Check that motherfucker out! That is truly, in the original sense of the word, epic. If only if it wasn't tied to so much pain and tragedy.
See more of them Brutalist monuments over nhya.
Spomenik
See more of them Brutalist monuments over nhya.
Upon arrival
You check your instruments. You check your instruments again even though the AI is perfectly capable of monitoring everything much better than you. It's not that you don't trust it, how could you not trust it, you're just nervous. And scared. Not of them, not of what they might do to you if they catch up to what you've done or figure out where you're going. You're scared of what is left behind. A life of disappointment, being beaten into dank submission, ennui and boredom. You're almost elated, relieved that the fear you felt before today, that nagging feeling of discontent tugging at your entrails has now metamorphosed into something new. Your fear has become a force of survival. An instinct rather than a reminder. Now your fear lets you know you're still alive, before, it only let you know you weren't dead.
Your mind is racing with all the possibilities. All the choices, all the desires that can now be fulfilled. You've been planning this relocation for months. You've done all the research. You know what to do. And even if you didn't, the prototype super-AI you stole would. Now you can say that word too, steal, and you can say it without it meaning injustice. Now it means taking back what's yours. What didn't belong where it was. Relocating. Liberating. The AI will help you, not start over, but continue. Improve. Correct all the mistakes you know of and find even more. Together you'll build a new world on top of the old one's ruins. Together, you'll turn the present into archaeology. This is what you've been hoping, yearning, living for.
You feel a bit sad about everyone and everything you left behind but that's a small sadness. It's the sadness of your favourite grandmother that died twenty years ago. The kind of sadness that is reassuring, stroking your back while whispering in your ear, you're doing ok, keep it up, move on. So you do. You keep going, you move.
The trip will take a while. Everything has been precalculated several times over. Doublechecked and triplechecked and verified. Until you reach the opaque upper layer of the planet's atmosphere, you know exactly what to do and what is going to happen. The entering and the landing, that's another matter. You know nothing about that. The AI knows a few things, it has calculated and simulated and extrapolated. But you don't care about that. You want to see with your eyes. Feel and sense and devour with every single channel of perception that you can. This new place. This new home.
You're getting closer. You try to think of something in your memories, your past to compare this to but you can't. The closest you can get is the moment before a massive orgasm. The instant when everything in you clenches as hard as it can in preparation of the internal sensory explosion that happens immediately after, that is if you're fucking with a good lover. You smirk at your own thoughts. And the smile is quickly replaced by a shadow of regret. You're going to miss the sex. Whether sweet, slow and loving or hard and dirty, you're going to miss it at least for a while.
It's here. The moment. Now it starts. You look at the screen, your eyes hungry. In front of you a big blanket of gas. Broiling pinkish gray masses shifting and pulsing and meshing with each other. This is the first frontier. After this the unknown. Your breath is shallow, anxious, almost unwilling to enter your lungs. You feel a pressure on your skin right above your bladder. Fuck that, you think to yourself, I'd rather piss myself than miss this. You're in the clouds now. Mammoth clouds. Clouds like mountains, like valleys in old books, endless, without time. Your neuromesh reminds your body to breathe deeper, slower, if you want to retain consciousness. You pace yourself and wait. Wait for the clouds to end. For the light at the end.
You wait.
And then.
Home.
Your feet hurt and your calves and your hips. In fact, everything hurts. It would take less time to try and list the things on your body that don't hurt. You need this. Your pain is new, just like your fear, it is now a sister, not an enemy. A friend that warns you when you've gone too far. And you have. While the AI has been busy building you a companion-droid and several Beast-Of-Burden ones for itself, you have been exploring. First, the landing site. Then the thickets all around you. Then with your companion-droid, it calls itself Can'Kay, you went to the closest river for what it called a reconnaissance mission and what you called skinny-dipping while the AI and its BOBs built you a low-impact underground shelter. After that came the big trek up the hill. You named the hill Mammatus after the searing memory of the clouds on your entry. Your pain is satisfying. It's the kind of pain that drives you nose-first into the deepest, most satisfying sleep. No dreams, no turning, just blackness, void and the next morning nothing but love for returning to consciousness. You can't help but feel that this is how every person in the universe should wake up every morning. With a deep burning desire to not spend another moment asleep, hurting to grab a big, lusty handful of life's ass.
The view from the hill is amazing, thick forests, almost tropical, big bodies of water crazily slashing and cutting at the land like drunken abstractionist painters. At the distance, movement. Life. Grazing figures lazily shifting on the luminous grass.
That was good. That was too good. You would feel naughty if you were a different kind of person. But you're you and you feel good about yourself. You also feel good about the slamming orgasm you just had. It had been too long without a decent train wreck of an orgasm. Thank fuck for Penis Valley. You smile and giggle inside. You think that's funny. Penis Valley. Not the name though, the fact that there is a place that warrants it. You found it a few weeks after landing. A big wide plain showered with light. Full of strange protuberances. Mushroom-like growths from the ground with a wide, round, flat base that narrowed quickly into a thick stem and rose insolently towards the sky. Widening slightly at the top to look like narrower and elongated mushrooms. You thought how weird, they look like cocks. It had been too long. You started touching yourself. You took of your clothes. The droid stared emptily at you, having even less inhibitions than you. You walked up to the one that was closest and then your body took over. You stood above it, spread your legs slightly apart and slowly lowered yourself onto it. It felt alive inside you, not like a companion, warm and comforting, but cool and playful like a flower. At the end, you clenched while your world was dismantled and put back together in an instant. You felt something shooting inside you. It wasn't upsetting but you had your neuromesh analyse it anyway. It wasn't dangerous. You asked it to get rid of it anyway and send the analysis results back to the AI for further research.
You then forgot completely about that and concentrated at the warm feeling left in your belly. It felt good. You caught a rogue thought speeding through your mind. Children. Little, loud versions of you. You thought, no chance. You could only make clones of yourself. You never thought sperm would be a necessity for colonising a planet. You couldn't get enough variation on your genetic material to produce babies without the danger of a multitude of syndromes.
Unless...
You notice all the little details. Your toenails are beautifully trimmed. You didn't do that, the neuromesh did. It dictates the speed at which everything in your body works. You've had the same haircut for three years now and it looks just as good as it did when you got it. Your bum has started to get sore from siting on the same seat for too long. You put your feet up and you think you can smell them. Your sense of smell has become insane. You think you can smell water and metals and a lot of other stuff that you know you shouldn't be able to smell. Your neuromesh turns it down a bit. You sigh in relief. The room seems a bit bare now that you think about it. Just not right. The floor would be too cold. No it wouldn't. You fidget internally. You wish you had someone to snap to. The droids are no good. They seem genuinely hurt and they never snap back which makes you feel like shit about yourself.
You concentrate on the seven little ones. Snug inside you. You get up. Fuck this. You're not a fucking incubator with legs. You're going for a walk and a swim. Maybe a fuck too.
Your mind is racing with all the possibilities. All the choices, all the desires that can now be fulfilled. You've been planning this relocation for months. You've done all the research. You know what to do. And even if you didn't, the prototype super-AI you stole would. Now you can say that word too, steal, and you can say it without it meaning injustice. Now it means taking back what's yours. What didn't belong where it was. Relocating. Liberating. The AI will help you, not start over, but continue. Improve. Correct all the mistakes you know of and find even more. Together you'll build a new world on top of the old one's ruins. Together, you'll turn the present into archaeology. This is what you've been hoping, yearning, living for.
You feel a bit sad about everyone and everything you left behind but that's a small sadness. It's the sadness of your favourite grandmother that died twenty years ago. The kind of sadness that is reassuring, stroking your back while whispering in your ear, you're doing ok, keep it up, move on. So you do. You keep going, you move.
The trip will take a while. Everything has been precalculated several times over. Doublechecked and triplechecked and verified. Until you reach the opaque upper layer of the planet's atmosphere, you know exactly what to do and what is going to happen. The entering and the landing, that's another matter. You know nothing about that. The AI knows a few things, it has calculated and simulated and extrapolated. But you don't care about that. You want to see with your eyes. Feel and sense and devour with every single channel of perception that you can. This new place. This new home.
~
You're getting closer. You try to think of something in your memories, your past to compare this to but you can't. The closest you can get is the moment before a massive orgasm. The instant when everything in you clenches as hard as it can in preparation of the internal sensory explosion that happens immediately after, that is if you're fucking with a good lover. You smirk at your own thoughts. And the smile is quickly replaced by a shadow of regret. You're going to miss the sex. Whether sweet, slow and loving or hard and dirty, you're going to miss it at least for a while.
~
It's here. The moment. Now it starts. You look at the screen, your eyes hungry. In front of you a big blanket of gas. Broiling pinkish gray masses shifting and pulsing and meshing with each other. This is the first frontier. After this the unknown. Your breath is shallow, anxious, almost unwilling to enter your lungs. You feel a pressure on your skin right above your bladder. Fuck that, you think to yourself, I'd rather piss myself than miss this. You're in the clouds now. Mammoth clouds. Clouds like mountains, like valleys in old books, endless, without time. Your neuromesh reminds your body to breathe deeper, slower, if you want to retain consciousness. You pace yourself and wait. Wait for the clouds to end. For the light at the end.
You wait.
And then.
Home.
~
Your feet hurt and your calves and your hips. In fact, everything hurts. It would take less time to try and list the things on your body that don't hurt. You need this. Your pain is new, just like your fear, it is now a sister, not an enemy. A friend that warns you when you've gone too far. And you have. While the AI has been busy building you a companion-droid and several Beast-Of-Burden ones for itself, you have been exploring. First, the landing site. Then the thickets all around you. Then with your companion-droid, it calls itself Can'Kay, you went to the closest river for what it called a reconnaissance mission and what you called skinny-dipping while the AI and its BOBs built you a low-impact underground shelter. After that came the big trek up the hill. You named the hill Mammatus after the searing memory of the clouds on your entry. Your pain is satisfying. It's the kind of pain that drives you nose-first into the deepest, most satisfying sleep. No dreams, no turning, just blackness, void and the next morning nothing but love for returning to consciousness. You can't help but feel that this is how every person in the universe should wake up every morning. With a deep burning desire to not spend another moment asleep, hurting to grab a big, lusty handful of life's ass.
The view from the hill is amazing, thick forests, almost tropical, big bodies of water crazily slashing and cutting at the land like drunken abstractionist painters. At the distance, movement. Life. Grazing figures lazily shifting on the luminous grass.
~
That was good. That was too good. You would feel naughty if you were a different kind of person. But you're you and you feel good about yourself. You also feel good about the slamming orgasm you just had. It had been too long without a decent train wreck of an orgasm. Thank fuck for Penis Valley. You smile and giggle inside. You think that's funny. Penis Valley. Not the name though, the fact that there is a place that warrants it. You found it a few weeks after landing. A big wide plain showered with light. Full of strange protuberances. Mushroom-like growths from the ground with a wide, round, flat base that narrowed quickly into a thick stem and rose insolently towards the sky. Widening slightly at the top to look like narrower and elongated mushrooms. You thought how weird, they look like cocks. It had been too long. You started touching yourself. You took of your clothes. The droid stared emptily at you, having even less inhibitions than you. You walked up to the one that was closest and then your body took over. You stood above it, spread your legs slightly apart and slowly lowered yourself onto it. It felt alive inside you, not like a companion, warm and comforting, but cool and playful like a flower. At the end, you clenched while your world was dismantled and put back together in an instant. You felt something shooting inside you. It wasn't upsetting but you had your neuromesh analyse it anyway. It wasn't dangerous. You asked it to get rid of it anyway and send the analysis results back to the AI for further research.
You then forgot completely about that and concentrated at the warm feeling left in your belly. It felt good. You caught a rogue thought speeding through your mind. Children. Little, loud versions of you. You thought, no chance. You could only make clones of yourself. You never thought sperm would be a necessity for colonising a planet. You couldn't get enough variation on your genetic material to produce babies without the danger of a multitude of syndromes.
Unless...
~
You notice all the little details. Your toenails are beautifully trimmed. You didn't do that, the neuromesh did. It dictates the speed at which everything in your body works. You've had the same haircut for three years now and it looks just as good as it did when you got it. Your bum has started to get sore from siting on the same seat for too long. You put your feet up and you think you can smell them. Your sense of smell has become insane. You think you can smell water and metals and a lot of other stuff that you know you shouldn't be able to smell. Your neuromesh turns it down a bit. You sigh in relief. The room seems a bit bare now that you think about it. Just not right. The floor would be too cold. No it wouldn't. You fidget internally. You wish you had someone to snap to. The droids are no good. They seem genuinely hurt and they never snap back which makes you feel like shit about yourself.
You concentrate on the seven little ones. Snug inside you. You get up. Fuck this. You're not a fucking incubator with legs. You're going for a walk and a swim. Maybe a fuck too.
Words Don't Work
They don't, do they? Not always. Just when it's most important that they do work, they fail. Consider the use of words in arguments. From personal experience and from what others have communicated to me over the years words are never enough to shift someone's worldview. And how could they? We grow up in complex systems which give rise to well rooted, ingrained ideas. You think a well thought out, well researched and well presented argument is enough to change that? Fuck no! That would be reasonable.
Look at the world around you, it's full of ideas that shouldn't exist. Control, hierarchy, oppression, prejudice, domination, authority. But these ideas exist and it looks like no amount of argument is going to change that. So if words aren't any good, what's left? Actions I hear you cry in my head, and can you please stop it?
Actions affect the tangible world and everything in it. But what happens if what you want to eradicate an idea? Not make it vanish, because that would deny people choice. Not matter how idiotic an idea may seem you have to be able to choose not to follow it to make the result worth anything at all. What good is it to not be a racist if there's only one race or not be a sexist if there's only one gender? Crude examples I know but the reasoning behind them is sound. But what happens if you want to reveal the shittiness in an idea? To make it clear for everyone to see and to make it a horrible choice. Surely that would be enough to make an idea wither and die, right?
To cut a long story short, I want to know how we can kill ideas. Words don't seem to work and actions have an equally long history, if not longer, of not working. So consider this a call for developing an armoury for fighting ideas. We need it.
Look at the world around you, it's full of ideas that shouldn't exist. Control, hierarchy, oppression, prejudice, domination, authority. But these ideas exist and it looks like no amount of argument is going to change that. So if words aren't any good, what's left? Actions I hear you cry in my head, and can you please stop it?
Actions affect the tangible world and everything in it. But what happens if what you want to eradicate an idea? Not make it vanish, because that would deny people choice. Not matter how idiotic an idea may seem you have to be able to choose not to follow it to make the result worth anything at all. What good is it to not be a racist if there's only one race or not be a sexist if there's only one gender? Crude examples I know but the reasoning behind them is sound. But what happens if you want to reveal the shittiness in an idea? To make it clear for everyone to see and to make it a horrible choice. Surely that would be enough to make an idea wither and die, right?
To cut a long story short, I want to know how we can kill ideas. Words don't seem to work and actions have an equally long history, if not longer, of not working. So consider this a call for developing an armoury for fighting ideas. We need it.
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