Negative Azimuth
524F474552 knew that all P7s were networked by an orbiting satellite. That had been quiet for quite some time. He missed the pings. He assumed the satellite was no longer functional. His instructions, in case of such an event, was to roam as far, as long as possible and collect as much data as his storage capacity allowed. Then, some day, he could transmit what he’d seen. The last P7 he’d encountered was stuck in powdery sand, almost frictionless. He stood with the other, at a safe distance, for almost a week. It was painful to record. Worse than destruction was immobility.
Source: whtebkgrnd
Film
AUGS were the only ones allowed to record things. Cameras were registered, and AUGS were licensed. The appearance of an AUG was a notable event, usually resulting in hushed tones, furtive glancing. Coverage was supposed to be even and impartial, but people knew that either something had happened or was going to happen. AUGS would never create narrative, they simply recorded. Given their profession, they tended to be socially separate, keeping with their own kind.
Minimizing, Maximizing
They were accustomed to games: the urge ran deep down. These were puzzles, stacking games, combat. The stacking games ended badly, especially since the wolves arrived. Combat games became hunting.
Pops
Pops had been there almost 25 years. Lifespan was supposed to be just two. Stationary, though he was, his articulated arm still moved a little, and his high gain still worked. Wind storms wiped the dust from solar panels, a nuclear pellet kept him warm at night (which lasted several weeks at a time). For 20 years it had been quiet. The last five, noisey. He could hear animals around him now, and they seemed to know him. They’d built up something around him, something large, filled with echoes.
Passionate Machines
First came the rabbits, birds and deer. Then came the horses, buffalo and wolves. There hadn’t been rebuilding in a long time, they had moved to reproduction. Homogenity, it was determined after all models were made the same, was inefficient and limiting. They needed as wide a variety of forms as they could get. And they found them in the data they’d carefully migrated down from each stage, with which the originals had landed. Pictures of animals real and unreal.
Barking Dogs, Laughing Men
Dr Chahine was a zoologist, so the visit he got in his offices from the Department of Rocketry was surprising. They had him sign a series of documents promising secrecy (all citizens had seen these boilerplate papers at one time or another). Then they began the strangest speculative conversation. What would, they asked, animals like Modar or Xynth be like, if they really existed? How strong? How fast? How long would they live? He hadn’t heard this legendist fueled fantasy since he was a freshman, and only when drunk. Certainly no adult professional had time to spend on silly questions like this.
The Rise of Science
The first incarnation of the Union (The Almagamated Union of Trade Sciences) was a clearing house for worker placement. One of the demands they made of the workers, craftsmen, proto-engineers they connected with employers was that any advances in the trade be written down, which they then subsequently gathered and published. In this sense all knowledge was made available to anyone that could get a trade broadsheet. Since the legendists had political and cultural power, but little financial power, the Union grew quickly as they rode the back of regional expansion, forcing industry to hire who they wanted to hire, when they wanted to hire them. Both parties paid fees every step of the way. Scientists in the modern era didn’t necessarily like to comment much on their origins, since the criminal behavior that spotted the development of the Union had always given it the veneer of complete corruption. However, the broadsheets continued, and as long as the Union was being paid, for the most part, industry was free to innovate as much as it liked. The secret power of the Union was not the knowledge it facilitated and broadcast, but the resources and contacts it controlled.
Idealism Versus Survival
That night jakob took the last train out of the city. His parents had a cabin very far up, they would go up there when he was little to ice fish. He assumed eventually the inspectors would learn this. But not right away. It was remote enough. He’d have to get a horse at the last town on the line. Motorized crawlers were rare and for the wealthy. While there had been a lot of building around the towns in the area, no one had been bothered to build any farther. Jakob suspected that over the years people had lost immunity to the cold. He thought people had become soft, lazy, stayed indoors when possible. And yet anyone looking at Jakob would think the same of him. He was an academic, was ill-suited for survival the way his ancestors had lived. He’d have to rely on his idealism to keep him warm, at least until they found him or he ran out of food.
Fuzzy Logic
- committee: describe to us again the events that took place on Friday morning, from just before ...
- controller: ... just before the landing?
- committee: right, just before.
- controller: the touch down position was within expectations. there was nominal drift.
- committee: did operations detect anything in the area before touch down?
- controller: there was nothing unusual that we could detect.
- committee: ... from satellitte?
- controller: correct, from satellite. but, given the resolution and the processing time, this wouldn't have made a difference.
- committee: so you're saying there's no way you could've known? what did you expect to find at the landing site?
- controller: robots sir. a limited number of older model robots.
- committee: robots that your own robots had been designed to destroy ...
- controller: correct sir.
- committee: and what did you find there, instead?
- controller: animals sir.
Brutal Reusability
The early reconstructions were highly dysfunctional. The reconstructions were reconstructed. Eventually, parts were made homogeneous, rules and regulations formed around who got what, when. The new society found themselves suddenly familiar with supply and demand. Certain caches demanded access and supplies. Violence erupted when they were denied. The casualties were refactored, reconstructed. The refactored saw efficiency in this and then refactored any remaining originals they could find. They did this with sympathy and brevity.
Parity Is For Horses
The original nomadic inhabitants of Cbyx rode Modar from one oasis to the next, beasts captured and trained as cubs. The riders developed an extremely close relationship with the animals, the bond was carried over by legendists as ancient, noble, spiritual. What were written as saintly men and women of Cbyx nature, quitely and stoically enduring, became Northern horsemen, cantankerous, drunken, combative, wild. And they in turn became fable for teleplays, books, programs. Their iconography graced everything having to do with the North. Of great fascination, and State disapproval of the previous century was the brief war between the horsemen and the expanding industry. The purposing of horses for labor was anathema to the tradition of the Cbyx riders, enough that the horsemen, who rarely organized, caused twenty years of havok for any State loving midlander who happened into their hills.
Pantography
Brynja took a streetcar. She was entitled to her own automobile, but disliked the quiet resentment that the privilege caused. The streetcars here were old style, electric, clattering. She found them comforting. She wondered about a world where everyone would be allowed an auotmobile, the chaos and inefficiency. She rode with other citizens, the cold night causing them to have bundled up, warming their hands on cups of tea sold at the back. A radio next to the driver relentlessly broadcast static peppered State news.
Loudly, But Infrequently
524F474552 moved carefully around the crater. It had taken days. Before the uplink was removed he’d have had telemetry. Now all robots simply talked to one another. Many had no audio, so a system of semaphore was worked out. Some used lights, some used moving parts. As he rounded a small hill he saw, in the distance, another unit. The other unit acknowledged him by raising an arm. Then it raised another. And another. Its arms began to move directionally, independently. A message. 524F474552 focused attention. “B … E … W … A … R … E”.
Well, he thought, that was intriguing.
Crashing Into The Sea
Brenken’s Skyward Explorer’s Club Of Dirigibles had exactly one outing. Fourteen balloons sailed that day, with the intent of crossing the expanse of space from Ebyx to Cbyx. They’d brought with them numerous supplies for the landing on the other side: great quantities of salt pork, hardtack, chocolate, and of course many bottles of Vassyka, to celebrate. Several teams had sleds and dogs, since there was much disagreement, traditionally, whether Cbyx was a desert of sand or a desert of snow. (The liturgy was fuzzy on this point.) The others had brought umbrellas.
Eight hours into the flight, half a dozen balloons had been forced down due to inclement winds. Brenken’s dirigible soldiered on in the lead. The air became rarefied. Brenken had anticipated this and had included barrels of sea-level air, which his constitution favored. Twelve hours into the flight Brenken’s pilot repeated they still weren’t gaining altitude. They had, however, drifted significantly over the Eastern Ocean. No other dirigibles were visible. The previous had gone down on fire as the team had tried to keep themselves warm on deck by burning their copious supply of reading material they’d loaded for the long journey.
The last the crowd on the ground saw of Brenken during launch, as he floated into the distance, was a triumphant wave, his hand cupped to his mouth, hollering something they couldn’t hear.
