Note: The pictures were taken with a 1.3 megapixel camera, to ensure their kippleization.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/74285152@N00/sets/72157622774242606/

The county dump was a few miles outside of town. In a few minutes they were they were pulling up to the darkened facility.
“Should I leave my headlights on so you can see?” asked Bryan.
“No, they actually have security cameras. I doubt anyone ever checks them. But even if they do they wouldn’t be able to tell who anybody was as long as they aren’t illuminated. So keep your lights off. I have an LED on my key chain.”
As they got out of the car, Bryan asked, “So, have you cut a hole in the fence some where”?
“No,” he replied, “that is not really a very elegant solution. I would prefer to have the people running the dump not even now that people are dumpster diving”.
“So how are going to get in?” Bryan asked.
“We just climb over the fence,” he answered.
“But it’s a barbed wire fence. How will we be able to get over it without needing tetanus shots”?
“I’ll show you,” Edwin said while reaching back into Bryan’s car.
He came back out with the floor mat from Bryan’s car. Bryan looked askance at him but said nothing. They walked towards the fence, the light of the nearly full moon providing more than enough light to see. When they reached the base of the fence, Edwin handed Bryan the floor mat and climbed up near the top of the fence. He waved for Bryan to hand him the floor mat. He took it and draped it over the barbed wire. This created a place on the top of the fence where he could grip the top of the fence without injuring himself. He pulled himself over and let himself drop to the ground.
Looking back through the fence at Bryan he grinned and said, “Nothing to it. Barbed wire seems pretty silly don’t you think”?
Bryan just laughed and started climbing the fence. After he was back on the ground on the other side, they set off across the complex. They left the floor mat on the fence so they wouldn’t have to put it back up on the way out.
“This isn’t going to smell very nice is it?” asked Bryan, his voice dripping with sarcasm. It was clear from his tone that he considered his question to be rhetorical.
“Actually, it is not going to be very bad,” replied Edwin, “The dump prohibits throwing away electronics in the trash. There are some toxic chemicals in some of the components that have to be disposed of in a special way. So they have a separate dumpster for electronics and computers and such”.
“That’s pretty awesome actually,” Bryan said, “It’s almost like they want people to take that stuff”.
“I think that may actually be the case. I can’t be sure, but why would they really mind. It costs money to dispose of that stuff correctly. Not to mention that it is better for the environment for all this to be reused instead of thrown away.”
They came to the electronics dumpster and he opened the lid. As Edwin peered in he saw that it was almost empty.
“Damn. They must have just emptied it. I’m going to have to crawl in to reach anything,” said Edwin.
He scrambled over the edge and let himself gently down into the dumpster, carefully avoiding stepping on the few items in the bottom of the dumpster. Edwin didn’t want to damage anything more than it already was. There were about half a dozen computers of various configurations and completeness strewn about. Also in the dumpster where a couple of dead monitors, an old CRT television, and other assorted kipple of an electronic nature. Edwin spotted a likely looking old beige box and handed it out to Bryan. The only other thing that looked worth the effort was what once had probably been a top of the line laptop. It was now obsolete and looked the worse for wear. He handed this out to Bryan as well. After a few more minutes of scrounging he didn’t see anything he wanted to haul back over the fence. He pulled himself out, and he grabbed the computers from Bryan. He and Bryan headed back to the place on the fence where they had left the floor mat. Edwin put down the computers and went over first.

I hope that you will like my work even if it’s not done yet. Enjoy!

But before you read a short synopsis:

The story is set around thirty years from now in the States. The pharmaceutical corporation named “INSOMINA” is in charge of everything a powerful corporation can take control of. INSOMNIA being head of the state, legalized scientific experiments on humans. They began including children in their experiments as well and discovered something very unique about their brains.

The nerve tracts and parts in the brain resonsible for the storage of information are in a growing stage and can manipulated by their scientific methods. The first biological “experience” storage was created, by infusing a child’s brain with the information one wants to store. After storing the nerve tracts and cells of the child’s brain, containg the information gets removed or “harvested” and implanted into the brain of one of INSOMNIA’s scientists who fits the donator the most.

Everyone who tries to save these children from their terrible fate will be persecuted.

But there is one man who hates INSOMNIA so much that he will take that risk.

I’m sorry if the synopsis is kinda vague. I will update this post and correct all mistakes I made.

The first pages of the comic can be found on my deviant art page.

http://luckyprophet.deviantart.com/gallery/

Please let me know if it doesn’t work!!

P.S: It begins with BLAZE Part1: The Boy. After that P2,…etc.

“Damn it, not again, not when I’m dreaming of her” he shouted, kicking away the clock’s antenna towards the wall. He closed his eyes, she was still there: soft and warm, sleeping in his arms and slowly fading away.

He opened his eyes—she was gone.

⁂

She died two months ago—a traffic accident they said, and he had almost bought it. But he had spotted something on the advertisement for the next show she was supposed to run. He saw the designs he knew by heart—low quality copies of her ideas. He should know them, after all, he had helped her with the algorithms that ran them.

He reminded himself of the importance of that very day, and he rose. Behind him, the bed sheets rolled and disappeared into the recycling unit accompanied by the voracious sound of thousand of nano machines at work.

“Today,” he spoke to himself, “today is revenge—pure, precise mathematical revenge.”

He met her in a bar in Akureyri, on one of the few snowy days of the year. He had come  with no specific goal—and surely not looking for a woman—he sat at the bar next to her by chance. While he was waiting for his drink, he noticed the fine shadows she was casting with the coaster she was cutting with a small sharp scissor. There was something fractal and at the same time, deeply visceral in her cutwork. He could almost feel the algorithms breathing behind those interweaved moving patterns.

By morning they were already packing for London. Her name was Julia.

⁂

Today’s event was in the TATE Modern’s Turbine Room. Glowing billboards on the sides of the building were shouting in bright orange: ‘London Couture Fashion Week.’

He was late. He rushed in, flashed his ID card towards an immobile yet menacing security guard shouting “I’m Oren, I’m… I’m with that equipment”—pointing towards the stage—”and I’m late!” and asked one of the useless assistants  to fetch him a double espresso. He then proceeded backstage to check the antennae and their delay lines.

⁂

This had all started couple years ago: fashion houses equipped their outlets with nano factories—tens of thousands of nano machines at work. Miniature Jacquard looms that would knit, weave and sew anything according to rigourous patterns. Each night, authorised shops would tune into a broadcast and manufacture the stocks needed.

Julia started as a fashion pirate: she was illegally tuning into such broadcasts and fabricating pirate copies of various popular and expensive garments. One could easily identify the copies, as they had compression artefacts visible on some delicate patterns and particularly along the seams.

It quickly became very fashionable to wear such obviously pirated clothes, and the fashion industry reacted by incorporating intentional flaws—now called “designer artefacts”—into their collections and charging even more for them.

This was a declaration of war.

Ironically, the fashion pirates’ replicas were soon copied back into the original collection, upsetting many of the pirates. They fought back by jamming and altering the very broadcasts they were copying, trying to buff out the synthetic artefacts and etch instead various statements and poor designs on the original clothing.

This was the birth of the fashion graffiti.

The fashion and entertainment industries, while fighting the pirates and the fashion graffiti artists, needed a way monetize this. Many of the fashion houses began headhunting and  even started to cut deals with several talented graffiti artists stage performances of the new ‘haute couture.’

The day they met in Akureyri, she had just done such a graffiti, but her piece wasn’t just the mere “spraying” of some bizarre pattern into a broadcast. She managed—in realtime—to decode, alter and re-inject the sewing instructions creating an intricate and uniquely beautiful lace on a very expensive dress.

That night he was bewitched. They spent the whole night arguing on generative algorithms, fractals and compression techniques. He hadn’t had such fun with a girl in ages.

The next day they left for London to cut a deal with a fashion house, any big house.

⁂

Today’s Haute Couture event was based on a very simple concept: a graffiti artist would manipulate the broadcast live, on stage. The unique creations would then be on the catwalk in a matter of tens of seconds.

This was supposed to be Julia’s show.

He finished the hardware checks and proceeded to inspect the seed data for his algorithms, doing the final adjustments for his victim, who had just arrived. The controversial Alex, a mediocre actor turned fashion designer and now—through his connections in the industry—become the fashion graffiti sensation of the year almost overnight.

With Julia’s designs.

Alex intermediated Julia’s deal, had her run a pilot show. He had stole everything he could and disposed of her. But Alex didn’t know about the relationship between Oren and Julia. Or, maybe he was too arrogant to believe that Oren would dare to do anything apart of his job, as broadcast engineer.

And he was going to do his job, to implement the so-called Alex designs into the transcoders. He worked obsessively day and night to perfect his algorithms, to avenge her with her own designs.

⁂

The show was approaching its glorious end, the lights faded and the spotlight focused on the catwalk. After twelve brilliant designs created live on the stage, Alex was going to reveal the  orchestrated masterpiece of the season.

Alex, wearing the ultimate creation stepped out, onto the catwalk. He made couple steps and  the audience was stilled.

The collar was the first thing, its purpose was to silence him. Then, the memory fibres in his white suit started to react to his body heat: seams constricting, lace coming to life, patterns unfolding.

Shoulder blades rose behind him with a wet sound and then slowly folded back like the wings of an impotent angel. Muscles started slowly to extrude between seams, perfect symmetrical red stains appeared on the white suit, a red Rorschach butterfly trying to escape from his white cocoon.

The suit started folding him in angular patterns, with a beautiful mathematical precision.

Then the process stopped, the end form was attained: a silent sculpture, ribs in blossom, a bright red origami flower, like a water lily resting on a lake of bloody pink foam, still steaming.

And the silence ended.

⁂

After four months they found him hiding in Korea. Two Network agents escorted him to one of their facilities in Busan.

He sat in a room, alone at a table for at least two hours when two carefully dressed men entered.

“You thought you could get away with that stunt, didn’t you?” one of them asked.

“Not in this world,” said the other.

Not anymore, he thought.

“In our current legal system, we have an average of 27 executions per month,” started the first one, then continued:

“But the public is quite bored of all the bloody medieval re-enactments we do for them. We want you to put your stunt to good, public use. We want you to design the executions for the next season, we even have several fashion houses investing in the show, for the pilot one we chose to work with…”

He turned his head away and looked up through the window, it was one of those rare snowy days.

It rained a lot where he lived. It almost never stopped. This was not because the house had been built in an unfortunate climate, but rather that the climate had been made unfortunate by a corporation that was simply called W-Corp. W-Corp, with the help of large swarms of aerial nanobots, controlled the weather. The company primarily sold its services to cities and other large population centers. For a price, these cities could make sure that a ball game was never canceled on account of the weather again. Many cities had long term contracts with W-Corp, and in these cities it was always sunny. However, all that moister had to go somewhere, and inevitably it got dumped on rural areas about a hundred miles away from the cities. The house with the tin roof had the misfortune to be located in one of those areas.

It rained so much that now, ten years after Ralph had moved to the house, he was rarely conscious of the white noise that was his constant companion there. Therefore, it is not altogether peculiar that the silence woke Ralph Werner. It was one of those rare events, occurring only a few times a year, when it had stopped raining. At first, Ralph was not entirely sure what had woke him. He translated the glowing points of light from his binary alarm clock to mean that it was 11:00 at night. When his still groggy mind finally realized that it was silent in the house he sat bolt upright. If it had stopped raining then there might be a break in the cloud cover! He hastily dressed and hurried outside into the night. It had been over a year since he had last seen the stars. The clouds had indeed broken and had been mostly blown away by a stiff breeze. What’s more, there was no moon out. Ralph gawked up into the sky where he could clearly make out the Milky Way. After several minutes of quiet admiration, Ralph realized tonight was the perfect night for a little long distance communication.

Ralph pulled out his tablet and opened up his Onion Chat window. Onion Chat was an application that used a network of encrypted proxy servers to exchange messages. Not only did this prevent a network snooper from reading your messages it stopped them from even seeing who you were sending them to. What this meant was that the data packets coming out of Ralph’s tablet would bounce all over the world even though their final destination was Thomas’ house, a couple dozen miles away. Thomas was Ralph’s best friend, and they had participated in many a project before.

“Hey, you awake?” he sent.

Half a minute later the reply came, “Yeah man. Are you outside?”

“Sure am. It’s beautiful up there. How are the batteries doing?”

“Ha! You’re thinking the same thing I am. I plugged the last one in a couple days ago, so it is probably done by now. Get your butt down here and we’ll break some laws!”

“All right. I’ll just grab the equipment and head over to your place. See you in about half an hour.”

Ralph pocketed his tablet and went back into his house. In his laundry room there was a safe in addition to the washer and dryer. From this safe he removed a device that, if found, could land him a life sentence in prison. It was a maser. A maser is a device much like a laser except it emits a narrow beam of microwave radiation instead of visible light radiation. The reason why this devise was so illegal was that it had the capability to send strong radio signals over distances of thousands of light-years. Doing so had been deemed a threat to security. A few decades ago, scientists had begun to send these signals in an attempt to contact any possible alien civilizations that might be listening. This effort had been termed Active SETI or METI (Messaging Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence).

These efforts had only been going on a few months when they started being investigated by various security agencies. Paranoid as always, there agencies argued that ET might not be friendly, and that actively trying to make contact with alien civilizations was risky. If these aliens were hostile, the very existence of the human race could be at stake. So they banned people from broadcasting to the stars and made possession of the equipment necessary to do so illegal. Of course, any violation of the mandates of the security agencies, who were only really separate in name, was deemed treason and carried a life sentence.

Ralph was pretty sure that the heads of the security agencies, whom he and others often referred to just as S, were not actually worried about alien invasions. After all, the signals would not reach most of the targets for thousands of years. Ralph didn’t think that these people really cared about the safety of someone that far in the future; he was pretty sure they only cared about power. They were simply using one of the oldest tricks in the book to get it. It was the classic FUD tactic, Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Make the people afraid of something, and make sure that they think you are the only ones who can keep them safe. Aliens were an easy bogeyman to point to and claim could come down from the skies and kill everyone unless S was given enough budget and power.

Since it was now impossible for METI efforts to be conducted in the public, they were now conducted underground. Through the use of encrypted anonymous onion networks plans for masers that could be built by anyone with a 3D printer were published, and star coverage was coordinated. The METI Experiment continued. However, the METI effort had a side benefit. If a bunch of dedicated amateurs could do METI work under the noses of S using only publicly available technology and software, it undermined the organizations that claimed to be protecting people by stopping such activities.

Ralph loaded the maser into the trunk of his car, and started off to Thomas’ house. He lived two mountains away, in an even more isolated house. As he drove he switched on the radio and listened to what sounded like that last movement of a Bach violin sonata. It had a nice quick pace and helped him stay awake. After a few minutes the music ended and the announcer came on. “And the was the lovely Sonata Number Three for Violin in C Major by J.S. Bach, performed by the great Itzhak Perlman. It’s 11:40 PM and your listening to Public Radio WPSV 94.2 your source for NPR and classical music. Now for the news.” A short jingle was played and as it was fading out a new voice came onto the air. “This is NPR news from Washington. The NSA has released a press statement stating that an one of the core organizers of the illegal METI broadcasting efforts has been apprehended. Though they have not released the suspects name they have stated that she is a low level employ of weather giant W-Corp. The suspect is currently being detained and interrogated in an undisclosed maximum secur-” Ralph snorted and turned off the radio. It was just more FUD from the incompetent S. An effort to look like they were actually doing something. Of coarse the media would never get a name and the suspect, if she even existed (which Ralph doubted) would never go on trial. This was not the first time they had claimed to capture “core” METI organizers, and it would not be the last. It was pure propaganda.

Ralph drove up Thomas’ long driveway and found him sitting on the hood of his beat up pickup truck. Ralph pulled up beside him and cut the current of his car. He got out and walked up to Thomas.

“You ready?” he asked.

“Almost,” Thomas replied, “Let me grab a few things and then we can go get the last battery.”

Thomas stalked back to his house and came back a few minutes later carrying two collapsible camp chairs. They usually covered one star from the time it rose to the time it set, which was usually about eight hours, so they would be out for a while and it wouldn’t hurt to have a comfortable place to sit and enjoy the view. Thomas peeled a tarp off the bed of his Toyota pickup to reveal several large cube shaped batteries and an assortment of kipple. He tossed the chairs in and covered the bed again with the tarp. They both piled into Thomas’ truck and about five minutes later they had stopped at an apparently random spot on the road.

They climbed out of the old Toyota and started climbing up the hill on the side of the road. It was heavily wooded and was technically part of a National Forest. After about a tenth of a mile the trees ended in an abrupt line and opened up into a narrow grassy strip that ran in a more or less straight line for as far as they could make out in either direction. In the center of the strip were power lines. At the base of the nearest box, Ralph could just make out another of the batteries. Thomas had managed to run a line from the top of the pole down to the ground to the battery. Thomas had carried a thick rubber mat from the floor of his truck with him and he placed it next to the battery. Standing on the mat he carefully disconnected one end of the wire from one of the batteries terminals. Then he disconnected the other end. After the battery was secure he wrapped his arms and legs around the wooden pole and started climbing up to the top. Once he was there he did something that Ralph could not make out and the rest of the wire fell to the ground. Ralph started coiling up the now safe cable as Thomas descended the pole.

“I guess working as a technician for the Power Company has its benefits,” said Ralph, as he as Thomas walked back to the truck. Thomas just chuckled softly. They peeled back the tarp one more time and Thomas placed the battery into the bed of the truck as Ralph put down the coil of high capacity insulated wire. They covered the bed again and got back into the truck.

In the cab they paused and Thomas asked, “Do you want to stop and grab some provisions before we go do this?”

“Absolutely,” Ralph replied.

So they drove to the edge of town and stopped at a batts station / convenience store. The battery that ran Thomas’ truck still had more than half capacity so they just went into the store. They picked out a couple four packs of PowerThirst Energy Drink (one pack of shockolate and one pack of rawberry), some hot dogs and and buns, a foam cooler and some ice to keep everything chilled and a couple bundles of firewood.

“I’ll pay for all this,” said Ralph, “and you can pay for breakfast tomorrow.”

“Deal,” his friend replied.

After they had put their newly purchased provisions into the back of the truck, they headed off to their usual broadcast position. As they came to the top of a mountain pass, they turn off on a gravel road. Branching off this road were several hiking trials on which motorized vehicles were prohibited. At this time of night there would be no one to stop them from driving on them, and even in the day these trails were hardly ever used due to the fact that it was almost always raining. So Thomas turned right onto one that ran all the way to the summit of the mountain where there was an old wooden fire tower. As they bumped and drove up the trail Ralph could hear branches scraping up against the truck. They stopped a dozen feet away from the tower and got out. After removing the tarp, they starting moving batteries and equipment up to the top of the tower.

“Man! This sure beats getting soaked by rain while getting all this stuff up here,” commented Thomas.

“No kidding”

They rigged the batteries together and attached them to the maser, which stood on a self-aiming tripod. He synced the maser to his tablet so it could communicate with meti.onion which was the network hub of the clandestine METI project. After scanning the horizon to see just what kind of line of sight of the sky it had (a rather good one from up here), it downloaded a work assignment from the network. According to his tablet, they would be transmitting to a star that was set to rise in four minutes and set in about eight and a half hours at ten o’clock or so. Ralph watched the time until star rise elapse and the red transmit light come on. The maser was now blasting a megawatt of energy in the form of 21 centimeter microwaves at some distant star, possibly to some distant alien civilization.

“Hey, the maser is hot, so don’t step in front of it,” said Ralph.

Thomas laughed and asked, “Worried that I’ll get fried?”

“Not really, I just don’t want you to block the message and interfere with the search for alien life,” Ralph quipped back.

“It’s nice to know that I have friends that care,” said Thomas in a sarcastic tone, “Now, do you think you can help me get this fire started?”

Before long they were roasting hot dogs around a nice camp fire enjoying the rainless night. They stared at that stars and thought their own thoughts. Ralph wondered what an alien being might be like if we ever discovered any. What would they look like? What would their culture be like? Would they even be biological or would they have uploaded their minds into computers? Thomas thought mostly about the some porn he had torrented the other day.

After awhile Ralph got bored and brought up the meti.onion website to see just how much credit they would earn tonight. Meti.onion had a simple credit system based on how much time you were transmitting. The credit wasn’t really worth anything, it merely provided a competitive aspect to the project. No one was really quite sure how meti.onion verified transmission. The creator of the site (someone who went by the alias devstar) claimed she had invented a method of triangulating transmitters using the tiny amount of photons that were refracted by Earth’s atmosphere. A feat that S had apparently not been able to replicate, or they would have caught most of the people transmitting by now. Devstar claimed that this was because they were incompetent idiots, and everyone on meti.onion had a laugh. Now there was a news update on the site.

“Did you hear about that new S FUD?” Ralph asked.

“No, what are they saying this time?”

“I heard about it on the radio on the way to your house,” Ralph said as he cracked open an energy drink, “The NSA is claiming that they got some high ranking METI organizer.”

Thomas shook his head. “Do you think it might be true?”

“No. I logged on to meti.onion and they posted a news update about it. I’ll read it to you.” Ralph cleared his throat. “S is spreading the bullshit pretty thick tonight. They claim that they have apprehended some big METI organizer. I’ve checked with all the people who help me run the site and they are all fine. So, considering that we are the only big METI organization that I have heard of, I can only assume that S is up to its old tricks once again. I would hope that nobody is alarmed and that this doesn’t scare people away from transmitting. Lets get out there and show them they can’t intimidate us!”

“Here Here!” cried Thomas, and they both raised their cans.

“Well,” said Ralph, “thats just what we are doing. We are transmitting on the very night they tried to scare us off. You know, devstar might award a credit bonus for transmitting tonight, she usually awards them to people who transmit on holidays so maybe we will get one for tonight.”

“That would be really cool,” replied Thomas.

After that the conversation died down a bit. Thomas went to his truck and pulled out a copy of “Contact” by Carl Sagan out of his glove box. Ralph had given Thomas that book for his birthday last month. He had purchased it at a yard sale. He suspected that the elderly woman who sold it to him was unaware that it was a book banned by S. After a few minutes of watching the glowing embers of their dying campfire, Ralph turned his attention back to his tablet and began perusing the meti.onion forums. After awhile, Ralph noticed a faint bass throbbing noise that was Dopplering up in frequency and becoming louder in volume. What ever it was, it was getting closer. Thomas had heard it to and was looking around trying to determine where the noise was coming from.

“Sounds like a chopper,” Thomas said, in a confused tone.

The sound had become almost deafening but they still couldn’t see anything. If it were an aircraft, it wasn’t using the requisite running lights. They stared in the apparent direction of the noise which Ralph could tell by its Doppler shift was slowing down. All of the sudden they were blinded by massively bright flood lights.

The Voice of God proclaimed, “FCC! You are under arrest. Do not try to flee.”

They tried to flee. Of course they did. They knew what being caught meant. It meant disappearing into a secret prison. It meant interrogation. It meant becoming a statistic that S used to scare the population into submission. Fleeing didn’t do him much good though. His night vision had been devastated by the floodlights. He tripped over a rock and started tumbling down the mountain. He hit a tree with a sickening crunch, and he was pretty sure he had cracked a rib. While he had been falling, agents in black insignialess jumpsuits had slid down ropes from the helicopter. Before he could get back up the floodlight was on him again. He felt his arms being yanked behind his back and cuffed. Someone pulled a black fabric sack over his head. They pulled him into the helicopter and flew away.

Some indeterminate amount of time later the chopper landed, and he was man-handled into some sort of motor vehicle. As the vehicle started driving everything fell into place in Ralph’s head. The news about S apprehending a big METI organizer who worked at W-Corp wasn’t FUD after all. They had probably somehow caught devstar. She had probably been some programmer there who had secretly installed a subroutine into W-Corp’s nanobot swarms that was able to detect maser transmissions in the 21 cm band and detect which star the transmitter was pointed at, and therefore where it was pointed from. That is how she was able to verify the transmissions and award credit. That bullshit about using diffracted photons had been misinformation meant to eat up S’ time on a hopeless radio technology problem. They had probably “interrogated” her passwords out of her and posted a bit of misinformation of their own.

After what seemed like hours of driving, the Adrenaline rush left Ralph. He was exhausted. As the vehicle jostled he drifted off to sleep. Sometime later the vehicle reached its destination and the driver cut off the engine. The silence woke Ralph Werner.

Week 6: 14th – 21st October

This week is a little different to what we’ve been doing over the last month or so. We’re in the middle of our creative endeavour: This week, participants will use the basic elements of cyberpunk, as discussed over the last 5 weeks, as the basis for their own cyberpunk writings. However, we decided that a week is not nearly enough time to craft the cyberpunk masterpieces  so we decided to extend the assignment (and the course) by another week, so people have 2 weeks to finish their original stories/comics/movies for the last week of the coursework.

However, we will be getting together this Wednesday (21st) at the usual time, partly becuase we all like each other so much that a week without a chat would just be an empty wasteland of neon light and dusky skies, and partly to use the time to bounce ideas off each other, get initial feedback on what people are working on and generally check in. Then the following Wednesday (28th) we’ll be discussing the final works.

You may find this link useful: Tips on Writing Cyberpunk by Ken “Wirehead” Wronkiewicz and Marshall Motley.

Image: Cyberpunk Reads by Maurits Burger on Flickr. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 ]]> http://blogs.p2pu.org/cyberpunk/2009/10/20/week-6/feed/ 0 http://blogs.p2pu.org/cyberpunk/2009/10/14/week-5-p2pu-snow-crash-i-robot-c-doctorow-n-stephensen-brianwilliams/ http://blogs.p2pu.org/cyberpunk/2009/10/14/week-5-p2pu-snow-crash-i-robot-c-doctorow-n-stephensen-brianwilliams/#comments Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:01:34 +0000 briancrime http://blogs.p2pu.org/cyberpunk/?p=357 Week 5 : P2PU : SNOW CRASH I, ROBOT C DOCTOROW N STEPHENSEN [brianwilliams]

“…“I think it s a fallacy that the science fiction is about the future anyway.  The science fiction I like is always about the present.  It’s about holding a warped mirror up to today, so that we can see it more clearly…”

-       Cory Doctorow. Pond, Doug.  “Interview with Cory Doctorow” The Massachusetts Review, Winter 2004/2005; 45, 4; @ 753

The easy differences between Snow Crash (SC) and I, Robot (IR) are many:  the one (SC) sprawls across 440 pages, the other (IR) 50 some.

SC flits back and forth from the deepest historical depths to the most poignant, absurdist present like an old timey comic strip kaleidoscope flashing, “Zing! Zap! Pow! Bang.”  The other (IR) is situated in a bifurcated world, split by an enormous social chasm … The kind we see today, yesterday, tomorrow, in our world …

SC moves from the dawn of virus, language, and code, to the disturbingly hilarious and familiar contemporary world of Hiro – Where government is ineffectual, language a virus, and the world gated, racist, surreal, and infected. IR moves from one regime to another, a world divided by intellectual code, norms, and control systems.

But perhaps one could argue the protagonists of Snow Crash and I, Robot both approach their dissimilar worlds in the same general heroic arc … The more or less doomed police detective of IR is, I would argue, braver still than Hiro.  Arturo, PD 3^RD GRADE, is an almost innocent tool of fascist systems he doesn’t necessarily see.  Arturo is a latter day Don Quixote tilting windmills.  At the story’s conclusion, with no alternatives remaining, he only just begins to understand the extent of the mutated synthesis of human  | machine that his ex-wife, “The most brilliant human scientist working in Eurasia today,” has wrought.  As he considers the present for his daughter, and his purchase for her, archaic toy soldiers, he sees a bridge to a past that can never exist again.  Arturo is courageous in his solemn loyalty to family and country.  He is equal parts deluded, brave and tragic.

Hiro, on the other hand, is a savant of the Metaverse, even while living in Reality’s storage facility.  He is, in fact, the best sword fighter in the fabricated world (he wrote the program), the hero savior of hackers in Metaverse and humans in Reality alike.

The police detective discovers his society is constructed around an elaborate lie.  The other world of Eurasia poses challenges to the very core of what Arturo believes humans are, and what robots threaten to become.

He must see one iteration of his child’s mother die at the hands of his culture’s black arachnid warriors before he understands the depths of his culture’s repression.  And he cannot accept the world his child almost immediately embraces.  A world of copies of humans and robo/biologic blends.  Mortality is lost inEurasia, as is the foundation of his world view – that robots are to be disdained and dismissed and kept distant from humanity.

HP of SC is at home with his world.  He seems incapable of surprise at the endless ironies, indignaties, etc.

I suppose Hiro is more like a Kevin Kline force of nature to me — he’s hysterical, he’s brilliant, he’s so far embedded in the “warped present” as to be The Prince of Metaverse.

Hiro is the real deal. For all of those reasons, it’s hard to see someone like Hiro as “real” … [though he is one of my fav characters, all time ]

And while I’ll always consider the last words of one of William Burroughs’ characters, mumbled to his son on his death bed … , “Stay out of churches, son. All they got a key to is the shithouse…

And never wear a policeman’s badge…”

I have to say, Cory Doctorow’s Arturo seems so real to me. He is human confronting inhumanity. He is not unjustifiably deluded into thinking fealty to his country of origin and family, his life, is a principle worth defending …. Until he learns the truth, of course.

And i love how nothing is simple in the balance between Arturo’s repressive, corrupt, and controlling society and the “Utopian” .alt society of Eurasia …

I immediately felt an electric charge when I realized Arturo’s x-wife was in fact a synthesized copy.

To extrapolate from that epiphany leads to some very challenging futures, for anyone with thoughts of what it means to be human. And finally, the fact that

Arturo truly has so little choice. To love a child is to know that you have no choice but to save your child.

All things else — dust.  [ "But wé dream we are rooted in earth—Dust!" Gerard Manley Hopkins]

So Arturo is Father of the Year and far more real than Hiro … But both characters shine!

I was born behind the so-called “Iron Curtain,” been raised in a communist society where we were taught that we were the chosen ones, that our ideology was the purest and our technology was the best. And supposedly—in our glorious history—we invented everything and the perverted capitalists had again and again stole from us, but in the end we will prevail.

Now, “I, Robot” is set in a such society (UNATS: United North American Trading Sphere) which is in a perpetual war with Eurasia.

The police has unlimited wiretapping powers, Arturo is wiretapping his own daughter and keeps her under constant strict surveillance, probably because he is guilty for not doing the same with his wife, a brilliant scientist which defected to Eurasia.

As expected— in a totalitarian state at war with its own citizens—his wife was tried in absentia for treason and sentenced to death.

The UNATS technology, which was the best as it enforce their ideology is actually reflecting the effects of that ideology; all the devices are clunky and unpleasant.

“Sir,” he said, gathering up his personal computer so that he’d have an excuse to go — no one could be expected to hold one of UNATS Robotics’s heavy luggables for very long.
…magazines, books, a computer. If the latter was Eurasian, it could be small enough to fit in her pocket; you could build a positronic brain pretty small and light if you didn’t care about the three laws.

Even the UNATS robot is the dumbed down human, the smelly working class drone that will turn you in with a smile.

…robots were the worst, programmed to be friendly to a fault, even as they surveilled and snitched out every person who walked past their eternally vigilant, ever-remembering electrical eyes and brains.

While the Eurasian robot is better in many aspects and it is a free thinker as does not obey a particular ideology.

“My name is Benny. I’m a Eurasian robot, and I am much stronger and faster than you, and I don’t obey the three laws. I’m also much smarter than you. I am pleased to host you here.”
“Hi, Benny,” he said. The human name tasted wrong on his tongue. “Nice to meet you.” He closed the door.

How awful, he is just ‘Benny,’ not ‘Comrade Benny.’

The Social Harmony is fighting smuggled outsider evil technology, which acts as enemy propaganda, betraying the forced artificial stasis of their perfect society where kids were not even allowed toys.

The little illegal robot-pet eggs they’d started seeing last year: she’d made him one of those for their second date, and now they were draining the productive hours of half the children of UNATS, demanding to be “fed” and “hugged.”

When those clunky tools, robots; the disabling, dehumanising technology stopped functioning he felt first impotent, then he slowly remembers of his “safe place,” a human place without robots, a better place.

He felt so impotent just then that he nearly did it anyway. What did it matter? He couldn’t control his daughter, his wife was working to destroy the social fabric of UNATS, and he was rendered useless because the goddamned robots — mechanical coppers that he absolutely loathed — were all broken.

He closed his eyes and visualized stepping through a door to his safe place … No robots there — not even reliable day-long electricity, just honest work and the sun and the call of the loons all night.

Then he learns from his wife that the Social Harmony is secretly using the very technology they despise, by betraying their own laws just to exercise more control.

They wanted me to be a part of a secret unit of Social Harmony researchers who build non-three-laws positronics for internal use by the state, anti-personnel robots used to put down uprisings and torture-robots for use in questioning dissidents.

Later, he and his daughter have to defect to Eurasia to escape the Social Harmony “inquisition,” and his wife is killed during in the escape.

When they arrive Eurasia they learn that there they were not just making robots, they were also making people, cyborgs. He is confronted with the idea of 3,422 copies of his wife as he is welcomed by one of them.

The story ends with Arturo giving his daughter a present, a set of tin soldiers, made by human hands, “little people in human image,” while questioning how long have humans been making people. He is accepting the realities of the new society, while looking at his only daughter.

“… there’s only one of you,” Arturo said.
She craned her neck.
“Not for long!” she said, and broke away, skipping forward and whirling around to take it all in.

Apart of the ending, the Eurasian part; the whole story is painful familiar, starting from the similarities of Social Harmony with the regular political police…

The technology behind the “Iron Curtain” was clunky, noisy, the mechanisms greasy and smelly; while the rare smuggled western devices were sleek, silent, beautiful even on the inside; they were pure propaganda, unwritten one, you looked at them and you marvelled at their technological features, at their design and then you started questioning why “we” cannot do such things, what do we miss? and the answer was freedom, the freedom to think, create and evolve.

“I, Robot” is not just fiction, it is something more outrageous than fiction, it outlines a painful archetype. As a story, it is set in the future, but as an archetype we felt its dark presence, we know that it had happen and we are outraged that that it is still happening right now.
Where? Think North Korea.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson and Cory Doctorow’s I, Robot are very different stories. They are really almost on opposite ends of the spectrum of Cyberpunk literature, in my opinion. In analyzing them we can observe an interesting dichotomy.

Snow Crash is set in a world without government. Or rather, a world that is governed by corporations. It’s main character is almost a stereotype, with the unlikely name of Hiro Protagonist. The technology that the plot is centered around is largely a computer based virtual reality called the Metaverse.

I, Robot’s setting is one where there is one very organized government/corporation. The main character is not really a cyberpunk. However, his daughter and wife are. The tech in this story is mostly focused on sentient robots.

I apologize for the brevity of this post. My only excuse is that my little sister came down with the flu last week and was generous enough to give it to me (it may or may not be swine flu). I can hardly think straight, much less write an essay.

The story follows a member of Social Harmony called Arturo Icaza de Arana-Goldberg, a police officer who is raising his daughter alone since his ex-wife, a scientist and specialist in positronics, defected to Eurasia, a rival trading sphere, which is portrayed by Arturo and his superiors as the evil enemy. We learn during the course of the story that Eurasia is actually a far more free, technologically advanced and less restrictive society, this realisation occurs when Arturo’s wife returns and tries to convince the two of them to join her, which leads to a series of events that force Arturo to confront his manufactured beliefs.

Doctrow succeeds in describing a fascinating future, in which an oppressive government, through an enforcement arm called Social Harmony, keeps a close watch on its citizens by bugging phones and using robots to carry out surveillance etc. these are simply tools that are available to police officers to use, without any need to resort to warrants, or worry about civil liberties, which is all very Orwellian …

“He was a cop — every phone and every computer was an open book to him, so that this involved nothing more than dialing a number on his special copper’s phone, entering her number and a PIN, and then listening as his daughter had truck with a criminal enterprise”

Technology and trade plays an important role in the story, UNATS technology appears to be inferior and isn’t designed for interoperability, however the market is being flooded by elecontronics from Eurasia developed to be interoperable with UNATS tech by scientists who have defected. One of the touches I really liked was how Doctrow changed the innocuous phone-book into something forbidden and seedy (anyone who, like me, grew up copying programmes out of magazines onto ZX Spectrums and Commodore 64’s will find this amusing):

” ‘I didn’t make it,’ he said. ‘I typed in the source and tweaked it and installed it, but I didn’t make it. I don’t know who did. It’s from a phone-book.’ Arturo grunted. The phone-books — fat books filled with illegal software code left anonymously in pay phones, toilets and other semi-private places — turned up all over the place. Social Harmony said that the phone-books had to be written by non-three-laws brains in Eurasia, no person could come up with ideas that weird.”

It is the policy of Social Harmony to stem the illegal importing of Eurasian products and this isnt just likened to a war, it’s described as one:

“…The Eurasians deliberately manufacture their components to interoperate with UNATS Robotics brains, and so long as their equipment circulates within UNATS borders, there will be moderately skilled hackers who take advantage of this fact to introduce dangerous, anti-social modifications into our nation’s infrastructure. This quarter is the quarter that Social Harmony and law enforcement dry up the supply of Eurasian electronics. We have added new sniffers and border-patrols, new customs agents and new detector vans. Beat officers have been instructed to arrest any street dealer they encounter and district attorneys will be asking for the maximum jail time for them. This is the war on the home-front, detectives, and it’s every bit as serious as the shooting war. Your part in this war, as highly trained, highly decorated detectives, will be to use snitches, arrest-trails and seized evidence to track down higher-level suppliers, the ones who get the dealers their goods. And then Social Harmony wants you to get their suppliers, and so on, up the chain — to run the corruption to ground and to bring it to a halt. The Social Harmony dossier on Eurasian importers is updated hourly, and has a high-capacity positronic interface that is available to answer your questions and accept your input for synthesis into its analytical model. We are relying on you to feed the dossier, to give it the raw materials and then to use it to win this war.”

I could go on for ages about closed and open world systems and how the story is a metaphor for that, but I won’t For me the speech above set the tone for the story, it was eerily reminiscent of the speeches made by “Father” from Equilibrium as he describes EC-10 materials that need to be destroyed for the greater good. The state needs to control everything. This is starkly contrasted in Neil Stephenson’s “Snow Crash”^[3] which is the epitome of a free market economy on steroids. Paul Graham Raven, in a review ^[4], summed up Snow Crash wonderfully well when he wrote:

“Snow Crash is about the destruction of hierarchy: the US Government portrayed as an atrophied, toothless and irrelevant bureaucracy; the climactic shattering of L Bob Rife’s pyramidal army of brainwashed acolytes; the free-agent clout of Raven, the one-man nuclear superpower. The world of Snow Crash tends toward a rhizomatic structure: small independent nodes and sub-networks, interlinked and interdependent, with no central governance. Snow Crash is a story about the failure of autocracy and hegemony, and the rise of emergent systems. Snow Crash is a blueprint for the internet; this is why it speaks truth and passion to those who have colonized the internet like a promised land.”

There isn’t a central government, or single corporation in Snow Crash but rather a multitude of organisations, franchises and enclaves, its a society that encourages entrepreneurship almost at any cost. Richard Rorty described the America of Snow Crash as “a twenty-first-century America in which the needs of the entrepreneurs have won out over hopes of a free and egalitarian society“^[5]. I think there is a ‘cut-throat’ feel to Snow Crash, a society in which everyone is out for themselves, because they have to, society is geared towards that. Hiro, the main protagonist, in Snow Crash is according to his business card “Last of the freelance hackers and Greatest swordfighter in the world” who is completely broke and delivers pizzas for the Mafia, at least until he loses that job and decides to get back into the information selling game. He’s the quintessential cyberpunk hacker, who is called into action by his ex-girlfriend to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding the new pseudo-narcotic called Snow Crash the effects of which are experienced in the Metaverse and also in the physical world.

It’s a familiar pattern.

I would argue that the two stories do follow a similar story telling arc, the anti-hero is called into action, embarks on an investigation / adventure, discovers some truth about the world and himself etc. the overall pattern feels similar to the journeys that Neuromancer’s Case and or The Matrix’ Neo go on. Equally the worlds that are envisaged are not that different from the worlds that Gibson or Sterling etc. posited. There’s something about the world that we recognise and plays on our fears and draws us in. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that I dont believe Neuromancer is more “classical” than “Snow Crash”, for me personally they are both classical cyberpunk.

Second Life on the cover of BusinessWeek

In Neuromancer, when Gibson envisaged the Sprawl, and his Matrix, it was before “the internet” had really arrived. By 1992 when Stephenson wrote Snow Crash, the ‘internet’ was a buzzword, it was the beginning of the Wired era, and so the virtual reality based Metaverse that he pictures is one that we can really relate to today: I’d argue that significant portions of it are already a reality – just look at Second Life, or even World of Warcraft, we may not be able to ‘jack-in’ to those directly but that doesnt stop millions of people around the world persuing an alternate existence behind an avatar within those environments. Stephenson wasn’t the first to use the sanskrit word ‘Avatar’ to describe an on-line virtual body, the success of Snow Crash popularised the term to the extent that it is the accepted term for this concept anywhere on the web – illustrating one aspect of the cultural influence of his work.

Franchising the individual, is an important concept in Snow Crash, and again its one that we see in the real world around us, made far more effective because of the internet. The atomisation of the market place. Every individual is a buyer. Every individual has something to sell. E-Bay is real world example of this, and we can take this further if we look at something like Google’s Knol which enables experts, connoisseurs and possessors of uncommon knowledge alike to share and potentially monetize their information on a subject. Hiro made use of a similar system for part-time work, “collecting intel to upload onto the CIC library”.

“I, Robot” is a very short story and consequently its harder to draw detailed parallels, but I would argue that Snow Crash goes further than Neuromancer, in that it is more prophetic, and I think that has to do with historical context and relevance to the here and now.

References:

[1] – Cory Doctrow – “I, Robot”, http://www.infinitematrix.net/stories/shorts/i-robot.html

[2] – Matthew J. Brady, February 21, 2008 – http://www.comicsbulletin.com/reviews/120360525021274.htm

[3] – WikiPage – “Snow Crash”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash

[4] – Paul Graham Raven, “SF Site featured review: Snow Crash”, 2008, http://www.sfsite.com/09a/sn279.htm

[5] – Richard Rorty – , WikiPage on “Achieving our Country” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achieving_Our_Country

Image: not at all interesting by keankelly on Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Image: Second Life on the cover of Business Week by thelastminute on Flickr, CC BY 2.0