perfidy

Baby drifts toward oscar-5 at a speed that is a small, but still significant fraction of the speed of light. The light of three suns is joined by the distant and fading glimmer of twelve small stars that once were populous worlds, and more recently targets of fleet RKVs. Here in the dim reaches of the Proxima's Kuiper Belt, that amounts to one small notch above total darkness.

Sensor take from the hk's ansibles back and forth, and Baby's dense processor matrix distills the raw data into a cetacean-amenable worldview. Light and heat, gravity and neutrinos are to her as sound once was, the window through which the world impinges on her consciousness. That the senses are different means little, nor the fact that they are filtered first through vastly more computing power than the entire world possessed when first man flew in space.

Now that she is closer, she again begins to see emissions from oscar. Two orders of magnitude lower than before, but at this range easily detectable to baby's exquisitely tuned senses. No heavy neutrino pulses that would indicate large power sources. No evidence of ultradense matter. No sign at all that the target is anything other than a hapless slowmover. Baby is by nature cautious, no matter what the walking squids in tacops feel. Caution, then application of extreme firepower. It is a lesson that many human warriors have learned, and one that baby learned from her mother's milk. Of course, she used different weapons, then.

Within herself, some of her new weapons are waking. Fleet tacops wants a softkill. Hunting is joyful, always, but Baby has come to relish the bright glorious release of the hardkill. The masked actinic glare of antimatter penetrators detonating from within a target, the subtleties of targeting a spread kinetic lances, maneuver for gravity gauge, or an artfully laid killgrid of megaton class self-imploding singularities.

None of this. Along her ventral surface, just forward of her drive shield, a small bay door snaps open and a fraction of second later snaps closed. In that fraction, a small bag is propelled on jet of nitrogen as cold (precisely as cold) as the ambient vacuum. The bag opens, and almost magically continues to open, each fold seeming to occur naturally, until in moments the small bag is a transparent film over a click in diameter.

The film seems to pause, and then stretches as if being tugged on the edge. At the point of maximum tension, the film snaps dissolves utterly. And where the film was, is now a flat cloud of fog that for a moment glints in the dim weapon light. Baby chirps her drive, giving her a minutely different course from the now invisible foglet. A while later the process repeats, and then again. Baby waits, and for every second she waits, her trajectory departs more and more from the three spreading clouds.

Baby waits, and finally spins; she points her tail directly toward the target and lets loose a long burst from her drive. In exactly 46 seconds, oscar-5 will know exactly where she was. But she won't be there.

message-id: [42f0f069b.d752d0d7db110e-A5d0ddd194d4d.004564E].
date: 21 apr 2105 23:22:35 -5461 - [relative].
from: hk-55 [abdelwahab].
to: unif/ussconstitution/tacops/weps [mother].
subject: hey...
content-type: text/plain.
content-transfer-encoding: 2048bit.
authenticator: 53d.b1f0.69e.0a11/word of the day is bitches.
message reads:
weapons away.
range 18.8mclicks/0.75min.
commencing evasive.
Taskgroup 14.9/55 target box patt 5/2
[attachment: tg sensor take mission time 28:27:79]
baby not sure about this one.
[attachment: extract fleet a-2 subagency concl #14-17 report slowmovers]

***

At a minimum, just over ninety-two seconds will elapse before the earliest possible response from oscar could arrive - assuming millisecond reflexes and light speed weapons, which is not an unreasonable assumption at all. Activating her drive again would only create a glowing "you are here" for oscar to vector violent traffic towards her. And given the size of oscar – a small asteroid's worth of mass – molecular assemblers can convert that amount of matter into a truly frightening quantity of weaponry, even in the amount of time that oscar may, or may not have been aware of her and (possibly) the balance of her taskgroup.

True surprise in the strategic sense is difficult to impossible to achieve when war is fought in a completely transparent medium. Given sufficient processing capacity – a fungible commodity even if when strong AI is impossible - and enough eyes, nothing is undetectable. Mass, heat and power all conspire against those who would like to be invisible. Strategic surprise can only be achieved at speeds crowding very close to C.

At such colossal velocities, intelligence of an attacker's existence only just outpaces the attacker itself. That knowledge is necessarily, and drastically, outdated. By the time even an alert defender sees the enemy there, they are already nearly here.

The less energetic the speed, the more difficult it is to gain surprise. However, tactical surprise can be achieved by a clever attacker. Light speed delay provides a lever for wedging the way inside an opponent's decision loop. What the invaders failed to do, and what the fleet had done only weeks before in return was one way to exploit the (mostly) iron laws of causality and observation imposed by the speed of light. Non-relativistic combat required the opposite. By presenting a bewilderingly large array of choices for the enemy to chew on, the gap between action and observation built into the very fabric of spacetime makes it possible to lock an opponent into constantly reorienting to a new conception of the conflict, and never taking effective action.

As baby's drive stabs into the darkness, her fifteen shadows burn to life. Though she didn't feel it, baby's consciousness spread over hundreds of thousands of kilometers.

Ansible links connected her mind with the minds of her drones. Instantaneous (albeit low bandwidth) communication made these far distant parts of her mind effectively closer than parts of her own body. She experienced herself as one, though she and her fifteen skittle drones are farther apart than earth from the rubble of earth's moon. She felt no more spread out than a human feels spread apart by looking out though two eyes or hearing through two ears.

The tiny drones are small versions of the hunter killer whose mind they shared. Narrow, lethal shapes clothed in deepest black. Where the hunter's skin enveloped many complex engines of war, and the capacity to radically alter its form, the drone was relatively simple - a capsule of fuel, a drive made to appear (at a long enough remove) just like an hk's, and everything needful to give the appearance of a much larger warship. The sensors on the skin of the drones were in every respect similar to those on the skin of its parent, and contributed to baby's growing sense of the battlespace.

Sixteen targets might have been a challenge for a mid-twentieth century wet navy warship. But no ship since. Baby's constellation of iridescent commas still shine as she endeavors to be somewhere else.

***

One of the most maddening things about being a student of history (and I use the word student in the loosest possible sense) is the growing realization that not only is the past gone, much of it is unrecoverable. Historians talk about "facts" as though they were each and every one equal, as though the proceedings of a probate court in colonial Massachusetts are exactly as revealing of a sliver of the past as is a shard of pottery from Padua. This is of course absurd. Without rigorous research to establish context, neither one means a damn thing, and even after research two experts may come to diametrical interpretations. If this weren't the case, would we be still arguing whether slavery was the true root cause of the Civil War? (The answer by the way is "yes," with a "but.")

Worse yet, there's the sense that every day is slipping into the past in large part unrecorded, becoming part of a massive void that ought to- but does not- contain the rich and bloody chronicle of human experience. In this age of email and electronics, even the simple things that historians have always relied upon - like letters, diaries, and so forth - are used less and less in favor of electronic or disposable media that in five years -five years!! - may be unreadable to the casual researcher. We know who Samuel Pepys went to visit 343 years ago yesterday, but the preponderance of my extensive correspondence with my coblogger Buckethead is encoded in an email format proprietary to Juno/United Online.

Which is why projects like the Photovoice project of the Nature Conservancy are so wonderful.

That is all.

Walking around town over lunch, I ran into a protest happening at McPherson Square. There, right under the General's Horse's Ass, were a bunch of people in red hats shouting a lot. So far, so typical. Goofy sartorial choices go hand in hand with loud shouting in DC. As I got close enough to read the signs, I became sorely befuddled. For the signs read something like this:

Which seemed to me like Bush was fighting AIDS, and these people would like it if he'd just stop. This message was in stark contrast to the rather fey appearance of most of the protestors.

The group sponsoring the protest can be found here, but I found no evidence of the mysterious signs at their site. Sadly, I didn't have my phone with me, else I would have snapped a few pics.

Then, when I finally arrived at the Chinese buffet, I noticed for the first time that behind the counter was displayed a Kimber Mfg. calendar. Kimber, as in the firearms manufacturer responsible for my own personal weapon, the Kimber Custom .45ACP. A weapon that, I might add, is fully illegal for Chinese restaurateurs in DC to own.

And Friday, the smelliest bum I have ever encountered assaulted another, less smelly bum right outside my office. This match-up was not as impressive as those offered by Bumfights empresssario (and now felon) xxx, but I did see the less loathsome bum do about a 4.5 40 trying to escape either a) his opponent's fearsome martial arts skills; or b) the aftermath of said bum's use of his own pants as a porta-john. Two police officers and several security guards did nothing but smile patronizingly. Eventually, one of the building maintenance staff came along and hosed down the spot where the violent bum had been standing.

And one of these days, I will discover the mysteries of 1086 Vermont Ave., NW. I think it may be... a brothel. The prostitutes are usually out on the street over the noon hour, then retire to wherever prostitutes hang out whilst their clients are working; and then stand watch for most of the evening. Some even are still working at six or seven in the morning, or so I have been told. I'm usually not in that early, but I have reliable sources. (The guards at my building.) Apparently there is a brisk trade in illicit sex in the alley behind my office building at all hours of the day.

Well, there are a lot of lobbyists around.

This week's Carnival of the Recipes is up at Pajamapundits.com. Don't go hungry.

Elisa has Carnival of Music #20 up, go check it out. Faced with a total lack of submissions, she has heroically put together an excellent carnival. To prevent this sort of cruelty, make your submissions to next week's here. And for those who have just joined us, we here at Perfidy hosted last week's carnival. 
 

On this day in history...

Male Colorado voters make the morally correct but tactically foolish decision to grant the vote to the women of that state. Twenty-three years later and also on this day, Jeanette Rankin of Montana becomes the first woman elected to the US Congress.

Interestingly, many of the colonies had at least some provision for women voting. New Jersey was the last of these to remove that privilege in 1807. Some states allowed women to vote in school board elections throughout the nineteenth century, and several of the territories preceded Colorado in granting women's suffrage.

I am reminded of a Man Show skit where Adam and the other dude go to a county fair and set up a booth for an "End the Suffrage of Women" movement. Playing on the similarity of the words 'suffrage' and 'suffering.' they convinced several well-meaning but rather dim women to sign. They even got one woman to volunteer to help get signatures. In her defense, she spoke very poor english. But the best part was the reaction of the very few people who actually knew what suffrage is. One elderly gentleman was on the verge of violence. Another, a young protester hippie type woman, patiently tried to explain to the non-english speaker that what she was doing was not a good thing, and that the nice young men were in fact making fun of her.

It's day four of the novel writing, and I have two days worth in the can. Unlike the madly prolific EDog (7500 words) I am having trouble achieving, let alone maintaining, the required clip of 1667 words a day. Still, this is the most fiction I have ever written in such a small period of time. I've been significantly more productive many times on the non-fiction side, and that leaves me some small hope that I can eventually pick up the pace.

Funny thing, though, writing non fiction is for me easy. You all may argue amongst yourselves about the quality of that writing, but at least the production of it is no real burden for me. It generally flows out my brain, through my fingers and onto the screen without skull sweat, headaches or worry. Fiction, on the other hand, hurts my brain. I'm not sure about the deep psychological reasons for it - but some part of me seems to think that fiction is vastly more important than non fiction. There is a pressure in me to make sure that it is really good before writing it, let alone letting others see it. I don't feel that at all with the non-fiction. Maybe because I always wanted to be an author of sf novels, I can't afford to fail. I didn't grow up wanting to be an essayist or blogger and perhaps that is why it feels easier. It's difficult, too, to post these things. I cringe before clicking the submit button. Even telling you that I cringe before clicking the button is easier than letting you see the fiction. Let us hope that this all builds character.

Aside from the neurosis and paranoia, I am also thinking harder on all of this than even the more complicated posts, or on term papers back in school. This is a good thing, I believe, but it is tiring. Writing five hundred words of fiction is more tiring than a day's worth of heavy blogging, even if it only takes an hour. Trying to keep in my head the evolving characters and plot is not so hard, but applying that knowledge consistently is. I've wasted a fair chunk of time writing background material, even though I'd promised myself not to. But it is so much easier - it's more like nonfiction.

And of course, it's easier to write this post than to write the next chapter. If I can avoid Civ IV tonight, hopefully I can get a couple more in the bag.

Mind lives in – is – a narrow wedge of utter blackness. Within the light drinking skin are engines, weapons and the mind that humans call hk-55 or, sometimes, baby. Baby is a hole in the darkness of space, coasting in the vast emptiness on the edge of the system.

Five hours away is oscar-5, the sole focus of baby's attention. Emissions still dribble from the target, indicating to baby's hunter mind either carelessness or high cunning of a variety she has only encountered once since her pod arrived in this space. Baby's podmates are spread across a cubic day, senses straining the void. They all hope for ambush, for sport; though they will never tell the people.

Baby ponders the target. Intelligence sub-agencies have categorized this contact according to a Byzantine taxonomy laboriously constructed from the evidence of probes, hk's, warships, killers, and the wreckage of thousands of softkilled targets. Baby knows the details in the new parts of her mind, but doesn't care. Only if something surprising had surfaced in the analysis would she have paid close attention. She savors the emissions, smelling the minute dimpling of spacetime, and the wake of its passage.

It's a big one, and slow. It must have been climbing upsystem for years before we arrived. She'd been seeing more of these lately. The fast movers only met their fate faster. She knows her prey, and knows what surprises they are capable of.

Emission spike! This tastes like fear. Now silence, but this prey is too late to discipline. Baby ansibles her new podmates.

message-id: [9198d4ee0.511030705q94e4aff4f].
date: 21 apr 2105 16:59:57 -9120 - [relative].
from: hk-55 [abdelwahab].
to: list: taskgroup 14.9/55 [deltagreen].
subject: oscar-5
content-type: text/plain.
content-transfer-encoding: 1024bit.
authenticator: 2g6.h249.56j.204/word of the day is gumbo
message reads:
sensor spike/emission quiet
indic. target aware
group close, patt.5/2
group 360/60 outwatch, maintain emcon
baby softkill, gunnr sift ashes

Four pings. Her pod will watch for sharks, while she closes with the target. None knew exactly what made the target spook. Perhaps an attentive eye saw a shadow drift before a distant star. Or maybe simply fear. Very reasonable fear. It mattered not - the hunters were too close. Baby coasts on. Her vector will in time bring her within range of the slowmover regardless of how it maneuvers. She understands the complexities of orbital mechanics and maneuver in flat space as she had once understood currents and cold water. She remembers the water, before the people had taken her, and remade her. But she was happy. This was hunting like nothing she had known, and better by far.

Spread apart more than two hundred times the distance from Earth to the sun, Baby's taskgroup responds instantly to the causal channel message. The other hunter killers bend their trajectories on quiet streams of fast ions. They will provide outwatch, high cover. Two were heading downsystem, spinward of the target. Shaping course to box the slowmover, they are on the opposite side and their drives invisible, pointed away from both to the target and what remains of life in system. The third hunter killer is upsystem of baby, thrusting down and watching in. Gunnr coasts in baby's wake. She will not take part in the battle, but feast on the remains.

***

Over at FARK, folks are working on a series of Magic: the Gathering cards devoted to political and cultural issues.

Some are better than others of course, but a few really shine for me:

Personal fave below the fold:

The USS Constitution, flagship of task force 14-9, is mostly quiet. Quiet because it is nighttime according to the ship clocks, clocks now running faster than at any time in the last two (or six) years since the ship finished breaking down to non-relativistic speeds on a torch of antimatter. Quiet because it is a warship. Quiet because it is following the wake of four relativistic kill vehicles that, though they left three years Earth time after the fleet, they arrived here only two weeks ago, local time. They didn’t have to slow down gently. They would go from within a loud shout of C to nothing in a fraction of a second, imparting all of their energy of motion in a cataclysm more ferocious by far than the asteroid which once, long ago, ended the dinosaurs on far away Earth.

In the cold depths, just outside the cometary halo, the three suns of the Centauri were bright pinpoints of yellow, yellow and red. Long, needle-like and black, the RKVs had exhausted all but a tiny fraction of their antimatter fuel accelerating out from Earth’s fractured moon to travel twenty-four trillion miles at 92% of the speed of light. Half a year out, the shipminds absorbed the sensor take from the starwisp probes that preceded them. The probes, in their hundreds, had wafted into the system months earlier. Only hundreds of grams in weight, their gossamer wings brought a simple payload, a fabricator seed enveloped in bardo cone insulation. The solar wind of the destination stars slowed the wisps to manageable speeds, so that when the seed hit a useful body the fabricator seed would survive the impact. Once planted in a cometary body the seed, powered by a small subcritical isotope pile and informed by a carbon matrix library of designs, set about constructing a small but powerful observatory from the dirty ice.

On the Constitution, the crew and the shipmind's military intelligence sub-agencies analyze the fresh data and compared it with the picture generated by Big Eye, the carefully hidden, extremely long baseline interferometer observatory in the Oort Cloud four light years behind. Many emission sources had gone dark, others were dramatically dimmer. The enemy attempted to hide, no matter how impossible it was to hide a system-wide information and industrial ecology.

The four killers divide and divide again, fissioning into 256 needles, every one of which harbored a fragment of the shipmind, a reservoir of antimatter for terminal guidance, and a target. Each mirv moved through the darkness at 92 percent of the speed of light. Each mirv headed was for the most populous inhabited bodies orbiting the three stars of the system. Each mirv had, by right of its fantastic momentum, enough kinetic energy to sere a continent to ashes, or break to pieces a medium sized asteroid. The mirved RKVs jockey for position as final orders are ansibled to the killers. The minds of the ships, weak AI inhabiting a nucleus of quantum foam around which orbited a constellation of submolar processors, intend only destruction.

***

The world seemed small as Captain Sely left command space and settled into the confines of his mind. Agencies and voices clamored for attention at the edges of his consciousness, but he pushes them aside. For now, coffee is the top of the agenda. Caffeine to restore alertness, and to dull the pain of living a wider life than God intended.

Sely unfolded his wiry frame from the acceleration couch he had occupied for the last seventy-two hours. The last dribbles of shockgel disappeared into the fabric of the couch as he floated toward the desk at the opposite side of the cabin. Looking around the spacious cabin, he smiled at the thought that despite years in the vastness of interstellar space, space was what he would miss most when in a few hours the ship would collapse in on itself, hollow spaces mostly disappearing to make the ship ready for combat. The easy days of the long passage were almost gone.

Work-ups for the coming weeks were going well – a quick inner glance and training information scrolled across his vision for a moment before flicking away – the crew was tight. As well they should be, he thought, after two years of unending practice in the simulation spaces. Fleet two-shop had digested the intel dump from the probe network, and had fed the final targets into the killers. His own intel group even now was cataloguing targets, and working with ops to spin up a target matrix for 14-9's area of responsibility.

For now, though… Coffee. Sely opened a small cabinet and removed something that looked like a large syringe. Which in a way, it was. Almost a century of hard-won experience had shown that a French press was the only traditional method of coffee preparation even remotely suitable for freefall. Filling a bulb with coffee, he drifted over to his desk.

He could never avoid looking at the old-style photograph clipped to the top of the desk. A picture of woman and child, his wife and daughter. Dead since the invaders dropped some very, very large rocks on his home. And on the homes of almost two billion others. Sely and his son had been in the moon. Not that they escaped anything save death there.

A redness flicked at the edges of his vision. Sely's medical automation asking permission to adjust his cognition to dampen out anguish, and replace it with calmness and focus. Sely brushed this aside as he always did. Only in combat would he accept that sort of meddling. In combat, he never needed it.

Sely looked about him and contemplated the small bubble of air and light and heat that encased him. I've had two years of respite from horror, he thought. And used it to plan the visitation of horror. Now the planning is nearly done. Soon, it will be killing time.

***

OK folks, I need a ruling on something.

As my fellow Ministers and a few readers are aware, I have a second regular job at night at a certain armed courier company. Let's call it "ArmCo". I work with a few young men who are smart, funny, and have much more on the ball than a pitiless, soulless career at ArmCo might suggest. They know it too, but are still a little too unseasoned to understand how little time they have left before they're out of better job options and ArmCo is the best of the bad ones. We have alot of laughs though, and get along great.

At night we usually get everything done early, and have alot of time to gab. Despite whatever meandering twists and turns the conversations might take, astute observers will realize there are really only two topics: chicks, and zombies.

So.

Until last night, those two themes were separated by a vast and yawning gulf. Until last night, they were safely kept far apart. Until last night, there was absolutely no consideration of the unholy and just deeply weird repercussions that might arise from carnal relations with the undead. Until last night, when sort of mostly out of the blue, Dan asked,

"Say I'm tappin' a zombie chick, right? A chick who used to be hot and maybe still looked mostly normal. And say she doesn't bite me or anything. Would I then become a zombie?"

...

Huh.

...

Huh.

...

Here's my reasoning thus far (accept the premise as is. Dan is a former Marine who was wounded and medically discharged. He doesn't have a plate in his head or anything, but he sometimes lets you think he does. Just roll with it):

One the one hand, it would seem that fluid exchange is the essence (to reference both comically brilliant mathematician John Nash AND comically brilliant fictional character General Jack T. Ripper) of zombie creation. That is, some fluid from an existing zombie enters the body of normal human, typically by way of open wound, and presto-changeo the human becomes a zombie in some certain time.

But upon reflection, I'm not sure we ever clearly understand which fluid is the medium for infection: saliva? Blood? Bile? Um, other..? To be sure it depends on the zombies we're talking about: Romero zombies are pretty unambiguously bite/saliva driven, as 28 Days Later zombies (arguably not zombies, but leave it alone for now) were clearly the blood-spewing-and-sharing variety.

As Dan didn't specify which universe his hot zombie chick came from, I focused instead on what I was given: one female zombie. No open wounds. No blood. No other possibility for fluid exchange outside the naughty bits. Would Dan then become an undead Dan? What about with a condom?

I went round and round with this, but just couldn't come down definitively on one side or the other.

There is a passage in Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting that goes:

Spud turns and says something to Renton, who can't hear him above a song by the Farm, which, Renton considers, like all their songs, is listenable only if you're E'd out of your box, and if you're E'd out of your box it would be a waste listening to The Farm, you'd be better off at some rave freaking out to heavy techno-sounds.

New Orleans stoner-rock trio Suplecs are a bit like this. On one hand they are heavy and fast. On the other hand the guitars sound like they were recorded in a closet, their riffs are boring, and their overall vibe recalls all the million stoner-metal bands I've already heard. And for my money if you have to get high to appreciate something, there's no there, there in the first place.

For the most part this is the way I feel about stoner-rock in general, or whatever it is the kids are calling it these days. I remember a few years ago when the Queens of the Stone Age first came up hearing from all quarters how great and original they were, how great their songs were, how heavy they sounded and so on. Then I heard the band and they were ok, sure, but nothing to write home about. Then I realized that most of the people who had been crowing about QOTSA so hard were also habitual stoners: mystery solved. Since then a good handful of similar bands have crossed my path: Kyuss, Nashville Pussy, Fu Manchu, and Gov't Mule, just to name a few that come to mind. Some of them are really good no matter your chemical status, but I always have the sneaking suspicion that they would be better if you were too high to see: a bad sign, for my money.

Suplecs don't seem to have figured out yet what kind of band they want to be, and it shows. "Tsunami," the first song on their latest album, Powtin' On The Outside, Pawty On The Inside lifts its riff from an old Scorpions song. They even want you to know it, since the first word of each verse is "Blackout!" just like the Germans wrote it. The very next track, "Black Cloud" contains the stanza,

If life is a bowl of cherries, how come I'm in the pits?
If life is a bowl of cherries, smells like shit 'n' I'm eatin' it.
Cuz I've been feedin' it, now I gotta deal with it."

What? Are these guys kidding?

About two thirds of Powtin' is this kind of goofy thrash metal, but a few songs switch things up by including either sincere ('serious') angst-laden lyrics and metal screams or Gov't Mule style instrumental space jams. "Gotta Pain," alternates metal screams with generic impassioned teenage alienation, "End of Me" is a barstool blooze revved up to 200 RPM, and "Cities of the Dead" is a six-minute jam instrumental that builds and builds but never really comes into focus or gets anywhere. On "Welcome Home" and the finale "Meatballs and Spaghetti" the band combine all of these into one unwieldy whole.

After a half dozen listens I keep expecting the various ideas swirling around to take shape and turn into something with momentum, but they never really do. Choruses don't quite come together, drama never unfolds, and the ever-present sludgy riffs spin their wheels in the mud. The most compelling music on the album is the untitled bonus track, which is about three and a half minutes of fairly groovy jamming; nothing special in and of itself, but far more accessible and coherent than any of the ten official songs that came before.

If Suplecs figure out which thing they want to do well, they probably have one or two solid albums in them. But Powtin' On The Inside, Pawty On The Outside is nothing special, a half-baked (ooh! A pun!) mess of sludgy thrash, noodly jams, and odds and ends that sound too much like other bands to really make much of an impression. I don't really smoke the reefer, so I have no idea what changes if you were to get baked and give Powtin' a spin. But I do know that if that were to happen, there are many albums I'd much rather have around than this one.

This post also appears at blogcritics.org.

See? This guy gets it. Even though Pittsburgh is doomed in the event of zombie infestatation, it seems that someone there is aware of the impending threat to humankind posed by the robots. Although the article in question and the gentleman's book, titled "How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion," is about robots generally, the information contained therein certainly applies to space robots as well.

"Any robot could rebel, from a toaster to a Terminator, and so it is crucial to learn the strengths and weaknesses of every robot enemy," author Daniel H. Wilson warns in "How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion."

What makes the book cool -- and unlike some other survival books -- is that Wilson is an actual roboticist, who got his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon last month. While his scenarios are outlandish -- describing attacks by humanoid robots, some of them with creepy tails, some that can climb walls or swim -- the research on how to build and attack the robot creatures is quite real.

*snip*

Some of the features of these service bots can be found in a robotic dog named Aibo
From the get-go, Wilson's 178-page book is clearly for the humor section; the graphics give it away with pictures of old school video-game robots zapping humans with lasers. It's riddled with B-movie language about "the nefarious robot mind" and survival tips that are closer to "The Onion" than a science book. (A tip for telling whether a new acquaintance is a real person or a humanoid robot: "Does your friend smell like a brand-new soccer ball?")

Some of the tips are real.

A robot trying to find you will use thermal imaging based on the roughly 91-degree temperature of human skin, so smearing yourself in cool mud will confuse them. If being chased by an unmanned robot vehicle, flee to a rustic, unmapped area with lots of obstacles. If your robot "smart" house -- one wired with video surveillance and computer gear -- tries to trap you, chop your way out with an ax and don't take your cell phone, because the house will track you with it.

Wilson hatched the idea for the book in the Squirrel Hill Cafe, better known as the Squirrel Cage, less well known as the place where they used to have a bottle of rye whiskey just for me. That place makes you wicket smaaaaht, let me tell ya.

The Ministry implores all readers to support Mr. Wilson in his efforts to educate humanity. That is all.

If I ever find the guy who crapped in my Wheaties this morning, he will be, in the immortal words of Walter Sobchak, entering a world of pain.

Holy crap. I swear I never thought I would be saying something like this right out loud (I might have to turn in my fellow traveler card to the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy), but some things just aren't right. One is the current initiative in my fair Commonwealth, known unfairly by its detractors as Taxachusetts, to let the children of illegal immigrants attend state colleges at in-state resident tuition levels.

State Attorney General (and likely Democratic candidate for Governator) Tom Reilly is pushing this plan as part of his campaign bid. And now our Lieutenant Governer, Republican Kerry Healy, is getting crap for saying something about it.

Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Not in a million years. That's my tax money. That I pay because I live here legally.

Now, I'm not a close-the-borders kind of guy. Immigration is what made this country great (that plus strategic genocide, but I'm not, really not in favor of repeating that part of our history), and I like it a lot when the best and brightest - or the most desperate and resourceful - from around the world come to our shores in search of a piece o' whatever makes them happy. And maybe our immigration policies need a bunch of work to make it easier for people to be documented and cleared to enter, and maybe the slugs at the Department of Homeland Security who are responsible for visas and such could stop trying to make life as hard as possible for all supplicants at their grubby Formica altars. I agree. We need to get on that.

But in the meantime, we need to do something about the people here illegally. Yes, I know our economy could grind to a halt if we sent everyone home en masse. But guess what? The answer to that conundrum is not to decide the rules are meaningless. By "do something," I mean 'figuring out how to more efficiently police our borders,' 'how to more efficiently screen guest workers such as seasonal produce pickers,' 'how to streamline the visa process,' and so on. "Something" is not giving away tuition breaks to the chidren of illegals. Do that, and the difference between legal and illegal immigration becomes less and less meaningful. If you get a drivers' license (such as California proposes) and in-state tuition, why ever go to the goons at DHS to plead your case?

I get where the impulse comes from. The kids, it's likely, aren't generally here of their own volition; they haven't broken immigration laws independently of the authority of their parents. This is America, after all, and people deserve a shot. If they're bright, we can use them. Now that they're here, sure, it would be nice if they got smart and educated, and stayed in the Bay State as hardworking, aboveboard and upright legal aliens. That's a nice idea.

But until the day they get their visa or their green card, it's also bullshit.

Folks, this shit ain't right. This is, or usedta be, America.

[wik] Like John McCain said,

"I hold no brief for the prisoners. I do hold a brief for the reputation of the United States of America. We are Americans, and we hold ourselves to humane standards of treatment of people no matter how evil or terrible they may be. To do otherwise undermines our security, but it also undermines our greatness as a nation. We are not simply any other country. We stand for something more in the world – a moral mission, one of freedom and democracy and human rights at home and abroad. We are better than these terrorists, and we will we win. The enemy we fight has no respect for human life or human rights. They don’t deserve our sympathy. But this isn’t about who they are. This is about who we are. These are the values that distinguish us from our enemies. "

In the immortal words of the Original Rube (one of my many avatars), fuckin' A, dude.

That was a 589 word snippet. I'm editing the next eight hundred or so. Don't worry though, I won't be commenting like this throughout the whole novel, though I will occasionally - and probably in greater depth as I writhe in the agonies of procrastination. Like now.

There are currents in space more subtle than those in any ocean. The glimmering of the Milky Way and a hundred billion stars only teases the mind with light, but does not light the way. Through the darkness coasts a ship, call it that though it has no crew. It has mind, which is the ship. A mind that once hunted through dark waters but now hunts different prey, with different senses.

Tenuous wisps of gas so thin that more than a single molecule in a cubic meter counts as dense brush the skin of the ship. Mind feels gentle tugging currents of electromagnetic fields, and the pull of a stars years in the distance. Far behind, mind senses the mother ship, and the humans who brought it across a gulf of years for vengeance. Hours to the side are its podmates, searching and seeking. Sniffing and listening but silent in the deep just as mind is.

Light impinges on delicate sensors, lightly aged and with the flavor of metal and machine. Prey. Mind touches a part of its sensorium, activating the ansible causal channel back to the mother. Entangled quantum particles separated at birth, each knowing what happens to other no matter the distance between them. An ever dwindling pool of communication, instantaneous and unreadable. Once consumed in the act of communication, the causal channel is nothing but a useless bit of entropy.

message-id: [7533020.1114066576010].
date: 20 apr 2105 23:56:15 -0700 - [relative].
from: hk-55 [abdelwahab].
to: unif/ussconstitution/tacops/weps [mother].
subject: hey...
content-type: text/plain.
content-transfer-encoding: 512bit.
authenticator: 2a21.24e4.5bb.234/word of the day is euphonious.
message reads:
new contact.
designate oscar-5.
range ~81mclicks/4.5lmin.
[attachment: sensor take mission time 05:01:79]
prelim:
target acquisition due to poor target emission control. (.78 probable)
‘civilian’ vessel/habitat (.56 probable)
orders?

Mind waits, knowing what the answer will be. It is always the same. It misses the hunting songs it sang in a long distant ocean. A living mind instantiated in a quantum foam computing matrix (with the small bit of living flesh without which Mind would not exist) cannot sing, except to itself. Mind coasts through the silent darkness.

Mind focuses on the passive sensor arrays layered on its nose. Designed and crafted atom by atom to drink in any light no matter what its frequency, the arrays give both sight and stealth. Running powered almost completely down, mind emits very little heat, and that shunted carefully backward, excreted in dribbles of infrared photons from folded fractal heat exchangers.

Mind listens, attentive to the emissions from oscar-5. There is no sense to them, nothing intelligible or decipherable, at least not to mind’s inboard expert systems. But the flavor… It tastes like softness, carelessness. Low microwave emissions, sideband emanations from insufficiently shielded devices. Leaky internal communications? The enemy, talking to itself knowing that someone is listening yet unable to maintain disciplined silence.

A tickle from the ansible. Mind turns its attention to the incoming message queue.

message-id: [OF8D833F44.C4FCE053-ON85256FE7.0047217E].
date: 20 apr 2105 00:01:30 -0430 - [relative].
from: unif/ussconstitution/tacops/weps [mother].
to: hk-55 [abdelwahab].
subject: re: hey...
content-type: text/plain.
content-transfer-encoding: 512bit.
authenticator: 2f8.2cc.b52.254/word of the day is niggardly.
message reads:
confirm local analysis.
track new contact oscar-5, pursue to termination.
softkill, maintain emcon.
new taskgroup 14/7, your lead, hk-32/hk-57/hk-59/mb-02 seconded.
upload softkill intel via mb-02 ansiblelink.
be alert for other habs, lurkers. good hunting, baby.

Mind sends ansible pings to its new podmates, gaining and giving position coordinates and relative vectors. A brief flurry of transmissions establish roles and timetables. Incremental genocide to proceed at their earliest convenience.

***

Today is day one of a month of enjoyable hell. Or miserable heaven. Or... something. I have just under 30 days from this moment to complete a 50,000 word novel. EDog is the son of a bitch who got me hooked on this idea. So I, and perhaps you, have him to blame. In the meantime, go read his second National Novel Writing Month effort, Propane Jockeys. John from Texas Best Grok is also participating in the madness - check out his efforts as well.

I am an innovative procrastinator. For starters, I'm writing this post. Also, I haven't come up with a name for my novel larva. So, once everyone has had a chance to read a bit of what I'm going to post, submit title suggestions in the comments.

As I was preparing to post the first chunk of my magnum opus, I realized with horror that I didn't have a category for my novel posts. This led to almost an hour of web searching, photoshopping and web admining, and so I can no present to you our new Perfidious category, NaNoWriMo. Click on that link, or the category link in the left toolbar, and you will be able to access all of my novel related posts. Or, just watch for the watch icon on new posts, and you'll know that during novel writing month, there is only one time, and that is too late.

The first chunk should be up shortly, and more later this evening. I'm going to try to get to the required average speed of 1667 words a day for the first week, then pick up the pace because I know I'm going to be wicked short of time come Thanksgiving.

I hope you enjoy it.

Been listening to music, lately...and thought I'd share the list, because of the deep window this provides into my life.

• Feeder: Pushing the Senses -- What can I say? Yet another masterpiece from the best rock band hardly anybody in the US has heard of. You must go straight to Amazon and spend crazy money on finding their CDs.
• Let's Go: Let's Go -- Great straight-up melodic pop-rock. Handsome without the bitter metal.
• Fluke: Puppy -- You might know track 3 from the last Matrix movie (remember the big dance/orgy scene prior to the big battle?). The rest of the CD is great, pounding rhythms and melodies, and some of the best arpeggiated electronics I've heard in a while. Closes with the unexpectedly beautiful Blue Sky -- a kind of electronic/gospel hybrid.
• Coldplay: X&Y -- Yeah, me and everybody else. It's good enough to deserve it.
• Mercuy Rev: The Secret Migration -- I've known this band to be a critic's favorite for a while but never picked anything up. Good, melodic progressive, with Zero 7 overtones in places.
• Morel: Lucky Strike -- DC native (I think ;) Richard Morel creates another dark dance/pop thinker. Driving dance beats, brutal lyrics, Pink Noise (Deep Dish) production...there's much to like here. First listen makes you think it's just another dance record, but the unusually beautiful melodies hit you, and then the words hit you like a sledgehammer. Not for everyone, but it should be.
• Royksopp: The Undertanding -- Simply brilliant electronica from these Scandinavian geniuses. They forge through new territory with this release (as with their last), but the results never stop being musical and never stop being accessible.
• Orbital: Blue Album -- Orbital's last, so they say, and relatively satisfying. Can't say I'd give it top marks, but there are a couple of standouts that make the CD worth buying. In particular I love You Lot's sampled speech:

You, are becoming Gods. There's a new master of creation, and it's you! Unraveled DNA and at the same time youre cultivating bacteria strong enough to kill every living thing. Do you think you are ready for that much power. You lot ? You lot?! Cheeky b**tards. You're running around science like kids with guns, creating a new world, while you've got is stinking, but, hands up, hands up anyone who thinks you've got it right. Yea there's always one. I can see you. If you want the position of God then take the responsibility

Bush nominated Sam Alito for the Supreme Court. Conservatives will be happy, as Alito is one of the elect - his name is on the consensus list of acceptable candidates for the court. By nominating Scalito, Bush will bring the wandering sheep back into the fold. We'll have to see whether the Democrats flip their lid over this nomination. Offhand, I don't see how they can, as it seems pretty much everyone is in agreement that the man has the juice for the post. Any opposition will likely be purely ideological.

For my part, I'm cool with this one. From Jonathan Turley on MSNBC:

In addition, Alito has written a very controversial dissent in a case involving the ownership of machine guns, suggesting that a statute prohibiting such things might be unconstitutional.

Conservatives have kicked the commies to the curb in Poland. However, the two parties that together garnered a majority of the votes fell out over distribution of high-level posts in the new government. But hey, at least the commies are out.