Filed under: Writing | Tags: 'rodes, all, cyberpunk, fiction, future, lead, roam, sci-fi, technology, to, writing
This is a big ugly link back to part 1.
Cadejo was pacing. Cadejo always paced. You could tell how agitated he was by the amount of steps he took between each about-face and I often wondered if there was a way to annoy him enough that he’d spin in place like he was in a microwave oven. I imagine he’d turn a similar colour in both situations, too.
I sat in one of his uncomfortable foam office chairs, watching him skitter back and forth like I was watching a game of tennis, and waited. My hand was in my coat pocket, nervously fingering the ‘board Jackson had given me before I got called to the office.
“It’s those darn kids, again.” He finally spluttered, mercifully dropping into his own comfortable-looking leather chair and sighing. “They really stepped in the dog-doo this time.”
‘Just fucking swear, Sarge, it’s good for you!’ I didn’t say. What I did say was, “Kids?”
He leaned forward, elbows on his desk and sat back in the chair again in one swift movement. Only Tec-Sec’s Sergeant Eddie Cadejo could find a way to pace while sitting down.
“Those punk kids, the Gamers, they hack private networks to play their stupid little games. Well now they’re in real trouble.” He seemed genuinely excited at the prospect. Fully aware of what ‘those punk kids’ did for fun, I just stared at him until he continued.
“This time they jacked the internal service network of Remus Tech.” He got up and began pacing again, but this time he was smiling. If he was more inclined to the theatrical like Jackson I imagine he’d be literally wringing his hands with glee.
“We never catch them, though.” I chose to address his quartz paperweight rather than follow him around the room with my head this time. “Why is this time any different?”
He stopped, turned, regarded me and then practically skipped back to his desk to point at his computer screen.
“Because they just logged in! Remus Golems noticed them immediately and called it in.”
I stopped messing around with my semi-legal new ‘board and pulled my rolling gear from my pocket. As I rolled I asked him the question I knew he wanted me to ask.
“Why,” I licked the gum strip on the paper and tapped the cigarette on his desk, “would Remus Tech’s own Golems not shut them down immediately?”
They wanted us to catch these kids. They wanted them in the cells until they could sue them properly. So they gave them a wide berth on the network and called us, hoping we’d get there in time. That’s what Cadejo was saying, significant slower than I had thought it. They were sending out a clean-up crew, including me.
“You’re sending me because I need to get my footwork hours in, for my promotion.” I gave up playing twenty questions. I already knew all this.
“We’re sending you, too, because you…” He trailed off and gave me an annoyed look. I lit my cigarette and focussed on the paperweight. “Fine. Go to the bays now.” He began a wider path in his pacing, more relaxed now he’d palmed this one off on me. I set off for the parking bays.
—
On the drive to Remus Technologies’ enormous and ornate headquarters I thought about what was about to happen. I liked these kids. I’m part of the reason we’d never caught them. What can I say? Good adversaries are hard to find over the Grid, and this group were the best in The City. Only one had ever beaten me in a game before, but they put up a good fight.
One grunt nudged the identical aerogel armour of the one to his right and gestured my way. A wordless ‘what’s his deal?’ I payed no attention, I was decking in with my *Roam™ powered portable Grid-visor™*. Checking on Remus’ Golems.
Every major company has Golems. They patrol the networks night and day looking for intruders and kicking them out, sometimes with severe penalties. Since Remus Tech controlled the Roam™ system their Golems even had the power to ban you from being online at all, at least on all Remus owned services. Unfortunately that included the Grid; the fate of the internet of old, after Remus got their grubby mitts all over it, and ‘nothing happens off the Grid’ as the ads scream proudly. You had to be particularly malicious and stupid to get caught and full-service Hammered though. It didn’t happen often.
Using my Tec-Sec ID code I forced the Golems to give up the exact coordinates of the intruders, which I relayed to the captain of the little crew of officers. Then, using a little Remus ID I hacked up, I also forced them to leave me alone for a little while. I had to warn my adversaries in time for them to log out and scarper; it wouldn’t do to let them feel the full brunt of Remus’ legal team. Or teams, as it were.
“Hands off your tackle and eyes open. We’re here.” The captain called as the van rolled to a gentle stop.
Shit.
Filed under: Gibberish | Tags: Creme, Creme Egg, Egg, Life, Special, Stars, Universe
I just found a Creme Egg in my pocket! (Link for anyone who may not know of them. Just in case.)
“Over reacting a little aren’t you, J Bov?”
Let me tell you something;
When you glance at the night sky on occasion, you see the beautiful points of light, shimmering in the firmament, and you pause.
You are staring up into the light from a billion other suns. There are stars so large if you replaced our star with them they would reach the furthest point of the orbit of Jupiter. We can see whole other galaxies, hundreds of billions of suns spiralling in space, with the naked eye.
Our planet is a tiny rock, spinning in the dark. We’ve discovered a little over five hundred others through the years, none of them Earth-like. I will almost definately never set foot on Mars, or even our own moon, I’ll probably never leave this one insignificant mote of dust.
Small comforts are rarely afforded in this dark, lonesome universe.
But I exist. You exist. A ridiculously long, twisted line of history has led to chance meetings, from which sprung one of almost infinite possible new lives, who met someone else and did it again. This decreases the odds of my or your ancestors even meeting to incredibly low. More chance meetings and eventually, one of millions of sperm meets one of millions of eggs and from a huge range of possible expressions of that meeting it’s you. Wonderful, miraculous you and me.
Every molecule in your body can be traced to cosmic phenomena; you and I are swirling masses of space stuff that coalesces for an instant as us, then moves along. The odds of these things are so small as to be essentially zero, but here we are.
All this means that, against astronomical odds, you were born from the heart of a star. I was too. So too was the person, who I will never meet, who thought up Creme Eggs.
I could have been anywhere, at any time and it could have been anything that I’d forgotten I had, but it wasn’t.
So from all this mad, swirling, chaotic mess we can condence down to a single, shining moment wherein I find something in my pocket and tell you about it.
This very moment when I found a Creme Egg and it made me smile
and that, Sir or Madam,
that is very special.
Filed under: Diatribes and Debates, Philosophical Bollocks, SCIENCE!, Writing | Tags: 2010, 2011, hope, humanity, learned, learning, new year
So 2010 is almost over, the starting point of a new decade grinds slowly into the middle. What have we learned this year?
Nothing we didn’t know already, basically. Tories are evil, Lib Dems are spineless and Labour are practically useless.
We’ve learned that charges will be dug up out of nowhere so America can get somebody they think has wronged them ( Support Assange).
We’ve learned that some people fear science while others fear religion, with both sides willing to call for genecide.
We’ve also learned that protesting doesn’t work and neither does rioting. It’s impossible to change someone else’s mind for them.
We’ve learned that snow get’s boring very quickly and that here in England we still can’t deal with it.
On top of these things, we’ve learned that TV will continue to aim for the lowest common denominator and succeed in making stars out of preening idiot nobodies.
We’ve learned that the music industry is far from dead, but it is senile now.
Is it all bad? Looks that way, but when evil rushed from the box there was one thing left inside. Quivering in the corner right at the bottom, cold and naked, was hope.
We’ve learned that privately funded space flight is not just theoretically possible; it’s a viable option and probably the only way the layman will get off this rock. That’s exciting.
We’ve learned that a cure for HIV is closer than ever. So too, cancer.
We’ve learned that stem cells are essentially magic cures for almost any genetic defect, if only people would take the research seriously.
We’ve learned that at least some people care what happens to them and others.
We’ve learned that there are always voices from the dark telling us that we’re cared for and that we’ll be okay if we just hang in there.
We’ve learned that there are whole nations committed to making sure this planet doesn’t become a burned out, inhospitable Venus clone.
We’ve seen pictures of the Earth taken from the window of the ISS.
We’ve witnessed changing attitudes towards race and sexuality.
We’ve seen people seriously considering the medical and economic benefits of legalizing a substance that is only illegal in the first place because a man who hated Mexicans wanted to monopolize the paper industry.
We’ve seen great art created and people engaging with it.
We’ve seen kids becoming genuinely excited about reading books. Sure, shit books, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Personally I’ve learned something quite important. It’s the same as it ever was. We go around and around again and every time it gets a little bit better, we care a little bit more about people instead of things, everything gets a little bit easier.
We can have frank discussions about controversial subjects and we can research controversial topics with less incoherent, uneducated screaming.
So yes, 2010 is drawing ever closer to being an entry in history books. But despite how it may look right now, I think we’re going to be okay. If we just hang in there, we’ll be okay.
Filed under: Angry Slurred Shouting, Diatribes and Debates, Gibberish, People, Writing | Tags: apocalypse, armageddon, Cameron, Clegg, dream, dreams, end of the world, horror, nightmare, politics, rage
I’d always assumed that when the world ended I’d be with my friends and family in a meadow on a hill, watching a city crumble in the distance. The sunset would paint the sky purple and red and orange, Sigur Ros would be playing from somewhere in the background and we’d talk about the good times.
As the end drew near we’d exchange our goodbyes, crack some jokes and then there would be quiet and peace; drawing comfort from the futility of worrying about anything. A bitter-sweet ending, an idealized finale.
That’s why last nights dream struck me to my soul.
The world was ending, but my friends and family weren’t there. They were away on some exotic beach, being massaged by supermodels and chuckling to themselves, this I knew. Nor was I in a meadow. Instead I was on a bus, surrounded by knobheads, the reek of urine ruining my journey.
Occasionally someone would flick the back of my head and when I turned to glare at them I missed the crumbling city behind me, turning around in time to see just settling dust, a horrible grey in the garish yellow midday sunlight. The bus was now parked, but nobody got off.
From the window I could see the panic, hear the running feet. Here and there was looting, I saw a group of children repeatedly stabbing an elderly shopkeeper for a mars bar.
Over the din I could hear Jedward being played from some invisible speakers.
Then, projected enormously against the wreckage, began an endlessly looping video of David Cameron violently robbing a poor, old woman. Perhaps because it was projected onto an uneven ruin, perhaps not, he had taken on the aspect of a six-limbed monster bedecked in hideous spines and scale-like plates. From between two of the plates grew the constantly, sickly grinning face of Nick Clegg, like a tumor.
I could see both Milibands and the rest of Labour springing to and fro, wearing signs which read “the end is nigh!” While I couldn’t question the validity of their warning, I also couldn’t shake the feeling that they were slightly late to this party.
Suddenly I was on my feet; I grabbed and shook madly the nearest person to me.
I continued to shake him as I heard myself screaming; “No! This can’t be the end! It can’t all end like this, can it!? We worked harder than this, didn’t we!? DIDN’T WE!?”
His face remained impassive, staring straight ahead rather than watching the world fall apart around him.
He squinted at me through the pudgy rolls of flab around his eyes, unblinking, and without a word he put another handful of fries into his idiot mouth.
I began to yell incoherently, a wordlessly protest that any sane person would echo. I yelled alone. The insistent sound of a siren began then.
I awoke with a start, drenched in cold sweat, slapping my alarm to stop its wailing. I looked about myself; everything was as it should be, from my window I could see a thin mist, rising quickly in the bright but gentle morning light.
I breathed a sigh of relief and after my morning ministrations I made a cup of tea. I lit my first cigarette of the day and, mug in hand, waited for my jangled nerves to calm.
Sufficiently relaxed and now assured that what I had seen was only a terrible dream, I turned on the television. Eventually, bored of sitcoms, I made a huge mistake; I switched to the news.
I haven’t stopped screaming since.
Filed under: Writing | Tags: drink, fun with words, ink, poem, Poetry, printer, rhyme, writing
Mikey Pinter, son of a printer,
Had a great fondness for ink,
Cyan or magenta, it just didn’t enter,
His head that it wasn’t a drink.
It was early one morning,
As Friday was dawning,
That Mikey first started to run.
“It does barely tickle,
And it’s only a trickle,
But I’ll tell you, it isn’t much fun!“
A great, beefy man,
With a pie-vending van,
Met Mikey at that Summers Fayre.
“Well, you are what you eat!“
Cried the man with the meat,
But there was only a stick figure there.
Mikey Pinter, son of a printer,
Had a great fondness for ink.
His life must be boring,
Stuck as a drawing,
All thanks to a poor taste in drink.
Filed under: Diatribes and Debates, Gibberish, Philosophical Bollocks, SCIENCE! | Tags: Asimo, emotions, genius, important, robots, sad
I’ve always thought robots were cool. They really are; most males aged about 10 and up think this. Some move on and stop caring, forgetting about what were essentially characters of stories that could well have been human. Others, like myself, maintain a viewpoint of robots as not just cool characters, but important elements in the technological evolution of humanity.
That’s why I love Asimov’s robot stories. Many of these involve robots as parables for the human condition. Emotional tales of machines that are sometimes more ‘human’ than their creators.
There’s one point stuck in my memory where I realised the emotional significance of robots:
A group of primary school children in Japan were introduced to Asimo, Honda’s advanced robot that’s capable of running, climbing stairs and so on.
After some brief introductions (Asimo bows and waves hell to the children) there were many questions.
What does Asimo do for fun? (Dances, apparently).
How much did he cost?
How fast can he run?
Then after a short pause a tentative hand is raised from the back of the group.
One small boy, who will grow into a genius in my opinion, asked a question that is beautiful in it’s simplicity and scope. A question that signifies an important turning point in this child’s life, whether he knows it or not.
The question, after seeing Asimo standing stock still awaiting commands, was thus:
“Is he sad?”
Isn’t that wonderful?
In response the spokesperson hastily replied ‘Oh, no, Asimo isn’t sad! Look!’
Then, to prove how happy he was, the people by the controls made Asimo dance.
It bares repeating.
They made him dance.
That’s heartbreaking. I can’t be the only person who thinks so. When I’m quite tired it brings me close to tears, if I’m honest.
This story is so touching. It’s so sad.
Some people will be confused, to those people I say sorry, I can’t explain myself. It just hits me right in the heart whenever I remember it.
J Bov.
My ideas are coming together on Chapter 2 of ‘All ‘Rodes Lead to Roam’. Soon I’ll be in a position to write a good one, instead of the shit I’ve jotted down in notepads and scraps of paper.
It’s been a while because a dose of writer’s block caused by shit I’m dealing with and a plain and simple lack of decent, or at least coherent, ideas.
Plus, whine bitch moan excuses excuses.
In other news; I’m infrequently writing at computergamehate.tumblr.com under the pseudonym ‘Fortune’ when I can think of things to hate about games. I don’t tend to play shit stuff, so yeah, infrequently.
I intend to start doing some bad movie reviews (reviews of bad movies, not bad reviews of movies, perish the thought) just to keep my hand in and raise my blood-pressure some more.
Aside from all of this, if anyone from a magazine or newspaper is reading, I’m more than happy to write for money. Seriously. Money. Anything you like, I’m quite au fait on lots of subjects. For money. Please?
Filed under: Diatribes and Debates, Gibberish, Philosophical Bollocks, SCIENCE! | Tags: aspects, bollocks, chair, holism, holistic, philosophical, philosophy, rambling, reductionism, reductionist
Consider this:
If a robot can be shown a chair and told ‘this is a chair’, then be shown a totally different (chair like) object and identify it as a chair also, rather than, say, a stool, or differentiate between a stool and, for example, a side-table of similar size, it’s more than likely that there is no separate, definable ‘chair-ness’ inherant in the object.
Rather, it is a construction of building blocks that form a recognisable form, based on or bourne out of it’s function. A simply defined, easily recognisable piece of learned information; a chair has a base or legs, a platform for sitting and a vertical portion to rest your back against. A machine or robot could simply learn to look for these basic parts and match them to available data, remembering (to a degree) what a chair should be or have. A sort of educated inference if it hasn’t seen the specific object before.
This is, of course, unless the robot has access to a different form of ‘thinking’ than it was programmed with. Some combination of processors that gave rise to another kind of intelligence. The ghost in the machine, if you will. An indefinable quality that allows it to recognise the inherant ‘chair-ness’ of an object alongside is physical attributes as a chair. Even if we can’t recogninse or find this ability in the robots programming or build, perhaps simply because an intelligence with the same ability created the one in question it is just naturally endowed with it also; it’s programmed in unknowingly as part of the ability to recognise objects.
Perhaps the question isn’t of holistic (the whole is more than the sum of it’s parts) or reductionist (there is only the simply defined building blocks or parts that define an object and it’s function) viewpoints; it’s possible there is a third way to view this.
This leads to the more pertinent question, or rather suggestion:
An object, in this case a chair, does have or contain a definable ‘chair-ness’, but this attribute is not above and beyond the sum of it’s parts. The physical objects that make it up, it’s visible, testable components (legs, a seat, a backrest etc.) combined with it’s definite function (for sitting, resting etc.) give the object it’s undefinable attribute as a ‘chair’ (in whatever language you care to mention).
It is X type of object because it has Y and it is for Z, where X is a quality that can only really but determined by personal experience rather than explanation. One could explain the components and the function of the chair, but not communicate in any real way its ‘chair’ aspect.
This may be the very reason we have one name for it, rather than a sentence explaining its form and function. Obviously it’s partly for the sake of expendiency, but perhaps the need to consolidate its nature into one word also defines its aspect, or is a product thereof. We see it’s ‘chair-ness’ so we call it a chair. Not implying that chairs existed long before we had a name for them, just that the object has an attribute we can use one word to define. Of course it could well be that because we have one word for the object, this adds to its ‘chair-ness’, one more part of it to be added to the whole, the name somehow begets or at least contributes to the aspect of this object.
Obviously, this all depends on whether the fucking thing exists in the first place.
I guess you could say it all began in a dimly lit hole off Main Street, but doesn’t it always?
This particular one was a dingy cafe-bar dive that at least had the decency to serve coffee that didn’t make me retch.
I rolled a cigarette, then made the ‘next track’ finger gesture to change what was playing through my aural implants; they were cheap Toshis but hell, at least they worked. I’d just sparked up when Jackson walked in, looking smug. He always looked smug. He waddled over to my booth and slid in across from me, looking instantly at home amid the flecks of grease and who knows what else on the vinyl-covered seat.
“Still smoking that ancient shit, then?” He pointed to my cigarette. “It’s gonna kill you stone fucking dead someday.”
As he spoke he put a flame to the end of a Chariot Slim, the most expensive machine-rolled doob on the market. At least they would be if Jackson wasn’t importing cheap foreign knockoffs. Less than 100% legal, but at 33% of the price it was a risk that not just Jackson would make to at least look like they could afford the real deal. I was a pure tobacco smoker, one of about 30 left, at least in this city.
He called the moderately attractive waitress over and demanded his usual four espressos then sat grinning, twirling his moustache with the air of a man well versed in the twirling of things. I could never shake the feeling that he had practiced this maneuver in front of a mirror at home. He thought it made him look distiguished. I thought it made him look like a Dickensian villain, not that anyone knew who Dickens was anymore.
As Jackson bombed his third tiny coffee I observed him. He hadn’t changed in all the time I’d known him; still short, thickset, the only real change was the streaks of grey forming in his dark hair.
He was a cartoonist by trade but between jobs he was a ‘middleman’, a tech-smuggler. What I’m trying to ingrain here is that this man smuggled an awful lot of tech, whereas not many people had seen his cartoons.
“Anyway,” he began again, wiping excess coffee from his chin into his shirt collar, “I’ve managed to find you a job. Special. I’ve also managed, at great personal cost, to track down the gear you’ll need.” He slapped a bit of circuit board onto the table, wires splayed out like some dead squid from the future.
“Are you insane?” I asked him through a hastily exhaled cloud of blue smoke. “Do you know how long they’ll put you away for even having that?” All the same my fingers stretched towards the tech.
If it were possible for him to look more smug I imagine he would have at this point.
“It’s all rammed togather from parts obtainable through the proper legal channels. To the untrained eye it’s the countdown timer from an industrial dishwasher.”
“No one in Tec-Sec has untrained eyes, Jackson, and last time I checked, dishwashers didn’t need a ‘Rode hookup.” I pointed to the tiny removable implant connected to the board. It had all the right connectors to interface with any cranial electrode; temple or behind the ear. Hell, I bet with the right exchanger you could even jack it into an old BNBS (Back of the Neck, Base of the Skull), although they probably weren’t fast enough anymore and the only people that had them were guys old enough to remember that movie ‘The Matrix’.
“Listen,” he began, “I went through pain and hardship to get this to you. Damn hack-addict pulled a blade on me.” He pulled up his sleeve to show me a short, shallow cut.
I drummed a little pattern on the table, a signal to flip on the medical diagnostic software in my display contacts. I shouldn’t have it but a while back I had a friend who had a friend who had a distant relative who robbed a hospital. This business is 46% who you know.
“That’s self inflicted, Jackass, you’re trying to guilt me into this job you’ve dredged up from somewhere.”
He glared at me for a second, chewing his doob.
“Right, asshole,” he dropped all pretense of patience or decorum and became the scum I knew and respected, “do you want this or not? Unlike a few people I haven’t the luxury of weeks to make decisions. I know a guy in the Ciphers who’ll pay me fucking good money for it today.” He slapped the board emphatically.
“Calm yourself, Jacky-boy. I’m just playing a little hardball over coffee; it’s the business you’ve come to expect, who am I to disappoint? Now stop hitting my tech.” I quickly placed the board into my jacket.
“It’s valuable.”
