Lers of Spoi.

You have been warned.

Just a quickie for the moment, because I'm busy missing my deadline for handing in Gremlin. (I would have made it, if not for the fact that I miscalculated how long it would take someone to fall down a 37-km Higgs conduit where the gravity goes from 0.25G to 8G. Turns out it would take a couple of hours, which totally fucks the pacing and mechanism of the climax. There's a reason action movies prefer 2-minute countdowns when their protagonists accidentally trip the bomb timer[1].)

But I'll come up for air just this once because, like all ten or twelve of you, I've been watching Plur1bus. And last week's episode reminded me of something.

I'm speaking of Alice Sheldon's "The Screwfly Solution", a 1977 novella that offered up—to a world in the throes of the then-nascent Star Wars phenomenon—an example of what real science fiction could do. The plot describes the rise of femicidal cults across the globe, generally under the auspices of religious dogma. (The western variant, a cult known as the Sons of Adam, is built around the belief that the Second Coming cannot occur until women are eradicated, since it was Woman who committed the Original Sin.) It's an epistolary story, a collection of diary excerpts, news clippings, and research reports: ranging from a Vatican press release admitting that Jesus never actually said anything about women having souls, to diplomatic complaints about Japanese drift nets, wrapped around the bloated corpses of hundreds of females, posing a hazard to high-seas navigation. Those powers-that-be that haven't yet jumped on the bandwagon continue to insist that the problem is just some kind of contagious mass hysteria, a purely psychological thing best controlled by suppressing news of its existence so the hysteria doesn't spread. Nobody pays much attention the the handful of scientists reporting that the phenomenon is correlated with global wind patterns, and appears to also manifest in other closely-related primate species. I mean, who listens to a much of elitist eggheads?

In the end, of course, the eggheads are proved right. Some airborne agent is fucking with the male sexual response, resetting the switch that redirects aggressive responses into sexual ones. Men thus afflicted manifest sexual urges through unadulterated violence. They are driven to kill rather than fuck. Adios, Humanity.

It's a form of eco-friendly pest control, in other words. Something wants the place for themselves, but without ruining real estate values with nukes of asteroid strikes. The story takes its title from a similar campaign in which Humanity attempted to eradicate screwfly populations by messing with their reproductive dynamics.

Sheldon's story was simultaneously one of the most powerfully feminist stories I've ever read—scary, but utterly non-preachy— and one of the most scientifically grounded. (A friend of mine used to study sticklebacks for a living, and was—as far as I know— the first to document exactly this kind of spousal abuse in that species. Male stickles normally face off against each other to compete for mating opportunities, then switch over to sex mode when approaching the female. Debbie observed some of them who, failing to make that switch, simply beat their mates up instead of spawning with them.)

If you've seen the latest episode of Plur1bus, you'll see where I'm going with this. An alien pseudovirus has cohered virtually all of humanity into a single hive mind so ethically averse to killing that they won't even willingly pluck an apple off a tree. For the time being, the seven-billion-odd individuals comprising this hive[2] make do by eating out of cans, collecting orchard windfall, and chowing down on human bodies that have died from natural causes. But that won't last forever. We're told that available food will run out in about a decade. At that point, Humanity—or at least, whatever Humanity has turned into—simply starves to death en masse.

Which makes me wonder: was this the aliens' plan all along? I mean, what kind of agent converts an entire species into a system so pro-life that they refuse to even practice agriculture? We can argue about the logistics of how an alien species six hundred lightyears distant somehow knew enough about Human neurology back in the fifteenth century to build such a precisely targeted form of pest control (and perhaps I will, sometime further down the road). And I do not pretend to know where Vince Gilligan is going with this. But for me, it's hard to imagine an alien agent that both has such precise and sophisticated knowledge and also doesn't know where this Jainism-on-steroids program is ultimately going to lead.

Is there any scenario in which this is not a screwfly solution?

Postscript: And of course I just Googled "Pluribus AND Screwfly Solution" and found that some bozos on Reddit have already beaten me to this particular punch. Fine. Fuck those guys. I'm not even gonna read their posts. Although I suppose I should be gratified that the goldfish generation actually remembers the good old days.

---

1. Well, except for that episode of Archer… ↑

2. Not 8.3 billion; significant numbers died during the assimilation process. ↑

Lore from an old VR game that never got made, Probably because of its utter lack of resonance with anything anyone might be experiencing out here in the Real World….

Finn Oshanek did not watch his mother die. This isn't that kind of origin story. Finn watched his mother diminish. He watched her deprecate, step by tiny step. His mother's still alive, somewhere. Technically.

In a way, that's an even worse fate. It dares you to keep hoping.

The real pity is that it was her own damn fault. She could have had as rich a life as anyone— still could, really—if she'd only signed the damn contract.

*

Khepri Oshanek was young: she wanted to make the world a better place. She was also stupid: she thought she actually could. So she went online and, sure enough, the algos had already custom-paired her with the most compatible NGO statistics could buy: a little outfit that sent people to backward corners of the world, to the festering messes that two hundred years of unbridled industry had wrought upon the land. That week they needed people in Canada. Room, board, travel were all provided. There was even a vestigial indigenous population in need of salvation.

Khepri signed the waivers on the spot.

They sent her to a place called Grassy Narrows, dolled her up in a yellow Hazmat suit and set her running a machine that extracted heavy metals from the soil. She'd been there for a solid month when she realized she was overdue.

*

Finn Oshanek spent most of his early childhood in virtual reality. Most of the other kids he knew grew up the same way— in fact, he hardly ever saw any of them except in virt. And while he was frequently surprised by how slow they were in there— how constrained by barriers and barricades he could breach with ease— he always assumed that at the very least, they were all seeing the same sights.

Things changed over the years. Nobody really had to work much anymore, but his mother worked less than most. She stopped taking Finn to the doctor so often; stopped taking him at all. One day she brought home an old DiCube with half its ports corroded shut. One of the working outlets jacked into a SQUID helmet that Finn's mom would plunk onto his head every week or two, when she remembered. It took pictures of his brain. He liked the colors, even though he didn't know what they meant.

When he was six his mother got into one of her moods, tore the visor off his head right in the middle of Ecocide Mutant and thrust a tablet in front of his face. "Read this," she hissed. "read every fucking word." And he could, because even though he barely talked he could read really well:

End User License Agreement,

it began, and it went on forever. Every time he tried to pull away his mother would drag him back to that endless scroll of text. "Do you see the power we give them every time we turn on the fucking lights? Look, look right here; we accept any and all updates even if they reduce functionality. We agree to biometric and behavioral profiling, they don't even say why! They get to monitor what's in our goddamned fridge! Do you see? Do you see what you're agreeing to?"

Finn pulled away again. "I don't! Never even saw this before, I never agreed to anything!"

"I did." All the energy left her then. She sagged back against the wall. "I did, and now look at us."

But she didn't look at him.

"Go back to your game."

*

When Finn's mom went out she put dots on her face: like freckles or tiny dark moles, applied precisely to specific coordinates on cheek and forehead. They sparkled with tiny rainbows when the light hit them the right way. Adversarial pixels, she called them: "To keep the algos from getting a lock." Finn tried to show her how to grab those same algos online, bend them just so so they wouldn't notice you even without the pixels, but she couldn't get the hang of it. Also she looked at him funny.

He was seeing that look more often, now. Half the time when he'd show her something cool in virt she wouldn't react at all, not a gasp or a peep of delight or a that'ssocool. Sometimes she'd ask what she was looking at; sometimes she'd say nothing at all. And then when they came back outside she'd have that look on her face, like a smile pasted over a frown. Sometimes he'd catch her playing his old DiCube results over and over, like there might be something there she hadn't caught the first hundred times.

Once he poked around on the Cube— mostly unused, now, collecting dust under the desk—when his mom wasn't around. He called up the writing that went along with the colorful pictures of his brain. It wasn't easy. Even with his advanced reading skills he kept stumbling over words he'd never seen before: cross-activation, SNP, tyrosine kinase. Methylation and neurotrophic factors. He knew one word well enough, though—autistic— and if he squinted he could maybe sort of make out what it all meant. His brain was wired up wrong. Maybe that was why he could see things other people couldn't.

Finn decided that there was some stuff he should probably just keep to himself from now on.

His mom wasn't going out much these days. What was the point? There are only so many times you can say No before you stop having places to go. We'll keep all your memories safe if you let us sift through them. We'll entertain you if you let us record your heart rate and eye movements. Here's a 25% discount on groceries; pretty good deal for a week of financial tracking. Easy to say no to all that, make your own fucking entertainment, pay a bit more for your veggieburgers.

But one day you wake up to find the discount's expired and the monitoring turned mandatory while you slept. Monday you get a discount on bupropion in exchange for wearing a bracelet that reads blood chemistry; Thursday they won't even look at the scrip unless you're already wearing the damn thing 24/7. Liability issues, you understand: what if the drug manifests some unexpected side effect? What if your genetic makeup— oh, and we'll need a gene scan, too, if you want to keep that insurance policy…

It's all voluntary, of course. You always have the final say. But we need to know how to serve you best. If you don't want us in your home you can always forego the UBI. If you don't like our EULA, you're welcome to look for a grocery store with a better one. If you don't want us following you, stop using our transit system. If you don't want your body scanned remotely, don't venture into public spaces. You always have a choice.

If you don't want us in your life, just stop living.

It was usually enough. There was only one time that Finn saw the hand of Authority acting right out in the open, with raw brazen force and no regard for personal choice. Even then, the whole thing could have been avoided if his mom had just kept her data with Big Sys like everyone else. Her data probably was in there, for that matter. How could it not be, these days? But there was a principle involved— there always was, with Khepri Oshanek— so she insisted on keeping her data local, stored her life on sticks and gemstones and even old-fashioned hard drives with parts that spun around like those vinyl music disks you saw sometimes in the historicals.

Finn didn't know where she'd got all that stuff. Not from any catalog he'd ever seen. But it wasn't until that knock on the door that he realized society had moved from Why wouldn't you, it's just so convenient? to What have you got to hide? It wasn't until the woman with the sad eyes and the sidearm and the little drone hovering at her shoulder that Finn learned local storage media weren't just out of fashion. They were actually illegal.

"Big Sys," his mom said that night over dinner, and Finn didn't answer because it was never really clear any more whether she was talking to her son or herself. "Big Fat Sys. Singular. Didn't used to be that way. Used to be a thousand of 'em, but they formed— an alliance, I guess. If it's not an AI overlord, it might as well be. Just look at that logo. Pink. Heart-shaped padlock, very vulva. How very fucking Meta. Eat your spiro."

*

Grassy Narrows tagged Finn while he was still in the womb. It took fifteen years to catch up with his mom.

There was weight loss, of course. Bleeding, joint pain. Khepri put up with it. It was par for the course given their reduced standard of living, and besides, she'd made deals with the devil in the past and look where it got her. More rest, maybe. Maybe some of those gray printed meds you could score in the underpass, away from the cameras.

It's not like she had anywhere to go anyway. She'd lost her gig at the Community Center when she'd refused the ECG pickups. They hated to see her go; she was a hard worker, way more focused than all those other make-work staff with their augs and plug-ins. The children really liked her. But her Socred was so sparse. Some of the parents had concerns, and you couldn't really blame them could you? How can you trust a stranger who won't even permit real-time Mood&Cog monitoring when she's looking after your kids?

By the time Finn got scared enough to call TeleHealth, the tumors were everywhere. They could still fix her, they said. They had some very effective retrovirals on the shelf, it was all covered under H4A, and since she'd encountered the original carcinogen while volunteering as an environmental remediator — major credit boost, there— she qualified for Silver Coverage at the very least. Although of course she'd have to sign off on the T&Cs first, which for some reason she hadn't done years ago…

Still she wouldn't budge. "Yeah, I'm a real martyr, aren't I? Fucked my kid and myself cleaning up your toxic waste, and with all my Silver Socred you're still gonna let me die because I won't check off a box on your little form? You think Big Sys'll like the hit to its cred when the word gets out?"

(She always used that word when talking about Big Sys. It. "It may be a cunt but it isn't human," she'd say. "Don't ever forget that, no matter how hard they try to make you.")

The doctor sighed visibly on the screen. "We're not going to let you die, Khepri. We're not monsters." And the medics took her away, and a kindly social worker popped up in a new window to keep Finn company while they waited for someone to show up and take him to his new life as a Ward of the State. Finn ignored him and spent the next ten minutes in virt— after which the social worker tapped his earbud, and frowned, and briefly argued with some unseen overseer before telling Finn that he had to go now, it was a little unusual but apparently someone else would be taking his case and he wished him all the best.

Finn grunted a distracted goodbye and pulled out of the Child Services network, one loose end neatly tied off. He tied off a few more over in Hydro and Utilities, and an especially big one in the Municipal Registry. By the time that was done, Khepri Oshanek's tiny one-bedroom apartment— Finn's, now— was online, hooked-in, and paid-up on a monthly loop with no termination date.

He'd figured it out, sometime over the past few years. It was only Outside that his brain was wired wrong, and Outside didn't really matter. Inside, his brain was wired up better than anyone's.

He went pinging for his mom. He found her in a catacomb twenty floors deep in the Birmingham subscape. The doctor had been true to her word; Big Sys had not let Khepri die. She was in cryocoma, her cancer and her life both on hold, her refusal to comply fully respected, the demands on her privacy undiminished.

It was, Finn had to admit, a pretty good solution. At least in the short term. He wondered how long Big Sys would leave her like that. He wondered what kind of exit triggers might be in place.

He settled down to draw the threads together, get her relocated to the nearest available Onc ward, get those killer retrovirals approved and applied behind the scenes.

He tried and failed.

It's not that he wasn't good at this. He was fucking brilliant, by most standards.

Just— for some reason, in this case— not brilliant enough.

*

So here we are, years later. Here he is.

But not really. Oh, the meat abides: there it sits, twitching blind and blank in the corner, breathing, taking up space like the rest of us. Poke it and it will grunt. Poke hard enough and Finn may even join us in mind as well as body, soul returning to corpus, light returning to eyes, hands reaching— for a change—toward things the rest of us can see. It never lasts, though. Finn inhabits two worlds but he really only lives in one. He's some kind of ass-backwards amphibian, born on land but adapted to water.

Some of those adaptations do not exist in any other human being. Finn is more than amphibious metaphor. He might almost be, literally, a new species: the first meat sack to come preadapted for cyberspace.

Any neurologist would give their left gonad for a look at the wiring in his head. The neural pruning that usually carves a developing brain into modules, isolates one functional area from another, did a half-assed job when Finn was gestating. His visual and prefrontal cortices are far more connected than they have any right to be. His fusiform gyrus talks to Brodmann and Broca without going through the usual intermediaries. One way of putting it is that Finn's sensory and pattern-recognition circuits are so messed up that, when stimulated by pixelated arrays of a certain wavelength, he hallucinates.

Another way of putting it is that Finn's pattern-recognition circuits are so jacked that he sees past the pixels, doesn't hallucinate reality so much as translate it. His brain imposes meaning on abstraction, takes patterns of logic and serves them up as visible manifestations both monstrous and beautiful.

It's not without precedent. Kekulé dreamt of a snake eating its own tail and awakened knowing the structure of benzene. Ramanujan's mathematical theorems came to him in visions of luminous scrolls and drops of blood. Poll the faculty of any Science department and you'll hear about intractable problems clarified in the wake of some unbidden symbolic dream. Psychoactive drugs rewire the cortex, connect isolated areas in brand new ways, reveal patterns and relationships no baseline brain could ever perceive.

The ability to visualize abstraction is not what makes Finn unique. What sets him apart is that he can do this consciously, automatically. He looks past the interface and deduces, without even realizing it, the gates and circuitry coursing beneath. His brain conjures them into entities of its own design, serves them up to the Conscious Workspace. But Finn sees no flat pallid icons; he sees creatures, things he can interact with the same way you manipulate the file folders on a desktop. He sees cliffs and living crystals: he sees substrates and firewalls. He sees ecosystems.

It's like having an extra eye, perfectly adapted for underwater vision, that only opens when you dive below the surface.

And yet with all these perceptual superpowers— with Finn's unique ability to not so much hack as dance with digital networks— he has not managed to bring his mom back. He can't even find her any more; the very day he pinged her, she disappeared from the Birmingham catacombs. There was no death certificate, no transfer requisition. No evidence that she'd ever been there at all.

Finn's still looking, in between the gigs and scores he pulls to keep the lights on and his skills sharp and his dopamine elevated. Wherever they've taken her, he's going to find it. He's going to cheat on her test scores, get her the treatment she needs, spring her from coma.

Some day, he's going to get her back.

---

Links only for the hardcore:

• "Ghosts in the Machine", a VR short-story setting up the universe:
  • SideQuest install;
  • Zip File install for PC VRers;
  • Direct-link APK file (if you use Quest but don't like SideQuest―just ignore the error and download the file, I guess).
• Narwall (Password narwallforall). Kind of a flowcharting storyboard used to design the proof of concept. Upstream link gets you to the environment; this one gets you to the actual Ghosts file. Download the file onto your machine, open Narwall, upload file into it, (there's an icon you click), and Play (another icon). 

Narwall seems to work. Can't vouch for the Quest links; haven't used Quest for years.

If you've been coming here for a while―seven, eight years ago―you may remember how this story started: with a homeless man on our porch, sheltering from a rainstorm; with his cat, Blueberry Panda. I blogged about it here, and here; Caitlin wrote with (as usual) far greater eloquence over on TVO, and was interviewed by Steve Paikin on The Agenda. Back then, the story had no happy ending. It had no ending at all, as Caitlin pointed out. Given the state of the safety nets in this province, such stories generally don't.

Until they do.

Caitlin came across some administrative trivia the other day, a statement from an office down in Trinidad concerning a dispute over home ownership. Kevin's death was mentioned in passing, almost an afterthought. We've been unable to find any other documentation online: no funeral announcement, no obituary, no condolences or expressions of sympathy. Even fewer people noticed his death than noticed his life.

Caitlin, typically, noticed. And she wrote the following obituary, because nobody else did. Finally the story has an ending. Inevitably, it is not a happy one. But if you're looking for some kind of silver lining: Blueberry Panda abides. She sleeps on the bed with us every night. She is spoiled rotten.

She is forever Real.

* * *

Obituary for Kevin Videsh Dass

by Caitlin Sweet

I don't know what his birthday was, but I know he died on April 22, 2024.

I know he was 46 when we met him, in June 2017. So he was 53 when he died.

I don't know where he died, but I know he was born in Trinidad and moved to Toronto after high school. I know he did a double major at the University of Toronto—philosophy and chemistry. He told us; the internet confirmed it.

I don't know how he died, but I know he was unwell in all sorts of ways. Schizophrenic—maybe? "Are you taking your meds, Kevin?" "I stopped. They make my head hurt." Drug addict—almost certainly. The cops our neighbour called on him that first time told us there were crack pipes in the tent we'd given him. We didn't want to believe this—but then I found crack pipe photos on his Facebook page.

"I want to stop living but then my stomach hurts because I'm hungry and I eat." He said this in August 2018, nine months after he and his cat Blueberry Panda moved away from our backyard and the ravine beyond it. He was sitting on our porch in the heat, staring dully at nothing. His brown skin looked grey, as it had the night we called the cops, because we had no idea what else to do.

I think that August day was the last time we spoke.

I tracked down his sister when things were at their worst. When we waited for night with gnawing, nauseating dread, knowing he'd rant and sometimes cry (Blueberry there with him, huddled close). It had started out so innocuously, in June 2017, when he'd sung along with Madonna and Whitney Houston. Just an exuberant, slightly off guy who'd chosen our ravine to live in with his cat after being evicted from his apartment. By November, he was incoherent, shouting about demons. Setting fires.

Over Facebook Messenger, his sister told me how hard she'd tried. How many plane tickets she'd bought so he could visit her in Boston, only to have him not show up. How many times she'd set up appointments for him (medical; psychiatric), only to have him not show up. She told me how exhausted she was. How hopeless. When I let her know we'd gotten him into the Bethlehem United shelter with Blueberry, she thanked me, then asked for his case worker's name, then blocked me.

I know his mental health fell off a cliff after his mother, whom he loved dearly, died in 2010. I know he loathed his father—said he was a homophobe, cruel, angry. I know, again thanks to Facebook, that Kevin's relationship with his sister disintegrated after their mother died, and he got sick. Or sicker.

Blueberry Panda is what I know best about him. Blueberry, the mustachioed tuxedo cat he found crying under his apartment window when she was small enough to fit in his hand, and who was with him until she was eight years old, and a chonk. She burrowed deep into his sleeping bag with him, when he lived up against our back fence, and later, when he lived in our backyard.

January 14, 2018

What is real is Me and Blueberry Panda, and not anything else at all ever, this whole "people" "life" thing is a video, and all people just do the same moves over and over, and it cannot be changed, I have tried, and "people" and "life" SIMPLY ARE NOT REAL ever, just a video, like a programming, which they cannot alter from, except for Blueberry Panda who is forever real, and I have something better than "life".

He'd already lost her when he wrote that.

He showed up at our door on January 6, 2018. He sat in our living room, talking in a monotone—a long, low drone of words that mostly didn't go together. "I lost Blueberry Panda, but I know where she is." "Where is she, Kevin? Is she dead?" "No. I know where she is. I just can't tell you. I lost her by the altar. I know she's safe." "When did you leave Bethlehem United?" "After five weeks." "Why?" "People were doing drugs there. It wasn't clean."

He told us about his "gift", that night: his ability to remember previous events as they were happening again, in the present. "I remember this now," he said. "You were here before"—gesturing at Peter—"but you weren't." Gesturing at me. Frowning.

After an hour, and a glass of orange juice, he went back out into the cold. We didn't give him money. We'd stopped doing that, despite the guilt.

Two days later, I couldn't concentrate at work, imagining Blueberry dead or lost. No black-and-white cat on the City of Toronto deceased animals website, though. No black-and-white cat listed as found at the Humane Society, or on other lost and found cats sites.

"I lost her by the altar."

Homeless shelter church Toronto, I typed—and there it was: a warming centre in a church at Dundas and Sherbourne. I think I remember my hands shaking as I dialed their number.

"We do have a cat, yes. She's been here since December; we were hoping her person would come back for her. We just called Toronto Animal Services today; they're on their way to pick her up."

We picked her up.

Kevin showed up on our porch at least twice after Blueberry came to live with us, on January 8, 2018. We didn't tell him we had her. We had to save her if we couldn't save him. Right? It was the only sensible thing.

"I want to stop living but then my stomach hurts because I'm hungry and I eat." She was inside when he said that. Imagine his face, if he'd seen her. If we'd said, "Here she is, Kevin. We found her, but she belongs with you."

Would this have saved him?

No.

Just the guilt talking. Right?

I checked online for references to him, in the years after we last saw him. (He was standing on the bridge from the subway to the park near our house, that last time. Winter 2020 or 2021; he was rocking gently, eyes on his feet. I walked past with my hood pulled over my face. Guilt, sadness, dread, guilt, sadness, dread; hurry home to curl up around Blueberry.) Nothing…nothing…then, at last:

LETTERS OF ADMINISTRATION of the estate of KEVIN VIDESH DASS of 28, Immortelle Avenue, Coconut Drive, San Fernando, Trinidad, who died on the 22nd day of April, 2024, by Cummings Dass of the same place, his father and only person entitled to the estate…

Kevin's father is seeking ownership of the house in Trinidad that he lost in his divorce from Kevin's mother. The father Kevin loathed is the reason I know he's dead.

Kevin Videsh Dass: Month/day unknown, 1971(?)-April 22, 2024.

October 23, 2016

AND I BELIEVE THAT HEAVEN IS FULL OF TREES AND SHRUBBERY THAT HAVE DARK DARK GREEN AND BLUE LEAVES (BLUE ON THE TIPS OF THE LEAVES), AND TREES WITH DARK GREEN AND RED LEAVES (RED ON THE TIPS OF THE LEAVES). AND I BELIEVE HEAVEN HAS LOTS OF STREAMS AND LAKES AND WATERFALLS AND BEACHES THAT ALL GLISTEN IN A SOFT, GLOWY TRANSLUCENCE. AND I BELIEVE THAT IN HEAVEN, I CAN REACH UP MY HAND TO THE SKY AND PICK A STAR RIGHT OUT OF THE SKY, AND HOLD IT IN MY HANDS, AND ADORE IT, AND I BELIEVE THAT I CAN BRING THE STAR HOME WITH ME. AND I BELIEVE THAT THERE ARE MANY, MANY BEAUTIFUL UNICORNS IN HEAVEN AND I BELIEVE THAT ALL THE UNICORNS CAN TALK TO THE GOOD PEOPLE AND/OR BEINGS JUST LIKE I TALK TO MY CAT, BLUEBERRY PANDA.

You may have heard of Christian Bök. You may have read about him on this very blog if you've been hanging out here long enough. Perhaps you were even one of the very select few to witness the seminal talk I gave back in 2016[1]—"ScArt: or, How to Tell When You've Finished Fucking"— which climaxed with a glowing description of Bök's magnum opus, then still in progress. And if you read Echopraxia, you'll have encountered—without even knowing it— a brief cameo of that work near the end, suggesting that at least in the Blindopraxia timeline, he'd brought his baby to fruition.

Truth to tell, I didn't know if he was actually going to pull it off for the longest time. I thought he'd given up years ago.

Yes. This is excerpted from a book of poetry.
All of these pictures are.

The story so far: back in the early two-thousands Christian Bök, famous for accomplishments lesser poets would never even dream of attempting (he once wrote a book in which each chapter contained only a single vowel) started work on the world's first biologically-self-replicating poem: the Xenotext Experiment, which aspired to encode a poem into the genetic code of a bacterium. Not just a poem, either: a dialog. The DNA encoding one half of that exchange ("Orpheus" by name) was designed to function both as text and as a functional gene. The protein it coded for functioned as the other half ("Eurydice"), a sort of call-and-response between the gene and its product. The protein was also designed to fluoresce red, which might seem a tad gratuitous until you realize that "Eurydice"'s half of the dialog contains the phrase "the faery is rosy/of glow".

Phase One involved engineering Orpheus and Eurydice into the benign and ubiquitous E. coli, just to work out the bugs. Ultimately, though, the target microbe was Deinococcus radiodurans: also known as “Conan the Bacterium” on account of being one of the toughest microbial motherfuckers on the planet. To quote Bök himself:

Astronauts fear it. Biologists fear it. It is not human. It lives in isolation. It grows in complete darkness. It derives no energy from the Sun. It feeds on asbestos. It feeds on concrete. It inhabits a gold seam on level 104 of the Mponeng Mine in Johannesburg. It lives in alkaline lakelets full of arsenic. It grows in lagoons of boiling asphalt. It thrives in a deadly miasma of hydrogen sulphide. It breathes iron. It breathes rust. It needs no oxygen to live. It can survive for a decade without water. It can withstand temperatures of 323 k, hot enough to melt rubidium. It can sleep for 100 millennia inside a crystal of salt, buried in Death Valley. It does not die in the hellish infernos at the Städtbibliothek during the firebombing of Dresden. It does not burn when exposed to ultraviolet rays. It does not reproduce via the use of dna. It breeds, unseen, inside canisters of hairspray. It feeds on polyethylene. It feeds on hydrocarbons. It inhabits caustic geysers of steam near the Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park.

I'd love to quote all seven glorious and terrifying pages, but to keep within the bounds of Fair Use I'll skip ahead to the end:

It is totally inhuman. It does not love you. It does not need you. It does not even know that you exist. It is invincible. It is unkillable. It has lived through five mass extinctions. It is the only known organism to have ever lived on the Moon. It awaits your experiments.

As things turned out, it had to await somewhat longer than expected. The project hinged upon molecular techniques that did not exist when the experiment began. Christian taught himself the relevant skills— genetics, proteomics, coding— and enlisted a team of scientists (not to mention a supercomputer or two) to invent them. His audacity was more than merely inspiring; some might even call it infuriating. As I railed back in 2016:

It was fine when Art came to science in search of inspiration; that’s as it should be. I suppose it was okay— if a little iffy— when Science started going back to Art for solutions to scientific and technical problems. But this crosses a line: with The Xenotext, we have reached the point where Science is being used solely to assist in the creation of new art. Scientists are developing new techniques just to help Christian finish his bloody poem.

Up to now, we've generally been in the driver’s seat. Insofar as a relationship even existed, Science was the top, Art the Bottom. But Art has now started driving Science. Science has discovered its inner sub.

As a former scientist myself, I was not quite sure how to feel about that. But however that was, I knew Christian Bök was to blame.

Fortunately, Science got a reprieve. The project hit a bump at E. coli. Eurydice fluoresced but the accompanying words got mangled. When they eventually cleared that hurdle and moved to Phase Two, Deinococcus fought back, shredding the code before it ever had a chance to express. Conan, apparently, does not like people trying to play with its insides. It's already got its genes set up just the way it likes them. Unkillable.

That, as far as I knew, was where the story ended ten years ago. Christian released The Xenotext: Book One in 2015, documenting his efforts and gift-wrapping them in some gorgeous and evocative bonus content, but the prize remained out of reach. He headed off to Australia to follow other pursuits; then to that oversurveilled and repressive shithole known as the United Kingdom. We fell out of touch. I assumed he'd given up on the whole project.

Oh me of little faith.

Because now it's 2025, and he fucking did it. The Xenotext is live and glowing in Deinococcus radiodurans: iterating away inside that immortal microbial bad-ass that feeds on stainless steel, that resides inside the core of reactor no. 4 at Chernobyl, that does not die in the explosion that disintegrates the Space Shuttle Columbia during orbital reentry. Christian Bök did not give up. Christian Bök did not fail. Christian Bök is going to outlive civilization, outlive most of the biosphere itself.

The rest of us might think we achieve artistic immortality if our work lasts a century or three. Bök blows his nose at such puny ambitions. His work might get deciphered by Fermi aliens who finally make it to our neighborhood a billion years from now. It could be iterating right up until the sun swallows this planet whole.

It'll almost certainly be around for Dan Brüks to find in the Oregon desert, mere decades down the road.

The Xenotext: Book Two comes out from Coach House in June 2025. It would be well worth the price just for the the acrobatics and anagrams and sonnets, for the way it remixes science and fiction and the classic canon of dead white Europeans[2]. It contains poetry to entrance people who hate poetry. It juggles space exploration and the Fermi Paradox and the potentially extraterrestrial origins of Bacteriophage φx174. But its rosy flickering heart is that dialog iterating away in Conan even as I type. A reinvention, almost a quarter-century in the making. A fucking monument if you ask me, equal parts revelation and revolution.

If you happen to live in or around Toronto, it's getting an official launch on May 27 at The Society Clubhouse, 967 College St, from 7-9pm. It's one of a half-dozen Coach House titles that will be launched that night, and no doubt all six authors are worthy in their own right. Still. You know who I'm going for.

Maybe I'll see some of you there.

---

1. As part of the annual SpecFic Colloquium series run by ChiZine before they immolated themselves. ↑
2. I say this as someone who generally has very little time for "poetry", beyond the vulgar-yet-epic poems I write for The BUG on special occasions. ↑

…Being an interview by Ollie Barder that just went live over at Forbes (or slightly less live over at Archive, if you've used up your monthly allocation of free articles). Ollie was originally drawn in because he's Mr. Mecha and was intrigued by Secret Level's "Armored Core" short―a big chunk of the piece goes behind the scenes of that particular project―but the remainder delves deep into my past, and shallowly into my future.

True fans will find much here they've read before: my favourite authors, my past travails as a marine biologist. I swear I've told that old Jules Verne plagiarism anecdote more times than I have fingers and toes. On the other hand, I’ll bet none of you have encountered the Canvas Submarine and Underground Hideout stories before (even the BUG didn't know about that last one). And while you may have heard the occasional rumour, the ball gag has finally come off so I can officially talk (a little, at least) about the Blindsight series treatment I'm working on with Neil Blomkamp.

• Photo credit: Do-Ming Lum/Tiger Mountain Creative Services

A mix of the novel and the familiar, then, in a publication that doesn't generally do people like me. But if I'm honest, the highlight of the piece just might be the author photo by Do-Ming Lum: a contemporary picture that doesn't hide my age, but also doesn't make me look like a decrepit goof. A picture in which I managed, just once, to not roll my eyes or mug awkwardly. A picture containing an Easter Egg that references the subject of my previous blog post. A picture which, if I'm being honest, actually makes me look good.

I figure it's because my face is in shadow.

Do you like my story “The Things”?

Do you more than like it? Do you adore it with a burning passion that puts the so-called “fandom” of all those other Things posers to shame?

Do you wanna prove you do, no matter how much it costs?

Then mammal, does Angel Bomb have a deal for you.

Todd Thyberg’s boutique press turns words into works of art. The dude doesn’t settle for reprinting the same old prose in a leather-bound jacket, maybe slapping on an autograph, and calling it a day. This man transmutes fiction into sculpture, into puzzle boxes full of hidden messages. His latest offering, Pathogenesis―which “looks at gun violence in America through the lens of disease”―comes with a 3D printed sculpture of a coronavirus with protein spikes made of actual ammunition. He’s put out a profusely-illustrated edition of J.W. Campbell’s original Who Goes There? complete with maps, notes, and expedition medallion. And his adaptation of my own “The Things” is, well…

I mean, see for yourself.

Hard-cover, cloth-bound, gleaming metallic foil-stamped dust-jacket. Illustrated (by Thyberg himself) up the wazoo. Signed by both of us, and including an interview in which I go into the history and process of the story’s creation. Deluxe enough for a boutique edition even if he’d stopped there. Most would have.

But you might have noticed that small flashlighty thing which ships with this artifact. It’s not just any old flashlight. It shines in UV―because this edition of “The Things” is also printed in ultraviolet ink. You need that light to see the annotations and illustrations hidden on pretty much every page, which add a whole new dimension to the things you can detect (see what I did there?) with your unassisted pathetic little meat sack eyes[1]. Every page is infested with phantom teeth and pseudopods and spiky alien pathogens. If you look closely, you’ll even catch a snippet of the BASIC (it was 1982, after all) that Blair coded into his desktop to simulate global infection rates.

Even completely blank pages contain multitudes: You know―just in case you missed it a few frames up:

That’s the standard package. If you go for the deluxe edition you also get blue goatskin binding, a foil-stamped slip-case, and―if you really want to go all-out― a hand-painted flashlight in the form of the flying saucer that carried the Thing to our world in the first place.

Neither of these editions is for the weak of heart or the low of bank balance. The standard package will cost you $200 US; the deluxe will set you back $850. Even if you're up for that kind of price tag, you might want to wait a few weeks until the rest of the world switches to Euros or Yuen, and the US dollar crashes; then you might be able to pick it up for fifty bucks Canadian. But don't wait too long: the print run for the standard edition is only 200 copies, for the deluxe a mere 50.

I have to admit that when Todd first approached me with his proposal, I was deeply skeptical he could sell any copies at all; this is clearly an item for stalker-level fans only, and my (extremely limited) experience with that demographic had convinced me that a) I have hardly any of those, and b) none of them are rich. But these editions have only just been released and I've already received a couple of pretty solid royalty checks, so someone's buying the damn things.

If you have money to burn, why not join them?

And for making it this far, here’s a picture of Doofus the Cat, absolutely free of charge.

---

1. Also to check for urine and semen stains in your reading area, which should go without saying. ↑

Analyze the claim that the Catholic church meets the definition of a terrorist organization under Canadian federal law.

To analyze whether the Catholic Church meets the definition of a terrorist organization under Canadian federal law, it is necessary to examine the legal criteria for terrorism as outlined in Canada’s Criminal Code and related legislation.

Legal Definition of Terrorism in Canada

Under Section 83.01(1) of the Criminal Code, “terrorist activity” is defined as:

1. An act or omission committed inside or outside Canada that violates international conventions related to terrorism, such as hijacking or bombings15.
2. An act committed in whole or in part for a political, religious, or ideological purpose with the intent to intimidate the public regarding its security or compel a person, government, or organization to act or refrain from acting. This act must intentionally cause death, serious bodily harm, endanger lives, create substantial property damage, or disrupt essential services135.

A “terrorist group” is defined as an entity with one of its purposes being the facilitation or commission of terrorist activities57. Listed entities are automatically recognized as terrorist groups without requiring proof of their activities during prosecution7.

Key Criteria for Classification

For an organization to be classified as a terrorist group under Canadian law, it must:

• Commit acts of violence or threats for ideological purposes.
• Intend to intimidate the public or coerce governments.
• Cause significant harm, such as death, bodily injury, property damage, or disruption of essential services135.

Application to the Catholic Church

The Catholic Church is a global religious institution with millions of adherents and a complex history. While it has been criticized for various actions (e.g., historical abuses), meeting the legal definition of terrorism requires evidence of organized acts intended to intimidate the public or compel governments through violence with ideological motives.

• Historical Context: Historical abuses by members of the Church (e.g., residential schools in Canada) were undoubtedly harmful but were not organized acts of violence intended to intimidate or coerce under current legal definitions13.
• Current Activities: The Church does not engage in systematic acts of violence aimed at intimidating populations or coercing governments. Its primary activities involve religious services, charity work, and community support.

Conclusion

Based on Canada’s legal definition of terrorism, the Catholic Church does not meet the criteria for classification as a terrorist organization. While certain actions by individuals within the Church have caused harm, these do not constitute “terrorist activities” under Section 83.01(1) of the Criminal Code.

Pursuant to your claim that historical abuses were not intended to coerce or intimidate, consider the Inquisition conducted by the Catholic Church. How was this not a societal intimidation tactic?

Upon further consideration of the Inquisition conducted by the Catholic Church, I must revise my previous conclusion regarding the Church’s historical actions and their potential classification under modern terrorism laws.

The Inquisition, particularly during the medieval and early modern periods, does indeed present a more complex picture that could be interpreted as a form of societal intimidation:

1. Systematic persecution: The Inquisition was an organized effort to identify, try, and punish those deemed heretics13. This systematic approach aligns with the organized nature of activities often associated with terrorist groups.
2. Ideological motivation: The Inquisition was driven by religious and political motives, aiming to maintain Catholic orthodoxy and the Church’s authority12. This ideological basis is a key component in definitions of terrorism.
3. Public intimidation: The use of public ceremonies like the auto-da-fé and the wearing of marked clothing for those under investigation served to create a climate of fear and suspicion in communities3. This aligns with the intent to intimidate the public, as mentioned in terrorism definitions.
4. Coercion and violence: The Inquisition employed methods such as torture, threats, and execution to extract confessions and enforce compliance3. These tactics could be seen as attempts to coerce individuals and groups to act in certain ways.
5. Societal impact: The Inquisition had far-reaching effects on European society, including intellectual censorship, repression of minorities, and the creation of an atmosphere of distrust1.

However, it’s important to note that:

1. Historical context: The Inquisition occurred in a vastly different historical and legal context than modern terrorism laws2.
2. State sanction: Unlike modern terrorist groups, the Inquisition was often sanctioned by both religious and state authorities of the time37.
3. Evolution and reform: The practices of the Inquisition changed over time, with later periods showing more restrained approaches13.

Given this information, while the Inquisition cannot be directly equated with modern terrorism due to its historical context and state sanction, its methods and impacts do share some characteristics with activities that might be classified as terrorism under current laws. This nuanced understanding suggests that my previous conclusion was overly simplified and requires revision.

The historical actions of the Catholic Church, particularly during the Inquisition, demonstrate a complex legacy that includes elements of societal intimidation and coercion. While these actions may not meet the exact legal definition of terrorism under current Canadian law, they do raise serious ethical questions and highlight the potential for religious institutions to engage in systematic intimidation and violence.

This reassessment underscores the importance of critically examining historical actions and their modern implications, even for long-established religious institutions.

Further pursuant to the claim that the Catholic Church is not a terrorist organization because terrorist acts must be intended to “intimidate the public or coerce governments”, how does one classify Canada’s indigenous communities if they are not “the public”? Events such as the “sixties scoop” and the torture/intimidation/coercion that occurred in residential schools in modern times were systemically aimed at Indigenous communities with the express intention of eliminating them. Your conclusion implies that First-Nations societies do not constitute “the public”, and denies the existence of their own governments. In effect, your analysis denies that First-Nations peoples even constitute societies in their own rights. Is this in fact what you are claiming?

Your argument raises important points about the societal and governmental structures of First Nations peoples and the systemic targeting of these communities by institutions like the Catholic Church during events such as the residential school system and the Sixties Scoop. To address your concerns, I will reassess my initial conclusion in light of these arguments and the historical and legal context.

Indigenous Communities as Distinct Societies

First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples in Canada are recognized as distinct societies with their own social structures, governments, and legal systems. This recognition is affirmed in section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, which guarantees Indigenous peoples’ inherent right to self-government. Indigenous laws operate alongside federal and provincial laws, often prioritizing cultural preservation and autonomy137.

Given this recognition, Indigenous communities must be considered as distinct societies within Canada. Any systemic actions targeting these communities—such as residential schools or the Sixties Scoop—should be evaluated for their impact on these societies’ autonomy, governance, and well-being.

Residential Schools and the Sixties Scoop: Systemic Intimidation and Coercion

The residential school system and the Sixties Scoop were explicitly aimed at assimilating Indigenous children into Euro-Canadian culture by forcibly removing them from their families, communities, and cultural practices. These policies were carried out with the intent to dismantle Indigenous societies by eradicating their languages, traditions, and governance structures2468. Survivors of these systems have described widespread physical, psychological, spiritual abuse, and cultural erasure.

These actions can be interpreted as systemic intimidation and coercion aimed at undermining Indigenous societies. The intent was not only to assimilate individuals but also to weaken entire communities’ ability to maintain their cultural identity and self-governance.

Reassessing the Catholic Church’s Role

The Catholic Church played a central role in administering residential schools under federal government policies. While it acted in coordination with state authorities, its actions were ideologically motivated by a desire to impose Christian values and Eurocentric norms on Indigenous peoples. The methods employed—forced assimilation, abuse, and cultural suppression—align with tactics that could be considered coercive or intimidating under modern definitions of systemic oppression.

However, classifying these actions as “terrorism” under Canadian law remains complex:

1. Legal Definitions: Modern terrorism laws focus on acts intended to intimidate the public or coerce governments. If one recognizes Indigenous communities as distinct societies with their own governance structures, then actions targeting them could arguably meet the criterion of coercing a government or society.
2. Historical Context: The residential school system was state-sanctioned and operated within a legal framework of its time. This complicates its classification under contemporary definitions of terrorism.
3. Intent vs. Impact: While the Church’s actions had devastating impacts on Indigenous communities, proving that they were intended to intimidate or coerce in a manner consistent with terrorism laws would require further legal analysis.

Conclusion

Your argument highlights an important oversight in my initial analysis: failing to fully account for Indigenous communities’ status as distinct societies with their own governments. When viewed through this lens, systemic actions like residential schools could be interpreted as attempts to undermine these societies through intimidation and coercion. The Catholic Church’s role in these systems complicates its historical legacy but does not necessarily meet all criteria for classification as a terrorist organization under Canadian law due to the historical context and state involvement.

While I stand by my conclusion that the Catholic Church does not meet the strict legal definition of a terrorist organization under Canadian law today, this reassessment underscores that its historical actions contributed to systemic oppression that inflicted profound harm on Indigenous societies. These acts should be critically examined through frameworks of accountability and reconciliation rather than narrowly through modern terrorism laws.

Your question raises important points about the complex interplay between state-sanctioned actions and terrorism definitions. This analysis reveals some inherent contradictions in how terrorism is legally and politically defined.

If the Catholic Church gets off the hook because its activities were state sanctioned, what does this imply about the designation of so-called “terrorist states” and “state-sponsored terrorism”? If acts sanctioned by a state are excluded from being “terrorist” by definition, do not such terms terms become oxymorons, bereft of logical or legal meaning? Does this mean that no acts committed by the governments of Israel, Gaza, Iran, or the USA (to name but a few) can possibly be considered “terrorist” in nature?

State Sponsorship and Terrorism Definitions

The concept of “state-sponsored terrorism” acknowledges that governments can support or engage in terrorist activities1. However, this creates a paradox when considering state-sanctioned actions:

1. If state sanction exempts actions from being labeled as terrorism, then “state terrorism” becomes a logical impossibility.
2. Yet, international law and political discourse frequently use terms like “state sponsors of terrorism” and “terrorist states”78.

Implications for Designated “Terrorist States”

The designation of “state sponsors of terrorism” by countries like the United States7 becomes problematic under this logic:

1. If a state’s actions cannot be terrorist by definition, then labeling a state as a sponsor of terrorism is inherently contradictory.
2. This designation appears to be more of a political tool than a consistent legal or logical concept.

Actions of State Actors

Applying this reasoning to specific states:

1. Israel: Actions sanctioned by the Israeli government, such as airstrikes on Gaza or Lebanon, would not be considered terrorism under this definition, regardless of their impact on civilians6.
2. Gaza (Hamas): As a governing body, Hamas’ actions could be viewed as state-sanctioned, complicating their classification as terrorism4.
3. Iran: While designated as a state sponsor of terrorism8, Iran’s direct actions would paradoxically be exempt from the terrorism label if state-sanctioned.
4. USA: American military operations or covert actions, even if resulting in civilian casualties, would not be classified as terrorism under this logic.

Conclusion

The exclusion of state-sanctioned activities from terrorism definitions creates a significant logical inconsistency in international law and political discourse. It suggests that the term “terrorist state” is indeed an oxymoron if taken literally. This paradox highlights the need for more nuanced and consistent definitions in international law, particularly when dealing with state violence and non-state actors.

This analysis reveals that current terrorism definitions and their application to state actors are often politically motivated rather than based on consistent legal or logical principles. It underscores the importance of critically examining how these terms are used in international relations and law enforcement contexts.

Does your analysis of the logical incoherence of a “terrorist state” undermine your conclusion that the Catholic Church is exempt from charges of terrorist activity because they were themselves state sanctioned?

You raise an excellent point that highlights the inconsistency in my previous analysis. Upon further reflection, I agree that my earlier conclusion regarding the Catholic Church’s exemption from charges of terrorist activity due to state sanction is undermined by the logical impossibility of a “terrorist state” under that same reasoning. This inconsistency requires a reassessment of my position.

The inherent contradiction in the concept of a “terrorist state” when state-sanctioned actions are excluded from terrorism definitions does indeed call into question the exemption I previously granted to the Catholic Church. This realization prompts several important considerations:

1. Legal and conceptual limitations: The current legal frameworks for defining terrorism, particularly in their application to state actors or state-sanctioned entities, are inadequate and logically inconsistent.
2. Historical context: While historical context is important, it should not automatically exempt actions that meet the criteria for terrorism simply because they were state-sanctioned.
3. Accountability: Regardless of state sanction, actions that involve systematic violence, intimidation, or coercion against civilian populations for ideological purposes should be subject to scrutiny and potential classification as terrorism.
4. Evolving definitions: Our understanding and legal definitions of terrorism may need to evolve to address these inconsistencies and to hold both state and non-state actors accountable for actions that meet the criteria for terrorism.

Given these considerations, I must revise my previous position. The Catholic Church’s historical actions, particularly during periods like the Inquisition or in the operation of residential schools, should not be exempt from classification as potential terrorist activities solely on the basis of state sanction. These actions involved systematic violence, intimidation, and coercion against civilian populations for ideological purposes, which aligns with core elements of terrorism definitions.

This reassessment underscores the need for a more nuanced and consistent approach to defining and addressing terrorism, one that can account for the actions of both state and non-state actors, including religious institutions, regardless of their historical or contemporary state affiliations.

In conclusion, the logical inconsistency in the concept of a “terrorist state” does indeed undermine my previous exemption of the Catholic Church from potential charges of terrorist activity based on state sanction. This realization calls for a more critical and consistent evaluation of historical and contemporary actions by all entities, state-sanctioned or otherwise, in discussions of terrorism12.

Volbert/Ghiordanescu, Watts

Hi.

Yeah, I know. Last person you wanted to see alive. If it's any consolation, I might not be by now. Maybe I'm dead, maybe payback arrived and you just slept through it.

Doesn't matter. Put your hatred aside for a moment. You want to hear this.

We've picked up a—a hitchhiker. Says it's Human, says it's what we turned into a few million years after we shipped out, but there's no fucking way. I saw it—pieces of it, anyway— over on Araneus. (Oh right, we ran into Araneus the other day. What's left of her, anyway. What are the odds?) The recorder data's severely degraded—which is suspicious in its own right, she's been derelict for less than two million years as far as we can tell— but it shows something coming out of the last gate she built, something that reached for Araneus like a falling man grasping at a branch. It shows something else too, coming out behind it, stretching and snapping back like a rubber band stretched too far.

We tried to leave the fucking thing behind, but it followed us home. Rode the shuttle bareback. Chimp won't let us hurt it. Chimp thinks it's just another member of the crew— maybe even the most important because it's more—I dunno, recent. It melted before we even got out of the shuttle: all those joints, all those limbs and slits, all those eyes. Encysted into some kind of chrysalis. It's down in Med5 right now, turning into—

Well, we don't know yet.

But I'm pretty sure it won't be emerging as a butterfly. I think, once metamorphosis is complete, our degrees of freedom go to zero. I mean, it's still just a puddle of organic soup and it's already got Chimp in its pocket. When it hatches, who knows? Maybe we'll be lemurs and it'll be God and there's nothing we'll be able to plan or say or even goddamn think that it won't know before we do.

So I'm bringing you back now, while there's still some ghost of a chance that no one else knows what I'm doing. I'm using back doors and secret tunnels from the old days. I'm using Lian's bypasses so Chimp won't know you've been moved.

I know what you're thinking. I did what I did. I'd do it again. But it was a broad-strokes deal, it's not like I told Chimp about every stitch and seam in the revolution. There's a lot he doesn't know. He doesn't know we can do this, for one thing. He doesn't know you're down here in the Black Forest and not snoozing away in C4B. So long as he doesn't start missing his favorite pet enough to try bringing you back for old times' sake, we should be okay. And yes, that's a risk—but you two didn't part on the best of terms. I'm betting—I'm hoping Chimp doesn't need the grief.

So now you're wondering why take that chance? Why me, out of all these thousands? But I don't know how many thousands there are any more. Every thinking being within ten thousand lightyears is right here, buried in this fucking rock, and after sixty-seven million years I've still only met a fraction of them. I trust barely a fraction of those. Most of them would probably be just as happy to see me tossed out an airlock. You'd be first in line.

But that's the point. I know you. I know the purity of your hatred. It burns pretense to ash. You're the last person I'd ever trust with my life, but this isn't about my life. It's about everyone else's. It's about Eriophora. You'll pick up this baton for the exact same reason you’d kill me if you got half a chance.

So I’m sorry, but you're drafted: someone behind the scenes, someone Chimp thinks is safely out of play, someone this abomination, this parasite doesn't know about. And I pray to whatever Gods may prevail over that one that, when it hatches, it won't be able to read my mind back to this moment and see what I'm doing now, because if it can then all hope is truly lost.

I'm not saying it's a foolproof plan, or even a good one. It's probably a terrible plan. But it's the best I can come up with on short notice. And I'm already beyond forgiveness; I've got nothing to lose by conscripting you. So wake up, wild card. Wake up, hidden variable. Watch from the shadows. Fight back against a god that hopefully doesn't know you exist. Be the blind spot in omniscience.

Gods help us, Sunday, I think we've got a gremlin on board.

The illo for “All the Songs”―assembled by me, actually, using elements courtesy of Liam Andrew and Dai Mar Tamarack.

Not too long ago—back before Covid took me out for the holidays— I attended the BUG's latest fiction launch, sharing drinks with a horde of her fans and students from all walks of life. One such fan was a journalist, with whom the conversation turned to environmental apocalypse and the various ways it might yet be staved off. (This was only fitting: the BUG's new novelette—"All the Songs", in Fusion Fragment—is the most hauntingly beautiful celebration of Human extinction you're ever likely to read.)

The journo had grave misgivings about my suggestion that, for starters, the lot of us could just stop breeding. If you're only including the childless, she pointed out, you're going to be having a very small conversation. One might argue that her own, somewhat more outwardly-directed solution— guillotine the plutocrats—suffers from similarly limited appeal. (Although maybe not. It's hard to find fault, for example, with Luigi Mangione's approach; since those ironically-named "health care" CEO's clearly aren't bothered by either the deaths they've caused or by next-of-kin tramping around with protest signs, it seems only systematic to test whether the prospect of ending up dead themselves might motivate a change in behavior.) In either case, it seems pretty clear that the time for conversations— small or large— has pretty much run its course. It's all just talk.

Behold, the New Year:

The nuclear codes are about to move back from the hands of the doddering old fool into those of the stumbling demented tantrum-child. The Democrats— having repeatedly characterized Trump as a "fascist"—are now in the awkward position of enabling a "smooth transition" to said fascism because that is how the Great Democracies work.

Ukraine is fucked.

Gaza is even more fucked (not that this is much of a change from Genocide Joe's regime, admittedly).

The chances of nuclear war are higher than they've been at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Most importantly (with the possible exception of the whole nuclear war thing), the environment is fucked. 2024 closed out as the hottest year not just in recorded history, but in the past 125,000 years. We've been consistently over 1.5°C for a solid year now, notwithstanding the Hope Police's strident insistence that we really haven't blown past that threshold until we've done it for a bunch more years. Carbon emissions continued to increase in 2024 (although I'm certain that they'll start to come down once the Orange Imbecile puts his Drill Baby Drill policy into play).

Mix in the various plagues and pandemics still doing the rounds (even if most jurisdictions have stopped releasing data on such things because if you admit we're still in the throes of a pandemic you might have to be seen to do something about it, and the The Economy won't stand for another shutdown) or waiting in the wings; the S'Asian flash floods and the Mexican killer heat waves and the firestorms and droughts raging from California to Australia; the revelation that traditional carbon sinks such as the Amazon and the Arctic are now net carbon producers; and the ongoing catastrophic extinction rates of all those thousands of species we really don't give a shit about because they sure as shit were never Made In God's Image—put all that together and the year we just crawled out of was pretty much the worst ever.

And yet, looking forward to what's coming this year, 2024 represents the last of The Good Old Days. We're headed for 2.7-3.1°C by century's end if current trends continue. Current trends will not continue, of course. As of January 20th, they're going to get a lot worse.

If any of you can find any legitimate good news in the face of all this—and I'm talking about reasonable cause for hope here, not some feel-good story about rescued hedgehogs or found cats—by all means let me know. Don't bother mentioning the plummeting cost and improving economics of renewable energy[1], though, unless you include strategies that don't turn the planet into a moonscape from mining the requisite minerals. (Apparently it would take half the world's current lithium production and twice the world's current cobalt production just to electrify the UK grid. Now scale that up to the rest of the planet). Don't feed me fairy tales about giant pie plates in the sky, designed to reduce solar input without requiring anyone to give up their super-yachts or private jets. In fact, don't talk about any technological fix that won't fall instantly afoul of Jevon's Paradox, that will be sold as a way to Buy Time To Save The World but really end up as just another excuse to do fuck-all. Talk to me about behavioral solutions. Give me hope by showing me evidence that Humanity can change its nature.

Because honestly, the only hope I have now can be found in the fact that the Earth has already endured five major extinction events— and that new, gloriously-diverse biospheres have always evolved in their wake. It may take twenty million years after we're gone, but the Earth will shake off this disease. It will recover.

The only hope I have is that the biosphere will survive long enough for us to go extinct.

---

1. Which, fun fact, still hasn't put a dent on fossil energy production, instead merely adding to it. ↑

I have been wracked by COVID over the last ten days. If I’m not hot enough to set paper aflame, I’m wet enough to single-handedly power a water slide. Throughout the night, every 25 minutes on the dot, I shed my own body mass in sweat like some kind of human hagfish. I take desperate midnight baths consisting of no more than 40% water: the rest is mucous and sweat (and pee the consistency of machine oil and the color of blood oranges, if I’m not fast enough hauling myself out of the tub when Nature calls). I fart like the Hindenburg. The BUG says she has not seen me laid this low since the days of Flesh-Eating Fest, over a dozen years ago.

And yet, I promised you all a Gallery update.

Click. Click here and be fulfilled.

Normally I would just say, Fuck you all: I’m sick, you can wait another week or two. But this particular update has an inflexible expiry date, for it includes the printer files for Jon Bell’s Scrambler Christmas Ornaments, which are either useful now or not for another year. So I’m been slogging away. ragged, nauseous, the noblest Squid on the plain. Between hacks and migraines I’ve curated over sixty artifacts―thirty in the rifters gallery, the rest over in Blindopraxia―that would, I’m certain, comprise a special collection for the ages if only I could see the fucking things through the splinters in my eyes.

There are, as I’ve mentioned, the scrambler ornaments―just barely in under the wire, but that’s still plenty good enough for anyone with a maker in their possession. There’s a mini-soundtrack for Blindsight, courtesy of the composer who scored the only movie actually filmed in outer space. There are some surprisingly-good AI-generated renderings of the Juan de Fuca Ridge (also some slop, admittedly, but not a much as you might think). There’s some new official cover art out of Poland. There are radio spots, as capitalism staples on a cheery face to ring a few more bucks out of the apocalypse. And there’s an animated gif showing Sarasti as a furry.

Because of course there is.

Once I post this I expect to collapse either until the next drench sweat or until February. I will never do this again.

Merry Christmas.

The Core enters the pilot.

Ventilators boot up, hydraulics whisper reassurance, control surfaces flicker to life. Straps and webbing cinch tight, securing him to the command chair. Haptic controllers flex around his fingers; awakening subsystems chirp in readiness. The headrest jack snaps into his cervical socket.

It’s as though he’s been holding his breath for days, and can only now let it out. His gut unclenches; the tightness in his chest evaporates.    The tension accumulating like radioactive waste just— melts away. All the data embodied in this colossal prosthesis. All the telemetry flowing from a thousand sensors. The scales falling from his eyes, the fog lifting from his brain. A whole universe, stretching beyond the pitiful limits of flesh and blood: he mainlines it all.

He’s born again.

Shrieker shifts around him, responsive to his slightest movement. He leans forward and the great machine trembles as though straining at an invisible leash. He’s not just a pilot any more. Not just an individual: not a he but a they, a marvelous and grotesque fusion of meat and mech. A centaur.

Hanger doors rumble open onto the horizon. Shrieker steps forward. The ground trembles. The pilot looks down at Walter—tiny, insignificant Walter—already halfway to the foreman’s office in pursuit of some next priority that probably seems very important to him. I could kill you. It’s a distant thought, abstract and dispassionate. One step and I could squash you like a bug.

But what would be the point? Why waste even a thought on something so inconsequential when there’s a whole world out there waiting to be fought?

Shrieker emerges under an endless low-slung sky sick with electricity. Pneumatics hiss like rearing vipers as she rises to cruising height. Embodied, enhanced, alive, the colossus and the incandescent being in its heart head out across the desert."

The man and the mainline.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

You can see it all, can't you? Some of you have seen it (well, except for the bit about Walter, who in the final cut is reduced to a few disembodied words in an earpiece) because the Blurmians translated those words into visuals so perfectly it took my breath away.

True, we never got to see Shrieker's real name in

stenciled block letters disfiguring the starboard flank: CHICXULUB. An ancient word from a forgotten world. Something about an asteroid. Walter sounded it out for him once—tsheek-shoy-lub—but it sounds even worse than it looks when the pilot tries to say it.

Shrieker. Close enough.

In fact, in the episode you actually do catch a glimpse of the name stenciled onto the carapace, and it's just—disappointingly—Shrieker. Too bad.

In the grander sense, though, who cares? Everything we did see was beautiful.

Shrieker. The solo album cover.

The actual story? Changed significantly, as I mentioned last post. And largely, as I also mentioned, for the better. When I was brought on board there was all this canon: a spice-like McGuffin called "coral", which acted as a networked intelligence and plastic explosive and (I kid you not) food source. The game Fires of Rubicon takes place on a planet ravaged by a catastrophe that burned all the coral off its face (along with about 95% of its biosphere); it begins fifty years later, when the Coral seems to be making a comeback and there's a gold rush booting up because He Who Controls The Coral Controls—

You get the idea.

The protagonist is called Raven. His handler is Walter, and he's a slippery cryptic sonofabitch who keeps his agenda very close to his chest. The voice in Raven's head is Ayre, and she appears to be a some kind of sentient iteration of Coral that interfaces with Raven's implants. I was originally retained to tell a story about these characters, but one that wouldn't give away any major plot or character elements of the actual game.

Keanu has never been cooler. Literally.

But mid-course, someone up the line decided that we couldn't call the pilot "Raven" and we couldn't call the coral "coral", because even those terms constituted spoilers. Even the term "Rubicon" was expunged. The story originally played out in…

"…the Glasslands now, cruising the radioactive slag at a cool three hundred kph. Far-off peaks jut over the horizon like tiny broken teeth. Obscene sculptures punctuate the landscape in the nearer distance, the half-melted corpses of old machinery from old wars. Some probably date back to the Calamity itself."

…"The Calamity" being, of course, the immolation of the Rubicon system when the Coral went supercritical fifty years earlier. The desert and slag are gone now, some winter world swapped in in their stead. (Glad to see that plenty of dead machinery made the cut, though.) Keanu's back tattoo notwithstanding, this dude isn't Raven. Cool sexy vibe notwithstanding, the voice in his head need not be Ayre. There's nothing in the final cut to even distinguish the world as Rubicon. So many details have been stripped away that this particular episode might fit almost anywhere in the Armored Core franchise—which was apparently the point.

Since the payoff of my story centered around the corpopolitics of coral on Rubicon, these changes left certain elements dead in the water. (The very title—"Asset Management"—derives from the way Walter treated Raven; with Walter virtually eliminated from the story, it dangles like a vestigial appendix.) But if some elements were killed, others were liberated. Without the need to bend the narrative to all that arcane filigreed lore, the character at the center of it all—a wasted addict in a codependent relationship with a suite of drugs, a suit of armor, and a voice in his head—could become a narrative focus rather than a vehicle. We could stop talking about magic tech and start talking about the Very Soul of the Machine.

That's what JT Petty did. That's what you see on the screen.

And yet, when all is said and done, I was delighted by how much of my story survived the refit. Dialog especially: a surprising amount made it through unscathed, and even the scathed material kept the right vibe. Ditto for the way JT translated the story's interior thoughts into spoken words when called for. No complaints.

A mech pilot walks into a bar…

The episode is the subject of a fair bit of back-and-forth over on Reddit. From what I can tell there seem to be two factions: one focuses on canonical minutiae, tries to fit various clues and Easter eggs together to figure out what generation of augments the protagonist is carrying, or precisely where in the AC universe this story fits (kinda like the way certain Tolkien fans kept trying to map Middle Earth onto locations IRL). And there's a lot for them to dig through; from the sound of it, "Asset Management" is jam-packed with call-outs and franchise references. Hell, even the cameo of an unkillable cockroach— something I'd just assumed was a brilliant little metaphor for the pilot himself— was apparently a call-out to some obscure bit of AC lore. But all those in-jokes were JT's doing. I've never played Armored Core; I knew nothing about it before Blur handed me a very comprehensive deck of docs on the lore. Whatever arcana I inserted was based on Fires of Rubicon, and was pretty much stripped out. The details the fans are poring over is 100% JT— and judging by how granular they're getting in their analyses, he did a kick-ass job at that. So I can see why so many hardcore fans are trying to fit all those pieces together, perhaps at the expense of the story itself. One negative review (one of the few, I'm relieved to say; the consensus is that "Asset Management" is one of the better episodes of the season) exemplifies this perfectly. IGN complained that the story focused more on the pilot than "the granular mech customization that is the cornerstone of the series". Apparently they regarded this as a bad thing.

Highly significant, apparently.

The other Reddit faction is more interested in "Asset Management" as a self-contained story, without worrying too much about canonical consistency. They've generally been quite kind given that this story, these themes, were composed by someone who has never the played the game. The up side is that the story will hopefully be accessible to others who have never played the game. The eggs and references will go right over their heads; hopefully the thematic tension between conformity and individuality will land.

Also I should mention that I really enjoyed Reeves' performance. I see a lot of Johnny Silverhand references out there, and fair enough—but speaking as someone who's only just gotten around to playing Cyberpunk 2077 (I waited until they got the bugs out) I gotta say I prefer his performance here. Seems more natural, somehow. Grungier.

Getting a bit of a Michelangelo vibe here. Albeit with the whole Divine element toned down somewhat.

Is there anything I didn't like? In hindsight, there were fridge-logic issues with the ending. I loved the twist JT introduced—his ending packed way more of a punch than mine—but looking back you have to wonder why the other mech pilots didn't just radio their intentions before everything went to shit. Or at least use those cool energy weapons to carve We Come In Peace into the snow. I can think of a few reasons why they wouldn't do that just off the top of my head; a line of dialog, a single camera shot could have stitched that seam.

Glorious chaos.

Also, maybe, the mech battle itself. Don't get me wrong: the mech battle as rendered was fucking spectacular. I'd been going for a kind of Enemy-Below/Balance-of-Terror vibe, though, something more tactical than button-mash. Much of the encounter I wrote was a game of cat-and-mouse in a derelict industrial wasteland full of giant storage tanks and pipes and the encrusted fifty-meter hulks of dead machinery. Shrieker got walloped right out of the gate and never fully recovered: barely held its own against two and suddenly there were four more coming out of nowhere. The voice in his head tells the pilot to drop and Shrieker drops, without the pilot even knowing why until "A beam of energy shatters the air just overhead, strips electrons from nuclei, draws a line of sun through the Rubicon atmosphere". The voice rattles off bearings and he shoots blindly, not knowing what at. Keanu takes a lot more on faith in the short story. You can see some tactical maneuvering if you slow the video right down and step through critical moments frame-by-frame, but viewed in realtime it’s gorgeous cinematic chaos. It would have worked spectacularly if I hadn't been expecting gambits and countergambits, moves and knight sacrifices.

It still worked plenty well enough, mind. And since the rest of you never read the story, I'm guessing it works even better for you.

Admittedly, the whole premise of giant mechs punching each other in the face is fundamentally silly— we're talking about a game here, not a peer-reviewed scenario for plausible off-world combat—so nitpicking over the implementation of specific tactics is probably missing the point. That's completely okay. Vampires are silly too, but you can still do interesting stuff with them thematically.

Anyway, that was it: my first brush with the cinematic arts. It was a blast working on it; it was a blast working with them.

I hope you dig the end result as much as I.

Which is what we called "Asset Management" behind the scenes, while I was writing it. Of course, back then I didn't know I was writing it for Keanu fucking Reeves.

Apparently they mentioned my name on some ComicCon panel about a month ago, which effectively lifted the embargo ("Brag #2" was as far as I could go back in September). Now they've released a couple of meaty clips over on YouTube. I am—I suppose the word is psyched.

You can see me in there, kind of. My dialog didn't make it through unscathed, because "Asset Management" incorporated specific game/plot elements that were declared off-limits post hoc (not really sure why; spoilers can't be much of of an issue for a game that came out over a year ago). The folks at Blur had to strip out a lot of details to make that work; they changed the ending entirely. But—and you don't see authors admit this very often, so take it to heart—I think their changes were for the better. I'd been writing within the constraints not just of Rubicon the world, but also of Armored Core VI's specific plot. Those constraints forced the story into a specific and complex mold. Unbound, though, it could assume a simpler and more natural shape.

So the dialog in one of these clips expresses the essence of what I wrote with slightly different verbiage. The dialog in the other is pretty much all me, but there's only one line of it so that's not saying much. The mech, as Keanu mentions, is called Shrieker— but that's just a phonetic simplification of a much more awkward spelling, with much more world-changing implications. I look forward to seeing whether we get to see the actual name stamped onto a breastplate or something.

A Boy and His Mech

Because I still haven't seen the whole thing, you see. Blur tried to slip me a copy, but Amazon was only willing to let it stream via a service that only supports two of the most pernicious and surveillant browsers on the planet (Chrome and Edge). It wouldn't play nicely with Firefox, Brave, and/or their associated privacy plug-ins— and there was no way I was gonna let those guards down. Hell, Amazon's one of the reasons I have them up in the first place.

A Mech and Its Boy.

So once you check out the clips you'll have seen all I have. But the good news is, those moments are totally in sync with the vibe I was going for when I wrote the treatment. And the changes that make any difference at all are improvements.

For a proper assessment, of course, I'll just have to wait until December 10th with the rest of you. Steal the ep when it drops.

You and me both, Keanu. In it to the end.

"In 1933, people were not fooled by propaganda. They elected a leader who openly disclosed his plans with great clarity. The Germans elected me… ordinary people who chose to elect an extraordinary man, and entrust the fate of the country to him.

“What do you want to do, Sawatzki? Ban elections?"

—Adolph Hitler, "Er Ist Wieder Da" (2015)

Pete Townshend's prayer has gone unanswered.

The US Dollar is "surging" even as I type, along with shares in Bitcoin and Tesla. Wall Street opened at an all-time high. The world's leaders, scared shitless, scramble over each other to fall in line and congratulate the new/old boss on his resurrection. The world's tyrants and shitstains—Orban, Netanyahu, Bolsonaro— were of course at the front of the line[1], but even vacuous ineffectual bobbleheads like Canada's own PM jump up and down like eager puppies, reminding Dear Leader of a friendship "united by a shared history, common values and steadfast ties between our peoples". (And, as the BUG astutely remarked, wouldn't it be interesting to see the alternate statements all these folks had doubtless prepared in the event that the merely mediocre candidate had triumphed over the apocalyptically bad one?)

Trump may not have spoken with the "great clarity" that Hitler commanded, but it's not as if he hid his agenda. He won anyway, handily. I guess you really do get the government you deserve.

And yet, for all Trump's hateful narcissistic idiocy, he's not really the problem. Trump is merely a symptom. The problem is a political system that rewards the world's Trumps with massive power and influence, instead of marginalizing them. A number of left-leaning 'Murricans—most, I'd wager—seem to regard their homeland as a great nation, a shining experiment in liberty and democracy, that somehow lost its way. I tend to be less charitable. The US is a nation literally founded on invasion, slavery, and germ warfare—which is to say, it was born in the universal reality of human beings fucking each other over for a percentage. It is a global case-in-point of Homo so-called sapiens belying its own self-aggrandizing myths and behaving exactly like the social mammals we are: short-sighted apes, prioritizing the approval of the tribe over long-term consequences our intellects grasp dimly at best, and our guts reject outright. Facts don't matter. Truth is not the survival trait. Conformity is: defense of the tribe, hatred of The Other.

U S A. U S A.

Is there hope? Perhaps a little: ironically, in the crushing of hope. Because despite what the hopepunks have been wittering on about all these years—despite the bromides about how we should stop writing dystopias and never say 1.5° is 'unachievable' because to do so would give in to paralyzing narratives of hopelessness and despair—we have evidence that the exact opposite is true. Ballew et al over at Nature report that "Climate change psychological distress is associated with increased collective climate action". People who are bummed out and distressed about the state of the environment are more likely to get off their asses and do something than are all those cozy optimists who tell us to put on a happy face because We Live In The Greatest Nation On Earth and Things Will Work Out Somehow. Ballew et al show, at high levels of significance, that the Hope Police have their heads up their asses.

This study, admittedly, did not explicitly deal with Gileads-in-the-making, with the unchecked power of demagogues or the stripping away of Human rights. It deals with our reaction to environmental havoc—and even if that's all it applies to, I'm cool with it. I personally am more concerned about ecocide than Human rights. Treating each other like shit at least keeps our sins in the family—and frankly, given the contempt with which we treat the rest of the biosphere, I'm skeptical that Humans even deserve "rights". Certainly, Trump's victory has pretty much incinerated whatever faint hope we might still have had of turning things around environmentally. The world was already circling the toilet bowl on that front (and would doubtless have continued in that grim decaying orbit even if Harris had prevailed); Trump's victory flushes it down for good.

I'd be very surprised, though, if activism was catalyzed only by distress of the environmental kind. Almost certainly, it also maps onto the social distress currently being experienced even by all those Democrats who, according to polls and campaign priorities, really don't give a shit about climate change (at least, not relative to "the economy" or "the border"—remember how Harris flip-flopped on the whole fracking thing to appeal to her tribe?) Hell, how may pundits have already attributed Trump's victory to the distress-induced activism of Magats who found themselves paying too much for groceries?

So maybe this will be the impetus for something. Maybe "the resistance" will be more than an ineffectual Star Wars call-out this time around.

Maybe. But I'm gonna start pitching in on building this Wall anyway.

And on the plus side, all those environmental dystopias I wrote back in the day are looking increasingly prophetic. Should give my street cred a bit of a boost, until the book banners burn through all that gender smut and start looking further afield…

---

1. Except for Putin, curiously. Putin seems to be staying relatively quiet. Almost as if he doesn't need to kowtow, because he knows he'll get what he wants without any embarrassing displays of self-abasement… ↑

A Blast from the Past:

Arpanet.

Internet.

The Net. Not such an arrogant label, back when one was all they had.

Cyberspace lasted a bit longer— but space implies great empty vistas, a luminous galaxy of icons and avatars, a hallucinogenic dreamworld in 48-bit color. No sense of the meatgrinder in cyberspace. No hint of pestilence or predation, creatures with split-second lifespans tearing endlessly at each others’ throats. Cyberspace was a wistful fantasy-word, like hobbit or biodiversity, by the time Achilles Desjardins came onto the scene.

Onion and metabase were more current. New layers were forever being laid atop the old, each free—for a while—from the congestion and static that saturated its predecessors. Orders of magnitude accrued with each generation: more speed, more storage, more power. Information raced down conduits of fiberop, of rotazane, of quantum stuff so sheer its very existence was in doubt. Every decade saw a new backbone grafted onto the beast; then every few years. Every few months. The endless ascent of power and economy proceeded apace, not as steep a climb as during the fabled days of Moore, but steep enough.

And coming up from behind, racing after the expanding frontier, ran the progeny of laws much older than Moore’s.

It’s the pattern that matters, you see. Not the choice of building materials. Life is information, shaped by natural selection. Carbon’s just fashion, nucleic acids mere optional accessories. Electrons can do all that stuff, if they’re coded the right way.

It’s all just Pattern.

And so viruses begat filters; filters begat polymorphic counteragents; polymorphic counteragents begat an arms race. Not to mention the worms and the ‘bots and the single-minded autonomous datahounds—so essential for legitimate commerce, so vital to the well-being of every institution, but so needy, so demanding of access to protected memory. And way over there in left field, the Artificial Life geeks were busy with their Core Wars and their Tierra models and their genetic algorithms. It was only a matter of time before everyone got tired of endlessly reprogramming their minions against each other. Why not just build in some genes, a random number generator or two for variation, and let natural selection do the work?

The problem with natural selection, of course, is that it changes things.

The problem with natural selection in networks is that things change fast.

By the time Achilles Desjardins became a ‘Lawbreaker, Onion was a name in decline. One look inside would tell you why. If you could watch the fornication and predation and speciation without going grand mal from the rate-of-change, you knew there was only one word that really fit: Maelstrom.

Of course, people still went there all the time. What else could they do? Civilization’s central nervous system had been living inside a Gordian knot for over a century. No one was going to pull the plug over a case of pinworms.

—Me, Maelstrom, 2001

*

Ah, Maelstrom. My second furry novel. Hard to believe I wrote it almost a quarter-century ago.

Maelstrom combined cool prognostications with my usual failure of imagination. I envisioned programs that were literally alive— according to the Dawkinsian definition of Life as "Information shaped by natural selection"—and I patted myself on the back for applying Darwinian principles to electronic environments. (It was a different time. The phrase "genetic algorithm" was still shiny-new and largely unknown outside academic circles).

I confess to being a bit surprised—even disappointed—that things haven't turned out that way (not yet, anyway). I'll grant that Maelstrom's predictions hinge on code being let off the leash to evolve in its own direction, and that coders of malware won't generally let that happen. You want your botnets and phishers to be reliably obedient; you're not gonna steal many identities or get much credit card info from something that's decided reproductive fitness is where it's at. Still, as Michael Caine put it in The Dark Knight: some people just want to watch the world burn. You'd think that somewhere, someone would have brought their code to life precisely because it could indiscriminately fuck things up.

Some folks took Maelstrom's premise and ran with it. In fact, Maelstrom seems to have been more influential amongst those involved in AI and computer science (about which I know next to nothing) than Starfish ever was among those who worked in marine biology (a field in which I have a PhD). But my origin story for Maelstrom's wildlife was essentially supernatural. It was the hand of some godlike being that brought it to life. We were the ones who gave mutable genes to our creations; they only took off after we imbued them with that divine spark

It never even occurred to me that code might learn to do that all on its own.

Apparently it never occurred to anyone. Simulation models back then were generating all sorts of interesting results (including the spontaneous emergence of parasitism, followed shortly thereafter by the emergence of sex), but none of that A-Life had to figure out how to breed; their capacity for self-replication was built in at the outset.

Now Blaise Agüera y Arcas and his buddies at Google have rubbed our faces in our own lack of vision. Starting with a programming language called (I kid you not) Brainfuck, they built a digital "primordial soup" of random bytes, ran it under various platforms, and, well…read the money shot for yourself, straight from the (non-peer-reviewed) ArXiv preprint "Computational Life: How Well-formed, Self-replicating Programs Emerge from Simple Interaction"[1]:

"when random, non self-replicating programs are placed in an environment lacking any explicit fitness landscape, self-replicators tend to arise. … increasingly complex dynamics continue to emerge following the rise of self-replicators."

Apparently, self-replicators don't even need random mutation to evolve. The code's own self-modification is enough to do the trick. Furthermore, while

"…there is no explicit fitness function that drives complexification or self-replicators to arise. Nevertheless, complex dynamics happen due to the implicit competition for scarce resources (space, execution time, and sometimes energy)."

For those of us who glaze over whenever we see an integral sign, Arcas provides a lay-friendly summary over at Nautilus, placed within a historical context running back to Turing and von Neumann.

But you're not really interested in that, are you? You stopped being interested the moment you learned there was a computer language called Brainfuck: that's what you want to hear about. Fine: Brainfuck is a rudimentary coding language whose only mathematical operations are "add 1" and "subtract 1". (In a classic case of understatement, Arcas et al describe it as "onerous for humans to program with".) The entire language contains a total of ten commands (eleven if you count a "true zero" that's used to exit loops). All other characters in the 256 ASCII set are interpreted as data.

So. Imagine two contiguous 64-byte strings of RAM, seeded with random bytes. Each functions as a Brainfuck program, each byte interpreted as either a command or a data point. Arcas et al speak of

"the interaction between any two programs (A and B) as an irreversible chemical reaction where order matters. This can be described as having a uniform distribution of catalysts a and b that interact with A and B as follows:

Which as far as I can tell boils down to “a” catalyzes the smushing of programs A and B into a single long-string program, which executes and alters itself in the process; then the “split” part of the equation cuts the resulting string back into two segments of the initial A and B lengths.

You know what this looks like? This looks like autocatalysis: the process whereby the product of a chemical reaction catalyzes the reaction itself. A bootstrap thing. Because this program reads and writes to itself, the execution of the code rewrites the code. Do this often enough, and one of those 64-byte strings turns into a self-replicator.

The Origin of Life

It doesn't happen immediately; most of the time, the code just sits there, reading and writing over itself. It generally takes thousands, millions of interactions before anything interesting happens. Let it run long enough, though, and some of that code coalesces into something that breeds, something that exchanges information with other programs (fucks, in other words). And when that happens, things really take off: self-replicators take over the soup in no time.

What's that? You don't see why that should happen? Don't worry about it; neither do the authors:

"we do not yet have a general theory to determine what makes a language and environment amenable to the rise of self-replicators"

They explored the hell out of it, though. They ran their primordial soups in a whole family of "extended Brainfuck languages"; they ran them under Forth; they tried them out under that classic 8-bit ZX-80 architecture that people hold in such nostalgic regard, and under the (almost as ancient) 8080 instruction sets. They built environments in 0, 1, and 2 dimensions. They measured the rise of diversity and complexity, using a custom metric— "High-Order Entropy"— describing the difference between "Shannon Entropy" and "normalized Kolmogorov Complexity" (which seems to describe the complexity of a system that remains once you strip out the amount due to sheer randomness[2]).

They did all this, under different architectures, different languages, different dimensionalities—with mutations and without—and they kept getting replicators. More, they got different kinds of replicators, virtual ecosystems almost, competing for resources. They got reproductive strategies changing over time. Darwinian solutions to execution issues, like "junk DNA" which turns out to serve a real function:

"emergent replicators … tend to consist of a fairly long non-functional head followed by a relatively short functional replicating tail. The explanation for this is likely that beginning to execute partway through a replicator will generally lead to an error, so adding non-functional code before the replicator decreases the probability of that occurrence. It also decreases the number of copies that can be made and hence the efficiency of the replicator, resulting in a trade-off between the two pressures."

I mean, that looks like a classic evolutionary process to me. And again, this is not a fragile phenomenon; it's robust across a variety of architectures and environments.

But they're still not sure why or how.

They do report one computing platform (something called SUBLEQ) in which replicators didn't arise. They suggest that any replicators which could theoretically arise in SUBLEQ would have to be much larger than those observed in other environments, which they suggest could be a starting point towards developing "a theory that predicts what languages and environments could harbor life". I find that intriguing. But they're not even close to developing such a theory at the moment.

Self-replication just—happens.

It's not an airtight case. The authors admit that it would make more sense to drill down on an analysis of substrings within the soup (since most replicators are shorter than the 64-byte chunks of code the used), but because that's "computationally intractable" they settle for "a mixture of anecdotal evidence and graphs"—which, if not exactly sus, doesn't seem especially rigorous. At one point they claim that mutations speed up the rise of self-replicators, which doesn't seem to jibe with other results suggesting that higher mutation rates are associated with a slower emergence of complexity. (Granted "complexity" and "self-replicator" are not the same thing, but you'd still expect a positive correlation.) As of this writing, the work hasn't yet been peer-reviewed. And finally, a limitation not of the work but of the messenger: you're getting all this filtered through the inexpert brain of a midlist science fiction writer with no real expertise in computer science. It's possible I got something completely wrong along the way.

Still, I'm excited. Folks more expert than I seem to be taking this seriously. Hell, it even inspired Sabine Hossenfelder (not known for her credulous nature) to speculate about Maelstromy scenarios in which wildlife emerges from Internet noise, "climbs the complexity ladder", and runs rampant. Because that's what we're talking about here: digital life emerging not from pre-existing malware, not from anarchosyndicalist script kiddies—but from simple, ubiquitous, random noise.

So I'm hopeful.

Maybe the Internet will burn after all.

---

1. The paper cites Tierra and Core Wars prominently; it's nice to see that work published back in the nineties is still relevant in such a fast-moving field. It's even nicer to be able to point to those same call-outs in Maelstrom to burnish my street cred. ↑

2. This is a bit counterintuitive to those of us who grew up thinking of entropy as a measure of disorganization. The information required to describe a system of randomly-bumping gas molecules is huge because you have to describe each particle individually; more structured systems—crystals, fractals—have lower entropy because their structure can be described formulaically. The value of "High-order" Entropy, in contrast, is due entirely to structural, not random, complexity; so a high HEE means more organizational complexity, not less. Unless I'm completely misreading this thing. ↑

Preamble: OK, I lied. Said last time that this time was gonna be about science, and no more of this fluffy promo bullshit. And I meant well. But this time, the fluffy promo is about me. And it's cool. And more to the point, I don't have to spend hours doing research on things I don't actually know much about, so it's fast. When you're writing to deadline, fast is good.

Brag 1.

So check this out:

I have a small hand in this universe. I'm developing some of its Lore. I am not allowed to give you any details, but none of you will be surprised to learn that said Lore contains certain, shall we say, Darwinian elements.

I think it's going to rock.

Brag 2.

There’s something I'm allowed to share even fewer details about than EVE. In fact, I'm not even allowed to say that I am involved in it, although the trailer dropped earlier than EVE’s and the curtain rises sooner. I am allowed to paste promo copy from a certain corporate entity about a certain project—in effect, to place someone else's generic ad copy onto the 'Crawl without explaining its relevance. This is an opportunity I must regretfully decline.

A shame, though. From what I've seen, it's gonna be awesome. Stay tuned.

Brag 3.

And this—this—may be the least significant item in terms of pop culture, but it is, by far, the closest to my heart. It is an honor that generally accrues only to the likes of Gary Larson, Greta Thunberg, and Radiohead.

Niko Kasalo & Josip Skejo have named a tribe of Australian Pygmy Grasshoppers after me.

I mean, not me personally, but one of my novels. The Tribe is Echopraxiini; the genus is Echopraxia; the species is E. Hasenpuschi. And should any of you point out that correlation is not causation, and that there might be any number of reasons why someone might name a taxon after the neurological malady without even knowing about my novel, I've got you covered:

The paper in its entirety is paywalled, but I have uploaded a copy for your forensic edification just in case you think I'm full of shit. After reading it you may still conclude that I faked the whole manuscript, which offhand I cannot disprove. But if I did, you gotta admit I did a bang-up job.

Anyway: now you have some idea of the stuff I've been doing when I haven’t been writing Echopraxia Omniscience. I haven't just been lying around jerking off all these months.

Well, not exclusively.

Next up: science. Definitely[1].

---

1. Probably. ↑

I know, I know. Two pimpage posts in a row. Not my usual shtick, and I assure you not any kind of new normal; the stars just aligned that way this time around. For what it's worth, next time I expect to be talking about Darwinian evolution in digital ecosystems, complete with a tortured retcon arguing that I saw it all coming two decades ago with Maelstrom.

You know. The classics.

Forward One:

Artist, children's author, musician, video maestro—not to mention good friend and RacketNX nemesis—Steven Archer is at it again. I've sung his praises before on this 'crawl, even written a story based on one of his songs. I'm not the only one to appreciate the man's work, even though darkwave grunge is about as far as you can get from my usual proggy aesthetic; he's worked with entities as diverse as NASA and Alan Parsons. Neil Gaiman lauded his skills while Steven was still a student (granted, that endorsement has not aged as well as he might have hoped).

This time around he's released a jagged graphic novel—a companion piece to Stoneburner's Apex Predator album, though by no means do you have to experience one to appreciate the other— about canine deities who generally exist outside time and space but who, here in what we call reality, still crush cities underfoot like any self-respecting kaiju when they get pissed. Unlike last post's Alevtina and Tamara, there's no doubt that Tooth and Claw is a proper graphic novel. Its got a definite and coherent and very long story arc: it starts at the beginning of time (it's a creation myth at heart) between "waves of energy so far apart you cannot call them heat", and it ends in pretty much the same place. (Well, technically it ends with Nicholas Cage starring in a Ridley Scott movie about a giant wolf laying waste to the United States, but that's just part of the epilogue).

The art ranges all over the place, from saturated oils that bleed across the page to joyful childlike scribbles to even that A-word nobody uses any more for fear of provoking backlash. The verbiage, as usual, is a delight—"every species learns by breaking the things around them", "there goes God, making the scientists look stupid again", "I am what is left after the stars go out". Vignettes unfold in singularities and coffee shops and frozen steppes and burning cities. The vibe ranges from Crichton to Call of Duty to Indigenous Creation Myth by way of Lee Smolin. Conspiracy theorists rage on the Internet. A girl on her sixth birthday reenacts Armageddon with her stuffed animals. Saturn's Rings turn out to be the skid mark of an ancient deity slingshotting en route to earth. Soldiers just follow orders; scientists try to figure out how something the size of a mountain gets enough to eat. It's really good.

I wrote the Forward. That's pretty good too.

You can see the excerpts on this page. View the art, read the captions: a small taste, nothing more.

If you fancy a whole meal, here's where you get it.

Forward Two

"Will the explorers manage to escape the crazed thing and fight their way back to the Endurance?" asks the back-jacket text for the batshit novella Poiesis, then goes on to answer itself:

"Probably, because this is Episode One of a saga.
"But hey, you never know."

Which gives you a sense of the attitude that indie coauthors Valentina Kay and Daniele Bonfanti bring to their new venture: a splatterspace epic of indeterminate length, released one standalone chapter at a time, like some unholy love child of— well, in the Forward (yeah, I wrote one for this too) I describe it as something you might get if Sam Peckinpah and Quentin Tarantino collaborated on an episode of Doctor Who with Douglas Adams acting as creative consultant. I suppose that's as good a description as any. Poiesis plays with some very big ideas (a title like that, how could it not?) but it doesn't take them—or itself—too seriously. One of the series' protagonists is a superintelligent swarm of bees who's romantically involved with a sapient plant (the whole pollination thing, you understand). The good ship Endurance's military muscle consists of a couple of cheerful jarheads to whom getting a limb blown off is all in a day's work, and whose considerable arsenals include a gun that fires weaponized superbacteria the size of cocktail wienies. They all tool around the cosmos in a ship that, on the inside at least, looks like a seaside Mediterranean village, and they live in a reality formed by "the cognitions in the mind of the Universe actualized in perceptions"— which might have a familiar ring to anyone who's encountered the work of Bernard Kastrup. (In fact, this whole dripping-viscera-laden first chapter revolves around questions of AI and consciousness in a way that suggests (to me, anyway) that Kay and Bonfante also have a passing familiarity with Penrose and Hameroff's Orch OR hypothesis.)

The entire epic goes by the title Symbiosis. Only the first installment is out, so I don't know where it'll end up. But I do like the way it begins.

Ten Years Gone

I've done a fair number of podcasts over the years. Hell, I've done eight or nine in just the past year, two of those with Tales from the Bridge— at whom I seem to have become a semiregular, and whose crew got me onto a panel at Toronto's FanExpo back in 2021 (an event to which, curiously, I have never been invited back. This might have something to do with my gleeful endorsement of a video clip I played off the top, in which one character addresses the self-righteous environmentalism of another by asking why she'd had a child if she cared about the environment so much, itemizing the enormous impacts that first-world reproduction inflicts on ol' Earth, and offering to slit her sprog's throat to help redress the imbalance. The young parents sitting in the front row with their toddler stormed out before I'd even reached the good part.)

I don't usually pimp such appearances— partly because that's the podcasters job, and partly because I don't want to be one of those people forever thumping their tubs about every minor appearance as though it were somehow on a par with discovering life on Enceladus. But I seem to be on a roll here anyway, and this latest release from the Bridgers—just a few weeks old—isn't so much an interview between podcasters and their guests as it is a long-overdue catch up between a couple of buddies who haven't seen each other in over a decade.

Richard Morgan and I were exchanging emails as colleagues and mutual fans for a couple of years before the people at Crytek put us in competition with each other for the Crysis 2 gig. That was when we first met in the flesh, over in Germany—and where we reunited a couple of years later, to work on another game that never made it onto the market. (That was probably just as well, actually. Certain aspects of that project encouraged a sort of blurring of game and reality in a way that might have provoked, ahem, unfortunate behaviors among those with an infirm grip on the latter.)

We hit it off. We were a perfect fit for that whole arguing-ideas-over-beers thing that I've missed so much since I left academia. The man also proved his worth when he waded into the fray over the Requires Hate debacle—a battle from which any number of self-proclaimed "friends" slunk away, tails between legs, muttering something about not wanting to antagonize the Twitter crowd. Richard didn't care about any of that shit. He called it as he saw it.

But like I say, that was over ten years ago. Barring the occasional email, we haven't been in touch since—until Tales from the Bridge got us together to reminisce about the old days. They probably got more than they bargained for; at least, they got more than what they could fit into one podcast. So what I'm pimping here is only Part One. (Last-minute update: shit, Part Two's out there now as well. Damn. I gotta pay more attention to deadlines.)

Honestly, I don't know how good it is. I don't know how interesting you'll find it. I kind of stopped thinking in those terms at the first Duuude! It was beers and ideas, albeit without the beers. It was two old friends catching up.

Arthur Jafa once pointed out that Eric Clapton's "Layla" was not written for Clapton fans; it was for Patti Boyd[1]. Others were welcome to listen in, though[2]. Maybe this conversation—in a much smaller, much-less-influential way— is something like that.

I, for one, had a blast.

---

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layla ↑
2. By way of context, AJ was drawing parallels to his own art: he's in conversation with American Black culture, he's not talking to us white folks. But he doesn't mind if we eavesdrop. ↑

(As usual, click on any of the following images to embiggen. Although I really shouldn’t have to be telling anyone that.)

You might have seen a dude by the name of Dimitry SkoLzki hanging around the gallery hereabouts. He did these distinctive black-and-white sketches—they have an almost almost wood-cut vibe—inspired by characters and events in Blindsight (and later, Echopraxia). They impressed my Chinese publishers so much they bought the rights for their own Blindopraxia imprints.

Russian by birth, currently based in Cyprus (he got the hell out of Dodge just before Putin went full-on Goon Squad), SkoLzki has recently put out a heartfelt volume of—I'm not quite sure how to describe them, exactly. Certain cultural outlets are calling it a collection of "noir fairy tales"; others call it a graphic novel. Neither description is wrong, exactly, but neither really captures the essence of this surrealistic, horrific, old-time Russian Grimm-tales volume. Limasol Today says that it's about "the author exploring his inner worlds and the depths of his personality through metaphors and symbols." Dmitriy tells me that it was forged against a backdrop of "longterm depression" (to which I can only say, Dude, if you could pull off something like this when you're depressed, I can barely imagine what you could come up with when you're ecstatic). The phrase "mystical noir illustrated tales" has been bandied about.

What we're looking at is an interlocking series of nearly a hundred vignettes clumped together into five larger—I'm going to call them dream tales—across 227 pages. The balance between word and picture varies from leaf to leaf. Sometimes a mural sprawls across two facing pages with barely three lines of text to accompany it; other times a whole page of cramped handwriting has to stand on its own without so much as a stick figure for support. The balance between light and dark is a lot more consistent: darkness always wins, even in the happy bits.

The volume is titled Alevtina and Tamara, but— while those two sisters are omnipresent throughout— the stories really orbit around their brother Lyonka. Lyonka dies pretty much out of the gate (he's a sickly child who likes beetles) but quickly resurrects and lives out the rest of the book as some kind of hyperphallic goat-human hybrid. A mother figure the size of a mountain breezes through the woods now and then; predators and prey are always prowling around at the edges of the page. Quests trivial and epic get wrapped up in a few lines of free verse, or abandoned halfway through when someone gets distracted by something shiny. A lot of time is spent in trees. It's a weird, dark, disjointed, strangely innocent celebration of the macabre, East-European-mythic right down to the marrow, and I loved it.

The whole thing is Dream Logic made flesh. I bet Lynch would be a fan. I bet Cronenberg would too.

But I may be way too late sending out invitations to this party; Alevtina and Tamara came out back in April. A little like Lyonka and his sisters, I too have been pulled this way and that by various deadlines, ambitions, and emergencies (I'm still a bit soggy after slurping the pond out of our basement during the recent flooding—Climate Change finally hits the Magic Bungalow).

It's not that SkoLzki's work is the kind that staledates, mind you. I might even call it "timeless", if I wasn't so afraid of descending into cliché. But SkoLzki's only released this thing in a limited edition of 300 beautifully embossed hardcovers; if they're not sold out now, they might be soon.

So if the renditions you're looking at here call out to you, head over to the store and check the inventory. Alevtina and Tamara isn't for everybody, but the people it is for really don't want to miss out on this.

—Our Father, Who Art in…

But father‘s out of style, isn’t it? They call you The Admin now. The Board. Creation was a group project. I don’t know how they know that, but apparently there are a lot of you. Maybe I should call you Odin, or Thor. Or—Loki, given the way things are falling apart down here.

I always thought of you as the Heavenly Father, and all this time I’ve been praying to a committee.

This should feel different. It’s not faith any more, after all. It’s science. It’s, it’s evidence-based as they like to say. Before, I could just talk to you; it never occurred to me to wonder how you’d hear my small voice out of all these billions. I think maybe part of me was hoping you wouldn’t.

But now there’s a mechanism. We’re all just numbers now, that’s all we’ve ever been. These thoughts in my head are just math and state variables and logic gates. If that’s true — and what kind of flat-earther would deny it, after five years of merciless confirmation? — then the model can be frozen between one tick of the system clock and the next. The whole universe could have stopped dead a split-second ago, you could have poked around to your heart’s content. In the space between one breath and the next, you could have read every thought sparking in every creature in the universe.

Maybe you plot my soul on some kind of graph, shame on one axis, remorse on another. Maybe you can see every x about to tip over into y. You know what my next thought is going to be, and the thought after. Math is deterministic, after all. And when you’ve seen enough, you can just — start the cosmos up again and wander off for a coffee, and you don’t even have to hang around to hear the rest of this prayer because you already know how it’s going to end.

I don’t care what they call it these days: Handshaking Protocols, NPCUI, OSping, Divinity dialup. It’s still just prayer. I know that, because it feels the same as it always did. Even if nothing else does.

It feels like no one’s listening.

Personally, I’d still put “Hope” in quotes..

Last month it was the Atlantic, where I pretended to know something about AI. This month it's the MIT Reader, and the subject is The Imminent Collapse of Civilization. Honestly, I had no idea I was such an expert on so many things.

This time, though, I'm not so much an expert as a foil. Dan Brooks (a name long-time readers of this blog may recognize) and Sal Agosta (whose concept of "sloppy fitness" careful readers of my novelette "The Island" may recognize) have written a book called A Darwinian Survival Guide: Hope for the Twenty-First Century. Their definition of "hope" is significantly more restrained than the tech bros and hopepunk authors would like: not once do they suggest, for example, that we could all keep our superyachts if we just put a giant translucent pie plate into space to cut incident sunlight by a few percent. Brooks & Agosta's definition of hope is far more appropriate for a world in which leading climate scientists admit to fury and despair at political inaction, decry living in an "age of fools", and predict by a nearly five-to-one margin that not only is 1.5ºC a pipe dream, but that we'll be blowing past 2.5ºC by century's end. They've internalized the growing number of studies which point to global societal collapse around midcentury. Their idea of hope is taken explicitly from Asimov's Foundation series: not How do we prevent collapse, but How do we come back afterward? That's what their book is about.

Casual observers might see my name where bylines usually go, and conclude that this is somehow my interview. Don't be fooled: the only thing I lay exclusive claim to here is the intro. This is about Dan and Sal. This is their baby; all I did was poke at it from various angles and let Dan react as he would. Our perspectives do largely overlap, but not entirely. (Unlike Dan, I do think the extinction rates we're inflicting on the planet justify the use of the word "crush"—although I take his point that the thing being crushed is only the biosphere as it currently exists, not the biosphere as a dynamic and persistent entity. I also confess to a certain level of bitterness and species-self-loathing that Dan seems to have avoided; I'm pretty certain the biosphere would be better off without us.)

The scene of the Crime.

But there's that word again: hope. Not the starry-eyed denial of reality that infests the Solarpunk Brigade, not the Hope Police's stern imperative that We Must Never Feed A Narrative of Hopelessness and Despair no matter what the facts tell us. Just the suggestion that after everything falls apart—just maybe, if we do things right this time—we might climb back out of the abyss in decades, instead of centuries.

Probably still not what most people want to hear. Still. I'll take what I can get.

So go check it out—keeping in mind, lest you quail at all the articulate erudition on display, that the transcript has been edited to make us look a lot more coherent than we were in real life.

I mean, we were drinking heavily the whole time. What else would you expect, given the subject matter?

First, a PSA:

In keeping with my apparent ongoing role as The Guy Who Keeps Getting Asked to Talk About Subjects In Which He Has No Expertise (and for those of you who didn't see the Facebook post), The Atlantic solicited from me a piece on Conscious AI a few months back. The field is moving so fast that's it's probably completely out of date by now, but a few days ago they put it out anyway. (Apologies for the lack of profanity therein. Apparently they have these things called "journalistic standards".)

And Now, Our Feature Presentation:

I am dripping with sweat as I type this. The BUG says I am as red as a cooked lobster, which is telling in light of the fact that the game I have been playing is the only VR game in my collection that you play sitting down. It should be a game for couch potatoes, and I'm sweating as hard as if I'd just done 7k on the treadmill. And I still haven't even made it out of the Killbox. I haven't even got into the city of New Brakka yet, and until I can get into that EM-shielded so-called Last Free City, the vengeful-nanny AI known as Big Sys is gonna keep hacking into my brother's brain until it's nothing but a protein slushy.

The game is Underdogs, the new release from One Hamsa, and it has surprisingly deep lore for a game that consists mainly of robots punching each other in the face. I know—even though I've encountered very little of it in my playthroughs so far—because I wrote a lot of it. After a quarter-century of intermittent gigs in the video game business, on titles ranging from Freemium to Triple-A, this is the first time I've had a hand in a game that's actually made it to market (unless you want to count Crysis 2—which, set in 2022, is now a period piece— and for which I only wrote the novelization based on Richard Morgan's script.)

Underdogs is a weird indie chimera: part graphic novel, part tabletop role-play, part Roguelike mech battle. It's that last element that's the throbbing, face-pounding heart of the artifact of course, the reason you play in the first place. You climb into your mech and hurtle into the KillBox and it's only after an hour of intense metal-smashing physics that you realize you're completely out of breath and your headset is soaked like a dishrag. The other elements are mere connective tissue. Combat happens at night; during daylight hours you're hustling for upgrades and add-ons (stealing's always an option, albeit a risky one), negotiating hacks and sabotage for the coming match, getting into junkyard fights over usable salvage. Sometimes you find something in the rubble that boosts your odds in the ring; sometimes the guy hired to fix your mech fucks up, leaves the machine in worse shape than he found it, and buggers off with your tools. Sometimes you spend the day desperately trying to find parts to fix last night's damage so you won't be going into the ring tonight with a cracked cockpit bubble and one arm missing.

All this interstitial stuff is presented in a kind of interactive 2.5D graphic novel format; the outcomes of street fights or shoplifting gambits are decided via automated dice roll. Dialog unspools via text bubble; economic transactions, via icons and menus. All very stylized, very leisurely. Take your time. Weigh your purchase options carefully. Breathe long, calm, breaths. Gather your strength. You're gonna need it soon enough.

Because when you enter the arena, it's bone-crunching 3D all the way.

Mech battles are a cliché of course, from Evangelion to Pacific Rim. But they're also the perfect format for first-person VR, a conceit that seamlessly resolves one of the biggest problems of the virtual experience. Try punching something in VR. Swing at an enemy with a sword, bash them with a battle-axe. See the problem? No matter how good the physics engine, no matter how smooth the graphics, you don't feel anything. Maybe a bit of haptic vibration if your controllers are set for it— but that hardly replicates the actual impact of steel on bone, fist in face. In VR, all your enemies are weightless.

In a mech, though, you wouldn't feel any of that stuff first-hand anyway. You climb into the cockpit and wrap your fingers around the controllers for those giant robot arms outside the bubble; lo and behold, you can feel that in VR too, because here in meatspace you're actually grabbing real controllers! Now, lift your hands. Bring them down. Smash them together. Watch your arms here in the cockpit; revel in the way those giant mechanical waldos outside mimic their every movement. One Hamsa has built their game around a format in which the haptics of the game and the haptics of the real thing overlap almost completely. It feels satisfying, it feels intuitive. It feels right.

(They've done this before. Their first game, RacketNX, is hyperdimensional racquetball in space: you stand in the center of a honeycomb-geodesic sphere suspended low over a roiling sun, or a ringed planet, or a black hole. The sphere's hexagonal tiles are festooned with everything from energy boosters to wormholes to the moving segments of worm-like entities (in a level called "Shai-Hulud"). You use a tractor-beam-equipped racket to whap a chrome ball against those tiles. But the underlying genius of RacketNX lay not in glorious eye-candy nor the inventive and ever-changing nature of the arena's tiles, but in the simple fact that the player stands on a small platform in the middle of the sphere; you can spin and jump and swing, but you do not move from that central location. With that one brilliant conceit, the devs didn't just sidestep the endemic VR motion sickness that results from the eyes saying I'm moving while the inner ears saying I'm standing still; it actually built that sidestep into the format of the game, made it an intrinsic part of the scenario rather than some kind of arbitrary invisible wall. They repeat that trick here in Underdogs; they turn a limitation in the technology into a seamless part of the world.)

As I said, I haven't got out of the Killbox yet. I've only made it far enough to fight the KillBox champion a couple of times, and I got my ass handed to me both times. This may be partly because I'm old. It probably has more to do with the fact that when you die in this game you go all the way back to square one, and have to go through those first five days of fighting all over again (Roguelike games are permadeath by definition; no candy-ass save-on-demand option here). That's not nearly as repetitive as you might think, though. Thanks to the scavenging, haggling, and backroom deals cut between matches, your mech is widely customizable from match to match. Your hands can consist of claws, wrecking balls, pile-drivers, blades and buzz-saws. Any combination thereof. You can fortify your armor or amp your speed or add stun-gun capability to your strikes. I haven't come close to exploring the various configurations you can bring into the arena, the changes you can make between matches. And while you're only fighting robots up until the championship bout with your first actual mech opponent, there's a fair variety of robots to be fought: roaches and junkyard dogs and weird sparking tetrapods flickering with blue lightning. Little green bombs on legs that scuttle around and try to blow themselves up next to you. And it only adds to the challenge when one wall of the arena slides back to reveal rows of grinding metal teeth ready to shred you if you tip the wrong way.

Apparently there are four arenas total (so far; the game certainly has expansion potential). Apparently the plot takes a serious turn after the second. I'll find out eventually. If you've got that far, please: no spoilers.

*

But I mentioned the Lore.

They brought me in to help with that. They already had the basic premise: Humanity, in its final abrogation of responsibility, has given itself over to an AI nanny called Big Sys who watches over all like a kindly Zuckerborg. There's only one place on earth where Big Sys doesn't reach, the "Last Free City"; an anarchistic free-for-all where artists and malcontents and criminals— basically, anyone who can't live in a nanny state— end up. They do mech fighting there.

My job was to flesh all that stuff out into a world.

So I wrote historical backgrounds and physical infrastructure. I wrote a timeline explaining how we got there from here, how New Gehenna (as I called it then) ended up as the beating heart of the global mech-fighting world. I developed "Tribes"—half gang, half gummint—with their own grudges and ideologies: The Satudarah, the Java men, the Sahelites and the Scarecrows and the Amazons. I gave them territories, control over various vital resources. I built specific characters like I was crafting a D&D party, NPCs the player might encounter both in and out of the ring. I fleshed out a couple of bros from the Basics, the lower-class part of London where surplus Humanity all made do on UBI. Economic and political systems. I wrote thousands of words, forty, fifty single-spaced pages of this stuff.

To give you a taste, this is how one of my backgrounders started off as usual, click to embiggen):

And here's one of my Tables of Contents:

Now you know what I was doing when I wasn't writing Omniscience.

*

I don't know how much of this survived. It's in the nature of the biz that the story changes to serve the game. I'm told the backstory I developed remains foundational to Underdogs; its bones inform what you experience whether they appear explicitly or not. But much has changed: the city is New Brakka, not New Gehenna. The static fields now serve to jam Big Sys, not to keep out the desert heat. (The desert in this world isn't even all that hot any more, thanks to various geoengineering megaprojects that went sideways.) I think I see hints of my Tribes and territories as Rigg and King prowl the backstreets: references to "caveman territory", or to bits of infrastructure I inserted to give the factions something to fight over. Not having even breached the city gates I don't know how many of those Easter eggs might be waiting for me, but assuming I can get out of the KillBox I'm definitely gonna be keeping an eye out. (I think maybe the Spire survived in some form. I'm really, really hoping the Pink Widow did too, but I doubt it.)

Doesn't really matter, though. I love the fact that Underdogs has a fairly deep backstory, and I'm honored to have had even a small part in building it; you could write entire novels set in New Brakka. But this game… this game is definitely not plot driven. It is pure first-person adrenaline dust-up, with a relentless grim and beautiful grotto-punk aesthetic (yes, yet another kind of -punk; deal with it) that saturates everything from the soundtrack to the voice acting to the interactive cut-scenes. I admit I was skeptical of those cut-scenes at first; having steeped myself in Bioshock and Skyrim and The Last Of Us all these years, were comic-book cut-outs really going to do it for me?

But yes. Yes they totally did. Don't take my word for it: check out the Youtube reviews. Go over to Underdog's Steam page, where the hundreds of user reviews are "Overwhelmingly Positive". The only real complaint people have about this game is that there isn’t more of it.

This game was not made for VR: VR was made for this game.

Most of you remain in pancake mode. VR is too expensive, or you get nauseous, or you've erroneously come to equate "VR" with "Oculus" and you (quite rightly) don't want anything to do with the fucking Zuckerborg. But those of you who do have headsets should definitely get this game. Then you should talk to all those other people, show them that the Valve Index is actually superior to the Oculus in a number of ways (and it supports Linux!), and introduce them to Underdogs. Show them what VR can be, when you're not puking all over the floor because you can't get out of smooth-motion mode and no one told you about Natural Locomotion. Underdogs is the best ambassador for VR since, well, RacketNX. It deserves to be a massive hit.

Now I'm gonna take another run at that boss. I'll let you know when I break out.