#if its not trying to make the people there paranoid its just a grift | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

canmom · 2 years

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hey there, i'm sorry to bring this back up, but like a couple other askers i have been struggling with anxiety about roko's basilisk recently-- or more specifically, about yudkovsky's belief in the potentiality of a "real", working basilisk concept. i know that, understandably, we're not big fans of him here and i don't mean to come off like i ascribe much credibility to him. this is just something that i've been extremely paranoid about. i wanted to know your thoughts, thanks in advance

Hey friend, no worries, if my role is to be the Basilisk Reassurer of Tumblr then that is one I accept. (Naively? I wish one day I can write a post so searing that it will dispel this demon for good.)

The thing about Yudkowsky is that he's functionally a conman - or more precisely, a court wizard. I don't mean that he's insincere (he seems rather painfully so, and devoted to spending years trying to iron out the wrinkles in his convoluted worldview, but then again his belief system does seem to have done very well for him), but he's learned to build up a great image of power around himself, and use that presumption of seriousness and insight to justify his vague, extravagant claims.

To elaborate - we'll start by taking his writing on the 'AI-box experiment'. I'm going to be doing this from memory but if you need me to dig up the links, it should still be possible to find them.

grift 1. the ai-box

This is a thought experiment Yudkowsky cooked up to explain why it would not be safe to try and separate his imaginary omnipotent artificial intelligence from the world, in a 'box'. Yudkowsky claims that the AI would be so much smarter than the humans guarding it that, even if the only means it has to communicate is a chat box, it would inevitably be able to manipulate them into 'opening the box' and letting the AI carry out its evil plans on the world. (Thus the only solution is to pay Yudkowsky to win the race to build a 'good' omnipotent AI system first.)

To prove this rather contrived scenario would play out the way he says, Yudkowsky carried out an 'experiment' in which he invited participants to roleplay as the human guarding the box, and Yudkowsky would play the AI. The human player would have a certain set of arguments they weren't allowed to make (e.g. questioning the AI's capabilities), they had to take it seriously and not just go 'shut up' to the AI, etc.; on his side, Yudkowsky wouldn't be allowed to just pay them $10000 to pretend they'd been persuaded or something. There was a great performance of like, dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's to make you believe this would be a 'realistic simulation' of a human with god in a box. On his website, Yudkowsky then published the results saying x% of people turned out to 'open the box', details don't really matter tbh.

What he did not reveal at this point (perhaps he did later? if so it would be years after) was any sort of chat transcript, i.e. exact argument he used to win these people around. His vague justification for this was that then the discourse around it would focus on whether his argument is sound - rather than his intended rhetorical point, that the AI, which is of course much more of a master manipulator than old Eliezer, would always be able to convince someone to let it out.

What you can see at work here is the trick: Yudkowsky does a great deal of work to build up the rhetorical aura of the AI (and himself) as master manipulator, and then, out of some paternalistic instinct I guess, hides the object of the rhetoric from scrutiny so you only have his word for it. The result is a feeling: there's this mysterious super-argument out there that can convince people to do what they avowedly would not, and you don't know what it is, isn't that scary? Isn't it lucky Eliezer is here to defend you from such things?

(Nevermind that even without any conscious selection effect, the people who would agree to such an 'experiment' are probably a group that's very susceptible to Eliezer's bullshit. The point isn't to do actual science, which it only vaguely resembles - it's to create a little rhetorical device to support the rest of Eliezer's project, in which it was successful. Eliezer tells you there's a naive idea of 'AI boxing' that someone allegedly promotes, and then 'proves' this is foolish. Wow, that Eliezer chap sure is a smart cookie, huh? Lucky he headed that one off.)

grift 2. MIRI

The same is of course the case for Yudkowsky's central grift, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (once called the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence), a think tank which was founded on the promise that Eliezer Yudkowsky is working very, very hard on solving all the problems of ethics and then implementing the godlike AI with this philosophy at its core. All his other work - the blogposts, the fanfictions, the pissy arguments on Reddit about Roko's basilisk - are merely there to promote this real project, which he is honestly working very hard on, gov'nor.

Of course, he can hardly share the methods he's pursuing in an unfinished state. Because Eliezer Yudkowsky and his friends are unique geniuses, and nobody else has any relevant input. So if the output of MIRI is some largely ignored philosophy papers repackaging LessWrong rhetoric, that proves nothing. At least they're not still trying to write the AI in Java I guess?

Now, it's probably tired to say this at this point, but there is no evidence whatsoever that anyone at MIRI has any facility in AI research, or that Yudkowsky is capable of solving the nebulous problem he set out to solve, or that their project is even possible in the first place, and even if any of that was true, there's not much reason to think their chances of success will scale with money.

Currently the most successful avenue in AI research is to throw vast quantities of computing power to train a "neural network" (essentially a glorified multivariable polynomial function!) to fit itself to the desired behaviour. This can produce some startling successes in many fields like computer graphics, but it is also notoriously opaque - we find it very hard to understand the internal representations in the layers of a neural network, let alone modify them to our liking, at least without using another neural network (as in a GAN). Training a neural network to contain something so abstract as a moral philosophy is at this point perhaps even less plausible, let alone reliable, than indoctrinating a human to follow it.

Moreover, making any headway requires vast amounts of computing power to train the networks: it's not entirely a brute force approach because there are better and worse ways to design and train a network, but ultimately it's a game you can only enter if you're a large tech company. Even then, even in fields where moderate successes have been found like voice recognition, the 'AI' is often augmented by vast armies of poorly paid humans on services like Mechanical Turk to apply corrections.

The main success of MIRI - outside of being the centre of a cult - is making its case to people with vastly more money than any human could ever figure out to do with, like Peter Thiel, to put aside a million dollars or two on the offchance that he's onto something here. I don't even think these people are true believers, but even if any of them are, they're very much selected from a milieu that is as vulnerable to believing these kinds of fantasies as the tech workers who form LessWrong's primary base.

So let's return to my original claim: Eliezer Yudkowsky is a court wizard. Instead of promising the ability to turn lead into gold, or an elixir or immortality, he's promising the reins to an AI god which will further technocapital's hold on the planet. Eventually.

Like a court wizard, Eliezer Yudkowsky's primary means to justify his extravagant claims is to cultivate an aura of hidden powers and secret knowledge.

This is not dissimilar to the advertising industry, which claims an incredible ability to exert hyper-specific social control - subtly planting ideas in the back of peoples' mind that manifest at the product shelf - when in fact what they're often doing is patting themselves on the back for metrics which reward showing people ads for things they were already going to buy. The clients of the ad industry must believe that their ability to valorise their capital is dependent on the ad industry's secret knowledge, worth paying large sums for. Since it's actually extremely difficult to measure the impact of an ad campaign on sales of a given product outside of exceptional cases (a viral ad leading to a brief spike), it's relatively easy for them to get along making extravagant claims, and even present an aura of scientific scrutiny, without really ever having the goods.

Note that a court wizard does not need to be insincere. Believing in your own shit is a great way to make yourself sound more convincing. John Dee mixed real concrete advice to Queen Elizabeth I (mostly very evil but nevertheless prescient like build colonies! make an empire!) with complete nonsense (advice on what was astrologically auspicious), but to his mind, he was probably sincere on all of it. He believed, for example, that his friend Edward Kelley really could talk to angels, enough that when Kelley told him "the angels say I have to sleep with your wife", Dee went along with it (although it broke his relationship to Kelley).

I don't really know if Yudkowsky realises, deep down, that this is all a bunch of bullshit designed to scare ex-Christians who read a lot of science fiction novels - because the human capacity for self-delusion is enormous. Unfortunately for him, this can't simply be reduced to a list of simple, atomic 'cognitive biases'. Sometimes you invent an entire ideology that is rewarding and self-reinforcing enough to swallow up your life.

grift 3. the 'stronger' Roko's basilisk

Is there a 'stronger' Roko's Basilisk out there? Maybe, since Roko's Basilisk is complete nonsense with multiple weak premises and strained logical steps, so you could probably tighten up one or two of them.

(for example, I think many presentations dispense with the elaborate contrivance of 'acausal trade' and instead present a simpler argument that goes along the lines of - "what if you are the ancestor simulation and the AI will torture you at any minute"? to which the only answer is just, what if the world was made of pudding? [click that btw :p it's a cute song and a great little animation])

I don't know if that's what Yudkowsky has in mind. There are so many objections to Roko's Basilisk that a version of the argument that answers all of them seems unlikely. Yudkowsky meanwhile buys most of the premises of Roko's basilisk - that there can and will be a godlike AI, that the AI will be motivated to play the 'acausal trade' game to motivate long-dead people who imagined something vaguely like it existing, that it is possible to create an 'ancestor simulation' - so he could probably find some small tweak that would make it into a version that would satisfy him. I strongly doubt his version of the argument would satisfy me. And I would guess it wouldn't satisfy you either if he bothered to show you.

But we can't know because he won't tell us. Because if he told us, he'd be subject to criticism and scrutiny, and if he doesn't tell us, he gets to get both the rewards of having this scary spin on Pascal's wager out in the wild to motivate people to give him money, and to his followers, the appearance of wisely protecting people from dangerous cognitohazards that only Eliezer Yudkowsky is brave and smart enough to defuse.

So all you can really say to this is "prove it, bitch" and get on with your life because he won't. He just wants to scare you, and thereby justify himself when people made fun of his initial wild overreaction.

Anyway, I would also add, Eliezer Yudkowsky is largely the man responsible for spreading Roko's basilisk - by attempting to suppress it and kicking off a Streisand effect. By this point if people know anything about LessWrong it's "that crazy Roko's Basilisk thing". There's fucking Youtube videos with huge view counts about it. Did he anticipate this would happen? I think that gives him too much credit - he's not playing five dimensional chess, he's just huffing his own farts in an echo chamber of people who believe him when he says he's a genius fighting to save the world. Maybe he was having a bad day and panicked himself like so many of his readers and now gets a flashback any time someone mentions the 'babyfucker' around him. I'd feel bad for him but you know.

I'm just really sorry that people still have to deal with this horseshit in 2022. It's - in effect if not design - a cult indoctrination tool designed to pick on people who are probably autistic, lacking meaningful connections, and certainly very anxious about doing right in the world. Lesswrong's ideology speaks in an appealing language of systems, probabilities and so on, it gives the appearance of being no-bullshit and insightful and the rush of finding someone who either thinks like you or thinks in a fascinatingly alien and novel way, it gives the satisfaction of being smart enough to follow all its tracts - and then twists this rhetoric into a knife to stab you in the eye. (The same goes even more for the subsequent mutation to the 'slate star codex' fandom.)

Unequivocally: the existence of the Roko's Basilisk argument is strong evidence for the opposite conclusion - if you want to minimise suffering for yourself and other people, you should make sure anyone who behaves like Eliezer Yudkowsky has as little money and power as possible.

#lesswrongers

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cranehusbands · 4 years

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fortune favours the broken

Crypto | Park Tae Joon/Loba Andrade; established relationship; secret relationship; post-broken ghost; formal events; alcohol tw; 1861 words

a/n: AND ITS ALL DONE. I DID THE WEEK. still kinda sad i fumbled over the past two days but!!! i wrote 7 fics in a row, and posted them, and im so proud of myself for doing just that.

wanted to flip back around and write cryptloba again for @apex-rarepairweek day 7, which was a free day. so i just went.. crazy stupid. i was aiming for ~2000 words for the grand finale to this wonderful week, but i wont drag out what little inspo i can gather! hope you all had as much fun this week as i did! <3

likes < reblogs, any comments in the tags are appreciated

ao3 mirror in the reblogs!

Preview: The thief twirled her keys around her finger for a moment, before sticking it into the cork guarding the top of the bottle of wine they were about to share, popping it open and pouring it into the plastic, disposable cup Crypto held, before pouring her own, and putting the bottle down on the floor beside her feet, ready for another top-up. “How romantic.” “Isn’t it just?” He held his cup up to her in a toast, to which she accepted, the two of them giggling a little at the anticlimactic clunk of plastic before taking a drink. They shared the silence for a moment, before Loba rested her head against his shoulder again, as she had done at the party, putting her free hand against his leg, smirking to himself as he tensed a little, though her expression soon softened as he did, resting his head against hers. She closed her eyes. “One day, I’ll be able to tell the world just how great of a man Taejoon Park is.” “And what will you do?” “I’ll scream it at the top of my lungs, at every chance I get.”

At the end of every season, officials held a big formal event to celebrate the achievements of the legends, and to flaunt how much money they had. Crypto never really cared for it; too loud, too many variables to consider, too high of a risk for him to get caught. But somehow, every time, he was roped into it. And somehow, he surely couldn’t imagine why, he always hated it.

It was Rampart this time. The newest legend was all too excited, blinded by the lights and the flashy formalities that came with her golden card into the games, up to her neck in the wealth but seeming to never lose her… less-than-grateful charm that he almost enjoyed, if not for her pushiness to get him involved in the antics. But he would humour her. He’d humoured Mirage when he got here, then Wattson the season after, and then finally Loba, the newest legend before the younger Brit had arrived, who offered her hand to dance with him in one corner of the ballroom that night, despite everything that had happened that caused a strain between a once-tight group. (He should have blamed her, he should, but he took her hand and danced with her that night, and to say that he had fallen for her charms - not the charms of Loba, the thief, but Loba Andrade, the woman who had cared to check on him after the ghost was no longer broken - was an understated fact.)

But, as always, things soon took a turn for the worst, even more so than before. Rampart and Mirage had begun arguing over something or other, Octane had caused chaos in the bathrooms (he didn’t even want to know about that), there was a commotion with the reporters that had arrived for an exclusive scoop that he hadn’t managed to catch, and all the while he had remained in one corner, a glass of wine in hand, and unlike any party before, no one had dragged him to dance. ...Well, no one like before, anyways, when he was just as isolated. Crypto stole a glance around - where was the thief anyway? He was sure he’d seen her earlier that night, arriving arm and arm with the rest of the female legends, absolutely stealing the show with her glamour and charm. But now, among the atmosphere of tension and animosity as the cracks and strains had begun to show between business partners - no, between friends - she’d disappeared into the night, as was in her job description.

“Ah, Mr. Kim?” An unfamiliar voice snapped him out of his search, if only momentarily, as he looked down to the rather short, bespeckled man, in a tatty denim jacket and a hastily put-on tie, wielding a notebook. “Apologies, I’m sure you’re enjoying yourself here… on your own… but I wanted to ask you a few questions, if you wouldn’t mind.”

And of course, he too wasn’t immune to harassment by the press. He was disappointed, but not in the least bit surprised.

The questions were just as invasive as he expected, though the reporter was nervous and stuttering over his words, staring down at his notebook in surprise at some of the things coming out of his mouth from a script, so there was some sympathy there. He was just trying to get by, working the grift, as it were - had he still had his old life, Crypto would have inclined to offer more sympathy in solidarity, but this was just pathetic.

He eventually had to excuse himself, getting more and more paranoid as the kid pressed on, quickly apologising before weaving his way through the crowd, where people got too close and for a moment he caught his breath as he felt them almost grab at him - but surely he was just imagining things, imagining his nightmares. Right? ...Right?

The hacker pushed open the door with one hand, dragging his hand down his face as he did. He needed air, needed space. The hacker loosened the tie around his neck, no longer used to wearing them day in and day out as he had done before, in what seemed like a life so distant to him now, popping a button before heading to the balcony, a tall figure already standing there catching his eye.

Loba was pretty in any lighting, but the moonlight seemed to make her look almost divine, the light catching off of the many crystals that littered her dark red dress, lighting up the velvet as it pooled around her feet, like the blood she spilled and shed so often in the arena that she had made her home, but in a way that was… befitting of her grace.

He didn’t say anything to her, watching her take a slow drink from her flute of champagne, staining the glass with the maroon lipstick she wore so well, dark hair cascading down her shoulders.

In fact, it was she that saw him, and spoke, and he knew the smile that played at her lips as she sparked a conversation. “Too much?”

“Ya.”

“Need a drink?”

“Please.”

Loba chuckled, handing over her half empty flute for him to take a sip out of, the fingers brushing as the glass was exchanged. She folded her arms against the railing. “Though I must say, the look suits you. Very dashing.”

He almost choked as he drank, quickly pulling the glass away from his lips and covering his mouth with the side of his fist, patting his chest with it to force the champagne down, only making her laugh a little more - it was like music, that laugh of hers, though she took far too much pleasure in embarrassing him, even when they were alone. Crypto quickly passed the glass back, which she took delicately in her hand.

“...It was the reporters,” Loba told him, after a few beats of silence, the two of them listened to the sounds of the night, and the quiet muffled noises of the party just behind them.

He glanced at her, thinking back to the commotion in the room. So that’s where she’d been. “You too?”

“They had the… the gaul to ask about my parents, and my relationship with that… demonio. The way he claws his way under my skin, and the way they just… eat it up, everything he’s done to me, for years, the calatorals and the nightmare. I just…” She huffed, holding her flute of champagne and twirling it a few times, lips curling a little as she scoffed. “Odio este lugar.”

He paused, watching as she tilted her head back, how her soft lips took the wine in from the glass in a single drink before bringing it back down again. He leaned in closer to her, and lowered his voice. “Daleun delo gaja.”

Loba paused, and looked over to him, and for a moment, she seemed grateful.“...Sí.”

Crypto tried his best to hold back his sigh of relief, as she looked up to him, her face softening as she put her now empty wine glass on the side of the balcony, and held her hand out to him. Her nails were perfect, rings and her signature bracelet sparkling in the moonlight of the outside, and her skin was soft as he gently took her hand, gently running a thumb over her knuckles. And, after glancing at the many glass doors of the party on the inside, he dared to kiss the back of her hand, to which she chuckled.

“My, so old fashioned.”

“Nothing wrong with the classics.” He looked up to her through his eyelashes, finding himself almost smirking at the banter as he stood up again, never letting go of her hand, though feeling it flip in his light grip to hold onto his in return.

They shared a silent moment of serenity on the balcony together, peace from the expectations of the masses and the responsibilities on their shoulders as Apex Legends, as Loba moved in to rest her head against his shoulder, gently swaying as she took hold of his other hand. Crypto soon obliged, smiling to himself a little as they shared a solitary dance in the back of the moonlight and stars.

Crypto left the party first - no one would object to that, seeing him head out of the front door to catch a taxi back to the dropship. No one had seen Loba leave, but they didn’t pay it much mind - the girl had her buttons pushed, she needed her space. The cover they provided was perfect, as they met again in a park somewhat close but still far enough away from the gala that no one would find them, sitting side by side on a lonely bench, highlighted by a moonbeam. How poetic.

The thief twirled her keys around her finger for a moment, before sticking it into the cork guarding the top of the bottle of wine they were about to share, popping it open and pouring it into the plastic, disposable cup Crypto held, before pouring her own, and putting the bottle down on the floor beside her feet, ready for another top-up. “How romantic.”

“Isn’t it just?” He held his cup up to her in a toast, to which she accepted, the two of them giggling a little at the anticlimactic clunk of plastic before taking a drink.

They shared the silence for a moment, before Loba rested her head against his shoulder again, as she had done at the party, putting her free hand against his leg, smirking to himself as he tensed a little, though her expression soon softened as he did, resting his head against hers. She closed her eyes. “One day, I’ll be able to tell the world just how great of a man Taejoon Park is.”

“And what will you do?”

“I’ll scream it at the top of my lungs, at every chance I get.”

“We can only dream.” He moved his head to take a drink without spilling it on his shirt, sighing in an almost resigned way, before he resumed his position. “I’m tired of hiding.”

“I know, amor. I know.” Loba patted her hand against his leg, feeling her take hold of it and pull it off, interlocking her fingers between the gaps in hers. She moved her head to look at him, the moonlight casting a shadow over his tired eyes. Balancing the plastic cup of wine against the edge of the bench, the thief moved her hand to hold his face, gentle in the way she cupped his cheek as she moved in to share a soft kiss. And, perhaps pushed by the alcohol in his system, he didn’t bother to hesitate in case anyone was watching, returning the kiss and even smiling between pauses to catch his breath, face littered with lipstick kisses by the time they were done.

They ended up finishing their bottle that night, each other’s company far better than the fancy gala and jewels and riches that came with their profession. Yes… solitude would do, for now, until they were finally free to tell the world exactly who they were.

#apex legends #apex rarepair week #cryptloba #crypto #loba #apex legends tag #dahl.doc

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leam1983 · 4 years

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Cyberpunk 2077 Thoughts

Having perused Dark Horse Books’ The World of Cyberpunk 2077 over the past few days, I’ve gotten a better feel for the various basic hooks that structure V’s inception as a protagonist. The short of it is the Polish wizards are on the right path to nailing Pondsmith’s treatment the same way they nailed Sapkowski’s works.

Consider the following as half a brain dump, half a series of prospective spoilers, and also half projection, so either skip this, find some other entry to read, or come back to this come late November.

I know I mentioned three halves, but it’s late and I don’t give a shit.

I’m serious - DO NOT PRESS ON IF YOU’RE THE TYPE TO BLOW A GASKET IF YOU’RE INADVERTANTLY SPOILED.

The latest Night City Wire as of August exposed three incipient “life paths”, or starting branches of V’s path. I’ll tackle my personal narrative approaches to them in the order of my choosing.

Nomads: CP2077 is set in a world where much of what we understand to define a family has been blown up, tossed around by climate change and nuclear fire and then stitched back together using grit, resourcefulness and the last dying embers of human decency. Nomads are less a group of people defined by blood relations and more a cadre of individuals that share something more significant than mere genes. It might be a common history, a set of shared hardships, a yen for similar automotive and engineering-related projects - whatever it is, that something pulls people together in ways Corpo rats and street kids will never experience.

This seems to define even the average Nomad’s degree of education. Surprisingly, Nomads are the most well-read group in Coronado Bay’s greater area, some caravans reportedly including entire RVs packed with books. Nomads generationally elect teachers and record-keepers and seem to care for those cultural remnants of the old world, before Pondsmith’s paranoid alternate sixties kicked off more than a century’s worth of technological progression and rampant dehumanization. To a Night City native, a Nomad’s speech patterns appear precious and uselessly florid, while they might appear almost normal to us - maybe slightly touched by the fact that Grandpa Joe or whatever really wanted you to have your Greek classics down before you were old enough to repair your first CH00H2 carburetor on your own.

That new, mega-clustered version of family matters immensely to the Nomads. You identify to yours the same way Orcs in Shadow of War might refer to their clan, or the same way a Scottish clan might design specific visual cues identifying its members. In normal circumstances, Nomads live, thrive and die in service to the clan - and the opening segment for V’s Nomad origins suggests that something happened to his clan. They’re gone, or so the narration says, without going into further detail. Is V responsible? We don’t currently know. As it stands, however, he is a lone Nomad in a clan of one, and soon finds himself pushed out of the Californian wastes and into Night City’s neon-drenched streets.

Seeing this, I considered the narration as an admission of guilt on V’s part. He feels responsible, and hopes that grinding his way to success will in some way atone for what he’s done. Consequently, my Nomad V would be as gruff as could be, but as moral and upstanding as the setting allows. He considers himself as having been invested with an example to set, and would intend to set his sights on more than just filthy lucre. Honest filthy lucre is what matters to him, if that concept even is possible: he might deal in unsavory types and illicit activities, but he always does so with a certain moral rectitude - as a tough and gruff, lean and stringy type you can occasionally catch in his battered Thornton pick-up truck with his feet up on the dashboard and a dog-eared copy of Plato’s Republic in hand. Jackie honestly wonders how he can put up with that Greek pendejo’s endless words and the lack of scrolling animations, while V keeps his Kiroshi optics’ News ticker locked onto grassroots Leftist RSS feeds that stoke a bit of an ignored Rockerboy ethos in him. Quoting Marx in Night City might feel like trying to teach lab rats in the finer points of string theory, but it at least feels genuine to him, compared to the predigested sociopolitical pap Militech, Arasaka and their ilk are more than happy to spew on the airwaves.

There’s a lot to be pissed off about in Richard Night’s failed utopia, a lot of fat cats to gut and buildings to burn. Still, he leaves the glowering act and the churning rage to Johnny Silverhand’s imprinted ghost. Being more of a down-low, gun-toting choomba than a classic Street Samurai, Vincent “V” Carson thinks first and strikes second.

Vinnie isn’t much for electric guitars and anarchy in the UK, much less in the Free State of Southern California; but he does love the occasional Leonard Cohen ballad or the occasional shot of Johnny Cash’s melancholy. Having picked up something of a Northern Texas drawl while cruising, he might feel like Harry Dresden’s Good Ol’ Boy cousin, magic tricks here pushed aside in favor of a measure of dermal plating and a good ol’ fashioned twelve-gauge and revolver combo. Not being much of a techno-fetishist, he considers his optics and his skull jack as being begrudging concessions to an era that looks down on fully “ganic” types. Having grown up with TV serials and the occasional visor-based Braindance all depicting cyberpsychosis as something vile that utterly dehumanizes its sufferers, he’s naturally wary around anyone who seems a little too giddy with the prospect of taking a few scalpels to perfectly decent muscles and bones.

His Thornton is where most of his Eddies go, and yes, he’s named his truck Suzie. Suzie’s done right by him, and he’ll do right by her - unless someone else with a pretty smile and a working moral compass makes him swoon.

Street Kids: if you weren’t taught on the highways or in corporate arcologies, odds are you became a positive blip in an otherwise grim statistic, one of the myriad fucked-up kids raised by other fucked-up kids with more seniority than you. With no roads and paid-for nannies, you survived off of grifts, grit, violence, deceit, smarts and gumption - and that, in its own screwball way, creates its own blood ties. You’re wise by Heywood’s standards - streetwise, that is - and you speak the back-alleys’ lingua franca of threats, insinuation and casual intimidation like no other.

If only Jackie hadn’t fingered that Rayfield, huh? This beaut could’ve been paydirt! Well, at least for a week or so, judging by the fact that hundreds of car thefts are reported across Night City on a daily basis. At least, Dean - who also goes as “V” - got to make a new friend while out in the pokey, and managed to shake a few proverbial trees... They’ve got a short-lease in with Trauma Team’s frequency and could maybe hook themselves up with a sweet finder’s fee for anyone who’s on the verge of death at the hands of the city’s Scavengers...

Little does V know, that’s selling Trauma Team as well as their clients painfully short. Shows of gratitude don’t mean anything if you’re not packing the right social status. He barely remembers his birth parents as it is, and grew up the fifth grubby prospect of one of the Valentinos’ “school clubs” (hence the nickname) - where the points of study refer to the proper observances to be held in Jesus Malaverde’s presence, intensive Chicano and Spanish immersion, as well as the handling of common types of weaponry.

Vincent and Dean would be likely to shoot one another, if placed in the same room. One clings onto nearly-lost value systems, while the other commodifies what can be discarded like so much flesh - only inasmuch as his efforts to pacify his unofficial five or six abuelas force him to forego extensive modifications. His knives and wrist-mounted data port are his main tools of the trade, although Dean keeps his hacking creds along the bare minimum. Why bother, when melting an ATM’s ICE wall and whacking the cops with a baseball bat is all you need? There’s a type of gun for nearly anything else, if someone knows where to look...

Dean has no last name, and is consequently registered as “Dean Smith” in the city’s Census records. That doesn’t suggest, however, that he wouldn’t want to make one for himself. As he’s less focused on the city’s legends than on its kingmakers and pawn-movers, Dexter DeShawn strikes him as someone to emulate, watch and learn from - all with a decent degree of caution.

Being on top matters a little less to him than eventually pulling Heywood’s stings. With a little fear and a lot of persistence, Dean “V.” Smith knows that one day, he won’t go hungry on a weeknight. To that end, he’s certainly a hearty eater, here paired with extensive free-weight training regimens and the use of anabolic stimulants. Oh, sure, he’ll speak of family and blood like the best soldier festooned in Santa Muerte visual codices, but his friend Jackie’s got a mind like a slow and steady steel trap.

Either Dean blows his new fellow Street Samurai out of the pond, or he does. Unlike Jackie, however, Dean isn’t realistic about it. Friendships are a rare gift in Heywood, if not the rest of Night City, and Dean’s convinced that Jackie could conceivably look past his final betrayal.

Corpo: nowadays, we’re mostly familiar with the idea of one-percenters creating a bubble of affluence for themselves. Boarding schools, private villas, prebooked vacations across the globe’s priciest spots, access to the hottest trends on the minute of their inception - what this tends to forego is the level of social disconnect that’s required in order to stay relevant. We’re only just waking up to the consequences of letting an aging, crusty first-generation Yuppie be crowned the ruler of the free world, and even someone who’s behind on their Bret Easton Ellis could tell you that Donald J. Trump is a sociopath and a narcissist.

Take that mindset, and cultivate it into an ethos that’s taught to children from a very early age - children who live, eat, shit and breathe in accordance with their parent corporation’s tenets. The more placid, mid-tier lifers in the genre are called sararimen, in reference to William Gibson’s use of the term to designate low-level company workers in Chiba City. A bit like Shenzhen’s factory workers and execs, everything in a corpo’s life is in service to the corporation.

In Night City, as of 2077, two major players have installed this culture of total obedience in their roster. Their names are Militech and Arasaka. One is a juggernaut in the field of military-grade personal defence, the other has a wider grasp and reach, but is more fragile. Arasaka owes that fragility to the last fifty years having involved its re-establishment and reconstruction. Fifty years ago, Night City’s Corpo Plaza was blasted open by a thermonuclear discharge that sent the Japanese giant packing. The charges had been set by three Edgerunners: Rogue, Morgan Blackhand and Johnny Silverhand - accessorily a well-respected Rockerboy and front-line member of the band SAMURAI. Only Rogue survived that fateful night, or so the street lingo goes, having gone on to start a legitimate consultation business as well as a fruitful career in the hospitality business. Her bar, the Afterlife, is Night City’s hotspot for every techie, script kiddie and accomplished cyber-spelunker.

Our gal Vivian knows this. She knows this, because Vivian “V.” Banks lives two lives.

In one of them, she’s a lean and hungry Junior Executive in Arasaka’s Counter-Intel division. In that line of work, you either fuck someone’s prospects or protect your own, or ensure that no up-and-comer just out of the company’s Law School program manages to push you off the board. She knows full well that in centuries past, corpo-speak was made up of mild euphemisms that at best referred to destroying a rival’s prospects or lifelihood. Taking a life was something that required careful deliberation, especially when tossing a fat severance bonus into an aging CFO’s three-piece pockets and letting your erstwhile rival snort cocaine off of the rolling hips of Tahitian dancers was so much cheaper...

Nowadays, zeroing someone is commonplace.

You’re born for Arasaka, and chances are you’ll die for Arasaka just the same. Viv’s killed, lied, cheated and even stole her way to her position, remorse being this vaguely churning sense of coldness in her gut that keeps one-night stands coming in and out of her bedroom. She only remembers her parents as being credit-chip enablers and personal enhancement drug addicts, cutting ties with them so completely on the day of her official hiring that it felt more like a tacit understanding.

On most days, sex and booze keep the cold at bay. On most days, Vivian Banks is a class-act of a sociopath. The stronger she gets, however, and the more paranoid her targets become - which reinforces her own paranoia. Before long, playing the part of one of Arasaka’s several poisonous flowers won’t work anymore.

Unfortunately, she trusts no-one. No Fixer could put her in contact with any hacker she’d trust, no rando fresh off the street with a retro-tinted National Arms plinker would satisfy her. To climb up the ranks and maybe share tea with Old Man Saburo himself, she needs a spotless performance record. She needs skills.

More importantly, she needs a reputation. That means leaving Arasaka Tower and mingling with the experts in their own field - and it means filling out her back book of successful hits. The drinks at the Afterlife are decent enough, but what she’s after is an official in.

If she can get to Rogue, or maybe even hook up with a ripperdoc not bought and paid for by the company, she might be able to score both new skills and increased performance...

If it were as simple as slitting Janet’s throat in HR and diving her way to an orgiastic performance review quite innocently left on the department’s server, she would’ve done that already. Viv is my obvious Pure Stealth build candidate, my main-line hacker and would-be engineer with a thing for black power skirts and designer offensive augments.

With that said, we’re months ahead of schedule, all the good shit’s already come out, so we’re stuck playing the waiting game...

What are your own character or build ideas for Cyberpunk 2077?

#cyberpunk 2077 #spoilers #build ideas #characters #roleplaying

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ebhenah · 6 years

Text

Sunkissed (Original Fiction)

Fictober 18 Day 16

Prompt: “This is gonna be so much fun!”

Original fiction, Original characters (a continuation of my Fictober Day 7 story: Uncharted, Day 8 story : Anchor and Day 13 story: Soulmates. This one featuring Spook and a new OC: Grift)

Rating: T Mentions of war, death, gun violence

So, there were lots of things that sucked about being stranded in a new timeline, almost a decade before your own birth and staring down the early days of a war that you really hoped turned out differently this time around than your own history would suggest. Little things like being out of touch with pop culture, or not being able to find your favorite tool because it hasn’t been created yet, or craving a food no one knows how to make. Weird things like realizing the new baby that everyone is cooing over is your favorite babysitter from when you were six, or seeing vehicles you consider ‘classics’ being billed as the cutting edge of technology, or fixing your aunt her favorite drink only to have her choke on it, because it was the first time she’d ever tasted alcohol. Oops.

There were big things, too. So few of the people she was meeting now were alive in her timeline, even though they were young and healthy. Her history knowledge told a story of a world that was wholly unprepared for the might of the invaders that came seemingly out of nowhere, attacked using technology they couldn’t even grasp, and operated under a moral view that was unfathomable to humans. Losses had been staggering, to say the least. The devastation unthinkable for anyone who hadn’t witnessed it for themselves. That’s what she and her family had been sent back to try to avoid. They’d done everything they were supposed to- and a bit more… but she was never supposed to stick around to see how those changes played out.

In her childhood, the Earth had been teeming with alien life from across multiple galaxies, humans making up only a small portion of the population. The skies had been grey and dull, air quality poor except in areas where massive purification complexes filtered dust and other fallout from the air and water. It had been HOT, the destruction of hundreds of cities within the span of a few months too much for the planet to correct on its own and throwing ‘greenhouse effect’ into being almost overnight. Most of the surface was water, the majority of the rest was desert, and massive sandstorms raged outside of cities built under the protection of huge forcefields or physical domes- much of the population living underground or in orbit. Now, she was one of less than a thousand individuals with even partial alien heritage, and the Earth was green and lush and thriving. No air quality alerts, no radiation alarms, no food shortages. She was now getting to see the Earth that her family loved and spoke about. The Earth that so many people had died trying to protect.

Sometimes, the weight of that gift got to her. People already thought she was the strange alien traveller, stranger even than the other aliens she had brought with her. It didn’t help that it had been decided it was best not to mention the whole ‘time travel’ thing and instead a cover story of being a science experiment that had been force-grown on a world that no longer exists and growing up in the resistance had been built for her. (Actually, it wasn’t even all that far off from the truth). She was seen as someone not to be trusted, despite being vouched for by the planets most celebrated heroes. Despite the knowledge she had offered them. That was alright. She was from a much more paranoid world than this one, so the mistrust didn’t really bother her much.

But the odd looks when she would get overwhelmed by the little things she’d only ever heard about were frustrating. She wanted to scream and yell at them to appreciate it all, because it could still be lost. Her timeline might not be that different from this one, even with all the work they’d put into changing it.

Seeing a butterfly was a MIRACLE. Swimming in the ocean was a GIFT. Being able to stand, on the Earth’s surface, and feel the sun kiss your skin, no need for breathing apparatus, no need for thick suits to protect the skin from being sanded off by the grit in the air, no need for heavy goggles that protected the eyes from pollution and radiation? Just your feet, on the ground; soft sunshine warming you; clean, salty spray from the nearby beach tickling your flesh; sweet smelling flowers wafting on the breeze? That was something out of a fairy story… and she was going to make the most of it every chance she got, dammit. And if people looked askance at her for it, well, they could stuff it.

“So,” came an awkward voice from somewhere behind her. “When they said you were getting some sun down by the water… I wasn’t really expecting to find you naked…”

She turned toward the newcomer, “you squeamish about nudity, Grift?” He was, by her math, maybe a year her senior at this point. Elite pilot, fast track for military leadership- a rising star by all accounts. In her memory, he was one of the highest ranking members of a military force that was getting younger and younger by the year as losses continued to mount. But he’d been on the front lines of the fighting since the very first assault, and not only had he survived, each and every one of his squadrons held some of the highest survival rates on the books. Smart. Talented. Responsible. Respected… and an arrogant asshole who CONSISTENTLY butted heads with her father and with the aliens that held the power to make tactical decisions. Not a particularly well-liked guy among her loved ones when she was growing up.

She could see all those traits in him now, too, for all that he was younger, brasher, less worldly, more innocent. Green. He was also a xenophobe, which had surprised her, because the man she’d known ‘back home’ was not. Of course, by the time she’d been born, he’d had almost a decade of fighting side by side with aliens to rid him of any initial distrust.

“That’s not my name,” he said, as he always did when she called him that. She was starting to wonder how long it would take him to clue in that the main reason she did it was BECAUSE it got to him. It seemed pretty obvious to her. He didn’t even know yet how much of an insult it actually was. Man, she could not WAIT until the Byx/Sieb made contact with the humans and he found out what ‘grift’ actually MEANT! “Not squeamish about it, no. Just wasn’t expecting to see you… without clothes in public at high noon. You immune to skin cancer or something?”

She tipped her face up to the light, loving the way the sun tickled her markings. “I don’t actually know,” she answered, shrugging, “I’m not really used to worrying about things that might kill me in a few decades. Usually, I can barely keep up with the things that might kill me this week.”

“Yeah, that makes a certain amount of sense,” he chuckled. “You don’t mind people staring?”

“I’m purple, Grift. I’m purple with color-changing rosettes, pointy ears and sometimes my eyes glow… and I blush blue. I’m used to people staring.” She bent down to pull a pair of shorts and a tank top out of her bag, clearly her alone time was being cut short. “What’s going on?”

“Word from on high,” he joked, referring to the tactical ships that were in orbit above them. “I’m supposed to test your firearm conflict competency. The new allies are pushing for you to get a security clearance with Earth’s military… even though you aren’t military.”

“How are they justifying that?” she asked, slipping into the shorts, curious to see what loopholes the younger versions of her family were coming up with.

“Diplomat status,” he said dryly.

She stopped short, waistband sitting at mid-thigh, and gaped at him. “DIPLOMAT?!?!” she laughed, “me??? That’s rich. I suck with diplomacy.”

“Looks like we are in agreement on that front,” he answered.

She glared, tugging the shorts into place and getting to work on the button fly, “listen up, pretty boy- you are no better with people than I am, and you are WELL aware of that.”

“Pretty boy?” one of his eyebrows quirked, he seemed surprised that she’d said that.

“What? You have symmetrical features, good hair, are in good shape, high cheekbones, straight nose, full lips, delicate features… objectively, you are pretty- which you KNOW and have no qualms about exploiting. It wasn’t a compliment. I’m not swooning.”

“You don’t strike me as the type to swoon,” he said on a short bark of laughter.

“You don’t know me,” she reminded him, pulling on the tank top as she walked toward him, “I’m a notorious swooner. You’re just not my type.”

“Not a fan of pretty?” he teased.

“Big fan of pretty,” she replied, her eyes glowing a soft, warm yellow, “all kinds of pretty. Pretty hair, pretty eyes, pretty legs, pretty wings- annnd there you go. That face. The one you made when I said wings. That’s why you aren’t my type. It’s not about how you look, Grift. There’s something ugly in you. You’re pretty like Vokarin Crystal is pretty. Lovely to look at, but get too close, and it poisons you. I’m not human, and I can’t change that. So, I stay away from anyone who thinks that makes me some kind of monster. You can smile and charm, but I see that ugliness in you- just as easily as I see your pretty hair and perfect bone structure. It doesn’t blind me to the fact that you are VERY good at your job, though… so, how do we assess my firearm conflict competency?”

“There is a specific set of training scenarios you need to pass,” he answered, falling into step beside her as they walked back to the building, “all done with non-lethal munitions.”

She turned to him, a predatory smile stretching her lips, and she could feel her ears flatten back in anticipation of something that stirred her hunting instincts, “shoot’em’up sims? I love shoot’em’up sims!”

“Don’t get cocky,” he warned her, voice stern. “I’m the one you are facing off against, and I have HIGH standards.”

“Shoot’em’up sims against YOU?” she could feel her rosettes cycle through a few different colors in response to her shifting mood, “ohhhhh man! This is gonna be so much fun!”

#fictober18 #fictober18day16 #Day16ThisIsGonnaBeSoMuchFun #scifi #ThisIsGonnaBeSoMuchFun

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