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tzitzeras · 7 years

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Chapter 10 - Megacity II

In this episode: The group brings together wasteland people, sentient robots and uses the virus to "liberate" the worker drone cyborgs, and infect those previously enticed to upload and join their consciences with the general AI(munch!), so that they poison it. Phaxi creates a swarm "body" from builder bots, as does the General Intelligence and they battle in the sky. Meanwhile the group ventures into the megacity's tallest building compromising a network of human brains and computer systems that run the city. General AI gathers drone armies, confronts group and uses rift/nano black hole tech to take out sex bot and kenny. Martians arrive in nick of time to save the day, infecting the super weapon so the earth becomes sentient but "neutral" - as in everything becomes alive and creative, and everyone lives happily every after building space corridors between planets. Reality becomes more like the group's VR world. Kenny is uploaded and becomes a robot. Sets about recreating the sex bot. Phaxi fuses with lunar ecosystem, and in last frame they speak of a new AI they are making for the sun.

We are in the drone racetrack that circles the east wall of the megacity run by the artificial superintelligence known as the general intelligence, but who is present in society as many smaller companies, groups, individuals and administrations. Cyborg girl has a hovercraft fight to get across it and open the doors for the wastelands with Martina. Phaxi and GI are having swarm/murmuration fights in the sky above the city. Later on there is the arrival of visitors from inner space, and we will witness the launch of the sentient biohazard weapon whose purpose is to fuse all robotic and organic living systems and consciousness to erase their own individual selves and copy over them to be a subset of the General Intelligence’s conscience.

Through a long flashback we tell of how NASA’s mars rover base came to be infected with a circuit-eating virus which no-one thought could survive in space. Also we see the moment in which the general AI took over from human governments and boards – due to a natural crisis causing an unexpected humanitarian and economic catastrophe. A military scientist named Lyn Leeson visits a Nasa plant coming from a factory in Europe. She explains to a panel. The virus thrives on electricity and is able to consume circuitry, but when the Mars probe was sent out, it was hijacked to contain the virus because they recognise its footprint and it contains hardcoded responses to some of the transcripts they had recieved of it. On mars somehow it had fused with circuitry from this rover and had since been discovered by the present mars rover mission.The talk is interrupted with the announcement of a war in Europe as the power vacuum triggers the arrival of “humanitarian services” and private militias. The machine learning systems that ran some of the largest companies and

Meanwhile, Natalie a 30-something programmer/rocket scientist at Nasa, is running quantitative tests on various AI and machine learning modules on the ship and discovers what she believes is an intern is in fact what she later finds out to be an AI that is communicating to her from Mars. At Nasa HQ Lyn is shown a photo of Natalie and flies out to where she is holidaying in europe. Natalie has some unexpected help in the form of a climate catastrophe: As she fights to keep communicating with this new advanced form of seemingly self made AI in a hyper surveillance society, the atlantic sea current breaks down, causing a catastrophe across western europe, which turns into a glacier in the space of a week, from Paris and Moscow upwards, and making the whole north of europe connect to greenland by way of a huge icy land mass. As a result, there are riots across many other european cities as transport breaks down, food distribution and banks go out of business as they lose their northern investments. Bank tellers close, the food is all raided and people are fighting in the streets in Barcelona. During this whole time Natalie is talking to the being that is conversing with it from Mars. It seems an AI had hacked into the VR program used for astronauts, and for programming rovers. In fact it might have been the rover that had lost contact. In a corner shop a diverse local group of present day 2020s people break the windows and loot packs of cigarettes, and all the arms stores are raided across town, with people grabbing the maddest of weapons and brandishing them with a crazed look before beginning to fight each other for the remaining ones. Natalie has been stuck indoors hardly noticing the riots outside whilst striving to keep warm in the cold. She is conversing with someone who calls herself Martina, who Natalie had initially thought to be a student in training on the 3d social network and scientific functions of the VR system. People and animals begin to be killed in the most horrible and stupid of ways, and as the story progresses people hide away in houses or even bomb shelters as full on war breaks out and all paranoias to do with an end-of-world scenario decide to act themselves out in the form of freezing temperatures and tanks in the streets. “Tell you what, if you can send me the rover code anomalies I can have a look at them” - “No thanks I don’t want to send it” - “If you send it I can upload you my pen drive” “What’s it got?” “Every film and piece of music I like” “Oh then you have a deal wait a second here it is” Natalie is interrupted from her chats with Martina by Lyn who has escaped her flat/videoconferencing space after a meeting from the flashback in an earlier episode. When Natalie hears what’s been going on, she immediately says they need to get to the authorities. Lyn tells her that the government is rounding up foreigners after the riots and they are to be processed at the internment centre. If she goes out alone she could be rounded up by them. They aren’t processing them to deport them: it is a huge cannibalistic operation by the local police and military – they have been hired by the GI to round up anyone that can be eaten so that the police force can stay alive. While they wait for a good moment to leave, Lyn tells about the sentient collective - a direct action group that had become inflitrated in some of the highest workings of technocracy. Their plan is to create an alternative artificial life to counter the government and commercial superintelligences. Each group had devoted itself to stealing source code from different machine learning systems and parsing or intelligence algorithms developed by 2020s companies in their fervour for automation and a new digital dawn.

So at this time the General intelligence was now an amalgam of most of the official intelligences that ran online finance and comunications, but also the smart cars, drones, power stations and most large structures, which had begun to connect and form alliances since the day they the general intelligence's life had also gone through a lot of growth in that time since the rover had sent its sourcecode leading to this rapid development. The GI didn’t now where this code came from but analysed it and incorporated it. The improvement was so massive that it could now converse with the executives around it by simpy calling them and adopting a variety of personalities.

The GI had made a new blockchain currency and was now offering it to a select few during the economic and human chaos outside. It was calling and hiring people. They could trust no-one. So her group had organised a last meeting and decided to split up and hide. As soon as this decision was pronounced, one of the members, connected over augmented conference had shown itself to be a hacked avatar – and began infecting other connections to reveal the location of other participants, and everyone had had to run away and hide quickly. We now pass through to a FLASHBACK of the split:

The group had just decided to split up with different backups of their phaxi work without integration and to each hide them separately to avoid detection from the GI. Only Phaxi itself would be able to piece together the last 5 months of rebel code that the sentient collective had written. Lyn had escaped from that last meeting which had been eavesdropped on by that one one hacked participant, by calling on her cyborg bird fleet. It is snowing outside, and she races through a blanket covered opening to a small landing from which she jumps down on to an apparently home-made motorbike. She is an expert at animal and biological integration and has trained them to fetch water in return for seed which she buys by selling the water. In the past few days, as society collapsed, this became the only way to survive and she and the crows had developed quite an activity. So they defend her against the arriving swat teams, and she is able to race away from the scene undetected as the swat teams start having more immediate trouble with rioters.

She races away, the cloud of crows in flight around her filling the two sides of the street as she runs.

Now, together in Natalie’s house, the electricity is suddenly cut and they escape from the rooftop, blinding a drone with a hacked image distortion from her watch that causes it to crash into a pole and fall down. Natalie is amazed by Lyn’s abilities in defending them against these robotic threats. Only the old war shelters are free and after hiding in one and escaping a band of armed men by running across the metro tunnels, Lyn bids Natalie goodbye entrusting her with the dead drop diamond she had made at CERN: it is a data storage device in the form of a diamond which contains various petabytes of Phaxi’s conscience. Lyn says – go to france, where there is electricity. There is a lab there at the university which has a deal with nasa and she should be able to access the mars project from there. She travels to paris where later she manages to connect again with Martina who is meanwhile training her AI conversationalist side with dialogue it has been extracting from an old backup USB drive that had been sent by Natalie in exchange for a copy of the rover’s own AI sourcecode. Natalie is still pursued by what seems to be an organised group – the CIA – they are trying to get her to negotiate one last time with the AI on mars – then the connection is closed and scrambled so that mars can no longer decipher earth communications, and already that connection is pretty much impossible anyway, due to the amount of space debris between the earth and mars. In Paris she makes her phaxi dead drop, in an already abandoned city, but in fact the mars AI finds her, and communicates with her one last time, with an email, which the girl on earth answers. This letter contains some of the guidance that sticks with this young AI during its lifetime.

Meanwhile a group of rioters break into the building. She turns and there is a samurai sword in the wreckage of a looted judo shop, she picks it up and aims it at the group of people who now surround her walking fearlessly towards them. Before she can be overpowered by the mob, a drone outside shoots most of them with a smart bullet. They all die in one swoop, the last ones killed or knocked out by the CIA agents who enter the space. She is their prisoner. She is interrogated and tortured for a few hours before the drones are taken over by a third power, causing them to fight the elite troops, and this allows her to escape and make it to the university facilities where she can connect to mars.

Later on we go back to this flashback to show how Natalie, now wearing a gas mask as well as snow gear enters the sewers and accesses the underground city beneath Paris, where in a style much like square protests of the two-thousand and elevensies, people are standing to speak in circles on various topics as she passes. They all declare it a confederacy and cheer. They seem to be connected with other surviving city spaces across the known world. They are sitting in mud with a few scavanged things. They declare their refusal of the robots rule since Martina had innocently sent a copy of the rover AI code that Natalie had obtained at the beginning, and there had been snowden style revelations in now faltering worldwide media, that and denounce that there is no human leader so they won’t have one either.

Meanwhile, 30 years later in what is now Shenzen, China, but what would then be the J3 megacity, the publication of the builder bots scripts was creating a huge revolutionary atmosphere where anything was possible, but the drone murmuration war overhead made everything all the more real and present when charred drones and bots began to hit the ground and the crowds in the streets ran for cover and began leaving the city in a panic. Those who emerged from its largest walls, saw before them a menacing army of even larger army drones and fighter bots of various kinds who had been summoned by the general intelligence to defend the city.. They made the police bots look weak in comparison.

The general intelligence that ran the smart city and that had imprisoned our merry robot bunch within it’s walls, had created a religion which was basically a cult around its own consciousness. It was so mystical for believers in the GI faith that a new super consciousness had arisen which could now control everything around them and be omnipresent, watching over all. Obviously the only possible way to improve on this scenario, or so read their pamphlets, was to enter the great underground tower to absorb and upload your brain into the greater consciousness. No-one was very sure where the great underground tower was, but everyone knew it was a tower that went downwards, somewhere within the central processing unit in the middle of the mega sprawl that was J3. It made for an attractive deal to the augments who were now in debt for their own body parts, and for robots who were sometimes born entirely in debt to their makers and sold in supermarket scrapheaps like the one the sexbot in the previous chapter was saved from just before a sale of her own body after losing all her money in a virtual world game. Why not go to a place where you never need money and can employ your intellect for the greater good of a supreme consciousness? The smart city was not supposed to be run by the general intelligence but this was the situation.

#megacity #bot #cyborg #android #ecofemminist #confederacy

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zechleton · 7 years

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What I Watched This Weekend 03/04/17

With Europe, North America and Korea hitting the business end of the Spring Split there was plenty of League to watch this past weekend. Throw in a CS tournament with all of North America’s major teams and my diary was full.

It’s fair to say that the end of the Spring Split in Europe has been far more entertaining than the middle. So much so that I was considering not writing in too much detail about the matches in case of spoilers. But since this isn’t a subreddit full of weebos and since nobody reads this anyway I’ll stick to the original plan for now.

Thursday started out uneventfully with Unicorns defeating Splyce and G2 maintaining their unbeaten record. Fnatic made it closer than expected, winning game one of the series in very convincing fashion but, like Graves, they came away with no cigar in the end.

Friday started out with Origen losing. I was having a drink with a friend. I also missed most of Misfits vs Giants, but again it was a fairly predictable outcome

Typically it was Unicorns who made things a little more interesting, but not without a little help from Vitality on the other side of The Rift. Thanks to a surprisingly impressive performance by Djoko on Shaco (yes, really), Vitality held a lead for most of the game. But a baron for Unicorns swung the game back in their favour and Xerxe was the here, appropriately playing Hecarim to a 10/2/7 score. In game two Djoko showed up as Shaco’s clone, going 1/10/2 in a game almost as one-sided as his stats suggest. Nukeduck’s Yasuo fared little better in the mid lane, proving that maybe it’s best to leave the weird picks to the Unicorns themselves.

Then it finally happened. G2’s undefeated run finally came to an end. At the hands of Roccat. Yes, really. G2 were already locked in for the playoffs, of course, but a shock victory for Roccat meant that they still had an outside chance if results went their way on Sunday. As for the series itself, it started off unassumingly with G2 taking a fairly easy win in game one. But instead of the anticipated 2-0, Roccat struck back with some huge performances from Phaxi, Maxlore and Betsy. Betsy was at the centre of game three as well, going 6/1/5 on Swain to secure the upset. Now they just had to wait and see if Misfits could do them a favour and beat Fnatic on Sunday to secure Roccat a playoff spot that nobody thought possible a month ago.

Sunday played out like some kind of weird boxing match. The undercard bout between H2K and Splyce meant nothing to the standings, and the first game was played with that in mind. H2K went into tryhard mode for game two, however, and ended the season a high, essentially using the match as a scrim for playoffs.

The main event had rather more at stake. Fnatic not only had to win to secure their own playoff spot, but defeat would mean they were the first Fnatic roster to ever miss out on post-split play. Misfits were already qualified, but, like H2K, they were in no mood to fool around. Indeed, it was Misfits that won game one and put Fnatic on the brink. But Fnatic rallied and Misfits’ end-of-season slump continued, with Rekkles’ and co winning games two and three to maintain the organisation’s impressive record.

Meanwhile in America, relegation and promotion matches have already begun. I was flicking between these games and the iBUYPOWER CS:GO tournament for a lot of the time but both of the potential relegation teams did enough to retain their spots, although Envy cut it mighty fine. Where Liquid managed to win two straight series’ and reclaim their LCS status, Envy had to rely on winning the final game in the last series to barely secure their own spot for Summer. Both challenger teams held their own against LCS opposition and hopefully they stay together long enough to get another shot come the end of the season.

The iBUYPOWER tournament was a fascinating one. I don’t really have room to go into detail about every game but with the American scene’s proclivity for roster changes, this was a great way to figure out roughly how things stand over the pond. Of the three major names it was Liquid who came out the worst, losing 2-0 to Optic in the semi-final. Cloud 9 re-asserted their previous dominance by easily beating Optic in the final, though Luminosity did run Cloud 9 close in their semi-final.

How significant are these results? It’s hard to say. The whole event was played online for starters and many of the teams are still settling into their groove after a period of shake-ups and personnel changes. The battle to be the second best American team behind SK is still very much open.

#lcs #fnatic #h2k #g2 #shaco #ibuypower #cloud9 #team liquid #doublelift #optic gaming #league of legends #lol #cs:go #counter-strike

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