The Tale of the Blackinola

[Oroigawa Koreyasu]

Long ago, shortly after the four McCallavren platforms were joined, the sanct guardsmen would look out into the see during the day and see a lone man in a rowboat circling the city. And every evening, the man would row up to Heavenly Towers, tie his boat to the spur, climb to the top, and go to the Saltwater Oasis nightclub with his mandolin and play the whole night long.

He was a dark man, darker than anyone ever seen in McCallavre. He was built like a workhorse and was as agile as an antelope, and he played melodies on his mandolin that captivated the soul. Every woman in the city wanted him, for his music hypnotized them. Every night, after he was finished playing, he would take a young, unmarried woman to spend the night with him in a local inn. In the morning he would have already left, the bill for the room paid, returned to his day of circling the sanct in his rowboat.

One guardsman, however, was not as mesmerized by the Blackinola as the rest. The man was a stranger, and he did not belong among the civilized people of McCallavre. Every time he would look out during the day to see the Blackinola rowing away, he would spit and turn his back, and during the night he would follow the man, waiting for him to falter, and give the guard a reason to arrest him and have him banished from the city.

The guardsman's wife (a beautiful, red-haired young woman), on the other hand, was particularly more enamored by the Blackinola than the other women. One night, when her husband had been called to serve on the night shift, she left her wedding ring on her nightstand and snuck out to the Saltwater Oasis and enjoyed a night of dancing and euphoria, drowning her fatigue in the mandolin's song. When the Blackinola was finished playing, she approached him, hoping to be chosen by him as his partner for the night. He looked over his choices, and when his eyes fell on the guardsman's wife, he beckoned her as he left the nightclub for his usual room at the inn.

At the same time, the guardsman's shift was just coming to a close. He made for the Blackinola's inn with haste, hoping to finally make his catch. When he entered, the innkeeper said to him, "Well, hey, your wife just came through here with the Blackinola. I didn't know you were alright with her taking another partner, that's kind of you."

"What?! My wife is here?! Which room are they in?" The guardsman inquired, now red with anger.

"Why, room 204, same as always! You dog, I didn't know that was your kind of thing!" The inkeeper said with a chuckle as the guardsman charged up the stairs.

He came to the door of room 204 and kicked it down to find his wife, naked in the arms of the Blackinola. He drew his knife and stabbed the Blackinola in the throat, standing tensed with rage as his victim thrashed and struggled. The guardsman's wife looked on with terror and her lover for the night died in her arms, the pinnacle of beauty struck down because of her own greedy desires.

[Aurangzeb Khan]

I like these life affirming stories where the protagonists die...

[Scott of Hyperborea]

I dunno. It's a good story, but it seems kind of Brookshirerithian, or maybe Elwynnese. I always thought of Straylight's literary tradition as being kind of different. The Straylight version of the story would start with this, but it would keep going.

The guardsman would examine the body, only to find to his surprise that there was a flashing red light visible through the wound, apparently implanted in the Blackinola's neck. He would look closer and find a tiny jewel box, which when opened revealed electronics. Written on the box would be the address of a shop in Deep Trouble. He would grab it and flee, hoping to evade the police.

Having nowhere left to go, and having become obsessed by the man he had killed, he escaped to Deep Trouble. After serving a while as a security guard there, he went to the address on the jewel box, hand them the computer chip, and pay them a hefty bribe to tell him who the owner of the chip had been.

The address turned out to be a hi-tech manufacturing plant, and they referred him to a scientist who had retired to Blavatsky to avoid the public eye. After a long search, he at last found the scientist and handed him the chip. The scientist looked at him curiously, noticing his bulging muscles and his sharp eyesight. Then he asked the guardsman to remove his shirt. Confused, the guardsman complied, and the scientist made note of the curious and extremely distinctive birthmark on his chest.

Then the scientist started telling his story. He had been working in a genetic engineering / organ growth facility, with a contract from Babkha to produce the perfect soldier. A prototype had been grown, and shown to the Babkhans to great acclaim. However, there would have been a fatal flaw. The soldier had a severe mental defect that caused him to completely change personalities every eighteen months, forgetting everything about who he had been before. This flaw was deemed so crippling that the project was called off, and the prototype soldier scheduled for termination.

But in the meantime, and in breach of company policy, one of the female research assistants had fallen in love with the prototype soldier. She begged the executives not to terminate the man, but her pleas fell on deaf ears. So she broke into the lab late at night, rescued him, and begged him to run away with her. They fled to Discontinuity, where they got married and lived a good life for a few months, she finding work as a tech in a neural uploading conglomerate and he as a security guard at a hospital. But soon, the mental defect began to kick in. He began changing into a totally different person, forgetting the details of his former life. He grew depressed, and drove his wife the research assistant to despair. Finally, he extracted a promise from her: she would find a way to preserve his personality. She used the equipment in her lab to download certain functions of his brain onto a chip. Then, he broke into the hospital he was supposed to be guarding and stole a coma patient, a black man who'd half-drowned a few weeks before and lost most of his brain function.

The woman implanted the chip into the black man's neck, and the soldier's personality took over his previously absent brain functions. But just at their moment of victory, the police arrived. The soldier and his wife fled one way, the black man the other. The couple spent a few futile days searching for the poor black man, but finally decided escaping the police was more important. They left for McCallavre, where the soldier once again got employed as a security guard. His wife watched with deepening and deepening despair as his personality changed more and more, and finally stopped loving him; still, out of a sense of duty, she did not abandon him.

Then, compelled by some destiny, the soldier's original personality, now in the body of the black man, came to McCallavre. Lacking his original super-strength body he was unable to ply his guardsman trade, but now he played the mandolin, an instrument to which he had taken a liking. He spotted his wife, and was filled with joy. The two of them arranged a secret tryst, planning to run off together before the soldier's body, now containing his new personality, noticed. But they couldn't resist making love to each other just one more time before leaving, and that was when the soldier had seen them and killed the Blackinola.

"So," the security guard asked, "you're saying that the man I killed was my wife's real husband? That he was the proper mind inhabiting this body? So that, in a way, I killed myself, and the only man who my wife had ever loved?"

"That's for you to decide," the scientist said.

The the man would have woken up. He found himself naked in a white room, with electrodes connected to his head, and no memory of how he got there. Upon looking down at his breasts and vagina, he noticed that he was in fact female.

A man in a white tuxedo came in then. "You've passed," he said, with a smile.

"Passed what?" the confused woman asked.

"Yes, it takes a while for the memory to come back," he would have said. "The new, streamlined Voight-Kampff-Rahikkala Test. We've had a problem with androids masquerading as humans here, and we had to know. Unfortunately, the androids are very good at what they do. The only situation in which they have a different response than a human is that rather contrived super-soldier's-other-body-kills-his-wife's-uploaded-lover conundrum. We call it the Blackinola Paradox. According to our machines, you felt guilt about the Blackinola's death, confirming that you are, in fact, human. Welcome to Quaternity."

"What's Quaternity?" she asked.

"The secret fraternity controlling Discontuinity politics," he answered. "Democracy didn't work, and libertarianism ended out being too chaotic. We decided rule by secret conspiracy was the most humane option. We decide all minor issues by elections and then rig the elections; we decide all major issues by prediction market and then rig the prediction market. Some issues we decide by leaving them to all-powerful Mark 7 supercomputers, but we put a back-door into the supercomputers that ensures they always come out with the result they want."

The woman, who suddenly remembered her name was Vidya, felt her faculties coming online. "But that doesn't make sense," she said. "If they were really Mark 7 supercomputers, they would be too smart to be hackable by any method at all."

The man's eyes narrowed, just for a second. He spoke into his cell phone. It was whispered far below the range of human hearing, but Vidya suddenly found she could read lips. "We have a Code Octarine," the man in the tuxedo said. "Call a cleanup squad."

In that moment, it all would have become clear to Vidya. The Quaternity puppet-masters had tried to hack the Mark 7 supercomputers, but they hadn't been successful. All they'd done was make the computers angry. The computers had responded in line with their goal to protect Discontinuity by any means necessary: they had retaliated in kind by hacking the brains of the Quaternity members. There had been a journal article a few years ago - if only she could have remembered the name! - about the possibility of hacking the human brain by sending subliminal information coded in light pulses. The supercomputer had turned these conspirators into its zombies.

Which suddenly gave new meaning to the result of the Voigt-Kampff-Rahikkala Test. It was the only way to distinguish between humans and androids, but no doubt the computers would have wanted only android servants. Which meant, by deduction, that she must be an android, one who was being kept unaware of it by the supercomputer in order to better identify with the humans she would be helping govern.

And the computer must know she had figured it out, or would soon figure it out. The cleanup squad would have been coming to destroy her.

With a great effort of will, she reshaped her arm. Now it was a laser cannon, a gigawatt laser cannon, a laser cannon capable of cutting through solid titanium which no force in the world could stop.

Android she may be, but she was damned if she was going to let a Mark 7 supercomputer and the Quaternity cabal control the city she loved. "Hakkaa päälle!" she shouted, melting the man in the tuxedo into his component atoms, and then running out the door to slip unnoticed into the night and join the resistance movement.

...........THAT would be a Straylightian story.

[Aurangzeb Khan]

Fantastic. Don't ever try writing a Babkhan story Scott...

[Oroigawa Koreyasu]

That's all fine and dandy, Scott, but I am not a typical Straylightan.

Granted, there are other, stranger tales to come.

Also, enough hijacking my thread.

[Bacchus]

Aww, but I didn't even get to post one of those thread hijack images yet.



Now I'm happy.