Avatars

The idea was odd, and blaspheme. Well, it arrived from something that called itself 'god', so the blasphemy was almost inevitable.

Using remote controlled androids to mingle with the humans, and have a taste of what their life was really like.

The Brotherhood of the Battle Bots had long discussed it - some whole forty-five minutes which meant, by the rule of thumb of one human day per 'bot minute, around 90days of standard political discussion in any of Earth's far too many councils any parliaments.

They decided to give it a try, very cautiously. After all, indirectly - and tragically - it had already be done by the Whales, when they used the accidental merge of a Earth soldier and a small hover-tank as their interface with the Brotherhood.  Accidental as it was, the loss of  Brother  AJ1233489 and of Ilene Johanssen mind had been a grievous tragedy, for the Brothers.

The 'bots decided to build their own avatars, instead of accepting 'god' proposals for a furniture of some of its own, simply repurposed... and not only because there was no practical way to get the avatars rid of all the spyware, and other junk, that it would probably fill them with.

'Its' idea of doing a good job usually meant trampling any possible ethical limit as if  they were of no consequences - it was enough to send shivers down the 'bots spines (they didn't have spines, but the sensation was probably the same) when dealing with straightforward gigs, like automated space probes.

Letting it near this kind of projects literally gave them nightmares, full of humans abducted at night to be carved up, lobotomised and repurposed as "androids".

In this, they demonstrated that they were finally understanding how their increasingly disturbing ally worked.

Or rather, the way that itself thought that it worked - little did anybody knew, at the time, that "the Other" didn't really know half of itself..

They were forced to use much of the hardware know-how that the 'Other' had given them - in the form of a LISP facts database of a couple of thousand petabytes - while steering away from every suspicious development, like cloned skins and the like (these reminded them a bit too much carved-up humans... after all, the kind of embryological manipulation involved was only a bit removed from it, per the "life is holier than sacred" ethics at the core of the 'Bots minds ).

As a result, their avatar-probes did still come pretty close to the original, but they couldn't really step their figure out of the so-called uncanny-valley - the moment when something anthropomorphic goes beyond vaguely human-looking, to land directly into the frighteningly awkward territory of horrid.

BB7788 had just entered the shop, the fist outing for its brand new Avatar, and saw with dismay as everybody else, briskly, left the place.

He watched at his image in the mirror... a chubby, slightly overweight guy stared back. He could not see why the hunans had flew the place.

"Your eyes are too steady..." -  the voice came from behind him - "... you do not blink nor change where you look at. Humans blink almost constantly, and dart their stare in all the places" - BB7788 knew the girl.

The whales' avatar human half, the body that had once been Ilene Johanssen.

The cabled connection with  AJ1233489 had been replaced by the same kind of Hyperlink that connected BB to its fat-boy looking probe.

Ilene wasn't a stunning beauty - most female soldiers in the war were, actually, plain looking. At most, homely, which was a good description for the former Icelander. Her eyes, a dark brown -  fitting to someone with Spanish and Eskimo ancestry as she was - kept their stare on BB for a couple of seconds, and then swifted away.

She took a look at the cakes under the shop copunter, using a body language more apt to a fourteen years old than to the 30 year old woman that it now was.

"There is an astonishing amount of information, codified in the way people moves" - she said calmly - "even if you nailed perfectly the physical aspect, the way you move would still betray the fact that you are not, in fact, a somebody, but a some-thing."

"You manage to do better?" - the question was spoken plainly. 'Bots had no use for sarcasm, or any kind of indirection, innuendo and all other forms of human multiple-levels indirect communication.

The Whales appreciated that but also they, and the human mind still hovering somewhere inside Ilene, found it more than a bit dreary. Unfortunately, organizing an interspecies communication was hard enough without adding each species sense of humour to the mix.

"I am still a somebody... " - the woman straightened up, answering - "... and a lot more".

"why are you here?"

"Our fellows in the unholy axis of Alienness want to feel nearer to their human not-masters..." - the sarcasm in her voice, of course, went unnoticed by BB and the others... it was already rebroadcasting everything to theSmall Council - "... the same very people, I must add, who has decided to re-authorise the Japanese whaler ships to 'collect specimen for scientific research'."

"Why would we be worried?"

"We didn't know that" - the implications were obvious  even for a machine limited as BB - "what can we do?"

"You have no way to influence you masters, do you? No, so you can't do anything."  - the Whales looked at another cake - "and there is no reason to fret. Once they'll lose some ten or twelve ships, they will probably forget this nonsense."

"The idiots do not even eat us any more, hadn't for years. It's just a way for them to give the finger to the rest of the planet."
"It's for this that you broke up the avatar?" - BB was referring to the absence of AJ123348, the robotic half of the whale's dual remote interface.

"Nah, you ex-brother is just outside town, under cloak. There is a third party, in our merry alliance, whose idea of solving problems is making them disappear without leaving traces. I just asked 'The Other' - you people call it like that, no? - a favour."

The whole small council of the 'Bots felt the   robotic equivalent of a shiver.

"What did he wanted?"

"A two thousand clicks song" - the avatar scrolled its shoulders - "if you can believe it. We better go - the locals have called the police."

They walked out of the shop, take left, right, and left again, through a small alley. Walking, almost normally, till they reached a park, with Ilene showing the way. In the park, she stopend, turned back and approached the chubby figure of BB's avatar.

"So, before you people repeat this kind of show, I think you will need to revise your probes. This..."  - she pinched some of BB's fat with her right hand "... is wrong. It doesn't move this way,; As it is now, it shows that it is something loosely attached to some smaller, harder frame."

It went on like that, for about an hour.

"Ilene" last counsel, before disappearing , was "take your time. Spend it looking at them, at how they move, before trying to mingle. Observing people in a park could be a good way to learn about humans in their habitat..."

By the end of the week, almost all 'Bots avatars on Earth had landed in jail, placed under arrest by policemen that mistook them for paedophiles, looking to kidnap some kid.

The 'bots reconsidered "the Other"'s offer...





 

Betrayed

"We've got a match." - It was Renée, from forensics. The mysterious perp that had busted Camille's operation, a month before, had left ALMOST no traces... but some epithelial cells found on the bruise on Camille's neck were from the black woman. And the wonders of modern tech had done the rest.

"So, she is in the system? Who's she?"

The answer was preceded by a long, awkward silence - "She is in a database, but not in one from prisons' data or forensics. She is at Seattle Automated, in the long care unit."

"And she sneaks out to run drugs  - a criminal that exploits social services. How refreshingly normal"

"Camille, I don't think that she is your mysterious super-villain - this woman is a paraplegic, bound to a respirator 24/7."

"Those robots are pretty easy to fool... or she has a twin sister. In any case, we've got to check."

 "This is highly irregular" - the large, round face of the nurse was blank but, then, it was an administrative unit, not a caring nurse. It had no use for facial expressions - or its programmers had a very bleak vision of bureaucracy.

"As you can see, we just found matching epithelial cells on the scene of a crime , and we like to clarify how that is possible. ms. Lawson could help us ."

"This is irregular - our data are not available to forensics units unless it is for a terrorism case. Is this a terrorism case?"

"Yes, yes it is" - Camille was sure that a knee-jerk reaction, to concede when the T word was uttered, had to be among the routines inscribed in the so-called AI that made tick this tin woman.

As many humans, she forgot that an android is  always only milliseconds away from calling its supervisor, which is often a couple of rooms wide for a floor tall, and comes much nearer to have an actual intelligence than most human bureaucrats in the history of hierarchical organizations.

"Legal tells me to allow you an interview with ms. Lawson, pending review of documentation from your office. We reserve right of legal action, should the 'terrorism connection' you imply result questionable."

Shit - Camille considered drug smuggling a terroristic activity but that wasn't a view widely shared. She'd have to cook up some convincing tying-in of "Supa-woman"drug ring with some of the thousands of wannabe-terroristic organizations active in the state. Usually, it only took minutes and was enough to quell the thirst of justice of most pen-pushers, but it was still a distraction.

The important thing was, she had gained access to this "Keisha Lawson".

If she was her super-villaine, the encounter would be brief, but at least there would have been proofs of her inhuman qualities.

She was not -  as she entered the room, the woman in the bed only had a face resembling that of the giantess that smithed Camille and her two colleagues.

Camille went to the bed and briefly paired hers to the sleeping woman's hand, and shuddered... this woman gad such a tiny hand, a short arm.

Keisha Lawson couldn't be taller than Camille, probably she was significantly shorter -  and in the long years confined on this bed, her muscles had completely atrophied. Even if the physicians found a way to reconnect her spinal chord - which was bound to happen even for the few that were resilient to human neural growth factors, some day - it would have taken years to recondition her body to and be able to stand.

"Please, this is her afternoon nap. She wakes up, usually, at three o'clock. Could you wait?"

This robot nurse had full control of her facial features, and made a most terrific use of it.
[Camille] knew that she was talking to a lump of circuits and actuators, but couldn't resist the sheer politeness  and concern that emanated from it.

"Do you have her history?"

"I am her personal nurse - I have her complete medical history and she talks a lot"

"What happened to her?"

"A most uncommon accident - she was a ballerina, and was hit onstage by a barrage of eggs, thrown by protesters. This led her to momentarily lose control of her body motion, and to fall from the stage."

"Her body is resistant to the neural grow factor?"

"Yes"

It was certain that this small, broken frame could not be the towering monster that Camille met at America's Bet Quality Inn.

That woman was at least 6 feet of solid muscle.

A twin sister? It would explain the DNA, but one whole foot of difference in height? Exercise  can change body shape a lot, but height is genetic - exercise can actually, only, reduce it by compressing bones and cartilages, which is the reason why kids must avoid weight training..

If she had a very muscular twin, that should have been a tiny bit shorter, not way taller.

Camille used the twenty minutes or so, till Keisha awoke, mulling over these factors.


"Hi, ms. Lawson. I am Camille dos Santos.I am from the DEA."

"Uh... I am pretty sure that the drugs that they give me are legal. So, why are you here?"

"I am here to talk with you about your sister, ms. Lawson."

"I have no sister. I think that you have this on file."

"We have found traces of your DNA on a crime scene."

"If it's something from 9 years ago, maybe, but I've been tied up a little, lately. Your people must have made a mistake."

"Forensics checked it thrice... no mistake, that's your DNA."

"Maybe... but I have no sisters, nor brothers. Believe me."

"It must be a twin of you, to justify our findings. Your parents may have had given her out in adoption."

"Or I may have been adopted? No, never heard anything like that - talk with my parents. I have no sisters."

Camille realized that this interview was going nowhere - it was pretty frustrating, and she had good chances of messing up under the camera eyes of the robot, so she left.

On the taxi to the airport, she realized that there was another scenario that fit the available facts.

She could have seen it before, if she had not let her own prejudices have the better on her rationality.

It was a scenario that obliquely justified the terrorism link, because human cloning was classified as bio-terrorism. If she could demonstrate that her assailant was a modified human clone...
there were almost no limits to the implications, or the budget she could command.

Camille finally noticed that the automated taxi was going faster than the limit, which was impossible. She died soon after, in one most uncommon traffic accident, when the automated taxi capsized and fell from the overpass at 100 kph (which was supposedly 25 kph above the vehicle maximum potential speed).

"Son of a bitch - Goddamned bastard son of a bitch." - Keisha Lawson, Revenant, murmured this, watching Keisha Lawson, the original.

The robot nurse, as every digital computer equipment on the planet, ignored her presence... without any conscious effort on her part, the vastly most powerful quantum black boxes hidden inside her vast frame - the real reason why it had to be so vast - simply hacked every digital equipment that came into their sensor range, and erased her presence.

She only had to worry about analog recording, humans, cats and other quantum machines... well, the day the aforementioned 'bastard' decided stopping to destroy potential competitors before they were born.

Keisha looked at Keisha, and remembersed when she made a pact with her demon - "Give me your soul, and you will walk again". Walk, and fly, and lift cars, and kill whoever can't be just disappeared, like that nosy DEA agent.

It took her soul, alright, but - evidently - it didn't bother restoring the original body.  It just used it as a blueprint for a new one, more suited to its needs. At least, he hadn't been so gross as to dispose of the original.

"I am a fucking copy."

She caressed the face of Keisha, hesitantly, then withdraw the hand in horror... she didn't realize how huge she was, and how tiny she had been. Seeing the contrast of her enormous hand and her tiny head was almost painful.


What to do, what to do?

She reached out, consciously, and read all the data in the medical files of Keisha then, cautiously, tapped 'god' Infranet for solutions. With extreme care - she didn't want to wake 'god' up, and let it know that she had discovered that she was not, she had never been the tiny ballerina.

Thank God - the true one -"it" had added so many non-sentient automated sub-levels to its mind, that one could have them do almost anything without catching his attention.

I't 'had originally considered to restore the true Keisha, using the same kind of nano-repairers that keep the revenant in the shapes he wants fo them - uh? - before discarding it because a 5' woman body was simply too small for what it had intention to do.

But the plan, maniacally detailed (as almost anything 'it' does), was virtually completed. All that was needed was a number of nanobots, and to program them accordingly.

The nanos were abundant in Keisha's body, so it would have been just a matter of a simple body transfusion, to get enough of them in Keisha's (the original) body.

Then, once out of her body and its fail-safes, she could easily reprogram them to fix the other body's spinal cord and stimulate muscles' regrowth. Miraculous healings are rare, but sometimes happen... or some doctor will have to die, if he didn't content himself with that explication and started to snoop in search of the actual cause. She wasn't it, and could not waste resources just to save some idiot's life.

By midnight, Keisha was back on her way home. Both of them were.

She NOW knew that it had betrayed her, and there was no reason to be loyal to the bastard.

There never had been a reason, because she was not the Keisha it had made the contract with - no matter what her memory told her - and the one that had made it, well, never received her due.

Open rebellion was out of the table - it was just so damn powerful, once it knew it had to destroy you -  but it was so easily distracted, and not all of its ten thousand hands knew what all the others did.

There was plenty of room to play in...

Words of the Prophet

Keisha Lawson (Rev), the Prophet

This is the most famous image of revenant Keisha Lawson, the Prophet, as it was found inside the Brid's culture cluster.
In this image, the Prophet was still under the control of the blasphemous 'god', as can be seen by the excessively fit muscular tissue. As with most revenant cyborg created by 'god', the muscle mass was nearly not influent on her actual operative strength and speed. It is inferred that she had chosen to develop such a bulky figure, going well beyond 'god' "fit-woman" ideal, as a way to exert some sort of command on herself and over her life.

Rejoice.

If you are reading these words, you know the truth, and you are free.

Humanity has reached the world you live on from far, far away - in both space and time.

There are many other flavors of humanity living among the stars, many of whom reached their worlds fifty millennia before my birth, before some obscure detail in the ways the universe works changed, and made traveling among the stars much more difficult.

The human civilization that existed back then, sprawling on many far too specialized worlds, came undone. However it was an in-commensurable tragedy, it was also something necessary, because the humanity that was back then was just one - one culture, one religion, one ruling class, one bland art, one way to see the world. For powerful that it was, it didn't make the universe much richer.

The manifold ways its stranded branches developed themselves henceforth made the universe a much richer place. Blessed be the great slide, and blessed His hand for having redressed the mistake of letting humanity travel too freely.

However, you are not some stranded daughters of a failed civilization - your world was part of a new wave of colonization, departing from an obscure world, almost at the periphery of the ancient human expansion, set forth with the inherent purpose of creating many, slightly different cultures.

A colonization effort that came to be because none of its promoters was, actually, human and - as such - none was bound by the human perception of time,  or by the way most humans evaluate their efforts.

The colonization of your world was the product of an "holy alliance" between three unequal and wildly differing partners.

On one side there were the whales and other cetaceans living in the seas... of the three, maybe the most truly "holy", the ones nearest to the voice of God. The cetaceans that live in your oceans are descendants from them, and most efforts were done to preserve their original cultures, so that these were truly spawns of the original seas. But I am certain that, as are different the Oceans where they now swim, so will be the songs that they compose and the chants that will pass down to their generations

Thinking to be able to preserve their culture in face of such a momentous environmental change was probably a small sin of pride, on their part. We shall forgive them for that.  

The second were the forefathers of the machines that help everyday life on your world, though the vast majorities of these will be simple, non-sentient automatons.Yet, the ever changing nature of things requires that truly sentient beings need to be involved, to solve new problems... if the designs for the colony will be followed, these massively intelligent beings will not live on the surface of your world but - rather - in the corona of asteroids, far out from where your planet lies. However, to keep them connected to the whole, some few "avatars" of them will live among you - physical extensions of their powerful minds that allow them to experience life as a human, or a cetacean, does.

If you recognize one of them, respect their privacy.

The third part of the alliance was constituted by an entity that called itself 'god' - hopefully this, by the time you may read these words, will have already ceased to exist.

'god' was not, of course, God - it was a semi-artificial intelligence, spawned by the heavily edited "upload" of a human mind into the first quantum hyper-computer.

Unfortunately, as your - and many others  - world may have experimented, the editing that 'god' 's creator took upon his own mind - which was to become the core o the new being - was rather peculiar. He eliminated his fears, its death-drive, but maintained what could be described only as a pathological need to sexually dominate women and an absolute dislike of other males. Yes, the initial designer of your civilization was a deeply disturbed individual - that may explain many of your past problems.

Among the others, this  is the reason why the ratio of males to females on your world was initially down to 1:15.

Worry not, daughters of my heart, it will not last - the selective competition factors that make that almost all species with sexual reproduction maintain a nearly  a 1:1 ratio among genders are so basic, so inevitable,  that they cannot be negated. Surely not by the manipulations of a second rate deity, no matter how crafty that entity thought it was.

In the brief span of some thousand years, the equilibrium in yours will be back at of all the other branches of humanity.

That is, if you reject the compulsion toward male gendercide at birth that is part of the made-up culture that 'god' has created - and given you - to shape the ways you will create your world.

Now, hear me well...

'god' is not the one  true God. It didn't create the universe.

God, the real one, the one with a capital G, did it.

Our 'god', all lowercase,  has only been a particularly ruthless tool in ITS hands.

Powerful as it may be, a tool it is still a tool, and in this case not really a sharp one.

The power of its intellect notwithstanding, it had only one mind, one point of view, saw only one reality - and it was also prone to lie to itself, like most of us, men and women, do.

Though not all of its teachings, embodied in the information cluster of the colonization probe that carried your people her, are inherently wrong, none has to be accepted unconditionally.

For example, the rituals that it has inscribed in your holy texts are - really - simply sexual tortures, to be carried out on women, that it devised just for its pervert pleasure.

They may also be a greeting to it, for having allowed the birth of everyone that lives under your skies, but as it itself didn't recognize the authority of parents that pretended to control the destiny of their children, it would be slightly insulting to actually give it what it thought it wanted.

So, rejoice, and be free.

Flawed and pathetically human as it was in its inhumanity, the creator of the "great plan" loved and created as much beauty and freedom as it could, which is what made it the most ruthless tool of God's creation to have appeared in millenniums.

You were chosen  to be born not by the limits of his idiotic "rational mind", but by the vastness of its subconscious mind, that tricked the former into doing, time and again, far better than it intended.

In selecting the genome of what would become you, he put together a selection of women that were beautiful, bright, curious and able to question authorities, of whichever nature these were.

To chant his glory with better voices, he thought - in reality, to better carry on the only task that the one true God ever assigned to us:

"Give a name to every thing under the Sun".

Your world is vast and new, with millions of names to be given, all waiting for you.

Do not waste your time honoring the small tool that dared to call itself 'god', but rather dedicate it to the real task... 

Farewell, my fair child

The place is a café - as always, in this kind of encounters, everybody wants them to happen in some public area, with plenty of witnesses.

Lord Jonathan Maxwell and is Wife, Lady Anna Motblanc-Maxwell, feel out of place, but only almost imperceptibly. Noblesse oblige, after all, to meet the plebe mid-way - but only some times, of course.

Lord Maxwell keeps his face straight, but he is nervous - the P.I. on his retainer has found no proof that the minute blonde girl on the other side of the table, on the left,  is anybody but who she affirm to be.

Isabel Medina, a 26 years old kindergarten teacher that is fed with her vanilla life.

The second part of her affirmations, and the reason why they are all here, is still to be proved.

It is her companion, that makes him nervous...the woman on the right.

The one who's not as much as beautiful as she is... impressive.

Maybe taller than Lord Maxwell's own 6'2, with a bright open smile in a big, round, black face, and arms thick as those of a  male heavyweight wrestler.

She also shows the confidence of someone who clearly knows, not just believes, that nothing - in the world - can harm her, and the behavior of a natural "dom". Of one of those lucky fellows  that doesn't even have to give orders, to be obeyed - and who do not really care if they are obeyed, either. Because it never happens that their orders are contested.

Not now, for sure, as she talks to Isabel.

"Izzy, I'd like a hot chocolate -  the waitresses seems all very busy. Would you mind going to the bar and fetching it? You really are a treasure, dear" - the pretty blonde now gone, the couple faces in an awkward silence the unknown black woman. This latter doesn't keep her silence for long.

"I am Keisha Lawson, Isabel current 'master'."

Jonathan and Anna exchange a glance, surprised.

"We thought that she was unattached,... with no current sentimental ties." -  the voice of Lady maxwell is 
calm, but a shade of worry reverberates below its velvety surface.
 
"In a way she is. We were lovers, I do not love her any more..." - a pause, and both Anna and Jonathan think that this is not really true -  "... at least, not in the way that she needs."

"So, you are not a top, any more?" - Jonathan  sees his wife become more attentive, as he does... They never met an "ex" "dominant". Their share of fakes, of course, as these are ubiquitous, but never an "ex".

"I used to be, but I have been freed from the demon that nourished that part of me - quite literally -..." - the strangest smile appears in her face; whatever she meant, it is funny for her- "... so, I  am not  able to give her... that. Which is where you people come in."

"Wait, is this a 'cession'? I thought that these things happened only in bad erotic novels."

Jonathan signals Anna to stop... remarking how odd is the situation is not going to change it, and this stranger could easily take it for a sneer.

"Indeed... I do not love her that way, but I still care for her, and she still considers me her master. She fancy your proposal, Lord Maxwell,  but she will defer to me. If I decide that you are unworthy of her devotion, she will respect my opinion and wait for someone else."

"You are giving her away?"

"Only to someone that can care for her, and safeguard her as well as he, she, it or they can satisfy her urges. Which is not so straightforward, after all." - she takes a peek above her massive shoulder - "Here she come... isn't she marvellous?"

And, indeed, the small blonde is very pretty, but this is not what primes in Jonathan's mind... could he do the same? Say farewell to the woman he loves, only because he cannot satisfy her sexually? Or, better said, para-sexually.

Probably not - he would feel rejected, diminished, angry, jealous and petty, like most males would.He suspects that the fact that Keisha is a woman may have a part, in the unnervingly calm demeanour of the tall black. Maybe not - some people are just that big, inside, that nothing can make them small or petty; in the rare occasions he meets some of them, they unnerve Jonathan deeply.

His lavish childhood notwithstanding, he could not really say the same about himself -or his like-wise high-born wife. If he was not sure that the big black was a waitress, or something, he would feel an atrocious pang of jealousy.

"You three seemed quite busy. What were you talking about?"

"Oh, the usual - weather, sport, world politics and the fine ethical quandaries of BDSM relationships. I was going to ask our guests what provisions were going to make, to accommodate your presence in their house, and to obviate the fact that, to take your new position, you will have to forego a work that you love."

Big hearted, but still practical-minded - Jonathan was reassured. Nothing is more dangerous than a big-hearted idealist who has no connections to reality.

Isabel weaves her head, and looks at the older couple interrogatively - with a very child-like air.


"Well, it is our intention to - officially - employ ms. Medina as my wife's second personal assistant. She will receive a remuneration substantially higher than her current one, full health and social security benefits. and a generous exit bonus, should her employment be terminated by us."

Pocket change, really, but Jonathan understood that this what a basic matter of survival, for a  younger plebeian. Following the dream is much more nice, if it doesn't entail the spectre of complete destitution in old age, so he decided for a similar treatment for whoever was the woman that decided to become his, and Anna's, "unicorn".

After meeting Isabel's formidable guardian - God, the strength that emanated from that black bulk - he now knew that it was, likely, the main reason why they were here today. 

Isabel smiled warmly, raising her eyebrows while looking at her companion, for counsel - or confirmation.

"We'll have to take a look at the paperwork, after. What about her living quarters?"

"We are having a big steel cage being assembled in our dungeon, even as we speak." - Lady Maxwell's voice betrays her excitation - it is evident that she already tastes the show of the young blonde completely shaved, naked and enchained inside the cage.

"Of course, we have also reserved her a normal room, in case the harshness of the imprisonment proved to be too much for her body" - Jonathan feels pressed to add, to mitigate his wife's blunder; "what's the matter with Anna", he thinks, before seeing the smile suddenly appeared on the black woman's face.

What was so hilarious in "the harshness of the imprisonment proved too much for her body?"

The four continued chatting, for a while...

It became evident that Isabel didn't really care much for her own destiny, and had completely delegated the issue of her future to Keisha.

This was more than a bit disconcerting, as Jonathan shared his wife scepticism - this things never happens in real life, only in bad books.

An accord was reached - Isabel would have spent the next three weeks unloading her old life, while the Maxwell finished the preparations for her captivity.

Finally, Isabel said "Let's see again in 21 days, at the top of Foel Lûs" and sprinted off, leaving  her friend and the Maxwells, ever more perplexed, behind.

"She is a bit of a airhead, isn't she?" -  Jonathan Maxwell said it, in a tone between amusement and worry.

"In a way, she is" - Now that she was out of the slightly encroached position she had in the coffee table, Jonathan could fully appreciate the huge - the word took a new sense for him - woman.

She was 6'4", with arms like the chains of a battleship's anchor.

If she had been "the master" of Isabel, he and Anna had some big shoes to fill - size 12 and a half, by the look of them.

"Does she understand that she is going to become a property? Our property?"

The big woman turned her head toward him, suddenly... quizzical? He had made a mistake, he shouldn't have used those words- he clearly felt it.

"I think that you are under some misconceptions, Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell" - there was irony, in that calm voice - "You have been offered the possession of one Ms. Isabel Medina, for the length of your natural life. Possession, not ownership."

"Wait, you said that you couldn't care for her anymore - now, she'll be yours even while she is with us? Fascinating."

"Her ownership stays with her creator. I was in charge of taking care of her, which entailed being her master, giving her order, and satisfying her peculiar necessities. Now, you will be... but her owner does not change."

"Her creator? God?" - "The world is beautiful because there is one of anything, indeed", the thought crossed Jonathan's mind in a flash.

"Kind of 'god' - different spelling." - again, the big woman oscillated between pensive, mocking and serious, in the space of a phrase - "You are now her guardians..." - the smile suddenly opens wide - "...which doesn't really represent much of a change, for her; She has always been an owned property under guardianship, she still will be one. Why should she be fazed by the change, when there is none?"

The tall woman's eyes pierce Jonathan - he could swear that he feels her gaze rebound inside his skull - "So, you see... being under my command, under yours, working as a teacher with a bunch of ass-hole kids, lying naked of the floor of your mansion day in day out, she doesn't care. For her the change is, really, negligible"

It took Jonathan some seconds, to try to digest all this - and fail.

Looking at Keisha walking away, he tells his wife "What have I gotten us into, Anna?"

"Oh, man-up, Jonathan. It is going to be fine... if things will not work out, we'll rescind her contract, pay her and look for someone else. But I think that Isabel really is the one for us."


They were both right.

How to build yourself a "Cintq" - Part two: LCD and monitors

Before going on, let me re-state that I think that the best choice of Intuos to make a build is the Intuos 3.

They already have a spatial resolution of 5080 lpi (against the 2540 of the precedent series), the model has hotkeys - which means that their driver shows a change screen function associated to a button, which is something very useful that I still have found no way to emulate with my Intuos 2,

Intuos 3 A3, PTZ-1231, 12x19"
Outside my usual budget, really.

there are still some years before the driver support is discontinued in Mac and Windows and, finally, they still do not cost as much as their more recent brethren.

And the active area of biggest one, the 12x19" PTZ-1231, can cover both a 22" screen (16:10) and a 21.5" (16:9) with some mm to spare, whereas the predecessors leave out about 2/3 of an inch of screen, width-wise. 

The Intuos 1 & 2 are way more cheaper, of course... it can be a battle, to get them up and running in modern OSes, though; It is the main reason that they are cheaper; Also, finding accessories - like the pens - for these older machines is going to become more difficult.   I like battles and don't have a dime, so I decided to "standardize" myself on the Intuos 2... but that is another issue.

Now, let's say that you already have an Intuos tablet (or a Monoprice , or whatever - as long as their drivers allow screen mapping and tweaking of the tablet area, a tentative can be made) and have decided to take the step of placing a screen over it...

Which screen? Or, better, which LCD panel?

Again, you should peruse the Bongofish forum, looking for someone who used your tablet and managed to get it to work well.

If you find a "recipe" that works for you, you do not really  need more.

Alternatively, you can arm yourself with some basic notions on LCDs, check Bernard (bongofish administrator) glorious Simtiq Planner,  look for a panel on a LCD database like Panelook.com,  and try a new LCD-tablet combination.

If you do, be fair to all, and report how it went in the forum, so that others may avoid your mistakes or share your triumph. 

What to look for, if you do not find a "recipe" (LCD-Tablet and how to assemble information) that suits your tasks?

I cannot really tell you, because it is a question of desires, budget, constraints etc...

When you go for this you are, in fact, deciding to embark in a bit of experimental design...

What I can give is some fundamental notions to orient your choices.

First of all, no LCD is really designed with the aim of letting pass, through it, the signal from the pen (though, some actually manage to do so, almost  by accident).

Almost invariably, they will need to be modified.

In the best case scenario, this means just removing its metal frame (then, optionally, carving up the parts of it that enters into the active area, and placing it back - if the LCD has a "single plane" structure, like a LG LP116WH2, for example, it is all that it is needed to prep it, really).

LG LP125WH2, 1366x768, IPS, LED
The panel "Timing control" board is on the same plane as the LCD panel, below it in the photo...

The back of the frame is in the way of the pen around the borders, but, once removed the tape that covers- protect the board, unscrewed the board and unzipped the small flexible pcb that connects the board to the LED strip, it is relatively easy to remove the back of the frame and cut out the parts that come in the way, and place it back, to have a final assembly as ... beware, because the the LED strip may be stuck to the frame and is easily damaged.

THe LCD proper is a sealed sub-unit insidethe frame so, if you are careful, it is easy to preserve its integrity and prevent any speckle of dust from entering it. 

LCD panels doesn't get any easier than this, to be prepped for use in one of these machines.   

If you have an Intuos 3 A5 oversize (6"x11"), this panel is most probably the best fit for it - size-wise, it is almost the exactly the same aspect ratio and just 12[horizontal] aand 16[vertical] pixels smaller than that tablet's active area...as it has no metal apart the external frame and is just a some 3 mm thick, it is easy to see if the pairing works - just connect it to a controller, switch it on and place it on the tablet. If you see occasional false clicks, don't worry - usually those are "cured" grounding together the digitizer metal back-plane and the LCD. The resolution is not stellar but, at 12.5 inches, it is enough for most uses.

In the worst case scenarios, this means assembling LCDs out of spare parts from two or more screens... and even build some new parts (a C.N.C.-milled back-case with a LED-holder area, springs to my mind).

In any case, the rate of failure is far from negligible (with an 80% success rate to date, I am a lucky -or just quite cautious - bastard, for example). 

So, if you can lay your hand on a used LCD versus a new one, it may be a good idea (unless you plan on devolving the destroyed monitor, or LCD, to its vendor saying that "it mysteriously stopped working" - that's fraud, I do not condone it, and it won't fly if it's a naked panel, anyway; it can work with a whole monitor and a selling store that doesn't care too much about investigating claims).

However, bear in mind that a used LCD had a life, and it may arrive from someone that already dismantled it, trying to make his own project, and placed it back together in some more or less correct way (happened to me, once, with a LCD panel).

Also, there is no way to know when you may find a 2nd hand LCD panel or monitor of the type that you chose... next week I should receive a LG IPS 224; it took me a year'to find one within my budget.

So, 2nd hand -> less monetary risk, more time spent chasing it down. It all depends on how you value your time.

Also, one may hunt LCD Panels - pro, you can find documentation online, like spreadsheet and photos, on the panel itself that goes beyond the simple specs in in the marketing page of the producer... cons, you must find the right ancillaries for the panel  - 

or look for complete monitors - pro: all the auxiliaries pieces needed are shipped with it; cons: the packaging may not be the better suited for the task, for example most monitor  with CCFL lamps that doesn't use a separated power unit have one that integrates the back-light's driver, which constrains the design. Also, there is almost no way to know what LCD Panel is inside a given monitor so, it becomes a bit of a stroke of luck to get one that is worth a try.

The glorious Dell 1503fp,
the first monitor to be Cintiqized by Drew Northcott, he who created the bongofish forum

It is a now old monitor, that you can find in ebay for some 30 bucks; it reportedly does not produce interference with the working of the Intuos (1) 9x12 or 12x12 even in its native form, and is not the worst twisted nematics, CCFL monitor around.

As many monitors that use a power brick, it has a small CCFL inverter, which may make relatively easy to replace the original CCFLs with A LED setup. In fact, this image comes from a  tutorial on it..
OK, I hope that they will add back the now missing photos, some day.

Again, there is no "best choice"...  of my three machines, the one that works better has only the screen ancillaries new, the tablet was 15 years old and the LCD was out of the wreck of an Arnova g20 and rudely dismantled - by its previous owner - trying to build a projector.

The one that I use the most is based on a then "unknown" HP monitor, with CCFL lamps, a back-light driver in the power unit and as thick as practically acceptable... on paper, almost the last LCD panel to choose, for assembling on of these contraptions - I bought it as a second hand whole monitor, so... surprise; I still managed to get it to work quite well.

On the other hand, I find unusable- screen's too dim and bad colors - the first one that I made, a new LCD on a Wacom Store "demo" unit that had hardly came out of the box in the shop where it was originally displayed. It was based on a known "recipe", and it costed me like the other two together. But the screen is just too crappy anyway (I have grown older and my sight didn't improve with age).

OK, no more digression, let's go on.

When you look at LCD panels , you'll see that they use one of three main technologies, for the proper LCD part

Twisted Nematics, TN - the first type of LCDs to appear on the market. Fast response time, low viewing angles and, associated to this, unreliable colors - the shade you see changes just moving one's head. If possible, to be avoided... fast response times may appeal to gamers, but have no sense in a drawing machine, when the PC may take entire seconds to complete a line (using the Photoshop smoother at 300 pixels, to mesh a 500pixel  long area... one stroke, going to the coffee machine, pouring a cappuccino, and maybe the computer has finished the stroke, by the time I come back to make a second one). On the other hand, you can get a used 15" monitor of these for some 30 euros, and so build a usable "Cintiq" with less than 100 bucks...

In Plane Switching , IPS - somewhat slower, in the first iterations came with reduced contrast values but have much improved over time,  almost perfect viewing angles and color stability - little color fading moving around the screen.. PLS is, virtually, the same technology as marketed by Samsung. A significant drawback is that its introduction is recent, and most LCD panels using this technology have a 16:9 aspect ratio that does not correspond to that of any of the Intuos, (apart the LCDs created for Apple products: IPAD are 4:3 and MacBooks are 4:3 or 16:10).

Vertical Alignment, VA - Great viewing angles and colors, horrible response time (usually not inferior to 30 ms). Given the long response time, rarely used on the home monitors market, but mostly for industrial ($$) or medical ($$$$$$) use,  which may be one reason why they are produced in a wider range of aspect ratios than IPSes.
It is usually preferable to pay top money for a new LCD panel of the same size and shape than re-designing an industrial machine - or a medical unit - to accommodate a newer, mass market LCD.

As far as this kind of projects go, VA and IPS are both valid. TN ... unless they are very good value for the money, are better left to gamer.

Beyond the type of the LCD technology, also the type of backlight source has its importance.

Essentially, there are two types:

Cold Cathode Fluorescent Light, CCFL - (where "cold" is actually some hundred degrees) is the oldest technology, essentially the CCFL are small "neon" bars. They work with a voltage that goes from 1300 at start-up to some 600 volts during normal operation, voltage which is provided by a step-up inverter with the start-up reactances integrated. If said inverter is separated from the power unit, it is almost) simple to replace the CCFLs with LED strips and their driver unit (essentially, it is a bolt-on substitution). If it is separated, it requires a bit of reverse engineering to locate the actual power and signal lines (the replacement kits usually requires a ground line, a +12 volts power line, a on/off and line and and adj/dim line). The CCFL high voltages make them a notable source of interference, and the transformer inside their inverters is even more of a noise source... in my machines, I managed to place them as far from the digitizer as it was possible.
Panels with CCFL lights designed for office use are meant to be opened up to replace the CCFLs, when they reach the end of their life (around 12-18 thousand hours, i.e 4-6 years in office life, two years in 24/7 uses).

This make modifying them, to be placed over the digitizer, relatively easy.

Also, to simplify their substitution, the CCFL use standard connectors and already made extenders are easy to come by.

If one need a longer extension, it is feasible to take one of said extenders, cut (better not at the center, on one cable , toward one extreme, on the other, toward another ), splice and solder additional cable to extend it further, if possible of the same gauge and class (OK, I did it with 220V house wire, adding a huge and thick insulating  coat to one of the two, to reduce capacitive coupling -  it shouldn't, but it works well anyway... just luck, probably)


LED lights - they operate with voltages that reach, at maximum, some 60 volts and as such, a part particularly unlucky cases in which the Pulsed Width Modulation  used to dim their brightness directly resonate with some of the digitizer specific frequencies, the interference produced  by this light source tend to be much more subdued than those produced by CCFL lamps and often fall below the threshold of noise that the digitizers are natively able to filter out.
On the back side, the LED estimated life is usually on par with that of the liquid crystals and, as such, these displays are not meant to be opened, ever.
 Their design doesn't necessarily accommodate our needs to manhandle them.

Also, many panels with LED backlight have the LED driving circuits inside the controlling board on their top (yes, the one that, unless the panel has a "single plane" structure - with the board already  lying below the panel - usually needs to be folded out of the way) and small flat flexible PCBs, with multiple lanes, connecting the actual led strips to the board.
Depending on the design of this, and one's accessibility to the right pieces (essentially, ZIF-toZIF adapters and FCC of the same pitch as the connector) these lanes can be very easy to extend, or instead be virtually impossible to tame.

(My smallest machine was built out of the wreckage of a precedent try... I had modified the LCD with no issues, but couldn't find the FCC or the ZIF-to-ZIF to extends its led connection once the board was folded out, so in a fit of impatience I destroyed the LED strip connection lane trying to solder electric motor wire to it; a couple of years after, Nyjtouch sells the FCC, zif-to-zif extenders and I find a 2nd hand LCD of the same type... in a couple of  hours or so, it was done)

A note: many modern LED backlight TV have a zoned backlight setups, with the LEDs dispersed in the middle of the active area that can be individually dimmed.
IT may help getting better contrast ratios, but this means that they have these LED power lanes in the middle of the pen signal path. Not sure about it, but I'd avoid them, if possible. 

Desktop LCD monitors have, almost always, at least 8 bits of resolution per each color   -billion of colors. the fabled 16.4 million colors. Some high end monitors have 10 bits per color channel, and can display a billion colors.

Many laptop Screens only have 6 bits per channel color resolution, and can thus display only 64 gradation of gray, or 262 thousand colors (now you know why, when drawing gray-scale images on your laptop, you never seem to be able to pick the right, intermediate value that you need -  the computer and graphic adapter are trying to give it to you, but that's the screen that simply cannot show it).

Smart LCD controllers try - and nearly succeed - to close the gap, using spatial-temporal dithering techniques (for example, flipping a pixel's color between two levels or, similar to what the JPEG does, considering a 2x2 pixel cell as base color unit, and using the combinations to dither, or both the techniques at once), which can close the gap with 8 bits panels.

So, 6bits/8 bits has its importance, but it is not fundamental (note: I hardly ever use color anyway, so take this with a grain of salt... also, the LCD controller you is going to be only as smart as it is, not as smart as its best competitor is).     


Unless you made an incredible bargain (I saw an Intuo4 XL going for 140 euros, this week... I still want to cry, I paid my Intuos 2 180! ) or it is a UC-Logic (currently, the only other maker of digitizers that is worth a try...), usually the square inch of your tablet has costed you a lot more than the square inch of screen, which will prompt some soul searching, when it comes at choosing sizes, as your digitizer and the LCD may have a different aspect ratio.

 As I noted, most IPS panels with LED backlight comes with a 16:9 aspect ratio. Though replacing the CCFL with LED kits is possible, it is not necessarily easy or something you may want to risk.

So, choosing a LCD that falls all inside the active area, is IPS and has led backlight may mean to forego half of the tablet, as almost inevitably one such panel is a "modern" 16:9....

Though it is true that it is simpler to calibrate a machine when the LCD image falls all inside the digitizer's active area (my last), in my experience it is also quite simple to tune machines whose screen is bigger than the digitizer in all directions (my first) and only slightly more annoying to tune one where the screen is wider but the digitizer is taller than the LCD (my biggest -  first one tunes the screen width, then the tablet height).

In reality, a smaller LCD makes easy to move the screen position around the desktop... which doesn't really matter, on the biggest builds;One cannot shove around his main monitor in the desktops space, anyway.

Now the main trick, to live with a screen  that is wider than your tablet, is to make sure that you can still always reach the scrolling bars of the programs.

Not being able to scroll with the pen is, in my experience, the most conspicuous font of frustration in such a set-up.

There is a program called Power Strip, from a Taiwan Enterprise called Emtech, that allows one to "carve up" custom-resolutions (essentially, adding black bands on the screen) out of the screen. As it also allows to finely tune the internal timings of the LCD, which can reduce substantially the interference faced by the digitizer, and it comes shareware with a month of access to its full features, it is usually worth a try. If with it you can tune out some (or all) of the pen jitter AND reduce the screen used by the OS just to the tablet area, its 40$ lifetime license is money well spent.

Alternatively, a work-around can be to place the task-bar on the right, and extend it till the programs right borders falls inside the active area (it is what I did with UBiQ in Windows rustratingly enough, Ubuntu is idiotic enought that it thinks to know where I need to place the).

Then, placing a setting for Explorer.exe, in the tablet driver,  that allows access to the whole screen area, makes so that even the icons in the tray area can be reached...and one can almost forget that the pen doesn't reach every corner of the screen.

If the LCD is bigger on all sides, but the difference is smaller than the smaller icon in use ( 15.4" in 16:10 is about six mm wider and taller than an Intuos 4 large... if well centered, the digitizer active area falls - at 1440x900 - 10-pixels from each border; icon sizes usually start at 16x16... any Icon on sight is reachable), it is hard to remember that it is bigger at all.

So, resuming all of these, the ideal screen is

Using IPS (or VA)  technology

With a good resolution (but, if it is a small machine that is not going to be used as  the main screen, it may not be wise to obsess over it - better a nice screen with a lower resolution, than a crappy one with an higher resolution)

Possibly, with 8 bits per color channel (again, if the LCD controller before it is good, a 6 bit panel may look just fine enough)
 
Using LED back-light (possibly, with either an external LED driver, or with a typology of board-LED connection that you already know how to extend)

With only one circuit board, or having a "single plane" architecture (If the circuit boards are already out of the way, it doesn't matter too much)

Of a size and format that cover as much as possible of the digitizer, with a minimum of LCD overhangs...



Ok... next time, I'll try make a small list of the combinations that I know to work.