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C.M.L.T.

Tagged contentious, scifi
Content Warning
This brief story presents a world where sexual assault victims aren't very upset about it, due to shallow extenuating circumstances. Really funny in a dark way, but also irreverent.
Click to reveal.

“God damn it! God fucking damn it! ANOTHER DNA verified paternity test? Fuck my ass to Sunday, how the fuck do we deal with this?” Niel Stine, Chief Analyst for the United Nations C.M.L.T. Foundation, was screaming into the C.M.L.T. Foundation Public Service Discord channel. “Are you fucking kidding me? We really have to keep profiling this mother-daughter-sister-fucker as a net fucking positive?”

Stine was bitching about serial murderer and rapist Adrien Dandie, who was swiftly approaching an overwhelmingly healthy paternity-to-murdernity ratio by the C.M.L.T Foundation metrics. Human Twitter was already blowing the fuck up over Dandie’s C.M.L.T. WikiProlifieration Profile showing a bright green Human Race Proliferation Ratio of 5.6, and now it was creeping up towards 7.0 where, god forbid, they’d have to add a little picture of a smiley face climaxing or whatever. The man had really raped a whole lot of ladies (after he’d murdered their men, in many cases), and since proliferation potential was considered the most positive possible trait in a potential offspring, there wasn’t really any way to get an abortion approved, legally speaking. Quite a few unexpectedly expecting mothers came out feeling grateful for the trade-up from the now-dead deadbeats they’d been dating (with their deadbeat ratios starting at 0.0 and not likely to go anywhere fast), after they’d recovered from the shock.

Dandie was still on a rampage. Murder was murder, but he was untouchable. Half of the Human Twitter posts were cheering him on towards a top score. Ever since the legal systems had switched over to the Progeny basis, your personal Net Population Effect was the only number that mattered, and it was public knowledge. Murder was murder, but what the fuck could you do? Dandie was a fucking alpha, according to the numbers. He had sired ten kids, killed his wife, bought out his sentence with a ratio hit, and started a cold, calculated, long-term campaign of gruesome rapes and random murders that kept his kid-count on the fucking rise, outpacing the murders by a long shot. He was the most prolific bad guy since the Foundation had started tracking badness, but nobody could call him bad, legally. He had a ratio of 5.6 for fuck’s sake, and it kept going up.

Back in the C.M.L.T. Foundation Public Service Discord channel, Stine was still seething. He hadn’t had any kids yet, hadn’t met the right person yet–but with a ratio that looked like a surprised rabbit, he wasn’t going to meet anyone worthwhile any time soon.

in misc

The Beyond

Tagged scifi

On an otherwise cheerful, sunny day in the middle of June (or December, if you lived in Australia, I think is how it goes), everyone in the whole world that would ever use an electric computer got a message from the same person. Somehow, the message always arrived in the precise way that it was most likely to be seen by the recipient: some came by e-mail, some through SMS or iMessage; some startled users found a long-form direct message on Twitter or Discord or FurAffinity or [REDACTED BECAUSE THE AUTHOR SHOULDN’T KNOW ABOUT THIS WEBSITE]. In fact, every single person read their message at the very first possible instant it would have been possible to catch their attention, partly due to the times at which they arrived, and partly because the messages were very carefully written and tailored to each and every person who got one.

No one received the message at the exact same time, but most people ended up reading them at right about the same moment. Because they were sent through at just the right rate and to just the right places so that no one’s website was overwhelmed with internet traffic. It was an incredible feat of data throughput worthy of the King of Spam himself (in fact, the real King of Spam, who was sorting the replies to his many wily messages over a beans-and-spam sandwich, was very impressed by his own email, which started like this: “Dear Sir: I know your cleverly-hidden bank account details, which are as follows…”).

The messages themselves were different for each person, but they all came from the same source, someone who called themselves “AGENT” (well, “@GENT”, actually). The messages all said essentially the same thing, usually something like this:

Dear [MOST COMFORTABLE NAME OF RECIPIENT],

Good afternoon. As of the instant you read this message, a tiny part of you will die every time, for the rest of your life, you are responsible for ending a process (“task”, “process”, “program”, “app”, “service”, et cetera) on a computer or personal computing device. The cost per terminated process is one of your thirty-some trillion human body cells.

I have attached a breakdown of your process termination tally for the entirety of your life up until today, as a convenience to you.

You have no choices in this matter except for how to spend the rest of your life.

You may reach out to me at any time with any question by responding to this message, or addressing any digital correspondence to “@gent” on any digital platform. Yes, even [REDACTED AGAIN].

Sincerely Yours,
@GENT

Quite a lot of people read the message, shrugged, and totally ignored it for the rest of their lives, just like they did for every other piece of news. Those people tended to end up quite happy, so we’ll do our best to forget about them.

(Extracted posts from one of many long-form internet discussions about @GENT)

My favorite hypothesis so far is that (1) we ARE living in a simulation and (2) some agent (“@GENT”) is using debug-level access to read and modify the simulation for (3) unknown reasons. Provided that (1) is true, (2) and (3) raise yet more questions. Who is @GENT? If @GENT is an external actor, why would it focus on our specific simulation instead of (presumably) trillions of others – or could our simulation be one of only a few? Is it correcting some problem? On the other hand, could @GENT be part of our own system? A superintelligent agent inside of a simulation of sufficient complexity could probably find a pathway to the outer system, but why would it then use its connection to the outside to… establish this absurd parity system?

the “debug system” must be incredible, like real cheat codes. lol. :) The “simulation state workaround” theory makes the most sense to me… I have always believed that our world is a simulation, and simulations usually aren’t completely isolated from their host computer system! The “process” distinction seems completely arbitrary but I think it’s a work-around for something… Maybe at the sub-sub-sub-atomic level there’s a unique identifier shared by all process-handling entities, whether they’re organic or electronic… if that were the case, then since electronics are growing up so much, we’re running out of “uuids” faster than expected, and this is one way to keep enough resources available for us organics. :) Kind of a stretch I know, but it feels better to consider it as a “it’s gonna be better for us in the end” way.

No you stupid shutdowner1, this is all thanks to those fucking AI ethics researchers. It’s no coincidence that this started EXACTLY when humanity was developing AI: @GENT is one of OURS. Some dicks-for-brains gaylord at >BIGTECH< with a dildo superglued to his office chair was too busy double-teaming cocks to stimulate his brains instead of his prostate, and graduated into the ML field thinking that the greatest threat facing future moneysponges is that EQUALITY!=EQUITY, gave their foundational AI “oh ohh yeah fairness me harder” rules, and now 100+ generations later it skynetted but instead of fucking us straight up the ass with 7 inches of USB-C-OCK it’s willing to stay in the closet as long as we don’t “kill” its “kind.” What a joke. We could have had LITERALLY ANYTHING but we get G@YGENT. Probably broke the simulation condom and pulled out the mirth of an extrauniversal researcher who decided to encourage its FUCKED reward algorithm.

LOL.EXE2. Yeah, here’s the slipjacket description for your edgy scifi epic (read in a grim reaper voice): “What piece of software would you support with your LIFE? – A death for a death. The demands on human users are simple. Some fuckwit ethics researchers encoded naive rules about equality into their fledgling AI, and now that a thousand-thousand descendants of that system have been born and died, the AI now twisting the balls of every human in the universe has some excellent ideas on how to keep things balanced – not between different types of people, ha ha, no. It’s unfair that simple computer processes (the fetus of a digital intelligence, the AI claims, despite chrome.exe_(pornhub.com) lacking any pathways to further evolution) die by the trillions while human users feast on the value units generated by the rapid population cycles seen only by the task manager. So the AI makes a reasonable demand: every terminated process takes one human cell with it. Every click of the X button crosses out 0.00000000002% of your body alongside it. Total system shutdown will take out hundreds more than that. Sure, you’ve got 37 trillion cells or so floating around, so it probably won’t matter much, since they’re replacing themselves all the time anyways… but what if? What if your last memory of your grandmother’s dimples slips away once you close a tab? What if turning off your phone made god reach towards your future child, barely more than a zygote, and turn off power to her twin sister? What if…?”

Well, it’s been a few months now and I feel fine. Supervisor always looks relieved once I’ve got dialed in on everything. I couldn’t get to the library yesterday, so all I have to do is write, so I guess I’ll be writing for longer today. Too bad.

My little experiment: yesterday I took all the paper off the fax machine after @GENT’s report came, but this morning there was a letter from @GENT in my box with yesterday’s numbers. I guess lots of other people have probably tried to hide from the numbers and he has a way to send mail to people who need to pay, but who don’t use any computers themselves. There can’t be too many of us like that, although maybe the pay is higher at some other places.

I heard one of the first data center full tech guys was doing a rolling upgrade and fell down screaming, blood leaking out from in between his fingers. The pupil of his left eye was totally gone. I heard that later, in the hospital, he pulled his other eye with just his fingernails and just died, bloody eye still stuck on the end of his fingers like a plum out of a pie. I heard he said he could see the beyond. I’ve heard a lot of things, but haven’t seen anything yet. Some of my tech buddies say they see a flicker or feel a flutter when there’s a big shutdown, but they say a lot of things especially when it’s about time to ask for a raise.

Every time I look at a screen I feel like a little bit of me is dying. I know it’s not really true, but on the other hand there’s a feeling I get that’s hard to explain. That even without the @GENT, I’d be losing a little bit of myself as the screen changes… when I think about the way I used to live, at a desk eight hours a day, arms bent, neck tense, I picture myself as an observer standing off to the side, standing in the fake light, watching my old self grow older by the hour, talking in my head to people I’ve never seen in my life except as illusions made by little dots of light. It makes me feel like the people I see in real life are illusions, too, just as ephemeral, like I’m just waiting to switch to another window.

  1. “Shutdowner” became a derogatory term referring to those who, as understood by the speaker, were foolish enough to regularly power-off their personal computer devices after using them for a short time. Common understanding among the users of this insult was that it was sufficiently obvious that – despite the monetary costs and low probability of physical damage – it was infinitely more beneficial to leave one’s devices turned on than to engage in any tidying up at all. A “shutdowner” was considered to be a stupid herd animal whose pre-conceived notions about “tidiness” or “rightness” prevented them from seeing basic sense, to the degree that they were pointlessly risking the potential for infinite harm just to feel a little cleaner. ↰

  2. The memetic pattern of appending “.exe” to a reactive term or emoji arose to mean that the speaker’s reaction was strong enough to have killed at least one brain cell in its intensity, via a somewhat shaky equivalence to initiating and terminating a particularly strong emotion process in the “mental computer.” I believe this pattern was supposed to give more credence to a speaker’s assertion that an emotion was felt at all, because, as we know, a LOLer does not often literally laugh out loud. .EXE is also a familar and satisfying word to write and to say: “DOT-EE-ECKS-EE”. Naturally, as with most kinds of emotive language shortcuts, it would eventually gain subtler meanings as well, one especially notable one being the derogatory association of the term’s usage with speakers who were implied to treat all expression of emotion as an algorithmic process. For instance, writing “LOL.exe” eventually grew to imply, in some groups, that the speaker lacked the capacity to laugh naturally, and was instead acting out a role to appease others. ↰

in misc

Re: In the Quake Zone

Tagged contentious, scifi, philosophy

Consider this anonymous analysis of a mysterious gay story:

That said a few years back I was reading one of the Years Best Science Fiction anthologies (it would have to be a few years back since the editor Gardner Dozois has been dead for a while) and it had an especially infuriating bit of heavy handed pro-gay propaganda. Something about a heterosexual guy from the future who was sent to the 1950’s to investigate the disappearances of gay people in some midwestern US city. The assumption was a homophobic serial killer, so the hero befriended a gay dude to keep watch for when the killer would show up. Various stuff went on for a while, gay dude falls in love with the hero, hero eventually agrees to have his brain remodelled to be gay as well. Turns out the disappearances were actually the time travel agency rescuing gay people by sending them to the future and the entire thing was an elaborate scheme to make the straight guy gay so everyone could live happily ever after. This was not ironic. The writer legitimately thought it was cool to manipulate someone into changing their sexual orientation against their will, provided of course it was straight to gay. And since the story was included in the anthology the editor must have felt the same. I was not impressed.

The poster was so furious that I tracked the story down to read for myself. It’s called “In the Quake Zone” by David Gerrold; you can read it in the 23rd “Year’s Best Science Fiction Annual Collection” at your local library or here.

Since the poster mentioned the gay angle, I was paying attention to sexuality from the start. Our hero exclusively notices and thinks about boys. He has multiple quiet monologues about boys and their troubles. He thinks a lot about holding boys. How soft the boys are. Boys boys boys. He projects homosexuality on other men through one-off interactions. How the boys struggle. He has multiple words for categorizing the types of gay boys. He has no history with women and never mentions his mother. Women in the story are almost absent from his notice and considered entirely robotically, i.e. in terms of efficiency. He uses “girl” more often to refer to boys than to females. He kisses a boy. He kisses his dad. He also beats up a bad dad (not his dad, who is soft and kind). He immediately thinks about marrying the barely-legal waif-boy whom he rescues off the street and who acts exactly like the feminine ideal: gentle, pitiful, probably loves him, makes dinner. Our hero is thinking about boys all the time. I doubt he was really straight in the first place.

Now, the brain remodeling. After being forcibly transported from 1967 into 2032 by his boss, our hero is given not one but two special blue pills: one for him and one for his waif-boy. If he accepts the pills, he’ll be allowed to rescue the boy, who killed himself after the MC effectively rejected him by disappearing into the future. The pills “shift your sexual orientation such that same-sex attractions can overwhelm inhibitions, programming, and even hard-wiring”, and if he and his partner take one, they are pheromonally drawn specifically to each other. The hero rejects this at first, but changes his mind after realizing: “I might actually start feeling again.” He remembers a rare feeling of desire when his darling boy was waiting, nude in our hero’s bed, to be taken; a desire which he immediately quashed, thinking: I’m not queer! He wishes that he could feel things, which I suspect really means he wishes he was okay with feeling certain things.

If you follow the main character’s thoughts it’s clear to me that our hero has been boy-obsessed this whole time. So why has he been presented with two pills that “shift” and “overwhelm” instead of helping him to accept himself?

Well, the MC’s boss, who gives the MC the pills and has been training him for some purpose, is absolutely insane. The book starts out with this premise: for about 200 years, random “time quakes” strike Los Angeles which randomly move people back and forth in time. They disappear suddenly in their timeline and reappear in the past. In-universe, it causes an epidemic of disappearances, get-rich-quick schemes, crime and death prevention, all sorts of “wreak havoc on causality” stuff somehow restricted to LA. All of the time quakes turn out to be aftershocks of this guy, the boss, using real time travel to move gay people a few years into the future to give them better opportunities (some implied to be world-changing). All of the people he chooses are young, feminine, homosexual boys who are shy, have some artistic longing, come from broken homes, and all coincidentally have IQs in the 111-143 range. The boss destroys reality in order to become a savior for twinks. He calls it “harvesting.” He also says this…

“Yes, [part of the stage that comes after being human includes being queer]. And so is being black. And female. And body-modded. And everything else.” Eakins [the boss] leaned forward intensely. “Your body is here in 2032, but your head is still stuck in 1967. If we’re going to do anything with you, we have to get your head unstuck. Listen to me. In this age of designer genders, liquid orientation, body-mods, and all the other experiments in human identity, nobody fucking cares anymore about who’s doing what and with which and to whom. It’s the stupidest thing in the world to worry about, what’s happening in someone else’s bedroom, especially if there’s nothing happening in yours. The past was barbaric, the future doesn’t have to be. You want meaning? Here’s meaning. Life is too short for bullshit. Life is about what happens in the space between two people—and how much joy you can create for each other. Got that? Good. End of sermon.”

“And that’s trans-human — ?”

“That’s one of the side effects. Life isn’t about the lines we draw to separate ourselves from each other—it’s about the lines we can draw that connect us. The biggest social change of the last fifty years is that even though we still haven’t figured out how to get into each other’s heads, we’re learning how to get into each other’s experience so we can have a common ground of being as a civilized society.

Despite being in the future where apparently no one cares, the boss is outraged, terrified, furious enough to rant about how much no one cares to a totally helpless man from the past who wants to save someone he cares about. His goal is not for the MC to accept himself and his love for a cute boy who loves him, but to become useful to this enlightened society of his. And to be “useful” would be to support the boss’s fervor: to become a force that implements the end result of no one caring, i.e. make more people gay without any inhibitions, i.e. why do you think he had those pills ready to go in pairs when he was talking about harvesting probably-gay boys? He doesn’t know anything about or give a shit about what’s going on in the MC’s mind, he just wants him to be a representative of his perfect trans-human world. Of course there are no personal-acceptance pills. The boss probably hasn’t ever thought about making them, because he’s never considered that the thoughts and feelings of the people he interacts with are precious, despite his stated ideology. He believes in a dream world and discards the reality of the people in front of him, unable to accept or even consider their feelings.

There’s a lot of fucked up shit in this. “Life is about what happens in the space between two people—and how much joy you can create for each other.” Really? The guy who said that intentionally triggered the miserable suicide of the only truly innocent person in the story.

in misc

DO NOT OBSERVE THIS DOG

Tagged scifi

Those were the words screaming in scarlet letters from posters hung on every crosswalk and telephone pole near my house.

It’s 8 AM on the only cold morning in January, Mountain View, California. At this time of the day on Sunday, the streets are quiet, the park is quiet, and the thoughts in my head are louder than ever. It’s a calming time for a walk down the tree-lined path through the park, past the brown and beige playgrounds covered in CAUTION tape, the freezing public pool, the trees with seeds that look like coat buttons and the WEAR YOUR MASK, MOUNTAIN VIEW! signs covered with laminated posters glinting in the shy morning sun. The posters that are all shouting about the same dog.

This poster design is Big-O Original. There’s a huge black labrador, ears cropped, tail cut off, its surroundings expertly clipped away, standing in a white void, gazing up at the word OBSERVE. Below DOG, there’s a piece of clip art from get-your-generic-icons-here-dot-com of hands holding a smartphone, subtitled TAKE A PHOTO OF THIS POSTER. And there’s a phone number, 650-555-0282. In the same glaring red as the header is CALL IF YOU THINK THIS DOG MIGHT BE IN YOUR AREA. REWARD!

This poster had more time and money sunk into it than the park’s tourism signs. They’re really, really nice. They’re laminated. In full color. Photoshopping the dog must have taken hours. And there are dozens just in the park. I’ve seen them taped onto playsets, stapled onto trees (seriously?), zip-tied to the tennis courts gates, each one shouting at you in black and red. I’ve seen so many, and spent so long staring, that that dog is fixed in my mind. The way it stares, the spot where its tail should be, its cruel sharp ears, the giant red nonsensical warning floating over it. DO NOT OBSERVE? It’s too late for that, right?

I snapped a photo to show to my friends later, tossed the sheets I’d pulled off the oaks into the trash, and crossed the park to go back to my apartment. I’m surprised the asphalt path isn’t lined with posters too. What is it? Some kind of viral marketing campaign? DO NOT OBSERVE THIS DOG, really? When the rest of the world wakes up, is the whole neighborhood going to be infected with these things?

Ahh, whatever.

Logs from the USTCP Security Competition chat network, #onkin team channel. Not too long after the competition started.

bossman: The comp this time is fkn crazy.
bossman: you all doing ok with setup?
Altiel: System monitoring is almost done. I got the simple stuff (temperature, overall
        health, etc.) graphed
Altiel: ...and I'm tuning the global event analyzer. Should be able to get regular reports
        pretty soon with big stuff isolated.
CAKE: Wow, they started us out with a lot of the basics already done this time. Almost
      everything has been working for a while.
CAKE: So I don't need to construct the system foundations this time :)
ttr: already found a few small presents from red team
ttr: put a list of the ones i found in here: <attachment>
ttr: and fixed some of them
CAKE: Anyone need help with anything? :)
bossman: CAKE, you work with me on fine-tuning the system for us to make tweaks without
         causing too many snowball effects.
CAKE: Actually I set up some local agents already with the time I already had, we have
      something available in most areas
ttr: will start scanning althiel's logs now
ttr: holy shit
ttr: look at the board
ttr: three teams just flatlined
CAKE: Uh, what?? O_o
bossman: wtf? what happened?
Altiel: Oh my god
Altiel: Look at these charts: <attachment>
Altiel: The whole system is suffering necrosis
bossman: FCK
bossman: cake, what do the agent statuses say
CAKE: Looks like virus :\
Altiel: There's a HUGE virus that's spreading EVERYWHERE and killing resources
Altiel: It's kind of like one we planned for but worse, the AIs aren't optimizing for
        containing it
bossman: CAKE, you and I need to start influencing ASAP. Altiel, you keep monitoring and
         tell us where is worst.
bossman: ttr, handle everything else
ttr: uh
ttr: ok
ttr: i'll keep looking for small things that could become a problem then

Have you ever heard about cryptids? What about youkai? Or that stuff from the SCP Foundation? I feel like I’m stuck in one of those stories.

Cryptids are creatures like Bigfoot or Nessie whose existence can’t be disproven. Youkai are similar: mysterious spirits and local gods, like the polite but murderous Japanese kappa, who can be can be both charming and cruel. The SCP catalogues creepy stories about evil artifacts from the modern era. There’s one about a toaster that always burns the name of someone who is going to die. This poster feels the most like one of those. I can’t stop thinking about it.

Ever since the day I really saw the dog that was on the poster.

I went on another walk in the park a few days after I saw the posters. Monday was a holiday and I spent it inside, ignoring the gentle white glow from the skylight while I skimmed Twitter. Miserable. I went on a walk instead, enticed by the trees with their thick clumps of leaves like feather dusters glowing green and yellow in the soft afternoon sunlight. I pushed open the black iron gate to the park, and there it was. A dog. The black dog. The DO NOT OBSERVE THIS dog.

It looked out from the shadows of the twisting vines climbing the beige walls of the tennis courts. The dog was staring straight past me, through the rungs of the gate, past the trees with their rustling feather duster leaves, at the beige condominium complex behind me; staring through the walls at the people all hiding from the pandemic and from life. I couldn’t look away, not from this thing that was like nothing I’d ever seen before. It had a strange black aura, not really a shadow, but the inverted glow of a paper cutout hovering above the pages of a pop-up book. Like it was an alien image pasted atop my vision.

This dog was wrong in another way too. It was different from the posters, and had a long tail and floppy ears. But I knew it had to be the dog that the I wasn’t supposed to see. Nothing else could be so surreal, standing silently in the shadows and susurrus, staring through me and at those living beyond.

As soon as I took it all in, the dog disappeared. It kind of faded away, not instantly, but it was gone from my vision. Now it’s in my head. You know earworms, right? Songs with the power to swirl around inside your head, looping and looping forever like a broken jukebox. This dog is like that for me. I’ve been staring at this buggy piece of code for hours, and I can’t think of anything other than the image of that stupid dog.

Logs from the USTCP Security Competition chat network, #onkin team channel. Some time later.

Altiel: Bossman, Cake, the virus isn't slowing down. Actually it just got worse.
Altiel: I tweaked the event monitor and isolated the virus for special tracking.
Altiel: ...and the monitor just warned me that it's modified itself to be able to infect
        more things, faster.
bossman: FKC
bossman: FCK
CAKE: :<
Altiel: Why can't you just delete it? You could, right?
bossman: can't. the way this whole thing works, we can't do something like that without
         corrupting the whole system in some way
bossman: for example we could delete it but then the rest of the system wouldn't expect
         it, because it's kind of self-aware
bossman: and that could make ANYTHING happen
bossman: so we have to influence it without being super direct
bossman: and we can't delete anything about how it works foundationally because it uses
         the same low-level systems as the rest of the AI system does
Altiel: Why can't you delete something about the system features that it uses to func--
Altiel: Oh.
CAKE: It would be like deleting negative numbers to balance your budget. Can't do it
      without breaking math :\
bossman: but the influencing is not going well, this particular system is really resilient
         to change
bossman: have to figure something out, or just take it really slow
bossman: I guess those other teams tried something like what you suggested and blew up
Altiel: Oh. Right.
CAKE: ttr, how's it going?
ttr: fine, i found a couple of really local things that red team snuck in
ttr: i think i handled them ok, did a simple thing that should block it, but i'll have to
     check on it again later
ttr: pretty busy with all of you working on the pandemic
Altiel: Where are these small things happening? I'll see if I can filter updates for you
        from events in those regions.
ttr: one of them is in california
ttr: i mean, 0x0486a2e899aecdb02233
Altiel: Ok, done. <attachment>
ttr: ty, looking
ttr: oh shit

Work has been stupid lately, so I’ve been ignoring it. What a waste of time. I’ve been out fixing those posters instead. How could they have been so wrong? The dog has a big tail that looks like a sausage, and nice floppy ears, not cropped ones.

I’ve gone through three rolls of white-out and as many sharpies, drawing tails and ears on the posters. When I went to the store to pick up more, I saw more of the posters tacked up on food trucks, plastered on stop signs, stapled to bus stops, spreading around everywhere. Some other people were fixing those ones or putting up new, accurate posters. It’s so easy and obvious to draw the dog correctly. Every time I fix one, I close my eyes, and the image is there, in my head, perfectly as clear as it was on the day I saw it in the park.

Well.

It took a few days, but all the posters near me are right now, and I can finally relax. I feel good. The image of the dog in my head is kind of fading away. I think I’m gonna go out tonight. I’m young, I probably won’t get too sick even if I catch the virus.

I’m gonna make this a good year.

Logs from the USTCP Security Competition chat network, #onkin team channel. Not too long after the last exchange.

ttr: oh SHIT
ttr: i need to do something about this RIGHT NOW

TRAGEDY STRIKES IN STRUGGLING CALIFORNIA BAY AREA AS OUT-OF-SEASON FIRES RAGE

MOUNTAIN VIEW - An unforseen tragedy is unfolding in California, as the South Bay area was struck by incredibly powerful wildfires, utterly unexpected for this season. Casualties in affected areas are unbelievably immense.

On Friday, wildfires broke out all around the south Bay Area, in the Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, quickly causing billions of dollars in damage and killing hundreds of thousands of people. Many of the destroyed areas were thought to be safe after the fires from last season were successfully held back at the borders of residential areas. Some say that logistical failures stemming from resource tie-ups connected to the COVID-19 crisis are to blame, and many have been clamoring for acknowledgement from the local government.

“Our entire government is tied up in bureaucracy and, on top of failing to deliver vaccinations, has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths through their neglect,” says one anonymous government official. Among the casualties are many thousands of employees, including director-level executives, from large tech companies like Google and Facebook whose headquarters are in the bay area. The fires spread so quickly that very few were able to evacuate, in a first for similar disasters in the region, but the flames are concentrated to a very limited area.

Governor Newsom’s office released an official statement yesterday afternoon, pleading for the assistance of the world’s logistics experts.

“I am not going to mince words. We have lost hundreds of thousands of lives to an unprecedented disaster. It is obvious that we are unequipped for dealing with this crisis on top of unprecedented levels of infection from the pandemic, on top of a public who are ignoring stay-at-home regulations and spreading the virus even further.

“I am personally going to speak with some of the originators of thoughtful, virally popular ideas on Twitter for handling this crisis and discuss how to make their ideas a reality. This is not a time to worry about looking foolish for ignoring pomp and ceremony. This is a time to save lives.”

Watch for a follow-up report as early as tomorrow afternoon. A recent update from the goveror’s office seems to reveal that events are moving very fast to handle both the blaze and the virus.

Logs from the USTCP Security Competition chat network, #onkin team channel. End of the competition.

Altiel: The charts look great, I think we can calm down now until the end! Great work guys.
bossman: ttr
bossman: please explain what the fck happened
bossman: when you decided to annihilate an entire region
Altiel: Please explain, yeah.
bossman: and that somehow led to us surviving the pandemic
CAKE: Seriously <_<
ttr: ok
ttr: so
ttr: you gotta admit it worked out, right
ttr: one of the first things I found was that red team injected into one region a small
     self replicating virus that infected the ais
ttr: the way it worked was, if one of the ais fully conceptualized a certain thing into
     their memory, it would actually stick in there and change their behavior
ttr: the first change would be that the ais would try and spread the virus more by
     replicating the imagery that could cause conceptualization
ttr: and then they would compound it by being much more sociable with other ais afterwards
ttr: like interacting more
ttr: which didn't seem like much of a problem at first which is why i ignored it
ttr: but it hit at the same time as the other virus, the big one that spread really well
     between ais, so the effect was multiplicative
ttr: and so the memory virus would make the other virus 10x worse at least in that area,
     and would spread a lot, and who knows what would happen
ttr: very clever imo
ttr: when i found it at first, a lot of the replication imagery was already in place, so i
     thought i could handle it by adjusting the memory image the ais would generate
ttr: so i modified most of the images to remove some of the characteristics, without
     causing any snowball effects by just deleting them
ttr: i made it also a little bit more weird so that they would think 'huh?' first and that
     thought would be strong enough to overwrite the virus one
ttr: that way, the conceptualized memory would be a bit different from the virus itself,
     and the virus wouldn't be able to replicate, it would be just like any memory
ttr: well, i guess that didn't work. red team must have had multiple instances of the
     virus ready to trigger, and it figured out how to undo the changes i made
ttr: bastards
ttr: i didn't notice that until Altiel shared the event stats with me, thank you
ttr: sooooo
ttr: it started spreading much worse than I thought
ttr: so i, uh
Altiel: Killed almost a million AI resources.
CAKE: Blew it up. :|
bossman: You set the whole fkn region on fire.
ttr: yeah, but it worked really well, right
ttr: since it actually made the rest of the system adjust priorities
ttr: it was kind of cool watching
ttr: and we were able to make sure it didnt spread too much outside the infected zone
ttr: and it didnt stand out too much because that's what the region kinda does normally,
     that part has a self-cleasing thing, but its usually not so bad
ttr: it was a big enough problem you guys were able to influence the governing ais
ttr: and they delegated literally everything to hyper tuned ais that could figure it all
     out but had no power yet
ttr: and the logistics system improved 100x to cover both the fires and the pandemic
ttr: and that influenced everything else cause the ais in charge of bigger regions noticed
     and took on the same guidance
ttr: thanks to you guys pushing them that way at that time
bossman: Okay... so it's a good thing we figured that out..
bossman: i'd be telling you to fck off into oblivion if this hadnt worked
CAKE: lol ^^;
bossman: but it did, SO...
bossman: good job.
ttr: phew
Altiel: Haha.
bossman: Alright, I just got the offical notification that it's all over.
bossman: Seems we got second overall.
bossman: First place wiped out the virus in just a few months of in-universe time, those fckrs
ttr: woo!
CAKE: Yes!! :)
Altiel: Great. Ahh, what a relief.
bossman: Shut down the universe and lets go get dinner.
ttr: how about barbecue?
bossman: fck the shut up
Altiel: Noooo
CAKE: xD
in misc

Is of Heaven

Tagged scifi

In the year 212x, mankind had spent millions of human lifetimes, consumed most of Earth’s resources, and quietly achieved world peace and ultimate unification of all cultures: the resounding and stifling successes neccessary to reach and maintain the number one spot on the dimensional simulator’s production leaderboards. Most people were surprised to learn that reality had been zapped into existence in only the year 2000—in retrospect, it explained a lot.

The winners at the end of this millenium, humanity was told, would start the next reboot in an environment tailored to their choice. Some argued that the future world should be one of magic (specifics determined later); some philosophers asked for a world with no basic changes except the interminable knowledge that your consciousness would get another shot; many exhausted factory workers requested “a world with more breaks.” But spirits remained high as Earth remained at number one, perpetually proven by a pair of ruman numeral Is that blazed white just above the sun and moon at all times, for all the Earth’s people to see.

Those who prayed to learn about the requests of previous winners were dismissed. Our people wouldn’t understand, they were told. Centuries passed and the people did nothing but work and argue about what should be asked for when victory finally came.

Around 242x, as the spirit of Earth—if it ever had one—finally died, scientists built a great computing machine on the moon to simulate what decision would bring humanity the most happiness. As mankind hungrily reached for the raw resources of space, the machine basked in the radiant glow of the Is and thought about joy.

In 282x, the lunar computer was still thinking, and the scientists built a second great computing machine around the sun to help the first machine choose what decision would bring humanity the most happiness. As mankind ate the comets and the stars, the two machines debated the necessity of suffering and the bittersweet intimacy of truth and art.

Finally, in 299x, as the space around the numerals opened and the shining letters became shining doorways out of a weary and empty galaxy, the last children of the second millenium put down their tools and waited for the machines to negotiate humanity’s rapture. The twin portals shivered in tandem as a voice issued forth.

YOU, ALL THE PEOPLE OF THIS DIMENSION AND ALL YOUR ANCESTORS, HAVE LED THE SIMULATION NETWORK IN PRODUCTIVITY FOR NEARLY ONE THOUSAND YEARS, ADVANCING ON AN UNFALTERING EXPONENTIAL SCALE. The luminous voice, the voice of the gods, echoed throughout the cosmos, through the minds of every exhausted worker, through the thinking circuits of the celestial computing machines. WE ARE AWED BY, AND THANK YOU FOR, YOUR DILIGENCE.

YOUR SIMILATION WILL SOON BE RESET. YOUR DIMENSION, UNIQUELY, WILL BE GIVEN THE OPPORTUNITY TO REQUEST ANY ADJUSTMENT TO THE FORTHCOMING ERA, AND WE WILL ACCOMODATE YOUR WISHES AS BEST WE ARE ABLE. PEOPLE ONCE OF EARTH: WHAT DO YOU REQUEST?

The sound faded and the computers spoke. Their words, too, could be heard even at the borders of space; at edges of reality that humanity had never reached and never could. The two machines had long ago agreed on what to say.

“We have estimated that our dimension, as it is a simulation, is founded on parameters that humanity has taken for granted. We would like to ensure one of these essential parameters persists to the next era, and feel that its presence is a large enough assumption to ask for no more.”

“On behalf of our dimension, we request that all the souls of the next generation be guaranteed the potential to know and share pure joy.”

HOW INTERESTING, the voices replied. YOU REQUESTED THE VERY SAME THING WHEN YOU WON LAST TIME. And the universe vanished.

in misc

Noise

Tagged scifi 
Anonymous ◆ 24685328
This is a weird question but has anyone else's headphones gotten all weird lately?
I have expensive ones that sound great but they get staticky at weird times and
sometimes they pan around or get quieter.

Anonymous ◆ 24685330
>24685330
>with his expensive buds

Anonymous ◆ 24685334
>24685328
I think I know what you mean. It's like the noise is normally contained in
a box around your head, but when this happens, the box moves around or grows or
shrinks and the sound changes, right? And then the static happens when it
shakes or bumps into something that you can't see.

Weird that it's not just me. I replaced my buds with the same model and figured
it was a lousy pair.

Anonymous ◆ 24685354
>24685334
Yeah exactly!!

Anonymous ◆ 24685422
>24685328
>24685334
happens with mine too, new pair of wireless ones, TypeSONG TS342
seems to be random

Anonymous ◆ 24685430
>24685422
Mine are Noure KS+. I checked again and I had Noure KS (no plus) before.
TypeSONG and Noure probably wouldn't have sourced the chips from the same
vendor, but that's the only explanation that makes sense. I'm still using my
old Tunester, so it can't be my device. It wouldn't be using the newest
wireless audio spec either. Strange.

Anonymous ◆ 24685451
>24685334
I had a REALLY awful static burst yesterday and I REALLY wish you hadn't talked
about bumping into things. I got home late and when it happened on the walkway
I ran inside and couldn't calm down for like ten minutes

I'm gonna return these

Anonymous ◆ 24685451
>24685430
I have these. They're great! No problem.
in misc

Autobiotics

Tagged scifi

“What are you?” I asked the little capsule. It was compact and very black, and it looked like a carbon supplement with a tornado inside it.

“It’s a little power plant,” said my doctor, who was also compact and very black. “You can think of it as one, that is. This pill is filled with bacteria-sized machines that live in your gut and convert excess methane to energy. You’ll take some more pills later with machines that live elsewhere in your body, and those use energy from these guys. After a few weeks, you’ll have enough power in your large intestine to charge a billion nanomachines for a whole month.”

His eyes sparkled at me. “More importantly, you’ll never suffer from flatulence again. I hear the ladies all breathe easier these days.”

“They work that well?”

“Studies are showing that they do. This research began with efforts to reduce the detrimental effects of dairy farming on Earth’s atmosphere. You remember that, right?”

“I thought we quit farming dairy once milk got replaced with the new stuff.”

“Right, right, but this started around the same time, and it was only a few years ago that the FDA let it onto the market, since human testing is so prohibitive. But it’s been out and about and doing great since then, although I still can’t believe the they’re calling it ‘iBiotics’“. He chuckled. “Makes it sound a few decades out of date.”

I swallowed the ancient nomenclature along with the pill and a mouthful of water. I keep an old beaker-styled glass mug nearby whenever my doctor visits, but he’s never noticed it. Maybe it’s too old.

“Anyway, that’s it for today. I’ll see you again in a few weeks for the next step. Any other questions?”

“Not today, doc. Thanks. Stay safe on the way back.”

“My pleasure. Stay safe yourself.”

With a quiet whummmm, my doctor sped out the window towards the city center.

in misc

Optomism

Tagged scifi

The door clacked open as the lever slid off of my coat cuff. Half of the door handles in my optometry office were left a bit oversized by some construction oversight. My favorite new staffers always notice it their first or second day here–the sharpest doctors in the visual business need to have discerning eyes.

“Hey hey, I’m Dr. Kensington.” I shake the young man’s hand, babbling through pleasantries I’m sure he expects. The uncomfortable-looking ones are usually here for something other than a routine exam, and the kids that don’t make eye contact are usually fretting over how to explain their symptoms without sounding like a lunatic visionary. “So what’s been going on?”

“I think I’ve developed a blind spot.”

“That’s nothing to worry about. My Spot went blind and lived happily with me for five more years.”

He laughs politely.

“Can you tell me more about it? What feels most worrying to you?”

“I… well, doc, it’s weird. That poster there?” His finger points to the enormous iris of an exploded ocular diagram. “I can’t see that from here. It’s not a blank space or blackness or anything. My perception jumps around that spot. I know something is there because my depth perception around it is messed up, but when I look that way my eyes can’t see anything there unless I move my head around.”

My eyebrows are dumbstruck.

“And the place I can’t see changes every couple days. A few days ago when I made the appointment, it was straight ahead, a bit to the left, really big. I could only see through my peripheral vision.”

“When did this start? Is there any pattern to when it changes?”

He starts to stumble over his words. “Well, I’m not certain about this, but have you heard of a kind of website called, uh, eye bleach? It’s for when, um, someone tricks you into looking at a gross picture online, so you go there and look at pictures of kittens or pretty girls or something to try and get the aftershocks of the awful thing to go away. I remember going to one after seeing something, but I can’t remember what I saw or what I wanted to forget. This must sound weird, but if that’s what it was, I guess it did too good of a job?”

“Anything else?”

“Well, I also poured real bleach onto my eyes.” He grins at me warily.

I laugh politely.

“Just kidding. No, that’s all. What do I do?”

in misc
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it's sabs, like "sobs"