I’m trying and failing to come up with a pun combining these two. I’m ashamed.
Watch Vitruvian be the worst of them all. When he gets caught up in a pairing he really gets caught up in it… not that anyone could tell… of course.
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Tumblr for Myrmidons… Mumblr?
Tumblr and the Three Rings is a tad more difficult… all I got is ‘Thumblr’. Which… Yeah, no.
OH MY GOD, why can I not internet properly today? I did not mean for two separate posts, but it happened… Whoops.
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Ariadne is running around frantically, looking for the novel she’d just finished so that she can slip it back into Arinthas’ “hiding” place. She asks Vitruvian, who answers her with a glance that all but says “really, you’re asking me?” He turns to leave, but knocks into a desk or a bookshelf or something and then… There’s the novel… and stacks upon stacks of paper with fandoodles and fan theories and fanfic. Ariadne grabs the book - it’s open to a random page- and sees extensive highlighting and scribbled comments that definitely were not there when she read it.
AHH, and it’s all self-insert fanfic!
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“Well?! What do you think?!”
Arinthas looks warily at the machine’s smiling face, which is nearly vibrating with excitement. He raises an eyebrow in judgement and glances down at the pages covered in her dense and unusually flowery handwriting. He glances back up at her.
“What do I think.”
She nods vigorously, mere inches from his face.
“Yes.”
Arinthas strokes his chin pensively, keeping eye contact.
“What do I think of this. This… novel. This novel that you have written. This novel that you have written and are now giving to me, Arinthas.”
She cocks a finger at him excitedly.
“Yes.”
Arinthas takes a deep and weary breath as he takes one final leaf through the notes. How to put this…
“Well, the premise is overly simplistic, the characters are one-dimensional, the romantic relationships are shallow and unburdened by conflict, and for nearly four pages the heroine’s name changes from ‘Lady Fanshaw’ to ‘Ariadne’.”
The real Ariadne’s face freezes for a moment, then her face seems to oscillate between emotions for a few seconds, seeming to settle on resolute after a brief scuffle with wide-eyed pouting.
“Ok, I hear you. You need a little time to digest what you’re reading.”
She jumps up and theatrically dusts herself off, placing her hands on her hips confidently.
“Keep it, give it a closer read, and tell me what you think in the morning!”
She marches quickly away, leaving the somewhat awed Arinthas silently trying to figure out what precisely has overcome a machine that he thought he understood as intimately as a Father understands a Daughter.
After a few long moments of silence in the dark, two glowing orange eyes seem to stalk towards him out of the night.
Vitruvian steps into the firelight and silently gathers up the papers from Arinthas’ hands, fixing him with a stare that would likely cause most grown adults to do in their underpants something that their mothers patiently spent a great deal of time trying to get them not to.
“You saw nothing.”
Without another word he stalks back into the pitch-black night, leaving Arinthas even more confused than before.
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You are such a prolific writer; I struggle to put 1500 words down to move forward in my update - you churn out more in your teases almost daily.
I just am content to enjoy your progression and lurk but know I’m still supporting you.
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And this gets me thinking about the Thinker mc and the upper brain and any other surviving Thinkers and sentient machines.
Clearly not all thinking machines go insane after thousands of years, for example Damascus Jim still seems fine. The question then becomes, as Jim seems to be entirely mechanical, is myrmidon insanity a biological function?
If it really is the last and ultimate fail-safe the pre-fall humans built into their androids (in case of robot rebellion one would assume). In the game world this seems to be similar to the Lysine contingency of Jurrasic park fame (even though using lysine as the proposed fail-safe was not all that well-researched by the author there) the myrmidons are seemingly suspiciously similar in that they, like JP’s resurrected Dinosaurs, are not designed with the ability to reproduce and seem to lose their mind at around 1000 years of age or so. All possibly to prevent them from ever overtaking the humans should they rebel (one assumes the pre-fall humans also had lifespans running into the centuries at the very least).
Therefore, if any of this is true, can that fail-safe be disabled, and if it can how does one go about it?
Is it sufficient for the Thinker, for example, to simply “remove” some memories by compressing the details of many, mostly mundane events and either deleting them, or better, store them in an archive for later perusal? Or is a complete wipe and personality reset necessary.
This is one of the reasons why establishing communication with other units (still) connected to the “upper brain” might be of value. Are they doing any research to “cure” or reverse this inevitable myrmidon decline and if so can the mc possibly collaborate?
I think a partial solution to retain at least our personality might indeed be to have more than one brain in our frame, so we can periodically take one of them offline for maintenance.
Interesting, my Thinker bot will no doubt want to take a look at them himself.
Ariadne will certainly provide an interesting contrast to my mc’s efforts to become a more perfect machine on the mage path. I imagine she would be surprised perhaps even horrified at my mc’s attitude towards his human half.
In fact in choosing the mage path the mc already rejects what she seems to want most, to be (perceived as) human among a circle of friends (or a pit of vipers in the noble’s case).
Then again depending on how the story goes it might be possible for my mc to “compromise” with his human half and merely subdue and suppress his feelings and emotions most of the time, like mr. Spock or Sherlock Holmes, and that may even be a result of how much he takes his talks with Ariadne to heart.
He does seem to be one of the more interesting characters on the noble path and if I can ever get over myself and try that route one day, I think trying to romance him is much more interesting than romancing either mister Finn or the royals.
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Your posts make for crazy interesting reading (emphasis on ‘interesting,’ mind, I’m not trying to insult you or anything. Promise) but… color me curious…
Why must ‘perfect machine’ and ‘humanity’ be mutually exclusive (or some better word(s) that would fit here)? (Blah blah blah, the human body is a machine in itself, etc., etc., let’s not go here…) What precisely is your idea of a ‘perfect’ machine? Or is it ‘cold, calculating, unfeeling, logical…’ and all those other fun adjectives? How is that any more ‘perfect’ than a machine that is on the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of emotional expression?
And why do you not like user names? Did a user name kick your dog?
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You are kind to say, but I could use a little more focus, for all the teasers and extra details I’ve yet to put Chapter One of the Rebel path up.
Still, being prolific in the wrong direction is better than being stuck, I suppose.
Well you haven’t met Jim yet, he’s a little eccentric at best. However you are quite right, not all Myrmidons go completely stark-raving, so there must be some combination of factors that allows one to keep one’s mental faculties intact.
I’ll have a think about that, as you’d clearly like your MC to survive beyond the heat death of the universe, never mind the game.
Even if there are no more Thinkers left, perhaps some of them left something in the Upper Brain that would help you? Maybe they left a copy of a mind containing seditious software upgrades, tucked away behind a firewall in the Universe’s most secure lockbox?
I can’t possibly comment at this juncture one way or another…
Perhaps you could simply separate your existing brain into two separate entities, the equivalent of a severed Corpus Callosum. Of course, you’d have to ensure that whatever solution you pursue, you find a way to effectively ensure that ‘you’ are the dominant para-personality in this little arrangement, and I don’t know how you would go about that.
That’s true, all three of you are working toward a different ideal, Vitruvian is looking to keep his own mind (and potential) in check by limiting himself, Ariadne is looking to connect with other and find perfection through empathy.
You will have to determine precisely what your path is, and whether the being you are looking to create deserves to outlast its thousand year lifespan. If there is anything to be learned from the ruined world, it is that hubris never goes unpunished.
He is something of an enigma, isn’t he?
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No, it comes from some old forums when I was much younger where you could retrieve your password, but never your username if you forgot them. Surprise, surprise while I was usually quite good at remembering my passwords I used to forget what seemingly “cool”, flavour of the month, nickname I’d chosen as a username if I didn’t frequent something in more than a week, or so.
So I finally got fed up with thinking up all these new names I’d just inevitably forget anyway, but I also, obviously didn’t want to use my real name, or anything connected to it, on them interwebs whenever I could avoid it, so I finally just decided to name my new username after my experience with the damned things and I haven’t forgotten it ever since.
Wolf’s existence would seem to belie that statement, to some extent at least.
While “heat death of the universe” may not be necessary, as it would become awfully boring by then, increasing that lifespan and our sanity say a hundredfold might be worthwhile. He’d certainly want to take his time exploring the entirety of the artificial world both in and beyond the three rings and I don’t think you’d get very far with that in just under a millennium.
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The Wolf is a complicated creature, he blows hot and cold depending on moods that can change in seconds or millennia, I’m not sure he should be your role model.
True, it would probably take the better part of a million years to walk the length of the Ringworld alone, let alone get invested in what’s going on across the rest of the universe.
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So, about the third gender. It appears to be much rarer than the original two, since only one such character has been mentioned. How large a percentage of the population do they make up? Are there people who are attracted only to that gender? This would mean that there are many more possible sexual orientations due to the third gender. Also, how accepting is the population towards trans people, or people who refuse to be classified as any of the genders?
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Only one such character has been mentioned so far, but realistically I would guess that the Androgyne population would be somewhere between 15% and 20% of all humans within the Rings, as one must be directly related to an Androgyne in order to give birth to one.
Absolutely, they tend to be thought of as more good looking as a rule than the other genders (fewer genetic defects, well blended features etc).
I know! Isn’t the thought fascinating? Imagining all the cultural permutations makes my head spin.
Very accepting. The wide spectrum of the Intersex gender means that nobody has any strong sense of gender norms, meaning that the concept of subverting gender norms basically has no meaning.
That was an awesome set of questions, thank you.
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Don’t you think it would lead more to an change of how existing words are perceived and maybe how the distribution is? Even today some people already use heterosexuel in the sense of “attracted to people of a different gender as the own” and not as “attracted to people of the opposite gender”… So someone who is only attracted to people of that gender would depending on the own gender still count as either hetero- or homosexual. Bisexual is mostly defined as “attraction to two or more genders”, polysexuual as “attraction to people of various genders” and pan as “attraction to people of all genders”.
It’s not as if agender/bogender/non-binary/etc aren’t already a thing, even when the acceptances and cultural context is much different from the one in the game world.
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can’t believe I didn’t comment on this earlier…
yus… just like my stories.
That’s… Actually an extremely fun reason. Way to stick it Internet man, man.
Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if the words themselves weren’t in circulation anymore. A whole new lingo for a whole new ring world.
awkward cough
[…I may or may not have written a horrible AU fic and butchered some characterizations simply so I could make a pun, but I don’t think this convo is the best time to post it…]
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Yeah, but in that case we anyway are just reading a translation to make it comprehensible for us, considering how much language can change in a few years…
I meant it more in the sense that the concepts we are talking about when it comes to the third gender of the game world aren’t that much of a novelity with already today existing concept of sexuality, gender and attraction in mind. Many of the possible “new” sexual orientations that could come from it, do indeed already exist.
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Much as @OScott theorises, people don’t need so many specific words to describe relatively simple behaviours that just happen to be occurring between the three genders. We need a whole glut of words to describe different genders and sexual identities because for the past 10,000 years we’ve had a very specific and narrow concept of what humanity should look like, a bi-gendered monogamous pair-bonder that structures it’s life around it’s gender.
We’re trying to throw that off at the moment, but we’ve only been seriously trying to do so for a century or so (globally speaking, of course). We need those words to describe to people who still ascribe to the old ways what precisely we are doing with each other.
The Three Rings have been living with gender and sexual fluidity for millennia now, maybe longer before the Fall.
Instead of complicating the process, they have simplified it immensely. Whoever you are in a relationship with is your mate, the rest is not strictly relevant.
They don’t need words for identities that are obscure or differing from the mainstream because now there is no mainstream.
Ergo, many of the words we currently need to assert an atypical identity are no longer needed, and therefore drift away.
Of course, even in our own society these groups have always existed in some form or another, but it is only now that they are being written in to society as a whole, from California to Siberia to Tsushima.
We’re all having to welcome them, acclimate them into our social structures, and start learning from them and letting them contribute fully to our species.
That job was done epochs ago in this story, now they get to reap the benefits.
I must have it. Now.
Very true, but all of those groups currently live in a marginalised, compressed fashion that does not allow their romantic innovations to really expand and seep into society at large. Take polyamory as an example. While poly people exist (and I should imagine in great numbers) they are offered no legal protections of any kind, they cannot marry each other without risking prosecution, and they generally have to live ‘under the radar’ to the point that when the debates over gay marriage were being held, the most common attack and defence between the two camps was “They’re going to open the gates to depravity! They’re going to have great big swinging orgies!” to which the pro-marriage camp had to reply “Hey, we only want to marry each other, we’re not monsters!”
That is of course a shocking over-simplification, but people with non-monogamous romantic ideals are pretty low on the legal and moral totem-pole. This means that we won’t really know whether group-matrimony offers any benefits over monogamy, or it’s effect on art, music or culture.
One thing that evangelical conservatives accidentally get right is that these social changes will have a profound effect in changing the cultural landscape. The problem is that they automatically assume this is bad.
In the Three Rings, these cultural changes are not only accepted, they are uncontested. Their society has integrated them so completely that they can now reap the benefits of all the formerly marginalised voices to create a deeper, more complex social harmony.
I’m at work, so I can’t really get deep into the guts of this point, but I hope you get the general cut-and-thrust of where I’m coming from.
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Very well… Just remember, I did it all for the pun. I simply hope it lands…
edit: I’M SO MAD, HANNIBAL WOULD’VE BEEN PERFECT FOR THIS.
Disclaimer: No actual David Fincher films or @Moreau characters (except Flash, poor thing… but I need to maintain some adherence to canon, right?) were harmed in the making of this AU.
edit: I half-assed a coda because I may still be sleep deprived, but the novelty’s worn off.
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Oh I don’t have a problem with seeing that the perception and culture of gender and sexuality would in many ways be very different from the one we have today. My soley problem was with the subliminal implication that those orientations would not already exist (which probably wasn’t intentioned on anyones part, but could be taken that way, because of the wording of the original ask). As that got resolved anyway, there is no problem anymore.
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Would it, hypothetically be speaking, be possible to create that “social harmony” in a pairing with both the prince and mr. Gray? (That might just be one of the few things that would get me to try a go at the “noble” path).
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Ok, so I’m finally off work, time to take a look at wha-
What did you do…
You know how some writers have a kind of strange multiple-personality-disorder style relationship with their characters?
Flash is literally screaming right now.
Good-o. One of the things I’ve been striving for with this piece is to portray traditionally disenfranchised groups as fully included and equal in society in what I hope feels like a natural way. I’m always open for ways to portray these characters and groups in a better light, and critiques when I don’t manage to.
It’s a process, right?
You know, the more I think about the more it seems like a good idea. All I have to do is contrive a reason for the two of them to meet in such a way that they can develop their own relationship outside of merely orbiting the MC.
You have now added your second character to this story, that of The Black Chevalier!
A well-dressed Masked Man who stalks the streets of Kadana doing battle with evildoers and upsetting the King’s Royal Guards.
Wherever there is intrigue and scandal, the Chevalier is there!
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