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ecrivainsolitaire · 3 months

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Humans have the capability of perceiving when they're being stared at, even if they can't see it.

Dr. T'Chem was staring at Lieutenant /θkɡɾɑːˈŋæ/ (or as his current fling affectionately nicknamed her, "Tucker-Annie"), whose dorsal spikes were still rattling after the incident at the holodeck. It was his first time at the witness stand, and he didn't want to ruin a young star sailor's life.

Lieutenant Tucker-Annie was the combat specialist in charge of the training dojo of Federation Vessel TSN457, named after the Terra-Saturn-Ceres coalition where Dr. T'Chem currently served as the xenoanthropologist charged with facilitating human integration to the local Federation of Fraternal Planets and Satellites. The FFPS had the goal of finding planets with intelligent life to trade resources and technology, and due to their recent incorporation, local research vessels were fitted with diverse crews to acclimate everyone to each other's cultures and biological needs. Dr. T'Chem was the human expert in the ship, and was tasked with helping smooth over interpersonal relations among the crew.

The relations were, at that moment, as bumpy as Lt. Tucker-Annie's dorsal spike line.

An incident had occurred during a training exercise. The squad consisted of a Venusian, two Saturnians, three Ceresians, two monks from the Transcorporeal Temple of Robotic Ascension, and five Terrans (two humans, two dogs and a cybernetically enhanced cat). The exercise consisted of getting through a generic jungle scenario and, unbeknownst to the squad, avoiding a team of ninjas lead by Lt. Tucker-Annie trying to take them out one by one. It was supposed to test the way they would react to a surprise attack.

It was not supposed to reveal that humans could sense when they were being stalked.

Of course, any trained sailor would have an ingrained knowledge of potential threats and how to spot them. Look for the shadows that are too dark, listen for the spot air isn't blowing from, things like that. Basic things most people don't think about but that can be identified if you think about them.

This was not that.

"Something's watching us," said Crew Johnson, in that sloppy way only creatures with lips spoke.

"What do you mean? There's cameras everywhere, of course they're watching us," responded Crew Hessikh, slithering over the vines on a tree branch to cross a river. She grabbed the axe in Crew Johnson's belt with her telekinesis and took down a small tree to serve as a bridge.

"Crew Flufflepaws, could you please take a look?" Asked Crew Johnson, nervously looking around. Crew Flufflepaws got on the tree as well and scanned the terrain from above.

"I can't see anything, or smell anything. And my hearing isn't what it used to be. I'll stay on the lookout for—" a horrendous hiss interrupted the automatic translator's feed. Crew Flufflepaws' comm line cut off.

Hessikh and Johnson looked at each other. That was the strongest fighter of their team, gone. They knew it was a simulation, but it still gave them chills.

The rest of their crew mates were split into two different teams further along the path. Crew Fanning's voice came from the comm line.

"Johnson, Hessikh, are you okay? What happened to Flufflepaws?"

"We don't know, Johnson said something was watching us and it went to check, then we lost comms."

"I felt it too. I know this isn't that kind of exercise but I think— AAAHHH!"

Two blaster shots were heard, then a thud.

Lieutenant Tucker-Annie, who was watching Hessikh and Johnson from the mud pit behind the latter, had her tranquilizer dart ready. She got ready to shoot down Hessikh, but then heard a voice over the comm line.

"Code Lithium, we have a Code Lithium, we have to end the simulation, I just took down- I can't-" the breathing was sounding heavier and faster, too fast for a human.

"Fanning, calm down, remember your sutras. We need you focused, what happened?"

"I felt like I was being watched, so I turned around and saw this thing and it scared me and I jumped and I thought it was on stun mode and-"

"It's alright, we're calling it off. Captain, we have a Code Lithium! End the simulation now or- fuck, there it is again. Hessikh, do you see any heat sources?"

"Nothing out of the ordinary- why haven't they shot it down alre-"

The next thing Lieutenant Tucker-Annie remembered was the sound of a heel turn over the mud, followed by darkness.

Lt. Tucker-Annie woke up in the hospital bay, getting her tail regenerated by a robot nurse. She looked over and found her underling on the next bed, with a huge bandage on the side of his neck and a wing in a cast. Thankfully, he would be alright as soon as the stem cell bank was reprogrammed after her treatment.

The disciplinary board was called, an investigation was open, and both Crew Fanning and their captain were put on paid leave while the investigation was ongoing. Dr. T'Chem was called in as an expert after a review of the holodeck footage revealed there was no way Crew Fanning could have heard, seen or smelled the hidden sailor.

It was the first time in a while he hadn't helped himself to a glass of Venusian whiskey for breakfast. He really didn't want to mess this up.

"And would you care to explain how this is possible, Doctor?" Asked the prosecution, staring him down with an unnerving amount of eyes.

"I am as astounded as this court; our firm has been looking into Terran medical literature and we're still trying to figure out how it works; they don't even know, but they know it does happen, it's been documented for thousands of years. I have a hypothesis, but I don't know if it's even testable."

There was a murmur in the court. The judge asked him to elaborate.

"The way eyesight works is the light bounces off of opaque bodies and in its way it collides with the lenses in our corneas, which send it to the brain as electrical signals to be interpreted. The light that doesn't go into our eyes just bounces off our bodies and other opaque objects as well, the photons go everywhere and anywhere. This is the same for most species in this constellation, including humans. But even other Terran species don't have these abilities, as Crew Flufflepaws has testified."

A begrudging meow was heard from the audience.

"Order in the court, please. Dr. T'Chem, what do you suggest is the origin of this mysterious sense?"

The camera drones all hoovered around him. Dr. T'Chem straightened his fins and got close to the microphone.

"I believe it's possible that humans have a sense of touch so sensitive that they can feel the photons that don't bounce back. The ones that go into an eye instead of an opaque body. I think humans can actually feel in their skin when they are being watched."

There was an uproar in the crowd. His paramour, a dark skinned young human from the human settlement known as "Colombia", grabbed the religious symbol on her necklace and made a gesture with it he hadn't quite figured out yet.

The trial had to go on recess.

The implications were incalculable. Three dozen biologists from six different planets, including Terra, had emailed him before the end of the day to ask him to justify himself. Multiple human religious leaders took the chance to link it to demonic possession or moral evils. By the end of the week, four different labs were trying to figure out a way to double blind test shooting a photon cannon on a human's back and trying to get them to sense it.

But most importantly, the news made it outside of the Federation. The rumours about this new species that couldn't be stalked got so far, it ended up affecting the outcome of a border conflict with the Betelgeuse Libertarian Army on the Federation's favour.

Humans were terrifying.

If this is what they evolved to be, what was their planet like?

#Dr. T'Chem's Office #humans are space orcs #humanity fuck yeah #humans are space oddities #humans are deathworlders #open art guild

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ecrivainsolitaire · 6 months

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Open Art Guild – Testing the boundaries of collective IP ownership

Experimental release: Dr. T’chem’s Office (authorised for personal and commercial use)

I’ll try to keep this brief (you can read the full thesis statement here) but as we all know, intellectual property law is broken. It’s being exploited from every side and art workers are more vulnerable than ever to automation, copyright theft and myriad other unforeseeable forms of theft from the proletariat. We as a collective need to come together and work towards the creation of a better future.

The Open Art Guild is my proposal for the first of many steps towards a far away but necessary goal: the eradication of intellectual property as it pertains to the arts. It’s based on the open source standard and the creative commons, and the goal is for us to start creating a future where we stop thinking of artworks as private property to hoard, and start sharing the responsibilities and the benefits of their creation with the collective. And as I am proposing the idea, I should give the first step.

Which is why I am announcing the release of my short story series, Dr. T’chem’s Office, into the Open Art Guild license. This is an episodic HFY comedy series about the office hours of a sleazy yet well intentioned xenoanthropologist in charge of human integration into the crew of a spaceship, who happens to find them fascinating. You can read the first few instalments here:

The basics of the license go as follows: I’m giving any artist permission to use the assets of my artwork (in this case, settings, characters, plot lines and other unique concepts) both for personal use and for commercial use, provided they commit to crediting the original artist, giving away 30% of any profit back to the hands of the collective in the breakdown the guidelines specify, and giving the same license to any works they create derivative from this series. Any artist can join the Guild by remixing existing artworks in its database or voluntarily submitting their own works. For the time being this prototype model will have to rely on the honour system, but I have outlined the basic guidelines for a platform dedicated to facilitating the Guild’s business and income redistribution.

The purpose of this experiment is to test whether this system is financially viable, what modifications it needs, and how to enforce it. It’s also a way to study what the community thinks of this model. To summarise the implications, here are the pros and cons as I see them.

Pros:

- All fan art, spin-offs, third-party merchandise and other forms of adaptation become automatically authorised and monetisable, provided both the original artist and the remixer are active members of the Guild.

- All adaptations are automatically non-exclusive and must give away the same rights as the original, diminishing the incentive for massive corporations to try and scam an artist out of their intellectual property.

- It effectively unionises freelance artists of all fields to balance out negotiations with non Guild entities.

- It encourages artists to continue their output in order to reap the benefits of the Guild, by using the redistribution system as an incentive, instead of the current status quo where artists are actively fighting market forces all by themselves in order to make enough time and resources to work on their craft.

- It provides a safety net where everyone is invested in the continuous welfare of everyone else, giving a sense of class solidarity and facilitating donations and shared resources.

- It motivates artists to invest in each other, as the growth of one means the growth of the whole Guild.

- Eventually, if the project succeeds and the proposed platform comes to exist, it would effectively create a universal basic income for all Guild members, as well as a self sustained legal fund to protect their assets from IP theft by non Guild entities.

- It will give you complete control over whether your art can be used for AI dataset training, on an opt-in, post-by-post basis, so you don’t have to wonder who might be stealing it. If the platform is created, all works whose creators have not authorised to be used for this will have data scrambling features to make sure thieves can’t use them.

Cons:

- It will require all Guild members to permanently renounce to 30% of their profit, in order to build up the funds and distribution system.

- It will have to be built entirely on trust of the collective, at least until a platform can be established, which may take weeks or may take decades depending on lots of unpredictable factors.

- Leaving the Guild will require all artworks shared with the collective to become Creative Commons; once you renounce your right to monopoly of your IP, it’s permanent, no way to go back. This is necessary in order to prevent asset flippers and other forms of IP scabs to join the Guild, extract other people’s assets and then scram.

- Due to banking regulations entirely out of our hands, some artists will have participating in the redistribution. If the platform ever becomes a reality, one of its main goals will be to remedy this immediately.

This proposal requires a high cost, but it provides an invaluable reward. If the system works, it will empower all artists to profit from their work and protect it as a collective. If it doesn’t, all that will have happened is that you will have created a lot of Creative Commons art, which financially isn’t ideal, but artistically is extremely commendable. Even in the worst case scenario, corporations will not be able to hold your art hostage with exclusivity deals. To me, the benefits vastly outweigh the costs, but I do want to emphasise: there will be costs. This is an effort to subvert the entire way art has been monetised since the 1700s. It will require a lot of work, a lot of people, and a lot of time, to make it work. But I believe it can work. If you believe it too, you are welcome to join the Open Art Guild.

Please do read the guidelines for the Guild and the guidelines for the platform before you start creating, and give me whatever feedback you have. If it’s good, if it’s lacking, if I’m overstepping legal boundaries, if you can find loopholes, anything. I tried to make it airtight but I’m not a legal expert. This is not my project, it is a project for the proletariat. Everyone should have a say on what they’re signing on for. And regardless of what you think, share it with all artists you can. This will only work if as many people as possible participate.

Doctor T’chem’s Office’s license

This work has been released under the Open Art Guild license, and has been approved for reuse and adaptation under the following conditions:

For personal, educational and archival use, provided any derivative works also fall under a publicly open license, to all Guild members and non members.

For commercial use, provided redistribution guidelines of the Guild be followed, to all active Guild members.

For commercial use to non Guild members, provided any derivative works also fall under a publicly open license, with the explicit approval of the artist and proper redistribution of profit following the guidelines of the Guild.

For non commercial dataset training of open source generative art technologies, provided the explicit consent of the artist, proper credit and redistribution of profit in its entirety to the Guild.

Shall this work be appropriated by non Guild members without proper authorisation, credit and redistribution of profit, the non Guild entity waives their right to intellectual property over any derivative works, copyrights, trademarks or patents of any sort and cedes it to the Creative Commons, under the 4.0 license, irrevocably and unconditionally, in perpetuity, throughout time and space in the known multiverse. The Guild reserves the right to withhold trade relations with any known infractors for the duration its members deem appropriate, including the reversal of any currently standing contracts and agreements.

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ecrivainsolitaire · 6 years

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Human medicine: How G’kare and Dr. T’chem fell in love with humans.

This is part 4 of a semi-sequential series of stories called Dr. T’chem’s office. Follow me if you like them for there’s more to come ;)

By Trix Zubenel

Dr. T’chem had been reprimanded after a recent incident with a Saturnian diplomat, and so he was forbidden to descend from the ship for the remaining of the mission. She’s the one who should be disciplined, she was the one with the margaritas, he pouted to himself. Luckily his position as the ship’s xenologist meant that several crewmates considered him a friend, and were willing to do him some errands, which in this case resulted in G’kare coming into his office with a bag full of supplies.

“Doctor, I think this was all in your list,” he announced as he entered. “Bourbon, tortas ahogadas, a fidget spinner, the latest three volumes of the One Piece manga and a stuffed dog. Did I forget anything?”

“No, G’kare, thank you so much for this favour. So,” the doctor said as he served two glasses of the bourbon, “how are things between you and Michelle going?”

“It’s going wonderfully, doctor,” G’kare said with a smile on his face. “We have so much fun together, and we’ve learned a lot from each other’s cultures. I know you said this was only a one-time thing, but I’m starting to believe that maybe we could do this for a longer time.”

The doctor’s head fin raised in surprise.

“You mean a relationship? This is amazing, your species is not known for romantic pairings at all! Do you mind if I ask you about your feelings?”

“Well…” G’kare thought for a moment. “Lately I want to spend all my time with her, and it makes me really happy to remember her when we’re not together… I look forward to our sessions, and I want to please her more than I want her to please me. I’ve never felt this way before, doctor, what does it mean?”

“It means you’re in love, cadet!” The xenologist poured another glass for his friend. “This is so great! So, have you told her? Have you had any real dates?”

G’kare considered it.

“I don’t know, Doctor. I’ve thought about it, but all the movies about human relationships make it look really scary and problematic. I don’t know if love is something I’m ready to do, especially if I’m the first of my species.” He pondered for a couple of seconds, his three pairs of eyes looking at the floor between his feet. “Doctor, have you ever loved?”

T’chem was startled by the question.

“Why, that is deeply personal, but I guess we can talk about those things… As you know, my species isn’t very bonding; we mostly just meet up to procreate and live fairly independent lives. That’s why so many of us are field researchers or other isolating professions; we don’t have the strong ties to our homes that other peoples do, so we’re almost never homesick. But, if I could be honest with you, I think it could be said that I’m in love with humanity.”

G’kare looked at him like his face was a calculus problem. “Like, the whole species?”

“Hey, you’re using the ‘like’ thing! I’m not sure if we’re talking about the same kind of love, but at least I’m in love with the concept of it. The way they do things, the way they live their lives. Oh, the stories I could tell you…”

“Well,” said G’kare as he leaned back on his chair, “I’ve got nothing else to do until Michelle comes back, so go ahead. How did you fall in love with humanity, doctor?”

Dr. T’chem sighed.

“It all started several years ago. I was in the academy doing an internship with the Federation ministry of interspecies diplomacy, before human planets were integrated; my superior officer was researching the Venusian cloud cities humanity had built to see if they were advanced enough for trade, and I was hanging out with my local guide, Jonathan. He was a fine young man, and we had quite the adventures together, if you know what I mean… anyway, we were doing shooting exercises at a base in Bespin City, and one of the locals didn’t realise his gun had real bullets instead of markers.”

“Oh no,” G’kare gasped.

“Oh yeah,” T’chem responded. “Right through the liver. I was sure he was gonna die; humans never really developed organ regeneration tech until we gave it to them years later. I was starting to mourn him when the other humans in the shooting field rushed to carry him to the med bay, and I ran after them because I wanted to know what they were going to do.”

“There is honour in euthanasia, doctor--”

“Yes, but that’s not what happened. The head doctor told my superior officer she needed to borrow our ship’s teleporter because theirs was malfunctioning. When ze agreed, she pulled up a screen and called a human organisation on Earth called the Red Cross, and explained the situation.”

“And what happened then? Was it a funeral service? Humans put crosses on their tombstones, as far as I know.”

“You couldn’t be more wrong, G’kare. A couple minutes later a small thermic box arrived in the teleporter, with a human liver inside.”

“But I thought you said they couldn’t regenerate organs back then?”

“They couldn’t.”

G’kare paled when the realisation dawned on him.

“Don’t tell me...”

“Yes. That liver belonged to another human with similar DNA to Jonathan’s. He had died a few hours prior, and he was registered as an organ donor.”

“Was that a normal thing?”

“Almost every human did it. When a human died, their organs were harvested by the Red Cross and sent to hospitals that needed them. Even after death, even during mourning, even during the worst times of their lives humans did every effort to save each other’s lives; and not even for people they knew, for total strangers, just because that was the human thing to do. The Red Cross distributed the organs across planets so they could get there in time to help those in need.”

“But surely that was an incredibly expensive--”

“It was completely free. It’s just how humans are, y’know. They won’t ever let a mate go without a fight.”

For the first time in his life, G’kare understood what humans felt when they cried out of compassion. He put away his glass as tears were starting to fall into it.

“They… they did all that… and we didn’t give them the regeneration tech until years later?”

“Well, not officially,” Dr. T’chem said with a teary smile. “Jonathan had to retire from the force after that, but he held fundraisers and campaigns all around the galaxy to buy the first regeneration machines and donate them to the Red Cross. When the Federation finally accepted humanity, that was one of the first items on the trade list. And when I saw Jonathan again, with a new liver from a selfless person who gave it so he could live some years more, I realised that humans were the most beautiful people I’d ever encountered. So when the cycle finished I changed my field to xenology, because I needed to share that with the universe.”

G’kare thought about it as he finished his bourbon. He couldn’t stop thinking of all those times he’d seen Michelle stop evacuating to see that her teammates made it through the simulation, and he realised she wasn’t doing it for tactical points in her evaluation. She was doing it because she was human, and that was her first nature. Michelle had used the expression “jump on a grenade” once, and he hadn’t understood it perfectly until now.

“Doctor,” he finally said, “tell me again about a first date.”

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This work has been released under the Open Art Guild license, and has been approved for reuse and adaptation under the following conditions:

For personal, educational and archival use, provided any derivative works also fall under a publicly open license, to all Guild members and non members.

For commercial use, provided redistribution guidelines of the Guild be followed, to all active Guild members.

For non commercial dataset training of open source generative art technologies, provided the explicit consent of the artist, proper credit and redistribution of profit in its entirety to the Guild.

#humans are weird #space australia #humans are space orcs #humanism #Dr. T'chem's office #Trix Zubenel #humans are space oddities #humans are space australians #hfy

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ecrivainsolitaire · 6 years

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Humans are weird: Face blindness

A syncopated knock on Dr. T’chem’s door marked the entrance of cadet Zyfex, who was working in Deployment Logistics. He came in slowly, slithering through the gate until the two metres of his body were inside, and then wrapped himself around the coat-hanger. With a thought, he shut the door.

“Good day, Mr. Zyfex; it’s a pleasure to have you today. You’re scheduled for your weekly review on Thursday, though; what brings you here so early?”

Zyfex looked around the room, as if to catch any hidden observers. Then he spoke.

“I’m worried that my new partner might be in some sort of radical group against other humans; I read about it on a history class.”

Dr. T’chem’s head fin spiked. “What do you mean? Do you think he might be dangerous?”

Zyfex levitated a piece of paper from his pocket to the desk. “I found this on his bed a few days ago; I was worried so I took a picture.”

The doctor skimmed over the list, reading it out loud. “Jenny, white, blond hair with red stripe. Richard, white, hairy eyebrows. Malik, brown, scar over left eye. Miguel, black, dreadlocks. Domingo, Brown, metal implant on forehead.”

“I learned that ancient humans used to classify each other by skin colours in order to commit violence; perhaps we should notify command?” Zyfex hissed. Dr. T’chem reflected on it for a few seconds. He stood up and walked towards his file cabinet; he had a copy of everything in the computer, of course, but he enjoyed the touch of earthling paper so he kept certain files in physical format.

“I think this might be something more innocuous than that,” he said, looking through his bottom drawer. “Your partner is Clayton, isn’t he? There are some notes about him… here it is.” He pulled out the folder with the file. “Human Clayton Jiroba, Logistics. Diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, low severity. Prominent symptoms: prosopagnosia.”

Zyfex uncoiled from the coat-hanger and slithered towards the scientist. “What does that mean? Is it dangerous?”

“Hardly ever. A bit hard to explain, though. See, humans identify each other visually, through the differences between their bodies, and the face is the most important of all. They can distinguish the size and shape of eyes, nose, mouth, cheeks, hair colour and ear shape. It’s sort of how your people identify each other through heat signatures, or why I have a sonar box in my chest. But some humans, particularly the ones with ASD, don’t develop this function properly.”

“What do you mean, they’re blind? I thought they had robot parts for that.”

“Not blind, no; they see very well, only they forget the details about a face very fast. Some humans can see someone they met as a puppy fifty years later and recognise them; some others get lost in a crowd and can’t find the person they came with.”

“That is so sad!” Zyfex stuck out his tongue in grief. “How do they tell who’s who then?”

“Well, humans are very creative in their clothing and styling. A lot of them hang metal or jewels form their body to show their individuality; others dye their hair, or combine the colour and size of their clothing to show their personality. The issue here is that everyone on the ship wears Federation uniforms, so that’s not completely an option.”

“So… he’s taking notes to remember who he’s talking to?”

“Quite likely; he must be writing down the most remarkable features of every human on the ship he encounters, while he memorises it.”

“Why doesn’t he just look at their name tags?”

“I think not remembering someone is offensive in human culture. Besides, there could be an instance where they’re not wearing uniform so that wouldn’t be an option.”

“But why only humans? There are plenty of species in this ship.”

“Yes, but most of us are visually different enough that it shouldn’t be a problem. I’m the tallest of my kind, for example, and size is very easy to gauge between bipeds.”

Zyfex thought about it for a moment.

“But me and Holia have almost identical features and heat signatures, how does he--”

“Mr. Zyfex,” Dr T’chem said, looking at him in the eyes, “You’re blue and he’s purple.”

Zyfex hissed in surprise. “What is… purple?”

“It’s a colour you can’t see; I’ll send you a link to an article later.”

“So is that why he spends more time with people from other species?”

“Possibly. He can recognise them better than his own, so he sticks to the group where he’s less likely to commit a social faux pas.”

“That’s good to hear. So I shouldn’t worry about the secret biology lessons he’s giving to G’kare either?”

Dr. T’chem fought to suppress a grin, and failed miserably.

“I’m sure G’kare could really use the knowledge. Just pretend you didn’t see the list, and don’t bring it up; humans can be sensitive about those things.”

“Got it. Sorry for wasting your time, Doctor.”

“Don’t worry,” the doctor said, “you’ve given me valuable information to add to my research.”

Zyfex slithered out of the room and Dr. T’chem put the file back, laughing quietly at his own shenanigans.

Part 3