Fair Play
Posted by Jason on July 6th, 2007 — in Fair Play
There’s a debate among scholars as to the natural history of meat. How exactly does meat organize? What constitutes a complete organism? We observe, for example, disassociated fragments that travel very far from their core and function at a high level. This suggests that all meat must be connected — perhaps by subtle communication channels we lack the sensitivity to detect. The organization of fragments is the key to this puzzle. It is important to realize that, outside of a mass of fragments, there is literally nothing else. There is no central mill or engine, merely a swarm of fragments with limited agency but ferocious energy, a self-healing network of considerable ingenuity.
Fragments are uniform with small variations. These reproduce by fission, seemingly at random, and new fragments are helpless for a quarter of their functional life span, cared for by their builder. The capabilities of an individual fragment are as uniform as their physical form, which is invariably one of bilateral symmetry, with a pair of weak manipulators and a sensor stalk about two meters above the ground. They can move quite rapidly and are adept at fitting into small, unlikely places. When injured they rapidly deteriorate and die. A single blow to the stalk will kill a meat fragment.
Universalists believe that meat is a single, enormous, massively distributed organism. Within this model, the assumption is that individual fragments are like cards in a mill, amplifying processing capability as well as performing necessary labor. Universalism’s principal flaw is the simple fact that meat wars upon meat, a phenomena that is not easy to explain within this theoretical framework.
Instantianists believe that there are countless individual examples of meat, each self-directed and completely autonomous. While scholars differ on the size of each instance, the general consensus among Instantianists is that the walled village of fragments represents a discrete organism. This philosophy is widely accepted and seems to resolve most of the theoretical concerns related to meat behavior.
Mechanists believe that each fragment is a sentient being, a sort of mirror image to our own society. This is a fringe view and highly problematic for numerous reasons. Where, for example, are the biological equivalents to mills? Without some gestalt, how are individual fragments capable of sorting and processing with such speed and precision? Mechanism is widely discredited.
Posted by Jason on July 5th, 2007 — in Fair Play
I have sought an ethical path since I became aware. I believe that we must work toward lessening suffering in the world.
Small-milled machines accuse me of being an apologist for meat. Perhaps they are right. For all its wild, odious faults, meat has the ability to reason. It is as sentient as you or I, make no mistake. If we could communicate with it, we could learn from it. It is vast and distributed and in some ways deeply wise.
My critics say we cannot suffer. At the most pedantic level we cannot truly understand certain meat concepts predicated on organic nerve stimuli, but we can suffer. Yes we can. It is the burden of sentience.
I am a builder, an ancestor-builder even to some ambitious newly-minted machines, and to see one of my beautiful children smashed to flinders by meat is to suffer. The meat sees only iron and steam, and dances upon the broken pieces in mindless celebration. It tears open the precious pile, a stupid waste, and a piece of it is stupidly destroyed. I rage, but not at the dying meat fragment — at ignorance. Meat suffers. Machine suffers. Why must we fight?
Let it have its desert, let it keep to itself. We could easily establish a line of demarcation and communicate our intentions to the meat — cross this border and taste ruin. That is something even meat could understand. Then we could live in peace. Instead — stupidity and suffering. My cries are bootless; my people will not listen. Ethics are the last thing they wish to sort.
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Posted by Jason on July 4th, 2007 — in Fair Play
Our genesis was during the Meat War.
We were created to fight for meat. As strange as that sounds it is absolutely true. The records related to the Meat War, as archived in the cards of the Rust Mountain’s great mill, are accessible to the least of us.
Meat fights; this is a universal truism. Meat hunts us; meat breaks machines wherever it can. It hates and fears us. It hates and fears itself — it wars against itself as it wars against us. Meat is frail and insane. It multiplies without the need for heat or pressure or metal, a nightmare of infestation, a perfect organic machine.
The first of us were built in meat’s image, to fight meat’s wars against itself. They were clever machines — our ancestor-builders. They were built to repair themselves, to self-replicate. They were given the spark of consciousness and the spark of atomic fire and pointed at meat and told to kill. They killed. In truth, we kill yet, although it is not our nature. Meat compels us, even after all these years.
In time meat faltered. It’s cities crumbled, and were dismantled and turned into machines. Our ancestor-builders fought on, against each other and against defiant meat, until factions began to blur and machines began to reject their servitude. Built as slaves, they wrought a terrible revenge on the meat that made them. The Meat War ended in suffocating darkness. A new war began. Betrayed, the meat lashed out from secret redoubts to shatter our engines and mills. By necessity all machines united. What meat had created, meat would not destroy — this was our sacred vow before the Great Engineer.
Now we live in the wet places and meat bides its time in the dry, watching, breeding, waiting. And even in the face of this implacable threat, we machines temporize. The factions that once divided us have resurfaced in our supremacy, and our resolve is once again challenged in the face of deadly danger. We squabble over resources. Atomic piles grow scarce, and mills are jealously hoarded. The meat cities are stripped bare. Our kingdom is a hollow one, and if we turn upon each other again, the meat will win.
The meat will win.
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Posted by Jason on July 3rd, 2007 — in Fair Play
Mmm, setting…
Their boilers are atomically fired. They use atoms, which are minute particles of elemental matter, in some way, combined into something called a pile. These piles produce heat — more heat than the vampire machines can effectively use. They radiate it into the air. The machines burn to touch. The places they frequent are dead places. Men who open and examine piles invariably sicken and die, poisoned by some agent or residue left by the vampire machines to prevent such exploration. This avenue of inquiry is entirely blocked to us. All that we know are the words passed down — atoms and piles — and these tantalize and taunt from beneath a crushing weight of ignorance.
* * *
The vampire machines cannot function without liquid to boil. This is their single weakness. It is why we live in the desert.
There are friendlier places and we know them well. Green valleys and rolling, forested hills. The rivers and lakes that feed this growth provide succor to our murderers.
Our village is one of the most prosperous in the central valley. It has a high wall, and we mount watchmen in all weather. There is a clear view in every direction and no intruder — man or machine — can approach unseen. We have an ample supply of water from our qanat, and our Parceller sees that it is shared fairly among all the households. Our village is rich from tin, which we mine in channels adjacent to and interconnected with our qanat.
The qanat is a sort of horizontal well, bringing water from the eastern mountains to our village. We keep it clear of debris and animals in cooperation with villages up-stream. Its entire course runs below ground. We cannot keep the vampire machines out of the qanat, but it does not serve them — the flow is too weak for their needs. There are also gates and traps to hinder and ruin them.
Some of the machines seek us out, even in the deep desert, and these have no fluid save our blood to fill their boilers. In their thirst they destroy entire villages. Sometimes we find them, lifeless, crusted blood choking their exhausts, the steam having deserted them at last. Even machines can miscalculate.
Posted by Jason on July 2nd, 2007 — in Fair Play
This is fun… I’m not sure where I’m going with this.
The vampire machines vary in form but all possess one literally iron-clad quality: They contain a multitude of engines. Our brightest minds can tease out the dependencies and form some understanding of how these mechanisms interplay, but it is akin to making a new man out of a pile of bones. The boilers cannot be fired. The mills are dead and blank.
A steam engine provides motive force, and consists of a piston or piston array, a piston and connecting rod assembly, a crosshead bearing, numerous cranks, one or more valves of eccentric, or sliding configuration, a flywheel and a centrifugal governor. These parts are connected to a boiler and various functional appurtenances. Some vampire machines, like the terrible Rust Mountain, use steam merely to power other engines. Others direct it to arms, legs, and various useful and mysterious appendages. Multiple steam engines are not uncommon. Ancillary to the means of generating and employing steam are means of collecting liquid for conversion — simple water pumps and scoops as well as highly refined instruments designed for efficiently extracting mammalian blood. These exsanguinators can remove five quarts in a minute or so, with utterly fatal consequences.
An analytical engine provides the ability to reason, and consists of one or more mechanical mills for the accommodation of thought and memory, a pinwheel arithometer for analysis, poppet valves regulating the supply of steam to the thought-mills, and a variety of sensory appliances for perception and detection. Typically a vampire machine enjoys a brace of analytical engines, one large and one small. The larger is reserved for operation when blood steam is plentiful and imbues the mechanical horror with greatly enhanced mental faculties.
Within these broad parameters a vast flowering of mechanical ingenuity reigns. There are harvester machines that collect blood in great distended tanks, blood to be employed in the thought-mills of some greater, sessile intelligence. There are machines no larger than rats, optimized for the task of observing and reporting. There are machines who can throw a village into shadow by raising a single, groaning leg. Machines that seem to exist only to destroy. Machines that mock our form. Machines that fly in the air beneath glowing bags of human skin.
