Ari's HUGE MEANDERING RANT

[Scott of Hyperborea]

Now publically available for the first time!

Scott, this one's for you. Do with it (and with what's in the wiki) what you will. (ignoring it might be a good idea for the sake of school and so ) Also, just as a warning... I always proofread my posts and try to fix their wording and complete all the broken sentences and such. Except when I write huge long posts late at night. Caveat lector.

First, though... you know how people call Straylight science fiction? Well... it is, but really, but it's not a very far-future kind of scifi. In most places it's high-end SL0 at most - the kinds of things that we'd be building all over the place on Earth if kiloscale engineering were easy and cheap. The AI in Backbone Site is pretty much the only thing that's really far-fetched, and it's a minor player, really.

The basic idea about Deep Trouble is that it's slightly more far-fetched scifi than the rest of Straylight, mostly in that its people are different. The technology isn't significantly different, it's just that in Deep Trouble, we've got long-running voluntary eugenics programs (perhaps occasionally augmented with small (~5-10) cloning runs for excellent genetic stock), minor genetic engineering, actually useful holistic childcare and education programs, bionics, rudimentary MMIs, etc..

It's your choice what you do with those things. I haven't really managed to even decide what kind of social dynamics the availability and acceptance of this technology creates. Here are a couple of choices I've been thinking of, though:

- There's a sharp distinction between the elite that knows about and understands how this all works, and a low-SL0 underclass that refuses to use, understand, or benefit from them (and even in the case they do go for something, say for instance they send their boy off at the age of three to be transformed into a SuperCitizen, they'll probably pick something that didn't actually work in the first place and only messes the kid up completely). The elite citizens are somewhat peaceful and altruistic among their own, but return the underclass's mistrust with arrogance, and there's even some violence between the two groups. This is the dynamic I was going for on the wiki page. With this, it'd have to be publicly known that there's some kind of strangeness going on in Deep Trouble, but the information could be heavily distorted to the point where nobody with the resources to research it is particularly interested.

- The whole city makes use of the technologies but they're rather unreliable. While the place is not exactly crawling with genetic mongrelfolk, it's common for people to be a little bit aristocratically messed up in the head, or just generally stupid. Perhaps someone's absolutely brilliant but only produces terrible offspring, while someone else happens to have a whole family of kids with enormous muscles (but maybe without the heart to run them?), that kind of thing. The social dynamic is meritocratic-medievalish, with equality considered a ridiculous concept. Deep Trouble is considered by outsiders to be just one nutty sanct among others.

- It all actually works. All 20000 or so citizens are transhumans commonly living to ages of 120-150, and actually happier, more productive, more rational, more intelligent, more consistently altruistic, that sort of stuff. Of course, this choice would be rather... UnStraylightian. And, as we'll soon find, superfluous.


You see, beyond all that transhumanism stuff, one theme that's interested me since forever is the idea of "the guy that's prepared for every situation". You probably don't remember that one character I once played in a Treesian RP thread who had a coatful of Pockets of Holding - he carried an enormous amount of small items with him, with something appropriate for almost every situation tucked away *somewhere*. If nothing else, a bonsai tree to throw at the head of an attacking dragon (I still haven't forgiven Bill for spelling that as "banzai", btw). It was a huge gimmick, yes, but could have proven fun if the thread had gone on for long enough... I hope...

Anyway, Deep Trouble needs these guys. Not people with a separate tool for everything, no, but people who are fast runners and even faster thinkers, and who do come equipped with a whole bunch of *well-hidden* equipment to get them through most situations. I'd say a couple of dozen of them, in a program that actually does know the facts about what results they want from breeding and how to find the right genetic material, one that actually can transform them from only slightly above-average children to truly exceptional agents of their cause (though I have no idea what that cause would be yet :P), and one that actually can get them some *nifty* bionics. Let's say about 12 of these guys. 20 at most. You know, few enough that they're all on a first-name bases, that always makes this kind of stuff more fun to work with

One possible name that I was thinking of for them was Kellersmen, because hey, if you're doing a lot of work to change mankind you're going to have to refer to the Germans in some way, and Keller is a very neat name .

A couple of ideas for what kind of stuff you'd find on a Kellersman:

- With a couple of rejuvenation treatments, they get very long-lived; let's say somewhere in the range of 200 or 300 years. Just to get them a little bit of time to learn their jobs and actually get some work done

- Fun ways to disguise oneself. I quote: "I always wanted the ability to rapidly grow facial hair. Like, really fast. So whenever someone is trying to be really stern with me, I can just have a blank look on my face and sprout a huge beard in a few seconds." So, how about a few fillable gas bags in strategic places under the skin (dunno how well the human skin stretches, but you might be able to pull off slight apparent changes in body weight), and retractable hairs? They sound rather low-tech but it would probably be a huge amount of work to get them to look right... but they'd be neat in any case.

- More reliable and useful pain signaling than the natural system provides. That is, a few filters on the right places in the neural tracks, to make sure that big shocks do always get noticed (whereas the natural system is known to sometimes leave unreported things like one's limbs getting sliced off), and distracting pain can be selectively filtered out and replaced with light white noise.

- Speaking of limbs getting sliced off, maybe a couple of arterial valves and bypasses in select locations so that, for instance, getting shot in the foot is only a minor inconvenience (merely enough to force you to replace that foot later)?

- To get into the really fun stuff... yeah, ubiquitous computing is... a thing. I don't know if there's anywhere *inside* the human body that's a useful place for mounting a computer, but then again the exact location doesn't really matter. The point here is to pretend you have arbitrarily much money to throw at the problem, so you can make the solution as fancy as you like within reasonable technological limits .
- how to interface with the user? I'm not very partial towards a "completely part of the mind" solution... but it's got to be *something* neat. Maybe a completely new sense? It's unfortunate that we're born with one set of sensory modalities that we never get to expand, that makes it a bit difficult to imagine a decent basis for a new one. However... I have an idea... find it at the end of this post, marked with a (*).
- how to interface with the outside world? I'd say... just carry something that looks like the http://www.picotux.com/ and communicates over RF with the internal computer? I'd rather try not to poke any extra holes in the Kellersmen' skins...

- A continuous satellite phone connection. Or local network if that's too amusing. In any case, the world's always available to them.

- Perhaps climbing the tech tree up a bit too high... but, respirocytes? Those things are just *cute*. Even something like an hour spent comfortably holding one's breath underwater would be mighty dandy

- Perhaps X-men territory... but, really, sometimes you just don't *want* a hole in the head, so, a reinforced skull? You can't really defend yourself against getting your whole body riddled with bullets, but perhaps the one thing you'll want to protect in a Kellersman is quite often the brain... (especially considering new rejuvenation techniques. The only death is information-theoretic death.)

- there would probably be more but I'm getting kinda exhausted...


Anyway, yeah. Those would be some of the actual, specific tools at their disposal. Then there would be some other good stuff... for instance, you know, training someone to be loyal is one thing, *building* him to be loyal is another. Assume that the ethical side just never appeared to be a problem to anyone, and of course, that should the issue come up, the Kellersmen would be *very* able to convincingly argue that they are moral subjects with complex feelings and all the things that really define humans, they just happen to *want* to serve their cause above everything else. It's kinda like wolves vs. dogs, except a Kellersman would be able to make you feel bad for comparing him to a dog and insinuating he has no dignity. If he needed to do that, that is.

In closing, the Kellersmen are kinda like the Hyperborean paladins, just fewer in number, even more ridiculously expensive per soldier, and involve some complete geek-outs in their conception. Sound good?


(*) Once, on an afternoon when pretty much all aspects of my sleep rhythm were synchronised to different periods, and I was desperately trying to push them all together to catch a few hours before an important occasion... I had a very strange, very abstract dream. I've forgotten the details long ago, but the drift is, I dreamed of graphs. You know, graphs as in graph theory, and more generally, as mathematical, Platonically immutable objects. I had this feeling of timelessness - while my viewpoint was hurtling along and I was viewing them in time, the structures themselves felt absolutely outside of it, and there were some moments when I sort of felt the same, too.

On different nights... well, you know, my hypnagogias, when I remember them (i.e. when I wake up from them) usually tend to be dream scenes, but my hypnopompias are almost always associations of voices, numbers, even geometric forms and such. And I could swear that a couple of times, they've simply been sentences, some kind of *pure* sentences of language, if such a thing is even definable: Not the shapes written on surfaces to represent language, not the sounds made by voiceboxes to represent language, but language itself. The idea of "a language inside the head" that's separate from written or spoken language seems... difficult, but desirable, to me. I don't know what research has been done into it, though.

Perhaps these kinds of ideas could be used to build an entirely different sensory modality? Something based on sets, graphs, or some other kind of mathematical objects? Maybe with an ability to "constantly perceive" a limited amount of them - kind of as if they were long-term memory, but not quite. It would be somewhat difficult to explain, though vision would be a somewhat close metaphor. Kinda. An abstract language sense could be a lot easier. Everybody's welcome to air their ideas.

(of course, they're going to also need a visual implant to sense visual data, too, so... you could just decide to not go through the trouble)