#I also do it for converting numbers in science

[asystoless]

i remember when my friends publicly shamed me for saying I convince myself that £9,500 per year to go to university isn't that much because 9.5k word fics aren't that long so it's actually not that much money

[creature-wizard]

What an AI generated website can look like

Hey folks! I just encountered a website that's obviously AI generated, so I figured I'd use it as an example to help you spot websites that might be AI generated content farms!

First, the website is called faunafacts.com. And one of the first things that sticks out to me is how low-effort the logo is:

Regardless of whether a website is AI generated or not, a lazy and low-quality logo is a big clue that the website's content will also be lazy and low-quality.

If we click on Browse Animals, we see four options: Cows, Wolves, Bears, and Snakes.

Let's click Wolves.

The first thing I want you to notice is the lack of topical focus. Sure, it's all about wolves, but the content on them is all over the place. We have content on wolf hunting, a page on animals that resemble wolves, pages that explain the alleged social structure of wolves, and pages on wolf symbolism.

A website with content created by real people isn't going to be all over the place like this. It would be created with more of a focus in mind, like animal biology and behavior. The whole spiritual symbol thing here mixed with supposed biological and behavioral information is weird.

The next thing I want you to notice are the links to pages on topics that are quite frankly bizarre: "Wolf vs Mastiff: Things You Need To Know" and "Can You Ride A Wolf? (No, Because...)" Who is even looking for this kind of information in large enough numbers that it needs a dedicated page?

Then of course, there's the fact that they're repeating the debunked wolf hierarchy stuff, which anyone who actually knew anything about wolves at this point wouldn't post.

Now let's look at what's on one of the actual pages. We'll check out the wolves vs. mastiff page, and we can soon find a telltale sign of AI: rambling off topic to talk about something completely unrelated.

Both animals are carnivores. In the wild, wolves hunt large animals like bison, deer, and even elk. Sometimes, they may also hunt small mammals like the beaver.

Mastiffs, on the other hand, are mainly fed with dog food. As a dog, a mastiff left in the wild will eat anything. However, it will have difficulties hunting, as this instinct may have already departed the dogs of today.

A mastiff is not an obligate carnivore. Dogs can eat plant matter. Some say that dogs can survive on a vegetable diet.

Dogs being made vegetarians is a contentious issue. Scientifically, dogs belong to the order Carnivora. There is a movement today to convert dogs to a vegan diet. While science has nothing against it, the fear of many is that when dog owners do this, a vegan diet will certainly have an impact on the species.

This page is supposed to be comparing mastiffs with wolves, but then it starts talking about the vegan pet food movement. This happened because large language models generate text based on on what's statistically likely to follow the last text it just generated.

Finally, the website's images are AI generated:

If you know what to look for, this is a very obviously AI generated image. There's no graininess to the image, and the details are both unnaturally smooth and unnaturally crisp. It also has that high color saturation that many AI generated images have.

So there you go, this is one example of what an AI generated website can look like! Be careful out there!

[januwo]

Timbuktu - Africa's Forgotten Library

Timbuktu, to many that name is simply a term for "middle of nowhere", somewhere you'd go to if you didn't come back in home by dinner, and many don't even know it was a real place, on the other side of the Sahara from Morocco.

And if you look deeper, Timbuktu isn't just a place but one of the greatest intellectual centres of the Medieval era.

It didn't hold just books but a reflection of Sub-Saharan's intellectual hub, who's library was the largest in the world for centuries.

"View of Tombouctou from a hill" from Rene Caille's Journals, 1830

On the subject of historical libraries, the Library of Alexandria and the loss of scrolls is never one to miss. It is the subject of countless mourning for the 400,000 books that burned down (though that story isn't really true).

Yet, Timbuktu's libraries are home to an estimated 700,000 manuscripts dating back as far as the 11th century, almost double what was in Alexandria, about science, law, astronomy, health, philosophy, and more.

This number is so large it was only in the late 19th-century when British Library recorded hitting that milestone, centuries after the printing press.

And unlike the common belief that it was simply copies of Arabic texts, there were many, many original texts were written by West African scholars from Mali to Nigeria to Sudan, thinking and philosophising on concepts not seen elsewhere.

And unlike the unrecoverable books of Alexandria, Timbuktu's books are still out there, not in massive public libraries but hidden in homes, cellars, basements, under wells and beds. Away from the colonialist powers around the city that till this day keep trying to destroy its tradition.

So if one singular West African city is home to a unique repository of culturally distant Medieval knowledge larger than any seen at the time, why isn't it more well known?

Abdel Kader Haidara, director of the Bibliotheque Mama Haidara De library looking through manuscripts in his house. Photographed by National Geographic, Sep 2009.

Historians may debate the origins of Timbuktu in different languages and different etymologies, but local tradition dating back to the 17th century at least indicates that it's in the name itself:

Around 1000AD, among the northern tributaries of the Niger, sat a water well used by pastoralists and merchants crossing the Saharra, this much we do know of.

Oral tradition preserved in the manuscripts state that the well was cared for by an elderly woman named Buktu. The area became known as "Tim-Buktu", Buktu’s Place.

Her legacy, like many women in Timbuktu's history, was never erased and also reflects the more egalitarian society that it was known for.

"Arrival at Timbuktu" circa 1100 AD in Tifinagh and Magrashab Ajami, depicting a caramel caravan greeted by Buktu, edited from a print of Timbuktu in 1891 as I couldn't find any depictions of Buktu.

As an essential stop on the trans-Saharan route, it eventually became a permanent dwelling growing in size, becoming a commercial market and later a place of education.

And around the same time, Islam was spreading in Africa.

But you see, the stereotype of a religion spread by conquest wasn't true in West Africa, it was too hard to reach. It was spread through Islamic merchants that came and settled in cities, creating their own class of citizens.

These merchants created communities of learning, law, and commerce, and gradually over time converted people, taught others, and created a shared community based on Islam. Cities across West Africa had this revolution in time, but Timbuktu was the northern door leading the way. It was small at first.

Mansa Musa, king of the Mali Empire between 1317-1354, from the 1375 Catalan Atlas. His caption reads "This king is the richest and noblest of all these lands due to the abundance of gold that is extracted from his lands"

But then came Mansa Musa, that guy, the richest man in history. His story is one most of us know and is a whole post on its own but he's the key originator of this story.

After travelling back from Mecca in 1324, he saw potential and peacefully annexed the city of Timbuktu on his way, full of ideas from what he found in the great cities he passed through.

He funded the already existing mosques and brought in scholars from North Africa, wanting Timbuktu to also be a city of scholars, as the gateway from North to West.

And it worked.

An 800 year old pre-Mali Empire Qur'an from the the year 1215, illuminated manuscripts were common among the Qu'ran found in Timbuktu, often incorporating local textile motifs mixed with Islamic geometry.

At its peak in the 16th century, it had a population of 100,000 people with 25,000 of its inhabitants being scholars. That's a quarter of a city engaged in education on a level unlike any other city in the world.

Mosques like the Sankoré Madrassa, a place of learning created around the same time as Oxford University, became libraries, classrooms, lodges for pilgrims, and more above the place of worship, and started writing tens of thousands of books.

These madrassa's were places where scholars could convene with their students rather than a strict university setting.

In Timbuktu, it wasn't a school's prestige that was important but the teacher that was most important, and usually the children of the teachers also became teachers, creating a culture of families renowned for their intellectual prowess.

Public libraries weren't common but scholars had their own big libraries. Ahmad Baba lost 1600 books in the Morroccan invasion, which his student famously commented was the smallest library out of any library in his family.

And unlike modern and ancient stereotypes, they created literature and developed entirely new genres of literature, and a new form of Islam too still practiced today.

The Sankoré Madrassa in Timbuktu, photo by Bert de Rulier

Timbuktu was remote, that's hard to deny, but it's fame was certainly not. Scholars from Morocco and Egypt came to study, coming from societies where differing views on religion could be deadly they were shocked at the wildly different and unique debates and hadith in Timbuktu.

One famous story tells of an Egyptian scholar coming to teach in Sankoré, but humbled by those around him that he became a student. This wasn't unusual, and Timbuktu's fame was in the pride of this sort of environment.

This relative flexibility of thought in Timbuktu was because of its remoteness, away from the strict standards of the North who couldn't keep a watchful eye.

Conversions to Islam were done through cultural negotiation and persuasion, creating an Islam more tolerant of local African traditions, yet always respecting the Quran. This was something that famous Moroccan traveler Ibn Battutta infamously found horrifying in his 1350 visit to the Mali Empire.

And women were part of the conversation too, Nigerian scholar Usman dan Fodio, famous for innovating the famous Sokoto literary tradition in northern Nigeria, was part of a family that believed in gender equality.

His sisters were known to read and write, copy manuscripts, take care of his libraries, and Fodio's daughter Nana Asma'u became the most famous female poet, polyglot and teacher in West Africa. She formed a cradle of female teachers called jajiss who travelled across the region teaching women to the same standard as men did.

Tolerance and apathy for keeping the faith are reasons some modern researches would lead you to believe the rationale for this cultural mix, but it was simply a different blend that always ultimately followed the Quran.

One of Nana Asma'u's works, written in her mother tongue Fulfulde, 1822

Each town often had its own mufti, these were trained judges who handled local disputes: marriage, trade, inheritance, and even gossip. They wrote to other scholars for advice, receiving detailed legal rulings. These texts with the legal rulings are called fatwa.

Fatwas are a treasure trove of local legal reasoning, especially in West Africa where we see different approaches and belief systems compared to other regions. Topics ranged from dowry rights, camel disputes, and even cheating scandals.

West African fatwas reveal a lively, flexible, and deeply contextual Islamic world that often debated concepts in ways unthinkable in the Arab world.

And this is one of Timbuktu’s greatest contributions, pioneering an African scholarly tradition that merged worlds, and brought lived social context into theology.

Looking into specific fatwas and authors and analysing West African Islamic tradition and social roles is for a whole seperate post, but know that through it we can see a completely unique intellectual understanding of Islam forming.

However fatwa's are fairly common across the Islamic world, did Timbuktu or Mali contribute anything groundbreaking? Yes.

A page from a 19th century commonplace book, starting with a sheep-related fatwa and ending on a note about a hadith.

Timbuktu wouldn't last in its golden age forever, and in 1591 the city was sacked by the Moroccans, destroying manuscripts and destroying tombs. This event started a power vacuum and chaos between rivaling families.

To make sense of it all and to settle disputes on legitimacy, scholars started compiling histories of Timbuktu and the surrounding histories in the Sahel, these were called Tarikhs, historical chronicles.

In 1655, the Tarikh al-Sudan was published, Sudan being a name for the black African regions. It's actually THE primary source for where the histories of the Mali, Songhai, and Ghana empires that we know today come from.

The Tarikh genre in Timbuktu is particularly interesting, however what was revolutionary about it wasn't the text itself but where it was sourced from, oral histories and commentaries.

In most historiographic tradition at that time, only written material was accepted as legitimate for history, and everything else deemed irrelevant. Oral stories were usually performed to teach morality, a lesson, and thus events might be exaggerated or a narrative entirely fictionalised, so academia dismissed it as irrelevant.

But what Abd al-Sa'di realised was that oral histories sung and said by the bards (called griots) were generally very accurate at giving a general yet intimate view of moments in history, where even fiction when critically analsyed could give us deep insights in history. This revolution gave us one of the best examples of historiography in the African continent.

It would take until the 19th century for the West to even consider oral stories/fiction as having historical basis, when a very amateur archaeologist decided to forgo all established convention and believe Homer, in the process finding the city of Troy millenia after its name was first sung.

Many scholars turned to Ajami, the use of arabic script to write local languages, preserve and ideas that otherwise had no written form. The 20+ languages known to be written this way were part of a unique blend that elevated the languages of the people to an equal intellectual status as Arabic, in fact this was so much the case that foreign scholars to the region would often learn Fulfulde due to its prominence.

So knowing the massive, unique, distinct and large literary tradition in the city and abroad, why isn't it more well known and researched?

A more recent copy of the Tarikh al-Sudan sitting in the Metropolitan Museum.

The Moroccan invasions never slowed down the intellectual tradition but made people wary of outsiders. A couple European explorers were known to be murdered in their attempt to visit the city in fear of what they would bring if they brought back news. Teachers taught in their homes instead, if need be children were taught in secret. French colonialisation didn't help matters but people persisted.

After Mali's independence, there was renewed interest in Timbuktu which led to some digitalisation projects. Gathering books included literally knocking on people's doors and convincing them that the foreign researchers would do no harm to the texts, creating libraries with tens of thousands of copies.

In 2012, with a jihadist takeover that was much against what Timbuktu stood for, attempted to get rid of any manuscripts found in the city as part of a push against non-Sharia compliancy. Books were smuggled on rice bags, donkey carts, and re-hidden again with the help of researchers, successfully being able to smuggle a total of 300,000 known books, with many probably still in the city.

Digitalisation has largely been a success with over 150,000 books available in online archives, specifically in the Virtual Hill Museum & Manuscript Library. However, a tiny minority are translated and studied and even less are readily available. This was due to efforts prioritising conservation before research, and so it's knowledge remains underappreciated simply because the wide world doesn't yet have easy access and interest in it yet.

Timbuktu is a city of many wonders to uncover, and may it stand as a testament that West Africa, and the continent more broadly, has always been a cradle of knowledge, history, and depth the world can no longer afford to overlook.

READ MORE:

Hill Museum & Manuscript Library - Contains thousands of manuscripts I used for statistics

African Bibliophiles: Books and Libraries in Medieval Timbuktu by Brent Singleton - Interesting research on its book keeping and intellectual culture

Beyond Timbuktu An Intellectual History Of Muslim West Africa by Ousmane Oumar Kane - A book moving away from the Western lens on Timbuktu, with takes and information I found so fascinating I'll write much further on these topics when I finish reading it.

The Meanings of Timbuktu by Shamil Jeppie and Souleymane Bachir Diagne - Fascinating deep dive, with many examples I used, into many specific aspects of the manuscripts I'd need many more posts to explore.

[dweamofsweep]

Cyborg 009 Tribute Anthology Story 4: "Eight Rooms" by Torishima Denpou

An account of Jet Link's experiences with Black Ghost in the time leading up to the 00-Numbers' escape -- mostly focusing on him and two of his friends from the Jets who were also recruited by Black Ghost and being modified to fly.

Scans and Google Translation on Drive

Or read below the cut! As per usual I tried to clean it up a bit, but left anything I couldn't really make sense of. This one's a little long but enjoy - a tad morbid at times though...

Eight Rooms Torishima Denpou

How did Jet Link become 002? This is the unknown story behind the development of the Zero Zero Number Cyborg.

Jet Link (002) has the ability to fly freely in the air with the flight units equipped on his legs. He was the leader of a gang of delinquents on the West Side of New York, but after stabbing an opponent in a fight with a rival group, he was called out to by the Black Ghost Gang while on the run, and converted into a cyborg.

When the Black Ghost Gang went on a "human hunt" for cyborg experiments, they had the following conditions: "They must be of a different race… and of a different age… and they must not cause much trouble when abducted" (Original Story). Though they are both from America, Geronimo Jr. (005) is a Native American compared to the white Jet. He is a cyborg with reinforced skin and a million horsepower of superhuman strength. He is silent, calm, and has a proud spirit. In the original illustrations from the beginning of the series, 005's protective suit was painted green.

Torishima Denpou was born in Osaka Prefecture in 1970. He made his debut in 2011 with "Kikai-tachi no Do" (The Perfect Attendance Student), which won the 2nd Sogen SF Short Story Award. He won the 234th Japan Science Fiction Grand Prize for his collection of stories "Kikai-tachi no Do" (2013), and the 640th Japan Science Fiction Grand Prize for his first original full-length novel "Yadokari no Hoshi" (2019). His works include "Run (lol)", "Kensei no Mushi" (a renamed paperback edition of "Octologue Torishima Denbou Works Collection" published in 2020), "Nufuretsun the Musician", and "Travel Letters Collection: Yukiatashi Shi Asatte" (co-authored with Takayama Haneko and Kurata Takashi), among others.

A strange figure floated in the grey expanse of sky. It was about sixty feet above the ground, swaying up and down and side to side but maintaining its position. We held our breath and looked up at it. Its upper body was wearing a flight suit, but from the waist down it was a mass of scrap metal with pipes, pumps, and combustion chambers all protruding, making it look like a bronze statue on a pedestal. From a pair of nozzles at the bottom, high-temperature, high-pressure gas was blasting out with a roar, forming a thick trunk that spread like a cumulonimbus cloud all over the launch pad and the surrounding sandy beach. "Tony's thing is pretty stable this time," I commented, and Kevin nodded, "Yeah, he beat me to it," and then said, "But it's still really noisy. You could do a better job of muffling it," as he looked around the paved area known as the control area on the war-torn beach. Large equipment covered in cords was lined up in a haphazard fashion, and researchers were measuring various things. Dr. O and Dr. G were standing next to the control desk closer to us, staring at Tony with binoculars.

"Good job, Tony Kaczynski. Much better than your last flight. Keep it up," Dr. O said into the radio microphone in German-accented English, then directed instructions to one of the researchers. "Pauman, try increasing the amount of fodder a little. No, let's avoid the lottery. Keep an eye on the TQ value too."

Let's talk! Our artificial hearing is highly sensitive, so it can pick up voices even from some distance away. However, when researchers talk to each other, they often use code words to prevent secret information from leaking, and sometimes they even use languages ​​other than English that I can't understand, so it's often hard to understand what they're saying. They are of various races, but judging from the chatter I can overhear, it seems that quite a few of them are scientists from countries that had lost the war. It seems that the doctor and several other researchers had worked on research and development of V2 rockets at the German Army Weapons Office during the war, and memories of the hardships of that time would sometimes pop up in their conversations.

Kevin yawned loudly, and I yawned too. "By the time I got here, I was exhausted from all the work I had done on the maintenance shed."

Suddenly, Dr. O turned around, looked up at us, and said, "You should be more aware that you have been chosen by Project Nurnurzwei. Air superiority will be the key to future wars. You will be the vanguard of that war."

"This?" I said with a wry smile, looking down at my whole body as I stood on the transport cart. From the waist down, my legs were equipped with a different type of twin thruster unit from Tony's, and were more than one size larger than normal legs. Kevin's thruster unit, standing next to me, was slightly smaller, but more deformed than mine, and both of us were completely misshapen.

He was a long-legged circus clown.

I couldn't help but think that it would be far more realistic to ride a rocket as my bare flesh than to float in the air in this ridiculous, patchwork body that could barely walk on its own.

Suddenly, a dangerous sound of gunfire that sounded like a machine gun rang out, and I looked over my shoulder. I couldn't see because of the high protective wall, but they must have been test-firing a new weapon. The protective wall joined a cliff of almost the same height, and beyond that I could see a low mountain with a ridge lined with what looked like radar antennas.

Tony slowly descended, weakening the thrusters, and everyone was on edge. One of the test subjects had lost his life in an explosion of the thruster unit during the previous landing. He was a Turkish man who had been brought in via a different route from us, and we hadn't yet become acquainted with him.

The landing covered the area around Negira in smoke, and everyone gasped in admiration. "That was a splendid landing," Dr. O said, and the surrounding researchers applauded.

Tony said with an excited look on his face, "This time, I'll walk with these big legs," but we tried to stop him, saying, "Hey, it's dangerous, so stop," and "It'll be a repeat of what happened last time." The last time he tried, he fell like a chess piece and suffered a mild concussion. But surprisingly, Dr. X said, “He can try it.”

"The moving parts have been improved since then. Let me try it. That's great, Dr. G."

Dr. G, who designed the walking mechanism for the Beard Launch Unit, is silent as he plays with his white beard. He snorts and nods to the researcher in charge of operating the launch pad's arm.

Tony lifted one of the two totem pole-like launch units, which were still spewing smoke from all over, with an unsettling creak, and sent it one step forward, lowering the guard pipe-like tip of the nozzle to the floor. Just as he was about to take the same step with the other one, its whole body tilted heavily and began to fall - "Damn it!" Tony spat out, throwing both hands in the air - and was immediately grabbed by the arms of the launch pad on both sides and placed on a transport cart on the paved road.

"I thought they had improved it," Dr. O muttered dissatisfiedly.

"It's an unreasonable request from the start to use such bulky thruster units as legs," Doctor G retorted in Russian-accented English. This doctor, who is in charge of integrating and coordinating the construction of our bodies, was once a brilliant scientist at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Perhaps he gave up his position to come here because of the excellent research environment and treatment. "Besides, no matter how smoothly we can move, with this size you won't be able to fit through the passageway," he said, spreading his arms wide with his short body. "You have to do something about the thruster units first. You boasted that you would definitely make them small enough to fit into normal legs."

Tony was carried over to us, upright on a transport cart, and said, "While I was floating in the air…I wasn't feeling bad," he said, smiling at us, then looked confused when he saw the two doctors' grim expressions.

"Of course. We've been working day and night to miniaturize it to the size of a normal leg." There was no lie in Professor O's words. Looking closely, his face was paler than our artificial skin, and you could see how exhausted he was. "But to make it happen without compromising, we need to develop a new fuel. If your lover, Professor M, could figure out the optimal reaction method for Odin's blood--"

Tony whistles. “She must be the one who came to the flight test the other day," Kevin says, frowning for some reason. I'm sure he's a regular. I didn't remember him.

"Stop it. How many times do I have to tell you we're not lovers?" Dr. G became restless and rubbed his big nose.

"It doesn't seem like an intimacy to me."

"I'm just asking for a little advice - no, no. Anything that doesn't relate to flight tests.

Please send it to me.”

"Anyway, you're closer to her than anyone else. Please urge her to speed up his research…" Dr. O raised one hand and put his face close to the radio microphone. "Now, let's move on to the next test. Jet Link, I'm counting on you."

My transport cart moved forward on the sand, and the tips of the two arms connected with my waist and lifted me up.

Then -- I can feel the weight of my legs putting a great deal of strain on the joints -- slowly lowered onto a launch pad that is also used for missile test launches.

I slide the protective covers over my eye sockets forward, covering my eyeballs. My vision blurs for a moment, but I soon get used to it. After adjusting the width of my legs and straightening my posture, I try to ignite the propulsion unit, repeatedly moving the vague illusion of a control console that my auxiliary brain has in my mind, but perhaps I'm not concentrating enough, as it didn't respond as well as it did last time.

"It seems the projection within your consciousness still needs some adjustment. For now, please use the control console on your waist.” I can hear Doctor X's voice through my ears, and I grasp the receiver-like control console and press a switch.

The thruster unit on my lower body began to tremble violently――― A golden light spread from the soles of my feet, and smoke began to swell up like rainclouds. Just as I thought my body was beginning to float, it suddenly began to tilt to one side, and I quickly operated the stick on the control console, but now it was shaking back and forth――――

"The arm is supporting you. Just calm down and get used to it."

I was swaying back and forth like a bad surfer -- I could see Tony and Kevin laughing -- and while I was struggling to keep my balance, I felt the sensation of the nozzle rising up in the soles of my feet, and they were twisting and squeezing me as newly formed organs.

"Good, your attitude is stable. Keep going up."

I squeeze out the fluid from both my legs, and the force pushing up from below makes my back tense.

Hearing the arm let go of my body, I feel a sense of freedom, but at the same time, loneliness at the loss of my lifeline. Looking down, white smoke is expanding and covering the area. Dark depressions that look like explosions remain here and there on the beach. I stare at the various displays on the virtual gauges, which float vaguely in my field of vision like the shadows of floaters. The fuel capacity is already decreasing. Doctor O says there's nothing to worry about, but I can't shake the fear that the fuel filling my legs will ignite.

The launch pad and the doctors are seen receding into the distance below.

Six meters, seven meters—the numbers on the display went up, but it didn't match the height I could see below me. I was annoyed that metric units were the standard here. On the other side of the protective wall, the ruins of the city, a training ground, came into view, and an explosion of flames rose from the road on the left. The roar of the rocket unit prevented me from hearing the explosions. Fifteen meters, twenty meters—further beyond, a mountain ridge reminiscent of a camel's hump peeked out. Simple buildings stood sparsely on the mountainside, but I couldn't tell which one was the one we were living in.

"Now, descend about ten meters."

Umm… about 30 feet. I eased up on the jet and went down. My back stiffened as I tried to keep my balance. I was told to go up again, and I did.

As I went up and down as instructed, the heat from the thruster became unsettling. My waist and neck felt like they were being burned, and the smoke from the engines was filling my field of vision.

I was shocked when I saw the display on the device. It was obvious that the temperature of the legs was unbelievably high, but the temperature of the whole body was also not something a human could bear.

"Doctor! The body temperature is--" I cried out, and Doctor G's voice said, "It's within the capacity of your body's structure. Don't worry, your homeostatic functions will catch up soon and you should feel better." Soon I noticed that some organ had begun to pulsate in my abdomen. Gradually the heat subsided, and my thirst subsided.

“That said, your sympathetic nervous system response is a bit extreme. There is room for improvement.”

My body temperature has gone down and I feel better, but it's still much higher than normal. I realize that my bare flesh cannot withstand this test.

“Here we go again.”

The doctor's voice returns, ordering them to rise and fall.

Once you get the hang of it intuitively, simply moving it up and down feels unsatisfying and a little silly.

"Feeling good. That's all for today. Land on your feet."

Bracing myself, I reduced the output of the thrust unit while adjusting the direction of the nozzle and began to descend carefully.

The guard pipes surround the nozzle, and the rocket lands safely on the launch pad. The weight of the rocket's body is suddenly transferred to the rocket's body, but is relieved by the shock-absorbing action. The smell of burning chemicals from the floating smoke fills the air. Through the blurred view, the sound of the researchers clapping can be heard.

Once the vibrations in the legs subsided, I was lifted up by an arm and transferred to a transport cart, which then moved along the paved road. As Kevin passed by, we drove to the control station and watched as he was placed on the launch pad.

Kevin, who was smaller than us, began to tremble as his legs shook and he began to rise, spreading smoke with a thunderous roar. He remained suspended in the air at about his own height, floating from side to side. His face, which had looked calm, turned into a pained expression as if petrification was spreading throughout his body.

"The temperature in Section D is rising rapidly!" the researcher called out.

The doctor instructs the researchers, but there is a dull explosion from Kevin's right leg and flames rise up. He is lowered onto the launch pad by an arm, and the researchers immediately surround him and spray foam from a fire extinguisher.

"It seems that cooling the combustion chamber is difficult with this model," Dr. O said wryly.

"For now, we should make it a GT engine and reduce the amount of oxidizer."

"Not yet! We are being asked to operate outside the atmosphere."

The doctor and Dr. G argue in English, which is not each other's native language.

"At least use AB cooling---"

"Then I'll be disposable! This is why I can only think of replacing my body with parts.

Monmonha.”

"Have you forgotten that you are only alive thanks to a replacement heart!"

Before the end of the war, a researcher had said that Dr. O had been shot to death to destroy evidence. Was that rumor true?

Afterwards, we were carried on a transport cart to a one-story maintenance shed near the cliff at the foot of the mountain, and each of us was made to lie down on a large maintenance bench that looked like a noble's bed.

Here, researchers led by Dr. G swarmed around us with strange tools in their hands and began removing the leg-like thruster units. Sensing someone's gaze, I looked towards the wall, where Dr. O was gazing thoughtfully at the thruster unit with his hand on his chin.

It often takes too long to remove them and we often get bored with it.

"It's too much work to spend so much time changing the landing gear every single time we do a flight test," Tony complained, and Kevin agreed. "You know what? I only had a quick glimpse today."

"You guys, why don't you read a book? Some subjects do that during maintenance. You can even use the library if you do that."

In response to the researcher's words, I replied, "I took a look once, but all they had were technical books related to science and the military," and then I said something that had been on my mind for a while.

"In the first place, why bother making the legs into launch units? Wouldn't it be better to just carry them on your back? That way it wouldn't take as much time and there wouldn't be as much danger. You wouldn't have to worry about the size either---"

"Don't be stupid!" Dr. O yelled, coming towards me with a pale face.

"It's the likeness that counts! Don't you realize how much money has been spent on it?"

"Your competitor is a former colleague of Dr. X. He's pushing forward with a space program across your country---"

Doctor X raised his voice even more after hearing what the researcher said to us.

"The space program that they rushed into after being overtaken by their enemy country is nothing more than a cover-up, with their fragile bodies stuffed into a giant iron box and then launched!"

"But astronauts do incredible amounts of training to prepare their bodies for space," Tony said.

"No matter how hard we try, we can't surpass the limits of humanity. If we venture into space alone, we'll be doomed. We'll have no choice but to stay quietly inside the iron box. That way we won't be able to achieve the harvest that will come someday."

"So you want us to dunk on a satellite from here into space?" Tony laughed.

"What do you mean, harvest?" Kevin asked warily.

"It's a critical moment that will determine the future of humanity. To be worthy of the harvest, humanity itself must transform into a new body suited to space. Otherwise we will―”

"Oh, shut up already!" Doctor G stood up from behind my thruster unit. "I've had enough of your mystical nonsense. Doctor X, can you please stay outside until I finish this job?"

"It's blissful to not know anything." Dr. ○ shook his head from side to side like a military doctor who has noticed the death of a wounded soldier, then turned and left.

After about two hours of having the flight unit removed, I began to feel uneasy, even though it had felt so foreign. Next, the fitting of the prosthetic leg, which had a slender curve and looked almost identical to a normal leg, began. Multiple thin cables were connected one by one, and the joints on the thigh were fitted and fixed from the outside with several long hinges. After a while, my calf began to spasm. This was the initial movement indicating that the nerves had begun to work. Unlike the walking mechanism of the thrust unit, which transmits power through hydraulic cylinders, underneath the skin were bundles of elastic artificial muscles, the same as those in the upper body.

I sat up, twisted my waist, and pushed both of my prosthetic legs out of the bed. My knees bent smoothly, and my feet touched the floor. I tried to stand up. At first, I felt a strange sensation of numbness, but as I moved up and down, I gradually got used to it. I tried to move the nozzle of the ejection unit, and I ended up puckering my toes.

"It's easier to move around than this morning, and it feels more natural." I always felt a disconnect with my prosthetic leg, and when I stayed still, I would sometimes feel an uncomfortable tingling sensation that I couldn't bear.

"Maybe it's a new leg?"

"They look the same though," said Kevin, whose transplant had just finished, standing up and shaking his legs up and down.

Dr. G looked at the movement with narrowed eyes and said, "The outside is the same, but the brain that processes the nervous system has been replaced."

"What? So there's a brain in the leg?" Tony, whose attachment had not yet been completed, said as he lay down.

"It's true, it's easier to move than before." Kevin gradually increases the speed of his feet, and finally begins to perform his special skill, tapping, with a brisk rhythm.

"Wow, that's impressive," said Dr. G with a rare exclamation of admiration.

An attendant in camouflage uniform appears, and we follow him out of the maintenance building. We go around to the back and find an area resembling a weapons graveyard, with rusted parts from aircraft and tanks scattered in piles. We go down a flight of stairs from an entrance that resembles a half-buried subway station. A long underground passage appears, and at the end are two men with bare metallic upper bodies walking awkwardly behind the attendant. They must be from Room 004, two doors down. We continue on. When we reach the elevator lobby, the third door from the right is open, and the three from before are waiting inside. One of them, a grey-haired man, is walking towards us with a pile of soot-covered metal.

He holds an arm in front of him that looks like an awkwardly connected tube, and presses the opening/closing button with one of his fingers, which also has a tube shape. A book was peeking out from his pants pocket. ”Exodus'' written by Leon Uris.

“I wonder if it was you who made that explosion sound.Are you test-firing a new weapon?'' Tony asked. The gray-haired man glanced at him with pale eyes, but remained silent with his thin lips drawn together.

"Aren't these guys robots after all?" Kevin scoffs.

“Would you all shut up? We're told not to talk to anyone in the other room,'' says our attendant. According to Instructor R, this is to avoid the risk of leaking secrets from other departments when engaging in special operations in different countries.

The man's hand moves intermittently and leaves the open/close button, and the door closes.

The elevator starts moving. There is no floor number display, and I still don't know what floor it is on. For a while, the only sound I could hear was my own breathing.

Even if it is rising, could it have exceeded its current height just now?

The brass elevator arrives and the doors open. Near the front is a door with a brass plate engraved with 〈003〉. This number represents not only the room but also the project. We started walking to the left of the passage, and the other three started walking to the right. When we arrived in front of Room 002, the room of Project Nurunurzwei, according to Dr. O, the attendant placed something that looked like a lighter under the doorknob and unlocked it. As soon as the three of them entered, the door closed and locked again.

Tony turns on the ceiling light. It was a bleak room with no windows, exposed concrete walls and floors, minimal furniture and fixtures, and a projector and film cans.

Kevin and Tony sat down on the couch. They said, "We can finally take a breather," but I actually felt like I was suffocating.

I was extremely thirsty. I took three beer bottles from the small refrigerator in the corner of the room, closed the door with my foot, handed them to them, and sat down on the sofa across the low table. Each person picks up a bottle and pops the lid off with just their thumb.

"Don't you remember Jeff?" Tony said.

“Well, he was able to open the lid with just his fingers.'' I could see the proud look on Jeff's face. “Ah. You can’t do that. You’re laughing at us, saying we’re stupid.”

Jeff was stabbed to death six months before he came here. We all assumed it was the Sharks’ work. I take a sip of beer. The bitterness spreads, and a fine, bubbling sensation passes down your throat. I was lucky that that feeling didn't change, but I couldn't get drunk as much as I used to, probably because of the artificial organs.

"If I had the body I have now back then, the Sharks wouldn't have been my enemy. I could have driven them all back to Puerto Rico."

Tony says so, but we’re on this island in the middle of nowhere, far from the Westside.

Now, I couldn't remember clearly why we started fighting with the Sharks. We were both immigrants. Why did Jeff have to die? What were we angry about?

"You were no match for them in your previous body. That's why you had to run away, and you ended up like this,” Kevin said, laughing irritably. He probably still had feelings for her.

The sensation of stabbing Pedro of the Sharks comes back to my hand. Even though my bones and muscles have been completely replaced with artificial ones, it hasn't disappeared. That day, we Jets just happened to run into the Sharks. The skirmishes had been going on for a while, and with Jeff, it wasn't a surprise that it could have happened at any time. Before I knew it, Pedro and I were facing each other with knives in our hands - as soon as Pedro fell, the sound of sirens rang out, and we all ran away at once, but I was chased by the police and had nowhere to run. That's when the scouts from the organization appeared. They said, "We'll get you out of here. And not only that, we can give you power - looking back, it was a very sudden and suspicious offer.

I was put in the back seat of a car, and with a partition and black windows blocking out the view, I was taken to a place I didn't know for about half a day, and locked alone in a room like a storeroom in the basement of an old building. Three days later, I was suddenly taken to a place that seemed to be a munitions factory in the middle of the night, and was taken to a place called a runway.

When I got on the Lopera plane, I was surprised to see Tony and Kevin sitting in my seat. Turns out the day after the incident, another conflict broke out, resulting in several deaths on both sides, and they were scouted during the escape.

"Hey Jet, don't apologize. I love the way my body is right now…Except for my legs,” he said, laughing.

I accepted the offer not only because I was upset, but also because I was fed up with the town and myself and wanted to get away from it all.

Suddenly there was the sound of a baby crying.

"Didn't you hear that just now?"

"Oh no… I'm hallucinating again the sound of a baby crying. I'm starting to miss the time when my mother was comforting me.

Isn't that right?"

"You idiot," I said, throwing the bottle cap at Kevin and leaning back on the sofa.

There was a sound of the door unlocking, and it opened. The cart entered on its own, unfolded a long, thin arm that had been stored next to the tabletop, and placed dinner plates filled with food on the table from inside. The attendant told me that it was a type of robot originally made to lay mines. I felt uneasy every time this thing handed out food.

The dinner plate is divided into two compartments: bread, chili peppers with sausage, and a sausage.

The meal consisted of pieces of bread, a salad of steamed vegetables, cut fruit, etc. Attached to the side like a paper napkin was a mark sheet.

"Today's off."

The reason Kevin said that was because the ration was a hydrocodile combat ration. It was made by another company in the organization for export to the military forces of various countries, and was sometimes served as a sample like this.

"Well, there's still a lot of it."

When the wagon leaves, we start eating with plastic forks in hand. For a while, the only sound we can hear is the sound of chewing. Our artificial organs are powered by the power reactor, but the parts of our bodies that remain physical still need calories. Not only that, but even if all of our organs were replaced with artificial ones, a person's mind would not be able to function properly without the input of information such as taste and texture from food, Dr. G said.

"I wonder if responding to the scouting call was really the right decision," Kevin suddenly muttered.

"Here we go again. We got powers," Tony replies, annoyed.

"The strength to levitate in the air and open a beer bottle with your bare hands?" Kevin snorted.

“So, you’d rather be thrown in jail and have to eat stinky food for years. I guess it’s better in moderation.”

"How is this different from a prison? The door is locked and you can't go out freely. The attendants are always following us around like prison guards. And as for this food…"

"We're classified, so it can't be helped. It's for our own protection."

No, this place might be worse than prison, I thought to myself.

"Hey Jet, you've been awfully quiet lately."

"You're still worried, aren't you? This guy is surprisingly quick to jump to conclusions. I thought it was just a coincidence. You looked so hard, but there was no wiretapping device anywhere, right?"

"It's not that. I'm just a bit tired."

For a while now, there have been many incidents where it seemed like something was leaking information about the room. If we complained about a shortage of room supplies, they would be delivered right away, and if one of us let slip that he was feeling unwell, an unexpected inspection would suddenly be carried out. There was also one time when the three of us had a good time badmouthing an attendant, and the day after that, that attendant's attitude became obviously harsh. I had thoroughly searched the room, thinking that there might have been a listening device installed, but couldn't find one. However, that wasn't the only reason why I had become less talkative.

"At least you can't drink beer in prison," Tony retorted, putting the bottle to his mouth.

"No Heineken. I want Pabst Blue Ribbon," Kevin yelled.

"I don't care about beer, but I'd rather have kielbasa than this sausage," I said.

"I'd like to have pierogi and bigos. Koptuka and golabki. I'm starting to want to go home," said Kevin.

All of these were familiar foods in our neighborhood.

"Oh man, you're homesick," Tony said, stirring his chili beans with his fork. "I'm not. I was so bored of all those places."

As we were eating and talking about pointless things, Tony suddenly laughed, "I never thought there'd be any love affairs between those boring doctors. Especially Dr. G and Dr. M."

Kevin leaned back in the sofa and sighed in annoyance.

"I actually liked her a lot. But she was just a boring old man's woman."

"What, that plain woman? The women in the next room are much better. You see, there's a girl who looks like the actress in 'Parisienne' that we all went to see the other day---"

"She's obviously a whore! I saw her walking around upstairs in a fancy dress.”

"Hey, stop talking like that!"

The memory of my mother being mocked like that came back to me and I became angry.

"What's the matter, Jet? You've become really sensitive. Everyone on this floor is a test subject like us, which means you've got a scar on your shin. And her face is way too perfect. I bet it's an artificial creation for espionage or something. But at least the doctor is flesh and blood."

"Well, she’s an ice queen,” Tony said.

I was getting tired of their conversation. I marked all my marks on the exam sheet with low marks, and today…

"I'm tired, so I'll go to sleep first," I said, retreating to the back of the room. I lay down on the bottom of the bunk bed on the right. The mattress was like a hotel mattress and was comfortable to sleep on. A Turkish man had previously slept on the top bunk.

As I leaned against the wall, unable to sleep, I heard a clattering noise, the room went dark, and I began to hear gunfire and explosions along with the sound of a sewing machine-like projector. They were probably the war records lent by the instructor. They all seemed to have been edited by the organization. That was about all the entertainment we could get.

Depending on the intensity of the projector's light, countless letters of text appear on the concrete wall, as if faintly scratched. They appear to have been written with a sharp object by the test subjects who had lived in Room 002 before us. After noticing this, I gradually read the letters as I fell asleep. The handwriting was all over the place, with some indecipherable characters that looked like Chinese or Arabic, and some messy writing that looked like it had been written by a young child who couldn't move their hands well.

/My whole body hurts so much I feel like it's going to fall apart. I can't stop feeling nauseous. /Today I'm suffering from severe dizziness and lightheadedness. /I've complained to the doctor about my digestive problems and he's adjusted them. At the moment I can't excrete without medication. /I've had diarrhea for about two weeks. /Are you okay? I wonder if it's gotten better. /I haven't been able to sleep for days because I can't get rid of this tingling feeling in every corner of my body. Tomorrow I'll be injected with a drug that calms excessive nerve activity. They say they'll replace the artificial nerves in my limbs soon. /I feel sick. My vision keeps getting distorted. The skin all over my body is starting to fester and the pain is so bad I had to have pain blockade done. /As I thought, my lymphatic system is blocked and the lymph nodes are distorted. I'm tired of going to the infirmary every three days. /I haven't had any feeling in my skin since my last surgery. I don't even notice when I hit something and make a hole in my skin. /My hands and feet are in violent convulsions, and I can't even think about it. Make a movement that doesn't seem right.

Some of the notes appear to be conversations, but they may just have been added by later residents.

I wonder just how long they've been researching this. I realize that the reason this body can move so smoothly is thanks to the many test subjects that have been there up until now. After the first major operation, there have been numerous repeat operations and adjustments. About a month ago, another department had reportedly achieved new results, and the skin on his entire body was replaced. The new skin material is strong and elastic, and it even has the ability to sweat and regenerate to a certain extent. Immediately after the operation, his senses became too sensitive, though, and they had to make the adjustments more restrained.

The sound and light of the projector disappear, and the letters become invisible. Where are the former test subjects now?

"There'll be lectures again tomorrow. How tedious," "I actually quite like it. Don't you think what Instructor R has to say makes sense?" Tony and Kevin said these things as they climbed into the bunk beds opposite each other.

As I finished breakfast, an attendant appeared. When I went out to the aisle, another attendant appeared a little ahead.

A man stood there, and four women in protective suits were emerging from Room 003. Tony gave a faint whistle.

"Am I being glared at?" Kevin asked in a low voice. The women's gazes were certainly harsher than usual, and it felt as though they were all focused on Kevin. For some reason, the eyes of one of them looked familiar. Where had they met?

"What are you doing? Let's go."

Urged by the attendant, the women started to walk, and we followed behind. We passed Room 004, then Room 005, and when they started to climb the stairs between Room 006 and Room 007, I realized from her profile that she was the assistant who had been beside Dr. G during the surgery. While the other assistants were handing over surgical instruments and operating the equipment, she simply turned her eyes above the mask towards us, and only occasionally whispered in Dr. G's ear, which caught my attention.

There were training rooms and lecture halls lined up on the upper floors, and today I was in the fourth lecture hall on the left from the staircase. There were only chairs lined up in the windowless space, and about twenty subjects were sitting there. Native Americans, blacks, Asians, Arabs, Hispanics - there were probably people of various races there to intervene in the conflicts between countries. Private conversations were strictly forbidden, and even with so many people there, it was incredibly quiet.

We passed the attendants who were standing guard at the wall and took a seat near the front.

I took a deep breath. Maybe it was because of the air conditioning, but I felt a little drowsy as soon as I entered this room.

Footsteps were heard from behind, and Instructor R, wearing military uniform and wearing black-rimmed glasses, appeared in front of the front wall where the whiteboard was hung.

"So today, let's start by talking about the difference between conflict, civil war, and war."

Instructor R began his lecture in a calm tone, and I began to lose my attention.

From the first lecture I attended, I was wary that this might be the kind of ideological reform that a dictatorship would carry out, so I tried to avoid listening to what he had to say as much as possible.

Tony commented, "That sounds very interesting to me," and Kevin said something I'm tired of hearing: "You weren't so quick to jump to conclusions before." That may be true. But the instructor's seemingly cheerful eyes didn't reveal any emotion like our artificial eyes.

But even if I made it through the lecture like that, at night, as I was falling asleep in bed, I would suddenly find my lips moving and silently repeating the words of the instructor that I had pushed aside from my consciousness.

I wondered if this was due to my auxiliary brain. Just as I was wondering if this would continue forever, I heard the sound of a baby crying from somewhere, and the noise brought me back to reality.

A nurse occasionally comes and goes from room 001 next door, so perhaps it's a childcare room.

When I once suggested that to Tony and Kevin, they laughed and asked me why there was a nursery here. They said they had never heard any crying in the first place.

The instructor is now talking while writing letters and lines on the whiteboard.

"Humans have an eternal war instinct. Do you believe that? If it weren't for that, you wouldn't have come here."

No, my lips are moving. The words I heard from my instructor before are coming back to me.

Certainly, that may be true. The conflict between the Sharks and Jets was like a territorial dispute between countries. Until that decisive day, boredom, anxiety, and anger were always swirling among us, and we couldn't calm down. We were always waiting for something to happen. Unable to wait, we wandered around the other person's territory as if it were our own. If war is an instinct, then peace is something different and explosive--At that moment, I heard the baby's cry again, and stood up. With everyone's eyes on me, cold sweat rolled down my forehead. This was far from Room 001. I wondered if something was wrong with me after all. "What's wrong?"

“No, sorry.” I said as I sat down.

"You seem a bit restless these days, but I hope you'll listen to me without worrying," the instructor said with a smile, without scolding him.

After the lecture, we waited for the crowd to leave before getting up from our seats. The two of them were grinning and teasing me, saying, "What are you doing? Just listen." As we went down the stairs, a Latin man with long black hair was facing an attendant in front of Room 007. I wonder if he had been in the lecture room before. It was a face I'd never seen before. The toe of his right leather shoe was a little chipped.

"Are you going to leave me with an unfulfilled heart?" the man said to the attendant, gesturing dramatically.

"Really, he's always such a pain. Enough with that little drama, just hurry up. Go into your room.”

The man raised his arms to his shoulders as if to say that the man was worthless and walked through the door.

I was beginning to get a rough idea of ​​which face was in which room, but I wasn't sure how many people were in Room 007. Perhaps because of a high turnover rate, I kept seeing new faces of different races— but for some reason, most of them seemed to speak British English.

We returned to Room 002 and a cart soon arrived, carrying a row of round tins along with dinner plates: new film footage.

As we were eating, Tony and Kevin started talking about their past heroic deeds. I wonder how many times we've told these stories.

"Jet was amazing back then. You led the others and stormed into Joey's store right away."

"Yeah, that was funny. They broke the display window and knocked over the shelves full of merchandise one after another. Lollipops were scattered everywhere, and the customers who stepped on them started dancing…"

Through the green beer bottle, I can see all the trouble I caused in the past and my spine stiffens.

"Johnny loved cameras and he used to take a lot of pictures. When Jet saw the developed photos, he suddenly stood up and said, 'Joey had another store, didn't he? Let's go and raid it now.'"

I took a deep breath and said, "I guess I was just really drunk," and let the story go. Thinking back on the blurry image of myself pushing over a shelf or kicking someone, I felt like I was possessed by something, and it was so hideous that it made my chest ache.

"We have a new film, let's watch it together today," they invited me, but I made the excuse that my artificial organs were not working well and went to bed. It was no lie, I had a terrible heartburn.

As I gazed upon the letters engraved on the wall, sleepiness began to overcome me - and before I knew it, my lips were once again tracing the words that Instructor R had said today.

The leader of this organization has been pondering how humanity, unable to escape from this war instinct, can avoid destruction. To achieve this, he needs the enormous framework of the Cold War.

This is made up of countless proxy wars and civil wars, and it is this organization that maintains the balance between them.

Those words even bring back Tony's excited voice.

--- This is good. From now on, we will be able to take control of the war instinct that has been twisting us around so much.

Perhaps there really was no other way to maintain peace. Just as I was about to become convinced of this, the sound of a baby crying came again, bringing me back to my senses.

---No. Don't be swallowed up.

Yes, it's strange. Peace that is premised on the masses of people who just want to live their daily lives being killed, injured, and suffering…

No, it's not peace or balance….it's nothing….civil war is a…testing ground…demonstration ground for new weapons….and a liquidation ground for old weapons.

I was almost sucked into the organization's philosophy. I had to be careful. Even as I kept this in mind, I felt uneasy. Were all the words that were running through my head just now my own?

After about ten days of nothing but lectures, the next flight test was scheduled. In the maintenance shed, Dr. G and his team removed the artificial leg and carefully installed the jet unit, which had different piping from the previous one.

This time, all three were the same model.

Kevin was the first to stand on the launch pad. The rocket unit started to fire, and his whole body started to rise. There was less smoke than last time, and the noise was somewhat reduced. Kevin rose to a height of 100 meters. Following the instructions of Dr. O, he moved forward horizontally while maintaining his posture, and then started to move in a circle.

"Good. Excellent," said Dr. X, holding the radio microphone, with a satisfied look on his face. "However, this is still only as high as the Saturn rocket itself. It's stable, so please rise another 100 meters."

Kevin increased the power and continued to climb. From the ground he became the size of a bean and reached 200 meters.

When I expanded my vision, he saw us and gave me a playful look. Kevin returned as if he was riding an invisible elevator down, and then it was me.

This time I was able to ignite the rocket unit inside the chamber.

I feel strong pressure and heat under my feet as I ascend. Today, I can see the explosions on the training ground on the other side of the wall. Is it the expressionless man from Room 004 again? Ten meters, twenty meters -- I'm starting to get used to the metric system of distances -- forty-sixty. Everything outside gets smaller -- I finally reach a hundred meters. It's not as scary as I thought it would be.

The doctor asked me to try moving horizontally. I felt my body rising and falling as I changed direction. The sense is interesting.

This time, I was told to climb until I was told to stop, and I increased the output. The vibration of the legs increased, and the altimeter changed faster at the edge of my shaking vision. My whole body was exposed to the strong wind. "That's fine, just maintain the altitude," I heard a voice say, and I was surprised to see the display. I had reached 300 meters, surpassing Kevin.

Beyond the training ground was a forest dotted with numerous facilities and ponds, all surrounded by an ultramarine sea. I was disappointed to see that it was an isolated island, just as we had been told. I felt once again that this nested prison was cramped, and when I averted his gaze to the distant sea, I saw a long, thin white shadow. It looked like a container ship. It would be impossible to cross the sea with the fuel of this thruster unit, but maybe I could make it to the ship - just as I was dreaming of this, I was told to come back. I reduced the thruster output and slowly descended - even if I managed to escape, how would I survive day to day with legs that could not even walk? And besides, how was I going to maintain this body covered in artificial organs without the facilities and doctors here? It would soon become dysfunctional. Just as I was laughing at my delusions, my flight suit started flapping violently.

I noticed that the wind was getting stronger.

"What's wrong, you've strayed quite a bit."

"The wind speed is increasing rapidly.”

Looking down, I could see that it was indeed further away from the launch pad than I had expected.

"Link, can you control it?"

I try to resist by adjusting my body and the direction of the nozzle, but in a vertical position My entire body is exposed to the wind and inevitably swept away.

"There's no other way. Just land on the sand."

There was no other choice. I carefully made my way down, but just as I thought I was approaching the beach, a cloud of dust rose up in a great wave, and I was as if I was being engulfed in a tornado. My body tilted forward and my shoulders dug into the sand as I landed. When I stopped moving, I spat out the sand that had gotten into my mouth. A strong wind soon blew away the smoke and dust, and I could see the launch pad about 300 meters away, and a transport cart on caterpillar tracks heading towards me. I noticed that the sand was wet, and looked behind me, where large waves were crashing on the shore. The wind was blowing sharply.

is increasing in strength.

"Today's flight test will be stopped here," Dr. O's voice rang out.

Tony had been in a bad mood since they'd gotten back to their room, which was understandable, since all it had taken was a long time to replace the leg, and then another long time to put it back together without doing anything.

As for me, I was trying to push out the grains of sand that had gotten into the gaps between my eyeballs and were making a rattling noise, so I made water come out from inside and wiped them with a towel, but I looked a bit funny.

Tony's usual grin seemed to return slightly.

For days afterwards, the wind was so strong that the sound and vibrations could be heard through the walls, and instead of flight tests, a lecture on the world situation was held. Normally I would have diverted my attention, but the organization had an accurate grasp of the world situation even behind the scenes in order to cause proxy wars and civil wars and continue them for the long term, and while I was wary, there was a lot to learn. The twisted feuds between various countries that have continued for a long time are mind-boggling.

As I walked down the stairs after finishing my lecture, I noticed an attendant in front of Room 007, standing there in a daze facing a man who appeared to be of Polynesian descent. Was he another newcomer? No, I felt like I'd seen him somewhere before… Just as I was trying to remember, the attendant suddenly came back to his senses, his face twisted in anger, and he shouted, "Stop with those nasty pranks. Are you trying to be a ghost? Get over it."

"What are you talking about now? You've been calling us subjects ghosts behind our backs for a while now, haven't you? Hey, you guys know that, right?" he said in British English, suddenly turning towards me. Indeed, I had occasionally heard the word ghost.

"That's why I'm showing myself as I wish. I think it suits the name of this organization and the name of this island. Or do you feel guilty about something?"

If we were ghosts, this would be limbo.

"Stop it right now! Stop it!"

"Would you be satisfied if I confessed that my brother poisoned me? Yes, my brother was having an illicit relationship with your mother. Will you take revenge? Revenge…" The man's tone suddenly became dramatic.

"I told you to stop!"

"Hey, what are you doing? Hurry up and walk away," the attendant said, nudging me on the shoulder. "You were distracted too," I replied, and was nudging again, so I had no choice but to start walking.

“What is that?” says Kevin.

"I feel like I've seen that guy before," I muttered,

"You know, a long time ago, during our flight test, a man was driving right in front of us and drowned in the ocean.

The man who was discovered---"

"Ah, that was him.” I nodded. "Thank goodness. I guess he was resuscitated."

"But that's strange. Wasn't that man in Room 008?"

Tony's voice reminded me that the toes of the man's shoes were also peeling off.

In the next flight test, a thruster unit with a slightly slimmer outline was attached. "Another new model that can't even walk," Kevin complained, glancing to the left. Just when I thought he was looking at Dr. G standing there, a woman's voice came from behind the equipment next to him. "Your children are growing up nicely."

Because of the previous experience, Tony took on the first flight test. When the engine started to burn, the smoke was so low and the noise was so low that it seemed like a malfunction. However, he was surprised to see that the engine began to rise at a much faster speed than before. It quickly reached a height of 100 meters, but the doctor kept asking for another 100 meters, and another 100 meters.

"Dr. O, aren't you being too impatient?" "They're urging us from above to put it into action as soon as possible," I heard a researcher operating the equipment near me say in a hushed voice.

When Tony reached a height of 500 meters, Dr. X ordered him to climb further. However, for some reason, Tony suddenly began to descend.

As he walked beside the transport cart returning with Tony on it, Dr. X asked in rapid succession, "What's wrong, Tony Kaczynski? The flight seemed stable, but was there something wrong that we didn't know about?"

"Sorry. My body suddenly started shaking and I couldn't stop. I'll do it better next time."

I'm sure it would be difficult to endure such a high altitude. I was next, so I stood on the launch pad feeling nervous. As soon as the rocket started to eject, I was pushed up with a tremendous force. I flew, cutting through the air with my body, and in no time I was 500 meters high. Without any structural support, I was floating higher than the Empire State Building.

I could see almost the entire island surrounded by the sea. On the other side of the mountain was a long runway, a plaza lined with fighter planes, and a hangar. I felt anxious when I was brought here on a windowless propeller plane.

It comes back to life. There are shipyard-like facilities, as well as submarines and battleships moored there. The buildings scattered across the island are hard to see from directly above, blending in with the natural scenery. This is probably intentional.

I was told to continue climbing from there. On the way, I saw several pigeon-sized birds with black spots on a silver background fly away from the edge of my vision. They were disturbing the birds' habitat.

From there, I rise 500 meters, to 1,000 meters in altitude. In feet, that's about 3,280, which is about the same height as the Catskill Mountains that my mother took me to when I was a child. Because my body and senses are in homeostatic mode, I don't feel cold. The scenery of the island is densely packed, and the buildings scattered on the mountain look like nothing more than breadcrumbs. I guess I'm more tolerant of heights than I thought. Or rather, the higher I go, the less afraid I feel.

With a satisfied voice, Dr. O told me to return and slowly descended. Next, Kevin also successfully flew to 1,000 meters.

On the way back, I got in the elevator with the man from Room 004. The other man was gone, and his metallic arm had taken on a much more human outline.

Three days later, in the flight test, we aimed for even higher heights. Things were the same for me until halfway, but when I reached a height equivalent to the Grand Canyon, Dr. X warned me, "Careful, it's a stratocumulus cloud. It's 700 meters thick." As soon as I looked up, I saw a thick layer of white.

I entered the tectonic cloud. Visibility was zero and I lost our sense of spatial orientation. In the midst of a panic, I continued to adjust the direction of the nozzle, relying only on the attitude indicator of the virtual instrument. When I finally escaped from the cloud and bathed in sunlight under the vast blue canopy, the dazzling brightness gave me a refreshing feeling that I hadn't felt in a long time.

Directly below me, clouds with undulating patterns spread out, and it seemed unreal. I was already well over 2,000 meters above sea level. Since we were high enough, we decided to start training in horizontal flight. The doctor told me to be careful because it was easy to rotate horizontally because there were no wings, so I carefully leaned my body forward, but I backed away and moved both my legs as if I was struggling, and my whole body started to rotate. I moved my limbs to return to the original position, but I rotated even more incoherently, and I couldn't even understand what the situation was. I couldn't even capture it with the attitude gage, and I didn't have time to listen to the communication. It seemed to be falling diagonally while rotating violently. Driven by impatience, I stopped the thruster unit for a moment, and reignited it when my body became vertical. I finally regained stability and descended, dragging my fear with me.

The doctor rushed over to the launch pad and slapped me on the back enthusiastically.

Kevin flew to the same height, then circled the island three times in steady level flight, while Tony finally got up to a thousand meters, then gave up again and came down, muttering repeatedly that he wasn't scared of heights, he wasn't scared of heights.

In our next test flight, Kevin and I got 5,000 meters, and Tony got 1,500 meters.

It was a little chilly in normal mode, but the temperature was about 10 degrees below zero, and I felt the artificial skin on my face getting tight.

After finishing the tests for the day, as Doctor X was checking the thruster unit, I asked him a simple question.

"Even an uneducated man like me can see that there's no way it could fly that high or stay afloat for long with the amount of fuel that fits in its legs. It's only going to take up more space than it needs, since it's not drawing in any air from the outside. What on earth is this thing called the Blood of Odin that you all call it?"

"It seems you’re not completely ignorant," Dr. X said, pushing down his sunglasses. "That's just a temporary name - well, you could say it's a gift from God. It's based on a completely different principle than existing energy," he said, laughing suggestively. "Even this is just the cream of the crop. Dr. M will be the one to make it even more efficient."

That night, Tony and Kevin had a fight over a trivial disagreement about their past heroic deeds.

On our next test flight, Tony remained at 1,000 meters, but Kevin and I improved on our records by leaps and bounds. We flew through low, mid, and high clouds until we reached 8,000 meters, and then I climbed a precise 849 meters.

I couldn't help but laugh: I had reached the height of Everest without having climbed the mountain.

The temperature was nearly minus 40 degrees, but the heat from the thruster unit was circulating throughout my body, keeping my body functioning. Before I knew it, I realized that my breathing had switched to a closed system. At first, I felt short of breath and was worried, but I gradually got used to it. At this altitude, the air pressure was only about one-third that of the surface, making it difficult to breathe normally.

I once again attempted level flight. After trying various directions for my limbs, I was able to find a position that would increase my lift. Flying through the sky with a view of the sea of ​​clouds stretching as far as the eye could see, the vast ocean peeking through the gaps, and islands floating there like sea turtles was an indescribably exhilarating experience.

Kevin, who must have had the same experience, returned to the surface and as soon as Dr. G approached him, he turned furious and tried to punch him, but was stopped by the researchers. Dr. G didn't seem surprised, and said, "I know, I know. I was monitoring you. It was painful, wasn't it?" "Just as it was," the doctor repeated to calm Kevin down as he spoke for Kevin's thoughts. "And it's still painful now. That's right. There was a delay in your lung function switching over to a closed system. We need to check your respiratory system immediately." Kevin's eyes rolled back. "Take him to the maintenance shed. Hurry!" Amazing.

Kevin was hospitalized for a few days and returned safely. He was in a good mood, so I wondered what happened, but he said that when he was coming back here, he saw Dr. G and Dr. M arguing in the hallway. Dr. M's name is Julia, I heard, he said with a grin.

For a while afterwards, the lectures were painful. Now, less than half of the students are taking the course.

The people remaining had decreased to just 100. Perhaps they had died in an accident, or been sent to the battlefield. The thought that it would not be surprising if I, too, disappeared like that at any time made me uneasy.

Room 002 was quiet. Kevin had heard the attendants whispering that one person from each project would be used as a prototype for a cyborg soldier. Tony didn't take it seriously, thinking he'd probably misheard something, but he remained quiet.

As I was falling asleep, the words of the instructor came back to me, but I brushed them off by asking myself questions like I was having an auditory hallucination. But one night, I was seized by the sensation that I was talking to someone else.

At that moment, the voice in question said, "Yes, it's me speaking. I'm Ivan. I'm the only test subject in Room 001." And it frightened me to death.

"You mean they're using in-ear communication? But it shouldn't work between subjects yet."

With that thought in my mind, Ivan replied.

"This is the voice that my thoughts cause to affect your brain, resulting in your consciousness as your inner voice." According to Ivan, shortly after he was born, his father, a Soviet neuroscientist, underwent surgery to enhance his brain function, which not only gave him an extraordinary level of intelligence, but also enabled him to communicate thoughts through telepathy. Ivan did not like this organization, and while keeping his ability to communicate thoughts a secret, he apparently continued to send thoughts into the minds of the subjects in an attempt to nullify the ideological correction carried out in Instructor R's lectures using language, environment, and an auxiliary brain.

When I asked Tony and Kevin if they had avoided the ideological correction, Tony said that he was too sympathetic to the content of the lecture.

Kevin only had partial responses and it didn't work. It seems that with other projects, only a few subjects were able to communicate like me.

"Hehe…hahahaha," I couldn't contain my laughter.

"What's the matter, Jet? Have you gone crazy?" and "Stop laughing like that. It’s not like you,” the two of them said, looking put out of their minds.

As they said, maybe I was going crazy and creating a personality in my head that didn't exist.

The next flight test would involve overhauling multiple organs and replacing the thruster unit at the same time, so I headed to the maintenance yard two hours early. There were more doctors and researchers there than usual.

The reason they put the anesthesia mask on our faces without shutting down our nervous system was to protect our secrets from ourselves.

When I woke up, I had a large scar from my epigastric cavity to my lower abdomen, and some parts were starting to close up. Beyond that, I could see my prosthetic legs, and was disappointed to see that they hadn't been replaced yet.

"Eh? So we're just going to install the rocket unit now?" "We can't do this," Kevin and Tony groaned.

The doctors looked at each other and told us to get into our flight suits and head to the launch pad.

As I walked along the paved road, I asked Dr. G, who was standing next to me, "How is it? Is it easy to walk?"

"Yes, I can move very naturally. I feel more connected than usual," I replied. Perhaps it was thanks to the overhaul. The doctors nodded in satisfaction. I thought today would be mainly spent testing the walking of the prosthetic leg, but Dr. O urged me, "Let's start with Jet." "What are you doing? Get up to the launch pad quickly."

Feeling confused, I climbed up the steps to the launch pad.

Not knowing what to do, I just stood there like a singer whose mind had gone blank on her first stage performance, when I was told that those legs were the new propulsion unit, and I cried out, "No matter what, there's no way I can fly with those ordinary legs… the fuel!”

Tony and Kevin also looked at the doctor with quizzical looks.

"I told you I would make it so that it would fit on a normal leg. Thanks to the research of Dr. M and the accumulated data from your flight tests, this has finally come true. Now, take off your shoes and use the internal controls to expose the nozzle."

Half-believing, I did as he said and raised one foot. It looked like a normal sole, with a hollow arch. While I was looking at the control panel inside my mind, trying to grasp the sensations of an organ, my heel suddenly started to hollow out, and at the same time the nozzle came out, causing me to gasp. It was much smaller than the nozzle of the previous thrust unit, but it could be moved more delicately.

One of the researchers came over carrying a pair of high-top boots. They were designed to aid in flight, and the iris shutters on the soles of the boots would open when the nozzle was exposed. After putting on the boots, Dr.

“Now, we will begin the flight test of the new thruster unit.”

I tapped my feet on the floor of the launch pad several times, exhaled slowly, and operated it from within my mind. As I held my position, feeling uneasy, I felt a burning sensation in my calves, like the feeling in your throat when you drink straight bourbon, and jets began to shoot out from the soles of my feet - and just as I thought that, my body began to rise up as if blown away, and a laugh escaped from the back of my throat. I stumbled wildly like a tightrope walker, but gradually I began to get the hang of how to balance. I rose at an unprecedented speed. I had doubts about whether I would really be able to fly the same distance on these legs as before, but as if I had turned into a ballistic missile, I was zipping through one cloud of mist after another, and before I knew it, I was high in the air.

We were a thousand meters up. And yet, "The fuel gauge on the virtual instrument isn't dropping as much as it used to…"

"That's probably true. Now that we only need reactants, our range has increased significantly."

Perhaps due to the shape of the legs, it was easier to transition to level flight and keep the body stable. Realizing a dramatic improvement in my abilities, I returned when I reached an altitude of 2,000 meters.

After the flight test, we were thankful to be released without any need for a landing gear replacement, just a few checks in the maintenance shed. Even after returning to the room, I still couldn't believe that we had flown in the sky on just these legs, which were still hot. We were more cheerful than we had been in a long time.

"With this, we might actually be able to dunk on a satellite in space."

Kevin said this and began performing a light-hearted tap dance, while Tony and I watched him intently, sipping our beers.

Now that we were able to move while remaining as rocket units, combat training also began, including flying. We put on olive drab protective suits and engaged in repeated mock battles against multiple small fighter planes at a training ground resembling a ghost town inland from the island. I don't know if the small fighter planes were self-propelled or remote-controlled. They were about the size of a child, and with their six thin legs they could easily move through any type of rubble, spasmodically aiming the muzzle of their assault rifles at their targets and firing accurately. Even though they were dummy bullets, if they hit their target they would make a hole in the artificial skin, and since pain blocking is prohibited during training, it meant that we had to endure a fair amount of pain.

We moved quickly while hiding in buildings, and attacked the small fighter planes when we found an opening. Whether we were escaping or sniping, the key was to use the rockets effectively. Tony was the one who achieved the most success in the mock battle. As if to relieve his frustration from the flight test, he quickly disabled the enemy plane, and was disappointed that he wasn't up against a human. While we were in the maintenance shed undergoing treatment to quickly close the holes in our artificial skin, he was practicing his shooting and honing his skills.

They also began to hold mock battles with subjects in other rooms.

I guess the fact that we can now reveal some details about our individual projects means that our ideological correction is complete.

Because the man in Room 008 was so stubborn, he kept low and moved swiftly, dodging our attacks with ease, so the fights often ended without a conclusion. The two giants in Room 005 approached slowly, holding huge anti-tank rifles that normal humans would have difficulty lifting on their sturdy bodies. Once Kevin was hit squarely in the belly, losing so much of his artificial skin that it could not be restored by regeneration, and he needed a skin graft. His large size made him an easy target, but his skin seemed to have a different composition from ours, so it did not cause any damage. Once when I fled into a narrow, complicated alley, he let go of his anti-tank rifle and approached me, which frightened me. He collapsed the wall of the building I was hiding in with his body, picked up a chunk of the wall the size of a car with both arms, and threw it at me. If I hadn't quickly escaped into the air, I would have been in danger. The output of his artificial muscles is on a different level than ours.

The man in Room 004 was the most skilled in fighting. His shooting was flawless, and every time a mock battle started, we were hit right away. Even Tony didn't last long. Once, I was lucky enough to fire multiple shots at his arm, knocking the assault rifle flying with the impact. When I approached him with the gun pointed at me, he raised his metallic right hand as if asking for a handshake, and suddenly fired bullets from all five fingertips. I was caught off guard, hit by a dummy bullet all over my chest, and writhed in pain. We began to call him the Grim Reaper.

"Your attack the other day was splendid. It left a nice scratch on the armor," Ivan passed this message from “Heinrich” as I lay in bed resting with my eyes closed.

As combat training increased in the schedule, lecture time decreased, and I was no longer bothered by Instructor R's voice when I was falling asleep, but the fictitious personality Ivan, which I had apparently created while resisting ideological reform, told me various things about the organization and the other subjects. There were multiple factions in the organization, such as those who believe in a higher being and those who are profit-oriented and merchants of death themselves, and it was not a monolithic organization. I could only smile wryly at my other personality, who had made up every detail, including the circumstances of how the subjects were brought here and their names. Perhaps an auxiliary brain was also involved, nurturing various memories, unconscious desires, and assumptions as seeds - the reason for the sudden increase in subjects in Room 007 was that one subject, who was actually a stage actor, was changing the cell arrangement of his artificial skin to become various characters, and as a result of his research, our skin was also able to regenerate. Apparently the women in Room 003 were information-gathering test subjects with farsightedness, clairvoyance and radar capabilities, and it was likely this association was brought to mind by suspicions of wiretapping in the room and the gaze of the assistant during the surgery. It was clear that the name of one of them, Françoise, came from my memory. After all, it was the same name as an actress in a French film I had previously seen with Tony and the others. To top it off, the person who was connecting everyone through Ivan and trying to put a certain plan into action was Dr. G, the one who had transformed us into the way we were, and I couldn't help but feel a sense of self-confidence.

I was astonished at this unconscious opportunism. The title of the book the Grim Reaper was carrying came to mind. It was exactly what I wanted.

After the day's combat training, we were exhausted and eating dinner in our room. Just as Kevin said, "I'm going to have to drink a Pabst Blue Ribbon already," the fire alarm started ringing loudly.

"Fire has broken out. 00 Project subjects are to evacuate through the emergency exit," an announcement was made, and the sound of the door unlocking was heard.

Stepping out into the corridor, the place was filled with smoke and extremely hot. The smoke exhaust system must have been working as the smoke started to flow in one direction and dissipate, and behind the three women in Room 003 and the two large men in Room 005, I saw a red pillar of fire erupting, scorching the ceiling. Within the flames were figures. One was lying on his back, the pillar of fire emerging from his abdomen. The other was kneeling beside him, engulfed in flames with his hand outstretched. Was it the Asian man I had seen before? Perhaps he had been caught in the crossfire while trying to help. Each time the pillar of fire shook, I could see figures on the other side of the corridor, distorted by the heat. They were probably from Room 007 and Room 008.

The Native American in Room 005 tries to approach, but is thrown back by the flames. The Arab in the same room pulls him by the arm, saying, "Let's go."

"Evacuate immediately through the emergency exits." The announcement was made again, and the subjects looked back at the flames.

I walk quickly. The emergency exit is on the other side of Room 001.

The Arab suddenly turned his attention to Room 004 and knocked on the door, shouting, "Hey, you too, run." Now that I think about it, I haven't seen the gray-haired man. The black-haired woman in Room 003 put her hand on the Arab's back and said, "He's out training right now. Come on, let's go."

There was no way either of them would survive the flames. Just as I was thinking this, a voice rang in my head.

"I'm sorry, but Lorenzo is no longer breathing. The high-pressure furnace went out of control. However, the other, Chang, is fine. His body is extremely fire-resistant."

A woman who seemed to be a nurse walked next to me holding a baby with a pacifier in its mouth and said, "It's okay, Ivan. Those people will put out the fire." It sent a shiver down my spine.

Looking back, I saw attendants rushing to the other side of the pillar of flame with fire extinguishers in hand and starting to spray the fire extinguisher. I turned my face back and stared at the baby.

"Surely the voice in my head is really…

"I told you, I'm in the next room.” Perhaps it's just my imagination, but the voice now sounds like a child's. My eyes meet with the woman from Room 003 who was nearby. Those eyes that seem to see through everything---

"What do you mean evacuate? The emergency door is still locked." Kevin, who was the first to reach the emergency exit, grabbed the metal lever and applied force. The lever twisted and turned, but the door did not open an inch. "Damn it."

"I'll do it," a huge Arab man said from behind him, and he swung his arms down, making a bronze-like bang as the iron door was dented.

"Fire extinguished. Evacuation order lifted. Return to your rooms!" one of the attendants ordered in a loud voice. The other attendant was communicating over the walkie-talkie, "Yes. These are Project 006's ghosts, Beta and Gamma. We're taking them to the medical room."

"What a fuss," Tony said, noticing the baby. "You're kidding, there's really a baby? Maybe it's Dr. M and Dr. G's child."

The nurse glared at Tony, but when Ivan started crying she started to walk away, comforting him. The others were starting to go back to their rooms.

There was still food left on the plate on the table, but it looked burnt and I didn't feel like eating it. I lay in bed, smelling the burnt food in my nostrils, and thought about what Ivan had said.

"You won't have to bother with me for a while," Ivan suddenly said. "Due to the side effects of the brain surgery, I can only wake up every fifteen days. Don't worry, our plan will continue in the meantime. First, we need to apply for use under the pretext of flight tests to secure the test aircraft. We're sure we'll be contacted by our allies in some way."

It was strange to think that I was floating at the height that passenger planes fly.

It's easy to fly. I'm circling at an altitude of 10,000 meters, pressurized, with my breathing system switched to a closed system. Directly below me is a sea of ​​clouds with a dense cauliflower-like texture, and here and there, enormous cumulonimbus clouds protrude like strange structures. It's like looking at the palace of the gods.

In the next flight test, there are plans to attempt to soar into the stratosphere.

After receiving the order to return, the rocket stops thrusting and begins its free fall. A hazy ocean comes into view through the clouds. Looking down from this height, there is no land to be seen. A glimpse of curling hair flickers at the edge of his vision. As the isolated island, which was nothing more than a dot, begins to grow in size, the rocket returns to a vertical position and begins thrusting again. Although it sways from side to side, it regains stability and adjusts its direction, slowly landing as if it is being sucked into the rectangular launch pad that is rapidly approaching.

I was even more moved when I saw Kevin take off in his place. Like a magic beanstalk, the smoke rose vertically and increased in speed, before disappearing from sight. Even if I thought I had caught it for a moment by expanding my vision, a slight deviation would cause it to slip out of my field of vision.

Hearing a commotion behind him, he turned to look at the control room. Dr. O and Dr. G were losing their composure, and just as I wondered what was wrong, they began to raise their voices.

"Hey, Mr. Warner! Don't answer me! Kevin Warner!"

“He continues to deviate to the north-northwest."

" This is a remote island in the middle of the ocean.You should know that too. If you stay like this, you won't be able to come back. Eventually, you'll reach the sea--"

People were exchanging opinions such as, "The nearest island is probably Island X -- there's not enough reactant left to get there…"

"Hey, could it be Kevin…" Tony said in a high-pitched voice, and I looked back at his clouded face in shock. Kevin was always feeling nostalgic for his hometown. Was it an impulsive act? Or had he waited until his thruster unit was indistinguishable from his legs before taking action? Perhaps he was heading for a ship like the one he'd seen before. Just as I was thinking of keeping quiet about that,

"Investigate the ships sailing along the coast,"

"A Liberian-flagged container ship is sailing 30 kilometers ahead."

"There's no other way. Forcefully transfer control of your body to the auxiliary brain, activate Z-consciousness, and automatically return to your original position in the shortest possible distance. There should still be enough reactive material."

“Did you hear?" Tony whispered. "Oh, I didn't know there was such a mechanism in the auxiliary brain," I replied. This would mean that Ivan and the others' plan would not work.

All we could do was wait with bated breath. It felt like a long time had passed.

"That's strange. It's going off course. It's not slowing down. It's not processing the orders properly.”

"The Z-sense may be causing a conflict. Please continue to correct the course."

I cast my eyes into the distance, searching for Kevin's shadow.

"We've seen it," a voice says, and a little later we see Kevin's small shadow flying horizontally. He's heading toward the mountain. Dr. G and some of the researchers run toward the underground passage.

"Do something, we can't lose this valuable test machine."

"No. I can't correct the direction."

Kevin shot smoke and charged towards the mountain with the force of a cannonball, and then an explosion erupted from the side of a building on the ridge, and a crash rang out.

Kevin died that same day. His brain shell was intact, but his brain was severely damaged. His body would become a valuable specimen for the project.

"Unlike you, he seemed to fit in well with this organization. I imagined that one day we would travel around the battlefields of various countries and enjoy reunions from time to time," Tony said, drinking his Heineken. "Don't wake him up."

So without replying, I put the empty bottle down and took another one out of the fridge.

Even though I realized that Ivan wasn't my other self, once I stopped hearing that voice, it felt like half of my brain had gone to sleep and I couldn't think clearly.

Kevin's death did not change the scheduled date for the next test flight.

Taking off from the launch pad, I flew at an unprecedented speed, trying to shake off the vortex of grief that was threatening to engulf me. At an altitude of about 4,000 meters, a cone of steam like a dance skirt spread around my body.

As I passed through layers of clouds, I suddenly realized that I was over 10,000 meters above sea level. 10,500 meters - 11,000 meters - I wonder if it's okay to call it the stratosphere from this point onwards. The temperature was minus 50 degrees. I felt my skin twitching from the sudden change in temperature. Even though my senses were much duller in normal mode, the harshness of the extreme cold was transmitted to me as pain.

You can see the unobstructed expanse of the deep blue universe and the mysterious curved surface of the earth, bathed in light. There are no people, trees, cities, or any living things, and the smooth sea of ​​clouds and surface of the earth are like primordial foam.

As we continue to climb, I'm a little surprised at the temperature displayed on the virtual gauge. I thought the temperature would get lower as we gained altitude, but it seems to be returning to normal.

Suddenly, the doctors' voices of joy burst into my ears along with a static sound. It was hard to hear, but it seemed they were saying that we had passed the stratopause. We had finally passed an altitude of 50,000 meters and entered the mesosphere. The only sound coming from the earphones was intermittent static. The light detection display showed that before I knew it, the amount of harmful solar radiation had increased. My whole body was exposed to piercing light. It was an environment where no flesh could survive, and a space suit would have been necessary.

How much time had passed?

As I was enveloped in a meditative solitude, as if I was witnessing the moment of creation, I heard the deeply moved voice of Dr. X. It seemed that communication was being restored.

"You bring back memories of the rocket projects we were involved in. And you are a human being with a will. You yourself, a human being, have achieved this. It won't be long before you reach the Kármán line."

Frustrated at having my alone time interrupted, I mutter sarcastically, unable to keep my mouth shut, "Cyborgs can't really be called human."

"Such thinking will soon become outdated. In the future, artificial limbs, organs, and muscles will become as indispensable as glasses," Sato tried to advise him. "You probably don't understand that yet. You may be the ones to take over the human race.

I shut off the launch unit and begin free-falling in a prone position. I feel as if I am simply floating in the air, caught in a strong wind, without any speed. However, my altitude continues to drop at an incredible rate. Every now and then, a mass of air crashes into me, almost chipping away at my body. Soon the world begins to revert.

It regains countless details and loses its mysterious quality.

As we approached 10,000 meters, my ears suddenly started to ring. Several voices were heard.

There is some noise, but I can't hear it clearly.

I screamed as I fell at two hundred kilometers per hour.

"What on earth is going on?!"

"At normal power output, there is a possibility of an explosion. If we reduce power and slow down, we will be able to withstand it, but for safety, we will use the parachute built into your back. We have an airbag vehicle ready just in case. Once we reach an altitude of 1,000 meters--

"Please calm down and listen. We've found an abnormality in the piping system of your left leg," Dr. O began.

"Understood"

I continue falling as if embracing the wind. Even at an altitude of 10,000 meters, if I keep falling I'll reach the ground in just three minutes. It's an unbelievable short time.

The string first pulls the paper on the abdomen of the flight suit, peeling off part of the suit from the back. You can see that the back is exposed. Then, when I try to deploy the parachute inside my body, a loud explosion is heard and a shock runs through my whole body, and my vision turns red. I’m engulfed in swirling flames - just as I realize this, I lose consciousness.

Thinking I heard a voice, I opened my eyes, smiled at the hazy world, and passed out again.

"Link, wake up, Jet Link!"

A voice called out to me. I took a deep breath and opened my eyes. I smelled something burnt. I quickly looked around my body. The flames had disappeared, and my left leg, which was missing up to the knee, revealed its soot-covered internal structure. Smoke was pouring up towards my waist.

"Open the parachute! The parachute!"

Looking at the altimeter, I saw that we were below 800 meters.

"What do you mean it can last for that long?" I shouted, internally activating the parachute release mechanism and preparing for the recoil - but nothing happened. "The parachute won't release!" I tried to release it again and again. "It's no good!"

"The shock of the explosion may have caused a malfunction. The only way to kill the momentum is to use one foot to inject air. Aim for the airbag car on the beach."

"But the wind is picking up. What if we can't control it? Wouldn't it be safer to head out to sea?"

"In the sea, it's the same as crashing into the ground. Suddenly, the voice changes from Dr. O. It's Instructor R.

When you get off the bag car, go to the sand or forest as much as possible. Hold your legs and---"

With determination, I began to thrust with just my remaining right foot. My body shook a little but stabilized. It felt good. It felt like I was riding a wave and going down. Carefully maintaining my balance, I slowed down. It was as if I was grappling with the gigantic Earth - the moment I felt that, I was thrown over my shoulders and launched into a spiral spin. It was an incredible spin. I could hear some kind of voice in the back of my ears, but it was all scattered into meaningless sounds. My feet shook as well.

No matter how hard I moved, I couldn't turn it around and I lost consciousness again.

--- I open my eyes. Countless transparent balls scatter upwards. I'm underwater. In the distance, the bright surface of the ocean is swaying. They move away from me in an instant.

Breathing had switched back to a closed system.

Even after crashing into the ocean, this structure allowed me to survive with just a missing left leg. No, that doesn't seem to be the case exactly. I can’t move at all.

A depth gauge appears at the edge of my vision. Thirty meters deep -- I sink helplessly -- I increase the brightness of my vision -- fifty meters, sixty meters -- a colorful fish I've never seen before passes before my eyes. I don't know if it's real or an illusion -- seventy meters, eighty meters -- it's already too deep for even divers to dive.

The fading oxygen supply won't last long. I feel dizzy, and the blood drains from my head… Just as I feel a strange emotion at how even a body so artificial can drain my blood, I lose consciousness.

Where am I? Is this death? No, I can still see the sign.

Depth: 620 metres.

Something flickered at the edge of my vision. A shadow that looked like a living thing. It was wriggling and approaching me.

Could it be a dolphin or something? Can it really dive that deep? No, it looks like a human figure.

But it couldn't be a person. I was running out of oxygen and was having an illusion.

He approaches, swinging both legs in a graceful arc. I realize he is the agile man from Room 008, whom I have fought in mock battles a few times. Come to think of it, Ivan had told me he was a test subject specialized in underwater activities. I wonder how he knew I was here.

The man approached me, swinging his legs widely, picked up my body, which was as stiff as a plaster statue, and began swimming upwards.

When I woke up in the intensive care unit, my eyes were covered and I couldn't see anything. I tried to move my body, but I had no feeling below my neck. I groaned in fear, and then I heard Doctor G's voice say, “You’re awake?” He said that the impact of the crash into the ocean and water seeping in from damaged parts had caused malfunctions in various parts of my body, so he had deprived me of my senses and was in the process of overhauling my entire body. Realizing that I still barely knew how my own body worked, I asked him to remove the covers from my eyes. After a moment of hesitation, the doctor did so. I hesitated, but…

I gasped. All I had was my head and chest, connected to multiple life support systems.

The rest of my lower body was lying on the bed. The woman from Room 003 was standing next to the doctor, using her special vision to look inside my body and point out the damaged areas one by one.

I was strangely awake as I watched various prosthetic devices being fitted and cables being connected, and then I was put to sleep with anesthesia because they were going to start a procedure on my nervous system. When I woke up, apart from the visible seams of the skin, my body was back to normal. I was basking in relief when Dr. G said,

"You've heard from Ivan. We've been planning our escape from this island for months."

I couldn't help but look around the room.

"Don't worry. All communications in this room have been cut off to prevent them affecting the equipment."

"Even if we tried to escape, the auxiliary brain had something called Z consciousness, and it was forcibly controlling our bodies.”

"I took this surgery as an opportunity to remove the Z-consciousness from your auxiliary brain. I have done this on others whenever I have had the chance," the doctor stroked his white beard. "A new subject recently underwent surgery to become an integrated cyborg that combines the advantages of all 00 Projects. This will be the benchmark for future combat cyborgs."

"You're taking the best of both worlds," I muttered, remembering the words of the test subjects carved into the wall.

"That's why we can't just leave you here. And that includes you guys, of course. Also, this plan wouldn't work without the test subjects' abilities. Ivan will wake up in a few days and start speaking to all of you. Be prepared."

The days of flight testing I had spent with the doctors had become invaluable.

I still didn't fully trust Dr. G and the other subjects.

Even after I was restored to normal, I remained hospitalized in the intensive care unit to adjust the neural transmissions throughout my body. As I lay in bed staring at the impersonal ceiling, I imagined the many things this organization could potentially do to people all over the world.

I was surprised when Tony suddenly came into the room. He stood next to me, looked around my body with amusement at the number of cords connected to it, and said, "At that time, I thought you were completely dead."

"Yeah, me too---I'm glad I was able to come to this room."

A few days ago, the cyborgs were given permission to freely roam the second level of the facility, and the restrictions on ear communication were lifted.

"Now, each project has only one person, and they are all called by their 00 number."

"Just one? You're still here."

"I've come here because today is my last day on this island."

"Finally? To some country… will you be sent?"

"Yeah. As a special agent, it's not a bad idea to continue the proxy war in a flashy way. Well, on a battlefield somewhere."

Tony said and left.

The figure moved as if it could see every bullet's movement. It dodged attacks with incredible speed and instantly returned fire. Sometimes it was impossible to follow the figure, and the next time I saw it, it was in an unexpected place.

We lay side by side on the cliff in our olive drab protective suits and watched in amazement as a mock battle between the Project 009 test subject and miniature fighter planes.

All the small battle machines stopped moving. The doctors walked among the smoke rising from the small battle machines, clapping their hands.

"The test is over. You're perfect." "Congratulations 009." "You're amazing." "Absolutely brilliant."

The subject, called 009, seems wary of the doctors.

"---And over there are your companions. Let me introduce them---"

When one of the doctors raised his hand towards the 00 numbers,

"Would you keep your hands up?” 007 rang out in the same voice he once uttered on stage. With that as a signal, we all aimed our assault rifles at them. 004 pointed his guns at them, while 003, who was next to him, was holding 001 to his chest and relaying various information he had detected, such as the location of personnel and weapons in the surrounding area.

"Hey, stop joking," said one of the doctors I didn't know,

"Hehehe… I wouldn't do something like that as a joke," says 007 as he fires a bullet precisely at the man's feet.

"Link, we have accomplished miracles together that are beyond human understanding!" I hear the voice of Professor O.

"Are you out of your mind?" and "There's no way I can escape from this organization," the doctors screamed, so we fired warning shots at them.

"Wait. We should take a hostage," 003 suggested, and I clarified my position by saying, "I think 003 is right. Anyone will do," and then mentioned Dr. G's name.

When Dr. G started to walk away with a stiff face, 003 called out to 009, "Come over here." The other doctors hurriedly tried to stop 009, encouraging him to fight with us. We told the confused 009, "Trust us," and "You're one of us," without any lies. It was as if the conflict swirling inside his motionless body was visible.

Suddenly, 009 looked up in surprise, and 001 waved his hands in response and began to babble. 009's face became more determined, and he stepped forward.

The “joint exercise” scheduled to take place after this will likely be a real battle.

END

[jeffyfitoftheyear]

🌟Jeff Satur outfit of the year 2023🌟

Okay sats, it's here. We've suffered all year, now it's time to see which cunty little Jeff fit reigns supreme for 2023!

Instructions for how it will work is below. Nominations are now open! And will close on the 20th of Dec, 1pm AEDT. Here's a link to a time zone converter.

Submission rules:

Images must be from 2023, and must be submitted with a nominated category. Images submitted with no category will be admired dutifully, but then discarded. 

Submit an image to this blog with a nominated category. You are allowed to submit as many as you like!

The categories are:

Promo Event: this can be a music award, brand event, sponsorship appearance or affiliated sponsorship photo post.

For a music award event if Jeff performed: the outfit on the red carpet would go under promo event, the outfit on stage would go under concert

Music Video Any outfit from Jeff’s music videos and collaborated music videos. This also includes promo like the Space Shuttle number 8 video, as it has the similar levels of planning/art direction.

Concert: Any outfit Jeff wears on stage.

Magazine: Any outfit from a magazine shoot.

*If you have a photo with a fit that doesn’t seem to fit any of the above nominated categories but you really want it in, nominate it with Misc, and we will try to shoehorn it into one we think it fits, if we can. This isn’t gonna be an exact science 💖

Bonus Round: Thirst trap (please submit these with ‘thirst’ as the category.)

These are not outfits, these are Jeff thirst traps. Like this :)

*thirst trap is important for our morale pls submit your worst

The spirit of this is silliness. Please campaign for your favorite Jeff fits. Wax lyrical upon how and where gender was stolen. Tell your friend about the cunty little boots and hot little corsets. 

Advisory: Don’t be negative on other outfits, don’t comment in ways that insult or put down other outfits, people or Jeff. This is just for fun! So please, have fun and be considerate. 

How it will work:

Images will be submitted for different categories, then moved on into voting rounds.

NOMINATIONS:

Open to Submissions! Send all images to this blog's inbox, with your nominated category.  Send as many as you like!

ROUND ONE:

Winnowing down submissions

(This will be the trickiest bit and will need the most participation. So please, look upon the Jeffy images and cast your valued votes upon your most favoured fits….)

Submissions will be gathered under four categories, and posted under a cut (this will be four separate posts, one for each category). Each image will be numbered. Each person gets three votes per category, and can choose their top three images by commenting. 

For example, you can comment under a post: I choose 21, 9, and 8!

Each image you choose gets one vote. If you are biased you can do this:

I choose 11, 11, and 11

PLEASE be cutthroat. It will both be funny, and help us winnow down the images.

The top images will be chosen by the highest number of votes cast.

The top five in each category will then progress to the next round.

ROUND TWO - 24 hour poll

Category finals

Four separate posted polls for each category. (Promo Event, Music video, Magazine and Concert)

Vote for your favorite in each category. The four winners of each category will move on to the finals.

ROUND THREE, SEMI FINALS - 24 hour poll

The four winners from the Category finals will go into a face off. Who gets bracketed up against each other will be chosen by past polls results. The two highest scorers/percentage winners will go up against each other (for example if Magazine got 61, and Promo got 72, they will be up against each other, whilst the lower scorers get put up against each other)

The two winners proceed to the FINALS

ROUND FOUR, FINALS!!! - 24 hour poll

FINAL ROUND

This is it. The moment. The two cuntiest Jeff fits of 2023 will be pitted against each other….

The final poll will run for 24 hours, and after that the winner will be declared!!

_

Okay I tried to make this simple and as straightforward as I could. Happy to answer any questions etc, below!

Also beautiful boobtube Jeff gif by the immeasurable @guzhu-furen 🙏💖

[tomorrowusa]

First a heads-up. Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman has retired from the New York Times. But he is now fairly active at his Substack. Occasionally we'll be linking some of his work there.

In this piece, Dr. Krugman argues that the MAGA war on the "deep state" is also a war on America's health.

One enduring theme of the MAGA movement has been hostility toward the “deep state” — what people outside the movement might call professional civil servants. Trump and company believe that the deep state is out to get them, which is paranoid. But they’re not wrong to believe that public employees who see themselves as working for the nation rather than for whoever currently occupies the White House pose a problem for their agenda. So what will MAGA do, now that it’s in power? Many observers, myself included, have focused on plans to convert a number of civil service jobs into political appointments. But just a few days into the new regime it’s clear that the assault on professional government will be much broader than that — that it will involve an effort to intimidate and politicize civil servants, too. And early indications are that one prime target will be agencies devoted to protecting public health. [ ... ] Public health agencies, even more than the rest of the government, are in the firing line. You can’t talk seriously about health policy without taking race and gender into account; yet according to the New York Times, one contractor collecting demographic data for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has already been told to stop work, and the results of an already completed survey won’t be released. But wait, there’s more: federal health agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes for Health, have been ordered to pause all external communications, including health advisories and scientific reports. NIH, in particular, appears to have been effectively put in lockdown, with even routine meetings canceled and employees forbidden to travel.

He concludes...

If MAGA had been around at the time, do you have any doubts that it would have opposed all of these public health measures and accused their proponents of being part of some dark conspiracy? And when — not if — the next pandemic strikes, do you expect our battered, politicized public health agencies to keep Americans properly informed? If Trump is still in charge, do you expect him to respond effectively, as opposed to minimizing the threat and muzzling anyone who might contradict him? It’s hard to feel optimistic about any of these concerns.

Did I just hear the word "pandemic"? There is some distressing news out of Uganda from the Washington Post.

Uganda announced Thursday that a nurse, 32, had died of Ebola in the capital, Kampala, amid a new outbreak of the deadly virus there — the first in two years. The country has activated emergency response procedures, officials said. Uganda registered 164 cases and 55 confirmed deaths from Ebola over four months in late 2022. That outbreak ended early the following year. The patient died after experiencing fever-like symptoms and seeking treatment at several hospitals and from a traditional healer, Diana Atwine, permanent secretary of the Health Ministry, said in a statement on Thursday. His fever, chest pain and breathing difficulty progressed to unexplained bleeding, a common symptom of a severe case of Ebola. Forty-four close contacts have been cited for tracing, including 30 health workers and patients from a hospital and 11 family members.

Ebola makes COVID seem like a fun disease. The mortality rate for the 2014 outbreak of Ebola in West Africa was around 40%. The Obama administration took decisive action to limit Ebola in the United States. Thanks to quick science-based action, the number of Ebola cases in the US was limited to 11 (eleven). Out of the 11, just 2 cases were contracted inside the US. 2 of the 11 died – 18.2% or less than half of the international rate.

At the end of the Obama administration, his National Security Council staff authored a guide called "Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents" and left it for Trump to use. Of course Trump ignored it.

Trump team failed to follow NSC’s pandemic playbook

The first COVID-19 case appeared in the US on 21 January 2020. Instead of taking decisive measures recommended in the Obama pandemic playbook, Trump said this to his favorite CNBC host.

While Trump dawdled and did the usual Trumpian things like rage tweet about the 2020 Oscars, the virus spread throught the US. He only got around to declaring a pandemic emergency on Friday the 13th of March – a day after the stock markets crashed.

^^^ dark red = deaths, orange/pink = infections

By March 13th, COVID-19 had spread to 49 states and DC. Ultimately, at least 30% of the US population became infected and 1.14 million deaths were reported.

If Ebola spreads to the US while Trump and RFK Jr. are in charge, expect a catastrophe.

[mulders-too-large-shirt]

my favorite scully moments from s5

in episode 1, we see the tomato poster on her wall, and i love it so much <3

shortly after, she has a confrontation with skinner:

“and what about your lie, agent scully? what does it lead to?”

“the truth- about the men behind what happened to me, about my abduction and the tests, about being exposed to something against my will, about being put on a table and having something implanted in me and then having my memory stolen, only to have it returned along with a disease that i was given” <- the way skinner was concerned for her safety but she took it as a challenge, getting angrier and angrier throughout the scene- OOOH, it was just SO good!

and when she finds that she was exposed to the mysterious substance from the ice core, she says “if my work with agent mulder has tested the foundation of my beliefs, science has been and continues to be my guiding light… now i’m again relying on its familiar and systematic methods to arrive at a truth” <- YES!!!!! SCIENCE!!! coming back to what has saved her over and over again and has been the basis of her life's work!! and the admission that her beliefs have been challenged by the things they've found!! i love this quote so much!! i want to analyze it forever!

in episode 2, mulder arrives at her hospital bed while her cancer is worsening, explaining his theory that the microchip he found will cure her. bill gets mad at him for suggesting something so ridiculous. she diffuses the tension by saying that everyone has their hearts in the right place, but it needs to be her choice (very diplomatic; she's clearly the middle child) and then decides that she will move forward with the procedure, choosing to take a risk and choosing hope... trusting mulder... augh. the symbolism of it all...

in episode 4, scully arrives in mulder’s motel room with cheese and wine, ready to relax, with this killer line: “however, i must remind you, this goes against the bureau’s policy of male and female agents consorting in the same motel room while on assignment” (and then she is SO sad when he runs off to investigate something instead of enjoying hangout time, telling him he needs to work on his communication skills😟)

another bug fact moment with scully in episode 4 when she starts telling mulder about tick metabolism!! i love bug facts with scully!!

later, she's staring intently at the dead mothman and says “there has to be a scientific explanation for this” which is just so Her. (also, she shot and killed mothman with her amazing aim, which deserves its own shoutout)

the striped suit in episode 5......... good LORD!!!

in episode 6, she sees bill’s heavily pregnant wife tara and loudly declares “you’re HUGE!” which was SO cute

later, when she is worried that the phone isn’t working properly because she kept getting mysterious calls, she dials mulder's number. she doesn’t say a word when he picks up; she just listens to his voice. the intimacy of this moment makes me want to cry.

her episode 10 beach outfit! showing up to maine in a t shirt that says "maine", so you know she bought it before she even rolled up! renting that convertible! telling mulder that she is going to hang up now!

(i'm imagining how she was preparing for her trip and must have bought a shirt that says her destination on it, and it is SO funny/cute/nerdy)

scully episode 10 one-liners shoutout moment: “people say she’s a witch” “well, that’s not the first time for that accusation in these parts” and then later her dry remark on “new england hospitality” after someone slams the door in her face

she was SO dedicated to not getting involved with that dumbass haunted doll case. even though the local cops had no idea what they were doing and she had to walk them through it with baby steps, she kept saying “well! that sucks for y’all. let me go visit the beach now” and i was DYING. she was COMMITTED to that rest. and rightfully so!

bubble bath time with classical music and reading “affirmations for women who do too much” <3

jack the policeman takes her to get lobster and she is utterly shocked at the size of the creature, saying “that looks like something out of jules verne. we’re supposed to eat that?” <- NERD! nerd! i was blushing and giggling.

i’m barely exaggerating when i say that scully putting that haunted doll in the microwave might be the best moment of the whole show.

she also calls mulder and asks about the prevalence of evil dolls in occult literature, because she does not give a damn if this thing is a demon or a ghoul while she’s off the clock, she just needs it to leave her alone, and i respect that SO much

in episode 11, she’s very cranky to be woken up by mulder at 2:45 AM to poke around and investigate, and i don’t blame her!!

they’re trying to figure out what messages this dead hacker left behind when she points out the obvious (“anyone, uh, think to check his email?”) and the reaction from mulder and the lone gunmen is PRICELESS

(she also looks SO impressed when mulder figures out a series of random numbers is an ID for a shipping container. i swear she wanted him there)

her visible attraction to esther/invisgoth- i saw that tackling scene, the hand to the chest, the bullying (“what was your role in all of this? were you the bass player?”), scully's reaction to learning her name is esther, that face she made when esther asks “are you gonna take off my cuffs, or do i have to do this with my tongue?” ... scully. i know what you are.

and she is SO pissed off when esther takes her hostage- mulder calls while she's driving, and she picks up with the most flat and angry voice you can imagine: “where are you? it sounds like you’re driving” “you are correct, sir” 😐

but then esther starts sobbing in her car, and scully comforts her, putting her arm on her shoulder, as if moments ago there was not a gun to her face- because she is fundamentally a kind person and will offer a shoulder to cry on, even to this annoying, attractive goth lady who kidnapped her <3

(she also climbs onto a tractor trailer to tell a guy not to drive over the exploding bridge, which i thought was funny because she just gets right up there)

later in episode 11, she has to decide between killing this AI thing that will ruin the whole world or saving mulder, and she picks saving mulder with zero hesitation!!!!!!! and then carries him to safety!!! and tries to save esther, too!!!

there are SO many excellent moments in episode 12, but a special shoutout to: “first of all, if the family of ronnie strickland does indeed decide to sue the FBI for, i think the figure is $446 million, then you and i will most certainly be codefendants. and second of all… i don’t even HAVE a second of all, mulder! i’m in this as deep as you are, and i’m not even the one that overreacted! i didn’t do the (gesturing) with the thing!” <- scully being so mad she’s at a loss for words is SO funny to me!!!

she has to do an autopsy and lets out the saddest yeehaw ever recorded when her scalpel blade slips out (AND when she finds mushroom pizza in the dead guy's stomach, she thinks it sounds so good she orders some for herself... scully, you are so weird and i love you) 

then when she finds more pizza in the second dead guy, she immediately realizes mulder is in danger, and runs back to save him from a teenage vampire!!!!

when mulder renounces his belief in the extraterrestrial in episode 13, she jokingly says her work here is done and tells him to have a nice life <3

she also grows to be cassandra’s defender, sticking up for her despite her eccentric story of alien abduction after she notices the parallels between their experiences; she breaks her agreement with spender to leave her alone because she needs to warn her that if she removes the implant, she will get very sick (!! again!!! her kindness!!!)

scully IMMEDIATELY noticing that mulder is being weird as hell in episode 18, but not knowing it is because he is undercover, and straight up confronting him about it (“i expect you to give me an answer. i expect you to tell me the truth” <- YEAH, YOU TELL HIM GIRL!)

and her accusing the motel worker of giving someone else her keys so she could figure out where tf mulder went: “who are you?” “who am i? who is he?!” and of course “are you the wife?” “not even close” <- oh she was so mad she suddenly knew how to lie!!! i watched that scene three times and laughed each time!

she’s also MAD AS HELL when she gets brought before the CIA representative and skinner and it killed me: “what the hell is going on?” “i apologize for our methods. they may well have saved agent mulder’s life” “what about my life? i don’t appreciate being run off the road” <- STOP RUNNING HER OFF OF ROADS!!! she knows her value and she is worth more than that!!!

but when they ask her if she’s suspicious of mulder’s actions lately, she IMMEDIATELY denies it. she might think that he is up to no good, but how DARE an outside party accuse him of this?!? this cannot be! she will defend his honor!!

(and breaking into his motel room to fix his finger........)

doctor nerd moments in episode 18 as she looks at bacteria and says “it looks like a streptococcus!” and then realizes it cannot be that, because “strep wouldn’t be able to survive any kind of exposure to the environment” (and then her incredibly confident “my research indicates that it was almost certainly developed domestically"... yeah, dr. scully MD is ON the CASE!!!)

when mulder gets all pissy in episode 19 because he thinks skinner is sending them on a busywork trip, she sets him straight: “you’re saying ‘i’ a lot. i heard ‘we’” <- ONCE AGAIN: GET HIS ASS!

sticking by her guns in episode 19 and refusing to autopsy the body and fuel mulder’s delusions (until she later is forced to)

later, he’s being held in the hospital, and the nurse refuses to let her see him, so she bursts in with her gun just in time to save him from some evil bug creature!!!

she holds gibson’s hand in episode 20, comforting him and walking him back to his room after he underwent testing <3 and later she chats with him about how his powers work while he watches cartoons; he says she doesn’t care what other people think, and she promises that no one will hurt him </3

then she brings the data she gathered from the testing to the lone gunmen, tells them to analyze it “with an eye to the parapsychological”, AND gets the tea on diana. truly a woman of action!

[physalian]

On Using Measurements and Metrics in Fantasy

This is what *I* do and what I find more immersive, easier to write, less world-bending, and more productive: I don’t use actual metric or imperial measurement systems. Why?

Personally I don’t like seeing a world completely different than our own referencing an Earth-bound measurement system (but when I must, I use metric even though I’m American).

Some people don’t have a useful frame of reference for how big something actually is if you just throw big numbers at them. Or even big units. Yeah I know a ‘football’ field is big, but that’s a very foggy and useless ‘big’ if I don't actually watch the sport and see it on a daily basis.

Specific numbers end up seeming more important than they are, whether you’re giving weights, lengths, times, etc, because you got specific. 24 hours won’t raise any brows but 22 hours will. And you just open yourself up to plot holes getting needlessly specific. You’re inviting your readers to do the math and if *you* didn’t do the math, they will find out about it.

This is for fantasy, not any other genre, although I’d still rely on vague numbers anyway unless I’m writing something super sciency where the math is important. Anything from sports to rocket science.

So what I do instead:

Give you measurements you can reference yourself. If I have a tiny fantasy macguffin, it’s about a pinkie finger wide, not 2cm. If I have a sci-fi ship, it’s about two houses/stories tall, not 20ft. It’s a puncture wound the size of a fist, not 4in. It’s a bed small enough for the character to sprawl and still hang off. It’s shoes that can fit in the palm of their hands.

Why I think this works better:

I really suck at converting numbers to actual measurements. Tell me to measure 4 inches between my hands and I’ll give you a gap +/- 2. But the size of a fist? Well I’ve got two right here, now I know what you’re talking about. Hands aren’t all the same size, but for me reading, that’s all I need to know. Do not make me bust out a tape measure or google to properly appreciate the scale of a thing in your book.

Outside of letting my characters give rough time estimates (e.g. a journey taking maybe 2 weeks) because they don’t know themselves, specific numbers aren’t very useful.

If you pick the right size comparison (picking the right allegory), it’ll read more immersive and less sterile. A character just got shot. Is the wound 1 cm, the size of a pencil, or the size of the fingers trying to dig the bullet out? A character is trapped in a criminally small cell. Is it 5 feet wide, or is it so small, they can’t even stretch out fully? A character has to make an incredible shot with a gun or a bow. Is their target 100ft away, or is it an ant on the horizon, is the target’s head the size of a marble? A character is about to fall, is the drop 800ft, or is it so far, they can’t even see the bottom? So far there’s clouds at the bottom? So far the river below is thin as a hair? The biggest lake in the region might be 4 miles across, but more importantly, standing on the bank feels like standing at the coast, cause that there’s an ocean. A tower might be 60ft tall, but more importantly, it gives you vertigo and seems to sway in the wind and it’s taller than every other structure around.

I think this also works with character descriptions. My character has no idea how long he’s been held captive, but his hair has grown out over his eyes to cue you in on the passage of time. Or my character isn’t 4’11, but her head doesn’t reach her boyfriend’s chest. Or, my character has some truly massive muscles, biceps like this other dude’s head. My character has an ugly scar from a nasty knife fight. It’s not eight inches across, but the person touching it can’t even cover it with their whole hand. This character has lost a lot of blood, not 1 liter, but enough that their clothes are dripping with it and the carpet can’t soak it all up.

Generally, the actual number isn’t the most important detail your audience wants to take away from the page, it’s what that metric now means for the scene. A 4ft cell means nothing to me, but a cell so small, my character might go crazy from claustrophobia is important.

And, also, maybe your characters also suck at gauging metrics. I have a character who’s good with horses who’ll give you their heights in hands, but another who’ll just say that one’s so tall, he can’t see over her shoulders.

When the characters need to know the numbers, give the numbers. If you have two people building something, letting them toss weights and lengths back and forth makes sense. But when it’s only the audience that needs to know the numbers, consider coming up with some other way to convey them.

[letmexplor]

Starting Science of Deduction: A quick guide

Problems you might face

It is hard to hold so many facts in your head

You are not in a habit to observe. You often forget to be observant.

You are trying to jump to conclusions which is dangerous to do with incomplete information

My Suggestions

Use it to Learn it

By it's nature, Observation and deduction is something you do. Not something you read. Avoid the trap of finding the best book on observation, deduction, memory instead find ways to use it in your daily life.

There are an amazing number of applications of the skill of observation. To start out, observe your room, your house, workplace/college/school, public transport, a walk in the neighborhood. It can be anything. I have mentioned it before It will be really hard to hold the information and build a habit of observing. Don't worry too much about it right now. Just remind yourself to observe, you can even set a reminder every 1-2 hour to observe.

Skillsets

Science of Deduction is a vast topic. It gets overwhelming just to figure out what you are dealing with. So here are some basic skillsets you require

Observation - focus on making observation a second nature. you can do it simply by doing it. There is more to it but we can figure it out later

Memory - You want 1. RETAIN more information 2. RECALL the information quickly. This is not something you can train overnight. Do your research, but not too much. It will just confuse you. There are really only 2 principles at the core of all memory techniques - 1. We retain more information if we associate it with existing information 2. We are better at remember Images than text or numbers. So convert information into images. (if that don't make sense, that's not a problem. It will after you have done your own research on memory)

Logical reasoning - This is really the Deduction part of the skill. It is actually Deduction, Induction, abduction. These are methods to draw conclusions from given information. Firstly, everyone has basic level of logic but you can improve it further by Practice and simple understanding of methods and laws. (In my opinion, you don't need to when starting out. You will feel the need to do it when the time is right for you)

Knowledge - This is a hard one to teach. Because really every information is useful information. If you know the price of that new car, You can deduce.. how much the owner paid for it. it seems obvious but it wouldn't be if you didn't know the price of that new car. Notice I don't want you to deduce the pay grade of the owner just based on that new car because it is not enough information. Always be aware of jumping to conclusions. So, be on the lookout for useful information.

Expectations

Everyone wants to start off with amazing observational skills and make some crazy deductions. But when you really dive into it, It is hard just to practice observation all the time. Understand that it is a long process and also there is no hurry. Build the habit of observation, everything will start to fall in place.

[wirewitchviolet]

How a Computer Works- Part 4 (Binary Math)

This is the 4th part in a series of posts explaining how computers work such that you can build your own from just wires and spare electronics (or hell, Minecraft redstone signals, a carefully balanced water fountain, anything you can build logic from really). The series starts in this post, the most recent entry before this was part 3, but the only REALLY required reading for this one should be part 2. Get that knowledge in your brain so this next bit can make sense to you.

Also, I'm basically teaching a pretty in-depth computer science class here for free out of the goodness of my heart, so if you have the cash to spare, maybe consider throwing a little money my way so I can keep surviving and doing stuff like this?

Our focus for today's lesson is going to be actually designing one of these modules we have hooked up to the bus to actually do stuff with any data we pass into it. As I've mentioned a few times, all of this stuff we're passing along can be thought of in a lot of different ways. Completing a circuit when one tracing wires out connects to a positive charge and another a negative means the same thing as a gate saying true, will turn a light tied in there on, we can call it a 1 in our abstract computery talk, or several other things, but we're dong math today so let's think about numbers.

Let's think in Binary

So I think I've referenced binary numbers a few times in a really hand-wavey sort of way, but it's good to stop and make sure we all get the concept thoroughly. Normally, when we think about numbers, we're using our good pals the Arabic numerals- 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9. We just decided to make unique little squiggles to represent these first ten numbers if we include 0, and then if we add together 9+1, we're out of symbols, so we start a new column, put a 1 in it, and reset to 0 in the one we're in. So, 9+1=10. We call this "base ten math" because ten is where we have to start that new column... but really, we kinda just picked ten out of a hat for this? Presumably it's because most of us have ten fingers.

Maybe if we all had hands like typical American cartoon characters, we'd only have made eight unique symbols. 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 and 7. Add 1 to 7 and we start a new column there instead of after coming up with symbols for those fingers we don't have. In base eight math, 7+1=10. It's a smaller group we're dedicating that next numeral over to, but you can see how that works, right?

Or hey, what if the first person to start counting stuff on their fingers just thought about it differently. You can totally hold up 0 fingers. So really on just one hand you can easily go 0 1 2 3 4 5. Well, what if we just use our other hand past there? Every time we run out of fingers on our right hand, we reset it to zero and add one on our left. It's base six math in this example but hey with just our hands we can display any number from 0 to a base six 55! Which in base ten would be, let's see, 5x6+5, so, yeah, any number from 0 to 35, but that's still pretty good. Converting it into base six is kind of a pain since you've gotta stop and do the multiplication, but if we all just kinda thought in base six we wouldn't need to convert at all.

And hey, what if we really thought big here? Instead of using one hand for the next column of numbers, we could just treat every finger as a column on its own. Holding some of the required groupings of fingers up can kinda give you a hand cramp, but hey we've got ten columns that can hold a 0 or a 1, so we can count all the way up from 0 to 1111111111! Or uh, in base ten, 1023. Still a really impressive number though! Just explaining this to you I've upped how how you can count on your fingers by more than a hundred times. You're welcome! Sorry about the hand cramps. We're not looking into binary math for the sake of saving fingers though, we're doing it because we're designing logic circuits and doing math on the assumption that the only symbols we have to count with are 0 and 1. Anyway, just so we're on the same page, let's count up from 0 in binary for a while here:

0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111, 1000, 1001, 1010, 1011, 1100, 1101, 1111, 10000.

You can follow along with the pattern right? And if you're curious what that'd be all standard base 10 style, let's count through that same number of... numbers that way.

0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. I made some of these bold to make it a little easier to count along. It's the ones where we're adding a new column in binary, and hey look, it's all the powers of 2. If you have to convert in your head, that makes it easier.

Binary Addition

So let's try thinking in JUST binary now and do some basic math. Before we get into the double-digits- Wait no, if we're pedantic, di- is the prefix for ten things so we shouldn't be saying "digits," we're in base two, so, bi- so... the double bits, I guess), we're just got:

0+0=0. 1+0=1. 0+1=1. 1+1=10

Hey, wait. does that pattern look familiar to you? Like we had to go to a second bit for 1+1, but just ignore that for a moment and look at the lowest one. Humor me. We saw this same pattern in part 2!

0 xor 0 outputs 0. 1 xor 0 outputs 1. 0 xor 1 outputs 1. 1 xor 1 outputs 0.

Oh damn. So if we want to add two bits of data, we just XOR them. All we have to worry about is the spill-over into the next column. Well.. hell, let's see what this looks like if we're looking at two columns here.

00+00=00. 01+00=01. 00+01=01. 01+01=10.

If we just look at the "1s column" digit, yeah, XOR works. And is there a pattern for the "10s column?" Well, it's a 0 for everything except when we go 1+1... we had a logic circuit for that too though, right? Yeah, good ol' AND. Only outputs 1 if both value A and value B it's looking at are both 1.

So OK. We rig up a circuit that has a XOR gate and an AND gate. We feed the first number we want to add into both of these gates, and we can display our answer as a two bit number, with what the AND spits out on the left, and the one the XOR spits out on the right. BAM. We are masters of addition... so long as the highest numbers we want to add together are 1+1. We uh... we should probably try to improve upon that. Also we've got this whole structure to the whole computer where we've got these registers feeding in and out of a bus with a fixed number of data bits on it, kinda would be nice if the number of bits going back out to our bus was the same as the number coming in to our addition circuit... and like, yeah, that's kind of an impossible goal since it's always possible when adding two numbers the same length that you need an extra column to display the answer, but you know, if the first bit of at least one of the numbers we're adding is a 0 it'll fit, so let's get to that point at least.

So OK. Let's expand things out. We're adding any 2 bit numbers now, and let's pretend we've got like a calculator with a 3 bit display.

000+000=000. 001+000=001. 000+001=001. 001+001=010.

010+000=010. 011+000=011. 010+001=011. 011+001=100.

000+010=010. 001+010=011. 000+011=011. 001+011=100.

010+010=100. 011+010=101. 010+011=101. 011+011=110.

I'm being kinda redundant with showing 0+1 and 1+0 and such. Let's narrow these down to just the ones we need a new bit of logic to make happen though. The 1s bit is groovy. We feed the 1s bits of ANY two numbers into a XOR gate, we get the correct 1s bit for our answer. And if the next bits over are 0s, we can pop what's coming out of our AND gate in there out to there and that's fine too. We're also good if we just look at the 10s column, everywhere we don't need to worry about the 1s column affecting it. The places where we need to do more with our logic are just where we're doing the whole "carry the 1 thing." I already set up the grid of all these so that's just the stuff in the far right column, but hey, let me bold those up too.

And let me just kinda blank out these other bits so we're really focused in on the part where there's a problem...

_0_+_0_=_1_. _1_+_0_=_0_. _0_+_1_=_0_. _1_+_1_=_1_.

Well huh. If we're just looking at a bit in the middle of our big long number, and we're carrying a 1 to that position, we sure seem to be getting the exact opposite of what we get when we aren't carrying anything in here. So OK, let's redesign our logic circuit here. We've got our bit A wire and our bit B wire coming in like we did before, going into that XOR for this output bit, but we need to add a wire for whether we're carrying a 1 in from the next circuit over, and if so, flip that result. Do we have a way to do that easily? Well OK, logic chart time. If we have a 0 and no carry, we want 0. I'm lazy, so, 0 bla 0=0, 1 bla 0=1, 0 bla 1= 1, 1 bla 1 = 0. Oh, that's another XOR gate. We XOR A and B like before, and then just XOR that result with our carry bit, and we are definitely displaying the right thing in this part of our answer. Now we just need to double check if our corner case of handling a carry messes with the next carry anywhere and... oh damn yeah.

011+001=100, and 001+011=100. These are the cases where the 1s column carrying a 1 to the 10s column means we have to do something different with that carry bit. So, we're still making our carry-the-1 result a 1 if A and B are 1... but we also need to make sure it's a 1 if we are both carrying something in, AND our original XOR gate is spitting a 1 out. Well we can throw that AND in there, and we can throw in an OR to check either of these two conditions, and there's our new and improved carry-the-1? result.

So let's put it all together now!

For a given bit, we have value A, value B, and Carry. We have a XOR gate that takes A and B in. We feed the result of that and Carry into another XOR gate. That spits out the sum for this bit. Then we AND the result of that first XOR and our Carry feed that result into one side of an OR gate. We feed A and B into a second AND gate, the result of that is the other input for our OR. That OR now spits out a fresh Carry bit. We can plug that into the next adder circuit down the line, for the next column to the left in our result. BAM, there we go. Just clone this whole weird set of 5 logic gates for as many bits as you want to deal with, daisy chain those carry values into each other, and congratulations. You have somehow rigged together something where electricity goes in, electricity goes out, and the weird path it has to take along the way has this weird side effect where you can work out what two binary numbers add up to. Please note again that we didn't at any point make some sort of magical computer person and teach it how to do math, we just found patterns in how electricity flows and where the pure math concept of logic gates and binary math happen to work the same way and exploited that for a result that's convenient to us. Shame that was such a pain wiring up, but hey, every time you add another copy of this onto the end, you double the range of numbers you're able to work with. Eventually that hits a point where it's worth the effort.

Well addition is all well and good, what about subtraction?

OK, so just to take stock, so far we have a big addressed block of memory somewhere we keep our numbers in. We have, for example, 8 bit lines on our bus, and when we want to do addition, we set stuff that turns on "hey, place with our first number, put it on the bus" then "hey register A, read the bus for a moment," then the same to get a number to slap in register B, and we've got this sum register sitting between registers A and B with a bunch of these adder circuits hooked in between all the bits. We might have some leftover carry line with a 1 on it and nowhere to plug it in, but ignoring that spill-over, every bit on our bus is to go good for addition. When we're setting up command codes, we can make more to do some other math with A and B and that's all well and good, but we have a real big problem when it comes to subtraction, because out of what's going into A, going into B, and coming out of sum, at least somewhere we're going to need to deal with the concept of negative numbers. So when we're doing subtraction, one line on our bus needs to be reserved for whether it's positive or negative. If you program, you're maybe familiar with the concept of unsigned integers vs. signed integers? This is that. With only positive numbers, if we've got say, 8 bits to work with, we've got a range of 00000000 to 11111111 to work with, or 0-255 in decimal, but if one of those is getting swiped for negative or positive, now we're talking like, -127-127.

But wait, that's not quite right, is it? Like if we arbitrarily say that leftmost digit is 1 if we're negative, we get things like, 1 being 00000001, 0 being 00000000, -2 being 10000010 etc. but... what's 10000000? -0? That's the same thing is 0. That's redundant and also gonna really screw the count up if we're like, adding 5 to -2! Or really, any other math we're doing.

Oh and we also need to remember when we're stuffing a negative number into a memory register, it's not like that register knows what concept the bits we're shoving into it represent, so like, you personally have to be responsible for remembering that that 1 on the leftmost line, for that particular value, is noting that it's negative, and not that the 10000000s place or whatever has a 1 for some number, or the first of 8 switch variables you're stashing in this address to save on space is on, or whatever else. We here at the memory address hotel are just trapping electron wiggles in a weird little latch or we aren't. No labels, no judgements.

So OK no matter how we're storing negative numbers we need to just actually remember or take notes some way on what the hell convention we're using to represent negative numbers, and where we're applying it. But we also need a convention where like, the math works, at all. Just having a bit be the is it negative bit works real bad because aside from having -0 in there, we're trying to count backwards from 0 and our math module has no conception of back. Or of counting for that matter. Or 0. It's just a circuit we made.

OK, so, let's maybe store our negative numbers in a different way. You know how a car has an odometer? Rolling numbers counting up how many miles you've gone? And there's a point where you run out of digits and it rolls back around to 0? Well funny thing about our addition thing is if you add a 1 to a display of all 1s, that also rolls back around to 0 (and has that carry value just hanging out in space unless we have a better idea of what to plug it into). So if we like, have all the numbers we can display printed out on paper, and we represent that rolling over by just rolling the paper up and taping it, so we have a bit where the count is going like: ..11111101, 11111110, 11111111, 00000000, 0000001... well we can just arbitrarily declare that all 0s is really 0, and the all 1s before it is -1, etc. Try to make that work maybe. And still remember that 10000000 or whatever is where we abruptly loop back between the highest positive/lowest negative numbers we're handling.

Here's a funny thing though. If we start counting backwards, we totally get this inverted version of what we get counting forwards. Just going to show this with 3 bits for convenience but going up from 000 you go:

000, 001, 010, 100, 101, 110... and going back from 111, you go

111, 110, 101, 100, 011, 010, 001... and yeah, look at that with a fixed with font, and it's all just flipped. And huh, you know what else is cool? If we go back to saying the first bit is 1 for negative numbers and a 0 for positive, you can just add these and it almost works. You want to subtract 1 from 1, that's the same as adding 1 and -1. Invert the negative, that's 001+110=111... 1 shy of the 000 we want. Huh.

What about 2-2? 010+101=111. 3-3? 011+100=111. Everything that should be 0 is 111, which is 1 less than 0 when we roll over. What about stuff that should be positive? 3-1? 011+110=(1)001. 2-1? 010+110=(1)000. 3-2? 011+101=000. Still all 1 off if we just ignore that carry going out of range.

-1-1? 110+110=(1)100, which translates back to -3... and that's kinda the only example I can give that's in range with this, but throw in more bits and follow this convention and it'll all keep working out that you get exactly 1 less than what you want, turns out. So, if we're in subtract mode, we just... invert something we're bringing in then add 1 to it and it should all work out?

So OK. We have a wire coming into math land from what mode are we in, it's a 1 if we're doing subtraction. We XOR that subtract line bit with every bit of what's coming into B, that does nothing if we're in addition mode, but if we're in subtraction mode, we're flipping every bit, and tada, the subtraction works without any other changes. We just need to conditionally add 1 if we're in subtract mode now but... wait, we already have literally that. We just take this same "we are in subtract mode" wire and run it in as a carry-in to the rightmost bit of our adder chain. Again, if we're doing addition, that just carries in a 0 and does nothing, but if we're in subtraction, it carries in a 1, and... we're done. The explanation was a long walk, but yeah, when subtracting, just add those extra XORs, plug in that carry, and remember your negative numbers are all weird in storage. Done.

Let's do multiplication and division next!

No. We can't do that.

Well seriously, that's not a thing we can just layer on top of this relatively simple thing we have wired up. We've got this lean mean math machine will give you whatever result you need basically the instant you load values into A and B. Definitely by the time you, being conscientious about not leaving the doors to the bus open all the time, officially flag things to write out from sum and into whatever destination. Multiplying and dividing though, we need more steps, and we need scratch spaces for temporary values. I suppose if you're careful you can multiply by like, loading 0 into B, load the first number you want to multiply into A, just feed sum directly into B, and pulse the clock however many times you want to multiply, but... you probably don't want to just constantly be reading and writing like that, it's tying the whole bus up, unless you have an alternate pathway just for this, and you have to keep count. Still, I'm assuming that's how people do it when they build a dedicated function in. I'm still looking at older systems which assume you're going to do most of your multiplication one step at a time, running through some code.

There's one big exception though. If you multiply any number by 10, you just add a 0 onto the end of the number... and guess what? I'm not using "10" specifically to mean "ten" here. Whatever base you're doing your math in, that still works. So in binary, if you just want to specifically multiply by 2, it is super easy to just shift every bit to the left. Like, have some sort of "shift left/multiply by 2" wire come in, set up logical conditions so that when its set, all we do is have the bit that we are feed into the carry flag, then for the sum ignore everything but the carry flag. 00011001 turns right into 00110010. I picked that out of a hat, but that's binary for 25 getting doubled to 50 as I eyeball it here. Dead simple to do as a single operation. Shifting everything to the right, AKA dividing by 2 is similarly simple... and hey, you might notice that in say... very old games, there's a whole lot of numbers doubling. Like ghosts in Pacman? Each is worth twice the points as the last? Yeah that's because that's easy to do fast.

Other math though takes more steps, and tends to involve extra hardware design to make it work. Like if you're doing division where you aren't guaranteed to have a whole number at the end, so, most division? Suddenly you need to have decimal points in all of this, and work out where they go, and this is why you hear people talk about "floating point processors" as this whole special thing that we just did not have for decades. For now at least, that's beyond the scope of what I'm teaching. Might get there eventually.

A final bit about bits...

So hey, we need to pick some arbitrary bit count for how wide we make our bus and our registers, and also some number for memory registers, command codes, maybe other stuff. And you just kinda want to pick a nice round number. You can't pick ten though, because ten isn't a round number in binary. It's 1010. So usually, we round down to 8, nice and simple, or we round up to 16. And then if we're like filling out charts of values, it's easier to count in those bases. Counting in base 8 is easy enough. 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 10. With base 16 though, we need 6 more symbols in there, so we go with 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F 10. And sometimes people make a point of making the B and D lowercase, because if you want to display those on the sort of 7-segment display you still see on cheap clocks or things going for an 80s look, B and 8 are too similar, and D and 0. Base 16 is also called hexidecimal. People will shorten that to "hex" and you see it a ton when people are looking at raw data and don't want to get thrown by long binary numbers, and it particularly gets out to the general public when we're talking about like, 8-bit color values. 8 bits gives you a number from 0-63, hey that's just 2 digits in base 16, so like, for HTML color codes, you can use 2 digits each for red green and blue values, and technical artists just kinda memorize stuff like "right so FFFFFF is white, 700080 is a pretty bright, slightly blue-ish purple, etc."

We tend to go with 8 bits in most places though, or some multiple of 8 anyway, and someone randomly decided to call 8 bits a byte, and that's kind of just our standardized unit for measuring data now. Well mostly standardize. Because people will say, like, 1 kilobyte is 1000 bytes, but in practice people actually round things off to binary values and they're going to actually be off a little.

Anyway, linguistic trivia! Whatever number of bits it is we store in a register/load to the bus is called a "word" and we talk about how many bits long our words are, because once you design the architecture, you're stuck with it and all. And sometimes you want to be space efficient and not use a whole word, so you do some logic gate trickier to chop off whatever portion you don't need when reading it and not change what parts you aren't trying to when writing it and just kinda store multiple variables in a single value. One common thing that happens as a result of this is that you'll break up an 8-bit value because you just want like two values from 0-15 instead of one from 0-255. And when we're working with one of those half-bytes, because puns, the actually term for that is "a nibble." No really. And if we're using a single bit for a variable a lot of the time we call that a flag. Common to see a byte used to hold 8 flags.

For now let me just point anyone following along with this at this first post of me talking about the game console I'm designing. That's a pretty similar topic to this one.

Let me also point you again at my patreon, too.

CONTINUED IN PART 5

[candy8448]

CHEMISTRY GCSE AQA NOTES!!

About the mark schemes!

(Also applies to the other sciences)

(From a higher triple science student)

Guys, i did a practice chem paper 1 and marked it myself and i had a look at the mark scheme while marking it so here a few tips i found:

Calculations: dont worry if you think you got the wrong answer, the mark scheme says that if you have the wrong number but continued calculating everything with the correct methods, you still get the marks, you only miss one mark. That also includes forgetting to convert units!

Name the salt: the mark scheme says the full written name of the salt, but it also says to allow just the chemical symbols. That means you will get a mark for saying KCl rather than Pottassium Chloride. That means if you forget how to assemble the word, you can just use the periodic table and get the symbols for the elements (keep in mind this is in the "allow" section so it might not apply to this year, but idk how it works

Expand everything: every single thing you write, develop every word. Thats how you get the marks. Dont just say "it affects the body because oxygen cant get in" say "-and oxygen is needed for respiration" and then "and respiration releases energy" and then go a step forwards and say "and the body needs energy for it to function properly" and then "so if there isn't any oxygen, the body cannot function normally" go all the way until you cannot add any more detail at all, the mark scheme doesnt just want the steps to a practical, it wants every reason you do each step and because of what it affects (if in doupt if you got full marks, just go a little bit further)

[bargainbinwizard]

Spiritual Big Crunch

This may be a little out there even when it comes to spirituality but it's something to think about.

Assume the afterlife exists.

Nature with all of its cycles and infinite possibilities. There's time,space, infinite amounts of realms and spiritual beings including Gods. There's also the multiverse and many many other multiverses according to quantum physics. In short, everything exists in some matter and nobody really dies,we just change form. Transmutation.

Here is the cycle of reincarnation and everything is born,dies and comes back into another thing. Not necessary as a conscious thing because you can come back as a pure energy. Not necessary because of a ''higher purpose'' either but because of pure logic and numbers. People poop,alright? You can come back as spiritual poop. It's science. We like to use labels like the pure vibration of ''love'',''peace'',''angelic'' etc but believe it or not, there is more than one version of ''love''. And they all have various temperatures, different ways of manifesting, different colors...basically let's just make it all simple and say it's like the air. Air in different areas and places all over the globe have different molecules inside, different science elements inside as well as come in many temperatures. Now considering that there are an infinite amount of realms (and multiverses) ''love'' is going to look and sound different in all of them.

Energy moves,simple as that. They all have different patterns and even deities and time and space are an energy. And in the land of infinite possibility, there is always going to be something that'll cause the energy to stop and be still.

So where am I going with this? It's very possible that if you wait long enough (like untold amounts of time) EVERY SINGLE ENERGY across all multiverses and spirit realms are going to crash into each other and be still or be constantly this one thing. This one thing is the most simplistic energy of all and everything in the spirit realm is going to be it,and it cannot and WILL NOT CHANGE. All cycles of nature will eventually crash into each other or halt and become one state. That means deities and spiritual realms will eventually crash into each other,merge and there will be no more differences between them. They will not be able to speak,move or do anything because they are just still.

That means no more afterlives,no more creation,no more destruction,no more cycles,no more anything but... just absolute stillness. Just this one simplistic thing.

It's hard for me to explain so let me just put a picture to make it easier for you to see where I'm coming from.

This is a picture of the corpses of all of your deities that you worship. See how everything is just one color and how nothing is different and there are no shapes? No life or worlds,no souls,no aspects, no spiritual purpose? It just is?

I call this the spiritual big crunch.

It will not happen in our lifetime and it won't happen all at once. First, stillness will start manifesting as a small minor thing in certain ''groups'' in the multiverse but as long as there is movement around it, the stillness will break apart. However, if you put a hundred chimpanzees on a typewriter, they will eventually type up Shakespeare. Even in this universe, galaxies are moving towards us,our sun will explode,our stars will burn out and this place will be awfully dark. Anyway, eventually everything is going to meet each other and is slowly going to convert everything into one thing. Its likely that there are going to be multiple groups of ''stillness'' energy that are going to appear around all of existence that vibrate completely differently but the ''stillness'' won't always be that one point because they will evenly meet in the middle.

Uh here's another picture. (Note:I don't think that there is any stillness areas around us that I know of. This is just an example)

''Stillness'' or spiritually constipated energy (because NOTHING WILL BE CREATED OR DESTROYED) could look like anything so that's why they are many different colors. It's not about ''death'' or ''peace'', it's about everything becomes this ONE simplistic energy because everything ran into each other and now it can't do anything but simply exist...or even not exist. We are in the multicolored multiverse consciousness group and these cycles of nature can still reach these ''still'' areas and make them move,therefore breaking their ''still'' energy up.

Of course, if you ask Gods about human death, they will say that it doesn't exist. That there is the afterlife. If you ask them if ''stillness'' exists however, they will refuse to acknowledge it. They will say that it doesn't exist either. That nature will move for eternity. HOWEVER there's something that they're aren't telling you. When deities say something, it's a spell. They create what they speak. They may contradict each others will since they are different personalities but they tend to make things happen when they say something to you. When they say ''Stillness doesn't exist.'' that is them refusing to ''die''. That is their spark of life. That is their will to live,their will to move. That is because deities AND NATURE knows that if they stop ''moving'' they as a concept will cease to be.

Even Gods ''fear'' death but they won't say that to your face. They all communicate with their actions even if you as a human can't comprehend their motives or ways.

(I have more stuff about this subject but it's difficult to explain so I'll just leave this here.)

[askmadcomcrew]

Hmm, how about...

To everyone: General opinions on zeds?

Hank: Annoying, if in large groups. One zed isn't much to worry about, and is easy to kill with a headshot or knife to the head. It's the hordes you have to watch out for.

Sanford: Zeds are basically animals at this point, mindless and roving. They're only really capable of convertin' others into more zeds, and they just keep doing that forever until they run of of folks to convert. They're not so bad in open areas, but they can really get the jump on you in tight spaces.

Deimos: They're creepy and weird, and I really don't like 'em too much. I prefer to deal with them at range with guns, Sanford likes to let 'em get close so he can stab 'em in the head, or just uses his hook. Letting them get close is just about the worst thing you can do, but it helps to know what to do when one is on top of you tryna much on your face. A quick knife to the head usually does the trick.

Doc: Zeds are the result of Enmeshment, tech I theorize was stolen from me around the time of my arena experiment by an...Unsavory character. Unlike most zombies in media you're used to, their bites are not fatal, as myself and most of my men have suffered zed bites which can be treated like any other wound. Dr. Christoff notably weaponized a massive horde of Zeds during his insurrection on Nexus City, causing the deaths of hundreds and larger numbers of zeds to spread throughout the Nevadean wastes. Needless to say, they can be rather troublesome, but are not a consistent factor in my day to day life.

Jeb: I am not overly fond of the existence of Zeds, they are an affront to nature much like many of the Nexus Core's experiments. However, that does not make them any less useful. Zeds in large numbers can be sent towards a specific target, and if that target is unprepared to deal with an infestation, they can prove quite effective. You do not have to worry about morale or morality with Zeds, they simply move towards the next closest source of food, and onto the next when that food source has been exhausted. They also make for veritable meatshields.

Tricky: ME 'N ZEDS GET ALONG LIKE BREAD AND BUTTER!!! MOSTLY CONSIDERING I AM ONE, OR AT LEAST USED TO BE. I'M NOT REALLY SURE WHAT I AM ANYMORE AFTER I HAD THAT RUN IN WITH THE AUDITOR!!! OH WELL, I GUESS IT DOESN'T REALLY MATTER. I USUALLY LIKE TO STRAP BOMBS ONTO THEM AND SEND THEM ON THEIR MERRY WAY!!! IT'S ALREADY BAD ENOUGH TO HAVE A ZED TRYING TO EAT YOU, EVEN WORSE WHEN THEY EXPLODE!!! HAHAHAHAHAAHA

Crackpot: Well, I have quite the...Special relationship with Zeds, needless to say, being their creator and all. Zeds are my greatest scientific success, and were part of the reason I was briefly made head of Project Nexus when Christoff got the can. My zeds may not have been as directly capable as Christoff's sleepwalkers, but we could make so many more of them to keep Project Nexus afloat. It's a shame that bastard Christoff misused them in order to help bring the city down.

Sheriff: Well, considerin' they still dominate an entire sector of Nexus City, I ain't too fond of 'em. My boys are putting in a lot of resources in trying to clear out the Zed infestation over in Residential. It's slow goin', but we're whittling their numbers down one by one. I got round the clock snipers on any vantage point that's safe enough to snipe from, just shootin' 'em down as they see 'em. At some point in the future the streets of Residential should be relatively safe to navigate again.

Phobos: Another wonderful byproduct of Nexus Science, Zeds are one of the many ways I continued Project Nexus. As inhospitable as they may be, they proved to be very useful tools in keeping more S3LFs out of the other place. The Nexus Core had no shortage of corpses, so we could pump as many S3LFs into them as we desired.

Auditor: They are of little concern, however they are known to assault certain AAHW bases closer to the outskirts of Nexus City. Massive, wandering droves of Zeds can reduce a fortified position to rubble and more zeds extremely quickly. I occasionally dispatch anti-Zed units to clear out Zed infested areas, in order to keep population low. If Zed numbers are allowed to get too high, they can pose a great threat to my operation here.

[ronaldono-sense]

Doubts 'bout Cyclonopedia: does these mean anything?

Reza Negarestani's most famous book, Cyclonopedia (2008), is a hard one to get through. Far from impossible, though. Even if you're not following its threads closely, the main theme isn't all that missable—not by a long shot.

Perhaps I'm too invested in the book's world to be able to surmise it neatly; perhaps to do so is against its core message(s). If you have read it already, you can skip this paragraph, but if you're reading this post because you're interested in it, just give it a shot. If the preface (named 'incognitum hactenus') doesn't hook you in, maybe leave it for now. Alas, if you'd still like to be given something to chew on, its premise is that the Middle East, as a geopolitical entity, is alive; its petroil is not only sentient but also the lubrificant that gets the deleuzoguattarian Body without Organs all lubbed up and smooth so the chains flying out of these Lament Configurations called war-machines can have a good time channeling us to the Insurrectionary Other.

If you're familiar with SF at all, you'll excuse Cyclonopedia habit of presenting its terminology and lingo first, with explanations later. But you also can have it as a philosophical treatise, and a serious one at that. It has a credible bibliography, and the book's reinterpretations of its source materials are not unprecedented, either. For example, when it says the Middle East is alive, and all that jazz about oil, it is getting that off of a certain Dr. Parsani, so heavily quoted, matter of fact, you'd think he's not real, but a Theory-Fiction fabrication. But that's just not the case.

I absented myself from doing any 'behind the scenes' research on Cyclonopedia, though. At least, for now. I finished it some weeks ago and am currently past the 200-page mark of Fanged Noumena. But it still has its little mysteries, and I still wonder what these Plot Holes are yet successfully withholding from me. And that's what I need help with.

Assuming you have read it, you know Cyclonopedia doesn't tell you everything. Quick example: 'incognitum hactenus' gives the reader two links, but it doesn't tell what they're for. It matters little, nonetheless: one is a time zone converter and the other is a Not Found page (unless you erase part of it so you're directed to a 'Computer Science student web server'?).

But, of course, there's more. There's the '2th 3St', 2 and S being character's names, but still, it doesn't come up again in this equation form, so what's up with that?

Following, I give the ones that really stuck with me along these weeks I thought I put it to rest. Needless to say, this is a cry for help.

I. This footnote:

II. This other footnote, which might be Persian:

III. Also this one:

IV. On page 39 (and the previous one), you see these strings of 'random' bracketed numbers (the footnote talks about PGPs):

V. And finally, there's a footnote on page 37 where someone (Reza?) is at the hotel room 302, bothered by someone (the preface's author) wearing a DFA 1979 shirt. But if we go back to the preface, it is she who is at the 302 room. There, you read:

// SSS ['S' is the same person Reza? is adressing in the 37 footnote] Try to change my room as 302 is really getting to me. There is someone [Reza?] in the window across the way who keeps looking at me.

//

I'm wondering if this is an overlook (it seems that way), or a time-space shenanigans scenario, since the preface gives us this graph:

I'm sure other minor things could also be adressed, and even these ones shouldn't make too much of a difference, if at all, but—at the same time I don't want to sign up a reddit account to ask this, and will therefore shout into the tumblr void—engaging in a community manner with Cyclonopedia, CCRU or CCRU-adjacent material is, probably, the better way to do it and proceed.

[rudolphsb9]

I was originally going to write an entire rant about the treatment Skip Woods gives to his female characters across both his outings in the Hitman franchise. I started going through Hitman (2007) with the intention of studying how Nika was portrayed as a character with the sole purpose of ranting about problems I saw in the way Woods handles women, female leads in particular (to be frank, there are few other female characters of note in either film; Diana is grandfathered in as an important character, but as I've ranted about before and will do so again, Katia's mother doesn't get the grace of a canonical name despite haunting most of H:A47). But, as I was doing that, I realized how similar the films are overall, at least in how they set themselves up.

One of the big points for me was the similarity between Katia and Nika, not in minute details but in overall character sketch: a woman in a bad position in life who is in need of rescue and (perhaps by necessity of genre convention) sexy. But not just any kind of sexy, she also has to be exotic. Nika is a Russian sex slave, a stereotype that may have flown in 2007 but needed necessary updating for 2015. So, Katia's mother is Sri Lankan Tamil. (She's initially implied to be mixed, which would slot her into the But Not Too Foreign trope where acceptable love interest territory lies, but when the story shifts gears to sibling team up mode and John is revealed to be a straight up antagonist, Katia is directly stated to be the product of mad science. It's highly probable that but for necessary modifications, she is a direct clone of her own mother--"You are the reflection of the woman I loved.")

There are other points I observed, too, mostly in setup (the details of deviation allow for the films to run different courses in their second halves). The prologue of the program that produced 47, the placements of any flashbacks (they taper out by the half-way point), the entire plot of "initial hit kick starting the action, followed by find the girl (whether that was an original goal or not), followed by kidnap the girl and deliver to her a series of key revelations, followed by drag her along to help on the mission". I don't watch enough movies (action movies in general or Woods' work in specific) to know whether this is scènes à faire or if H:A47 is really just Hitman (2007) with a different coat of paint. But I also don't think it's a bad thing. Lots of creatives have pet themes that make it into almost all their work.

The similarities also make it really easy to see where I think one version did better than the other. The prologue and flashbacks 47 has to getting tattooed from Hitman (2007) are something I prefer over H:A47, for example. Instead of the clinical sterility of medical exams, we get glimpses into the actual training the boys were given, including the implication that they were the ones responsible for shooting any of their number who tried to escape. 47 fixates on the tattoo because it caused him a lot of pain. There's a similar moment in H:A47 but instead 47 is asked if it hurt, and says yes. Coupled with the fact that in the 2015 version of the prologue, we do see 19 get his number, and the machine doing the stamping... gets it done in a couple of seconds and 19 doesn't even flinch. In the 2007 version somebody is using an actual tattoo gun, forcing him to keep a steady hand and 47 to hold as still as possible to not mess up the lines. To quote Dan Olsen: "inference is dramatically inferior to being shown."

(As a random aside, the monks in the 2007 version go completely unexplained. I think they were only included because in the second game 47 briefly converts to Catholicism and lives in a monastery. I have a web of theories about how the movies and games play off each other; this and 47's wearing the stripe tie from Blood Money for the first act are on that pin board.)

On the other end, I think Katia is an improvement, character wise, over Nika, and that boils down to one specific change. Katia is 47's little sister, a product of the same experiments that produced 47 himself. Because Katia also has Agent abilities, this handily allows her to participate freely in the action, in part because 47 spends the second half forcing/teaching Katia to use her abilities for combat until she can manage without prodding. Nika, for her part, acts in her storyline in spite of 47. She's told over and over again to stay put and not wander off or interfere, and she wanders off and interferes (though she does only interfere once; 47 scared her straight after that). Nika's primary story function is... teaching 47 to love? It's unclear, and her method half the time is to attempt to seduce him which, given his explicit rejection of the idea, counts as assault. Making Katia 47's sister eliminates the need for any weird "romance" dynamic involving 47 himself, and makes them much more equal in their interactions.

I want to make another point of comparison, too, and this is going to bring in ideas from the games. It's 47's relationship to his own name, which has clearly changed as time goes on. In Blood Money (which I'm certain influenced Hitman (2007)), 47 states "Names are for friends, so I don't need one." In Hitman (2007), he tells Nika "The place I was raised, they didn't give us names, they gave us numbers. Mine was 47." Both of these statements imply that he doesn't view 47 as a proper name but as something imposed on him (there's an argument to be made that in the 2007 film, the Organization used numbers as a means to strip their orphan charges of identity to keep them in line and foster loyalty).

However, in H:A47, he has this exchange:

Sanders: "So why don't we start with your name." 47: "47." Sanders: "That's... not a name." 47: "No, but it is mine."

Additionally in the prologue sequence of Hitman (2016), he has this exchange:

47: "I believe they called me... 47." Diana: "That's not a name." 47: "So make it one."

The acceptance of "47" as a name in its own right implies a version of the character more at peace with his clonehood and circumstances. In H:A47 especially, there are implications that the clones had a sort of subculture, or cultural identity among themselves (47 outright states that while each clone gets barcoded at birth, they only get the corresponding number stamped on them "when [they] become Agents", and if that's not a rite of passage I'm a wheel of cheese). One could surmise that their numerical identifiers were given appropriate significance, and I have nothing to go on here but I do think they lined up in numerical order for everything that required them to assemble in an orderly fashion (which is everything they could have been required to do at the lab).

The point I'm trying to make here is that as the Hitman franchise has progressed, the character of 47 has changed his relationship with the fact that his name is 47 (and everything that implies). Here I'm not going to say one or the other is bad, but I do think it's interesting and worth further study.

[bepisconsumer]

what are your controversial opinions about celsius

That it has little to nothing that makes it better than Fahrenheit but it rides the coattails of the rest of the metric system and uses its borrowed clout to make itself seem better.

You should be using Kelvin if you're doing science and the benefits of knowing how water feels at any given temperature are minimal for the vast majority of other cases. The 2 main places that we (or at least I)interact with temperature measurement regularly are the weather and making food. Fahrenheit being a more granular scale has a slight advantage for cooking/baking in my opinion, and when you view it as a %-hot scale it works very well for gauging how cold or hot I'm gonna feel outside (there is some slight bias to this point I am aware, but I think it still holds some value)

People can whine that "Celsius is better cause it's defined by a universal constant" all they want, the constant they chose was arbitrary for the sake of making it stay the same and that can be (or has been, I'm not 100% sure) done for Fahrenheit as well. There is also very little value to be had by making the freezing and boiling points of water 0 and 100. Sure, it's easy to remember, but remembering any two numbers at all is easy in and of itself. I don't lose sleep over the boiling point of water being 212 instead of a nicer, divisible-by-ten number.

Speaking of dividing by ten, the biggest advantage of the metric system, there is a distinct lack of this when it comes to Celsius. You don't need to convert to like Kilocelsiuses or some shit like that. In non-scientific settings you rarely ever convert temperature units at ALL, and most of the time when you DO you're just going back and forth between °C and °F so there isn't even any inherent connection to the metric system that Celsius has except for its ubiquity.

At the end of the day, I doubt any of these opinions I hold will ever matter because the US switching to metric officially is probably just a pipe dream, but in such a case I am fully prepared to die fighting for my right to Fahrenheit in a Metric world