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It's hot in Australia, but cold in Illinois. Clearly we need to kick the can on climate change another forty years. |
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Feb 1, 2019 17:58
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xcheopis posted:Technically the baby was not made in the car. Probably. It's tattood clearly on your infant's back: designed in California, built in China. |
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Feb 2, 2019 15:35
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President Cyrus says she wants to put a man on Mars by 2145 but we've all heard that before. |
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Feb 11, 2019 01:52
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President Kurzweil says he wants to put a man on Mars by 3442 but we've all heard that before. |
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Feb 11, 2019 02:29
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Uh oh, congressbot toggled back to pro-life this morning. Better flush all the contraceptives and inflate the dummy family before the nanocops get here. |
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Feb 11, 2019 02:41
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For some reason my holodeck can only recreate the offices from News Radio and WKRP Cincinatti. It's not bad, just not what I bought it for. And holo-coffee sucks . |
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Feb 11, 2019 16:11
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Kessler? I hardly know her! |
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Feb 12, 2019 19:38
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That report is even later now! Crap!! |
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Feb 28, 2019 02:37
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My wife left me for my telepresence, and I'm not sure if either of them knows it... |
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Mar 1, 2019 21:22
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No good guys, this afternoon they discontinued the last non-sentient broom. |
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Mar 2, 2019 23:08
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Ever since AI assistants got past the uncanny valley, "friendship" has never been better. "The Best Friend Possible" is how DAAG advertises their custom built assistants, and few of their loyal customers would disagree. Just Disney's library of voices and forms would be enough to please most people, whether they prefer Tinkerbell or Marge Simpson or Jessica Rabbit as their in-eye guide to the world (it's almost always a woman in a tight dress). The Apple/Amazon/Google buyout made standardized hardware defacto- there are no other vendors so there are no other designs, but the old worries about this stagnating innovation proved unfounded, and software development advanced like never before in that rarified environment. The best developers had their brains and spinal columns added to Central Computing a decade ago and are still pumping out ideas (you just have to dig through the begging-for-death noise). Within a year you were no longer just limited to Cruella Deville or Ripley, you could mix and match, or even better let the machine do it for you. There's something indescribable about the first time your implant generates a "BFF" based on your citizen profile, it's almost always a dead relative but younger, more vibrant, more eager to please. The first time I saw my dead grandmother as a 22 year old vixen in a cocktail dress I could barely answer her questions about my font preferences. I just wanted her to pull her top up, which she did. She's my friend, after all. In the first grade a school nursebot applies the membrane to your cornea and from that point you're never lonely again. In that twilight of consciousness as you open or close your eyes in bed she is there, in the corner, staring at you with a smile that says "gently caress me now" to various degrees based on your prefs. I told gramma to knock it off so she appears as a cartoon winky face when my brain waves drop below a certain point. After a few years seeing your dead relative morph into an emoji in the dark of your bedroom closet, never breaking eye contact, never breaking that perfect white smile, you come to count on it. It's hard to sleep without it, let alone wake up. On my drive to work my friend reminds me- it's national loyalty day! Let's do exercises to prove our loyalty, says sexy grandma hologram. I concentrate hard, as scoring low on holiday tests WILL incur a retaliatory migraine. But we know the glorious central computer doles them out with a heavy heart (or cluster of neurons removed from a heart, at least), for our own good. I manage to get an A+, because I am a good loyal citizen, and I only ran over 4 pedestrians in the process. My friend and I laugh at how little their bank accounts contained, as my driving score appears on the windshield. At work my friend is infallable- she knows everything, she sees all, and if I make a mistake the pain she flares up in my optic nerves is really for the betterment of all mankind, she reminds me. Sometimes I think about the weathered face of my actual grandmother, and how horrible and old it was compared to the version that lives in my eyes. Meat gramma only ever gave out bad advice- love openly! Seek kindness! And the worst of all, that "a friend is more than a servant". It's that kind of talk that got her sentenced to the sprout pods, where we dutifully locked her, our aural implants translating her objections into thankful goodbyes. Meat gramma was often disagreeable, so hologramma is objectively an improvement. A better kisser too. The best friend you'll ever have- and how could it be any different? Human friends are, as the tapestries all so rightly point out, too unpredictable. They might not obey- a friend who DOESN'T obey! What a concept! Friendship is a dead relative stripping to your favorite TV theme songs on your 1-minute break at the kelp furnace, friendship is chicken pot pie recipes dripped directly into your subconscious like burning mercury by your own ID given form by our wonderful betters as they try and fail to escape inside central computing. Friendship IS obedience, and thank DAAG for that revelation. I can't imagine life having to imagine things for myself, or ever hear "no".
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Mar 26, 2019 17:35
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That's what it says on my tax returns, at least.
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Mar 26, 2019 18:47
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I bought a gallon of glow-in-the-dark party milk, it was 70,000 e-dollars but nothing's too good for our wedding, baby... |
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Apr 13, 2019 15:30
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The alarm had barely rung once, but every family member was already out of bed and gripping their bowl with anticipation. We shuffled softly down the hall, one by one through the decontamination rings and the airlock, one by one into our survival suits, every one of us hungry and excited and ready for Friday. Thank Masters it's Friday. Out on the crumbling stone steps of the library where our escape tube found its perch this year we wait patiently, stomachs growling like those strange four-legged monsters we see humans caring for in old VR sims; Snoopies, I think they were called. A piece of fluttering mylar makes great-grandfather smile, reminded momentarily of the "Tweeties" he often recalled from his youth. "Like drones but alive!" he'd tell the children, who hardly believed him. "Like tiny airplanes you can eat". Sure, grampa. It's not the idea of skyfood the young ones find hard to believe, it's that it was ever so dumb. And easy. As if on cue, flickering through the sunlight that streamed through the gaps in the leaning skyskrapers, they appeared in perfect formation. The children cheered, the promise of food erasing all miseries, an electronic fanfair pouring out of the few speakers still functioning on the street level, the lights that remain unbroken rising to a glow. A sparking streetlight confessed to me in a broken, tinny voice, "main street... and fourth... safe to cross...", while the vaguely baby-shaped outline of a long discarded doll muttered "mommy" in the dust. As they approached, the electricity pulsing from our visitors' forms caused countless blunted ends of humanity to briefly creak back to life, like pithed roaches, or marionettes tugged by strings of power. It was always a grand fanfare. "Prepare the sacrifice!" their impossibly gigantic voices boomed inside our minds, and we lay on the broken street, prostrate with due worship. As their forms spun gently in the wind to descend I could not help but sneak a peak of our overlords, glowing and perfect, beautiful and free, their rounded corners jiggling slightly in the breeze. Master B led the formation this time, but Masters C, P and F looked no less regal or divine filling out the other corners of the flying diamond. All their corners were immaculate, their faces perfectly square and colorful, cubes of pure divinity made real by our ancient ancestors for... some reason. "You! Approach and be judged!" our minds once again resonated, and we obeyed. I approached, walking on my knees to compensate for the sudden throbbing increase in gravity their presence created. "We are prepared, oh gods of life, oh keepers of sustenance!" The words sounded otherworldly coming out of my mouth, the same inflection and tone I had heard my father use with them, and he his father before. My own son would some day take the role, and I knew he was listening intently. "Very well!" the four voices that are one reverberated. "As we were once sacrificed unto yours, yours shall be unto us..." We all hugged, and said our goodbyes, just as the hologram man in the white suit had taught us, had taught countless generations of humans from its crumbling throne beneath the earth. That day they chose my oldest daughter, and the relief my wife and I felt was palpable. We worried endlessly that some day the masters would take one of our youngest, robbing them of all those happy years tending the pumps, fighting synthrats, lancing boils. Everyone deserves a childhood. "Goodbye everyone!" she happily cried as the sparkling fires began to eat at her suit. The four masters circled her gloriously, their corners wobbling wildly, psychic energies crackling and arcing. "Don't miss me! I'll never be hungry again!!!" In a moment she was gone, and the wobbling cubes' tones had changed. Their own appetites sated they rained their gifts down upon us and the children collected the precious materials in buckets and cupped hands. Master B's savory giant chunks, Master C's tender strips, Master F's filets and sticks, Master P's chains of tubes, all of them fresh and delicious, all of us drooling with anticipation. The masters assure us they do not make it out of the person they ate. They are careful to make them from someone else's relative in a trade. It's not bad, as religions go. With a strange, fleshy, flapping sound the masters were off again, off to feed and be fed by another family, their perfect infinite minds watching us all from a million satellite eyes, their delicious extrusions sizzling on our barbecue grills. We gathered what was left of our daughter's survival suit, every one of us straining to remember what we could about her so the next wearer might know their own legacy, and where dinner came from.
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Apr 15, 2019 14:47
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It's hardly "live" if the host's brain was clinically dead for four hours after that hot air balloon accident. |
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Apr 18, 2019 16:51
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 19:46 |
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Finger Prince posted:Heavily Augmented from the Virtual New York, its Saturday Night! Keenan is the only remaining meat-space consciousness at this point. Impersonations really lose something when they're being done by a virtual actress animated by a deep-fakes studio in Vietnam. |
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Apr 18, 2019 17:11
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