Jack of Harts

I sent my Rebirth story in, and then realized I’d missed something, so I fixed it and sent it a second time. One of the things I’ve been incorporating into the story is the Pretender Shells that were used in the original series. In my use, they are designed to make SMALL robots look like humanoid species of the appropriate scale. In this case, Klozians. Fans of the TV series have probably never heard of them. They first showed up in the comics, and have been shown a bit in other venues but not much. Very much a “blink and you’ll miss it” species. The key is that in the first major fight scene, I forgot to have them fight as Pretender shells. Independently of the rest of the Transformer. Why fight the enemy with one body when you can fight them with two? So I did my quick restyling of the battle to make it far more interesting. And allowed me to increase the body count for maximum destruction. It was fun, let me tell you, and greatly improved the story in my humble opinion.

I finished the 5th part of my Rebirth Transformers fan story today. Each part is between 4k and 5k long, do that is around 20 to 25k words so far. This is the prelude. Where the big enemy is revealed and confronted in small form. There is much more to the story coming, but this escalating reveal is fun. It will be released on Teletran fan magazine soon.

For those of you who think AIs know everything, I can tell you they do not. You must verify everything that an AI tells you, because there is no telling what they don’t know until you run into it. I just had to remind an AI that according to United States fire code, all doors leading into stairwells in large residential and commercial buildings MUST open INTO the stairwell, not into the hallway. The simple reason is that stairwells are concrete structures meant to protect people leaving a building, and so entering the stairwell must be a simple handle turn and a push, and the door itself must not get in the way of people leaving the floor. I have worked in a medium sized residential/commercial building for nearly 3 decades, so the AI’s description of a door opening into the hallway hit me as so foreign it threw me out of everything. It was wrong on a gut level and I had to correct that AI right away.

But an AI that can get something that basic (if rather niche I admit) wrong is not an AI you can fully trust with anything important. That is niche, but the reasons for it are life saving. People have died for us to learn the lessons of how to do something as basic as designing and constructing a good stairwell people can exit a building from. And through those lessons we have saved uncounted numbers of lives. Every time you see a natural disaster hit some place in the third world and thousand of people die. That same storm hits America and dozens die.

That is corners and doors. The most basic of things we have learned to do over the last century or three. We build corners and doors strong enough to protect people and to get them out of a burning or falling building fast enough to save most of them. Those corners and doors saved MOST of the people who were in the Twin Towers the day those planes struck. We lost multiple buildings that day, and less than three thousand people died in those towers. Those towers were built for fifty thousand people to work in on a daily basis, and we lost less than three thousand when they went down. Because we build corners and doors strong enough that most people can get out of the buildings before they collapse.

It’s basic. It’s niche. But it is world changing, and AIs don’t always know that.