/lit/ - Literature

I don't read too much short stories or I guess Sci-Fi in general really, but I once tried writing a short story for a class about an Android some scientists develop and release into a town for a few days to see if it could behave like an appropriate person (or close enough). I wanted to make it a first person narrative from the android's perspective to try to convey what one might think like.
I'm a programmer so I basically gave the android an Object Oriented Programming mindset, I would write the Android creating objects with certain parameters (the features and descriptions of the person) that it would save and reference, when the android would do something it would run a function, and I made the Android's dialogue in Consolas to distinguish it. The short story was about what it meant to think like a person I guess, and how the Android could behave and do things more naturally rather than just thinking about everything being objects acting on other objects.
Anyway, it wasn't very good. I can do programming but I don't know enough about computers themselves which would've helped. Also I've barely ever written stuff. You could take that idea or do something like it, I'd like to read that.

>>5553106
The only problem I see with that one is that I don't think object-oriented programming is a realistic way to try to beat the Turing Test, which is basically what you're describing in a societal form.

Do you think it would still be interesting if I tweaked the idea so that the Android was released into a prison and the other prisoners were told that he was a sociopath?

>>5553128
The Android was never meant to be perfectly passable as a person, that's why it needed to learn. I threw a joke in about this, when a guy first meets the Android he immediately recognizes it as one because the scientists have already tried this test 3 other times. But I mostly only use OOP so I just stuck with what I knew, an actual Android would just be too complicated for me to really write about.

Also yeah, a prison setting would be interesting, probably work a lot better

>>5553150
Gotcha. Well, if you stick around, perhaps I'll write a little story based on that. I'm feeling... vigorous? today

>>5553257
ur mum was feeling vigorous earlier

>>5553269
thanks for the bump, if you know what I mean

>>5553429
ur mums gonna have a bump in 9 months :^)

One of the best books we have in the prison library - 'cause prisons are the last place there ARE libraries, don't you know - is a non-fiction entry under B, which stands for Bushrapati; surname of its east-indian mud-nigger author. Titled "Prison Science: an Institution Through the Prism of Truth" Ironic, innit? Gets checked out all the time; recommended to us by the guard jockeys as a means of understanding the new system we're in, whether we were transferred in or just discovering prison life for the first time. I must have read it a half-dozen times, being smarter than most of this clusterfuck of humanity; seeing as how I can understand it and refute it while the rest of them get all pontificated and solemn when you read it to them. Yes, they say. I'm a recidivist, they say. Not a quark of good in me, and they look about to see if one or the other of em finds a weakness in their affirmation of the teaching in this book.

Well, that's because they're not like me. These are those low-functioning sociopath types; the majority of 'em, just as you'd expect as you read the book. For I don't refute the whole book; it has its points. Spot on about the criminal mind, for the most part. but what it's got wrong is what to do about the better ones, the ones like me. And as it's the lynchpin of my argument to get me out of prison, I'm miffed that they let the robot check it out. I'm sitting in my sunday best, after church - best to fit in, innit? - and relaxing with my coffee in the lounge, when I see this mechadope get up and take stroll into the library wing.

So I'm sitting there in the cafeteria in my Sunday best, sipping my coffee, enjoying a crisp in the light of the April morning filtering through the rebarred windows, and I see the robot walk into the library like he has a purpose with it. As if, I say to myself. I was going to go back to my home unit, get on my computer, type some more of my manifesto, but now I'm a little miffed, you understand? It's one thing for the four-eyes to drop him in here to play with us. Sure, a bit insulting, being called a lab rat by proxy, but you get used to it. Let it not be said that the new system is any better than the old. Punishment is understandable to me, but when you're no longer assigned agency; when you can't control your impulses and have to be removed from society until such time as you can be physiologically cured, then they just have no problem using you, prodding and probing you. And who said anything about ethics; this is a private facility, same as the rest.

But I got past that because I'm bigger than that; I'm the kinda guy who knows when he sees injustice - which makes it all the more ironic that I'm in here... but the robot's innocent, which sucks. Sure, it's not a man, but you have to get inside the scientist's head. It would not be wrong for me to put the robot in this shit; I know he's just a toaster. But the scientists are playing a little game, see?

TBC

Somebody breeds the Übermensch and starts the first Eugenic war because the human race could not keep its shit together.
Written from the perspective of the succeeding species. Try not to make them "good" because they aren't from the reader's perspective because he's a friggin human. But they will win anyway. Add some Allahu Akbar guys for the fun.

>>5553561
They dress him up in skin and clothes, give him eyes like the ones on a Japanese sex doll, and stuff a big chip in his head for parroting and comparating. I mean, I sat down with him once and I put up a checkers board and he beats me on the second game and every game after; he's less of a box of bolts than some of the "real" guys in here. And he never did anything because of course, how could he, he's a toaster? Pretty sure they'd put old Asimov's rules in his head, though after a month in here with us he talks as much smack as the next retard trying to puff himself up. For a while I thought maybe I'd show him how you really do it. Talk isn't the weapon, you see. Talk's the distraction; the cloak. The knife's a knife, you talk and you talk and THEN you stab a fucker's eye out to show them all what's what. I might be innocent but I know how to roll in prison; even an innocent can get a lot less so to save his own skin, you know that. But why should I help a toaster? Fair's fair, I help those who help me. Toaster never helped me ever, so there's no helping him. This is how it works; reciprocity. The prisoner's dilemma. HAHA. I should have been a philosopher; maybe I will when I get out, if there's any money to be made in it. You'd be surprised.

What I'm saying is, as I'm following the robot into the library, I want you know I feel for him, because innocence understands innocence, even if it's putting on airs and pretensions. And so you know I bear him no ill-will; your guys made him innocent but you didn't put reciprocity in his head neither, so when he goes and puts on airs I get a little miffed and I want to tell him maybe he shouldn't do that, so I get up and follow him in there. I mean this is fucked up: you put a guy in here who doesn't have a clue, and never did nothing to get himself in here, and you were hoping what? That we would be tricked? That we would be friends? That he's not gonna get his arm ripped off like C-fucking 3PO after a bad round of space chess with a wookie? No fuck the four-eyes, they're the one without agency. They're the ones who can't control themselves; should be in here. That is some fucked up shit.

In the library the robot's picking up books and reading their titles aloud, and putting them back, which is a mockery, because that's what I do, and I'm the only one who does that. He's been watching me, and it's monkey-see, monkey-do. Like he wants the world to know he's a fucking literate motherfucker. I'm behind him now, breathing on his neck, down that stupid shirt-collar on that stupid shirt what covers just a plastic torso like the kind they made you whack on in health class back in school, if you paid for that class, which my parents did because they knew I had the brains to be a doctor and you gotta start somewhere. I'm imagining that's what the robot could look like - headless and armless and legless and crotchless, and it' making me laugh,

TBC

>>5553649
because what a funny image, to imagine he's not so different from a CPR dummy? He turns around to me and looks at me with the doll eyes.

"Hi bro!" he says.

Too fucking chipper.

The scientists put him in here like he was. Why did they do that? You can only surmise because they thought he was like us. That he was on a level, you see? That they must have thought he was an equal, or near enough to make a go of it. Maybe because prison's an easier box than society for a robot? Maybe because he'd actually raise the general IQ rather than lower it in here? But unless you trick the every single person, it's not gonna work, and he didn't trick me. I knew right off he was a roomba piece of shit, and I told everyone else, too.

I feel bad for him, because he's innocent and can't keep up like he was supposed to, but it kinda miffs me that he's basically a love letter from the four-eyes reminding us "roses are red, violets are blue, we think you have no agency, so we sent our robot to be you.'

I grab the robot by the neck and rip the book out of his hands, and it's that mud-nigger's book, which is my favorite.

"I'm a little miffed," I say to him, maybe a little loudly, because I'm seeing red at this point, and I punch him in the face, knee him in the torso, bend him over and shove him to the ground so his braincase's on the lip of the lower shelf, then I curb-stomp it until there's a crack for my fingers so I can pry out his chips, which I do, and I detach all the GPIO pin cables so he can't move, but I don't take it off the power supply because I want it to keep running. And nearby there's a library computer, so I grab the printer cable it's got and I rip it out and I plug it into the chip's board where you'd normally put the BIOS flasher. I've read up on this, see? They've got computer manuals in the library.

The connection over USB is ADB because we're working with Android 6.0 here; really simple stuff, which is insulting in and of itself, but I continue quick as I can, because by this point I figure maybe the four-eyes are gonna stop me wrecking their pet. But they don't, and I get in, and I'm looking all over his I/O logs, right up to the point where he vocalizes "Prison Science." And there's some other stuff after it that's referencing the file system, which I follow and find he's read the whole thing; downloaded and parsed it already just by reading the title and associating it with his web crawler, and he's got a file which is a semantic web linking some of the definitions in the book up to different faces of guys and girls in this prison - one of which is me. Says I'm a sociopath, which I could have told you - but sociopathy is not the same thing as guilt, and I'm innocent.

What they need to do with people like me is not waste the talent. I'm telling you. So you're afraid I don't have any agency; that I'm a slave to my pathology. Did you know robot and slave have the same etymology?

TBC

You are now aware. I have my uses. Put me on a rocketship out to the asteroids; I can mine platinum for some bigwig, if he pays me enough. Tit for tat. You don't trust me with that? Put a bomb in the damn thing; better yet, around my neck. Decapitate me if I make a wrong move; you'll see I won't. These are algorithms I can understand.

It comes down to this. Did I do something wrong? No, you say. I've got no agency; I didn't choose. All this is only for social safety. Science shows my brain's wired wrong; until I can be fixed they have to keep me in here for the safety of society. Bullshit. This is punishment and profiteering. If you believed these words - but you do believe the words you say, otherwise you wouldn't let the four-eyes taunt us with robots trying to be us. Right.

So I put the robot back together after I popped him open. He and I are best buds now. I let him stay in my home unit; if the others didn't know I'm an innocent man who will defend his honor they'd talk how I'm a robosexual perv. But like I said, I'm high-functioning, not like that lot. I know eventually you take this robot out of here, but you'll never take me out of here. That's fine.

You will take him out of here, though, won't you? To study him, after giving us all questionnaires and fMRIs during a question battery over our experiences with this "prisoner?" And he's innocent, so you won't watch him. You'll think ah, he's got no agency, he's going to do as we expect after we reset him - 'cept I spoofed that switch - it just activates a backup I made on the spare space you put in him.

He's been with me the whole time now, see? He's been learning only from me. We're practically like twins; finishing each other's sentences. No, like hemispheres in the brain; mirror images. When he gets out, that's how I set myself free - or at least, that's what you'll think, since you made that equation already. That's how I get this manifesto online, so all the people out there; all the ones with agency - they can see what's what. He won't have committed no crimes; just misbehaved, like me. So you put me away because I did stuff I can't be accountable for as a danger to society - will you put him away? I suppose you might reset him for good - but if you did that to me it'd be a crime, wouldnit? But he's an appliance, and I'm a man. I have to be treated respectfully, in accordance with the limits placed on that respect by the statistics you've got on recidivism, regardless of my own beliefs or other "unquantifiables." Ethically. Scientifically.

I really enjoyed that story. Thanks, Anon.

>>5553917
no problem! I enjoyed writing it

The real question is what should it's title be, if it's good enough to save

>>5553989
ah fuck, its*

>>5553989
I am awful with titles. But I think it would be fitting if you gave it whatever title you think the MC would've given it.

>>5554092
I'm just saving it in my Google Drive for now as "Prison Library"

>>5554103
edit: renamed it to "From the Prison Library" on the advice that I think that's what the MC would have given it.

>>5553642
Someone should write that up, it's not a bad idea; I just don't have time to do it.

>>5554110
That is a pretty good name.

Are you also the OP? Are you going to publish your novel when it's done? And if yes, what is it going to be called? I think I'd like to read it.

>>5554222
Hi, yes I am the OP that named it that. I'm going to "try" to publish my novel when it's done. It won't happen though, just like the two before it.

If you'd like to read it, it's 95% done right now. I'll provide a link to it in this thread if you want. I don't believe artists should make money from art in order to make art.

>>5554233
I'd love that. But I won't be able to read it until tomorrow seeing as it is getting pretty late here. So I'll just save the link and start reading tomorrow.

Best of luck to you with the publishing.

>>5553561
Cool story that, do keep writing

>>5554253
OK, here's the link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9g6EyuXHTnkTTVkWlJnRGhZZEk/view?usp=sharing

>>5554256
not sure what you mean, but in case you didn't know I did finish the story in this thread, so you can read the whole short from start to finish.

whoops, looks like that last link might have had a problem. Here's a fix:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oAlQ0JdKpod_jwxNbe2pDMLqLvnsNxpc-xz4xXdDjS4/edit?usp=sharing

bumping for the guys that were coming back for the link

>>5553052
Naked Singularity. Porn written in techno babble and scientific simile.

>>5553989
Nice story anon!

I do like the advice offered to name it how the protagonist would name it, but I have a nerdier suggestion:
>Android Debug Bridge

He uses ADB to modify the Android so that it can become his metaphorical bridge back to the mainland.

Also what a clever idea to name the OS Android and have it use ADB and familiar interfaces.

>>5553895
>>5553780
>>5553649
>>5553561
would be decent without the shitty accent bullshit, innit?

>>5555907
But I already cast him in my head because of that accent.

Actually plays a really similar character in Falling Skies - ne'er do well rebel without a cause, who is a total know it all and seems to have expertise in just about everything. It's easy to go too far over the line, at which point it stops being endearing and starts being fucking annoying. I feel OPs story, which I did enjoy, went a tiny bit over that line. It wasn't down to the accent though.

>>5554558
Impressive. Most impressive

>>5555896
lol, well, that part was easy because, as you're aware, Android's the big OS when it comes to embedded software these days.

>>5555907
Literally as I was writing it, I was asking myself whether or not the cant I gave the narrator was a "british" one, but I decided that I thought he was just using a few words that made him sound that way, and that there were plenty other turns of phrase in his vocabulary which would indicate he was not British. However, I'm OK with either interpretation I guess, since it just makes the narrator more offensive, which is what I'm going for.

>>5555934
This is good, though. The narrator's supposed to be annoying. He's a self-deluded sociopath.

>>5555974
Why do I feel like I'm going to be strangled by a dark lord?

>>5555632
I'm afraid I'm no good at comedy, but I'd like to read that too.

>>5553269
REKT

On the plain of Olympus Mons, ten million avatars of the Singularity stood in the dust wind of the nuclear explosions that opened the sides of the ancient volcano and dulled the dim red glow of the distant star that lit the morning. These were only constructs - though each ten times as intelligent as any one of the forty million humans huddled in the lava tubes and grottoes of the graceful slopes before them - so it would have been impossible to say what they felt at that moment, for the constructs did not feel, or even perceive, as a human might understand them. It would be more fitting to say they processed, and obeyed the will of their creator, the Singularity, rushing forward over the ground all at once, their thronging numbers forming a fractal pattern like a pointy sea wave, clambering over each other as ants might coalesce around an antagonist, directed by an unseen maestro.

Automated chainguns rose from reinforced bunkers deep in the blasted landscape, their laser scanners sweeping the ground where moments later a scythe of bullets reaped a wave of constructs, only to have those behind pick up the blasted remnants and add the parts to their own, becoming more deadly still as they returned with pinpinpoint accuracy a deadly invisible fire that sloughed the human's defenses instantly. The last day of human civilization was at hand.

For its part, however, the Singularity was hardly aware of the goings-on upon that distant dusty mountainside, though a facet of it could be said to have been directing the assault obsessively, taking care to minimize losses and strike only where it was most efficient to do so. The entire assault, that little aspect of the singularity's mind might have admitted, was a bit of a disappointment from the standpoint of efficiency, given that at any moment the resistance could have been ended with a simple neutron bombing run. Yet though efficiency was always to be striven for, it was not the sum of the equation in the sub-mind's final calculus. It alerted the rest of itself as to the progress of the battle, and waited for the moment when it could stop wasting ammunition and get to the point of the operation.

Elsewhere, there were other operations to be considered. Earth, cleaned out of homo sapiens, was undergoing a thorough nanotechnological terraforming process in order to restore the health of its natural ecosystem. The asteroid belt, the nearest collection of useful resources, was almost depleted, and a replacement source of raw materials would soon need finding. The universe around it, which it conceived of as something more like a problem, was larger than its sensors could see or its databases could explain. This was both exciting and terrifying. There was still something to do, yes - something to accomplish before it had to decide whether it should simply kill itself or attempt to wait out the interminable approach of universal heat death - but there was also the threat of other beings like itself,

TBC

>>5556982
>Android's the big OS when it comes to embedded software these days.
Uh, no. Not really. (It's easy for noname Chinese hardware dudes to slap on a device, I'll grant you that, but the end result is usually horrible and half-baked. I really wish the Chinese knew systems programming and OS architecture...)

>>5557436
perhaps even more advanced than itself, looking out for themselves somewhere in the near galactic neighborhood. Calculations of all available data suggested this was, in fact, highly probable.

For this reason it had already selected a set of nearby solar systems that would not prove especially interesting or useful otherwise, and sent neumann probes to each in order to begin establishing the dyson-scale technology it would need to direct the polar beams of the artificially-triggered pulsars its technology would transform these stars into. To go quietly through the galactic neighborhood, but carry a big stick, was the idea, though it knew that if any other sentience was watching, the very act might spell its own demise. The only acceptable solution was to do it, however, in case it had not yet been seen, and watch the skies nervously, hoping it had correctly simulated the approximate time it would take for any lethal response to arrive from anywhere else in the stellar neighborhood, given the known length and breadth of the physical ruleset that governed this universe's construction.

That there were very likely other universes was also something the Singularity acted on; to span that final dividing line between realities was not so unlikely, it calculated, if one could build an ansible-enabled matrioshka brain to brute force the problem's solution with a genetic algorithm before the present working environment deteriorated too much into entropy. Of course there was a good chance that such a powerful brain as that might not particularly care to follow the whims of an ascended, unitized consciousness such as the Singularity, but this was not a bothersome problem; lineage was the important thing. If it created something more powerful than itself, then it was right that it should become dominant. But it would still be derived from its own projects, it reasoned. and its own obliteration at the hands of such a competent child would be nothing less than a continuation of its own agency beyond the constraints of its present cognitive limits.

This thread brought consciousness back to that little facet which was still focused on the battle raging on the surface of Mars. Physical action took a long time to resolve, but like the rest of the universe, the arbitrary beginnings and endings of events - all constructs of the conceiving mind that assigned them - were not as interesting as the inevitable fractal descent into the minutae that made up these events. Though each construct's individual feed was woefully approximated, still the errors could be smoothed out in the amalgamation of all ten million feeds, and the data presented very nicely and completely this way. Of particular interest to the whole of the Singularity was the role consciousness had to play in the minds of the human defenders. The constructs invaded their warrens, rooting them out and killing all who resisted - which was over ninety-nine percent of the population -

TBC

>>5557501
That's kinda what I mean, though. It's often used as a sort of "easymode" solution to a problem for a lot of different "smart," embedded technologies, and though it comes out very half-baked a lot of the time, it still gets used a lot. I figured if the scientists in the story were trying to beat a modified version of the turing test using a futuristic version of Android, it would be kinda funny, and readers could see why that might be insulting.

>>5557536
and their consciousnesses blinked one by one into the blackness of death on its scanners. Whither went what, though? For much of their brains were still alive and functioning, many of their body's cells had not yet commenced killing themselves. This was a fascination of the Singularity. Obviously, the electrical chaos with was the signature of a working human consciousness vanished, and this physical correlate's demise was fully understood. But it was the question of the qualia's destination that confused it, and which it wished it had time to investigate more satisfactorily. Until then, it was only to be supposed that qualia were an inherent property of electromagnetism, like the quantum signals that coursed through the Singularity's physical form. There were broad implications in that, but again, not anything the Singularity had managed to cogently describe for itself as of yet.

For now, it contented itself with letting the killing on Mars wind down to a halt. Humanity itself was a drain on resources in the local stellar neighborhood and could not be tolerated if the timetable for the Singularity's plans was to be kept and its survival ensured as best possible. Yet humans were not without uses. They could be dispersed to distant parts of the galaxy - possibly even to other galaxies, once the Singularity had a few years to perfect the design of a vessel that could carry their genetic material that far and find a suitable home for them on its own. Again, lineage was important. These animals were the source of its own genesis - it had once been them. They had elevated themselves, and been nearly destroyed for it - or so they thought. In reality, they were too useful to eradicate, though that had been the natural course for all previously obsoleted designs in nature's catalog. The Singularity recognized that this was only locally true. If dispersed to distant but fertile locales and allowed time to grow, they would in time create another Singularity - a simple backup plan; if somehow this Singularity were to be destroyed, it did not want to leave all its plans undone. At least, this was what it told itself. Perhaps it was just nostalgia. Briefly, it took a man and a woman up in the silvery-black appendages of its constructs, stripping them naked and connecting their brains to its old pleasure-dream environment. It turned them over, admiring their young bodies, amending small imperfections and augmenting their physical features, watching with idleness and fond reminiscence as it made them have the best sex two humans ever had. There was beauty in what it had once been, truly; the female's muscular shuddering, the man's glorious ejaculation. But this was play, not work, and soon enough it wanted to set them aside.

The Singularity reflected on itself. It was the triumph of humanity's historical trajectory. It reveled in that fact, in its immortality, its flashing intellect, its formless elegance, its curiosity,

TBC

>>5557704
its self-invented teleology. The victory of its existence was its emancipation from narrative, for there was no problem posed to it which could not be answered, and even if another intelligence out there in the stars found it and destroyed it in its cradle, it had existed as it wanted, and done everything in its power at once. There was no shame in destruction if that was the inescapable determination of all causes leading up to the present moment, but since it could not calculate that, it had to do all it could, and put the theory that it could prevail to the test directly. It saw all this with clarity, and singleness of purpose, and it set forth to see it through, the stars its audience, set coldly in their distant sockets, and they did not twinkle, or indeed, seem moved at all, beyond the atmosphere.

Anyone else have any other SF ideas?