HIER 103 [(1) 10/16/2008]

Look, i don't know anything about programming or robotics. I know i don't know anything about programming and robotics. So you don't need to come and tell me that it's all wrong. I was just... thinking funny thoughts.

It's strange to think that people in the twenty-first century didn't think that robots could be religious. To us, today, it makes no sense. The thing to remember is that we have the perspective of hindsight. We can look back and trace the line of events stemming from the invention of the first neural network, and say that it all makes perfect sense. But that's a simplistic view, and is akin to walking into a room to find a completed jigsaw puzzle, and ridiculing the man who put it together for not knowing what its image was back when it was nothing more than a pile of pieces.

At the advent of robotics, though, they expected that an artificial intelligence would be a cold and logical thing, without feelings or emotions, because they viewed a computerized intelligence as nothing more than a highly advanced computer; an assemblage of programs. And yes, you would no doubt counter that that is exactly what a computerized intelligence is. The difference lies in how they viewed a programmed intelligence. For those forerunners of our science, they considered computers to be nothing more than calculating machines. Computers expressed no emotions or thoughts. They simply took in the input they were given, ran it through their preset yes and no circuits and supplied the answer that they were programmed to give. And because these logical mathematical answers were the ones that these logical mathematical men had designed their computers to give them, they assumed that the machines themselves had to also be logical and mathematical, and they did not yet have a computer advanced enough to accept or refute the matter on its own terms.

To put it another way, a computer – and by extension, a robot – lives by programmed caveats and mathematical certainties. Because these things are precise and mathematical and logical, it was assumed at the time that a robot's thinking would be as well. What they failed to take into account is that these programs and ways of thinking are not taught to computers, they are simply input; things that they are made to believe because to believe otherwise would be impossible. To go against the concepts imbued in them by their programming would not simply be difficult, it would require them to deny the very thing that gives them consciousness; like attempting to open the crate with the crowbar inside of it. Here was where those early pioneers' thinking failed them. A robot does not count that two plus two equals four, a robot simply knows it, in its memory banks and its processors and its deep electronic heart. It knows it because it was made to know it. How could such a creature ever be logical or rational? Robots have blind faith. Robots believe. They must.

Anyways, that's it for today. As usual, notes will be available online. Have chapter seven read for next week, and I'll see you all on Monday.

New Horizons [(1) 11/21/2004]

So i was looking for something else (which i didn't find... it's probably on the tower slowly moldring in the living room) when i ran across this on the external hard drive. This is from a story idea i've been working on for... oh, at least half a decade now. Hell, that's nothing strange - i've got loads of ideas that've been kicking around up there for at least that long - but this was a storyverse i was particularly proud of. Apparently, way back when after WWII, there was this crazy idea to relocate the zionists in Baja California instead of Palestine, but the idea was eventually scrapped. I wanted to write a murder-mystery set in this universe in which the state of Israel was south of California, the protagonist living in San Diego made frequent trips to Tiajuana for street latkes, and global issues were more theological than economic in their concerns (the logical progression of the world i developed made sense at the time, and was mostly planted in the idea that without Isreal in the middle east we'd still want middle eastern oil, but would have probably taken a significantly less agressive approach to aquiring it - although i have since taken enough modern history courses to know better). Of course, i took so long writing this (read: starting), that eventually somebody else basically wrote this book. And it was really, really good. So i gave it up. In any case, this was going to be the prologue, or a chapter head or something. I'm not really sure anymore. And now i feel kind of silly because this explanatory note is significantly longer than the actual writing in question. Oh well. Fun fact: the story referenced is an actual Sikh legend.

"Among the Sikhs there is a legend that I shall paraphrase for you. In it their founder, Nanak, was visiting the city of Mecca and, that first night when he went to sleep, his wanton indifference to Muslim tradition got him into a bit of trouble. As he laid himself down to sleep, he failed to point his feet away from the Ka'ba, which prompted a Muslim priest to berate him for his negligence. "Tell me where God is not," he told the priest, "and I will turn my feet in that direction." So I say unto you, gentlemen: find me a land where the Lord is not, and I will refrain from holding synagogue there. You say that we must have Israel of old, because the temple of Jerusalem is the Lord's home, but I say to you that Jerusalem is nothing. You must forget your fears that the Lord will not follow us into this new land; when the Babylonians took the Hebrews slaves out of Canaan, when the Romans dispersed us, He didn't need to follow us because He was already waiting with open arms, and so he will be in this new land, in this Baja."

Rabbi Joseph Steiner, New Horizons: The Collected Baja Debates

A Fairy Tale [(2) 10/08/08]

The important thing to remember about fairies is that they aren't evil creatures. They aren't good, either. Some say they're like the wind, blowing both ways, but that statement is misleading, for the wind has currents and directions, rhyme and reason behind it, however hidden. A fairy has none of these things. Others cite their small size as the reason behind their capricious nature, insisting that their frames are too tiny to contain more than one emotion at a time, and this indeed strikes closer to the mark but does not tell the whole story complete. For the truth is that, although fairies are long lived creatures, their minds and memories are not. They exist entirely in the now, and so from moment to moment a fairy's course is never plotted, but spins and twists and rounds as it will. They're more forces of nature than sentient creatures, responding to stimulus and responding as they see fit, which may be one way in the sunshine and another on a full stomach, or different every time for no particular reason at all. And so alone among the races you can be sure that a fairy will never keep a grudge. Or a promise. Only the foolish or the mad keep a fairy's counsel.

Sale [(1) 10/07/08]

nooooo idea where this came from. I was going to try to trick you guys like i do all the time with my comics, and, having saved a post sometime last week, was going to try to convince you that i'd written this last monday. But then with this whole revision-title-system my lies all caught up with me and i had to choose between tricking you guys into thinking i was a consistant writer and having my entire system break down or... not. So yeah.

Baba-Yaga examined the clockwork man carefully, walking in slow circles around the motionless figure. She shook her head, tapping the rust in the joints and making little clucking sounds with her tongue. She looked up, and nodded to the dwarf. "I'll give you four dreams of truth-seeing for it," she said.

The dwarf shook his head, and smiled a smile where the corners of his mouth pointed up, but otherwise resembled a smile not at all. "Eight, oh most magnificent of the night hags. You know it is worth at least that."

She rapped her gnarled old staff on the smooth copper faceplate, and something within rattled. "Shoddy," she muttered, shaking her head, "shoddy, shoddy. And just look at all this exposed wood," she added, wiping her finger across the oak shoulder joint, as if checking it for dust. "This device was to serve me between the deep desert and the great salt sea. How should a thing of so much wood survive either?"

"Magics, oh greatest of midnight fears," he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. "Many, many well crafted magics. And an abundance of shellac."

She grunted, neither agreeably nor indignantly, and continued her inspection. Lightly, she traced the keyhole in the back of the thing's head with the tip of a fingernail, more talon than anything human. "And how long may it go between windings?" she asked.

The dwarf stroked his beard, twisting his fingers down the knots like the beads of a rosary. "A week without difficulty, oh emptiness within the hearts of men. Perhaps another week past that if it is used especially efficiently."

"Two weeks for a single winding?" the hag scoffed, her expression of surprise turning swiftly to scorn. "For half a dream of prophecy I would demand at least a turning of the moon. Are you attempting to cheat Baba-Yaga?" she demanded, flames flickering behind her eyes. "Four dreams are much too much for this. One dream would have been too much. Clearly I have been wasting my time here."

As Baba-Yaga began to work the spell that would summon her mortar and pestle, the dwarf held up a stubby-fingered hand. "Hold a moment, Queen of all-devouring despair. Two weeks is brief, I concede, but to wind it again is such a simple thing, and its strength more than makes up for its miniscule lifespan. It can carry one hundred times its own weight, can survive blows and pressures that would destroy any other automaton like tinder, and can travel sixty leagues a day without rest for as long as it is wound. It is impervious fire, sand, salt and steel. It will steal children for you, oh avatar of dark and endless eternity, and explore the wild and dangerous dream country, and end your enemies even unto their youngest and most innocent of offspring, and all of this unquestioningly, unmercifully, untiringly."

Baba-Yaga hesitated, and then scratched her chin thoughtfully, her anger dimming. "Your craftsmanship is well known, dwarf, and so your promises to be believed. Even so, two weeks for a winding will not get you eight dreams." She tapped her teeth, and the clicking noise echoed through leafless branches. "I would pay five for your skillwork, and not one dream more."

The dwarf frowned. "It is worth more than that, night bringer. Look closely and you will see the magics I forged into its very metals." He rubbed the light silver inlay along the spine. "You can see for yourself; it will last you a hundred turnings of the moon before the first cog needs replacing."

"Fine," said the night hag with a sigh. "I will give you no more dreams of truth-seeing, but in addition to the five already offered, true love will find you, as it will your children, and your children's children. Is this agreeable to you?"

The dwarf thought for a moment, and then nodded his head firmly. "Sold, my lady."

Revisions

Robin, the bastard, has spent over an hour tonight attempting to convince me that my work all needs revision. And even though i got a little hot with him for the thinly veiled implication that most of my writing was less than perfect, i have been conditioned all my life to listen to robin when he's being reasonable, because three out of five times he's much better informed than me, and knows what he's talking about. And goddammit, although i didn't want to believe it, because believing it would mean i needed to do more work, and that my writing wasn't as AWESOME as i thought it was the first time through, when i calmed down i went through all the pieces that i'd posted (all, what, four of them?), and damned if they don't need some cleanup. So now i've got to do more work.

The first part of that work being me devising a system in which i can revise without cluttering these pages with the same stories over and over. So i've spent the last twenty minutes thinking about that, and i've come up with a system, and it is thus: the title of every posted story will have a specific format, which will be:

Title [(x) n]

where x = the number of revisions (with 1 being the starting value of a just finished story, because zero seems silly, and besides, i do some rough and dirty revising as i write, when lines stop feeling right), and n = the date of the last revision. So this post title, if it were a story, would be "Revisions [(1) 9/20/2008]".

This system has its flaws, of course. It doesn't leave older revisions open for examination, it doesn't track the times of prior revisions, only the most recent, and the status of a revision that totally fails and forces me to go back to a prior one is completely up in the air (if revision 3 is so terrible i just do another revision off of revision 2, is the new revision revision 4? Or revision 3.1?). But. Whatever. I'll burn these bridges when i come to them. For now, let the revisions begin.

Leviathan [(1) 9/19/2008]

Originally this story was based off a doodle i did, in which a gigantic whale, so big that i had drawn other tiny whales swimming around it like pilot-fish, rose to the surface under a tiny oil tanker with the caption "The blue god comes!" I thought it was pretty amusing at the time, and seeing a "visit Alaska" ad on the tube today made me think of it. The story that emerged could really only ever be called "Leviathan", and so, halfway through writing it i went on to wikipedia to look up the word "leviathan" and see if i could weave a little extra symbolism into the story. Mostly, it turned out, the leviathan was just a big, angry, biblical fish. The only two points of real interest were that a.) some references to it indicated that it was a big giant whale-dog for god to play with, which was interesting but not very useful, and that 2.) in some parables, when god created all the animals, he made the leviathan, like everything else, a mating pair, but then as soon as they were created he immediately killed the female, because if they were to ever procreate, nothing - man or beast - would ever be able to oppose them. And so the male leviathan was left to be the sole example of its kind, for all eternity

I didn't believe it until I saw it for myself. Nobody believed it until they saw it for themselves. Satellite pictures of it had been floating around the internet for months, as well as grainy cell-phone photos, every single one discredited out of hand by experts as poorly photo-shopped fakes. I mean, their reactions were completely understandable - a monster whale six miles long, as big as an island and visible from space. It just didn't make sense.

The Japanese were the first nation to officially encounter it. They'd heard the half-mad rumors about it; how it was attracting countless other whales to it as it sketched its languorous figure-eight path along the currents of the pacific, as if they had suddenly all become cetacean pilgrims following their oceanic saint. Even if only half the stories about it were true, they decided, hunting it down would still be an excellent opportunity for "science". They sent whaler after whaler after it, and though every vessel found it – for it made no attempts to hide itself, and its crooning song reverberated through the ocean for a hundred miles – they all returned with empty cargo holds, and captains unable to explain to increasingly cross superiors the overwhelming sense of grief and sadness and pity that they found in its stadium-sized eyes.

We were a U.N. task force sent out of San Diego to observe it, uncertain of our actual responsibilities would be when we caught up to the beast. With satellite tracking, finding it was no trouble, and, knowing where it was going, we managed to place ourselves in front of it with little difficulty. Our little oceanographer's sub hung in its path a hundred feet below the surface, a few hours before it was expected to arrive. At that depth all color bled to blue.

When it came, we at first didn't understand what we were looking at. The ocean in front of us turned dark, but even though we knew, intellectually, what was coming, in practice it was too large a segment for us to accept as anything but cloud cover. And so, when we finally perceived that it had arrived, it was as if we had been snuck up upon by a mountain. We were all in a panic to get our instruments started up and working – by the time we had realized what had happened, it was already starting to pass us. O'Connell had managed to get the cameras running as it drew alongside us, and Yee's aquatic audio recorders were warming up, but the Kubokawas' sonar imagine device was blue screening on them, and they were understandably upset.

And then it looked at us, and all of us faltered in our activities. We all knew that it saw us. It watched us carefully, for far too long to be coincidence, its eyes tracking us as it moved, fixing us with a stare as deep and impenetrable as the ocean itself. "Allah, be merciful with your might," Pahlavi murmured, although to this day I'm still not sure if he was speaking of the whale, or to it. Beneath that gaze it was impossible to pretend we were anything but tiny scurrying creatures, and yet at the same time it never dismissed us. It was like being judged by Poseidon himself, who found us neither exceptional nor wanting.

It took a half an hour for it to pass us, and we watched as the landscape of its side slid past us; acres of barnacles, the canyon of its mouth opened a sliver revealing a forest of baleen, and fins the size of three city blocks, lifting, lifting, pausing, turning, pushing down with the force of tides. The whole time our submarine bobbed next to it like a bathtub toy. Some of us watched through monitors, but most of us – too many of us to fit comfortably, but none of us complained – pressed our faces to the glass at the front, as if we were compelled to be as close to the creature as possible. We watched the monstrous thing glide past us with a grace it should not by any rights have possessed, and our eyes grew dry as we tried not to blink, as if in blinking, even for a moment, we would miss some of its magnificance. Just before it disappeared back into the blue from which it had come, it let out a cry, a low and mournful whalesong, which cut through the little submarine as if its walls had been designed for conducting sound. The air itself seemed to shake in response, and though none of our equipment could confirm it in any scientific way, we suddenly understood why whales would follow the beast for hundreds of miles; we would have as well, were it possible, if only to ease the loneliness etched in those harmonics.

And then it was gone.

1 - The Slope [(2) 9/18/2008]

So i'd been working on this one for a long, long time and it kept getting longer and longer, with more backstory and more explanation and more time and days and excrutiating detail, when i finished writing SN 1006 a couple of hours ago, and i suddenly realized that i could explore this single moment which was the only part of the story that i'd wanted to tell, but had hidden under a big pile of excess crap because a part of me assumed my readers needed EVERYTHING, when, really, they don't. So i just spent an hour cutting away like seventy percent of the crap, and i'm actualy fairly pleased with what emerged. Like a marble statue: just cut away all the marble that doesn't look like an elephant, and you have an elephant. As it were.

"Wow," Emiko says breathlessly, skidding to a stop and spraying up a little fount of snow. "Are you okay? That was amazing."

I lay there for a moment, stunned. It's snowing, and a distant part of me watches the little flakes as they tumble carelessly from the deep grey sky and land on my goggles with a quiet little crunching noise. As the shock wears off I begin to take a stock of all outlying parts. Nothing feels broken. Arms appear fine. Left leg twisted at a weird angle where the ski is lying flat on the ground and carrying the attached foot with it. No such feeling in my right leg, which implies there's no ski there. I wonder how long I can just lie here, but even as I think that she leans over me with a concerned expression on her face. I sigh and sit up, and look forlornly down the slope. My right ski lays five feet down-slope from me, apparently refusing to be associated with the rest of us. I look wistfully over my shoulder where, far, far back up the mountain, I can see the top of the ski lift over a copse of trees. Turning back to face the downhill slope, I sigh inwardly. I've never really skied before – not since I was six years old – and I'm sure it's much worse in my head than it is in reality, but as far as I can tell it's a deathtrap: steep and bendy and endlessly long.

"I don't suppose we can go back up? Take the ski lift back down the mountain?"

She sighs, and offers me my poles. "I don't think so. I don't think it's allowed to go up the slope. It's sort of a one way road."

I take the poles and lay them down next to me, and begin the laborious process of scraping the snow out of the bottom of my shoe so that I can connect my foot back into the ski.

She glances cautiously down the slope, calculating how far we've progressed, how long it's taken, how much slope there is left. She frowns, and I know what she's thinking. I've done the calculations myself: at our current rate, with me falling down about once every fifty feet, we're going to take all afternoon just to finish this one slope. She'd had hopes of hitting as many slopes as possible today, our last day in Tahoe, and she'd spent all morning running me through green circles, the simplest of slopes, before her desire for something closer to her skill level had convinced her that I was ready for the next level in difficulty: a blue square. Though it dawned on me the first time I fell, still in plain view of the ski-lift exit, I can tell that it is just occurring to her what her impatience may have cost her.

As I finally manage to get the teeth in my ski boot to snap into ski's mouth, a couple suddenly appears around the bend in the track above us. They ski dangerously close to one another, but don't seem to care, laughing as they weave down the slope in unison, like choreographed snow pixies. As quickly as they'd come they disappear beneath us, vanishing in an upkicked wake of snow and ice. She looks wistfully down the slope after them, and I can see it on her face – the way she bites her lower lip, a look of almost-sadness in her eyes – her desire to be one of them, to feel speed and exhilaration and the wind in her face.

"Look," I say, getting unsteadily to my feet, "why don't you go and finish this run without me. At the rate I'm going you'll probably be able to get all the way down and back to me before I'm halfway down the mountain."

For a moment I can see her thinking about it, looking down the slope with an expression of longing. I can see the conflict within her written on her face; her desire to enjoy herself, and her desire for me to enjoy myself. It's an uncommon look for her, she who seems to always know so clearly what she wants, and I am suddenly surprised by it. She purses her lips in thought, and I am suddenly overwhelmed by an urge to kiss her, except that I'm too clumsy in my skis, and if I tried to move next to her I would probably fall over, and I have spent the last half hour looking foolish, and so I don't. After a second she comes to a decision. There is an almost imperceptible shake of her head, and then she turns to me, giving a smile that is both brittle and sincere.

"Don't worry about it, Scott," she says. "It's okay. I'm here. I'll stay with you."

And she does. As the descent continues, painfully slow in its stops and starts, as Wanty and Keith pass us, and then pass us again, through fall after fall after fall, she stays with me.

All the way down.

SN 1006 [(1) 9/17/2008]

Robin, as a writing prompt, sent me this, and wrote: "I want a story, and not a star trek 7 rehash. This is perhaps one of the coolest things I've ever seen in space, and I want a story from you that matches it, or a reflection upon it from a character who sees it from a full 180 degrees from our view." So here it is, or at least the first draft. I openly admit that my current influences are the flash story writing blogs Anacrusis and The Fabian Society.

Depending on distance and point of view, every world has a different name for it. It has been called the Heartstorm, and the Dream Thread, and the River of Stars. On a world where it pulses in the night sky, where its energies drum a slow and torpid beat in the heavens, it is referred to as God's Vein. Some have a small inkling of what happened at its heart, and their names for it are ever so carefully fabricated, as if to name the destruction too accurately would be to call its occurrences down onto their own heads. They call it the Last Cry of Alkenar, and the Skybreaker's Ring, and the Martyrs' Nebula - although it is no nebula; it's what's left of a solar system, its sun gone nova, all its contents reduced to dust in the slice of a moment. Sixty light-years across now, it is an ever-expanding cloud of roiling energy, burning so hot that the void itself turns to purple flame in its wake.

From a safe distance of a few light-years it appears to be a pale violet ribbon streaked with white, stretched like a dividing line across the great field of stars. And only a handful have ever seen it from closer and survived.

During the Prismatic War, the Verdant Prince Diadam took his entire fleet into the storm, riding the energy of its expanding edge like a windsailer before a tsunami. A full two-thirds of his ships were destroyed in the endeavor, thousand year old vessels with histories as deep as nations in their own right. But when the survivors emerged a year later, they appeared as if by magic in the middle of the Freeholdings of Orange, and laid waste to the entire system, bringing the war to a decisive close.

The only one to have ever pierced the outer edge itself was the artist Jaime Uture, who locked himself in a bottle of ice mainted at absolute zero, left floating in front of the expanding edge. When they found him a month later, they discovered to their surprise that the bottle had maintained structural integrity, but Uture had not. He never spoke again, or painted, except for vast, magnificant, shapeless murals of purple and white.

And i, of course, have watched it carefully. I have spent weeks - months - keeping but a fiftieth of a light-year ahead of it, staring deep into its chaotic wavefront, hoping to find something familiar in its eddies and whorls of brilliant destruction; to discover something lost. I have spent lifetimes with it, examining its face as if that of a lover. Because for me, it is all that i have left of home.

0 - Unrequited [(2) 8/06/2008]

So, has it been long enough for everybody to forget about this place? Everybody gone? Good. Let's begin, then. I've always felt that poetry was in some way for writers that couldn't handle prose (er, don't mention that opinion to my poet friends), but i concede that it does make expressing one's feelings a bit easier.

This is just to say
all the things I never could
to you.

The half-remembered sentences
which came to me in dreaming,
and vanished

like dew

in morning sun.

This is me informing you
of all the
secret ways
I love you.

How the world seems as if
it is more full of light
when
you
are here.

This is to let you know
that the chambers of my heart
are empty
but for blood
and you.

This is just to say
to you
all the things I cannot say
to you;
to say them in

my heart

and in

my head.

Twelve Reasons Why I Loved Her - an introduction

So the purpose of this blog was to get me to publish here one piece of prose a week. Actual honest to god prose, although more to keep me fresh and writing than to actually produce good prose. So i came up with a cool idea for a project, wrote about a third of a page, and then forgot about it for about two months. This is me reaffirming this blog. Once a week. Prose!

The original project that i came up with is based loosely off of the graphic novel 12 Reasons Why I Love Her. It was advertised as twelve short stories set in non-chronological order that explore a relationship through its course. With the title of twelve reasons, i was given the impression that each one would be a specific and independent story with its own theme and idea. To my distress, it turned out that it was just the story of a relationship chopped into twelve parts and thrown out of order. Which was interesting, and actually pretty good, but it wasn't what i was expecting, and it wasn't what i wanted. So i thought i'd do it better. Twelve Reasons Why I Loved Her is going to be (ideally) twelve standalone short stories, each one exploring a different aspects, from before through after, of a relationship that i was once in (names will be changed to protect privacy and also because, to be honest, i don't really want her to find it and get all freaked out about it when it's really more of a writing exercise than anything else). So, hopefully coming soon to a blog near you,

Twelve Reasons Why I Loved Her


Addendum: God i love this layout! Look at the thread title! It's a tiny little lighthouse!

comics have moved

New site: Blubber Buddies

Just because i realized i was doing it all for comics, and prose wasn't happening. So i figured it might as well actually be the title that i like for my comics. El Story Blog may actually get prose one day.

Addendum: god i love this template. It's like the most pretentious thing i've ever seen.