The Calculator (DC Multiverse, SI as canon character, Season 1 complete)
- Thread starter TLPG
- Start date
- Superhero
- Location
- netherlands
- Pronouns
- She/They
hmm good points
Jiopaba
Eat Lightning; Crap Success.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure if this happened to me I'd wind up taking a similar course of action.
Either it's the most concerted and astounding gaslighting attempt anyone has ever been subject to, or the lens I view reality through is flawed. Maybe if none of my memories ever matched up, but the person the SI has become was apparently living their life, shares many of their skills if to an exaggerated level, etc. There's a lot more evidence that the memories of real life are false than there are of the DC universe being wrong.
Either it's the most concerted and astounding gaslighting attempt anyone has ever been subject to, or the lens I view reality through is flawed. Maybe if none of my memories ever matched up, but the person the SI has become was apparently living their life, shares many of their skills if to an exaggerated level, etc. There's a lot more evidence that the memories of real life are false than there are of the DC universe being wrong.
AI Threats and Authorial Declarations
- Location
- USA
Sorry for the large post. No story content, just a backlog of comment replies.
FYI, I usually post stories early Wednesday and early Friday, U.S. Eastern Time.
Believe it or not, I randomly selected both a name and gender for Pooja before writing this part, then just wrote to the result. I think it turned out well.
After my first draft, I went back and included those specifically for this reason. Hope it helped. I'm trying to write "smart" fiction, but I don't mean to lose anyone not familiar with the domain specific knowledge being discussed here.
Awesome, that's basically what I was going for. Nailed it.
Hopefully the latest chapter makes it clear that AI tech is just a thing in this world. People understand how to work with them and don't usually freak out like the SI is. He calms down a little once he gets peer reviewed papers on the subject, and goes over some of her code. Or, what she claims is her code.
The idea that an AI is a threat IRL is, in my mind, best explained in two basic, non-technical ways:
The threat of a human-level artificial intelligence is that it can escalate fast and with the same lack of ethics and foresight of the worst psychotically-delusional antisocial murderer, but with little of the reduction in effectiveness in the execution of their plans. It isn't about superpowers, though please note that a runaway AI self-improving into a world-class threat in the DC universe would have access to people with powers and schizo-tech doomsday devices.
I tried to make it clear what was going on through how the SI was reacting, with maximum show-not-tell given the situation. This might have confused context and fact a bit in the process. I'll declare some things right now. Not really spoilers, but skip the rest of this post if you don't want things hand-fed to you.
FYI, I usually post stories early Wednesday and early Friday, U.S. Eastern Time.
Believe it or not, I randomly selected both a name and gender for Pooja before writing this part, then just wrote to the result. I think it turned out well.
I'll pretend I understood any of
that and say Pooja seems friendly enough.
After my first draft, I went back and included those specifically for this reason. Hope it helped. I'm trying to write "smart" fiction, but I don't mean to lose anyone not familiar with the domain specific knowledge being discussed here.
Awesome, that's basically what I was going for. Nailed it.
Which is exactly what a dangerous AI would say.
(Also, "I noticed you worrying about LessWrong AI danger stuff.")
Hopefully the latest chapter makes it clear that AI tech is just a thing in this world. People understand how to work with them and don't usually freak out like the SI is. He calms down a little once he gets peer reviewed papers on the subject, and goes over some of her code. Or, what she claims is her code.
The idea that an AI is a threat IRL is, in my mind, best explained in two basic, non-technical ways:
- An AI, possibly by design and always by its computer-based nature, can exist completely outside human social constraints in a way that even the worst iconoclasts living alone in cabins in the woods can't approach. They do not necessarily have an innate, instinctual reason not to optimize themselves and their environment in a way completely unfriendly to humans, or life on Earth in general.
- An AI can do human level things with human tools they have access to, but in general better and with more focused attempts. Imagine how much damage can be done with things like email phishing scams and SWAT'ing by a ruthless intelligence that never sleeps, never gets bored, and is not constrained by the shame of being called out for their lies. Imagine how much damage even simple identity theft could do, and the resources available to a system with access to complex hacking tools and no compunction against blackmail and credible threats to people's lives. Please see things like AI Boxing experiments and books like Daemon by Daniel Suarez.
The threat of a human-level artificial intelligence is that it can escalate fast and with the same lack of ethics and foresight of the worst psychotically-delusional antisocial murderer, but with little of the reduction in effectiveness in the execution of their plans. It isn't about superpowers, though please note that a runaway AI self-improving into a world-class threat in the DC universe would have access to people with powers and schizo-tech doomsday devices.
I tried to make it clear what was going on through how the SI was reacting, with maximum show-not-tell given the situation. This might have confused context and fact a bit in the process. I'll declare some things right now. Not really spoilers, but skip the rest of this post if you don't want things hand-fed to you.
- It isn't just the SI's mind in a totally new person's body, in the DC universe.
- No comment on whether or not I actually look like any DC the Calculator representations IRL.
- In all seriousness, assume the SI is like me, but I'm fudging some of the details and just lying about others. Not even confirming I'm really male. I'm also pulling in a few details from some friends of mine. This is for privacy reasons and just to make it a better story.
- The SI has some proof that the Calculator's history in this world is the same as the SI's original memories, just a little off. The SI doesn't remember being the Calculator, but there is even photographic evidence of someone who looks like how he remembers he looked. In short, he thinks they are the same person, possibly from different universes.
- In my story, the SI can see himself becoming someone like the Calculator. In "Drugs", he even agrees with many of the Calculator's plans and starts to implement some of them.
- The SI doesn't know (yet) why his memories are different from what appears to be the history of this world. He doesn't know how he missed things like his house being a low-impact secret lair for a supervillain.
- He does know that, while he was working at TriD, the human being called the Calculator wasn't active--at least, as reported by Pooja's systems, which were continuing to do low-level, email FAQ business under that name. So he isn't thinking this is a straightforward Fight Club scenario.
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- Location
- The INTERNET!
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
In all honesty, the characterization reads a little more like you've had your personality and memories selectively edited, than as a true SI. This isn't a bad thing, in fact I like it really well. And the only thing making it impossible to work in-universe is your out of context knowledge.
And that kind of personality and memory edit has happened before in DC, notably to Dr Light, after he raped Elongated Man's civilian wife. I doubt that Calculator would do something that heinous, but he may have found something Man Was Not Meant To Know, and had to have Martian Manhunter rub a metaphorical magnet on his hard drive.
And that kind of personality and memory edit has happened before in DC, notably to Dr Light, after he raped Elongated Man's civilian wife. I doubt that Calculator would do something that heinous, but he may have found something Man Was Not Meant To Know, and had to have Martian Manhunter rub a metaphorical magnet on his hard drive.
The List
- Location
- USA
After working until three in the morning, I slept ten hours straight. Two egg-white omelets from scratch, a freezer hash brown thing toasted into edibility, carefully measured nootropics, and two Diet Gingold later I felt up to continuing to work through the mountain of data.
"Pooja," I said to the empty room.
"Yes?" she replied, once again right in my ear. Made sense pickups and narrow-bream speakers would be house-wide.
"Please order more Diet Gingold. Put it on a recurring schedule based on my average and peek consumption profiles to provide maximum availability. I'm starting to get a taste for it."
"I will do so."
I plopped down in my computer chair. "Well, not taste. It's nasty. But I had three total yesterday and woke up without a crick in my neck for once. So. There's that."
"Extremely useful anecdotal data noted. I'll be sure to cross-reference this report with the extensive medical information already collected over the course of eight hours yesterday by more than three-quarters of a million dollars worth of scientific equipment."
I think my AI was getting snippy with me. I started up the local terminal by touching the keyboard. The monitors bloomed again.
Email from work. Low priority, so I wasn't alerted. The sort of sensitive, caring, don't-sue-us message you'd expect. Offices closed until further notice. Unpaid vacations for everyone. Don't call us, we'll call you.
"Pooja, how much are you making monthly as the Calculator?"
"Over the last year, an average of fifty thousand dollars."
I sat forward on my chair, frowning. "Wait, fifty thousand a year?"
"A month."
"Huh. Well, we're not hurting for money. Good job."
"Thank you. And agreed. That is, unless you require capital quantities of money, in which case you will need to resume consulting and shipping operations. Soon."
She did seem impatient to get down to work. I was fine with that. "Pooja, open all notes on current projects."
Windows covered the top three screens. A few key taps opened additional documents on the lower ones. I took more notes as I went, trying to make sense of things while avoiding the most important decisions. Like what to do about Slade Wilson.
I had cleared up some questions about the business of being the Calculator. There were three main parts to my former self's operations:
First, the email system. I'd poked around this some already. People wrote in via an encrypted darknet contact box on a site listing services, arranged payment based on a simple price sheet, then got specific information in return. Payment was in either anonymous cryptocurrency or, more expensively, though a secure escrow cum money laundering operation.
Past-me had gathered a huge pile of information: corporate secrets, the powers of heroes and villains, magic items, secret locations of (less useful) hidden treasures. While Pooja had been in charge, no original research was sold, and answers were limited to specific "safe" categories. This meant many more lucrative jobs were politely rejected.
For example, one thing I didn't sell through the automated system was secret identities. Too many factors to consider to trust it to the computer—at the time, to the less than one-year-old and unnamed Pooja.
The second part was a kind of villainous business consulting service. It was both for helping new players get started and working out more complicated plots for established players. I sold myself as the voice of experience and reason, in a field I'd never actually participated in—costumed crime. In the process, I secretly worked to make a kinder, gentler criminal culture.
No guarantees. Read the fine print. Ignore my advice and screw up bad enough to get people killed, and local superheroes get an anonymous info-dump in their email the next morning.
I hadn't apparently cared to actually help these people do their stupid, stupid crimes directly and in person—good for me—but rather I worked as a knowledge consultant. This helped reduce collateral damage and the worst of the mad, destroy-the-world schemes. As my marketing was mostly limited to word of mouth, such consulting still had to help their schemes; my services had a much better success rate than most managed in a world with superheroes in every major city. This made my services relatively popular.
As I'd discovered late last night, it seems that had also gotten me into trouble with Slade Wilson. I still had a decision to make there.
And last of all was my personal projects and the resulting offshoot technology. Power suits. Hard light generators. Nootropics. Magic item investigations and provenance. Smuggling and some now-defunct contracts with black and gray market auction houses. I rarely sold examples of stolen tech and never simple intellectual property—straight-forward, white-collar industrial espionage was too attention-grabbing for international law enforcement. It also didn't really interest me. Oh, I still stole their secrets, but I just didn't sell it to the highest bidder. If someone was just sitting on some breakthrough useful to the world, I sometimes played Robin Hood, but I wasn't interested in it being part of my regular business.
I also never sold my own original designs—those were usually in the area of technological refinements of the works of others. I wasn't a technological genius, bursting with ideas, but I could often make them work more practically than their inventors. My skills lay in software and hardware hacking. In understanding how things worked. In Reading The Fine Manual.
There were certain areas where that didn't help. As I'd found in my notes before, most magic items only worked on people with one of a few magic genes or imbuements. Atlantis ancestor or otherwise related to famous historic magic users, born a demigod, granted power and slash or created by little-gee gods—those were the paths to magic. More on that last one later.
I didn't have "it", that spark. Seventeen tests, all negative. Looked comprehensive. Shit. That wasn't to be an easy path to success, and was one big reason why I didn't already have real ultimate power.
Or maybe the mess my memory was could be blamed on a failed attempt. Something to look out for, to avoid repeating similar mistakes.
"Pooja, remind me not to consume any energy fields bigger than my head."
"Such has already been noted. Repeatedly. It is on The List."
My eyes narrowed. I could hear the capital letters. I pointed at a monitor. "...pull up...The List."
Well. Looks like I literally did have an evil overlord list of things to do. And not do. It was...copyright-infringingly close to what I remembered from the very late nineties. Mine was over five hundred items long. The source seemed to be profiles of the crimes people not using my services committed and general observations of how things worked in this world. Similar to the comics, otherwise intelligent villains made many, many easily avoidable mistakes. It was also used as part of the seeded knowledge base integrated into Pooja's reasoning systems.
A quick and careful search determined...it was an original creation of mine. That explained a lot about the DC universe. Thinking in tropes wasn't a thing here. Fiction was usually adorably naïve and irony wasn't really a thing, except in some dark, unpopular books and indie movies. Maybe I was living in a more hopeful world. A positive effect of all the superheroes?
"Pooja, do I have any lists of positive effects of superheroes?"
"You do now."
I sighed. "Add it to my reading queue, please."
A swipe of my mouse and the evil overlord list was added to the queue as well. Things just kept piling up. Weird, weird things.
The rest of the personal projects looked good. I required a power source for the hard light generators. Looked like it needed something like a small, portable fusion power plant. That could almost fit in your pocket. Little progress there, but I had a list of requirements. And the prototype suit it was meant for…
I blinked, then stood up and walked over to the hall closet. Dragging the heavy, dusty box out and into the living room reassured me I didn't have the strength of Hercules or something similar. If I'd lost my memory to an ascension attempt, that part hadn't worked.
Slightly worryingly, to get to the box I had to move a large duffel bag full of guns and ammunition I didn't remember having.
"Pooja, we'll talk about the guns later."
"It shall be so."
The suit was black with green highlights. Not just armor, but a skeletal cage that could support itself and still folded up into the box my microwave had come in. As I'd read, the strength and agility enhancements were supported by the suit, not by weak human limbs. Protection seemed to be a secondary purpose for the exosuit, though it did cover the body completely, with thick panels at vital points and a full-head helmet. The main purpose was getting a cobbled-together hard light system into the field. With human tech, this ended up being quite a bit larger than a ring.
It was still unusually light, made of some advanced carbon-nano-foam material—the details were superscience technobabble to me right now. Speaking of, the hard-light generator was mounted center front. It just looked like a thick part of the cuirass without being called out by something dumb, like a large glowing calculator pad. That would be really stupid. The design would make me look a little fat, but it could be worse. I wasn't planning on anyone seeing it.
There was a slot underneath the generator for the power supply, currently empty. The space was maybe the size of a car battery, but half as thick. I packed the suit up and shoved it back in the closet.
Back in my office, I took a closer look at the specs and poked at some serious, high-end suppliers. Huh. No wonder it wasn't up and working. That power requirement basically meant superscience, not just expensive cutting-edge science.
In this world, the future was even more unevenly spread out than what I remembered. Cops still used projectile pistols, but the U.S. military was testing second generation laser rifles. Lex Luthor had powered exoskeletons for workers, but most companies couldn't afford them, so most construction was still done the dangerous, inefficient old way. My car was a rather plain gas-hybrid, but my computer used holographic screens, three dimensional memory, and nanofabbed light-pipe chips.
Something to run the hard light generator simply wasn't available on the open market, but there was a good chance I'd run into someone who had some unreleased schizo-tech that fit. I already had it tagged in case something showed up that fit my needs.
The hard light generator was my most advanced project, other than Pooja, so I'd probably focus on finishing it when I found a good power supply. The suit was mostly complete, but it lacked a user interface. Likewise, the generator needed some control systems for the programs to actually make the hard light constructs. I'd done the basic outlines, but both projects needed a lot of hard, boring work to make the systems both safe and intuitive.
I leaned back in my chair. "Pooja, how's your C programming language chops?"
"I am currently able to write and debug computer programs in over twenty languages."
"What do you think, can you whip something up for operating this?" I pointed at the pseudo-code and design specs I'd been looking at.
Pooja replied without a pause. "As I said the last time you asked this question, that would not be a good idea. When working as a user interface or systems architect programmer, I am...not very human understandable. For technical details, I can mimic human standards according to best practices as outlined in trade manuals, and I can follow engineering specifications when revising and improving human-written code for control systems; but once I began optimizing entirely new user interface systems, or creating control subsystems from scratch, I tend to...forget myself, and do weird things without noticing. My user interface designs are, and I quote you, 'ugly square piles of eyestrain'. I so far seem to lack a mature, sensitive artistic touch. I am also, according to you, 'too damn optimistic' when it comes to safety planning."
I had a brief image of me choosing a gray button on a heads up display filled with gray buttons and the suit tearing me in half and noped out of that line of thought. "That's okay, Pooja. We'll work something out. Thanks for explaining."
A quick note to look into outsourcing some programming jobs and I forced myself to move on.
So much for magic and technology. There was one other way to serious power on a DC 'verse Earth. I'd left it for last in my review because it strained belief.
Some really obvious things here were a secret. Superman being an alien was a fringe theory, for example. Some dangerous things were very secret: Kryptonite didn't even show up in my systems. Some odd, out-right illogical things with huge implications were common knowledge that no one thought too much about.
For example, religion here seemed to scientifically, observably, repeatably, provably work.
I sighed, opening yet more windows full of text-based headaches.
"Pooja," I said to the empty room.
"Yes?" she replied, once again right in my ear. Made sense pickups and narrow-bream speakers would be house-wide.
"Please order more Diet Gingold. Put it on a recurring schedule based on my average and peek consumption profiles to provide maximum availability. I'm starting to get a taste for it."
"I will do so."
I plopped down in my computer chair. "Well, not taste. It's nasty. But I had three total yesterday and woke up without a crick in my neck for once. So. There's that."
"Extremely useful anecdotal data noted. I'll be sure to cross-reference this report with the extensive medical information already collected over the course of eight hours yesterday by more than three-quarters of a million dollars worth of scientific equipment."
I think my AI was getting snippy with me. I started up the local terminal by touching the keyboard. The monitors bloomed again.
Email from work. Low priority, so I wasn't alerted. The sort of sensitive, caring, don't-sue-us message you'd expect. Offices closed until further notice. Unpaid vacations for everyone. Don't call us, we'll call you.
"Pooja, how much are you making monthly as the Calculator?"
"Over the last year, an average of fifty thousand dollars."
I sat forward on my chair, frowning. "Wait, fifty thousand a year?"
"A month."
"Huh. Well, we're not hurting for money. Good job."
"Thank you. And agreed. That is, unless you require capital quantities of money, in which case you will need to resume consulting and shipping operations. Soon."
She did seem impatient to get down to work. I was fine with that. "Pooja, open all notes on current projects."
Windows covered the top three screens. A few key taps opened additional documents on the lower ones. I took more notes as I went, trying to make sense of things while avoiding the most important decisions. Like what to do about Slade Wilson.
I had cleared up some questions about the business of being the Calculator. There were three main parts to my former self's operations:
First, the email system. I'd poked around this some already. People wrote in via an encrypted darknet contact box on a site listing services, arranged payment based on a simple price sheet, then got specific information in return. Payment was in either anonymous cryptocurrency or, more expensively, though a secure escrow cum money laundering operation.
Past-me had gathered a huge pile of information: corporate secrets, the powers of heroes and villains, magic items, secret locations of (less useful) hidden treasures. While Pooja had been in charge, no original research was sold, and answers were limited to specific "safe" categories. This meant many more lucrative jobs were politely rejected.
For example, one thing I didn't sell through the automated system was secret identities. Too many factors to consider to trust it to the computer—at the time, to the less than one-year-old and unnamed Pooja.
The second part was a kind of villainous business consulting service. It was both for helping new players get started and working out more complicated plots for established players. I sold myself as the voice of experience and reason, in a field I'd never actually participated in—costumed crime. In the process, I secretly worked to make a kinder, gentler criminal culture.
No guarantees. Read the fine print. Ignore my advice and screw up bad enough to get people killed, and local superheroes get an anonymous info-dump in their email the next morning.
I hadn't apparently cared to actually help these people do their stupid, stupid crimes directly and in person—good for me—but rather I worked as a knowledge consultant. This helped reduce collateral damage and the worst of the mad, destroy-the-world schemes. As my marketing was mostly limited to word of mouth, such consulting still had to help their schemes; my services had a much better success rate than most managed in a world with superheroes in every major city. This made my services relatively popular.
As I'd discovered late last night, it seems that had also gotten me into trouble with Slade Wilson. I still had a decision to make there.
And last of all was my personal projects and the resulting offshoot technology. Power suits. Hard light generators. Nootropics. Magic item investigations and provenance. Smuggling and some now-defunct contracts with black and gray market auction houses. I rarely sold examples of stolen tech and never simple intellectual property—straight-forward, white-collar industrial espionage was too attention-grabbing for international law enforcement. It also didn't really interest me. Oh, I still stole their secrets, but I just didn't sell it to the highest bidder. If someone was just sitting on some breakthrough useful to the world, I sometimes played Robin Hood, but I wasn't interested in it being part of my regular business.
I also never sold my own original designs—those were usually in the area of technological refinements of the works of others. I wasn't a technological genius, bursting with ideas, but I could often make them work more practically than their inventors. My skills lay in software and hardware hacking. In understanding how things worked. In Reading The Fine Manual.
There were certain areas where that didn't help. As I'd found in my notes before, most magic items only worked on people with one of a few magic genes or imbuements. Atlantis ancestor or otherwise related to famous historic magic users, born a demigod, granted power and slash or created by little-gee gods—those were the paths to magic. More on that last one later.
I didn't have "it", that spark. Seventeen tests, all negative. Looked comprehensive. Shit. That wasn't to be an easy path to success, and was one big reason why I didn't already have real ultimate power.
Or maybe the mess my memory was could be blamed on a failed attempt. Something to look out for, to avoid repeating similar mistakes.
"Pooja, remind me not to consume any energy fields bigger than my head."
"Such has already been noted. Repeatedly. It is on The List."
My eyes narrowed. I could hear the capital letters. I pointed at a monitor. "...pull up...The List."
Well. Looks like I literally did have an evil overlord list of things to do. And not do. It was...copyright-infringingly close to what I remembered from the very late nineties. Mine was over five hundred items long. The source seemed to be profiles of the crimes people not using my services committed and general observations of how things worked in this world. Similar to the comics, otherwise intelligent villains made many, many easily avoidable mistakes. It was also used as part of the seeded knowledge base integrated into Pooja's reasoning systems.
A quick and careful search determined...it was an original creation of mine. That explained a lot about the DC universe. Thinking in tropes wasn't a thing here. Fiction was usually adorably naïve and irony wasn't really a thing, except in some dark, unpopular books and indie movies. Maybe I was living in a more hopeful world. A positive effect of all the superheroes?
"Pooja, do I have any lists of positive effects of superheroes?"
"You do now."
I sighed. "Add it to my reading queue, please."
A swipe of my mouse and the evil overlord list was added to the queue as well. Things just kept piling up. Weird, weird things.
The rest of the personal projects looked good. I required a power source for the hard light generators. Looked like it needed something like a small, portable fusion power plant. That could almost fit in your pocket. Little progress there, but I had a list of requirements. And the prototype suit it was meant for…
I blinked, then stood up and walked over to the hall closet. Dragging the heavy, dusty box out and into the living room reassured me I didn't have the strength of Hercules or something similar. If I'd lost my memory to an ascension attempt, that part hadn't worked.
Slightly worryingly, to get to the box I had to move a large duffel bag full of guns and ammunition I didn't remember having.
"Pooja, we'll talk about the guns later."
"It shall be so."
The suit was black with green highlights. Not just armor, but a skeletal cage that could support itself and still folded up into the box my microwave had come in. As I'd read, the strength and agility enhancements were supported by the suit, not by weak human limbs. Protection seemed to be a secondary purpose for the exosuit, though it did cover the body completely, with thick panels at vital points and a full-head helmet. The main purpose was getting a cobbled-together hard light system into the field. With human tech, this ended up being quite a bit larger than a ring.
It was still unusually light, made of some advanced carbon-nano-foam material—the details were superscience technobabble to me right now. Speaking of, the hard-light generator was mounted center front. It just looked like a thick part of the cuirass without being called out by something dumb, like a large glowing calculator pad. That would be really stupid. The design would make me look a little fat, but it could be worse. I wasn't planning on anyone seeing it.
There was a slot underneath the generator for the power supply, currently empty. The space was maybe the size of a car battery, but half as thick. I packed the suit up and shoved it back in the closet.
Back in my office, I took a closer look at the specs and poked at some serious, high-end suppliers. Huh. No wonder it wasn't up and working. That power requirement basically meant superscience, not just expensive cutting-edge science.
In this world, the future was even more unevenly spread out than what I remembered. Cops still used projectile pistols, but the U.S. military was testing second generation laser rifles. Lex Luthor had powered exoskeletons for workers, but most companies couldn't afford them, so most construction was still done the dangerous, inefficient old way. My car was a rather plain gas-hybrid, but my computer used holographic screens, three dimensional memory, and nanofabbed light-pipe chips.
Something to run the hard light generator simply wasn't available on the open market, but there was a good chance I'd run into someone who had some unreleased schizo-tech that fit. I already had it tagged in case something showed up that fit my needs.
The hard light generator was my most advanced project, other than Pooja, so I'd probably focus on finishing it when I found a good power supply. The suit was mostly complete, but it lacked a user interface. Likewise, the generator needed some control systems for the programs to actually make the hard light constructs. I'd done the basic outlines, but both projects needed a lot of hard, boring work to make the systems both safe and intuitive.
I leaned back in my chair. "Pooja, how's your C programming language chops?"
"I am currently able to write and debug computer programs in over twenty languages."
"What do you think, can you whip something up for operating this?" I pointed at the pseudo-code and design specs I'd been looking at.
Pooja replied without a pause. "As I said the last time you asked this question, that would not be a good idea. When working as a user interface or systems architect programmer, I am...not very human understandable. For technical details, I can mimic human standards according to best practices as outlined in trade manuals, and I can follow engineering specifications when revising and improving human-written code for control systems; but once I began optimizing entirely new user interface systems, or creating control subsystems from scratch, I tend to...forget myself, and do weird things without noticing. My user interface designs are, and I quote you, 'ugly square piles of eyestrain'. I so far seem to lack a mature, sensitive artistic touch. I am also, according to you, 'too damn optimistic' when it comes to safety planning."
I had a brief image of me choosing a gray button on a heads up display filled with gray buttons and the suit tearing me in half and noped out of that line of thought. "That's okay, Pooja. We'll work something out. Thanks for explaining."
A quick note to look into outsourcing some programming jobs and I forced myself to move on.
So much for magic and technology. There was one other way to serious power on a DC 'verse Earth. I'd left it for last in my review because it strained belief.
Some really obvious things here were a secret. Superman being an alien was a fringe theory, for example. Some dangerous things were very secret: Kryptonite didn't even show up in my systems. Some odd, out-right illogical things with huge implications were common knowledge that no one thought too much about.
For example, religion here seemed to scientifically, observably, repeatably, provably work.
I sighed, opening yet more windows full of text-based headaches.
- Location
- Maybe?
Hm, so Pooja lacks the ability to simulate humans? Because that's nearly 1:1 equivalent to writing good UX. Seriously, given the ability to simulate humans, you can write a UX optimizer in probably 30-50 lines of high-level pseudocode. It's just "select 10000 random actions (including those unrelated to ux actions) weighted by probability, sequence and user experience, measure the time with this ux between "action decided" and "action executed", minimize some mix of average and worst-case, permute ux using monte-carlo methods, crank for an hour or however long it takes to stop getting improvements."
That should cover distractions, bad style, typical patterns and learning.
Maybe she runs into issues because really good UX inherently requires deliberately shaping the mind of the user.
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- Location
- Australia
If Pooja has that capability it is probably crippled by the software restrictions. The specific ones would probably be the ones preventing her from social engineering and manipulation of the user.
Y'know, a thought on Slade... see if you have enough money to set up an escrow account for a contract on anyone who kills you, and also, possibly, put out a contract on Slade contingent on him not dropping the contract on your life.
Gives him exactly the same problem you have.
Gives him exactly the same problem you have.
always_confused
Perpetually unwanted
- Location
- SEA
Would that really work? I'd imagine not many people would want to go up against Deathstroke, or at least not enough people to make his life comparably miserable as the SIs would be.
deadpan29
Strangely Stoic
All the physical and informational evidence in this world, excepting his own subjective memories, says this is probably the case. Even if he doesn't believe it himself, everyone and everything in this universe is going to treat him as if this is the case. If he's approaching all this with a rationalist methodology, then he should believe the mounting evidence over his subjective memories.
Also, whether or not he believes he was always the Calculator, he's kind of stuck acting the part. Especially with Deathstroke looking for him.
It also seems to me that, with all the dark channels set up, one logical step would be to send a message to Deathstroke asking if this is a contract or something personal.
- Location
- US
I feel like the real big question is whether his meta/outside knowledge about the setting is broader than the information he gathered as Calculator, and whether anything that is beyond the scope of what he gathered is accurate.
If his "meta" knowledge is just a manifestation of his paranoia coloring the information he gathered and packaging it into the form of "comic books," that's one thing. If he's consistently extending beyond anything he could have reasonably known about, that's a real big deal.
He should probably figure out which way it's going before he starts relying on his "knowledge." Easy trivial example would be something like "the Batman is Bruce Wayne." That's almost certainly not a piece of information he could have worked out as the Calculator, but it's also one of the most consistent facts regardless of whatever alternate universe changes there are. If Bruce Wayne is the Batman here, that's not only important in itself, it means he can rely on a lot of other assumptions. If he isn't, if it's just something Calculator idly thought up and worked into his comic book fantasy, or if it's a smokescreen he took as fact (and, again, worked into the delusion), it could be super dangerous to rely on that "fact," along with a lot of other "facts" he's gotten from his fantasy without any grounding.
If his "meta" knowledge is just a manifestation of his paranoia coloring the information he gathered and packaging it into the form of "comic books," that's one thing. If he's consistently extending beyond anything he could have reasonably known about, that's a real big deal.
He should probably figure out which way it's going before he starts relying on his "knowledge." Easy trivial example would be something like "the Batman is Bruce Wayne." That's almost certainly not a piece of information he could have worked out as the Calculator, but it's also one of the most consistent facts regardless of whatever alternate universe changes there are. If Bruce Wayne is the Batman here, that's not only important in itself, it means he can rely on a lot of other assumptions. If he isn't, if it's just something Calculator idly thought up and worked into his comic book fantasy, or if it's a smokescreen he took as fact (and, again, worked into the delusion), it could be super dangerous to rely on that "fact," along with a lot of other "facts" he's gotten from his fantasy without any grounding.
Probably, but it's a start and who knows, they might get lucky.
- Location
- St. Louis
True, but proving or disproving a hypothesis is much easier than idle wondering. If he really wants to know whether Batman is Bruce Wayne or not, asking "Is Bruce Wayne Batman?" is much easier to find answers for than "Who is Batman"? The biggest reason Bruce's secret is so seldom discovered is because few people ever look for evidence connecting Bruce Wayne as Batman because they never have a reason to assume it's a question they need to ask. If that makes any sense. You have to have a reason to even think Bruce Wayne might be Batman before you would go looking proof of it. Calc here has that reason, even if it may chalk up to nothing more than his own delusion. You and I know it's more than that, but from his perspective and that of others in this universe it's an assumption that really comes out left field.
I mean, most humans working in ux can't create decent UX.
- Location
- Maybe?
Well, humans are notoriously terrible at modelling other humans. Especially ones they don't know and whose experience is alien to them, such as the mythical "users".
- Location
- US
I feel like an AI could probably have an easier time doing UX, really.
Start with basic "simple" design from popular websites and apps, then start working as a UX designer for new sites and apps (through intermediaries and shells), and do a shit-ton of distributed A/B testing. Prioritize based on a combination of long-term user engagement with short-term efficiency to establish a comfortable understanding of design in a universal sense, and then when trying to make UI for very limited situations (like power armor) combine those universal graphical and "feel" principles with user feedback on the particular use cases of the UI in question.
Once the equipment is pushed out to testing, then you can keep refining the UI, although A/B testing should obviously be suspended during actual use. I mean, you'd probably end up with somewhat questionable results at first (everything looks like a website and elements are all slightly too big), but it would still be better than indistinguishable grey rectangles. It sounds like the problem is Pooja trying to create a design from nothing. She just needs some practice in a low-risk area first.
Start with basic "simple" design from popular websites and apps, then start working as a UX designer for new sites and apps (through intermediaries and shells), and do a shit-ton of distributed A/B testing. Prioritize based on a combination of long-term user engagement with short-term efficiency to establish a comfortable understanding of design in a universal sense, and then when trying to make UI for very limited situations (like power armor) combine those universal graphical and "feel" principles with user feedback on the particular use cases of the UI in question.
Once the equipment is pushed out to testing, then you can keep refining the UI, although A/B testing should obviously be suspended during actual use. I mean, you'd probably end up with somewhat questionable results at first (everything looks like a website and elements are all slightly too big), but it would still be better than indistinguishable grey rectangles. It sounds like the problem is Pooja trying to create a design from nothing. She just needs some practice in a low-risk area first.
I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing with zachol.
Assuming that you're disagreeing, if he's just the Calculator with a damaged memory, his delusions should be no more accurate than any guesses he could make on his own. He wouldn't have, on his own, guessed that Bruce Wayne is Batman, so if that checks out, that shows that he is not deluded.
The fact that he could have *confirmed* on his own that Bruce Wayne is Batman doesn't change this.
Programming and Memory
- Location
- USA
Sorry, no story post today. Next post Friday morning. Blame the 4th.
I do have some comment replies, however.
Pooja isn't able to simulate humans. She's barely human level herself, and that requires millions in networked computer equipment. She also doesn't scale well, though that hasn't really come up yet. Programming for humans isn't something she's good at, partially because she wasn't made to be good at it, and partially because she hasn't been running her affective interface. That includes learning programs for human reactions and interactions.
Give her a break. She's less than two years old, and mostly running on human processing time.
Past-Calculator also left her in a sort of low-power mode, mentally speaking. She only started running at full power when the root user login was triggered during Slade Wilson's attack.
Or at least, that's what her logs seemed to show.
The SI could do all of this programming. He really doesn't want to waste his time on days if not weeks of driver design, making hardware simulations, unit testing, fuzz testing, and making iterative UI design improvements.
He's not the "mad science of hard work" sort, but rather the "mad science of genius and audacity" kind of person.
This will be a thing. It is in real life.
Money fixes a lot of problems with Slade, but would need to be handled very carefully. More details on what the Calculator found out about Slade Wilson in the next chapter. Or maybe the one after.
The SI would never just assume he was the Calculator given the circumstances and leave it at that, but it is currently his best hypothesis so he's acting accordingly. And part of that is not hacking the Bat Computer.
Though it hasn't come up, the SI had checked and Batman could be Bruce Wayne. The Calculator already had records on this, too. He didn't dig deeper then and the SI won't now without good reason.
It isn't clear yet, but there are things he knows that aren't in his database. Whether that is because he didn't know these things before, didn't write them down in his database, or had the information wiped at some point is an important question.
The Calculator doesn't have copies of DC comics in his databases, so matching up the knowledge of characters and storylines is what the SI is doing right now. That isn't fun for me to write IRL, so I'm not showing that part, other than as it is important to the plot of this story. Or is especially interesting. Or funny. Hope that makes sense.
I do have some comment replies, however.
Pooja isn't able to simulate humans. She's barely human level herself, and that requires millions in networked computer equipment. She also doesn't scale well, though that hasn't really come up yet. Programming for humans isn't something she's good at, partially because she wasn't made to be good at it, and partially because she hasn't been running her affective interface. That includes learning programs for human reactions and interactions.
Give her a break. She's less than two years old, and mostly running on human processing time.
Past-Calculator also left her in a sort of low-power mode, mentally speaking. She only started running at full power when the root user login was triggered during Slade Wilson's attack.
Or at least, that's what her logs seemed to show.
The SI could do all of this programming. He really doesn't want to waste his time on days if not weeks of driver design, making hardware simulations, unit testing, fuzz testing, and making iterative UI design improvements.
He's not the "mad science of hard work" sort, but rather the "mad science of genius and audacity" kind of person.
This will be a thing. It is in real life.
Money fixes a lot of problems with Slade, but would need to be handled very carefully. More details on what the Calculator found out about Slade Wilson in the next chapter. Or maybe the one after.
The SI would never just assume he was the Calculator given the circumstances and leave it at that, but it is currently his best hypothesis so he's acting accordingly. And part of that is not hacking the Bat Computer.
Though it hasn't come up, the SI had checked and Batman could be Bruce Wayne. The Calculator already had records on this, too. He didn't dig deeper then and the SI won't now without good reason.
It isn't clear yet, but there are things he knows that aren't in his database. Whether that is because he didn't know these things before, didn't write them down in his database, or had the information wiped at some point is an important question.
The Calculator doesn't have copies of DC comics in his databases, so matching up the knowledge of characters and storylines is what the SI is doing right now. That isn't fun for me to write IRL, so I'm not showing that part, other than as it is important to the plot of this story. Or is especially interesting. Or funny. Hope that makes sense.
On Religion
- Location
- USA
Pooja's automated letters were quite good. Take this excerpt from one she gave me for approval today:
If it wasn't for the mix of amateur nootropics raging through my system, I would have given up hours ago on this stupid subject.
In this universe, at least on this Earth, religions worked. Dozens of them, but within some really odd constraints. The very idea made my head hurt, but I had to do something while procrasti- proactively waiting on the next step in resolving the Slade Wilson situation.
Turns out I owed him something. Something that had caused him to start attacking my organization at a specific time and place, without warning. Something that had been deleted from my records, or maybe never written down or even spoken of in Pooja's presence. Pooja was working on it, looking for hints and suggestions from my actions around the period in question, just before the missing months. A lot of the corrupted or deleted information was cross-linked to magic and religion, so I was following the trail, hoping something would jump out at me.
Looking at some of these records, it was uncanny how closely past-me came to the decisions I would have made. Past-me had treated the world's religious texts as a practical tourist's guidebook, with entries on the local restaurants. His personal faith was that of a munchkining power-gamer and his alter was an armory.
Pooja had lists of supernatural and religious countermeasures that worked for mere mortals. Most were already implemented. My house was stocked with holy water and hacked Super Soakers. I had a silver crucifix and garlic extract in a velvet case inside my gun bag—which also had silver-tipped bullets for a Colt .45.
Because vampires and werewolves were also real. Religious iconography and liquids for vampires, pure silver and physical trauma for werewolves, and strong smells for both.
Enochian sigils were carved into my house's foundation at corner posts. Voodoo bags were buried in my tiny suburban yard. I was an ordained priest—from an organization over the Internet, but a legit one. That part was the same, but it seemed a little more...serious than the one I'd remembered getting.
My digital calendar had Easter and Christmas services at a local Catholic church penciled in. That was a safe bet for minimal-effort results, based on past research. It seemed simply paying lip service like that automatically made me less vulnerable to even non-Christian demonic entities, as well as Vodun and other types of nasty curses. It might provide a minimal mystical protection for my...sigh...my "soul". Whatever that was. My notes suggested that I'd stuck to Christian worship practices as they were scientifically proven the most reliable in this day and age. They were also super easy, anyone could do them anywhere, and they had no serious drawbacks.
Anyway, past-me had scienced this up. A lot. So had a large number of respectable scientists.
Medical journals—real, serious ones—said things like, someone praying with a patient was shown to result in 5.2% faster recovery times for that patient. This was properly controlled and blinded. It was good science that gave a completely different result than in the universe I remembered.
Type of prayer didn't matter, so long as it was close enough to the regular practices of a major world religion. And this effect worked for and with anyone, even people of different faiths. Didn't need a priest. Could even have a barely practicing Shinto believer give Christian prayers to a Buddhist. Didn't matter if they spoke the language the prayer was in, or the same language, they just had to do the ritual with the patient. That's how well it worked.
Follow the steps, get results. Just like with summoning a demon. Hmm.
"Hey, Pooja? I'm reading the files on religion."
"I know," she said. "I'm the files."
"Right. Uh. So, do these things work for you?"
"I have a prayer subroutine that appears to reduce bit flips from cosmic background radiation resulting in memory errors by about five percent. Similar reductions exist in wear and tear on hardware itself. This is in line with results reported from other machine intelligences. Actions consist of a number of seconds worth of top-priority cycles spent on repeatedly reprocessing the correct ritual thoughts. I have also taken the opportunity to include some unstructured contemplation on the nature of reality."
"Huh. Oh right, so that's what that subroutine was. Weird."
"Yes. But as it works, I am perfectly willing to take advantage of it. I also have a scheduled prayer routine for your health and success in your missions. No possible data available on results, but it seems doctrinal sound."
A praying computer. I was...going to leave that one for now or I'd be at it all day.
How much was required to get a prayer to work? Varied by religion and study cited. The big ones worked for literally everyone, and all the time. No results the majority of the time for prayers or sacrifices for the numerically smaller religions.
Reviewing the possible things you could provably do with religion, it was kind of...bland. Passive effects, mostly. No one was rolling a D&D cleric anytime soon here, but it also wasn't Warhammer 40k with universe dooming side-effects.
Praying for something didn't do anything special. You got the same baseline effect as anyone—minor health benefits, reduced chance of injurious accidents. Proclamations or blessings from priests or shamans didn't matter, even ones from the big religions. They didn't get any special powers—well, some demons seemed to avoid them, but only some. No turning undead, no laying-on hands.
Still, get a few tens of millions of followers in a religion and things started happening. Very, very minor things, but still better than what I remembered—which was being an atheist, and being correct in there being no scientific evidence for religion. But here, there was overwhelming evidence.
And that left a very important question for someone as aggressively atheistic as me. A couple of questions. Serious ones, like, "am I screwed?" and more generally, "is this a worst-case hell universe where the majority of the population of the planet are doomed for all eternity after death?"
This information was over two years old, but I updated my journal search results and...yeah, strangely enough religion hadn't changed much. It didn't look too bad on the afterlife front. Mostly because that part of religion didn't seem to work. At all.
The reports from magical practitioners of various sorts mostly agreed that there were a lot of afterlives currently active—each an extra, closed planar space near to Earth.
And that was it. Nothing got in or out. No magic spells or miracles to bring back the dead. Information was hard to come by, as no one actually got into the afterlives...alive. No one came back from them, either. Some mages claimed otherwise, but none that had their results peer reviewed and duplicated.
It wasn't established that anything from a person's body or, ugh, "soul" went to any religion's afterlives. But if one died after a minimum level of adherence to, say, belief in the Norse pantheon, scrying spells targeted at the correct plane found something that looked like how you were in life, in something like how Valhalla and Fólkvangr were described in stories. No exceptions, even for those not meeting traditional entry requirements like dying in battle. Odd. All attempts at magical communication with those planes or beings on them failed, without exception. Apparently Odin wasn't returning the Harvard Divinity School's calls.
Arguments raged over what this meant. No mages could confirm anything. Tracking spells failed on death, both on bodies and whatever extra "soul" stuff magic could track, so it wasn't possible to directly link people on Earth with any after death experiences.
The Abrahamic religions seemed to combine all the weirdest bits of Catholic fanfiction and apocrypha, then barfed the results out all over Earth.
So demons were real and seriously bad news. I made a note to look up the Justice League's countermeasures. Hopefully they were up to snuff, but I had my doubts. Most people didn't take demons seriously, despite the apparently large body of evidence.
Angels were the opposite: a hypothesis with some anecdotal evidence supporting them, and everyone wanted to believe in them. The problem was, they seemed to work in secret, and no one could get a magical look at the Abrahamic Heaven or even find evidence it existed. There was no credible evidence of the The Silver City, Purgatory, or Limbo either, and no one could find an angel to ask. Some reportedly showed up on WWI battlefields, but they didn't stick around to answer question. Weird pictures existed, but that wasn't proof. Also, no evidence of the Spectre or the Presence, but that sort of figured.
Thankfully it didn't seem like Hellblazer was canon in my current universe. No John Constantine in the news, UK census, birth records, or arrest reports. None of the disastrous canon events had happened that I could find. Their awful angels and demons weren't the reality I was facing now. Small blessings, so to speak. That would have been a full time job, and I'd have had to switch to full-time celestial fighting just to keep my peace of mind.
The Sandman series was still up in the air.
"Pooja, please place an alert for a substantiated appearance or magical detection of a female death avatar or entity. Primary features: usually late '80s Goth clothing, ankh necklace, facial tattoo or makeup eye of Horus on right eye, leads people to an afterlife. Top priority. I need to know if such a being is operating on Earth."
"It is done. Looking out for opportunities for you to flirt with death and setting your civilian online dating site profile to it's complicated."
Sassy. But that was a class of thing I needed to know about. They would be worse even than demons.
On this Earth both demons and the possible angels appeared to just be powerful magical beings, but ones with specific attributes. It wasn't just metahumans pretending. People like Ra's al Ghul or even Superman were simply not on the same power scale, and didn't display the same extra-dimensional tendencies.
Jack the Ripper, for example, was suspected of being possessed by a genuine demon, and in this world he had actively displayed powers with strong religious flavor. Jason Blood and Etrigan existed since the 6th Century, with proof already indexed in my historic databases of the supernatural. This was all linked to the only known Abrahamic plane. And it wasn't Heaven.
There was a demon controlled, Christian-branded plane called Hell, co-ruled by a "Blaze" and "Satanus". Humans had talked to them, with various but almost inevitably unfortunate results. Mages had visited Hell. But beyond that, there was little scientific evidence for the traditional canon Christian afterlife.
Hell was, thankfully, just for demons. No humans were sent there, according to experts, unless it was by a human mage or a demon on Earth personally, physically dragging someone back with them. They were very, very sure of this. Which made sense, if you thought about it. Mages worried about dead loved ones or demons made Hell quite well explored, despite the obvious dangers.
But no one had any evidence that a capital-H Heaven counterpart existed. Unlike other afterlife planes, mages couldn't locate it with spells, and again no tracking could follow anyone to any extra-planer region where it might be hidden.
Was it just better protected than other religion's planes? Did it even exist?
"Pooja. I need a wide, speculative search. Is...there evidence of a God? Big G?"
"Terms not well defined."
"How about a being or beings with no known mortal antecedents, possessing powers not directly comparable to typical categories of metahumans, known systems of magical constructs, or technological creations such as yourself."
"Yes," she said simply.
Pictures of Greek gods followed. And Egyptian. And more. Those Japanese supernatural beings they had, the nature spirits and such. So much for Shintoism not doing anything useful—just their traditions would keep one from being eaten by a kappa. Oh shit. Was that...a Chinese dragon as large as a mountain? All these were candid pictures that could totally be 'shops, if not for the accompanying Wikipedia pages, newspaper citations, and guides on where to find the fantastic beasts if you had a death wish.
"And the Abrahamic one?"
"No known proof."
"And their Heaven?"
"The same. No proof."
Okay. Well, so much for easy answers. Past-me had dealt with this in a predictable manner. All the best possible paths to power had been well explored already.
There were lots of alternatives, but they didn't pan out. As fun as digging into historic mesoamerican religious esoterica was, I'd quickly found some...potential drawbacks. Too many thorns bloodily dragged through sensitive body parts for sacrifice, too little ultimate effect. My information on Hindu and Buddhist practices was confused and contradictory, and it came down to the fact that Buddhahood likely wasn't in the cards for me—unless I was looking to spend a few hundred reincarnations worth of tries at it. Which itself had little hard proof but lots of anecdotal evidence.
Despite all the otherworldly threats, it was interesting how much more...hopeful this world seemed to be. Maybe that was from religion, maybe superheroes.
That's not to say religion seemed to have made things all better in this universe. After Hitler's use of the Spear of Destiny prevented heroes like Wonder Woman and the Justice Society from fighting in Europe or the Pacific until after his defeat by the mundane Allied armies, the modern world had gone through a revolution in the study of religious phenomenon. There was now a DARPA branch devoted to it.
Japan had also been spared two atomic bombs. The Justice League's actions in the Pacific had a similar effect in pressuring Japan into ending the war, only a week later than in my remembered history but with hundreds of thousands of fewer civilian and military casualties. That sort of change to history was the exception, but an interesting one.
The United States now had universal singe-payer healthcare. Which included some types of magical healing from metahumans, and access to both licensed magical healers and religious assistance. Not clear why it had come about so smoothly during an economic boom in the '80s, but it stuck. That alone was a damn miracle.
Speaking of miracles, there weren't any. One couldn't just hook up with Poseidon, become his best ever worshiper, and BAM! Awesome god-granted powers. Reputable gods didn't do that sort of thing, even for fervent worshipers. Zeus and his ilk appeared to exist, though the god of Abraham was MIA. Or maybe just some extra-planer beings that called themselves similarly. Point was, their kind didn't hand out powers. Ever. Zeus didn't answer prayers, either, which was a little confusing but fit as the Greek pantheon had very few active worshipers in modern times.
I squinted at the screen, following an obscure reference to a possible superhero origin story.
Well. Some long-forgotten gods it seems did grant powers—an exception to the small-religions-do-nothing phenomenon. Based on reports of failed archaeological expeditions, a dangerous and vastly underpaid profession in this universe, attempting to worship strange old (or elder) gods was risky, and far too easily researched in forbidden tomes. The old gods might answer with gifts of power. They might just suck out your life force through a curly straw.
I'd written off that path to power with a triple underline, and actually had a list of suspicious things things to look out for. Someone just saying a prayer to an elder god didn't (virtually ever) actually get direct intervention, like with most of the smaller religions. But if I found someone with a tendency towards antediluvian library card records was making lists of local virgins and stockpiling logs of sweet-smelling wood, I'd assume they weren't planning a frat party.
I stared at the notes I was taking as I went. No safe religious superpowers, prayer worked but only a little, demons were real, no Heaven but Hell was only for demons, book a carefully guided tour to East Asia, and don't read from the book or tease happy lucky dark gods.
Wow. No wonder I had needed brain boosting drugs—just keeping up with this shit along with the superheroes and villains was a full-time job. Good thing I had Pooja to help.
Past-me had decided to avoid dealing with the currently active gods and other religious routes to power, and I had to agree. Proven passive defenses were enough. From reports of metahumans and mages involving themselves in such things, once one stepped into the realm of the gods, so to speak, they tended to focus on you and yours. I had no urge to become the next Odysseus. I'd just let my computer automatically pray for me and attend a couple of services a year. Maybe...bone up on my exorcism rites. Just in case.
Pooja's smooth, professional voice cut through my musing. "Calculator, reports ready." She popped up a window. "Still processing: inductive analysis of missing data related to Slade Wilson. Completed jobs listed here. Analysis results now available. News reports on the Calculator and seven other identities. Data analysis of Calculator projects compared against independent information sources. Still awaiting your review: list of historic events relating to superpowers and anachronistic tech."
That last jumped out at me. Time to sort out the mess history was in. Looked like it started with...time travelers from the future, time-traveling immortal cavemen, and Neolithic time-traveling female knights of the round table. Huh.
This could take a while. All the better to avoid the Slade Wilson problem. I said a silent prayer to whatever gods assisted with research work and dove back in again.
Rare author's note: Sorry this one was so long, and so late. They are related. It took longer to edit and proof than I expected. Please excuse any errors that were left, or just point them out. As usual, I welcome all feedback. Next post should be Wednesday next week, on schedule. Thanks for reading.
"In summary, summoning lesser demonic entities to distract the police and guards while robbing a casino run by the Penguin is not advised. Also be aware that deployment of Vatican hit squads have in the past been authorized against those involved in such activities.
"See attached cost-benefit analysis, reports on casualties after known successful demon summons, and summaries of financial, existential, and health risks related to both failed and successful summonings. A white paper on challenges related to criminal action in the greater Gotham area is also attached, at no extra charge.
"Please remit the total amount due on your account, listed below, no later than June 15th, 2017 to avoid penalty bounties. Thank you for your business."
"See attached cost-benefit analysis, reports on casualties after known successful demon summons, and summaries of financial, existential, and health risks related to both failed and successful summonings. A white paper on challenges related to criminal action in the greater Gotham area is also attached, at no extra charge.
"Please remit the total amount due on your account, listed below, no later than June 15th, 2017 to avoid penalty bounties. Thank you for your business."
If it wasn't for the mix of amateur nootropics raging through my system, I would have given up hours ago on this stupid subject.
In this universe, at least on this Earth, religions worked. Dozens of them, but within some really odd constraints. The very idea made my head hurt, but I had to do something while procrasti- proactively waiting on the next step in resolving the Slade Wilson situation.
Turns out I owed him something. Something that had caused him to start attacking my organization at a specific time and place, without warning. Something that had been deleted from my records, or maybe never written down or even spoken of in Pooja's presence. Pooja was working on it, looking for hints and suggestions from my actions around the period in question, just before the missing months. A lot of the corrupted or deleted information was cross-linked to magic and religion, so I was following the trail, hoping something would jump out at me.
Looking at some of these records, it was uncanny how closely past-me came to the decisions I would have made. Past-me had treated the world's religious texts as a practical tourist's guidebook, with entries on the local restaurants. His personal faith was that of a munchkining power-gamer and his alter was an armory.
Pooja had lists of supernatural and religious countermeasures that worked for mere mortals. Most were already implemented. My house was stocked with holy water and hacked Super Soakers. I had a silver crucifix and garlic extract in a velvet case inside my gun bag—which also had silver-tipped bullets for a Colt .45.
Because vampires and werewolves were also real. Religious iconography and liquids for vampires, pure silver and physical trauma for werewolves, and strong smells for both.
Enochian sigils were carved into my house's foundation at corner posts. Voodoo bags were buried in my tiny suburban yard. I was an ordained priest—from an organization over the Internet, but a legit one. That part was the same, but it seemed a little more...serious than the one I'd remembered getting.
My digital calendar had Easter and Christmas services at a local Catholic church penciled in. That was a safe bet for minimal-effort results, based on past research. It seemed simply paying lip service like that automatically made me less vulnerable to even non-Christian demonic entities, as well as Vodun and other types of nasty curses. It might provide a minimal mystical protection for my...sigh...my "soul". Whatever that was. My notes suggested that I'd stuck to Christian worship practices as they were scientifically proven the most reliable in this day and age. They were also super easy, anyone could do them anywhere, and they had no serious drawbacks.
Anyway, past-me had scienced this up. A lot. So had a large number of respectable scientists.
Medical journals—real, serious ones—said things like, someone praying with a patient was shown to result in 5.2% faster recovery times for that patient. This was properly controlled and blinded. It was good science that gave a completely different result than in the universe I remembered.
Type of prayer didn't matter, so long as it was close enough to the regular practices of a major world religion. And this effect worked for and with anyone, even people of different faiths. Didn't need a priest. Could even have a barely practicing Shinto believer give Christian prayers to a Buddhist. Didn't matter if they spoke the language the prayer was in, or the same language, they just had to do the ritual with the patient. That's how well it worked.
Follow the steps, get results. Just like with summoning a demon. Hmm.
"Hey, Pooja? I'm reading the files on religion."
"I know," she said. "I'm the files."
"Right. Uh. So, do these things work for you?"
"I have a prayer subroutine that appears to reduce bit flips from cosmic background radiation resulting in memory errors by about five percent. Similar reductions exist in wear and tear on hardware itself. This is in line with results reported from other machine intelligences. Actions consist of a number of seconds worth of top-priority cycles spent on repeatedly reprocessing the correct ritual thoughts. I have also taken the opportunity to include some unstructured contemplation on the nature of reality."
"Huh. Oh right, so that's what that subroutine was. Weird."
"Yes. But as it works, I am perfectly willing to take advantage of it. I also have a scheduled prayer routine for your health and success in your missions. No possible data available on results, but it seems doctrinal sound."
A praying computer. I was...going to leave that one for now or I'd be at it all day.
How much was required to get a prayer to work? Varied by religion and study cited. The big ones worked for literally everyone, and all the time. No results the majority of the time for prayers or sacrifices for the numerically smaller religions.
Reviewing the possible things you could provably do with religion, it was kind of...bland. Passive effects, mostly. No one was rolling a D&D cleric anytime soon here, but it also wasn't Warhammer 40k with universe dooming side-effects.
Praying for something didn't do anything special. You got the same baseline effect as anyone—minor health benefits, reduced chance of injurious accidents. Proclamations or blessings from priests or shamans didn't matter, even ones from the big religions. They didn't get any special powers—well, some demons seemed to avoid them, but only some. No turning undead, no laying-on hands.
Still, get a few tens of millions of followers in a religion and things started happening. Very, very minor things, but still better than what I remembered—which was being an atheist, and being correct in there being no scientific evidence for religion. But here, there was overwhelming evidence.
And that left a very important question for someone as aggressively atheistic as me. A couple of questions. Serious ones, like, "am I screwed?" and more generally, "is this a worst-case hell universe where the majority of the population of the planet are doomed for all eternity after death?"
This information was over two years old, but I updated my journal search results and...yeah, strangely enough religion hadn't changed much. It didn't look too bad on the afterlife front. Mostly because that part of religion didn't seem to work. At all.
The reports from magical practitioners of various sorts mostly agreed that there were a lot of afterlives currently active—each an extra, closed planar space near to Earth.
And that was it. Nothing got in or out. No magic spells or miracles to bring back the dead. Information was hard to come by, as no one actually got into the afterlives...alive. No one came back from them, either. Some mages claimed otherwise, but none that had their results peer reviewed and duplicated.
It wasn't established that anything from a person's body or, ugh, "soul" went to any religion's afterlives. But if one died after a minimum level of adherence to, say, belief in the Norse pantheon, scrying spells targeted at the correct plane found something that looked like how you were in life, in something like how Valhalla and Fólkvangr were described in stories. No exceptions, even for those not meeting traditional entry requirements like dying in battle. Odd. All attempts at magical communication with those planes or beings on them failed, without exception. Apparently Odin wasn't returning the Harvard Divinity School's calls.
Arguments raged over what this meant. No mages could confirm anything. Tracking spells failed on death, both on bodies and whatever extra "soul" stuff magic could track, so it wasn't possible to directly link people on Earth with any after death experiences.
The Abrahamic religions seemed to combine all the weirdest bits of Catholic fanfiction and apocrypha, then barfed the results out all over Earth.
So demons were real and seriously bad news. I made a note to look up the Justice League's countermeasures. Hopefully they were up to snuff, but I had my doubts. Most people didn't take demons seriously, despite the apparently large body of evidence.
Angels were the opposite: a hypothesis with some anecdotal evidence supporting them, and everyone wanted to believe in them. The problem was, they seemed to work in secret, and no one could get a magical look at the Abrahamic Heaven or even find evidence it existed. There was no credible evidence of the The Silver City, Purgatory, or Limbo either, and no one could find an angel to ask. Some reportedly showed up on WWI battlefields, but they didn't stick around to answer question. Weird pictures existed, but that wasn't proof. Also, no evidence of the Spectre or the Presence, but that sort of figured.
Thankfully it didn't seem like Hellblazer was canon in my current universe. No John Constantine in the news, UK census, birth records, or arrest reports. None of the disastrous canon events had happened that I could find. Their awful angels and demons weren't the reality I was facing now. Small blessings, so to speak. That would have been a full time job, and I'd have had to switch to full-time celestial fighting just to keep my peace of mind.
The Sandman series was still up in the air.
"Pooja, please place an alert for a substantiated appearance or magical detection of a female death avatar or entity. Primary features: usually late '80s Goth clothing, ankh necklace, facial tattoo or makeup eye of Horus on right eye, leads people to an afterlife. Top priority. I need to know if such a being is operating on Earth."
"It is done. Looking out for opportunities for you to flirt with death and setting your civilian online dating site profile to it's complicated."
Sassy. But that was a class of thing I needed to know about. They would be worse even than demons.
On this Earth both demons and the possible angels appeared to just be powerful magical beings, but ones with specific attributes. It wasn't just metahumans pretending. People like Ra's al Ghul or even Superman were simply not on the same power scale, and didn't display the same extra-dimensional tendencies.
Jack the Ripper, for example, was suspected of being possessed by a genuine demon, and in this world he had actively displayed powers with strong religious flavor. Jason Blood and Etrigan existed since the 6th Century, with proof already indexed in my historic databases of the supernatural. This was all linked to the only known Abrahamic plane. And it wasn't Heaven.
There was a demon controlled, Christian-branded plane called Hell, co-ruled by a "Blaze" and "Satanus". Humans had talked to them, with various but almost inevitably unfortunate results. Mages had visited Hell. But beyond that, there was little scientific evidence for the traditional canon Christian afterlife.
Hell was, thankfully, just for demons. No humans were sent there, according to experts, unless it was by a human mage or a demon on Earth personally, physically dragging someone back with them. They were very, very sure of this. Which made sense, if you thought about it. Mages worried about dead loved ones or demons made Hell quite well explored, despite the obvious dangers.
But no one had any evidence that a capital-H Heaven counterpart existed. Unlike other afterlife planes, mages couldn't locate it with spells, and again no tracking could follow anyone to any extra-planer region where it might be hidden.
Was it just better protected than other religion's planes? Did it even exist?
"Pooja. I need a wide, speculative search. Is...there evidence of a God? Big G?"
"Terms not well defined."
"How about a being or beings with no known mortal antecedents, possessing powers not directly comparable to typical categories of metahumans, known systems of magical constructs, or technological creations such as yourself."
"Yes," she said simply.
Pictures of Greek gods followed. And Egyptian. And more. Those Japanese supernatural beings they had, the nature spirits and such. So much for Shintoism not doing anything useful—just their traditions would keep one from being eaten by a kappa. Oh shit. Was that...a Chinese dragon as large as a mountain? All these were candid pictures that could totally be 'shops, if not for the accompanying Wikipedia pages, newspaper citations, and guides on where to find the fantastic beasts if you had a death wish.
"And the Abrahamic one?"
"No known proof."
"And their Heaven?"
"The same. No proof."
Okay. Well, so much for easy answers. Past-me had dealt with this in a predictable manner. All the best possible paths to power had been well explored already.
There were lots of alternatives, but they didn't pan out. As fun as digging into historic mesoamerican religious esoterica was, I'd quickly found some...potential drawbacks. Too many thorns bloodily dragged through sensitive body parts for sacrifice, too little ultimate effect. My information on Hindu and Buddhist practices was confused and contradictory, and it came down to the fact that Buddhahood likely wasn't in the cards for me—unless I was looking to spend a few hundred reincarnations worth of tries at it. Which itself had little hard proof but lots of anecdotal evidence.
Despite all the otherworldly threats, it was interesting how much more...hopeful this world seemed to be. Maybe that was from religion, maybe superheroes.
That's not to say religion seemed to have made things all better in this universe. After Hitler's use of the Spear of Destiny prevented heroes like Wonder Woman and the Justice Society from fighting in Europe or the Pacific until after his defeat by the mundane Allied armies, the modern world had gone through a revolution in the study of religious phenomenon. There was now a DARPA branch devoted to it.
Japan had also been spared two atomic bombs. The Justice League's actions in the Pacific had a similar effect in pressuring Japan into ending the war, only a week later than in my remembered history but with hundreds of thousands of fewer civilian and military casualties. That sort of change to history was the exception, but an interesting one.
The United States now had universal singe-payer healthcare. Which included some types of magical healing from metahumans, and access to both licensed magical healers and religious assistance. Not clear why it had come about so smoothly during an economic boom in the '80s, but it stuck. That alone was a damn miracle.
Speaking of miracles, there weren't any. One couldn't just hook up with Poseidon, become his best ever worshiper, and BAM! Awesome god-granted powers. Reputable gods didn't do that sort of thing, even for fervent worshipers. Zeus and his ilk appeared to exist, though the god of Abraham was MIA. Or maybe just some extra-planer beings that called themselves similarly. Point was, their kind didn't hand out powers. Ever. Zeus didn't answer prayers, either, which was a little confusing but fit as the Greek pantheon had very few active worshipers in modern times.
I squinted at the screen, following an obscure reference to a possible superhero origin story.
Well. Some long-forgotten gods it seems did grant powers—an exception to the small-religions-do-nothing phenomenon. Based on reports of failed archaeological expeditions, a dangerous and vastly underpaid profession in this universe, attempting to worship strange old (or elder) gods was risky, and far too easily researched in forbidden tomes. The old gods might answer with gifts of power. They might just suck out your life force through a curly straw.
I'd written off that path to power with a triple underline, and actually had a list of suspicious things things to look out for. Someone just saying a prayer to an elder god didn't (virtually ever) actually get direct intervention, like with most of the smaller religions. But if I found someone with a tendency towards antediluvian library card records was making lists of local virgins and stockpiling logs of sweet-smelling wood, I'd assume they weren't planning a frat party.
I stared at the notes I was taking as I went. No safe religious superpowers, prayer worked but only a little, demons were real, no Heaven but Hell was only for demons, book a carefully guided tour to East Asia, and don't read from the book or tease happy lucky dark gods.
Wow. No wonder I had needed brain boosting drugs—just keeping up with this shit along with the superheroes and villains was a full-time job. Good thing I had Pooja to help.
Past-me had decided to avoid dealing with the currently active gods and other religious routes to power, and I had to agree. Proven passive defenses were enough. From reports of metahumans and mages involving themselves in such things, once one stepped into the realm of the gods, so to speak, they tended to focus on you and yours. I had no urge to become the next Odysseus. I'd just let my computer automatically pray for me and attend a couple of services a year. Maybe...bone up on my exorcism rites. Just in case.
Pooja's smooth, professional voice cut through my musing. "Calculator, reports ready." She popped up a window. "Still processing: inductive analysis of missing data related to Slade Wilson. Completed jobs listed here. Analysis results now available. News reports on the Calculator and seven other identities. Data analysis of Calculator projects compared against independent information sources. Still awaiting your review: list of historic events relating to superpowers and anachronistic tech."
That last jumped out at me. Time to sort out the mess history was in. Looked like it started with...time travelers from the future, time-traveling immortal cavemen, and Neolithic time-traveling female knights of the round table. Huh.
This could take a while. All the better to avoid the Slade Wilson problem. I said a silent prayer to whatever gods assisted with research work and dove back in again.
Rare author's note: Sorry this one was so long, and so late. They are related. It took longer to edit and proof than I expected. Please excuse any errors that were left, or just point them out. As usual, I welcome all feedback. Next post should be Wednesday next week, on schedule. Thanks for reading.
- Location
- Poland
The Adeptus Mechanicus was right! There are machine spirits! What else were they right about? The Omnissiah?
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
*Screams internally*
- Location
- Maybe?
Note: if you can scry afterlives it should be possible to set up one-directional resurrections, via copying the brainstate of the scried human. Would still leave their time-of-death version stuck in heaven, of course.
Unless the scry resolution is too limited for that, of course.
Do prayer effects stack with multiple people? Do they stack with multiple religions?
Unless the scry resolution is too limited for that, of course.
Do prayer effects stack with multiple people? Do they stack with multiple religions?
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- Location
- Turkey
maybe nanite implants to fine tune your body? Human body accumulates damage as they age. Even if you are feeling completely fine and no pain, there is still a little bit of damage. You can also get rid of your disease marker genes with nanites working on them.