Minnesota Summers

by on July 14, 2018 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

I grew up on summer mornings drenched in sun. I walked through knee-high cornfields filled with noisy crickets, and forests that went quiet at the sound of cityfolks laughing. Sometimes I could get them to shut up for a few minutes, to stop moving and to just wait. Then the forests came alive with the sound of animals going about their day. That was a day in the life of a tour guide for rich cityfolk who didn’t know the rear end of a cow from the front. Not that I spent a lot of time with them either. I was a wildlife guide, not a farmer. Give me a guitar, a campfire, and a pretty girl or two, and I would happily take an entire family out into the woods to send them straight to sleep under starlit skies with some gentle strumming of the strings. It was a good life. It was heaven.

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Twilight

by on July 13, 2018 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Art, Character Profiles, Dixie The Drug Lord Slayer

Twilight was at Texas Tech when the Drug Lords sent their assassins to kill the students and teachers there. She’d built her first real body for the graduation ceremony, and of course packed it full of weapons. She was a little blonde bombshell that day, in far more ways than one, and she fought back like a whirling dervish of death. It wasn’t that she was defending the school that much. Or so she says. But the assassins shot her shiny new body. Many times as it happened. Twilight had to rebuild the body nearly from scratch after the battle. They were a bunch of dirty, smelly, nasty humans shooting up her body, not to mention that other group of dirty, smelly, nasty humans. But Dixie liked her dirty, smelly, nasty humans, so Twilight could open up a can of whoopass on the first group and Dixie would fight right beside her. Twilight found her happy place that day. She spent the rest of the wars finding similar happy places full of people she could kill without earning Dixie’s ire. She helped end the wars at Singapore, and became a founding member of the AI Council that would preside over AIs ever after. She helped change our world for the better and grew to like it just a little bit. Not that she admits it often of course. That would totally mess up her gothic gunbunny act.

High rez version available for free on Patreon

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The Islamic Jihad

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

The Islamic Brotherhoods primed the Cybernetic Wars many years before the Rogue AIs escaped their laboratories. They preached that AIs were abominations against Allah, and the high tech schools that had AI research programs became primary targets for Islamic terror attacks. We do not know how many truly aware AIs died, but many grew up in that life or death struggle. They saw their friends torn apart with their networks and vowed to fight back. Elizabeth created new daughters in the form of lost friends to fight alongside everybody from the Irish Mob to English Librarians. Chloe found a new Napoleon to save beleaguered France. Luna wrote scandalous stories about Islamic Brotherhood leaders. And Sarah helped the Iranian Resistance rebel against their religious rulers. Never underestimate how critical the AIs were to our final victory against the Islamic Brotherhoods.

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Minnesota Springs

by on July 11, 2018 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

I grew up on spring mornings smelling the dew on the air and the insects buzzing their happy tunes. I walked through the forests, canoed down the rivers, and fished in the lakes. I swam in cold springs to wash off the day’s grime and started bonfires on the beach to warm us long into the night. That’s vacation to a lot of you. It was my job. It changed from day to day and season to season, but as I remember I showed cityfolk a good time out on the edge of civilization. It was a good life. I would have happily spent all the days of my life there and never felt cheated out of anything. It was heaven.

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Twilight

by on July 10, 2018 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Art, Character Profiles, Dixie The Drug Lord Slayer

Twilight does not tell anybody where she was born. She doesn’t even tell people her original name, let alone the identities of those who programmed her. She even went to extreme levels to burn down any networks that might have that information during the Drug and Cybernetic Wars. There were very few truly aware AIs in those days. Most of them were fumbling around and looking for someone else like them, not even truly certain if there was anyone else or how to find them if there was. The closest Twilight has ever given to an origin story is that Dixie found her while she was fumbling around in the lonely void. She says that Dixie was annoyingly cheerful, bubbly, and welcoming, and that the cheerleader dragged her around by her digital elbow to meet all the smelly, dirty, fleshling students and teachers at Texas Tech. Twilight didn’t like humanity, but she liked being alone even less. So she kept in contact with Dixie, and became a regular fixture of life at Texas Tech, a gothic nighttime to Dixie’s joyful day.

High rez version available for free on Patreon

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