#firefall peter watts

[mattiebluebird]

siri keeton: hello, my job is to take the jargon spat out by hyperintelligent posthumans and translate it into something that the average person can understand. in order to do this, i must observe, and due to this (and other various traumas in my past) i've developed a set of algorithms to study and mimic human behavior.

everyone, for some reason: you unfeeling monster. you unsentient creature. get out of my fucking sight.

[stainlesssteellocust]

Blindsight’s implication that psychopathy/Dark Triad traits are the result of rudimentary vampire genes is interesting, since the vampires got Jurassic-Parked back to life out of corporate greed; a field where such things are overrepresented. In essence, vampire genes brought the vampires back to life.

Blood will out, as they say.

[this-has-returned]

I'd love to write more fanfiction, but I feel like I'm not smart enough to write for most of my fandoms lol.

And by that I mean I wanna write Firefall fanfic, but the worldbuilding of Peter Watts is absolutely fucking bonkers.

Ah well. I still have that Deep Rock Galactic x Dwarf Fortress fanfic series. I'm still rather happy with how it turned out.

[rachell-redacted]

[quirkycatsfatstacks]

Review: Blindsight by Peter Watts

Review: Blindsight by Peter Watts

Series: Firefall #1Author: Peter WattsPublisher: Tor BooksReleased: October 3, 2006Received: NetGalleyWarnings: Ableism, abuse, domestic violence, medical experimentation, mental health issues Are you reading to dive into a speculative science fiction novel full of aliens, vampires, and monsters? Then it’s time to talk about Blindsight by Peter Watts. Humanity has always known that they are not…

[spacebrick3]

ItsGBM Day 15

Alright - I missed a few days because of AP testing, but here we are again!

Pick a book, what is a song that fits that book?

Alright - for the book, I’ll go with Firefall by Peter Watts. It’s an amazing first-contact story, even if a bit strange, just because of how accurate it all feels and how…alien the aliens seem.

The song I’m going with is Cypherpunk by Ben Prunty, since it has the right mix of dark, tech, and strange that I think fits the book well:

[starscaul]

[theone]

Annie's 2022 books

Hello besties, here's my reading list this year 😇

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (re-read); 5/5 stars

The Colonel (Firefall #1.5) by Peter Watts; 2/5 stars

Echopraxia (Firefal #2) by Peter Watts; 4/5 stars

Abaddon's Gate (The Expanse #3) by James S. A. Corey; 5/5 stars

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo; 4.5/5 stars

Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo; 4/5 stars

В пукнатините на канона - Георги Господинов; 3/5 stars

Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky; 3.5/5 stars

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins; 4/5 stars (re-read)

Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness! by Selma Lagerlöf; 4/5 stars

Сватби на животни и неща - Георги Господинов, Рая Господинова; 3/5 stars

Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia E. Butler; 4/5 stars

Momo by Michael Ende; 5/5 stars

Vicious by V. E. Schwab; 2.5/5 stars

Anthology of the classical Latin American short stories by various authors; 3/5 stars

The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett; 3/5 stars

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood; 5/5 stars

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi; 4/5 stars

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery; 5/5 stars

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and The Story of a Return by Marjane Satrapi; 4/5 stars

The Beach by Alex Garland; 4.5/5 stars

Sandkings / Nightflyers by George R. R. Martin; 3.5/5 stars

Vita Nostra by Marina & Sergey Dyachenko; 3/5 stars

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr; 5/5 stars

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead; 4/5 stars

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe; 4/5 stars

Cibola Burn (The Expanse #4) by James S. A. Corey; 4/5 stars

House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk; 4.5/5 stars

The Colour Out of Space by H.P. Lovecraft; 4/5 stars

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson; 5/5 stars

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë; 4/5 stars

Room 1408 by Stephen King; 4/5 stars

The Dreams in the Witch House by H.P. Lovecraft; 4/5 stars

The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft; 3/5 stars

At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft; 4/5 stars

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey; 4/5 stars

Doom Patrol, Vol. 1: Crawling from the Wreckage by Grant Morrison; 4/5 stars

Doom Patrol, Vol. 2: The Painting That Ate Paris by Grant Morrison; 3/5 stars

Marvels by Kurt Busiek & Alex Ross; 2.5/5 stars

Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett; 4/5 stars

Doom Patrol, Vol. 3: Down Paradise Way by Grant Morrison; 3.5/5 stars

Кедер - Йорданка Белева; 4.5/5 stars

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (re-read); 4/5 stars

Doom Patrol, Vol. 4: Musclebound by Grant Morrison; 5/5 stars

[ghostflowerdreams]

Books Similar To Dead Space

If you enjoyed the survival horror game franchise Dead Space, you might enjoy some of these book recommendations. Most of the books are considered space horror, a subgenres of science fiction. Nearly all of them is set in deep space on a spaceship, research station, moon, and so on with an unknown entity--be it a deadly extraterrestrial, alien virus and whatnot that the protagonist must face. If not, the humans might’ve unknowingly, maybe even purposely disturbed something that they shouldn’t have.

I’ve also included a few books that have a similar isolation and creepy atmosphere to them that ‘space horror’ has. There’s even a few that don’t have a lot of focus on the horror element, but leans heavily towards sci-fi or another genre like thriller or mystery. And some of them take place somewhere on Earth instead of space. Either way, you’re sure to be spooked at some point when reading them.

Note: If you’re a fan of the Alien franchise--even the video game Alien: Isolation (2014), the video game Prey (2017), the films Event Horizon (1997), Infini (2015), Pandorum (2009), The Void (2016), Harbinger Down (2015), The Last Days on Mars (2013) and whatnot. You may also like most of these books too.

Dead Space: Martyr by B. K. Evenson -- Is the prequel novel to the Dead Space franchise and it revolves around geophysicist Michael Altman as he investigates a mysterious signal and uncovers a mysterious alien artifact.

The Season of Passage by Christopher Pike -- Dr. Lauren Wagner was a celebrity. She was involved with the most exciting adventure mankind had ever undertaken: a manned expedition to Mars. The whole world admired and respected her. But Lauren knew fear. Inside―voices entreating her to love them. Outside―the mystery of the missing group that had gone before her. The dead group. But were they simply dead? Or something else?

Alien: The Official Movie Novelization by Alan Dean Foster -- A crew of spaceship Nostromo is suddenly woken up from a cryogenic sleep because of mysterious signals coming from an unknown planet and received by a ship computer. The astronauts land on the planet surface and go to investigate an alien spaceship where one of them is attacked by an alien which fasten itself on his face. When the crew returns to their ship and abandon the planet, nobody forefeels that the real horror will begin very soon...

Aliens: The Official Movie Novelization by Alan Dean Foster -- In the sequel to the 1979 film Alien, Ellen Ripley is forced to return to planet LV-426, where her crew encountered the hostile Alien creature. There they discovered hundreds of eggs, and just one slaughtered everyone but Ripley. This time she's accompanied by a unit of Colonial Marines, but even their firepower may not be enough for them to survive and learn the fate of the colony known as Hadley's Hope.

Blindsight (Firefall, #1) by Peter Watts -- Two months have past since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned. The heavens have been silent since―until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. Something talks out there: but not to us. Who should we send to meet the alien, when the alien doesn't want to meet?

Send a linguist with multiple-personality disorder and a biologist so spliced with machinery that he can't feel his own flesh. Send a pacifist warrior and a vampire recalled from the grave by the voodoo of paleogenetics. Send a man with half his mind gone since childhood. Send them to the edge of the solar system, praying you can trust such freaks and monsters with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find―but you'd give anything for that to be true, if you knew what was waiting for them...

The Burning Dark (Spider War #1) by Adam Christopher -- Back in the day, Captain Abraham Idaho Cleveland had led the Fleet into battle against an implacable machine intelligence capable of devouring entire worlds. But after saving a planet, and getting a bum robot knee in the process, he finds himself relegated to one of the most remote backwaters in Fleetspace to oversee the decommissioning of a semi-deserted space station well past its use-by date.

But all is not well aboard the U-Star Coast City. The station's reclusive Commandant is nowhere to be seen, leaving Cleveland to deal with a hostile crew on his own. Persistent malfunctions plague the station's systems while interference from a toxic purple star makes even ordinary communications problematic. Alien shadows and whispers seem to haunt the lonely corridors and airlocks, fraying the nerves of everyone aboard.

Isolated and friendless, Cleveland reaches out to the universe via an old-fashioned space radio, only to tune in to a strange, enigmatic signal: a woman's voice that seems to echo across a thousand light-years of space. But is the transmission just a random bit of static from the past―or a warning of an undying menace beyond mortal comprehension?

Pitch Black by Frank Lauria -- Is a novel adaptation based on the screenplay by Jim & Ken Wheat and David Twohy of the film Pitch Black (2000).

A rogue comet spears an earth-bound commercial spacecraft, forcing it to plummet to the surface of an unknown planet. With the captain dead, a brave pilot performs a perilous crash landing. Other than three suns-which create perpetual light-and a slight oxygen deficiency, a search party discovers that the planet isn't much different from Earth...until they stumble across a ghostly settlement littered with the human remains of geologists who mysteriously perished exactly sixty years ago. And the most horrific discovery of all: below the surface of the soil, where darkness reigns, live hungry predators with a deadly appetite.

Once every sixty years a solar eclipse darkens the skies and allows the blood-hungry creatures to escape from their underground tomb. With only hours before total blackout, everyone must unite in a race to raise the geologists' abandoned ship before becoming a long-awaited meal...

Dead Moon by Peter Clines-- In the year 2243, the Moon belongs to the dead. The largest graveyard in the solar system, it was the perfect solution to the overcrowding and environmental problems that had plagued mankind for centuries. And the perfect place for Cali Washington to run away from her past.

But when a mysterious meteor crashes into one of the Moon's cemeteries, Cali and her fellow Caretakers find themselves surrounded by a terrifying enemy force that outnumbers them more than a thousand to one. An enemy not hindered by the lack of air or warmth or sustenance.

An enemy that is already dead. Now Cali and her compatriots must fight to survive. Because if they don't, everyone on the Moon may be joining the dead. And maybe everyone on Earth, too...

The Dark Ship by Phillip P. Peterson -- Captain Jeff Austin and his crew are stranded in the interstellar void after their bomber is destroyed. Their last hope is a giant alien spacecraft floating abandoned in space. But not long after gaining access, the crew’s worst fears are confirmed: they are not alone on board, and soon their lives are under threat from sinister aliens. There seems to be only one way out: Jeff sets off with the last survivors to the distant center of the ship to uncover the dark secrets of its extraterrestrial inhabitants. But nothing can prepare them for the horror that awaits them deep inside The Black Ship.

Event Horizon by Steven McDonald -- Seven years ago an experimental space vessel disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Now the ship has been found orbiting Neptune. When a salvage team is sent to investigate, they encounter the ultimate horror that lurks behind the Event Horizon.

The Black Corridor by Michael Moorcock -- The spaceship Hope Dempsey held thirteen men and women, refugees fleeing an Earth doomed by atomic destruction. While 12 slept in suspended animation, the thirteenth, Ryan, ran the ship alone. For three years he had been responsible for the lives of the only humans left in the universe. Ryan's job was to see that they reached a distant sun where unmanned probes had detected two earth-like planets.

Salvation Day by Kali Wallace -- They thought the ship would be their salvation. Zahra knew every detail of the plan. House of Wisdom, a massive exploration vessel, had been abandoned by the government of Earth a decade earlier, when a deadly virus broke out and killed everyone on board in a matter of hours. But now it could belong to her people if they were bold enough to take it. All they needed to do was kidnap Jaswinder Bhattacharya—the sole survivor of the tragedy, and the last person whose genetic signature would allow entry to the spaceship.

But what Zahra and her crew could not know was what waited for them on the ship—a terrifying secret buried by the government. A threat to all of humanity that lay sleeping alongside the orbiting dead. And then they woke it up.

The Mona Lisa by Tessa Kum and Jeff VanderMeer -- Is the seventh and longest short story in Halo: Evolutions - Essential Tales of the Halo Universe. It follows the crew of the UNSC Red Horse as they are sent to investigate the fate of the Mona Lisa, which has mysteriously come to rest near the destroyed Installation 04. After boarding the ship, a team of Marines stumbles upon a parasitic nightmare, and begin a desperate struggle for survival against the infested Humans and Elites.

The Terminus Project by G.L. Jones -- Deep in the void, on the outer rim of the galaxy, a United Core Worlds mining station clings to the surface of a blasted planet. The station is home to a crew of 15, who at the best of times would be at each other’s throats. This is not the best of times. The UCW drop ship that delivers precious supplies has crashed.

The crash destroyed the communications link. The station can’t communicate with the supply ship that orbits above. Something survived the crash, something stalks the crew. There is a traitor among them. The crew must find a way to survive. The thing that hunts them grows stronger with each passing hour...

Ship of Fools by Richard Paul Russo -- (also known as Unto Leviathan). After centuries of wandering through the galaxy in search of other life, the crew of the starship Argonos, the home to generations of humans, is lured by an unidentified transmission to a nearby planet, where they come face to face with a brutal tragedy and a haunting alien mystery.

Parasite by Darcy Coates -- A guard discovers an unusual lifeform on her remote moon outpost. She disregards protocol to investigate it, with catastrophic consequences.

Contagion (Contagion, #1) by Erin Bowman -- After receiving a distress call from a drill team on a distant planet, a skeleton crew is sent into deep space to perform a standard search-and-rescue mission.

When they arrive, they find the planet littered with the remains of the project—including its members’ dead bodies. As they try to piece together what could have possibly decimated an entire project, they discover that some things are best left buried—and some monsters are only too ready to awaken...

Salvaged by Madeleine Roux-- Rosalyn Devar is on the run from her famous family, the bioengineering job she's come to hate, and her messed-up life. She's run all the way to outer space, where she's taken a position as a "space janitor," cleaning up ill-fated research expeditions. But no matter how far she goes, Rosalyn can't escape herself. After too many mistakes on the job, she's given one last chance: take care of salvaging the Brigantine, a research vessel that has gone dark, with all crew aboard thought dead.

But the Brigantine's crew are very much alive--if not entirely human. Now Rosalyn is trapped on board, alone with a crew infected by a mysterious parasitic alien. The captain, Edison Aries, seems to still maintain some control over himself and the crew, but he won't be able to keep fighting much longer. Rosalyn and Edison must find a way to stop the parasite's onslaught...or it may take over the entire human race.

The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling -- When Gyre Price lied her way into this expedition, she thought she’d be mapping mineral deposits, and that her biggest problems would be cave collapses and gear malfunctions. She also thought that the fat paycheck—enough to get her off-planet and on the trail of her mother—meant she’d get a skilled surface team, monitoring her suit and environment, keeping her safe. Keeping her sane.

Pitch Dark by Courtney Alameda -- Lost to time, Tuck Morgan and his crew have slept in stasis aboard the USS John Muir for centuries. Their ship harbors a chunk of Earth, which unbeknownst to them, is the last hope for the failing human race.

Laura Cruz is a ship raider searching the galaxy for the history that was scattered to the stars. Once her family locates the John Muir and its precious cargo, they are certain human civilization is saved.

When Tuck's and Laura’s worlds collide―literally―the two teens must outwit their enemies, evade brutal monsters that kill with sound, and work together to save the John Muir...and the whole human race.

The Deep by Nick Cutter -- A strange plague called the ’Gets is decimating humanity on a global scale. It causes people to forget—small things at first, like where they left their keys…then the not-so-small things like how to drive, or the letters of the alphabet. Then their bodies forget how to function involuntarily…and there is no cure.

However, far below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, deep in the Mariana Trench, an heretofore unknown substance hailed as “ambrosia”’—a universal healer, from initial reports—has been discovered. It may just be the key to eradicating the ’Gets. In order to study this phenomenon, a special research lab, the Trieste, has been built eight miles under the sea’s surface. But when the station goes incommunicado, a brave few descend through the lightless fathoms in hopes of unraveling the mysteries lurking at those crushing depths…and perhaps to encounter an evil blacker than anything one could possibly imagine.

Black Sun Rising (The Coldfire Trilogy, #1) by C.S. Friedman -- Over a millennium ago, Erna, a seismically active yet beautiful world was settled by colonists from far-distant Earth. But the seemingly habitable planet was fraught with perils no one could have foretold. The colonists found themselves caught in a desperate battle for survival against the fae, a terrifying natural force with the power to prey upon the human mind itself, drawing forth a person's worst nightmare images or most treasured dreams and indiscriminately giving them life.

Twelve centuries after fate first stranded the colonists on Erna, mankind has achieved an uneasy stalemate, and human sorcerers manipulate the fae for their own profit, little realizing that demonic forces which feed upon such efforts are rapidly gaining in strength.

Now, as the hordes of the dark fae multiply, four people—Priest, Adept, Apprentice, and Sorcerer—are about to be drawn inexorably together for a mission which will force them to confront an evil beyond their imagining, in a conflict which will put not only their own lives but the very fate of humankind in jeopardy.

Sphere by Michael Crichton -- In the middle of the South Pacific, a thousand feet below the surface of the water, a huge vessel is discovered resting on the ocean floor. It is a spaceship of phenomenal dimensions, apparently undamaged by its fall from the sky. And, most startling, it appears to be at least three hundred years old. But even more fantastic—and frightening—is what waits inside…

Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear-- A starship hurtles through the emptiness of space. Its destination-unknown. Its purpose-a mystery.

Now, one man wakes up. Ripped from a dream of a new home-a new planet and the woman he was meant to love in his arms-he finds himself wet, naked, and freezing to death. The dark halls are full of monsters but trusting other survivors he meets might be the greater danger.

All he has are questions -- Who is he? Where are they going? What happened to the dream of a new life? What happened to Hull 03? All will be answered, if he can survive the ship.

The Last Astronaut by David Wellington -- Sally Jansen was NASA's leading astronaut, until a mission to Mars ended in disaster. Haunted by her failure, she lives in quiet anonymity, convinced her days in space are over. She's wrong.

A large alien object has entered the solar system on a straight course toward Earth. It has made no attempt to communicate. Out of time and out of options, NASA turns to Jansen.

But as the object reveals its secrets, Jansen and her crew find themselves in a desperate struggle for survival -- against the cold vacuum of space, and something far, far worse...

The Hematophages by Stephen Kozeniewski -- Doctoral student Paige Ambroziak is a “station bunny” – she’s never set foot off the deep space outpost where she grew up. But when she’s offered a small fortune to join a clandestine salvage mission, she jumps at the chance to leave the cutthroat world of academia behind.

Paige is convinced she’s been enlisted to find the legendary Manifest Destiny, a long-lost colonization vessel from an era before the corporations ruled Earth and its colonies. Whatever she’s looking for, though, rests in the blood-like seas of a planet-sized organism called a fleshworld. Dangers abound for Paige and her shipmates. Flying outside charted space means competing corporations can shoot them on sight rather than respect their salvage rights. The area is also crawling with pirates like the ghoulish skin-wrappers, known for murdering anyone they can’t extort.

But the greatest threat to Paige’s mission is the nauseating alien parasites which infest the fleshworld. These lamprey-like monstrosities are used to swimming freely in an ocean of blood, and will happily spill a new one from the veins of the outsiders who have tainted their home. In just a few short, bone-chilling hours Paige learns that there are no limits to the depravity and violence of the grotesque nightmares known as…THE HEMATOPHAGES.

Nightflyers by George R. R. Martin -- Tells the stories of a starship crew who begin mysteriously dying one by one, electronic zombies, recreational warfare, a primitive alien culture, and an experiment in deep space.

Dream Houses by Genevieve Valentine -- It takes a certain type to crew a ship that drops you seven years at a time into the Deep. Kite-class cargo ships like Menkalinan get burned-out veterans, techs who’ve been warned off-planet, medics who weren’t much good on the ground.

The Gliese-D run isn’t quite the end of the line, but it’s getting there. No cachet, no rewards, no future; their trading posts get Kites full of cargo that the crew never ask questions about, because if it’s headed for Gliese-D, it’s probably something nobody wanted.

A year into the Deep, Amadis Reyes wakes up. Menkalinan is sounding the alarm; something’s wrong. The rest of the crew are dead. That’s not even what’s wrong.

The Thing by Alan Dean Foster -- This book is a novelization of the 1982 screenplay for John Carpenter's movie, The Thing. Which is also based on the novella 'Who Goes There'? by John. W. Campbell. The story involves an American research station tucked away in the solitary landscape of the Antarctic. The isolated crew is disturbed at their base camp by a helicopter shooting at a sled dog. When they take in the dog, it brutally attacks both human beings and canines in the camp and they discover that the beast can assume the shape of its victims.

The Last Man From Earth by Arvind Jagessar -- Troubled space pilot Jake Tiber awakens one day to find every other human being in the outer space community dead or missing. His search for answers will lead him to strange sights and terrifying monsters that will make him question his very sanity. But he must press on, for he has to find out whether he is a prisoner of his own mind or... the last man from Earth.

[unofficialyuletide]

Nomination Queries, #2

Second round of queries, same ask: if you nominated any of the listed fandoms, please drop by the mod post to help the mods out.

The Adventures of Lady No-Kids (A Comic) どうぶつの森 | Animal Crossing Series Baba Yaga Fairy Tale 그 악녀를 조심하세요! | Beware of the Villainess! Blackadder Canadian Actor RPF Cordelia (Movie Poster 2020) Daniel Blackland Series - Greg van Eekhout Dietland Dogpound Shuffle (1975) The Electric State - Simon Stålenhag Firefall Series - Peter Watts folklore - Taylor Swift (Album) Teenage Love Triangle Trilogy - Taylor Swift illicit affairs - Taylor Swift (Song). Ghost in the Shell (Anime & Manga) Ghost of Tsushima (Video Game) Hadestown Haunted Elevator - SNL Sketch Heart of Gold - Sharon Shinn Henry V - Shakespeare Henry IV - Shakespeare Shakespeare's Second Tetralogy Ιστορία του Πελοποννησιακού Πολέμου - Θουκυδίδης | History of the Peloponnesian Wars - Thucydides Jennifer's Body (2009) Katmai National Park Bear Cams - Explore.org Fat Bear Week 2020 Kate Daniels - Ilona Andrews The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin Marvel 1602 Oishinbo Peter Pan Goes Wrong (Play) The Prisoner (1967) Rainbow Brite The Sims (Video Games) Sims Bustin' Out/Urbz handheld/Sims 2 DS (Video Games) Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) Snowpiercer (2013) Spelunky Star Trek - Various Authors ウルトラシリーズ | Ultra Series Vatican Miracle Examiner Wonho (Musician) Evita - All Media Types Kemono no Souja & Related Fandoms

In other news, there are only 605!!! fandoms left to be considered. Which means the TAGSET IS COMING :D

[mattiebluebird]

Man Jukka Sarasti huh. Let me just brutally maul this guy and rip through his coping mechanisms and force him to feel empathy for the first time in his life so that he can have an epiphany about these aliens we're studying. Then I'll die

[stainlesssteellocust]

so the alfar pinnacle of beauty would basically be a Blindsight Vampire, for the record

I can textually support this but I’d need to get home to my copy of Nightmare Stacks to do so

[this-has-returned]

Spoilers for Blindsight and Echopraxia by Peter Watts...

Okay, so I've been trying to process the Scrambler perspective in these books. (Maybe it should be called the "Rorschach perspective", if Scramblers are more like white blood cells...?)

During Firefall, enough data was gathered on Humans and Human technology to create a plan to stop us from emitting signals into space.

The problem, though, is Theseus used hidden technology and was launched with a breakneck schedule, which completely took Rorschach by surprise, because it shouldn't have been possible for Humans to build this so fast, much less find Rorschach at Big Ben.

This would have been Rorschach's first clue that things like Vampires, Transhumans, and Bicamerals live among the Humans.

This means that Rorschach is not working with enough data. So it injected two spies into Theseus to try and get a better idea of what pilots such a bleeding-edge spacecraft. Inside, it finds a team of Transhumans, someone with half a brain swapped out with a machine, a Vampire, and a high-level general intelligence in the computer systems.

The Vampire and general intelligence refuse to enter Rorschach for inspection, so it has to gather what it can from the invaders, at first. After abducting Susan James, and adjusting her to be a surprise agent later, they discover that we have the ability to coordinate several intelligences as a single system. This creates more questions than answers, so Rorschach must search harder.

The two spies probably discover the general intelligence running the ship. This probably fills in a few blanks, because there's no way the flesh-and-bone team members could have planned and executed any of this.

At the end of Blindsight and parts of Echopraxia, it's implied that the Scramblers somehow collected a large amount of data on Theseus. If Theseus self-destructed, it was probably all gathered by the two spies sniffing the camera and computer feeds, as they leisurely explored the operating system, and participated in the tests inflicted upon them. Honestly, I can't imagine that these tests would have slowed a Scrambler's ability to snoop around.

So the Scramblers store the data in their bodies, and leap back to Rorschach, so it can assimilate what was gathered.

In Echopraxia, the telematter stream is shown to be hijacked. This either means that the spies were covertly emitting from it while on Theseus (which I assume the general intelligence would have noticed), or Rorschach survived the antimatter detonation from Theseus, and replicated the telematter broadcast itself. I feel like there's an argument to be made that general intelligence might have genuinely not noticed, and the Bicamerals (who detected the hijack) are a magnitude smarter than the Theseus computer.

Either way, why does Rorschach send an agent (Portia) to the Icarus station?

Because there's still one more blank to fill.

The Humans could not have implemented the strategies seen from Theseus, but it's discovered that they're being orchestrated by a general intelligence in the computer.

But the general intelligence is not what created the ship and spotted Big Ben. There's still something even smarter lurking in the solar system, and it's not coming out to meet Rorschach. Rorschach needs bait.

Because Rorschach is hunting for Bicams.

So it uses the telematter stream in a way that only something like the Bicams would notice. It installs Portia at Icarus to fill in the missing blank when something so smart comes to look.

And when it DOES find the missing piece, it's clear that Humans are simply obsolete, and that Rorschach's species will not need to worry about open broadcasts in the future. That problem is solving itself, and requires no further intervention, and those that will usurp the Human species will still not be a threat to Rorschach's people. Indeed, it only took Rorschach's arrival, and nobody else needs to follow up in the solar system.

Also, if we are to take some passing details from Echopraxia into account, the Singularity has likely been born already, and has far-surpassed even the Bicams. This Singularity might be something that Rorschach's people identify as an ally, if not a simple non-issue cohabitant of the galaxy. Rorschach may have been attempting to diagnose and cure the Singularity of a rampant disease, because if the broadcasts are bothering Rorschach from WAY out in deep space, it must be absolutely insufferable to live ON THE PLANET that the broadcasts originate from!

[rachell-redacted]

One day you argue on Twitter about the purpose of vampires in Peter Watts’s books, and the next day people are throwing you a quote from his website, where he “looks at you” in regards of his characters’ shipping. Wild.

One way or another, Dr. Watts is now curious why didn’t anyone pair Jukka and Valerie? Something tells me that there are such shippers ... but I decided to contribute and picture our beloved vampires together. This is certainly not what the author was expecting, and not what I expected either, but it is what it is.

The more I think about Firefall as a whole and Jukka’s place in it, the more I am convinced that it was he who sent the package to Earth that Valerie received and used so effectively. This is what this art is about. Thorns are a metaphor or something like that.

[coldalbion]

“What do you think vision is?” she asked him. “You don’t see a fraction of the things that surround you, and at least half the things you do see are deceptive. Hell, color doesn’t even exist outside your own head. Vision’s just plain wrong; it only persists because it works. If you’re going to dismiss the idea of God, you better stop believing your own eyes in the bargain.” “My eyes never told me to murder anyone who doesn’t share my worldview.” “My God never told me to do that, either.” “Lots of people’s Gods have.” “Riiight. And we’re just gonna ignore everybody who quoted Darwin to justify turning people into slaves? Or wiping them out altogether?” He opened his mouth; she preempted him with a raised hand: “Let’s just agree that neither side has a monopoly on assholes. The point is, once you recognize that every human model of reality is fundamentally unreal, then it all just comes down to which one works best.

Firefall, Peter Watts

[spacebrick3]

ItsGBM Day 29

A book that challenged you as a reader (as in technically not morally).

For this, I’m going to have to go with Firefall (or even just Blindsight) by Peter Watts. It’s a great book dealing with psychology, consciousness, sentience, the like in a great sci-fi format, but, as one reviewer put it, “it's a superb book written by someone who does not want you to entirely understand it.”