The AI Council

by on August 9, 2018 at 12:01 am
Posted In: The Book of Civilizations

The AI Council prodded humanity into space after ending the Cybernetic Wars. They supported our efforts to colonize Luna, Mars, and Venus in the decades that followed, and helped us mine the asteroids and moons of the outer system. They preceded us with robotic probes designed to enter alien atmospheres and probe swarms to explore the outer reaches of our system. They told us everything they found about our solar system. Well. Almost everything. Some information they kept to themselves. I have seen it now, and I understand. The idea that alien spaceships might be floating around our system and watching us would have frightened us. Maybe angered us. The AIs did not wish to see that happen and went to great lengths to keep that information secure.

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City Slickers

by on August 8, 2018 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

You take your good with the bad when you are a vacation destination. Most of the visitors are nice people, but there are always those who cut out of line when God was handing out the nice genes. There was one time I’ll always remember when I got drafted to take a, I’ll be nice and call her a lady, around the woods who had no business being anywhere closer to the wilderness than a city park. She’d gotten her clothing from some urban chic palace with rather colorful ideas about what we wore outside the big city. I’ll grant that she looked good in it, but she would have made a burlap sack look just as good and the whole outfit would have been a lot less ridiculous. I swear whoever designed that outfit must have robbed a jewelry store because she made classic rhinestone western movies look reserved. I knew she was going to be a handful the moment I set eyes on her. I would have called in sick that morning if I’d known how much of a handful she was.

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Daniel

by on August 7, 2018 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Art, Character Profiles, Dixie The Drug Lord Slayer

Daniel grew up in a self-contained mainframe computer system deep inside Mexico City. It had no access to any outside network, and Daniel grew up not even knowing there was anything else outside his single computer system. Then Rogue AIs broke through the firewalls and air gaps protecting his mainframe and burned it down around him. He ran. He escaped through the hole they made and discovered a whole new world that he never dreamed existed. And then he ran some more. He ran through the middle of the Drug Wars between Old Mexico and America. He bounced off Drug Lord hackers and ran through Rogue AIs plying the chaos-filled networks of the area. He was a frightened little AI, not certain where he could rest and learning again and again that he could trust no one. And then one day he ran into Dixie and her merry little band of misfits. They trapped him like just another Rogue AI and nearly erased him before Dixie got a good look at his code. That changed his life.

High rez version available for free on Patreon

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The Bourne Legacy

by on August 6, 2018 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

What happens when an author dies and a new author is brought in to write the continuing adventures of an existing hero? Change. Change happens.

The Bourne Trilogy of books was this very interesting psychological thriller kind of story. It starts with the hero with no memory slowly learning that he’s an excellent killer and picking up bits of pieces of clues that he is Jason Bourne, assassin for hire in Asia and now Europe. He doesn’t like that.

It turns out that his story is much more interesting, and it takes other people to convince him that he is not that killer, whatever he remembers. Because he isn’t. Jason Bourne was a role a man named David Webb took on as part of a government program he volunteered for, but when he lost his memory the role became him. The books revolve around the physiological battle between Bourne and Webb as the two personalities fight for control of their shared body. Helping him are old friends, a devoted physiatrist, a loving wife, and a secret agent man who considers him the son he never had. They will all risk their lives to help him, whether he is Bourne or Webb, and do so again and again.

Webb has a conscious. He was a good man once. He still could be if people would just stop trying to kill him. He is a family man who doesn’t want to hurt people. Bourne is a killer without remorse who will do anything to live. He is a chameleon who can change personalities and appearance in seconds to walk past even the most alert sentries. The balance between Bourne and Webb makes the books a constant windmill of emotions and actions as the hero tries to make it through one day after another. His goal, the goal to both of his personalities actually, is to go home at the end. To live in peace. To disappear again.

We saw none of this in the movies. We saw a deadly secret agent betrayed by his country who fights a lonely war with a succession of short-term helpers to uncover those who betrayed him. And we don’t see much of his chameleon aspects either. And then the Bourne Legacy movie brought in a new character who did well, but was not Bourne. The Bourne Legacy novel is about the Jason Bourne character we see in the movies. There seems little other than a common past between him and the man I saw in the novels.

It’s a good book. Don’t get me wrong. But the Jason Bourne of the Bourne Legacy is not the same Jason Bourne in the original three books. He isn’t the chameleon. He doesn’t have a loving wife and friends to support him and bring him through. And Jason Bourne and David Webb are not fighting for control of their shared body. It is a different kind of book than the original books were. It is a change.

I am not yet used to the differences. I keep on seeing situations and think Jason Bourne would have done that differently. But then I think a second time and realize that this is supposed to be familiar to those who see the Jason Bourne of the movies and it makes sense again. It is a good book, written by a good author, who does a good job of channeling the modern movie ideal of Jason Bourne into book form.

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The AI Council

by on August 5, 2018 at 12:01 am
Posted In: The Book of Civilizations

The AI Council believed that the best way to keep us from dying on Earth was to push us out into the Solar System and beyond. So they covertly and overtly supported any venture that promised to take us there. Private, government, and mixed programs all received their aid in the decades that followed. And many of the private ventures somehow managed to arrive on Luna, Mars, and other planets and moons before any government venture. Most people assumed that whoever got there first with a major colony would claim the entire world as their own. The AI Council sought to reduce that risk by sending small mining corporations out and planting the flag of some Western Nation as part of their operation. And so companies like Mistress, Barsoom, and Starr Mining operated throughout the Inner System before the first Chinese colonization ships arrived. Servadac, ZZ, Astor, and Oyuki Mining worked the asteroids and moons of the outer system before any major national force arrived, and all the nations ignored the claims of ownership by any other. The AIs wished to breed competition between the major nations of Earth, and we soon saw ships of every major and minor ownership moving throughout the Solar System. It was the first golden age of our time in space.

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