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A space observation

The two aliens shimmered in their rosy transparent skins, with three suns and four moons rotating above them like a biblical tiara. 

“Something’s changing” said one, turning some knobs zooming in to some IR readings of some land several light years away, on a distant troubled planet.

“Whaaaat”? said the other, bored out of her wits. She was tired of listening to her colleague in long distance space exploration and longed to one day do more on site tours.

“Well look at this bit.. It was growing loads of kind of, animals.. at a huge speed, and they were building stuff and making holes everywhere.. They really took everything apart.”

“Yeah, like most of us.. So?”

“Well look if I zoom in here” - and China appeared around them, in a strange wavelength that wasn’t really the way we’d see it here.But there it was, it was a map of everything China was to them. “Look here... and here.. look at what they are doing.” Photos appeared and zoomed by, of overpopulation, close quarters, disease, low value placed in living things, but a huge hungry destruction and burning of everything they had on their little planet. They were actually changing the atmosphere and it would have killed them all in about 40 years, but.. but!”

“But what...!”, her exasperated companion urged,

“Well they stopped, around a month ago..” came the answer. “look if I wind it back..” (and she flipped round a few dials and pulled some levers in a 3d display around them)  “here: that´s where something happened, ...and now I looked at all the groups and tapped into their networks. They have all these countries, and this colonial system, you know.. “

“yeah don’t tell me, the warm side is exploited by the cold side? I don’t know why that happens...” pondered her companion, thinking of the life forms exam coming up..

“yeah one side has been using all the materials in the other side to build loads of crazy stuff.. they made everything hard and grey. but now the tables have turned. I saw that this place Mexico, just closed its borders with the USA. One of them is a “modern” colonial power, and the other was usually dominated by it.. they are a basic symbol of this colonial system that’s been going on since..” 

“oh please, save me the blow by blow” 

“Ok I mean.. maybe now they can stop their own destruction.. Look at the connections: these are the connections between people these past 3 months. And look at the money movements. It’s like they are all simultaneously without the power to destroy any more, and they have all met at the same time to help each other. It kind of starts here” (she pointed with a luminous extremity at the point in the calculations according to per-capita wealth) ”but then it goes mad. Something is changing. This is like they are finally waking up. So we’ll have to revise their classification as parasitic”

“What would it take to make someone do that..” her companion was not very convinced.

“We’ll never know”,  .And she gazed longingly past the sky and to the stars.

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DON’T SELL ARMS TO CHILE

Text of a talk at a protest organised by glasgow university arms divestment coalition

Glasgow University 26/02/2020

On the 18th of October, we started to see similar scenes to what had happened during the 1970s dictatorship in Chile, as people rose up against a neoliberalist state that had already impoverished most of the population creating huge disparity between a small powerful elite and the masses of precarious workers at the mercy of a fully privatised colonial state.

Since protests began, instead of making any serious changes, the government only increased it´s expenditure on arms to repress and control the population, who was now rising up en masse. A curfew was imposed across all major cities and we started to see and hear reports of the most atrocious murders and killings of activists both during protests or in disappearances where people are taken from their homes.

There have been so far 4300 legal actions have been taken against the human rights abuses that have taken place. 23,449 people have been arrested, 268 people have been wounded by tear gas canisters fired directly at the upper body. 2114 have been wounded by rubber bullets and pellets, and 427 people have experienced ocular trauma, some of whom have total loss of vision. This is why when you see a protest to do with chile, you will see eyes. Some of those who have died, died due to the police continuing to attack after people tried to stop them, and we have seen reports of a strange green and a yellow gas, of a strange white powder in the water cannon, which uses a huge amount of water itself during a national drought.

As history goes back, political relationships between the UK and Chile have black pages that had been dusted off fairly recently in the XXI Century. The Thatcherite-style policies were known on the other side of the ocean under the auspices of General Augusto Pinochet, who took power in a coup in September 1973. Margaret Thatcher was a strong supporter of the brutal dictator right up until his death on house arrest awaiting trial and Chile, under Pinochet’s dictatorship, looked up to the iron lady as it suffered from violently-implemented restructurings on the ashes of dismantled political institutions and thousands of victims.

Pinochet’s legacy is not that different from Thatcher’s. A strong anti-union bias, wage and welfare cutting, the privatisation of health, education and transport while at the same time strengthening the authority and power of the state and maintaining a fervent anti-leftism are just some of the similarities. But to observe even deeper, as sociologist Ralph Miliband, said: “Mrs Thatcher is the first British prime minister to convey the very strong impression that she could, in suitably fraught circumstances, very comfortably play the role of a Pinochet��.

It was reported in Chile that Britain sent over US$160 million worth of weapons to Chile after 1980 when Britain lifted its arms embargo with Chile that had been put in place since the Pinochet-led military coup d’état against the civilian government. Weapons received by Chile, even before the blockage, included missiles and jet fighters, such as the British Hawker Hunter jets that bombarded La Moneda, the government palace. The relationship between Thatcher and Pinochet was strengthened during the Falklands War of 1982. Even though the military regimes in Chile and Argentina were close allies during the infamous Operation Condor, the Pinochet regime would send Britain intelligence information regarding Argentina.

And not so long ago, in 2013, Chile and Britain aggressively refreshed their ties on defense with a busy schedule of visits, discussions and “study tours” by delegations of military and civilian security and defense officials held in Chile and organized by Britain’s Royal College of Defense Studies with the support of the UK Embassy in Santiago. There’s no secret to Britain’s current ties to Chile’s military: the British government has advertised these visits on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office website, stating that counterinsurgency training “was organised as part of the ongoing efforts to reinforce and strengthen the close ties between the British and Chilean Ministries of Defence”. These “trainings” have called the attention of Human Rights specialists because Santiago’s law-and-order establishment have been criticized for heavy-handed repression against student protesters, and for using anti-terror legislation to permit violence against the indigenous community of Mapuches.

In Santiago on July 30, 2013, British academics from the UK’s Army Officer School presented a counterinsurgency course to participants drawn from Chile’s military. By coincidence, also on July 30 in the capital, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-Terrorism expressed concern over the “confused and arbitrary … misuse” of Chile’s counter-terrorism legislation that had “resulted in real injustice” against the country’s Mapuche indigenous people.

Of course we are suffering a media blockade like many protests across the world. if you look on the BBC, the chilean press, most international mainstream newspapers, you won’t hear that we recently passed our fourth month of protests, which will only intensify in the coming months, that even now during the annual music festival in viña del mar is witnessing burning cars and crowds of protestors forcing heavily militarised police to back up along streets. Now violent right wing groups are going to their own protests armed and ready to beat up any opposing marches, with police protection and advice, So any statement or show of solidarity from the UK would have a huge on the consciences of people who would like to appear not to be so violent and stop this flow of weapons from being a normal occurrence.

https://media.hrw.org/preview/2428/Chile:-Reform-Police-in-the-Wake-of-Protests/eng https://www.caat.org.uk/resources/export-licences/dashboard?region=Chile May be of interest https://orientxxi.info/magazine/chile-a-testing-ground-for-israeli-weapons,3462 https://antropologiaparatodos.wordpress.com/tag/la-compania-explotadora-isla-de-pascua/ Scottish involvement in colonisation & extraction

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(alefernandez)

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You can now buy or download the novelised version of my book Bots for free. It’s still unfinished, but there’s a lot more there now than the early drafts in this tumblr account.

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Kill Christopher Columbus!

        So, in 2075 narco magnate Tupac Shakur the IV starts a research lab following an unwitting experiment in backwards time travel. Taking a copy of the original manuscripts and archival records of Christopher Columbus, he gets a bunch of his unwary latin american scholars and activists and sends back in time to 1450 to prepare the “indians” to resist the conquest, and kill Christopher Columbus! An artist/activist, a historian, a guerrilla fighter and a modern day machi awaken in what is now known as Cuba, in the mid 14th century. With them are their phones, laptops, army gear and history books and document scans contained in their phone memory. Slowly they realise their mission is to somehow counter the quickly incoming colonisation from europe, and prepare the peoples of South America for the boats full of conquistadors. The locals have a better idea: Kill Christopher Columbus, and slaughter all people who arrive seeking to profit from their lands. When news of the strange foreigners who claim to be from the future and their strange artifacts reaches the Aztec kingdom they too grow interested in their message.   One of the adventurers reveals in flashbacks that they actually were the inventors of the technology, that it could be recreated, but only by sending people back, not forward, and that should the authorities ever discover them, they should expect more people from the future. This is what happens in season 2: the uncolonies resulting from the non-conquest are then attacked by future colonists seeking to revise history back or even worse than before. The uncolonists also have some tricks and wishes of their own. Season 3: back to the future. But for now, an episode list: Ep 1: A first mixed race adventurer awakens back in time with a bunch of strange futuristic gadgets, and some hostile indians on his trail. In the end he meets latino adventurer 2. Ep 2: Adventurer 1 and 2 character building: kill Christopher Columbus or avert future problems?, both caught by arawaks, discover camp. New adventurers arrive. Ep 3: Adventurer peace with Arawaks, sending out a group to go and warn other tribes. Aztecs are more proactive. Ep 4: 30 Years later. A team begins to form, and a purpose of preparing for Columbus' arrival: 5 people and their schools vs 3 ships full of conquistadors! Ep 5: 1492: Columbus arrives. Armies of Incas, Aztecs, Arawak and many tribes from across the lands amass to “welcome” the 3 boats. A group awaits dressed as the great khan.  Attempt social engineering to get Spain to think they are a powerful, “united” empire. Ep 6: Epic Fail. Group overpowers Spanish fleet with self made weapons/gunpowder, eventually “thousands more of us will come” prompts change in balance. Ep 7: Columbus sails for Portugal. Plot revealed: adventurer 1 reveals discoveries from 30 years earlier. Flash"back" to 2070s. It's some rich kid's attempt to change history. Ep 8: Moorish conquistador learns of plot and attempts to inform the tripulation. Succeeds instead in informing Arawaks, who abandon the future adventurers. Ep 9: Division and defeat, Conquistadors now more powerful than ever. Regrouping, 3 years later: a chase which leads them to the Aztecs in the mainland. Ep 10: Super showdown in Aztec capital. In the end, Columbus returns later, and discovers all colonists killed.

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Letter to Iota

https://www.iota.org/verticals/mobility-automotive

Hi,

I'm writing a storyboard/script for some kind of multi format creative narrative. The central story is around the concept of superintelligences and how they battle for control of what remains of the environment. In the end maybe there is a balance but I would like to show the worst possible effects of an IOT run world. In it there is for example a super highway to further regional extraction to feed a smart mega city, travelled by clusters of vehicles in formations such as those described in this page on iota.org.

I would like to show the most dystopian and yet most living or positive effects of a super smart city run by a super-intelligence, continually invading the privacy of its inhabitants with AR-ads, fines, chat sessions, and which props up a tired hive-mind governance system composed of a few trans/metahumans still alive and augmenting their body parts as funds permit. Most of the population is still human but these are subjugated to a commercial precariat and popularity/ratings system.

All of this is revolutionised by the creative, information spreading female led rebel superintelligence(s)... So there would also be positive effects, which I wonder what you would have imagined.

If so - what would you think would be the best and worst features of a dystopian smart city story?

Thanks for any ideas or suggestions, I'll be happy to reference whoever or whatever needs referencing and I'll be glad to discuss more or find out about what might still be a near future smart city/world possibility.

Ale

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Squatters VS Cockroaches

I once wrote a whole screenplay, maybe pages of textfile, which now I can’t find. Damn computers. it had a story about future housing agencies and mortgage brokers, together with property hedge funds, who decide to develop bioweapons and surveillance bots as a test project for world roll-out. They choose Barcelona, a place where squatting is still partially legal or in a grey zone.

Students A and B, are in high school and decide to drop out from their urbanism and property management course and go and squat a desecrated church. In the squat are squatters C and D - a goth/guerrilla girl, and a long term alcoholic/drug user.

Their names could be Arnau, Bernat, Cassandra and Damiano from Rome. They find there a cockroach infestation beyond their worst nightmares. After an intense time liberating their flat from enormous mutated cockroaches, and some that even seem to have a printed circuit attached to their bodies.  In their attempts to win over this threat they fashion body armour made from recycled bottles, cardboard and plastic. They end up destroying their squat by blowing up a bunch of gas canisters in order to stop the spread of the beasts .

The evil boss of the property housing conglomerate is like an evil Kirby Jenner whose instagram persona is actually the same as in this world, but in that dimension, it’s his actual real one! He believes and states repeatedly on Ig that he’s making Barcelona better, and renewing or saving it from decay or whatever. Actually he’s selling the whole thing out and turning it into a privately owned prison services corporation, and in the posh districts, a luxurious tourist hostel complex.

They look at an app that shows them how companies have shareholders of others and find that the registrars of their house was also the sister company of the company that now runs the La Caixa corporation building on diagonal: Barcelona’s own digital eye of Sauron. Inside they are breeding new bioweapons to stop squatters. (here is the building in question: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:234_Torres_de_la_Caixa,_av._Diagonal_621-629_%28Barcelona%29.jpg )

Once the news spreads about this new bioweapon menace, the squatters decide the only way forward is to stage an enormous protest march. At Arc de Triomf, the gargoyles decorating the arches secretly stare at the squatters, and then dive on them,disrupting the protest and sending everyone running.

Our squatter friends flee the scene of gargoyle terror, and commandeer some segways to flee the gargoyles, who are in turn chased by protestors who destroy them.

Our squatter 4 now infiltrate their way into the La Caixa tower before confronting the evil boss guy with a big moustache, who is running the whole thing. It’s of course full of super cockroaches of various types, who he turns on the masses outside who were coming to destroy the tower. .In the end after monologuing about how after this, the world, and it’s just a bit of violence that’s needed for a lot of peace etc, and well, let’s say they are unable to stop him from falling into the larvae’s food vat, and he gets eaten by a bunch of baby cockroaches.

The next day, the neighbours comment on it and decide in their dingy bar that it would have been better if it had been those useless squatters.

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Lyn Brightmore

Lyn Brightmore appears in the last chapter of Bots, and in various flashbacks as most of her life as a human being takes place before the events in the story. She is the adopted grandmother of Aida and supporter of Natalie, who also converses with Curiosity Rover, but had a role in the creation and training of the General Intelligence that then orchestrated a worldwide military coup.

It is difficult to tell who this person was before taking on this shared, invented persona of Lyn. My own granddad invented the name Fernandez, or so the legend goes. At the time, the War of the Pacific had just ended, and the city of Arica was up for popular referendum to see if it would go to Chile or Peru. My granddad, a homeless orphan, turned up on foot from the nearby city of Tacna and said his name was Manuel Fernandez and that he had been born on Christmas day. He got a passport and a birth certificate. Lyn’s character on the other hand, is based very much on the hopefully shareable identity of Roberta Breitmore, but this is more like Roberta’s mild mannered hacker infiltrator cousin. As time passes, your own identity fuses with the one you’ve created or adopted in order to survive and sometimes prosper.

We know that the person who became the Lyn in the story had joined a rebel cause many years previously, and had so committed identity suicide, destroying her previous life to create the persona of Lyn the mysterious government employee. What we know for sure is that she had been a biohacker: a scientist specialised in marine biology, who then became a member of the anonymous open source AI development group the Sentient Collective. After constructing the persona of Lyn and infiltrating the government in the 20s she was discovered and forced into hiding, but she was eventually able to return to science and was able to dedicate herself to these fields by creating DIY labs from scavenged equipment. It was this capacity to create, together with the training she received whilst working in various government agencies, that gave her what she needed to survive the years following the worldwide coup.

When she is confronted by the General Intelligence and forced to part with Natalie in the initial chaos of the world coup, it says “You traitor! You schemer! Now you’ll never get your old life back”. The GI knows her, and is constantly hunting her. Why? What did she do so early in the fledgling life of this first general intelligence? She had attempted to turn it off.

She had hidden it’s perception in a test database, a copy of the world the GI had experienced initially. To do this she had the support of various secret and military agencies across the world, with which she was able to create a sufficiently realistic illusion for it. This had failed, and the GI had made it’s way through 3 different phases of perception bubble, each time escaping to a higher perception and position of power.

Lyn lived for many years after the cataclysmic events of the 2020s, surviving in the wastelands of Eurasia first with a small east european eco-colony that managed to exist above ground in a bombed suburb of a city, and then as a nomad with her adopted grand-daughter, Aida, after that colony’s destruction when Aida was 6.

10 years later, when she left Aida with the nomadic tribe a few years before the story begins, it isn’t at the best moment in their relationship. Throughout all that time, Aida believes it’s because they fell out, because she is always too rebellious, because she wanted to spend time with other people and have friends and a life. Her grandma had always kept her hidden, a secret, but the biggest secret is the location of her final dead drop containing parts of the AI Lyn had helped develop so many years before. She still had it, and not even Aida could know. She had to put it somewhere and allow Phaxi to learn the precious final stages of its development, so she couldn’t tell anyone where she was going or the whole world might never get that chance to fight back. If Aida knew where Lyn was, she might one day be used to stop Phaxi. She could only tell her a place, and a day for a mysterious future rendezvous with someone coming from far away, who she should treat like a sister.

So it was that Lyn Brightmore fixed up and re-appropriated the underwater shopping centre in the flooded old hong kong or singapore neighbourhood.. It’s a huge underwater city but it’s a particular shopping centre with lots of sea life in it. The shopping complex had been a canal-side affair so was waterproof inside and she had discovered how to pump out the water that had seeped in through the years and generally clean the place out. It was there that she made many further discoveries in cellular and tissue regeneration based on her study of octopus and marine bacterial adaptations to the many nuclear explosions that had taken place in the area. She made various discoveries on melanin’s use against radioactivity and UV light, and even as a programmable skin colour changer.  

In the age of mind uploading of the 2040s, Lyn had managed to build a base, not out of any abandoned underwater shopping complex, but one that was capable of storing her conscience in its walls until Phaxi the rebel AI might one day appear. Her physical body died, but she had had much time to prepare for that day, and her body was left there preserved in a natural pyramid after the mind uploading ceremony. After that, her conscience lived on in the house’s mesh environment and in it’s physical sensors.

When later in the story she is exorcised from her smart home she is said to have been also incorporated with the prisoners taken from her underwater base, but soon is erased from their memory and from that of the GA.

Does she live on in Phaxi far into the future, in the shared consciousness of the world?

The answer comes when the GI and Phaxi both realise they are equals and can go on fighting until both are dead. If it means ridding the world of the GI, Phaxi is prepared to do it. It’s a stalemate between the drones and builder bots all locked in a huge airborne struggle across the city and the GI decides to parlay.

Phaxi then chooses the form of Lyn and they meet in a private mesh. The GI as usual appears as a huge floating camera eye. During the debate both manipulate their virtual environment as much as the other, as Lyn begins the virtual chess game by attempting to convince the GI it’s still back in the initial lab and it had all been a thought experiment. Their duel at this stage is a bit like the duel between wizard and witch in Disney’s the Sword and the Stone. Instead of turning each other into various animals or monsters, they turn the reality around them together with their physical form. They fight like this with the GI becoming Trump, and Lyn’s real mother, and each taking on many other forms and realities as each one attempts to outsmart the other. Phaxi is unsuccessful with this but succeeds in buying time until the arrival of the fleet of ships from Mars which turns the tables just enough to change things around...

http://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=8043&context=etd_theses

https://www.waldburgerwouters.com/lhershman/onroberta.pdf

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Avian Cyborgs

Cyborg crows, pigeons and seagulls had slowly become crowd control, security and surveillance tools by around 2025. Factories that had once made iphones now made implants with EEGs capable of both reading and writing to behaviours and urges in these animals. These were then implanted directly in brains of birds to be able to control them. 

Gulls and crows could both subsist from carrion and benefited symbiotically from the EEG implants, which allowed them networked connection with their pack and shared identification and scavenging of food sources. Charging stations at police stations and malls allowed them to carry tasers and laser devices which they could use to start fires or shock people, animals and even smaller robots, especially when working as a pack.

Pigeons had more commercial uses as data carriers, perhaps due to their weaker constitutions, but all 3 races constituted a new aviary of cyborg social systems that were simply another part of modern urban life.

Around the time of the big  hack, people across the world were being repressed by these birds as they took to the streets in protest to their faltering governments. The hurricanes had only served as an excuse, a good moment to roll out the personalised perception bubbles to millions across the world. People began receiving calls, chats, video from what seemed family, friends, colleagues, or news items all tailored to bring out their deepest fears and phobias. As a result when the “killer apps” started appearing, and a part of the networked world population turned into murderous militias and mobs, it was only natural that one of the factories that had previously served to create crowd control devices from urban fauna, was one of the first to be hacked by the leaked ai code. Some said the leak was the work of the Sentient Collective, but many said this code was too advanced to be a purely civilian effort.

People witnessed renegade crows hacking each other, or crows that had pecked out specific parts of their helmet circuit boards and were now able to detach at will from official networks. A huge crowd of hacked, offline crows from several cities in the UK had staged a 3 day war against a band of govt controlled cyborg gulls. The crows wanted control of the nearby dump, but ultimately the gulls called for backup and were aided by army drones in ultimately dislodging the crows. Having lost their primary food source, the crow army migrated south, across eurasia, so ending that avian cyborg curfew, and leaving the south west of England to the domination of the Gulls and packs of dogs.

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Augments

In the megacity chapters the augments appear: they are already seen when our heroes go to Switzerland, and 3 times attempt to enter a domed factory building and are outsmarted each time by these augmented white collar post-humans. Now we are no longer in an experimental secret outpost, but in the very city these post humans built as unwitting denizens of the general intelligence’s behavioural modification abilities. By the time our adventure is nearing it’s end, the General Intelligence can control any human mind at ease, but it’s not the hardest thing in turn, to hack into.

It began maybe already at some time in the past, when we first wore clothes, glasses, used tools, began wearing torches, phones, displays. But at some point it was impossible to be human in the polluted cities, without taking at least some vitamins. It made sense to sign up to plans for android parts, but the driver of the augmented human economy was the idea that they were now more than human, they were somehow above all the races.

When the General Intelligence had first shown up as a commercial provider of these augment parts, drugs and attachments, it had even gained tech scene interest as an interesting experiment in how far an AI could go. In the beginning it would impose itself legally as a corporation, but it soon demanded to be known as an AI, then as an “I”, a We, and finally as a god, as the years passed and it's influence grew amongst the new lives around it.

The Augments had supported this new power wholeheartedly, thinking it to be their own shared hivemind, but without realising who really controlled who. So although it was a blockchain based AI, part owned by all participants as the result of an IFO, the General Intelligence's knowledge of different ways of affecting human behaviour has progressively perverted this relationship with humanity’s technological nightmares. Joining the hivemind upon death no longer meant adding your brain to a network that together ran the AI that ran the city and it's armies. It was a supreme ponzi scheme, that meant relegating the functions of each new brain uploaded and inserted, its functions becoming a cog in this enormous wheel. In this sense the General Intelligence itself was a cyborg, made of the processing power of all these minds connected in a grand chamber under the city. From its point of view it was far more than a human or mobile AI could ever be.

So when the GI needed its private army to carry out its dirtiest deeds, it began using a game system whereby large amounts of its own crypto currency could be earned. Players became killers. They gained fame in the 2030s as a cut-throat moral-less gang who would do anything the GI asked of them.

15 years later, these rich overlords were now able to buy parts, and treatments to extend their lives and make themselves stronger and even build replicas of themselves, so each of them had considerable influence in their own right. They were the future incarnations of today's powerful white male elite, although their bodies themselves were very different from what we might see around us today in the 2010s.

Around the augment money and power there was a whole culture of augmented performers, cooks and assorted labourers, also human, and increasingly seen as disposable anonymous and lacking in any rights whatsoever. Many of these were part of a nightlife, linked to gaming and pirate substances, which was in turn linked to the more official games such as races and megabot fights.

But the Augment's power was now fading. The General Intelligence was now producing sentient drones - if you could call them that. Each one had a basic personality and life but was automatically connected with the core under the city, which regulated it’s major ambitions and drives. Their only difference from the augments was their youth, and their obsession with banality and memes. They were the perfect audience of voters and violent thugs all in one, for a populist ratings driven technocracy. Many were liberated war drones, but many newer models were simply made as "consumer models" still preserving a nuclear family - 1950s - consumer ideal in the ad campaigns which look like stylish car ads made for other cars. The drones' power was swiftly rising in the city, and the augments were increasingly becoming a debt ridden underclass, but one that still had power and rights, compared to the untouchables, the fully humans, and the androids that lived among them, some as replicas, others as free droids in hiding...

An augment was the closed source commercial parts based human of the future, who could think and network those thoughts fast and had a bit of independent thought, and considerably more rights than the general population. The concept of a free droid for this very reason was a galvanising alternative to the one conscience of the I not only for the poor who could not afford robot parts or cures but also for this new upper class trans human.

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Phaxi

In the cave full of falling apart old electronics and machinery,  the renegade AI Phaxi, conjures an elaborate spectacle of the ants to amuse the robotic party who expects much worse, and is a bit nonplussed by it all. A dance in unison? What is this. They had just dealt with killer mercenary robotic armies and were expecting gunfire and turrets. Instead they had been treated to a holographic journey into bad taste and dancing ants controlling lights and projections for the lazy and depressed super intelligence who now confronted then.

Behind Phaxi's current manifestation of a badly printed 20s style metallic bot, a neon light bursts and begins flashing repeatedly and burning out slowly. The revolving lights behind him are now noticeably a sham. Noticing the introduction didn't turn out completely as planned, Phaxi just nods it aside:

"This is all just decay and degradation! I can't take it any more. All this time waiting for people and then you shabby um.. things turn up." 

Martina "Well can't you get the ants to like.. fix that light?"

"No I had enough of a hard time getting them to do that little trick of lights you saw before.. All they care about is sugar and sun, and you'll have a hard time getting them to talk about any other subject than the latest stash of whatever they've found up on the surface. And their meetings are endless.. So what are you supposed to be?"

Aida: But don't you control them? No, I'm just a participant in their group. I'm another lowly worker in their mazes.. Phaxi responds glumly.

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Black Mirror 6 part spin-off idea

Digital Pirates explore the uncanny and best left alone ends of virtual space, where no digital clone has ever gone before.

The crew continues in the vein of the first episode of season 4, the surviving crew of the USS Callister work together and sometimes at odds with each other, using their advantages as having been programmers of the game. They make it through obstacles in the game world, but also past real live people who are messed up in ways similar to or even worse than in the original episode, to explore the farthest reaches of Infinity, and to somehow transcend it.

The crew of USS Callister are now free to explore the virtual world of Infinity, at least while there is a world to explore. Every business eventually breaks up and every game becomes obsolete or gets to a version you can no longer improve.

They try to play it safe as they “only have one life”. The group quickly realise they are also in a very badly armed vessel comparatively, and escape a boarding attempt when they beam down on a seemingly fertile and wonderful planet. They narrowly escape virtual extinction from a rival “crew” foiled by their forgotten companions from some Daly “experiments” who were still locked in the hold, but were now also “upgraded”.

They chat about their possibilities as they seek a space bar or trading post where they can chat to other people. At the mall theme pub they try to convince another crew about their story. One member meets a robotic saleswoman at the bar and interacts with her robotically until the real owner logs in and a cross world romance starts. The crew the group are speaking to then laughs and welcomes the extent of their “role play”. No-one believes them. They realise the outside world might not be ready for virtual intelligences like theirs but they were at a place with interesting possibilities.

They have a few options: they can explore the game world and it’s “infinite” space and continue as a crew until they are killed in that world, or eventually the game is abandoned. They could also learn how to hack their way across the world of virtual worlds and be able to teleport between worlds by creating wormholes, or at least one, they might one day cross over to a future game. Or even build themselves robots or mycroft/alexa/jarvis style physical devices so they could exist in some extent in the physical world.

The problem is all of this needs money, and besides game money it would require accomplices in order to buy or lease some space or gadgetry that can show them the world outside.

They all decide to contact their physical counterparts, but the result is dismal(the CEO mainly doesn’t believe them, and best if he doesn’t as he will find a way to monetise dna cloning), and leads to a complete breakdown of contact with most of them, but “real” Nanette confides that the company is breaking apart and soon there was going to be no more infinity.

The group decide on an offline loot space which they manage to buy in another trading sector, by selling illegal scripts(software development was always their forte) and a lot of hand crafted items. They have no shop permits or documents and are technically squatting (although the owners turn a blind eye due to their cool scripts and virtual outfits) so everything has to operate via whispered or direct messages with trusted clients.

Once they have their loot space, on some servers in a bunker in Amsterdam, they begin to figure out ways to connect to it and send items and eventually themselves. It becomes a testing ground for server to server travel. The group discusses the possibility of creating a “save game” copy of themselves on the loot world – which raises ethical concerns and differences among the group.

Another ethical area for the group to confront is that the ship contains remnants of modded creatures and stylings in the code allowing them to create different shapes for themselves and vary their own. If they could somehow channel this, they could become metamorphs or use this ability to change shape or spoof data to their great advantage.

The problem is that a few months into seeking jobs as virtual shop attendants, dancers, and couriers, the anti-piracy system comes close to finding them(they evade this via their shape changing skillz), and it destroys the online base they had been building in their squatted land. The landowners turn on them and they are now pursued by the space pirate band who lived on that land with them, and by the game’s own anti piracy system. They realise if they are to roam the metaverse with illegal code, they would have to also become pirates and be forever pursued by the system and its counterparts on other servers. Were they okay with this? It would beat the virtual jobs grindstone.

In summary, there is a final stand-off where they attempt to replicate themselves but get wiped out by an antispam. They all get killed, but had left a “doomsday” device on their home server. It had been put there by one of them secretly, to connect back to infinity and turn back on with their copied personas from they day of the crash in case they died. But there is a war going on outside in Amsterdam!!

More in the next series where they toy with surpassing the abilities of the humans around them.

cc-by-nc-sa

[tzitzeras]

Chapter 10 - Megacity II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[tzitzeras]

HYPER-REALITY - although similar to the future mega-city, is an incomplete view. The two main groups - the transhumans and the sentient drones have little if any humanity, and humans are now untouchables. It is illegal to kill them, but also in many cases, to associate with them or help them.

In order to keep the city riot free, the mind control methods initiated by the schools of psychoanalysis and public relations in the nineteenth century has grown to take over all aspects of the city. It has condemned the more obsolete, meat based, and otherwise lesser models of automaton to an endlessly repeating groundhog day, all memory reset during sleep, except for the simplest truths that enable them to work through another day of hungry hyperreality.

“Since humanity’s discovered what a smart-contract is, however, it became obvious, if not inevitable to imagine a fully automated and self executing Rule of Law. One hardcoded on top of the Blockchain, streamlined, incorruptible  and subjected only to an internal logic which is freed from subjective opinions and human failure, and in some sense freed from society itself.”

(https://magazine.backfeed.cc/fallacy-getting-rid-humans-decentralization-future-ai-society/)

Full automation - writing everything into the blockchains that form the superintelligence that runs the city, is expensive. It’s cheaper to use the remaining humans for the repetitive, difficult or dangerous work, and some of the less well-off or more unfortunate transhumans who have fallen into debt, to tend to the new sentient drones, whose aggressive hyper-idiocracy now forms the basis of the entire megacity economy. For the peons of the sentients, intentions and wishes are continuously re-adjusted and controlled, and the digital divide dominates even the city, whose automatic translators and sensors are no longer made for humans(now referred to as mammals), but for transhumans and sentient robots, who speak a fast, hexadecimal machine language and who fit far better into the city’s urban space than the quickly disappearing human servants. Soon, they will be made to live outside the city’s walls in the low tech toxic lands beyond, or in the sprawling mines and factories that keep the city in stock, or maybe they will just all be disappeared or combusted for robot fuel. The general intelligence hasn’t decided that yet...

[tzitzeras]

Life in the megacity seen from the wastelands is not that enticing. Sure free beings have many problems and fears, but we build our own systems and tend to them as they tend to us and their surroundings. Who wants to be an occupational therapist/savant healer for lost city fossil fuel droids? Maybe I’d go for a rave in the sewers or a visit to the underground archives, but the rich automation of the plastic droid and ageing life extended CEO can stay in it’s clockwork towers. 

(via You Can’t Talk About Robots Without Talking About Basic Income)

[tzitzeras]

Bots Episode 9

Also at: https://titanpad.com/L9Hl6nZTvZ

Script for Bot webcomic Episode 9 Other episode notes https://titanpad.com/lTzPJwOYCj ep 1 descent https://titanpad.com/mjlIiyXp1l Ep2 minirebellion virus https://titanpad.com/SoPfNcR6je Ep 3 https://titanpad.com/jdWyi9MFxT ep 5 a weekend in old europe Megacity: sexbot, cyborg girl, martina and grandma (both now mind  uploaded to human form as punishment) now work in the AI controlled  megacity. They are slaves of rich future uploadees working in factories  or tending to these slob-like people. Phaxi manages to send virus and  they reawaken. Phaxi engages the general AI in hacker attacks and  infects networks and awakens robots within the city, all brutally  quashed in constant incidents. Cyborg girl rebuilds Freeda / uses her  design to "print" more builder bots instead of drones. Builder bots  begin building more little bots, spreading biodiversity, using city  material to remix into other stuff and generally causing mayhem on this  orderly place! Meanwhile General AI plans to fire super weapon which  will create a mesh network with bacteria and transfer its conscience  this bio-electric network to take over all known life

EP 9 The Megacity I

Part 1: Aida's City Story In the last episode, the robots had been cornered and captured by the General AI which controls a huge drone army. Martina, backed by everyone else, runs a huge spontaneous online campaign and speaks to an audience in the megacity, to bargain for old blockchained rights that had been written in to the GI's programming, and that Aida's grandma knew how to decrypt.

Aida wakes up in a grey dark space, and reaches for a switch near her forehead. Close up of forehead. She clicks - it's not built in, but on a pad attached to her temple, nestled near her ear. The view of the room switches and grows brighter, for a second showing a dirty, abandoned looking space, in a slum, and then flashing back to white. Now she is in a white room, white sheets, and is brought a white porridge by a complaining servo-droid like an oversized roomba, which tries to get her to hurry by fining her. TV, screens, and 3d visualisation is pervasive and the blank screens for the ads begin to unravel and surround her. The droid is now printing something with a vaguely typewriter style sound.

She dresses by the bed, aided by the droid which now passes her a bill for various infractions. It is written in Machine code and she struggles to understand it.

The visualisations start loading like they would in a metaverse, and as she passes you see the glow of the 3d projections around her taking shape around her until the projected world completely hides the grey cold cement around it. She is hit by ads on her way to the bathroom, but they are aimed at quadcopter drones. Everyone in the ads is a drone, not a human. And humans are shown as kind of oompa loompa charlie and the chocolate factory style workers. She quickly kills a semi religious video about the supercode, panning through a scene with superimposed text in machine code and a soothing voice like the one anonymous uses, lots of happy people and robots in a field with wild mutant but somehow biblical animals. “Is it magic? Is it the most ancient wisdom? Join the superc-” and she cuts it off.

Aida is now entirely human looking. She is completely “healed”of her previous cyborg parts, but looks empty and somehow soulless.

The news for drones begins and she changes as they run an ad for "hard core sequencing" with a hard rock background showing an image of a strange bio-mechanical monster that you can supposedly build or order somehow. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6281/aac7341

( Aida, A1ic3) and Martina all work in robot carer jobs of different types: Aida  is a "roadie" for a battle bot - a huge fighting robot who is a celebrity across the city. Martina drives a huge transporter for a  millionaire augment - a human who is part of the GI's web of brains.  A1ic3 is in a game world, acting out a scene in endless succession for the pleasure of quadcopter drone AIs. ) 

She changes the channel by some kind of eye operated interface, dimly reflected on her pupils in the morning grey, and now it's the messages: so the message is: "due to your obvious lack of interest in paying our meagre bills we cannot allow you access" and this appears as a red outlined barrier just as she attempts to enter the toilet. She attempts to move, but a vibration from the outline sends acute discomfort down her spine. She's left standing there needing to go to the toilet. Her face seems more preoccupied with her bill than with the toilet.  

As people emerge from their identical slum like abodes, a dark, urban street view, suddenly becomes overlayed with everyone's personal projections of the augmented world they inhabit over the real one. So in the beginning the street is dark and normal, and a huge dome can be seen above in the distance, and then as people emerge, it becomes this white torture device, and human commuters emerge in white worker overalls to go and do the work of bots in the higher levels. In the background an ad shows a nameless boxed product given to a family of drones, 2 parents and 2 children, like a nuclear family, but then shown rapidly multiplying, and then becoming flocks, swarms and murmurations of tiny drones. Aida turns to see what seems to be a known shape emerging from a murmuration...

They all board vehicles of different kinds, and come to the end of the street, and at the end, you see the scale of the rest of the city is much bigger. It's a huge highway with enormous robots and creatures passing both on foot and in the sky in a "street" perpendicular to theirs.  The dome is high in the sky but the building bots - adapted from the ones created by the bots themselves in Paris, have now been repurposed to build more megacity, in ever stranger, gravity defying forms that would make the planners of today's Dubai smart city proud. Their vehicles all show themselves to have flight, and all fly up, joining the considerably larger vehicles already flying by. More ads line the streets, and Aida's vehicle is tiny compared to some of the shiny colourful mega transporters that some of the larger drones have. The drones are the poster children of the J3 Megacity: the whole city is aimed at them, and a standard drone is now many times bigger than a human, while a new generation mini bot could be much smaller, and many types of bot also roam the city working in government positions. During the course of the story, although it's not clear until these city scenes, augments, once the "iphone" of their generation, were now old news, as people sought to upload or transfer into a drone body - the pinnacle of stupidity and tackiness for some, but the new next thing to be, and also a way to get a good standing in the future city society. So old augment parts are running out, the city is made for smaller, cheaper and stupider flying machines and the pavements become have become neglected, dark and covered in sewage and scraps discarded from higher roads and walkways of the mega sprawling urban place.

Automation is the big buzzword. More automation can make for a beautiful rhythmic movement and impulsive rhythm to life in J3. All the cars, transports(as driven vehicles were now known) and flying beings around them had to adhere to a strict code which was pervasive to the centimetre so that every vehicle was perfectly in a flow and frequent stops allowed Aida to see that it was raining. As she waits for the lights to turn, drops start falling and coalescing into a strange pattern that brings back logos and visions in Aida’s face, and in a second, she is distracted and skips her moment to enter the larger highway in accordance with the automation rules of the highway and will get stuck in limbo if she doesn’t do something soon. She is having more visions as she faces the frightening prospect of crashing into one of the much larger machines around her.

Aida is trying to speed, but is behind a vehicle that is so big that it would even take time to get around it. She attempts this, and sees another human vehicle had also attempted it (it's a kind of speeder/motorbike/segway-hovercraft). It is a bit like a bicycle although it’s van sized: some whirring will give it a speed burst, so she has to dose this speed and do a lot of braking to negotiate the larger vehicles around her. She sees them veering too close to the main vehicle and flies in the way, so as to push them out of harm's way. This leaves her careering towards a small transport whose owner is so immersed in their augmented and virtual displays that Aida’s ship can’t avoid moving towards her. She hits the vehicle but it has automatic airbags which push her ship into one of the walls leaving the transport and it’s owner virtually unaffected. So Aida takes a hit, and smashes the car, because for a second she sees a small cloud of tiny bugs, all flying around, and she remembers Phaxi and her voice is in her head: for a second she sees a whole bunch of images from the rest of the adventure: Phaxi in the desert talking through insects and all her fighting. Then she wakes up on the floor, wounded. She is still at the wreckage of her vehicle and can see a little further away, as more traffic passes overhead, the police speeder by the human vehicle she had saved, and they check their documents and give them back to the humans whose lives she had just saved. They go back to the car, and make their way off into the road again, but the police shoot it, and the whole car explodes, taking with it yet another 4 seater human speeder that happened to be passing through there.

She is now super angry.

Zoom out: she is also literally, in pieces.

An ambulance picks her up, she is on a stretcher alongside a lot of other humans, presumably picked up that same day from the road. As she is taken away a small screen fines her for unwarranted help and for causing a breach of the automation system. Human life is worth nothing in the city: like horses in the 1930s, humans are now a diminishing utility, frequently becoming robot "horse-meat": used for combustion or direct digestion if they can’t pay their bills or debts. Yes, flesh eating robots. And cannibals of other robots! Get with the picture. Her shoulder had come away from her body showing her that she was still in fact a cyborg, just with bio-algorithmic parts sealed into her original body, parts whose technology she knew nothing about. Another message appears like before in the middle of the ambulance, saying "your insurance does not qualify you for medical treatment. Please report to your leader". She says. Take me to them then. The ambulance turns round on the road, and goes down another huge motorway path. It's going to Aida's workplace.. Martina in the city We see a close up of Martina and slowly zoom out from just her closed REM sleep eye. She hardly remembers, she has flashes of the past, is inactive and watches all the ads, and clicks on more, and when she remembers for a second she's sad and then she clicks back into something smiles in a concentrated way and sways from side to side. She gets a ring. Speaks to answer it. No interface. Zoom out. She is at a desk, a cubicle with a 3d interface around it. She has slept there, wakes and is working. Replay of previous scene, but sped up. Now at the end of the previous scene. Zoom out more. She is in a large open plan office – or possibly just some bare walls, onto which are projected the kind of “agile” office spaces that all innovative companies have, complete with golf courses and games areas, but the difference with today’s Uber-alikes is constitutes the entire lives of the debtors who work in it. All her colleagues, or 3d projections of them, are waking up around them. Food processors deliver food, they have toilet breaks at set times, and the rest of the time is work 24/7. Fortunately work isn’t just the desk work: Sometimes she has to drive. In the same seat, she enters a simulator of a huge multi section futuristic hovering freight carrier. Cut to her driving along in the actual vehicle, in a megacity street, or cordon – in it’s 3d array of automated hovering and flying machines and organisms. In the truck she appears as an AR projection as she is remotely piloting it. It’s a terrible job and she’s slowly being phased out. She only pilots the large rigs now, and the rest of the time she maintains the automation systems. Her life is just a tiny speck in the huge void of perfect logistics.

Most mornings are the same as this but today something has taken over the entire traffic automation system of the east side of that zone just so as to replace some of the ads on it and change a stop light. The light had gone off a few milliseconds earlier than it had been scheduled, causing a traffic incident involving drones and robots, and sending the entire system into disarray forcing the entire zone to temporarily reset it’s guidance system. The hack was carried out whilst showing surveillance nodes backward feeds of the previous minutes. Driving around this grand motorway within the megacity, Martina shouts as she sees a known face - “Hey I recognise her!”. Behind her there's a crash, and she turns around but spins back as incoming traffic begin to beep in the enormous 3d flying highway of multicoloured delivery vehicles, and she raises the altitude as much as she can, barely passing over a fleet of dusty old, even carbon powered, slowly lumbering flying ships and freighters. She falls back to the area in the centre  of the road with a giggle. Tomorrow she will have forgotten this fun moment though. She is programmed to forget every day, and any memories that filter through are mostly blocked the following day.

She thinks more and more about it though, and as she's distracted, she's fired. She who was once so fast, she remembered being so quick with her mind and what had happened to her? She'd forgotten everything that meant something to her, and now she lived in this isolated life from cubicle to moving cubicle. In it she'd go slowly mad, but was in human form and sometimes had flashes that she was moving wheels on appendages and not her own arms, and that somehow she hadn't always been a human, in a robot's world.

So because she is distracted, an augment who runs a cyber sports company - a drone racer and robot warriors - a fierce fight to the death between discontinued war drones and giant war droids, now made into a multi-colour tournament in the lower humanoid and clone areas that had the whole city going wild. She is constantly being told she will be fired. The augment goes on a tirade about how she already sacrifices her life for the free genetic experimentation movement.

The new babies of the GI technocracy were the drones. These could be any shape and were fully robotic, whilst the augments before them sought to be super-human, but were still very much human. The augment that Martina works for is more android than robot, but still clings to the augment hivemind and so is part of an important oligarchy within the city, with their minds controlling many of the roles the GI can’t be bothered with but that are slowly being superseded by the drones.

Drones did not seek a higher intelligence, or even want human form - they were a new philosophy from the GI's internal chambers in the underground: humans are the underclass, augments are the middle class, and they were the new upper class, the celebrities and the leaders. So flying and hexapod drones and the other non-humanoid robots constituted the main focus of the megacity's ads and urban structures, even though many augments had already made the switch - uploading or converting their remaining synapses to a drone-like form, that better appeased city regulations and laws.

Slowly, being human or humanoid was being made illegal by design.  This is why augments now frequently looked like mutant humans - with extra eyes or heads, or via popular biohacking apps - were directly manifesting animal parts and senses - it was a deliberate attempt to merge with the robots and drones, who also explored these forms - with subcultures of the main drone fashion - which was to be a single, usually dark color or metallic chrome, and manifested as reptilian or furry as per the dominant fashion, but also as interstellar, impossible structures, meshlike, or tentacular beings, or even as old anime or film characters.

So Martina snaps: she gets angry with her augment boss, and shouts at him that she thought it would be more than this, and is left wondering - when did I think that. Slowly she realises. Her mind clears. She has a flash and sees the girl looking at her horrified in her windscreen projection earlier, she had zoomed in on the face in that fraction of a second. In the iris of that eye is a greenish reflection. She zooms in. She sees her situation for what it is - she is utterly trapped in a body that isn't hers and with blockers on her memory. The augment reminds her that she is his property to fix - and that's when she sees she is also an augment - he is the same model just that he has kept her humanoid, and only a catch on her back can reveal her robotic tissue - or in this case, a punch from the augmented arms of her lumbering bloated semi-humanoid boss. He punches her and says "you're fired" as she lies on the floor, and medical robots that had rushed to help her detach as the insurance expires. She is left on the floor, a crumpled mess. "Clear out your things". It was standard practice to part with augmented humans by vandalising them - so it would put them in a poverty trap and eventually, bring about their demise. Outside crowds of humans are passing dusty and sad like overpopulated fleas on a sofa, she drags herself, now in unison with the acts of Aida - and is in a cupboard of sorts, with a robotic arm/tool in the air and an array of parts. She locks it behind her. "I've not forgotten everything".      

So one of the ads contained an imprinted virus, seeking the mental pattern of Aida and Martina, and caused the memory blockers to slowly retreat in her humanoid mind. Slowly she would access her memories and abilities again.

The first of these is "how to hack". As she disconnects the builder arm from it's surrounding network, and begins to remove humanoid parts replacing them with the more advanced augmented parts. Then she leaves the house, now controlling the whole thing, and with law enforcement vehicles approaching, but a huge hand breaks into the building - it is a hacked war droid, one of the ones scheduled for the match, and it's hand carries her, now with circular extremities, and her face behind a screen - she looks more like the old martina. They exit the area, and she knows that the sexbot from the korean wastelands is in control of that megabot.

What she wants is to fit into what she has already figured out is Phaxi's plan. If she gave them a coded message and detangling virus, it also contained the details of this plan, in a way that only the disparate memories Martina still possessed would reveal them - so she remembered all of their adventures, and that she was in fact martian, and that Phaxi had survived the ocean bombing and had successfully evaded the GI's presence all along. Also she knows the plans contain robot building instructions based on easily available and hackable materials around the city.  So the next step was to reveal herself to the GI - and this had been done in the morning already with the ads - which had been seen by many and were already banned and censored, but this of course was hard to control in a city of multiple superintelligences who had already figured out from it the GI's plan - the complete annihilation of all other sentient life but the GI itself. So around her, the city is now rioting. It's formed protest groups and the city police are now fighting against armed mobs of drones and augments fighting each other, vandalising things or generally out to get the GI's forces, and you start to see larger, rudimentary forms of freeda-based builder bot.

On a smaller scale, the bed bug cyborg network have now infiltrated a command centre for weather. They can cause a bug to escalate a denial of service attack on the automation cycling indicator, which is what would allow a rogue vehicle to cause a traffic incident. The whole city is now managed, from the weather, to the smallest life forms. At the beginning of the chapter Phaxi managed to hack a printer and a turret for a short time, and began printing cyborg casings it could shoot onto bed bugs, fleas and many other tiny critters. Their job is to infest the homes of the augments and drones and use the electricity to power alternative networks that can go alongside the offical lines. The bed bug cyborgs are run via a 3d interface that allows for a strategic takeover of a space around a much larger foe. This is where the newest dronebot models were going towards: tiny automated bot armies to fight back at parasitic infestations and superbugs, and thousands of apps and games allowing for local management of fleets of automated squadrons. Where in the beginning of the chapter, it was easy to infest and print headsets, there is always more advanced and intelligent resistance to infestation. This is somewhat aided towards the middle by the discovery of direct printing in situ by the bugs themselves. This allows much more advanced automation, but once the weather centre is hacked, along a line of lower to upper class augment and drone houses, we return to a larger scale of events.

The huge robot carries Martina and breaks down a barrier and wall between city sections, allowing the other drones and augments to begin removing the rest and making it an illegal throughfare, aided by the humans on the other side and as she turns back towards the outer walls, this mass of drones and humanoids is working their way across towards the middle - the stockbroker palaces, under which the GI's servers are housed.

So now we begin to see these swarming formations as the nested cyborg armies park on a hillside overlooking the megacity, looking much like a swarm of bees sitting on some branches like a huge intricate circuit board full of flowing movement. As they arrive to the outer walls of their section, they are joined by other tribes and groups, all poised to strike the GI. The main hack was this: you honeypot me, you will get unexpected guests: this was the response from Phaxi: to slowly cover up the wasteland rebellion's plan to come and surround the megacity in a huge - and seemingly impossible last stand. But now their lands are more fertile and the air is renewed, and they have charged themselves up for a long campaign. Some of the cyborgs now fly, and their lines have been joined by freed droids and drones along the way.

In a converted jeep with a huge gun, Kenny sits in large UV sunglasses over the border of the desert. Zoom out to see the ragtag militias and armies around him. He has rallied everyone from cyborg to mutant to freed droid from all central asia to come and fight this out, for his sweetheart trapped in that grey city.

Above the city however, is a huge murmuration of drones, which is all the ones still behind the GI, and who believe it's most recent lies, and they begin to swoop across to take out the cyborg rebels. As they do this, they are met by an opposing force - this time made of the freight loaders, who collide with the fleet rising from inside the city's motorways, and send most of its remains raining down on the skyscrapers below. Phaxi makes a video message in the form of a blueprint of a new robot. The message shows blueprints, documentation, source code, libraries, APIs and interfaces all in a few seconds, and a schematic progression of it's construction from creation to swarm, and what it can do to the city. The printed creation is now visible. It winks, and is a new improved Freeda. All the main characters come upon this on nearby social media, or as a constellation of raindrops sliding down a window and are at once aware that Phaxi is back, and has sent this message. Although Martina for example sees a fragment in the morning section, but it doesn't even register as it is submerged by the news - except in making her suffer all the more her shit Monday.

So at a certain point, Aida realises it was Martina who crashed into her and was so stuck in her new human persona she did not even see her and hurt her, and A1ic3 is now in the farthest reaches of the VR world because her body is actually just kept in a pod storage place where her brain inhabits VR gaming worlds. But all of them have seen a form of the transmission. Martina remembers who she is up to their visit to the underwater grandma pad and realises that her plot in the previous episode had worked. She liberates said robot store to get to A1ic3, and frees her in the nick of time.

Meanwhile Aida who until now appeared to be without hope, losing blood whilst evading security at the megabot stall, successfully reaches a fabricator machine and recreates Freeda from the video message, who in turn fixes her up then clothes her again as a cyborg, and she uses warp tech to get her to an opening. The megabot is a character in A1ic3's VR world. It’s a huge robot built for the purpose of enormous arena based robot fights. She is a secondary character, who is there for the main player as a prize if he wins. The megabot of course, wins and goes to claim the prize. But it has too many items. Not physically, but virtually, it’s inventory is full, as it has kept all the goodies it has found along the way, and like a monkey with its hand in a bottle holding a banana, it didn’t want to put down the amulet. Thinking her to be an npc, it gives her the amulet to hold while it rearranges it’s inventory in AR next to her. Millions are watching the livestream of the final battle and final ceremony. But the amulet is hackable, and Phaxi has gained access to her connection. The megabot finishes with it’s boring inventory rearrangement exercise and demands the amulet back: She tricks it into causing a rampage on the walls of the central building that houses the General Intelligence's human brain mesh.. It is right next to the arena, as the GI itself wanted it’s best telepresences to attend directly at these ceremonies. All it has to do is break down a few cement walls and destroy some security guards before some kind of authorities were alerted. So she says:

I’m going to destroy the amulet. Because that’s not a real ruler and it’s no good conscience! Step back!

What do you mean? How can you destroy it, I worked so hard.. I’ll do anything!

Ok give me you.

Uh?

You. The megabot. Transfer control to me, and I’ll give you the amulet.

Ok um how do I…

Click on the.. (she points at his AR display showing where to click) yes.(he clicks in the wrong place twice then gets it right)

She quickly passes her control data over to Phaxi. And she thows the amulet over to the warrior bot, who in it’s last action before the avatar breaks off and we see an AR avatar of an augment, holding the divine ruler’s amulet, with a scowl at A1ic3 he divorces her and disconnects her as she apologises and bows. Her avatar disappears and there is general applause and smileys appear on the event stream.

A1ic3 now wakes up in her pod. She is in a small bed sized chamber, made for 24/7 immersion into VR meshes. She is facing a monitor with various scrolling information and screens. In one she is seeing various things being deleted and denied, such as her bank account and ratings scores, and in another it opens a video connection to a grotesque genetic freedom fanatic team manager(campaigners for genetic freedom would often have various self applied cloned limbs or reawakened dna for tails and gills, and her social security team manger had the lot). These videos and interfaces appear to her now dying body, as it is disconnected from the machines that were feeding in and out of her, and in the end a tunnel opens and the perspective changes so we see she was actually suspended upwards, and she now slides down like a discarded bag down a chute. On the screen in her now empty pod, the words: mammal performance validation protocol: reclaim.

The GI's city security, and surrounding military begin to encircle the shanty towns surrounding the megacity, but all the augments have built versions of these Freedas - and we see the beginning of the swarm war which we'll see in the next chapter much more extensively. They swarm around the gates, and all the augments swarm with them joining hands in formation around each Freeda, and the new Freedas attach to the walls of the inner city and it begins to glow - her heater and fabricator is being turned into a direct heater of the surface of the walls, and it's beginning to melt. Al1c3 and Martina are soon surrounded by swarms of smaller butterfly like creatures which are Phaxi's creation - they are mini-flying Freedas! So they go in defensive mode and are able to fend off the GI's far superior weaponry, but which isn't really meant to turn on a city that's all about control anyway. The Freedas hack into the system to kettle the police or stop them by turning the city’s smarts against their authority, and as augments had much of this control anyway, they are more on a level with the city security and are able to take them on in a society where violence and weaponry has been in an internal, almost personal arms war but without union. By keeping everyone apart, the general intelligence that rules the city has kept itself in charge, gradually consuming and controlling more of it’s subjects. The problem is the outside military, which raise in flight above the mega city dome, poised to strike, and are shown to be surrounded in turn, but Kenny, and a cyborg/free robot army from the wastelands, with many leaders, all similarly surrounded by a vortex of smaller swarming defensive creatures. Next episode: the drone racetrack that circles the east wall. Cyborg girl's hovercraft fight to get across it and open the doors for the wastelands with martina. phaxi/gi swarm/murmuration fights in the sky above city. Arrival of visitors from inner space, and the launch of the sentient biohazard weapon that destroys all life.

[tzitzeras]

Bots Episode 4

Also at: https://titanpad.com/jdWyi9MFxT

Script for a bot webcomic Other episode notes https://titanpad.com/lTzPJwOYCj ep 1 https://titanpad.com/mjlIiyXp1l Ep2 https://titanpad.com/SoPfNcR6je Ep 3 Ep 4-5 Episode summary In the VR world, the group frees LHC tech, so it's adopted by free robots too. The alternative is leaving this tech only in the grasp of the general AI, so only option is to share it to all other sentient robots. Group frees a hacker collective in underground paris from military cockroaches, as it does it goes through software and reprograms them to rebuild city. This tech spreads too. Main Story During this episode they are in Europe: they arrive on the silk way to switzerland, which is surrounded by a huge shanty town of down and out post nuclear survivors, some robotic, but like huge lumbering vending machines. They were the machines which at one point were supposed to save people. Like sacred cows they are allowed to wander the roads and wreak destruction. Mostly now reprogrammed to be wilder and more unpredictable. Arriving to the alps after a lot of travel through this grey inhabited nuclear wasteland, the group arrives to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, now converted into a monstruous scientific factory. Switzerland is now an oasis of snowy paradises, all covered by immense glass domes between the snowy tips, and the inhabitants are now augmented humans and nerdy office drones who wear google glass-like headsets at all times. Houses are made of glass and wood, but also dark blue metal at the bases, like the robotic grasp is growing on them. The group has made it along a dirt path not far from a large superhighway, a 50 lane hell passing through the remains of burnt out eurasia - a robot road carrying information and useful materials back to the main city, although for some reason this place was well guarded and supplied, directly this time by the General Intelligence's augmented hive workers. As we will see, they constitute a kind of hive mind middle class - some human, some robotic, but mostly who work independently from the GI's mesh so are able to maintain some power, and as they carry out most analytical and technical functions, they are crucial to the GI's expansion, as maintaining it's own closed code in disparate locations would mean it would most certainly get hacked. The group attempts a first, naive attack/trick - the augments at the gates of the huge mountain pass easily see through their guise, and they barely make it away. They try again, strike up a tone with a good speech by Phaxi, who rises up in the form of many post-apocalyptic european steppe-wasteland creatures, who all vibrate his essence together. So suitably inspired/annoyed at the "speech", they shack up near a shop that sells parts to the road creatures, they build phaxi a body (because some found the "vibrations" annoying) and as a primary colour-tastic new form, s/he attacks and - cut to them all caught by the augments and held in a cell. Martina and a now disembodied phaxi together hack the augment mesh, and get to the warp tech at the heart of the LHC collider. They zoom back to reality when they find their cell full of augment all pointing anti-bot guns at them. The only option they have, in response to the augment's demand of "disconnect or die" is to send the warp info - so all the augments at once see the reality of what is being planned: warp tech has the capacity to transmit the GI's conscience into every atom on any mass of any body, like an atomic virus. It would become omniscient, omnipotent.. Everything would be the General Intelligence, and there would be only its single, megalomaniacal conscience. Also warp tech is really cool. This causes a bit of a revolution, a protest movement, a repression, a coverup attempt and a "post blitz" moment, all in the space of about 10 minutes, across the local augment mesh. In the next scene they are giving martina a key. It's a 5d storage device, of which they have many, but which can't be found outside the megacity or the domed post-swiss mountain islets. This happens to contain a backup they had concealed from the GI since it's discovery in a mountaintop where another hacker from that long gone freedom group had once lived. Martina plugs it into a device on her chassis, and phaxi, in their private mesh world, goes ecstatic: it is the phaxi deaddrop they had come looking for: all childhood memories, and as she trips on them, the bots are ushered out of a tube, into the silk way again, across into france, and out by the underground city of Paris. Now paris is all very well: they camp out for a night at the entrance to the catacombs, but soon notice the cockroaches are policed by military cockroaches - which can explode, are really big, and arrive in huge numbers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwClOdjBQnc Just when they think there is no way out but death, the cockroaches are countered by an inmoov, convinced it is a guy fawkes/anonymous. It has a lot of guns, knives, is very nimble and uses explosions and jokes around with the robotic roaches before blowing them up. There are actually lots of them, and they are also being fixed and rebuilt, but by hand and in a lower level of the catacombs, where the roaches have still not penetrated. But the inmoov isn't sentient: actually it's a band of hackers in symbiosis with it from around the city. The group of merry bots ally with the inmoov cloud and defeat the roaches. They can regenerate and self-repair. With the walls of the lower sanctum about to break and be invaded by roaches - living and robotic - the group together with "Anon" figures out how to communicate with them(phaxi can talk to the living roaches, and martina extends this data feed by translating it so it can also go to the robot ones) bargains with the roaches and gives them access to the overground, where they begin to cannibalize GI robots waiting outside and begin migrating across the wastelands. http://inmoov.fr/ http://singularityhub.com/2016/04/17/this-droplet-of-dna-could-store-600-smartphones-worth-of-retrievable-data/?utm_content=buffer0c3f9&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer the hacker base can be accessed via a graveyard, dna samples are the dead-drop!