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omgkatsudonplease · 6 years

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For the song prompts: "Boredom and Joy" by Jets Overhead. ^_^

day 3, part 2!

and yes, NICA (numerical integrated computer array, but i’m really bad at acronyms so pls feel free to suggest alternatives) is the AI version of @nicaforov. listen,,, evil AI is out, thirsty AI is in 😉

For Nevans, the act of the forehead and fingertip touch is deeply intimate, a show of trust and affection. Here is my mind meeting yours, it says. Here are my defenses, all laid bare at your feet. I am vulnerable at your touch, my mind open to yours and yours to mine.

Kissing Yuuri is more than he could have ever imagined.

He feels a weightlessness he’d never felt before, a sense of perfect clarity and rightness as the Terran’s fingertips press into his own. Yuuri breathes into their space, his lashes fluttering in wonder, and Viktor is blown away at the sheer wealth of information that Yuuri’s mind grants him at this touch. The underlying buzz of fear and anxiety, the strength, the stubbornness, the love – everything a contradiction and yet all of it impossibly amalgamated into the wonderful being kissing him now.

It’s everything Viktor has ever wanted to feel, and he never wants to stop feeling it, ever again.

“Are you okay?” Yuuri asks as they pull apart. “You seem… winded.”

“It’s a good winded,” Viktor says quickly. Not entirely – just this one kiss feels like the first bite into forbidden fruit. Now that he’s had a taste, he doesn’t want to return to normal, to a life without Yuuri in it.

Which may happen, as his time is running out. He cannot ascend the throne unbonded; Gosha has already had to hand down his place in the succession because he’s been unable to bond with any of the Candidates. The prospect of returning to Neva after this, and making a Candidate his bonded consort just to ascend the throne doesn’t appeal to him at all anymore.

(Gosha, as someone who had thrown himself into the study of ruling the planet, had wanted the throne more than him. He would be better suited, if it weren’t for his relatively terrible empath skills.)

Viktor tears himself out from his thoughts when he feels Yuuri’s fingers against the back of his hand. Unthinking, he turns his hand over, baring his palms. Yuuri smiles, trailing designs across Viktor’s skin.

“We should get up,” Yuuri says after a moment. His room is starting to brighten, anyway; Viktor suspects the hue of the light is meant to mimic Terran daylight. “NICA, what are we doing today?”

There is a meeting at 0800 standard hours, she replies. Captain Babicheva would like to discuss the job given to the crew by Prince Viktor of the House of Nikiforov. A pause. The Prince is in your quarters with you.

“Yeah, I got that,” Yuuri says, laughing. “What are the specifics of the job?”

The location and safe return of Prince Yuri of the House of Nikiforov, replies NICA. Prince Yuri is an adopted high-empath Nevan formerly of the noble House of Plisetsky, a cadet branch of the House of Nikiforov. His powers were discovered at the age of 5, and from thereon he was adopted into the main line and is currently second in the line of succession.

“That’s not public record,” Viktor remarks, raising an eyebrow. “I didn’t know ship computers had access to royal documents.”

“NICA’s sort of one of my pet projects,” Yuuri admits, his cheeks flushing pink. “Mila actually put some of the Nevan stuff into her when I was coding for her information retrieval system. She said it was ‘just in case’, so…”

Captain Babicheva has eluded Nevan Searchers for three Standard years after fleeing the planet in an attempt to escape an intended bonding to Prince Alexei, NICA chips in cheerily. Prince Alexei is currently unbonded, but has an official companion, a Terran named Kat Parson –

“NICA, you could’ve told me that before we went to Neva in the first place,” Yuuri points out.

Captain Babicheva set the security on that information to a ‘need to know’ basis. I have deduced that you need to know.

“Thanks.” Yuuri sighs. “NICA, can you order me a coffee?”

Viktor follows him, fascinated, as they head through the halls of the ship towards the galley. The Firebird is an older model of a standard Nevan long-distance starship, able to accommodate a crew of fifty with escape pods to spare, though clearly the current crew is much smaller than that. Based on some of the patches and quirks in the panelling and the Terran-coded ship’s computer, though, it’s clear that the Firebird has gotten some modifications during her time with this crew.

“I also put NICA on my own ship,” Yuuri adds as they pass the doors marked ‘hangar’. “In fact that’s where I do most of the tinkering; better she messes up the Vicchan instead of the Firebird, you know?”

“You named your ship after your dog?” asks Viktor, eyes wide.

“Well, her real name is the Victory,” replies Yuuri, shrugging. “I got her when we escaped an Orson raider fleet, so it felt fitting.”

Viktor gapes. Until now, he’s never heard of anyone who’s escaped an Orson raider fleet and lived to tell the tale. “How did that happen?”

“You should ask Phichit for the story, he’s got musical numbers,” replies Yuuri, as they step into the galley and he heads straight for the replicator. “Thank god for still being in orbit – I sometimes forget what real coffee tastes like when we’re out in space for ages.”

“Are you just trying to turn me off going out to space with you?” teases Viktor. “Because it’s not happening.”

Welcome, Prince Viktor of the House of Nikiforov, the ship’s computer suddenly says. Viktor blinks at the replicator panel, now displaying a variety of menu options. We have a variety of standard Nevan cuisine to order from portside for your comfort and enjoyment.

“It’s spaceport food,” says Yuuri, already halfway through his coffee. “Nothing fancy.”

Viktor purses his lips and looks at the menu. “What if I want to try something else?” he asks.

“There’s some meals from most Federation planets,” replies Yuuri. “I’ve been trying to perfect my mother’s katsudon recipe, but it’s strangely hard to code for breaded pork cutlets?”

“Ooh! I’d like to try that,” says Viktor. The replicator makes a whirring noise.

“Ah, I feel like I should apologise in advance.” Yuuri laughs. “Maybe if you ever find yourself on Earth sometime you should find my mother and get the original recipe. Nothing else will ever compare.”

Half an hour later, Viktor realises that if he ever does do that, he might expire on the spot from good food, because the replicator katsudon is one of the most delicious things he’s had in his entire life.

“Wow, this is amazing!” he exclaims. “Who made it?”

“The replicator,” says Yuuri. “Though, technically it was NICA controlling it. Again, it’s not really authentic, since she has to break down our existing food stock to create the raw ingredients, so sometimes she runs out of, like, the pork toner or the egg, or… I’m sorry. Bad time to discuss it.”

“Well, I don’t have a point of comparison, so it tastes good to me,” replies Viktor matter-of-factly. He looks up at one of the lights. “NICA, it was delicious!”

Thank you, Prince Viktor, replies NICA. I’m deeply touched.

After eating, Yuuri leads him into the wardroom where the meeting is apparently scheduled to take place. Mila is there, along with two Allegrians, the dark-skinned Terran Viktor vaguely recognises as Phichit, and Dr Minami. The ship’s doctor is sitting off to the side, though, and he waves at Viktor as they come in.

“Feeling better?” he asks. Viktor smiles and rotates his wrist upwards thrice. The Allegrian gesture works; Dr Minami smiles and repeats it.

“Thank you for joining us today, Your Highness,” Mila says as the door closes behind Yuuri. “Phichit has intercepted transmissions from Nevan Law Enforcement about the origins of the metal you turned in last night.”

The anger. The panic. The confusion. Viktor’s stomach turns as the reports are projected for everyone to see. “The Mandalan Empire,” he breathes.

“No way,” says Phichit.

The projection fades. Everyone looks over at the Terran, who has a hand clenched firmly against the table. “It says it’s Mandalan in origin,” one of the Allegrians points out.

“Most of the Mandalan delegation were severely injured,” Phichit points out. “They’re in no position to be stealing princes.”

“Maybe they did that and someone else took advantage of the situation?” asks Yuuri. Phichit sends him a betrayed expression.

“Seung-gil is a student, not a terrorist,” he hisses.

“Maybe not him, but one of his colleagues –”

“Which one of us spent the evening talking to them?” demands Phichit. “Chris, you can back me up. They support Prime Minister Park and the Emperor’s peace policies. They would never.”

The Allegrian named Chris bites his lip. “They were supportive of the Federation treaty,” he agrees after a moment. “But –”

“Okay, maybe it’s just my little human gut instinct, but I know they’re innocent,” snaps Phichit. “Wrong place at the wrong time. Someone stole a Mandalan bomb and set it off –”

“It was a Mandalan ship energy core,” corrects Mila. “They’re extremely volatile in contact with liquid. There’s a Mandalan ship out there with no or very little energy; those things are extremely pricey because they’re so efficient otherwise.”

“That only supports my theory!” Phichit exclaims, throwing up his hands. “Why would the Mandalans sabotage their own ship? I bet you someone did it to make it look like the Mandalans want to breach the treaty. Maybe the warmongering hawks in their Imperial Fleet paid them.”

Viktor takes the security footage of the blast, magnifying it until it fills most of the space. “Has whoever done this sent any demands?” he asks.

“Not that the Nevan Police know of,” replies Mila. “While they search planetside, we’ll check the logs at the spaceport. Chances are, whoever did this would want to get out of Nevan territory as soon as possible, especially if they’re also responsible for the explosion.”

“I think I know who did it,” says Chris suddenly, holding up his commlink. Viktor only catches a glimpse of a conversation hovering above the commlink before Chris dismisses it. “Seung-gil texted me, says he just got discharged from the hospital but can’t find his ship anywhere.”

A pause. “You think… no way.” Phichit shakes his head.

Chris nods. “Whoever stole Seung-gil’s ship probably has the Prince, too.”

#yoi #viktuuri #victuuri #lily's dabbles #yoiroyaltyweek #day 3 #rewrite the stars #iwritevictuuri #ask

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mrmichaelchadler · 5 years

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Blade Runner 2049 and the Disposability of Virtual Females

This review was originally published on January 18, 2018 and is being republished for Women Writers Week.

During Phillip K. Dick’s research on Nazi Germany for The Man in the High Castle, he came across a cache of Gestapo documents stashed in the closed stacks at UC Berkeley’s library, including the diary of an SS officer stationed in Warsaw, near the Jewish ghetto. One entry was the man griping that his sleep was being interrupted by the cries of starving children. Shaken, Dick later reflected in an interview “It is not human to complain in your diary that starving children are keeping you awake ... There is among us something that is a bipedal humanoid, morphologically identical to the human being but that is not human.”

That compassion is what’s supposed to separate us from androids, and the collective human failure to always pass a Voight-Kampff test is the knife’s edge (blade’s edge?) paradox that’s part of what makes the original "Blade Runner" such an intriguing cult puzzle. Conversely, "Blade Runner 2049’s" philosophical themes are more elusive, if not downright murky (like its cinematography) and let’s let Ridley Scott say it: “[That movie] was fucking way too long.” The only recurring theme that’s crystal-clear is the expendability of women. "Blade Runner 2049" is extraordinarily brutal to female bodies. (Maybe that’s why it bombed at the box office, with only 29% of ticket sales going to women.) What begins as a egalitarian attitude to nudity (there are flaccid penises on some inert replicant bodies on display in a lab morgue) quickly turns into the same-old acreage of female flesh, usually as a prelude to maiming, objectifying, or taking a bullet to the head.

That’s the hardest and ugliest scene in "Blade Runner 2049": Rachel, digitally recreated as a young Sean Young, marching on screen, tilting her head a little bit, mouthing a few lines of dialogue and then getting shot in the head, execution style. OK, it’s not Rachel. It’s another clone in the Rachel model made by the Tyrell Corporation. But it’s still hard to take. And it’s the most shocking example of an ominous trend of the new technology of virtual actors treating actresses more callously than actors, both on and off-screen.

To be fair, isn’t every actor eventually a virtual actor? Just a couple bouncing photons, first off their god-given cheekbones onto raw negative or digital plate, and then from the reflective surface of the screen into our dark-dilated eyes. There’s a scene in "Blade Runner 2049" that acknowledges that truth, when the holographic girlfriend Joi consummates her relationship with K by projecting her image overtop the prostitute Mariette’s fleshy replicant body. We cheer for Joi and K. One might be a robot and the other an AI, but the movie takes great pains to emphasize how their love is real. The biggest irony is that a movie explicitly musing about how synthetic humans deserve empathy and inclusion is blind to the antithetical practice of using virtual actresses to speed up the expiration date on their already perishable careers.

For the sake of narrowing this article’s scope, let’s clarify that a motion-capture actor like Andy Serkis is not a virtual actor. Serkis is paid as an actor is paid, he wears a costume as an actor does (in this case, a digital costume) and Gollum’s presence on screen still contains Serkis’s performance. (The chrome form of the T-1000 in "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," recreated in a computer from reference footage of Robert Patrick, can also be considered this way for our purposes.) We’re only going to discuss the descendants of "Rendez-vous à Montréal" (1987), the computer animated short starring 3D approximations of Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart. This definition of a virtual actor can range from compositing a face or head onto a stand-in’s body (Brad Pitt in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," Brandon Lee in "The Crow," Oliver Reed in "Gladiator," Jeff Bridges in "Tron: Legacy") to using age smoothing software (also Pitt in "Benjamin Button," Robert Downey Jr. in "Captain America: Civil War," Kurt Russell in "Guardians of the Galaxy") to creating an entire virtual body (Ryan Reynolds in "Deadpool").

Every example cited above is of a man, and every one of those actors got to appear in other scenes in those movies as their usual, sometimes wrinkly, unaugmented selves as well. (Wrinkly and unaugmented is how Peter Cushing’s avatar appeared in "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story," too.) Actresses barely get to appear wrinkly in movies anyway, and now with the advent of virtual possibilities Hollywood has jumped on the chance to find another way to exclude them based on age. I’m not the first critic to notice this— Nate Jones pointed it out in an article in Vulture in October of last year, touching on the other egregious example of a young virtual Carrie Fisher in "Rogue One".) When it came to creating the virtual Rachel, Young did have some involvement (presumably with her consent, and was presumably financially compensated. As much as Robert Downey, Jr. was for "Captain America: Civil War"? Probably not.).

The Rachel that appears on-screen was recreated by British effects house MPC from archival photographs and footage, with Young coming in to have her present-day face scanned digitally and give body stand-in Loren Peta some movement consultation. But that’s not her body on screen, it’s not her voice, and that’s not her face. And if it’s not her real self in other scenes of the movie, like it was for Downey, Jr. or most of the other actors on the list above, it’s not her payday. To paraphrase Rachel in the original "Blade Runner," ever since she got old and “difficult,” that death-knell slur for actresses, Sean Young’s no longer in the business ... she is the business. And the sadism with which Rachel is treated in her 180-some seconds of screen time is utterly cold-blooded and unnecessary, almost as jarringly cruel as the way the bitchy assistant Zara in "Jurassic World" was subjected to a virtual mauling and death totally out of proportion to her "crimes."

Let’s play Tyrell’s advocate for a moment here: is Villeneuve merely accurately ... well, replicating the disposability and callousness of the original "Blade Runner" towards its replicants, especially Pris and Zhora? Is the point that all replicants are disposable, and do we merely notice the way the equally callous way female replicants are dispatched because it twinges at our chivalry? (It has crossed his mind. As he put it in an interview with Gizmodo: “Cinema is a mirror on society. Blade Runner is not about tomorrow; it’s about today. And I’m sorry, but the world is not kind to women.”) But this argument isn’t about one female character in one dark and dystopian movie. It’s about Young, Hollywood exile, and all the other young actresses who are at the brunt of a new way to make them disposable. Rachel in "Blade Runner 2049" is a stand-in for all of them, given the merest morsel of time in the sun before she’s shot in the head.

Rachel has always been special, and not just because she’s the most advanced replicant ever made. In the seduction scene (or rape scene, as can be equally argued) in the original movie, she is reluctant to the point of tears to go to bed with Deckard because she doesn’t trust whether her feelings of love are real. In the moment she quavers “Put your hands on me,” she is taking an unprecedented leap across the uncanny valley, trusting that this new feeling that has germinated inside her—something not included in Tyrell’s niece’s childish memories, that rogue wild thing called love that a lab cannot yet make—is true, the first real feeling she’s ever had. To have her dispatched so brutally sends shockwaves that resonate beyond the narrative into the strange and merciless new world actresses must now negotiate thanks to its thoughtlessness. Hey, "Blade Runner 2049": You know that Voight-Kampff test of yours? Did you ever take that test yourself?

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