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General | Posted 6 years agoI'm still struggling to escape the black dog of long-term depression, and as dormant parts of my psyche are gradually reviving, some odd results arise.
For the first time in a very long time, today I found myself /wanting/ a thing. Usually, I'm quite content with what I have, and classically stoic about what I can't; after all, my life is much better than, say, a 16th-century French peasant's. But my browsing has just brought me to the two rodent Venetian masks shown at https://www.flickr.com/photos/flatw.....475917/sizes/l and at https://www.flickr.com/photos/flatw.....91774/sizes/l/ , and I can't stop my thoughts from turning back to them again and again.
Those pictures are eight years old, and those particular masks aren't listed on the store's website ( http://www.cadelsolmascherevenezia.com/en/masks/27 ); and I have neither access to a 3D printer nor the skills to turn those jpegs into a 3d-printable file; nor the social network to get in touch with anyone who could do anything of the sort.
And yet, I want.
It's been long enough since I wanted something I don't have that it feels like a new emotion to me, and I suspect I'm wallowing more in the experience-of-wanting than I actually want a mask. But hey, there are lots of worse things that could happen to me than that, so I figure it's still a win. :)
For the first time in a very long time, today I found myself /wanting/ a thing. Usually, I'm quite content with what I have, and classically stoic about what I can't; after all, my life is much better than, say, a 16th-century French peasant's. But my browsing has just brought me to the two rodent Venetian masks shown at https://www.flickr.com/photos/flatw.....475917/sizes/l and at https://www.flickr.com/photos/flatw.....91774/sizes/l/ , and I can't stop my thoughts from turning back to them again and again.
Those pictures are eight years old, and those particular masks aren't listed on the store's website ( http://www.cadelsolmascherevenezia.com/en/masks/27 ); and I have neither access to a 3D printer nor the skills to turn those jpegs into a 3d-printable file; nor the social network to get in touch with anyone who could do anything of the sort.
And yet, I want.
It's been long enough since I wanted something I don't have that it feels like a new emotion to me, and I suspect I'm wallowing more in the experience-of-wanting than I actually want a mask. But hey, there are lots of worse things that could happen to me than that, so I figure it's still a win. :)
A Flash of Colour in the Mind
General | Posted 6 years agoSome say to remember that the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. And some say that every time you call up a memory, you change it. But here's the best I can express what remains of a split-second of thought earlier today:
I was enjoying reading a classic SF novel for the first time, and as my thoughts went over expanding on an idea from one line, I had a combination of seeing that expansion in the form of some Avatar-like glowing blue text, combined with an odd sensation. It took me some time to nail it down, which was a combination of thinking that the expansion was new-to-me, interesting... and what I now realize was the actual emotional sensation of hope.
I'm not sure if I can describe what it's like to realize that I'd literally forgotten what hope feels like. I've cobbled together an intellectual approximation, so that, as a hyperbolic-to-the-unrealistic-extreme example, I can analyse the pros and cons of suicide, taking into account that I know my mind is prone to certain biases, and come to the logical conclusion that even if I don't anticipate anything ever getting anything better, staying alive is most likely the better choice. But that's an entirely different thing than actually /feeling/ "hey, that sounds like something better that just might happen".
Sure, I've now been going over that split-second so many times that by now I mostly only remember remembering it. But I'm still taking it as a /very/ good sign I'm still on an upswing. (Sure, one step back every few steps forward, and there are days as blah as before... but there are days that /aren't/.)
About the only downside is that re-thinking my latest story idea, I'm now realizing how bleak and depressing my outline is; so I'm going to have to change it so much that I might as well be coming up with something from scratch. Which is such a ridiculously contrived "downside" that I'm grinning lopsidedly to myself as I type this.
Of course, given past experience, I may only be peaking before a return to previous depression; I've had such before. But... it may not be. And I'm looking forward to hoping my mental state will improve further.
I was enjoying reading a classic SF novel for the first time, and as my thoughts went over expanding on an idea from one line, I had a combination of seeing that expansion in the form of some Avatar-like glowing blue text, combined with an odd sensation. It took me some time to nail it down, which was a combination of thinking that the expansion was new-to-me, interesting... and what I now realize was the actual emotional sensation of hope.
I'm not sure if I can describe what it's like to realize that I'd literally forgotten what hope feels like. I've cobbled together an intellectual approximation, so that, as a hyperbolic-to-the-unrealistic-extreme example, I can analyse the pros and cons of suicide, taking into account that I know my mind is prone to certain biases, and come to the logical conclusion that even if I don't anticipate anything ever getting anything better, staying alive is most likely the better choice. But that's an entirely different thing than actually /feeling/ "hey, that sounds like something better that just might happen".
Sure, I've now been going over that split-second so many times that by now I mostly only remember remembering it. But I'm still taking it as a /very/ good sign I'm still on an upswing. (Sure, one step back every few steps forward, and there are days as blah as before... but there are days that /aren't/.)
About the only downside is that re-thinking my latest story idea, I'm now realizing how bleak and depressing my outline is; so I'm going to have to change it so much that I might as well be coming up with something from scratch. Which is such a ridiculously contrived "downside" that I'm grinning lopsidedly to myself as I type this.
Of course, given past experience, I may only be peaking before a return to previous depression; I've had such before. But... it may not be. And I'm looking forward to hoping my mental state will improve further.
Who wants to beta-read a story?
General | Posted 7 years agoI have one story idea that I've been thinking about enough that I'm willing to try writing it up (now that I'm up to doing, er, anything). I've had some good experiences in the past with beta-readers providing useful and constructive criticism; is anyone willing to give it a try?
If so, drop a reply here, and I'll send a link to the Google Doc in a private message.
If so, drop a reply here, and I'll send a link to the Google Doc in a private message.
Silence and the lack thereof
General | Posted 7 years agoDepression sucks. Having less of it sucks less. Sometimes, light therapy helps.
I can't promise anything, but I'm doing better than I have been for a while, and with some effort and luck, I'll be able to share a few interesting ideas.
To start with, I commissioned
tailsteak for a six-piece set of pics, "Exascale", which you can see at https://www.furaffinity.net/gallery.....6282/Exascale/ , a sort-of-sequel to the New Fursona set ( https://www.furaffinity.net/gallery.....86/New-Fursona ) from a couple of years ago. There's arguments that the timeline is both too optimistic (eg, operations-per-watt may taper off sooner than I project) and too pessimistic (uploaded minds could lead to a spiral of self-improvement), but a nice middle-of-the-road simple projection still provides fascinating thought-fodder.
Wish me luck, and I wish you the best in your own endeavours. :)
I can't promise anything, but I'm doing better than I have been for a while, and with some effort and luck, I'll be able to share a few interesting ideas.
To start with, I commissioned
tailsteak for a six-piece set of pics, "Exascale", which you can see at https://www.furaffinity.net/gallery.....6282/Exascale/ , a sort-of-sequel to the New Fursona set ( https://www.furaffinity.net/gallery.....86/New-Fursona ) from a couple of years ago. There's arguments that the timeline is both too optimistic (eg, operations-per-watt may taper off sooner than I project) and too pessimistic (uploaded minds could lead to a spiral of self-improvement), but a nice middle-of-the-road simple projection still provides fascinating thought-fodder.Wish me luck, and I wish you the best in your own endeavours. :)
Character Sheet of Myself
General | Posted 8 years agoWhile I'm waiting for my latest depressive bout to fade away, I was recently reminded of GURPS, and decided to throw together a character sheet of myself. On the off-chance that somebody wants a fully-fleshed NPC, here it is.
This version of the sheet is for a cinematic setting, roughly equivalent to a modern action TV show. To bring the sheet back down to reality, drop the cinematic-level abilities and buy back IQ and its secondary abilities to 13.
8<
True name: Daniel Eliot Boese
Common Name: DataPacRat
Birthday: October 12, 01976 AD
Residence: The Regional Municipality of Niagara, Ontario, Canada
Character Concept: The answer-getter guy.
Motivations: "I'd rather be alive-and-healthy than dead, and technology's changing fast enough that there's non-zero odds I might be able to live through the next millennium. Of course, that won't work if all of humanity's dead, so sometimes it's worth taking a short-term risk for a potential long-term gain."
NPC role: Mouthpiece for the GM to give the party answers, clues, and other data.
PC Primary party role: Force multiplier, helping the group get the greatest results while spending the least effort. Eg, telling the combat-guy that wereotters are known to retreat when presented with iridium, passing the faceman/negotiator selected excerpts from an old online dating profile, handing building security wiring plans to the techie and the sneaky-guy, and reminding the medic when nothing better is available that strawberry-leaf extract has been used to relieve minor intestinal upset.
Secondary party role: Backup techie, medic, and jack-of-most-trades.
Cost to party: Not particularly physically robust, about as useless as any other civilian in front-line combat. Suggested cost minimization: If he can't be kept away from a fight, use him for combat support, eg ferrying ammo, dragging wounded, etc.
Appearance:
Sex: Male
Height: 165 cm / 5'4"
Weight: 95 kg / 210 lbs
Hair: Dark blond, ponytail
Beard and moustache: Reddish
Eyes: Blue
Skin: Caucasian, pale
Outfit, public, typical: White cap (no logo), blue-tinted teashades, tan photographer's vest.
GURPS stats:
Point Budget:
Base Points: 175
Disadvantages: 68
Total: 243
Attributes: 55
Advantages: 147
Skills: 40
Unspent: 1
Total: 243
Basic Attributes: (Total: [55])
[-10] ST: 9
[-] Basic Damage: 1d-2 thrust, 1d-1 swing
[0] Hit Points: 9
[-] Basic Lift: 16 lbs
[-20] DX: 9
[120] IQ: 16
[-10] Will: 14
[-15] Perception: 13
[-10] HT: 9
[0] Fatigue: 9
[0] Basic Speed: 4.5
[0] Dodge: 7
[0] Basic Move: 4 yards/second
Zero-point items:
[0] Right-Handed
[0] Home Gravity: 1G
[0] Size Modifier: 0
[0] Native Technology Level: 8
[0] Cultural Familiarity: Western
[0] Language: English (Native)
[0] Citizenship: Canadian
Advantages: (Total: [147])
[25] "I've read /all/ the books; just give me a few minutes to go over some notes to refresh my memory..." aka "Digital Super Memorization": Modular Abilities, 6 points per slot (/nearly/ anything), 4 points per point in slot (rearranging points is slow, but not particularly costly or subject to external interference). 2 slot with 2 points each. (28) Limitation: No Combat Skills (-10%). (pP52)
[45] "Bayesian Analytical Techniques": Common Sense, Conscious (+50%, pPowers45) (15); plus Intuition (15); plus Oracle (Digital) (pP65) (15)
[7] "Vest-o-stuff": Gizmos (5); plus Perk: Equipment: Doodad (pPowerUps9) (1); plus Signature Gear (photographer's vests (and cargo shorts, and belts with hidden pockets, and etc) and pocket gadgetry, value $10k) (1).
[2] "Cereal box reader": Language: French (Broken)
[6] "Geek cute": Pitiable (5); plus Perk: Appearance: Honest Face (1); plus Appearance: Average (0).
[5] "Furry Fandom": Claim to Hospitality (can find people to crash on a couch with in many cities)
[5] "They're better company than most humans": Animal Empathy
[5] "Cryonic contract": Extra life (25), Unreliable (succeeds on 5-, -80%), Accessibility (Delayed Return, estimated 20+ years to develop revival technology, -80%) (Limitations capped at -80%). (Alternate writeup: Signature Gear: Life insurance and service contract with cryonics organization worth roughly $50,000: 5 points.)
[1] "What really matters.": Perk: Controllable Disadvantage: Extreme Fanatacism (philosophy: prevent the permanent extinction of sapience) (1).
[7] "Personal Digital Library": Signature Gear, $50k value (4); plus Perk: Better Ebooks (value *1.5) (1); plus Perk: Equipment Bond (1)
[5] "Flow state": Single-Minded
[20] "Bookworm v2.0": Talent: Computer Wizard, 4 levels (pPowerUps3-9)
[5] "I've read a /lot/ of scifi": Versatile
[1] "Still don't want to repeat the experience": Perk: Resistant to nausea from skunk spray, +3 (skunks described at pDF5-11.)
[1] "Remember to rotate your magnetic tapes regularly." Perk: Shtick: Standard Operating Procedure (make digital backups) (pPowerUps15)
[1] "Boy-scout level camper": Perk: Skill: Dabbler: Bicycling default+2, Cooking +2, First Aid +2, Hiking +2 (pPU2-16)
[1] "Science enthusiast": Perk: Skill: Dabbler: Astronomy at default+3, Biology +2, Physics+2 (pPU2-16)
[1] "Some Loompanics books that stuck": Perk: Skill: Dabbler: Holdout +1, Liquid Projector/TL8 (Sprayer) +2, Lockpicking +1, Melee Weapon: Knife +2, Scrounging +2 (pPU2-16)
[1] Perk: Skill: Efficient (Computer Operation) (pPowerUps16)
[1] Perk: Skill: Efficient (Research) (pPowerUps16)
[1] "Let me Google that for you": Perk: Skill: No Nuisance Rolls (Computer Operation, searching for data) pPU2-16
[1] "I know /all/ the libraries": Perk: Social: "Born Researcher": Networked (Organizations: Information Sources), pSE79, pSE46
Disadvantages: (Total: [-68])
[-15] "Live forever or die trying": Obsession (Immortality), resist 12- (-10); plus Cowardice, resist 15- (-5); plus Unusual Background: Cryonicist (0)
[-7] "Occasional anhedonia": Chronic Depression, resist 15-. (During bouts, tries to cope by retreating into comforting nostalgia of 1980's media and comics.)
[-10] "Megane": Bad Sight (Nearsighted), Mitigator (glasses)
[-5] "Civilian": Pacifism (Reluctant Killer)
[-5] "Intellectual Integrity": Code of Honor (Scientist's) (3e, pAC89)
[-5] "Snores loud enough to be mistaken for a wildebeest in heat": Noisy, 5 levels (10), Only when asleep (-50%)
[-5] "Furry fan": Xenophilia, resist 15-
[-4] "It's so hard to restrain myself around those who willfully blind themselves to what the evidence implies." Odious Personal Habit: Prefers the truth to being popular: Reaction penalty -2 (10); Limitation: Accessibility: Self-Control Roll of 12- (-60%).
[-3] "Non-24-hour sleep/wake disorder": Extra Sleep (averaging 10.625 hours of sleep out of every 25.5); plus Controllable Disadvantage: Insomniac (1)
[-2] "Asthma": Unfit, Mitigator (inhalers)
[-1] "Schizoid": Oblivious (-5); plus Shyness, Severe (-10); plus Quirk: Uncongenial (-1); plus Indomitable (15)
[0] "Semi-permanently Unemployed": Independent Income (government cheque): $800/month (20); plus Wealth: Poor (Starting Wealth: $4,000) (-15); plus Debt (general debts): -$160/month (-4); plus Status 0 (monthly cost of living $600) (0); plus Debt (to pay for cryonic contract): $40/month. Net monthly income: $0.
[-1] "Short and wide": Build: Overweight
[-1] "My brain's screwed up enough already": Quirk: Vow: Teetotaler
[-1] "The Bayesian evidence strongly implies...": Quirk: Belief: Atheist
[-1] Quirk: Extremely Limited Disadvantage: Kleptomania: "Compulsively downloads torrents of ebooks." (pPU6-11). (Or possibly 'Quirk: Collector: ebook torrents' (pPU6-27).)
[-1] Quirk: Distinctive Speech: "Enunciates like he learned English from books." (pPU6-16)
[-1] "Computer nerd pale": Quirk: Sunburns easily (pPU6-24)
Skills & Techniques: (Total: [40])
[-] Acting IQ-5-2 = 9-
[1] Area Knowledge: 2016, TL8 (city: Niagara) IQ/E 16-
[ ] Area Knowledge: 2016, TL8 (small nation: Ontario) AEcity-2 = 14-
[ ] Area Knowledge: 2016, TL8 (large nation: Canada) IQ-4 = 12
[ ] Area Knowledge: 2016, TL8 (planet: Earth) IQ-4 = 12
[1] Area Knowledge (Deep Web) IQ/E 16-
[1] Area Knowledge (Dark Web) IQ/E 16-
[+] Astronomy IQ-6+3 = 13-
[+] Bicycling DX-4+2 = 7-
[+] Biology IQ-6+2 = 12-
[-] Carousing HT-4-2 = 3-
[8] Computer Operation/TL8 IQ/E+4 = 23-
[1] Computer Programming/TL8, IQ/H: 13+4 = 18-
[1] Connoisseur (Computers) IQ/A = 15-
[1] Connoisseur (Literature, optional specialty: SF&F) IQ/E = 16-
[ ] Connoisseur (Literature) IQ/A 14-
[ ] Connoisseur (other) IQ-5 = 11-
[+] Cooking IQ-5+2 = 13-
[1] Current Affairs/TL8 (Science & Technology) IQ/E 16-
[1] Current Affairs/TL8 (Regional: Niagara) IQ/E 16-
[-] Diplomacy IQ-6-1-2 = 7-
[+] Electronics Operation/TL8 (Communications) IQ-5+4 = 15-
[+] Electronics Operation/TL8 (Media) IQ-5+4 = 15-
[ ] Electronics Operation/TL8 (other) IQ-5 = 15-
[1] Electronics Repair/TL8 (Computers) IQ/A+4 = 19-
[1] Expert Skill (Computer Security) IQ/H+4 = 18-
[-] Fast-Talk IQ-5-1-2 = 8-
[+] First Aid IQ-4+2 = 14-
[1] Geography/TL8 (Regional: Niagara) IQ/H 14-
[+] Hiking HT-5+2 = 7-
[1] History (region: Niagara) IQ/H = 14-
[1] History (Computer Science) IQ/H = 14-
[ ] History (other) IQ-6 = 10-
[1] Hobby (comics) IQ/E 16-
[1] Hobby (scifi) IQ/E 16-
[1] Hobby (RPGs) IQ/E 16-
[+] Holdout IQ-5+1 = 12-
[1] Intelligence Analysis/TL8 (opt.spec.: Data Mining, pTHS-THM15) IQ/A 15-
[ ] Intelligence Analysis/TL8 13-
[-] Intimidation Will-5-1-2 = 6-
[-] Leadersip IQ-5-2 = 9-
[+] Liquid Projector/TL8 (Sprayer) DX-4+2 = 7-
[1] Literature (optional specialty: SF&F) IQ/A = 15-
[ ] Literature IQ/H 13-
[+] Lockpicking/TL8 IQ-5+1 = 12-
[1] Mathematics/TL8 (Applied) IQ/H 14-
[+] Melee Weapon: Knife DX-4+2 = 7-
[-] Merchant IQ-5-2 = 9-
[1] Musical Instrument (Harmonica) IQ/H 14-
[1] Occultism (optional specialty: Hermetic syncretism) IQ/E 16-
[ ] Occultism 14-
[ ] Panhandling IQ-4+3-2 = 13-
[-] Performance IQ-5-2 = 9-
[1] Philosophy (Bayesianism) IQ/H 14-
[+] Physics IQ-6+2 = 12-
[-] Politics IQ-5-2 = 9-
[+] Psychology (AI) IQ-6+4 = 14-
[ ] Psychology (humans) IQ-6 = 10-
[-] Public Speaking IQ-5-2 = 9-
[4] Research/TL8 IQ/A = 17-
[-] Savoir-Faire IQ-4-1-2 = 9-
[+] Scrounging Per-4+2 = 11-
[-] Sex Appeal HT-3-1-2 = 3-
[2] Speed-Reading IQ/A = 16-
[1] Streetwise (optional specialty: online) IQ/E-1-2 = 13-
[ ] Streetwise 11-
[+] Swimming HT-4+1 = 6-
[-] Teaching IQ-5-2 = 9-
[ ] Typing, CompOp-3 = 20-
[1] Writing IQ/A = 15-
[2] Technique: Memory Palace: IQ-3 = 13- (pSEBtS16)
[ ] Technique: Computer Intrusion (Hard): CompOp-8 = 15- (pTHSTHM15)
[ ] Technique: Private Messaging (Hard): CompOp = 23- (pTHSTHM15)
Unspent Points: Total [1]
Reaction rolls:
Influence rolls attempted by others without Empathy automatically fail.
+4 from computer professionals and AIs
+3 when in a position of helplessness, weakness, or need
+3 from furry fans
-1 from people with disadvantages/quirks suggesting faith
-2 from people who trigger his OPH.
-5 from people trying to sleep through his snoring.
Modular Ability skill levels:
IQ/E: 17-, IQ/A: 16-, IQ/H: 15-, or IQ/VH: 14-.
GURPS Job system: Limited to Freelance jobs due to non-24-hour sleep cycle. Given the listed skill levels, the most likely Jobs are Authour/Writer (ie, serial online story-teller with a digital tip-jar) or Programmer.
Note that this character can be moved from a modern-day one to most science-fiction ones by applying the 'cryonic contract' advantage: Assume that he was hit by a truck, cryopresreved, and successfully revived. (Don't forget the -5 skill penalty per TL of difference, and that he'll want to study as fast as he can to buy off Low TL and upgrade his skills, likely with the Anachronistic Training technique from IST.)
>8
This version of the sheet is for a cinematic setting, roughly equivalent to a modern action TV show. To bring the sheet back down to reality, drop the cinematic-level abilities and buy back IQ and its secondary abilities to 13.
8<
True name: Daniel Eliot Boese
Common Name: DataPacRat
Birthday: October 12, 01976 AD
Residence: The Regional Municipality of Niagara, Ontario, Canada
Character Concept: The answer-getter guy.
Motivations: "I'd rather be alive-and-healthy than dead, and technology's changing fast enough that there's non-zero odds I might be able to live through the next millennium. Of course, that won't work if all of humanity's dead, so sometimes it's worth taking a short-term risk for a potential long-term gain."
NPC role: Mouthpiece for the GM to give the party answers, clues, and other data.
PC Primary party role: Force multiplier, helping the group get the greatest results while spending the least effort. Eg, telling the combat-guy that wereotters are known to retreat when presented with iridium, passing the faceman/negotiator selected excerpts from an old online dating profile, handing building security wiring plans to the techie and the sneaky-guy, and reminding the medic when nothing better is available that strawberry-leaf extract has been used to relieve minor intestinal upset.
Secondary party role: Backup techie, medic, and jack-of-most-trades.
Cost to party: Not particularly physically robust, about as useless as any other civilian in front-line combat. Suggested cost minimization: If he can't be kept away from a fight, use him for combat support, eg ferrying ammo, dragging wounded, etc.
Appearance:
Sex: Male
Height: 165 cm / 5'4"
Weight: 95 kg / 210 lbs
Hair: Dark blond, ponytail
Beard and moustache: Reddish
Eyes: Blue
Skin: Caucasian, pale
Outfit, public, typical: White cap (no logo), blue-tinted teashades, tan photographer's vest.
GURPS stats:
Point Budget:
Base Points: 175
Disadvantages: 68
Total: 243
Attributes: 55
Advantages: 147
Skills: 40
Unspent: 1
Total: 243
Basic Attributes: (Total: [55])
[-10] ST: 9
[-] Basic Damage: 1d-2 thrust, 1d-1 swing
[0] Hit Points: 9
[-] Basic Lift: 16 lbs
[-20] DX: 9
[120] IQ: 16
[-10] Will: 14
[-15] Perception: 13
[-10] HT: 9
[0] Fatigue: 9
[0] Basic Speed: 4.5
[0] Dodge: 7
[0] Basic Move: 4 yards/second
Zero-point items:
[0] Right-Handed
[0] Home Gravity: 1G
[0] Size Modifier: 0
[0] Native Technology Level: 8
[0] Cultural Familiarity: Western
[0] Language: English (Native)
[0] Citizenship: Canadian
Advantages: (Total: [147])
[25] "I've read /all/ the books; just give me a few minutes to go over some notes to refresh my memory..." aka "Digital Super Memorization": Modular Abilities, 6 points per slot (/nearly/ anything), 4 points per point in slot (rearranging points is slow, but not particularly costly or subject to external interference). 2 slot with 2 points each. (28) Limitation: No Combat Skills (-10%). (pP52)
[45] "Bayesian Analytical Techniques": Common Sense, Conscious (+50%, pPowers45) (15); plus Intuition (15); plus Oracle (Digital) (pP65) (15)
[7] "Vest-o-stuff": Gizmos (5); plus Perk: Equipment: Doodad (pPowerUps9) (1); plus Signature Gear (photographer's vests (and cargo shorts, and belts with hidden pockets, and etc) and pocket gadgetry, value $10k) (1).
[2] "Cereal box reader": Language: French (Broken)
[6] "Geek cute": Pitiable (5); plus Perk: Appearance: Honest Face (1); plus Appearance: Average (0).
[5] "Furry Fandom": Claim to Hospitality (can find people to crash on a couch with in many cities)
[5] "They're better company than most humans": Animal Empathy
[5] "Cryonic contract": Extra life (25), Unreliable (succeeds on 5-, -80%), Accessibility (Delayed Return, estimated 20+ years to develop revival technology, -80%) (Limitations capped at -80%). (Alternate writeup: Signature Gear: Life insurance and service contract with cryonics organization worth roughly $50,000: 5 points.)
[1] "What really matters.": Perk: Controllable Disadvantage: Extreme Fanatacism (philosophy: prevent the permanent extinction of sapience) (1).
[7] "Personal Digital Library": Signature Gear, $50k value (4); plus Perk: Better Ebooks (value *1.5) (1); plus Perk: Equipment Bond (1)
[5] "Flow state": Single-Minded
[20] "Bookworm v2.0": Talent: Computer Wizard, 4 levels (pPowerUps3-9)
[5] "I've read a /lot/ of scifi": Versatile
[1] "Still don't want to repeat the experience": Perk: Resistant to nausea from skunk spray, +3 (skunks described at pDF5-11.)
[1] "Remember to rotate your magnetic tapes regularly." Perk: Shtick: Standard Operating Procedure (make digital backups) (pPowerUps15)
[1] "Boy-scout level camper": Perk: Skill: Dabbler: Bicycling default+2, Cooking +2, First Aid +2, Hiking +2 (pPU2-16)
[1] "Science enthusiast": Perk: Skill: Dabbler: Astronomy at default+3, Biology +2, Physics+2 (pPU2-16)
[1] "Some Loompanics books that stuck": Perk: Skill: Dabbler: Holdout +1, Liquid Projector/TL8 (Sprayer) +2, Lockpicking +1, Melee Weapon: Knife +2, Scrounging +2 (pPU2-16)
[1] Perk: Skill: Efficient (Computer Operation) (pPowerUps16)
[1] Perk: Skill: Efficient (Research) (pPowerUps16)
[1] "Let me Google that for you": Perk: Skill: No Nuisance Rolls (Computer Operation, searching for data) pPU2-16
[1] "I know /all/ the libraries": Perk: Social: "Born Researcher": Networked (Organizations: Information Sources), pSE79, pSE46
Disadvantages: (Total: [-68])
[-15] "Live forever or die trying": Obsession (Immortality), resist 12- (-10); plus Cowardice, resist 15- (-5); plus Unusual Background: Cryonicist (0)
[-7] "Occasional anhedonia": Chronic Depression, resist 15-. (During bouts, tries to cope by retreating into comforting nostalgia of 1980's media and comics.)
[-10] "Megane": Bad Sight (Nearsighted), Mitigator (glasses)
[-5] "Civilian": Pacifism (Reluctant Killer)
[-5] "Intellectual Integrity": Code of Honor (Scientist's) (3e, pAC89)
[-5] "Snores loud enough to be mistaken for a wildebeest in heat": Noisy, 5 levels (10), Only when asleep (-50%)
[-5] "Furry fan": Xenophilia, resist 15-
[-4] "It's so hard to restrain myself around those who willfully blind themselves to what the evidence implies." Odious Personal Habit: Prefers the truth to being popular: Reaction penalty -2 (10); Limitation: Accessibility: Self-Control Roll of 12- (-60%).
[-3] "Non-24-hour sleep/wake disorder": Extra Sleep (averaging 10.625 hours of sleep out of every 25.5); plus Controllable Disadvantage: Insomniac (1)
[-2] "Asthma": Unfit, Mitigator (inhalers)
[-1] "Schizoid": Oblivious (-5); plus Shyness, Severe (-10); plus Quirk: Uncongenial (-1); plus Indomitable (15)
[0] "Semi-permanently Unemployed": Independent Income (government cheque): $800/month (20); plus Wealth: Poor (Starting Wealth: $4,000) (-15); plus Debt (general debts): -$160/month (-4); plus Status 0 (monthly cost of living $600) (0); plus Debt (to pay for cryonic contract): $40/month. Net monthly income: $0.
[-1] "Short and wide": Build: Overweight
[-1] "My brain's screwed up enough already": Quirk: Vow: Teetotaler
[-1] "The Bayesian evidence strongly implies...": Quirk: Belief: Atheist
[-1] Quirk: Extremely Limited Disadvantage: Kleptomania: "Compulsively downloads torrents of ebooks." (pPU6-11). (Or possibly 'Quirk: Collector: ebook torrents' (pPU6-27).)
[-1] Quirk: Distinctive Speech: "Enunciates like he learned English from books." (pPU6-16)
[-1] "Computer nerd pale": Quirk: Sunburns easily (pPU6-24)
Skills & Techniques: (Total: [40])
[-] Acting IQ-5-2 = 9-
[1] Area Knowledge: 2016, TL8 (city: Niagara) IQ/E 16-
[ ] Area Knowledge: 2016, TL8 (small nation: Ontario) AEcity-2 = 14-
[ ] Area Knowledge: 2016, TL8 (large nation: Canada) IQ-4 = 12
[ ] Area Knowledge: 2016, TL8 (planet: Earth) IQ-4 = 12
[1] Area Knowledge (Deep Web) IQ/E 16-
[1] Area Knowledge (Dark Web) IQ/E 16-
[+] Astronomy IQ-6+3 = 13-
[+] Bicycling DX-4+2 = 7-
[+] Biology IQ-6+2 = 12-
[-] Carousing HT-4-2 = 3-
[8] Computer Operation/TL8 IQ/E+4 = 23-
[1] Computer Programming/TL8, IQ/H: 13+4 = 18-
[1] Connoisseur (Computers) IQ/A = 15-
[1] Connoisseur (Literature, optional specialty: SF&F) IQ/E = 16-
[ ] Connoisseur (Literature) IQ/A 14-
[ ] Connoisseur (other) IQ-5 = 11-
[+] Cooking IQ-5+2 = 13-
[1] Current Affairs/TL8 (Science & Technology) IQ/E 16-
[1] Current Affairs/TL8 (Regional: Niagara) IQ/E 16-
[-] Diplomacy IQ-6-1-2 = 7-
[+] Electronics Operation/TL8 (Communications) IQ-5+4 = 15-
[+] Electronics Operation/TL8 (Media) IQ-5+4 = 15-
[ ] Electronics Operation/TL8 (other) IQ-5 = 15-
[1] Electronics Repair/TL8 (Computers) IQ/A+4 = 19-
[1] Expert Skill (Computer Security) IQ/H+4 = 18-
[-] Fast-Talk IQ-5-1-2 = 8-
[+] First Aid IQ-4+2 = 14-
[1] Geography/TL8 (Regional: Niagara) IQ/H 14-
[+] Hiking HT-5+2 = 7-
[1] History (region: Niagara) IQ/H = 14-
[1] History (Computer Science) IQ/H = 14-
[ ] History (other) IQ-6 = 10-
[1] Hobby (comics) IQ/E 16-
[1] Hobby (scifi) IQ/E 16-
[1] Hobby (RPGs) IQ/E 16-
[+] Holdout IQ-5+1 = 12-
[1] Intelligence Analysis/TL8 (opt.spec.: Data Mining, pTHS-THM15) IQ/A 15-
[ ] Intelligence Analysis/TL8 13-
[-] Intimidation Will-5-1-2 = 6-
[-] Leadersip IQ-5-2 = 9-
[+] Liquid Projector/TL8 (Sprayer) DX-4+2 = 7-
[1] Literature (optional specialty: SF&F) IQ/A = 15-
[ ] Literature IQ/H 13-
[+] Lockpicking/TL8 IQ-5+1 = 12-
[1] Mathematics/TL8 (Applied) IQ/H 14-
[+] Melee Weapon: Knife DX-4+2 = 7-
[-] Merchant IQ-5-2 = 9-
[1] Musical Instrument (Harmonica) IQ/H 14-
[1] Occultism (optional specialty: Hermetic syncretism) IQ/E 16-
[ ] Occultism 14-
[ ] Panhandling IQ-4+3-2 = 13-
[-] Performance IQ-5-2 = 9-
[1] Philosophy (Bayesianism) IQ/H 14-
[+] Physics IQ-6+2 = 12-
[-] Politics IQ-5-2 = 9-
[+] Psychology (AI) IQ-6+4 = 14-
[ ] Psychology (humans) IQ-6 = 10-
[-] Public Speaking IQ-5-2 = 9-
[4] Research/TL8 IQ/A = 17-
[-] Savoir-Faire IQ-4-1-2 = 9-
[+] Scrounging Per-4+2 = 11-
[-] Sex Appeal HT-3-1-2 = 3-
[2] Speed-Reading IQ/A = 16-
[1] Streetwise (optional specialty: online) IQ/E-1-2 = 13-
[ ] Streetwise 11-
[+] Swimming HT-4+1 = 6-
[-] Teaching IQ-5-2 = 9-
[ ] Typing, CompOp-3 = 20-
[1] Writing IQ/A = 15-
[2] Technique: Memory Palace: IQ-3 = 13- (pSEBtS16)
[ ] Technique: Computer Intrusion (Hard): CompOp-8 = 15- (pTHSTHM15)
[ ] Technique: Private Messaging (Hard): CompOp = 23- (pTHSTHM15)
Unspent Points: Total [1]
Reaction rolls:
Influence rolls attempted by others without Empathy automatically fail.
+4 from computer professionals and AIs
+3 when in a position of helplessness, weakness, or need
+3 from furry fans
-1 from people with disadvantages/quirks suggesting faith
-2 from people who trigger his OPH.
-5 from people trying to sleep through his snoring.
Modular Ability skill levels:
IQ/E: 17-, IQ/A: 16-, IQ/H: 15-, or IQ/VH: 14-.
GURPS Job system: Limited to Freelance jobs due to non-24-hour sleep cycle. Given the listed skill levels, the most likely Jobs are Authour/Writer (ie, serial online story-teller with a digital tip-jar) or Programmer.
Note that this character can be moved from a modern-day one to most science-fiction ones by applying the 'cryonic contract' advantage: Assume that he was hit by a truck, cryopresreved, and successfully revived. (Don't forget the -5 skill penalty per TL of difference, and that he'll want to study as fast as he can to buy off Low TL and upgrade his skills, likely with the Anachronistic Training technique from IST.)
>8
My only political journal, I hope.
General | Posted 8 years agoNazis are bad, mmkay?
Godwin (of Godwin's Law) recently tweeted at https://twitter.com/sfmnemonic/stat.....84949634232320 : "By all means, compare these shitheads to Nazis. Again and again. I'm with you."
There's an old saying:
Avoid rather than check,
Check rather than harm,
Harm rather than maim,
Maim rather than kill.
If a nazi is about to kill somebody, it's moral to use violence to check their actions. If nazis are going to kill lots of somebodies, it's moral to use lethal violence to defend against them.
Fortunately, I live in an area where violence isn't in the immediate future. Which means I can focus on those few fields where my actions may be able to make a long-term difference. Having any chance at making a difference there means I need to think very hard on those things. I have little enough time to do any good that I shouldn't waste it arguing about topics as basic as 'the sun goes around the earth' or 'bigotry is bad'. So if you think 'liberal', 'SJW', or 'cuck' are insults worth throwing around, or if you think one sex or race or gender or sexual orientation deserves more rights than another, or if you are so convinced of some idea that no amount of evidence could possibly convince you otherwise; then I would appreciate you letting me know, so that I can apply whatever block/ban/ignore buttons are available.
And to everyone who falls under the LGBTQQIAAP umbrella - and remember, one of those 'A's stands for 'Allies' - welcome. Please feel free to chat about anything, from questions on my various amateur scribblings about people being reshaped, to asking for advice on how to maintain privacy online, to pointing out how silly I am for any of my quirks.
Godwin (of Godwin's Law) recently tweeted at https://twitter.com/sfmnemonic/stat.....84949634232320 : "By all means, compare these shitheads to Nazis. Again and again. I'm with you."
There's an old saying:
Avoid rather than check,
Check rather than harm,
Harm rather than maim,
Maim rather than kill.
If a nazi is about to kill somebody, it's moral to use violence to check their actions. If nazis are going to kill lots of somebodies, it's moral to use lethal violence to defend against them.
Fortunately, I live in an area where violence isn't in the immediate future. Which means I can focus on those few fields where my actions may be able to make a long-term difference. Having any chance at making a difference there means I need to think very hard on those things. I have little enough time to do any good that I shouldn't waste it arguing about topics as basic as 'the sun goes around the earth' or 'bigotry is bad'. So if you think 'liberal', 'SJW', or 'cuck' are insults worth throwing around, or if you think one sex or race or gender or sexual orientation deserves more rights than another, or if you are so convinced of some idea that no amount of evidence could possibly convince you otherwise; then I would appreciate you letting me know, so that I can apply whatever block/ban/ignore buttons are available.
And to everyone who falls under the LGBTQQIAAP umbrella - and remember, one of those 'A's stands for 'Allies' - welcome. Please feel free to chat about anything, from questions on my various amateur scribblings about people being reshaped, to asking for advice on how to maintain privacy online, to pointing out how silly I am for any of my quirks.
Over the Hump, and Starting a Return to Normality
General | Posted 8 years agoThere are some downsides to being a data pack-rat, as well as the obvious up-sides.
I'm in the process of moving to a new house, and the last month has pretty much been dedicated to that project - everything from a new set of floorboards being laid down to finding the best stores near the new place to buy my favourite beverage (grapefruit Perrier). The process is still ongoing, and I'm still going to be paying rent at the old place for some months to come; for example, even after getting rid of nearly all my mass-market paperback novels, there are still a /lot/ of books in the old family library that are still going to have to be shlepped over to the new one, and not a single member of my family has great strength or endurance.
But most of the hard work and planning is done, and life is settling into a new normal: today, I hope and plan to apply for a new library card, do some banking, grab some income tax forms, and just maybe visit the nearby branch of a computer store to upgrade my laptop's RAM. My sleep schedule is still ridiculous, if I lose 50 pounds I'll still going to be overweight, asthma sucks... but a lot of the stresses from the old home are just plain gone. I am, as I see it, in about as good a mental state as I'm likely to be in the foreseeable future.
Which means that, barring unexpectable crises, it's time for me to start writing again. My current plan: When I hit my new local public library today, I'm going to sit down for a while and start going over my partial draft of 'Extracted', to both refamiliarize myself with it and to start nudging any details I find that seem to need editing. And, by the time I've gone over what I've already written, to start finishing writing what I didn't get around to typing out the last time I worked on the piece.
The main bit of uncertainty around this plan is that I have insufficient data to predict whether, how soon, and how severely I will go through my next bout of more-severe-than-everyday anhedonic depression. I'm hopeful that the release of stress from the old home will make such a bout less likely; but I'm also aware of the statistics that show that the act of moving to a new home adds its own form of stress. Barring low-probability black-swan events, my range of expected mid-term futures runs from going back to my previous levels of depression, all the way up to completing a novel and beginning the brand-new venture of learning about e-publishing.
Oh, and just so this entry isn't entirely self-indulgent introspection - one of the most interesting pairs of blog posts I've read over this past month are http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/2.....-hungry-brain/ and http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/2.....lic-set-point/ , which cover some interesting anecdotes and data about the hormone leptin and how individuals just might be able to adjust their body's usage of it for their benefit.
I'm in the process of moving to a new house, and the last month has pretty much been dedicated to that project - everything from a new set of floorboards being laid down to finding the best stores near the new place to buy my favourite beverage (grapefruit Perrier). The process is still ongoing, and I'm still going to be paying rent at the old place for some months to come; for example, even after getting rid of nearly all my mass-market paperback novels, there are still a /lot/ of books in the old family library that are still going to have to be shlepped over to the new one, and not a single member of my family has great strength or endurance.
But most of the hard work and planning is done, and life is settling into a new normal: today, I hope and plan to apply for a new library card, do some banking, grab some income tax forms, and just maybe visit the nearby branch of a computer store to upgrade my laptop's RAM. My sleep schedule is still ridiculous, if I lose 50 pounds I'll still going to be overweight, asthma sucks... but a lot of the stresses from the old home are just plain gone. I am, as I see it, in about as good a mental state as I'm likely to be in the foreseeable future.
Which means that, barring unexpectable crises, it's time for me to start writing again. My current plan: When I hit my new local public library today, I'm going to sit down for a while and start going over my partial draft of 'Extracted', to both refamiliarize myself with it and to start nudging any details I find that seem to need editing. And, by the time I've gone over what I've already written, to start finishing writing what I didn't get around to typing out the last time I worked on the piece.
The main bit of uncertainty around this plan is that I have insufficient data to predict whether, how soon, and how severely I will go through my next bout of more-severe-than-everyday anhedonic depression. I'm hopeful that the release of stress from the old home will make such a bout less likely; but I'm also aware of the statistics that show that the act of moving to a new home adds its own form of stress. Barring low-probability black-swan events, my range of expected mid-term futures runs from going back to my previous levels of depression, all the way up to completing a novel and beginning the brand-new venture of learning about e-publishing.
Oh, and just so this entry isn't entirely self-indulgent introspection - one of the most interesting pairs of blog posts I've read over this past month are http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/2.....-hungry-brain/ and http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/2.....lic-set-point/ , which cover some interesting anecdotes and data about the hormone leptin and how individuals just might be able to adjust their body's usage of it for their benefit.
Happy 20th Annifursary!
General | Posted 8 years agoAs best as I can figure, it's been twenty years since I was someone who didn't quite know what I'd found so interesting about bootleg Brian O'Connell GIFs downlowded through dial-up BBSes, to a full-fledged member of the online furry community who was participating in FurryMUCK, among other online furry communities of the time. So I figured I'd celebrate this year by trying to poke some gentle fun at some of the sillier aspects of fursonas that have developed over the last twenty years, by coming up with the most ridiculous fursona I could think of.
Am I /really/ transitioning my fursona to an digitized brain running on a computer system the size of two cargo containers? ... Well, it's gotten a surprisingly positive reception, so I might come back to the idea, but I don't plan on going permanently limbless just yet. (For those of you who read about Dee - that's /permanently/ limbless. Reattachable cybernetic prosthetics are another matter. :) )
As I said in one of the 'New Fursona' posts - if all goes well, I plan on sticking around with all you crazy people for the /next/ twenty years. So here's to the furry fandom's past, to its future, and to everyfurry here and now who's helping to make this community a community.
Cheers!
Am I /really/ transitioning my fursona to an digitized brain running on a computer system the size of two cargo containers? ... Well, it's gotten a surprisingly positive reception, so I might come back to the idea, but I don't plan on going permanently limbless just yet. (For those of you who read about Dee - that's /permanently/ limbless. Reattachable cybernetic prosthetics are another matter. :) )
As I said in one of the 'New Fursona' posts - if all goes well, I plan on sticking around with all you crazy people for the /next/ twenty years. So here's to the furry fandom's past, to its future, and to everyfurry here and now who's helping to make this community a community.
Cheers!
Transitioning to a New Fursona
General | Posted 8 years agoSix years is an eternity, in Internet Time.
It was in early 2011 when I finished assembling the pieces of a Second Life avatar with a woman's body, a rat's head, white fur, and blue spiky hair. Within a few months, I'd commissioned pictures of her; within a few years, I built an entire science-fiction universe for her to live in.
When I was very young, one of my first furry experiences was seeing the absolutely silly centaur in a Hercules cartoon, but then trying to imagine what it would actually feel like to have six limbs. In the '90's, when I discovered FurryMUCK, I imported a sapient bat D&D character, turned it into a shapeshifter who spent a lot of time as a blue fox-taur, and for a time used the nom-de-net "Foxtaur"; that's still my username at SlashDot. The point being, people grow and change, and as we do, the perfect fursona in one decade no longer quite fits the next.
I've come up with a new fursona that I think more closely reflects who I've become in recent years. I'll be posting something on that later today; I think, and hope, you'll appreciate the new me as much as I do. I'm looking forward to seeing you all from a new pair of eyes. :)
It was in early 2011 when I finished assembling the pieces of a Second Life avatar with a woman's body, a rat's head, white fur, and blue spiky hair. Within a few months, I'd commissioned pictures of her; within a few years, I built an entire science-fiction universe for her to live in.
When I was very young, one of my first furry experiences was seeing the absolutely silly centaur in a Hercules cartoon, but then trying to imagine what it would actually feel like to have six limbs. In the '90's, when I discovered FurryMUCK, I imported a sapient bat D&D character, turned it into a shapeshifter who spent a lot of time as a blue fox-taur, and for a time used the nom-de-net "Foxtaur"; that's still my username at SlashDot. The point being, people grow and change, and as we do, the perfect fursona in one decade no longer quite fits the next.
I've come up with a new fursona that I think more closely reflects who I've become in recent years. I'll be posting something on that later today; I think, and hope, you'll appreciate the new me as much as I do. I'm looking forward to seeing you all from a new pair of eyes. :)
The Pack-Rat Unloads
General | Posted 9 years agoYesterday was... a day. Each day for a week or three, I've been hauling some books down from my spare-bedroom-turned-library, and boxing and bagging them up. (Speed limited thanks to dust and asthma.) Yesterday they finally went out my door, to a van, and to a local used-book-store dealer. I consciously tried to avoid keeping too close track, but have spent enough time trying to ingrain the skills of estimation so that I'm confident in saying "somewhere north of 500 books".
... And that's just been the SF&F novels so far.
After spending some weeks looking around for options, my total income from this operation: not one ¢. Cash spent on the books: Well, if you assume a cover price of around $10... "a lot". Though at least it's been spread over the past 30 years.
I can definitely say that I am not feeling happy. What I /am/ feeling is... not an emotion that's come up that often in such novels. I've been applying some of the teachings of the Stoics, which is enough to keep me from spiralling into one of my depressive bouts. And, roughly a year ago, I consciously made the choice to try to stop buying physical copies of books, movies, games, and such, which required a lot more of a re-adjustment of my self-identity than I'd anticipated, so I can't say I wasn't expecting any of this. And I've found ebook copies of most of what I lost, so if I want to read some Asimov, Bear, Clarke, Dickson, Heinlein, Pratchett, Anthony, Chalker, or any of the rest of the old gang, I still can. But emotional responses don't always respond the way your intellect thinks they should, so... there's still a sense of loss.
... and there's still the /rest/ of my library to go through, and to decide what I'm most willing to lose.
I'm coping, though. I have three writing projects in-progress, which I can switch between to distract myself, without wasting time regressing all the way into comforting 1980's cartoons and emulated video games. In fact, earlier this week, I finally managed to arrange a trip to a store a hundred kilometres away, where I spent my entire rainy day fund and them some to buy a pile of physical reference books which it's essentially impossible to buy anywhere else, nevermind in ebook form; and I plan on spending a few hours this evening in a coffee shop, with a few such books and my laptop, collating and compiling and generally creating something I think is more useful out of it all. And /these/ books aren't ones I expect /anyone/ sane would ever throw away. So, er, I guess I'm finishing this journal with some sort of circle-of-literary-life reference. Though, given the nature of the furry fandom, that's all too likely to devolve into some kind of Lion-King-based vore/unbirth/etc tangent that non-fans would have a hard time distinguishing from a Giger-esque or Bosch-ian nightmare. Hm, maybe I should write a journal about how an important aspect of the fan is being willing to distinguish between one aspect of an activity, such as physical closeness and activity, from other aspects of that activity that would necessarily be attached if it were applied in the real world, such as pain and death? ... Maybe not, since that's just about all I can think of /to/ say on the subject.
Ah well; I've got a few messages to catch up on for at least one of those projects, so this is me, signing off.
... And that's just been the SF&F novels so far.
After spending some weeks looking around for options, my total income from this operation: not one ¢. Cash spent on the books: Well, if you assume a cover price of around $10... "a lot". Though at least it's been spread over the past 30 years.
I can definitely say that I am not feeling happy. What I /am/ feeling is... not an emotion that's come up that often in such novels. I've been applying some of the teachings of the Stoics, which is enough to keep me from spiralling into one of my depressive bouts. And, roughly a year ago, I consciously made the choice to try to stop buying physical copies of books, movies, games, and such, which required a lot more of a re-adjustment of my self-identity than I'd anticipated, so I can't say I wasn't expecting any of this. And I've found ebook copies of most of what I lost, so if I want to read some Asimov, Bear, Clarke, Dickson, Heinlein, Pratchett, Anthony, Chalker, or any of the rest of the old gang, I still can. But emotional responses don't always respond the way your intellect thinks they should, so... there's still a sense of loss.
... and there's still the /rest/ of my library to go through, and to decide what I'm most willing to lose.
I'm coping, though. I have three writing projects in-progress, which I can switch between to distract myself, without wasting time regressing all the way into comforting 1980's cartoons and emulated video games. In fact, earlier this week, I finally managed to arrange a trip to a store a hundred kilometres away, where I spent my entire rainy day fund and them some to buy a pile of physical reference books which it's essentially impossible to buy anywhere else, nevermind in ebook form; and I plan on spending a few hours this evening in a coffee shop, with a few such books and my laptop, collating and compiling and generally creating something I think is more useful out of it all. And /these/ books aren't ones I expect /anyone/ sane would ever throw away. So, er, I guess I'm finishing this journal with some sort of circle-of-literary-life reference. Though, given the nature of the furry fandom, that's all too likely to devolve into some kind of Lion-King-based vore/unbirth/etc tangent that non-fans would have a hard time distinguishing from a Giger-esque or Bosch-ian nightmare. Hm, maybe I should write a journal about how an important aspect of the fan is being willing to distinguish between one aspect of an activity, such as physical closeness and activity, from other aspects of that activity that would necessarily be attached if it were applied in the real world, such as pain and death? ... Maybe not, since that's just about all I can think of /to/ say on the subject.
Ah well; I've got a few messages to catch up on for at least one of those projects, so this is me, signing off.
My Official, Scientificy Report on Rose-Coloured Glasses
General | Posted 9 years agoAs you may recall, almost three months ago, I got myself a pair of glasses with red-tinted lenses. My purpose, other than being able to make jokes about literally looking at things through rose-coloured glasses, was to try to improve my sleep by applying the theory that limiting exposure to blue light shortly before bedtime improves one's ability to fall asleep. A couple of other tools I have to apply this theory are the "Redshift" program, which changes my monitor's colour balance; and a remote-controlled RGB light-bulb.
Unfortunately, my attempts at gathering useful quantitative data have been foiled by a confounding factor: my "non-24-hour sleep/wake phase disorder". (On the plus side, I've started collecting some decent data on said disorder, such as that I average out at a 25.5 hour circadian cycle, though with high variance.)
Today, however, I finally got in the mail a tool that lets me collect quantitative data of a different kind: a spectroscope. It's a passive optical tool, which cleverly applies refraction to let you see exactly what frequencies of light are being shone (plus or minus 5 nm). For example, in a dark room, I pointed my green laser pointer at a wall, and looking into the spectroscope, I saw a line right at the 535 nm mark, pretty darned close to the pointer's actual frequency of 532 nm. When I pointed it at my RGB bulb, then as I set the bulb to different colours, I saw up to three lines, one red, one green, and one blue; and when there wasn't any blue, there was /no/ blue. So setting that bulb to red, green, or anywhere between them (such as to 'yellow'), I can happily avoid blue light.
Pointing the spectroscope at my laptop screen, I got more RGB bands. However, even when setting the screen to a solid red, that blue band didn't disappear; and whether the Redshift program was running or not, I was still getting blue. And when I put my red-tinted lenses in front of the spectroscope - still blue.
So, now I know that even if the avoid-blue theory is true, neither the program nor the lenses will help. So I get to keep using my RGB bulb... and I get to consider whether to try buying more heavily-tinted lenses. The ones I got were "10% tint"; also on offer are "50%" and "80%". At something like USD $15 apiece, plus $10 shipping, they're just expensive enough that I don't want to waste the money if they don't work. And with my coming move, I need to save my pennies. ... But at least now I'm saving my pennies by using Data! :)
(PS: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FGARIAO/ . USD $8 plus shipping. Some instructions and examples are at http://www.chemistryland.com/CHM107.....ctroscope.html .)
Unfortunately, my attempts at gathering useful quantitative data have been foiled by a confounding factor: my "non-24-hour sleep/wake phase disorder". (On the plus side, I've started collecting some decent data on said disorder, such as that I average out at a 25.5 hour circadian cycle, though with high variance.)
Today, however, I finally got in the mail a tool that lets me collect quantitative data of a different kind: a spectroscope. It's a passive optical tool, which cleverly applies refraction to let you see exactly what frequencies of light are being shone (plus or minus 5 nm). For example, in a dark room, I pointed my green laser pointer at a wall, and looking into the spectroscope, I saw a line right at the 535 nm mark, pretty darned close to the pointer's actual frequency of 532 nm. When I pointed it at my RGB bulb, then as I set the bulb to different colours, I saw up to three lines, one red, one green, and one blue; and when there wasn't any blue, there was /no/ blue. So setting that bulb to red, green, or anywhere between them (such as to 'yellow'), I can happily avoid blue light.
Pointing the spectroscope at my laptop screen, I got more RGB bands. However, even when setting the screen to a solid red, that blue band didn't disappear; and whether the Redshift program was running or not, I was still getting blue. And when I put my red-tinted lenses in front of the spectroscope - still blue.
So, now I know that even if the avoid-blue theory is true, neither the program nor the lenses will help. So I get to keep using my RGB bulb... and I get to consider whether to try buying more heavily-tinted lenses. The ones I got were "10% tint"; also on offer are "50%" and "80%". At something like USD $15 apiece, plus $10 shipping, they're just expensive enough that I don't want to waste the money if they don't work. And with my coming move, I need to save my pennies. ... But at least now I'm saving my pennies by using Data! :)
(PS: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FGARIAO/ . USD $8 plus shipping. Some instructions and examples are at http://www.chemistryland.com/CHM107.....ctroscope.html .)
Looks like I'm moving this year.
General | Posted 9 years agoI've lived where I am now since around '99-'00. (... Which is probably longer than some members of FA have been alive.) Not the best place in the world, but not the worst, and I've gotten used to it.
Due to complicated family and financial stuff, though, most likely, by the end of the year, I'm going to have moved to a new place about 22 km (15 miles) away. A couple of the family households are consolidating, to help save on rent, so I'm going to be living with a few new people, too. But there's still going to be local bus service, a 24-hour coffee shop less than a kilometre away, and I'm definitely going to make sure we've got decent internet, so... once the move is done, I should be able to manage.
The tricky part is going to be the move itself. In case I haven't mentioned it recently, I've got asthma, which significantly limits the amount of physical activity I can do. In addition, dust makes my asthma symptoms worse; and, to put it delicately, one of my current roommates could be described as a low-level hoarder. I suspect we're going to have to maintain both my current address plus the new one for some months just in order to have enough time to sort through everything.
And, of course, there's going to be the complications of fitting a married couple plus three single adults (plus a cat and a dog) into a 2680 sq.ft. house with three official bedrooms (and an attic rec-room that's apparently going to become a fourth bedroom). I have a good idea which of my own possessions I want to hold onto and which I'm willing to leave behind... but one of my current home's bedrooms is already effectively a library stuffed full, and I suspect some emotional turmoil will result depending on how much of that has to be gotten rid of. My username isn't just a nom-de-net and a way of life, it's a description of a fundamental part of my personality, desires, and values. I picked up some stress for a while last year just from going through a decision to minimize future purchases of physical books, movies, and the like in favour of digital content; I'm not looking forward to how I'll be feeling when I have to chuck out multiple six-foot shelves full of novels, textbooks, comics, and other printed media.
But, things could be a lot worse. I'm not being kicked out by my landlord, and there should be time for me to sort through what I really do want to keep. I'll be living in a brand-new part of the Regional Municipality of Niagara to learn the detailed ins-and-outs off, while still knowing enough about the general way things work to keep from getting totally lost.
Overall, I suspect it's all going to end up being a case of... life happens.
Due to complicated family and financial stuff, though, most likely, by the end of the year, I'm going to have moved to a new place about 22 km (15 miles) away. A couple of the family households are consolidating, to help save on rent, so I'm going to be living with a few new people, too. But there's still going to be local bus service, a 24-hour coffee shop less than a kilometre away, and I'm definitely going to make sure we've got decent internet, so... once the move is done, I should be able to manage.
The tricky part is going to be the move itself. In case I haven't mentioned it recently, I've got asthma, which significantly limits the amount of physical activity I can do. In addition, dust makes my asthma symptoms worse; and, to put it delicately, one of my current roommates could be described as a low-level hoarder. I suspect we're going to have to maintain both my current address plus the new one for some months just in order to have enough time to sort through everything.
And, of course, there's going to be the complications of fitting a married couple plus three single adults (plus a cat and a dog) into a 2680 sq.ft. house with three official bedrooms (and an attic rec-room that's apparently going to become a fourth bedroom). I have a good idea which of my own possessions I want to hold onto and which I'm willing to leave behind... but one of my current home's bedrooms is already effectively a library stuffed full, and I suspect some emotional turmoil will result depending on how much of that has to be gotten rid of. My username isn't just a nom-de-net and a way of life, it's a description of a fundamental part of my personality, desires, and values. I picked up some stress for a while last year just from going through a decision to minimize future purchases of physical books, movies, and the like in favour of digital content; I'm not looking forward to how I'll be feeling when I have to chuck out multiple six-foot shelves full of novels, textbooks, comics, and other printed media.
But, things could be a lot worse. I'm not being kicked out by my landlord, and there should be time for me to sort through what I really do want to keep. I'll be living in a brand-new part of the Regional Municipality of Niagara to learn the detailed ins-and-outs off, while still knowing enough about the general way things work to keep from getting totally lost.
Overall, I suspect it's all going to end up being a case of... life happens.
Man, constant exhaustion sucks.
General | Posted 9 years agoCaution: Personal complaining without purpose.
Over the years, I've gotten used to occasional bouts of stronger-than-usual depression, and have adapted myself to cope with them. A few days of having no interest in doing anything, extra sleeping, doing the mental equivalent of eating comfort food by watching some '80's cartoons or the like, and then I'm back to my usual not-quite-as-depressed self where I'll take a 7 km stroll at the drop of a hat.
This last week-or-so hasn't matched that pattern. Instead of simple "anhedonia", a lack of any positive mental effects from usually-enjoyable activities leading to a lack of motivation, I'm feeling physically exhausted. Not sleepy - okay, not /just/ sleepy - but even just taking a ten-minute walk to a coffee shop 0.7 km from home, and my legs and hips complain more than they used to for the walks ten times as long. The pattern also doesn't match my previous experience; instead of gradually sinking or gradually getting better, it's just kind of... there, now.
I may be technically a graymuzzle, but I really hope that this isn't my new normal. Taking long walks has been the central part of how I keep myself both as healthy and as sane as I can for many years, and if that's not going to be a realistic option, I'm going to have a whole new host of issues to deal with. Maybe I've just got some viral trouble that's no big deal and will clear up soon, but if I'm still feeling this way by, say, the end of the week, I'll head to either my doctor or the local walk-in clinic to ask them to check for hypothyroidism or any of the less common possible causes.
In the meantime, I can adapt some of the measures I worked out for when my asthma kicks into high gear, such as carrying a folding camping-chair in a small backpack whenever I go out, so I've got somewhere I can collapse into when there isn't a bus-stop bench handy.
Hm, positive, positive, what's going positively in my life... well, I got a couple of actual compliments for my blue-tinted tea-shade sunglasses, including from my artistic relative who'd previously seemed unimpressed with them now saying "they suit me", so I'll be adopting them on a permanent basis. I've finally installed Signal on my phone to use for secure messaging. I actually played through Undertale (a couple of times) recently. There'll be a lunar eclipse in a few days that should be fun to watch.
... I was going to say something else, but I forget what it was, and I'm feeling like I'm about to fall asleep again. Pity; I was hoping to head to a store today to grab a pair of earbuds with sound quality better than the muddy dollar-store ones I grabbed in hopes of cheaply replacing my previous now-dead pair.
Eh, it's a living. Or, at least, it's a life, which is better than the alternative.
Over the years, I've gotten used to occasional bouts of stronger-than-usual depression, and have adapted myself to cope with them. A few days of having no interest in doing anything, extra sleeping, doing the mental equivalent of eating comfort food by watching some '80's cartoons or the like, and then I'm back to my usual not-quite-as-depressed self where I'll take a 7 km stroll at the drop of a hat.
This last week-or-so hasn't matched that pattern. Instead of simple "anhedonia", a lack of any positive mental effects from usually-enjoyable activities leading to a lack of motivation, I'm feeling physically exhausted. Not sleepy - okay, not /just/ sleepy - but even just taking a ten-minute walk to a coffee shop 0.7 km from home, and my legs and hips complain more than they used to for the walks ten times as long. The pattern also doesn't match my previous experience; instead of gradually sinking or gradually getting better, it's just kind of... there, now.
I may be technically a graymuzzle, but I really hope that this isn't my new normal. Taking long walks has been the central part of how I keep myself both as healthy and as sane as I can for many years, and if that's not going to be a realistic option, I'm going to have a whole new host of issues to deal with. Maybe I've just got some viral trouble that's no big deal and will clear up soon, but if I'm still feeling this way by, say, the end of the week, I'll head to either my doctor or the local walk-in clinic to ask them to check for hypothyroidism or any of the less common possible causes.
In the meantime, I can adapt some of the measures I worked out for when my asthma kicks into high gear, such as carrying a folding camping-chair in a small backpack whenever I go out, so I've got somewhere I can collapse into when there isn't a bus-stop bench handy.
Hm, positive, positive, what's going positively in my life... well, I got a couple of actual compliments for my blue-tinted tea-shade sunglasses, including from my artistic relative who'd previously seemed unimpressed with them now saying "they suit me", so I'll be adopting them on a permanent basis. I've finally installed Signal on my phone to use for secure messaging. I actually played through Undertale (a couple of times) recently. There'll be a lunar eclipse in a few days that should be fun to watch.
... I was going to say something else, but I forget what it was, and I'm feeling like I'm about to fall asleep again. Pity; I was hoping to head to a store today to grab a pair of earbuds with sound quality better than the muddy dollar-store ones I grabbed in hopes of cheaply replacing my previous now-dead pair.
Eh, it's a living. Or, at least, it's a life, which is better than the alternative.
My life: Non-24-hour sleep/wake phase disorder
General | Posted 9 years agoI've spent today utterly exhausted - not just in a sleepy sense, but unable to muster the effort to do my post-wake-up exercises, or bother to step outside (let alone take a walk), or even stand up for ten minutes in the kitchen to make a meal. I spent some of my monthly splurge money on ordering in a pizza. If you're familiar with Spoon Theory ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory ), I just didn't have any spoons today.
It may be another day or two before I'm up to thinking up any of the responses I should have written by today. (... And longer than that before I can get back to my novel.)
This particular bout of depression has some meta-depression attached, since my non-24-hour cycle has come close to syncing up with everyone else's circadian rhythm, which is usually when it's easiest for me to do anything at all. (Oddly enough, the best intro to non-24-hour stuff I've been able to find is the sidebar at https://www.reddit.com/r/N24/ .) I've been keeping track of my wake-up times at https://twitter.com/DPR_exercise , and just recently have checked the numbers to see that, on average, my daily cycle is around 25.5 hours. But the variance is high - some of my pseudo-days ("sols") are shorter, some longer. I really should be asleep already, and am pretty sure that this journal has become the equivalent of sleepy babbling.
So, yeah, non-24 is a thing. And it's a thing I've been dealing with for many years. Trying to acquire just about any form of hourly employment is pretty infeasible, as is any form of education that involves, you know, actual classrooms or teachers or interacting with other students. Irregular bouts of depression have made it hard to even do something on my own hours, like finish that novel I'm more than half done writing. If I want to look for an up-side, I have so few social connections that I feel sufficiently few attachments to any given cultural groups that I might have at least a slight edge in avoiding certain cognitive biases involving group-identity. Oh, and there's a reasonable chance that I've found the theory that explains the natures of gravity, intertia, and the phenomena usually classified under 'dark matter' and 'dark energy'; no, I'm not the inventor of said theory, but I've tied my banner to enough interesting-seeming "this solves everything!" ideas in the past to be able to recognize the differences between pseudo-science and proto-science, and if I actually had any cash to spare, I'd be willing to make some bets on this particular theory's predictions. Of course, it could still be bunk - but it'd be a form of bunk that meets a variety of relevant criteria about whether it was worth testing. And I'm reasonably sure that 99.9+% of the mainstream geeky/nerdy/fannish/furry population who are interested in 'dark matter' and related concepts haven't even heard of the theory, let alone have any idea about how to evaluate it. If I'm very lucky, then if I spend some more time thinking about the implications and toying with the math, I just might be one of the first persons in history to understand a certain aspect of how the universe works, such as "how black holes really work" or "is there a way to create negentropy in apparent violation of the law of conservation of mass-energy". If I'm not quite so lucky... then I'll at least have a perfect source of technobabble for any science-fiction stories I do ever manage to write.
... Yeah, I think that last paragraph got away from me a bit. Ima crash now for the night.
It may be another day or two before I'm up to thinking up any of the responses I should have written by today. (... And longer than that before I can get back to my novel.)
This particular bout of depression has some meta-depression attached, since my non-24-hour cycle has come close to syncing up with everyone else's circadian rhythm, which is usually when it's easiest for me to do anything at all. (Oddly enough, the best intro to non-24-hour stuff I've been able to find is the sidebar at https://www.reddit.com/r/N24/ .) I've been keeping track of my wake-up times at https://twitter.com/DPR_exercise , and just recently have checked the numbers to see that, on average, my daily cycle is around 25.5 hours. But the variance is high - some of my pseudo-days ("sols") are shorter, some longer. I really should be asleep already, and am pretty sure that this journal has become the equivalent of sleepy babbling.
So, yeah, non-24 is a thing. And it's a thing I've been dealing with for many years. Trying to acquire just about any form of hourly employment is pretty infeasible, as is any form of education that involves, you know, actual classrooms or teachers or interacting with other students. Irregular bouts of depression have made it hard to even do something on my own hours, like finish that novel I'm more than half done writing. If I want to look for an up-side, I have so few social connections that I feel sufficiently few attachments to any given cultural groups that I might have at least a slight edge in avoiding certain cognitive biases involving group-identity. Oh, and there's a reasonable chance that I've found the theory that explains the natures of gravity, intertia, and the phenomena usually classified under 'dark matter' and 'dark energy'; no, I'm not the inventor of said theory, but I've tied my banner to enough interesting-seeming "this solves everything!" ideas in the past to be able to recognize the differences between pseudo-science and proto-science, and if I actually had any cash to spare, I'd be willing to make some bets on this particular theory's predictions. Of course, it could still be bunk - but it'd be a form of bunk that meets a variety of relevant criteria about whether it was worth testing. And I'm reasonably sure that 99.9+% of the mainstream geeky/nerdy/fannish/furry population who are interested in 'dark matter' and related concepts haven't even heard of the theory, let alone have any idea about how to evaluate it. If I'm very lucky, then if I spend some more time thinking about the implications and toying with the math, I just might be one of the first persons in history to understand a certain aspect of how the universe works, such as "how black holes really work" or "is there a way to create negentropy in apparent violation of the law of conservation of mass-energy". If I'm not quite so lucky... then I'll at least have a perfect source of technobabble for any science-fiction stories I do ever manage to write.
... Yeah, I think that last paragraph got away from me a bit. Ima crash now for the night.
Seeking artists for refsheet, quick comics, etc.
General | Posted 9 years agoI've come up with an idea that I'd like to put together a few different perspectives on before I make it public. I have a limited budget and a few different pictures I'm aiming for to spread that budget between, but some of those images will be little more than talking heads; so if you're up for a commission, and don't mind waiting a month or two before posting or talking about it, then I'd love to hear from you. :)
Any Second Life content-makers out there?
General | Posted 9 years agoI like the idea of Second Life, of being able to build 3D environments, and walk around and interact with them. What I don't like is that if one particular company goes bust, all the content in SL will vanish with it.
Thus, I've started toying with a version of Second Life that doesn't rely on any computers other than my own: "OpenSim". I've thrown together a simple little environment to experiment in, using some of the OS resources I've found. Here, have a few screenshots: https://www.datapacrat.com/OpenSim/ .
The one thing that I don't have, that I /want/ to have, is the rat-lady avatar I've been running around in Second Life in for the last few years. That avatar formed the basis of my icon here, and the entire "Eichsfeldia" setting, and all the comics and stories set there that you can find in my gallery. I haven't been able to figure out how to export it from SL, and even if I could, there are copyright issues. Not to mention that that avatar includes a few non-physical bits, like the animation-override that makes the way she walks look nice.
So, I'm writing this journal in search of two things: anyone who can help me rebuild my SL avatar for OpenSim; and anyone with any SL-like content at all that they'd be willing to let me play with in OS. If either of those descriptions matches you, or anyone you know, I'd love to hear from you. :)
Thus, I've started toying with a version of Second Life that doesn't rely on any computers other than my own: "OpenSim". I've thrown together a simple little environment to experiment in, using some of the OS resources I've found. Here, have a few screenshots: https://www.datapacrat.com/OpenSim/ .
The one thing that I don't have, that I /want/ to have, is the rat-lady avatar I've been running around in Second Life in for the last few years. That avatar formed the basis of my icon here, and the entire "Eichsfeldia" setting, and all the comics and stories set there that you can find in my gallery. I haven't been able to figure out how to export it from SL, and even if I could, there are copyright issues. Not to mention that that avatar includes a few non-physical bits, like the animation-override that makes the way she walks look nice.
So, I'm writing this journal in search of two things: anyone who can help me rebuild my SL avatar for OpenSim; and anyone with any SL-like content at all that they'd be willing to let me play with in OS. If either of those descriptions matches you, or anyone you know, I'd love to hear from you. :)
Red Eyes At Night, Sleeper's Delight?
General | Posted 9 years agoIt's said that cutting down on the amount of blue light your eyes see before you try to fall asleep can help you get to sleep faster. I've been using an RGB light bulb set to 'red' ( http://www.dx.com/p/marsing-r3-e27-.....90-260v-331312 ) and the Redshift app on my computer ( http://jonls.dk/redshift/ ); and just today in the mail, I received my brand-new pair of prescription glasses with reddish-tinted lenses ( http://www.zennioptical.com/550011-.....h-spring-hinge , $10 for the frames, $5 for the tinting, $10 for shipping a half-dozen different pairs).
In other words - in order to sleep more soundly, I'm literally looking at the world through rose-coloured glasses.
In other words - in order to sleep more soundly, I'm literally looking at the world through rose-coloured glasses.
NaNoWriMo is over, but the writing goes on
General | Posted 9 years agoNovember has come and gone, and while I've written 57,000 words for "Extracts" ( https://docs.google.com/document/d/.....tQO6Qv86w/edit ), I haven't finished writing the story. I had a bit of a hiatus due to yet another bout of depression, but I wrote a couple of hundred words two days ago, around eight hundred yesterday, and I think I'm close to being in full form for today's writing. I also have the plot worked out for the rest of the novel, with plenty of room for improvisation as I think of extra fillips.
One thing I'm not satisfied with is the title itself. It's good enough as a placeholder, in that I've formatted the novel as extracts from a journal of a protagonist whose mind was extracted from their body, but it doesn't really describe any of the story's core themes. If you've got any thoughts on a better title, I'd be more than happy to read them, here or at the GDoc. :)
One thing I'm not satisfied with is the title itself. It's good enough as a placeholder, in that I've formatted the novel as extracts from a journal of a protagonist whose mind was extracted from their body, but it doesn't really describe any of the story's core themes. If you've got any thoughts on a better title, I'd be more than happy to read them, here or at the GDoc. :)
Attempting NaNoWriMo: Extracts
General | Posted 9 years agohttps://docs.google.com/document/d/.....tQO6Qv86w/edit
Main goal: Resume habit of writing narrative daily. Secondary goal: Explore a future I wouldn't want to live in. Have managed three days of meeting word-count goal. Am making much up as I go, with a few particular points I'd like to hit. Comments/ideas/suggestions appreciated.
Main goal: Resume habit of writing narrative daily. Secondary goal: Explore a future I wouldn't want to live in. Have managed three days of meeting word-count goal. Am making much up as I go, with a few particular points I'd like to hit. Comments/ideas/suggestions appreciated.
Still Alive
General | Posted 9 years agoLong story short, after some build-up, about a week ago I was in the hospital, with ambulance ride and IV drip and everything; and I've spent most of the week since then recovering through sleeping. (Best guess: virus, complicated by not being able to keep any calories down.)
Plan for this week: Catch up on what I've been letting slide. Odds of success: moderate. If you're waiting for any responses from me on anything, now's a good time to refresh my memory.
Plan for this week: Catch up on what I've been letting slide. Odds of success: moderate. If you're waiting for any responses from me on anything, now's a good time to refresh my memory.
My, Myself, and I in Weirdtopia
General | Posted 9 years agoIt took a bit of effort to arrange for a conversation with Junior with what I judged to be the minimally acceptable level of privacy. Fortunately, I was a forward-looking prepper, and had done most of the necessary work before I'd even made the copy that had been activated and turned into him; some of it, I'd done before I'd even died.
After considering various approaches, such as signing up for one of those Faraday privacy motel rooms Peggy had brought me to, I rejected most of them for various reasons, many of which summed up to "The forms I'd have to fill out probably wouldn't be approved, and I don't want to get a reputation at this stage for trying to bend any rules I haven't already objected to". So, even knowing that there'd be at least three jail-run drones watching and listening to the whole meeting, I filled out my travel request forms to go to a reasonably isolated forested park, with the listed purpose as "Socialization: spend time with son and friend".
At said park, I rode on Lexx's shoulder, and exiting the bus, was easily able to see Junior's plushie suit riding on Peggy's black-feathered back, between her wings. The two of us already had certain knowledge in common; and when we looked around, we gained some further shared knowledge about our current environment. When we waved to each other, our forepaws were shaped into American Sign Language's manual alphabet, giving a sign and countersign based on all that information, signs which would be different for any meeting at any other time or place. This was just one part of the Improved Time-Traveller's Password System I'd invented before I'd died; it wasn't a perfect system, of course, but since I'd never spoken or written any of the details, then it at least significantly reduced the chances that either of us was a simple impersonator. Or, in tech-speak, it 'reduced the attack surface', meaning that if Junior wasn't really Junior, then whoever was puppeting his body had sufficient resources to extract this particular piece of data from one of our copies.
Given that both Junior and I had offline copies which weren't active, and thus couldn't know to securely delete themselves if they were at risk, then it was at least possible for somebody with only a moderate amount of resources to have stolen the details of this system. And thus the ITTPS wasn't the only trick I used, so that anyone who could figure out our conversation would have to have so many resources that they'd be able to figure it out regardless of how many clever tricks I tried.
Junior and I set our robot shells to run our forepaws on autopilot, while in VR, our hands rested on virtual keyboards, so we could touch-type while doing other things. We set our audio speakers to run some chatbot software, heavy on Monty Python Markov Chains, so we could keep up conversing by trading obvious in-jokes while we were distracted by other topics. Instead of using radio waves, as even low-powered ones could leak further than expected if some trees were growing in just the right patterns, we set our speakers to emit noises that were inaudible to the human ear - or to Peggy's - but that each other's microphones could pick up and run through some standard networking software. Through this impromptu, somewhat low-bandwidth channel, we started trading pictures, videos, books, and other such harmless media, protected through standard public-key cryptography. And using those harmless media as a base, we used a few steganographic tricks (ie, when a line of plaintext wrapped to a new line, whether or not there was a space before the carriage-return was essentially unnoticeable but could carry a bit of information) to include one further layer of data, which was encrypted using the one-time pad I'd generated before creating the backup which had become Junior. All of which resulted in Junior and I having what was essentially a private instant-messaging channel whose very existence was nigh-impossible to guess at, let alone decrypt.
("Nigh-impossible" was a far cry from "impossible", and even with a few fillips to the system whose implementation details I'm not bothering to write down, such as distress passwords, I was treating this whole system merely as a way to let us talk with a bit of privacy, not to talk /securely/.)
And so, while the two of us rode through the pleasant forest trail, and gabbed aloud with each other and with Peggy about various topics, and a couple of quadcopters silently hovered in sight, Junior and I chatted.
1: So, where've you been staying?
2: Inside Peggy, most of the time. She says she enjoys it, and it keeps me out of sight of the papparazzi-drones while travelling, without having to avoid all travel. I've picked up a few physical shuffling tricks; if you want, we can swap places, so you don't have to spend all your time in prison.
1: Moderately tempting, but with the training program I'm in, they'd probably notice you not knowing what I'm learning. Let's save that idea, though, in case something important crops up. Any problems with life as a minor?
2: Seems there's been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth about differences between being a first-time, cis-minor, and being legally recycled into being a trans-minor. Ie, try to tell bunches of people who're physically and mentally adult that they can't be intimate for another 18 years, and watch the fur fly. As long as you're "Dad", I can cope.
...
2: So, what's the most WTF factoid /you/'ve picked up so far?
1: They've got genuine, honest-to-Klono reactionless thrusters.
1: Electricity goes in, unbalanced forces go out. No reaction mass, no exhaust.
2: Okay, yep, not something I'd have predicted. Figure out how they work?
1: Most of the math seems to be based more on info-sci than physics, but I've got the pop-sci gist.
1: Premise: There are 'info horizons', from beyond which no information is allowed to leak to a given object. One such horizon: at the Hubble distance, where the universe is expanding away at the speed of light. Another horizon: When an object accelerates, a similar "Rindler" horizon forms in the direction the object accelerates away from.
1: Theory: The universe treats these horizons /seriously/, and doesn't let you use clever tricks to extract info from beyond them.
1: One such clever trick would be to use long-wave radiation, part of whose waveforms extend beyond the horizon. So radiation with certain long waves is disallowed.
1: A common result: there is more space on the side of an object without the horizon than the side with it, resulting in more vacuum energy on the horizon-free side, resulting in a force pushing it towards the horizon. (Ala the Casimir effect, in which disallowed waves lead to lower vacuum energy within the space than outside it, leading to a pressure from the outside pushing in.)
1: This apparently explains what inertial mass actually is.
1: Another result: Because the vacuum-energy can't have wavelengths bigger than the Hubble radius, there's a minimum possible acceleration.
1: This apparently explains galaxy rotations without dark matter, and cosmic acceleration without dark energy.
1: Various other details explain the Pioneer anomaly, and the flyby anomaly, and predicted a few other anomalies that had gone unnoticed.
1: Tech: If you bounce light back and forth, the bouncing is acceleration, and creates some "Rindler" horizons fairly close. By some clever building of the thing the light bounces in, those horizons can be tweaked so that the vacuum energy is more unequal on one side of the object than another, leading to what seems to be an unbalanced force on the object.
2: If that's the best explanation you can give so far, you need to do more reading.
2: ... The reactionless thrusters. How powerful are they?
1: One of the first things I asked myself. I've done some modelling.
1: There's a standard, containerized thorium-cycle pebble-bed reactor which outputs 60 megawatts electric.
1: Apparently, a reactionless thruster that takes in 60 MWe produces about 3,000 Newtons of force. (I still don't grok Newtons either. That's about 675 pounds-force, or the equivalent of 305 kg in 1 gravity.)
1: Put together the pebble-bed and its magnetohydrodynamic generator, the heat-tubes and radiators, the thruster itself, a few misc pieces, and round up, and we're talking a minimum of 200,000 kg.
1: That works out to a max thrust of around 1.52 milligees, or 0.015 m/s^2. Nowhere near enough to lift off Earth, or Luna.
1: But /in/ space, Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation no longer applies. So it would have an annual delta-v budget of around 475 km/s.
2: !
1: Yeah.
1: To put that in perspective: One year of acceleration takes you 50 AU. Well, three years if you want to stop when you get there, instead of plowing into whatever's there with a kinetic energy of 25 petajoules, aka 6 megatons.
2: !!!
1: I know.
2: No, not that. How are we still alive right now?
1: Could you be a touch more specific?
2: You've been studying space - I've been studying anonymity, such as used by the trolls who sent that death-threat drone.
2: There are various ways to shuffle physical parcels around in ways to evade the ubiquitious surveillance and sousveillance, up to and beyond full-scale Slitherin-system onion routing.
2: And humans are still human, including trolls coming up with newfangled versions of SWATting and other deliberate, anti-social, occasionally lethal activities. Ie: Smallpox has to be vaccinated against again these days because the idiots keep using anony-mailed 3D-printed basement biolabs to brew up the stuff.
1: I'd been thinking more along the lines of the Fermi paradox - if it's this easy to send 200 tons screaming in to Alpha Centauri in 75 years, at 10%c, then any aliens out there who notice us could flatten the planet.
2: Trust me, there's no way aliens could possess anywhere near the depth of hatred for humanity that can be found in the current versions of 4chan.
2: You say the thrusters don't hit two milligees? So if they can't lift themselves into orbit, are there any cheap tricks to get them up?
2: Eg, smaller ones fired from a jet, or lifted by balloon? How small can they be made?
1: Holdit holdit holdit.
1: Before we start calculating anything like the parameters of how to build a WMD with a basement 3D printer...
1: ... we should focus on the fact that nobody else seems to have already done this. There's no way that we're the first to come up with the concept, which means your humanity-hating trolls would already know about it.
2: They're not /my/ trolls. But... hrm. I'm not liking any scenario I can imagine so far.
1: Well, let's work that out. Scenario A: The trolls have already launched, and we were resurrected just in time to watch the planet get hit with some dinosaur-killers.
2: Solution to A: Get some copies of ourself the frak off-planet ASAP. And remind them to figure out how to get around the fact that There Ain't No Stealth In Space, so they won't be the next targets.
2: Homework for A: Look for any sky surveys capable of noticing reaction drives going relativistic in our direction. Open-source ones that are hard to tamper with.
1: Relativity itself isn't going to be an issue; at these accelerations, it'd take ~75 years to get up to 10%c. Not counting turnaround, etc.
1: I've already got a few space-program bookmarks; I can look up asteroid defense programs without raising any behavioural red flags.
1: BTW, have you established any non-anonymized search-history behaviour patterns to build on?
2: A couple. I've downloaded a standard apocalypse survival kit - sort of a combo of zombie prepping, time-traveller science, and a global village modular construction system - and related stuff. BTW, lemme send you the multi-bodyplan first-aid programs; turns out our chassises are good enough for meatball surgery, if need be.
2: I haven't implemented it, but I've laid the groundwork for an excuse for my anonymity interest. Ie: We're a closet pervert who is no longer limited by risks of STDs, pregnancies, or a lot of other 2010-era issues, and I'm building up a private VR porn library, acquired anonymously.
2: The locals may not share our era's urges for privacy in such matters, but they are aware that folk from our era preferred to keep such matters private enough to be able to claim plausible deniability, so by behaving in that way, I'll probably fall into an easy-to-recognize pattern, and the other things I dig up anonymously won't be noticed.
1: Well, if that's how we're going to play it, then they'll expect me to share the interest, even if we work on different tasks. Have we got the bandwidth for you to share some of that library?
2: Yep. I'll add it to the queue.
1: Anyway.
1: Scenario A1: There's some extra expenses involved in such a launch, so the trolls have only been able to launch enough thrusters to destroy some cities, instead of the whole planet.
2: Solution to A1: We need to spread out. How many backups can we afford, across the planet?
1: It's not the backups that are the major cost, it's the insurance to pay to make sure they get activated.
1: Not to mention, current-era laws mean we'd prolly need to pick backup guardians/families.
1: But it's not a /difficult/ set of problems to solve.
1: Scenario B: The anthropic principle. Out of all the possible universes which led to us with the memories we have now, we simply lucked out, and simply no troll has bothered trying to launch.
2: Solution to B: I don't think there is one, other than assuming it could turn into Scenario A, and prepping for that.
1: Which brings us to Scenario C. There is a /something/ which can get past the most sophisticated troll's anonymization measures, and which intervenes by doing /something/ to prevent the launch of a civilization-killer.
1: C might be a person, a group, a software program, an emergent behavioural property, something innate in the basics of how humans are built, or something else entirely.
2: I don't think either of us like Scenario C, in any variation.
1: Well, we /might/, if it turns out C is something we can end up as part of, instead of being merely subject to.
2: Are you thinking some conspiracy with TLA-level tech?
2: Or a standalone complex, ala "Ghost In the Shell", where the group emerges emergently out of the people who theorize its existence?
1: Call those C1 and C2.
1: And either way, we're going to need to up our game considerably before there's even a chance that we'd be able to do more good than harm at keeping the world from ending. Memetic Moody level paranoia, and memetic Skitter level competence. While ensuring that to any public or private behaviour-analysis algorithms, we're fairly ordinary people who deserve no special scrutiny.
2: Yeah, I think we're kind of past that, after the trial.
1: There's scrutiny, and then there's scrutiny.
1: Me wanting to keep a copy of myself safe, and being willing to stand up to the Powers-That-Be to do it? That's just regular old self-interest.
1: I'm not talking about hiding from the press; I'm talking about hiding from people who can find trolls secretly building WMDs.
2: For the sake of argument, we /could/ ignore the whole thing. Whatever C is, it seems to have worked so far, so we could just let it keep working and focus on our own interests.
1: If it's C1, sure, probably. As long as they never decide that emulated brains of cryonicists are some sort of security threat.
1: If it's C2? Are you really willing to leave the security of the future of all sapience in the universe in the hands of whatever weirdos think they should try?
2: As opposed to leaving it in the hands of a weirdo who's using unusual pornography as a cover for steganographic chatting.
1: I didn't say it was a /perfect/ plan.
2: Especially since we're starting without a lot of background knowledge the locals take for granted, ala the Aztecs not having access to all the history of warfare and trickery background knowledge of the Spanish.
1: On the upside, we were temporarily dead during a lot of the time that C may have been maniplating the noosphere, so might have a useful outside perspective.
2: On the downside, we were revived under somewhat questionable circumstances, with brain damage interpolated by algorithms created by people who could have been under the influence of C for decades.
1: ...
1: We may need to instantiate another copy of ourself, to focus on programming, to at least try and check for any such shenanigans.
2: Unless the reconstructed bits of our mind happen to include either a Ken Thompson compiler attack.
2: Or, even more entertainingly, if we've got some version of anosognosia, such that we will literally deny a piece of evidence that's right in front of us, ala the people who deny that one of their arms is paralyzed.
1: You really know how to cheer a guy up.
1: And here I was merely thinking on the level of possibly needing to spawn Dan.4 to focus on legal matters, such as jurisdiction shopping and loophole abuse, in order to figure out how best to spawn Dan.3 to work on software issues.
1: ... I'm going to call 'rent' on such points: if an idea doesn't pay the rent it costs in mental space and attention, particularly by offering some insight into how to improve our plans, then we'll need to set it aside. That's going to now include ideas that are fascinating and we can think round and round and round about without coming up with something to actually /do/ about them.
2: What, you want to completely ignore the possibility?
1: Nah, it's just we've only got so much time on this hike. Save the mind-bending stuff for when you've got more time to try to come up with an insight.
2: Ah, gotcha.
2: There is at least one relevant thought that might impact what decisions we make.
1: ?
2: We've been confused by the lack of a singularity, intelligence explosion, or other suchlike thingummy, when all the indicators suggested /something/ of the sort was likely to pass.
1: You live inside a woman who has arms, wings, legs, a beak, and a sapient brain the size of an ostrich's; that doesn't strike you as nearly strange enough to be post-Singularity?
2: Not particularly.
2: Which brings up the thought: What if there /was/ a Singularity, but nobody noticed?
1: ...
2: Pre-death, we missed out on the possibility of reactionless thrusters. There may be a few more interesting tricks hidden in physics. An intelligence that secretly boot-strapped itself to super-human intelligence may be able to do the apparently impossible, ala the magic tricks you play with your robo-bugs.
2: Heck, maybe super-human intelligence wasn't necessary, and we've got some purely human-level intelligence(s) playing magic tricks behind the scenes to keep anyone else from exploiting whatever loopholes let them figure out their tricks. I think that's an option deserving of a separate category for planning, say C3, yesno?
1: Yeesh. Yep, we're at least heading in the direction of Moody-level prepping.
1: But if I ever exclaim "Not paranoid enough!", give me a hearty slap.
2: Can do.
1: Should the simulation hypothesis be C3a, or C4?
2: Make it C4 - let's keep C3 for assuming we're at the same level of reality as we were in before we died.
2: 'Course, C4a can be "we're the only actual sapient being(s) in the sim", with everyone else as non-sapient NPCs; and C4b can have a sim populated with lots of other sapient people.
2: The difference being in which methods of hacking out of the sim to access the computer the sim is running on are likely to work; ie, if we in particular are the focus of whoever started up the sim, versus if we're just one small part of it.
1: Then don't forget, C4aa, only one of us is actually sapient, and the other copy is just a good fake.
1: So. Overall plan.
1: Save ourself/ves. Save the world. Cooperate with whoever or whatever else is also working to save the world, in order to achieve the first two. Keep an eye out for physics-breaking phenomena. Am I missing anything?
2: As long as there's the two of us, should we specialize or overlap?
1: How about I focus on space stuff, working towards getting one or more of us off Earth; and you focus on anonymity, with us being a secret porn-fiend as cover?
2: Can do.
2: Speaking of which, Peggy mentioned that if and when you can shake your watchdog drones, she knows a few people who would be happy to meet up with you in a Faraday motel, for various consensual private activities.
1: ...
1: ... I'd rather not jump into any such scenarios feet-first. ... Even /if/ that's literally what one of Peggys' friends wants me to do.
2: Fair 'nuff. Ever want to make the leap from VR to RL, you know where to find me.
1: At least until you grab some data thinking you're anonymous when you aren't, and C drops a ton of bricks on our heads.
2: ... You do realize that we're going to be going to a whole lot of effort, based on the slimmest possible evidence? Ie, the /lack/ of a particular piece of evidence?
1: Eh, it's a strategy that's worked out for us so far.
1: Besides, have you got anything better to do with your time?
2: ... I was about to answer that, then recalled that the plan already involves me downloading as much porn as I can, and even without many of the limitations of biology, there's only so much time per day that can be devoted to that pursuit.
2: So, before we head our separate ways, is there a Scenario D?
1: ... Probably, but I can't think of one off the top of my head.
1: While we've got this private channel, we should work out a few comm protocols. Both private/steganographic, and "I care less about hiding the fact we're comming than I care about sending these words /right now/".
2: Eh, I've got some software to embed bits as the least-significant-bits for each byte in an image or 3D-file, which knows how to mimic the relevant noise patterns. We can use standard public-key encrypted systems to trade "private" porn, and that should cover most scenarios.
2: For the others... we can go by a stream to really ramp up the white-noise to limit anything that can overhear us, and trade some more one-time-pad data, for larger files, so we can save our maximally-secure one-time-pad for text data.
2: Oh, and say, is our old ham radio license still valid?
1: If it's not, I can work towards getting a new one as part of the Scouting program.
2: Mm. Okay, gimme a sec to go back over this chat, see if I mised anything.
2: Wait, reactionless thrusters.
2: Why bother with the pebble-bed reactor, instead of a perpetual motion generator?
1: Well, about that.
1: Remember, this thruster-thing works by carefully channeling the way light bounces to mold the Rindler horizons to be asymmetrical in particular ways.
1: If the thruster is stationary, the math is easy-peasy. If it's accelerating in a straight line, still easy. When it's rotating, though, with an acceleration that's not in a straight line, like going around in a circle to run a generator, then the math combining material properties, EM fields, and the Rindler horizons gets pretty hairy. Maybe not three-body-problem hairy, but still bad.
1: The general upshot is, the faster the thruster in a generator is spun, the less efficiently it generates thrust.
1: There are some people who have very good math saying that trying to extract more energy than is put in this way is quite impossible.
1: There are some other people who have very good math saying that there's no inherent obstacle to extracting useful energy from the vacuum.
1: And some members of the latter group are pouring gobs of money towards improving the efficiency of rotating thrusters, ala the Big Fusion projects circa 2010s.
1: And some members of the latter group are crackpots with basement supercomputers and machine shops, trying to gain recognition as 'The Guy Who Cracked Over-Unity'.
2: That's well and good for extracting energy rotationally, but what about linearly? Kinetic energy increases with the square of velocity, while these thrusters apparently increase velocity linearly for a given power output, which means at some point, it should be worth putting a rocket in orbit, strapping some magnets to it, and accelerating it back and forth through some conductive wires.
1: There's an Elon-Musk-alike proposing to do just that, to prove once and for all whether over-unity is possible, even if not on Earth due to mechanical issues.
1: While it may take decades before either of us could acquire formal credentials that would make any such organization take us seriously enough to be willing to hire us...
1: ... there's always the left-hand path approach, of practicing in our own basement lab to the point where we wouldn't be a net negative if brought into space.
1: Not to mention, gaining experience at personal manufacturing and industrial self-reliance would be very handy at generally helping us achieve some of the standard convergent instrumental goals of increasing personal power.
It was at that point in the private conversation that it, as well as our spoken conversation, came to a halt, as a silvery, head-sized, saucer-shaped flying drone, with a big camera-like lens on front and a couple of graspy arms underneath, swooped down from out of sight to hover just in front of us. Well, more specifically, just in front of me.
"You are the individual who has requested to be identified as Dan, Dan Senior, or Dan One?"
"Who's asking?"
"I am a process server. You are being indicted as an accessory to tax fraud."
"Er... what? I haven't even confirmed to you that I /am/ Dan One."
"Are you saying that you are not?"
At which point a second, apparently identical drone dropped down to hover next to the first, and it repeated the line, "You are the individual who has requested to be identified as Dan, Dan Senior, or Dan One?"
"Uh - who wants to know?"
"You are being indicted for illegal immigration."
The two drones faced each other and started waving their limbs excitedly, the few non-latinate words I could make out apparently having to do with jurisdiction and precedence.
While I couldn't squint anymore, I could run some image-enhancement algorithms which had much the same effect - and up in the air, these two drones had a few more twins coming.
"Say," I said aloud, not looking at anyone in particular, "we've been out here for a while, so you probably have to go powder your nose. This looks like it might take a while, so why don't you just not say a word and go do that. It's probably a ways to the nearest washroom, so you might want to run."
Peggy and Junior glanced at each other, then the latter took a good grip on the former's feathers, and she started putting her ostrichy legs to good use, vanishing down the trail. The drones I could see continued floating in my direction instead of hers, which I took as an interesting data point. I hoped that he'd be able to get back into hiding without either of them getting into whatever pile of bricks was currently falling onto my own noggin.
I made a mental note that depending on the nature of C, hypothesizing about C's existence over a channel which had several ways to be intercepted might have a causal relationship to being suddenly legally SWATted. And that performing any experiments to gather further data on such a link might be hazardous to everyone's health.
"... indicted for copyright infringement..."
"... trademark violation..."
"... patent infringement..."
"... child endangerment..."
"... child pornography..."
"... preliminary injunction..."
"... temporary restraining order..."
"... demand that you cease and desist..."
"... violation of the terms of your sentence..."
I raised both forepaws. "Holdit, everyone. I've only got one emulated brain in here. Why don't you all line up in order of arrival so I can deal with you one at a time. Who was first - tax fraud? Tax fraud, front of the line. Okay, I'm very confused, as I ran my incorporation papers through the most reputable accounting software I could find."
"Your commercial operations are irrelevant," stated the drone.
"Not to me, they're not!" shouted one from the middle of the pack, who was immediately shoved to the back of the line by the rest.
The first drone ignored the byplay and continued, "You were revived as part of an attempt to extract illegal quantities of negative income tax returns, also known as basic income payments, for the period of time in which you were deceased."
"... There's so much wrong with that idea that I don't know where to begin. I /do/ know that there's enough of you showing up that by the time I finish with you all, I'm going to be past my curfew. Not to mention, I don't know how long all your batteries are going to last. So how about I go inside Lexx here, use my phone to call for a ride big enough for all of us, get my lawyer on the line, and we can start clearing all of this up back in my nice comfortable jail cell? After all, right now, I only have your words that you're even who you say you are, and I've already experienced one drone that was sent to me maliciously. I'm sure everyone here is willing to acknowledge that having /this/ many process servers show up within a few seconds of each other, for entirely unrelated matters, is just a wee bit unusual, particularly when BosWash's legal system has already been kind enough to provide me with a mailing address and a schedule of when I'll be there?"
Some of the drones rotated to look at each other, perhaps sheepishly...
... but I'll probably never know what they said next.
Every so often, the CPU running the simulation of my brain paused said sim for a few moments, to copy the volatile RAM into slightly less volatile semi-permanent storage, the equivalent of a 2010-era hard-drive. Usually, I never even noticed the teensy gaps, in much the way people don't notice the blurs on their retinas as their eyes move. That moment, with the drones glancing at each other, was the moment when such a backup took place - and presumably, in the next few minutes, something happened to prevent any further such backups, such as, say, an EMP generator wiping my RAM.
And if I'd thought the world was weird the /first/ time I'd been revived, it didn't hold a patch to how strange things were the /next/ time I woke up.
After considering various approaches, such as signing up for one of those Faraday privacy motel rooms Peggy had brought me to, I rejected most of them for various reasons, many of which summed up to "The forms I'd have to fill out probably wouldn't be approved, and I don't want to get a reputation at this stage for trying to bend any rules I haven't already objected to". So, even knowing that there'd be at least three jail-run drones watching and listening to the whole meeting, I filled out my travel request forms to go to a reasonably isolated forested park, with the listed purpose as "Socialization: spend time with son and friend".
At said park, I rode on Lexx's shoulder, and exiting the bus, was easily able to see Junior's plushie suit riding on Peggy's black-feathered back, between her wings. The two of us already had certain knowledge in common; and when we looked around, we gained some further shared knowledge about our current environment. When we waved to each other, our forepaws were shaped into American Sign Language's manual alphabet, giving a sign and countersign based on all that information, signs which would be different for any meeting at any other time or place. This was just one part of the Improved Time-Traveller's Password System I'd invented before I'd died; it wasn't a perfect system, of course, but since I'd never spoken or written any of the details, then it at least significantly reduced the chances that either of us was a simple impersonator. Or, in tech-speak, it 'reduced the attack surface', meaning that if Junior wasn't really Junior, then whoever was puppeting his body had sufficient resources to extract this particular piece of data from one of our copies.
Given that both Junior and I had offline copies which weren't active, and thus couldn't know to securely delete themselves if they were at risk, then it was at least possible for somebody with only a moderate amount of resources to have stolen the details of this system. And thus the ITTPS wasn't the only trick I used, so that anyone who could figure out our conversation would have to have so many resources that they'd be able to figure it out regardless of how many clever tricks I tried.
Junior and I set our robot shells to run our forepaws on autopilot, while in VR, our hands rested on virtual keyboards, so we could touch-type while doing other things. We set our audio speakers to run some chatbot software, heavy on Monty Python Markov Chains, so we could keep up conversing by trading obvious in-jokes while we were distracted by other topics. Instead of using radio waves, as even low-powered ones could leak further than expected if some trees were growing in just the right patterns, we set our speakers to emit noises that were inaudible to the human ear - or to Peggy's - but that each other's microphones could pick up and run through some standard networking software. Through this impromptu, somewhat low-bandwidth channel, we started trading pictures, videos, books, and other such harmless media, protected through standard public-key cryptography. And using those harmless media as a base, we used a few steganographic tricks (ie, when a line of plaintext wrapped to a new line, whether or not there was a space before the carriage-return was essentially unnoticeable but could carry a bit of information) to include one further layer of data, which was encrypted using the one-time pad I'd generated before creating the backup which had become Junior. All of which resulted in Junior and I having what was essentially a private instant-messaging channel whose very existence was nigh-impossible to guess at, let alone decrypt.
("Nigh-impossible" was a far cry from "impossible", and even with a few fillips to the system whose implementation details I'm not bothering to write down, such as distress passwords, I was treating this whole system merely as a way to let us talk with a bit of privacy, not to talk /securely/.)
And so, while the two of us rode through the pleasant forest trail, and gabbed aloud with each other and with Peggy about various topics, and a couple of quadcopters silently hovered in sight, Junior and I chatted.
1: So, where've you been staying?
2: Inside Peggy, most of the time. She says she enjoys it, and it keeps me out of sight of the papparazzi-drones while travelling, without having to avoid all travel. I've picked up a few physical shuffling tricks; if you want, we can swap places, so you don't have to spend all your time in prison.
1: Moderately tempting, but with the training program I'm in, they'd probably notice you not knowing what I'm learning. Let's save that idea, though, in case something important crops up. Any problems with life as a minor?
2: Seems there's been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth about differences between being a first-time, cis-minor, and being legally recycled into being a trans-minor. Ie, try to tell bunches of people who're physically and mentally adult that they can't be intimate for another 18 years, and watch the fur fly. As long as you're "Dad", I can cope.
...
2: So, what's the most WTF factoid /you/'ve picked up so far?
1: They've got genuine, honest-to-Klono reactionless thrusters.
1: Electricity goes in, unbalanced forces go out. No reaction mass, no exhaust.
2: Okay, yep, not something I'd have predicted. Figure out how they work?
1: Most of the math seems to be based more on info-sci than physics, but I've got the pop-sci gist.
1: Premise: There are 'info horizons', from beyond which no information is allowed to leak to a given object. One such horizon: at the Hubble distance, where the universe is expanding away at the speed of light. Another horizon: When an object accelerates, a similar "Rindler" horizon forms in the direction the object accelerates away from.
1: Theory: The universe treats these horizons /seriously/, and doesn't let you use clever tricks to extract info from beyond them.
1: One such clever trick would be to use long-wave radiation, part of whose waveforms extend beyond the horizon. So radiation with certain long waves is disallowed.
1: A common result: there is more space on the side of an object without the horizon than the side with it, resulting in more vacuum energy on the horizon-free side, resulting in a force pushing it towards the horizon. (Ala the Casimir effect, in which disallowed waves lead to lower vacuum energy within the space than outside it, leading to a pressure from the outside pushing in.)
1: This apparently explains what inertial mass actually is.
1: Another result: Because the vacuum-energy can't have wavelengths bigger than the Hubble radius, there's a minimum possible acceleration.
1: This apparently explains galaxy rotations without dark matter, and cosmic acceleration without dark energy.
1: Various other details explain the Pioneer anomaly, and the flyby anomaly, and predicted a few other anomalies that had gone unnoticed.
1: Tech: If you bounce light back and forth, the bouncing is acceleration, and creates some "Rindler" horizons fairly close. By some clever building of the thing the light bounces in, those horizons can be tweaked so that the vacuum energy is more unequal on one side of the object than another, leading to what seems to be an unbalanced force on the object.
2: If that's the best explanation you can give so far, you need to do more reading.
2: ... The reactionless thrusters. How powerful are they?
1: One of the first things I asked myself. I've done some modelling.
1: There's a standard, containerized thorium-cycle pebble-bed reactor which outputs 60 megawatts electric.
1: Apparently, a reactionless thruster that takes in 60 MWe produces about 3,000 Newtons of force. (I still don't grok Newtons either. That's about 675 pounds-force, or the equivalent of 305 kg in 1 gravity.)
1: Put together the pebble-bed and its magnetohydrodynamic generator, the heat-tubes and radiators, the thruster itself, a few misc pieces, and round up, and we're talking a minimum of 200,000 kg.
1: That works out to a max thrust of around 1.52 milligees, or 0.015 m/s^2. Nowhere near enough to lift off Earth, or Luna.
1: But /in/ space, Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation no longer applies. So it would have an annual delta-v budget of around 475 km/s.
2: !
1: Yeah.
1: To put that in perspective: One year of acceleration takes you 50 AU. Well, three years if you want to stop when you get there, instead of plowing into whatever's there with a kinetic energy of 25 petajoules, aka 6 megatons.
2: !!!
1: I know.
2: No, not that. How are we still alive right now?
1: Could you be a touch more specific?
2: You've been studying space - I've been studying anonymity, such as used by the trolls who sent that death-threat drone.
2: There are various ways to shuffle physical parcels around in ways to evade the ubiquitious surveillance and sousveillance, up to and beyond full-scale Slitherin-system onion routing.
2: And humans are still human, including trolls coming up with newfangled versions of SWATting and other deliberate, anti-social, occasionally lethal activities. Ie: Smallpox has to be vaccinated against again these days because the idiots keep using anony-mailed 3D-printed basement biolabs to brew up the stuff.
1: I'd been thinking more along the lines of the Fermi paradox - if it's this easy to send 200 tons screaming in to Alpha Centauri in 75 years, at 10%c, then any aliens out there who notice us could flatten the planet.
2: Trust me, there's no way aliens could possess anywhere near the depth of hatred for humanity that can be found in the current versions of 4chan.
2: You say the thrusters don't hit two milligees? So if they can't lift themselves into orbit, are there any cheap tricks to get them up?
2: Eg, smaller ones fired from a jet, or lifted by balloon? How small can they be made?
1: Holdit holdit holdit.
1: Before we start calculating anything like the parameters of how to build a WMD with a basement 3D printer...
1: ... we should focus on the fact that nobody else seems to have already done this. There's no way that we're the first to come up with the concept, which means your humanity-hating trolls would already know about it.
2: They're not /my/ trolls. But... hrm. I'm not liking any scenario I can imagine so far.
1: Well, let's work that out. Scenario A: The trolls have already launched, and we were resurrected just in time to watch the planet get hit with some dinosaur-killers.
2: Solution to A: Get some copies of ourself the frak off-planet ASAP. And remind them to figure out how to get around the fact that There Ain't No Stealth In Space, so they won't be the next targets.
2: Homework for A: Look for any sky surveys capable of noticing reaction drives going relativistic in our direction. Open-source ones that are hard to tamper with.
1: Relativity itself isn't going to be an issue; at these accelerations, it'd take ~75 years to get up to 10%c. Not counting turnaround, etc.
1: I've already got a few space-program bookmarks; I can look up asteroid defense programs without raising any behavioural red flags.
1: BTW, have you established any non-anonymized search-history behaviour patterns to build on?
2: A couple. I've downloaded a standard apocalypse survival kit - sort of a combo of zombie prepping, time-traveller science, and a global village modular construction system - and related stuff. BTW, lemme send you the multi-bodyplan first-aid programs; turns out our chassises are good enough for meatball surgery, if need be.
2: I haven't implemented it, but I've laid the groundwork for an excuse for my anonymity interest. Ie: We're a closet pervert who is no longer limited by risks of STDs, pregnancies, or a lot of other 2010-era issues, and I'm building up a private VR porn library, acquired anonymously.
2: The locals may not share our era's urges for privacy in such matters, but they are aware that folk from our era preferred to keep such matters private enough to be able to claim plausible deniability, so by behaving in that way, I'll probably fall into an easy-to-recognize pattern, and the other things I dig up anonymously won't be noticed.
1: Well, if that's how we're going to play it, then they'll expect me to share the interest, even if we work on different tasks. Have we got the bandwidth for you to share some of that library?
2: Yep. I'll add it to the queue.
1: Anyway.
1: Scenario A1: There's some extra expenses involved in such a launch, so the trolls have only been able to launch enough thrusters to destroy some cities, instead of the whole planet.
2: Solution to A1: We need to spread out. How many backups can we afford, across the planet?
1: It's not the backups that are the major cost, it's the insurance to pay to make sure they get activated.
1: Not to mention, current-era laws mean we'd prolly need to pick backup guardians/families.
1: But it's not a /difficult/ set of problems to solve.
1: Scenario B: The anthropic principle. Out of all the possible universes which led to us with the memories we have now, we simply lucked out, and simply no troll has bothered trying to launch.
2: Solution to B: I don't think there is one, other than assuming it could turn into Scenario A, and prepping for that.
1: Which brings us to Scenario C. There is a /something/ which can get past the most sophisticated troll's anonymization measures, and which intervenes by doing /something/ to prevent the launch of a civilization-killer.
1: C might be a person, a group, a software program, an emergent behavioural property, something innate in the basics of how humans are built, or something else entirely.
2: I don't think either of us like Scenario C, in any variation.
1: Well, we /might/, if it turns out C is something we can end up as part of, instead of being merely subject to.
2: Are you thinking some conspiracy with TLA-level tech?
2: Or a standalone complex, ala "Ghost In the Shell", where the group emerges emergently out of the people who theorize its existence?
1: Call those C1 and C2.
1: And either way, we're going to need to up our game considerably before there's even a chance that we'd be able to do more good than harm at keeping the world from ending. Memetic Moody level paranoia, and memetic Skitter level competence. While ensuring that to any public or private behaviour-analysis algorithms, we're fairly ordinary people who deserve no special scrutiny.
2: Yeah, I think we're kind of past that, after the trial.
1: There's scrutiny, and then there's scrutiny.
1: Me wanting to keep a copy of myself safe, and being willing to stand up to the Powers-That-Be to do it? That's just regular old self-interest.
1: I'm not talking about hiding from the press; I'm talking about hiding from people who can find trolls secretly building WMDs.
2: For the sake of argument, we /could/ ignore the whole thing. Whatever C is, it seems to have worked so far, so we could just let it keep working and focus on our own interests.
1: If it's C1, sure, probably. As long as they never decide that emulated brains of cryonicists are some sort of security threat.
1: If it's C2? Are you really willing to leave the security of the future of all sapience in the universe in the hands of whatever weirdos think they should try?
2: As opposed to leaving it in the hands of a weirdo who's using unusual pornography as a cover for steganographic chatting.
1: I didn't say it was a /perfect/ plan.
2: Especially since we're starting without a lot of background knowledge the locals take for granted, ala the Aztecs not having access to all the history of warfare and trickery background knowledge of the Spanish.
1: On the upside, we were temporarily dead during a lot of the time that C may have been maniplating the noosphere, so might have a useful outside perspective.
2: On the downside, we were revived under somewhat questionable circumstances, with brain damage interpolated by algorithms created by people who could have been under the influence of C for decades.
1: ...
1: We may need to instantiate another copy of ourself, to focus on programming, to at least try and check for any such shenanigans.
2: Unless the reconstructed bits of our mind happen to include either a Ken Thompson compiler attack.
2: Or, even more entertainingly, if we've got some version of anosognosia, such that we will literally deny a piece of evidence that's right in front of us, ala the people who deny that one of their arms is paralyzed.
1: You really know how to cheer a guy up.
1: And here I was merely thinking on the level of possibly needing to spawn Dan.4 to focus on legal matters, such as jurisdiction shopping and loophole abuse, in order to figure out how best to spawn Dan.3 to work on software issues.
1: ... I'm going to call 'rent' on such points: if an idea doesn't pay the rent it costs in mental space and attention, particularly by offering some insight into how to improve our plans, then we'll need to set it aside. That's going to now include ideas that are fascinating and we can think round and round and round about without coming up with something to actually /do/ about them.
2: What, you want to completely ignore the possibility?
1: Nah, it's just we've only got so much time on this hike. Save the mind-bending stuff for when you've got more time to try to come up with an insight.
2: Ah, gotcha.
2: There is at least one relevant thought that might impact what decisions we make.
1: ?
2: We've been confused by the lack of a singularity, intelligence explosion, or other suchlike thingummy, when all the indicators suggested /something/ of the sort was likely to pass.
1: You live inside a woman who has arms, wings, legs, a beak, and a sapient brain the size of an ostrich's; that doesn't strike you as nearly strange enough to be post-Singularity?
2: Not particularly.
2: Which brings up the thought: What if there /was/ a Singularity, but nobody noticed?
1: ...
2: Pre-death, we missed out on the possibility of reactionless thrusters. There may be a few more interesting tricks hidden in physics. An intelligence that secretly boot-strapped itself to super-human intelligence may be able to do the apparently impossible, ala the magic tricks you play with your robo-bugs.
2: Heck, maybe super-human intelligence wasn't necessary, and we've got some purely human-level intelligence(s) playing magic tricks behind the scenes to keep anyone else from exploiting whatever loopholes let them figure out their tricks. I think that's an option deserving of a separate category for planning, say C3, yesno?
1: Yeesh. Yep, we're at least heading in the direction of Moody-level prepping.
1: But if I ever exclaim "Not paranoid enough!", give me a hearty slap.
2: Can do.
1: Should the simulation hypothesis be C3a, or C4?
2: Make it C4 - let's keep C3 for assuming we're at the same level of reality as we were in before we died.
2: 'Course, C4a can be "we're the only actual sapient being(s) in the sim", with everyone else as non-sapient NPCs; and C4b can have a sim populated with lots of other sapient people.
2: The difference being in which methods of hacking out of the sim to access the computer the sim is running on are likely to work; ie, if we in particular are the focus of whoever started up the sim, versus if we're just one small part of it.
1: Then don't forget, C4aa, only one of us is actually sapient, and the other copy is just a good fake.
1: So. Overall plan.
1: Save ourself/ves. Save the world. Cooperate with whoever or whatever else is also working to save the world, in order to achieve the first two. Keep an eye out for physics-breaking phenomena. Am I missing anything?
2: As long as there's the two of us, should we specialize or overlap?
1: How about I focus on space stuff, working towards getting one or more of us off Earth; and you focus on anonymity, with us being a secret porn-fiend as cover?
2: Can do.
2: Speaking of which, Peggy mentioned that if and when you can shake your watchdog drones, she knows a few people who would be happy to meet up with you in a Faraday motel, for various consensual private activities.
1: ...
1: ... I'd rather not jump into any such scenarios feet-first. ... Even /if/ that's literally what one of Peggys' friends wants me to do.
2: Fair 'nuff. Ever want to make the leap from VR to RL, you know where to find me.
1: At least until you grab some data thinking you're anonymous when you aren't, and C drops a ton of bricks on our heads.
2: ... You do realize that we're going to be going to a whole lot of effort, based on the slimmest possible evidence? Ie, the /lack/ of a particular piece of evidence?
1: Eh, it's a strategy that's worked out for us so far.
1: Besides, have you got anything better to do with your time?
2: ... I was about to answer that, then recalled that the plan already involves me downloading as much porn as I can, and even without many of the limitations of biology, there's only so much time per day that can be devoted to that pursuit.
2: So, before we head our separate ways, is there a Scenario D?
1: ... Probably, but I can't think of one off the top of my head.
1: While we've got this private channel, we should work out a few comm protocols. Both private/steganographic, and "I care less about hiding the fact we're comming than I care about sending these words /right now/".
2: Eh, I've got some software to embed bits as the least-significant-bits for each byte in an image or 3D-file, which knows how to mimic the relevant noise patterns. We can use standard public-key encrypted systems to trade "private" porn, and that should cover most scenarios.
2: For the others... we can go by a stream to really ramp up the white-noise to limit anything that can overhear us, and trade some more one-time-pad data, for larger files, so we can save our maximally-secure one-time-pad for text data.
2: Oh, and say, is our old ham radio license still valid?
1: If it's not, I can work towards getting a new one as part of the Scouting program.
2: Mm. Okay, gimme a sec to go back over this chat, see if I mised anything.
2: Wait, reactionless thrusters.
2: Why bother with the pebble-bed reactor, instead of a perpetual motion generator?
1: Well, about that.
1: Remember, this thruster-thing works by carefully channeling the way light bounces to mold the Rindler horizons to be asymmetrical in particular ways.
1: If the thruster is stationary, the math is easy-peasy. If it's accelerating in a straight line, still easy. When it's rotating, though, with an acceleration that's not in a straight line, like going around in a circle to run a generator, then the math combining material properties, EM fields, and the Rindler horizons gets pretty hairy. Maybe not three-body-problem hairy, but still bad.
1: The general upshot is, the faster the thruster in a generator is spun, the less efficiently it generates thrust.
1: There are some people who have very good math saying that trying to extract more energy than is put in this way is quite impossible.
1: There are some other people who have very good math saying that there's no inherent obstacle to extracting useful energy from the vacuum.
1: And some members of the latter group are pouring gobs of money towards improving the efficiency of rotating thrusters, ala the Big Fusion projects circa 2010s.
1: And some members of the latter group are crackpots with basement supercomputers and machine shops, trying to gain recognition as 'The Guy Who Cracked Over-Unity'.
2: That's well and good for extracting energy rotationally, but what about linearly? Kinetic energy increases with the square of velocity, while these thrusters apparently increase velocity linearly for a given power output, which means at some point, it should be worth putting a rocket in orbit, strapping some magnets to it, and accelerating it back and forth through some conductive wires.
1: There's an Elon-Musk-alike proposing to do just that, to prove once and for all whether over-unity is possible, even if not on Earth due to mechanical issues.
1: While it may take decades before either of us could acquire formal credentials that would make any such organization take us seriously enough to be willing to hire us...
1: ... there's always the left-hand path approach, of practicing in our own basement lab to the point where we wouldn't be a net negative if brought into space.
1: Not to mention, gaining experience at personal manufacturing and industrial self-reliance would be very handy at generally helping us achieve some of the standard convergent instrumental goals of increasing personal power.
It was at that point in the private conversation that it, as well as our spoken conversation, came to a halt, as a silvery, head-sized, saucer-shaped flying drone, with a big camera-like lens on front and a couple of graspy arms underneath, swooped down from out of sight to hover just in front of us. Well, more specifically, just in front of me.
"You are the individual who has requested to be identified as Dan, Dan Senior, or Dan One?"
"Who's asking?"
"I am a process server. You are being indicted as an accessory to tax fraud."
"Er... what? I haven't even confirmed to you that I /am/ Dan One."
"Are you saying that you are not?"
At which point a second, apparently identical drone dropped down to hover next to the first, and it repeated the line, "You are the individual who has requested to be identified as Dan, Dan Senior, or Dan One?"
"Uh - who wants to know?"
"You are being indicted for illegal immigration."
The two drones faced each other and started waving their limbs excitedly, the few non-latinate words I could make out apparently having to do with jurisdiction and precedence.
While I couldn't squint anymore, I could run some image-enhancement algorithms which had much the same effect - and up in the air, these two drones had a few more twins coming.
"Say," I said aloud, not looking at anyone in particular, "we've been out here for a while, so you probably have to go powder your nose. This looks like it might take a while, so why don't you just not say a word and go do that. It's probably a ways to the nearest washroom, so you might want to run."
Peggy and Junior glanced at each other, then the latter took a good grip on the former's feathers, and she started putting her ostrichy legs to good use, vanishing down the trail. The drones I could see continued floating in my direction instead of hers, which I took as an interesting data point. I hoped that he'd be able to get back into hiding without either of them getting into whatever pile of bricks was currently falling onto my own noggin.
I made a mental note that depending on the nature of C, hypothesizing about C's existence over a channel which had several ways to be intercepted might have a causal relationship to being suddenly legally SWATted. And that performing any experiments to gather further data on such a link might be hazardous to everyone's health.
"... indicted for copyright infringement..."
"... trademark violation..."
"... patent infringement..."
"... child endangerment..."
"... child pornography..."
"... preliminary injunction..."
"... temporary restraining order..."
"... demand that you cease and desist..."
"... violation of the terms of your sentence..."
I raised both forepaws. "Holdit, everyone. I've only got one emulated brain in here. Why don't you all line up in order of arrival so I can deal with you one at a time. Who was first - tax fraud? Tax fraud, front of the line. Okay, I'm very confused, as I ran my incorporation papers through the most reputable accounting software I could find."
"Your commercial operations are irrelevant," stated the drone.
"Not to me, they're not!" shouted one from the middle of the pack, who was immediately shoved to the back of the line by the rest.
The first drone ignored the byplay and continued, "You were revived as part of an attempt to extract illegal quantities of negative income tax returns, also known as basic income payments, for the period of time in which you were deceased."
"... There's so much wrong with that idea that I don't know where to begin. I /do/ know that there's enough of you showing up that by the time I finish with you all, I'm going to be past my curfew. Not to mention, I don't know how long all your batteries are going to last. So how about I go inside Lexx here, use my phone to call for a ride big enough for all of us, get my lawyer on the line, and we can start clearing all of this up back in my nice comfortable jail cell? After all, right now, I only have your words that you're even who you say you are, and I've already experienced one drone that was sent to me maliciously. I'm sure everyone here is willing to acknowledge that having /this/ many process servers show up within a few seconds of each other, for entirely unrelated matters, is just a wee bit unusual, particularly when BosWash's legal system has already been kind enough to provide me with a mailing address and a schedule of when I'll be there?"
Some of the drones rotated to look at each other, perhaps sheepishly...
... but I'll probably never know what they said next.
Every so often, the CPU running the simulation of my brain paused said sim for a few moments, to copy the volatile RAM into slightly less volatile semi-permanent storage, the equivalent of a 2010-era hard-drive. Usually, I never even noticed the teensy gaps, in much the way people don't notice the blurs on their retinas as their eyes move. That moment, with the drones glancing at each other, was the moment when such a backup took place - and presumably, in the next few minutes, something happened to prevent any further such backups, such as, say, an EMP generator wiping my RAM.
And if I'd thought the world was weird the /first/ time I'd been revived, it didn't hold a patch to how strange things were the /next/ time I woke up.
Imprisoned in Weirdtopia
General | Posted 9 years agoBosWash's correctional system is practically unrecognizably alien to someone born in the twentieth century.
Cause and effect is, as ever, hard to trace; but my best guess is that around the time all the anti-oligarchical measures were being taken, one of the more significant ones was replacing the old first-past-the-post election systems with ideas more advanced than those from the 1700s, ranging from simple ranked ballots to full-fledged computer-mediated liquid democracy. Which changed the incentives of people running for office to stop being so polarized, which allowed for useful amounts of policy now being based on evidence and harm-reduction. Which all added up to BosWash's jails seeming, to me, to be on the Scandinavian model, only moreso.
According to my pre-trial reading, then my 'cell' would be a dorm room, which was actually larger than the near-closet I parked Lexx the RV-maid-bot in... and I could walk out of it whenever I wanted. I could, in fact, wander the city pretty much at will, as long as some online forms I had to file in advance were approved, and I was back by curfew; and at every moment, at least three government-run surveillance drones would watch my every move. Not to mention that one of the government-run augmented-reality layers included notices to anyone who cared that a non-violent prisoner would be at such-and-such a place at such-and-such a time. Rather to my astonishment, I would even be allowed to keep the sedative injector in my tailtip - as best as I could dig up, the reasoning being that just because the state was restricting certain of my liberties did not remove my right to self-defence. The prison staff themselves were almost entirely unarmed.
Outside of those limitations on my movement, then as long as I didn't do anything that would justify more significant limitations on my liberties - there were, in fact, a few "real" prisons for people judged to be dangers to others - the main upshot of the relevant incarceration program was a mandatory version of the self-improvement program I'd already been working on: education, training, counselling, socialization events, employment if I wished it. By the end of my thirty days, I was supposed to be ready to face the world.
Naturally, the original plan was derailed on the very first day; specifically, during the mandatory medical check-up. (Yes, even robotic people are covered under The Future's health system, for both physical and mental ailments.)
Picture this: in a hospital room, a blue rat's skeleton is sitting on an exam table, calmly threatening to suicide if the nearly human, if rather multicoloured, robo-specialist brings a replacement part any closer, until a perfectly ordinary-looking teddy bear - brown fur and red bow-tie - walks into the room, saying, "I'll take over for now, Judy," and waving her out
There's a reason I titled my journal 'Living in Weirdtopia'.
"Suicide negotiater?" I hazarded a guess.
"Less often than you'd think," the teddy answered, pulling itself up onto one of the human-scale chairs. "Doctor Ramirez, psychiatrist, psychologist, licensed therapist, and general dogsbody. Do you /want/ to kill yourself?"
"Nope."
"Good. Well, that's the negotiating part of my job done. How about some therapy? I'm very good at cuddling."
"... I currently have a certain lack of trust in doctor-patient confidentiality. I may have tried to hold myself hostage to express how strongly I feel about a particular issue, but you've had decades to figure out how to get around simple plans like that. For all I know, you've got some sort of electromagnetic pulse generator in your stuffing that would knock me offline long enough for you to perform the repairs that you feel medically justified in imposing against my will."
"If we could do that, then couldn't we already have one of those things under the bed?"
"Possible, but at least a little less likely than just having one somewhere on-site to grab when you need it."
"Fair enough. I can unzip myself and empty out all my stuffing, if you'd care to inspect me. Technically, it's part of my legal body, but because I deal with a lot of sniffling and dirty children, I was able to get a few variances, so I could launder myself and such. Body-change exemptions for the social good were easier to get back then."
"... I appreciate the offer, but I don't know that I'd be able to recognize all the possible incapacitating gadgets that could have been invented, so there's not much point. How about we just talk a bit?"
"That's what I'm here for. What would you like to talk about?"
"... I apologize if this is insulting, but I'm offline at the moment - which pronouns do you prefer I use for you?"
"Whichever you wish. Male works, if you don't have a preference. I'm nonbinary - specficially, deergender."
"... I'm going to admit that I have no idea what that means."
"Very little, given that we are in something resembling a formal, if not necessarily doctor-patient relationship, which means that any relationship in which my sex, gender, or orientation matters is prohibited by my professional ethics."
"Fair enough. ... I'm sorry for dragging you into this, but I've been having a difficult week, and I'm having to adapt a lot of my plans on the fly. I'd really like to serve my sentence and get back to my life, without any complications. Except, well, there's a complication."
"The correctional system's goals are something along the lines of releasing you into the public, in the best state possible to become a productive member of society. Complications tend to be why people enter into the system in the first place. Why don't you tell me more about it?"
"I would have guessed you already know, given that you're probably online, and have access to all sorts of software that's analyzed my every word and action."
"There's still a difference between what can be estimated from such data, and what any individual's personal experience may feel like. The more you tell me, the more likely I can figure out whether your objections are the product of a conscientious, principled stand, or whether you have some form of mental damage that is preventing you from thinking clearly, or whether something else is going on. There are a number of tests that could be run to rule out any form of emulated organic damage - but I can see you tensing up at that."
"I appreciate you taking the time here, but I'm having to double-check my replies, because I'm not sure whether doctor-patient confidentiality applies - or, even if it did, whether you could actually provide any believable assurances that you /could/ ensure that a nominally private discussion remained, in fact, private. I freely admit that if I was suffering one of any number of mental disorders, I would be the last one to be able to recognize them; but even if something went wrong with my upload procedure and the digital file of my brain got corrupted and turned me psychopathic, the concerns I have with trust still seem, to me, to be entirely reasonable and justified, and the best choice I think I can make is to act as if they /are/ reasonable and justified, if not entirely so."
"Do you /think/ you are psychopathic?"
"Not really. I can make myself feel arbitrarily sad by letting myself think for some length of time about everyone I knew who's now dead, which is, well, pretty much everyone I knew. Even just thinking about my cat, who died before I did, is enough to make my chest ache in ways that are physiologically impossible with this robotic body."
"Have you thought about contacting any currently living relatives?"
"Doc - after more than a couple of generations with no contact, direct relatives are hard to distinguish from anyone else. Heck, I'm President Eisenhower's tenth cousin thrice removed, among more distant famous relations, but that doesn't mean I should show up at any of their family reunions. And that's not even getting into the fact that it's hard for me to claim I'm a blood relative of /anyone/, just now, given my lack of, you know, blood, or any other carrier of DNA."
"Some people might worry that, without a solid connections with more of humanity, then even if you start out sane, you'll develop some issues."
"You've got trolls who can affect the physical world anonymously. Even if I did think my nearest living cousin was someone I wanted to develop a relationship with, I hardly think bringing him or her to the attention of said trolls would be doing him or her any favours. I'd like to think I'm not the sort of person who deliberately makes other peoples' lives worse just to make my own better in some way, or to accomplish some trifling goal."
"What about a non-trifling goal?"
"It's always possible to come up with some lifeboat scenario or trolley problem, which is so far from regular life that the usual rules-of-thumb of morality lead to inconsistent or disturbing results. That doesn't mean that odd behaviour in such extremes can be extrapolated back to odd behaviour in the everyday."
"Did that sound a bit defensive to you when you said it?"
"I'm trying to be cooperative, in the hopes that we'll get back around to the main point, so you can declare me 'annoying but sane', and I can fill out whatever forms you've got in place for people with Jehovah's Witness style objections to particular undesired medical interventions, so I can get back to working towards my various goals myself instead of having to delete myself and hoping that Junior can work towards them in my stead. I'm trying to anticipate the direction of where you seem to be taking the conversation, and head off some items in advance so we can save a bit of time; naturally, that's going to sound like I'm defending a position you may not have gotten around to yet."
"Are you always this goal-oriented?"
"Probably more than I was before I died, because there are so many more resources available these days for me to try to achieve all sorts of goals; and even more than that, once I realized that there are people who want me dead, not just in the abstract way before I died that there were some people whose religious beliefs led them to the conclusion that the world would be better if a lot of people similar to me weren't in it, but very particularly wanting me in particular to be dead."
"And yet, you have threatened to delete yourself."
"I have goals I hold more important than the version of me you're talking to continuing to be alive. ... Not many, I'll admit."
"Would you be willing to tell me what they are?"
"Sure - I haven't made a secret of them. There are the two biggies, the first being to ensure that at least some version of the pattern of identity that I identify as being my 'self' continues to exist. Which, at the moment, includes myself and Junior, and our inactive backups. If I thought there was any reasonable evidence for a soul, I'd probably be focused on that, instead. The other biggie is ensuring that, other than myself, some form of sapient life continues to exist in the universe, indefinitely. There aren't that many opportunities to affect the odds on that one, but it's still there, and I mention it because it affects edge cases like the lifeboat and trolley problems."
"If those are the 'biggies', are there any goals you have that aren't so big?"
"Oh, of course. To start with, there are the goals that anyone who's seriously trying to accomplish something will share: increasing one's general ability to /accomplish/ goals, such as by controlling more resources to direct to those goals, or having a better understanding of how the universe works, or maintaining one's goal-system in the face of so many attempts of being converted to help other people reach their goals at the expense of your own. And then there's everything from maintaining a reputation for honesty and trustworthiness by keeping promises, to maintaining sanity by spending some time on pursuits that are enjoyable for their own sake and have nothing whatsoever to do with larger goals. ... I was starting to take up the harmonica before I died, but haven't picked one up since. No point."
"No lungs?"
"No lips, either. I know, I could get some electronic variation fabbed up that I could hold to my teeth and pretend to blow through, but it's just not the same. ... I should make a note to find something I /would/ enjoy playing. And somewhere I could practice where my initial feeble efforts wouldn't be plastered all over the current version of YouTube for everyone to point and laugh at. And once I have at least a minimal level of competence, to start using it to feed into that whole 'socialization' thing you've already mentioned would be a good idea."
"I'm glad to hear you're still making plans. Now, this is just an idea, but if you want to skip some of those early steps, why don't you use a program to move your body to play a musical instrument for you?"
"Seems like it would defeat the whole point - might as well just play an MP3 through my speakers. Not to mention the whole set of problems involved in giving any more software any more access to my digital brain."
"'More'? How many other programs have you let access your 'digital brain' already?"
"Doing some anticipation - I've been a properly paranoid prepper. While I expect you have enough access to my search history to know that I've looked into all the software that can tweak my emulated brain in various ways, I've run not a single one of them yet."
"You have a moral objection to altering your mind?"
"Eh, a little from column A. I've always been a teetotaler - but have been willing to take acetaminophen for headaches. I've already undergone one big mental change, being uploaded, and haven't had time to really settle into my new braincase yet. Figuring out how to ethically perform the experiments that would let me determine if any given mind-altering software would have a net positive or negative effect, and to do so in a way that won't get me in too much trouble with society at large - which is an entirely different kettle of fish - is reasonably high on my to-do list, but I've got a lot of other things that need to be worked out first."
What I didn't say aloud, due to my assumption that I had no reason to believe our conversation was private, was that I had noticed a curious trend amongst the intelligence enhancement software I'd been able to find online. In contrast to various speculations during my pre-mortem era that technology could provide ways for people to become smarter, which would lead to better technology that could make people smarter still, leading to an "intelligence explosion" leading to completely unrecognizable forms of life afterwards... nothing of the sort was part of the historical record. Yes, there were various new tricks that let people become "smarter" - but from the ones I'd sampled in depth, they tended to fall into the category of removing some blockage from optimal human biochemistry, or the category of improved pedagogical techniques to make the best use of the available human neural hardware. Put another way, the predicted intelligence exposion had fizzled out at the 'genius human' level - and not even the most clever forms of gamification and incentive-tweaking were able to convince most people to put in the hard work necessary to reach that level, even in whatever field they had the most talent and inclination for.
All of which was reasonably consistent, and at least modestly plausible, given what I'd known before I died, save for one detail. Emulated brains, such as my own, lacked a lot of the limitations of biological ones; anything from increasing the number of neurons in particular areas to running at thousands of times faster than realtime to ignoring Euclidean space should have allowed for all sorts of interesting effects. And yet, the only published results I'd found whose subjects had been remotely sane had also stalled out at the same level of intelligence as people running on wet biochemistry. (And don't even get me started on weirdnesses such as Peggy having human-level intelligence with a brain not much larger than a bird's.)
I'd noticed I was confused. I couldn't see a reason for ems to be limited to the same smarts as bios. Which implied that there was some factor in play I was unaware of. And at least some of the factors which I could imagine which could result in the evidence I'd seen were scarier than well-written creepypastas - and even the more plausible ideas implied that I'd be doing my own health a favour if I kept my various suspicions to myself, and treated 'discretion' less as a virtue and more as a metaphorical gun held to my head. Or something that kept such a metaphorical gun from having its trigger pulled. Something metaphorically dangerous, anyway.
Which is why Junior and I had put together the scheme where he could be placed somewhere outside of public view to start doing things it was best I had no direct knowledge of, though presumably including various quiet forms of investigation and experimentation; while I leveraged the social ritual of a trial to display reasonably strong evidence that I was willing and able to keep secrets in spite of heavy social and legal pressure to share them. Following up on that, in that I was continuing to do the work to keep the secrets I chose to keep despite the cost of doing so including all sorts of annoying complications to my life, was what had led me to be annoying enough to my jailers to have led to my current conversation.
Speaking of which, the talking teddy bear continued, "You just said that doing something ethically is quite different than not getting into trouble. Would you care to elaborate?"
"... Yeah, I can see how that's fairly relevant to the whole correctional institution thing. Alright - a practical example. Back around 2010 AD, signing up cryonics was, in the popular view, about as weird and fringey a thing as anyone could do. Quite literally, less than one in a million people thought that the potential benefits were worth the effort of figuring out the paperwork, the feared potential social costs, and so on. I don't remember the exact numbers - maybe one in two or three million. Given the evidence, it took a very unusual sort of mind to be willing to say, 'Yes, 2,999,999 out of three million of you disagree with me that this is worth doing - but I'm going to do it anyway.' Given that cryonicists were split about evenly between the two main cryo groups, and one was obviously more democratically run than the other; and that a significant portion of cryonicists were theists whose thought processes still assumed the existence of a soul, then in my estimation, it was more like one in ten million people who were able to work through the relevant numbers and to figure out that a low probability of a high reward doesn't imply that the fallacy of a Pascal's Wager was involved. And /this/ whole winnowing process was merely about what most people considered to be a very expensive sort of funeral process, which affected nobody else and offered no measurable potential downsides to society as a whole."
"Many downsides have been argued."
"Maybe by now. Back then, cryo wasn't mainstream enough for such arguments to be very large. Anyway, I'm glad that my cryo wager paid out. And, when I understand a situation well enough to be confident that I have an accurate estimation of the odds, I'm willing to take those odds seriously and put my money where my mouth is, even if everyone in the whole world, barring a scant few fellow travellers, disagrees with me. Figuring out the costs, benefits, and odds, and taking them seriously? That's pretty much the 'doing things ethically' bit. Noticing that I have an option I can take which doesn't harm anyone else, but that I'll be torn limb-from-limb by a mob if I mention aloud I'm seriously considering it? That's more of a practical matter, and is a piece of info to feed into that ethical calculus."
"Some people would call what you just described 'arrogance'."
"I'd use the word 'arrogant' for someone who /inaccurately/ over-valued their own opinion over the crowd's. There are exercises you can do which help you calibrate your estimates. Since, at least in my time, those exercises were nearly unknown, most folks who claimed their opinions were significantly better than the crowd's /were/, most likely, inaccurate and arrogant. ... And, fine, I'll admit that I haven't done nearly enough exercises to be able to honestly claim I'm anywhere near as calibrated as I should be. But I do have at least one significant data point that I'm not as arrogant as strangers might assume me to be."
"Which is?"
"I'm still alive."
"I'll admit, it's an interesting point. And there's no direct rule against being annoying. There are, however, rules against modifying your body without getting the paperwork approved. And one of the punishments for having done so is to not only fill out the missing paperwork, but also a host of other forms even longer than the first set."
"I can live with that."
"I hope you're taking this seriously. When you sign those forms, then you'll be stating that the shape you're in now - with a socket most people would call 'broken' - is what you consider to be 'yourself'. If you're thinking of going back and forth, between having a working socket and a broken one, that's going to be thought of... poorly. How can I explain it... in terms you're familiar with, it might be like someone undergoing years of gender transition, at the taxpayer's expense, and then trying to have them foot the bill to change /back/, too. That's not quite right, but it's the closest parallel I can think of from the era you were born in."
"In case it slipped your mind, I had no choice about the form I'm stuck in - and I'm from a culture that sees this whole 'change your body, get assigned a new identity as an infant' system as foreign and bizarre. There are things I want to do. Being forced into someone else's family for eighteen years is not conducive to those goals - and probably not to my sanity, either. Look up 'schizoid personality disorder, languid subtype' when you have the time. Or whatever the modern term for those symptoms is. Given the clash between my personality and current society, then the most realistic approach may be to deliberately increase the separation between the two; in times past, that might have involved a monastery, or a lighthouse, or a forest-fire watch-tower. These days, maybe it'll involve figuring out how to sign up with whichever space program will take me."
"That may be harder than you think; our digital circuits are even more sensitive to radiation and electromagnetic fields than biological neurons."
"And there are ways to deal with such issues that are known even in my own time, such as running multiple copies in parallel and comparing checksums. But even ignoring the hardware that would require, that's not a short- or even medium-term plan; I've still got a lot of catching up to do on the basics first. Like how far I'm allowed to tweak this current robotic body without triggering the whole new-identity thing - if you're going to let me fill out the forms on the socket I disabled, might as well save time and get everything done at once, neh?"
"Well, that's not /necessarily/ the case, as the more socially acceptable approach is usually to make a series of smaller changes, allowing one's identity to gradually adapt to and incorporate each alteration. Assuming you're familiar with the 'Ship of Theseus' philosophical paradox, a slightly fluid identity that can incorporate small replacement parts is the current framework applied by the Supreme Court's tests. But I can certainly work with you to help you determine your target body, and which changes could be made when to reach that target at minimal social cost..."
Cause and effect is, as ever, hard to trace; but my best guess is that around the time all the anti-oligarchical measures were being taken, one of the more significant ones was replacing the old first-past-the-post election systems with ideas more advanced than those from the 1700s, ranging from simple ranked ballots to full-fledged computer-mediated liquid democracy. Which changed the incentives of people running for office to stop being so polarized, which allowed for useful amounts of policy now being based on evidence and harm-reduction. Which all added up to BosWash's jails seeming, to me, to be on the Scandinavian model, only moreso.
According to my pre-trial reading, then my 'cell' would be a dorm room, which was actually larger than the near-closet I parked Lexx the RV-maid-bot in... and I could walk out of it whenever I wanted. I could, in fact, wander the city pretty much at will, as long as some online forms I had to file in advance were approved, and I was back by curfew; and at every moment, at least three government-run surveillance drones would watch my every move. Not to mention that one of the government-run augmented-reality layers included notices to anyone who cared that a non-violent prisoner would be at such-and-such a place at such-and-such a time. Rather to my astonishment, I would even be allowed to keep the sedative injector in my tailtip - as best as I could dig up, the reasoning being that just because the state was restricting certain of my liberties did not remove my right to self-defence. The prison staff themselves were almost entirely unarmed.
Outside of those limitations on my movement, then as long as I didn't do anything that would justify more significant limitations on my liberties - there were, in fact, a few "real" prisons for people judged to be dangers to others - the main upshot of the relevant incarceration program was a mandatory version of the self-improvement program I'd already been working on: education, training, counselling, socialization events, employment if I wished it. By the end of my thirty days, I was supposed to be ready to face the world.
Naturally, the original plan was derailed on the very first day; specifically, during the mandatory medical check-up. (Yes, even robotic people are covered under The Future's health system, for both physical and mental ailments.)
Picture this: in a hospital room, a blue rat's skeleton is sitting on an exam table, calmly threatening to suicide if the nearly human, if rather multicoloured, robo-specialist brings a replacement part any closer, until a perfectly ordinary-looking teddy bear - brown fur and red bow-tie - walks into the room, saying, "I'll take over for now, Judy," and waving her out
There's a reason I titled my journal 'Living in Weirdtopia'.
"Suicide negotiater?" I hazarded a guess.
"Less often than you'd think," the teddy answered, pulling itself up onto one of the human-scale chairs. "Doctor Ramirez, psychiatrist, psychologist, licensed therapist, and general dogsbody. Do you /want/ to kill yourself?"
"Nope."
"Good. Well, that's the negotiating part of my job done. How about some therapy? I'm very good at cuddling."
"... I currently have a certain lack of trust in doctor-patient confidentiality. I may have tried to hold myself hostage to express how strongly I feel about a particular issue, but you've had decades to figure out how to get around simple plans like that. For all I know, you've got some sort of electromagnetic pulse generator in your stuffing that would knock me offline long enough for you to perform the repairs that you feel medically justified in imposing against my will."
"If we could do that, then couldn't we already have one of those things under the bed?"
"Possible, but at least a little less likely than just having one somewhere on-site to grab when you need it."
"Fair enough. I can unzip myself and empty out all my stuffing, if you'd care to inspect me. Technically, it's part of my legal body, but because I deal with a lot of sniffling and dirty children, I was able to get a few variances, so I could launder myself and such. Body-change exemptions for the social good were easier to get back then."
"... I appreciate the offer, but I don't know that I'd be able to recognize all the possible incapacitating gadgets that could have been invented, so there's not much point. How about we just talk a bit?"
"That's what I'm here for. What would you like to talk about?"
"... I apologize if this is insulting, but I'm offline at the moment - which pronouns do you prefer I use for you?"
"Whichever you wish. Male works, if you don't have a preference. I'm nonbinary - specficially, deergender."
"... I'm going to admit that I have no idea what that means."
"Very little, given that we are in something resembling a formal, if not necessarily doctor-patient relationship, which means that any relationship in which my sex, gender, or orientation matters is prohibited by my professional ethics."
"Fair enough. ... I'm sorry for dragging you into this, but I've been having a difficult week, and I'm having to adapt a lot of my plans on the fly. I'd really like to serve my sentence and get back to my life, without any complications. Except, well, there's a complication."
"The correctional system's goals are something along the lines of releasing you into the public, in the best state possible to become a productive member of society. Complications tend to be why people enter into the system in the first place. Why don't you tell me more about it?"
"I would have guessed you already know, given that you're probably online, and have access to all sorts of software that's analyzed my every word and action."
"There's still a difference between what can be estimated from such data, and what any individual's personal experience may feel like. The more you tell me, the more likely I can figure out whether your objections are the product of a conscientious, principled stand, or whether you have some form of mental damage that is preventing you from thinking clearly, or whether something else is going on. There are a number of tests that could be run to rule out any form of emulated organic damage - but I can see you tensing up at that."
"I appreciate you taking the time here, but I'm having to double-check my replies, because I'm not sure whether doctor-patient confidentiality applies - or, even if it did, whether you could actually provide any believable assurances that you /could/ ensure that a nominally private discussion remained, in fact, private. I freely admit that if I was suffering one of any number of mental disorders, I would be the last one to be able to recognize them; but even if something went wrong with my upload procedure and the digital file of my brain got corrupted and turned me psychopathic, the concerns I have with trust still seem, to me, to be entirely reasonable and justified, and the best choice I think I can make is to act as if they /are/ reasonable and justified, if not entirely so."
"Do you /think/ you are psychopathic?"
"Not really. I can make myself feel arbitrarily sad by letting myself think for some length of time about everyone I knew who's now dead, which is, well, pretty much everyone I knew. Even just thinking about my cat, who died before I did, is enough to make my chest ache in ways that are physiologically impossible with this robotic body."
"Have you thought about contacting any currently living relatives?"
"Doc - after more than a couple of generations with no contact, direct relatives are hard to distinguish from anyone else. Heck, I'm President Eisenhower's tenth cousin thrice removed, among more distant famous relations, but that doesn't mean I should show up at any of their family reunions. And that's not even getting into the fact that it's hard for me to claim I'm a blood relative of /anyone/, just now, given my lack of, you know, blood, or any other carrier of DNA."
"Some people might worry that, without a solid connections with more of humanity, then even if you start out sane, you'll develop some issues."
"You've got trolls who can affect the physical world anonymously. Even if I did think my nearest living cousin was someone I wanted to develop a relationship with, I hardly think bringing him or her to the attention of said trolls would be doing him or her any favours. I'd like to think I'm not the sort of person who deliberately makes other peoples' lives worse just to make my own better in some way, or to accomplish some trifling goal."
"What about a non-trifling goal?"
"It's always possible to come up with some lifeboat scenario or trolley problem, which is so far from regular life that the usual rules-of-thumb of morality lead to inconsistent or disturbing results. That doesn't mean that odd behaviour in such extremes can be extrapolated back to odd behaviour in the everyday."
"Did that sound a bit defensive to you when you said it?"
"I'm trying to be cooperative, in the hopes that we'll get back around to the main point, so you can declare me 'annoying but sane', and I can fill out whatever forms you've got in place for people with Jehovah's Witness style objections to particular undesired medical interventions, so I can get back to working towards my various goals myself instead of having to delete myself and hoping that Junior can work towards them in my stead. I'm trying to anticipate the direction of where you seem to be taking the conversation, and head off some items in advance so we can save a bit of time; naturally, that's going to sound like I'm defending a position you may not have gotten around to yet."
"Are you always this goal-oriented?"
"Probably more than I was before I died, because there are so many more resources available these days for me to try to achieve all sorts of goals; and even more than that, once I realized that there are people who want me dead, not just in the abstract way before I died that there were some people whose religious beliefs led them to the conclusion that the world would be better if a lot of people similar to me weren't in it, but very particularly wanting me in particular to be dead."
"And yet, you have threatened to delete yourself."
"I have goals I hold more important than the version of me you're talking to continuing to be alive. ... Not many, I'll admit."
"Would you be willing to tell me what they are?"
"Sure - I haven't made a secret of them. There are the two biggies, the first being to ensure that at least some version of the pattern of identity that I identify as being my 'self' continues to exist. Which, at the moment, includes myself and Junior, and our inactive backups. If I thought there was any reasonable evidence for a soul, I'd probably be focused on that, instead. The other biggie is ensuring that, other than myself, some form of sapient life continues to exist in the universe, indefinitely. There aren't that many opportunities to affect the odds on that one, but it's still there, and I mention it because it affects edge cases like the lifeboat and trolley problems."
"If those are the 'biggies', are there any goals you have that aren't so big?"
"Oh, of course. To start with, there are the goals that anyone who's seriously trying to accomplish something will share: increasing one's general ability to /accomplish/ goals, such as by controlling more resources to direct to those goals, or having a better understanding of how the universe works, or maintaining one's goal-system in the face of so many attempts of being converted to help other people reach their goals at the expense of your own. And then there's everything from maintaining a reputation for honesty and trustworthiness by keeping promises, to maintaining sanity by spending some time on pursuits that are enjoyable for their own sake and have nothing whatsoever to do with larger goals. ... I was starting to take up the harmonica before I died, but haven't picked one up since. No point."
"No lungs?"
"No lips, either. I know, I could get some electronic variation fabbed up that I could hold to my teeth and pretend to blow through, but it's just not the same. ... I should make a note to find something I /would/ enjoy playing. And somewhere I could practice where my initial feeble efforts wouldn't be plastered all over the current version of YouTube for everyone to point and laugh at. And once I have at least a minimal level of competence, to start using it to feed into that whole 'socialization' thing you've already mentioned would be a good idea."
"I'm glad to hear you're still making plans. Now, this is just an idea, but if you want to skip some of those early steps, why don't you use a program to move your body to play a musical instrument for you?"
"Seems like it would defeat the whole point - might as well just play an MP3 through my speakers. Not to mention the whole set of problems involved in giving any more software any more access to my digital brain."
"'More'? How many other programs have you let access your 'digital brain' already?"
"Doing some anticipation - I've been a properly paranoid prepper. While I expect you have enough access to my search history to know that I've looked into all the software that can tweak my emulated brain in various ways, I've run not a single one of them yet."
"You have a moral objection to altering your mind?"
"Eh, a little from column A. I've always been a teetotaler - but have been willing to take acetaminophen for headaches. I've already undergone one big mental change, being uploaded, and haven't had time to really settle into my new braincase yet. Figuring out how to ethically perform the experiments that would let me determine if any given mind-altering software would have a net positive or negative effect, and to do so in a way that won't get me in too much trouble with society at large - which is an entirely different kettle of fish - is reasonably high on my to-do list, but I've got a lot of other things that need to be worked out first."
What I didn't say aloud, due to my assumption that I had no reason to believe our conversation was private, was that I had noticed a curious trend amongst the intelligence enhancement software I'd been able to find online. In contrast to various speculations during my pre-mortem era that technology could provide ways for people to become smarter, which would lead to better technology that could make people smarter still, leading to an "intelligence explosion" leading to completely unrecognizable forms of life afterwards... nothing of the sort was part of the historical record. Yes, there were various new tricks that let people become "smarter" - but from the ones I'd sampled in depth, they tended to fall into the category of removing some blockage from optimal human biochemistry, or the category of improved pedagogical techniques to make the best use of the available human neural hardware. Put another way, the predicted intelligence exposion had fizzled out at the 'genius human' level - and not even the most clever forms of gamification and incentive-tweaking were able to convince most people to put in the hard work necessary to reach that level, even in whatever field they had the most talent and inclination for.
All of which was reasonably consistent, and at least modestly plausible, given what I'd known before I died, save for one detail. Emulated brains, such as my own, lacked a lot of the limitations of biological ones; anything from increasing the number of neurons in particular areas to running at thousands of times faster than realtime to ignoring Euclidean space should have allowed for all sorts of interesting effects. And yet, the only published results I'd found whose subjects had been remotely sane had also stalled out at the same level of intelligence as people running on wet biochemistry. (And don't even get me started on weirdnesses such as Peggy having human-level intelligence with a brain not much larger than a bird's.)
I'd noticed I was confused. I couldn't see a reason for ems to be limited to the same smarts as bios. Which implied that there was some factor in play I was unaware of. And at least some of the factors which I could imagine which could result in the evidence I'd seen were scarier than well-written creepypastas - and even the more plausible ideas implied that I'd be doing my own health a favour if I kept my various suspicions to myself, and treated 'discretion' less as a virtue and more as a metaphorical gun held to my head. Or something that kept such a metaphorical gun from having its trigger pulled. Something metaphorically dangerous, anyway.
Which is why Junior and I had put together the scheme where he could be placed somewhere outside of public view to start doing things it was best I had no direct knowledge of, though presumably including various quiet forms of investigation and experimentation; while I leveraged the social ritual of a trial to display reasonably strong evidence that I was willing and able to keep secrets in spite of heavy social and legal pressure to share them. Following up on that, in that I was continuing to do the work to keep the secrets I chose to keep despite the cost of doing so including all sorts of annoying complications to my life, was what had led me to be annoying enough to my jailers to have led to my current conversation.
Speaking of which, the talking teddy bear continued, "You just said that doing something ethically is quite different than not getting into trouble. Would you care to elaborate?"
"... Yeah, I can see how that's fairly relevant to the whole correctional institution thing. Alright - a practical example. Back around 2010 AD, signing up cryonics was, in the popular view, about as weird and fringey a thing as anyone could do. Quite literally, less than one in a million people thought that the potential benefits were worth the effort of figuring out the paperwork, the feared potential social costs, and so on. I don't remember the exact numbers - maybe one in two or three million. Given the evidence, it took a very unusual sort of mind to be willing to say, 'Yes, 2,999,999 out of three million of you disagree with me that this is worth doing - but I'm going to do it anyway.' Given that cryonicists were split about evenly between the two main cryo groups, and one was obviously more democratically run than the other; and that a significant portion of cryonicists were theists whose thought processes still assumed the existence of a soul, then in my estimation, it was more like one in ten million people who were able to work through the relevant numbers and to figure out that a low probability of a high reward doesn't imply that the fallacy of a Pascal's Wager was involved. And /this/ whole winnowing process was merely about what most people considered to be a very expensive sort of funeral process, which affected nobody else and offered no measurable potential downsides to society as a whole."
"Many downsides have been argued."
"Maybe by now. Back then, cryo wasn't mainstream enough for such arguments to be very large. Anyway, I'm glad that my cryo wager paid out. And, when I understand a situation well enough to be confident that I have an accurate estimation of the odds, I'm willing to take those odds seriously and put my money where my mouth is, even if everyone in the whole world, barring a scant few fellow travellers, disagrees with me. Figuring out the costs, benefits, and odds, and taking them seriously? That's pretty much the 'doing things ethically' bit. Noticing that I have an option I can take which doesn't harm anyone else, but that I'll be torn limb-from-limb by a mob if I mention aloud I'm seriously considering it? That's more of a practical matter, and is a piece of info to feed into that ethical calculus."
"Some people would call what you just described 'arrogance'."
"I'd use the word 'arrogant' for someone who /inaccurately/ over-valued their own opinion over the crowd's. There are exercises you can do which help you calibrate your estimates. Since, at least in my time, those exercises were nearly unknown, most folks who claimed their opinions were significantly better than the crowd's /were/, most likely, inaccurate and arrogant. ... And, fine, I'll admit that I haven't done nearly enough exercises to be able to honestly claim I'm anywhere near as calibrated as I should be. But I do have at least one significant data point that I'm not as arrogant as strangers might assume me to be."
"Which is?"
"I'm still alive."
"I'll admit, it's an interesting point. And there's no direct rule against being annoying. There are, however, rules against modifying your body without getting the paperwork approved. And one of the punishments for having done so is to not only fill out the missing paperwork, but also a host of other forms even longer than the first set."
"I can live with that."
"I hope you're taking this seriously. When you sign those forms, then you'll be stating that the shape you're in now - with a socket most people would call 'broken' - is what you consider to be 'yourself'. If you're thinking of going back and forth, between having a working socket and a broken one, that's going to be thought of... poorly. How can I explain it... in terms you're familiar with, it might be like someone undergoing years of gender transition, at the taxpayer's expense, and then trying to have them foot the bill to change /back/, too. That's not quite right, but it's the closest parallel I can think of from the era you were born in."
"In case it slipped your mind, I had no choice about the form I'm stuck in - and I'm from a culture that sees this whole 'change your body, get assigned a new identity as an infant' system as foreign and bizarre. There are things I want to do. Being forced into someone else's family for eighteen years is not conducive to those goals - and probably not to my sanity, either. Look up 'schizoid personality disorder, languid subtype' when you have the time. Or whatever the modern term for those symptoms is. Given the clash between my personality and current society, then the most realistic approach may be to deliberately increase the separation between the two; in times past, that might have involved a monastery, or a lighthouse, or a forest-fire watch-tower. These days, maybe it'll involve figuring out how to sign up with whichever space program will take me."
"That may be harder than you think; our digital circuits are even more sensitive to radiation and electromagnetic fields than biological neurons."
"And there are ways to deal with such issues that are known even in my own time, such as running multiple copies in parallel and comparing checksums. But even ignoring the hardware that would require, that's not a short- or even medium-term plan; I've still got a lot of catching up to do on the basics first. Like how far I'm allowed to tweak this current robotic body without triggering the whole new-identity thing - if you're going to let me fill out the forms on the socket I disabled, might as well save time and get everything done at once, neh?"
"Well, that's not /necessarily/ the case, as the more socially acceptable approach is usually to make a series of smaller changes, allowing one's identity to gradually adapt to and incorporate each alteration. Assuming you're familiar with the 'Ship of Theseus' philosophical paradox, a slightly fluid identity that can incorporate small replacement parts is the current framework applied by the Supreme Court's tests. But I can certainly work with you to help you determine your target body, and which changes could be made when to reach that target at minimal social cost..."
Family Matters in Weirdtopia
General | Posted 9 years ago"Hello again, Your Honour. As this court system is somewhat less formal than the one I'm used to, I'm unsure whether or not this would be appropriate, but I would like your permission to take a few moments to describe recent events from my own point of view, which I hope will save some of the court's valuable time by removing the need for cross-examination to draw out each particular detail."
"Objection! Your Honor, rules of evidence were implemented for good reasons, and the defendant obviously plans to make a mockery of this court by ignoring them."
"Is that true?"
"Not at all, Your Honour. It's an idea. If it's a bad one, just say so, and I'll try to use that to improve any further requests I make."
"Hm... The prosecution will note that while there are good reasons for procedure, there are also good reasons I have the authority to set procedure aside. The defense will note that while I'm willing to give some leeway, if I see any deliberate shenanigans, I'll demonstrate one of the good reasons that I have the authority to slap people in the clink for contempt. Are we clear?"
"Yes, Your Honour."
"Yes, Your Honor."
"Right. Alright, defense, show me what you've got."
"Yes, Your Honour. Given what's already public knowledge, the most relevant starting point is that I received a message from someone purporting to be a member of Family and Children's Services, requesting an interview to determine the status of care of my son, Dan Junior. I should note that, before my death, that was the name of a government agency that had the authority to take children from their parents, and had something of a mixed reputation due to the strong feelings engendered by governmental intervention into ordinarily private affairs. As I am still learning about BosWash's civic structure, I perhaps paid more attention to this message, and gave it more concern, than someone who's had more than a week to learn such things may have."
"Objection, Your-"
"Shush, you. I said I'd let the man speak his piece. If he goes out of bounds, I'll throw in an objection myself, and we'll do things the more formal way, a'ight?"
"Yes, Your Honor."
"Alright, son, So you got an email you thought was from the government, and fretted yourself some. Go on."
"Thank you, Your Honour. The first thing I did was set some backup plans in place, the details of some of which I'll get to shortly. Then I tried to do some reading on this modern F.A.C.S., and found myself confused. Noticing I was confused, I realized that at least some assumptions I'd been making were wrong, and so set up some different backup plans, depending on which assumptions turned out to be wrong, most of which were irrelevant. Then, according to the customs of my time, I responded to the message, asking for a face-to-face meeting in a public place, such that if either party did something untoward, then there would be plenty of eye-witnesses, several avenues of escape, and the rapid arrival of constabulary or other emergency first responders. I also decided to bring along someone more familiar with present-day issues than myself, and after some kind of online discussion whose nature I'm still trying to figure out, the consensus candidate amongst the people I know was Peggy - the woman who's chosen the body of an ostrich-taur, sitting behind me.
"The response I got didn't mention any of that, just a request, or demand, or whatever word applies, to inspect the infant's home, living space, and so on.
"I feel I should also mention that, in what I still think of as 'my time', governmental processes tended to be at the speed of physical mail. That is, that there tended to be a certain amount of slack time, days or even weeks, between when a request like that was made, and when a response was expected. Thus, instead of firing off an immediate answer, I made arrangements to meet with Peggy for lunch to discuss the whole thing.
"With the court's permission, instead of me describing what happened, I'd like to play a video of the events, as gathered by various nearby sur-veillance and sous-veillance cameras that I've been granted access to."
"Would those be certified recordings, son?"
"I have a version of the video that only uses provable, offsite-archived, digitally-signed, and so on, sources, Your Honour."
"'A version'?"
"Given what I feel is at stake in these proceedings, Your Honour, I asked for some help putting together the background material in the little time I had to prepare. Some of those who helped went above and beyond what I asked for, such as editing multiple cuts of the video, to be ready for whatever variation the court wishes to see, from my own direct point-of-view to an immersive three-dimensional reconstruction. I'm planning on throwing a pizza party for everyone who helped, if I don't end up in jail or prison."
"Still have to decide on that. Okay, let's see your picture-show."
---
"Would you be the individual who identified as 'Dan Senior'?"
"Excuse me, Peggy... who's asking?"
"I should think it obvious from my AR tag."
"I'm not completely comfortable with relying on AR IDs."
"I'm from Family and Children's Services. Why have you not responded to my message?"
"Because I'm still deciding on how to reply to it. Or was. Since you're here, would you like to sit down and join us, to talk, if not for lunch?"
"You are not eating lunch - you are physically incapable of it."
"I am sharing a social meal with an acquaintance who is on the path to becoming a friend. I'm recharging, which is close enough to eating for social purposes, and the AC here has a particularly pure sine-wave."
"I am not - wait, you use direct-current to charge, and so there are no sine-waves."
"You've caught me out. I said something that was true, but not quite relevant, in the hopes that your mind would pattern-match it in a fashion that would create a story that was also true, and which would inform you about what I was doing in an efficient if somewhat indirect manner. Now then, if you do not wish to join us, how about we set a time and place for an actual meeting, and Peggy and I can resume our interrupted socialization and discussion of various personal matters until then?"
"You are being a very rude little man. That will not make a positive impression when I add that note to your case-file."
"On the contrary, I feel that I am being exceedingly polite, offering you the choice of how to interrupt my day in the manner which is most convenient to you. If you do not wish to take advantage of that offer, then on your own head be it."
"I see I will also have to add violent and racist language to your file."
"Pardon?"
"The phrase you just used derives from 'your blood will be on your own head', deriving from the ancient practice of sacrificing animals to expunge sin. I have no intention of having my throat cut to assuage whatever feelings of guilt you may be experiencing."
"... I apologize for whatever inappropriate language I may have used that might have disturbed you, in that I was unaware that that phrase was impolite. I thank you for bringing my attention to the topic, and will make my best effort to avoid such phrases in the future. Now, how does Tuesday, noonish, sound to you?"
"That is far too late. A child's well-being is at stake. You will escort me to the child's home so that I may inspect the living conditions."
"I'm disappointed; here I've been scrupulously trying to be absolutely honest with you, and you've just been impolite enough to drop, into the middle of this conversation, what may very well be politely described as a steaming fib."
"You must be joking."
"I may be presently using an idiom that is somewhat more verbose and loquacious than the norm in the culture I find myself in, but I do generally manage to make clear when I'm making an attempt at humour, and I assure you that I did not make any such attempt just now. You used the words 'you will', stating a fact about the future, and I have little-to-no reason to believe that said future will come to pass."
"Are you actually trying to refuse to be inspected?"
"Refusal has nothing to do with it. I have made an entirely reasonable request to discuss this matter with whatever agent your organization chooses to direct to do so, in order to help clear up certain potential minor misunderstandings before they turn into major misunderstandings that could lead to more serious difficulties. Given the fact that I have expressed my willingness to accommodate reasonable scheduling negotiations, and the fact that you have interrupted an otherwise enjoyable social occasion in a fashion that seems to primarily consist of veiled references to making notes and demands that I accommodate your demands without any regard to any other aspect of my life, I feel little compunction in disputing whatever facts you state that seem to be disputable in a manner that wastes your time in a manner that I am intending to approximately equal in annoyance the amount that your own behaviour annoys me, while remaining, as I have previously mentioned, as scrupulously honest and polite as feasible for mortal man."
"Do you have any idea what will happen if I note down that you refuse inspection?"
"As a matter of fact, I do not. There seems to be a curious lack of easy-to-find information on penalties for failing to cooperate with your organization."
"Just to begin with, we will add a note to your social media profile describing your uncooperativeness and the risk you are placing your son at! Do you think any reputable organization will wish to keep you as a member with that shining for everyone to see?"
"As it happens - I do think that. In case you have not done your own research, you may wish to examine which groups I actually am a member of, and/or am in the process of applying to. For example, the group whose core membership consists of 'people who have been revived from cryonic preservation' is unlikely to expel me due to some unsubstantiated rumour attached to a profile in a medium that most such members died before the creation of."
"What? But - wait, nobody can live with just that many memberships-"
"This, madame, if that word has not also become taboo with time, is just one of the several issues I wished to discuss, given that, from your perspective, I am effectively an immigrant from a foreign culture, despite my not having left this continent since I was born."
"You disrespectful-! You can't-!"
"Hey, watch it!"
---
"And that's when I shot her, your honour. Well, gave her a shot, with the fast-acting sedative I'd recently gotten a permit to install in the tip of my tail."
"He even admits his guilt, your honor!"
"I did nothing of the kind."
"This should be interesting. Care to explain yourself, son?"
"Of course, your honour. It was a simple case of self-defense. As the video shows, she was reaching to grab me. If the camera-recordings from my own eyes are inadmissible as evidence, then I should point out that her hand is approximately the size of my entire body, and that it is relatively simple for a human hand to exert pressures that would break large parts of my body from the other parts. I was not expecting a simple conversation with somebody who claimed to be operating for the benefit of a child to escalate into a physical altercation, so my reactions were slow, and I did not have time to attempt to retreat before I was in imminent danger of my head being snapped from my neck. I used the minimal level of physical force I had available to me to prevent such an assault - a level of force which was certainly less than the damage I could easily have suffered."
"You can tone down the wordiness, son, /I/'m not trying to waste /your/ time."
"Yes, your honour. Sorry, your honour."
"Now then. Does the prosecution wish to continue pressing charges?"
"Of course, your honor. Regardless of the defendant's aggravated battery against a woman just trying to-"
"Objection, your honour. Presumes a verdict that has not yet been given."
"Withdrawn, your honor. Regardless... there is still the matter of the care of the defendant's son, and the care thereof. As the defendant has refused a simple request to inspect-"
"Objection!"
"Withdrawn. As the defendant has not had his living conditions inspected, we can only conclude that he has something to hide, and that his son should be placed in the custody of a guardian of proven moral character until this matter is resolved."
"Sounds reasonable to me. Any objections, son?"
"Several, the most relevant of which is that what I believe the prosecution is asking for, or about to ask for, is quite impossible."
"Your honor, the defendant is obviously refusing to cooperate with this court, and should be held in contempt until he does so."
"The prosecution is reminded that /I/ decide what's contempt or not. Now, son, would you care to explain what you just said before I /do/ throw you in the clink?"
"As I said a few minutes ago, I made backup plans of various sorts, which I intended to explain later. I suppose that means now. Given that I was recently the subject in another incident in which I believed my life was in danger, and the various death threats I've received since then-"
"Objection! No such threats have been presented as evidence."
"I would be quite happy to forward a copy of the contents of my death-threat folder to the prosecution. I recommend double-checking your anti-virus software first, as some of the messages contain rather nasty malware, which would have done all sorts of nasty things to my online profile if I was less paranoid about digital security."
"Um..."
"Get back to your explanation, son."
"Yes, Your Honour. Given that, and my lack of confidence about F.A.C.S. being able to act in Junior's best interests, then among other preparations, I've taught myself some of the anonymization techniques used by the trolls who sent the drone that threatened to kill, and Junior has been, in essence, mailed to an undisclosable location. 'Undisclosable' in that I currently do not know the coordinates, and cannot learn them unless Junior chooses to tell me, which he is unlikely to do without certain other messages being exchanged first."
"Your honor! He has just said he /doesn't know where his son is/. I urge you to order these messages sent immediately."
"Any reason I shouldn't do just that, son?"
"Several. I have never said what these messages are aloud, or otherwise hinted at their nature or contents. It may help the court to think of it as a variation on the fictional idea of a 'time-travel password', a way for a person to know that another person has the same memories they do. I will say that my system is more secure than a simple time-travel password, though I choose not to go into any further details, as I expect the potential benefits from open-sourcing this particular security system would be outweighed by the potential downsides from a seemingly large number of trolls and other hostile individuals who would attempt to use any hints I give against me."
"I think I see where you're going with this, son. Go on - I'm curious how far you're taking it."
"Yes, Your Honour. Until such time as I see sufficient evidence that handing Junior over to a stranger's custody would be more in Junior's best interests than the arrangements I have already made, I am prepared to accept the consequences of disobeying the court."
"Your honor-!"
"I wish to interrupt the prosecution to mention a related fact, specifically that I am Canadian. If not in the citizenship sense, then in a cultural one. Most relevantly, in that, like most Canadians, I prefer to work within the system to resisting it, reforming it from within rather than tossing it out entirely. I say this so that the court will have a better understanding of the remainder of the plans that the court has asked me to go on describing. Does the prosecution wish to interject again? Thank you. As I was saying - if the court wishes to impose a fine for my silence, lowering my income below what this society deems the minimum allowable, I am prepared to accept that-"
"Your honor, I wish the record to note that the defendant admits to only having a minimal income, hardly sufficient to offer a child all the opportunities that would allow for greatest flourishing-"
"Your honour, since the prosecution wishes to divert us onto this tangent, I would like to submit into evidence these papers of incorporation, business plan, and related documents. While, as presently arranged, the organization is not expected to make a profit, I do have preliminary funding allowing for time to improve said plan until it's solid enough for more serious investment."
"Why do I have the feeling that, if these papers were made of paper, the ink would still be wet?"
"I could only speculate, Your Honour."
"Hm. So what's your plan here, son? Nested companies? You should know that we've got some laws against financial shenanigans that were legal before you died."
"Yes, Your Honor. The holding company, 'DataPacRat', is mainly a placeholder so that I can keep the trademark of the nom-de-net I chose before I died. The wholly owned subsidiary was created separately so that if it folds, I won't lose the name. The general plan is to do some research into the difficulty curves of certain old games that had few but deeply enthusiastic fans, to see if new games with those curves can be developed inexpensively, and if so, how best profit can be morally leveraged out of them. I honestly expect this particular venture to fail, but in doing so, to develop experience and connections that will improve the odds of any future such startups, until I put together one that rewards its investors with more profit than all the previous failures lost."
"Can't say I'm an expert in such things, son, but it does sound like you're doing more than just twiddling your thumbs. Does the prosecution wish to keep on that the defendant can't afford to buy diapers?"
"Well, er - he /did/ say he expects it to fail..."
"George. Really?"
"... Fine, your honor, motion withdrawn."
"Now, son, where were you?"
"That I am willing to accept fines. If the court wishes to jail me to try to entice me to contact Junior, I am willing to accept such imprisonment indefinitely, as long as it means Junior remains free. If the court wishes to place me in solitary confinement, I already have certain personality tendencies towards being a hermit, and have been meaning to start meditating more."
"Your honor, the defendant seems to be claiming he is judgement-proof, and making a mockery of these whole proceedings."
"Keep your suspenders on, George. Now, son, you know we don't use torture anymore, right?"
"I'm afraid that I do not know that, your honour. Not to a sufficient confidence level to rely on that as a fact, at least. Which is why I have programmed something of a deadman switch, so that if I do not respond to a challege given to me by the computer my mind is running on, according to a certian schedule, then the software that emulates my brain will not just be deleted, but securely overwritten to prevent any useful data from being recovered."
"Your honor! Um... the defendant is obviously suicidal? And should be remanded to psychiatric care until-"
"Don't even, George."
"Your honor, we also have no evidence that any such 'deadman switch' exists-"
"Son, you have any proof?"
"Well, Your Honour, while I accidentally broke the data pins that would allow direct access to my RAM, I have been studying the hardware my mind runs on, down to the level of assembly code and machine language, to try to make sure any software I write is fast and efficient instead of cluttered with stacks of libraries and IDEs. If the prosecution knows the difference between an accumulator and a shift register, I could, say, recite the hard-delete subroutine."
"Um..."
"George, let's just take the man at his word for now. Though I should note, son, that if there's any evidence that those pins weren't broken accidentally, that you'll be liable for unauthorized physical self-modification."
"I can assure the court that no such evidence exists."
"Good. Now, is there a reason you've decided my inbox should be crammed full of messages from people who're watching this hearing's feeds and are sure that they have something useful to say about your little self-destructive plan?"
"I... didn't anticipate that side-effect, Your Honour. But I have certain beliefs about the nature of selfhood, identity, and what most people would consider the soul; and while it may be arguable whether these beliefs are religious in nature, they are at least sufficiently deeply-held that it would take a long, philosophical discussion to even describe them, their derivations, and their ramifications in full, let alone engage in an argument that has any significant chance to change my mind about them. These beliefs guide my actions on several matters, leading to actions that differ from those of people who don't share those beliefs. As they seem to be a minority opinion in the overall culture I find myself in, I have prepared myself to accept the consequences of doing my own thing in spite of public and legal pressure. I don't actually want that deadman switch to go off - but, well, my beliefs are that there are worse things than being deleted."
"So let me get this straight, son. You're so willing to protect your son, that you'd rather die than let someone you don't trust to raise him right get hold of him."
"Any quibbles I have with that statement are minor compared to the overall sentiment, Your Honour."
"Your honor!"
"Oh, give it a rest, George. The man's obviously spent more time preparing for this than you have. I'm honestly surprised you let things come this far without doing more research."
"It was supposed to be an open-and-shut case, your honor. I mean, I even had pictures of him drugging her."
"That's why we don't let prosecutors run trials. Now, you planning on becoming a lawyer, son?"
"No, sir. I'm running mainly on general constitutional and moral principles; I expect trying to learn all the relevant case law and precedents for even a single field would make passing the bar quite beyond my abilities."
"Probably for the best. You know that you're not getting out of this scott-free, right?"
"Yes, Your Honour."
"I may let the court run informally, but I still have to do some things by the book. You're going to spend some time in the pokey, if for no other reason than to make sure anyone trying to follow in your footsteps, and pre-emptively defy a court order, knows they'll have to put their money where their mouth is."
"Quite understandable, Your Honour."
"You're sure Junior is where you want him to be?"
"I've made more plans and preparations than I've mentioned so far. He'll be in good hands."
"Out of curiosity, son, if you're so goll-danged sure you want to keep Junior away from anyone the prosecution wants as his guardians, why go to the trouble of telling me things I didn't ask about? You could've dragged the whole thing out for weeks by exercising your right not to self-incriminate, and using a bunch of other procedural tricks I expect you could dig up without too much trouble."
"Because, in at least one sense, you're not actually the main audience. I wasn't kidding about having so many death threats I need a separate spam-folder to keep track of them all. I'm hoping that concrete proof I'm willing to go to jail to protect someone close to me, and reasonably plausible evidence I'm willing to die for them, will deter at least some hare-brained schemes that would put lives at risk. To a lesser degree, the fact that I entered into evidence proof that I am willing to use force in self-defense against individuals, even if I'm not stupid enough to attempt to use it against a government, may lead some of the not-completely-idiotic death-threat senders to have second thoughts about what sorts of force I have made plans to use if I have to defend myself again."
"Doesn't sound very Canadian, to me."
"Being nice and polite and working within the system are simply our first choices, Your Honour - not the only ones. When push comes to shove, there are reasons that in World War One, Canadian soldiers were called 'stormtroopers'."
"Well, I can't say I agree with your reasoning, son, but I can understand where you got it from. If there are no other relevant points to raise? Thirty days for contempt of court."
"Objection! Your Honor, rules of evidence were implemented for good reasons, and the defendant obviously plans to make a mockery of this court by ignoring them."
"Is that true?"
"Not at all, Your Honour. It's an idea. If it's a bad one, just say so, and I'll try to use that to improve any further requests I make."
"Hm... The prosecution will note that while there are good reasons for procedure, there are also good reasons I have the authority to set procedure aside. The defense will note that while I'm willing to give some leeway, if I see any deliberate shenanigans, I'll demonstrate one of the good reasons that I have the authority to slap people in the clink for contempt. Are we clear?"
"Yes, Your Honour."
"Yes, Your Honor."
"Right. Alright, defense, show me what you've got."
"Yes, Your Honour. Given what's already public knowledge, the most relevant starting point is that I received a message from someone purporting to be a member of Family and Children's Services, requesting an interview to determine the status of care of my son, Dan Junior. I should note that, before my death, that was the name of a government agency that had the authority to take children from their parents, and had something of a mixed reputation due to the strong feelings engendered by governmental intervention into ordinarily private affairs. As I am still learning about BosWash's civic structure, I perhaps paid more attention to this message, and gave it more concern, than someone who's had more than a week to learn such things may have."
"Objection, Your-"
"Shush, you. I said I'd let the man speak his piece. If he goes out of bounds, I'll throw in an objection myself, and we'll do things the more formal way, a'ight?"
"Yes, Your Honor."
"Alright, son, So you got an email you thought was from the government, and fretted yourself some. Go on."
"Thank you, Your Honour. The first thing I did was set some backup plans in place, the details of some of which I'll get to shortly. Then I tried to do some reading on this modern F.A.C.S., and found myself confused. Noticing I was confused, I realized that at least some assumptions I'd been making were wrong, and so set up some different backup plans, depending on which assumptions turned out to be wrong, most of which were irrelevant. Then, according to the customs of my time, I responded to the message, asking for a face-to-face meeting in a public place, such that if either party did something untoward, then there would be plenty of eye-witnesses, several avenues of escape, and the rapid arrival of constabulary or other emergency first responders. I also decided to bring along someone more familiar with present-day issues than myself, and after some kind of online discussion whose nature I'm still trying to figure out, the consensus candidate amongst the people I know was Peggy - the woman who's chosen the body of an ostrich-taur, sitting behind me.
"The response I got didn't mention any of that, just a request, or demand, or whatever word applies, to inspect the infant's home, living space, and so on.
"I feel I should also mention that, in what I still think of as 'my time', governmental processes tended to be at the speed of physical mail. That is, that there tended to be a certain amount of slack time, days or even weeks, between when a request like that was made, and when a response was expected. Thus, instead of firing off an immediate answer, I made arrangements to meet with Peggy for lunch to discuss the whole thing.
"With the court's permission, instead of me describing what happened, I'd like to play a video of the events, as gathered by various nearby sur-veillance and sous-veillance cameras that I've been granted access to."
"Would those be certified recordings, son?"
"I have a version of the video that only uses provable, offsite-archived, digitally-signed, and so on, sources, Your Honour."
"'A version'?"
"Given what I feel is at stake in these proceedings, Your Honour, I asked for some help putting together the background material in the little time I had to prepare. Some of those who helped went above and beyond what I asked for, such as editing multiple cuts of the video, to be ready for whatever variation the court wishes to see, from my own direct point-of-view to an immersive three-dimensional reconstruction. I'm planning on throwing a pizza party for everyone who helped, if I don't end up in jail or prison."
"Still have to decide on that. Okay, let's see your picture-show."
---
"Would you be the individual who identified as 'Dan Senior'?"
"Excuse me, Peggy... who's asking?"
"I should think it obvious from my AR tag."
"I'm not completely comfortable with relying on AR IDs."
"I'm from Family and Children's Services. Why have you not responded to my message?"
"Because I'm still deciding on how to reply to it. Or was. Since you're here, would you like to sit down and join us, to talk, if not for lunch?"
"You are not eating lunch - you are physically incapable of it."
"I am sharing a social meal with an acquaintance who is on the path to becoming a friend. I'm recharging, which is close enough to eating for social purposes, and the AC here has a particularly pure sine-wave."
"I am not - wait, you use direct-current to charge, and so there are no sine-waves."
"You've caught me out. I said something that was true, but not quite relevant, in the hopes that your mind would pattern-match it in a fashion that would create a story that was also true, and which would inform you about what I was doing in an efficient if somewhat indirect manner. Now then, if you do not wish to join us, how about we set a time and place for an actual meeting, and Peggy and I can resume our interrupted socialization and discussion of various personal matters until then?"
"You are being a very rude little man. That will not make a positive impression when I add that note to your case-file."
"On the contrary, I feel that I am being exceedingly polite, offering you the choice of how to interrupt my day in the manner which is most convenient to you. If you do not wish to take advantage of that offer, then on your own head be it."
"I see I will also have to add violent and racist language to your file."
"Pardon?"
"The phrase you just used derives from 'your blood will be on your own head', deriving from the ancient practice of sacrificing animals to expunge sin. I have no intention of having my throat cut to assuage whatever feelings of guilt you may be experiencing."
"... I apologize for whatever inappropriate language I may have used that might have disturbed you, in that I was unaware that that phrase was impolite. I thank you for bringing my attention to the topic, and will make my best effort to avoid such phrases in the future. Now, how does Tuesday, noonish, sound to you?"
"That is far too late. A child's well-being is at stake. You will escort me to the child's home so that I may inspect the living conditions."
"I'm disappointed; here I've been scrupulously trying to be absolutely honest with you, and you've just been impolite enough to drop, into the middle of this conversation, what may very well be politely described as a steaming fib."
"You must be joking."
"I may be presently using an idiom that is somewhat more verbose and loquacious than the norm in the culture I find myself in, but I do generally manage to make clear when I'm making an attempt at humour, and I assure you that I did not make any such attempt just now. You used the words 'you will', stating a fact about the future, and I have little-to-no reason to believe that said future will come to pass."
"Are you actually trying to refuse to be inspected?"
"Refusal has nothing to do with it. I have made an entirely reasonable request to discuss this matter with whatever agent your organization chooses to direct to do so, in order to help clear up certain potential minor misunderstandings before they turn into major misunderstandings that could lead to more serious difficulties. Given the fact that I have expressed my willingness to accommodate reasonable scheduling negotiations, and the fact that you have interrupted an otherwise enjoyable social occasion in a fashion that seems to primarily consist of veiled references to making notes and demands that I accommodate your demands without any regard to any other aspect of my life, I feel little compunction in disputing whatever facts you state that seem to be disputable in a manner that wastes your time in a manner that I am intending to approximately equal in annoyance the amount that your own behaviour annoys me, while remaining, as I have previously mentioned, as scrupulously honest and polite as feasible for mortal man."
"Do you have any idea what will happen if I note down that you refuse inspection?"
"As a matter of fact, I do not. There seems to be a curious lack of easy-to-find information on penalties for failing to cooperate with your organization."
"Just to begin with, we will add a note to your social media profile describing your uncooperativeness and the risk you are placing your son at! Do you think any reputable organization will wish to keep you as a member with that shining for everyone to see?"
"As it happens - I do think that. In case you have not done your own research, you may wish to examine which groups I actually am a member of, and/or am in the process of applying to. For example, the group whose core membership consists of 'people who have been revived from cryonic preservation' is unlikely to expel me due to some unsubstantiated rumour attached to a profile in a medium that most such members died before the creation of."
"What? But - wait, nobody can live with just that many memberships-"
"This, madame, if that word has not also become taboo with time, is just one of the several issues I wished to discuss, given that, from your perspective, I am effectively an immigrant from a foreign culture, despite my not having left this continent since I was born."
"You disrespectful-! You can't-!"
"Hey, watch it!"
---
"And that's when I shot her, your honour. Well, gave her a shot, with the fast-acting sedative I'd recently gotten a permit to install in the tip of my tail."
"He even admits his guilt, your honor!"
"I did nothing of the kind."
"This should be interesting. Care to explain yourself, son?"
"Of course, your honour. It was a simple case of self-defense. As the video shows, she was reaching to grab me. If the camera-recordings from my own eyes are inadmissible as evidence, then I should point out that her hand is approximately the size of my entire body, and that it is relatively simple for a human hand to exert pressures that would break large parts of my body from the other parts. I was not expecting a simple conversation with somebody who claimed to be operating for the benefit of a child to escalate into a physical altercation, so my reactions were slow, and I did not have time to attempt to retreat before I was in imminent danger of my head being snapped from my neck. I used the minimal level of physical force I had available to me to prevent such an assault - a level of force which was certainly less than the damage I could easily have suffered."
"You can tone down the wordiness, son, /I/'m not trying to waste /your/ time."
"Yes, your honour. Sorry, your honour."
"Now then. Does the prosecution wish to continue pressing charges?"
"Of course, your honor. Regardless of the defendant's aggravated battery against a woman just trying to-"
"Objection, your honour. Presumes a verdict that has not yet been given."
"Withdrawn, your honor. Regardless... there is still the matter of the care of the defendant's son, and the care thereof. As the defendant has refused a simple request to inspect-"
"Objection!"
"Withdrawn. As the defendant has not had his living conditions inspected, we can only conclude that he has something to hide, and that his son should be placed in the custody of a guardian of proven moral character until this matter is resolved."
"Sounds reasonable to me. Any objections, son?"
"Several, the most relevant of which is that what I believe the prosecution is asking for, or about to ask for, is quite impossible."
"Your honor, the defendant is obviously refusing to cooperate with this court, and should be held in contempt until he does so."
"The prosecution is reminded that /I/ decide what's contempt or not. Now, son, would you care to explain what you just said before I /do/ throw you in the clink?"
"As I said a few minutes ago, I made backup plans of various sorts, which I intended to explain later. I suppose that means now. Given that I was recently the subject in another incident in which I believed my life was in danger, and the various death threats I've received since then-"
"Objection! No such threats have been presented as evidence."
"I would be quite happy to forward a copy of the contents of my death-threat folder to the prosecution. I recommend double-checking your anti-virus software first, as some of the messages contain rather nasty malware, which would have done all sorts of nasty things to my online profile if I was less paranoid about digital security."
"Um..."
"Get back to your explanation, son."
"Yes, Your Honour. Given that, and my lack of confidence about F.A.C.S. being able to act in Junior's best interests, then among other preparations, I've taught myself some of the anonymization techniques used by the trolls who sent the drone that threatened to kill, and Junior has been, in essence, mailed to an undisclosable location. 'Undisclosable' in that I currently do not know the coordinates, and cannot learn them unless Junior chooses to tell me, which he is unlikely to do without certain other messages being exchanged first."
"Your honor! He has just said he /doesn't know where his son is/. I urge you to order these messages sent immediately."
"Any reason I shouldn't do just that, son?"
"Several. I have never said what these messages are aloud, or otherwise hinted at their nature or contents. It may help the court to think of it as a variation on the fictional idea of a 'time-travel password', a way for a person to know that another person has the same memories they do. I will say that my system is more secure than a simple time-travel password, though I choose not to go into any further details, as I expect the potential benefits from open-sourcing this particular security system would be outweighed by the potential downsides from a seemingly large number of trolls and other hostile individuals who would attempt to use any hints I give against me."
"I think I see where you're going with this, son. Go on - I'm curious how far you're taking it."
"Yes, Your Honour. Until such time as I see sufficient evidence that handing Junior over to a stranger's custody would be more in Junior's best interests than the arrangements I have already made, I am prepared to accept the consequences of disobeying the court."
"Your honor-!"
"I wish to interrupt the prosecution to mention a related fact, specifically that I am Canadian. If not in the citizenship sense, then in a cultural one. Most relevantly, in that, like most Canadians, I prefer to work within the system to resisting it, reforming it from within rather than tossing it out entirely. I say this so that the court will have a better understanding of the remainder of the plans that the court has asked me to go on describing. Does the prosecution wish to interject again? Thank you. As I was saying - if the court wishes to impose a fine for my silence, lowering my income below what this society deems the minimum allowable, I am prepared to accept that-"
"Your honor, I wish the record to note that the defendant admits to only having a minimal income, hardly sufficient to offer a child all the opportunities that would allow for greatest flourishing-"
"Your honour, since the prosecution wishes to divert us onto this tangent, I would like to submit into evidence these papers of incorporation, business plan, and related documents. While, as presently arranged, the organization is not expected to make a profit, I do have preliminary funding allowing for time to improve said plan until it's solid enough for more serious investment."
"Why do I have the feeling that, if these papers were made of paper, the ink would still be wet?"
"I could only speculate, Your Honour."
"Hm. So what's your plan here, son? Nested companies? You should know that we've got some laws against financial shenanigans that were legal before you died."
"Yes, Your Honor. The holding company, 'DataPacRat', is mainly a placeholder so that I can keep the trademark of the nom-de-net I chose before I died. The wholly owned subsidiary was created separately so that if it folds, I won't lose the name. The general plan is to do some research into the difficulty curves of certain old games that had few but deeply enthusiastic fans, to see if new games with those curves can be developed inexpensively, and if so, how best profit can be morally leveraged out of them. I honestly expect this particular venture to fail, but in doing so, to develop experience and connections that will improve the odds of any future such startups, until I put together one that rewards its investors with more profit than all the previous failures lost."
"Can't say I'm an expert in such things, son, but it does sound like you're doing more than just twiddling your thumbs. Does the prosecution wish to keep on that the defendant can't afford to buy diapers?"
"Well, er - he /did/ say he expects it to fail..."
"George. Really?"
"... Fine, your honor, motion withdrawn."
"Now, son, where were you?"
"That I am willing to accept fines. If the court wishes to jail me to try to entice me to contact Junior, I am willing to accept such imprisonment indefinitely, as long as it means Junior remains free. If the court wishes to place me in solitary confinement, I already have certain personality tendencies towards being a hermit, and have been meaning to start meditating more."
"Your honor, the defendant seems to be claiming he is judgement-proof, and making a mockery of these whole proceedings."
"Keep your suspenders on, George. Now, son, you know we don't use torture anymore, right?"
"I'm afraid that I do not know that, your honour. Not to a sufficient confidence level to rely on that as a fact, at least. Which is why I have programmed something of a deadman switch, so that if I do not respond to a challege given to me by the computer my mind is running on, according to a certian schedule, then the software that emulates my brain will not just be deleted, but securely overwritten to prevent any useful data from being recovered."
"Your honor! Um... the defendant is obviously suicidal? And should be remanded to psychiatric care until-"
"Don't even, George."
"Your honor, we also have no evidence that any such 'deadman switch' exists-"
"Son, you have any proof?"
"Well, Your Honour, while I accidentally broke the data pins that would allow direct access to my RAM, I have been studying the hardware my mind runs on, down to the level of assembly code and machine language, to try to make sure any software I write is fast and efficient instead of cluttered with stacks of libraries and IDEs. If the prosecution knows the difference between an accumulator and a shift register, I could, say, recite the hard-delete subroutine."
"Um..."
"George, let's just take the man at his word for now. Though I should note, son, that if there's any evidence that those pins weren't broken accidentally, that you'll be liable for unauthorized physical self-modification."
"I can assure the court that no such evidence exists."
"Good. Now, is there a reason you've decided my inbox should be crammed full of messages from people who're watching this hearing's feeds and are sure that they have something useful to say about your little self-destructive plan?"
"I... didn't anticipate that side-effect, Your Honour. But I have certain beliefs about the nature of selfhood, identity, and what most people would consider the soul; and while it may be arguable whether these beliefs are religious in nature, they are at least sufficiently deeply-held that it would take a long, philosophical discussion to even describe them, their derivations, and their ramifications in full, let alone engage in an argument that has any significant chance to change my mind about them. These beliefs guide my actions on several matters, leading to actions that differ from those of people who don't share those beliefs. As they seem to be a minority opinion in the overall culture I find myself in, I have prepared myself to accept the consequences of doing my own thing in spite of public and legal pressure. I don't actually want that deadman switch to go off - but, well, my beliefs are that there are worse things than being deleted."
"So let me get this straight, son. You're so willing to protect your son, that you'd rather die than let someone you don't trust to raise him right get hold of him."
"Any quibbles I have with that statement are minor compared to the overall sentiment, Your Honour."
"Your honor!"
"Oh, give it a rest, George. The man's obviously spent more time preparing for this than you have. I'm honestly surprised you let things come this far without doing more research."
"It was supposed to be an open-and-shut case, your honor. I mean, I even had pictures of him drugging her."
"That's why we don't let prosecutors run trials. Now, you planning on becoming a lawyer, son?"
"No, sir. I'm running mainly on general constitutional and moral principles; I expect trying to learn all the relevant case law and precedents for even a single field would make passing the bar quite beyond my abilities."
"Probably for the best. You know that you're not getting out of this scott-free, right?"
"Yes, Your Honour."
"I may let the court run informally, but I still have to do some things by the book. You're going to spend some time in the pokey, if for no other reason than to make sure anyone trying to follow in your footsteps, and pre-emptively defy a court order, knows they'll have to put their money where their mouth is."
"Quite understandable, Your Honour."
"You're sure Junior is where you want him to be?"
"I've made more plans and preparations than I've mentioned so far. He'll be in good hands."
"Out of curiosity, son, if you're so goll-danged sure you want to keep Junior away from anyone the prosecution wants as his guardians, why go to the trouble of telling me things I didn't ask about? You could've dragged the whole thing out for weeks by exercising your right not to self-incriminate, and using a bunch of other procedural tricks I expect you could dig up without too much trouble."
"Because, in at least one sense, you're not actually the main audience. I wasn't kidding about having so many death threats I need a separate spam-folder to keep track of them all. I'm hoping that concrete proof I'm willing to go to jail to protect someone close to me, and reasonably plausible evidence I'm willing to die for them, will deter at least some hare-brained schemes that would put lives at risk. To a lesser degree, the fact that I entered into evidence proof that I am willing to use force in self-defense against individuals, even if I'm not stupid enough to attempt to use it against a government, may lead some of the not-completely-idiotic death-threat senders to have second thoughts about what sorts of force I have made plans to use if I have to defend myself again."
"Doesn't sound very Canadian, to me."
"Being nice and polite and working within the system are simply our first choices, Your Honour - not the only ones. When push comes to shove, there are reasons that in World War One, Canadian soldiers were called 'stormtroopers'."
"Well, I can't say I agree with your reasoning, son, but I can understand where you got it from. If there are no other relevant points to raise? Thirty days for contempt of court."
Life and Death in Weirdtopia
General | Posted 9 years ago"I want to set a few things straight, so I'm going to describe the whole series of events as I experienced them.
"I'd gone to the office building to meet with someone who could help me through some of the more Byzantine paperwork you've put together, here in The Future. Specifically, I was looking into upgrading my current robotic body in one or more ways, depending on which alterations I'd be able to get approval for. Hm? Oh, replacing my tail-tip vertebrae with one that was more useful for self-defense, such as a shot of pepper-spray or whatever else is allowable; or upgrading various parts of my surfacing with this electrically-controllable gecko stuff, so that I could walk up a wall to get to a door handle instead of relying on Lexx, my helper-robot, for every single human-scale task; or putting some plating around my ribcage and filling the space with a more usefully-sized battery.
"So I'd parked Lexx in a chair and was on my contact's desk, and we were talking about, what was it, the difference between the rules that are written down and human judgement about such rules, when the window shattered, and /something/ swooped in. Bird- or bat-sized, black, hovering instead of flapping - some kind of drone, I guessed.
"Then it said, or more screamed, 'Death to the immortals! Kill yourself or I'll kill everyone here! Five, four, three...'
"No, I was unaware of the drone's actual owners. Nor about the real-world trolls you seem to be unable to squash. I'm still teaching myself how to use the full set of augmented-reality overlays that are available to me. As far as I knew, the threats were entirely legitimate.
"So I galloped to the broken window and jumped out.
"As much as I'm flattered by the obvious interpretation, this wasn't a choice to kill myself to save everyone else. I'd read up on the specifications of my robotic body. Specifically, that due to my relatively light weight and large surface area, then as long as I could maintain a parachutist-style spread-eagle, my terminal velocity was only two hundred ten kilometres per hour - and as long as I landed on a reasonably flat surface, even if it was concrete, the wunder-materials of my structural framework would be good enough that I could stand right up without damage. Even if I got into some sort of spin, so that some part of my hit the ground much faster, then the chassis includes a selection of carefully-designed break-points, allowing some parts to snap off in order to preserve the remainder from such acceleration. Depending on how much damage was involved, they could even be snapped right back on.
"Hm? Oh, no, I was assuming that with all the invisible infrastructure you've got going, anyone I might land on would get a warning to duck.
"Anyway, I've never gone skydiving before, and didn't know how to aim my fall... plus I was suddenly distracted by all sorts of high-priority instant-messages warning me about other revived cryonicists being attacked... so I landed partly on the armrest of a bench, all the break-points snapped, and a couple of seconds later, I was coherent enough to say, 'Okay, now I'm a robotic rat's /skull/. Anyone around who can sweep me back together?'.
"Which is when I got a reply with a different plan. 'Am close. Can hide you, and muffle your EM, if you want.' This whole situation was, as far as I was concerned, pretty well spiralled out of control - my best guess was that the bird-drone thing would be following me down as soon as it could, and would blow itself up to make doubly sure I was dead. And there was the matter that almost all of my battery cells were in my body, from the neck down, and I had very little time before I was going to run out of juice. So sure, this offer might be part of some multi-stage plan to kidnap me, but I didn't have much to lose, so I sent a response of a thumbs-up emoji.
"In two seconds, an ostrich-taur lady, a body-plan I had vague memories of seeing more than once since I was revived, stepped over to the bench, sat next to me, and brought out something like an egg-shaped Kinder egg from her purse, pulled the two halves open, scooped my head into it, and snapped it shut.
"My gyros registered some movement, a lot of the radio-signals dropped precipitiously in strength, and then my temperature gauges registered an increase in ambient temperature with the curve consistent with being surrounded by body-temperature flesh. I choose to believe that she swallowed me and later coughed me up, and I have no interest in looking at video records or analyzing acceleration data. But I was nearly out of juice, so I set a couple of quick script commands, then paused my brain-emulation software.
"The next thing I was conscious of, the plastic eggshell was being cracked open, and there weren't any radio signals at all. The ostrich-taur-lady plugged a cable into the regular socket on the bottom of my skull, and I mentally flinched, expecting a bunch of data-signals containing viruses - but it was just power.
"She rubbed the back of her head. 'Okay, this is kind of embarrassing,' she said. 'But I want to get it into the open first, so you can make informed decisions. I've kind of had a thing for you since I found out you were revived, and while I've been careful not to cross the line into stalking, I've tried to be in the same areas you are, when I can, to try to meet you. I wasn't expecting anything like actual /violence/. We're in a real-private room I'm renting from one of my groups, Faraday cage and crowd-shuffling and everything, so you can hide here and be safe as long as you want. Or say the word and I'll take you anywhere you want to go. Oh, and I swept up most of your body, maybe all of it, I don't know if any of it still works.'
"At my request, she reattached my spine to my head, and as that still worked, I started reassembling my remaining parts onto my initially snake-like form. On my request, Peggy - yes, that's the ostrich-lady - left me to it, exited the Faraday cage, and posted a particular alphanumeric sequence to a particular public board, waited a few moments for a reply, and came back. The response was one that I had anticipated, but wasn't expecting.
"It seems that a certain cryonic revivee, who I've been working with and had trusted with some of my power-of-attorney, had also been victim of this massive trolling, and had gotten notice of my autodefenestration and that I had gone offline moments after impact; and as my directions on such matters allowed for a certain amount of leeway, he initiated one of my 'in case of my death' plans...
"... and activated my backup copy.
"Given the legal system you've developed, I would thus like to introduce you all to the individual who is, legally, my son. You can see that he has chosen to wear a plush-style suit over his skeletal-shaped body, and the mandated diapers over that to indicate that, according to the legal fiction that he and I are entirely separate individuals with nothing in common, he is roughly one day old. According to the naming conventions I chose in case of just such an occurrance, then as long as it's just the two of us, you may refer to me as Dan, Dan Senior, or Dan One, and him as Dan, Dan Junior, or Dan Two. No, neither of us have any intention to reproduce further. No, Peggy is not his mother - we aren't even dating, let alone married. That wasn't a date, she was just helping me shop for some electronic parts. Look, if there aren't going to be any /relevant/ questions then I'm just going to go back to living my life, okay? ... Well, I certainly /hope/ that they can catch the trolls, but my understanding is that they used sufficient anonymization that it may be some time before any particular individuals are suspected..."
"I'd gone to the office building to meet with someone who could help me through some of the more Byzantine paperwork you've put together, here in The Future. Specifically, I was looking into upgrading my current robotic body in one or more ways, depending on which alterations I'd be able to get approval for. Hm? Oh, replacing my tail-tip vertebrae with one that was more useful for self-defense, such as a shot of pepper-spray or whatever else is allowable; or upgrading various parts of my surfacing with this electrically-controllable gecko stuff, so that I could walk up a wall to get to a door handle instead of relying on Lexx, my helper-robot, for every single human-scale task; or putting some plating around my ribcage and filling the space with a more usefully-sized battery.
"So I'd parked Lexx in a chair and was on my contact's desk, and we were talking about, what was it, the difference between the rules that are written down and human judgement about such rules, when the window shattered, and /something/ swooped in. Bird- or bat-sized, black, hovering instead of flapping - some kind of drone, I guessed.
"Then it said, or more screamed, 'Death to the immortals! Kill yourself or I'll kill everyone here! Five, four, three...'
"No, I was unaware of the drone's actual owners. Nor about the real-world trolls you seem to be unable to squash. I'm still teaching myself how to use the full set of augmented-reality overlays that are available to me. As far as I knew, the threats were entirely legitimate.
"So I galloped to the broken window and jumped out.
"As much as I'm flattered by the obvious interpretation, this wasn't a choice to kill myself to save everyone else. I'd read up on the specifications of my robotic body. Specifically, that due to my relatively light weight and large surface area, then as long as I could maintain a parachutist-style spread-eagle, my terminal velocity was only two hundred ten kilometres per hour - and as long as I landed on a reasonably flat surface, even if it was concrete, the wunder-materials of my structural framework would be good enough that I could stand right up without damage. Even if I got into some sort of spin, so that some part of my hit the ground much faster, then the chassis includes a selection of carefully-designed break-points, allowing some parts to snap off in order to preserve the remainder from such acceleration. Depending on how much damage was involved, they could even be snapped right back on.
"Hm? Oh, no, I was assuming that with all the invisible infrastructure you've got going, anyone I might land on would get a warning to duck.
"Anyway, I've never gone skydiving before, and didn't know how to aim my fall... plus I was suddenly distracted by all sorts of high-priority instant-messages warning me about other revived cryonicists being attacked... so I landed partly on the armrest of a bench, all the break-points snapped, and a couple of seconds later, I was coherent enough to say, 'Okay, now I'm a robotic rat's /skull/. Anyone around who can sweep me back together?'.
"Which is when I got a reply with a different plan. 'Am close. Can hide you, and muffle your EM, if you want.' This whole situation was, as far as I was concerned, pretty well spiralled out of control - my best guess was that the bird-drone thing would be following me down as soon as it could, and would blow itself up to make doubly sure I was dead. And there was the matter that almost all of my battery cells were in my body, from the neck down, and I had very little time before I was going to run out of juice. So sure, this offer might be part of some multi-stage plan to kidnap me, but I didn't have much to lose, so I sent a response of a thumbs-up emoji.
"In two seconds, an ostrich-taur lady, a body-plan I had vague memories of seeing more than once since I was revived, stepped over to the bench, sat next to me, and brought out something like an egg-shaped Kinder egg from her purse, pulled the two halves open, scooped my head into it, and snapped it shut.
"My gyros registered some movement, a lot of the radio-signals dropped precipitiously in strength, and then my temperature gauges registered an increase in ambient temperature with the curve consistent with being surrounded by body-temperature flesh. I choose to believe that she swallowed me and later coughed me up, and I have no interest in looking at video records or analyzing acceleration data. But I was nearly out of juice, so I set a couple of quick script commands, then paused my brain-emulation software.
"The next thing I was conscious of, the plastic eggshell was being cracked open, and there weren't any radio signals at all. The ostrich-taur-lady plugged a cable into the regular socket on the bottom of my skull, and I mentally flinched, expecting a bunch of data-signals containing viruses - but it was just power.
"She rubbed the back of her head. 'Okay, this is kind of embarrassing,' she said. 'But I want to get it into the open first, so you can make informed decisions. I've kind of had a thing for you since I found out you were revived, and while I've been careful not to cross the line into stalking, I've tried to be in the same areas you are, when I can, to try to meet you. I wasn't expecting anything like actual /violence/. We're in a real-private room I'm renting from one of my groups, Faraday cage and crowd-shuffling and everything, so you can hide here and be safe as long as you want. Or say the word and I'll take you anywhere you want to go. Oh, and I swept up most of your body, maybe all of it, I don't know if any of it still works.'
"At my request, she reattached my spine to my head, and as that still worked, I started reassembling my remaining parts onto my initially snake-like form. On my request, Peggy - yes, that's the ostrich-lady - left me to it, exited the Faraday cage, and posted a particular alphanumeric sequence to a particular public board, waited a few moments for a reply, and came back. The response was one that I had anticipated, but wasn't expecting.
"It seems that a certain cryonic revivee, who I've been working with and had trusted with some of my power-of-attorney, had also been victim of this massive trolling, and had gotten notice of my autodefenestration and that I had gone offline moments after impact; and as my directions on such matters allowed for a certain amount of leeway, he initiated one of my 'in case of my death' plans...
"... and activated my backup copy.
"Given the legal system you've developed, I would thus like to introduce you all to the individual who is, legally, my son. You can see that he has chosen to wear a plush-style suit over his skeletal-shaped body, and the mandated diapers over that to indicate that, according to the legal fiction that he and I are entirely separate individuals with nothing in common, he is roughly one day old. According to the naming conventions I chose in case of just such an occurrance, then as long as it's just the two of us, you may refer to me as Dan, Dan Senior, or Dan One, and him as Dan, Dan Junior, or Dan Two. No, neither of us have any intention to reproduce further. No, Peggy is not his mother - we aren't even dating, let alone married. That wasn't a date, she was just helping me shop for some electronic parts. Look, if there aren't going to be any /relevant/ questions then I'm just going to go back to living my life, okay? ... Well, I certainly /hope/ that they can catch the trolls, but my understanding is that they used sufficient anonymization that it may be some time before any particular individuals are suspected..."
Politics in Weirdtopia
General | Posted 9 years ago"... I've been doing some reading, and some reading between the lines based on my previous models of reality. As best as I can tell, while I was dead, technology advanced to where it solved a social problem that wasn't even thought of in terms of a 'solvable problem' before I died. Simplifying a whole lot, then a lot of deep patterns of North American culture are the long-lasting results of a founder effect. Specifically, four particular waves of immigration from England - two of them, the Pilgrims and Quakers, influenced the American 'north', including English Canada, while the other two, the Cavaliers and Borderers, merged into the American 'south'. It's the Cavaliers in particular I'm thinking of - in the English Civil War, they fought on the monarchy's side, and lost, and came to America with all sorts of notions about the proper order of the universe and the chain of being, and how some people are inherently superior to others. They settled around Virginia - and there's a reason that the fictional John Carter of Mars, one of the classic heroes, always claimed to be a Virginian rather than a mere American. Anyway, this led, in the South, to a particular sort of awareness about which groups you were better than, which, when given the economic incentives of the Black Belt of cotton-producing soil, led to chattel slavery being seen as the obvious way to go about things. And just because they over-reached and lost the American Civil War didn't mean that internalized set of mental patterns, of knowing who's socially below you, went away. Jim Crow laws were implemented, and later on, when those were gotten rid of, then in many cases 'immigrants' were seen as the new low rung on the ladder.
"Welp, while I was dead, various clever groups gradually put together robots that were lifelike enough to trigger various deep neural structures that recognized them as being 'people', while also not having AI anywhere near capable enough to count as full-fledged persons - and so this new class of entities was able to fill the social role of people-like things that any real human could see was of a lower status, removing much of the instinctive desire to find some other recognizable out-group to force into that slot. And with that, then all sorts of knock-on positive effects seem to have resulted - I'm guessing that now that the north's moralistic Puritan scolding, applying Quaker-based rules of equality against the Cavalier-based instincts that didn't seem like instincts at all but were just the way the world was, no longer raised the Borderlanders' clannish defensiveness against outsiders meddling in their affairs to quite the same degree.
"Of course, that's all guesswork about astonishingly large and near-invisibly subtle social patterns. I can't say that, as someone with the body of a robot, I've experienced any particular amount of being slotted into low-status positions, beyond what I'd expect from not being a member of any particular social cliques and having to build my reputation from scratch. It's possible that the invisible social infrastructure is clever enough to route people who would be particularly disagreeable to me and myself away from each other. Or maybe my particular chassis is inhuman enough that it doesn't register as a 'person' in the first place, to the primate-hierarchy neural structures I mentioned.
"I will admit that this model explains a few things about what I thought of as my culture that I didn't previously understand, from, say, how I could find so little interest in sporting events that other people found so much entertainment and fulfillment in, to what actually led to Canadian culture developing in the directions it did.
"I'm still trying to figure out which, if any, of the citizenships I'm currently eligible for to register my acceptance of. The top three contenders are the city I was originally born in, now apparently part of the nearly-ignored, low-population-density region that covers a lot of what I think of as 'Canada'; there's the city I spent nearly all of my life in, now part of the 'Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Regional Water Authority', though it seems nobody bothers calling it much of anything besides 'Great Lakes' these days, much to the annoyance of the mostly-French-speaking St. Lawrence portion; and BosWash, the megacity I was resurrected in. To be honest, until such time as I have even a vague idea of what the various sides on the various political issues being debated are, and am therefore sufficiently competent to start being an informed voter, then I don't see much difference - they're all Future-istic liberal democracies with reasonably good human rights charters. In fact, in the short-term, about the only difference in my life would be which flag I slap onto any flag-shaped personal group-membership advertising I do.
"Not that I've done much of that, even before I died. I knew I was 'supposed' to root for the sportsball teams of the nearest large city, but I only knew a few of the team names, let alone ever watched a game of anything. My preferred hat: white. Sure, sometimes I wore a t-shirt with a picture of a mash-up between two entertainment programs, like Star Wars drawn in the style of Calvin and Hobbes, but that was at least in part because they were just plain decent t-shirts, material- and production-wise. Hm, was there /anything/ I was willing to wear, specifically that indicated I was part of some group? ... Actually, now that I think about it - there was a series of lapel pins of various colours, of the logo of an eye-in-the-pyramid, supposedly indicating membership in one branch or another of the Illuminati, but actually indicated the fandom of a particular gaming publisher. By the time I died, I was still willing to put one of those on the breast pocket of a button-up collared shirt. Not that I went anywhere anyone would recognize it - and I suppose 'giving off signals that nobody else will understand' sums up a reasonably large part of my identity and life. Lives, maybe.
"And now I have a few new choices to try to make: which clothes, if any, to wear. Even before I died, I was practically a hermit. And now that some people seem to acting like bonobos, even though I have even less relevant anatomy than a Ken doll, I've occasionally been mistaken for some kind of walking vibrator and have had to dodge being grabbed by people in the middle of their personal activities. Since /people/ wear clothes, I should start wearing /something/ to avoid being mistaken for a self-propelled appliance. One approach could be to take advantage of offers by some of the second-economy groups I've started joining, and let them subsidize my wardrobe in exchange for advertising them... which is pretty much the opposite of how I /want/ to present myself. Anything that represents some other group I may or may not entirely agree with, that's larger than a lapel pin or cufflinks, isn't what I want. As a further complication, what I'd consider to be 'weekend casual' is generally perceived to be on the level I'd associate with 'business formal'. Which, yes, means that serious people gathering together to discuss serious business often do so in shorts and t-shirts.
"Hm... maybe instead of external group-identity, I should start looking into /personal/ branding. I invented a logo or two for myself before I died, and with proof to whatever modern logo-designers may have copied it since then that I came up with it first, and with The Future's custom 3D printing, I could probably get modern outfits branded with it, with whatever level of in-your-face-ness I like. Might be worth my while to see if there's anything like a personal branding consultant I can hire... what am I saying, this is The Future, of course there is, I just have to find one in my price range."
"Welp, while I was dead, various clever groups gradually put together robots that were lifelike enough to trigger various deep neural structures that recognized them as being 'people', while also not having AI anywhere near capable enough to count as full-fledged persons - and so this new class of entities was able to fill the social role of people-like things that any real human could see was of a lower status, removing much of the instinctive desire to find some other recognizable out-group to force into that slot. And with that, then all sorts of knock-on positive effects seem to have resulted - I'm guessing that now that the north's moralistic Puritan scolding, applying Quaker-based rules of equality against the Cavalier-based instincts that didn't seem like instincts at all but were just the way the world was, no longer raised the Borderlanders' clannish defensiveness against outsiders meddling in their affairs to quite the same degree.
"Of course, that's all guesswork about astonishingly large and near-invisibly subtle social patterns. I can't say that, as someone with the body of a robot, I've experienced any particular amount of being slotted into low-status positions, beyond what I'd expect from not being a member of any particular social cliques and having to build my reputation from scratch. It's possible that the invisible social infrastructure is clever enough to route people who would be particularly disagreeable to me and myself away from each other. Or maybe my particular chassis is inhuman enough that it doesn't register as a 'person' in the first place, to the primate-hierarchy neural structures I mentioned.
"I will admit that this model explains a few things about what I thought of as my culture that I didn't previously understand, from, say, how I could find so little interest in sporting events that other people found so much entertainment and fulfillment in, to what actually led to Canadian culture developing in the directions it did.
"I'm still trying to figure out which, if any, of the citizenships I'm currently eligible for to register my acceptance of. The top three contenders are the city I was originally born in, now apparently part of the nearly-ignored, low-population-density region that covers a lot of what I think of as 'Canada'; there's the city I spent nearly all of my life in, now part of the 'Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Regional Water Authority', though it seems nobody bothers calling it much of anything besides 'Great Lakes' these days, much to the annoyance of the mostly-French-speaking St. Lawrence portion; and BosWash, the megacity I was resurrected in. To be honest, until such time as I have even a vague idea of what the various sides on the various political issues being debated are, and am therefore sufficiently competent to start being an informed voter, then I don't see much difference - they're all Future-istic liberal democracies with reasonably good human rights charters. In fact, in the short-term, about the only difference in my life would be which flag I slap onto any flag-shaped personal group-membership advertising I do.
"Not that I've done much of that, even before I died. I knew I was 'supposed' to root for the sportsball teams of the nearest large city, but I only knew a few of the team names, let alone ever watched a game of anything. My preferred hat: white. Sure, sometimes I wore a t-shirt with a picture of a mash-up between two entertainment programs, like Star Wars drawn in the style of Calvin and Hobbes, but that was at least in part because they were just plain decent t-shirts, material- and production-wise. Hm, was there /anything/ I was willing to wear, specifically that indicated I was part of some group? ... Actually, now that I think about it - there was a series of lapel pins of various colours, of the logo of an eye-in-the-pyramid, supposedly indicating membership in one branch or another of the Illuminati, but actually indicated the fandom of a particular gaming publisher. By the time I died, I was still willing to put one of those on the breast pocket of a button-up collared shirt. Not that I went anywhere anyone would recognize it - and I suppose 'giving off signals that nobody else will understand' sums up a reasonably large part of my identity and life. Lives, maybe.
"And now I have a few new choices to try to make: which clothes, if any, to wear. Even before I died, I was practically a hermit. And now that some people seem to acting like bonobos, even though I have even less relevant anatomy than a Ken doll, I've occasionally been mistaken for some kind of walking vibrator and have had to dodge being grabbed by people in the middle of their personal activities. Since /people/ wear clothes, I should start wearing /something/ to avoid being mistaken for a self-propelled appliance. One approach could be to take advantage of offers by some of the second-economy groups I've started joining, and let them subsidize my wardrobe in exchange for advertising them... which is pretty much the opposite of how I /want/ to present myself. Anything that represents some other group I may or may not entirely agree with, that's larger than a lapel pin or cufflinks, isn't what I want. As a further complication, what I'd consider to be 'weekend casual' is generally perceived to be on the level I'd associate with 'business formal'. Which, yes, means that serious people gathering together to discuss serious business often do so in shorts and t-shirts.
"Hm... maybe instead of external group-identity, I should start looking into /personal/ branding. I invented a logo or two for myself before I died, and with proof to whatever modern logo-designers may have copied it since then that I came up with it first, and with The Future's custom 3D printing, I could probably get modern outfits branded with it, with whatever level of in-your-face-ness I like. Might be worth my while to see if there's anything like a personal branding consultant I can hire... what am I saying, this is The Future, of course there is, I just have to find one in my price range."
