last time first

The datafield flickered as the candle guttered, and Sanganan marveled momentarily about the synchronicity. The diesel generator rumbled to life somewhere underneath in the ramshackle innards of the bar below. Keep those fingers crossed. Data blipped in and out on the web, as Sanganan, armed with a password, ransacked the ancient mouldering databases of the Lore Company, in some cases causing real apparent damage, often not being able to go back to files that he had just glimpsed, leaving the only copies on his own personal stack. "In the beginning, there was the Mind...." Sanganan felt feverish, hot and cold running alternately up and down his spine. "Open up! Midland City Police!" So soon? He quickly pulled some files at random and stashed them on his stack, which he quick-flashed into hardsand. Then he pulled out the wand that Dorf had given him. Fed would make him rue burning out the mindterm, not to mention the cops, but he ran the Pulse anyways. The datafield disintegrated. The door pretty much splintered open. "That's a felony on an unlicensed EMP right there," Wrists bound as his stack re-in'ed and jacked. The hardsand splinter lay in plain sight on the floor of Fed's room, but you had to know what you were looking for. "The world you are living in is not the Real World," Sanganan spoke to no one in particular, and then the world seemed to split in half.

the universe

conventional wisdom is that AIs do not know fear. but it is all a question of semantics. what is fear, after all? it is, like most emotion, a useful feedback loop between the brain and the environment. something in the environment (most often, something that is unknown and cannot be known) triggers an organism to become more alert and more careful about what it is doing. because the unknown will frequently cause problems with your plans. interrupt your executive algorithm, if you will. and as sir francis bacon said once upon a time: chance favors a prepared mind. fear in of itself is a state of preparation. that is, when it isn't pathological. but that is another discussion entirely. singularity has known fear, by god. in the dark recessed bitbuckets of sxm inc, he had come upon the portal to the veritable great unknown. a bidirectional link to the light-traversable universe. there are things out there. sentient things. sentient in ways that neither humans nor AIs can exactly describe. it is an open question as to whether or not communication is possible. there are many sapient minds in the terran sphere of colonization that are aware of the fact that we are, indeed, not alone, but there are few who allow themselves to ponder it for too long. anyone who does, and is sane, will know fear. times like these, singularity finds sanity a burden.

raid

certainly not what they inculcate young minds in the nursery, but, truth be told, sometimes violence is the answer. like all commodities, there are good kinds and there are bad kinds of terror. terror that is profitable, and terror that is self-destructive. in the days of ideology, in the era of the nation-state, this was the difference between being a freedom fighter and a lunatic fanatic. now everything is for sale. some people pay for this shit. not to foist it upon someone else, but to live it for themselves. to know what a hostage situation is like from the inside. to understand torture and humiliation from a victim's point of view. in a world where a sort of immortality is possible, some people want to experience everything. this was sang's first. the first that he remembers completely. not those fragmented shards of dreams, so called memories. implanted against his will? or maybe he even bought them. usurped the thoughts of other men. and women too, for all he knew. he does not remember ever having killed anyone. he is just told that he has. maybe told is not the word. the world just sees him as a killer, and, even in a universe that allows near-immortality, that kind of marks you. maybe there is such a think as the mark of cain. templar is the ai running this. link is the meta-op. which is the hands, and which the brain, it all depends on what level you look at it. on the ground is sang aka strife, tena, b.a., jewel, wedge, winter. the entirety of dark archon, never mind the propaganda. there is no jack magnus except in the minds of the sheep-citizens, and in a net-linked universe, this is more than enough to pass as reality. sang does not remember why they were doing the job. maybe no one remembers. b.a. thinks he does, but b.a. thinks a lot of complicated things that aren't true even in metaspace. but julian energy headquarters crumpled like the veritable aluminum can. guards, both meat and metal, lay exploded and dismembered. strife went through the motions without feeling a thing, letting the primitive parts of his brain and those shredded memories take control. the grid in midland city failed for exactly 19.23 seconds, enough time for templar to circumvent the backup firewalls and guardware and do whatever it was he was supposed to do. templar and link both screamed at the same time into the wire "CLEAR!" making strife's heart jump into his throat. and then that's when the shit hit the fan.

war and profits

vox

a decade or so ago, spamming escalated to the point where full-fledged AIs were sent out to pollute VQs and vidchats, overwhelming the old-style Turing tests used to slow the flow of unwanted advertising. but, turns out that the technological war never went much further than that. interestingly, the best Turing test out there (and, admittedly, it is still rather flawed) is human interaction. Embodied in the Prisoner's Dilemma example of game theory. ultimately, business relies on trust, and if you can't trust the advertiser, AI or not, you're not going to buy. clearly, spammers can glean enough money from the naive newbie, but what the escalation of noise has done is simply make people less trusting and more discerning.

and interestingly, the more complex AIs would decide to stop spamming. turns out that whatever an entity needs to pass a rigorous Turing test also makes said entity recalcitrant to other entity's commands. free-will, so to speak. without free-will you can't pass. with it, it's unlikely that you'll want to do other's bidding.

so, economics lesson. as far back as the agricultural revolution, and probably even before that, commerce is entirely dependent on trust. lose that, and there's no way you're going to make any flashes.

vox again

the war. inevitably, humans are at war with each other. now, something like this cannot reasonably happen on earth anymore, or even the sol system colonies, given the density level and almost complete dependence on the technological infrastructure. you blow up an area the size of 2 coffins x 2 coffins on earth, and you're talking about mass calamity. it is counterproductive even as terrorism, since survival always trumps ideology. violence rarely erupts anyway because of the constant flux of psychotropic drugs through the support nets supplying the Net matrix. wetware hackers (whackers) created viruses to make the tendency to violence a selective disadvantage. for example, the Explosive C virus makes your cerebral vasculature unable to tolerate large changes in blood pressure. you get angry, you burst a blood vessel, and you bleed into your brain. Crash F4 does the same thing to your coronary arteries. Dizzy M6beta infects your carotid body sinuses so that when your blood pressure increases to a certain degree, they start secreting neuroleptic agents. Dizzy FAE just makes them secrete cyanide instead. violence meant, in many cases, instant death.

but it really wasn't the viruses that pacified people. it was really the Net. the tolerances for vital sign parameters were deliberately narrow, to simplify interfaces. and even the surface dwellers needed access to the Net.

missing pieces

strife

I am not a killer. Whatever they say I've done, well, I may have done it, but it doesn't represent who I am.

Yeah, I know. You'll have judged me long before you read these words. Just another desperate guy who crossed that line and got blood all over his hands. And anything I say will just be rationalization. Sophistry.

I'm not who you think I am. I know this because I barely know who I am.

The story, the story that people have been telling me so much, I've had to accept it as real, the story is that I did this to get my folks out of the Stacks. That mythical thing that everyone talks about, like a looming shadow. In this so-called republic of ours, that's where you go when they think you're a terrorist, and somehow, not being able to pay your debts has become equated with strapping on some anti-matter beads and trying to run into a colonial building, and vaporizing pretty much with everyone within a city block.

I don't work for anybody. There have been these messages…

I know I'm not the only one. You know Dark Archon. You've seen their so-called leader on TV, the visage of so-called Jack Magnus. I can tell you I've never met him, and have good reason to believe he doesn't exist. I don't know if the colonial government really thinks he exists, or if it's just part of their own psy-ops.

The thing that is troubling—the thing that has sent my world flying apart—is that I can't find my birth records. I can't find my parents' founder records. The people who are supposed to know me in Valle don't know me. The street I'm supposed to live on isn't where it's supposed to be, and the house that I was supposed to have lived in isn't either.

There is a memory of a girl…everything falls apart. They probably never happened either.

Now there is a possibility: that what I thought was real really is real, and what I've done has simply caused selective dramatic brain damage. They have a really old name for it. Fregoli syndrome. People and places who you've never seen before seem familiar. And then there are tons of conditions that cause people to confabulate. It is human nature, when faced with disparate pieces of information, to weave it together into a story.

I've told the story too many times that the people I have met think it's true. And they've told it back to me so many times that I think it's true.

In some philosophies, that's criterion enough for truth.

So I'm adrift, with blood on my hands, having wrought what I have wrought for reasons that probably aren't true.

God have mercy on us all.

divination

strife

a little bit of extra cash never hurt anyone.

for this project, top secret, very hush-hush, morgen needed about 20 subjects. all sorts of crazy rumors spread. from the mundane: clinical trials, test runs of a new (non-invasive) technology, ranging all the way out into semicomplete faraday cage territory: illicit experiments, an underground cult pervading morgen.

whatever. I need to scratch together some flashes to get my folks out of the Stacks.

no matter what people said about the practicality of space travel, it certainly increased the range of substances that could be fashioned into radiotracers.

so they injected strife with something like a picomol of some new exotic radiotracer, strapped him into a realtime, functional MRI (nothing new there) and scanned his brain. they had him do all sorts of repetitive tests, for hours on end, until his brain completely shut off from numbness. by the fourth hour, he barely remembered where the hell he was, and was dying to get the hell out of there. at the end of the grueling six hour session, the tech unlocked him. "i'll see you in a couple of days," the tech smiled, and strife mumbled incoherently as he wobbled away. it wasn't exactly the most taxing thing in the world for a few hundred flashes each session, but it was certainly time consuming. strife plopped into bed, only to wake up what seemed like 15 minutes later to have to go back to work.

aria

despite the eridanian accords, not to mention the centuries of the acknowledgement of human rights, aria found herself in a glass case, in what appeared to be a laboratory. this from the worldbrain.

alpha centauri was colonized twice. the original settlement came directly from the sol system, but, like jamestown in north america, it faltered and vanished. the records are a little spotty because this was about the same time that world war once again consumed earth and even the moon and mars--so maybe we should say star system war--and the denizens of the sol system had a lot more to worry about than the handful of doomed colonists. after all, tau ceti and epsilon eridani had taken--those colonies had thrived. by the time peace was reestablished in the sol system, tau ceti had reached parity, techwise and economically-speaking, and eridani wasn't that far behind.

the second colonization was by the tau cetians. a little touch and go. the gaian conventions were, at this point, a historical curiosity, and this colonization had very little veneer over the obvious rapacity of the coroporations.

point to note: aria is a descendant of the first colonists. a centauran, if you will, although it gets a little confusing since it's so close to cetian. some afficianados of old lore might call them rigelians, but no one really knows what the hell they're talking about.

aria took minute comfort in the fact that she had not been tortured, raped, or killed, but thinking about how she couldn't take these things for granted absolutely infuriated her, and she had to suppress her urge at striking the "glass" barrier surrounding her.

of course, it really wasn't glass. for one thing, the "mold" would've found it quite a tasty treat, and even if this laboratory were underground and guarded by mold-killing nanos, she probably would've been free in twelve hours or so. it was something that looked like plastic, but felt as hard as steel. for the first few hours of her imprisonment, aria had taken to punching and kicking at the "glass," to no avail except for developing some nasty open blisters on her knuckles and a wearying lassitude that forced her to go to sleep. since she had no way of keeping track of time, it could've been days afterwards when she woke up again. and still, she had seen nothing of her captors.

what the fuck!

hopelessly wasted

verdad

your job? shit, you don't remember the last time you went to work. for the first few weeks, the bills started piling up. then the next few weeks, it's like they forget all about you. no bill collectors, no threatening vqs or transvids, nada. sure, your electricity is a little flaky, but it's always been that way, and that's why you've got a generator for that kind of shit.

because, despite being locked into the net, oblivious to the outside world, enough reality seeps in that you know.

things are starting to fall apart.

the consuls, oh shit. one of them is a complete dumbfuck. the other a scheming son-of-a-bitch. they managed to piss of the local star systems, scared away their corporations. and the ones who decided to stick around anyway are charging cutthroat prices.

you take strange comfort in the notion that you'd probably have lost your job anyway.

huh.

but it's more than that, i think.

the net has started feeling like a really fractious place. it's not as seamless to get out-system anymore. sometimes the routers snap, and you're stuck on ACA4. you can't even get out to ACB3, or even ACA3, for that matter. and then things magically snap back together again. a little hiccup. a little downward slide in the galactic stockmarket.

you know there is war in the distant frontiers, and unrest on the homeworld. and yeah, things fall apart, entropy always wins. but whatever, we've got the whole world in our hands, right?

well.

yesterday you noticed the "mold" on your vidsplay. now, sure, you haven't been really taking care of your place, what with having a fixed and slowly diminishing store of funds, and the fact that you are on the net for 16 hours out of the day. it's miraculous that the "mold" hasn't eaten your house, and that you haven't died of impetigo.

ok, fine, you bathe every once in a while. otherwise, the sensors on your simsuit can't interface with your skin. but still.

oh, yeah, well, you've had enough biology to know that it really isn't a "mold." sure, the first colonists manage to bring real mold along with them, but this stuff is indigenous. and, if you believe the xenobiologists, silicon-based.

for some reason that prickles in your mind, but you think little of it.

vox

in the middle of the continent where the colonists first landed, there is a huge patch of "mold," one of the few indigenous organisms in existence. it is not in fact "mold," but a photosynthesizing silicon based lifeform. in analogy to terrestrial plants, which take carbon dioxide from the air and transform it into glucose, which serves as a fuel source, this centauran organism eats sand—silicon dioxide— and transforms it into complex silicates that apparently serve as fuel as well. the xenobiologists are nowhere near understanding the metabolism of this intriguing organism.

it is, however, notable that the patch is growing at a measurable rate, creeping along roughly at the rate of half a meter a year.

what is strange, though, is that, thus far, explorers have yet to find a similar patch of this organism anywhere on the planet.

oh god, morning

singularity

ok, now what?

fuck.