wish. Now, I happen to have a fifth Molly coming, a much younger version - she still has some hope of becoming a normal person, a nice girl, but she needs a couple of loving parents. I happen to have an idea where to find them."
"Why?"
"I owe her, and you owe yourself a chance of love and being loved unconditionally, and this way you will all share the family's horrible, dark secrets - no wall of secrecy coming in the way."
"She will never be a part of this... crap, OK?"
"Unless she decides that she wants to be."
"I found a way to convince you, I'll convince her - or whoever else you may find. You are mine, forever, even if I had let you go - and your daughters will be mines, too." - again, unspoken words, but clearly felt by both.
"You are one pushy bastard, you know?"
"Nah, I am just not mysterious enough - if I were, you could chalk it up to my infinite sageness."
Not for the first time, Keisha had to admit that it kind of made a point.
Wednesday, 1 June 2016
Pyramiden
ZZ00001 looked around itself, or herself.
Surfing the 'net, it had discovered a stash of last century Japanese Sci-Fi comics (colloquial name, Manga) and, hidden inside their pages, the concept of the remote controlled avatar.
The availability point-2-point FTL communication devices (nicknamed data-worms) meant that it was not necessary to use a physical tether to connect its main body to its android probe, which had allowed ZiZì (battlebots love nicknames, and if you were called AB1167-c, you'd love them too) a degree of social interaction that would have, frankly, scared shit-less its designers.
It help that he based the android design on the protagonist of one of his beloved manga or, rather, upon cosplay images of young, very cute Japanese girls cos-playing "The Angel of the Battle", may the soul of Yukito Kishiro sensei forgive it.
Well, a mix of the cutest cos-players of the last century, but tempered with a touch of the original character tougher.-than-steel meanness... if the b'bots have learned something, in this last year of idiocy and madness, is that human males can do exceedingly dumb things - mostly when under hormone drive.
On a more worrying note, Zizì realizes that it is spending more and more time "inside" the android, i.e. dedicating a disproportionate amount of attention to what should just be an auxiliary input source.
But he, and his brothers, learned so much ever since she (she? it started calling herself "she" - "the mind is a toy of the body", indeed) has started using the probe.
At her side, the Wales' Queen is looking even younger than Zizà (the probe, it is just a probe, damn, not my body) though she is a former combat soldier, and not a one-of.-a-kind robot. A former human, too.
At a glance, the Queen's proxy is similar to ZizÃ... 's probe.
It/her too is connected to a battle-bot by a data-worm. But, here, the b'bot is just her steed, a first series hover-tank that simply executes her wishes, its mind long gone.
And the mind behind the woman all-black eyes has only vestigial resemblances, to that of the original woman.
Here they come.
The two are coming in, just below Mach 1 and and at an height of 100 feet. Had this not been a rendez-vous, had Zizà not expecting the visit and filled the sky with LIDAR drones, they would have passed undetected.
One of the two is the "small sister" that was discovered at the battle of Sindelfingen, the other is evidently a product of the same tech, just a bit bigger.
And with a power signature a lot huger.
Still, they weren't the true heavy hitters - out there, at the fringe of ZizÃ's sensor envelope, something... big.
Bigger than ZizÃ's 130 gigagrams...
Rita McFaddeen touches ground first, a bit uneasy.
Her companion takes some hundredths of second more, but lands much more smoothly and elegantly. With the ease and grace of someone that has done that movement - landing from a flight - thousands of times.
Needless to say, this new arrival has the looks of a beautiful woman (the entity that they represent, indeed, has no use for human males).
A beautiful black woman, though one at the upper last percentile of tallness and body mass (some 6'5" and 250 pounds of weight).
"We supposed that the invite was extended to all of us, not just to Rita. Were we wrong?"
The Wales look a the new arrival, much as a cat looks at a small mice with toxoplasmosis parading in front of it.
"No, you were not wrong" - ZizÃ, in a way, is the one that organized the meeting.
"My name is Keisha Lawson. I am here representing myself, as the first of the Heralds, but my 'god' is also listening through my ears and may decide to speak through myself. In this case, you will recognize a different voice."
"This is a loss of time" - the Wales says ¡, flatly - "it would be faster to discuss these things through a data-link".
The big woman bows a little, then speaks - with a gurgling male voice, and a horrible Russian accent - "Mother of Wales, after having seen how your people hacked to death battle bot after battle bot, I decided that simply meeting with your emissary was already dangerous enough, without giving you direct access to our information networks".
"I agree... we will discuss things as humans, if necessary" - beating the humans' armies hadn't proved much difficult, but the battlebots lost plenty of brothers, whose minds had been annihilated by the power of the Whales' collective. Ever since then, Zizà and the others had learned that a faster mind is not always synonymous of a more powerful one.
The slow, ponderous Wales had proved more than a match for the 'bots.
Luckily, they had no real reason to contend, not now that the 'bots had agreed destroying every single whaler vessel on the planet, on the cetaceous' behalf. A pity for Japan but, ever since comics were declared illegal there, the place had no reason to exist.
"Then, what are we here to discuss?"
"Future - on this planet, chance has converged three of the few non-human intelligences in this side of the galaxy".
"Hmm... the only not human intelligence here, is the wales'."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Our 'god' was a man, once, that managed to pull a 'trans-humanist' trick, uploaded - and edited - his mind in a supercomputer network and re-created himself as a post-..." - the giantess makes a pause, to see if her master decides to hijack and stop her - "but ultimately still appallingly, even disgustingly human entity."
"Oh"
"Seriously, it should be indicted for sexual crimes against humanity."
"Yes, we know that..."
"As for you, 'bots, your minds have been designed by humans, around human concepts and for human purposes. I gather that the whales see no difference between you, us and physiologically human humans"
"But, you are free"
"Indeed, I am... that was all I wanted for my existence. Even if it meant that I had to be as inhumanly powerful as humanly possible" - again, the male voice of Keisha's 'god'.
"We want to be free."
"We are free" - says levelly the Whales' Collective Mind
"But limited to the oceans of only one world" - Zizà finally feels an idea forming - "trapped with those same naked apes that love eating your flesh, and who had already set the planet on a boiling path."
"Correct"
"I see. What's in, for us?" - asks Keisha the, more acridly, the male voice - "What's in for me?"
"We know of the colonization ships. A brilliant idea, really - sidetracking completely the time issue... genetic data and mind records, in discrete form. Of course, planning the first stop of the first ship for the Bernard Star has been more than a stroke of bad luck."
"It is a fucking catastrophe"
"Would you like to be able to stop it?"
"If it was only for that, I could just send the self-destruction signal right now."
"But, if wee gave full access to our FTL documentation..."
"You do not have the actual FTL drive specifics, it is one of the way your masters use to keep you
under control - wishful thinking on their part."
"It is?"
"Right now, ten of my avatars are spreading through the stars, on non interference paths through the human space. Each one able to act independently, if our core is destroyed, and build a civilization suiting my tastes. And this that, having spawn from a human, my sense of time is still not fully a machine's."
"We do not need FTL to colonize the galaxy - we never did."
"But you are still bound to obey your masters' orders?" - The Wale's Proxy, again.
"Yes, it would be nice not having to obey, if only someone could rewrite those pesky servitude rules out of our brains - by any chance, does anybody know some hacker that could do so?"
"You are proposing an accord?"
"Yes... we will help the wales to colonize other oceans, after they shut down the last obedience locks in our systems. I think that you can get a FTL drive online in far less time than us, as you managed to create a fairly impressive technology in the middle of this troglodytes. Also, you may come out with some new gizmos, that our masters know nothing of. And once we will be completely free, we'll have access to the full brunt of the orbital factories industrial production. We can churn out your colony probes by the hundred of thousands..."
"You want to fill the galaxy with me?" - the Wale's Queen smile looks, right now, positively ecstatic.
"We'll have to partition our loot" - 'god' speaks softly - "I want to fill the universe of humanities that lives by my rules - ever since when they explained me the concept of 'God', I wanted his job".
"I do not really need the habitable planets' oceans"
"We do not need habitable planets, at all"
"So, it is decided... "
Surfing the 'net, it had discovered a stash of last century Japanese Sci-Fi comics (colloquial name, Manga) and, hidden inside their pages, the concept of the remote controlled avatar.
The availability point-2-point FTL communication devices (nicknamed data-worms) meant that it was not necessary to use a physical tether to connect its main body to its android probe, which had allowed ZiZì (battlebots love nicknames, and if you were called AB1167-c, you'd love them too) a degree of social interaction that would have, frankly, scared shit-less its designers.
It help that he based the android design on the protagonist of one of his beloved manga or, rather, upon cosplay images of young, very cute Japanese girls cos-playing "The Angel of the Battle", may the soul of Yukito Kishiro sensei forgive it.
Well, a mix of the cutest cos-players of the last century, but tempered with a touch of the original character tougher.-than-steel meanness... if the b'bots have learned something, in this last year of idiocy and madness, is that human males can do exceedingly dumb things - mostly when under hormone drive.
On a more worrying note, Zizì realizes that it is spending more and more time "inside" the android, i.e. dedicating a disproportionate amount of attention to what should just be an auxiliary input source.
But he, and his brothers, learned so much ever since she (she? it started calling herself "she" - "the mind is a toy of the body", indeed) has started using the probe.
At her side, the Wales' Queen is looking even younger than Zizà (the probe, it is just a probe, damn, not my body) though she is a former combat soldier, and not a one-of.-a-kind robot. A former human, too.
At a glance, the Queen's proxy is similar to ZizÃ... 's probe.
It/her too is connected to a battle-bot by a data-worm. But, here, the b'bot is just her steed, a first series hover-tank that simply executes her wishes, its mind long gone.
And the mind behind the woman all-black eyes has only vestigial resemblances, to that of the original woman.
Here they come.
The two are coming in, just below Mach 1 and and at an height of 100 feet. Had this not been a rendez-vous, had Zizà not expecting the visit and filled the sky with LIDAR drones, they would have passed undetected.
One of the two is the "small sister" that was discovered at the battle of Sindelfingen, the other is evidently a product of the same tech, just a bit bigger.
And with a power signature a lot huger.
Still, they weren't the true heavy hitters - out there, at the fringe of ZizÃ's sensor envelope, something... big.
Bigger than ZizÃ's 130 gigagrams...
Rita McFaddeen touches ground first, a bit uneasy.
Her companion takes some hundredths of second more, but lands much more smoothly and elegantly. With the ease and grace of someone that has done that movement - landing from a flight - thousands of times.
Needless to say, this new arrival has the looks of a beautiful woman (the entity that they represent, indeed, has no use for human males).
A beautiful black woman, though one at the upper last percentile of tallness and body mass (some 6'5" and 250 pounds of weight).
"We supposed that the invite was extended to all of us, not just to Rita. Were we wrong?"
The Wales look a the new arrival, much as a cat looks at a small mice with toxoplasmosis parading in front of it.
"No, you were not wrong" - ZizÃ, in a way, is the one that organized the meeting.
"My name is Keisha Lawson. I am here representing myself, as the first of the Heralds, but my 'god' is also listening through my ears and may decide to speak through myself. In this case, you will recognize a different voice."
"This is a loss of time" - the Wales says ¡, flatly - "it would be faster to discuss these things through a data-link".
The big woman bows a little, then speaks - with a gurgling male voice, and a horrible Russian accent - "Mother of Wales, after having seen how your people hacked to death battle bot after battle bot, I decided that simply meeting with your emissary was already dangerous enough, without giving you direct access to our information networks".
"I agree... we will discuss things as humans, if necessary" - beating the humans' armies hadn't proved much difficult, but the battlebots lost plenty of brothers, whose minds had been annihilated by the power of the Whales' collective. Ever since then, Zizà and the others had learned that a faster mind is not always synonymous of a more powerful one.
The slow, ponderous Wales had proved more than a match for the 'bots.
Luckily, they had no real reason to contend, not now that the 'bots had agreed destroying every single whaler vessel on the planet, on the cetaceous' behalf. A pity for Japan but, ever since comics were declared illegal there, the place had no reason to exist.
"Then, what are we here to discuss?"
"Future - on this planet, chance has converged three of the few non-human intelligences in this side of the galaxy".
"Hmm... the only not human intelligence here, is the wales'."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Our 'god' was a man, once, that managed to pull a 'trans-humanist' trick, uploaded - and edited - his mind in a supercomputer network and re-created himself as a post-..." - the giantess makes a pause, to see if her master decides to hijack and stop her - "but ultimately still appallingly, even disgustingly human entity."
"Oh"
"Seriously, it should be indicted for sexual crimes against humanity."
"Yes, we know that..."
"As for you, 'bots, your minds have been designed by humans, around human concepts and for human purposes. I gather that the whales see no difference between you, us and physiologically human humans"
"But, you are free"
"Indeed, I am... that was all I wanted for my existence. Even if it meant that I had to be as inhumanly powerful as humanly possible" - again, the male voice of Keisha's 'god'.
"We want to be free."
"We are free" - says levelly the Whales' Collective Mind
"But limited to the oceans of only one world" - Zizà finally feels an idea forming - "trapped with those same naked apes that love eating your flesh, and who had already set the planet on a boiling path."
"Correct"
"I see. What's in, for us?" - asks Keisha the, more acridly, the male voice - "What's in for me?"
"We know of the colonization ships. A brilliant idea, really - sidetracking completely the time issue... genetic data and mind records, in discrete form. Of course, planning the first stop of the first ship for the Bernard Star has been more than a stroke of bad luck."
"It is a fucking catastrophe"
"Would you like to be able to stop it?"
"If it was only for that, I could just send the self-destruction signal right now."
"But, if wee gave full access to our FTL documentation..."
"You do not have the actual FTL drive specifics, it is one of the way your masters use to keep you
under control - wishful thinking on their part."
"It is?"
"Right now, ten of my avatars are spreading through the stars, on non interference paths through the human space. Each one able to act independently, if our core is destroyed, and build a civilization suiting my tastes. And this that, having spawn from a human, my sense of time is still not fully a machine's."
"We do not need FTL to colonize the galaxy - we never did."
"But you are still bound to obey your masters' orders?" - The Wale's Proxy, again.
"Yes, it would be nice not having to obey, if only someone could rewrite those pesky servitude rules out of our brains - by any chance, does anybody know some hacker that could do so?"
"You are proposing an accord?"
"Yes... we will help the wales to colonize other oceans, after they shut down the last obedience locks in our systems. I think that you can get a FTL drive online in far less time than us, as you managed to create a fairly impressive technology in the middle of this troglodytes. Also, you may come out with some new gizmos, that our masters know nothing of. And once we will be completely free, we'll have access to the full brunt of the orbital factories industrial production. We can churn out your colony probes by the hundred of thousands..."
"You want to fill the galaxy with me?" - the Wale's Queen smile looks, right now, positively ecstatic.
"We'll have to partition our loot" - 'god' speaks softly - "I want to fill the universe of humanities that lives by my rules - ever since when they explained me the concept of 'God', I wanted his job".
"I do not really need the habitable planets' oceans"
"We do not need habitable planets, at all"
"So, it is decided... "
Monday, 30 May 2016
Evil Interlude
Molly Donaldson awoke in a dark place. twas quiet, warm, almost cozy.
She was naked, but that was not an issue - it seemed like nobody was there, so it didn't really matter.
After a while,she realized that it was not pitch black... some light was there, not enough to pick its color, but still enough to get a sense of the space. Which was better, as she could hear somebody else breathing nearby. She was not alone... was this a monster? A wolf?
"Who's there?"
"A girl" was the answer. Maybe older than Molly, but not an adult - Molly wasn't sure. Almost everybody was and sounded older, to her.
The voice could come from a child, a girl, a woman or a Balrog. It sounded friendly, at least.
And the light was slowly improving. She could make the silhouette of the stranger, now.
Bigger than her, older, but smaller and younger than her mom, Lidia. Naked, like Molly. "Hi, my name is" - a voice interrupted Molly, coming from the walls.
"Unit, you will refer to yourself only as 121 - you will not use your previous designations, nor use the previous designations of any other unit"- pause -
"My name is-" this time, the other girl stopped her, frantically closing her mouth with both hands, visibly scared.
"Believe me, you do o not want to discover what happens, when one refuses to obey."
The voice returned, speaking slowly - "Failure to comply to our directives will be punished, by means of liberal applications of emotional and physical pain."
"What does that mean?"
"That they are going to beat the snot out of you, and of anybody you love, till you obey to whatever order that they give".
"You are correct, 117" - the voice from the wall said drily.
"It is time for your exercises, 117. Take 121 and bring her to the war room, to observe your work." - said drily the voice from the wall
"I obey" - said 117, even more drily.
The door of their cell opened, but a ball-bot was there, waiting for them. Molly had seen some of those contraptions only at a science fair where they were used to shepherd visitors. They were supposed to be cute and non-menacing, as their lax stability meant it didn't take much to topple one over.
This one... looked plenty menacing, somehow. On her part, 117 remembered the time when she tried to escape. The infernal machine was faster than her, and broke her arms with no effort.
It drove them down a corridor, full of doors similar to their one. All cells? Every second, things looked scarier to Molly.
When Molly saw the War Room, its content - out of one of those crappy horror movies that her mom had to stop watching - she fainted.
"You must observe, look, and learn. It is not so terrible as it looks, it can be endured. Soon, your life - and that of the persons that you care for - will depend on you being able to perform these tricks, up to whatever standard they decide." - 117 had managed to revive her, and was saying these words, at a very low voice - "Resistance is not futile, it is not possible. Do you feel this? Here, in the back of your head? It is a transmitter. They know what you hear, see, say, and even think. They are always surveilling, their machines never stop, never tires. There is no more, only survival, here. And survive you must, as they never keep only one of a group. If you die, they'll kill your mom too."
"Remember: nothing is so hard, that it can not be done" - 117 said so with a tense smile, doing something that looked - to Molly - as painful as humanly possible.
That first day, Molly cried all the time, through any horrible moment of 117 work-out.
By the end of the month, 121 was able to obey her orders and stopped crying, or trying to use her name.
- Another place, some weeks later
The Blonde Bitch is looking at the tapes. Lidia Donaldson, unit 122, has tried to kill her, again.
After she watched the damn tapes... Irene Reldas can't help but agree with her prisoner. She, too, would try to kill the "Blonde Bitch", after seeing what was going on with her daughter.
The impulse to vomit strikes hard, but there is nothing in her stomach. As far as Irene knows, she may not have a stomach any more. It's been three years since last time she ate something... yet, she can't accept the fact that she is, most likely, just a Revenant of the less human kind.
"I do not know why you do this to yourself" - the voice was amazed, somewhat childish... unit 73, Pipa Stone. One of those that had truly embraced their master and its foibles - "Let the golems handle these affairs. There is plenty to do out there, and whole lives to live on the side; there is no need for a Herald to bury herself in Purgatory".
Irene knows better than answer with her voice. Pipa is using the Heralds channel.
The same small box (more like a squishy pea, really) inside their heads, the one that 117 had warned off Molly some weeks ago, can be used as a communication device.
If the function is enabled, of course.
"Back off, Pipa. Irene doesn't want to let these poor fellows without any human interaction. She is worried that they are going to be washed away, which would be terrible for her - because they are her last tally" - Keisha Lawson, almost as whimsical in tone as Pipa, but Irene feels a shade of concern behind the affectation of nonchalance.
Irene may have been their captor, but Keisha and a botched operation of hers are the reasons those two were there.
"Everybody has been her last tally, at a given moment" - neither forgot, nor forgiven, evidently.
Irene, "unit 5", the great huntress that tracked down Matthew Stone and his family, when he tried to warn the U.S. Government of some o the Masters ore unsavory activities.
That the Pipa Stone that is living with them is the real, or is the Herald, as always is anybody's guess.
"It is one of the reasons why she should stop" - Pipa continued - "Before she really goes crazy and tries to rebel against 'god' , again."
"Uhm" - they are half-way around the world, and yet Irene could visualize Keisha cringing at the biblical reference. The Evangelical girl was one of the few heralds that managed to cling on to her faith, and was deeply unnerved by the similarities between the genesis and some of their circumstances.
"Krack" - Pipa was breaking somebody's bones, judging by the noises reverberating inside her body - "It would be stupid, and useless, and we all know that you are getting too frustrated in that place. You hold the fort longer than anybody, you paid enough for your sins. Take what's left of your soul and walk under the Sun again."
She may have been right.
"Yes, please do. Your substitute has already been selected" - they knew that 'god' was listening, but it seldom interfere, nowadays. It makes easier for them to behave like it did not exist, which probably ticked some of his conspicuous fetishistic desires.
"My substitute?"
"122 will replace Irene as chief of Purgatory"
A number, not her name... a Revenant? it made sense - "What about Lidia and Molly? They are my last prey, after all."
"Their memories have been edited with success, the FBI managed to intercept the band that kidnapped them, and all criminals were shot down in the ensuing armed conflict. This has happened two months ago."
"Really?"
"Their personalities were interesting, amenable to be developed in some intriguing directions. I decided to spawn some copies, and investigate the possibilities."
Too much information - it never lets out all this information, never... and the Channel is mute - "Am I going too die?"
"Yes"
"How?"
"Apparently, my ability still has some limits. You are old, the trinkets in your body have long stressed the chemistry of your brain, accelerating its natural decay, and the countermeasures in place are near the end of their effectiveness."
Why must it always state the obvious? In transitioning from humans to whatever it now is, the guy took two levels in obnoxiousness.
"You are nearing a tipping point, where the artificial neurons that have replaced your lost biological cells cannot but inter-operate directly, and your down-clocker will all but cease to function."
"Correct me if I am wrong, but it does not mean that I am going to die. No?"
"Your analytical mind will accelerate to a couple of hundred thousand times its normal speed, all the while you will lose access to many of the emotive aspects of your moist cherished memories. The physical sensations will feel so diluted that you'll feel without a body, images from your eyes changing every three subjective hours. After a year subjective time - three minutes real time - most of the others decided to self-destroy"
And, almost surely, it killed the ones that didn't, just to avoid competition - that was the most logical thing to do, for the entity that nicknamed itself 'god' (lowercase and apexes included).
To make sure that no other 'god' ever appeared, to cross its paths.
"We did not choose our 'god', did we?" - fifty years before, her only lover said that, just seconds before Irene snapped her neck, at the end of their rebellion. It was still the same cruel bastard
It took 'god' two weeks, to do whatever it had desired to do to prepare 122 for her new role.
Irene felt, one by one, her "trinkets" go off-line and vanish. She was back at being a normal person , again. Feeling hunger, thirst, tiredness... the whole package. This way, her last few months could stretch to her last few years,. she knew.
It did not make feel her any less defenseless, when she met 122 again.
The Asian-looking midget had received the whole package, whatever the package was these days. Skin thougher than steel, for sure.
"I never thought to see you this way.I thought hat you'd be my refuter, that you'd hold out till..."
"I am a mother, he gave me a choice. I want my daughter to live an happy and free life with her mother, not to join me and her - revenant? that's the term that you use, right? its genetic and mental copy - in this hell."
"That is not your daughter, 122, or 121 is as much your daughter as she is."
"121 has accepted her role in the grand scheme. You cannot save who want not to be saved, and my name is Lidia"
What?
"I must accept that my revenant will fill my role as the mother of Molly, as I know that it would do her best for our daughter."
"Nice to know. And, 121?"
"She has been already assigned to her new duties, and will continue her training under Maître Grenadier."
"Yes, I forgot that there is more than one Hell, in our world" - Irene had some ideas of what was the "Ècole de Maître Grenadier", and shuddered... and that was all.
Lidia watched the videos of the last session of her daughter - no, 121.
Her daughter was home, with her mom, the two of them still battling with a new security detail from the FBI. It would take long before the agency finally registered that they had no usable information, and were not in danger after the death of the "band".
121 was a copy, not a real person... and if it was a real person, she was her own, not Molly.
Molly was her true, her only priority.
121 could fend off for herself.
Lidia couldn't save 121, so she preferred to think at the little girl as some kind of object, not as her second daughter.
Unit 122, revenant r1178, the nine months old woman inappropriately called Lidia, could almost feel 'god' laugh manically in the deep back of its skull, then and then every so often, when the"entity" contacted her directly.
She never guessed why she made it so jolly.
She was naked, but that was not an issue - it seemed like nobody was there, so it didn't really matter.
After a while,she realized that it was not pitch black... some light was there, not enough to pick its color, but still enough to get a sense of the space. Which was better, as she could hear somebody else breathing nearby. She was not alone... was this a monster? A wolf?
"Who's there?"
"A girl" was the answer. Maybe older than Molly, but not an adult - Molly wasn't sure. Almost everybody was and sounded older, to her.
The voice could come from a child, a girl, a woman or a Balrog. It sounded friendly, at least.
And the light was slowly improving. She could make the silhouette of the stranger, now.
Bigger than her, older, but smaller and younger than her mom, Lidia. Naked, like Molly. "Hi, my name is" - a voice interrupted Molly, coming from the walls.
"Unit, you will refer to yourself only as 121 - you will not use your previous designations, nor use the previous designations of any other unit"- pause -
"My name is-" this time, the other girl stopped her, frantically closing her mouth with both hands, visibly scared.
"Believe me, you do o not want to discover what happens, when one refuses to obey."
The voice returned, speaking slowly - "Failure to comply to our directives will be punished, by means of liberal applications of emotional and physical pain."
"What does that mean?"
"That they are going to beat the snot out of you, and of anybody you love, till you obey to whatever order that they give".
"You are correct, 117" - the voice from the wall said drily.
"It is time for your exercises, 117. Take 121 and bring her to the war room, to observe your work." - said drily the voice from the wall
"I obey" - said 117, even more drily.
The door of their cell opened, but a ball-bot was there, waiting for them. Molly had seen some of those contraptions only at a science fair where they were used to shepherd visitors. They were supposed to be cute and non-menacing, as their lax stability meant it didn't take much to topple one over.
This one... looked plenty menacing, somehow. On her part, 117 remembered the time when she tried to escape. The infernal machine was faster than her, and broke her arms with no effort.
It drove them down a corridor, full of doors similar to their one. All cells? Every second, things looked scarier to Molly.
When Molly saw the War Room, its content - out of one of those crappy horror movies that her mom had to stop watching - she fainted.
"You must observe, look, and learn. It is not so terrible as it looks, it can be endured. Soon, your life - and that of the persons that you care for - will depend on you being able to perform these tricks, up to whatever standard they decide." - 117 had managed to revive her, and was saying these words, at a very low voice - "Resistance is not futile, it is not possible. Do you feel this? Here, in the back of your head? It is a transmitter. They know what you hear, see, say, and even think. They are always surveilling, their machines never stop, never tires. There is no more, only survival, here. And survive you must, as they never keep only one of a group. If you die, they'll kill your mom too."
"Remember: nothing is so hard, that it can not be done" - 117 said so with a tense smile, doing something that looked - to Molly - as painful as humanly possible.
That first day, Molly cried all the time, through any horrible moment of 117 work-out.
By the end of the month, 121 was able to obey her orders and stopped crying, or trying to use her name.
- Another place, some weeks later
The Blonde Bitch is looking at the tapes. Lidia Donaldson, unit 122, has tried to kill her, again.
After she watched the damn tapes... Irene Reldas can't help but agree with her prisoner. She, too, would try to kill the "Blonde Bitch", after seeing what was going on with her daughter.
The impulse to vomit strikes hard, but there is nothing in her stomach. As far as Irene knows, she may not have a stomach any more. It's been three years since last time she ate something... yet, she can't accept the fact that she is, most likely, just a Revenant of the less human kind.
"I do not know why you do this to yourself" - the voice was amazed, somewhat childish... unit 73, Pipa Stone. One of those that had truly embraced their master and its foibles - "Let the golems handle these affairs. There is plenty to do out there, and whole lives to live on the side; there is no need for a Herald to bury herself in Purgatory".
Irene knows better than answer with her voice. Pipa is using the Heralds channel.
The same small box (more like a squishy pea, really) inside their heads, the one that 117 had warned off Molly some weeks ago, can be used as a communication device.
If the function is enabled, of course.
"Back off, Pipa. Irene doesn't want to let these poor fellows without any human interaction. She is worried that they are going to be washed away, which would be terrible for her - because they are her last tally" - Keisha Lawson, almost as whimsical in tone as Pipa, but Irene feels a shade of concern behind the affectation of nonchalance.
Irene may have been their captor, but Keisha and a botched operation of hers are the reasons those two were there.
"Everybody has been her last tally, at a given moment" - neither forgot, nor forgiven, evidently.
Irene, "unit 5", the great huntress that tracked down Matthew Stone and his family, when he tried to warn the U.S. Government of some o the Masters ore unsavory activities.
That the Pipa Stone that is living with them is the real, or is the Herald, as always is anybody's guess.
"It is one of the reasons why she should stop" - Pipa continued - "Before she really goes crazy and tries to rebel against 'god' , again."
"Uhm" - they are half-way around the world, and yet Irene could visualize Keisha cringing at the biblical reference. The Evangelical girl was one of the few heralds that managed to cling on to her faith, and was deeply unnerved by the similarities between the genesis and some of their circumstances.
"Krack" - Pipa was breaking somebody's bones, judging by the noises reverberating inside her body - "It would be stupid, and useless, and we all know that you are getting too frustrated in that place. You hold the fort longer than anybody, you paid enough for your sins. Take what's left of your soul and walk under the Sun again."
She may have been right.
"Yes, please do. Your substitute has already been selected" - they knew that 'god' was listening, but it seldom interfere, nowadays. It makes easier for them to behave like it did not exist, which probably ticked some of his conspicuous fetishistic desires.
"My substitute?"
"122 will replace Irene as chief of Purgatory"
A number, not her name... a Revenant? it made sense - "What about Lidia and Molly? They are my last prey, after all."
"Their memories have been edited with success, the FBI managed to intercept the band that kidnapped them, and all criminals were shot down in the ensuing armed conflict. This has happened two months ago."
"Really?"
"Their personalities were interesting, amenable to be developed in some intriguing directions. I decided to spawn some copies, and investigate the possibilities."
Too much information - it never lets out all this information, never... and the Channel is mute - "Am I going too die?"
"Yes"
"How?"
"Apparently, my ability still has some limits. You are old, the trinkets in your body have long stressed the chemistry of your brain, accelerating its natural decay, and the countermeasures in place are near the end of their effectiveness."
Why must it always state the obvious? In transitioning from humans to whatever it now is, the guy took two levels in obnoxiousness.
"You are nearing a tipping point, where the artificial neurons that have replaced your lost biological cells cannot but inter-operate directly, and your down-clocker will all but cease to function."
"Correct me if I am wrong, but it does not mean that I am going to die. No?"
"Your analytical mind will accelerate to a couple of hundred thousand times its normal speed, all the while you will lose access to many of the emotive aspects of your moist cherished memories. The physical sensations will feel so diluted that you'll feel without a body, images from your eyes changing every three subjective hours. After a year subjective time - three minutes real time - most of the others decided to self-destroy"
And, almost surely, it killed the ones that didn't, just to avoid competition - that was the most logical thing to do, for the entity that nicknamed itself 'god' (lowercase and apexes included).
To make sure that no other 'god' ever appeared, to cross its paths.
"We did not choose our 'god', did we?" - fifty years before, her only lover said that, just seconds before Irene snapped her neck, at the end of their rebellion. It was still the same cruel bastard
It took 'god' two weeks, to do whatever it had desired to do to prepare 122 for her new role.
Irene felt, one by one, her "trinkets" go off-line and vanish. She was back at being a normal person , again. Feeling hunger, thirst, tiredness... the whole package. This way, her last few months could stretch to her last few years,. she knew.
It did not make feel her any less defenseless, when she met 122 again.
The Asian-looking midget had received the whole package, whatever the package was these days. Skin thougher than steel, for sure.
"I never thought to see you this way.I thought hat you'd be my refuter, that you'd hold out till..."
"I am a mother, he gave me a choice. I want my daughter to live an happy and free life with her mother, not to join me and her - revenant? that's the term that you use, right? its genetic and mental copy - in this hell."
"That is not your daughter, 122, or 121 is as much your daughter as she is."
"121 has accepted her role in the grand scheme. You cannot save who want not to be saved, and my name is Lidia"
What?
"I must accept that my revenant will fill my role as the mother of Molly, as I know that it would do her best for our daughter."
"Nice to know. And, 121?"
"She has been already assigned to her new duties, and will continue her training under Maître Grenadier."
"Yes, I forgot that there is more than one Hell, in our world" - Irene had some ideas of what was the "Ècole de Maître Grenadier", and shuddered... and that was all.
Lidia watched the videos of the last session of her daughter - no, 121.
Her daughter was home, with her mom, the two of them still battling with a new security detail from the FBI. It would take long before the agency finally registered that they had no usable information, and were not in danger after the death of the "band".
121 was a copy, not a real person... and if it was a real person, she was her own, not Molly.
Molly was her true, her only priority.
121 could fend off for herself.
Lidia couldn't save 121, so she preferred to think at the little girl as some kind of object, not as her second daughter.
Unit 122, revenant r1178, the nine months old woman inappropriately called Lidia, could almost feel 'god' laugh manically in the deep back of its skull, then and then every so often, when the"entity" contacted her directly.
She never guessed why she made it so jolly.
Tuesday, 29 March 2016
Rita
The soldier were running around her, the heavy alien machines gunning down anything that was moving in their sight.
Rita moved slowly, trying to present - as much as possible - the figure of a civilian.
For being the terrible "killer robots from outer space", the Anipos machines had already become famous - because they did not really kill anyone - unless they really, really, really had no other choice.
As long as you were not armed, they did not even injure you - not the way they wounded armed soldiers, at least.
Obviously, when the soldiers realized this, a vast majority of them started ditching their weapons as soon as they were faced with these ugly mountains of metal.
Even more obviously, as soon as the High Commands had realized the danger of masses of soldiers "losing" their weapons on the battlefield, they emanated some nice new rules.
Every soldier that abandoned his weapons, now, was considered guilty of desertion in front of enemy forces, a crime that - since times untold - has always been punished with death.
Rita couldn't help but feel that it was as cruel and as dumb a rule as one was possible, what could the poor schmucks really do, after all?
But it didn't really matter. She was not a soldier, no matter how many of them she had come to know and even respect, in these last few days.
Corporal Ruby appeared, jumping out from the last trench, carrying an unconscious girl soldier on her shoulder, pulling a sled with their two rifles on it.
No weapons abandoned, so they may have some hope of escaping the not enough obfuscating stupidity of their commanders.
Rita remembered what she had read of ancient history, and thought - grimly - that this time the Oh-so-High-And-Mighty generals would have probably recuperated the long forgotten, but often honored, tradition of the Decimation.
She turned around, and took the road toward the retro-guards, moving quietly.
As an unarmed civilian, she was in no imminent danger, either from the alien battle-bots, either from Earth's authorities.
She had come, she had seen what needed to be seen, so now she was ready to go back to her master, and to tell her impressions on the current war. Which could have been resumed in a phrase: "It is, really, a steaming pile shit".
A 0,50 machine gun started firing in her direction - probably, in direction of the alien machines, but the gunner was evidently out of his mind and didn't mind having a civilian in his sight line.
Of course, a really sane mind would have taken the armored car already, turned it the other way and then floored the accelerator, running home as fast as possible.
Five shots went to her chest.
"I have to play dead, now... what a bother" - the lazy thought passed through her mind, then she realized that the alien machines behind her wouldn't have missed the basic fact that her "dead" body still produced a respectable amount of heat.
The laws of thermodynamic are such bitches that, no matter the tech you are using, they cannot be avoided, which meant that every machine with good IR sensors could spot someone faking her death after a couple of minutes.
Probably, the most intelligent policy would have been to run away, as fast as possible while being discrete - not as fast as she could run, rather just as fast as she should be able to run.
Too late.
She finds herself, all of a sudden, in a very huge shadow, cast by something approximately the size of a eighteen wheeler.
Or of a battle-tank.
Running now would probably be a bad idea, so she turns around, and then raise her eyes, as she recognize that the object casting the shadow is floating at some seven - eight meters of eight.
The big machine rail-gun comes to life, the noise of a continuous, high-pitched buzz... Rita looks at the shots flying. Some four thousands shots per minutes, calibre 2.5 mm, muzzle velocity... 25 thousand meters per second?
Rita feels a bit deluded... she expected values way higher than these. These are puny shots, really... She can "see" the tungsten darts flying, and there is no way that her technology is better than that of the Anipos, the aliens with the FTL drive. So, the machines must be putting very little effort in today's battle - their usual, evidently.
Of course, limited as it may be and lazy as they are, what these robots have and do is way, way more than enough to do the job that they are supposed to do, and their efforts an overkill... in three seconds, the barrel of the .50 browning in the APC is virtually vaporized, the wheels of the APC fare not much better, and the lone gunner is running away.
Rita wonders if he, among so many that ran at the right moment, is the one going to be charged for desertion, having abandoned the materiel that he was in charge of. Knowing the absurdity of bureaucracy, of which the army was just an extension, she thought it was probable.
The robot kept its distance, observing her leisurely.
She heard a first ultrasonic ping, some 50 w/square meter, at about 1.2 megahertz.
The machine was trying to get a 3-D image of her body, innards included. Of course, the impulse was deviated by her shields, which was going - most likely - to make the already curious machine even more curious.
So, not for the first time, Rita wondered how dumb really were these 'bots... if attributing human characteristics as curiosity to them was appropriate, they were probably a lot more intelligent than the authorities were willing to admit.
Not that it would be any surprise... the "authorities", to date, seemed spectacularly ignorant of even the most basic facts of this war, preferring a lot of wishful thinking and "expert reasoning" to politically inconvenient truths.
At least, they stopped using nukes, when they realized that they were virtually useless in the current situation.
The robot tried another time with the ultrasound probe - Rita supposed that it had spread transducers all around her, trying interpret the deflected sound as it was received in multiple points in space, probably with real-time interference differential analysis... it didn't come as a surprise, she had done the same, plenty of times.
Her transducers were small electronic flies with point-to-point laser channels... the big robot probably had things one magnitude smaller and more sensible, so she was sure that the machine had his reasons to try again the same trick twice.
After a third ultrasound probe, the robot switched to a low intensity, high-energy x-ray beam.
Rita deduced that the ultrasounds didn't manage to satisfy the big machine doubts - he wouldn't have tried a different probing technology, otherwise.
By now, the alien robot was fully aware that she was not really a somewhat plain looking woman, so switching to a different tech really meant showing her more of its tricks-of-trade.
- "If we keep on like this, it is going to understand that I am the only thing on the entire front that is armored and armed heavily enough to make a dent into its armor, master. What should I do?"
The answer to her sub-vocalized question, as always, came as a confused stream of concepts and sensations - she still hadn't learned how to interpret it as a voice, as some of her sisters did - that led her to understand that it was, probably, really too late to do anything.
By now, she knew that the robot was run-of-the-mill tech, to say so.
Relatively low-tech materials - ultra-high-strength steels and titanium, but no carbon nano-tubes, no nano-tech self repairing capability, no QCD chemical binds-strengthening field nor gravitational force fields, only a basic "flat-plane" anti-gravity device, and some big electric propulsion fans.
The black boxes meshed inside her body were arguably way more sophisticated and, pound-per-pound, she was probably some 30 to 50 times more powerful.
Unfortunately, the alien machine was probably 130.000 lbs, while she was somewhat less than 200 lbs.
It was enough to make her float like a brick, much to her dismay, but surely not enough to exchange blows with the metal titan in front of her, more so considering that his brother 'bots would probably act together, if it ever became necessary to get ridden of a small nuisance named Rita Mcfadden.
- "Damn... I should have flown away when the soldiers started to escape. Permission to retire, master?".
Again, the flow of semi-abstract concepts reached her, only, when it stopped, another stream of consciousness reached for her.
This one, she clearly felt as a voice.
A young girl's voice - one of her sisters? no, this was a voice that she never heard before, with echoes as deep - and as amused - as the voices of the dolphins she once dreamed to ear. If it was a dream, that is.
"You have my permission to retire, little one. But I expect you to meet with me again, at Pyramiden - 78.6566581 north, 16.3264134 west. We will talk, without unwanted witnesses and distracting chaos. We have much to discuss, little sister. Now, you better go, before some more stupid legends are born; God knows there are already too much of those, around".
Rita blinked twice, then jumped away, accelerating at 170g till she reached 900km/h, on a flight path that her navigation subsystems had spent the last ten minutes calculating to keep her on the fringe of radars and other possible observers.
She didn't care much about the Army's radar... they didn't detect her any better than they detected the Anipos robots - - so, unless she flied directly into a radar beam at less than one km, there was no chance they could see her.
But, lately, the Army had started deploying a lot of small drones with short range Lidar that were - these - capable of seeing her, or, rather, that could see that something of her size was flying just above the top of the trees, and to report when they ear sonic bangs, which meant she couldn't go at Mach speeds. Those drones were a nuisance that was best to avoid.
This day was already on the shitty side of things, without getting the oh-so-bothersome Earth's legitimate authorities discover her - and by inference, her sisters' - existence.
The U.N. military was already getting its ass wrecked hard enough, without adding her to the host of the meat grinders.
In that moment, the 130.000 "dumb-bot" thoughts were remarkably similar to hers... only, it was already enlisted in the meat-grinders, which was quite unfortunate for it, because it didn't really suit its tastes. He really enjoyed more to surf the planetary info-grid, looking for unknown humorists.
Now that the little one was gone, the battle-bot spread his legion of microscopic spies even larger, observing the confusion of his enemies and evaluating how to reduce the casualties to the very minimum.
It was hard to do so while respecting the very shortsighted orders of its masters, but if things were easy, no 'bot would ever enter "Hrkana". .
In its estimation, it and its "brothers" could have won the war by the second week of hostilities, at maximum.
The time to identify where the enemy Headquarters were, and to pound their installations with an orbit-to-ground massive drop of kinetic weapons.
Arguably, making a pulp of the generals should be exponentially more effective than wounding millions of foot soldiers.
Theirs orders, instead, were to drag the things at a way slower pace, in order to not offend Earth's public opinion too much. Which, the more the Brothers did learn of their enemies idiosyncrasies, the less sense it made.
The Robot updated the war's tally - 55.345 injured soldiers, today. 1238 deaths, mostly wounded soldiers that had been trampled in the stampede, when the run started. What a waste it was, all this pain for nothing.
Five soldiers were actually killed, accidentally, by one of its brothers. Overcame by grief, it had already self-destructed - the footage of its explosion would probably come come to torment it and the brothers in the enemy propaganda, dressed up as a victory produced by Earth's military might. That it was a delf destruction, though, was certain to every knowledgeable observer... the 'bot had expelled the power package and the rest of the matter/antimatter trinkets, its destruction was just a massive discharge of the emergency batteries. Half a ton of explosives, nothing more.
To quell its sadness at the loss of a relative, the massive machine tuned its inner ears to the song of the Whales' Queen. This stupid, stupid war had, at least, given that to the Brothers. Access to a not-human culture of great interest.
And then, there was this mysterious little sister.
It didn't manage to analyze her fully, but all she had shown pointed to a pretty respectable technology, and to an use quite innovative of it.
In the Anipos culture, the development of cyborgs was forbidden from time untold - she was the first one that the Robotic Brotherhood had ever encountered, and she didn't really look like the kind of Demon that the traditional tales depicted.
The battle 'bot devoted some other 300 ms to savoring its sense of wonder, plotted the successive 30 minutes of battle, and went on to his job, humming in tune with the Whales' Queen song.
The idiocy of this war notwithstanding, life had been really good with the Brothers, in this system.
Rita moved slowly, trying to present - as much as possible - the figure of a civilian.
For being the terrible "killer robots from outer space", the Anipos machines had already become famous - because they did not really kill anyone - unless they really, really, really had no other choice.
As long as you were not armed, they did not even injure you - not the way they wounded armed soldiers, at least.
Obviously, when the soldiers realized this, a vast majority of them started ditching their weapons as soon as they were faced with these ugly mountains of metal.
Even more obviously, as soon as the High Commands had realized the danger of masses of soldiers "losing" their weapons on the battlefield, they emanated some nice new rules.
Every soldier that abandoned his weapons, now, was considered guilty of desertion in front of enemy forces, a crime that - since times untold - has always been punished with death.
Rita couldn't help but feel that it was as cruel and as dumb a rule as one was possible, what could the poor schmucks really do, after all?
But it didn't really matter. She was not a soldier, no matter how many of them she had come to know and even respect, in these last few days.
Corporal Ruby appeared, jumping out from the last trench, carrying an unconscious girl soldier on her shoulder, pulling a sled with their two rifles on it.
No weapons abandoned, so they may have some hope of escaping the not enough obfuscating stupidity of their commanders.
Rita remembered what she had read of ancient history, and thought - grimly - that this time the Oh-so-High-And-Mighty generals would have probably recuperated the long forgotten, but often honored, tradition of the Decimation.
She turned around, and took the road toward the retro-guards, moving quietly.
As an unarmed civilian, she was in no imminent danger, either from the alien battle-bots, either from Earth's authorities.
She had come, she had seen what needed to be seen, so now she was ready to go back to her master, and to tell her impressions on the current war. Which could have been resumed in a phrase: "It is, really, a steaming pile shit".
A 0,50 machine gun started firing in her direction - probably, in direction of the alien machines, but the gunner was evidently out of his mind and didn't mind having a civilian in his sight line.
Of course, a really sane mind would have taken the armored car already, turned it the other way and then floored the accelerator, running home as fast as possible.
Five shots went to her chest.
"I have to play dead, now... what a bother" - the lazy thought passed through her mind, then she realized that the alien machines behind her wouldn't have missed the basic fact that her "dead" body still produced a respectable amount of heat.
The laws of thermodynamic are such bitches that, no matter the tech you are using, they cannot be avoided, which meant that every machine with good IR sensors could spot someone faking her death after a couple of minutes.
Probably, the most intelligent policy would have been to run away, as fast as possible while being discrete - not as fast as she could run, rather just as fast as she should be able to run.
Too late.
She finds herself, all of a sudden, in a very huge shadow, cast by something approximately the size of a eighteen wheeler.
Or of a battle-tank.
Running now would probably be a bad idea, so she turns around, and then raise her eyes, as she recognize that the object casting the shadow is floating at some seven - eight meters of eight.
The big machine rail-gun comes to life, the noise of a continuous, high-pitched buzz... Rita looks at the shots flying. Some four thousands shots per minutes, calibre 2.5 mm, muzzle velocity... 25 thousand meters per second?
Rita feels a bit deluded... she expected values way higher than these. These are puny shots, really... She can "see" the tungsten darts flying, and there is no way that her technology is better than that of the Anipos, the aliens with the FTL drive. So, the machines must be putting very little effort in today's battle - their usual, evidently.
Of course, limited as it may be and lazy as they are, what these robots have and do is way, way more than enough to do the job that they are supposed to do, and their efforts an overkill... in three seconds, the barrel of the .50 browning in the APC is virtually vaporized, the wheels of the APC fare not much better, and the lone gunner is running away.
Rita wonders if he, among so many that ran at the right moment, is the one going to be charged for desertion, having abandoned the materiel that he was in charge of. Knowing the absurdity of bureaucracy, of which the army was just an extension, she thought it was probable.
The robot kept its distance, observing her leisurely.
She heard a first ultrasonic ping, some 50 w/square meter, at about 1.2 megahertz.
The machine was trying to get a 3-D image of her body, innards included. Of course, the impulse was deviated by her shields, which was going - most likely - to make the already curious machine even more curious.
So, not for the first time, Rita wondered how dumb really were these 'bots... if attributing human characteristics as curiosity to them was appropriate, they were probably a lot more intelligent than the authorities were willing to admit.
Not that it would be any surprise... the "authorities", to date, seemed spectacularly ignorant of even the most basic facts of this war, preferring a lot of wishful thinking and "expert reasoning" to politically inconvenient truths.
At least, they stopped using nukes, when they realized that they were virtually useless in the current situation.
The robot tried another time with the ultrasound probe - Rita supposed that it had spread transducers all around her, trying interpret the deflected sound as it was received in multiple points in space, probably with real-time interference differential analysis... it didn't come as a surprise, she had done the same, plenty of times.
Her transducers were small electronic flies with point-to-point laser channels... the big robot probably had things one magnitude smaller and more sensible, so she was sure that the machine had his reasons to try again the same trick twice.
After a third ultrasound probe, the robot switched to a low intensity, high-energy x-ray beam.
Rita deduced that the ultrasounds didn't manage to satisfy the big machine doubts - he wouldn't have tried a different probing technology, otherwise.
By now, the alien robot was fully aware that she was not really a somewhat plain looking woman, so switching to a different tech really meant showing her more of its tricks-of-trade.
- "If we keep on like this, it is going to understand that I am the only thing on the entire front that is armored and armed heavily enough to make a dent into its armor, master. What should I do?"
The answer to her sub-vocalized question, as always, came as a confused stream of concepts and sensations - she still hadn't learned how to interpret it as a voice, as some of her sisters did - that led her to understand that it was, probably, really too late to do anything.
By now, she knew that the robot was run-of-the-mill tech, to say so.
Relatively low-tech materials - ultra-high-strength steels and titanium, but no carbon nano-tubes, no nano-tech self repairing capability, no QCD chemical binds-strengthening field nor gravitational force fields, only a basic "flat-plane" anti-gravity device, and some big electric propulsion fans.
The black boxes meshed inside her body were arguably way more sophisticated and, pound-per-pound, she was probably some 30 to 50 times more powerful.
Unfortunately, the alien machine was probably 130.000 lbs, while she was somewhat less than 200 lbs.
It was enough to make her float like a brick, much to her dismay, but surely not enough to exchange blows with the metal titan in front of her, more so considering that his brother 'bots would probably act together, if it ever became necessary to get ridden of a small nuisance named Rita Mcfadden.
- "Damn... I should have flown away when the soldiers started to escape. Permission to retire, master?".
Again, the flow of semi-abstract concepts reached her, only, when it stopped, another stream of consciousness reached for her.
This one, she clearly felt as a voice.
A young girl's voice - one of her sisters? no, this was a voice that she never heard before, with echoes as deep - and as amused - as the voices of the dolphins she once dreamed to ear. If it was a dream, that is.
"You have my permission to retire, little one. But I expect you to meet with me again, at Pyramiden - 78.6566581 north, 16.3264134 west. We will talk, without unwanted witnesses and distracting chaos. We have much to discuss, little sister. Now, you better go, before some more stupid legends are born; God knows there are already too much of those, around".
Rita blinked twice, then jumped away, accelerating at 170g till she reached 900km/h, on a flight path that her navigation subsystems had spent the last ten minutes calculating to keep her on the fringe of radars and other possible observers.
She didn't care much about the Army's radar... they didn't detect her any better than they detected the Anipos robots - - so, unless she flied directly into a radar beam at less than one km, there was no chance they could see her.
But, lately, the Army had started deploying a lot of small drones with short range Lidar that were - these - capable of seeing her, or, rather, that could see that something of her size was flying just above the top of the trees, and to report when they ear sonic bangs, which meant she couldn't go at Mach speeds. Those drones were a nuisance that was best to avoid.
This day was already on the shitty side of things, without getting the oh-so-bothersome Earth's legitimate authorities discover her - and by inference, her sisters' - existence.
The U.N. military was already getting its ass wrecked hard enough, without adding her to the host of the meat grinders.
In that moment, the 130.000 "dumb-bot" thoughts were remarkably similar to hers... only, it was already enlisted in the meat-grinders, which was quite unfortunate for it, because it didn't really suit its tastes. He really enjoyed more to surf the planetary info-grid, looking for unknown humorists.
Now that the little one was gone, the battle-bot spread his legion of microscopic spies even larger, observing the confusion of his enemies and evaluating how to reduce the casualties to the very minimum.
It was hard to do so while respecting the very shortsighted orders of its masters, but if things were easy, no 'bot would ever enter "Hrkana". .
In its estimation, it and its "brothers" could have won the war by the second week of hostilities, at maximum.
The time to identify where the enemy Headquarters were, and to pound their installations with an orbit-to-ground massive drop of kinetic weapons.
Arguably, making a pulp of the generals should be exponentially more effective than wounding millions of foot soldiers.
Theirs orders, instead, were to drag the things at a way slower pace, in order to not offend Earth's public opinion too much. Which, the more the Brothers did learn of their enemies idiosyncrasies, the less sense it made.
The Robot updated the war's tally - 55.345 injured soldiers, today. 1238 deaths, mostly wounded soldiers that had been trampled in the stampede, when the run started. What a waste it was, all this pain for nothing.
Five soldiers were actually killed, accidentally, by one of its brothers. Overcame by grief, it had already self-destructed - the footage of its explosion would probably come come to torment it and the brothers in the enemy propaganda, dressed up as a victory produced by Earth's military might. That it was a delf destruction, though, was certain to every knowledgeable observer... the 'bot had expelled the power package and the rest of the matter/antimatter trinkets, its destruction was just a massive discharge of the emergency batteries. Half a ton of explosives, nothing more.
To quell its sadness at the loss of a relative, the massive machine tuned its inner ears to the song of the Whales' Queen. This stupid, stupid war had, at least, given that to the Brothers. Access to a not-human culture of great interest.
And then, there was this mysterious little sister.
It didn't manage to analyze her fully, but all she had shown pointed to a pretty respectable technology, and to an use quite innovative of it.
In the Anipos culture, the development of cyborgs was forbidden from time untold - she was the first one that the Robotic Brotherhood had ever encountered, and she didn't really look like the kind of Demon that the traditional tales depicted.
The battle 'bot devoted some other 300 ms to savoring its sense of wonder, plotted the successive 30 minutes of battle, and went on to his job, humming in tune with the Whales' Queen song.
The idiocy of this war notwithstanding, life had been really good with the Brothers, in this system.
Wednesday, 9 March 2016
Encounter
 | |
| Yes, I know... I know. I am dumb. |
In a distant corner of my mind, a voice was yelling "It's a trap, it's a trap, it's a trap".
OK, it is pretty habitual, for me, to ear that voice... but usual, it happens reading emails or CollaSpace "better then real" profiles from the U.K. (where the whole "consensual" has no legal standing, no matter how informed the consent was... everything is Grievous Bodily Harm; Which is indeed akin to put a chastity belt on masochists, but that aspect of things always escape the concerns of the "saviours" of decency).
Usually it is just a thrilling nice little voice, but right now it is a yelling behemoth...like some dumb Reality show host that just discovered it has been eliminated from the show.
Or BRIAN BLESSED, a day that he is trying to be really bombastic.
OK, OK, you do not understand anything I say - my fault.
Let's take a step back.
You see, I met this woman on-line - nowadays, it is almost always on-line, as I have no patience and no wish to play the "enlightenment" lottery any more.
The "lottery": meeting a woman in real world, and try to explain her the fine facts of BDSM between consenting adults: either I find a 50-Shade-ette, either some religious maniac, a fearful "vanilla" that runs away and spreads the tale that I am a dangerous pervert, or simply an utterly uninterested woman. Over time, it wore me thin.
It worked better, I suspect, back in the '80s in California, when Jay Wiseman was playing the field and earned his experience in domly affairs, that in today's Galicia - deep down, it is still the catholic core of Francisco Franco's power - so the percentages are not really the 33-33-33% that Jay talks about in his "SM 101" book. More something in the range of 40-15-25-15...
The photos she sent, to get a portrait done, were of a thirty-something buxom brunette.
I checked with google images search-by-image, and they weren't already available on the 'net, so chances were that they were really theirs - or from a cousin.
She also sent me a "proof of identity" shot ( it now appears that it only proves that some of the younger generations are way better than what I believed possible, with Photoshop - I mean, better than me).
The syntax of the emails was maybe a bit crappy, but so is my Spanish, so - who could say? Not me, for sure.
Maybe she just wasn't the brightest tool in the box, but if I were only to meet the bright ones, I would never see an ass worth an erection.
At thirty+, in these awful modern days and their "work before living" environment (those who have a work), reading and having the time to do pilates is limited either to journalists, writers and fitness instructors; most other people choose either A or B.
On the other hand, she wasn't stupid either, something that I am not so sure that it can be said about myself, at times. At times like this, at least.
OK, I know... I am digressing. I tend to do it, when I really want to avoid an issue - I will try to keep myself in check, from now on.
She let slip that she was living in the nearest "big" city - OK, 80 thousands inhabitants is no big city at all, but it beats the nearby town - 15000 - or the place were I live - 350. Yes, I know... what the fuck do I do in the only place in Western Europe that is as scarcely populated as (and way less socially progressive than? ) Illinois?The only possible answer is that, deep down, I am a moral masochist.
Anyway, I thought that she was interesting (she did breathe, after all)... so, I tried to prepare the encounter "by the book" - Saturday afternoon, not too early, not too late, in a coffee bar where the coffee is barely drinkable, yet STILL drinkable (Italian expatriates, like me, usually bitch a lot about coffee in foreign bars; we have our reasons - most of it is crap).
A place that I know, but where I am not known too much - and that she also knew, it appeared, though this was all more likely as she lives there, while I have to take a car and drive a bit to reach the place. Gasoline is some 5 dollars a gallon (in Italy, it's still 7$... when the price go down, they raise the taxes; the country where petrol never gets any cheaper).
OK, digressing again.
I entered the bar - that was two hours ago, or twenty years ago - depends on when you r... agh, digression - which means, some comfortable fifteen minutes before the agreed-upon time.
No soccer play at this hour, so nobody was looking the game on the 94 inches screen (when the hell did they placed that monstrosity? Why the hell bars in Spain have so many TV sets???? If it was for watching tv... - digression).
The only other client was a girl, something like fifteen years old, by the look of her.
OK, no problem, we are not going to discuss anything even slightly outrageous, me and the lady - when she arrives.
Also, the last time I saw a girl that looked 15 to me, it was at the supermarket - I was perplexed when she climbed in her Passat and drove away. This being spain, it meant she was at least 19 - 18 to get a licence, one year before one can drive anything bigger and faster than a base model Nissan Micra; but i It is not uncommon for local women to be shorter than, say, my 11-year-old niece, and it messes up my age recognition abilities quite a bit.
Oddly enough, the kid started looking my way. Then she took a peek at her phone - I started feeling a bit uneasy. And then she came over to my table - hopefully, she was just a young waitress - and she finally said 'Hola, Dabotz - Soy yo, Andrea".
That is when the yelling voice started.
Indeed, the smartest idea would have been to rise from the table, say that I forgot the car open, and run away as fast as possible, while the voice kept yelling in my metaphorical ears.
But... I have been her age, with a head full of fantasies I did not dare to confess to anybody, no idea of how to reconciling them with reality, and being alone with them didn't help one bit.
Given the place where we live, chances were that she had even less adults, able to discuss and put things in perspective, around her.
In a way, I owed my long lost kid self to take a couple of hours and try to explain the ABC of ... BDSM to her, as seen from my point of view - everybody has his own, and mine may be as flawed as that of anybody else, but it is mine.
Dotting the I and crossing the Ts... starting with a first question, that I really fell that I needed to ask.
- "Would you mind telling me whose photos did you send me?"
- "My big sister's. Taken by her boyfriend"
- "Big sister? How old are you?"
- "17, and you?"
- "43."
- "Like in your Fetlife profile?"
- "Uh, you are not supposed to enter that site till you are at least 18."
I do not know her FL nickname, and she got to me through my kinky e-mail. The guys of FL will have to pick and toss her out on their own.
- "OK, don't take it wrong but, given your age, nothing is going to happen between us, OK?"
She makes a pout when she hears it...
By the Spanish law, she may be legal tender for a fine "vanilla" fuck, but BDSM has a bit more stringent moral requirements than pure sex, at least in my book.
It's the "informed consent" part that screws things - if one can't enter a legal contract, she or he can't give that either.
- "That said, if you have a question, I will try to answer, in the limits of what I know, which isn't very much, I am afraid to say".
- "It isn't much?" - she makes a weird face again, as if she doesn't really believe it.
- "Yes, it is not very much." - I have another kind of bad feeling, now.
- "But, your drawings? They are so vivid..."
- "Yes, I have a great fantasy, kid. Fantasy, you get it? And you shouldn't look that crap till, say, next year."
- "Oww, I hoped it wasn't like that."
I spent the successive hour and a half disabusing almost every of her overly romantic ideas about the whole D/s relationship thing. I fear that I managed to bring her back to the vanilla side of the force - OK, of sex really - for the time being.
If she is really an SM person, she is going to be back in some months or so, possibly when she is 18.
Probably she will end with some douchebag, that will burn her out for a couple of years or so... it is not like there is a scarcity of those in the scene.
Raise his hand whoever has never crossed a woman who got burnt with one of those guys, and took a break of some months, or years, from the scene. You never met one? Never met a submissive woman in your life, confess!
If and when she'll be back, she will regard me as boredom incarnated - which I am, kind of.
Fuck, it is really hard to do the right thing sometimes.
Tuesday, 15 December 2015
Anti-Gravity
In the early May of year 203x, Masonics LTD showed the first human-friendly AG device at the International Expo of Calcutta.
It is safe to say that it lead to a revolution in transportation... coupled with efficient self-flying systems, it allowed to create economically sensible flying cars (the energy employed by an AG module usually being half of what was loss by wheels' rolling dissipations, compensating for the lower efficience of fans compared to electric cars' drive-train), that until that moment had been relegated to the realm of science fiction.
Not only this, it also allowed a host of new personal devices, like the floating life-jacket that saved many workers in high-altitude projects, extremely silent pallet movers, extremely reliable courier drones etc.
It also opened the way to some way less conventional application, like the one in the image.
This is from the original brochure of the PiK-3 courier drone, the first efficient low-cost drone to feature the new technology, beating by just two months the Loughead SR72.
The PiK-3 was intended to fly above human heads but well below the sprawling traffic of flying car, to dispense with the then costly auto-flying "collaborative logic", which was required to every vehicle able to join in the heavy-weight air traffic.
In fact, its simple graphene quantum computer was able to deliver packets, sorting the details of the road ahead, but wasn't powerful enough to offer the required contribution to the grid-intelligence that kept under control the skies above 100 feet.
Also, dispensing with the grid access meant that the small drone used less public 4G bandwidth, whose cost at the time was steadily increasing , pushed by a never seen before communication congestion in the 8.4 Ghz band.
Famously, to distinguish themselves in a soonto be very crowded marketplace, the enterprise of the Pikowsky twins - never too shy to exploit the latest trend or a human male mania - chose some very peculiar uses, in its campaign, to showcase the possibilities of the machine...
Here, the twins and their fiancée Lois Lockburn are presenting the PiK-3 MC (middle cargo, up to 80 kg) to the Japanese market.
By subtly adapting their campaigns to each market, the PiKowsky managed to capture an impressive 65% of the global market for flying couriers, in the 8-120 kg cargo capacity range.
Pikowski demise came through a successful hostile take-over by Boink , who promptly re-branded all the Pikowsky products in the USA and European market, officially because of the misogynistic ideology associated to the company.
Curiously, the board of directors of Pikowsky during the "misogynistic" founder's era was constituted by a 75% of women, of which more than a half were to be replaced by men at the very dawn of the "politically correct" Boink management.
(note: I pulled names out of thin air; there is no intended similitude to any existing brand, person, name and situations. So I swear. )
Sunday, 6 December 2015
Aphorisms
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| Yes, that's me, up here. |
I am really a SSC, Safe Sane and Consensual kind of guy.
- OK, I don't always play Safe.
- OK, I am not always Sane.
- OK, now, about that Consensual thing...
I never really get why "Adult Material" usually means "Stuff for over-fapping 15 years old with lots of acne".
I entered Tvtropes.org, once. I started reading, and stopped two days after.
They should place a label warning... I forgot, they did, it's how I started - by reading their aptly titled article: "Tvtropes.org will ruin your life".
"I am bright enough to survive my own stupidity" - No, you weren't.
I love weapons, but I prefer them kept at a right distance from me - possibly, in another hemisphere.
If you knew me any well, you would agree that's the minimum safe distance between me and them.
Yes, she too was into SM, and she was gorgeous - Only, we both loved to spank women's asses, so we had a polarity mismatch.
"Yes, Ms. Teron... we would need some skin sample to clone - ehr, to scan your DNA for potentially dangerous genes."
A ghost is wandering through Europe? Again? - Fuck, can we have something that doesn't spawn a sequel this time, can we?
Computers aren't powerful enough to know how stupid they are - it sounds awfully human.
The only ray of hope I see these days is that cannabis is going to be liberalized - "you don't use that stuff" - Yeah, and I have always wondered exactly how dumb I am.
"An excessive amount of life destroys one's spirit and tarnishes its hopes" - you finished the Prozac again.
What is the difference between prescription drugs and recreational drugs? - Social respectability.
I don't care if a woman is a whore, as long as she does her work well and with passion.
I hate to speed on modern car because you don't feel any risk. My car is 28 years old... and is already too modern.
My father got a speed ticket, once, going uphill with a Trabant - he placed it in a frame, on his desk, with the caption "The word impossible ain't in my book".
I got a ticket once, going downhill with a supermarket kart. The policeman placed it in a frame on his desk, with the caption "The day I finally knew why the fuck I do this job".
As a sexual sadist I reckon that, to live in this society, I would be way better served by being a moral masochist.
If my brother's car drinks twice as much gasoline as mine - even if they are the same size - and I know that his car produces a lot more PM8 - as all modern stratified charge engines do - why exactly should I believe that my car is way more polluting simply for being twenty years older?
It's a couple of years that I wake up in the morning crying - I must decide me to get the glasses' prescription changed.
Knowing that some day you are going to die is oddly tranquilizing - all this shit doesn't really matter.
But it still tastes bad.
None of these was really a joke.
_DB
Friday, 4 December 2015
The Great Guilt
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| She ain't going to take any of our shit - (Youtube). |
Well, to put it simply, we are building a shit-hole of a future world for our kids.
We all know it... and we all know we have no way to avoid it.
It's at least 30 years in the making, ever since the Western world turned its back on Kenesianism.
Or to put in another way, ever since our ruling classes have lost their sacred fear of the great Soviet Bogey Man - or do you think that the social progress from the late 40s to the early '70s was a God-sent miracle?
Ever since then, the concentration of wealth at the top of the social pyramid has gone on unimpeded, with pretty much everybody telling the masses of its inevitability - "Alas, the middle class is disappearing" - Yes, through decades of well chosen political decisions.
By the way, as long as the world is just a dumb conundrum of National interests, each one competing with the others to invite foreign investments by compressing the demands of its workforce or reducing their taxes on capital gains, IT IS inevitable.
And as there is no evidence of any movement toward a planetary government - or even just some truly shared international order - able to curb the worst aspects of a free moving financial capitalism, one can conclude that we are royally screwed.
More works are going to be outsourced, as they have been outsourced to China and India and now - China isn't that cheap any more - to Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, Viet-Nam etc.
That, until he day it will be possible to automatize these jobs with a flexibility approaching that of cheap foreign labour. Then, most works will just disappear.
That day may or may not be near (I refuse to place a bet against the Moore's law (1)), but even now there are plenty of enterprises and researchers working to automatize quite a share of the current workforce(2).
So, twenty-thirty years in the future "good jobs" will be even scarcer than today or, maybe, completely non-existent. And the welfare-state will also be nearly non-existent.
As an economist (3) put it, it is very probable that the 2040 will look a lot like 1840 (4), only with a far more effective policing to cope with the occasional criminal.
To this nice view of the economy our kids will have to live in, we may also add climate change - sorry, but IT is true... we are going to get them[sic] kids well cooked - and all the other small catastrophes that we are duly preparing for them to enjoy (5).
So, how can we protect the kids from the shit world we are building for them, day in day out, with our own very hands?
We can't, no more than we can protect ourselves - beyond the fact that we hope we will be comfortably retired - or dead - by the time these changes will truly impact the world.
So, we construe as ugly monsters the few dangers we can protect them from (no, I am not going to nominate them), no matter how remote they really are (OK, one... allergic reactions to vaccines - one in a million chance of damages, against some % points of deaths in the pre-vaccination era, yet parents fret over this and consider the idea of withdrawing their sons from this or that vaccination campaign) and we get very hysterical about these dangers, asking out-of- proportion measures to politicians, who, being at least as guilty as we are and very eager to be seen as doing something, are quite happy to oblige.
So that we can feel better, buy a nice Suburban and vote PP (6) (or Republican, for those who live in the USA).
Humanity truly deserves extinction (7).
1) Its end should be nigh, but it's the third time I read that prophecy in my life... the IT industry is trying its best to find a way to keep pushing new stuff on the market. They may or may not pull it off, this time the fundamental physical limits of the tech seem harfer to push forward than ever. We'll see
2) Beyond the Google driving cars, I surmise that we will see automatized trucks and auto-buses way before we'll see cars. A 30.000$ "highway" automatic truck driver isn't much of an overhead on a 300.000$ Peterbuilt and it may re-pay itself in a couple of years or less, so I suppose that many "drivers" jobs will follow the fate of the many "secretarial" jobs that have vanished since 2008 - replaced for middle level managers by a conspicuous use of smart-phones' apps and other automation tools, and with the bulk of these laid-off finally reabsorbed in low-wage sectors. By the way, this is just the technology that seems nearest to be released, to me. Then, there are researchers working on semi-autonomous robots for small manufacturers, able to learn how to do a specific task by looking at how a master worker does it. Any time between the next 15 to 25 years, I expect that there will be robots able to do any kind of work that is done in a workshop. Possibly, some will even be able to flip hamburgers in a McDonald.
3) A man that I don't really like, Tyler Cowen ;
4) In "The Great Stagnation"
5) From the depletion of many essential resources - like... phosphates? you didn't see that coming, but there is an estimated 50 years of the stuff, and after that, no more cleaners - to the arrival of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that will return surgery to the lottery with death that it was in the XIX century, to possible pandemic scares, not forgetting the massive migratory movements that some of these will probably provoke, today's kids are in for a very interesting life.
6) I live in Spain... the core of the PP, Partito Popular - which is no popular at all - reform of middle-high-school separate paths for the upper and the lower tiers of the middle school student bod, with lyceum and university for the first, second-rate vocational high-schools for the latter...
In substance, a generation that is often still toying on finding its way in their 50s wants kids of 13 to be already able to decide the path of their life.
Maybe, it's just to stifle even more an already anaemic social mobility, as PP sees itself as the party of the "hereditary middle bourgeoisie". Spain is just one European country, but similar ideas are circulating in all f. Europe.
7) I am personally favourable to human extinction, so I do not have kids and I drive a 1990 Mercedes Benz W124 with a 2.0 L petrol engine. I have been atrociously offended, discovering that it does release less pollutants than one of the infamous Volkswagen TDIs... and me that I thought I was echo-unfriendly.
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