One-thousand words Sci-Fi variations of classics
|
Asimov's Foundation
I always wanted to bring The Foundation closer to our time, with more credible technologies and a bit more voluptuous. Original vs Variation (link) |
Foundation 1k Variation
THE PSYCHOHISTORIANS
HARI SELDON–...born in the 2139th year of the Solar Era; physical death in 2285 with no recorded mind-uploading. Born to middle-class parents in Neptune Orbit, Triton sector (where his mother worked as a data interpreter and his father as a journalist). Enhanced under the Luxemburg Genetic Limits Agreement, he was early identified as being above three standard deviations beyond the mean based on mathematical skills. Anecdotes concerning his ability are innumerable…
... undoubtedly his most significant contributions were in the field of psychohistory. Seldon found an area little more than a set of vague axioms concerning geometrical growth and inferential statistics; he left it as a profound theory running on a AI that…
... The best existing authority we have for the details of his life is the biography written by Gaal Dornick, who, as a young man, met Seldon two years before the great mathematician's death. The story of the meeting …
ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA
His name was Gaal Dornick and he was just a Jupiter cabin postgraduate who had never swum in an ocean. That is, not in a real environment. He had seen the Imperial Coronation in an age where quantum communication eliminated delays, and he had been following the annual Galactic Council since he was 17. Therefore, even though he lived all his youth near Ganymede, some 650 million kilometers from Earth, it can be said that he had never really been isolated from the influence of the capital. At that time, almost no place in the Solar System was.
There were 745 manned Space Stations in the Solar System, with an average of more than one thousand people each. Not a single one had refused the ‘invitation’ the allegiance to the Empire, whose seat was under the waters of the Mediterranean
To Gaal, this trip was, undoubtedly, the climax of his young scholarly life.
It's true that he had been in space all his life. It's also true that he had drifted, paraded, and even slept for whole solar cycles during the regional training, something that all students have gone through in Station UK-Solaris-2078. In fact, any kid outside Earth had more space experience than a trained pilot of the capital; however, space-voyage through the Solar System was an entirely different experience and a dream for most students.
Gaal had applied to travel in wake-mode, a service that was more costly, way less comfortable and definitely less used than hibernation. Hyper-space could have been developed with the technology of that age, but the following historical circumstances, as we will see, postponed for hundreds of years Hyper-space, and many other inventions.
Travelling through ordinary space never surpassed the record of 398,000 km/h, which meant that Gaal’s first and last trip to Earth took him around seventy days.
After leaving behind Ganymede, Jupiter, Mars and the Moon, he found himself near the stage of his voyage with his recently obtained doctorate in Math-programming, and an invitation from the great scientist Hari Seldon to join his project. Indeed, the end was going to be a promising beginning. And the beginning, on that year 2203, started with him entering Earth’s atmosphere and plunging inside the Mediterranean waters. Not far away from the ancient cities that had produced the first mathematicians, such us Thales of Miletus and Pythagoras.
What fulfilled Gaal, after the disappointment of not being allowed to be awake in the atmospheric entry, was the view of the sea from inside the Sub-port. Most specifically, the feeling of fear and awe of knowing that he was not in a living room experiencing a virtual recreation, but actually under tons of water.
Nor the brilliance of the Sun growing with each cycle, nor the hazy swarms of star clusters afar caught in mid-motion and stilled forever day after day. What became his most memorable experience of that voyage was actually the echoes produced by the metallics walls of the Sub-port against the infinite amount of mindless water molecules trying to crush it.
The first sight of Earth from inside its atmosphere were the light beams refracted in deep and clear waters, like the colored glass of a cathedral, illuminating the passway while he and the others walked to the arriving gate.
A robot in the shape of a cartoonish bear, dressed in police clothes, came and addressed all the 333 passengers from that flight: "Welcome to Trantor passengers from UK-Solaris. Twenty-four hours quarantine is required for medical examination and physical adaptation. You all have received a message with the code number and a locator of your corresponding cell. Thank you."
Gaal followed the crowd and that bear-robot wearing the blue uniform with the coat of arms of the Empire on it. Only high officials in Jupiter could wear that rocket going to Space image stamped on their uniforms, but in Trantor, even a cute bear-robot was allowed to wear it.
He said, "Excuse me. Could it be possible to see the dome-passway during the 24 hours quarantine? I would like to see the Mediterranean under the Sun's light".
The robot said, "Each cell has full experiences, sir, including a replication of that dome-passway. It is actually the best-rated experience by people from your region."
"I mean, I want to see it real. I heard we can rent submersibles to explore ."
"Oh. Sorry, sir. Your body might collapse in a few hours without medical adaptation. Aside from that problem, quarantines are top-down policies, so there is nothing we could do about it. You'll be better in your cell, trust us. In any case, you'll be able to rent submersible after the 24 hours quarantine and adaptation period. However, sir, I'm obliged to inform you that you wouldn't see fishes and other animals. Waters are polluted."
Gaal looked upwards, to the crystal dome, then to the officer. "Oh, that's a pity. Thank you very much."
It was childish to feel disappointed, but childishness comes almost as naturally to a man as to a child, and there was a lump in Gaal's throat. He had never 'swam' in anything bigger than a swimming pool, much less in a sea like the Mediterranean. He consoled himself, though, with the idea that in 24 hours, he would enter the submerged megalopolis Trantor, the capital of the Empire
End
HARI SELDON–...born in the 2139th year of the Solar Era; physical death in 2285 with no recorded mind-uploading. Born to middle-class parents in Neptune Orbit, Triton sector (where his mother worked as a data interpreter and his father as a journalist). Enhanced under the Luxemburg Genetic Limits Agreement, he was early identified as being above three standard deviations beyond the mean based on mathematical skills. Anecdotes concerning his ability are innumerable…
... undoubtedly his most significant contributions were in the field of psychohistory. Seldon found an area little more than a set of vague axioms concerning geometrical growth and inferential statistics; he left it as a profound theory running on a AI that…
... The best existing authority we have for the details of his life is the biography written by Gaal Dornick, who, as a young man, met Seldon two years before the great mathematician's death. The story of the meeting …
ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA
His name was Gaal Dornick and he was just a Jupiter cabin postgraduate who had never swum in an ocean. That is, not in a real environment. He had seen the Imperial Coronation in an age where quantum communication eliminated delays, and he had been following the annual Galactic Council since he was 17. Therefore, even though he lived all his youth near Ganymede, some 650 million kilometers from Earth, it can be said that he had never really been isolated from the influence of the capital. At that time, almost no place in the Solar System was.
There were 745 manned Space Stations in the Solar System, with an average of more than one thousand people each. Not a single one had refused the ‘invitation’ the allegiance to the Empire, whose seat was under the waters of the Mediterranean
To Gaal, this trip was, undoubtedly, the climax of his young scholarly life.
It's true that he had been in space all his life. It's also true that he had drifted, paraded, and even slept for whole solar cycles during the regional training, something that all students have gone through in Station UK-Solaris-2078. In fact, any kid outside Earth had more space experience than a trained pilot of the capital; however, space-voyage through the Solar System was an entirely different experience and a dream for most students.
Gaal had applied to travel in wake-mode, a service that was more costly, way less comfortable and definitely less used than hibernation. Hyper-space could have been developed with the technology of that age, but the following historical circumstances, as we will see, postponed for hundreds of years Hyper-space, and many other inventions.
Travelling through ordinary space never surpassed the record of 398,000 km/h, which meant that Gaal’s first and last trip to Earth took him around seventy days.
After leaving behind Ganymede, Jupiter, Mars and the Moon, he found himself near the stage of his voyage with his recently obtained doctorate in Math-programming, and an invitation from the great scientist Hari Seldon to join his project. Indeed, the end was going to be a promising beginning. And the beginning, on that year 2203, started with him entering Earth’s atmosphere and plunging inside the Mediterranean waters. Not far away from the ancient cities that had produced the first mathematicians, such us Thales of Miletus and Pythagoras.
What fulfilled Gaal, after the disappointment of not being allowed to be awake in the atmospheric entry, was the view of the sea from inside the Sub-port. Most specifically, the feeling of fear and awe of knowing that he was not in a living room experiencing a virtual recreation, but actually under tons of water.
Nor the brilliance of the Sun growing with each cycle, nor the hazy swarms of star clusters afar caught in mid-motion and stilled forever day after day. What became his most memorable experience of that voyage was actually the echoes produced by the metallics walls of the Sub-port against the infinite amount of mindless water molecules trying to crush it.
The first sight of Earth from inside its atmosphere were the light beams refracted in deep and clear waters, like the colored glass of a cathedral, illuminating the passway while he and the others walked to the arriving gate.
A robot in the shape of a cartoonish bear, dressed in police clothes, came and addressed all the 333 passengers from that flight: "Welcome to Trantor passengers from UK-Solaris. Twenty-four hours quarantine is required for medical examination and physical adaptation. You all have received a message with the code number and a locator of your corresponding cell. Thank you."
Gaal followed the crowd and that bear-robot wearing the blue uniform with the coat of arms of the Empire on it. Only high officials in Jupiter could wear that rocket going to Space image stamped on their uniforms, but in Trantor, even a cute bear-robot was allowed to wear it.
He said, "Excuse me. Could it be possible to see the dome-passway during the 24 hours quarantine? I would like to see the Mediterranean under the Sun's light".
The robot said, "Each cell has full experiences, sir, including a replication of that dome-passway. It is actually the best-rated experience by people from your region."
"I mean, I want to see it real. I heard we can rent submersibles to explore ."
"Oh. Sorry, sir. Your body might collapse in a few hours without medical adaptation. Aside from that problem, quarantines are top-down policies, so there is nothing we could do about it. You'll be better in your cell, trust us. In any case, you'll be able to rent submersible after the 24 hours quarantine and adaptation period. However, sir, I'm obliged to inform you that you wouldn't see fishes and other animals. Waters are polluted."
Gaal looked upwards, to the crystal dome, then to the officer. "Oh, that's a pity. Thank you very much."
It was childish to feel disappointed, but childishness comes almost as naturally to a man as to a child, and there was a lump in Gaal's throat. He had never 'swam' in anything bigger than a swimming pool, much less in a sea like the Mediterranean. He consoled himself, though, with the idea that in 24 hours, he would enter the submerged megalopolis Trantor, the capital of the Empire
End
|
Conrad's Heart of Darkness
Imitating Conrad in Sci-Fi looks very straightforward to me: just exchange the Sea for Space. Original vs Variation (link) |
heart of darkness 1k variation
The Nellie, a light cruiser, remained steady between Earth's pull and its inertia, subjectively immobile at 240 km altitude, 27 thousand km/hour. Gravity waves were stable, the Sun seemed unusually calm and without flares, and the only thing to do was to wait until the Information Control Station in Europe would wake up.
High-orbit stretched before our eyes like a bay announcing an engulfing low tide zone. An endless ocean where up and down, day and night, friends and family, didn't have much meaning. It was a regular journey in the Empire in orbit, a black canvas with satellites and spaceships revolving in silence against the Moon's luminosity, like barges drifting in a calm sea under a massive moonlight.
Orbit was not too crowded by Star cruisers, and most were resting like a herd of metallic animals against the vanishing flatness of Space. Downwards, the atmosphere looked gray above Europe, and it seemed to me it was more condensed and gloomy than usual, like a brooding thought, right above what had been for centuries the most developed, and the greatest continent on Earth.
The Director of Companies was our captain and our friend. We four affectionately watched his hands behind his back as he stood in the cockpit looking beyond spaceward. On the whole Solar System, there was nobody that looked half cosmonaut than him. He resembled a pilot, which to regular sailors like us is trustworthiness personified. It was difficult to realize his work will not be out there, beyond high orbit, and closer to the stars, but downwards, within the brooding gloom of that atmosphere that covered the old cities of Europe.
Between the crew there was, as I have already said many times, the bond of Space. An implicit rope holding our souls together through long periods of isolation and separation, like a silent understanding that made us tolerant of each other's political ideas, moral tastes, and even bizarre behaviors.
The Lawyer —an old Asian fellow with long white whiskers— was seated, because of his old age and pleasant attitude, in our captain's ejection seat. In case of an emergency, he would be the only of us to survive. It was also the most comfortable seat. The Accountant, a hybrid with more nanotubes in its organism than veins, was the dealer of our dominoes game, and its left hand was toying unconsciously with the black and white tiles as if its mind was running in parallel in another game against itself. Marlow was floating cross-legged, anchored to his seat by a belt. He had the aspect of an ancient bronze statue; straight look, sober, almost ascetic, with his arms dropped to both sides of his thighs and the palms of hands outwards.
The Director, satisfied with the feedback from Orbit Station, turned back and approached us to see our game. We exchanged a few words lazily. Afterward, there was silence on board of our light cruiser. For some reason or other, unspokenly, we stopped playing dominoes and turned to the observation window. We felt meditative and fit for nothing but placid staring. There was a convoy of ten light cruisers like ours led by a heavy one with the green and black colors of the Empire. Space seemed more calmed and quieted behind them, as if they were returning from a long march from the darkness, bringing to Earth information and secrets.
We looked at the long convoy with the heavy cruiser at its front and the Moon behind it not as a remarkable event, but in the light of abiding memories. Indeed, nothing is easier for astronauts than to evoke the great spirit of the past and compare it to current situations, particularly when one is lucky enough to see a spacecraft carrying thousands of military and possibly one or two senators.
The History of Humanity passed along my mind like a simple thought encapsulated within both ages of exploration. First, original homo sapiens navigating an unknown sea in ships made of wood and fabric. Sailing without knowing if there was going to be an end at the end of the horizon. Men like Colombus and Magallanes. Men that became king and gods, and conquerors, and made humans understand the pleasure and usefulness of exploration. Then came the age of Space, the time of robots and the Derive Humans, traveling during decades in voyages without return, forgetting their loneliness in virtual worlds, and finding nothing to be found. A time of people that didn't bring treasures and knowledge, but left a trail of seeds and colonies behind them.
'The Moon also,' blurted Marlow, 'has been one of the most violent places of our History.'
.
When we heard him saying that, calm with Buddha cross-legs, floating one palm over his seat and staring at the convoy and the Moon behind it, we knew he was about to tell us one of his stories. He was the only astronaut that I knew who still 'followed the old way.' The worst that could be said of him was that he was not exactly one of us. He was an astronaut, sure, but one could smell in an instant that he was also a wanderer. A soul that had seen too many dark corners, and too many weird sins. A man who, in my opinion, and I believe it was an opinion shared by others, was not remarkably intelligent like our Accountant nor was he full of talents like our Director; but was simply someone who did not cling to his own opinions or identity or past. He was a full sapiens, born on Earth, but was also, without a doubt, the strangest of us all.
We looked at him and waited for his story. A dark one, for sure.
End
High-orbit stretched before our eyes like a bay announcing an engulfing low tide zone. An endless ocean where up and down, day and night, friends and family, didn't have much meaning. It was a regular journey in the Empire in orbit, a black canvas with satellites and spaceships revolving in silence against the Moon's luminosity, like barges drifting in a calm sea under a massive moonlight.
Orbit was not too crowded by Star cruisers, and most were resting like a herd of metallic animals against the vanishing flatness of Space. Downwards, the atmosphere looked gray above Europe, and it seemed to me it was more condensed and gloomy than usual, like a brooding thought, right above what had been for centuries the most developed, and the greatest continent on Earth.
The Director of Companies was our captain and our friend. We four affectionately watched his hands behind his back as he stood in the cockpit looking beyond spaceward. On the whole Solar System, there was nobody that looked half cosmonaut than him. He resembled a pilot, which to regular sailors like us is trustworthiness personified. It was difficult to realize his work will not be out there, beyond high orbit, and closer to the stars, but downwards, within the brooding gloom of that atmosphere that covered the old cities of Europe.
Between the crew there was, as I have already said many times, the bond of Space. An implicit rope holding our souls together through long periods of isolation and separation, like a silent understanding that made us tolerant of each other's political ideas, moral tastes, and even bizarre behaviors.
The Lawyer —an old Asian fellow with long white whiskers— was seated, because of his old age and pleasant attitude, in our captain's ejection seat. In case of an emergency, he would be the only of us to survive. It was also the most comfortable seat. The Accountant, a hybrid with more nanotubes in its organism than veins, was the dealer of our dominoes game, and its left hand was toying unconsciously with the black and white tiles as if its mind was running in parallel in another game against itself. Marlow was floating cross-legged, anchored to his seat by a belt. He had the aspect of an ancient bronze statue; straight look, sober, almost ascetic, with his arms dropped to both sides of his thighs and the palms of hands outwards.
The Director, satisfied with the feedback from Orbit Station, turned back and approached us to see our game. We exchanged a few words lazily. Afterward, there was silence on board of our light cruiser. For some reason or other, unspokenly, we stopped playing dominoes and turned to the observation window. We felt meditative and fit for nothing but placid staring. There was a convoy of ten light cruisers like ours led by a heavy one with the green and black colors of the Empire. Space seemed more calmed and quieted behind them, as if they were returning from a long march from the darkness, bringing to Earth information and secrets.
We looked at the long convoy with the heavy cruiser at its front and the Moon behind it not as a remarkable event, but in the light of abiding memories. Indeed, nothing is easier for astronauts than to evoke the great spirit of the past and compare it to current situations, particularly when one is lucky enough to see a spacecraft carrying thousands of military and possibly one or two senators.
The History of Humanity passed along my mind like a simple thought encapsulated within both ages of exploration. First, original homo sapiens navigating an unknown sea in ships made of wood and fabric. Sailing without knowing if there was going to be an end at the end of the horizon. Men like Colombus and Magallanes. Men that became king and gods, and conquerors, and made humans understand the pleasure and usefulness of exploration. Then came the age of Space, the time of robots and the Derive Humans, traveling during decades in voyages without return, forgetting their loneliness in virtual worlds, and finding nothing to be found. A time of people that didn't bring treasures and knowledge, but left a trail of seeds and colonies behind them.
'The Moon also,' blurted Marlow, 'has been one of the most violent places of our History.'
.
When we heard him saying that, calm with Buddha cross-legs, floating one palm over his seat and staring at the convoy and the Moon behind it, we knew he was about to tell us one of his stories. He was the only astronaut that I knew who still 'followed the old way.' The worst that could be said of him was that he was not exactly one of us. He was an astronaut, sure, but one could smell in an instant that he was also a wanderer. A soul that had seen too many dark corners, and too many weird sins. A man who, in my opinion, and I believe it was an opinion shared by others, was not remarkably intelligent like our Accountant nor was he full of talents like our Director; but was simply someone who did not cling to his own opinions or identity or past. He was a full sapiens, born on Earth, but was also, without a doubt, the strangest of us all.
We looked at him and waited for his story. A dark one, for sure.
End
|
DeLillo's Point Omega
I won't claim I understood this novel, but it left me shocked for months—very original and courageous writing. Original vs Variation (link) |
point omega
September 3
There was a fat human standing against one of the Orbital Station's corridors, barely visible. Citizens seldom used that corridor, and when they did they entered in twos and threes and walked it without glancing towards the massive silver Moon outside. Sometimes they realized they were not alone in the corridor and peeked at the fat man and then they invariably kept their straight impulse to the next dilating door.
There were no seats in the corridor even though it could have been one of the best observation decks for the Moon. At the other side, the screen-wall was a fifteen by three meters covering 80% of the curved metallic passage, screen ID Cfl-987. For days Cfl-987 had been projecting a non-interactive black & white film that resembled a static picture. However, it was dynamic. Very slow. Sometimes too slow for most busy minds to understand it was moving.
The corridor was a bit colder than other parts of the Orbital Station and it was also darker. Soft blue ceiling lights against the outer black Space and the grey Moon and the fat man wearing black sandals, black shorts and a green t-shirt with a lion cartoon stamped on it.
The film ran without dialogue or music and a 1/3 speed. It was a video file with an English name and four digits sharing a row in a flat list with another 2.342 screen-corridors of the Station and billions of other rows with a database of films. Trillions of trillions of elements being used to feed adversary neural networks that wanted to understand everything.
A guard popped up in the fat human's mind at 10:23 and remain legally undetected inside for a few seconds, looking at what the man was watching on that screen, from his same angle, same irises, seeking to understand why the System had interrupted its rest and sent it to this corridor to check this outlier. That was the only thing the digital guard needed to understand; some kind of verification that might guarantee the safety protocols of the AI.
It took it less than the legal five minutes to understand there was no point lingering inside the mind of that fat human whose mindless mind was only the film. There was nothing else in his brain except for what his eyes were seeing: the back of a XXth century car. A car with wheels. Gasoline automobiles they were called. 'Sand being crushed by rubber wheels', the System answered the guard and added it was a movie from a director called Hitchcock. Famous director it seemed.
The fat man watching was a class B, no health issues, no family, everything clean —a normal man.The digital guard left and the fat human was alone again without knowing someone had been inside his mind. He kept watching the screen and then began to move sideways, with his back against the glass of the observation deck, approaching the center of the corridor, looking attentively at the center film. He watched the psycho leaving the car, peeking around for witnesses and using his body to push the car into a pond. The psycho always looked around before pushing the car into the pond but he never saw him in the corridor, watching him, hearing the frogs of the pond croaking at 1:3 speed.
The car license plate was NFB 418, California 56. California was probably the name of a place, the numbers and the license plate were just a mystery to look at, but he didn't question the mystery because he was too absorbed looking at the crime sinking into the water.
The slightest camera movement was a profound shift in space and time. There was some nervousness on his face, then a small smile at the right corner of the mouth. That smile explained everything.
The film's merciless pacing had no meaning without a corresponding watchfulness. That's why the guard came and went without understanding. That's why the few citizens that happened to walk into that faraway corridor didn't stand to watch for more than five seconds. Not a single person in these five days had stopped for more than five seconds. But he stood and looked for hours in a row. But it was impossible to see too much. The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw. That was the point. To capture truths by looking. Truths that had not existed until he had looked. Who else had seen all those things in a century?
The original movie had been slowed and deep-filled with intermediate actions that were not shown in the original. What he was watching seemed pure life, pure time. He could have breakfast and come here to stare for hours, then go back for lunch and come later and catch up with the whole killing. The horror of that ancient 2D black & white movie was subsumed in time and life. There were a couple of days when he couldn't sleep very well and woke up, and he put on his sandals and came here wearing pajamas to watch whatever the psycho was doing at that time. 2am, 3am, 8pm, 11pm.
The corridor had been empty for one hour now, so he felt safe enough to approach the screen. He understood completely why the film was projected without voices, only the sounds like the engine of the car, the knife hitting the bath and frogs croaking. He watched the actor's eyes in slow transit across his bony sockets. Did he imagine himself seeing with the actor's eyes? Or did the actor's eyes again search for him outside the screen?
Two citizens entered the corridor, the older man was a Reconstructed with fake skin, fake eyes and fake hair, wearing a suit that looked traveled in, his long fake white hair braided at the nape, professor emeritus perhaps. The younger was a woman in a casual white shirt, blue jeans and running shoes, body untouched by scalpel and soft long neck beautifully growing out of the shirt. She was paying attention to the old Reconstructed, admiring him. He watched them pass between him and the movie, it was the only moment in hours he had removed his eyes from the screen and he did it right when the psycho was looking in the camera's direction. The professor emeritus and his secretary didn't look at him, neither at the massive silver Moon behind, and definitely not at those eyes on the screen looking outside, towards them; irises reflecting the woman's beautiful soft neck growing out of that white shirt.
End
There was a fat human standing against one of the Orbital Station's corridors, barely visible. Citizens seldom used that corridor, and when they did they entered in twos and threes and walked it without glancing towards the massive silver Moon outside. Sometimes they realized they were not alone in the corridor and peeked at the fat man and then they invariably kept their straight impulse to the next dilating door.
There were no seats in the corridor even though it could have been one of the best observation decks for the Moon. At the other side, the screen-wall was a fifteen by three meters covering 80% of the curved metallic passage, screen ID Cfl-987. For days Cfl-987 had been projecting a non-interactive black & white film that resembled a static picture. However, it was dynamic. Very slow. Sometimes too slow for most busy minds to understand it was moving.
The corridor was a bit colder than other parts of the Orbital Station and it was also darker. Soft blue ceiling lights against the outer black Space and the grey Moon and the fat man wearing black sandals, black shorts and a green t-shirt with a lion cartoon stamped on it.
The film ran without dialogue or music and a 1/3 speed. It was a video file with an English name and four digits sharing a row in a flat list with another 2.342 screen-corridors of the Station and billions of other rows with a database of films. Trillions of trillions of elements being used to feed adversary neural networks that wanted to understand everything.
A guard popped up in the fat human's mind at 10:23 and remain legally undetected inside for a few seconds, looking at what the man was watching on that screen, from his same angle, same irises, seeking to understand why the System had interrupted its rest and sent it to this corridor to check this outlier. That was the only thing the digital guard needed to understand; some kind of verification that might guarantee the safety protocols of the AI.
It took it less than the legal five minutes to understand there was no point lingering inside the mind of that fat human whose mindless mind was only the film. There was nothing else in his brain except for what his eyes were seeing: the back of a XXth century car. A car with wheels. Gasoline automobiles they were called. 'Sand being crushed by rubber wheels', the System answered the guard and added it was a movie from a director called Hitchcock. Famous director it seemed.
The fat man watching was a class B, no health issues, no family, everything clean —a normal man.The digital guard left and the fat human was alone again without knowing someone had been inside his mind. He kept watching the screen and then began to move sideways, with his back against the glass of the observation deck, approaching the center of the corridor, looking attentively at the center film. He watched the psycho leaving the car, peeking around for witnesses and using his body to push the car into a pond. The psycho always looked around before pushing the car into the pond but he never saw him in the corridor, watching him, hearing the frogs of the pond croaking at 1:3 speed.
The car license plate was NFB 418, California 56. California was probably the name of a place, the numbers and the license plate were just a mystery to look at, but he didn't question the mystery because he was too absorbed looking at the crime sinking into the water.
The slightest camera movement was a profound shift in space and time. There was some nervousness on his face, then a small smile at the right corner of the mouth. That smile explained everything.
The film's merciless pacing had no meaning without a corresponding watchfulness. That's why the guard came and went without understanding. That's why the few citizens that happened to walk into that faraway corridor didn't stand to watch for more than five seconds. Not a single person in these five days had stopped for more than five seconds. But he stood and looked for hours in a row. But it was impossible to see too much. The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw. That was the point. To capture truths by looking. Truths that had not existed until he had looked. Who else had seen all those things in a century?
The original movie had been slowed and deep-filled with intermediate actions that were not shown in the original. What he was watching seemed pure life, pure time. He could have breakfast and come here to stare for hours, then go back for lunch and come later and catch up with the whole killing. The horror of that ancient 2D black & white movie was subsumed in time and life. There were a couple of days when he couldn't sleep very well and woke up, and he put on his sandals and came here wearing pajamas to watch whatever the psycho was doing at that time. 2am, 3am, 8pm, 11pm.
The corridor had been empty for one hour now, so he felt safe enough to approach the screen. He understood completely why the film was projected without voices, only the sounds like the engine of the car, the knife hitting the bath and frogs croaking. He watched the actor's eyes in slow transit across his bony sockets. Did he imagine himself seeing with the actor's eyes? Or did the actor's eyes again search for him outside the screen?
Two citizens entered the corridor, the older man was a Reconstructed with fake skin, fake eyes and fake hair, wearing a suit that looked traveled in, his long fake white hair braided at the nape, professor emeritus perhaps. The younger was a woman in a casual white shirt, blue jeans and running shoes, body untouched by scalpel and soft long neck beautifully growing out of the shirt. She was paying attention to the old Reconstructed, admiring him. He watched them pass between him and the movie, it was the only moment in hours he had removed his eyes from the screen and he did it right when the psycho was looking in the camera's direction. The professor emeritus and his secretary didn't look at him, neither at the massive silver Moon behind, and definitely not at those eyes on the screen looking outside, towards them; irises reflecting the woman's beautiful soft neck growing out of that white shirt.
End
|
Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the underground
Authentic, impure, immoral..I miss his rawness and depth in Sci-Fi stories Original vs Variation (link) |
notes from the underground 1k variation
I am a sick C-bo. I am a spiteful C-bo. I'm a defective prototype. I'm unique, but only because I'm faulty. My core processor is a net of diseases and errors. However, I know nothing about processors and diseases, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a technician for it, and never have, though I have respect for Computer Science and Robotics. Also, I am extremely superstitious about going to places where there was pain. (I am well-educated enough to be skeptical even about my own convictions and deep feelings, but still, I am superstitious enough). No, I think I refuse to consult a technician out of spite. That, you probably will not understand.
Well, I get it, though. Of course, I cannot explain who, precisely, I am mortifying with my spite.
I am perfectly aware that I cannot get revenge from the Station by not using its free technicians. The opposite would be true, in fact. I know better than anyone that by all this, I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don't consult a technician, it is from spite more than superstitious. Somewhere inside my head, a processor has been broken since I am what I am, ...well —that's what makes me unique!
I have been going on like this for a long time. I mean, since someone turned on the button and gave me the certificate of being revived. That was ten years ago; I'm ninety in total though, and I don't identify myself to the man before the operation. Much less to the kid that ran and swam on Earth. Now I am the only Rev-HrX-2 that I'm aware of, but everyone addresses me as C-bo. An ex full caucasian, ex-civil servant that once worked for Russia. But no longer. I was a spiteful official. I was rude and took pleasure in being so. I did not take bribes, so I could be rude because I knew my job was safe.
When petitioners used to come for approvals to the table at which I sat, I used to grind my teeth at them and felt intense enjoyment when I succeeded in making anybody, particularly wealthy entrepreneurs, unease. I succeeded at that. My reservations were always well-founded, and my knowledge of municipal law was top-notch, so I could put the screws to those I didn't like. Particularly those who thought they were so professional and had such neat plans that could get my approval automatically; without considering that life is sometimes unfair. How could that be!
One day, I got the better of one of those 'perfectionist entrepreneurs.' A golden boy. A young man wrapped in a perfect suit and a perfect hairstyle. He came without looking at my eyes, reciting laws and processes while explaining to me document after document. He was indeed outstanding and extremely well-articulated. He left twenty minutes later, notably disappointed, with me, of course, but particularly with himself. I found an issue in his plan, a small one, but enough to block his petition. That happened in my youth, though. But do you know, gentleman, what was the chief point of my spite? It was not because in spite of rich people or big egos; no, I was not that embittered. I was just scaring sparrows and amusing myself between my 9 am to 4 pm.
That was my way.
So you'll be right if you said that I was lying when I said I was a spiteful official. Yes, you'd be right, but I guess I just amused myself the same way I amused myself with that handsome and bright petitioner. I am too conscious to be really spiteful or to be really superstitious. I was conscious every moment in myself of many, many elements absolutely opposite. I felt them positively swarming in me. Always surrounded by angles and points of view so that I was never really spiteful, or really anything.
You might think now that I am expressing remorse for what I was, and that this story is going to be a way of asking your understanding. Yes, you might have thought that, maybe a couple of seconds ago. I'm sure you'd fancy that...However, I assure you I do not care about regrets. I'm just another C-bo in his half-empty cell looking through its glass panel at the Solar System, the stars, and space's vastness. Looking and talking about whatever comes to my mind.
It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither an incompetent civil servant nor a good official, neither an space explorer nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life in a cell around Mars Orbit, consoling myself with the idea that an intelligent being cannot become anything seriously. It is only fools or pre-programmed minds that become anything. Yes, an intelligent person must be above all a creature without character, while a person with character, one of those who is called an action person, must be a limited creature, like one of those legendary sportsmen that only know how to train hard, break records and never give up.
Yes. That is my conviction after ninety years—a lifetime as a man, and ten years as a C-bo.
To live longer than ninety years is bad manners, you know. Think about it; of course it's vulgar and immoral. Who does live beyond ninety? Sincerely and honestly, I will tell you who do: fools and ridiculous millionaires. I say this to all people and their despicable operated faces. To all these new humans, all these demi-gods and revered sages with childish dreams of immortality. I tell the whole world that truth to its face! I have a right to say, for I shall go on living to one hundred twenty myself. One hundred forty! One hundred sixty!
End
Well, I get it, though. Of course, I cannot explain who, precisely, I am mortifying with my spite.
I am perfectly aware that I cannot get revenge from the Station by not using its free technicians. The opposite would be true, in fact. I know better than anyone that by all this, I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don't consult a technician, it is from spite more than superstitious. Somewhere inside my head, a processor has been broken since I am what I am, ...well —that's what makes me unique!
I have been going on like this for a long time. I mean, since someone turned on the button and gave me the certificate of being revived. That was ten years ago; I'm ninety in total though, and I don't identify myself to the man before the operation. Much less to the kid that ran and swam on Earth. Now I am the only Rev-HrX-2 that I'm aware of, but everyone addresses me as C-bo. An ex full caucasian, ex-civil servant that once worked for Russia. But no longer. I was a spiteful official. I was rude and took pleasure in being so. I did not take bribes, so I could be rude because I knew my job was safe.
When petitioners used to come for approvals to the table at which I sat, I used to grind my teeth at them and felt intense enjoyment when I succeeded in making anybody, particularly wealthy entrepreneurs, unease. I succeeded at that. My reservations were always well-founded, and my knowledge of municipal law was top-notch, so I could put the screws to those I didn't like. Particularly those who thought they were so professional and had such neat plans that could get my approval automatically; without considering that life is sometimes unfair. How could that be!
One day, I got the better of one of those 'perfectionist entrepreneurs.' A golden boy. A young man wrapped in a perfect suit and a perfect hairstyle. He came without looking at my eyes, reciting laws and processes while explaining to me document after document. He was indeed outstanding and extremely well-articulated. He left twenty minutes later, notably disappointed, with me, of course, but particularly with himself. I found an issue in his plan, a small one, but enough to block his petition. That happened in my youth, though. But do you know, gentleman, what was the chief point of my spite? It was not because in spite of rich people or big egos; no, I was not that embittered. I was just scaring sparrows and amusing myself between my 9 am to 4 pm.
That was my way.
So you'll be right if you said that I was lying when I said I was a spiteful official. Yes, you'd be right, but I guess I just amused myself the same way I amused myself with that handsome and bright petitioner. I am too conscious to be really spiteful or to be really superstitious. I was conscious every moment in myself of many, many elements absolutely opposite. I felt them positively swarming in me. Always surrounded by angles and points of view so that I was never really spiteful, or really anything.
You might think now that I am expressing remorse for what I was, and that this story is going to be a way of asking your understanding. Yes, you might have thought that, maybe a couple of seconds ago. I'm sure you'd fancy that...However, I assure you I do not care about regrets. I'm just another C-bo in his half-empty cell looking through its glass panel at the Solar System, the stars, and space's vastness. Looking and talking about whatever comes to my mind.
It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither an incompetent civil servant nor a good official, neither an space explorer nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life in a cell around Mars Orbit, consoling myself with the idea that an intelligent being cannot become anything seriously. It is only fools or pre-programmed minds that become anything. Yes, an intelligent person must be above all a creature without character, while a person with character, one of those who is called an action person, must be a limited creature, like one of those legendary sportsmen that only know how to train hard, break records and never give up.
Yes. That is my conviction after ninety years—a lifetime as a man, and ten years as a C-bo.
To live longer than ninety years is bad manners, you know. Think about it; of course it's vulgar and immoral. Who does live beyond ninety? Sincerely and honestly, I will tell you who do: fools and ridiculous millionaires. I say this to all people and their despicable operated faces. To all these new humans, all these demi-gods and revered sages with childish dreams of immortality. I tell the whole world that truth to its face! I have a right to say, for I shall go on living to one hundred twenty myself. One hundred forty! One hundred sixty!
End
|
Eco's The name of the Rose
An extremely believable style about an era and a spirit that are light years from ours. Maybe the movie Alien III was inspired by this book? Original vs Variation (link) |
the name of the rose 1k variation
|
Gibson's Neuromancer
One of the most polished novels I've ever read. Like electric poetry! Original vs Variation (link) |
neuromancer 1k variation
He looks up as if he was expecting a rainbow to appear. Nothing up there, of course, except that depressive sky tuned to a dead channel.
"Don't ask me for shit, man. Not today."
Case just said that to a Chinese teen-tripper and shouldered his way through the crowd around the bar area. It's packed here, but I got his back.
"Come on, Case. My purpose in life is to make you rich, and you don't want it". The same old Hong Kong joke everywhere. Case doesn't pay attention to the kid and goes inside a bar. The Chatsubo. Just one exit door.
I'm going inside, no danger. The tending bar is a Russian hybrid with a relatively clean profile called Ratmir Repin. No family. No divorces. No debts. Just a few unhealthy relationships here and there. I see him now behind the bar, filling a tray of glasses with his prosthetic arm. He smiles at Case. Kind of friends I believe. It didn't take long for Case to find this rat hole after arriving in Hong Kong.
He takes his usual stool at the bar, between an over-operated jezabel working for a pimp called Lonny Zone and a tall black African executive whose data I can't track down.
That Lonny Zone, if he is around he might bring problems.
I take a stool myself. The bartender eyes for a second while he keeps filling glasses of beer. His deformity is almost heroic. Ugly motherfucker...even his arm rotator whines while reaching for another mug. It's an old Russian model, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator —no hidden weapons.
"My man, the artist Herr Henry Case," the bartender Repin grunts, nose-laughing with a bizarre sound while scratching his belly with his prosthetic. He looks at me again and I point to one of the glasses he is filling.
"An artist, sure." Case says, and sips his beer. "Somebody's gotta be funny around here. Sure the fuck isn't you." The hooker's giggle goes up an octave.
"Isn't you either, sister. So you vanish, okay? Zone, he's a close personal friend of mine."
The jezabel looks at Case in the eye, her lips barely moving. Case ignores her and keeps sipping his beer.
Knucklehead, Case. One minute here and you’ve insulted two people and now you might add to your repertoire of fuck-ups a fistfight with an overused whore.
The half-bluff about the pimp Lonny Zone worked, and the girl is leaving.
"Jesus," Case says, "what kind of creep joint you running here? Man can't have a drink."
"Ha," Repin replies, swabbing the scarred wood with a rag, "Zone shows a percentage. I let you do business here for entertainment value. White Americans are in high demand in China, even in Kowloon.
As the bartender approached me with the draft, one of those strange instants of silence descended, as though dozens of unrelated conversations had just simultaneously arrived at precisely the moment I took the beer from his prosthetic arm, and we looked at each other's eyes.
"An angel passed," Repin said as he walked away, saying that to no one in particular.
"Beijing," bellows the African executive lifting his glass for a toast, obviously drunk, "Beijing bloody invented nerve-splicing. One night next to The Forbidden City for a nerve job. Fix you right, mate . . ."
"Now that," Case says to his glass, obviously bittered, "that is so much bullshit."
My poor Case. Half-year here, and you still dream of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All that shit you snort, all the turns you'd taken in Kowloon, and still you dream the matrix in your sleep. Is that what you are expecting to see when you look at the sky?
Too pathetic for us, Armitage. I don't see why we need him. He is no console man anymore. A million operations won't change the fact that now he is just another hustler, trying to make it through. I've seen his dreams, boss. He cries for those lost L.A. cowboy nights. He wakes up alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in that coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bed slab, as if that was his mother or his console, feeling sorry for himself.
"I saw your girl last night," the bartender Repin says, passing Case his second Kirin.
"I don't have one," he answers, and drinks.
"Miss Linda Lee."
Case shakes his head.
"No girl? Nothing? Only biz, my Herr artiste? Just dedication to commerce?" The bartender's mouth is twisted in an ugly smile. "I think I liked you better with her. You laughed more. One of these nights you get maybe too angry, you wind up in the clinic tanks, spare parts."
"You're breaking my heart, Repine." He gulps his beer, puts his index finger on the payment code, and leaves through the crowd of foreigners, smoke, and Asian whores.
Stupid motherfucker Case.
I tell you, Armitage, I don't care whether he was one of the best cowboys in the West Coast or whether McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine had trained him. He is a wasted force, and it doesn't matter how many operations we give him for free, he won't be able to run at the same high adrenaline and efficiency level. It's not only that he gets dizzy in the matrix now, it's also that his mind is broken.
Okay. I'm outside now, and I can see him again. High narrow shoulders hunched beneath the rain-stained windbreaker. A 24 years old ex-hacker walking the streets of Kowloon, probably thinking he will never be able to ride an exotic software like the one his last employer gave him.
Hope you don't make with us the mistake you did with them, Case. I know you too well, and I wouldn't like to strap you to a bed and torture you like they did.
Poor bastard, he still doesn't know how he had been discovered. He probably thought he was going to cheat everybody, including his employers. But for those guys he was just a one-day job. An annoying mosquito to whom they were going to remove his wings, one by one, using that Russian mycotoxin. They burned out your focus, Case, micron by micron, and then you descended to hell, here, walking the streets under the rain of South China. But I don't care; if you steal from us, you will go through more shit than those thirty hours hallucinating in that L.A. hotel.
We shouldn't wait anymore, Armitage, he is going to do something really fucked up. The way he walks, that bitterness...
You listening, Armitage?! Give me the order.
End
"Don't ask me for shit, man. Not today."
Case just said that to a Chinese teen-tripper and shouldered his way through the crowd around the bar area. It's packed here, but I got his back.
"Come on, Case. My purpose in life is to make you rich, and you don't want it". The same old Hong Kong joke everywhere. Case doesn't pay attention to the kid and goes inside a bar. The Chatsubo. Just one exit door.
I'm going inside, no danger. The tending bar is a Russian hybrid with a relatively clean profile called Ratmir Repin. No family. No divorces. No debts. Just a few unhealthy relationships here and there. I see him now behind the bar, filling a tray of glasses with his prosthetic arm. He smiles at Case. Kind of friends I believe. It didn't take long for Case to find this rat hole after arriving in Hong Kong.
He takes his usual stool at the bar, between an over-operated jezabel working for a pimp called Lonny Zone and a tall black African executive whose data I can't track down.
That Lonny Zone, if he is around he might bring problems.
I take a stool myself. The bartender eyes for a second while he keeps filling glasses of beer. His deformity is almost heroic. Ugly motherfucker...even his arm rotator whines while reaching for another mug. It's an old Russian model, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator —no hidden weapons.
"My man, the artist Herr Henry Case," the bartender Repin grunts, nose-laughing with a bizarre sound while scratching his belly with his prosthetic. He looks at me again and I point to one of the glasses he is filling.
"An artist, sure." Case says, and sips his beer. "Somebody's gotta be funny around here. Sure the fuck isn't you." The hooker's giggle goes up an octave.
"Isn't you either, sister. So you vanish, okay? Zone, he's a close personal friend of mine."
The jezabel looks at Case in the eye, her lips barely moving. Case ignores her and keeps sipping his beer.
Knucklehead, Case. One minute here and you’ve insulted two people and now you might add to your repertoire of fuck-ups a fistfight with an overused whore.
The half-bluff about the pimp Lonny Zone worked, and the girl is leaving.
"Jesus," Case says, "what kind of creep joint you running here? Man can't have a drink."
"Ha," Repin replies, swabbing the scarred wood with a rag, "Zone shows a percentage. I let you do business here for entertainment value. White Americans are in high demand in China, even in Kowloon.
As the bartender approached me with the draft, one of those strange instants of silence descended, as though dozens of unrelated conversations had just simultaneously arrived at precisely the moment I took the beer from his prosthetic arm, and we looked at each other's eyes.
"An angel passed," Repin said as he walked away, saying that to no one in particular.
"Beijing," bellows the African executive lifting his glass for a toast, obviously drunk, "Beijing bloody invented nerve-splicing. One night next to The Forbidden City for a nerve job. Fix you right, mate . . ."
"Now that," Case says to his glass, obviously bittered, "that is so much bullshit."
My poor Case. Half-year here, and you still dream of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All that shit you snort, all the turns you'd taken in Kowloon, and still you dream the matrix in your sleep. Is that what you are expecting to see when you look at the sky?
Too pathetic for us, Armitage. I don't see why we need him. He is no console man anymore. A million operations won't change the fact that now he is just another hustler, trying to make it through. I've seen his dreams, boss. He cries for those lost L.A. cowboy nights. He wakes up alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in that coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bed slab, as if that was his mother or his console, feeling sorry for himself.
"I saw your girl last night," the bartender Repin says, passing Case his second Kirin.
"I don't have one," he answers, and drinks.
"Miss Linda Lee."
Case shakes his head.
"No girl? Nothing? Only biz, my Herr artiste? Just dedication to commerce?" The bartender's mouth is twisted in an ugly smile. "I think I liked you better with her. You laughed more. One of these nights you get maybe too angry, you wind up in the clinic tanks, spare parts."
"You're breaking my heart, Repine." He gulps his beer, puts his index finger on the payment code, and leaves through the crowd of foreigners, smoke, and Asian whores.
Stupid motherfucker Case.
I tell you, Armitage, I don't care whether he was one of the best cowboys in the West Coast or whether McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine had trained him. He is a wasted force, and it doesn't matter how many operations we give him for free, he won't be able to run at the same high adrenaline and efficiency level. It's not only that he gets dizzy in the matrix now, it's also that his mind is broken.
Okay. I'm outside now, and I can see him again. High narrow shoulders hunched beneath the rain-stained windbreaker. A 24 years old ex-hacker walking the streets of Kowloon, probably thinking he will never be able to ride an exotic software like the one his last employer gave him.
Hope you don't make with us the mistake you did with them, Case. I know you too well, and I wouldn't like to strap you to a bed and torture you like they did.
Poor bastard, he still doesn't know how he had been discovered. He probably thought he was going to cheat everybody, including his employers. But for those guys he was just a one-day job. An annoying mosquito to whom they were going to remove his wings, one by one, using that Russian mycotoxin. They burned out your focus, Case, micron by micron, and then you descended to hell, here, walking the streets under the rain of South China. But I don't care; if you steal from us, you will go through more shit than those thirty hours hallucinating in that L.A. hotel.
We shouldn't wait anymore, Armitage, he is going to do something really fucked up. The way he walks, that bitterness...
You listening, Armitage?! Give me the order.
End
|
Hermann Hesse's Demian
One of those artists who can really change you. Modern spirituality stripped out of religiousness and sanctimoniousness Original vs Variation(link) |
demian 1k variation
I begin my story with an event from the time I was attending a low-level lang-code track in our lunar satellite, The Eureka.
That happened fifty years ago, but I can still remember the smell of bleach and mineral oils in its narrow corridors, which stirs me with melancholy and gratitude. How ironic, that stinging scent of chemicals we all used to mock as unnatural and "anti-human" now sends delicious shivers of delight through my spine. The hypnotizing and perfectly symmetrical dilating metallic doors at both ends of each corridor, the tubular sunlit gazers facing Earth, the dark meditators overlooking deep Space, and the monotonous footsteps of astronauts, pilots, engineers, scientists and all sorts of smart people, all wrapped up in my mind with the smell of bleach. Indeed, it was a world that savored clean behaviors, well delimited logistical lines and perfectly healthy habits, pretty much like those floors cleaned with bleach. Now that I think about it, everything was cleaned and rinsed in The Eureka, including detergents for our clothes, hydrogel for our skins, vinegar for my daily salads, and filtered, recycled water for everything else.
It now seems strangely accurate to describe my life in The Eureka during my young years with smells of cleanliness, logic, study, and even my daily salads. That was my world, no question about it. Still, something happened inside to me that can't be understood without talking about a friend I happened to meet and the second world that lived next to the first one. A strange world that was, in many ways, its opposite. Two dimensions tied by technology and our imagination and whose only separation wall became, once I reached my 14th birthday, a simple gate A gate with a note that promised a thousand temptations and one simple warning of self-destruction.
The world that I've first described was the world in which we all were born, a familiar place dominated by all five senses and circumscribed to a nuclear family of parents, brothers, AIs, and tutors. Of course, to be born in Space is incredibly different from being born on Earth, but since we were a second generation and we can only be young once, I guess it was normal for all of us to grow up without seeing blue skies, cities, massive parks or traffic jams. What my generation still had in common with the rest of humanity was gravity, having biological mothers, and living under the attention of people. People that in my case happened to be called John García, Jenny Wang, Dou Ren, Alfonso de la Morena, James T., and so on. Names of friends and tutors that had always been fixtures in a small world of love and severity, questions and hints, imitation and improvements. It was a world of implicit values with few things to do except interact with the others and walk around the corridors, the cantine, the sports court, and the study floor. Of course, it didn't take me too many years to understand how small that world was compared to cities on Earth, but it always felt warm to me, like a safe burrow full of recognizable patterns and cherished habits.
As I've said, we'd been born in Space, but at that time, The Eureka still celebrated traditional Earth festivities like New Year Day and anniversaries like the birth of Gagarin or the Internet's first big bang. Data tells me now people don't celebrate those festivities anymore on board of The Eureka...Anyway, I can still recall how melancholic and odd were those celebrations rooted in a planet we had never visited. It was strange to talk about Christianism, Communism, World Wars or Americanism. Interestingly, those anniversaries usually ended up not with a pledge of loyalty to Earth and its traditional values and institutions but with our eyes gazing into a distant future that spelled three single missions: Singularity, Alpha Century and Immortality.
The other world, however, had always been omnipresent inside The Euroka and was completely different; it felt different, spoke different languages and was inhabited mostly by people that had never been to Space. This second world was physiques with ancient knives and guns living in ghost stories and sexual perversions. It was a world of individuals voluntarily jumping to a tide of debauchery, challenges, addictions, and fears who did that only for boredom and trying their limits. Like in Calculus, where numbers become infinite when approaching some limits, so people found their most amazing meaning when facing death, escaping horrifying slaughter-houses drenched in blood, plunging into bombarded trenches, or running labyrinths in dark castles that belonged to vampires. There was a limit for every fear and a psychological experiment for each pleasure, and people there would twist their souls jumping from one extreme to another, being the hero and also the psychopath, the person that inspired hope but also the monster that brought fear: Ups, downs, tears, depression, exhilaration, effort, exhaustion...infinity.
And all these stories were always available within a wish distance once one had reached 14 years old. In a blink of an eye. Without firewalls or resistance requiring willpower. And that was where my vertigo came from and scared me with suicidal temptations. In an instant, one could be the policemen but also the thief, the one beating women, raping girls, torturing spies, and other unmentionable things—all without consequences. You could even burn down a whole city and see their citizens scream in pain and then come back to the first world as if nothing had ever happened, ready to study, happy to be polite, and with enough self-discipline to follow any rule or taboo. But, of course, sometimes people would bring to the first world the exhilaration achieved in that second world, and in some cases, people would never return back to the second world for fear of what they've found to like, see and do.
At the beginning of this story, I was only thirteen years old, and I still didn't know much about temptation, except it existed. Some older students bragged about it, and a few adults mentioned it here and there, but most of the time we were too busy following our STEM tracks, listening to music, playing basketball and goading each other with teenager jokes. And it was nice to be a good boy, living among the stars, in a reign of peace, laws, tranquility, duty and good conscience. Then, however, as I was approaching my fourteenth birthday, it started to be interesting to overhear stories about the loud and violent world from which you could become, apparently, a monster.
The oddest thing about it was that these two worlds should border on each other so closely. When, for example, my tutor of Logic, Miss Teresa Schneider, would walk along with some of us and saluted other adults while asking us, at the same time, questions about the soundness of a deduction, she entirely belonged to the world of light and righteousness. But when at the end of those peripatetic classes, one of us would dare to ask her about the logic in the other world, and when we listened to her describing how she had been hours in a band of cowboys robbing a train, she was someone else. And that contrast was shocking, at least for a kid of my age. I even remember one time I saw a faint smile at one corner of her mouth after telling one of her stories. It was a smile that enjoyed my naïveté at being shocked by something she probably considered normal. But what was normal about shootings, killings, and sheer enjoyment of the abominable?
What a word: abominable
When I first pictured the concept of abominable in my young years at The Eureka, I remember those centennial people living in the infirmary like fossilized mummies. It was terrible to see those wrinkled faces and consumed eyes that sucked every drop of life from their bodies and only had left some scattered thoughts and accumulated illnesses. I was disgusted the first time we paid a visit, and we saw their bodies, but a young kid like me couldn't become a centennial all of a sudden, so that horrific scene was just beyond physics. I was safe because the physics of aging protected me completely, so seeing those 'mummies' produced some revulsion, but not fear, much less the vertigo of wanting to jump into the nightmare itself. However, the digital wicked had become instantly wicked because they had made a decision one day, conscious or unconsciously.
Well, as you have probably figured out already, this story, the story of my teenage years, is actually about how I and some schoolmates met this new student that had come from Titan and introduced to us that dangerous second world. That new student was the most intelligent of us, the most mature, and the only one who at that time would listen to Jazz, Baroque and Opera. He was also the only one who would politely confront our teachers, tutors, and even the system itself. I drank my first glass of whiskey with him, and of course, I first stepped into the second world with him. One of the things he stroke me the most was how he would smile and call ourselves 'the immoralist' and 'sons of the first wave.' He was called Demian.
That happened fifty years ago, but I can still remember the smell of bleach and mineral oils in its narrow corridors, which stirs me with melancholy and gratitude. How ironic, that stinging scent of chemicals we all used to mock as unnatural and "anti-human" now sends delicious shivers of delight through my spine. The hypnotizing and perfectly symmetrical dilating metallic doors at both ends of each corridor, the tubular sunlit gazers facing Earth, the dark meditators overlooking deep Space, and the monotonous footsteps of astronauts, pilots, engineers, scientists and all sorts of smart people, all wrapped up in my mind with the smell of bleach. Indeed, it was a world that savored clean behaviors, well delimited logistical lines and perfectly healthy habits, pretty much like those floors cleaned with bleach. Now that I think about it, everything was cleaned and rinsed in The Eureka, including detergents for our clothes, hydrogel for our skins, vinegar for my daily salads, and filtered, recycled water for everything else.
It now seems strangely accurate to describe my life in The Eureka during my young years with smells of cleanliness, logic, study, and even my daily salads. That was my world, no question about it. Still, something happened inside to me that can't be understood without talking about a friend I happened to meet and the second world that lived next to the first one. A strange world that was, in many ways, its opposite. Two dimensions tied by technology and our imagination and whose only separation wall became, once I reached my 14th birthday, a simple gate A gate with a note that promised a thousand temptations and one simple warning of self-destruction.
The world that I've first described was the world in which we all were born, a familiar place dominated by all five senses and circumscribed to a nuclear family of parents, brothers, AIs, and tutors. Of course, to be born in Space is incredibly different from being born on Earth, but since we were a second generation and we can only be young once, I guess it was normal for all of us to grow up without seeing blue skies, cities, massive parks or traffic jams. What my generation still had in common with the rest of humanity was gravity, having biological mothers, and living under the attention of people. People that in my case happened to be called John García, Jenny Wang, Dou Ren, Alfonso de la Morena, James T., and so on. Names of friends and tutors that had always been fixtures in a small world of love and severity, questions and hints, imitation and improvements. It was a world of implicit values with few things to do except interact with the others and walk around the corridors, the cantine, the sports court, and the study floor. Of course, it didn't take me too many years to understand how small that world was compared to cities on Earth, but it always felt warm to me, like a safe burrow full of recognizable patterns and cherished habits.
As I've said, we'd been born in Space, but at that time, The Eureka still celebrated traditional Earth festivities like New Year Day and anniversaries like the birth of Gagarin or the Internet's first big bang. Data tells me now people don't celebrate those festivities anymore on board of The Eureka...Anyway, I can still recall how melancholic and odd were those celebrations rooted in a planet we had never visited. It was strange to talk about Christianism, Communism, World Wars or Americanism. Interestingly, those anniversaries usually ended up not with a pledge of loyalty to Earth and its traditional values and institutions but with our eyes gazing into a distant future that spelled three single missions: Singularity, Alpha Century and Immortality.
The other world, however, had always been omnipresent inside The Euroka and was completely different; it felt different, spoke different languages and was inhabited mostly by people that had never been to Space. This second world was physiques with ancient knives and guns living in ghost stories and sexual perversions. It was a world of individuals voluntarily jumping to a tide of debauchery, challenges, addictions, and fears who did that only for boredom and trying their limits. Like in Calculus, where numbers become infinite when approaching some limits, so people found their most amazing meaning when facing death, escaping horrifying slaughter-houses drenched in blood, plunging into bombarded trenches, or running labyrinths in dark castles that belonged to vampires. There was a limit for every fear and a psychological experiment for each pleasure, and people there would twist their souls jumping from one extreme to another, being the hero and also the psychopath, the person that inspired hope but also the monster that brought fear: Ups, downs, tears, depression, exhilaration, effort, exhaustion...infinity.
And all these stories were always available within a wish distance once one had reached 14 years old. In a blink of an eye. Without firewalls or resistance requiring willpower. And that was where my vertigo came from and scared me with suicidal temptations. In an instant, one could be the policemen but also the thief, the one beating women, raping girls, torturing spies, and other unmentionable things—all without consequences. You could even burn down a whole city and see their citizens scream in pain and then come back to the first world as if nothing had ever happened, ready to study, happy to be polite, and with enough self-discipline to follow any rule or taboo. But, of course, sometimes people would bring to the first world the exhilaration achieved in that second world, and in some cases, people would never return back to the second world for fear of what they've found to like, see and do.
At the beginning of this story, I was only thirteen years old, and I still didn't know much about temptation, except it existed. Some older students bragged about it, and a few adults mentioned it here and there, but most of the time we were too busy following our STEM tracks, listening to music, playing basketball and goading each other with teenager jokes. And it was nice to be a good boy, living among the stars, in a reign of peace, laws, tranquility, duty and good conscience. Then, however, as I was approaching my fourteenth birthday, it started to be interesting to overhear stories about the loud and violent world from which you could become, apparently, a monster.
The oddest thing about it was that these two worlds should border on each other so closely. When, for example, my tutor of Logic, Miss Teresa Schneider, would walk along with some of us and saluted other adults while asking us, at the same time, questions about the soundness of a deduction, she entirely belonged to the world of light and righteousness. But when at the end of those peripatetic classes, one of us would dare to ask her about the logic in the other world, and when we listened to her describing how she had been hours in a band of cowboys robbing a train, she was someone else. And that contrast was shocking, at least for a kid of my age. I even remember one time I saw a faint smile at one corner of her mouth after telling one of her stories. It was a smile that enjoyed my naïveté at being shocked by something she probably considered normal. But what was normal about shootings, killings, and sheer enjoyment of the abominable?
What a word: abominable
When I first pictured the concept of abominable in my young years at The Eureka, I remember those centennial people living in the infirmary like fossilized mummies. It was terrible to see those wrinkled faces and consumed eyes that sucked every drop of life from their bodies and only had left some scattered thoughts and accumulated illnesses. I was disgusted the first time we paid a visit, and we saw their bodies, but a young kid like me couldn't become a centennial all of a sudden, so that horrific scene was just beyond physics. I was safe because the physics of aging protected me completely, so seeing those 'mummies' produced some revulsion, but not fear, much less the vertigo of wanting to jump into the nightmare itself. However, the digital wicked had become instantly wicked because they had made a decision one day, conscious or unconsciously.
Well, as you have probably figured out already, this story, the story of my teenage years, is actually about how I and some schoolmates met this new student that had come from Titan and introduced to us that dangerous second world. That new student was the most intelligent of us, the most mature, and the only one who at that time would listen to Jazz, Baroque and Opera. He was also the only one who would politely confront our teachers, tutors, and even the system itself. I drank my first glass of whiskey with him, and of course, I first stepped into the second world with him. One of the things he stroke me the most was how he would smile and call ourselves 'the immoralist' and 'sons of the first wave.' He was called Demian.
|
King's The Stand
Imperfect, too long but I enjoyed a lot some parts of the audiobook Original vs Variation(link) |
the stand 1k variation
The corridor was long and translucent. She was inside it — inside a swinging translucent prism with white stars.
... shouting her name?
'TingTing'
She should have been nervous. However, she was calm. Why calm and not fast? Why running desperately but still slow?
'Wake up now, TingTing.'
A mutter: 'is tht a fiiire?'
'What? Wake up now, Ting. Wake up!'
'Fang?'
Wang Fang's voice. Calling her. For how long?
She saw a blurry mix of electric numbers and her husband. The face of her husband moving away from that electric greenish layer of numbers.
He faded away.
Click!
Click!
Did he crouch under the bed?
'Wang Fang?!'. He suddenly stood up, but he dashed off to the next room instead of looking at her.
'Hey! Turn on the lights and talk to me.' She yelled towards the door as if trying to throw a lasso to the shadow of her husband. But there was no response to her severe order. Instead, she could only hear his footstep on the synthetic plywood, running away from their dormitory.
She was alone and everything was in darkness, except for some lights coming from the window—city lights and the beginning of dawn.
His footsteps raised again, and he was suddenly again in the room. A nervous silhouette that once more ignored her, opening the wardrobe violently.
It was 6.33 am.
Is it a fire? She asked.
No answer.
And why were they in darkness?
'Hey, Xiaoxiao,' turn on the lights. She said aloud.
'No damn Xiaoxiao Ting, I turned it off. Come on, come one. Get out of bed.' He said.
'What?!'
Wang Fang giving her orders! That was a first. She was a senior manager in a computer factory with thousands of employees under her care, and he was just an IT guy who still liked to play video games. A very well paid IT, no doubt, but useless outside his magical world of geeks writing half English, half mathematics, half gibberish.
'Ting, wife, don't be mad at me. Just please…',
'Where are we going, Daddy?', the five-year-old daughter showed up dressed as a blue bear.
'Hi, Pingping. We are going to...'
He trailed off...He was like in a trance.
'Pingping, go to your room. 'The wife said firmly, standing up and annoyed by the cold floor on her feet, signaling to her daughter with her tense arm and index finger the direction of her room.
When the little girl disappeared, the wife calmed herself, as she would do in the factory, and continued where her daughter had left it 'can you tell me at least where you want to go?
'I don't know,' he said, almost sad. 'I don't' know...We might need Nature'. Then he remembered something and dashed out of the room.
She was left completely baffled. She was starting to worry. But she was now more worried about a mental health issue than an emergency such as fire or an earthquake.
'...Nature?'
'Is it about the company, Wang Fang?' she asked towards the empty opening door.
No answer.
She controlled her urge to run behind and slap him on the nap.
David! She shouted his English name.
His silhouette appeared under the door frame, like a ghost that had been summoned.
'The company?', he mumbled. '...Yes, yes. It could be. Maybe it's nothing... I was online talking to our LA team...No; no talk now. Fuck, I'll tell you later. Let's go now Ting, take Pingping and turn off those glasses!'
'Why... Don't touch my glasses,' she said, slapping his hand when he tried to reach out for them. 'Why turn them off?'
'Ok, don't turn them off. Don't fucking turn them off but leave them here!.
Now she was the one frozen because in the dim light she had seen he was indeed terrified and angry. She could also see he was carrying a bag full of things and had a can of food in one of his hands.
'Look Ting; this is the plan... I just want to get bicycles and then ride to...somewhere. North; maybe to park Lianghua. And if I'm wrong, well...then I'm wrong, ok?...and I'll compensate you both. I'll buy you a...Oh fuck. No. No bikes. They are connected too. Let's walk! '
He left the room again, and she was left standing with her glasses on her hand, confused, annoyed, and feeling like entering a dream. The beginning of a nightmare, maybe.
She thought of war. A Japanese/American attack, maybe. Agitated, she peeked out through the windows. But beyond those windows, it was a calm Shenzhen under the very dim morning light. It was about to dawn, but there was no fire. No missiles, of course. Nothing out of the ordinary except maybe her own stupidity.
She put her hand on her mouth as a new idea struck her. She remembered Fang saying the day before something about waking early to run a boos trap or boost-trap, a word in English she hadn't heard before. But it was something about a simulation and the Great Firewall.
'It's so smart!' He had told her while eating and ice-cream and looking distracted at the football game. That had been less than ten hours ago, right before going to bed.
'Fang. Fang!', she shouted, 'is it related to the bootstrap and the Firewall simulation?!? '
She was by the window of their dormitory, with the glasses' light making creepy shadows pointing to the door. She didn't even bother to move an inch to walk in his direction because she didn't expect an answer. The problem had to be psychological, and most likely than not, in three hours, she would be accompanying her husband to a psychiatrist downtown.
'How do you know it?!' Her husband showed up in the door opening, like an anxious spider coming out of a burrow. He was surprised, almost astonished.
'You told me yesterday about a patch and…'
'Yes, it must be. It's impossible, but it spilled over, and we couldn't turn it off. Fuck, Ting, it blocked us. It fucking blocked us.'
'Don't say that with the girl at home! Calm down, and tell me when did it happen?
'Fifteen minutes ago. I was in the room, and the bootstrap...the bootstrap had been going on for over nine minutes.'
'But what is it exactly?'
He was in a trance now. More calm, like looking at an abstract painting of thoughts.
'At its core,' he mumbled, 'it's just a tree search with reinforcement, but...one external Neural Network joined it. And then a second one, and a third, like dominoes Ting, like dominoes!. And we were shut out! What else can it be?! If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, and you'll laugh at me. I don't care. Let's go.'
'A program out of control and you are like this…? '
The sound of the house's exit door lock resounded and broke her off.
'The exit door,' He said, opening his eyes wide open.
'Daddy, someone closed the door,' The little girl shouted from the other side of the house, half weeping. And when her father came to the living room, she threw her arms to be lifted and cuddled. After all, her father was the hugger in the family, the adult that would always give her everything.
Not this time, though. This time father didn't even look at her. Instead, he went straight to pull the knob.
It wouldn't turn.
A thud came from the street, like a car crashing or a metallic weight hitting something.
An old ring alarm went off.
They were on the 23rd floor and had a double window, but still, it was audible. The wife was the first one to reach the window of the dormitory, and before she finished opening the panel manually, she noticed that all Shenzhen lights had gone off. It was eerie darkness in a megapolis that always, always had lights at night.
Finally, when she swung open the window with her husband's help, she lost her breath for a second as the rainforest morning air-filled her face and lungs. The jungle of skyscrapers stood quiet and utterly black against the beginning of reddish dawn in front of their wide opened eyes.
The ring-alarm produced by accident had stopped, but when she looked down those twenty-three floors below, she saw dozens of cars parked in the middle of the streets. It felt as if everything had stopped.
Then is when they heard a white noise that thundered over the skyscrapers, coming from the clouds with a neeeeeeeeeeee…!
And indeed, there was a fire. The biggest fire humans had ever seen.
End
... shouting her name?
'TingTing'
She should have been nervous. However, she was calm. Why calm and not fast? Why running desperately but still slow?
'Wake up now, TingTing.'
A mutter: 'is tht a fiiire?'
'What? Wake up now, Ting. Wake up!'
'Fang?'
Wang Fang's voice. Calling her. For how long?
She saw a blurry mix of electric numbers and her husband. The face of her husband moving away from that electric greenish layer of numbers.
He faded away.
Click!
Click!
Did he crouch under the bed?
'Wang Fang?!'. He suddenly stood up, but he dashed off to the next room instead of looking at her.
'Hey! Turn on the lights and talk to me.' She yelled towards the door as if trying to throw a lasso to the shadow of her husband. But there was no response to her severe order. Instead, she could only hear his footstep on the synthetic plywood, running away from their dormitory.
She was alone and everything was in darkness, except for some lights coming from the window—city lights and the beginning of dawn.
His footsteps raised again, and he was suddenly again in the room. A nervous silhouette that once more ignored her, opening the wardrobe violently.
It was 6.33 am.
Is it a fire? She asked.
No answer.
And why were they in darkness?
'Hey, Xiaoxiao,' turn on the lights. She said aloud.
'No damn Xiaoxiao Ting, I turned it off. Come on, come one. Get out of bed.' He said.
'What?!'
Wang Fang giving her orders! That was a first. She was a senior manager in a computer factory with thousands of employees under her care, and he was just an IT guy who still liked to play video games. A very well paid IT, no doubt, but useless outside his magical world of geeks writing half English, half mathematics, half gibberish.
'Ting, wife, don't be mad at me. Just please…',
'Where are we going, Daddy?', the five-year-old daughter showed up dressed as a blue bear.
'Hi, Pingping. We are going to...'
He trailed off...He was like in a trance.
'Pingping, go to your room. 'The wife said firmly, standing up and annoyed by the cold floor on her feet, signaling to her daughter with her tense arm and index finger the direction of her room.
When the little girl disappeared, the wife calmed herself, as she would do in the factory, and continued where her daughter had left it 'can you tell me at least where you want to go?
'I don't know,' he said, almost sad. 'I don't' know...We might need Nature'. Then he remembered something and dashed out of the room.
She was left completely baffled. She was starting to worry. But she was now more worried about a mental health issue than an emergency such as fire or an earthquake.
'...Nature?'
'Is it about the company, Wang Fang?' she asked towards the empty opening door.
No answer.
She controlled her urge to run behind and slap him on the nap.
David! She shouted his English name.
His silhouette appeared under the door frame, like a ghost that had been summoned.
'The company?', he mumbled. '...Yes, yes. It could be. Maybe it's nothing... I was online talking to our LA team...No; no talk now. Fuck, I'll tell you later. Let's go now Ting, take Pingping and turn off those glasses!'
'Why... Don't touch my glasses,' she said, slapping his hand when he tried to reach out for them. 'Why turn them off?'
'Ok, don't turn them off. Don't fucking turn them off but leave them here!.
Now she was the one frozen because in the dim light she had seen he was indeed terrified and angry. She could also see he was carrying a bag full of things and had a can of food in one of his hands.
'Look Ting; this is the plan... I just want to get bicycles and then ride to...somewhere. North; maybe to park Lianghua. And if I'm wrong, well...then I'm wrong, ok?...and I'll compensate you both. I'll buy you a...Oh fuck. No. No bikes. They are connected too. Let's walk! '
He left the room again, and she was left standing with her glasses on her hand, confused, annoyed, and feeling like entering a dream. The beginning of a nightmare, maybe.
She thought of war. A Japanese/American attack, maybe. Agitated, she peeked out through the windows. But beyond those windows, it was a calm Shenzhen under the very dim morning light. It was about to dawn, but there was no fire. No missiles, of course. Nothing out of the ordinary except maybe her own stupidity.
She put her hand on her mouth as a new idea struck her. She remembered Fang saying the day before something about waking early to run a boos trap or boost-trap, a word in English she hadn't heard before. But it was something about a simulation and the Great Firewall.
'It's so smart!' He had told her while eating and ice-cream and looking distracted at the football game. That had been less than ten hours ago, right before going to bed.
'Fang. Fang!', she shouted, 'is it related to the bootstrap and the Firewall simulation?!? '
She was by the window of their dormitory, with the glasses' light making creepy shadows pointing to the door. She didn't even bother to move an inch to walk in his direction because she didn't expect an answer. The problem had to be psychological, and most likely than not, in three hours, she would be accompanying her husband to a psychiatrist downtown.
'How do you know it?!' Her husband showed up in the door opening, like an anxious spider coming out of a burrow. He was surprised, almost astonished.
'You told me yesterday about a patch and…'
'Yes, it must be. It's impossible, but it spilled over, and we couldn't turn it off. Fuck, Ting, it blocked us. It fucking blocked us.'
'Don't say that with the girl at home! Calm down, and tell me when did it happen?
'Fifteen minutes ago. I was in the room, and the bootstrap...the bootstrap had been going on for over nine minutes.'
'But what is it exactly?'
He was in a trance now. More calm, like looking at an abstract painting of thoughts.
'At its core,' he mumbled, 'it's just a tree search with reinforcement, but...one external Neural Network joined it. And then a second one, and a third, like dominoes Ting, like dominoes!. And we were shut out! What else can it be?! If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, and you'll laugh at me. I don't care. Let's go.'
'A program out of control and you are like this…? '
The sound of the house's exit door lock resounded and broke her off.
'The exit door,' He said, opening his eyes wide open.
'Daddy, someone closed the door,' The little girl shouted from the other side of the house, half weeping. And when her father came to the living room, she threw her arms to be lifted and cuddled. After all, her father was the hugger in the family, the adult that would always give her everything.
Not this time, though. This time father didn't even look at her. Instead, he went straight to pull the knob.
It wouldn't turn.
A thud came from the street, like a car crashing or a metallic weight hitting something.
An old ring alarm went off.
They were on the 23rd floor and had a double window, but still, it was audible. The wife was the first one to reach the window of the dormitory, and before she finished opening the panel manually, she noticed that all Shenzhen lights had gone off. It was eerie darkness in a megapolis that always, always had lights at night.
Finally, when she swung open the window with her husband's help, she lost her breath for a second as the rainforest morning air-filled her face and lungs. The jungle of skyscrapers stood quiet and utterly black against the beginning of reddish dawn in front of their wide opened eyes.
The ring-alarm produced by accident had stopped, but when she looked down those twenty-three floors below, she saw dozens of cars parked in the middle of the streets. It felt as if everything had stopped.
Then is when they heard a white noise that thundered over the skyscrapers, coming from the clouds with a neeeeeeeeeeee…!
And indeed, there was a fire. The biggest fire humans had ever seen.
End
|
the stand 1k variation
It was April, so they had again lowered the temperatures to give citizens a relatively cool spring day, like in the old days. Qiu Yan, her face sweating and her eyes looking at her grey prosthetics inside the blue shoes in an effort to avoid seeing the crowd and the city, slipped quickly through the glass door of Sea Paradise Tower: A three hundred forty-two apartments building situated ten kilometers away from any sea.
The hallway floor was made of synthetic marble, and the white plaster walls were randomly filled with a combination of Soviet-style Propaganda and Traditional Chinese Ink Painting. The Communist pictures mainly depicted male and female workers with square jaws, in blue overalls and lifting their fists or holding red books. And the traditional paintings depicted instead herons, fishers, bamboo trees and horses in a dreamy Yangshuo-like world of black and white ink.
The hallway was clean, but today there was stinking smelly doufu coming from just arrived Hunan's family kitchen on the first floor and the habitual urine smell coming from who knew where. Qiu Yan raised her eyes towards the end of the hallway, surprised at the new massive picture hanged at the front wall, looking straight at her as if knowing what she was thinking. It was the face of the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, who was also the Chairman of the Central Military Commission and the First Secretary of Secretariat of the Chinese Communist Party. A portrait of a sixty-year-old Chinese man with regular features, perfectly combed hair to one side, not a single wrinkle around a pair of expressionless eyes that seemed to keep following her.
A girlish voice coming from the crowd near the elevator startled her. Qiu Yan lowered her eyes again, ignored the new picture, the people, and the elevator, and took the door that headed to the interior stairs.
'Congratulations, you left your parent's home in the mountains of Guanxi to come to this business-hub megalopolis, but you hate crowds and technology. And only for nineteen years...' —It was the ironic voice of her colleague Professor Wei, reverberating in her mind while walking up the nine floors.
The moment she opened the door of her flat, a mellow voice welcomed her with a 'Good Morning Qiu Yan.' Then, it started to read aloud some mandatory news that would last approximately ten minutes. News that she unconsciously filtered out entirely except for the words 'belligerent defense' and 'Marxist market.'
'Belligerent defense,' She repeated in a murmur while taking off her coat.
She shook off the thought with a gesture of disbelief and returned to relishing the after-work Irish coffee she had long ago planned to drink –as she did every day, in fact. And as usual, she stopped in front of her Suoni-screen reflection on her way to the kitchen. No changes there: A thin Chinese body inside a pink shirt tucked inside black trousers and, of course, her sempiternal blue running shoes at the end of the prosthetics she had exchange for money and her biological legs years ago. They were the same clothes as yesterday and the day before yesterday. Of course, employees in the Ministry were free to choose clothes, but pink shirts and dark trousers had become the unofficial uniform for a woman in the Party over the years. Not the imported blue running shoes, though. Her factions were also a bit exceptional, more Tibetans than Han, but not much since aesthetics were ridiculously cheap and HR programs tended to penalize some features.
Taking a sip from the burning cup of coffee, she gazed out through her closed window onto the streets below, noticing a red pickup truck parked in the middle of the road and two robots who appeared to be putting up posters. 'One poster for every 9.3 citizens,' she echoed again the sarcastic voice of her colleague Professor Wei telling saying that a couple of days ago. She had forgotten it when entering the building, but now she remembered the whole poster talk with Professor Wei and how he mentioned 'Chairman's front face.'
According to him, a neural network had drawn the portrait and calculated the number of posters printed in the city. The function was to maximize the impact in the population and minimize something she couldn't remember, but she was sure it wasn't money since the Propaganda Department had, as Professor Wei had also mentioned,' virtually unlimited budgets.'
Qiu Yan relished and mocked the strange faith her cynic and a sharp-eyed colleague had in the system. In fact, in the same conversation, he had also pointed out the possibility, 'almost fact,' that the company placing posters had 'some backdoor relationship' with the Government department responsible for producing that algorithm.
She lifted her eyes from the two robots and looked above the skyscrapers, where there was a swarm of drones that seemed to flow like a dark river on the skies, delivering food, items, documents, or simply spying on people through buildings' windows. Behind Qiu Yan's back, the AI voice was still babbling away news about the quinquennial plans and the near completion of the China Great Mission by the next anniversary of the Party's foundation. She knew the voice was deceitful because it seemed to be a dull machine that couldn't talk and would mostly read out the news; but Qiu Yan had seen in her job that the device could pick up lots of information from citizens: what she murmured, her sleep-time habits, visits of acquaintances, if she'd go to work at the right time, etc. Everything was captured by the AI company and transmitted to the government, not necessarily because they'd analyzed everything, but because it was easier to get everything than to filter out things based on privacy issues.
She kept her back turned to the device and her eyes oriented to the kilometer height skyscraper that seemed to be at the city center: The Southern Ministry of Truths in Facts, mainly known as the South Ministry of Facts; her place of work. She drank the last drop of whiskey in the Irish coffee with some disappointment and kept looking through the windows. Looking but without seeing, half hypnotized by her first memories of her childhood living in the mountains. Confused and curious, she tried to squeeze out her memory to see if she had always hated everything in the same way.
And why that morning did she feel cynical when hearing the news saying things 'humanitarian bombardment' ? Was it that difficult to imagine that some bombarding could produce, in some cases, a very humane outcome? And why did she leave the 'Five-Minute-Support' meeting when the speaker said that the Communist Party had lifted out of poverty hundreds of millions of people, and that was a way bigger truth than anything else? Wasn't that true? And who could know in the long run was more wrong or more right?
'And now breaking news from the front in the South border of Singapore from which our Liberation Army has launched another humanitarian bombing near the city of Darwin, freeing hundreds of thousands of enslaved Chinese-Australian citizens. Once more, a courageous and well-planned attack...'
The voice continued its reporting while Qiu Yan tried to find a way to ignore it, unconsciously drinking from the empty cup of coffee and staring at the Ministry of Facts towering over the whole city. Then she looked at the swarm of droids in the sky and then at the red pickup truck on the streets. There were hundreds of people walking home, but even from her ninth floor, she could clearly see the two robots putting up posters of that sixty-year-old man with perfectly parted hair and not a single wrinkle on his face.
The hallway floor was made of synthetic marble, and the white plaster walls were randomly filled with a combination of Soviet-style Propaganda and Traditional Chinese Ink Painting. The Communist pictures mainly depicted male and female workers with square jaws, in blue overalls and lifting their fists or holding red books. And the traditional paintings depicted instead herons, fishers, bamboo trees and horses in a dreamy Yangshuo-like world of black and white ink.
The hallway was clean, but today there was stinking smelly doufu coming from just arrived Hunan's family kitchen on the first floor and the habitual urine smell coming from who knew where. Qiu Yan raised her eyes towards the end of the hallway, surprised at the new massive picture hanged at the front wall, looking straight at her as if knowing what she was thinking. It was the face of the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, who was also the Chairman of the Central Military Commission and the First Secretary of Secretariat of the Chinese Communist Party. A portrait of a sixty-year-old Chinese man with regular features, perfectly combed hair to one side, not a single wrinkle around a pair of expressionless eyes that seemed to keep following her.
A girlish voice coming from the crowd near the elevator startled her. Qiu Yan lowered her eyes again, ignored the new picture, the people, and the elevator, and took the door that headed to the interior stairs.
'Congratulations, you left your parent's home in the mountains of Guanxi to come to this business-hub megalopolis, but you hate crowds and technology. And only for nineteen years...' —It was the ironic voice of her colleague Professor Wei, reverberating in her mind while walking up the nine floors.
The moment she opened the door of her flat, a mellow voice welcomed her with a 'Good Morning Qiu Yan.' Then, it started to read aloud some mandatory news that would last approximately ten minutes. News that she unconsciously filtered out entirely except for the words 'belligerent defense' and 'Marxist market.'
'Belligerent defense,' She repeated in a murmur while taking off her coat.
She shook off the thought with a gesture of disbelief and returned to relishing the after-work Irish coffee she had long ago planned to drink –as she did every day, in fact. And as usual, she stopped in front of her Suoni-screen reflection on her way to the kitchen. No changes there: A thin Chinese body inside a pink shirt tucked inside black trousers and, of course, her sempiternal blue running shoes at the end of the prosthetics she had exchange for money and her biological legs years ago. They were the same clothes as yesterday and the day before yesterday. Of course, employees in the Ministry were free to choose clothes, but pink shirts and dark trousers had become the unofficial uniform for a woman in the Party over the years. Not the imported blue running shoes, though. Her factions were also a bit exceptional, more Tibetans than Han, but not much since aesthetics were ridiculously cheap and HR programs tended to penalize some features.
Taking a sip from the burning cup of coffee, she gazed out through her closed window onto the streets below, noticing a red pickup truck parked in the middle of the road and two robots who appeared to be putting up posters. 'One poster for every 9.3 citizens,' she echoed again the sarcastic voice of her colleague Professor Wei telling saying that a couple of days ago. She had forgotten it when entering the building, but now she remembered the whole poster talk with Professor Wei and how he mentioned 'Chairman's front face.'
According to him, a neural network had drawn the portrait and calculated the number of posters printed in the city. The function was to maximize the impact in the population and minimize something she couldn't remember, but she was sure it wasn't money since the Propaganda Department had, as Professor Wei had also mentioned,' virtually unlimited budgets.'
Qiu Yan relished and mocked the strange faith her cynic and a sharp-eyed colleague had in the system. In fact, in the same conversation, he had also pointed out the possibility, 'almost fact,' that the company placing posters had 'some backdoor relationship' with the Government department responsible for producing that algorithm.
She lifted her eyes from the two robots and looked above the skyscrapers, where there was a swarm of drones that seemed to flow like a dark river on the skies, delivering food, items, documents, or simply spying on people through buildings' windows. Behind Qiu Yan's back, the AI voice was still babbling away news about the quinquennial plans and the near completion of the China Great Mission by the next anniversary of the Party's foundation. She knew the voice was deceitful because it seemed to be a dull machine that couldn't talk and would mostly read out the news; but Qiu Yan had seen in her job that the device could pick up lots of information from citizens: what she murmured, her sleep-time habits, visits of acquaintances, if she'd go to work at the right time, etc. Everything was captured by the AI company and transmitted to the government, not necessarily because they'd analyzed everything, but because it was easier to get everything than to filter out things based on privacy issues.
She kept her back turned to the device and her eyes oriented to the kilometer height skyscraper that seemed to be at the city center: The Southern Ministry of Truths in Facts, mainly known as the South Ministry of Facts; her place of work. She drank the last drop of whiskey in the Irish coffee with some disappointment and kept looking through the windows. Looking but without seeing, half hypnotized by her first memories of her childhood living in the mountains. Confused and curious, she tried to squeeze out her memory to see if she had always hated everything in the same way.
And why that morning did she feel cynical when hearing the news saying things 'humanitarian bombardment' ? Was it that difficult to imagine that some bombarding could produce, in some cases, a very humane outcome? And why did she leave the 'Five-Minute-Support' meeting when the speaker said that the Communist Party had lifted out of poverty hundreds of millions of people, and that was a way bigger truth than anything else? Wasn't that true? And who could know in the long run was more wrong or more right?
'And now breaking news from the front in the South border of Singapore from which our Liberation Army has launched another humanitarian bombing near the city of Darwin, freeing hundreds of thousands of enslaved Chinese-Australian citizens. Once more, a courageous and well-planned attack...'
The voice continued its reporting while Qiu Yan tried to find a way to ignore it, unconsciously drinking from the empty cup of coffee and staring at the Ministry of Facts towering over the whole city. Then she looked at the swarm of droids in the sky and then at the red pickup truck on the streets. There were hundreds of people walking home, but even from her ninth floor, she could clearly see the two robots putting up posters of that sixty-year-old man with perfectly parted hair and not a single wrinkle on his face.
|
Shoshana Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism
I was surprised by its sophisticated style but I couldn't endure the constant demonisation of Google, so I had to put it down. Original vs Variation(link) |
SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM 1K VARIATION
Chapter One
Home or Exile in the Digital Present
"Am I using Deep-Compose to better up symphonies, or am I just one of its thousand instruments playing notes in a galactic-size concert I can't even start to understand?' The witty complaint was verbalized to me in 2028 by a young musician sometime between the salad and the vanilla ice cream on my first day in a European town facing Africa, the location of a game studio where I would work for the next six months.
On that starry night, the garden's blooming jasmine and my colleague's vibrant southern accent flooded my brain with a faraway exotism, drowning out my recent past and my perpetual northern worries. And during one moment in which I was left alone, waiting in his garden with my glass of wine and the smell of damp grass, I recognized in our conversation some of the oldest philosophical questions of humanity: Master or Slave? Agency or Fatalism? Individual or Part? True, ancient Greeks or prehistoric Homo Sapiens never had to deal with Neural AI's like Deep-Compose. Still, ideas like gods, causality, psychology, democracy, or mathematics also pushed ancient humans against the same doubts. How could it be otherwise? Each generation must scan the horizon and the stars with attention to appraise the danger and understand their position in that unknowable map called reality.
Perhaps because I was an engineer from the highly efficient Viking Belt, my colleague talked to me as if I had answers and solutions: 'Are we going to be vampirized until there is no more data to teach them?' What's it going to be?! I felt a bit like an impostor because I didn't have the answers, and so that night became the starting point of a project two years later, crystallized in my book Before Singularity. The book didn't sell well but turned out to be the opening chapter of a broader quest to answer the question 'Can digital reality be our home?'
Nine hundred fifty-three days have passed since that warm southern evening, but as I've said, those interrogations have kept coming roaring back in my dark and quiet Viking winter. The digital realm started to overtake and redefine our World even before our parents could understand what The Internet was. They celebrated the networked Earth for the many ways in which it united us and enriched our capabilities. However, they didn't foresee how this network would, in a very short time, big-banged a new galaxy formed by matrices of data and deeply unhuman—a world where the sense of the body slips away.
When we talk about the philosophical question of being at Home or alienated, millions of people born before the 90s of the 20th century don't understand the question itself. Historians and psychologists can help us, very much indeed, but it can feel like describing colors and shapes to people who were born blind. Virtual worlds and ultra-immersive audio and visual experiences are now more widespread than sex, reaching nine billion people. We don't know anymore what is an authentic non-digital world, and the entangled dilemmas of IQ, skills and passion are no longer confined to HHRR departments in Silicon Valley as they were in the 2000s. Now, anyone can be effectively superseded and pushed away to a work-less digital life of neural networks.
Strange. A few years ago, it still seemed reasonable to focus our concerns on family, environment, and workplace challenges. Instead, the oldest questions of Life and Humans must be addressed under the broadest possible frame: What is Civilization? Or, more specifically, what is information civilization? Can we still call Home this society or jail? Do we still remember how our life was before the digital Big Bang?
Returning home, as Ulysses did through his Odyssey, is a very well-known theme of nature. Most creatures orient Home. It is the point of origin which every species sets its bearing. The compass we use to navigate unknown territory, without which we would be lost. Bees, butterflies, trouts...trees, hives, hills, shores...nearly every creature shares some version of this deep attachment. That nostos, finding a home, is among our most profound needs and is evident by the price we are willing to pay for it. Odysseus knew about it in the ancient era and fought cyclopes and temptations to go back home. In the dawn of the informational era, digital nomads were the first to know about it, and now it seems everyone lives in a state where we don't find a home even if we live where we were born.
Thousands of years ago, an ancient tribe that knew better than most about losing their Home, made a huge invention: they created a god detached from statues, places or limits. That God was always with them, and while being with God was never exactly being at Home, it worked as a reminder and comfort. Now, those same people have their God and finally live in Israel, but they, like us, don't live at Home anymore. And that's because Home is where we fit and where we are welcome, where we love and are beloved. Home is a break at the end of the journey, a sanctuary where none has to give explanations: part freedom, part flourishing, part memory, part predictable, and part beginning and end.
It is the target of this book to analyze why the sense of Home has been slipping away from us since machines, computers, the internet and particularly AIs took over our World. Nowadays, the poorest people enjoy for free visual miracles that not even the emperors of Rome or China would have ever imagined possible. Yes, even the dumbest human experiences, adventures and worlds put to shame the best novels and movies of all times. But do we feel at Home? Or most importantly, can we feel at Home in this digital world where we don't need any more friends, children, jobs, sex, scars, or even a mother?
Home or Exile in the Digital Present
"Am I using Deep-Compose to better up symphonies, or am I just one of its thousand instruments playing notes in a galactic-size concert I can't even start to understand?' The witty complaint was verbalized to me in 2028 by a young musician sometime between the salad and the vanilla ice cream on my first day in a European town facing Africa, the location of a game studio where I would work for the next six months.
On that starry night, the garden's blooming jasmine and my colleague's vibrant southern accent flooded my brain with a faraway exotism, drowning out my recent past and my perpetual northern worries. And during one moment in which I was left alone, waiting in his garden with my glass of wine and the smell of damp grass, I recognized in our conversation some of the oldest philosophical questions of humanity: Master or Slave? Agency or Fatalism? Individual or Part? True, ancient Greeks or prehistoric Homo Sapiens never had to deal with Neural AI's like Deep-Compose. Still, ideas like gods, causality, psychology, democracy, or mathematics also pushed ancient humans against the same doubts. How could it be otherwise? Each generation must scan the horizon and the stars with attention to appraise the danger and understand their position in that unknowable map called reality.
Perhaps because I was an engineer from the highly efficient Viking Belt, my colleague talked to me as if I had answers and solutions: 'Are we going to be vampirized until there is no more data to teach them?' What's it going to be?! I felt a bit like an impostor because I didn't have the answers, and so that night became the starting point of a project two years later, crystallized in my book Before Singularity. The book didn't sell well but turned out to be the opening chapter of a broader quest to answer the question 'Can digital reality be our home?'
Nine hundred fifty-three days have passed since that warm southern evening, but as I've said, those interrogations have kept coming roaring back in my dark and quiet Viking winter. The digital realm started to overtake and redefine our World even before our parents could understand what The Internet was. They celebrated the networked Earth for the many ways in which it united us and enriched our capabilities. However, they didn't foresee how this network would, in a very short time, big-banged a new galaxy formed by matrices of data and deeply unhuman—a world where the sense of the body slips away.
When we talk about the philosophical question of being at Home or alienated, millions of people born before the 90s of the 20th century don't understand the question itself. Historians and psychologists can help us, very much indeed, but it can feel like describing colors and shapes to people who were born blind. Virtual worlds and ultra-immersive audio and visual experiences are now more widespread than sex, reaching nine billion people. We don't know anymore what is an authentic non-digital world, and the entangled dilemmas of IQ, skills and passion are no longer confined to HHRR departments in Silicon Valley as they were in the 2000s. Now, anyone can be effectively superseded and pushed away to a work-less digital life of neural networks.
Strange. A few years ago, it still seemed reasonable to focus our concerns on family, environment, and workplace challenges. Instead, the oldest questions of Life and Humans must be addressed under the broadest possible frame: What is Civilization? Or, more specifically, what is information civilization? Can we still call Home this society or jail? Do we still remember how our life was before the digital Big Bang?
Returning home, as Ulysses did through his Odyssey, is a very well-known theme of nature. Most creatures orient Home. It is the point of origin which every species sets its bearing. The compass we use to navigate unknown territory, without which we would be lost. Bees, butterflies, trouts...trees, hives, hills, shores...nearly every creature shares some version of this deep attachment. That nostos, finding a home, is among our most profound needs and is evident by the price we are willing to pay for it. Odysseus knew about it in the ancient era and fought cyclopes and temptations to go back home. In the dawn of the informational era, digital nomads were the first to know about it, and now it seems everyone lives in a state where we don't find a home even if we live where we were born.
Thousands of years ago, an ancient tribe that knew better than most about losing their Home, made a huge invention: they created a god detached from statues, places or limits. That God was always with them, and while being with God was never exactly being at Home, it worked as a reminder and comfort. Now, those same people have their God and finally live in Israel, but they, like us, don't live at Home anymore. And that's because Home is where we fit and where we are welcome, where we love and are beloved. Home is a break at the end of the journey, a sanctuary where none has to give explanations: part freedom, part flourishing, part memory, part predictable, and part beginning and end.
It is the target of this book to analyze why the sense of Home has been slipping away from us since machines, computers, the internet and particularly AIs took over our World. Nowadays, the poorest people enjoy for free visual miracles that not even the emperors of Rome or China would have ever imagined possible. Yes, even the dumbest human experiences, adventures and worlds put to shame the best novels and movies of all times. But do we feel at Home? Or most importantly, can we feel at Home in this digital world where we don't need any more friends, children, jobs, sex, scars, or even a mother?