Fun With Zookeeping

They never did find the orangutan. Post-disaster analysis indicated that a sizable section of the mammal house got spaced at the moment of impact, and it was deemed likely that Mr. Bubbles ended up incandescing in the nearest star.

Of course by then that was the least of the U.F.S.S. Carnivale’s problems.

* * *

“Get this goddamn raptor out of my face!" Keeper Lieutenant Keller punched the snapping, feathered lizard straight in the snout, her powered environment suit lending her limbs the proportionate strength of a hacked off Tyrannosaurus Rex.

The velociraptor let out a high-pitched screech, then ExTee grabbed it by a haunch and slammed it into one of the remaining stasis cells. The blue-white field within flickered to life, locking the velociraptor in space and time.

"We are now down to two functional stasis cells," ExTee said. The android's shiny exterior was burnt and dented, and his voice was hissing static in the hard radiation.

"Save them for high-value lethals only," Keller said. "Do we know what the hell happened yet?"

"A navigational error ran us into a meteor," said Baila'rukh. The Hypersaurian veterinarian was affixing emergency oxygen supplies to a cache of smaller mammals that had survived decompression. An orange, hard light shield was plugging the hole, though Keller wouldn't rate it for long.

She did a quick head count. "Bai, where's the third lemur?"

"Didn't survive the impact." A long tongue flicked out and wiped a spot of blood from Baila'rukh's jaw.

Keller rolled her eyes, then staggered as she felt herself pulled toward the now-flickering light shield. The luminators set in the displays were dimming as well, some going out completely.

Keller's eyes widened. "Ah, shit. Did anyone check the Vore's pen?"

Her question was answered when a steel-gray insectile burst out of the opposite wall and burrowed into ExTee's chestplate. The android squealed as the two foot long bug buried itself in his innards and feasted on the delicious current within.

"Shit! Bai, get his mem-chips!" Keller pulled her laspistol and fired two quick shots that caught the Vore on its carapace. The insectile shrieked and launched itself away, digging quickly into the deck plates and out of sight.

ExTee toppled over, his power drained. Bai quickly moved to his side and pulled his mind free. "We've got to call a level five quarantine-"

"Won't work. The damn thing eats through adamantium. We need to kill it or we'll lose the entire ship."

Of course it was that moment the Captain chose to chime in. "Lieutenant, why am I receiving reports of a ravenous bug creature eating my ship?"

Keller gritted her teeth. "The Vore's loose, sir," she commed back. "We need fire teams patrolling all decks."

"Negative, Lieutenant. We need the specimen taken alive."

"Alive? Captain, the Vore will kill the entire ship in ten minutes."

"Alive, Lieutenant. Get it done." Keller swore as the Captain broke the connection.

"If we can get the Vore into a stasis cell..." Bai began.

"It won't stay still long enough," said Keller. "We'd need to bait it in and keep it eating long enough to..."

Keller glanced at the mem-chips in Bai's claws. "How many spare bodies does ExTee have again?"

Bai made to answer, but then he got distracted pulling a Siberian tiger off Keller's leg.

* * *

The ship was at 40% power by the time Keller and Bai got the last few dangerous animals contained and put their trap together. Bai had lined up all twenty of ExTee's spare bodies in the stasis cell. The inert android bodies looked like a squad of shiny aluminum soldiers at parade rest.

Keller was tracking shipboard faults on her HUD. As soon as she saw the trail of glitches heading toward their position again, she shouted "Now!"

Bai powered on the twenty androids. The Vore tunneled out of the ceiling seconds later, skittering at high speed for the largest power cluster in the room.

The ExTee bodies, following their default programming, bolted out of the stasis cell in all directions. The Vore leapt at one of them just as the artificial gravity plating failed, launching itself and the android through the hard light shielding and into vacuum.

Keller blinked. "Fuck," she said. "Captain, the Vore just spaced itself."

"Recover it."

"Re- we've got no way to do that, sir!"

There was a brief pause. "Understood. All evidence pertaining to this voyage will be destroyed immediately."

Keller's stomach knotted. "Captain, are you blowing up the ship?"

"Of course. My backup self is up to date and has no interest in serving out a millennial prison sentence for trafficking in bioweapons." The entity sounded amused. "By the way, your service has been terminated retroactively. We'll be billing any clones or next of kin you have to recover your pay. Good day cycle!"

"You bastard!" Keller slammed her fist against the deck. Bai was staring at her, his scales a deep terrified blue.

"I don't want to die," Bai hissed. "I have a creche of eggs due to hatch in twenty standard cycles."

"We're not going to die," Keller snapped. "Well, yet. Throw one of ExTee's bodies into the stasis cell and help me get it through the breach."

"What about the specimens?" Bai said, gripping a panicked ExTee body under its armpits.

"Just pick a few snacks and hurry up!"

* * *

The U.F.S.S. Carnivale was lost with all hands halfway through its transit, which subsequently ceased to exist on any galactic records. An industrial accident on Hydra Pacificus was fabricated to explain the ship's loss. The damage to the Carnivale's backing company's bottom line was papered over with the quick sale of a few toxic assets.

The stasis cell was eventually recovered by scavengers five decades later. Ironically the crew was made up of Bai's creche children, fully grown, and after a week of celebrations the Carnivale's survivors changed their names and enjoyed the benefits of compound interest.

No records of the Vore were ever created, which got really annoying when its parent species invaded the galaxy.

The Future Is Now

Intergalactic empires torn down by a single traitor. Biohackers growing ears on their arms. Millions of dollars won and lost using the knowledge of scant seconds. Giant robotic spiders.

This stuff sounds like it's science fiction, but it's really just a few things that popped up in my news feeds today. Because we are living in the future, ladies and gentlemen, and everyone got it wrong.

First let's discuss that intergalactic empire thing. Eve Online is a video game, a MMORPG. You are thinking of World of Warcraft right now, but you should be thinking of a living, breathing simulation of an intergalactic economy based on exploration, warfare, trading, and insane amounts of time spent building wealth-building alliances. And it results in some fascinating shit happening.

Consider an incident earlier this year where a bad mouse-click caused a space battle involving 3,000 starships and multiple alliances. Or one where a corporate thief rose to power and disbanded a corporation worth billions. Or the most recent SNAFU, when a ship worth 309 billion ISK, one of only three in existence, was destroyed through sheer treachery.

These are not scripted gaming events, these are conflicts coming about through the natural interaction of thousands of people in a strict simulated universe. This is stuff Advanced Dungeons & Dragons designers and economic theorists have erotic dreams about.

Prefer real life? How about news that Thomson Reuters, a company that sells consumer confidence data, got censured for selling their data to some companies a full two seconds ahead of its general release? Two seconds. But we live in a world where that's enough time for Wall Street traders to get into a market, catch a rise based on the report, make millions of dollars, and get out before most of the world even knows something is happening. If you tried to explain this to Franklin Delano Roosevelt or John D. Rockefeller, they'd have you thrown into a lunatic asylum. Today this isn't even news.

You know what is news? Reports of zombies rising from the grave and eating the flesh of the living. Biohackers using magnets to give themselves literal sixth senses, and bioartists attaching live human ears to their arms. And don't forget about the giant robotic spiders.



We carry phones hundreds of times more powerful than the best computers of a decade ago, we send libraries worth of information back and forth across the planet in seconds every day, we fight wars with killer robots and get directions from artificial intelligences, and this is just the shit we take for granted. The cutting edge of technology, the truly innovative stuff, is so weird that most of us aren't capable of coming to grips with it.

I'm blaming Warren Ellis for everything.

Transhumanist Blither

It's late but I'm going to get this down anyway, before the bees kill me.

First of all, from Wikipedia: "Transhumanism (abbreviated as H+ or h+) is an international cultural and intellectual movement with an eventual goal at fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities." Ref: the Cybermen, Khan Noonian Singh, Ghost in the Shell, and Transmetropolitan (God help us all). A lot of people got interested in it thanks to Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity; I got interested in it thanks to Charles Stross.

io9 pointed me towards The Transhumanist Wager, a book that is apparently the Atlas Shrugged of transhumanism. It follows Jethro Knights, a man obsessed with obtaining eternal life through biological and technological improvements to his own person, up to and including brain uploading. The Randian bits come in from repressive governments and religions that are cracking down on the Movement and Knights's radical Libertarian philosophy.

Fair enough. And I checked the book out on Amazon, read through the first few pages, and decided I wasn't going to go any further, if only because I've got a list of epic fantasies on my plate and I don't have time. But I did read Jethro's Transhuman equivalent of Asimov's Three Laws, which are:

1) A transhumanist must safeguard one's own existence above all else.

2) A transhumanist must strive to achieve omnipotence as expediently as possible - so long as one's actions do not conflict with the First Law.

3) A transhumanist must safeguard value in the universe - so long as one's actions do not conflict with the First and Second Laws.

Um.

Really?

My brain is imploding!

I'm going to assume these weren't written for the same reason Asimov wrote his Three Laws of Robitics, namely to abuse every loophole possible to write some cracking fiction. So are these three laws really the sort of thing transhumanists should obey?

Let's take Law One, which boils down to "Fuck the women and children, I'm getting on the boat!" Should it really be an ideal that preserving one's own existence comes before preserving the lives of one's children? It's fine if you're a sociopath, I suppose, but not great for people capable of normal human emotion. (I am, granted, ascribing human emotions to beings who might not be technically human.)

Then there's Law Two: "Become God." This is problematic on a ton of levels. First, an omnipotent being isn't likely to maintain "existence" as we would define it, so fulfilling Law Two might very well be mutually exclusive with Law One. Second, omnipotence is generally considered to be a singular attribute, possessed by only one entity (read: God), with members of a pantheon necessarily being vulnerable to other members of the pantheon. So transhumanist values must necessarily result in a Highlander situation: "There can be only one!" Finally, omnipotence is not necessarily a desirable state for a transhumanist, when a post-scarcity culture would suffice. Why be God when you can just be an immortal Superman with infinite wealth?

And then there's Law Three, which seems to be nothing more than a veneer of morality over some pretty messed up values. Screw that! If you're going to seek to be a sociopathic god, go all out. Don't limit yourself! Destroy planets, devour suns, harvest stem cells from newborns - whatever it takes! You've got to look out for Protogod Numero Uno.

Anyway, that's my science fiction allotment for the evening. Now I have to go figure out how many gods it takes to make up a decent magic system. I'm thinking ten...

On Angels In Manhattan

So, Doctor Who mid-season finale. Without spoiling anything, I enjoyed the episode and I'm looking forward to seeing where the series goes from here. Now I'm going to do a slightly more detailed review, and talk about some of the narrative challenges I think Steven Moffat had to face while writing it. So stop reading now if you haven't seen the episode yet.

My Doctor Who Season 7 Wingnut Theory

The Doctor Who season seven trailer is out this week, and we're seeing a lot more of what's likely to occur this season. Check it out:



Awesome, but that's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about a pet theory of mine on how the season's going to wrap up and set the stage for the Doctor's new companion. Rampant wittering (with full-blown spoilers for seasons five and six) begins after the jump.

The Important Lessons of Prometheus

Warning: You can infer spoilers about the movie Prometheus from this post.

So I just saw Prometheus this afternoon. It was a very good movie - not excellent, mind, but enjoyable to watch, and if you're a fan of science fiction/horror I recommend it. But a lot of the plot seemed to be... well, idiot-driven. Basically, if somebody needs to do something to advance the plot in this movie, and it doesn't make any sense whatsoever to do it... They'll do it! Because they're morons.

Clearly nobody on the Prometheus was trained in proper archeology, biology, or sociology techniques. But I am here to help! The following is a list of rules to follow when working on a xeno (alien) archaeology dig. Follow them, and you might live. Key word might.