#disclaimer that this is schematic and half-baked

[elancholia]

People in the late 20th century thought the fundamental arc of human history was exploration, whereas now it looks like it's information processing.

In traditional science fiction, the historically progressive human urge is wanderlust, the pull of unknown geography, horror vacui or amor vacui depending on how you look at it. Those writers invoke the elapse of time that separated Kitty Hawk from the moon landing. They recite a procession of discoverers that includes Columbus or the Polynesians and whose next logical steps are space colonization and superluminal travel. Era-defining technologies are transportation technologies. You still get this now, sometimes. In a much-dunked-upon scene in Star Trek: Discovery (2017), a character's litany of great inventors includes the Wright brothers, the guy who invented FTL, and Elon Musk.

The corresponding fear, of course, is alien invasion—that we are not Columbus but the Indians.

Now, the developments actually restructuring people's lives are either of the computer or on the computer. The PC, the internet, smartphones, social media, LLMs. Bits, not atoms. It has been this way for some time, though it hasn't fully made its way into culture. The progenitors of the new future are writing, the printing press, the abacus. We can see the arc clearly in retrospect, now that the future seems likely to be defined by machine learning.

Just as before, there is some anxiety that our trajectory will lead us into the grip of alien intelligences, horrendous and devouring.

If you go back to the period stretching (roughly) from the late 19th century through the Second World War, stories often hinge on wonder-substances and novel fundamental forces. This was, of course, an era in which a new force or element was turning up every other week. You couldn't swing a cat without hitting one. They discovered guncotton when some guy left his fouled lab coat next to an oven. Hence, Vril, the Ray, the "eighth and ninth solar rays" of Burroughs's Mars. In later stories, this sort of stuff is generally secondary, though superhero fiction preserves more of the old mentality.

#disclaimer that this is schematic and half-baked #meta stuff #culture #speculative fiction #ai #about fiction

[headspacedad]

Two Minutes (part 3)

All right!  So, I’ve been sitting on this one for a bit to see if Ryou would write differently for me but no.  He is very controlled, very consumed angry and he’s not done.  So here it is, for everyone screaming (with me because I was too) in agony over how Ryou would react to his twin’s disappearance and the ‘pilot error’ tag the mission got.  Ta da!  And, just as a reminder, this is all @theprojectava‘s fault because they drew a picture that put the burr under my saddle and got me writing for Ryou in the first place.

Also I feel I should warn.  I’m pretty sure this is the last chapter.  Because the next chapter would be the start of a very long fanfic I do not have the ability to get into right now.  Or anytime soon.  If anyone else wants to take it from here, throw a link to my part in your disclaimer and go for it!  If anyone just wants to talk shop and speculate, I am so here for that too, public or private.  And on that note - I hope you enjoy my suffering offering.

Chapters 1 and 2 if you need them.

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Whatever you create you are responsible for.

Ryou moved through the work shop with driven, ruthless efficiency.

Whatever you create - you are responsible for.

A year and a half.  A year since Little Magpie, the ship his brother had staked his life on, the ship Ryou had built as a promise to him, had gone silent.  A year and a half since his brother had left Earth.  And now this.

Ryou hadn’t stayed at the Garrison.  How could he?  How dare they?  ‘Pilot error’ his ass!  ‘Pilot error’ was just a fill in, just short hand for ‘we don’t know what happened’.  Just an excuse so Ryou’s own promising career wouldn’t be gutted.  ‘Pilot error’.  When the whole command staff knew the ship had made a safe landing, when there was no piloting going on at all.  When -

the fault had to have been with the ship itself.

...

With Ryou’s ship.

He couldn’t stay after that.  He couldn’t.

He could have moved to the private sector.  ‘Pilot error’ covered his sins.  Any of the corporations would have hired him for exorbitant amounts.  He could have hidden away in his work, he could have pretended half of him hadn’t been left to drift forever, slowly baking in cosmic radiation in the pathetic gravity of a god-forsaken moon.  He could have -

he couldn’t.

He couldn’t ignore his betrayal.  He couldn’t ignore his helplessness.  He went over the schematics of the ship until he saw them in his sleep, obsessive, driven, ruthless.  Trying to find where he went wrong.  Trying to find what he’d missed.

Trying to find out how he’d killed his own brother.

A year and a half.  A year and a half of purgatory, lost and adrift.  Where did he go if there was no Takashi to follow?  What mattered if there was no Takashi to smile his pride and approval?  His parents and grandmother mourned in their own way and never spoke a word of guilt to him.  They might not think there was any. But he knew.  He knew.  And he had to fix it. Somehow.  He always fixed things for Taka...

He’d ignored the calls three times, numbers with Garrison opening codes, before he’d picked up the fourth time and what his one-time colleague had told him had him jamming gear into a backpack and pulling strings back to America.’

Checking his comm messages on the way there had left him no more enlightened.  Just the team code for ‘respond immediately: emergency’ on two of them and nothing but static on the other, a bad reception on the edge of its transmission range.

And now here he was.  In one of the Garrison’s underground hangers with less than two hours of promised privacy thanks to both decontamination procedure and command scrambling to find someone who ranked enough up the chain to take charge of this.  And this was a ship the likes of which Ryou had never seen before.

His teammate hadn’t known how the Garrison had gotten it, just that it had just arrived and no one recognized a single piece of it.  Ryou didn’t either but it hummed to him, strange and foreign, the way all ships did and excitement threatened to make his hand shake too badly to work as he stepped into the cockpit past the scorch marks on the side of the doors and floor, over the outline of something the scientists had already removed. 

His colleague was going to get worse than fired if anyone ever realized she’d called him.  Ryou was going to get worse than arrested if he was caught.  And yet - the risk was worth it.  Because - finally - he had an answer.

Not a whole one.  It was wrapped in more questions than he knew to ask.  But - if Taka had been able to fly anything - Ryou had been able to build it.  And he’d started it all when he’d reverse engineered his late grandfather’s clock.  The ship wasn’t a clock - and he had less than two hours to figure it out.  But he would.  Damn everything left in the world - but he’d figure this ship out.

Because there was something else out there.  Something beyond the Garrison.  Something mankind hadn’t known about.  Something that had reached through the long emptiness of cold space to touch them.  Something this ship was a part of. 

Something that might - a year ago - had silenced a little magpie as it rested unsuspecting on a dead moon circling a human star.  It was a ridiculous theory.  Outlandish.  Possible but not probable considering the vastness of space and how far on the edge of things their tiny solar system was.  It was a fairy tale for tech heads. 

It didn’t make any sense.

But for the past year of his life, nothing in Ryou’s life had made sense.

He was willing to step away from what was sane.  And this ship would tell him.

No.

This ship would take him.

To find his brother.  To bring his body home.

And to find out what had happened to his magpie and make anyone responsible for it pay.

Pay like hell.

(continuation)

#shiro #VLD #shirogane takashi #takashi shirogane #voltron #ryou #ryou shirogane #two minutes #okay to reblog #fanfic