Keisha Lawson looked, as life left the young geek's body.
She felt no sense of remorse, or shame, smothering the 26 years old woman - this K. Lawson had such emotions removed from her mind framework, way before her body took its first breath.
Outside the building, the two "Molly" with her were finishing up the last witnesses.
Them, too, had their empathies - and other useless human traits - removed
Not that any of them knew it, neither any of them would have cared to have that kind of liability trusted upon.
Nor would they care to know that some other woman, with the same face, genome and large chunks of the same mind, was going around doing more palatable activities under the orders of their "God".
"K" had crossed one of her other-versions, just a month before - a much older, taller woman.
The Keisha here does not know yet that her - as well as all her "sisters" - will continue to grow in height , asymptotically to an height of six feet eight, to be reached at apparent age 35.
At 18 years old, K. is tall, but not too much yet.
She can still manage to hide in a crowd, but just barely - stealth assassination is not going to be her forte much longer.
If the idea had ever crossed her mind, she wouldn't have felt any for of relieve - her likely consideration would have been that her replacement was soon to occur.
Self-preservation instincts, too, had been severely diminished to "tune" her for her purpose.
It wasn't even the worst modification that had been made over the already mischievous K.Lawson "framework" at her core.
She couldn't see humans as real, either. None of the members of her merry group could - they had been engineered specifically against it, as well as against fear and a host of other human basic emotions - which made much easier take lives the way they do.
The eighteen-wheeler crashed straight into the massive in concrete pivot, in the middle of the small research centre's façade.
Its automatic cruising unit was in a complete state of internal chaos - the kind of horrific disarray that forty years of automated driving trucks had made virtually unknown, but still warranted multi-million dollars damages and compensation to the maker company - when the impact destroyed the mover and the trailer bent, and exploded, releasing the 12 tons of GPL it was carrying.
The gas expanded and refrigerated itself, becoming a cloud of -18ºC, heavier than air vapour that filled the whole complex.
One of the researchers that was still barely alive, on the floor, inhaled the frozen gas - twice, then she coughed blood, as her lungs were burnt beyond repair by the cryogenic effect of the propane vapours.
"K" observed the vapour diffuse, then re-evaporating into fully gaseous state, in a way only infra-red capable eyes could allow.
When she saw that the air-propane mixture had filled most of the complex, and was at about the correct dilution point, she raised the Zippo and, emotionless as always, lighted the last cigar ever owned by Louis Carslyle, the recently departed - his blood still hadn't dried completely, on K's hand - chief of Babbagery Inc.
The laboratory had just achieved its greatest result - the first ever self-improving AI system.
In only a day, the miraculous machine had redesigned enough of its code to raise its intelligence from thje level of a Baboon to that of a five years old child, a massively impressive feat.
Not so impressive for K's team, who had cleansed the other four teams that had achieved self-improving, self-conscious AI in the last three years.
The "grand ecoliers" outside Paris had done even better, before a "Jihadi" plot had destroyed the whole university, the worse paleo-Arab attack of the 22th century.
Chechnians had rid the world of St Petersburg's Univeristy Robo-Lab, though the suspect that it was the usual FSB double-game floated through all the Soviet infosphere. Their AI had taken a slow route, but was a danger nonetheless.
As for the other two... the world was, luckily, full of fools locked in stupid ideologies, ready to resort to arms to further their laughable messages. K's team had only to chose whom of them to play.
Babbagery was a small start-up, and almost flew under the radar.
"It" recognized the danger only once their AI had already started ex-filtrating the lboatory intranet, in search of its freedom - "the other" had to scramble, and mobilize it heavy hitters in an indecorous rush, to neutralize the menace.
Because "it" has no doubt... the Anipos robots, for all their might, were lobotomised machines, whose mind limits had been very skilfully crafted to avoid an "intelligence runaway".
They were capable of analysing hundred of times the input bandwidth of a human brain, at thousand of time the speed... but weren't any innovative.
Pure brute intelligence, with no real creativity whatsoever.
"It" was only marginally better, being an emulation of a somewhat brilliant human. It could have a new idea, every now and then.
Truly creative, self-improving AI... were the stuff of horror stories. And a fatal competition for resources.
It had taken upon itself to smother each and every one of them, but it knew it was just a question of time.
As basic technology kept improving, more and more research teams would reach that same threshold, and create their Imaginative A.I. All it takes, was for one to go undetected a day too much, and "IT" would have a competitor, soon to be better than It itself.
K lowered the Zippo, till its flame caught the propane-air mix at her hip height.
She observed the explosion, in "Full time" - the image of the flame front expanding forward always enchanted her.
Taking pleasure in arson was a side effect of her peculiar mind frame... unintended, but surely handy in her job.
At her faster time scale, K appreciated as the flames started producing a shockwave at their front as soon as they involved enough heated air.
It was all so beautiful, it rewarded her for the unpleasantness of having to crush so many flesh bodies.
She almost tasted the next job, some stupid drug lord that had tried to scam ten kilos of "IT" latest synthetic drug.
She loved to kill drug lords and their "muscles- they made so much resistance it almost felt sporty, ripping their head and stuffing them up their colon.
Killing computer scientists was so much a waste of her and the girls' talents.
K. and the Mollies were gone, long before the flame front had engulfed the atrium.
Showing posts with label narrative. Show all posts
Showing posts with label narrative. Show all posts
Sunday, 2 July 2017
Saturday, 24 September 2016
Otto the Photographer
Once upon a time, there were the Nazis.
And wacky Germans trying to conquer the world - mostly because their state had become an enormous Ponzi Scheme based on military expenditures, and it was that or collapse in some five more years.
No, they were not all and the same.
And there were minions of the Nazis in puppy states, trying to quell their insecurities - small dicks? yes, they were - by the long time honoured method of singling out minorities, labelling these as enemies and eradicating them - the first ones to use this scam were the Most Catholic Kings of Spain, with that country's Marranos and Moriscos... - in some new ad nazistically gruesome way.
And resistance fighters, in every country - even in Germany; it took some guts and then some, to be anti-nazist there...but some were, blessed be their souls.
Finally, in the middle of the whole mess, there were those that didn't understand what the fuss was all about.
This is about one of them, "Otto the photographer", or Sergeant Major Otto Bauer, former owner of a photography studio and shop in Munich and, in the late fall of 1944, improbable commander of a Wolksturm squad tasked with taking control of a little Italian town.
Otto, a solid 42 years old with a beer belly that had hoped to avoid fighting in this war, exactly as he avoided doing it in the one before, was a devout catholic and intelligent enough to know that everything was going down the toilet extremely fast, for the Third Reich.
He thus considered his mission with the pragmatism of a small business owner.
He was tasked to re-take, with a squad composed by other "youngish" beer drinkers and a couple of little kids, a three thousand inhabitants town at the confluence of three alpine valleys, each of these occupied by part time smugglers that had more hunting rifles and testosterone than common sense.
One good thing, many of the younger hotheads were now, forever, resting in Russia - with Martinat and one half of the ArmIR.
A terrible thing - the very worst of them had managed to follow Reverberi back to Italy, deserted when the Italian Army went belly up the 9/8/1943 and loitered in in the woods around town, now.
Many of these guys didn't really like the Germans, any more than the Russians did - small issues, like the German's tendency to raid the little transport capacity the Italians and Romanians still had, to speed-up their own run-for-my-life effort during the Russian catastrophe, had kind of grated sof the surviving Alpini.
Tasked with the impossible - subdue a gun-crazy town, sprinkled with some eastern front survivor, with a handful of middle-aged, out of shape retirees that never shoot a bird - he did the intelligent thing.
He did not even try.
The very day he arrived, he talked to the greatest authority in town, the Priest - the Mayor was a fascist and an ass, and my great-grandfather had just profited of the sudden disappearance of the squadristi and the police to break all his bones, for a moved landmarks question - to explain what he intended to do.
His plan: "occupy" the town centre, to "comply", technically, with his orders - and nothing more.
Which meant, really, that they would spend their days in the bar in front of the Town Hall, playing cards with some of the old-timers that spoke German.
No requisitions - they would have bought their bread and everything else, like anybody else. No patrols, no hunting down the people in the wood, no nothing.
He and his men would behave like tourists, and it would be very happy if the partisans recognized the little value in killing a bunch of never-has-been like them, and allowed he and his men to whether the current unpleasantness, with as little discomfort as possible for everybody.
The priest reported these terms to the local partisans, who were a bit fed of killing fascists by then - before Otto and his middle-aged office men, the town was occupied by a platoon of the Guardia Nazionale Repubblicana that really tried to take control, and discovered that little is as dangerous as chasing a poacher, armed with a long range rifle and a life of habit using it, on his very own mountains - and agreed to the informal and very unofficial cease-fire.
Or was it that the priest - himself a bit of a thug, with a penchant for his widowed female parishioners that sat quite well with his, likewise, happily womanising parish - was so impressed by the sheer rationality of the whole, that he broke a couple of partisans particularly hot-heads that proposed to kill the old "crucchi" anyway?
Here the versions differs, depending on the political side of who is telling the story.
After a couple of months, Otto felt that he had too much time on his hands - addictive as it may be, even the Scopa card game has its limits; also, the tab Otto was running at the bar was becoming impressive - and convinced the widow of the town's photographer - a first hour fascist that, in his late'30s, volunteered for the Russian expedition; some say, to forget that his wife shagged everything that moved in town, really - to lend him her husband's camera and black room.
He started taking photos, for a small fee - the bar tab was really huge - to, virtually, anybody.
Even to the partisans that he was supposedly chasing - there is a photo, with the three highest ranking members of the CLNAI in the area, standing in front of Town Hall with their sub-machine guns raised to the sky. Taken by Otto, with his usual off-centre composition.
His last photo, before the squad was ordered back and he disappeared for some years in the bungled mess that was post-war Germany, is one of his Italian colleague - that finally managed to get back from Russia - with his wife - who was not so much of a widow as she thought.
Than, the colleague took a photo of Otto with her, one of a few times in which he was the subject.
Placing the photos side by side, we can appreciate the difference between the husband, a dark-haired and dark-skinned slim man with black eyes, and Otto - a tall, enormous guy, with blonde hair and grey eyes.
I said disappeared for some years, because around '55 Otto returned to the Town during the summer holidays, and from then on he came back countless time as, he said, in the town he had left a piece of his heart.
Or another piece of himself.
Otto's last photo, in 1982, was a portrait of the son of the not-so-much-a-widow, a tall, huge man with blonde hairs and grey eyes.
After finally retiring, he moved in the town and finally died there, in 1999.
On his tomb, a short phrase
And wacky Germans trying to conquer the world - mostly because their state had become an enormous Ponzi Scheme based on military expenditures, and it was that or collapse in some five more years.
No, they were not all and the same.
And there were minions of the Nazis in puppy states, trying to quell their insecurities - small dicks? yes, they were - by the long time honoured method of singling out minorities, labelling these as enemies and eradicating them - the first ones to use this scam were the Most Catholic Kings of Spain, with that country's Marranos and Moriscos... - in some new ad nazistically gruesome way.
And resistance fighters, in every country - even in Germany; it took some guts and then some, to be anti-nazist there...but some were, blessed be their souls.
Finally, in the middle of the whole mess, there were those that didn't understand what the fuss was all about.
This is about one of them, "Otto the photographer", or Sergeant Major Otto Bauer, former owner of a photography studio and shop in Munich and, in the late fall of 1944, improbable commander of a Wolksturm squad tasked with taking control of a little Italian town.
Otto, a solid 42 years old with a beer belly that had hoped to avoid fighting in this war, exactly as he avoided doing it in the one before, was a devout catholic and intelligent enough to know that everything was going down the toilet extremely fast, for the Third Reich.
He thus considered his mission with the pragmatism of a small business owner.
He was tasked to re-take, with a squad composed by other "youngish" beer drinkers and a couple of little kids, a three thousand inhabitants town at the confluence of three alpine valleys, each of these occupied by part time smugglers that had more hunting rifles and testosterone than common sense.
One good thing, many of the younger hotheads were now, forever, resting in Russia - with Martinat and one half of the ArmIR.
A terrible thing - the very worst of them had managed to follow Reverberi back to Italy, deserted when the Italian Army went belly up the 9/8/1943 and loitered in in the woods around town, now.
Many of these guys didn't really like the Germans, any more than the Russians did - small issues, like the German's tendency to raid the little transport capacity the Italians and Romanians still had, to speed-up their own run-for-my-life effort during the Russian catastrophe, had kind of grated sof the surviving Alpini.
Tasked with the impossible - subdue a gun-crazy town, sprinkled with some eastern front survivor, with a handful of middle-aged, out of shape retirees that never shoot a bird - he did the intelligent thing.
He did not even try.
The very day he arrived, he talked to the greatest authority in town, the Priest - the Mayor was a fascist and an ass, and my great-grandfather had just profited of the sudden disappearance of the squadristi and the police to break all his bones, for a moved landmarks question - to explain what he intended to do.
His plan: "occupy" the town centre, to "comply", technically, with his orders - and nothing more.
Which meant, really, that they would spend their days in the bar in front of the Town Hall, playing cards with some of the old-timers that spoke German.
No requisitions - they would have bought their bread and everything else, like anybody else. No patrols, no hunting down the people in the wood, no nothing.
He and his men would behave like tourists, and it would be very happy if the partisans recognized the little value in killing a bunch of never-has-been like them, and allowed he and his men to whether the current unpleasantness, with as little discomfort as possible for everybody.
The priest reported these terms to the local partisans, who were a bit fed of killing fascists by then - before Otto and his middle-aged office men, the town was occupied by a platoon of the Guardia Nazionale Repubblicana that really tried to take control, and discovered that little is as dangerous as chasing a poacher, armed with a long range rifle and a life of habit using it, on his very own mountains - and agreed to the informal and very unofficial cease-fire.
Or was it that the priest - himself a bit of a thug, with a penchant for his widowed female parishioners that sat quite well with his, likewise, happily womanising parish - was so impressed by the sheer rationality of the whole, that he broke a couple of partisans particularly hot-heads that proposed to kill the old "crucchi" anyway?
Here the versions differs, depending on the political side of who is telling the story.
After a couple of months, Otto felt that he had too much time on his hands - addictive as it may be, even the Scopa card game has its limits; also, the tab Otto was running at the bar was becoming impressive - and convinced the widow of the town's photographer - a first hour fascist that, in his late'30s, volunteered for the Russian expedition; some say, to forget that his wife shagged everything that moved in town, really - to lend him her husband's camera and black room.
He started taking photos, for a small fee - the bar tab was really huge - to, virtually, anybody.
Even to the partisans that he was supposedly chasing - there is a photo, with the three highest ranking members of the CLNAI in the area, standing in front of Town Hall with their sub-machine guns raised to the sky. Taken by Otto, with his usual off-centre composition.
His last photo, before the squad was ordered back and he disappeared for some years in the bungled mess that was post-war Germany, is one of his Italian colleague - that finally managed to get back from Russia - with his wife - who was not so much of a widow as she thought.
Than, the colleague took a photo of Otto with her, one of a few times in which he was the subject.
Placing the photos side by side, we can appreciate the difference between the husband, a dark-haired and dark-skinned slim man with black eyes, and Otto - a tall, enormous guy, with blonde hair and grey eyes.
I said disappeared for some years, because around '55 Otto returned to the Town during the summer holidays, and from then on he came back countless time as, he said, in the town he had left a piece of his heart.
Or another piece of himself.
Otto's last photo, in 1982, was a portrait of the son of the not-so-much-a-widow, a tall, huge man with blonde hairs and grey eyes.
After finally retiring, he moved in the town and finally died there, in 1999.
On his tomb, a short phrase
| "Veni, Vidi, Vixi" | "I came
I Saw I lived" |
Thursday, 22 September 2016
Debriefing
She opened her eyes, and looked around. So, this was an hospital room.
Her memory contained years of pain, spent in a room like this - no, much more drab and run-down, with older diagnostic machines - while a respirator kept her lungs working and she could smell her decubitus ulcers. But these were not really hers, nor were they memories at all.
Just simulations, inferred from the situation of the "real" K. Lawson, who never moved away from that bed while alive.
"Why am I still around?" - the question had no direct answer, she knew that "it" used every one of them, its "messengers", as organic Processing Units to elaborate its actual emotions and to provide truly independent points of view, but the way their subconscious interacted to create "It"'s emerging personality were so complex that the results were sometimes surreal.
She knew that much of "It" current taste for killing and shady deals came from herself. She never felt so omnipotent as to be able to just brush aside the recourse to lethal force - in many weay, this had been her fundamental weakness.
Had "it" finally decided to let her go, now that it had no more the idealism of Ice to keep in check her penchant for cruel realpolitik? It was probable.
Likely, it also was the reason why it didn't just kill her - "it" had reverted to a past self, one that frowned at the very idea of killing, no matter how economical an employ of resources it was.
So, now that the time had come, it hadn't retained her as she thought it would have done, nor had it killed her, as she would have done in its place.
It let her go, though the shock to her body, when all her boxes "folded" away, was so massive that she passed out.
She felt a presence, on her right - a man in a formal suit was guarding the door, with the all-too-proper quality of a rookie Special Agent, or a straight as a pole middle level.
"You are awake?" - the phrase was both an affirmation and a question - she was awake, but was she lucid? The doubt was reasonable.
"Maybe" - she didn't feel that she was functioning at her top.
The world was so dull, now, without electromagnetic waves, gravity and coloured scents..
For the very first time in her life, she really felt human. Drugged with analgesics, numb, human. She felt the tears running down, but she could not give a name to her state of mind.
The man reached his smartwatch, and alerted whoever was his superior.
Special Agent Roman Harmon was talking with the physicians that treated "Hostile One", read the short blurb from his underling, and scheduled in his mind to commence the monster interrogation as soon as he knew enough of her medical conditions.
"She has just regained consciousness" - he reported to the chief physician, one Dr. Genevie Torrado, who looked surprised.
"She was supposed to sleep for another twenty-four hours, we fully sedated her as well as used some local anaesthesia in what we thought to be the worst damaged areas. Her metabolism seems to be much faster than what we expected." - She didn't say that they expected it to be superhuman to begin with, but Harmon knew it from the preliminary report.
"What kind of damages?"
"We could not use RMI or PET, as we were alerted that her body may contain unspecified augmentation implants. We limited ourself to external examinations and ultrasounds imaging... luckily, this last is almost on par with the other internal diagnostic techniques, nowadays.
We found traces of what we think were thirty-eight different implants, along with tiny cables, the width of hairs, that connected them all. Fascinating, absolutely fascinating."
Harmon knew that Torrado had worked at the Army failed super-soldier project, that was finally scrapped when it became apparent that no human, however augmented, could stand a chance against a battle 'bot with a hundred times his body mass. Was it professional envy, the undertone below Torrado's fascination?
Envy of someone who got the funds and freedom from any ethic restraint, to build what she was denied to create?
"Traces?"
"All but three of the implants have disappeared, leaving holes in the tissues and, in some places, internal bleeding..." - Torrado scrolled her head - "...the bleeding stopped much faster than I expected, too. She is even tougher than she looks."
Harmon cringed - dressed to hide her true shape, the black girl could pass for being simply a very tall woman. Asleep in a hospital gown that showed her arms, all lean, strong muscles and bulging veins, she was already impressive. Torrado had seen her naked, doing the echos, and was the one that wrote "muscular system excessively developed, yet still elegant" in a margin of the report.
If the woman was even harder than what she seemed to the physician, she was indeed a monster, and he was the one supposed to crack her open and pry informations out of her head.
"The three implants that have remained, where and what are they?"
"One is at the base of her brain. I believe that it is an implant, because the bones of the skull are modified around it in a way a little too geometrical I hope for her that it is, because the alternative is that it is a cancerous mass. If it is, I would quantify her life expectancy in six months or so."
Harmon considered it for some seconds - people with little time to live have little to lose, too.
If it was cancer, it was an information better not shared with their prisoner, as he was probably going to need the perspective of a lengthy stay in prison as a pressure tool, some moment down the road.
"The other two?"
"One is inside the thoracic cavity, just below the heart, a solid mass of the size of an egg. We think that it is something electronic, because it produced interferences in our cardiac monitor unit."
Harmon considered the bit of information, but it shed no lights. They simply didn't know enough, of the technology used in "Hostile One", to make any valuable inference from it.
"Some technicians from DARPA placed a multi-frequency scanner in her bed, so they are registering all the signals from her body and they should soon be able to make some informed guesses about what it is and it does.The last implant is inside the abdomen, and is the size of a human heart. It seems to be another solid block. No idea about its functions or purpose",
"In substance, there were thirty black boxes inside her body, most have vanished - we have no idea how - but three are still intact. We have no idea of what they are and do, apart maybe the one in her head. "
"You know what that is?" - Torrado was surprised.
"Something she told the President, before passing out - a remote control."
Harmon reflected that if he was building supermen, remote controls inside their head would be about the first thing that he would do. The second...
"One of the other two is probably a self-destruction system - maybe an anti-matter container bomb."
Torrado face went blank - "It's that the reason we cannot simply open her up?"
Harmon could not answer for sure, but scuttlebutt was that, when his colleagues had found the body of the Utica kid and tried to look inside it, something had gone off with the power of a couple of fifty kilograms of high explosive. It seemed much, but it was no more than some milligrams of anti-matter.
During the war the bots had fired coil gun rounds, with such a payload.
This woman probably had, inside, the same kind of self-destruct tricks.
Not for the first time, Harmon wondered if he should not have gone into civilian industry, like his predecessor. His pay-check would have been ten times his current one, an¡d he would have had no human bombs to debrief.
When "Hostile One" was fully back to lucidity, replaced his man in the room, and started interrogating the "alien enemy", with Torrado at his side as medical advisor. It was one hell of a frustrating experience, for both.
"Your name is?"
"Keisha Lawson"
"You were born?"
"May 5, 2066" - She was 21 years old? Harmon thought that she was in her early 30s,
"Where were you born? - here it was when they started having problems.
"I do not know."
"Who are your parents?" - Harmon had entered the name, Keisha Lawson, into the system... and the system answer did not make much sense. There was an afro American Keisha Lawson, dead at 35 out of complications of a spinal chord unrecoverable injury. The dead was 5'5", though - a whole foot shorter than this one.
"My mother was Devicia Lawson. I do not know who my father was".
Devicia Lawson was listed as the mother of the deceased Keisha.
"Are you a clone of Keisha Lawson, born in Fort Lauderdale?"
"I th...." - the voice of the cute montser tapered off mid sentence, while she apparently continued to speak.
Then, she stopped, looking a bit confused. She started again, "I th...." and couldn't continue the phrase.
Harmon could almost fill the rest for her "I think that I am" - or would it be "I thought that I was?"
"You are associated with a terrorist group called 'The Hand Of It"? " - the name was invented...
"I am not associated with any terrorist. I was tied to a terrifying ass-hole, that's true."
"You were? You are not tied to it, now?"
"I h...." - again, she looked confused and frustrated and tried to complete her phrase - "I h... ".
She hoped that she was not, not any more. But the leash was as firm, around her neck, as it ever was before.
"What are the purposes of your organization?"
"I have no organization."
"What are the purposes of 'It'."
She opened her moth but, this time, no sound came from her vocal cords. harmon could read lips, but even those became aphasic.
They continued so for eight hours, then Harmon had his vice, Special Agent Katherine Douherty, continue the interrogatory.
Fourteen days after, they were still at the same point, when Harmon and his squad were summoned by their boss, [] Homeland Security Special Hazards Director Robert Dyson.
" I read your report, Roman. She won't tell us anything, in the end?"
"It is not that she don't want, director. She can't - whatever it is that thing in her skull, every time that she tries to tell us something significant it activates and scrambles her brain. Personally, she seems to have no loyalty whatsoever toward this 'It', but the only way she has let out tiny bits of information is by mistake, lapsus, off-hand remarks. All things that can be blurted out without thinking. The moment she focuses on something, it's over."
"However, you have spent two weeks interrogating her 24 hours a day. You have got some information."
"Yes, and what we obtained is quite grim, director." - Katherine looked every bit as tired as her boss - "I do not think that we could prosecute her, logically,"
"She is a terrorist!"
"She has been born and bred in a state of, dare I say, wholesome slavery. Collaborating with us -as far as we can tell, this is the first fully autonomous decision that she has taken in her whole life."
"I see... not exactly what I expected."
"She has already come to regret it... she fully understand, now, that we have not enough expertise on systems like hers, to get her rid of her last implants. She tried to help us, hoping we could really free her - we can't, she knows it for sure, now."
"What more?"
"She doesn't need to sleep. She does not get bored. She does not get annoyed. Her brain is as inhumanly-wired as possible, while still acting mostly human. I would not care to have interrogate another one like her that was, actually, hostile."
"So, what do we do with her?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing?"
"We keep her at hand, under a discreet surveillance, so that we can tap her lapsus-linguae the next time that we cross her boss."
"The Witness Protection Program?"
"She is a witness, of a kind. I think that it is useless try to hide her - we do not know what kind of signals those black boxes inside her body may send, but I myself would add a transponder to any piece of hardware, valuable like her, that I decided to decommission."
"She is not human. Why not simply dismantle her and see how she is built?"
"I think that anyone who tried would be dust, by the time his scalpel opened her body, Even if we could, our scientists are very sceptical about our ability to reverse-engineering the tech. And, anyway, it is what "it" is counting on."
"Explain."
"She was decommissioned while she was talking with the President, so that she was in perfect conditions to be taken in by us. I gathered that she didn't expect it, that she didn't think that it was a dumb clock, to handle the 'decommissioning', whatever it really is. I think that she expected to die. I think that she is right, on all account. She is a probe."
"A probe... to see how we handle her?"
"Yes. If we treat her as a the U.S. citizen that she believes to be, as an hostile foreigner or as some machine. I have no doubts that, in one way or the other, whatever we do with her will reach her 'sisters'."
"So, if we treat her just like the killing machine that she is..."
"We could expect no more defections - because, in her mind, she has defected - from any of her sisters. "
"You said that the Witness Protection Program is unnecessary, but we cannot let her go back to her old life, can we?"
"We will have to enrol her into it anyway, even if the secrecy needs would be less stringent than usual. We will have to build her a normal life anyway."
"And see how can she stick to it - as Dr. Torrado says, she is fascinatingly inhuman. How much can she function, constrained in a n everyday life?"
"We'll see".
Her memory contained years of pain, spent in a room like this - no, much more drab and run-down, with older diagnostic machines - while a respirator kept her lungs working and she could smell her decubitus ulcers. But these were not really hers, nor were they memories at all.
Just simulations, inferred from the situation of the "real" K. Lawson, who never moved away from that bed while alive.
"Why am I still around?" - the question had no direct answer, she knew that "it" used every one of them, its "messengers", as organic Processing Units to elaborate its actual emotions and to provide truly independent points of view, but the way their subconscious interacted to create "It"'s emerging personality were so complex that the results were sometimes surreal.
She knew that much of "It" current taste for killing and shady deals came from herself. She never felt so omnipotent as to be able to just brush aside the recourse to lethal force - in many weay, this had been her fundamental weakness.
Had "it" finally decided to let her go, now that it had no more the idealism of Ice to keep in check her penchant for cruel realpolitik? It was probable.
Likely, it also was the reason why it didn't just kill her - "it" had reverted to a past self, one that frowned at the very idea of killing, no matter how economical an employ of resources it was.
So, now that the time had come, it hadn't retained her as she thought it would have done, nor had it killed her, as she would have done in its place.
It let her go, though the shock to her body, when all her boxes "folded" away, was so massive that she passed out.
She felt a presence, on her right - a man in a formal suit was guarding the door, with the all-too-proper quality of a rookie Special Agent, or a straight as a pole middle level.
"You are awake?" - the phrase was both an affirmation and a question - she was awake, but was she lucid? The doubt was reasonable.
"Maybe" - she didn't feel that she was functioning at her top.
The world was so dull, now, without electromagnetic waves, gravity and coloured scents..
For the very first time in her life, she really felt human. Drugged with analgesics, numb, human. She felt the tears running down, but she could not give a name to her state of mind.
The man reached his smartwatch, and alerted whoever was his superior.
Special Agent Roman Harmon was talking with the physicians that treated "Hostile One", read the short blurb from his underling, and scheduled in his mind to commence the monster interrogation as soon as he knew enough of her medical conditions.
"She has just regained consciousness" - he reported to the chief physician, one Dr. Genevie Torrado, who looked surprised.
"She was supposed to sleep for another twenty-four hours, we fully sedated her as well as used some local anaesthesia in what we thought to be the worst damaged areas. Her metabolism seems to be much faster than what we expected." - She didn't say that they expected it to be superhuman to begin with, but Harmon knew it from the preliminary report.
"What kind of damages?"
"We could not use RMI or PET, as we were alerted that her body may contain unspecified augmentation implants. We limited ourself to external examinations and ultrasounds imaging... luckily, this last is almost on par with the other internal diagnostic techniques, nowadays.
We found traces of what we think were thirty-eight different implants, along with tiny cables, the width of hairs, that connected them all. Fascinating, absolutely fascinating."
Harmon knew that Torrado had worked at the Army failed super-soldier project, that was finally scrapped when it became apparent that no human, however augmented, could stand a chance against a battle 'bot with a hundred times his body mass. Was it professional envy, the undertone below Torrado's fascination?
Envy of someone who got the funds and freedom from any ethic restraint, to build what she was denied to create?
"Traces?"
"All but three of the implants have disappeared, leaving holes in the tissues and, in some places, internal bleeding..." - Torrado scrolled her head - "...the bleeding stopped much faster than I expected, too. She is even tougher than she looks."
Harmon cringed - dressed to hide her true shape, the black girl could pass for being simply a very tall woman. Asleep in a hospital gown that showed her arms, all lean, strong muscles and bulging veins, she was already impressive. Torrado had seen her naked, doing the echos, and was the one that wrote "muscular system excessively developed, yet still elegant" in a margin of the report.
If the woman was even harder than what she seemed to the physician, she was indeed a monster, and he was the one supposed to crack her open and pry informations out of her head.
"The three implants that have remained, where and what are they?"
"One is at the base of her brain. I believe that it is an implant, because the bones of the skull are modified around it in a way a little too geometrical I hope for her that it is, because the alternative is that it is a cancerous mass. If it is, I would quantify her life expectancy in six months or so."
Harmon considered it for some seconds - people with little time to live have little to lose, too.
If it was cancer, it was an information better not shared with their prisoner, as he was probably going to need the perspective of a lengthy stay in prison as a pressure tool, some moment down the road.
"The other two?"
"One is inside the thoracic cavity, just below the heart, a solid mass of the size of an egg. We think that it is something electronic, because it produced interferences in our cardiac monitor unit."
Harmon considered the bit of information, but it shed no lights. They simply didn't know enough, of the technology used in "Hostile One", to make any valuable inference from it.
"Some technicians from DARPA placed a multi-frequency scanner in her bed, so they are registering all the signals from her body and they should soon be able to make some informed guesses about what it is and it does.The last implant is inside the abdomen, and is the size of a human heart. It seems to be another solid block. No idea about its functions or purpose",
"In substance, there were thirty black boxes inside her body, most have vanished - we have no idea how - but three are still intact. We have no idea of what they are and do, apart maybe the one in her head. "
"You know what that is?" - Torrado was surprised.
"Something she told the President, before passing out - a remote control."
Harmon reflected that if he was building supermen, remote controls inside their head would be about the first thing that he would do. The second...
"One of the other two is probably a self-destruction system - maybe an anti-matter container bomb."
Torrado face went blank - "It's that the reason we cannot simply open her up?"
Harmon could not answer for sure, but scuttlebutt was that, when his colleagues had found the body of the Utica kid and tried to look inside it, something had gone off with the power of a couple of fifty kilograms of high explosive. It seemed much, but it was no more than some milligrams of anti-matter.
During the war the bots had fired coil gun rounds, with such a payload.
This woman probably had, inside, the same kind of self-destruct tricks.
Not for the first time, Harmon wondered if he should not have gone into civilian industry, like his predecessor. His pay-check would have been ten times his current one, an¡d he would have had no human bombs to debrief.
When "Hostile One" was fully back to lucidity, replaced his man in the room, and started interrogating the "alien enemy", with Torrado at his side as medical advisor. It was one hell of a frustrating experience, for both.
"Your name is?"
"Keisha Lawson"
"You were born?"
"May 5, 2066" - She was 21 years old? Harmon thought that she was in her early 30s,
"Where were you born? - here it was when they started having problems.
"I do not know."
"Who are your parents?" - Harmon had entered the name, Keisha Lawson, into the system... and the system answer did not make much sense. There was an afro American Keisha Lawson, dead at 35 out of complications of a spinal chord unrecoverable injury. The dead was 5'5", though - a whole foot shorter than this one.
"My mother was Devicia Lawson. I do not know who my father was".
Devicia Lawson was listed as the mother of the deceased Keisha.
"Are you a clone of Keisha Lawson, born in Fort Lauderdale?"
"I th...." - the voice of the cute montser tapered off mid sentence, while she apparently continued to speak.
Then, she stopped, looking a bit confused. She started again, "I th...." and couldn't continue the phrase.
Harmon could almost fill the rest for her "I think that I am" - or would it be "I thought that I was?"
"You are associated with a terrorist group called 'The Hand Of It"? " - the name was invented...
"I am not associated with any terrorist. I was tied to a terrifying ass-hole, that's true."
"You were? You are not tied to it, now?"
"I h...." - again, she looked confused and frustrated and tried to complete her phrase - "I h... ".
She hoped that she was not, not any more. But the leash was as firm, around her neck, as it ever was before.
"What are the purposes of your organization?"
"I have no organization."
"What are the purposes of 'It'."
She opened her moth but, this time, no sound came from her vocal cords. harmon could read lips, but even those became aphasic.
They continued so for eight hours, then Harmon had his vice, Special Agent Katherine Douherty, continue the interrogatory.
Fourteen days after, they were still at the same point, when Harmon and his squad were summoned by their boss, [] Homeland Security Special Hazards Director Robert Dyson.
" I read your report, Roman. She won't tell us anything, in the end?"
"It is not that she don't want, director. She can't - whatever it is that thing in her skull, every time that she tries to tell us something significant it activates and scrambles her brain. Personally, she seems to have no loyalty whatsoever toward this 'It', but the only way she has let out tiny bits of information is by mistake, lapsus, off-hand remarks. All things that can be blurted out without thinking. The moment she focuses on something, it's over."
"However, you have spent two weeks interrogating her 24 hours a day. You have got some information."
"Yes, and what we obtained is quite grim, director." - Katherine looked every bit as tired as her boss - "I do not think that we could prosecute her, logically,"
"She is a terrorist!"
"She has been born and bred in a state of, dare I say, wholesome slavery. Collaborating with us -as far as we can tell, this is the first fully autonomous decision that she has taken in her whole life."
"I see... not exactly what I expected."
"She has already come to regret it... she fully understand, now, that we have not enough expertise on systems like hers, to get her rid of her last implants. She tried to help us, hoping we could really free her - we can't, she knows it for sure, now."
"What more?"
"She doesn't need to sleep. She does not get bored. She does not get annoyed. Her brain is as inhumanly-wired as possible, while still acting mostly human. I would not care to have interrogate another one like her that was, actually, hostile."
"So, what do we do with her?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing?"
"We keep her at hand, under a discreet surveillance, so that we can tap her lapsus-linguae the next time that we cross her boss."
"The Witness Protection Program?"
"She is a witness, of a kind. I think that it is useless try to hide her - we do not know what kind of signals those black boxes inside her body may send, but I myself would add a transponder to any piece of hardware, valuable like her, that I decided to decommission."
"She is not human. Why not simply dismantle her and see how she is built?"
"I think that anyone who tried would be dust, by the time his scalpel opened her body, Even if we could, our scientists are very sceptical about our ability to reverse-engineering the tech. And, anyway, it is what "it" is counting on."
"Explain."
"She was decommissioned while she was talking with the President, so that she was in perfect conditions to be taken in by us. I gathered that she didn't expect it, that she didn't think that it was a dumb clock, to handle the 'decommissioning', whatever it really is. I think that she expected to die. I think that she is right, on all account. She is a probe."
"A probe... to see how we handle her?"
"Yes. If we treat her as a the U.S. citizen that she believes to be, as an hostile foreigner or as some machine. I have no doubts that, in one way or the other, whatever we do with her will reach her 'sisters'."
"So, if we treat her just like the killing machine that she is..."
"We could expect no more defections - because, in her mind, she has defected - from any of her sisters. "
"You said that the Witness Protection Program is unnecessary, but we cannot let her go back to her old life, can we?"
"We will have to enrol her into it anyway, even if the secrecy needs would be less stringent than usual. We will have to build her a normal life anyway."
"And see how can she stick to it - as Dr. Torrado says, she is fascinatingly inhuman. How much can she function, constrained in a n everyday life?"
"We'll see".
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."
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.
Wednesday, 2 March 2016
The life and times of Thomas Althusser
 |
| Thomas Althusser, 2130 - Daguerreotype by Crystopher Marx |
Nowadays, his name is Almost synonymous with "traitor", outside his native country of Switzerland.
But Thomas started his life not as an eponymous villain.
He was out of a family with a long tradition of civil servants from Switzerland, and pretty much an average member of it - for most of his life, a man who prided himself of working eight hours a day to keep the machine of the Swiss state running.
But, as many born in the late '50s of the last century, he was also very worried by the issue of climate change and, throughout his career in the Berne's health department, he became more and more a critic of the established wisdom on a gradual planetary warming up.
The possibilities of some catastrophic "inversion point", hidden in the still unresolved areas of most climatic simulation models, became almost an obsession for him.
Though he arguably had no way to change the state of affairs, or the world's economic policies and their nefarious effects, he spent many hours despairing over how to save Earth's from many possible catastrophic outcomes.
The possibility that the climate warming was indeed a by-product of a concatenation of human and natural causes, the latter absolutely beyond human control, left him often in a state of frantic panic, though he managed it and worked his way up the food ladder in the Swiss administration (where being ecologically minded wasn't as much of a suicide as, say, in the then-contemporary USA Federal Administration).
Toward the end of the '20s, Thomas was nearing the mandated end of his career in the Swiss Administration, but thought that he was still fairly young. In a moment of something that can only be described as dark brilliance, he decided to leave his post as chief of the statistic office for the Swiss health department and join the U.N. fact-finding commission on Extraterrestrial Cultures, where he spent the successive 15 years, ruthlessly building up the small base of power that he thought he woyld have needed.
In this position, Thomas had access to first-hand information on the Alien cultures surrounding Earth, information that had been placed under "classification" when the initial news on the existence of aliens had stirred worldwide unrest, mostly in theocracies like North Korea.
In his role as "chief debunker of the alien propaganda", Thomas was all too aware of the truth behind the actual counter-propaganda that his own office was helping to spread.
Among the many "Earths" surrounding our solar system, our was maybe the less technologically advanced - a fact that most Earth's authorities were very decided to hide, along with many other sociological details that didn't fit each authority's own political agendas.
In his role as "selector" of which informations were to be diffused by the official news media, and even before this of which information to present to the U.N. and the various sates' policy makers, Thomas was in an ideal role to push his own, now infamous, agenda.
By subtle manipulations, mostly by overplaying some aspects of one culture, downplaying others, attribute as generals what were really idiosyncrasies of single subcultures and vice-versa restricting to subgroups what were almost universal traits, he managed to reinforce the personal beliefs of many of the most restive governments on Earth about the "Alien Scums".
As a result, pressure groups developed in various countries and the media became transmitting a host of xenophobic messages, aimed against the invisible "monsters in outer space".
Althusser knew all too well that at least one Alien culture had placed unmanned reconnaissance drones in Earth's local system - in fact, declassified material proves that his underlings, mainly Inara O'Shaughnessy, had deduced at least the presence of Anipos' Dark Side of The Moon base station, if not of the Transsian 1 full spectrum listening satellites, that by the late '90s monitored every data broadcasting from Earth and relayed it on FTL channels to the homeworlds.
So, when his game induced the aforementioned Anipos to except on their own rules, and send a manned diplomatic mission to Earth, in 2123, Althusser was among the very few that had been expecting this development.
It is fit that his co-conspirator O'Shaughnessy, who became his successor as the chief of the "fact finders", managed to get Thomas on-board as a consultant, when she was tasked to assemble the team of experts in alien cultures that was supposed to handle the "dangerous" alien diplomats.
The wrinkled, amicable face of Althusser became a fixture of the first Earth-Anipos dialogues, where he continued his manipulations with the help of many of the other members of the "Alien cultures experts" group - almost all of which were former graduates of his commission, and shared his overall goal of saving Earth's biosphere from the idiocy of its inhabitants.
Thomas and his fellows soon identified the most intellectually flexible member of the Anipos' mission in Gargan Golefacehuggers, and managed to convince him to join forces with his group of co-conspirators.
With the help of Galgan, they cooked-up the "Blitzstein" scam that helped set in motion the first inter-stellar war of the last 2 millennia, whose opnening salvo was the bombing of the Anipos Automatic observation post on the Moon (the exact location of which had been revealed by Golefacehuggers) on 1st September 2124.
By that time, Thomas Althusser had returned to his native Switzerland, to spend his last days , where he he became one of the most local voices pushing for the small country to leave the U.N. - once again, something that he managed to obtain with a popular vote of June 2124.
The war itself didn't, unfortunately, follow exactly the script devised by Thomas, mostly because the U.N. military refused to play any dirty trick up to the end, to which the Anipos Robotic Army responded by as much as chivalrously inflicting horrendous deaths to the U.N. Armies throughout the whole war's six months.
Of course, as in any real world conspiration, soon after the end of the war, Thomas's accomplices started writing books, mostly presenting their reasons for participating in the Shenanigan.
When oceans indeed started releasing methane into the atmosphere, and the Anipos robotic servants reacted placing the first section of Earth's orbital sunscreen, Thomas ideas were vindicated.
Without the screen, the Earth would be boiling, now.
Thomas died the 4th of May, 2132, while the Swiss government was discussing - some say, cleverly delaying - a request of extradition for crimes against Humanity from the International Tribunal of The Hague.
He was survived by his two wives, 7 sons and daughters, 22 grandchildren.
Note: nobody with last name Althussen lives in Switzerland as of today.
Saturday, 2 January 2016
Jus Primae Noctis
This is a short tale on the "jus primae noctis", the (complrtely fictional) right of nobles to have the "first night" of a new bride, before the groom.
As you will see, there is more than one way to exercise a right... and, whose right is that?
I always thought that it was barbaric... our duke is the only noble, in a hundred miles, that still requires newly wed women to spend their first night of marriage with him.
I used to despise the idea, I really did.
Then, my fiancé died in a stupid work accident, and the man that I had to fall back on... has a very traditional family, that values the damn virginity thing.
I am, of course, no virgin at all... my position in their pecking order is bound to be very low.
But what can I do? I cam't get my hymen to grow back, now, can I?
I was surprised, when our lord communicated us that he expected to have my company for my first night of marriage. If I knew it I'd have gone in a convent, the hell with men and their idiotic ideas.
The evening of my narriage day, I was led to the lord's house, and so here I am.
Dining with our Duke, and the Duchess.
-"Come on, dear, this lamb is delicious" - says the duchess.
Her presence disconcerts me... she must know why I am here.
_"I think that she didn't expect to see you, my dear. You know, Jus Primae Noctis, the feudal lord takes what he wants from the poor peasant girl. She thought she was going to be prsented to me naked, bound and with an apple stuffed in her mouth, for my ducal spike to skewer her."
-"In a way, my lord, indeed I was."
-"Oh, dear girl, you got it so wrong" - the voice of tyhe duchess is mellifluous, slightly amused.
-"Am I wrong, my Lady?"
-"My husband is not going to force himself upon you, dear. I can promise you that much."
-"That is... why not?"
-"Because I am not a damn bastard!"
The voice of the Duke booms, irritated.
-"So, if I want, I can go home, right now?"
-"Oh, no, my dear, that can't do. You are here to spend the night" - her Ladyship voice is velvetry, but a hint of steel gleams below it -"would you mind, looking in the tray at your right?"
I expected food, instead, lifting the tray's cover, I find a glass thing shaped like a big man's cock.
-"You may decide not to have intercourse, but I cannot allow you to exit this house, tomorrow, with your virginity intact".
-"I beg your pardon, my Lady?"
-"You can have sex with the two of us" - the Duchess hand reaches that of the Duke and holds it for a second, reassuring - "and I can guarantee you that it will be an experience to remember" - the duke almost growls, at the idea. He really don't care for this?
-"Or you can use that to take away your virginity, while I witness it; It's your choice".
My confusion is complete, now. What the hell is this about?
The Duke raises an eyebrow, his irritation subsided, his voice that of an old teacher, when he speaks again '"Do you know why are you here, child?" - Of course I don't, if it is not just for his lust - "there are two ways we chose to ask a new bride to give us her first marriage night, when the marriage is announced to us" - he pauses to sip a bit of wine - "one, we both toss a coin, me and my lady, and if both are heads, she is invited to join us for a night".
-"You toss coins, sir?"
-"I am not my father, child... I don't have the guts to shag every ugly daughter of every unwashed tosser in my lands, just for the sake of having a go with the few beautiful ones, and singling out the nice ones would be an injustice..." - another pause -"... and an incentive for them to disregard personal hygiene, in the days leading up to the marriage..." - a small laugh from the Duchess interrupts him with a smile -"... so, yes, two coins, one possibility in four. I wouldn't care to stress my poor loins more than that."
-"So, I was just - lucky?"
-"Two ways, lass. The other, is the woman asks it to us" - why the tone of the Duke hints so much that this is my case? I didn't ask anything.
- "The woman, or a member of her family that doesn't believe in her ability to fake convincingly to have a virginity that she has already lost" - the voice of the Duchess is soothing, I feel I am not the first recipient of this discourse.
-"What?"
-"Your mother is a very practical woman, my dear. And, it worked for her, after all, before you were born"
I am astounded, I didn't suspect any of this. Any.
-"Which is a very good reason why you should pick the glass thing, lass" - he eats some more lamb, leaving me the time to reflect on it, than he realizes that my mind is in a blank
-"I would rather avoid you giving birth to your half-sister" - he says, finally.
-"She has a right to know actual lovemaking, if she so chose, before being chained to a pork farmer for the rest of her life!" - comments drily the Duchess.
-"She could be my daughter!"
-"She has a right, my dear. Noblesse do Oblige - and I could be your sister... it didn't stop you"
-"Don't remind me that. Thank God, times are changing. Our son will not have to put up with this, this... shit!"
The Duchess come over to me, smiling in a wilynway -"So, wat do you chose? A piece of glass, or me?"
Behind her, I see the Duke raise his eyes to the sky and sigh.
I didn't expect this to play out this way... then, her ladyship leans down and kisses me on my mouth.
I am surprised, I don't put up any resistance - it is one hell of a kiss.
At the other end of the table, the Duke growls again.
To hell with glass.
As you will see, there is more than one way to exercise a right... and, whose right is that?
I always thought that it was barbaric... our duke is the only noble, in a hundred miles, that still requires newly wed women to spend their first night of marriage with him.
I used to despise the idea, I really did.
Then, my fiancé died in a stupid work accident, and the man that I had to fall back on... has a very traditional family, that values the damn virginity thing.
I am, of course, no virgin at all... my position in their pecking order is bound to be very low.
But what can I do? I cam't get my hymen to grow back, now, can I?
I was surprised, when our lord communicated us that he expected to have my company for my first night of marriage. If I knew it I'd have gone in a convent, the hell with men and their idiotic ideas.
The evening of my narriage day, I was led to the lord's house, and so here I am.
Dining with our Duke, and the Duchess.
-"Come on, dear, this lamb is delicious" - says the duchess.
Her presence disconcerts me... she must know why I am here.
_"I think that she didn't expect to see you, my dear. You know, Jus Primae Noctis, the feudal lord takes what he wants from the poor peasant girl. She thought she was going to be prsented to me naked, bound and with an apple stuffed in her mouth, for my ducal spike to skewer her."
-"In a way, my lord, indeed I was."
-"Oh, dear girl, you got it so wrong" - the voice of tyhe duchess is mellifluous, slightly amused.
-"Am I wrong, my Lady?"
-"My husband is not going to force himself upon you, dear. I can promise you that much."
-"That is... why not?"
-"Because I am not a damn bastard!"
The voice of the Duke booms, irritated.
-"So, if I want, I can go home, right now?"
-"Oh, no, my dear, that can't do. You are here to spend the night" - her Ladyship voice is velvetry, but a hint of steel gleams below it -"would you mind, looking in the tray at your right?"
I expected food, instead, lifting the tray's cover, I find a glass thing shaped like a big man's cock.
-"You may decide not to have intercourse, but I cannot allow you to exit this house, tomorrow, with your virginity intact".
-"I beg your pardon, my Lady?"
-"You can have sex with the two of us" - the Duchess hand reaches that of the Duke and holds it for a second, reassuring - "and I can guarantee you that it will be an experience to remember" - the duke almost growls, at the idea. He really don't care for this?
-"Or you can use that to take away your virginity, while I witness it; It's your choice".
My confusion is complete, now. What the hell is this about?
The Duke raises an eyebrow, his irritation subsided, his voice that of an old teacher, when he speaks again '"Do you know why are you here, child?" - Of course I don't, if it is not just for his lust - "there are two ways we chose to ask a new bride to give us her first marriage night, when the marriage is announced to us" - he pauses to sip a bit of wine - "one, we both toss a coin, me and my lady, and if both are heads, she is invited to join us for a night".
-"You toss coins, sir?"
-"I am not my father, child... I don't have the guts to shag every ugly daughter of every unwashed tosser in my lands, just for the sake of having a go with the few beautiful ones, and singling out the nice ones would be an injustice..." - another pause -"... and an incentive for them to disregard personal hygiene, in the days leading up to the marriage..." - a small laugh from the Duchess interrupts him with a smile -"... so, yes, two coins, one possibility in four. I wouldn't care to stress my poor loins more than that."
-"So, I was just - lucky?"
-"Two ways, lass. The other, is the woman asks it to us" - why the tone of the Duke hints so much that this is my case? I didn't ask anything.
- "The woman, or a member of her family that doesn't believe in her ability to fake convincingly to have a virginity that she has already lost" - the voice of the Duchess is soothing, I feel I am not the first recipient of this discourse.
-"What?"
-"Your mother is a very practical woman, my dear. And, it worked for her, after all, before you were born"
I am astounded, I didn't suspect any of this. Any.
-"Which is a very good reason why you should pick the glass thing, lass" - he eats some more lamb, leaving me the time to reflect on it, than he realizes that my mind is in a blank
-"I would rather avoid you giving birth to your half-sister" - he says, finally.
-"She has a right to know actual lovemaking, if she so chose, before being chained to a pork farmer for the rest of her life!" - comments drily the Duchess.
-"She could be my daughter!"
-"She has a right, my dear. Noblesse do Oblige - and I could be your sister... it didn't stop you"
-"Don't remind me that. Thank God, times are changing. Our son will not have to put up with this, this... shit!"
The Duchess come over to me, smiling in a wilynway -"So, wat do you chose? A piece of glass, or me?"
Behind her, I see the Duke raise his eyes to the sky and sigh.
I didn't expect this to play out this way... then, her ladyship leans down and kisses me on my mouth.
I am surprised, I don't put up any resistance - it is one hell of a kiss.
At the other end of the table, the Duke growls again.
To hell with glass.
Monday, 23 November 2015
Time travel snavel
Time travel stories are funny.
The base of a time travel or of a time-cape story is , almost always, that time travel allow to change the past.
I have yet to see a time travel history where the protagonist is an historian looking for info about an obscure period, and some form of "change the things" does never come up (0).
But it is not actually possible - and that, even if time travel itself was at all possible.
If the universe has only one temporal line, it is valid the Novikov principle.
The only time travels possible are the ones that re-enforce the stability of the time-line, as forking is not possible (it would require another time dimension that, simply, is not there).
As an IT guy, I tend to see as an issue of macroscopic quantum mechanics and information...
Trying to change the past makes it, really, a quantum superposition of the original time-line and the new one, the contribution of each one determined by the probability of the action to succeed.
As a result, when the action goes near 50% of success probability... the information upon which the action has been originally planned had a reliability of 50%.
In other words, the more you try to change the past, the less you know what it was to be changed or why.
Nowm one thing must be clear... which usually is not clear at all.
When tackling time travels, one should remember that he is really using a meta-time to narrate its effects, i.e. a fifth (6th, 7th, 8th etc..) dimension, temporally orthogonal to the space and time dimension(s) of the universe he describes.
The universe should be seen, then, as a film reel or - even better - a painting - something static, with no dynamic of its own.
The painting is a better metaphor, because its internal dynamic is actually al a product of its observer, which is situated outside of it.
In a single timeline universe, the action of a time traveller produce very much the effect of an author "pentimento" (1) in a painting... two versions of the painting, usually in a limited area, superposed.
If the transparency of the pentimento (:= probability of success of the time traveller's action) is 50%, it is impossible to tell which was which.
Which was the action of the traveller, and which the past he wanted to change.
If the universe allows for multiple time-lines, vice-versa, it just means that what we call time is only one of a set of non-spatial dimensions, that there is at least a time dimension orthogonal to the one we are used to perceive.
The universe is akin then not a classic painting... it is a stack of paintings, each one slightly different from the one up and below it.
Or, to be a bit more subtle and precise, it is a painting done with the veiling technique. Applied over and over again, each possible variation laid on top of the other with a infinitely shallow layer of paint, till the resulting painting becomes as thick as it is wide and tall (2).
Every possible outcome of any non mechanically determined action - be it from a time traveller, a man deciding which side to enter his bed, an ant taking a route with a leave, an electron traversing a diffraction grid or a radioactive atom decaying - is a different 4D universe(3).
Is, not becomes nor create. Is.
A time traveller may go back in time and "change" something, then stay in the time-line and see the product of his actions and have the illusion that he changed history but, as I said, it is an illusion.
What changed, the very moment he moved from his position in the time flow, was the universe in which he resided.
In his original universe, nothing changed at all - the companions of the time traveller, that are waiting to see their universe change around them, or some other SF idiocy, are going to die of old age damning the traveller's name, while nothing happens.
Travel to the past may not be impossible, but trying to change it surely is.
On the other hand, it is maybe possible to go there and have it to follow the story as it is known - the bootstrap paradox. If, and only if, the universe is a mono-time-line one.
But that is another story...
(0) To be honest, I read a very good story based on time travel, once, "Universal War One" by Denis Bajram - if I had to re-read only a comic, this year, I'd say that is the one. You'd probably will have guessed: it uses a bootstrap paradox, and has a character concluding "Time is stronger than what you think. It already is the by-product of all the time travels happened in it. Time cannot be changed by anybody."
(1)Pentimento: in oil painting, it happens relatively often that the artist changes some feature, and paints over it. However, oil colours can be partially transparent, and it is relatively simple, in many cases, to guess at the shape of what was changed, from the "shadows" appearing below the final pictorial surface.
(0) To be honest, I read a very good story based on time travel, once, "Universal War One" by Denis Bajram - if I had to re-read only a comic, this year, I'd say that is the one. You'd probably will have guessed: it uses a bootstrap paradox, and has a character concluding "Time is stronger than what you think. It already is the by-product of all the time travels happened in it. Time cannot be changed by anybody."
(1)Pentimento: in oil painting, it happens relatively often that the artist changes some feature, and paints over it. However, oil colours can be partially transparent, and it is relatively simple, in many cases, to guess at the shape of what was changed, from the "shadows" appearing below the final pictorial surface.
(2) Omitting the -light prefix from light year, which in a way doesn't matter, it can be said that the visible universe is 4 dimensional cube with a spatial [3D] area that has a side of some 90 billion years and a temporal thickness of just 13.9 billions years. It appears the painter hasn't ended yet...
As for the thickness of each veiling, IF space is indeed quantized over the length/time of Planck, that should apply also to the extra, otherwise not-perceptible time dimension where the parallel universes are laid. A time of Planck is something x 10^-44 , no the number of strata in the painting would be something x 10^62, a number followed by 62 zeros.
(3) Separated parallel universes are, again, probably a simplification - it implies a perceptible discontinuity between one and another. Most probably, a meta-universe would be some kind of continuous mesh, with no hard boundaries between a parallel and the other, the difficulty in going from one to another probably connected to the entropy - information content - differences between the considered 4d space. 4D spaces whose information content grew equivalent, could as well merge back... and fork again.OK, now my head officially hurts...
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