#she is basically the most high-tech ai in the world. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

selfshippinglover · 2 years

Note

Hey friend! Sorry I don't know much abt Rick and Morty but please tell me abt what's on your mind!!

EEEE HI COZZZY <3333 *WAVES SPORADICALLY* I don't mind at all friend! I just want an excuse to talk about the show :) Thank yoooou <3333 (tw: for spoilers for season 5 and kinda season 6??)

Throughout half of my work shift I was thinking about just how fucked up the trauma that Rick has been enduring really is and what processing that could possibly look like??

Like, it starts with Prime Rick offering him portal tech, the infinite multiverse, and being practically hailed as a god. Rick says no and Prime Rick for whatever reason murders the love of his life(Diane) and his young daughter(Beth) in retaliation. He is immediately ENRAGED, builds the quickest bs functioning portal gun he can throw together on pure adrenaline and goes on a 40 YEAR LONG REVENGE QUEST TO KILL THE GUY AND AVENGE HIS FAMILY!

He closes himself off to most of the world(mentally), solely focused on his revenge quest and nothing else. But since the multiverse is literally INFINITE and Prime Rick could be anywhere he decides to just starting killing any Rick he sees until he kills the right guy. This is a big part of his unending self-hatred.

Somewhere in his later 20′s-30′s he gets a high at a party and makes a friend named BirdPerson/BP. They eventually end up fighting together in the constant war against the Galactic Federation. After they start to turn the tide of the war, Rick confesses to caring about BP, even going so far to share the fact that he has multiversal travel and even admits to caring about HIM specifically and asking him to come travel with him. Everywhere, anywhere. It is also VERY obvious that he has a crush on BP and is confessing them through this action. Showing him the thing that started him on his current path, the thing that could be used to represent his trauma too. The first time he’s been open, emotional, vulnerable with another person since he lost his family and he’s rejected. (and you know, that happens. People don’t like you back sometime but it meant a lot and still does if he shows emotion around a person instead of his go to apathy)

Time continues marching forward and the killer isn’t found. by this he’s killed so many Ricks that he’s literally considered a threat to ALL ricks in the area and they beg to make a peace treaty so that’ll he stop killing them. He agrees and stops fighting them. But he still doesn’t have the guy. Drunk and empty he can only think of one last ditch effort to catch the guy; stake out his reality and hope he comes back.

Somewhere in that time he creates an ai that speaks in the voice of his dead wife to always remind himself of what he did to the ones he cares about and to fuel his revenge quest.He basically creates it to haunt himself. On top of all that, he’s developed a crippling alcohol problem, a general distance from any amount of expressing his feelings or attachment(after all, multiverse are infinite so what’s the point in caring anyways?) to/for others. The trauma accompanied by his experiences in the multiverse and BP’s rejection of his love push him to stop caring. To become apathetic to everything and everyone. to reject feelings and REAL connection because he and/or the people he loves will get hurt for it.

And that’s all before the show even starts!

After the show starts he meets up with one of his old flings, Unity. A wonderful hive mind that he finds himself able to open up to and become comfortable with. Is it only possible because he’s drunk and doing god knows what intergalactic drugs the entire time? Yes. but that’s just how bad it is at that point. He can only be open with others when he’s drowning in all his bad habits. He ends up ulling her down with him and she breaks it off because:

Female President: Rick, forgive me for doing this in notes; I’m not strong enough to do it in persons.

Delivery Guy: I realize now that I’m attracted to you for the same reason I can’t be with you: you can’t change.

Beggar: And I have no problem with that, but it clearly means I have a problem with myself.

Newspaper Vendor: I’m sure there’s no perfect version of me. I’m sure I’ll just unify species after species and never really be complete.

Female President (again): But I know how it goes with us. I lose who I am and become part of you. Because in a strange way, you’re better at what I do without even trying.

Thsi causes him to have his first BIG suicide attempt in the series. The attempts only increase as time goes on. Egging on Morty into killing him, throwing himself into deadly situations quietly hoping that he’ll finally be killed by rushing into a fight he wasn’t prepared enough for, and on and on it goes.

He even views loving someone else the way he cared for his wife, BP, his kid, his grandson as “irrational” and is happy to be rid of them!

All of this to say, what does moving on look like for someone that spent literally decades like this? Obviously it would start with being nicer to others and allowing himself to be open again but what else? It’d be a long and frustrating process. He’d need to lessen his use of drugs and alcohol despite those things being his go to painkillers for feelings, and somehow he’d also have to stop blaming himself for the death of his original family and except that it’s okay to move on from them, from the revenge quest....even though he’s said he doesn’t want to.

Like, I know he’s still a huge piece of shit and treats people like dirt to feel some sense of control and keep himself detached as much as possible(NOTHING excuses the way he treats others and I never want to excuse that) but like god it’s really gonna take a lot to move on.

#Cozy #long post #vsljhdkbskjbda #went off a bit but like #his backstory hurts man!#honestly #idk if i could even move on from all of that?like #goddamn that's really gonna take somke strength

8 notes · View notes

midnightactual · 9 months

Text

Verse: ARMORED WAR (Armored Core VI)

World: Seiko 4 Catalog Number: ISB0279 Type: terrestrial planet, continental Climate: varied, temperate Population: 457 million Satellites: 2 Notable Features: multiple space elevators, orbital power ring and dockyards

One of the earlier Earth analogues to be discovered following the advent and utilization of faster than light travel, Seiko 4 was initially colonized by a Japanese-led consortium of Pacific Rim and Southeast Asian nations. The planet required only modest terraforming efforts beyond the introduction of terrestrial flora and fauna and was, perhaps unsurprisingly, thereafter cultivated and developed with a care usually reserved for bonsai.

Today one of the crown jewels of the Core Systems, Seiko IV's lush and manicured yet still enchantingly wabi-sabi landscape, and its tidy but compact and gleaming cities, do well to belie the fact that it is a hotbed of corporate conflict which extends throughout the entire system. While the planetary governing authority keeps a tight lid on how volatile the clashes between rival companies can become publicly, behind the scenes and off-world, conflict roils away. Corruption is discreet but widespread, and in certain sectors "industrial accidents" are both commonplace and quickly hushed up.

Name: Yoruichi Shihōin Augmentation: Generation Ten Occupation: mercenary Affiliation: independent (nominally) Registration Number: Sk889 Callsign: Midnight Armored Core: Kurayami

Yoruichi is the scion of a locally powerful, family-held zaibatsu-style corporation, Shihōin Defense Systems, which specializes in military hardware and survival technology. The company's most notable products include general military equipment, armored vehicles and aircraft, a bespoke line of Muscle Tracer units running the gamut from basic to high-performance models, Armored Core parts design and development contracting for ALLMIND, various forms of spaceflight and extreme environment gear, and terraforming services. The one-time company CEO, Yoruichi never particularly cared for the corporate boardroom and its associated boredom.

Having been the leader of the SDS Security Forces before moving to the C-suite—and having stubbornly retained that role even after her promotion to being an executive—Yoruichi gained exhaustive combat experience in the system’s interminable covert wars. Naturally talented at piloting, she survived primarily through skill, training, experience, and grit, although her access to cutting edge technology and AI-assistant systems certainly didn't hurt.

Her resignation, while shocking to many within the company, was in fact negotiated within the Shihōin family, which was aware (and grudgingly approving) of her decision to tacitly promote the company’s interests in a different way: as a registered ALLMIND mercenary. To that end, satisfied that Coral-substitution human augmentation had advanced sufficiently, she finally took the plunge and became a member of Generation Ten to ensure that she might be as competitive as possible in the wild world of mercenary work.

Although a relatively new mercenary, her personal finances were far beyond enough to afford her high-end Armored Core parts. While always completing missions adequately to cover her expenses, she also uses them to collect combat data first-hand, as well as to scout out other corporate advances if and when possible.

A rather high-tech and high-end AC armed with weaponry developed during the Coral War, Kurayami is intended to maximize ground maneuverability and basic functionality in pursuit of closing to fire devastating plasma cannon salvos, especially when charged.

While the shoulder-mounted plasma cannons were nominally designed as mid-to-long range weapons and can be used as intended, in this configuration they're intended to be rammed down the enemy's throat at close-to-mid range in combination with needle gun fire. Kurayami features excellent basic, quick boost, and assault boost mobility toward that end, as well as pulse armor to make it even more difficult to stop on approach to its optimal combat range.

#Out Of Character #Headcanons #Verse: ARMORED WAR #Armored Core RP #Armored Core Roleplay #[ it's basically Shunkō ]#[ especially the tall TYBW wings kind ]

1 note · View note

greatwyrmgold · 1 year

Text

When looking at the Spring 2023 anime lineup, one title caught my eye. (Well, eight did, but I'm only talking about one now.) Kizuna no Allele seemed notable because, according to MAL, real-life VTuber Kizuna Ai plays a major role in the series's background. It sounded like an idol anime with the twist that the idols are virtual, but I've enjoyed some idol anime with unusual premises before. If Kizuna no Allele had one-tenth the charm of something like Zombie Land Saga, it would be plenty worth watching.

It doesn't.

This post got mulched when I tried to queue it twice, so I'll keep it brief. KnA is a "cute girls doing cute things" anime where neither the cute girls nor the cute things have any substance to them.

The protagonist, Miracle, is basically indistinguishable from any other genki girl (aside from the stars in her eyes, which are a nice VTuber character design touch). She's optimistic, she's a big fan of Kizuna Ai, she's sometimes awkward and sometimes confident. The guy in the greenhouse who made good tea has more character than Miracle, and we only see him for a couple minutes.

As for the "cute things"...a lot of that is a side effect of its worldbuilding.

Now, before we start: I'm not surprised that the anime didn't actually go for "idol anime but the idols are VTubers". The details of VTubing are neat, but it's hard to get an anime greenlit when its target audience is in the low thousands. (Most Gawr Gura fans don't care much about how VTuber models or community management work.)

But there's a big gap between that, and this.

Miracle goes to a school for not-VTubers. To do so, she has to run to a class building, then...use her smartwatch to astrally project into VR? Some of the students (and the teacher) have animal features and stuff, but most of them look like regular people, and Miracle just looks like herself in a different outfit, which kinda clashes with the emphasis she puts on how the virtual world lets you be whatever you want, but whatever. For class, she puts on a brief, boring, and pointless music video in an abstract screensaver space, which was apparently livestreamed to the public, and it's not explained what that was supposed to accomplish or what relevance it has to being a "virtual artist".

The idea, I think, it that we're supposed to get invested in Miracle's dream of being a non-VTuber. But this is impossible, both because it's impossible to get invested in an empty character like Miracle, and because the show does basically nothing to explain what that dream even is. This wouldn't be much of a problem if it was something the audience is familiar with, like being a pop idol, but KnA replaces the familiar with a confusing mess of impractically high-tech nonsense.

I don't want you to think everything in Kizuna no Allele was terrible. The first minute felt like an authentic Kizuna Ai video introduction with a much higher production budget, and that's neat. And immediately following it was a music video that I would definitely want to watch outside the context of this anime.

But inside the context of the anime, there's nothing except exposition about how Kizuna Ai vanished several years ago and the occasional stale trope.

#kizuna no allele #anime #vtuber #or lack thereof

1 note · View note

astcrfieldaway · 2 years

Text

✰ it’s time to wake up, TALI'ZORAH VAS NORMANDY you’ve been in cryosleep for too long and the people of MASS EFFECT miss you. when you went into slumber you were TWENTY FIVE years old, your pronouns are SHE/HER and you WERE VOLUNTEERED for the cambria program. now that you’ve awoken, your position as a CARTOGRAPHER is waiting for you. remember, the cambria one thanks you! ( luna, neelam gil )

the basics;

NAME: Tali’Zorah vas Normandy

ALIAS(ES): Tali, Admiral, Sparks, Miss vas Normandy

AGE: 25

PRONOUNS & GENDER: quarian female, she/her

BIRTHDAY & ZODIAC: n/a

FACECLAIM: neelam gil

AESTHETICS: silken fabric over an unyieldingly hard envirosuit, the flash of sharp eyes behind a mask separating you from the world, a kind heart after a lifetime of hardship and judgement, quick fingers in the guts of a humming ship, a yearning for real touch, and an undying dedication to her people

a deeper look;

BACKGROUND: tali is taken from a few months past the destroy ending of mass effect 3; the galaxy was undertaking the massive task of rebuilding.

WEAPONS: her mechanical abilities as an engineer and sharp wit can't be confiscated, but her shotgun, knife, and combat drone, chatika, definitely were.

POWERS/ABILITIES/SKILLS: high IQ with extensive knowledge and experience working with AI and defense drones. she’s used to hard scrabble situations and can cobble together mechanical tech from scraps. her time serving on the admiralty gave her political knowledge and strengthened her negotiation skills.

GREATEST STRENGTH: her compassion and ingenuity

GREATEST WEAKNESS/FLAW: shoulders all the blame she possibly can

ONE FEAR: spider and spider-adjacent creatures. and their skittering.

ONE HOPE: that something they find here in this universe can help the rebuilding effort back home

HEADCANON(S): quarians have functionally no immune system due to generations of living on sterile ships, and before that they lived symbiotically with the organisms on their home planet, so outside her room tali is always in a hermetically sealed enviro suit. since I am not bound by what video games can render I'm going to say the face mask is slightly more sheer than in the games, so the glow of her eyes and general shape of her face are visible in good lighting, though the specifics of her features are obscured.

the questionnaire;

How does your character feel about being dropped into the cambria program? Are they excited? Suspicious? Confused?

once she realized other normandy crew was there along with her, she became significantly less scared and instead curious and fascinated by the mechanics of the ship and method of bringing people in

What does your character hope to see the most during the cambria one’s journey?

as much new tech as possible

If your character could bring one thing or person from home, what would it be?

she’d break her combat drone out of weapons holding

#tali intro

1 note · View note

sextechnews · 2 years

Text

'Sextech' expert on the future of sex - Cyprus Mail

In one of the leading speakers at the upcoming Reflect futurecasting festival, THEO PANAYIDES meets a risk taker, a former competitive snowboarder and IT executive who is now the world’s leading authority on sextech If you want to see how technology is changing the world, note that I spoke via Zoom with Bryony Cole in Australia – 10am in Nicosia for me, 5pm on the outskirts of Melbourne for her – a (surprisingly non-glitchy) face-to-face that would’ve seemed like science fiction two decades ago. You want more? Note that she’ll be talking to a whole online audience at the very excellent Reflect Festival (www.reflectfest.com) next weekend, joining a host of speakers at the Limassol-based fest which has had to go (mostly) virtual, for the usual precautionary reasons. You want even more? How about ‘Harmony AI’, the first sex-capable AI (a.k.a. sex doll) that comes with 12 different personality types and will even recite poetry to you? How about Mend, an AI chatbot that helps you get through a breakup using a specific algorithm for three months? How about OMG Yes, using touchscreen technology to teach women how to bring themselves to orgasm? How about a virtual-reality headset – the tech is there, albeit still in the experimental stage – that’ll allow men and women to swap (virtual) bodies, so you look down and you’re suddenly a different gender? It may seem like we’ve veered off the subject – but in fact it’s not just communications that have been transformed by the tech revolution; how, after all, does it help to be instantly connected to a person halfway around the world if you’re still alienated from your own body? Bryony, an affable 37-year-old, is also “the world’s leading authority on sextech” according to her Reflect bio, ‘sextech’ (a $30 billion industry) being all of the above plus a good deal more – not just “sex robots and VR porn, all these sorts of sci-fi fantasies” but technology used to facilitate intimacy, to improve relationships. to prevent or report sexual abuse, above all (as she says from her locked-down abode in Victoria) to try and foster “communication and empathy and listening, they’re the things that make sex great”. Those are also things that make newspaper interviews great – and I wondered how accessible she’d be, given her extremely high profile (she’s appeared on assorted TV shows and had write-ups in Wired, The New York Times, Playboy, Mashable, ABC, Forbes and many other global media), but in fact she’s very open, and delighted to talk. Maybe it’s to stave off the boredom of lockdown, an enforced hiatus that’s applied more or less continuously since March in Melbourne – Bryony uses the time difference to her advantage, working in the mornings and taking Zoom calls or teaching “sextech school” in the afternoons – or maybe it’s because of her life before lockdown, which involved constant speaking engagements. Her subject is a popular one, wherever in the world she happens to be. “If you put sex on the agenda, the room is always going to be packed,” she admits wryly. It’s strange, in a way. A YouTube clip shows her speaking at Brain Bar, a high-profile Hungarian festival; the audience is young and presumably savvy – yet, when Bryony opens her presentation with “Let’s talk about sex, right?” (the ‘right?’ being an Aussie-ism that’s survived her years in New York and globe-trotter status), a little titter of excited laughter ripples through the room. “Yeah, we still carry so much shame around the topic of sex, and it’s still a taboo topic,” she replies when I wonder why we still get so excited over something so basic. People are titillated “because they don’t get to talk about it very often. Most of the time, they don’t even talk about it with the people they’re actually having it with.”

She herself was no different, having grown up “pretty average” in middle-class Australia – and her background is slightly unusual in that both of her parents are creatives (both work in TV, her dad as a director, her mum as a producer), yet “I was taught growing up not to have sex until I was married,” she recalls, a bit surprisingly; “It really wasn’t until I was 30 that I realised it’s okay to have sex with people that aren’t your boyfriend”. It was only when she started doing ‘Future of Sex’, her popular podcast, that she even heard about alternative options like Skirt Club, a global sub-culture where straight (but bi-curious) women go and flirt with other women. Bryony shakes her head ruefully: “I wish I could tell my 16-year-old self that virginity is a myth,” she sighs. “Y’know, you’re not going to lose anything, it’s a complete social construct!… You could say you’re a virgin with every partner that you have, because you learn their bodies – but so many of these lessons I feel like I learned so much later. was the one area I didn’t take any risk in.” That last sentence is important, though – because she’s always been a risk taker in general, not in the sense of being reckless but just going for it. It may well be significant that she started out as an athlete (a competitive snowboarder), athletes tending to be can-do types who don’t overthink their decisions. At 21, she and her then-boyfriend relocated to Western Australia and lived in a commune (their home was actually in a treehouse) for about a year. Earlier, at 18, she decided to travel the world, “so I looked in the newspaper, got a job door-knocking selling phone plans, made my money in a month got out of there… I was always quite precocious in that way”. She travelled across southern Europe, “worked in hostels and slept on rooftops, stuff that now I’d be like ‘I can’t do that’ – but I think it’s been very much a part of my DNA to do things that most people don’t feel comfortable doing. And if they’re like ‘Oh, you shouldn’t do that’, I’m like ‘I’m gonna do it!’.” Bryony calls herself “a provoker”, yet she doesn’t really seem like a troublemaker; she was never the type to start fights, or get chucked out of school. (School was actually an elite all-girls’ school where “we were told we had to be lawyers or doctors or business people… but there was never any talk about relationships or sexuality”.) Even as a snowboarder, she seems to have lacked the killer instinct that makes world champions; instead, she launched a programme to get more women into snowboarding. Her main traits seem to be that she’s open, optimistic, a connector who loves meeting people – and, again, that she goes for it, ignoring (and indeed provoking) the play-it-safe crowd. Her career, she muses, has “just been a series of saying ‘Yes’ to opportunities”. She wandered a bit in her 20s, from Lonely Planet to a tech-related job at the Department of Justice – then she joined Yammer, an early social network (“like Facebook, but for work”) which in turn was acquired by Microsoft, who gave her a position as ‘Head of Community and Thought Leadership’. All this took her closer to sextech, without being sextech – but the final piece in the puzzle was something else, something unrelated yet very much related: the fact that, like many women, she encountered “typical, I would say, sexual harassment from school onwards, into university and right through the workplace”. Some of it was just condescension, “like being introduced as a Barbie doll in a sales meeting when you’re an executive” (being blonde and bubbly cancels out being brainy, in the eyes of some men). Some of it was outright harassment: “I remember thinking, ‘Isn’t it strange that I walk outside my house and consider whether to go left or right according to how strong I feel that day, whether I want to be catcalled by the guys at the end of the street or not?’”. Bryony developed early, while still a pre-teen; she recalls her pride at going to Target with her mum to buy her first bra – yet “that was the last positive message I got about being a woman, and my body, and celebrating that”; if anything, being a little girl in the body of a woman made her want to hide, to be smaller. None of this really explains her current career – yet she started doing her podcast around the time of #MeToo (which revealed how common her experience was), “and I found that talking about the future of sex was a really powerful way to reclaim my voice, and do things that people find confronting”. Gender isn’t sex, yet the female experience – like the sexual experience – is tinged with a certain repression; the taboo around sex still derives much of its power from women being ashamed of female pleasure and female sexuality (though men being ashamed of ‘toxic masculinity’ is catching up fast). Easy to see how confronting one kind of repression might ease the other – and it’s surely no accident that a lot of the most successful sextech is aimed at empowering women. One current trend (typified by Dipsea, an app that’s raised over $5 million) is for “audio porn, or erotica, for women… We’re seeing things like vibrators synced to erotic literature. The erotic literature market is huge, right? It’s a huge industry driven by female consumers”. Harmony AI notwithstanding, women’s sex toys have been the real growth industry – backed by female celebs, thus for instance Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop brand selling a ‘This Smells Like My Vagina’ candle – though Bryony reckons that too will change. “For me, when I think about the future of sex, the most interesting part isn’t the technology. It’s the cultural conversation that opens up because we talk about technology.” “This is horrifying” reads a YouTube comment under Bryony’s explication of sextech at Brain Bar – which is also part of the cultural conversation. ‘Saying yes’ to this looming new world is a struggle for many people, especially when modern society (exacerbated by lockdown) is so full of solitary strangers staring at their screens, never venturing outside their homes; surely more apps and robots – let alone those promising to supply sexual pleasure – are the last thing we need. “We’re emotional creatures and technology is not, at the moment,” disagrees Bryony (granted, those last three words don’t inspire confidence). “I’m yet to be convinced we can fully rip out emotionality and copy it into technology.” One should also note that sextech is often not as radical as it seems. Mend, the post-breakup app, is actually “a journaling tool”, giving you prompts to “journal your feelings” and tracking the aftermath of the relationship; it supplies information, not emotional cues. Dipsea isn’t really so different to romantic novels in audiobook form. Harmony AI may indeed recite poetry – but can she supply the feeling a flesh-and-blood woman would bring to it?

In the end, sex (and sextech) is still about people – and Bryony Cole is a good ambassador, coming off as a sociable extrovert rather than a tech nerd or wild-eyed futurist. Much of her mission actually has to do with making sex more inclusive (normalising all the different kinds of sexuality, not just straight, able-bodied and pre-menopausal) and letting people talk about it. Fittingly, lockdown has made her (even) more expansive and gregarious: rather than withdraw into herself, she and her Trinidadian boyfriend now want to bring new life into the world. “I can’t wait to have kids, I’m so ready to have kids now,” she enthuses. “I’ve frozen my eggs, and I’m ready for it!” Her globe-trotting lifestyle of the past few years was great, but also rather lonely; Covid has been something of a gift – even in the most locked-down city on the planet – making her pause and think about what comes next. So what does come next – not just for Bryony, but for all of us? Will we start the day with a couple of orgasms, like the people in Woody Allen’s Sleeper? Will we finally shed the taboo around sex, and will that lead to freedom or general depravity? (Didn’t we already have a sexual revolution, 50 years ago?) Will sextech simply enhance our lives in the way Apple watches and vitamin supplements do, allowing us to be happier on the inside by being happier on the outside? One thing’s for sure: as confirmed by Bryony’s travels and speaking engagements – hopefully including Reflect in a couple of days – everyone in the world is “obsessed , yet so scared of sex. Everyone thinks that ‘Everyone else knows what they’re doing with sex, everyone else is doing the normal thing. Only I have no idea about it’. That’s what I’ve found”. I leave her to gaze at the great Southern Ocean (the house is right on the beach) while I look at the Pentadaktylos, 14,000 kilometres away. Two random lives linked by tech, and a common obsession. Read the full article

#news #Sextech

0 notes

softly-savage-mint-yoongi · 3 years

Photo

Heat Seekers I

Genre: Dark Cyberpunk AU Pairing: Chanyeol x f.reader Words: 5k Fic Warnings: Dead Dove: Do Not Eat. I’m serious people. If any of the chapter warnings are uncomfortable or triggering for you, please do not read this. Do so at your own discretion. Lots of angst and hurt, eventual smut. Chapter Warnings are below the cut. Author’s Note: There are some specific things in this fic that I’ve personally experienced, and some that I have not. Please understand my intention with this fic is a way of healing not just for myself but hopefully for others who unfortunately have experience with these types of situations. I did a lot of debating about whether or not I should even post this fic, and have spoken to a few individuals about it. Ultimately, with the intent of healing and moving past such trauma, it’s been decided OK to post. Please take my warnings seriously.

Chapter Warnings: Metaphoric descriptions of statutory rape. Assault, sexual assault. Gaslighting. Attempted murder. Brief mentions of substance abuse and prostitution. Minor character death.

You always believed there was no such thing as Heaven, but surely there was Hell. Several iterations of the grotesque and horrific afterlife; because humanity is a plague and that is what each of us deserved.

Perhaps in your younger days, you didn’t know it… no, even then you knew. Deep down inside you remember nothing of happiness or blessing. No memories of a person’s presence, actions, or words doing anything considerably good for anyone else. Certainly not without a motive. Certainly not out of empathy.

Before you could walk, throwing yourself into the repetitive ease of programmed machines and technology brought you peace. Technology is predictable and massively accessible to anyone. Technology is your comfort.

Electricity became nearly free and unlimited after the revolution that ended the War on Power in 2045. So long as the sun rose every day, there was never a shortage, and the resulting surge of technological advancements that boomed, as a result, have made most fairly new tech obsolete.

Sustainable, economic, and eco-friendly power became the way of the world. Wind energy became the norm. Buildings were now made from fiberglass solar panels, stronger, taller, and widely available, so every surface collected energy from the sun. Window glass collected heat to use in the winter, eliminating the need for natural gas heat altogether. More room for technology to grow. More surface area on the ground for parks and forests. Resorts built above an ocean’s surface harnessed the energy of the currents moving below their supports. Anything that wasn’t hovering in midair could collect energy from earthquakes and natural disasters alike, as long as humankind was lucky enough to have built something that could capture the energy and withstand the storm. The earth was well on its way to healing by the time you were born in 2051, and although humankind flourished along with it, the world was still a dangerous place. Corporations rose even higher and politics declined, dissolving into a place wrought with criminal activity and fear. Yes, humans were healthier, stronger, lived longer if they were lucky. But was that really such a good thing? Your parent would throw anything she didn’t find valuable at you whenever you locked her out of the apartment, and she was too weak to force her way inside. You were smart enough to know you would be no match in the likely event someone tried to break in, so you had to defend yourself. You wear wary of the men she brought inside, always idly wondering if any of them were your father, but so few of them ever returned.

You don’t remember ever knowing you even had a father before that, unknowing until she told you about sex and what makes a human child when you were four. Not that you’d asked and not that she would care to speak to you when she was anything other than suffocatingly drunk.

In a room that was barely such, the feeble plywood walls held together as if by magic and the curtain strung up as your door sagged so low it only served to be a nuisance to your agenda. Outdated machines and technology stacked high around the walls, most were scrap parts for your projects.

You dedicated every day to sitting in the same spot, surrounded by computers and machines, and learning what makes them function. The finite possibilities, yet the scope of their differences, is something that brought you peace and kept the gears in your own head turning. Sometimes, you would pretend and daydream as if you were an android yourself. You were not lucky enough to be born as one with artificial intelligence.

You attended virtual school whenever you felt like it, or at least you knew the basics. Your parent didn’t care. She nearly pretended like you didn’t exist, which suited you just fine. From the time you were five, she began leaving you alone at home. You knew how to pull the cracked plastic stool over to the counter and get yourself some goldfish crackers or something else simple. You weren’t allowed to use the stove even though you’d repaired it twice, but the microwave was fine.

You knew how to bathe and how to use the restroom and clean up after yourself because you had to. There was nobody else for a long time. Days came and went when you weren’t sure if she would ever come back, only for her to come banging on the squeaky front door or crashing through it slurring her words and waking you from a fitful sleep to wipe at your tear-stained cheeks in the middle of the night. The notion of your tears on her behalf was always something unpredictable and confusing to you. Why would you cry over such insignificance, you sometimes wondered to yourself.

If she stopped coming back one day you would figure it out. The nice man across the street from your apartment building ran a tiny tech store and he always had a smile for you and something that needed fixing. Most days he would ask you math problems as something he called a “lightning round” of questions for an extra quarter for every right answer. Surely the three dollars he gave you for what your fixed every time was enough to put what little food you needed in your stomach.

By the time you were eight, the habits you and your cohabitant fell into became routine. You became accustomed to sleeping during the day while she was out, setting your school live feed on record so you could watch it later. At night, while trying to drown out the sounds of her screaming or sex or shattering bottles, you would work. In the world you knew, the industry wasn’t as slow as it used to be. Too fast-paced for most new phone models to make it past their six-month mark before it was time to stop manufacturing and making capital, moving onto the next one. From what you understood, a new model of home security cameras could go on the market one day and be in the clearance pile before you got your next paycheck. Security tech became your playground after a few years, and you didn’t have enough money to buy anything. It never bothered you that you were always a step behind the latest tech because you had to wait a week until the latest model began showing up in dumpsters. It was never your intention to be faster than that. By the age of ten, you knew your priority was survival and in order to do that, you had to protect yourself with whatever means necessary. You had six different checkpoints in security on your living space not long after you became familiar with it. An additional four security cameras had been installed by your own two small hands around your building as well, at the entrance, elevator, your floor’s hall, and in front of your flimsy front door. All secretly controlled by you, without the knowledge of the outdated model of AI that ran your front desk, passively named Al- born of the building owner’s lack of creativity or care. Probably both.

You spent your days alone, in the tiny, insufferable hole in the wall place called your ‘home’. Where, as the years propelled to 2063 on your twelfth year, you chose to ignore most of the other inhabitants of this world. On a worn-out and broken faux leather armchair, perpetually stuck in the reclining position. Where you sat to work and where you slept and where you held your breath at the groaning sound omitted from its cushions every time you moved. You kept fixing it whenever it would break, dumping you from the side of it with a ‘plunk’ as the bars jumped off their tracks. You scowled every time they snapped the tracks completely. You worked to hone your skills in the world of technology, tinkering and learning every detail of every machine you could get your hands on from the dumpster behind your building. Sometimes if you were lucky, the building owner would forget to pay the trash removal services and it would pile up for weeks. Heaps of smelly trash were a small price to pay if it meant you could hit the jackpot and take several trips up and down the rickety old elevator with your arms full of tech.

Those were your happiest memories. Your body felt like jelly by the time you finished sorting through it all and bringing it up to your stash, carefully removing casings of microcomputers or game cartridges to get to the gold inside.

Everything was fine and although you couldn’t say you were content with your life- you didn’t hate it. You loved the freedom to be left alone and the peace of your tinkering tech. Perhaps a little impatient to grow up, but with every passing year, you celebrated quietly to yourself during the days you had been told your birth date fell. Somewhere between these seven days, you pulled up the same app on every smartphone you had in your possession and ran quickly around your makeshift room trying to blow out twenty digital candles in one big breath- careful not to trip over small piles of tech as you went.

It became a blur after you turned twelve. Somewhere along the timeline not long after that, a man started showing up to the apartment and threw off the balance you had so carefully maintained. You never knew his name, but you remember his face, his cologne, and his voice, and the way his eyes sparkled with something that sank in the pit of your stomach the first time you laid eyes on him. Most of all, even now, you remember him in your restless nightmares and the raw feeling of vindictive rage that in your weakest moments, reminds you that you’re alive, if only by the boiling heat of your blood rushing through your ears. In those moments, when your vision goes fuzzy with the desire to see him suffer and rot miserably in the deepest pits of hell, preferably bleeding and screaming.

You remember him from a time past, standing in the kitchen with your parent, one of her arms curled around his thick neck and the other raised in the air, his fingers closed around her slim wrist. The suit he wore looked expensive, and their bodies were slowly bending over the kitchen table in a strange dance, waiting for her back to snap and flatten against the wooden surface. Their eyes flashed to yours for less than a heartbeat as you walked to the refrigerator, laughing at something that lulled in the silence.

The next time you saw him he had fed your cohabitant something so toxic she passed out on the floor beside the couch. Then he spoke to you. In his deep baritone, he sounded like he smoked too many cigarettes too often. Or drank a bottle of razor blades.

“Pretty little thing ain’t ye?” he asked, dipping his head through the curtain that thinly veiled your world from outside eyes.

You ignored him, choosing to pretend as if the headphones situated on your head were actually producing audio. So he hit you.

Then he hit you again, screaming at you for ignoring him and calling you a bitch, whatever that meant. You heard it slung at your parent enough to know it was derogatory.

You didn’t even scream, you remember. Very clearly you sat shocked, but tears spilled down your cheeks from the pain alone. The heat you felt on your cheek, swelling and rough as if you’d fallen off a motorized bike and gotten road rash on your face.

Your fingers rose and you can recall them vividly, shaking as they reached to touch at your cheek and the hiss of pain as you recoiled from yourself.

Then, you try not to visualize it, but it won’t go away. You remember the feeling of his hand grabbing yours as it froze in midair, yanking you from the protection and warm affection of your old faux leather chair. It growled as he ripped you from its grasp in protest, pulling you so hard the force nearly dislocated your shoulder while he simply tossed you on the floor.

You remember the feeling of his fingers pulling at your clothes and then pain. Extreme pain, so brutal and fast it took your breath away. Your face throbbed as his palm fit perfectly across your whole skull, pushing your head onto the rough wood planks below.

You screamed, but you don’t remember if any sound came out, or if it was just that nobody cared that you did so. You screamed and cried, trying to crawl away as he grabbed at you. There was a ‘whoosh’ feeling as the air was ripped from your lungs when something burning sunk, forcing itself a home of darkness that never should have been between your soul and your corporeal form.

And then nothing.

You remember waking up to the sharp scent of blood, confirming it when you saw it on the floor around you, glistening and wet in the faint glow of computers. You remember the pain that shot between your legs as you tried to sit up properly, groaning as fresh tears worked down your cheeks. The cry that left you rippled pain across your face, too, and you remember crawling yourself over to your beloved chair and leaning against the comfort of its worn fabric as you reached for any of the smartphones you had.

For the first time ever, the brightness of a screen made you flinch back in the darkness. Persevering, you opened the camera and turned it to selfie mode, inspecting your face in the digital reflection. Your right cheek was fat and red, and two purple circles were clearly left in the wake of where his gaudy rings hit your skin. The stain on your skin crept up below your eye.

You made yourself calm down enough to quell the sobs wracking your chest to softer whimpers and tears to help the pain in your cheek stop.

It happened again some unknown weeks later. Your parent so stoned and drunk she passed out blissfully somewhere else and he came to you again. Your begging did you no good, and you were no match for his strength. Why hadn’t you run the moment you could stand on your legs again after the first assault? Why hadn’t you hauled every piece of your tech and saved dime from your bank account or gone to the nice old man across the street for help? Deep down, you knew. You were confident enough to know he would find you and smart enough to know he would kill you when he did.

The second time, you wished you had a gun or a knife. Not just cameras to catch him in the act. Or something that would make him stop and leave you alone. It was just as bad as the first, except this time you didn’t pass out. You did your best to stay still, compliance your only weapon in hoping he goes away that much sooner if you let it be over with. It still hurt just as bad, and he still left you in a puddle of white and red wetness on the floor. The scent of blood made you dizzy.

For the first time in your life, you begged. You begged the adult that raised you and fed you until you could do it yourself. For just once you desperately wished to talk to her and confirm. To make her do something to save you. You were terrified you wouldn’t be able to save yourself, and if this were the last thing she would ever do for you, if it were the last time you would ever see her, you would be grateful if she would just do something to save her daughter.

Hopelessness and an unending free-fall of terror are what you received. You were stronger than she was, and nearly her height by now, with a young healthy body not wrought with substance abuse. You forced her to sit still and keep her eyes open. To keep watching the video even though you couldn’t watch it yourself, barely able to weather the sounds coming from the captured footage.

When it was over, you hadn’t realized you were crying. Your vision blurred when you opened your eyes, with wet cheeks that felt the rush of air as you maneuvered in front of her and gingerly knelt on the floor to beg at her knees. You gathered her hands in her lap, struggling to hold them as you repeated your pleas.

She ignored them, literally shaking and gasping for breath and telling you it wasn’t real. Telling you it never happened. When you forced it upon her and threatened to go to the police with it she pulled your hair and screamed at you. Screamed that you were an idiot and that he would kill you both because didn’t you know who he was? Didn’t you know the power that man held over so many? No, you didn’t.

And it suddenly dawned on you, she was just as scared. She was scared and terrified and unable to grasp any semblance of control over what that man did anymore. She was a fool to think she ever did, and you were a fool to have a sliver of faith in her. So you left to clear your head, much to her cries not to. Born out of anxiety, fearful you would go to the police.

You walked farther than you thought you could as you attempted to regain the strength in your legs. Slowly, and by the time you returned the sun had fully set, but an orange glow caught your attention from the rooftop, one floor above yours. Wisps of smoke, too. Odd, nobody ever went up there.

A single stray cord and a plastic piece of backing laid on the floor between the elevator and your door, and your heart sunk back down all fourteen floors. You were out of breath and the pain between your legs was searing by the time you shoved your way through the metal door to the roof.

Sitting on the ledge was a gaunt, familiar face. She was smoking a cigarette, watching the flames and smoke from three rust-stained barrels. Inside of them was most of your tech. Your cameras, a few handfuls of smartphones, seven computers, gaming consoles, tablets.

You barely remember what happened after that, but you know it was a lot of screaming and a burn when you attempted to kick one of them and stomp out the flames. That day was the catalyst that made you take action, planning to escape from hell. If there was no chance to be saved by someone else, you would have to do it yourself.

Racing the clock on a high of anxiety, you only prayed that for three days he wouldn’t show up. You only needed three days.

On the afternoon of the second day, you hadn’t realized you were alone in the small apartment of your old and outdated building. You were too busy working like lightning to beat an imaginary deadline on your heels. You hadn’t noticed she had left until you came out shortly to use the restroom and find some crackers.

There he was at the kitchen table, the cheap metal legs of the chair bowing under his mass. You froze, watching him in shock and briefly you let your eyes wander around the living room to realize she wasn’t there. His voice was low as he told you she passed out in the elevator hours ago.

The chair made a horrible scuffing sound as he stood up, and you flinched. It didn’t matter once he took your wrist in his grip, and he made you suffer once more.

Something unhinged him this time, and even through the pain and nausea and the attempt to make yourself faint just to not have to live through it, you felt it. Felt the psychotic shift in his brain as he laughed at your pain.

It broke something inside of you. Escape. Do not let him do this to you. Definitely do not give up and let it happen. Retaliate. Fight. Get away. Run. Live.

You barely recall how you came to the conclusion, or how you stomached the grotesque way, when he leaned over your back, you turned your head. How you took the easiest thing to reach- his right ear lobe- between your teeth, and mangled him for all you were worth.

The gratification was immediate as he sprang from you, shoving you forward and holding his head. You remember no pain in that moment, and smiling with adrenaline, breathless but with lungs full of oxygen at the same time. You bolted before he could come back to his senses, grabbing your bag from your chair, thankfully nearly complete, and ran out, fixing your clothing along the way.

He tried to get up fast enough to stop you, lunging for you with one hand as you made it into the hallway, but whatever adrenaline you were on was potent, and your senses were razor sharp. You ducked his hand, hearing him barrel into the wall with his momentum as you made for the elevator.

You watched in slow motion the hopeless rage morph onto his stubbled face, knowing he wouldn’t catch you in time. Letting go of his ear, you saw it maimed, the bottom half missing, an obvious mouth-shaped crest bleeding heavily onto the floor as he reached instead to procure a gun from his jacket.

Although your heart leaped at the sight of it as the metal door creaked open behind you, his hands were messy, and the gun slipped from his bloody grip.

Turning to get on, you hesitated for just a second when you saw her there, passed out in the corner of the elevator. You shoved the button for the lobby as hard as you could, planning to rip the wires from the panel behind Al’s desk the moment it reached the bottom. It would give you enough time to get away as he descended the stairs.

You remember watching her sleep, but an eerie sense of foreboding grew in the intimate space the lower the elevator went, despite the beauty of golden hour cityscape from the window that served as the back wall of the capsule.

It took a few moments for you to realize the sun looked odd against her skin. Her hair didn’t catch the rays, nor did her lips hold the same color or fullness of your own, a feature you had in common. She looked sick.

An unfamiliar emotion welled in you. Some concoction of fear, sadness, and a heavy sense of solitude congealed in your chest and your throat as you crouched beside her quietly, afraid to make a sound.

Hesitantly, you touched her shoulder, immediately recoiling at the unnatural stone of her form, refusing to be pliant under the gentle press of your fingers. Swallowing the bile that rose in your throat, you grasped her shoulders, shaking her. Her body slid further down the wall when you let go. It remained there on the floor in an unnatural and rigid stillness, heavy.

You tripped as you receded backward, falling against the smooth metal of the door. Terror overcame you and a bewildering sense of lonely unknown stood towering before you in your mind’s eye. Not that you expected to ever see her again. Not that you expected to care, you hated her. But you hadn’t wanted her to die.

“Mom,” you remember choking up her title in reverence, the one and only time in your life you’d ever said the word.

You groaned with pain, suddenly powerless without the adrenaline that was just coursing through your veins. Everything hurt. Your vision, your head, your body, your heart. You were going to throw up. But you’d be damned if you did it before you escaped. You were so close. Just a little further.

Your mouth watered with the impending expulsion of your gut, but you managed to fall backward out of the elevator and stumble to your feet, feeling heavy as you trudged past Al’s inquiry of your health to the panel, ripping every wire out with your fist.

Just once you threw up beside the revolving door of your building before entering. You staggered through it after, feeling a rush of fresh air that told your very soul it was over.

You did it. Now you just had to make sure you survived, but you were good at that.

_________________

April, 2072

You pursed your lips, scowling at the bitter, sour flavor of the lollipop settled on your tongue. Leaning to the right, you lifted your hand from the grip of your bars, reaching through the thickness of your helmet through the open visor and whipping the candy from your mouth with a grimace.

You slowed, unable to afford a littering fine if you just threw it to the wind behind you, even though you wanted to rebel in that way. Too many high-tech cameras on the city streets to get away with anything unless you had the money to pay off the cops.

Which, unfortunately, you didn’t.

Twisting forward to squeeze the brake, you let your bike lull into a quiet purr as you pull off onto a quiet road, looking for the correct receptacle. You let it crawl forward, along the curb, and over a storm drain so you can lean over and drop the candy into the trash. For a moment, you lick your lips, pulling your backpack around to rummage through the bag of lollies inside for a better flavor.

While you search for a strawberry- your favorite- you weigh the pros and cons of just buying a bag of strawberry flavor instead of the assortment. Price, for starters, you scoff to yourself, remembering to pluck the sour apple wrapper from your pocket to toss into the trash. Exclusive flavor bags are more expensive, but you don’t waste as much by throwing out every god damned green apple you pluck from the bag.

Frowning when you come up empty-handed, you take the second-best choice, unwrapping the dark red of a cherry lolly when a presence catches your attention. A man, tall and thin, clothed in dark colors standing still against the bustle of the city. There’s a black baseball cap on his head, pressed down over dark red curls that peek out at the edges.

He’s wearing square, dark-tinted sunglasses that block out his eyes, with ears that bow out from his skull, and you briefly register that he’s built the same all around, in large proportions, from his hands to his face to his towering height.

Even in the late afternoon, his visage glows with artificial color as he basks in the light of a large television displayed in the storefront window. Although his attire tells you he’s trying to conceal his identity, he doesn’t seem to stick out, going ultimately unnoticed by the people passing by him.

His face is turned towards the television as a news channel covers a fire at a large corporate building from last night. It shows impressive plumes of flame and thick smoke, even darker than the night sky, glowing faintly with billions of lights.

The man watching the television bounces a short stick between his teeth, but you can’t tell what it is from this distance. You notice his face moves, the apples of his cheeks rising high as he smiles wide, easily a head above the crowd.

The sound of sirens from the recording of the fire dins away to the sound of an audio clip taken from a phone call. A man’s voice, clearly distorted with an autotune. Raspy, dark laughter, and a bitter promise to chase someone to hell.

A small part of you is smug, rooting for the villain even, and his vicious words to whomever the message are, or was, intended.

The sun is starting to set, and you hate having to watch the skyline glitter with the golden light as you drive on. It’s an unwanted and unnecessary memory, unforgiving in the distance of your timeline.

Luckily, you enter the undercity just as the light grows intense, escaping into the sleepless neon of your world. Into the black market and the tech industry, rife with people who thrive on a never-ending night, as if their veins are made of glass and filled with inert gases to make them glow just as brightly as the buildings here.

You’ve got a lead from a friend of sorts. Someone who you’ve got a history with from your days at the bordello, and who kept you alive once upon a time when you first came to the undercity, terrified but determined to forget yourself and be born as someone stronger, smarter, better.

He’s never given you bad intel before, so long as you could get to it before a clan or a faster loaner. Luckily, you have a natural gift for hacking and the latest model of ‘unhackable’ Hyperbikes are no exception to your deft fingers.

You pull up outside Blue House, scanning the digital bulletin for the job he mentioned. You press your finger to it, holding your breath for the marquee to inform you whether it’s still up for grabs, or if it is unfortunately for you- in progress.

A smile cracks your lips when the green light pops up, and you whip your glove off when the prompter asks to scan your left thumb. A second passes as the soft blue light moves across your finger, chirping in confirmation when it’s done.

You don’t even care what the job is- but Chan promised it would be something you could do. All you remember is hearing a payment sum that could put good food in your stomach for a month straight. The only question you had was why a tech hacking job was showing up on a brothel’s bulletin board.

Ultimately, what was one more undercover prostitution job? You were familiar with the work that came through the bordello, and its basic services. In the last two years, you’ve moved away from it little by little, having made some waves with your work as a hacker in the undercity. Your moniker started to be whispered across the shadows as the underdog, a genius ‘for the people’ hacker that put bad men where they belonged. Only Chan knew you by two names. The rest of the world only knew one.

The name Maneater.

#heat seekers #chanyeol x reader #chanyeol fanfiction #dead dove do not eat #exo fanfiction #chanyeol angst #exo angst #chanyeol fic #exo fic

62 notes · View notes

pleasereadmycrap · 4 years

Text

Time Gone By I

Pairing: Steve x Reader, Bucky x Reader

Warnings: angst

Summary: Steve left, and when he comes back, things have changed. (Not canon compliant)

A/N: Hey y’all. This is my new series. I hope y’all enjoy it. Also I know that I should start a new paragraph eveytime that sombody new speaks but I hit the 250 text block limit. So yes, I know I am not following basic grammar rules, and yes, it makes me cringe too. Next, I know it looks like Time Gone By I, but the name is Time Gone By. The I is just a Roman numeral. I know that I should have put a colon there, but when I did, it kind of irritated me so I deleted it.

As Steve walked through the gates of the Wakandan palace, he couldn’t hold in his admiration. His head was on a swivel as he took in the view of the city. It was a sight that he never thought he would see. In the 40s, Wakanda had been seen as a primitive third world country. By the 2010s, it seemed that not much had changed. The world still had yet to see this side of Wakanda, although it seemed that they wanted it that way. In fact, Steve, himself, had only ever really thought about it as the place his shield was made up until now. Walking through the palace gates, the first person that he saw was Bucky. He was excited to see his best friend for the first time in so many years. It was like a pattern for them- the world ripping them apart only to put them back together again. Only, Bucky didn’t look quite as happy to see Steve. He actually looked nervous.

“Hey, Buck. It’s been a while,” he called out as he ran towards Bucky and engulfed him in a tight hug that wasn’t returned nearly as enthusiastically. Then, he remembered where he was, disentangled himself from his friend, and bowed to the king. “I’m sorry, your majesty. That was disrespectful. I forgot myself. I apologize.”

“Please don’t apologize, and call me T’challa,” he replied in his lightly accented English that sounded so posh.

“Thank you, T’challa, and thank you for your hospitality. Now, Buck, how have you been? Tell me everything. It’s been so long.”

“Uh… Things have been different without you. I missed you,” he stammered, not quite meeting Steve’s eyes,

“I missed you too, bud. Now, where is she?”

“Who?”

“C’mon Buck. Don’t play stupid. You know who I’m talking about. Where’s Y/N?”

“Um, Steve. Things have changed since you’ve been gone. There’s a lot to talk about, you know?”

“No, I really don’t. What are you saying here, Buck?”

“I think now would be a good time to excuse myself,” T’challa said before turning and walking back into the palace. He signaled for the guard and everybody else to follow him.

‘C’mon, Buck. Just tell me what’s going on. I didn’t think that we kept things from each other.”

“No, you’re right. We don’t. It’s just that you left. You ran off and you followed Peggy’s niece around Europe for three years. Look, I get it. Peggy died and you were in a bad place, but was it really worth it? Was it worth it to leave the best thing that ever happened to your sorry ass to follow some remnant of Peggy like a dog chasing a stick?”

“Bucky, if you have something to say to me, just tell me, and stop beating around the bush!”

“I just don’t think that it’s a very good idea for you to see her right now,” Bucky said quietly, staring at his feet.

“Really? Who died and made you king?”

“Very mature, Steve.”

“If I want to see my girlfriend, I damn well will!”

“She’s not your girlfriend anymore!”

“What?” Steve asked, uncomprehending.

“You left to chase tail in Europe, and you think that you can just come back, and everything will be the same. You act like you were gone for a week or two, but it was three fucking years. You left us, all of us! Things have changed! You left her for another woman! She’s moved on! She doesn’t want to see you, Steve!”

“Moved on? Who has she moved on with?”

“Nobody. She’s just moved on,” Bucky said, sounding exasperated. “Look, I don’t want to talk about this anymore. There’s a room for you in the palace. You can set your stuff there.”

“Thanks,” Steve replied, before storming off into the palace.

When he reached his room, he marveled at it. The technology in there put that of the Compound or Tower to shame. The window stretched from floor to ceiling, and the view was incredible. It was a stark contrast to the view he was used to from his crappy flat in 40s Brooklyn, or the view of New York from the Tower. It even weirded him out not to see Thor and Nat wailing on each other in a field outside. Instead, he saw wide open spaces unlike New York and beautiful architecture unlike the Compound. It was all mixed together to create the most beautiful citadel that Steve had ever seen. He thought about asking whatever virtual assistant that was undoubtedly hooked up in his room about you, but he had only barely mastered JARVIS. He didn’t even know the name of this one, so he just sat on the bed and thought about what Bucky had said for a while. It wasn’t all true, was it? Had he really been gone that long? It hadn’t felt like three years when he had been with Sharon. Despite what everybody thought, and despite that ill timed kiss, he hadn’t been with Sharon for sex or a relationship or whatever. It was just that he had realized at the funeral when Sharon spoke as Peggy’s niece, how little he knew about Peggy’s life other than when he knew her. He needed to piece it together. He needed to know more. He wasn’t ready to let go yet, so yeah, he followed a woman around Europe just to find out more about her dead aunt. He hadn’t really seen himself as leaving you. He had meant to keep in touch with you. Really, he had. He had meant to come back, but two weeks turned to four, then eight, then three whole years. When had he let that happen? Suddenly, he heard a knock at his door. Steve opened it to find T’challa standing behind it.

“Prince T’challa, what can I do for you?”

“I thought I told you that just T’challa is fine” he teased Steve lightly.

“I’m sorry? What did you come to talk about?”

“I thought I should come and welcome you properly. It didn’t seem like things were good between you and your friend.”

“No, they weren’t, but it’s none of our concern. I wouldn’t want to bother you with my problems when you’re already showing me so much hospitality.”

“If a king cannot listen to the difficulties of his people, he has no business being king.”

“Very wise.”

“My father told me that.”

“He was a good man.”

“I know, but I am not here to talk about him. I thought I would tell you that we are having a party tomorrow night. I wanted to welcome all of the fighters and give them a chance to destress before the fight.”

“It sounds like a great idea. Will everybody in the palace be there?”

“I hope so. I’ll have a suit sent up to your room. According to our calculations, Thanos should be here in two days.”

“And those are accurate?”

“Shuri doesn’t make mistakes,” T’challa said in a tone that left no room for further questions on the matter. Steve wanted to ask who Shuri was but decided to leave it alone. “I’m having some of our scientists make a suit for you. It’ll be a little more high tech and more appropriate for the occasion than the stars and stripes.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ll have dinner sent up tonight. Most of your fellow teammates have opted to eat dinner in their rooms.”

“What information can you give me on Y/N?”

“I’m afraid it’s not my place.”

“Please,” Steve begged, employing his best puppy eyes.

“I should be going,” T’challa said, before leaving the room abruptly.

Dinner was sent up shortly after. It was a cheeseburger and fries, and probably the best that Steve had ever had. It reminded him of going out for lunch with Bucky after some of his less damaging fights, or going to Coney Island with girls that he only met two hours prior, but swore that he was going to marry. Steve missed back when things were simpler. After a while, the sky outside got dark, and Steve figured he should turn in early. The next couple of days were going to be rough, and he had better prepare the best that he could.

…

The next morning, Steve was woken up by blinding sunlight streaming through his window. He sat up in his bed and heard a voice coming from some hidden corner of his room.

“Good morning, Captain Rogers. The king would like to see you in the training lab at your earliest convenience,” a kind sounding female voice said in a stiff British accent that let him know it was some AI talking.

“Uh… good morning. Can you please tell the kind that I’ll be there soon, and could I also get directions to the training lab, please?”

“Just take the elevator to the lowest level.”

“Thank you.”

Steve dressed himself quickly in joggers and one of the T-shirts in the drawers of the dresser in his room. Evidently, whoever had stocked that dresser knew of his fondness for tight fitting shirts. He hustled down the hall to the elevator, still marveling at how modern the palace was. When he stepped into the lab though, he was in a whole other world. There were a plethora of machines whizzing over his head. There were different projects scattered everywhere in various states of completion. Holograms were projected around the room, showing the blueprints for multiple machines. It was like Stark Labs but bigger and even more high tech. He could hear a loud whirring coming from one corner of the room. He followed his ear in the direction of the noise to find T’challa watching a young woman hunched over a piece of metal that she was soldering.

“Hello,” Steve said as he walked up,not wanting to startle the girl wielding a glorified cauterizing knife.

“Ah, Captain Rogers, it is good to see you. This is my sister Shuri. She has been working on the suit for you.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Princess,” Steve bowed his head in respect.

“Shuri is fine,” she replied, finally looking up from her work.

“As long as you call me Steve.”

“Deal.”

“So what’s the deal on this new suit?”

“It’s over here. Follow me,” Shuri said as she started walking to the opposite side of the lab. “Your new suit will harness kinetic energy, same as my brother’s. It’s also a little darker and more appropriate for the solemnity of what’s to come, but heat reflective so that you won’t be burning up inside of it. It’ll be great if you ever decide to use it for stealth missions. The new suit will also be able to read and relay your vitals to the rest of your team, and of course, your new shields will be attached to the suit so you don’t have to worry about them getting lost on such a hectic battle field.

“That all sounds very impressive.”

“Shuri is the best we have, even better than your Stark,” T’challa cut in.

“I’m excited to see it, then.”

“Well, I’ll also need you to try it on. I used your measurements from the media about you, Dorito Man.”

“Is that what they call me?” Steve asked with a small chuckle “Yes, and it’s what your friend Natasha told me to call you when she helped me out with the guesstimating.”

“Of course she did.”

“She actually offered to help you test the suit out,” Shuri said as she stopped in front of a glass display case, containing a dark navy suit. Natasha stepped out from behind it with an impish grin on her face. “Hey, Cap.”

“Nat!” Steve exclaimed as he wrapped her in a tight hug. “I’ve missed you! Hey, I’ve been meaning to come find you and ask, how’s Y/N?”

“No, Steve.”

“C’mon Nat! Please!”

“Just put on the damn suit. Let’s get this over with,” Nat said, her voice laced with disdain. Shuri directed Steve behind a changing partition he requested, all the while insisting that it was nothing they hadn’t seen before. He emerged a few minutes later with his new suit on. It felt great and fit like a glove. “Stand on the line,” Natasha directed him, pointing to a tapeline on the floor. “I’m gonna hit you now,” and she did. She punched Steve as hard as he had ever seen her hit anyone, even their enemies, even HYDRA’s goonies.

“Jesus, Nat!”

“I said that I was going to hit you.”

“Not that hard!”

“Whatever. Now, run into that wall.”

“Why is Shuri recording?” Steve asked suspiciously. “Research purposes,” she answered simply, as she adjusted her tablet for a better angle. Steve did what he was told and ran into the wall. Immediately, he was blown back by some unseen force and knocked 20 feet onto his back. “That is so going viral!”

“What the hell was that?” he mustered out weakly over the sounds of everybody laughing with Nat being the loudest. “The kinetic energy in the suit,” Shuri answered. “I thought I warned you.”

“We all get revenge in different ways. I asked Shuri to help you test your suit. You forget, you left me too. Tell Sharon I say hi,” Nat said before walking out of the room proudly, still chuckling. “I think that I had better head back to my room now,” Steve said as he managed to rise to his feet. “See you tonight, Captain,” T’challa said as he attempted to stifle his laughs.

…

That night, Steve dressed himself in the suit that had been left at his door. It was a deep navy color that brought out the blue in his eyes. It was paired with a simple white shirt. Everything fit him perfectly like it had been tailor made for him, although he supposed it had been. He looked at himself anxiously in the mirror. He was afraid and excited. It was the first time that he would see you in 3 years. He didn’t know if he was ready. He started to walk downstairs, and he had to stop himself from running all the way to the main hall. He fiddled nervously with his cufflinks the entire way down in the elevator. When he reached the main hall, he realized how early he was. Only Natasha was there, standing behind the bar in a tailored white button down and black vest, fixing herself a drink.

“Hey,” Steve called out as he approached the bar. “Are we good after this morning?”

“Yeah, I just wanted to humiliate you.”

“I probably deserved it.”

“No, you definitely did. What are you drinking?”

“Do you have any of that Asgardian stuff from the last time that Thor was on Earth?”

“Ooh, starting off the night strong are we?”

“Well, I’m gonna see Y/N tonight.”

“Steve, are you sure that it’s a good idea to talk to her? She was messed up after you left, and now, she’s finally in a good place.”

“Why is everybody saying that? I love her! What aren’t you telling me?”

“Nothing,” Nat said, sounding tired, as she placed Steve’s drink in front of him. More people had filtered in at this point including Bucky. “Do you think that I should even try to talk to him?” Steve asked as he stared miserably at the bottom of his glass. “You’re best friends. It couldn’t hurt.”

“You didn’t see how mad he was yesterday.”

“I know how mad he got, and he had every right to do so, but Steve you’ve already lost him so many times. Don’t let it happen again.”

“I hate it when you’re right,” Steve said as he pushed away from the bar. “How are you doing?” he asked as he walked up to Bucky. “Worse, now that you’re here.”

“Are you kidding me? Why can’t we just be adults about this?”

“Last I checked, you haven’t acted like an adult in 3 years, if you ever did.”

“Are you really still this mad at me?”

“Are you really still a punk?” Bucky joked with a wink. “I missed you bud,” Steve said into Bucky’s hair as he enveloped him in a bruising hug, one that was returned with equal love this time. “I missed you too.”

Suddenly, Steve froze in Bucky’s arms. Bucky turned to see what had caused his friend’s sudden change, and saw you. You were making your way down the stairs into the ballroom, and you looked like a princess. Your hair had gotten longer since the last time Steve had seen you. It cascaded past your shoulders in soft curls. The dress you were wearing was champagne colored with a magnificent tulle skirt that belled out at your waist. The entire dress shimmered, giving you the illusion of having been showered in sparkles. You had reached the main floor and Steve saw your face light up when you caught sight of him.

“Hey!” you trilled as you completely overlooked Steve and flung yourself into Bucky’s arms. “Hey, Y/N. You look stunning,” Bucky stammered when he regained the ability to speak. “What the hell is going on here?” Steve asked incredulously. You whirled around and recognition flashed in your eyes as you backed father into Bucky’s chest and he wrapped his arms around you protectively. “Steve,” you gasped, the name falling from your lips like a forgotten prayer. “You- you can’t be here.”

“Really? Because the king personally reached out and asked for my help. Now does one of you care to explain?”

“You left,” you said defensively. “What are the two of you doing?”

“I thought you were gonna tell him,” you said to Bucky. “I needed more time. It’s not exactly something that you rush into when you see somebody for the first time in three years.”

“Tell me what?”

“Steve, let’s not. I mean, c’mon, we’re on good terms and besi-“ Bucky said, trying to soothe the situation, before Steve cut him off. “Screwing my girlfriend doesn’t exactly scream buddies!”

“That’s not fair,” you mumbled into Bucky’s chest, where you had turned and hidden your head. “What?” Steve asked, growing angrier by the minute. “That’s not fair, and you know it. You left me. I was devastated. Bucky was there for me, so excuse me for moving on!” you shouted as you whirled back around.” “I didn’t…”

“Didn’t what? Leave me? So then what do you call running off to Europe for three years without a word?”

“You don’t understand. I had to,” Steve said quietly with his head hung low like a puppy with his tail tucked between his legs. “Oh, so you were held at gunpoint? Were you forced to leave without saying goodbye?”

“Well, no, but-“

“Because the way I heard it,” you continued overtop of Steve’s protests. “Sharon wanted nothing to do with you after that crappy kiss, so she hopped around Europe for three years, trying to escape you, while you attempted to interrogate her about her dead aunt.”

“She kissed me.”

“I don’t want to hear your excuses Steve!”

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” Steve asked Bucky who now was standing a couple of steps behind you. “I think she’s got it covered.”

“You have no right to have any opinion about Bucky and I’s relationship. You shouldn’t even be here.”

“Y/N…”

“You can’t claim me as your property, Steve, not when you threw me away like a piece of trash.”

“Please.”

“I hope she was worth it,” you spat, before walking away and taking Bucky with you.

151 notes · View notes

maskydoolovesmasseffect · 3 years

Text

Mass Effect Tag

Wellio, I’ve been tagged by @berryshiara. Passing this on to @grummel83

Gunna answer my questions now. Y’all feel free to tell me what you think of these answers.

I’m a fan since: 2008. I was just out of high school and still not over KoTOR. I was fresh in the army and got to talking to some other dude fresh to the army about video games. He asked me if I played Mass Effect. I said no. By the next day I just about totally forgot about him, then he suddenly appeared out of nowhere sat in front of me in the chow hall and pulled a copy of ME1 for Xbox 360 out his pocket like he was a magician doing a magic trick (ACU pockets are huge.)

Anyway turns out that guy was a romance option and I must have picked the right dialogue options. I’m still with him, too.

Favorite game of the series:

Mass Effect 2. It seemed like that’s the one where choices mattered most and you really got to know your squaddies. Also MAJOR gameplay improvements over the first game. And that game gave me the most freedom to do basically whatever I wanted and wasnt afraid to give me consequences for it.

MShep or FShep:

FShep. Nothing against MShep, but for me the real Shep is FShep. Can’t beat Jennifer Hale’s voice.

Earthborn, Colonist, or Spacer:

Colonist. I like having the background of knowing just how dangerous the galaxy can be and how the Alliance can’t be everywhere at once so sometimes you need to manage your best on your own.

Biotics or Tech:

Both.

Paragon or Renegade:

Paragon, mostly. I tried being renegade but some of the actions are just so pointlessly dickish, or even outright unhinged in a way that would make it impossible to believe the Alliance would ever promote Shepard as an officer or even keep her in the Alliance at all, especially in the first game.

That said, there are times where a renegade action is more expedient and practical than a paragon one, like in 2 when you stab a dude in the back to prevent him from repairing an enemy gunship, so even with a paragon playthrough, my Shepard will have no issues taking that opportunity. She’s already seconds away from betraying all those guys anyway.

Paragon in treatment of others, renegade in combat pragmatism.

Favorite Class:

I play as infiltrator and vanguard.

Infiltrator is great for using a sniping and opening loot, and then for going invisible, and if I remember right AI hacking too. That’s cool and I wish there were more genuine opportunities for stealth.

Nowadays I play as Vanguard in my playthroughs mainly just so my Shepard can be canonically biotic for story reasons. From 2 on when looting no longer needs a special skill and I get to charge around the map. I don’t really care much about using biotics (that’s what the squadies are for) but the movement is super useful (when Shepard actually does the thing instead of just standing out in the open soaking up bullets until the ability decides to actually work.)

Favorite Companion:

Garrus. I like to set him up in sniper positions. When he actually STAYS where I put him instead of running straight up to enemies to try to snipe them at point blank, he’s great.

Also his quips in 2 on are pretty entertaining.

Least Favorite Companion:

Garrus, Oh my god. Go back to the sniper position where I put you. Leave tanking to krogan; you do not have the HP for this.

Also Kaidan in ME1. He can not shoot to save his life - literally.

My Squad Selection:

For all ME1 playthroughs after my first one, Ashley and Kaidan, just of their comments and because... well... I only have so much time with them.

Apart from that I mainly just pick my team based on who’s likely to have the most interesting commentary on whatever the mission happens to be, squad balance be damned.

Favorite In-Game Romance:

Garrus X Shepard is my favorite love story. They are just so adorable together and always supportive even when they disagree.

But my cannon romance is Kaidan X Shepard for the drama and angst.

Favorite NPC:

In ME1 there’s this random Turian on Noveria who randomly has like a New York accent and I absolutely adore him. He plays basically no part in the story other than some minor information but he’s just so pleasant to speak to.

“If you need anything, I’ll be here.”

Favorite Antagonist:

Morinth, the Ardat-Yakshi daughter of Samara. Yes, she’s a murderous vampire who will absolutely kill you given the chance... but like, it’s a medical condition. And I really can’t help but feel for ardat-yakshi in general when their only options are to spend their whole lives on the run from justicars out to execute them, or waste their entire 1000 year lifespan imprisoned in a monetary unable to experience the world at all. Yeah, Morinth is evil, but Ardat-Yakshi don’t exactly have a good deal.

Favorite Loyalty Mission:

Grunt’s loyalty mission is the best. I get to help my baby boy, reunite with Wrex, enjoy krogan society being fleshed out, have a kickass battle against a thresher maw, and get a breeding request. It’s nice to have a quest that isn’t about family drama and genuinely gets a happy end.

Favorite Mission:

Despite Citadel DLC requiring everyone to have a deathgrip on an idiot ball, and also basically gloss over some really dark stuff, the whole clone storyline with the whole crew is an absolute ride all the way though, with lots of interesting and unique scenarios, a ton of replay-value, and funny party banter that feels like it came straight out of a Marvel movie.

Favorite DLC:

Again, Citadel DLC. Not only did it come with the story above, it also had all those interactions with past and present crewmates, including a memorial for Thane (finally!), a cool apartment to hang out in, a party, an arcade, and an awesome battle arena. It really added a TON. Also, it’s nice to see Bioware figure out that DLC needs characters - I’m remembering back in the DLC to ME 1 the party never had a single thing to say, no matter what was going on. The fun and wacky Citadel DLC is a far cry from the serious and somewhat dark space opera Mass Effect started as, but as the final DLC capping off the end of the series, it gets to do a silly victory lap (and get the taste of the ending out of our mouths.)

Control, Synthesis, Or Destroy:

No.

Favorite Weapon:

Sniper rifles, whatever I have that’s fast and has high damage output. Also that one pistol that shoots tiny energy grenades. Pew pew.

Yeah I wasn’t really big into the weapons so much. I’m here to get my story on.

Favorite Place:

The presidium on the Citadel. It bothered me a lot when I couldn’t explore it in the second game. I know it would have been terribly impractical, but as the presidium is just a huge ring, it would have been cool to be able to explore the whole thing, going past all the little park areas, shops, monuments and so on until you loop aaaaall the way back around to where you started. Like, how cool would it be if the ring had a running track? Maybe C-sec academy trainees would be spotted jogging together along it in formation. And can you imagine grabbing a coffee (I was going to make up a space-related name for Starbucks but it’s already STARbucks...) and taking a nice stroll along the water before finding a nice bench to alien-watch from? Other locations in the game are like great places to explore and do gameplay stuff, but the presidium seems like a nice place to just be.

Favorite Quote:

"Stand in the ashes of a trillion dead souls and ask the ghosts if honor matters. The silence is your answer." - Javik.

This is such a fucking raw damn line. It makes me think a lot about Cerberus. When ME3 wasn’t out yet, I thought maybe the plan was Shepard would at some point choose a side, Alliance for paragons and Cerberus for renegades. It would have been so cool to have morality not merely be good vs evil, but idealism vs that ruthless calculus Garrus mentioned. How fucking raw would it be if Cerberus wasn’t just generically evil for no reason and suddenly indoctrinated but really were embodying that ruthless calculus, determined to defeat the reapers at any and all cost. Maybe Cerberus actions’ were more likely to do terrible things for the sake of ultimate victory, doing whatever it took, whereas the Alliance would be less willing to make the terrible choices and ultimately be less likely to succeed.

Now obviously, that’s not what happened, as it would have required Bioware to basically make two entirely separate games. But that line from Javik makes me think of that concept, and a universe where like Dragon Age party members can approve or disapprove of actions not merely as good or evil but along the lines of their personal values. I think Javik would sit at victory at all cost.

Also that one mission in 2 where some random NPC catches Shepard sneaking around and is all like ‘what are you doing here?’ and Shepard is like ‘What am I doing here? What are you doing here? Get out here before it blows!’ and the guy’s freaking out like WTF and she says ‘RUN!’ then laughs to herself as he flees from an imaginary bomb. Shep you troll.

The thing I like the least about the entire franchise:

The misogyny and objectification that crept its way in, epically from the second game on. Really didn’t like those ass-shot camera angles, or female characters being slut-shamed in-universe for the clothes the designers made them wear. Yikes.

But the biggest yikes for me in that regard is actually the reveal in 3 that the prothians guided asari development. That was fine and all, but the part that bothered me was the characters commenting “ooooh, so that’s why asari are so advanced,” as it was ever any kind of mystery before that exact moment. For one thing, asari aren’t really shown as being more advanced than anyone else, apart from having discovered the citadel first, and for second, why wouldn’t asari be advanced? All the way from ME1 it’s established that 1: Asari live for a really long time, and 2: can instant transmit information directly from brain to brain. That means they have long lifetime in which to accumulate knowledge and experience, and also can easily spread and preserve that knowledge without even the need for books. That ALONE should put them ahead. And even with all that, they only barely beat the salarians to discovering the Citadel first. But no one asks for an explanation for why salarians, who live only a few decades and can’t do mental data-transfer, are so advanced. No, only the success of the all-women race needs explaining. It was just one moment but it still bugs me.

Also the general loss of realism after the second game. First game everyone gets armor, including full-face helmets automatically on in environments that need it. After that, people can apparently just wander the battlefield half-naked and even somehow survive in a total vacuum if they just put a plastic cup (that isn’t even connected to anything) over their mouth and nose. In the first game they at least made up some reasonable-sounding science fiction explanation for things, but after that it’s like F-it everything is just space magic now.

Oh, and those repetitive unlocking stuff minigames. I use a mod to just skip those.

#mass effect #tag

14 notes · View notes

vegan-and-sara · 3 years

Link

Full article:

By Drew Harwell and Eva Dou

Dec. 8, 2020 at 7:30 a.m. PST

The Chinese tech giant Huawei has tested facial recognition software that could send automated “Uighur alarms” to government authorities when its camera systems identify members of the oppressed minority group, according to an internal document that provides further details about China’s artificial-intelligence surveillance regime.

A document signed by Huawei representatives — discovered by the research organization IPVM and shared exclusively with The Washington Post — shows that the telecommunications firm worked in 2018 with the facial recognition start-up Megvii to test an artificial-intelligence camera system that could scan faces in a crowd and estimate each person’s age, sex and ethnicity.

If the system detected the face of a member of the mostly Muslim minority group, the test report said, it could trigger a “Uighur alarm” — potentially flagging them for police in China, where members of the group have been detained en masse as part of a brutal government crackdown. The document, which was found on Huawei’s website, was removed shortly after The Post and IPVM asked the companies for comment.

Such technology has in recent years gained an expanding role among police departments in China, human rights activists say. But the document sheds new light on how Huawei, the world’s biggest maker of telecommunications equipment, has also contributed to its development, providing the servers, cameras, cloud-computing infrastructure and other tools undergirding the systems’ technological might.

John Honovich, the founder of IPVM, a Pennsylvania-based company that reviews and investigates video-surveillance equipment, said the document showed how “terrifying” and “totally normalized” such discriminatory technology has become.

“This is not one isolated company. This is systematic,” Honovich said. “A lot of thought went into making sure this ‘Uighur alarm’ works.”

Huawei and Megvii have announced three surveillance systems using both companies’ technology in the past couple years. The Post could not immediately confirm if the system with the “Uighur alarm” tested in 2018 was one of the three currently for sale.

Both companies have acknowledged the document is real. Shortly after this story published Tuesday morning, Huawei spokesman Glenn Schloss said the report “is simply a test and it has not seen real-world application. Huawei only supplies general-purpose products for this kind of testing. We do not provide custom algorithms or applications.”

Also after publication, a Megvii spokesman said the company’s systems are not designed to target or label ethnic groups.

Chinese officials have said such systems reflect the country’s technological advancement, and that their expanded use can help government responders and keep people safe. But to international rights advocates, they are a sign of China’s dream of social control — a way to identify unfavorable members of society and squash public dissent. China’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

First she survived a Uighur internment camp. Then she made it out of China.

Artificial-intelligence researchers and human rights advocates said they worry the technology’s development and normalization could lead to its spread around the world, as government authorities elsewhere push for a fast and automated way to detect members of ethnic groups they’ve deemed undesirable or a danger to their political control.

Maya Wang, a China senior researcher at the advocacy group Human Rights Watch, said the country has increasingly used AI-assisted surveillance to monitor the general public and oppress minorities, protesters and others deemed threats to the state.

“China’s surveillance ambition goes way, way, way beyond minority persecution,” Wang said, but “the persecution of minorities is obviously not exclusive to China. … And these systems would lend themselves quite well to countries that want to criminalize minorities.”

Trained on immense numbers of facial photos, the systems can begin to detect certain patterns that might differentiate, for instance, the faces of Uighur minorities from those of the Han majority in China. In one 2018 paper, “Facial feature discovery for ethnicity recognition,” AI researchers in China designed algorithms that could distinguish between the “facial landmarks” of Uighur, Korean and Tibetan faces.

But the software has sparked major ethical debates among AI researchers who say it could assist in discrimination, profiling or punishment. They argue also that the system is bound to return inaccurate results, because its performance would vary widely based on lighting, image quality and other factors — and because the diversity of people’s ethnicities and backgrounds is not so cleanly broken down into simple groupings.

Such ethnicity-detection software is not available in the United States. But algorithms that can analyze a person’s facial features or eye movements are increasingly popular in job-interview software and anti-cheating monitoring systems.

Clare Garvie, a senior associate at Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology who has studied facial recognition software, said the “Uighur alarm” software represents a dangerous step toward automating ethnic discrimination at a devastating scale.

“There are certain tools that quite simply have no positive application and plenty of negative applications, and an ethnic-classification tool is one of those,” Garvie said. “Name a human rights norm, and this is probably violative of that.”

Huawei and Megvii are two of China’s most prominent tech trailblazers, and officials have cast them as leaders of a national drive to reach the cutting edge of AI development. But the multibillion-dollar companies have also faced blowback from U.S. authorities, who argue they represent a security threat to the United States or have contributed to China’s brutal regime of ethnic oppression.

Eight Chinese companies, including Megvii, were hit with sanctions by the U.S. Commerce Department last year for their involvement in “human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-technology surveillance” against Uighurs and other Muslim minority groups.

The U.S. government has also issued sanctions against Huawei, banning the export of U.S. technology to the company and lobbying other countries to exclude its systems from their telecommunications networks.

Huawei, a hardware behemoth with equipment and services used in more than 170 countries, has surpassed Apple to become the world’s second-biggest maker of smartphones and is pushing to lead an international rollout of new 5G mobile networks that could reshape the Internet.

And Megvii, the Beijing-based developer of the Face Plus Plus system and one of the world’s most highly valued facial recognition start-ups, said in a public-offering prospectus last year that its “city [Internet of Things] solutions,” which include camera systems, sensors and software that government agencies can use to monitor the public, covered 112 cities across China as of last June.

The “Uighur alarm” document obtained by the researchers, called an “interoperability test report,” offers technical information on how authorities can align the Huawei-Megvii systems with other software tools for seamless public surveillance.

The system tested how a mix of Megvii’s facial recognition software and Huawei’s cameras, servers, networking equipment, cloud-computing platform and other hardware and software worked on dozens of “basic functions,” including its support of “recognition based on age, sex, ethnicity and angle of facial images,” the report states. It passed those tests, as well as another in which it was tested for its ability to support offline “Uighur alarms.”

The test report also said the system was able to take real-time snapshots of pedestrians, analyze video files and replay the 10 seconds of footage before and after any Uighur face is detected.

The document did not provide information on where or how often the system is used. But similar systems are used by police departments across China, according to official documents reviewed last year by the New York Times, which found one city system that had scanned for Uighur faces half a million times in a single month.

Jonathan Frankle, a deep-learning researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, said such systems are clearly becoming a priority among developers willing to capitalize on the technical ability to classify people by ethnicity or race. The flood of facial-image data from public crowds, he added, could be used to further develop the systems’ precision and processing power.

“People don't go to the trouble of building expensive systems like this for nothing,” Frankle said. “These aren't people burning money for fun. If they did this, they did it for a very specific reason in mind. And that reason is very clear.”

It’s less certain whether ethnicity-detecting software could ever take off outside the borders of a surveillance state. In the United States and other Western-style democracies, the systems could run up against long-established laws limiting government searches and mandating equal protection under the law.

Police and federal authorities in the United States have shown increasing interest in facial recognition software as an investigative tool, but the systems have sparked a fierce public backlash over their potential bias and inaccuracies, and some cities and police forces have opted to ban the technology outright.

Such technologies could, however, find a market among international regimes somewhere in the balance between Chinese and American influence. In Uganda, Huawei facial recognition cameras have already been used by police and government officials to surveil protesters and political opponents.

“If you’re willing to model your government and run your country in that way,” Frankle said, “why wouldn’t you use the best technology available to exert control over your citizens?”

Discrimination against Uighurs has long been prevalent in the majority-Han Chinese population. In the Xinjiang region of northwestern China, authorities have cited sporadic acts of terrorism as justification for a harsh crackdown starting in 2015 that has drawn condemnation from the United States and other Western nations. Scholars estimate more than 1 million Uighurs have been detained in reeducation camps, with some claims of torture.

U.S. national security adviser Robert O’Brien called the repressive treatment of minority groups in Xinjiang “something close to” genocide, in an online event hosted by the Aspen Institute in October.

Under international pressure, Xinjiang authorities announced last December that all reeducation “students” had graduated, though some Uighurs have since reported that they were forced to agree to work in factories or risk a return to detention. Xinjiang authorities say all residents work of their own free will.

The U.S. government has banned the import of certain products from China on the basis that they could have been made by forced labor in Xinjiang.

One of the Huawei-Megvii systems offered for sale after the “Uighur alarm” test, in June 2019, is advertised as saving local governments digital storage space by saving images in a single place.

Two other systems, said to use Megvii’s surveillance software and Huawei’s Atlas AI computing platform, were announced for sale in September. Both were described as “localization” of the products using Huawei chips and listed for sale “only by invitation.” Marketing materials for one of those systems say it was used by authorities in China’s southern Guizhou province to catch a criminal.

Some things people outside of China can do to help:

Folks in the US: contact your house representative and your state senators. Demand that they support the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2019 (H.R. 649), and that they take further action against the genocide in Xinjiang. You can even link this article or copy and paste paragraphs (with citation) in your email if writing is intimidating for you.

Folks from most countries can write to your ambassador in China.

Avoid buying from companies that use Uighur slave labor.

Read the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s analysis of slave labor and re-education camps in Xinjiang.

Boycott the Beijing 2022 Olympics.

#islamophobia #uighur genocide #china #huawei #beijing 2022

22 notes · View notes

theradioghost · 4 years

Note

I don't know if you're still doing podcast recs, but if you are, I really like dramas, horror, sci-fi, honestly anything that gives you the feels (especially if it has lgbtq+ rep). I am not much of a comedy person though unfortunately. The only podcast I finished was tma and I really loved it.

The recommendations are always on tap here, whenever my askbox is open! You might wanna check out:

Archive 81, for a found-footage horror about mysterious archives of tapes full of encounters with otherworldly horror, dark rituals, cults, and a long-suffering archivist with the same name as the show creator who plays him, which despite all that could not possibly be more different from TMA and yet easily matches it as one of the best horror stories I have ever enjoyed. The sound design on this show is basically unparalleled – where TMA has fairly minimalist sound design, A81 goes all out. Quite a few lgbtqa+ folk also.

I Am In Eskew, for a surreal, Lynchian horror about the city of Eskew, where it’s always raining and the streets are never the same twice, as narrated by a man who is trapped there and the woman hired to find him. Take the most viscerally disturbing episodes of TMA as a baseline for how intense this show is, then imagine the Spiral built a city and invited all the other fears over for a party. Also right up there as one of my favorite horror things ever, and recently ended, so you can listen to the whole thing right now.

Within The Wires, for a found-footage scifi dystopia, telling stories from an alternate-history world. Three of the four seasons focus on lgbtqa+ leads, and the first season, a set of instructional meditation tapes provided to a prisoner in a shadowy government institution, is still some of my absolute favorite creative use of medium and framing device ever.

Kane and Feels, for a surreal noir-flavored urban fantasy/horror hybrid, about a magically-inclined academic (and sarcastic little bastard man) named Lucifer Kane and his demon-punching partner with a heart of gold, Brutus Feels. They share a flat in London, they bicker like an old married couple, and they fight supernatural evil. This show WILL confuse the hell out of you and you will enjoy every second of it.

Alice Isn’t Dead, for a weird Americana horror story about a long-distance truck driver, criss-crossing the US in search of her missing wife. Along the way she discovers that both of them have been drawn into a dangerous secret war that seethes in the empty and abandoned expanses of America, and that inhuman hunters have begun to follow her. Also finished! And as the title kind of gives away, the lesbians do not die!

Janus Descending, for a sci-fi horror miniseries about two scientists sent to survey the remains of a dead alien civilization on a distant planet, only to learn all too well why the original inhabitants have disappeared. You hear one character’s story in chronological order and the other in reverse, with their perspectives alternating, which is done in an incredibly clever way so that even technically knowing what will happen it still holds you in suspense right to the end. Also, it made me cry, a lot.

SAYER, for a sci-fi horror with a touch of dark comedy, and probably the single best use of the “evil AI” trope I have ever seen. Tells the story of employees of tech corporation Aerolith Dynamics living on Earth’s artificial second moon, Typhon, in the form of messages from their AI overseer SAYER. The first season is great, the second season is okay, and the third and fourth seasons are fucking amazing.

Tides, for a really interesting sci-fi about a lone biologist trapped on an alien world shaped by deadly tidal forces. It’s different from just about any other sci-fi I know, focusing more on the main character’s interactions with and observations of this strange new world, where she’s very aware that she is the alien invader. (Also I don’t think any of the characters are straight.)

Station to Station, for a thrilling sci-fi mystery where a group of scientists and spies on a research ship (the ocean kind) discover that the time-warping anomaly they’re studying might be causing people to vanish from existence. Corporate espionage and high-stakes heartbreak abound. (And once again I’m not sure anyone is straight.)

The Strange Case of Starship Iris, for Being Gay And Doing Crime IN SPACE! Or, decades after a war with an alien species leaves humanity decimated and under the control of totalitarian leaders, the lone survivor of a research mission joins up with a ragtag crew of rebels and smugglers to figure out why the very government she worked for tried to kill her, and to stop them from inciting a second war. 100% lgbtqa+ found family in space heist action and it’s glorious in every way.

Unwell, for the horror-ish Midwestern gothic story of a young woman who returns to her hometown to help her estranged mother after an injury, and discovers that there is something just a little bit wrong, not just with her mother, but with her mother’s house, and with the whole town. Subtle and creepy. The protagonist is a biracial lesbian, one of the other major characters is nonbinary, the cast in general is super diverse.

The Blood Crow Stories, for an lgbtqa+ focused horror anthology! The four seasons so far have been the stories of an ancient evil stalking the passengers of a WWI-era utopian cruise ship, a dark Western mystery about a group of allies trying to stop the mysterious killer known only as the Savior, a 911 operator in a cyberpunk dystopia who starts getting terrifying phone calls from demons, and strange and deadly goings-on at a film studio in the golden age of Hollywood. Everyone is Very Gay and anyone can die, especially in season 1.

The Tower, for a melancholy experimental miniseries about a young woman who decides she’s going to climb the mysterious Tower, from which no one has ever returned. Quite short and very, very good.

Palimpsest, for a creepy, heartbreakingly sad and yet incredibly beautiful anthology series. Season one is the story of a woman who suspects her new home is haunted, season two is a turn-of-the-century urban fantasy about a girl who falls in love with the imprisoned fae princess she’s been hired to care for, and season three is about a WWII codebreaker who begins seeing ghosts on the streets of London during the Blitz.

Mabel, for a part-horror, part-love story, the kind of faerie tale where you feel obliged to spell it with an E because these are the kind of faeries that are utterly inhuman, and beautiful, and dangerous. Anna, the new caretaker for an elderly woman, leaves messages for her client’s mysteriously absent granddaughter Mabel. An old house in Ireland has a life and desires of its own, few of them friendly. Two women fall in love and set out for vengeance against the King Under The Hill. Creepy, strange, and gorgeously poetic.

Ars Paradoxica, for a sci-fi time travel Cold War espionage thriller. Physicist Dr. Sally Grissom accidentally invents time travel, landing herself – and her invention – in the middle of a classified government experiment during WWII. As the course of history utterly changes around them, she and what friends she can find in this new time must struggle with the ethics of what they’ve done, and the choices they’ll have to make. An aroace protagonist, Black secret agents, time-traveling Latina assassins, Jewish lesbian mathematicians, two men of color whose love changes the course of time itself, this show says a big fuck you to the idea that there’s anything hard about having a diverse cast in a period piece and it will break your heart, multiple times. Also finished!

The Far Meridian, for a genre-bending, poetic, at-times-heartwarming-at-times-heartbreaking story about an agoraphobic woman named Peri who decides to begin a search for her long-missing brother Ace after the lighthouse in which she lives begins mysteriously transporting to different places every day. I can never forget an early review that described this show as “the audio equivalent of a Van Gogh painting.” Suffice to say it is beautiful, and fantastically written and put together.

What’s the Frequency?, for a Surrealist noir horror mystery set in mid-20th-century LA. I’ll be honest, I’m not sure I can really explain what goes on in this show, but it features a detective named Walter “Troubles” Mix and his partner Whitney searching for a missing writer. Meanwhile, the only thing that seems to be playing on the radio is that writer’s show Love, Honor, and Decay, which also seems to be driving people to murder. Fantastically weird, deliciously creepy.

Directive, for a short sci-fi miniseries about a man hired to spend a very, very long trip through space alone, which doesn’t seem all that sad until suddenly it hits you with Every Feel You’ve Ever Had, seriously I don’t want to spoil it so I won’t say anything more but listen to this and then never feel the same way about Tuesdays again.

Wolf 359, for honestly one of the best podcasts out there, containing all of the drama and feels, seriously this show ended over two years ago and I still cry literal tears thinking about it sometimes. It has definite comedic leanings, especially in the first season which reads a bit more like a wacky office comedy set in space, but it takes a sharp turn towards high stakes, action, and feelings and that roller coaster never stops. Take four clashing personalities alone on a constantly-malfunctioning space station eight light years from earth, add some mysterious transmissions from the depths of space, toss in some seriously Jonah-Magnus-level manipulative evil bosses, and get ready to cry.

or, may I suggest Midnight Radio? It’s a lesbian-romance-slash-ghost-story completed miniseries about a late-night 1950s radio host in a small town who begins receiving mysterious letters from one of her listeners, and I have been assured by many people and occasionally their all-caps tweets that it provides ample Feelings! (also I wrote it.)

#holy fuck when did this answer get that long?#anyway I uh. hope at least one of these sounds good to you!#podcast recs #bobbie recommends things #Anonymous #asks #my posts

265 notes · View notes

someonestole15 · 3 years

Text

I remember you...

Jack in a box.

That, I ain’t.

Although this container was quite a sight to behold. Kira had been holding onto the keys to this one crate sitting in storage. Acquired from a trade she says, the markings on it are not familiar to me.

Kira opened the container door, the old hinges making their age known with a heavy squeak.

“I’ve been saving this for a rainy day, sounds like we’re getting one today.”

A mobile aerial kill vehicle, or MAKV for short, earlier models were known for being… fragile, but this one seems to be one of later ones. Twin engine layout capable of vertical take-off around a thin, decently armored fuselage with a high caliber machine gun mounted underneath a sensor pod at the front. A faint red star on the side of it, Russians did have their hand in upgrading the models before being absorbed into the corporation mess that they choose to call Federation.

Still prefer the older name, this thing lacks any advanced AI but works well enough in an airspace filled with hostiles. Point and shoot, I wheeled the drone out of the trailer and took a step back.

“Looks fine.”

“Here’s the kit to use it…” Kira said as she pulled the visor down to her face. “Seems like your standard VR setup, let’s see if the crow flies.”

Boot up sequence ran quite well, the old firmware gave off quite a few warnings and popups about updating for the low, low price of… Well, let’s say things made for warfare aren’t exactly cheap.

“All systems green, you wanna give it a test?”

“I might be able to link my own HUD to it, let me check…”

Older software, can still make use of the access keys, the drone would follow my view for targeting and ID targets within its view, allowing my eyes to work as sensors to amplify its own systems. Flying works, but how about the weaponry? I pointed two fingers from my right hand at an empty part of the warehouse and mimicked recoil with my wrist.

Click, empty weapon but operational systems, I landed the drone back at its stand.

“Good piece of kit this.”

“I’ll get it loaded up with rounds before the storm.”

Faint nod as I looked at my wrist for the time, 1 hour remaining.

Gone in a flash, 10 minutes left as I stood at the top ridge of the outpost. Full magazine, AP rounds and a heavy barrel, old world designs with new materials and tech to produce them, tested designs last forever. Click of the bolt release as Valkyrie lowered her binoculars picked her rifle back up.

“Will we be alright?” I asked her, light rain started to fall against my hood, greying fabric absorbing some of the color as it darkened to a navy blue.

“Are you feeling blue about this?”

“Somewhat, it has been a moment…”

“You never forget the basics, do you?”

“Like riding a bicycle…” Fresh rounds in the Phoenix, Magnum shells, the warmth from it rushed between my hand and the grip like a heartbeat. Vented barrel still there, the new cylinder holding 7 rounds instead of 6 and a refurbished frame for improved durability. Still heavy, still kicks like hell, don’t mind it, reminds me of the power hiding in that chamber.

The storm grew heavier by the minute, the wind and rain beating against my hood as my scanners picked up a ship amidst the clouds. Black like carbon, the shape of the frigate resembled that of the older corporation warships. Angled armor plating and point defense looking over most of the ships important parts.

One last attempt in communications, I placed my hand on my ear and opened the communications channel.

“This is Outpost Gilded Armory, Unknown ship, answer or we will open fire.”

Moment of silence, a response. A familiar voice caught me off guard.

“Found you.”

That voice…

Fuck sake…

Could have seen this coming, didn’t, remnant of Crimson still as vicious as a hungry wolf, one I had called Shinobi all this time, his name in reality was much easier…

Rex, he was an interesting one, studied the blade and got quite good at it, perhaps it got to his head. Codenamed “Sector” by the captain, I’ve had plenty of time to dig through my old memories from that the time before… She took over. Guessing she could see it on my pulse, I felt a slight shiver in my hand as I pushed the button back down.

“Been a while Rex, how’s the arm?”

“After all this time and you still have only that trick in your book? It’s almost amusing.”

The channel fell quiet for a moment before a different voice answered. Straight to the point, didn’t even bother to ask my name.

“This is Black Ocean Commander Violet Tetra, we suspect you are selling illegal goods within your outpost, surrender them or be eradicated.”

“And you just chose to tell this while you are in striking distance?”

“That is irrelevant, surrender the goods or we will take them by force.”

Not exactly my call to make, but Valkyrie had been relaying the comms over to the duo running the show down here and their answer to the threat was predictable. The anti-air weaponry on the roof behind us turned towards the ship as several red squares formed on my HUD indicating the lock-on.

“Your request has been denied.”

#logs of an android #scifi #science fiction #sci fi & fantasy #fantasy #fiction #writing #story #cyber #cyberpunk

1 note · View note

strangeandforlornbooks · 4 years

Text

best books with morally ambiguous narrators!

all y’all’s problematic faves and villains! :) also included are third person narrators but in books with morally ambiguous leads/themes

Sci-fi

Scythe by Neal Shusterman: in a future free from pain, disease, and war, people can live forever. ‘scythes’ are given the power to decide who lives and who dies to preserve the balance. sad and kinda gives of hunger games vibes, if you like that.

Neuromancer by William Gibson: basically invented the cyberpunk genre. strange and removed protagonists. (a team of computer hackers have to face off against an evil AI). you kind of dislike everyone and suddenly you’re crying over them. one of those trippy sci-fi classics.

The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut: very beautiful and very very sad (same author as slaughterhouse five). the richest man in america has to face a martian invasion. more about free will and bad people doing good things than a plot that makes any kind of sense.

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick: set in an alternate universe where the germans and japanese won world war two. not really like the tv show at all- it’s not an action story, and there’s not really the hope to somehow fix the world that drives a lot of dystopia stories. instead its about how people survive and connect to one another in a hopeless society.

The Scorpion Rules by Erin Bow: a supercomputer convinces the leaders of the world to keep the peace for hundreds of years by taking their children hostage and obliterating any city that disobeys. what happens to the hostage protagonists when war seems inevitable? lots of morally fraught decisions and characters slowly losing their identity. (plus a fun lesbian romance)

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson: a brilliant mathematician and a dedicated marine fight to keep the ultra secret in world war two. fifty years later, a tech company discovers what remains of their story. one of the most memorable sequences in the book is a japanese soldier slowly becoming disillusioned with his nation and horrified by the war even as he continues to fight.

Blade Runner by Philip K. Dick: another one of those sci-fi classics that’s not at all like the movie. there is a bounty hunter for robots, though, as well as a weird religion that probably is referencing catholicism and a decaying society with a shortage of pets. kind of a trip.

Wilder Girls by Rory Power: girls trapped in a boarding school on an isolated island must face a creeping rot that affects the animals and plants on the island as well as their own bodies. the protagonists will do anything to survive and keep each other safe. very tense (and bonus lesbian romance whoo)

The Fifth Season by N K Jemisin: three women are gifted with the ability to control the earth’s energy in a world where those who can do so are forced into hiding or slavery. some veryyyy dark choices here but lots of strong female characters.

Historical Fiction

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters: two victorian lesbians fall in love as they plot to betray each other in horrific ways. lots of plot twists, plucky thieves, gothic settings, and a great romance.

Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiwicz: a powerful roman soldier in the time of Nero plots to kidnap a young woman after he falls in love with her, only to learn more about the mysterious christian religion she follows. very melodramatic but some terrific prose.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr: a blind girl in France and a brilliant German boy recruited by the military struggle through the chaos of the second world war. ends with a bang (iykyk.) very sad, reads like poetry.

Boxers by Gene Luen Yang: graphic novel reveals the story of a young boy fighting in the boxer rebellion in early twentieth century china. the sequel, saints, is also excellent. beautifully and sympathetically shows the protagonist’s descent into evil- the reader really understands each step along the way.

Fantasy

Three Dark Crowns by Kendare Blake: three triplets separated at birth, each with their own magical powers, have to fight to the death to gain the throne. lots of fun honestly

Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo: everyone in these books is highly problematic but you love them all anyway. a ragtag game of criminals plan a heist on a magical fortress. some terrific tragic back stories, repressed feelings, and revenge schemes.

The Dark Tower series by Stephen King: idk how to describe these frankly but if you can put up with King’s appalling writing of female characters they’re pretty interesting. fantasy epic about saving the world/universe, sort of. cowboys and prophecies and overlapping dimensions and drug addicts galore.

The Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathan Stroud: lots of fun! a twelve year old decides to summon a demon for his cute lil revenge scheme. sarcastic demon narrator. lighthearted until s*** gets real suddenly.

Elegy and Swansong by Vale Aida: fantasy epic with machiavellian lesbians and enemies to lovers to enemies to ??? to lovers. charming and exciting and lovely characters.

The False Prince by Jennifer Nielsen: an orphan boy must compete with a few others for the chance to impersonate a dead prince. really dark but very tense and exciting and good twists.

The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu: fantasy epic. heroes overthrow an evil empire and then struggle as the revolution dissolves into warring factions. interesting world building and three dimensional characters, even if they only have a small part.

Circe by Madeline Miller: the story behind the witch who turns men into pigs in the odyssey. madeline miller really said, i just used my classics degree to write a beautiful gay love story and now im going to write a powerful feminist retelling because i can. queen. an amazing and satisfying book that kills me a lil bit because of the two lines referencing the song of achilles.

Heartless by Marissa Meyer: the tragic backstory for the queen of hearts in alice in wonderland. a little predictable but very fun with a compelling protagonist

A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) by George RR Martin: ok I know we all hate GRRM and rightfully so but admittedly these books do have some great characters and great scenes. they deserve better than GRRM though. also he will probably never finish the books anyway....

A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket: not really fantasy but not really anything else either. plucky, intelligent, and kind children fight off evil plots for thirteen books until suddenly you realize the world is not nearly as black and white as you thought.

Classics

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier: gothic romance!! a new wife is curious about the mysterious death of her predecessor in a creepy old house in the British countryside...good twists and lovely prose.

A Separate Peace by John Knowles: not really morally ambiguous but one awful decision suddenly has awful consequences and certain people are haunted by guilt forever.... really really really beautiful and really really really sad. boys in a boarding school grow up together under the shadow of world war two.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: while imperial russia slowly decays a beautiful young woman begins a destructive affair. a long book. very russian. the ending is incredibly tense and well written.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding: I think you know the plot to this one. the prose is better than you remember and the last scene is always exciting.

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie: one by one, the guests on an island are slowly picked off. one of Christie’s darkest mysteries- no happy ending here! very tense and great twists.

Contemporary

The Secret History by Donna Tartt: inspired the whole dark academia aesthetic. college students get a little too into ancient greece and it does not end very well. lovely prose but I found the characters unlikable.

Honorable Mentions

The Dublin Saga by Edward Rutherford: has literally a billion protagonists, but some of them are morally ambiguous ig? follows a few families stories’ from the 400s ad to irish independence in the 20s. beautifully captures the weight and movement of irish history.

Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer: how morally ambiguous can you be if you’re, like, eleven? a lot if you’re a criminal genius who wants to kidnap a fairy for your evil-ish plan apparently!

Redemption by Leon Uris: literally my favorite novel ever. the sequel to Trinity but can stand alone. various irish families struggle through the horrors of world war one. the hero isn’t really morally ambiguous, but the main theme of the novel is extremely bad people suddenly questioning their choices and eventually redeeming themselves. sweeping themes of love, screwed up families, redemption, and patriotism.

The Lymond Chronicles and House of Niccolo by Dorothy Dunnett: heroes redeem themselves/try to get rich/try to save their country in early renaissance Europe. if I actually knew what happened in these books I'm sure it would be morally ambiguous but its too confusing for me. in each book you spend at least a third convinced the protagonist is evil, though. lots of exciting sword fights, tragic romances, plot twists, and kicking english butt.

Bonus: Protagonist is less morally ambiguous and more very screwed up and sad all the time

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt: you know this one bc its quoted in all those quote compilations. basically the story of how one horrible event traumatizes a young man and how he develops a connection to a painting. really really really good.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro: hard to describe but strange... not an action novel or a dystopia really but sort of along those lines. very hopeless.

#book recs #morally ambiguous protagonists #dark academia #book recommendations #mine

72 notes · View notes

freshlybakedspiderbread · 3 years

Text

I brought up hanyang type 88 here and i said i’d explain, so here I am!!

okay so first off here’s a bunch of likely useful context about girls frontline. There is this feature in the game called digimind upgrade, or mod 3, where certain t-dolls can be upgraded past the normal maximum levels and stats, and at the same time gaining whole new abilities and also a new design. Basically a reinvention. There are like hundreds of playable characters in the game, and only a fraction will get mod 3s, typically the ‘main characters’ who are relevant to the major ongoing plot.

two things about getting a doll who has the ability to do digimind upgrade, to actually do that. One, is that it can be very costly in terms of in-game materials. like, maybe i just played the game wrong but I would have to grind for weeks in order to amass the materials to upgrade just one doll to mod 3. So even though by now there are dozens upon dozens of dolls who are capable of this feature, i’ve only actually done so with like, less than one dozen. A normal player probably has to be picky.

secondly, and this is the big one, every t-doll’s mod 3 comes with story cutscenes that become available for you to view upon upgrading them. Personally, i think most of the only worthwhile mod 3 stories are the ones that are associated with the actual major characters of the main story, especially since their upgrades actually happen in-canon and their mod 3 stories fill in blanks or otherwise expand upon the regular story chapters.

for the t-dolls who aren’t major characters that get digimind upgrades, their associated stories tend to follow a very basic pattern. They’re feeling like they are falling behind other T-Dolls in abilities or are otherwise experiencing a drop in confidence in their abilities, but then find the resolve in them to either change themselves or stand by an aspect of themselves, and this leads them to heading to the lab to get upgraded. obviously theres some nuances here and there depending on the character, but a lot of them, from what i saw, follow this basic pattern.

hanyang type 88 has a mod 3 but i certainly never wanted to see it. Firstly, using the feature at all takes up resources are kinda precious so i wasn’t just gonna use it on anyone. Secondly, she is just one of many one-off t-dolls that basically dont ever show up in any actual main story cutscenes or even funny events. Thirdly... you saw what she looked like in the linked post, i was in no rush to make use of her.

That being said, even if you don’t ever upgrade a t-doll, simply having them in your possession allows you to at least view the first of four parts of their mod 3 story, which nets you a small amount of those materials needed to see the rest (its a pretty fiendish system, huh o_O). I was lacking in some materials to upgrade a doll i cared about, so i just mucked around, eventually happened upon type88 again and decided that instead of just immediately feeding her to the furnace, I’d watch the first chapter of her mod 3 story. I watched it, it made me just curious enough to look further, and well. ...I got into it. Exactly what I got into, i shall now just elaborate and summarise the whole thing in my own way! Warning, it’s long!

(disclosure: my summary will bias towards my own preferred interpretation whenever any aspect is somewhat vague.)

The story starts with type 88, or as she is called by others in griffin base, Ai, working her shift in the base’s cafe, because what else would she be doing.

i hate looking at her! Anyway, its just a pleasant peaceful day and Ai is taking the logistic person, kalina’s order when suddenly in the middle of a conversation, Ai freezes in place and starts making worrying sounds.

kalina here and the t-dolls present in the cafe are concerned, and talk about how Type88 has actually been crashing like this more and more frequently lately, yet has not reported any of this to the maintenance crew despite the advice of her friends. They try rebooting her on the spot, but it has an even more concerning effect, because she starts erratically acting like she doesn’t recognise the others, and talks about how she is a maid in “Jiangcheng Cafe”. Afraid that her neural cloud (her mind) has been scrambled, they put her to sleep and bring her to the repair bay.

Its in the repair bay where they explain exactly what is wrong with type88. She is a fairly old doll, and her processing capacity has been severally clogged up for a long time. Her internal memory is overflowing because many large sections of her mind is filled with very large encrypted files (memories that she stored away). she is likely to keep crashing and possibly even cease functioning entirely one day if those encrypted files are not deleted, but nobody is really keen on just deleting parts of her mind without her consent. For now, kalina just opts to try and decrypt the files and see what they are.

And from here, we watch type88 memories from her perspective. Sort of. Kind of. It gets complicated later but for now, we view the first memory of her life, not as a combat t-doll type88, but...

...as 59898, a doll designed to be what is basically a ‘crash test dummy’ for testing artillery technology in a research station. With a purpose like this, 59898 has an (ostensibly) rudimentary AI. Her learning ability is intended to be used to better aid the results of their testing, but she also knows how to understand and even imitate specific human gestures in order to better respond to instructions or conversation, even though she herself has no voice module to speak with. She is assigned to assist one specific person.

first off, i was pretty shocked right off the bat that this story above so many others actually has unique assets to it. The above two sprites don’t show up anywhere else in the game, i don’t think. Secondly, this woman’s name is only ever spelled with those white squares, so I’m stuck with having to just calling her ‘the pilot’, as dry as that sounds... I just don’t want to type out weird characters every time, or call her ‘triple cube’...

Anyway, so 59898 is assigned to help this woman in testing artillery tech (stuff like mechs and tanks). I should mention really quick that in the game’s story, during this point of time is when world war iii is happening, but that’s just a backdrop for robots to eventually gain more prominence. Anyway, we move on to the second memory, where some time has already passed. At the beginning of this memory, the pilot is visibly depressed, which 59898 takes note of.

Her ‘comfort mode’ consists of patting the pilot on the head, who while surprised, actually is grateful. She feels comfortable enough to talk about her worries aloud to the doll, mentioning how she is a war refugee and has to make a living in the research base because she can’t go back to her home in china, at least not before making enough money for a very expensive and exclusive train ticket. She continues to talk at length to the doll...

...not that the test doll is capable of responding to anything she says. The pilot insists that she’s happy just to have someone listen to her though, since she feels like she can’t really express her feelings to any other person on the base. Despite that-

That aside, the pilot says that referring to 59898 by her serial number all the time feels a bit weird, so she decides to give the doll a name. (I sure wish the story would give this woman a name too, other than ‘three white squares’ but oh well...)

She talks more with Jiangcheng Ai, or just Ai, after that, asking her if she’d like a change of clothes sometime, like some casual clothes, or an old maid outfit from an old cafe job she used to have (I guess they had to throw in any explanation for that outfit somehow) Point is, more and more time passes.

As time passes though, and we go into the third memory, the pilot brings up complaints to her superiors about how the more recent testings, becoming more increasingly intense and frequent, are putting a great strain on Ai, and even repairs can only help maintain her chassis so much. She insists on wanting to take Ai’s place in the testing, but they refuse because, well, Ai’s entire purpose is to take the strain of these tests so that the human pilot doesn’t have to, and the doll is just a tool there to pave the way for the pilot to eventually take over the mech in action

The next time Ai wakes up from her most recent repairs, the pilot is there to greet her, and Ai can tell straight away that she’s unhappy and tries to comfort her again. The pilot is not surprised at this and talks about how this is how Ai has been since they first met. She goes on to say how all the other people on the base don’t know her half as well as Ai does. Ai tries to understand and determine what the pilot’s intentions with saying all this is, but she cannot do so and can only listen while offering ‘executing - affirmative nod’.

The pilot talks about how once the war is over, she’d like to take Ai back home with her, where they could go to all sorts of gatherings, and the pilot would introduce Ai to her friends.

Ai reviews her personal data, confirming that she has no owners or obligations other than the pilot, so she executes another affirmative nod, and the pilot says this:

As Ai tries and fails to further determine this, something bad happens! if you’ve read this far, i’m sure you’ve already guess what happens next...

At that exact moment, a warning goes out and the research base is being attacked by nebulous enemy forces. With no time to talk anymore, both the pilot and Ai head out into their first real fight.

They spend a good long while repelling enemy forces, working well together and apparently using all sorts of wacky anime weaponry like beam blades and whatever ‘retrograde evasion’ is!

obviously though, you already know this isn’t going to end well for them... When the pilot takes a breather, Ai moves to protect her, but at a critical moment, a sudden high-speed projectile comes her way. In the next instance there’s a crash, and we move onto another memory. Where its all fire and debris, and Ai can’t move.

^ this text box actually repeats several times, indicating that she is repeating her scan for life signs over and over. She gets an internal warning from her systems (differentiated with red text) that she has insufficient power and it warns her to immediately cease ineffective operations. [Unable to detect owner life signs] repeats again.

At this point, uuuuh, its a little stupid actually? because two humans show up, reusing generic ‘bad guy’ sprites from other events that don’t match the current environment and situation at all (one is in a suit and the other is in casual clothes). but the reason they’re here is to provide exposition out loud about what happened. It looked like the human’s mech took a hit for the doll and was blown to bits, though they talk about how that doesn’t make any sense.

Ai at this point tries to execute a bunch of different actions like hugging [target not found] and screaming [no relevant module] but they all fail, and her internal systems tell her that her power is running out and she will cease to function in 30 seconds.

So in those last 30 seconds, Ai decides to quickly review her internal files. the damage she took has corrupted her memories and she doesn’t have the time to properly go through them, so she executes a ‘simulated processed records’, which basically mean she’s just filling the blanks of those memories herself with simulations.

And I have to say. I was decently into and enjoying this little story so far, but its this part that’s the reason i became forced to make this stupid giant post. the first ‘memory’ loads up, and we see the pilot.

Different ‘memories’ of the days spent with the pilot are loaded back to back, each are very short and only last a few lines. Across these files, the two of them talk comfortably with each other, Ai is invited to go get coffee with her, the pilot talks about how going alone is boring and would rather spend time with Ai, Ai saying back with her own words that she always likes spending time with her, etc etc etc.

And then finally, she loads one last ‘memory’, from earlier that same day, before the explosion and the fighting.

and she shuts down.

i passed by this scene the first time all calm, but an hour or so later when I was in the bathroom replacing shampoo bottles, i started thinking about it and I literally started sobbing. And then again later that night when i was in bed. I hate this game!!

so that’s the ‘end’ of that, and the next scene opens, once again in griffin base’s cafe, except...

Ai is sporting a brand new (ugly) look. She says she’d like to take kalina’s order but she was just leaving on other business, as she likes keeping herself busy with all sorts of work around the base ever since she got upgraded into a gundam gajinka. and after she leaves, kalina talks with the other dolls about how Ai used to have some cache issues because her neutral cloud was too full, but upgrading into this new chassis easily fixed that and even allowed her to make use of her old locked away abilities.

Because of the way this scene in the cafe opens up exactly like the very first one at the beginning, it makes me believe that this final scene is also a simulated ‘memory’, that is, Ai filling in the blanks of her corrupted memories with what she wishes to be reality. And i feel confident in believing that because after the scene fades to black, we see more of her internal system monologue.

She (the system) says that the priority execution is to preserve those encrypted memory logs. She does so, and the neural cloud upgrade is complete with confirmation of no loss files. With no risk of deletion in this new form, she executes the command to unlock the encrypted memories. And finally...

[spiderbread dies]

i still wouldn’t use her in gameplay because i can’t stand looking at her design but i told you all i eat up robot with feelings stuff and this is like prime example of exactly that... and if i didn’t make this post, i think my own neutral cloud’s cache would be at risk of overflowing x_X!

#spider bread crumbs #gfl

6 notes · View notes