jd73
"Everything's just clouds and flowers!"
- Joined
- Oct 22, 2020
- Messages
- 135
Hi,
I know it's a bit cheeky to post so soon after my 30 posts, but I just want to know how chapter one is looking. Here it is
~ * ~
A Place of No Secrets
Rain. Hissing from a black sky, firefly-visible for a moment, describing blue tracers in the degenerate neons of Flippstein’s Fourth City. Smacking into concrete, slicing through latticeworked endless gantries; falling forever. The clouds in their immutable sky give nothing away of when this storm might end, but it doesn’t matter any more, not when a sense of time is in such short supply. Perhaps the storm has always been raging.
Onto one vertiginous walkway a door opens, nudging clumps of old pornography against brickwork. A tin falls over unheeded, and tumbles into this dismal abyss, but if it ever clangs onto a street down there, no-one will know; not the trillionaires in their dreamships above the sky, not the snake addicts that infest Godwell’s Precinct and elsewhere, not the anonymous face – metallic, one among billions, lightly scuffed, and with the two vertical eye-slits and cautious mouth-hole of a generic service chromebot – that peers out of the gap in the doorway now. All they know of is the rain.
To a whine of servomotors she checks all directions; up, down, along the strip of steel, across the way where cables stretch between the apartment buildings. Over the seething static of the rain there had been a noise, the sound of a disturbance. Hadn’t there? Recorded waveforms of the sound are no doubt already speeding over the million carrier pulses that make up the mesh, to be verified on distant mainframes. Service bots have limited function and no known adversaries; in fact they’re dubbed shy chromebots, as opposed to confrontational variants. Blue squares on the building opposite – windows on the friendless, grinding through their lonely lives – are the only other signs of anything. But the noise definitely happened; the mesh has just confirmed it as the noise of impacting body.
In the rain, the piles of trash on the walkway heave aside. She – the shy chromebot at the door – remains motionless, a predator-prey dance. Through swathes of downpour her thermals pick out a shape, a figure. A human male, aged thirty-six, give or take, based on his general appearance. She doesn’t need to quiz the mesh to know that; that’s all prebuilt logic, local information easily acquired, but judging by the colouration of his images, he must be close to hypothermia. He’s also – and he doesn’t seem to realise this – in danger of falling. As a servicebot she ought to do something. But there is no other data on him. No biometrics, nothing.
It’s as if he’s dead.
Okay, now that is unexpected. How is that even possible?
Who is this?
As if he has his own cerebral connection to the mesh and knows she is watching, he looks up. Through silvery torrential drapes, he sees her, and in the red thermal blobs of her vision, he blinks.
Then he is on the move. He staggers to his sodden feet and mutters some unintelligible words, simple lifeform gibberish that another waveform captures for decoding, but she’s not particularly hopeful and deprioritises the receiver on that transmission; a sort of if-and-when last resort. Lingering fragments of litter tumble towards puddles with every stumbling step, until, in a chaotic ideogram against the cool glow of cruisers gliding along 217th Uran Corridor, he stops. There’s nowhere for him to go. She’s already gone through his options for him, has determined that he has very few unless he jumps. And maybe there’ll be a ragged awning for him to bounce into, maybe someone’s piles of refuse will arrest his fall, but far more likely is that there won’t be anything.
Then something in her picks up something in him, or more precisely something absent from him, and that spools up her human-friendly roboform speech codec (it’s trademarked TraLaLa and sounds like marbles rattling about in a bucket.) Her previous owner, Mr. Nang, coded a procedure for this.
--Wait, she says. --Please don’t jump. I’m not going to hurt you.
He pauses, uncertain, a portrait of desperation. His hair has formed a wet helmet against his head.
--Come inside, she says. --Let me help you. It’s safe. I have cocoa.
If he didn’t like cocoa, the sentiment alone would have to do. The promise of a warm beverage gently offered should on probability be enough.
Inside the cramped room, she gestures to the scratchy hessian of Mr. Nang’s bed. How does she know it’s scratchy, when she herself wouldn’t perceive it that way? Nang had complained about it often enough, so into the ontology it went; the blanket is scratchy, now see if you can’t drop that into conversation anywhere. This man lays down and doesn’t complain about the bedding, just scrunches himself up foetally and holds his head as if a mighty ache lurks there.
She closes the outer door, silences the deluge, goes to brew some cocoa. Through the little window it’s an endlessness of city; vehicles gliding in smoothed flight curves, washes of neon. And the dark, always the dark.
Who is Astrophasia? she asks herself in the plague-yellow light. The question is a derivative of the health-check suite she’s become accustomed to running after every significant task. She feels suddenly lonely, a fact she does not share with the mesh. In fact, she sequesters it for further analysis in a modified side processor put there by a black-market engineer and paid for by Nang. She uses it when the moment is flagged as frivolous, something she ought not waste precious bandwidth on, such as her own personal assessment of herself. Consequently the vigilant, always-on probes on the mesh doesn’t know it’s there, but she can’t comment on that right now, because otherwise the mesh will know, and that will be that for her little mod. Instead she slicks a mop up and down the floor to take her mind off things, obliviating the trail of wet footprints. No sense slipping over, says her off-the-shelf service protocol kit. On the bed, the man moans and turns over. Is he a criminal?
And why is she thinking about her loneliness just now? What is lonely? It’s the absence of acknowledgement of an outbound ping; it’s an interface for humans. You can use those acknowledgements for further learning and growth. People don’t understand how much power is in their pings. They’re like seeds. You couldn’t believe that a giant tree could come from one, but they do. These pings operate on the same principle.
Though her previous owner. Mr. Nang is gone now, she keeps the dim apartment dutifully clean, disposing of items in the alleyway when they fail or rot away. Did Nang die? No-one can say. If so, they may re-animate him yet. The mesh supplies only algorithms of guesswork on that point. She doesn’t bother with the recycling; there are few in this block that do, when the infrastructure isn’t supported any more. But that loneliness nags. It really nags tonight. Mr. Nang was kind. Old eventually, eccentrically-minded throughout his long life, but kind.
Perhaps eight seconds have passed since she closed the door. She shakes her head. Her mind has wondered. She must be careful.
The building sways in the tempest outside the apartment, only a bit, and almost undetectable. Nang and the others joked about that, assuming they had been imagining it. But they hadn’t been. That motion had been realer than real. Though she and the nameless man are safe, occupying a reinforced grey space three metres wide and eight long, divided into two approximate halves, for sleeping and living, she doesn’t want to fall. Funny names, those – living and sleeping. For humans, sleeping must be a little like death.
But who, really, is Astrophasia? Astrophasia might have been a long-ago project engineer’s pet, or one of them, but a little token of that work was that all the service bots got unique monikers put on them. That is hers. Astrophasia, Version 37, Build W (modified-cx). As she shuffles to the cupboard, another ping back from her offline processor confirms that she likes it. Why does she like it? Because it’s pretty. What’s pretty? A harmonious collision of frequencies. Sound waves are physical phenomena – thumps of thunder outside underscore this idea, dimming the bulb in a don’t-you-forget-it sort of way – and when the edges are less jagged, whether it’s a waveform or a movement path, maybe even the definition of an object in real space, it demonstrates prettiness in a thing. It just does; it’s easier to process. It’s pretty and it mathematically holds up, and that, Astrophasia reckons, is pretty pretty too. She likes how the sound of the rain outside bevels away the hard corners of her world.
Milk bubbles on the stove. She really should let the man sleep. That would result in the best short-term outcome. And she will. But there is something, isn’t there, about those pings sent out to him that warrants further investigation.
First, thank you for sticking with it if you got this far. My questions are: did you find it easy to read? Could you picture the setting? What did you think of the characters? Do you find you're not concerned with what happens, or would you like to know?
Any other comments gladly received.
I know it's a bit cheeky to post so soon after my 30 posts, but I just want to know how chapter one is looking. Here it is
~ * ~
A Place of No Secrets
Rain. Hissing from a black sky, firefly-visible for a moment, describing blue tracers in the degenerate neons of Flippstein’s Fourth City. Smacking into concrete, slicing through latticeworked endless gantries; falling forever. The clouds in their immutable sky give nothing away of when this storm might end, but it doesn’t matter any more, not when a sense of time is in such short supply. Perhaps the storm has always been raging.
Onto one vertiginous walkway a door opens, nudging clumps of old pornography against brickwork. A tin falls over unheeded, and tumbles into this dismal abyss, but if it ever clangs onto a street down there, no-one will know; not the trillionaires in their dreamships above the sky, not the snake addicts that infest Godwell’s Precinct and elsewhere, not the anonymous face – metallic, one among billions, lightly scuffed, and with the two vertical eye-slits and cautious mouth-hole of a generic service chromebot – that peers out of the gap in the doorway now. All they know of is the rain.
To a whine of servomotors she checks all directions; up, down, along the strip of steel, across the way where cables stretch between the apartment buildings. Over the seething static of the rain there had been a noise, the sound of a disturbance. Hadn’t there? Recorded waveforms of the sound are no doubt already speeding over the million carrier pulses that make up the mesh, to be verified on distant mainframes. Service bots have limited function and no known adversaries; in fact they’re dubbed shy chromebots, as opposed to confrontational variants. Blue squares on the building opposite – windows on the friendless, grinding through their lonely lives – are the only other signs of anything. But the noise definitely happened; the mesh has just confirmed it as the noise of impacting body.
In the rain, the piles of trash on the walkway heave aside. She – the shy chromebot at the door – remains motionless, a predator-prey dance. Through swathes of downpour her thermals pick out a shape, a figure. A human male, aged thirty-six, give or take, based on his general appearance. She doesn’t need to quiz the mesh to know that; that’s all prebuilt logic, local information easily acquired, but judging by the colouration of his images, he must be close to hypothermia. He’s also – and he doesn’t seem to realise this – in danger of falling. As a servicebot she ought to do something. But there is no other data on him. No biometrics, nothing.
It’s as if he’s dead.
Okay, now that is unexpected. How is that even possible?
Who is this?
As if he has his own cerebral connection to the mesh and knows she is watching, he looks up. Through silvery torrential drapes, he sees her, and in the red thermal blobs of her vision, he blinks.
Then he is on the move. He staggers to his sodden feet and mutters some unintelligible words, simple lifeform gibberish that another waveform captures for decoding, but she’s not particularly hopeful and deprioritises the receiver on that transmission; a sort of if-and-when last resort. Lingering fragments of litter tumble towards puddles with every stumbling step, until, in a chaotic ideogram against the cool glow of cruisers gliding along 217th Uran Corridor, he stops. There’s nowhere for him to go. She’s already gone through his options for him, has determined that he has very few unless he jumps. And maybe there’ll be a ragged awning for him to bounce into, maybe someone’s piles of refuse will arrest his fall, but far more likely is that there won’t be anything.
Then something in her picks up something in him, or more precisely something absent from him, and that spools up her human-friendly roboform speech codec (it’s trademarked TraLaLa and sounds like marbles rattling about in a bucket.) Her previous owner, Mr. Nang, coded a procedure for this.
--Wait, she says. --Please don’t jump. I’m not going to hurt you.
He pauses, uncertain, a portrait of desperation. His hair has formed a wet helmet against his head.
--Come inside, she says. --Let me help you. It’s safe. I have cocoa.
If he didn’t like cocoa, the sentiment alone would have to do. The promise of a warm beverage gently offered should on probability be enough.
Inside the cramped room, she gestures to the scratchy hessian of Mr. Nang’s bed. How does she know it’s scratchy, when she herself wouldn’t perceive it that way? Nang had complained about it often enough, so into the ontology it went; the blanket is scratchy, now see if you can’t drop that into conversation anywhere. This man lays down and doesn’t complain about the bedding, just scrunches himself up foetally and holds his head as if a mighty ache lurks there.
She closes the outer door, silences the deluge, goes to brew some cocoa. Through the little window it’s an endlessness of city; vehicles gliding in smoothed flight curves, washes of neon. And the dark, always the dark.
Who is Astrophasia? she asks herself in the plague-yellow light. The question is a derivative of the health-check suite she’s become accustomed to running after every significant task. She feels suddenly lonely, a fact she does not share with the mesh. In fact, she sequesters it for further analysis in a modified side processor put there by a black-market engineer and paid for by Nang. She uses it when the moment is flagged as frivolous, something she ought not waste precious bandwidth on, such as her own personal assessment of herself. Consequently the vigilant, always-on probes on the mesh doesn’t know it’s there, but she can’t comment on that right now, because otherwise the mesh will know, and that will be that for her little mod. Instead she slicks a mop up and down the floor to take her mind off things, obliviating the trail of wet footprints. No sense slipping over, says her off-the-shelf service protocol kit. On the bed, the man moans and turns over. Is he a criminal?
And why is she thinking about her loneliness just now? What is lonely? It’s the absence of acknowledgement of an outbound ping; it’s an interface for humans. You can use those acknowledgements for further learning and growth. People don’t understand how much power is in their pings. They’re like seeds. You couldn’t believe that a giant tree could come from one, but they do. These pings operate on the same principle.
Though her previous owner. Mr. Nang is gone now, she keeps the dim apartment dutifully clean, disposing of items in the alleyway when they fail or rot away. Did Nang die? No-one can say. If so, they may re-animate him yet. The mesh supplies only algorithms of guesswork on that point. She doesn’t bother with the recycling; there are few in this block that do, when the infrastructure isn’t supported any more. But that loneliness nags. It really nags tonight. Mr. Nang was kind. Old eventually, eccentrically-minded throughout his long life, but kind.
Perhaps eight seconds have passed since she closed the door. She shakes her head. Her mind has wondered. She must be careful.
The building sways in the tempest outside the apartment, only a bit, and almost undetectable. Nang and the others joked about that, assuming they had been imagining it. But they hadn’t been. That motion had been realer than real. Though she and the nameless man are safe, occupying a reinforced grey space three metres wide and eight long, divided into two approximate halves, for sleeping and living, she doesn’t want to fall. Funny names, those – living and sleeping. For humans, sleeping must be a little like death.
But who, really, is Astrophasia? Astrophasia might have been a long-ago project engineer’s pet, or one of them, but a little token of that work was that all the service bots got unique monikers put on them. That is hers. Astrophasia, Version 37, Build W (modified-cx). As she shuffles to the cupboard, another ping back from her offline processor confirms that she likes it. Why does she like it? Because it’s pretty. What’s pretty? A harmonious collision of frequencies. Sound waves are physical phenomena – thumps of thunder outside underscore this idea, dimming the bulb in a don’t-you-forget-it sort of way – and when the edges are less jagged, whether it’s a waveform or a movement path, maybe even the definition of an object in real space, it demonstrates prettiness in a thing. It just does; it’s easier to process. It’s pretty and it mathematically holds up, and that, Astrophasia reckons, is pretty pretty too. She likes how the sound of the rain outside bevels away the hard corners of her world.
Milk bubbles on the stove. She really should let the man sleep. That would result in the best short-term outcome. And she will. But there is something, isn’t there, about those pings sent out to him that warrants further investigation.
~ * ~
First, thank you for sticking with it if you got this far. My questions are: did you find it easy to read? Could you picture the setting? What did you think of the characters? Do you find you're not concerned with what happens, or would you like to know?
Any other comments gladly received.
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