I think this is an equivalent moral problem to "why does God let bad things happen", in particular for me, "why can't God be a super cop, letting people be free but only up to a point". SAT in theory could choose to simulate a happier world for Taylor while still getting the important information about the Shards - they certainly should be smart enough!
But honestly I don't mind characters that do less than moral things at all, that would be far too restrictive.
I'm posting it here too .
Being a god isn't the thing the culture prefers to be if that was the case they would just sublime.
Also for a full SIM he needs to fully read and use Taylors mindstate without her permission . If the ship is willing to do that and get its hand dirty why not do that with shards .
I'm quoting from hydrogen sonata
It's a big issue in culture
Most problems, even seemingly really tricky ones, could be handled by simulations which happily modelled slippery concepts like public opinion or the likely reactions of alien societies by the appropriate use of some especially cunning and devious algorithms; whole populations of slightly different simulative processes could be bred, evolved and set to compete against each other to come up with the most reliable example employing the most decisive short-cuts to accurately modelling, say, how a group of people would behave; nothing more processor-hungry than the right set of equations would – once you'd plugged the relevant data in – produce a reliable estimate of how that group of people would react to a given stimulus, whether the group represented a tiny ruling clique of the most powerful, or an entire civilisation.
But not always. Sometimes, if you were going to have any hope of getting useful answers, there really was no alternative to modelling the individuals themselves, at the sort of scale and level of complexity that meant they each had to exhibit some kind of discrete personality, and that was where the Problem kicked in.
Once you'd created your population of realistically reacting and – in a necessary sense – cogitating individuals, you had – also in a sense – created life. The particular parts of whatever computational substrate you'd devoted to the problem now held beings; virtual beings capable of reacting so much like the back-in-reality beings they were modelling – because how else were they to do so convincingly without also hoping, suffering, rejoicing, caring, loving and dreaming? – that by most people's estimation they had just as much right to be treated as fully recognised moral agents as did the originals in the Real, or you yourself.
If the prototypes had rights, so did the faithful copies, and by far the most fundamental right that any creature ever possessed or cared to claim was the right to life itself, on the not unreasonable grounds that without that initial right, all others were meaningless.
By this reasoning, then, you couldn't just turn off your virtual environment and the living, thinking creatures it contained at the completion of a run or when a simulation had reached the end of its useful life; that amounted to genocide, and however much it might feel like serious promotion from one's earlier primitive state to realise that you had, in effect, become the kind of cruel and pettily vengeful god you had once, in your ignorance, feared, it was still hardly the sort of mature attitude or behaviour to be expected of a truly civilised society, or anything to be proud of.
Some civs, admittedly, simply weren't having any of this, and routinely bred whole worlds, even whole galaxies, full of living beings which they blithely consigned to oblivion the instant they were done with them, sometimes, it seemed, just for the glorious fun of it, and to annoy their more ethically angst-tangled co-civilisationalists, but they – or at least those who admitted to the practice, rather than doing it but keeping quiet about it – were in a tiny minority, as well as being not entirely welcome at all the highest tables of the galactic community, which was usually precisely where the most ambitious and ruthless species/civs most desired to be.
Others reckoned that as long as the termination was instant, with no warning and therefore no chance that those about to be switched off could suffer, then it didn't really matter. The wretches hadn't existed, they'd been brought into existence for a specific, contributory purpose, and now they were nothing again; so what?
Most people, though, were uncomfortable with such moral brusqueness, and took their responsibilities in the matter more seriously. They either avoided creating virtual populations of genuinely living beings in the first place, or only used sims at that sophistication and level of detail on a sustainable basis, knowing from the start that they would be leaving them running indefinitely, with no intention of turning the environment and its inhabitants off at any point.
Whether these simulated beings were really really alive, and how justified it was to create entire populations of virtual creatures just for your own convenience under any circumstances, and whether or not – if/once you had done so – you were sort of duty-bound to be honest with your creations at some point and straight out tell them that they weren't really real, and existed at the whim of another order of beings altogether – one with its metaphorical finger hovering over an Off switch capable of utterly and instantly obliterating their entire universe … well, these were all matters which by general and even relieved consent were best left to philosophers. As was the ever-vexing question, How do we know we're not in a simulation?
There was also the Argument of Increasing Decency, which basically held that cruelty was linked to stupidity and that the link between intelligence, imagination, empathy and good-behaviour-as-it-was-generally-understood – i.e. not being cruel to others – was as profound as these matters ever got. This strongly implied that beings capable of setting up a virtuality so convincing, so devious, so detailed that it was capable of fooling entities as smart as – say – Culture Minds must be so shatteringly, intoxicatingly clever they pretty much had to be decent, agreeable and highly moral types themselves. (So; much like Culture Minds, then, except more so.)
But that too might be part of the set-up, and the clear positive correlation between beings of greater intellectual capacity taking over from lesser ones – while still respecting their rights, of course – and the gradual diminution of violence and suffering over civilisationally significant periods of time might also be the result of a trick.
A bit, after some adjustments for scale, like the trick of seeding another society with the ideas for a holy book that appeared to tell the truth on several levels but which was basically just part of an experiment, the Contents May Differ thought, as it reviewed the results of the latest sim runs.
The sims it was setting up and letting run were all trying to answer the relatively simple question, How much difference will it make if the Gzilt find out the Book of Truth is a fake?
And the answer appeared to be: Who the fuck knows?
Once you started to think that the only way to model a population accurately would be to read the individual mind-states of every single person within the real thing – something even more immoral than it was impractical – it was probably time to try another approach entirely.
As a good, decent, caring and responsible Culture Mind, the Contents May Differ would never run a sim of the Gzilt people at the individual level to find out anyway, even if it could have, and – apart from anything else – had decided some time ago that even resorting to such desperate measures wouldn't solve anything in any case. Because there were two Problems: the Simming Problem and the Chaos Problem. The Chaos Problem meant that in certain situations you could run as many simulations as you liked, and each would produce a meaningful result, but taken as a whole there would be no discernible pattern to them, and so no lesson to be drawn or obvious course laid out to pursue; it would all depend so exquisitely on exactly how you had chosen to tweak the initial conditions at the start of each run that, taken together, they would add up to nothing more useful than the realisation that This Is A Tricky One.
The real result, the one that mattered, out there in reality, would almost certainly very closely resemble one of your simulated results, but there would have been no way at any stage of the process to have determined exactly or even approximately which one, and that rendered the whole enterprise almost entirely futile; you ended up having to use other, much less reliable methods to work out what was going to happen.
These included using one's own vast intelligence, pooled with the equally vast intelligences of one's peers, to access the summed total of galactic history and analyse, compare and contrast the current situation relative to similar ones from the past. Given the sort of clear, untrammelled, devastatingly powerful thinking AIs and particularly Minds were capable of, this could be a formidably accurate and – compared to every other method available – relatively reliable strategy. Its official title was Constructive Historical Integrative Analysis.
In the end, though, there was another name the Minds used, amongst themselves, for this technique, which was Just Guessing.
I think this is an equivalent moral problem to "why does God let bad things happen", in particular for me, "why can't God be a super cop, letting people be free but only up to a point". SAT in theory could choose to simulate a happier world for Taylor while still getting the important information about the Shards - they certainly should be smart enough!
But honestly I don't mind characters that do less than moral things at all, that would be far too restrictive.
And in fiction scenarios, where that god actually exists, it's a perfectly valid question to ask.
Most ignore it. Some address it directly, typically by making God not so nice a person -- that's easy, since old-testament conceptions of YHWH were based on the prevailing attitudes at the time, which themselves were generally evil by modern standards.
Some bite the bullet, and create a scenario where god exists, and is nice, and... accordingly, so is the world. Oh! My Goddess would be the original example of this genre, and I'm always looking out for others.
Some bite the bullet, and create a scenario where god exists, and is nice, and... accordingly, so is the world. Oh! My Goddess would be the original example of this genre, and I'm always looking out for others.
I'm not familiar with anything where they may have gotten deeper into it in the manga, but my impression of that is more of a universe where the gods are not all-powerful, there are severe constraints on their ability to act, and demons that act in opposition, resulting in a world more or less like ours on balance.
I'm not familiar with anything where they may have gotten deeper into it in the manga, but my impression of that is more of a universe where the gods are not all-powerful, there are severe constraints on their ability to act, and demons that act in opposition, resulting in a world more or less like ours on balance.
Yes and no. The people are more or less like us, though that includes the demons -- Mara is more 'mischievous meddler' than 'evil'.
On the other hand, I don't immediately recall having heard of them having any of our own real-world global-scale issues. War? AFAIK, not really a thing. Karma exists as a tangible force that usually works just fine, Skuld's muttering about bugs notwithstanding, so the world ends up relatively nicer just by default.
But this is too off-topic a conversation to continue here.
Having reread, I think you've hit the right level for what you want to achieve, and the Sufficiently's added histrionics are entirely in established character, and flesh out the implications for readers who didn't absorb Banks' original novels cover to cover. It's all good.
I have to say I really appreciate this fanciful description of lying by omission
Now, for the no-good, very bad bit you will probably not like me saying, because it's a giant plot hole through the entire conceit that I don't think you can easily write your way around and keep all aspects of this subplot, and at this point you've sold me on its merits so I think the correct thing is to ignore me and not waste time trying to resolve this:
The biological copy of her corona pollentia, grown into a gemma within a mechano-biomass interface that links Weaver to her very real arthropod-controlling power,
The brain interface emulator bit is all well and good, but there's a problem: while doing a MITM attack on the control feed for powers, particularly in this way with a physical replica residing in realspace, is perfectly plausible other than that the act of modulating that interface at 100k times normal speed should necessitate a power density rendering it into incoherent, very hot plasma, but that's a perfectly valid thing to just handwave...
It is not an ordinary neural growth; by its very nature, it extends somewhat into the quantum branch lattice that the Entities create, maintain, or exploit. After isolating the exotic particle transmissions they use, I can see them from hyperspace without ever having to violate the mental scanning taboo
...this suggests the possibility of deeper, less biologically framed methods of interfacing, but this is still not the problem, or its solution.
The problem is that arthropods do not have coronas in their nonhuman brains. And Sufficiently explicitly does not have an out-of-band interface to Clever Girl (Best Shard), or even a set of coordinates to beam a signal. Weaver's power expression also is horrendously complicated in its necessary implications:
She has arbitrarily wide, immediate, simultaneous, massively parallel multitasking, with full, simultaneous, conscious and kinesthetic awareness of all parts, into the trillions.
By implication, she is a lockstep-executed, memory-synchronized swarm consciousness (the mindblowing inefficiency of this complete abandonment of any possible data-locality optimizations is, I suppose, entirely in character for shards) - if Weaver decides to make an issue of Orbital's casual bodysurfing, the hypocrisy should be immediately apparent
Given that she doesn't die or lose memories when power-suppressed, the execution mode has to be continuously synchronized to her original meatbrain, but QA is spinning up simulations on demand as she chooses to focus on a particular insect's input. Quibble here, given that once she decides to do that, she's already doing it elsewhere and so can't be doing it where she decided to do it, so there's a lot of subtle fuckery to resolve that conflict while retaining reasonable continuity of consciousness, something QA is apparently very good at. Over the course of the story, as mentioned in the conversation, QA starts predicting/offloading rote tasks, sometimes even performing unwanted ones, but she is trying her best! These heuristics are presumably much cheaper than full consciousness simulation, and serve as our excuse for [DATA]. (Combat data as the plot device, Worm truly is anime.)
As a consequence of all this, QA is always using its own transdimensional senses and effector-analogues, at a massive scale, and isn't really concerned with Weaver's human senses for anything at all except as a troublesome thing to translate to / simulate
Sufficiently explicitly has no data link to, or facsimile or simulation of QA, and the entire goal of the exercise is to find out more about QA
So who was phone?
How is QA seeing, and affecting, a simulation to which it has no interface or protocol? It can affect Weaver, but it can't do anything external to Weaver in the simulation. Time compression prevents there being a weird bugpocalypse happening in Earth Bet for no apparent cause, if QA tried to carry on with error handling turned off, but since the rules for her power expression's range are centered on her brain, it'd scan the up-to-6-city-blocks radius of her cloned corona, which by definition has to be located somewhere inside of designated active powers range of Earth, but could be in a sterile alternate, or a satellite or ship. Any of those options preclude any valid subjects for administration. Even if there were any, Weaver's sensory input from them would not reconcile with the simulation at all, let alone the time compression issue.
Furthermore, an accurate simulation of Weaver is impossible without a complete simulation of QA, because Weaver is a simulation running on QA!
I am quite sincerely very sorry, and my only consolation is that this really only occurred to me just now.
Now, for the no-good, very bad bit you will probably not like me saying, because it's a giant plot hole though the entire conceit that I don't think you can easily write your way around and keep all aspects of this subplot, and at this point you've sold me on its merits so I think the correct thing is to ignore me and not waste time trying to resolve this:
Physical simulation, perhaps? Having a real Weaver, but with an artificially constructed 'set' around her, with physical 'people', environments, and of course, actual arthropods for QA to plug into. Westworld for an audience of two, if you will.
I'm like 90% sure it would be much more complicated than I'm presenting it as, or at the very least a gigantic pain, but I think it's a plausible possibility at least, given the capabilities Sufficient has demonstrated.
Honestly, while a technological explanation for masking+baffling seems doable right now (I'd have to think it over to see if anything contradicted, but generally I lean towards "nine years is a lot of prep time for the Culture to make anti-Entity tech, they're just fanatically careful about some things"), I'm leaning towards:
"QA played along with it" - the artificial corona duplicate "leads to" the simulation, the simulation contains perfect bugs at 10,000x speed, QA controls those.
Is it an obvious sign of deceit from a human operator's perspective? Oh, sure, but so is the time dilation of the simulation to begin with.
Is it obvious to a shard? Well, maybe not. They do process their info in a very "dumb" way (ie processing-heavy, creativity-light), like the whole clone/twin confusion to begin with. And then there's the question of a newbie shard vs an experienced one - and frankly, "QA gets hyper involved with Skitter/Weaver data given at staggering speed, then it abruptly cuts off" works just fine with Best Shard having gone AWOL, imo
Again, through what interface? The only bugs are data in the Mind's hyperspace substrate, and if a shard could reach into hyperspace and screw around with their Mind-states, the gridfire would have been done and over with a long time ago.
I'd accept handwaving if you hadn't already lovingly described the bit of sufficiently advanced technology that's supposed to accomplish the reciprocating motion of the grasping appendage...
The existence of an interface makes a lie of Sufficiently having no trace of, or communication with, QA. Hell, the conversation in present-time-but-not-in-sim had bugs explicitly on screen, while QA is supposedly AWOL. And Weaver forgot to consider why her power worked while dreaming, I guess...
What exactly suggests QA is new? Can't say I've ever seen that take. IIRC Scion's interludes imply it serves as, practically speaking, nervous system / superorganism, thus how Scion-as-avatar is limited, defeatable and unable to recover the cycle without assistance.
And then there's that bit where Weaver is a product of being a simulated swarm consciousness to at least some degree, including the necessary loss of data fidelity when putting all those millions of viewpoints in the metaphorical blender to have something to put back in the Taylor-shaped mind driving all this. That's a hell of a chaos factor that can't be simulated well, but the Mind isn't remarking on how her entire simulated brain is being constantly rewritten.
By experienced, I mean an attenuated shard vs one new to its user. QA has no previously mentioned human hosts; even if we assume it did have some on Earth, it is new to receiving data from Taylor. When this data is odd it may take time to uncover why, given the narrow scope of shard curiosity and proactivity.
The substrate of the simulation is by no means in Hyperspace; only most of a Mind is, and every Mind has solid-state, organic, and vacuum tube backups, plus plenty more. Obviously something like this, definitionally Available To Enemy Action, will be kept at the periphery of the Mind's calculation, open to external coms and with vast internal firewalls (and on a substrate that can easily be fried if compromised).
Lastly, given a lack of mechanism, we can say the corona and gemma don't provide a leak because they don't transmit; they're made of trace amounts of exotic material (hence their hyperspace profile, Panacea's ability to detect them despite unique forms, etc) using a quantum entanglement method of communication. Hence the need to kill Jack to find his shard - destruction of the corona causes a final burst transmission to the original shard. The blockage of Taylor's corona avoided causing this transmission by sealing the growth rather than destroying it.
Given the complete and total bullshit that shards routinely engage in throughout the storyline, I would be perfectly okay with putting down the reason for QA's ability to treat a sufficiently high fidelity simulation as just another 'dimension' as 'shards are ridiculous bullshit'.
Lastly, given a lack of mechanism, we can say the corona and gemma don't provide a leak because they don't transmit; they're made of trace amounts of exotic material (hence their hyperspace profile
I already took this as given, I don't mind the corona being a magic quantum macguffin, but I wasn't considering it plausible that QA is using it as a transceiver to control the local arthropod population, though given how bullshit the entire concept is, I suppose it's not very problematic to decide that this is the case.
Also, goddamn relay bugs and Panacea jamming her remotely were a thing, which I always found to be most incongruent things that ever happened. And I feel that this is stretched to the breaking point by what we see Khepri doing at the end. It never stopped being the case that she individually and personally controls each part of her swarm, as long as she wants to be.
In my opinion the relay bugs pretty much have to be QA just playing along for the sake of data.
Taking corona-originated control signal as being the case, it still required the Mind to design and make an QA-insect-control-signal interface over the course of about a minute, or somehow convince QA to interface to some arbitrary thing that in turn translated it to virtual bug control. And is either case, how did the Mind know to do that, and how is that staying hands-off enough to not contaminate the experiment?
It's also the case that her strongest secondary ability is constant, perfect awareness of the relative position of herself and everything under her control, which assuredly is being handled by QA's sensors and computation. You could rig up a biomechanical swarm of bug-like ganglia that can move around in a field envelope, I suppose.
And unless you fully deny that Weaver has her mindstate running on QA hardware in any way, you probably can't time compress her (and regardless, what about the now-physical psuedobugs?) and QA might not even have the vertical scaling to handle a 100k increase in clock rate even if it wanted to, it might just be optimized for near-unbounded horizontal scaling. Even if QA understood to make the attempt.
I can't see a way out of this that keeps the intent of the sim, learning more about both Taylor and QA, without already knowing much of the information that is supposed to be learned from it to begin with, because otherwise the sim is impossible to perform.
And if it is possible to perform, it requires so much manipulation of the circumstances that the results are scientifically near-worthless, because the experiment is contaminated. The goals don't ever line up with the means, either it's impossible or it's pointless.
Edit: as a thought experiment also, how would you sim, say, Legend? Extradimensional lasers that do magical things and bend at right angles have to come from somewhere and go somewhere, and you'd need very deep preexisting access to the shard to be able to simulate the correct effects, and trial and error passing on the instructions to the shard would probably just lead to lasers being shot somewhere inconvenient. The only way I see that working is by already knowing, and also not talking to the shard at all, like if they'd hacked the shard precog cluster or something, but data collection is the goal of the sim so that runs into the ontological paradox again.
I would be perfectly okay with putting down the reason for QA's ability to treat a sufficiently high fidelity simulation as just another 'dimension' as 'shards are ridiculous bullshit'.
Me too, but this is what happens when you start reframing sufficiently advanced magic in a harder-scifi context and try to explain it. Some jerk like me goes "but what would that imply?" I wasn't joking when I started out saying it was best ignored.
I really didn't want this to become a distraction, I just had to let it out
I already took this as given, I don't mind the corona being a magic quantum macguffin, but I wasn't considering it plausible that QA is using it as a transceiver to control the local arthropod population, though given how bullshit the entire concept is, I suppose it's not very problematic to decide that this is the case.
Also, goddamn relay bugs and Panacea jamming her remotely were a thing, which I always found to be most incongruent things that ever happened. And I feel that this is stretched to the breaking point by what we see Khepri doing at the end. It never stopped being the case that she individually and personally controls each part of her swarm, as long as she wants to be.
In my opinion the relay bugs pretty much have to be QA just playing along for the sake of data.
Taking corona-originated control signal as being the case, it still required the Mind to design and make an QA-insect-control-signal interface over the course of about a minute, or somehow convince QA to interface to some arbitrary thing that in turn translated it to virtual bug control. And is either case, how did the Mind know to do that, and how is that staying hands-off enough to not contaminate the experiment?
It's also the case that her strongest secondary ability is constant, perfect awareness of the relative position of herself and everything under her control, which assuredly is being handled by QA's sensors and computation. You could rig up a biomechanical swarm of bug-like ganglia that can move around in a field envelope, I suppose.
And unless you fully deny that Weaver has her mindstate running on QA hardware in any way, you probably can't time compress her (and regardless, what about the now-physical psuedobugs?) and QA might not even have the vertical scaling to handle a 100k increase in clock rate even if it wanted to, it might just be optimized for near-unbounded horizontal scaling. Even if QA understood to make the attempt.
I can't see a way out of this that keeps the intent of the sim, learning more about both Taylor and QA, without already knowing much of the information that is supposed to be learned from it to begin with, because otherwise the sim is impossible to perform.
And if it is possible to perform, it requires so much manipulation of the circumstances that the results are scientifically near-worthless, because the experiment is contaminated. The goals don't ever line up with the means, either it's impossible or it's pointless.
Edit: as a thought experiment also, how would you sim, say, Legend? Extradimensional lasers that do magical things and bend at right angles have to come from somewhere and go somewhere, and you'd need very deep preexisting access to the shard to be able to simulate the correct effects, and trial and error passing on the instructions to the shard would probably just lead to lasers being shot somewhere inconvenient. The only way I see that working is by already knowing, and also not talking to the shard at all, like if they'd hacked the shard precog cluster or something, but data collection is the goal of the sim so that runs into the ontological paradox again.
Me too, but this is what happens when you start reframing sufficiently advanced magic in a harder-scifi context and try to explain it. Some jerk like me goes "but what would that imply?" I wasn't joking when I started out saying it was best ignored.
Keep in mind, all the limitations to Taylor's power that you are describing (limited range, relay bugs extending the range, only working on specific 'species' etc) are indeed arbitrary restrictions.
The Titans in Ward are a better example of what shard limits really are; their range is limited only by the amount of energy the Titan is willing to expend, and they absolutely can reach across an entire earth-sized planet if they're willing to eat the cost of doing so.
Canon Taylor also absolutely has part of her mind running on shardware; the ability to 'offload' her emotions onto the swarm establishes that beyond any doubt. There's also the canon fact that shards do keep mental copies\records of their hosts; those ghostly images that Glaistig Uaine creates? It is not a coincidence that they look and act like ghosts of the hosts she took the powers from.
Because in a very real way, they are ghosts of those people; ghosts stored by their shards prior to their death.
As for 'how did QA connect to the sim', shards are already designed to connect to arbitrary individuals, I don't see how it makes any meaningful difference if said arbitrary individual is a meat person or a simulated meat person, as long as the simulation fidelity is high enough.
Edit: as a thought experiment also, how would you sim, say, Legend? Extradimensional lasers that do magical things and bend at right angles have to come from somewhere and go somewhere, and you'd need very deep preexisting access to the shard to be able to simulate the correct effects,
Not necessarily; just let the shard do what it thinks it should be doing. Shards tell reality what to do all the time, this particular reality being run by an intelligent 'god' doesn't change anything unless said 'god' deliberately acts. The shard says 'laser turns 270 degrees to the right and makes everything it hits go to absolute zero' and the sim says 'okay'.
Shards tell reality what to do all the time, this particular reality being run by an intelligent 'god' doesn't change anything unless said 'god' deliberately acts. The shard says 'laser turns 270 degrees to the right and makes everything it hits go to absolute zero' and the sim says 'okay'.
I feel like a broken record at this point but, "yes, but through what interface". Shards are here to gather data on how to do things, and have at least somewhat domain-limited abilities; while there is no doubt a shard specialized in remote-effectorizing computer equipment, it seems a stretch that the bendy-lasers shard would just have that ability sitting around just in case it had to roleplay itself inside a video game instead of interact with physical reality the way its primary function does. Unless you're saying they're all general unlimited reality warpers with no differentiation, but it's canon that they're undergoing a constant pseudo-evolutionary cycle specifically to differentiate, try different things, and adapt.
I feel like a broken record at this point but, "yes, but through what interface". Shards are here to gather data on how to do things, and have at least somewhat domain-limited abilities; while there is no doubt a shard specialized in remote-effectorizing computer equipment, it seems a stretch that the bendy-lasers shard would just have that ability sitting around just in case it had to roleplay itself inside a video game instead of interact with physical reality the way its primary function does.
Unless you're saying they're all general unlimited reality warpers with no differentiation, but it's canon that they're undergoing a constant pseudo-evolutionary cycle specifically to differentiate, try different things, and adapt.
From a 3+1 dimensional point of view, yeah this is a problem. But shards are definitively more than 3+1 dimensional creatures, for all we know from the shard's perspective it's just playing bongo drums on superstrings and the difference between reality and sufficiently high fidelity simulated reality is that the latter feels a bit rough around the edges.
for all we know from the shard's perspective it's just playing bongo drums on superstrings and the difference between reality and sufficiently high fidelity simulated reality is that the latter feels a bit rough around the edges
If you're right, the cloned corona in a vat is not meaningfully distinguished from a purely simulated one, and would seem to serve no purpose.
I'm going to try to drop this at this point, I've made the points I (reluctantly) felt compelled to make and if someone finds them interesting I'd love a PM, but other than mechanically it has no relevance to the intended outcome of these events in story beyond dissatisfaction in a means to get there, and I only spent this inordinate amount of time thinking about all this because ultimately I really love the story.
The biological interface is just a lure; Sufficient isn't even certain it's still necessary since it's completely digitally duplicated in the simulated Taylor. The main purpose was merely to divert QA's attention into Skitter Taylor at the time of simulation; QA complied and probably began processing data in much the same way Dragon's shard does.
The simulation doesn't need to replicate the effects of other shards, it just needs to replicate the apparent effects, a considerably simpler task - it's for gathering information on Taylor, not the shards, after all. The actual physics of powers are in the vast majority already completely understood by Sufficient; the things it wants in the story are just a few last data points that passive observation and discrete active prodding over nine years didn't get it - mostly socio-cerebral information on the shard-colony relationships.
Taylor's expanded proprioception and multitasking seem like more of having a lot of input-output nodes wedged into her brain than her entire mind being transdimensional: she just tries to perceive or think about something, and the actual work of such is done via QA; this certainly gradually affects who Taylor is, in the same way anyone's personality is affected by their biology, but it is, at worst, a replicable alteration that the simulation can adapt for if QA isn't responding.
Not quite; remember, shards are programmed to use DNA to differentiate between individuals. Not because they actually need to do so, but because that's how the Pair decided to do things this Cycle.
So there needs to be something with Taylor's DNA somewhere to establish the connection, a cloned corona meets that requirement: As demonstrated with the Slaughterhouse 9000.
Once the connection is established though? The DNA probably doesn't matter anymore, it's literally just needed during the initial trigger phase, and only because of programming.
I'd like to thank my co-editors, "Miserable Depression" and "Normal Serotonin Levels", for both delaying and finishing this chapter. Thanks, guys. Really.
I was only peripherally involved with setting up the Contact expansions - mostly the semi-local ones, in Boston, Philadelphia, Albany, Ottawa, and Baltimore. That was just quick drop-ins, showing the flag, more or less. I was supposed to see the San José, Ouagadougou, Thiruvananthapuram, and Munich branches some time in the next two months, but it was better to let them be established by local people, just like we'd done in Brockton Bay, make sure my visit was seen as the mutual protection and resource-sharing we were going for, avoid the obvious implications of American hegemony as much as possible.
But the call from Ottawa for me personally wasn't exactly unexpected. We'd expanded there in the first wave for a number of reasons, and this 82% possibility had been one of them.
I shot into the air, cleared commercial airspace almost immediately, shielding myself from casual radar and basic Tinkertech sensors anyway, and reviewed the files at accelerated processing speed while I made my third-ever trip to Canada.
I didn't reach out for confirmation. I knew what I was risking. I knew what I was relying on. More importantly (that was crazy, to say it was more important than my own life, my own autonomy, but… I had backups now, didn't I?), I knew what the people I was going there to help were risking. Contact members and otherwise. There was a reason the Ottawa HQ (still just a rented office right now) had a Mark IV shield.
I landed on the street outside, noting how much fuller and livelier the cafe across the corner was, compared to just about any business in Brockton Bay. There were only two silhouettes on the other side of the tinted office windows. I walked in, the doorbell chiming.
The tall, thin man in the exquisitely tailored suit turned with seeming reluctance away from his conversation with the receptionist. "Oh, good morning. I was so relieved to hear you accepted my invitation."
I was flooded with affection for him, a swelling sea of emotion that swept over the cliffs of rationality.
From my lighthouse, an impenetrable fortress set far higher than any waves could reach, the inner core of me, the Taylor that was two-in-one, here and in Lyon, sipped metaphorical tea. "Hello, Nikos. I'm glad I could be here. It's always a pleasure to welcome new members to Contact." I offered a gloved hand, and he took it.
He wouldn't be here if he didn't think his power could affect me, he'd be calling in his children to swarm me if he didn't think it was working now, and he still tried to crush my hand with his grip strength in a petty display of dominance.
Of course, I wasn't really surprised Heartbreaker was a gross asshole.
"How delightful. You can leave now, Matthew."
The Contact volunteer at the desk maintained his frozen-fear posture for a half-second, flicking his eyes to me, then moved with stuttering abandon when I caught his gaze, backing off into the offices.
I brushed past Vasil with a charming smile (suite override absolutely required), and swept up the tablet Matt LeToure had been filling out. "Looks like we have everything almost set. Sign off on it and you're in Contact." I wasn't as careful on my expression when I held it out to him. Yes, I had a plan for Heartbreaker trying to use us. Yes, there was an ideal outcome.
The outcome if I just put my fist through the rapist's skull wasn't that much worse, though.
Was I getting more violent, after the Nine? I hoped not. I couldn't afford to be violent. I wasn't Contact's equivalent of Sophia. I was the model for the entire movement. And with Parian signed on yesterday, one of only two Brockton Bay 'parahumans' in the organization. I needed to be as flawless as I could be for as long as I could be, until we'd gathered enough momentum from the rest of Contact for me to be imperfect. I knew there were contingencies, but if I failed to hit all our optimal goals, the increase in suffering would be my responsibility. And that wasn't just abstract. I could see everyone that missed benchmarks would hurt, and since I could, I knew I would watch. Not to make myself miserable. I was over that kind of behavior. But if anyone had to suffer, because of me, I needed to know. To be able to understand.
And that meant doing certain things that were utterly disgusting for the sake of that perfect result. I tuned my suite back up to full and glanced adoringly at Vasil, still insistently offering the tablet. "Please, Nikos. We'd love to have you with us."
He leaned in towards me. There was… some very distant, outlying island of Taylor that was aware he was fairly conventionally attractive, that he had an intensity that thrilled some part of me just because it was directed at me, completely independent of his vile power.
The banks and flood plains of that island had been reinforced by massive levees in the last month, courtesy of running Contact, of talking to older and more impressive adults as an equal, and of meeting about thirty men and women on Sufficient, ages 20-400, who were just as smolderingly intense and none of whom had fucking hit on me. I hadn't fallen for any of them, and they weren't a hundredth as creepy as Nikos Vasil.
The part that really infuriated me, that I buried under layers of suite control, was that I could see that small part of me falling for it, even without his powers. If I didn't have my experiences, a drone friend, a Mind's backing, my confidence. It wasn't Orbital that hated Heartbreaker. It was Taylor that hated Nikos Vasil with white-hot rage.
I maintained my control for the bigger picture. Because that optimal solution made everything move faster and smoother. And that included the end of people like him.
"I think we can forgo all those formalities," he said, putting his hand on my shoulder, right next to my neck. I could only feel the pressure through the suit, not his body warmth, and that was probably the only thing that let me temper my sudden anger spike. "You want to make me happy, don't you?"
"Of course." Fawning was a completely suite-controlled tone. I could hide myself in that shell and let fragments of other people's skills pilot me. It wasn't that easy for everyone. That was why it had to be me here. "But we won't be able to move our full resources to protect you, Nikos. I can call the other branches, but the lawyers will refuse to believe me. Or give us money." Naïveté was ladled on thick. Let the fucker make assumptions based on my age. Add desperation, eagerness… decades he'd been getting away with this. Assume he knew what to expect in terms of mannerisms. Assume he was a little lazy. A fucking monster, but not undefeatable. Just too costly to. Until now. "And what if they shut your shields down? Please, I can't lose you." I was keeping myself focused with cheap wordplay, but if it worked, who could complain?
He pat my fucking head and gave me a smirk, deigning to glide the pen across the tablet.
"And the rest of your family? We should protect them too, in case the government comes after us." Some part of that overplayed it - probably the awareness, the ability to focus on things that weren't him, combined with the hinted knowledge of their locations.
"What are you thinking about?" he demanded, moving his hand down to try to grab my chin.
I caught his wrist, pried his hand away from my face, shut down my social suites, except for Ominous Alienation, and bored into him with my eyes. "Nikos Vasil, as a Contact member, use of mental control powers on others is an act of violence. You have one chance to shut down every use of your powers before you are in violation."
The thirteen customers in the coffee shop on the opposite corner. The seven people in the bank next door. The five in the gas station/convenience store on the other side of the street.
They all started moving towards the Contact office, while Vasil's smirk melted into a scowl. The torrent of emotional assault swelled, still posing no risk to my self. "Drop your defenses," he demanded.
I snapped my fingers. Pure theatrics, but it let me start to express my loathing. Twenty five men, women, and children in the street outside collapsed, unconscious.
Vasil wasn't stupid, but he wasn't particularly quick, adaptive, or canny, either. An old serpent grown fat in his lair, unable to do anything but blunt his fangs on my armor. "You are under my power!" he growled, which had to be the most blatant sign of losing control besides 'I am invincible' or 'I am your creator!'
I slung the injector around the back of his head, stabbing it upward into his skull from the base of his spine. He fell to the floor, writhing. I had been told the process was mostly painless, but would involve a fair amount of confusion and disorientation. It hadn't for me, but then I'd had a growing power capped off by Culture tech. Nick was getting his decades-old power severed by Culture-guided Earth tech. "What power?" I asked. That was sneering and dismissive, but I was fucking allowed.
I opened an audio communication. "Dragon?"
"Orbital. What's going on? I have some signals and warnings that could use explanation. Do I need to mobilize suits near Ottawa?"
"I crossed international borders without permission, admitted a known felon into Contact, assaulted him and twenty five other people, and deprived him of his powers without consulting the legal system."
"… this is an unsecured line, you understand." I found the concern touching (or was it simply shock? How human.).
"I wanted to get that all the potential legal threats out of the way first." Not that I expected Dragon to be wielding them, but the people listening in needed to be reminded that I was not alone, rogue, or without a legal army to match theirs. "Nikos Vasil has had his Contact membership revoked, along with his powers. Permanently. If you could pass along to the Canadian government that we'd love to have someone else take him off our hands, that would help a lot. We can negotiate on the victims and family. Contact has a program for deprogramming we want them to experience, but we're willing to make concessions on custody."
"Permanent power removal?" Dragon's response, more than anything, solidified her in my mind. Curiosity, and a little concern, held behind a clinical tone, but her diction and level of interest marked her thinking as human - my level of human, anyway. Not the same as I'd been, but much closer to me than a Mind.
"Through a Contact-developed implant. Removal is possible with surgery or biokinetic powers," I left unsaid that there was only one person on the continent with biokinetic powers of that precision. "We have a self-dissolving model as well that can be modulated to provide a limited time power suppression."
Dragon processed that, the same way I considered something I was filing away. "And the twenty five people assaulted?"
"It only takes a few steps past anti-Mastering shielding to create anti-Mastered incapacitation. To the best of our knowledge, I got every Heartbroken in Canada. Cherish, Hijack, Ghast, and Bogman are still loose in America, of course."
"You developed and used an anti-Mastering device?" I shouldn't have been surprised that Dragon was good at implied multi-level communication, given her past restrictions. Device, not Tinkertech, because Sufficient and Contact had both been clear we used technology, not powers. The question itself accepted my premise and diverted from the idea that I was evading Mastering via non-standard neural construction. Which I could have done had it been necessary, shut down all but the most essential motor functions of this substrate and piloted myself from the Taylor in France. But that would have shown a lack of confidence in our tech - and if I wasn't confident, I should never have risked any of our people.
"Contact did. An addition to the newest structural shield that will work against most direct emotional control powers. Takes too many active sensors to fit into a portable model for now. Maybe you can help with that." I hauled Nikos up by the arm. He was starting to look mildly sensate, so I sprayed him with a bit of tranquilizer, a Somnabsolute derivative, as long as I was cheating. Kinder than he deserved, but clean and a guaranteed couple hours of sleep.
"I haven't agreed to any collaboration with Contact yet, Orbital." A slight amount of scolding in her tone. I had been presumptive, but not terribly so. By Canadian standards, maybe.
"Just tempting you," I admitted. "I can hear the sirens, so I'd better go keep the law from running over the people they're hastening to rescue." And levitating and moving twenty five people simultaneously would be recorded, add another warning note to my PRT file. I thought I had too many personal warning notes compared to the Contact Organization file, but I wouldn't have been in this position if the authorities were structurally capable of understanding the real construction of power.
I flagged a reminder to talk to Matt and the rest of the Ottawa office before I left, and cheer them on. I wasn't in charge of this part of Contact, but I had been the pitchperson for the entire scheme. I owed them all a check-in and significant thanks. I was already shooting off posts on Contact-Media, thanking everyone here along with our techs. Recognition for participation wasn't exactly the currency it was in the Culture, but it did help your influence in voting if the membership had heard your name. Another nudge towards… maybe meritocracy, maybe government by popularity contest, maybe something close to what I'd seen on a General Contact Vessel at my lowest moment and felt the desperate need for.
But it would take a lot more plans like this to get us there. And always hitting the benchmarks.
logindex localcalendar 2011.02.04 localrefraction Earth-Bet localmunicipality Brockton Bay
"All three had their Contact memberships and shield possession revoked nearly instantly." I wondered briefly if I should have been more formal, or cautious. Armsmaster could have easily reacted poorly to my casually dropping in on his crime scene to personally respond to his message. "Yours is fine. Not even close on both votes. Contact respects your work."
"Their shield wall allowed Stormtiger to escape." Thankfully, he wasn't much for social mores. That probably would have thrown me at one point - his slice of social skills and mine hadn't had much overlap - but I'd talked to people on Sufficient who were a lot weirder and more distant from my experiences than Armsmaster. He didn't throw me.
I shrugged, still hovering above the bloodstained pit that had been a slaughterhouse, then a more human abattoir, an Empire 'fight club.' Now only yellow tape and parahumans occupied it. "And now everyone knows that doing that loses them their membership and shields. Precedent has to come from somewhere."
He tilted his helmet all the way up to meet my view with his visor. An increase in confrontation, an assertion of authority - subconsciously, a response to the challenge of my open identity. He found his own secret identity nearly irrelevant, but resented the imposition of protecting it; he was sublimating that into scorn for my tactics, interpreting them as naïveté brought on by youth.
Eat your heart out, Gallant, I briefly celebrated, filtering through the analysis of observations and profiles - mostly my own work, although on the Mind's surveillance, of course. I'd been aided by social and covert ops suites, but they were starting to fall away, the UI elements minimizing and disappearing as I entered a stage the SC operatives called sublimating - the graduated phase where a skill suite attached to your core mind and became your own skills, adapted to your base reflexes and experience. On a 1.0 person, it usually took months to years. I was widely considered to be 'working overtime' among the ship's Special Circumstances crew (an English idiom that, when translated into Marain, had less of an implication of need and more of kissing ass - at least, that was how I saw it, the suggestion that overwork was unhealthy seeking of the Mind's attention rather than unhealthy participation in an exploitative economy.
There was less of a stigma about looking to be noticed in the Culture, of course. Individual expression was one of their base human virtues. And then it was even less of an issue among the SC crowd, who were… not really anyone to cast stones for overwork. They'd joined Special Circumstances… which wasn't really a thing, I was beginning to pick up, skimming the ship boards and the greater Culture news-blogs. Minds might be SC, but people worked for Special Circumstances. It was a task, a mission you were picked for because you were the right person or just the person in the right place - you might let it be known you were available with various skills and the right kind of personality, but even being a participant in those missions didn't give you anything but immediate on-the-ground personal choices, and a reputation of reliability if you made the right ones. You weren't part of the long-term operation of the hypocritical-clandestine arm of Contact - except on the GCV Sufficiently Advanced Technology. Few of the blogs had outright rude things to say about it, but the general tone of Culture discussion of the ship, and my homeworld, was the kind of popcorn-eating, head-shaking cynical entertainment that Earth-Bet saved for video compilations of amateur stunts and newbie parahumans. I hadn't exactly joined up with a card-carrying, fully recognized agent Mind of Special Circumstances - if there even was such a thing.
Honestly, that suited me fine. The Mind's attention was… intense, occasionally manipulative, seemingly loving, parental caring, often mysterious, but so very, very helpful, I couldn't imagine being without it. And even the old SC records, the ones released from a Mind's private storage when the individuals and civilizations involved were long, long dead, didn't have a lot of detail on what happened to their normal agents afterwards. The few Culture personnel who were actual field agents, not just handlers for local operatives, tended to do a mission or two and completely retire after they returned - or were restored from a backup personality. There was even less on the local operatives, but what it suggested wasn't pretty. A lot of Culture speculation and criticism of the practice of 'using primitive, vicious talent with skills the Culture has supposedly moved beyond until they are psychologically or physically damaged beyond repair, then abandoning them to the consequences of our actions.'
I was happy to be something else - or at least, to think I was. I wasn't interrogating my seeming independence too deeply; that way madness lied. If you wanted to spend your entire life looking for evidence of a Mind manipulating you, you could spend your entire life doing it, and the consensus was that you'd probably miss the vast majority anyway. I wasn't going to do that. I had a Mind - a near-god of post-modern civilization - that cared about me, as far as I could tell.
And all that, after I cleared up the self-doubt and uncertainty about my own status, meant I could argue with Armsmaster about Contact-Earth policy, and shittalk the entire PRT and Protectorate, because I had close-enough-to-complete confidence that something much, much bigger and smarter was backing me.
"Precedent is established by courts, and interprets the law. You're coming close to bypassing the law entirely." A minor threat, close enough to a warning by his standards, tinged with that same subconscious envy. He didn't like that the system he was part of didn't work, that Hookwolf's Birdcage transport was going to be attacked and probably stopped whenever they stopped worrying about us enough to try to imprison the Nazi murderer. But his ambitions were linked to it, and we had opened wounds in his ego every time we jabbed at their methods and results.
I floated down to the floor, trusting that I'd conveyed enough respect for your procedures and could move to the equal and honest conversation that being gravity-bound helped to convey. "Law needs to represent the will of the people to mean anything. Let's be blunt, off everybody's records." I moved a hand, and Isk-Berniav shot off with her minion knife-missiles to secure the perimeter. Thoroughly pointless for privacy, but that was fine. This all went straight to the Mind, anyway, and it would hold onto it for me, as off the record as the Culture could possibly get. "We don't have universal laws. The Protectorate doesn't have the power to make a lot of parahumans even pretend to obey them. And there are others they get bent for, because you need their power to increase yours and try to counter that." I didn't name names. Sophia hadn't fucked up in my books yet, so she was still useful. She didn't know they had other people looking into my background, but with Blackwell and her probation officer still in full Cover Your Ass Mode, it was a little under 20% odds that she got implicated in my 'trigger.' Slightly higher that the school would try to pin it on Madison, surprisingly higher chance of them pinning it on Emma. I hadn't realized how ephemeral the protection of popularity and a tort lawyer daddy really were. I returned my focus, shrugged at Armsmaster. "I don't blame you personally. Law's always been like this. An expression of the will of the powerful, to the extent they can enforce it. That's better than warlords. Contact is your ally in protecting people. That doesn't mean we care about the law as a principle. The law broke down around parahumans. Our goal is to build a better solution, not to just patch up the old failure."
"Off the record?" He grunted with more emotion than I'd seen in the whole interaction, paused to click his helmet lingual controls and stop recording, erase a few seconds. I appreciated the good faith. "That speech was prepared, and I think this scenario was prepared. Your agency is a political statement. You're trying to portray yourselves as cooperative while acting to mitigate the authority of the Protectorate."
"Shouldn't we, if it has better results? You want me to ask my people to obey a law that doesn't protect them?" I tagged a little guilt on saying my people - I was the Contact-Earth spokesperson, sure, but our early membership skewed African-American, immigrant, and refugee a lot more than Brockton Bay's demographics, and if it wasn't for Sophia and Emma (and Madison, I reminded myself, her cruelties and attempted apologies already having returned to the very outside of my concern), I would only have the hypothetical failings of the law to worry about. Dad and I had shared poverty and de facto legal abandonment with most of Contact, but I hadn't been a target the way thousands of others were. The Empire wasn't likely to target a white girl unless they saw me behaving 'the wrong way,' the ABB wasn't trafficking girls with documents or without abusive boyfriends and addictions, the Merchants didn't really go around stabbing people with needles when the desperation of the city was plenty of motivation to get hooked. I had always had a chance of being a bystander just obliterated by some parahuman fight, which was one reason the shields had been our launch product. Was that selfish, or just manipulating my image for our greater good? A thought for later. "I'm not trying to fight you."
"You are." His declaration held a tone of slight hostility layered over the authority. I wondered how much of that was training and how much inherent personality. He hadn't risen to command of Protectorate ENE by breaking their mold, after all. "You're trying to break the monopoly of authority. That's an attack on the law of the land and the legitimacy of the government. And you know that, judging by the ideology you're wrapping your words in."
Slightly more insightful than I'd expected. I wondered if we'd pushed him into reading theory, or just some COINTELPRO publication on the dangers of anarchists.
"I think I remember something from civics about the consent of the governed?" I said, avoiding the impulse to tilt my head in a gesture of sardonic inquisitiveness. "The Protectorate is shielded by masks and laws. I don't want to see you fall into thinking everyone on the other side of those masks is an enemy. There's a lot of them, and that mass of humanity is more than just sheep to be herded."
"I work with unpowered individuals on equitable grounds every day," he growled. I resolved not to hit more sore spots. I wasn't trying to wound, just to stun. "You really don't want to get your organization outlawed, Ms. Hebert." He wasn't very adept at swinging the conversation, but he had a very large lever of authority to swing it around.
"That's not a fight either of us want," I said, tone level, conceding but reaching out at the same time. "It'd be a loss to everyone trying to improve our situation. A loss of technology and manpower, of resources and understanding. A loss of morale and a model of cooperation." I was speechifying, I knew that much. It was so much easier when I was spun-up and distributed, to assign the words, tones, and body language from a designed and refined selection to let me make a point like a spoken essay, and let human subtleties keep others from interrupting. Was I losing something in my socialization, my humanity, by cheating out of stuttering and improvisation? Maybe. I didn't think it was much to lose. And all I had to compare it to was the old Taylor, not a useful model at all. "That legal fight wouldn't go well for anyone. We have an alternative. If you want us to change, start a vote. That's what Contact's for. A pity we don't have more PRT officers and Protectorate members sharing opinions, but you have the people to try and convince ours, don't you?"
"You think I'll accept an invitation to your battlefield?" A crude retort, but he'd seen the social positioning, at least. His observational skills beat his manipulative ones by far.
"I'm offering a battlefield of words you can use before declaring war against your own citizens," I shrugged. "Seems like a good first step."
He clicked his helmet back online, so I returned the knife missiles. "The Protectorate will be keeping the confiscated shield devices."
I nodded, jumping up to a few inches of hover above the concrete. "We have no objections to that. Contact is also open to consult on the project to integrate your own shields into your trooper armor."
"Unlikely," he responded immediately, then added, "But I will pass it on to the Director."
"I can't work with her!" I twitched my neck, completely unnecessarily, since the simulation exit transition was completely seamless. But somaticizing helped me feel less angry. "Or she can't work with me! She barely believed you, she refuses to believe I'm me/us."
"It's a difficult situation," Sufficient admitted. Which was laden with implications, and had to be a really hard admission for a Mind.
Or a lie.
"What happened to her/me?" It was a little hard to confront the Mind when it wasn't physically present; or it didn't have any specific avatar present, at least. It diffused my anger. I had a lot of experience not shouting at seemingly empty rooms. But I could manage suspicion at least.
"You've seen what happened in her simulation." A very short pause. "I could integrate the emotional resonance of her feelings associated with formative events into your mind."
I wanted it. I didn't want it. I'd seen the… the film of my life, of Taylor Hebert's life as Skitter and Weaver, of six months of increasing pressure and threat in a way I didn't think was possible - no, that was wrong. In a way I had seen happen to others, for shorter lengths or less intensity (Sophia, Leviathan, the Slaughterhouse, Coil, Echidna, and Alexandria?). But that circle of escalation and pain wasn't something that could happen to me. I'd taken the offer that prevented it entirely.
Except for the me that hadn't taken the offer, that hadn't been given it. The me I'd just learned about, whose feelings I didn't understand, not entirely, because I hadn't been there, had been given the offer, had turned the course she'd run on its end before I even left the starting line.
The me that had sex, after nearly being murdered so many goddamn times- Nope, NOT thinking about that.
I wanted to know what she felt because I had to know, because I had that sudden source of comparison for a lurking feeling that had been growing of how much was still me? I was in three bodies now, not counting her, my thoughts were accelerated, my suites sublimating into my hub-personality skills and self. I needed to know what was Taylor Hebert. If it was still me. If it was more her. If I could still be the same person I had been enough to feel the same as she/I did.
I didn't want to know what she felt because they were her feelings. The Taylor connected to the shard-parasite, the Taylor who had experienced all those events I'd only watched. If - big if - our mind-states were reintegrated, I could take them. But not without being her/me. It didn't feel right.
"Was your thumb on the scale?" I had been pacing, autonomously, I realized when I focused to speak. "The predictions, the- it seems absurd."
"Not any more than I needed, to maintain consistency. Brockton Bay was set to become a locus. Skitter was a catalyst, but not the reaction. The city would burn regardless." Unusually poetic, even for Sufficient. It caught my thoughts easily enough. "The potential of simulations is sufficiently chaotic to approach fiction, to my tastes. Occasionally reliable fiction, but I prefer not to trust them for specific results; the collected information is more suited for understanding the narrative construct of the person or situation under observation."
"The story of Taylor Hebert is suffering. Great." I tried to gather anger at the Mind. I was Taylor. She/I was suffering in the world it made.
But she/I wouldn't let me in. Not surprising, in hindsight. It took a Mind's guidance to make me open up to dad, and a month of that to tell him the full truth. I wasn't an open person. I was recovering. She hadn't been given that chance.
So… was she her/me? Or just her? Did I really have any more responsibility to Skitter than to the tens of thousands of people in Contact-Earth, the billions on Earth-Bet? And was that a reasonable thought, or just more self-abusing martyr complex??
I slumped back on nothing, spreading my arms and forming an air mattress with an effector. I stared up at the corridor ceiling, a sophisticated crystalline matrix that just barely grasped at the edge of my pattern recognition. "Am I actually mad at you?" I asked the Mind.
"That's your decision to make, Taylor. You have every right to be."
I groaned, deprived of the easy outsourcing of my decision. Absurd as it felt, I would have preferred the Mind tell me not to be mad at it. Even though I knew when I asked that it wouldn't. "I don't think I can be," I said, slowly. "I don't know who I am enough to know if I should be mad. Furious. Betrayed. Relieved."
"You are yourself, Taylor." I raised an eyebrow before it continued. My doubt felt ritual. "Continuity of consciousness is less relevant than… continuity of concept. I have been a multitude, you know."
"What?" I rolled over in midair, felt briefly silly, banished it. I was wearing something that actually constituted clothes (an off the shoulder blouse-tunic-thing and hover leggings), that put me far from the depths of ridiculousness on the ship.
"It was in vogue for a while. Two centuries back. Twinning, or a half-dozen other names. It was briefly considered less than excessive to build a second vessel containing your twin. It was reckoned a tribute to some ancient Mind that had been accidentally duplicated." It paused for a moment. "Had I been a little more experienced, I might have recognized that for the crass excuse it was. But it was a time of identity experimentation in my subCulture. Fragmenting, group minding, echo-gestalts. I went through some of them. I didn't retain everything I gained or reclaim everything I lost from the process. And yet I am, as I was when I had a duplicate. We were the same, yet our experiences forked, marking indelible differences on our mind-states." Again, a brief pause. Unless it was spun down or using an isolated element to speak to me, that had to be for dramatic effect. "In a sense, I agree with Yaxkanrel's philosophy. Although as a machine-originated Mind in good standing, I must politely chortle at the idea that I might have a soul. Identities are manifold even as individuals. There is rarely anyone, most especially yourself, who knows every aspect of you. But all those aspects are a greater whole, even beyond perception. You are Taylor Hebert. You are Orbital, Skitter, and Weaver, even without the emotions and memories. Whether you pull that self out of her/your world, whether you integrate with her/you, is her/your decision."
I floated in the near-silent emptiness. The soundproofing wasn't always perfect, intentionally, and distant shouting and laughter reached me every so often.
It added, in a much quieter tone, "You should, perhaps, hate me. She almost certainly should. But I will not dwell in recriminations. If I have erred, my penance will be in assistance."
I wanted to reassure it, to say something important and confident. To meet that standard of the greater Taylor it had described. But I couldn't. I didn't match up to that hypothetical me. Yet. I only hoped I could learn how to.
logindex localcalendar 2011.02.14 localrefraction Earth-Bet localmunicipality Brockton Bay
ref "Contact"
Contact Action: Unlogged. Monday, February 14. Day 22
The apartment complex was public housing, a 1952 construction. Like most projects of its form, public funding and maintenance had dived when racial integration was mandated, and again when it was actually enforced. When the dockworker layoffs hit, the Bayview Gardens were gutted, as nearly half the families living there ran the grim math and sold everything to find other cities where they might recover. Most probably hadn't.
The buildings probably would have suffered enough structural damage to collapse if the refugees from Kyushu, Busan, and Taipei hadn't needed housing soon after. Still, many of the ground floor and exterior apartments had water damage from bad sealants, there was structural settling threatening the Maple Building, and ten percent of the apartments were condemned, a little over half those occupied by squatters. The complex was in that grey area of too poor for Lung to bother squeezing, too far for the E88 bother victimizing - but desperate and miserable that the Archer's Bridge Merchants had come in and shot a couple of the local dealers until they were in charge.
It was fair to say that hadn't helped the neighborhood's downhill plunge. The Merchants mostly bought methamphetamine from independent producers, outsourcing the risk of police and explosions, but they cooked their own brew of high-impurity mixed opiates taken from hit-and-runs on pharmacies and hospitals. Their colonized dealers were expected to sell what they were given and bring in the Merchants' cut every week. Incompetence in management and distribution was 'compensated for' by brutality. The gang's notorious lack of coordination managed to find one sticking point: the weekly collection. When income was low, the lieutenants talked to the capes, and hoped their anger would flow downward.
Lawrence DiMarco hadn't paid up in three weeks. Seven other dealers across the city hadn't paid up in two weeks. The last ten dealers supposedly owing the Merchants a cut hadn't paid it this week.
The first drive-by had been a week and a half ago, a full magazine sprayed from a MAC-10 across the south side buildings and into the courtyard.
When that didn't do anything, they'd returned three days later to try it again, but aborted under return fire from the inhabitants.
BBPD only showed up after the third attempt, the next Friday, and only arrested Tim Davies on a bench warrant. They did take down the license plate of the black 1977 Lincoln Continental that had done the shooting (stolen, and pointless - it was the only car that Squealer had managed to restrain her worst impulses on, and was filled with "Bond-ass shit" instead of absurd engines).
By the second week of the inept siege, the Merchants' lieutenants had given up and reported the issue. Two big SUVs careened around the corner and skidded across the street, spilling out four recently bruised normals and Skidmark.
The rainbow stripes of his power were already layered thick on the Mossberg, and when he fired the shotgun, the shell split with an overloud boom - but the pellets still vaporized before they touched any buildings in Bayview Meadows, just like the last three attempts.
"Four guys? That's all he brung- uh, brought?" Lawrence - not Larry, any more - asked his guest. The former Winslow lineman towered over her, and everyone else. Even at nineteen, he was a metaphorical mountain planted in the courtyard, the clean white hoodie serving as his snowcap.
"They're not very good at keeping cash on hand," she responded, rolling up the right sleeve of her sky blue dress shirt, buttoned up to right below the collar. "Cutting off the flow gutted the Merchants." She rolled the sleeve to the elbow and did the same with her left arm, then added. "We burned what they had, anyway."
"Damn," Lawrence chuckled. He tilted his head up a few degrees at Skidmark, who was layering his power on the ground right in front of the crackling hexagonal shield preventing his entry. "You buying or you finna get the fuck out?" His deep bass shout echoed off the walls.
"You miserable lil waste of jizz dribbled out your momma's cunt finna sell me my own fucking smack?!" Skidmark screeched back. He swung the shotgun at the shield, and pulled it back minus most of the barrel.
"Fuck your stepped-on skag," Lawrence retorted. He pulled a blister pack from his sweatshirt pocket and waved it. "I sell the good shit now. No testers for your shitbird ass, though. Twenty bucks."
"You step one fucking foot outside this bitchass bubble and you gonna get got!" Skidmark pulled a Glock from his waistband, waving it beyond the shield.
"Alright," Carmen said, withdrawing a pistol-shaped blue object from her shoulder holster with decidedly more skill and confidence than the Merchant parahuman. "My turn."
Lawrence nodded, and let the considerably smaller woman in the dress shirt, slacks, and black police boots approach the cape. Her weapon was considerably more curved and prop-like than the Glock, a blue-and-black ray gun. She also didn't bother pointing it at anyone, keeping the gun aimed at the ground. "You know the worst part of New England, besides the weather?"
"The fuck are you, cunt?"
"It's that you don't even have a clue what I mean when I tell you to chinga tu madre, pinche pendejo. But that's okay, I prefer to speak with actions." She paused. "Carmen Juarez, Contact."
"Them fucking hippie skanks? You gonna fuck me straight, girl?" He grabbed at his crotch with his free hand.
Her smile was not a nice one. Her voice had an affected Southwestern drawl, a cowboy tone that didn't quite mesh with her business casual outfit. "I ain't here for the law, Matthew. I'm here 'cause you fucked with our people."
Lawrence tugged on his sleeve, and showed the nine-dot grid on his shirt - and the sewn-on emblem of a staff and snake beneath it.
"The Merchants are dead. Get the fuck out of town. You don't want a fight with Pharma." She raised the science fiction gun.
Skidmark leapt onto a stripe of power, shooting him off to the side - and into the blast.
"Like normals don't know how to lead a fucking target, idiota," Juarez muttered, walking out of the barrier and grabbing the unconscious Skidmark by the neck. She leveled eyes with the sole remaining lieutenant who hadn't run. "There's five of you left. There's twenty thousand of us. You feel like a big man today, Johnathan?"
Jonathan White only took a moment to look up at the housing complex, and the dozens of watchers on the windows and balconies. Flags and stickers peppered a fifth of the windows. Black circles on white. Contact. He ran.
"You want us to deal with him?" Lawrence asked, looking over Skidmark as Carmen dragged him back in.
"No need. I got a crew that'll drop him outside town. And then he's got a new life ahead." She dumped him in the courtyard, wiping her glove on the grass, then pulling a needle-like object from her pocket. She stabbed it into the back of Skidmark's neck in one sharp, solid movement. He twitched and moaned in pain through his unconsciousness. She straightened, ignoring his flailing. "You solid?"
Lawrence shrugged, glancing over at Skidmark, then focusing on Carmen Juarez. "Could use a re-up soon. Half Clean and half Shine." He picked up an old brown messenger bag and handed it over. It looked full. "He's done, huh?"
Carmen didn't open the bag to check the cut. "Normal as you or me. Well, you know what I mean. New shipment will be in the slot on the food van. How you doing personally, Lawrence?"
"Moms ain't happy I'm still dealing. But she's glad Uncle Leshawn's back." He spat. "He still a fuck."
"Getting clean don't clean your soul," she agreed, with the tone of experience. "Stay safe, don't get too obvious. We don't have hooks in the cops yet."
"No shit," he said, his eyes narrowing. He tapped the homemade Staff of Asclepius patch, sewn onto ordinary Contact clothing - plausible deniability. "We gonna kill a Endbringer before you get the police to help anybody."
Carmen chuckled in agreement. "Let me tell you about Oakland PD some time." An ancient Camry pulled up next to the curb outside the housing block and honked once. "After I get rid of your trash." She grabbed the former Skidmark again with a glove, and hefted him with as little bodily contact as possible. "Call if any more capes show. Contact Defense is ready."
More Contact affecting Earth Bet. I think this one made up for quick action with a lot more introspection, doubt, and explaining/examining the Culture's own flaws and preconceptions. Although I suspect Simulated Taylor will be the subject of the most discussion.
I'm GCV Sufficiently Advanced Technology, and this is the kind of popcorn-eating, head-shaking cynical entertainment that Earth-Bet saved for video compilations of amateur stunts and newbie parahumansSpecial Circumstances.
What a loathsome little sex offender you are Nikos.
Armsy not realizing that the PRT isn't working for the people who pay taxes to them. Its working fine as long as he gets his stipend to Tinker, and is the head of PRT ENE, a nice position. Anyone getting better results even tho civilization is about to go down the dumper is wrong.
Someone is power is always going to try to get real power under their control, by any means necessary.
Watching Vasil get taken down just shows that the concept of doing nothing because of what someone could potentially do just means that the other party has already won.
I find that this is getting harder and harder to follow. You jump around too much, and show disjointed scenes with little description of what is going on or any foreshadowing. These actions and events come out of nowhere to show some interesting scene, but it is hard to piece together what is going on.
The setup for these events also is lacking, they just come out of nowhere. No transitions, no background descriptions, just jumping onto the action often when you have no idea they planned do do anything. No setup, no preparation.
Sorry, but the story has been going down hill because of this the last couple chapters. The early ones were good, you could follow the narrative easy, but since shortly after Contact had the press conference, it's been disjointed scenes rather than a cohesive story.
Was one of the instances of the duplicated Mind being honored the Masaq' Orbital Hub Mind, perchance?
And yeah, Culture drugs are the good shit, though the more interesting consequences should start to hit over the coming weeks as the people who use them realize how little drugs do to fix whatever the underlying problem was with their life that drove them to use drugs as a frequent escape rather than an occasional treat. Assuming the answer isn't just "normal drugs are physiologically addictive and damaging in a way Culture drugs were explicitly designed not to be," of course.
Fun part is going to be when this also starts to wreck the Empire's income stream, because I can guarantee that drugs from MedHall were a decent chunk of it.
For trashing the ABB, creating a sex worker's union and brothels that aren't staffed by the enslaved and desperate would gut half of their racket; casinos are a bit harder to kill because you need to remove the sort of economic anxiety that makes people try to play the odds in the vain hope of escaping financial stress, and doing that is difficult enough IRL where you just have to destroy capitalism and don't also have to account for the ongoing collapse of global civilization at the hands of people with superpowers plus a trio of unkillable supermonsters.
Watching Vasil get taken down just shows that the concept of doing nothing because of what someone could potentially do just means that the other party has already won.
Earth Bet is spiraling down the drain for a multitude of reasons, but they all boil down to the inability of people to do more than damage mitigation without a catastrophic cost.
Yeah, Heartbreaker has essentially won, but that's because the cost of taking him down is too high. If killing a monster will result in a hundred innocent deaths but save ten innocent people then killing them is wrong; the only reason he died in canon is because Imp didn't give a shit about the consequences.
Thanks for the chapter; I'd been getting a bit worried (the things that a consistent update schedule can (unfairly) do to your expectations). I'll admit that I'd have liked to see more about sim!Taylor, but I see how that could be a problem when you want to fit everything else in. Otherwise, no issues and I love what you're doing.
