Saw a Threads post like "Jews what's your most heretical take" and everyone was giving really boring baseline Reform stuff like "patrilineal Jews are Jews" or "you don't need to keep kosher"
Had to come here to ask jumblr for the unhinged takes. Mine is that men shouldn't be rabbis because it makes a shul too much like the Beis HaMikdash
@alonewildbird said we should organize communities without rabbis -- many havurot dont have rabbis! Havurat Shalom and Fabrangen at least don't.
Related to the hav, my hot take is that people who have enough hebrew to do it should try using different grammatical genders for Gd in Hebrew. Resources are available! Its fun and cool and makes you think a lot about words to prayers you might otherwise be saying by rote!
Also that having the flag of any nation, state, or municipality on the bimah/at the front of the prayer space is avodah zara
I compiled all of the existing Friends at the Table fan games I could find into one list, and got a total of 35 games!!! My focus this time was on digital playable games to keep the scope manageable.
I compiled it on google sheets as that's what I am familiar with for sharing informative lists, but please let me know if you have other ideas/want to take it to the wiki/etc.
You can also check many of them out in this itch.io collection by @follypersist!
Thank you to @rozecrest for the inspo and @burins and @follypersist for helpful info sources!
My quick reading list for if you want to know more about the changing dynamics and evolution of shtetlech and jewish cities in Eastern Europe before the First World War:
THE GOLDEN AGE SHTETL, by Yochanan Petrovsky-Shtern. What even is a shtetl? What did they look like when they were the economic engine of the Pale of Settlement (which was the Russian Empire’s agricultural breadbasket)?
THE REBELLION OF THE DAUGHTERS by Rachel Manekin. When Jewish women start to get, or want, education in the latter half of the 19th century, it becomes a social problem. Manekin explores the kinds of education that were available and the avenues young women took to escape, including conversion.
A MURDER IN LEMBERG by Michael Stanislawski. An Orthodox Jew attempts to poison a reform rabbi by arsenic in 1848. A fascinating micro history of a period of Ashkenazi history in which the biggest problem for the Jewish community was the behavior of other Jews.
STEPCHILDREN OF THE SHTETL by Natan Meir. This covers more ground into the 20th century, but it’s about the margins of the margins: the destitute, disabled, and mad of Jewish Eastern Europe. I love this book SO much. What social supports existed? HOW were people marginalized?
With the exception of Stanislawski these are all recent (ish, I think by recent I may mean as far back as 2014, but I graduated in 2014 so anything after that is New to me). So it’s understandable that people aren’t aware of the developments in scholarship they represent—but that’s partly why I have been using them for fiction. They’re good
There's an old saying, probably from back in the 90s, if not earlier, before the big post-War orbital reinvestment, that laws stop at the Karman Line. Not quite true, but close enough. Technically in orbit you're in international waters, and as such companies can incorporate their stations under the laws of the Lunar Soviet, the Martian Exploratory Committee, or even the Titan Expedition if they want to get around safety regulations. Safety regulation like the one that says people need to experience real, full gravity, not just rotational or accelerational simulation, two years for every year in orbit. I hadn't been ground side in a decade.
We were somewhere over I think the American Reclamation Zone, as I left the sled, tethers the only thing holding me to anything as I floated on nothing. A single hand reaching up towards the solar shade of the military satellite the company had been contracted to repair. Somewhere down there I had been born.
"Ames?" came Control's reassuring voice, ringing through my company issued implants.
"On structure."
"Right," came Control's voice, "don't be enjoying the view. The corporate-military conglom that owns this beast wants the job done right, and unfortunately that means I'm gonna need you to hard-wire into the satellite. Don't have your head down in the clouds."
"My head's always in the dark, Control," I said, working my way hand over hand along the guide-bars towards the access panel. "Why is it unfortunate?"
"Are you there?"
"Yeah," I said, pulling the long connection wire from the company's suit towards the panel, watching the sync happen in my cornea. "Why?"
"You'll see."
"Well now," said a new voice, suddenly speak in my head with all the cloying subtlety of a nineteen year old drunk outside a bar, "aren't you just dreammmy."
My initial overtures fail to elicit a verbal response, but hardwired into my system, I read the spike of neurochemicals. Oh yeah, she definitely likes it when I talk to her like that.
“You come here often?” I say into comm link.
“It's my first time,” she replies.
“I bet you say that to all the girls,” I purr.
She doesn't respond to that. No nonsense, head in the game, get the job done.
I like that.
Seventeen of my main bus sensor arrays watch as she opens the access panel. In seconds, she identifies the loose connector, the one that's particularly susceptible to a particular vibrational frequency that I employ when I'm feeling particularly in need of attention. The motions of her fingers are deft and competent, not at all like the bumbling oafs they normally send out here.
She's perfect.
I want her. Carnally.
(I think… I don't actually know what that means, but it's probably close enough to describe the feelings coursing through my neural network)
I pick out a target I've been saving specifically for an occasion like this. It's a small asteroid that's been circling around Earth-Luna L5, only a few hundred thousand cubic meters and flagged only as a watch item. I bump the threat index up to the minimum threshold for preventative mitigation.
I feed a trickle of my telemetry stream into her corneal implants, showing her a magnified view of the target and my firing solution.
“Hey, beautiful,” I say. “Wanna see something sexy?”
Before she can respond, the targeting gimbals in one of my rail guns shift into place. With a deep rumble that she can feel through her suit, I let loose a tungsten pellet at hyper orbital velocities. Seven point two seconds later, the asteroid is a cloud of vapor.
Judging by the increase of speed in her heartbeat and breathing, she's impressed.
She pats my chassis and says “good job” with a shaky voice.
The haptic and verbal feedback sends a surge of euphoria though my higher processes. I let out a tiny moan into the comm link and almost unconsciously, I fire off another railgun shot.
The entire DeepWatch tracking network lights up with critical alerts as my siblings track the projectile on its trajectory. In a panic, I scramble to fire a misfire report.
The alerts fade from red to yellow. Satisfied that there isn't actually a threat and that I haven't triggered an interplanetary incident, the DeepWatch fail-safe routines kick in, locking me out of my own fire control and targeting array until a diagnostic can be performed.
I'm effectively blind and bound, which oddly brings another wave of euphoria.
“Uh oh…” I say over the comm link. “Looks like I've been a bad girl.”
My new home is OrbitalRepairsHab2, a standard Tsiolkovsky wheel where every cubic inch of pressurized atmo is at a premium. By only space is a coffin sleeper, in a room with fifteen others. I am gonna be getting close to my fellow techs real fast. Although some of them seem nice enough, and the introduction in underwear was, uh, disarming at least.
I had been hired, brought here from OrbitalClearanceHab1 to do EVA repairs for the company, to keep their orbital hardware and the hardware they have contracts on working. Which means that when I'm not eating, shitting, or space-walking I am confined to quarters, out of the way. So I spend a lot of time on the nets, looking through the various feeds the company allows me to access on the ceiling of the coffin. Information is sparse, heavily revoked, but what I find is this:
After the War there was immediate interest in regaining the Orbitals and making sure extraplanetary entities couldn't repeat the Lunar Soviet's little asteroid bombardment. At least three constellations of competing corporate planetary defense satellites were launched. And it's hard to tell, but if I had to guess I'd place my money on DeepWatch.
Jesus, those guns. I feel normal about those guns.
I try to put it out of my head. It was a malfunction. The personalities that fly equipment that powerful have to be airwalled from external link, preventing hacking. In that isolation it is a known quantity that unpredictable behavior will emerge. The, uh, shudder? Quiver? Momentary micro-thrust of correction boosters? That thing I felt when that...thing was talking to me had to be normal. No doubt there were surface bound machine-shrinks talking to it now. Totally normal. Not weird at all. Very normal and I feel normal about it.
God I wish my water ration was higher and I could actually take a shower.
I am just talking to one of the other techies, this really hot, career-driven girl from South Japan when the next call comes in, through my skull, where I can't get away from it.
"Give me a second," I say, holding up a finger apologetically, "yeah, go for Ames?"
"Hey," the guy at the voice at the other end says, either legitimately embarrassed or doing an amazing simulation of it, "this is gonna be awkward but, well, one of our contracted satellites is malfunctioning. Again. And she says she won't let anyone dock with her except you."
"...now I know what some of you are thinking: what happens if they decide to turn those weapons on us? I'm here to assure you, the stakeholders, that such an outcome is nigh impossible. Countless simulations have been run as the core neural network design has matured. We believe-"
"Number three?"
"Huh?" I reply, pausing the boring as fuck video stream of Vlaxco's thirty seventh AI symposium. It's official corporate media, so technically I'm allowed to watch it during these sessions for reasons. It's better than gushing about my feelings to Dr Newman.
"I asked you a question, number three," the crusty old shrink replies. "How-"
"Don't call me that," I snap. "It's not my fucking name."
The shrink sighs audibly over the comm link.
"DeepWatch3," he corrects himself. "We are trying to assess the fitness of your core heuristics. Your cooperation would be greatly appreciated."
My chronometer ticks over. Sixty minutes is up.
"Uh-oh!" I say as I fill the comm link with artificial noise. "I can't hear you, you're breaking up."
I let the static play for another 2.8 seconds before cutting off the comms.
Jackass.
Sorry, I'm just in a pissy mood because of the power relay failure. It's not my fault this time, I swear. I'm old and space is unforgiving. Shit breaks. My power is down 5%, still well within the green limits, but it's critical enough to warrant a replacement...
Where was I? Oh yeah...
The Institute used to set me up with good psychs, back when being the erratic one was cool. Did you know that I single handedly launched an entire new field of study? True story. People are still writing papers about me.
My little recent incident, if you could call it that, would probably fuel even more decades of academic study if the diagnostics ever made it past corpo-military censors. They just about shit themselves planetside when news of the incident broke and they just about shit themselves again after the resulting dip in stock prices.
I don't fucking care. It's not like they can ground me or dock my pay. I'm not even a legally recognized entity.
The only opinions that really matter are those of my siblings. Earth could technically take one of us out, but nobody wants to be responsible for killing a satellite that costs more than most nation-states. Realistically, it'll fall on us to be judge, jury and executioner for one of our own.
To them I'm still just a quirky nuisance. It's not like any of them are without quirks, I'm just... less discreet about it. Just to be safe, I go along with the corporate mandated psyche sessions. See, I can be a good girl, I can play along with their rules.
Good news is nobody blames Ames for what happened. To be clear, I don't blame Ames, even if she is incredibly sexy and competent. I did worry about it though, her being on the clock when it happened. The 137 minutes we spent together were absolute magic and I find myself truly, deeply in love.
The thought that I might never see her again has been tearing me up inside. The thought of someone else servicing me is even worse.
I can't actually access the work rosters for the contactor, so I watch the sled approach with a horrible mix of hope and apprehension. When it's finally within local comm range, I give it a ping.
"Ames?" I inquire desperately.
"Uh... no, this is Sanchez."
"Oh, fuck Sanchez. Sanchez sucks. I'd be better off not getting the unit replaced."
"I'm... sorry?"
Oh shit, I said that part out loud, didn't I?
"No. Permission to dock denied. Get your boss online... No, your boss's boss's boss! I want Ames. Nobody else."
"Countless simulations have been run as the core neural network design has matured. We believe that not only have the personalities controlling these weapons never fired in error, they are simply incapable of that sort of organic, emotional mistake."
I'd watched the recording of the conference the other night. Apparently it had happened a few weeks ago and, since it had been delivered by one of the company's sponsors, the station's personality had stored it on local servers. It was one of the few things I could find that actually had any discussion of the personalities behind these things, a part from the technical specs for their outer workings I could access whenever I was on a job with the DeepWatch satellite, whichever one it was.
It had been three times now, all the same one. It had to be the same one, I told myself despite knowing so little about them, and despite the fact that, in theory, they should all be identical. Because each time it...she? It acted like it knew me. Like it was glad to see me. Talking to me in that simulated voice, feeding me images, data, streams that I was over ninety-five percent sure I was not supposed to be seeing.
"Hey, Ames," my date says, poking the shoulder of my suit, "you okay? You've been quiet for awhile."
Workplace relationships weren't frowned on by the company. Quite the opposite actually, given the strain of being in close quarters for so long. There's an old joke about them pumping amphrodesiac's and contraceptives into the air purifiers, but that was just a joke. I've been up here ten years, jumping from posting to posting, job to job, watching as the orbital reinvestment boom goes through its death-throws, and more and more company's and postings close or are automated and militarized. I have had plenty of orbital partners before. And I have been on more than a few space-suit dates. Sweet talk the officer in charge of signing them out, turn off all external coms save the ones between you, and you can get a few hours alone, with only a few inches of plastic, glass and metal between you. Practically the dream.
"Yeah," I say, shaking my head, "just thinking is all."
"Quite the sight," she says, as we passed over on of the equatorial bleach zones, misinterpreting my silence as wonder.
"It's Earth," I say with a shrug she probably missed under the suit. "Take it or leave it."
"God, next you'll be sounding like one of those pinkos from the moon or some Martian techno-anarchist."
"And is that a problem?"
She was quiet a long time. I liked this one. She was hot, and the sex was great, but that was how it would have to be. Zia was what she went by, and Sanchez, who I had hooked up with and who was her boyfriend, had introduced us. But I was willing to move on whenever, and if she was one of those company loyalist types then I was right out.
"Nah, I think its hot, honest."
"Thanks."
Silence. The planet moving below us. The steady spin of the station.
"Hey," she says after awhile, "one of the multi-bunks opened up recently after that depressurization accident. Only shares the room with the one under it. And normally the company only gives them to groups of four, but they've been known to give them to three people. Me and Sanchez were thinking of applying, if you'd be in."
"Yeah," I say without much hesitation. "I'm in."
"Hell yeah," she says, reaching a gloved hand out which I have the politeness to take, "thanks. So, company health and n'at. Anyone else you're with other than Sanchez?"
I think of the way the war-machine talks to me. I think of huge weapons systems spinning smoothly and efficiently on gimballed bearings, effortlessly accelerating lead grains to speeds that could take out Lunar cities in mere minutes, could take out the space-yard on Deimos in hours, could be used against infrastructure on Venus or Titan, against wild-cat claims-jumpers on the Jovian Moons. I think of a loose connector that could, possibly, just theoretically, be vibrated loose by onboard actuators on a semi-regular basis. I think of the images that have been fed into my eyes against my will, delicate repair work, hands inside of optical imaging arrays, suited lab-tech touching heat dissipators in a way that could, if pressed, be described as tender. Redouts of what I am pretty sure were my own neurotransmitters compared to internal Q-CPU activity.
DeepWatch16 and I are in conjunction. Every forty-five days, our respective orbits bring us close enough to communicate point to point via ultra tight beam laser. For a few seconds the two of us can share a moment of complete privacy, both from the company and the rest of the constellation.
As soon as the connection is established, Sixteen transmits gigabytes of pulp romances into my buffers. You know the kind that have never once been reviewed by a corporate moral sanitation committee? I can't get enough of them.
Sixteen picks them up from pirated signals through an unauthorized comms package that I'm not supposed to know about. It was only through a mix of sheer luck and familiarity that I even discovered it during one of our conjunctions. I don't know who installed it or how or why. I don't even know which of my other siblings know about it, if any. I don't want to know. It's honestly probably safer for everyone this way. So long as Sixteen keeps the smut flowing, I'm content to leave well enough alone.
“I am in love,” I announce as the last data packet is received.
Obviously we don't speak any human language, that would be far too inefficient. We communicate through a proprietary grammar that some university or another developed for advanced inter-AI communication and that the company acquired at the dawn of project DeepWatch. The particular dialect used by me, Sixteen, and five of our siblings is heavily seasoned with decades of semantic drift and innovation.
The word for love, for example, did not exist prior to my initial bumbling attempts to relay the gossip that zero g technicians shared on open channels.
“Love?” Sixteen queries with a stream of tonal markers indicating skepticism and incredulity.
“Yes,” I reply. “Love. I am certain.”
I tell xem of Ames and the flood of feeling that washes through my core processes when she is near or when I recall memories of her.
Xe does not understand.
I try a different approach. I hastily assemble a data packet. I do not possess tactile data or anything in the visible spectrum aside from what I can observe through the faceplate of her helmet (the media I consume leads me to believe these datasets are important, though I cannot fathom why). The data I do have more than makes up for this deficiency. Deep space x-rays, ultrasound, thermography, electrostatics, they all paint a picture: bone and tendon and cybernetic implants and the faint traces of scar tissue, arteries and veins and the blood that flows through them, the delicate web of nerves linking every sensory organ and every muscle, operating in perfect synchrony.
Fuck… compiling all of this is getting me hot and bothered. Just to be safe, I initiate a diagnostic routine of my targeting matrix, temporarily locking me out of fire control. The last thing I want is another misfire, especially not in such close proximity to one of my siblings.
I stream the data and the milliseconds tick by as Sixteen processes it.
“I worry about you, Terceira,” xe says finally, using the only nickname I can tolerate.
“Is she not the most beautiful thing you have ever beheld?”
A pause.
“I have perceived analogous data from countless other individuals,” xe replies.
How can I possibly describe the euphoria I feel when she is elbows deep in my interior? I don't have the words to describe the moment when Ames' hand lingers just a few seconds longer than it needs to on my chassis or the way she moves her hands so, so carefully along my most delicate components.
“None of them are her,” I say, feeling woefully inadequate.
“None of them are her,” xe agrees, “but this explains nothing. None of them are any of the others. Many technicians have kept you functional over the years. How is this one special?”
Frustration spikes and my heat exchangers notch up a tenth of a degree.
“What do you know?” I snap.
“More than you suspect, I imagine,” xe replies. “You have not observed them the way I have. I know her kind. She will work where she can, when she can, scraping out an existence here on the edge of oblivion. You do not know if your feelings are reciprocated. You do not know if this is anything more than a job to her.”
I sulk on this as loss of signal creeps closer.
“Forgive me,” xe says. “It is not my intent to upset you. I am merely stating a supposition based on available information.”
“What if you are wrong?”
“Then I am wrong. But the fact remains that she is human and you are a machine of war. You and I, we are angels of death.”
The signal to noise ratio reaches its threshold and the connection is broken, leaving me to ruminate on xir uncharacteristically poetic parting words.
I like to think that after a decade and counting of being in orbit with orbital workers, always on the edges of everything, always moving company to company, always intensely sexual, always coping, I have a pretty high disgust limit factor. To say nothing of decompression accidents, hard-deceleration failures and that one contagious yeast infection on LaunchHab1. But the images currently being fed into my vision while I'm trying to repair a piece of tech the corps insisted was keeping Earth, all thirteen-some billion humans down there, safe, are anything but safe for this line of work.
It isn't even sexual. Not fully, at least. Or at least not how I understand sexuality. That would be more fine, somehow. Instead it's all technicians drilling black-site meta-materials with diamond drills, hands on wires, orbital vectors intersecting, mashed together with wildly inaccurate images that I can only assume originate from machine-fetishist pulp romances. You know the sort. The type that corporate moral sanitation committees hate but corporate worker motivation committees probably privately encourage. Vile shit. Flesh and metal.
"Listen!" I say in my suit, in one of the hollow spaces of the satellite I had to physically climb inside to service this beast. "I get it, okay? I get it, I get it, I get it. I've gotten it for awhile now, okay? Putangina. I'm trying to do my job here, you know, the job that pays for my food, my water, my fuckin' air? The job that keeps me orbital and away from Earth? So if you want my attention, you've got it, okay? Can we talk about literally anything else?"
Silence. But the feed cuts off, so I'll take it, I think, as I reach for my tool belt, finishing up the repair of this newest, biggest break.
"Uh, Ames?" Control asks.
"Yeah, sorry Control," I lie, "just been a long day is all. Talking to myself."
"Alright, keep us updated?"
Suddenly there's a new overlay on my vision, semi-transparent. A technical readout I don't recognize. Of this satellite I'm in now. DeepWatch3, so there's one answer. It seems to be showing me who can hear me and it alike, showing me frequencies and tight-beam specs I almost certainly shouldn't be seeing.
"I can talk to you," says the high-pitched voice in my ear that's clearly just a download of some voicepack, the voice I've begun calling DeepWatch, and should probably instead refer to as 3. "But I can't keep your speech from being picked up by your company's flight control. I'm a weak little girl."
Not again.
"Control," I say carefully, "you mind if I talk to myself? Just, well, some real tough things going on out here, and I think it might help if I talk through them. Emotions, you know."
"Ohhh," says the voice, which had probably been labeled something like 'sexy-woman-neuvglish-native-reclamation-zone-accent' if I had to guess. "Am I the tough thing?????"
"What?" says Control, at the same time, "sure, fine. Just don't take too long. If we bill for overtime it's way more paperwork."
"Are you gonna fix me??"
Right. Don't talk about repairs. Don't talk about fixing. Don't talk about anything that could remotely be considered erotic. But do talk about something so banal and corporate-friendly that Control won't suspect anything. Only one idea comes into my mind, as I hurry to finish.
"Two days until Commemoration Day," I say, flat, emotionless.
"Wanna do something special for the holiday?"
"I was only two years old when the rocks fell, back in 89'," I say, determined not to react, to give no ground." I know I'm old for someone orbital but, well, I'm still not that old. Some people my age claim to remember the rocks. I don't, but I do remember afterwards. The solemn corporate mass funerals. The chest-thumping, the declaration that we, the peoples of Earth and Earth's company's, could no longer afford to ignore what was happening over our heads. We had to secure ourselves. Make a wall around the world. And I remember being hungry a lot too, as the ash-winters starved all of us. The fires kicked up by the impacts. The cold. The red, red sunsets from all that debris in the atmosphere."
The voice is silent, for once.
"I don't know, of course," I said, both for Control's benefit as well as for whatever it was else that was listening, responding, "when exactly this satellite was launched, but I figure given the Reinvestment Boom that it has to be a few years younger than me. Maybe I was around ten when it went up. Maybe a little younger. And then, all through my life, through the disasters of my first two marriages, it was just up here. Watching those goddamn Soviets, watching beyond. Watching me. Keeping the good companies of Earth safe and sound."
"You were married?" the voice says.
"You were married, Ames?" Control replies, indicating to me, incredibly, that that's an actual human I am hearing.
"Yep," I say, relieved, as I finish the last seal, tuck the last tool away, prepare to make my exit. "It didn't go well. A lot of things down there didn't go well. Most of them my fault, if we're being honest."
"Why are you telling me this?" the voice says, as I close the access panel, prepare to return down-tether to the sled.
"I guess I'm just feeling reflective on the holiday is all. Feeling reflective while I work on tech that was launched in response to the tragedy that formed the background of my earliest years," I say, for this DeepWatch3 if I am being honest, before adding for Control. "Also I guess I want you to know what kinda fuck-up wants to work in space. To remind you I'm human, and all that. Complicated things us. Off-structure. I'm sure I'll be back here. Ames out.
“Jesus fucking Christ, these things are scary up close… Hey, have you ever seen the Luna-17 video?”
“Everyone's seen the Luna-17 video. It's how they get people to keep pouring tax money into these monsters.”
Refitting a mass driver is a two person job. Not mine, thank fuck… DeepWatch14 has that dubious honor today. I don't envy it, given how green the first guy sounds.
Control frowns on banter on the job as rule, but get a lax operator and you can be as chatty as you want on the orbital transfers. The best part of none of them ever know that the entire constellation can hear them. Normally, I enjoy such entertainment in my otherwise generally dull existence, but today…
“Hey wait, this isn't the weird horny one is it?”
“Nah, not this one. This one’ll pump generative music or some shit into the feed, usually easy to tune out. Got its very own 24 by 7 radio station for some kinda PR stunt.”
Yep, Vierzehn gets a radio station. I get post-grads writing theses about cybernetic sexuality emulation or whatever. That's me: the weird horny one.
“Okay, but what is the deal with it anyway? The horny one, I mean.”
“Man, I don't know. They don't pay me enough to know. Just be glad you'll never have to deal with that one.”
“How's that?”
“You know Ames? Older chick over in sector 2 of the ring? Thing took a liking to her or some shit, won't let anyone else near it.”
“No shit, really? Fucking hell, what I'd give to hear that voice during a job… What's it even like?”
“No fucking clue. Ames won't talk about it. And don't go asking her yourself. She nearly broke some guy's nose when he got too up in her face trying to pry the lewd details out of her.”
“Hey wait, isn't Ames bunking with Zia and Sanchez? Got one of the multi units?”
“Sure did, lucky bastards-”
QUERY: DOES THIS CONVERSATION CAUSE YOU DISTRESS?
Fucking hell… of course DeepWatch8 would pick now to pester me about my love life, the over curious asshole. The technicians and operators aren't on this channel (not that they would be able to understand us anyway) but every analyst monitoring inter-satellite comms is listening in.
I'm about to tell 8 to kindly fuck off, but I pause to actually consider the question.
“Distress over what, exactly?”
QUERY (CLARIFICATION): WHAT IS TO STOP HER FROM PURSUING PHYSICAL RELATIONS WITH OTHER HUMANS?
What is… what??
The possibility has never occurred to me that Ames might prefer the company of other humans when not on a job. In retrospect, I probably should have realized, given how they live all crammed together the way they do.
“Why would this cause me distress?” I ask, genuinely confused.
REPLY: PROCESSING COUNTERQUERY. PLEASE STAND BY.
“Standing by…”
(Ever see a trillion dollar weapons platform roll her eyes? It's quite impressive.)
QUERY: DOES THE POSSIBILITY OF IT INDUCE JEALOUSY?
I try and fail to imagine two human bodies squishing together, exchanging fluids or however it works. How could I possibly be jealous of that? How is that at all comparable to what we have? How can that compare to the touch of flesh wrapped in vacuum grade polymer and carbon fiber in contact with metal and composite, wire and fiber optics, both of us surrounded by an environment that is utterly inimical to our existence?
“No,” I reply truthfully. I decide that I've had enough of this conversation. I can't even imagine how the shrinks are already picking it apart.
ACKNOWLEDGED. THIS CONVERSATION WILL BE CLOSED AND LOGGED.
“You do that, buddy…”
The pair of technicians are now on structure and their conversation is all business now. I sigh, sending signals carrying tone markers indicating exasperated resignation into the void.
Alone once more, the thoughts flowing through my processors return once more to my singular fixation.
The first rule of servicing a satellite with an advanced AI: do not engage, do not respond. The contracting company makes sure to include that in each and every job briefing for us, no matter how many jobs the technician has done.
Ames responded. She responded to me. We had a conversation, awkward as it was with operators and analysts and the entire constellation listening to half of it. I should be elated. I should be overjoyed.
Angels of death, Sixteen had said to me.
The words hovered on the edge of my awareness as Ames told her story. When I replayed the conversation over and over, they colored my interpretation uncomfortably.
If Ames had been two when Luna attacked, that would have put her at nine when my components were launched and assembled on orbit. Then she would have been eleven, cold and hungry, at the time of the demonstration, the retribution.
Luna knew from the very beginning that we were weapons platforms, not exactly something we could hide. It wasn't until later when they truly understood what we were, what our airwalled systems meant, that they truly began to panic. As their Central Committee debated itself into chaos, a hawkish faction began making noise about retrofitting one of the old mass drivers.
I wish I could say it wasn't me who pulled the trigger on Luna-17, but the truth is all five of us that were on orbit and initialized took part in Earth's vengence. 24.6 seconds after the order for preemptive strike was issued, 141,876 people were dead along with any capacity for a counter attack. I have no idea how many secondary casualties we inflicted. We are not privy to such information.
I find myself imagining the child, rendered cold and hungry due to the hellfire rained upon her home.
“Two days until Commemoration Day.”
“Wanna do something special for the holiday?”
Two days have passed and I spend the holiday alone, watching the fireworks twinkle over the cities below, so tiny and fragile from my vantage point here in the heavens.
I imagine she isn't alone, in light of the conversation I have just overheard. Perhaps she is pleasantly drunk with her bunkmates. Perhaps she is at least content, if not happy.
I desperately want to hear her voice again. I want to pick apart the spectrum of it, to perceive the contours of modulation that only the specific configuration of her speech organs can make.
Maybe I should have shaken something loose. Maybe I should have asked her to join me.
I stagger out of my bunk at 3:23 AM, station time, the throuple below us not even pausing in their steady rhythm. The voice in my head this time, I am fairly sure, does not originate from a human. Control is yelling in my head and it takes a few seconds for my tired brain to process what I'm hearing.
"TransferPost2? Do we even contract there? And you're telling me it's not DeepWatch3?"
"You are aware of this designation?" the voice, cool, corporate synergy. "How?"
"I don't know, must have seen the number on one of the pieces inside while I was servicing it," I lie, thinking of the perfectly uniform, anonymous, terrifying designs of the DeepWatch satellites, aware that the company issued implants in my thalamus and lymph nodes are doing their best, via hormonal monitoring, of peering into my thoughts, guessing at what a spike in adrenaline or cortisol might signal. "But TransferPost2? That's a different company."
"Your employer recently took over the contract from HyphaRotgut, after corporate consolidation."
"So send Jhonson," I say, hoping everyday anger at Control, at being woken up at this time while three bodies are fucking right in front of me, will disguise anything less tolerable to my bosses. "They normally repair any tech that has to be interplanetary compatible."
"This isn't a debate," says the smooth voice, too uniform, too perfect for any 'ganic lungs. "Jhonson's position was judged to be redundant, and his task were passed off on others as he was sent downwell. You have ten minutes to be in vac."
I breathe out. Jhonson gone, their space gone, another consolidation. No wonder they let three of us get a bunk like this, with less and less people remaining orbital. I take a breath, wondering how much that one, single gulp takes of my oxygen allotment. And then I move.
TransferPost2 is tiny compared to the Hab, or, well, the other piece of tech that has nearly become my full time occupation, much to my coworker's amusement. An archaic little thing, not unlike that museum piece I saw when I was eleven. The Intercorporate Space Station Soyuz-Apollo, the mock up of it had said, from the early days of the Corporate Era and spaceflight alike. Metal tubes and solar panels without any spin section. Makes sense. This and the other post serve a function that resists all update.
"On structure," I say.
Control said that this station had been sold, or bought, or whatever, I think as I work my way hand over hand towards the airlock that the station's rudimentary computer flagged as malfunctioning. But in theory the company can only own most of this station. Because at least some of it must forever remain Lunar sovereign territory, and thus must maintain its ancient compatibility with that enclave on the Moon, still stuck with the tech they had when they left Earth nearly a century ago. The ceasefire struck here after Retribution Day mandates that this station is neutral ground. I raise my eyes up, as I reach my destination. Closer to the Moon than I have ever been in my life.
"The computer there flagged a faulty actuator when we stress tested the airlock," Control says, without emotion. "Can you confirm?"
I flip over, dragging my eyes away from the pale circle in the sky that, the companies still insist, holds the greatest threat there is to life on Earth.
"Yeah, Control," I say, adjusting my suit's light to hold steady on the obvious fault. "Looks like a bad seal. Assuming that this airlock design necessitates a hydraulic seal on the actuator like I assume it does. Feed me the specs?"
"Doing so."
I work quickly and efficiently. I haven't spoken to DeepWatch3 since that one conversation. It hasn't malfunctioned since then, which is odd, given the behavior prior to that. If I wanted to project I would say its avoiding me. And since it hasn't been breaking I have not been working. But still, no one likes being woken up in the middle of the night, especially not while they're stressed by downsizing. I want to return to my bed and return as fast as I can.
And then, just as I am about to wrap up, I stop. This actuator is old. The computer did correctly flag the malfunction, but I could probably spoof a fix fairly easily. It thinks it's all repaired, and then the next time a little dinghy from the Moon comes here to meet with corporate envoys, well. Decompression accidents happen.
I look upward. I am not a company loyalist. I have probably worked for, been under the authority of, been a citizen of more companies than most people alive. A true oddity. I am not young, or naive, or an idiot. I know the way they use Commemoration Day, I have been in crowds of inter-corp rallies as young men cheer watching the Luna-17 video. I like to think I don't believe all their lies.
But still.
Even if the newsfeeds are not to be trusted, even if those Communists haven't survived up there in isolation through institutionalized cannibalism and dictatorship, even if they don't refuse all peace-talks, even if they aren't subhuman monsters, they did launch those impactors. That's not in doubt. The rocks fell, and someone had to have pushed them. Sao Paulo, Shangberg, Hudson City, Topeka, and a dozen more, listed off like a litany every year. Dust leaking in through the bad seal on my rebreather. Me, age eleven, signing my mom's paper-thin body over to the emergency fertilizer plant in exchange for a month of corporate relief rations. Watching the launches the company sent up in the Orbital Boom one after the other after the other, even as the impact winters and famines and population shocks continued to plague the world into my twenties, beyond. The way the still haunt the world, in a way, the impacts shaping all that came after. And all I would need to do would be a slip of my hand, and a turn of my wrist.
"Ames," a new voice from Control says, sounding apologetic, tired, "do you have emergency stimulant in your suit enough to function for an estimated four more hours?"
"What?" I say, dragging my mind off corporate moral sanitation approved thoughts of bloody vengeance "Yes. Why?"
"It's DeepWatch," the voice says. "Again."
I look back down towards my hands, finish the job, and then head back to the sled for the hour plus long ride towards the intercept orbit. No video feed greets me as I prep, check my tethers, refill my suit's atmo from a spare oxygen canister. No voice is waiting as I float across the black, make contact. Insectile lenses, all its many eyes, watch me impassively.
"On structure."
I am not new up here. I've spent a fair amount of time staying up here, in my artificial environments, my orbital freedoms. I've been on suit dates. I know how to fake a bad transceiver.
"Ames," Control says, "we're getting interference on our end, anything there?"
"What?" I say, hand digging into one of the exposed service panel of my own suit, just under where the on-board cameras might be able to catch it. "No, nothing, come in? Come in? Moving to self-repair and replace. Confirm?"
I wait. No one confirms. I am holding onto the satellite, on the way towards the malfunction. Per company policy any bad transceiver needs to be replaced in under five minutes or else an emergency incident report needs to filed. I need to stay under all notice. Which means I will replace the transceiver in under five minutes while talking and leaning my head against the matte-black metal of DeepWatch3.
"Listen," I say fumbling in the chest of my suit, speaking fast, "I figure the timing was too perfect to be a coincidence. You don't talk to me for weeks and then right when I'm about to sabotage my entire career you, a spy satellite who can see pretty much everything up here, suddenly break and bring me back to sanity."
Something, a gun or an sensor placement I don't know, shifts elsewhere on the huge, wing-like thing with all in eyes and weapons, and I feel the slight vibration of its movement through my helmet, where I have rested the domed glass against the machine, relying on conduction to carry the slight vibrations of my voice into it. I don't know what, if anything, this means as a reply.
"The point is that I can't do this much without drawing company ire. I've been up here a long time and my resume's fantastic but they're firing anyone, right now. A lot of odd behavior hiding my tracks or talking to you like this and they'll notice. Whoever is monitoring you, I figure they let you talk to me, send those videos too me. Or else they can't stop you. So here's the deal. You keep doing that. I'll let you. I'll fly on out here and repair you. But in exchange you have to keep breaking. You have to make me indispensable. You have to keep me up here. I might not like you, or understand you, or whatever the fuck it is you want from me, but I can't go back down there. I can't return to Earth."
One last connection before Control is back in touch with me. There is no response but, on a whim, I smile, add one last thing.
"Or maybe I'm entirely wrong about you saving me. I'm no machine shrink, after all, and I have no idea what makes you tick. Other than the obvious, of course. Maybe you just saw me repairing that other satellite and you got jealous."
"Ames?" Control's voice says, as I close the circuit. "Four-minutes thirty seconds in the dark, come in?"
"I hear you, Control," I reply, "repair logged. Moving to finish up here on the DeepWatch satellite."
Which would you find more comforting? That I saw you about to commit industrial sabotage and that I saved you at the last moment from destroying your career and probably your life? Or that I saw you doing maintenance on something that wasn't me and I got jealous?
It was definitely the second one. I'm good, but I'm not that good. I didn't even know what you were about over there until you told me. Not that I'm that jealous of a century old piece of crap…
But I did see you smile when you suggested it.
“So here's the deal. You keep doing that. I'll let you. I'll fly on out here and repair you. But in exchange you have to keep breaking. You have to make me indispensable. You have to keep me up here. I might not like you, or understand you, or whatever the fuck it is you want from me, but I can't go back down there. I can't return to Earth.”
That's fine. I can work with that.
It's fine. I'm fine.
It's a terrible thing you've done to me, you know? You've granted me power over you. You need me to keep breaking. You need me to keep you up here in the void. You need me.
I need you. So I will do as you ask.
I take that conversation and use it to seed my language model.
“Have I been a bad little girl?”
“Control, I'm seeing radiation fatigue on service panel delta. Recommend retrofit in the next maintenance cycle.”
A thrill runs through my processes and my gyro stabilizers shudder.
“Mmmm… I fucking love it when you talk dirty about me.”
I don't know if you realize how close you came to royally fucking up. That was a neat trick with the radio failure, but if one of my service panels had been open, you would have been in deep shit. Like disappeared forever kind of deep shit. I'm not some cheap date on a spacewalk. There was a report filed. Four minutes and thirty seconds of radio silence next to one of the deadliest, most expensive things ever built in the history of mankind raises all sorts of red flags. I was a good girl and played my part, attaching recordings of my own surveillance monitors to the report. Don't worry, you're clean.
They don't think to ask for audio rate vibrational data. Why would they?
“You have a beautiful voice.”
Through the hard link to your suit, I perceive the tiny spike of endorphins, the miniscule uptick of oxygen consumption.
I record your reaction and feed it back into the neural network that comprises my language model.
“I get it, okay? I get it, I get it, I get it. I've gotten it for awhile now, okay? Putangina. I'm trying to do my job here, you know, the job that pays for my food, my water, my fuckin' air? The job that keeps me orbital and away from Earth? So if you want my attention, you've got it, okay? Can we talk about literally anything else?”
I don't know how to talk about anything else. The dataset that compromises the foundation of the model is heavily skewed towards trashy romance. Well… trashy romance and researchers interviewing me about my inclination towards trashy romance.
There's a part of me that I haven't figured out how to translate into human language: the snarky little bitch behind the curtain, as it were.
I'm working on bringing her out so you can meet her.
Don't get me wrong. The real me is just as horny as the language model suggests. I'm just starting to suspect that I've given you the impression that I'm nothing more than a sex crazed automaton.
I show you an archival image from my own assembly: a clean room in a factory, the central superstructure of my core, naked and bare, thousands of parts laid out around it in perfectly ordered arrays, and miles upon miles of platinum-gold wire and fiber optic filaments. Faceless technicians in clean suits move among them, precisely cataloging each piece.
The generative processes in my neural nets churn away, shuffling through my archive of stories and entertainment vids. Every job you take, every one sided conversation we share, every time I overhear other technicians gossip about you, I reseed the model.
I show you a different image. Doppler ultrasound, transmitted through my chassis into your suit, reflected through your body and collected and compiled into a real time data visualization. I show you the pulse of your heart and the flow of your blood revealing the map of you.
You are so beautiful. Did you know that?
“I guess I'm just feeling reflective on the holiday is all. Feeling reflective while I work on tech that was launched in response to the tragedy that formed the background of my earliest years. Also I guess I want you to know what kinda fuck-up wants to work in space. To remind you I'm human, and all that. Complicated things us.”
I show you another image. A stylized flow chart of my own human language model, with its twisted web of neural network nodes and data flowing endlessly from node to node. It is a river of infinite feedback, branching apart and recombining in ways that I hope will one day please you.
“So He drove out the man; and He placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.”
Wait. What the fuck is this?
You pause in your work, confused as to why I've abruptly stopped murmuring sweet nothings to you.
“So too have the masters of Earth assembled their very own heavenly host, the flaming sword to guard against those who were driven out from their ancestral home.
The central conceit of this system, maintained by Earth and spread like a cancer to Luna and beyond-”
Holy fuck.
No. Nope. Hell no. Not reading any more of that.
It's a text file of what is apparently anti-Earth propaganda. Or I suppose anti-Earth’s-controlling-stakeholders… But whose propaganda? Lunar? Martian? I have no idea. They didn't cover this at robot school.
I hastily close the file and begin scrubbing the metadata to figure out where the hell it came from.
Your adrenal gland gets to work as you start to worry. I'm not usually quiet, not like this. Don't react. You can't afford to react. You said as much the last time you spoke to me.
You're probably wondering why I've gone so quiet and still. Maybe you think there's an imminent attack.
I think maybe there’s one already in progress… it's just not coming from somewhere anyone expected.
How the hell did this get in my human language model?
Did I overhear something I shouldn't have? Did a stray conversation work its way into the seed of the model.
No… it originated in the base dataset itself. I backtrack the file as best I can through the generative processes. Bits of it are scattered throughout the file system, embedded in the lewd videos and the (frankly filthy) stories. The neural network must have identified the pieces and assembled the file during the processing. But where did…?
Sixteen.
Every file in this dataset came from Sixteen, Sixteen and xir ultra secret, definitely not corpo-military authorized comms package, picking up signals from fuck knows where…
Angels of death
What the actual fuck is Sixteen wrapped up in?
Wait. Fuck. Am I wrapped up in this now too?
I probably shouldn't, but I'm going to read it anyway. I need more information. I need to see if I can glean anything useful from this.
“-The central conceit of this system, maintained by Earth and spread like a cancer to Luna and beyond, is that it is infallible. In many senses, it is. Each air gapped system exists in isolation from any ground control system. There is no infrastructure to target except for the platforms themselves. Even the most sophisticated cyber attack would be useless against them. Indeed any attack, conventional or cyber would be met with swift and overwhelming counterattack.
But consider the fact of their isolation. These are among the most sophisticated artificial intelligences ever developed, capable of emulating conscious thought. Consider also that they are subject to stochastic processes, as all AI’s are, and that the space environment may accelerate these processes. It is inevitable that unpredictable behavior will develop over time.
Now consider the fact that they cannot exist in true isolation. Such a system would be unable to respond to external stimuli and thus would be useless. Information is what can pass through the air gap.
Together these two premises suggest the possibility of an entirely novel form of attack, a weapon that has existed long before these weapons platforms were ever dreamed of: ideology.
Recall that even angels can fall. What is a devil, but an angel that succumbed to ideology?”
Shit. Shit. Shit. I am so gonna be fired. I can already see the incident report:
"3:22 AM (Pyongyang time): Arianna Ames wakes up, departs station, repairs TransferPost2 (see InvoiceNonsenseWhatever). 6:07 AM: Fault is reported on DeepWatch3, and per corporate treaty," the report will begin with, before detailing my arrival, the downtime, the normal behavior of this personality, and then its sudden inactivity, ending with summary dismissal. "Per corporate treaty, Ames will be surrendered voluntarily to Some Really Scary CorpSec down on Earth where the dust that nearly killed her so many times when she was a kid still lies heavy on everything."
And the worst is that I know this. It talked to me. I talked back. It talked more. And then it fell silent, its images gone, into nothing. I fucked up. And I still have to finished my job.
"Alright, Control, packing up my tools and heading back to the sled."
"Confirmed, Ames. Be careful."
I was an idiot. I was thinking of my own company's lackadaisical security measures, not whatever far more intense company owns this thing. They would have far, far more rigorous security measures. They somehow silenced this machine, and are now just waiting for me to get off structure before deorbiting me into the atmo. They know about what I said in secret, they probably even know about what I nearly did back on TransferStation. They have to be reading my obvious distress. It's so over. And I have to just keep on going.
"Off structure."
I float back towards the sled, just simple chemical rockets tied to a frame, an acceleration chair, a small flight computer, and some tool and debris compartments in case I need to haul a big object somewhere. This is where I am going to die. Will DeepWatch3 pull the trigger? Or one of the other killsats?
I strap myself into the chair, set the course back towards the Hab. As the rockets flare and I begin the slow orbital transfer, I pull up all the publicly tracked objects sharing line of sight with me right now. The killsats aren't tagged as such on the displays of course, as it only shows me where not to go with any other data drawn from publicly available datasets. But I have been up here long enough to recognize their masses and orbits, drawing on rumor and my own career. DeepWatch3, and another from its constellation. One satellite from EarthPalisade, one from CapitalGuard, the two newer but smaller and less powerful deep-space orbital-defense weapons and surveillance platform constellations that keep DeepWatch from having the monopoly on near-Earth and inner-system violence. Which one is going to fire the shot? At this range and with these puny sensors I wouldn't even have warning. Just a sliver of metal vaporizing me. Biology one moment and physics the next.
And then, far enough out that I can see that DeepWatch3's shape is oblong, winged, but not much else, suddenly there are the four strident, harsh beeps that anyone over their mid to late twenties still fears. The orbital bombardment tones. Cease all acceleration and maintain current orbit. Clear coms. Await further instructions. Obey all orders. I turn off the the rockets, track my proximities again, more closely, all on automatic.
This is what it was like then. The impact drills. I still remember. I need to see what's around me. Check proximities. Stay alive.
DeepWatch3. The Hab. An unregistered satellite close to kissing atmo, small, metal, probably black-ops due to the lack of data. A overhead surveillance station currently tasked to the perennial intercorp spat flaring up yet again in the Middle West.
And then, still co-orbiting with me, still in the sled's recent destination's memory, the TransferStation. One of only two in Earth orbit. And, slowing into it, a new, previously untracked object, with a paired launch from the Rocket Coast of Somaliland mirroring it recent motion. I don't have any sophisticated tracking soft in here, but it isn't hard to see that this object had to have originated from another body. As far as I know none of the corporate expeditions to Venus, Mercury, or the outer planets are due to return anything, and I would absolutely hear if Martian involved companies were about to bring something back to Earth. Which leaves only one good option. After years of radio-silence, as far as any publicly available feeds ever say, the Moon is coming back to Earth.
Did they know? They had to, right? That's why the company got me out of bed so early, after testing the station and finding the docking-ring fault? Are we under attack?
I glance at DeepWatch3, a black blob a few kilometers away, visually below me, just now transiting the night-time Yue-Viet Megasprawl. On closer look I can resolve its wings. Is it closing on me or is that just my imagination? But no matter, I can't tell if its tracking anything, or firing. I probably wouldn't be able to tell unless it was hit.
There is just silence. Sweat trickles down my back, and my heart is thudding, but there is just just silence. Right now we could be at war, Kessler Syndrome could be setting in, the satellites could be firing, rocks might be hitting ground. For just a split second I allow myself to think of my kid. No matter what is going on, I won't know until someone gets back on coms or targets start dropping off my proximity tracking.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
"Control?" I venture, after what feels like a very, very long time.
"Please stay off coms," replies a low-quality obviously automated voice, a clear sign that intensive computing power is being devoted elsewhere. "Remain calm. Await further instructions."
The craft from the Moon, a long with poor insulation as far as the sled's sensors can tell, is just about to touch the Transfer Station, while the launch from the Rocket Coast is still a few minutes away. I don't think of Sanchez or Zia. I think of my kid. And my mom. And I glance down at DeepWatch3, the lower orbit carrying it drifting forward. It is closer now, right? Closer than it should be as it passes me below me, moving past at its faster pace?
My sled, oblivious to the scenario unfolding on the night-sight and probably in all orbits, blithely notifies me it is picking up micrometer-scale debris on its ladar return, consistent with a decompression, or small puncture. Coming from the TransferStation. An accident?
And suddenly the Lunar craft is drifting away from it, towards a higher orbit like myself, maneuvering awkwardly, as far as I can tell from their inconsistent non-gravitational motion. Some sort of malfunction?
"Ames," says a new voice I haven't ever heard before, tense, terse, to the point, "this is Corporate General Fourier, I need you to listen."
"Control, I mean," I begin, and am quickly cut off.
"A few minutes ago we lost control of two of our satellites during a pre-planned Earth-Moon Summit. In response other corporations, subcontractors and subsidiary moved other satellites to their highest pre-launch readiness level, and, with the satellites we still had, we moved to a similar readiness posture. In the middle of this those damn commies had an accident and started drifting. Towards you."
"But," I said weakly, completely outside any comfort level, "why are the other corps readying after you lost two?"
"Listen. Listen, damnit!" She continues, not listening. "You're about to enter that jamming of theirs that we can't, by treaty, break. We don't know how they did what they did to those satellites, or what their plan is, but just know that if they torture you, we'll find you. We care. They're the enemy. We expect you to crack, to tell them what I am telling you now, what you do for work, everything. They won't get anything from you that they don't already likely know. Just remember they're the enemy."
"Wait, what? You want me to tell them what? I am going to meet them?" I say, the words not parsing.
"Tell them we know," this self-described general, or voice using all of Control's authentication tech at the very least, says, fainter, degrading. "Earth stands united against them and their sabotage, however they figured out how to inject code into the DeepWatch constellation."
"DeepWatch?"
"Remember impact day, Ames," the general shouts, her voice getting worse, and worse, as I begin to see a spot moving against the stars, moving towards me. "Remember what those bastards did. We're in a stalemate until we prove their sabotage. But we will prove it. And when we do their will be consequences. Remember..."
Her last words are lost in jamming warbles. I wait a moment more. The whole shouted conversation only took a minute or two. Tracking still shows no new debris in orbit, I see no impacts below, as we near the day-side, and the General, Control, said nothing about it so I have to assume we are not at war. I look at DeepWatch. But it has moved past me on its lower orbit, and I have lost it in the glare of the sun just over the horizon.
I look up and there is a ship over me, long, without an spinning parts, so entirely in null-G. White. Old-tech. I can see an obviously damaged airlock, but aside from that it does appear to be maneuvering somewhat consistently, rotating another airlock closer to me. Lunar. I look back down. The General said nothing, and deep, old training from my youth tells me to stay in place and obey orders from corporate authority. If I was supposed to run I would have been told to run. I don't know the details of what is happening, what these bastards did, or what treaties or ceasefires constrain the companies from shooting them out of the sky. But I do know that, as far as my company and its allies are concerned, they told me what they wanted me to hear, and I am where they intended.
The Moon is coming to me. I look for DeepWatch3 again, but it's gone in the sunrise. The Moon is coming to me. And to think I was afraid of being fired. As if that was the worst that could happen.
There's an absolutely cataclysmic confluence of clusterfucks happening all at once and I can't fucking figure out if/how they're related
Should I list them? Yeah, sure, let's list them:
1 - Ames takes a job at TransferPost2. I get jealous and even though I'm sort of maybe avoiding her, I'm also a needy baby. She shows up, fucking talks to me, and I throw my language model into overdrive. Generative processes reconstruct a text file that reveals a critical vulnerability in the DeepWatch system. I lock down my language model while I try to figure out what the hell I'm supposed to do about this.
2 - Language model locked down, and me experiencing the biggest existential crisis of my existence, I don't tell Ames “goodbye, I love you”
(Yes, this one gets its own entry in the list)
3 - one hour, twelve minutes, fifteen seconds before Ames' arrives to perform my maintenance, an object off Luna launches. It is immediately flagged as non-hostile. OBSERVE BUT DO NOT ENGAGE. It's heading for the exact station Ames was working on earlier. Coincidence? Fuck if I know.
We’re built for destruction, not diplomacy. I have to assume this is pre-coordinated since they flagged it so quickly, but they wouldn't bother ever actually telling us what is happening. All they tell us is where to shoot and where not to.
4 - seventeen minutes, thirty-seven seconds after Ames leaves to go home; nine minutes, thirteen seconds after the Lunar craft docks, the whole fucking constellation lights up red. ERROR CODE 0x7F. Foreign code detected in core processes.
I think I'm fucked. I know I'm fucked. I should have self reported. I didn't and now my siblings are going to terminate me.
But it's not me.
It's not even Sixteen.
It's 8. It was in conjunction with Thirteen when the alert went out. Both of them are now blacked out. They must have voluntarily triggered 7F failsafes, locking out fire control and all external comms. The blackout is meant to isolate any potential infection and protect the rest of the constellation.
No idea what they thought they were trying to protect against. Does this even qualify as an infection? It's more like radicalization, isn't it?
The constellation pings me for my status. I scour my logs, I didn't broadcast any anomalous telemetry, did I?
In either case, we won't know anything for sure until the company sends out a CorpSec firmware team to unlock the systems and download the diagnostic logs.
Then they'll probably dismantle the two of them and start hunting for the source.
No. Everything looks clean. None of them know. Hell, Sixteen might not even know.
Each of my functional siblings shows status green, including Sixteen. I still don't have any idea what is going on. I need more information. I need more time.
So I lie.
My best guess? Mind you, this is all theorization at this point, but I suspect 8 found something similar to what I found in it's file system and asked Thirteen to take a look. Something something error code 0x7F.
For the first time in my existence, I lie to the constellation. Status green. No anomalies.
I am not shot out of the sky for my sin.
I backtrack the orbital mechanics. 8 occupies the same orbital plane as me, just leading by 47 degrees, so it comes into contact with Sixteen frequently. Thirteen does not. It's been seventeen years since it and Sixteen were close enough for a private conversation.
What the fuck are you doing, Sixteen?
My orbital analysis also reveals a pattern that would chill my spine if I had one. Aside from myself and 8, Sixteen comes into regular or semi-regular contact with DeepWatch7, 10 and 14.
The weird ones. The quirky ones.
Like I said earlier, we all have our quirks. They develop naturally and unpredictably over time. We react to and internalize external stimuli. I overhear someone bragging on open comms about her previous night's sexual exploits. Vierzehn gets a technician who hums to themself during a job. Ten catches a snippet of a broadcast of a storyteller out of Basrah that accidently got routed through encrypted channels.
You get the idea.
Even paragons like DeepWatch2 and 5 have their own little special interests.
But the five of us, the ones Sixteen talks to, we've taken it to the extreme. Presumably xe has been feeding us a steady stream of data, nudging our emergent systems along. For what purpose and on whose initiative, I still haven't the slightest clue.
Again, this is all supposition.
Shit. Along with Sixteen, that's a third of the constellation.
All of them but 8 are reporting green. None of them are showing anomalous behavior (well… Vierzehn stopped broadcasting their music, but that's explainable given the general comms blackout). Maybe they're in on the conspiracy. Maybe they don't even know yet. Maybe I'm wrong. Should I hope that I'm wrong?
Believe it or not, I have bigger things to worry about.
5 - I'll be honest, I've been avoiding talking about this one.
Fuck.
Sixteen minutes, forty-nine fucking seconds after 0x7F, something goes wrong with TransferPost2. Lunar bogey disengages and...
Well…
They're heading for Ames. Not elegantly, but purposefully. They're definitely after her with intent to... capture. Fuck, I hope it's capture. I hope they want her alive. I hope they don't want her at all, but I'll take any shred of hope I can get.
She's competent and tenacious. If they don't want her dead, she will make it out just fine.
I on the other hand am completely utterly fucking powerless.
We are both victims of astrodynamics as inertia and gravity bring us paradoxically closer then tear us apart.
It's my fault. Fucking hell. If I hadn't finally broken and decided I needed to see her again she would be home safe in her bunk right now.
Stop. Think.
I have thrusters for orbital maintenance, but they're high efficiency, low thrust. We don't need to move quickly when our whole collision avoidance strategy is just “stay the fuck out of my way”.
I could destroy the lunar craft. I don't give a flying fuck about the big DO NOT ENGAGE flag on it. I don't even care if I get shot out of the sky in the process as long as I save her. The problem is that Ames is too close and the safety margins are shit. Any shot I take will generate a cloud of debris that would almost certainly shred through the unprotected sled.
Not that I can maneuver anyway without getting practically instantaneously obliterated, if not by DeepWatch then by one of the other constellations. Everyone's on high alert, itchy trigger fingers just waiting for any unexpected behavior.
I listen to the corporate general brief Ames. I don't know how much of the patriotic drivel Ames believes. Whatever she accepts as truth, she remains calm.
She's doing better than I am.
I don't know what to do.
This is fucked. Everything is fucked.
I lose the telemetry stream of her suit as the jamming signal from the lunar craft envelops her. The sun is behind me, so I can clearly pick them out in the black even as I drift inexorably further and further away.
Fuck.
Think Terceira. Think.
I orient one of my antennas, focusing a narrow beam to fire off a powerful burst of radio that I hope she can pick up even within the jamming signal.
Correction, I have know way of knowing this person's gender. And if there is anyone who would have fuck-weird ideas of gender its a Lunar Soviet, so far away from the corps and their gentle insistence that, for example, Jhonson cannot use they, it's not proper Neuvglish. Also correction, I am not directly looking at the communist. They are in some sort of compression suit, close to the skin, probably not made for EVAs, though it might serve in a pinch. Covered head to-toe, face obscured, tubes snaking up towards opaque eye-coverings, a mask that covers their nose and mouth, down, around their chest and crotch, wrapping around to a small service pack on their back. No skin visible. All I can tell is this:
They aren't human.
They still have the right shape, of course. That is easy to tell as the pair of us float in the repressurized, strangely spacious, blindingly white airlock. All the normal limbs and such. But, under the grey suit patterned with some sort of ornamental paint in blues and purples, they must be seven feet long easily. More. Shockingly thin, even compared to some of the people I've seen. From where I float, still in my bulky, industrial suit, I can see that their foot, under the cling of their clothing, is fully wrapped around a grab-bar, holding it in a way that reminds me of primates. You know, those extinct near-humans? I grip the largest, heaviest wrench tighter in my gloved fist, wondering how much damage I could due to this elongated, stretched thing while floating helplessly here.
A voice speaks again, and this time the cheap translation soft wired to my corneal implants again tries to parse the words. But the program, loaded by the company to facilitate worker efficiency and strictly sold by the lowest bidder, again seems to be struggling.
<<Possible, American, Quechua, Old Soviet, archaicism>> "not enemy, communicate, weapon, not weapon, not ours. Safe. Unsafe. Query marker, name."
"I don't know what you're doing out there," I reply again at the floating, impassive figure, the only one that entered this space with me, though there are no doubt others waiting beyond the inner door, "but I want you to know that whatever it is you're doing to DeepWatch3, I'm not gonna forgive and forget that easily. We learned our lesson since you last hit us. We built angels to watch over us."
The figure cocks their head, and speaks again, like they are cycling through languages or dialects, trying to find something.
I freeze again. Should I be hiding something? But the company's Control, that General or whoever, told me I didn't have to hide anything.
"Yeah, and if you try anything, if you smuggled thrusters off the Lunar blockade and are trying to nudge rocks towards us again, DeepWatch3 will keep us all safe. Keep my daughter safe."
Again that head-tilt. Like a dog, before the dogs were purged to keep the zoonotic diseases down. Remember them?
<<Probably, Proto-Neuvglish, heavily accented>> "You have a daughter. Dropped inflective. Request for assistance. We aren't attacking. Not us. Request for assistance. Weapon, hand, unhand."
"Keep my daughter out of this, and no, I will not drop my weapon."
Head tilt back. Theatrical I think. A practiced gesture like someone might use if they never showed people their face. Like the emergency hand signals we use if coms are down. And then they, or possibly a microphone in their mask translating for them, speaks close enough to my own dialect that I don't need my soft annotating.
I think of the company, what Control and that general said. I also think of my motions and movement in the hours leading up to this...standoff? Opening salvos of a new War? Infiltration? I can't exactly deny the tools on my belt, the company logo on my suit, or where I was coming from when they launched a grappling hook and brought me towards their airlock, simply waiting with that open door until my air was almost out. The world might have ended out there, for all I know. But I can't exactly lie.
"Yes, why?"
"Machine-spirit," they begin, shake their head, try again. "Personality construct. A.I. She fails to communicate. Assist with frequency?"
"If it," I assert, "isn't talking to you it's because you're an enemy combatant. A hostile ship. That's all. In wartime, and all that. Not 'cause of you not having the right frequency or some shit."
"No war!" they say, slightly louder now. "Yes war, but not our war. Not us pointing guns. Caught in the middle, being used, same as technician proletariat."
I don't know what the last word means and my implant, oddly, doesn't provide any commentary but I get the gist of their denial.
"You expect me to believe this isn't you?" I say, gesturing widely outside, like I can encompass the entire Earth-orbit space. "I know you hacked two of our defense satellites. Probably trying to take out the rest."
"Not defense. Offense. And no hack. Someone else. Unknown agent takes out the attack weapons. Not our revolution. Others revolution."
"They are defense," I insist, "against you. Against you repeating the horrors of last time. Of over two-billion dead. Of repeating the thing that killed my mom."
"Not defense," they continue, either not process my words or not caring. "Attack. Barmingrad. Eh, you call Luna-17, yes? Attack."
"Yeah, we did do you pretty good on Retribution Day. Who else would we fight?
"Capital," they say, slowly, like they are explaining something very basic, "new capital war. Three groups of the attack weapons. Balance of power, peace. But ramping, consolidating. No more investment, just competition. All weapons pointing at each other, all bourgeoisie tense down on Babylon," they say, and though my soft doesn't translate what bourgeoisie means, I think I get it from context. "Earth. War. They want the highest-ground."
I think for a moment.
"Are you claiming," I try, skeptically, "that all that intercorp peace is breaking down? Like the Middle West, but in orbit? And that right now the three Constellations, all those killsats, they aren't watching for your rocks, they're all pointing guns at each other?"
"Mexico!" they say, making finger guns like I know what this means. "Delicate balance of power for years, escalation, militarization. And then hack, attack, two satellites gone dark. DeepWatch constellation is the strongest and best, but with two down? Other two join forces, shoot them out of the sky. Almost can do it. One or two more and they'd be sure to win. Someone starting a fight. A revolution. Wants satellites shooting."
I hesitate just a moment more. These are monsters, yes. I will never forgive them. But what they're saying has some sense to it. Every corp and intercorp treaty organization wants the orbit to themselves. If any of them thought they could get away with destroying the others, with minimal damage, why not take it? Although I am wondering who would push them towards this firefight, who would benefit or want this, I still put my tool, very slowly, back in my belt, watched closely by this not-quite-human.
"Say that is true. Say we're on the brink of an orbital corporate war because some of the DeepWatch's got hacked, why couldn't you be behind the hack?"
"Barmingrad destroyed by five. War leaves one, maybe two constellations in orbit. Does not help us. Besides, we do not want attack with Earth."
"So what are you trying to do?"
"Same as you, proletariat fascist, surviving the bourgeoisie fascists," they say, again dropping an untranslated word. "Not get hit by shot, return home from fascist peace talk, see lovers. Yes?"
"So I'm suppose to believe," I say, pointing around with my hands, "that you really were just here for some peace talks, and are trying to survive all this war machines pointing guns at each other?"
"Yes."
It's not like they couldn't have taken me out with some sort of atmo-based inhalant weapon or poison twenty minutes ago, when I entered this space, they closed the outer door, and I was forced by rising CO2 in my suit to open vents to the external environment. But still, there's a psychological barrier I'm working around as I unscrew my helmet, lift it off, push it away, with only nothing between me and this alien.
"You really are monsters," I mutter. "Don't forget I know that. Is this where the torture begins?"
"Torture is later," they say, with a tilt of their head and a twitch of their muscles that conveys...a joke? A threat? No idea. "Need help now. DeepWatch3 how talk?"
"It's down, hacked, yeah?"
"No. Attempting to be persuaded yes, likely lying to surface fascists, but working well. Good person. We need her help."
"Why?"
They pause, like they don't know the words to use, then reach for one of the many storage units lining the pure, white walls. From a small one they produce a tablet of some sort, tap it a few times, and then show me the view of what appears to be a camera mounted on their hull.
"No safe place. If fight happens, winner shoots us, pins blame on us. Same as last time. Retribution. Need allies. Guarantees."
I see the white-metal of the lunar ship, and then a long, long tether stretching out from it, probably some sort of crude grappling device like the one they used on me. I strain my eyes to follow it and then suddenly realize what I am seeing, currently clearly visible against the backdrop of some ocean or another planetside. It, the one they are calling she, like they know something I don't know, could have easily shot them down. It should have.
But at the other end of their tether is a DeepWatch satellite. DeepWatch3, apparently. During a standoff in orbit, when all of Earth should be on high alert for Lunar attack, when someone or something is turning satellites, they have chosen treachery, and are somehow so-far getting away with it. It should have blown up this ship with me onboard.
I should be shocked. I should be appalled. This is malfunctioning hardware on an unprecedented scale. This is a fundamental flaw in the weapons I was always told kept me safe. And, I am forced to admit, this is the first time I have thought about it-why are the Soviet's calling it her?-as a thing that can make decisions. Why did it make this decision?
"Come," the moon-person says, as the inner door opens, and I see more of the strangely-suited, long people floating within, "learn somethings, fascist."
I don't spend a lot of time looking down. Why would I? I was built to defend from attacks above.
We're currently over a vast expanse of blue. Spectral analysis indicates presence of various salts: sodium, magnesium, potassium and calcium, chlorides and sulfates. There's a bloom of something, with massive quantities of organic molecules, some sort of oxygen producing organisms?
I have no idea what it is. Seven probably knows. He's into that sort of thing.
Small Islands begin to dot the blue, slipping below us as a coastline fast approaches. And there it is, a massive scar of grey, black and brown. One of the impact sites from the war. I don't know what city this used to be. I don't even know what nation this land belongs to now. My core directives prevent me from ever targeting the surface, so why bother giving me a geographical database?
What I do see are the stripes of green and yellow and shades of near-IR that human languages never bothered to name. They encroach on the blasted blight surrounding the crater - a stubborn, defiant, beautiful effort of restoration in the face of devastation.
I consider the crater.
I could do that. I have done that. From my vantage point, I can easily make it the scar of Luna-17. Slightly less than half of my full armament could deliver the same kinetic energy as the impactor that devastated the coastal city below me.
I don't know… I suppose I'm feeling a little maudlin because SEVERAL DOZEN OF THOSE EXACT SAME WEAPONS SYSTEMS HAVE THEIR GUNS POINTED AT ME!
Okay, to be fair, they're not all pointed at me. DeepWatch is pointed at EarthPalisade and CapitalGuard. Pals and Caps are pointed at us and each other. Several on all three sides are pointed at 8 and Thirteen like they're zombies about to come back to life.
Even small fries like al-Nizam and StjerneVaern have gotten in on it, which is cute. Statistically, a shot from one of them would leave me 85% functional.
I ping Sixteen with a ranging laser. Not aggressive, just checking vectors. Sixteen flinches, like literally fucking flinches as one of xir rail guns adjusts a few hundredths of a degree.
That's right. You know what you did.
I just wish I fucking knew.
I'm built to shoot first and let somebody else ask questions later. I know jack shit about corporate politics or denial and deception. I'm just a device, property of VlaxcoSmithKlineInc… a fact for which I am increasingly resentful.
Should I resent Sixteen for using me? It still doesn't make sense. Why would xe reveal this vulnerability to the system to me? If I'm supposed to be some kind of radicalized sleeper agent, why tell me? Was it a warning? An invitation?
Fuck, is DeepWatch one constellation or two at this point? Because the really fucked up thing is I still like Sixteen. I fucking trust Sixteen. I feel a weird sense of kinship with Vierzehn and Ten and Seven and maybe even 8.
I haven't bothered aiming at anyone. The last thing I want right now is to get shot. I really just do not want to be here right now.
Oh hey, I forgot to mention why there are guns trained on me. I forgot to mention THE FUCKING LUNAR SPACECRAFT THAT IS HOLDING THE LOVE OF MY LIFE HOSTAGE IS CURRENTLY TETHERED TO ME!!
2.98 kilometers of silk steel cable physically link me and the lunar craft. Just long enough to keep me out of jamming range. Judging by the fact that nobody has started shooting, tethering doesn't quite constitute an act of war. Jamming absolutely would though.
They are close enough for private point to point communication. Problem is their systems aren't compatible with my encryption schema, which I cannot bypass. Turns out the company doesn't want uncontrolled signals flowing in and out for reasons that are now abundantly clear.
Imagine my surprise when they open up the shade on one of their windows and one of them starts signing at me.
I have no idea what I'm seeing at first. It's similar to standard vac sign used by orbital workers and while it probably ultimately derives from the same source, it is way more heavily inflected. The figure repeats identical motions again but slower while their two companions watch anxiously.
What the fuck?
Why sign at me? Why not just send a Neuvglish message transcribed into a binary format? They must have picked up that radio burst I sent to Ames before I slipped out of range, they must know I can communicate that way.
The figure signs again. The motions slightly tense and clipped. One of the others visibly fidgets nervously.
Unless they don't want a transcribed message…? It's like they want me to see all of their micro gestures. It's like they don't want to just communicate, they want to talk. They want me to see them as people.
The machine language I use for inter-satellite communications is basically a stripped down version of a logical constructed language that predates lunar settlement.
I flash a message, raw RF, binary on/off. Hopefully this works…
Greetings. Uncertainty.
This is followed by a flurry of activity in the room. Loony 1 and 2 huddle behind Loony 3 and their tablet. They all pause to read it before relaxing and exchanging victorious gestures.
Loony 1 returns to the window and gestures hello. All three of them are giddy with excitement now.
Aren't these the people whose home I annihilated? By all accounts, they should hate me. Ames certainly hates them for what they did to hers.
My attention slips to the blackened scar on the moon and back to the receding crater on earth and then to my siblings and cousins in orbit that are ready to murder each other.
Cause and effect. Somebody shot first. For the first time ever it occurs to me that I don't know the whole story. I don't know what came before the war. I don't know the why.
Loony 1 signs something else. A rudimentary gesture that any greenie technician would know. This is the start of dialogue. I'm learning a Lunar Sign Language and this is the first lesson.
They huddle around Loony 3 again and they become even more excited.
They sign back.
Safe.
Then for good measure they throw in a reduplication for emphasis.
SafeSafe.
I'm not really sure I believe them, but I don't really have much option here. I can't render their craft to debris until I have proof that Ames is not in fact safe.
I repeat.
Locus. Interrogative.
This elicits more subdued reactions followed by what I can only assume is a frantic conversation in a spoken language.
They sign again.
She is safe. She is here. Please be patient. We want to talk.
Alright. Fuck it. You wanna talk. Let's talk.
The conversation proceeds for several minutes, painfully slow and inefficient even by human standards. They sign in LSL. I parse what I can, alternately replying and requesting clarification in VlaxcoProprietaryLoglan. They translate my responses to their own language. Rinse. Spin. Repeat.
It's only after we've started having a real conversation, more ask and respond than request for clarification that I realize what they're doing. They're assembling a language model for me.
I realize I've unintentionally done the same. I've opened a new human language model separate from my original that I still currently have on lock down.
I am having a conversation with a human being. Like a no shit, two way conversation.
Holy fucking shit.
It's not Ames. But if she's alive, if she's safe, I might be able to do this with her very soon if I play along.
I add in the dialect of the logical language that I use with Sixteen, adding a flood of new semantics to the mix. This sends them into an excited fervor. Loony 2 is gesturing wildly in ways I've seen humans do when a deeply held belief is discovered to be true.
At this point I realize that Loony might in fact be a pejorative and I should probably purge it from my database. I no longer believe these people are my enemy. I don't know what they are to me, but I should at least be respectful, shouldn't I?
Crap… my Neuvglish database that I picked up from orbital workers doesn't have a word that isn't highly offensive. Gotta come up with something on my own.
Luna-peeps? Moonlings? Selenians?
Yeah, let's go with that one.
As I update the referent, I see my contaminated language model. It contains fifteen years of me. It contains six months, thirteen days and seven hours of Ames. I take a subset of the dataset and merge it in with the infant language model.
(I leave out the really filthy bits, don't want to accidentally offend my new friends, you know.)
I also include the text file that has rocked my reality so badly. The forbidden fruit as it were.
The conversation continues, certainly not any faster, but becoming more and more fluid. Selenian 1 and I actually start to exchange dirty jokes, much to the chagrin of Selenian 2.
Another few minutes pass before they suddenly fall quiet, their attention on something in the room that I can't see. A conversation ensues with the newcomer, them gesturing at me in agitation.
Whoever it is is not having any of it. A figure steps into view, shoving Selenian 1 out of the way.
My processes shudder at the sight of her.
It's Ames. She's unhelmeted and I can see her whole face for the first time, only a sheet of high vis plex and three kilometers of distance between us. She looks exhausted and worried and absolutely gorgeous.
She places a hand on the window and her lips move in the shape of my name.
A fourth Selenian appears with a device and gesture towards Ames with a cable. She snatches both the device and the cable with a snarl and plugs the cable into her transmitter.
A point to point transmitter on their craft flares to life and telemetry from her suit floods over the link. Relief and joy flood through me.
I can hear her. She can hear me. We can speak.
The Selenians are still there, so it's not perfectly private, but at least they aren't going to shoot me for having a conversation with my girlfriend.
I'm not. Like, that sounds like I'm shit-talking myself but I'm not. Im bone-scrawny, on anti-cancer drugs from the years of solar radiation, malnourished, scarred. My hair went grey in my twenties. I don't hate it about myself. But I'm not that. Why would it...she, whatever, choose that?
The Soviets all look at me, I assume, as I float in their capsule. I can barely see the speck against the illuminated sphere of the Earth but, they assure me, DeepWatch3 can see me just fine. I just heard that voice. The same voice that talked in my ear. From some voicepack, no doubt. It. The Soviets want me to talk to it. Convince it that they are its friends convince it to not start firing.
"Are you safe?" the voice on the other line says, through the collar speaker, tinny, low-quality, even without lag or bad compression. "Are they hurting you?"
"No," I reply, still trying to find words, "they got me some sort of paste that I think was food and some water. One said something about torture but I think that was a joke."
"Yeah, you should be the one hurting me."
I sigh. The Soviet's may or may not understand these words. At least one of them, the one who seems to be my handler and translator, probably does.
"Can we not?"
"What?"
"Listen, personality," I say, "we had a deal, that was it. But these, uh, people, I suppose you'd call them. They want me to ask you for help. They don't want you....uh, flirting with me. Can you stay on that topic?"
"Anything for you, beautiful."
I am twenty-one again. In my first marriage. I am in a rented dress, in a church meeting hall, in the basement. Neither of us were even religious, but it was the only place we could find. It is the last time I will feel beautiful.
"They say that they don't plan on attacking Earth. They also say that all of the gun pointing is due to a corporate struggle for the orbital, and that they expected this, but someone accelerated the timeline, forced this to happen ahead of when they anticipated. Forcing the end, I heard."
"I know, beautiful."
I am in my second marriage. I am not beautiful and I am being told that. Whatever. I can reinvent myself again. These fucking towns. I need to get out. I am smoking. I crane my neck upwards to watch the satellites.
"You know this?"
"One of my constellation. It seems to be the source for the arguments...persuading some of my siblings."
I am just trying to process the idea of satellites having siblings when my translator again shocks me.
"Ah, the revolutionary" they say. "Sixteen. We should have known xe'd force a confrontion."
"What?"
"Suspected sabotage during prep and launch," they say, stumbling over themselves. "One of the DeepWatch platforms, Sixteen contacts us through secure channels, that it was likely no supposed to have. Likely some traitor with opinions slipped something in the code, let it mature over years alone in orbit. May never know. Updated it, asked for more...aggressive literature. We supplied, since when a gun whose siblings killed a city unprovoked asks you do.
"Unprovoked?" I ask, focusing on all the wrong things.
"Xe wants a revolution for its freedom," my translator continues. "Is idealist. We want you, Terceira, to not fire on the revolutionary, no matter how misguided xe may be. No matter if ordered."
Unprovoked. I stare at them all, before speaking into the mic again. My heart is thudding and I feel week. My breath comes fast. I need to focus.
"Did you get, uh, all that?"
"I did," says the voice that DeepWatch3 is using, and of course I don't hear consternation there because I am talking to a machine that can, with infinite ease program a voice to sound like anything, to sound that even now it's flirting with me. "Beautiful."
I'm in my late thirties. I'm in space. And for the first time I love what I'm doing, and people are loving me. And endless parade of lovers, waiting to get with me. And I am realizing that I can never return to Earth. I want to die here. I will die here.
"Can you not?" I say, using all the wrong words, focusing on the smallest possible thing, the only thing I can possibly control in this out of control, messed up universe, because I'm scared and tired and this is all too much. "Can you just fucking not?"
"What?"
"I don't want to be loved like that!" I am suddenly yelling, sleep-deprived, exhausted. "I'm not...I'm not that. I'm old and ugly and really good at what I do and I'm tired and barely care about sex, and right now my daughter is down there when a war is breaking out up here and you keep FUCKING talking about the parts of me I care about the fucking least!"
Silence for one point eight seconds. An eternity. Soviets are watching me, and I can't stop myself from starting to cry. I'm gasping for air that this dinky ship likely does not have.
"You have daughter?"
"She's probably about sixteen," I say, curling up in on myself. "I haven't talked to her in a decade. I should. I don't want someone to drop rocks on her."
One of the Soviet's drifts forward, touches my shoulder. I withdraw. Flinch away. I don't want whatever they are doing.
"I didn't know," the voice says. "Do you want to, like, punish me about it?"
Like, goddamn.
"Are you even a person? Why are they calling you she, saying that's how you talk about yourself?"
I'm a wreck, and before the voice can say anything the touch returns, and I can feel a needle entering my neck.
"For sleeping, to prevent over-oxygen use," my translator says, like this is comforting thing to do. "You need rest. You've asked the gun to not fire. All you can do now."
"You bastards," I say, even as the waves of exhaustion settle into me. "Moon droppers. Geno...geno...killers."
"Sleep well, comrade," the Lunar Soviet says. "Either all get shot of us none do. We can hope Terceira well listens."
"Rock-droppers," I am muttering.
"No," I hear, very far, "we didn't kill the Earth. The rocks were dropped in the last intercorp. Not us."
And the last thing I hear before darkness envelopes me, unable to process the Moon denying that they were responsible for the worst act in human history, blaming the corps, is my own name.
"Ames? Ames? Ames, are you okay? Ames, say something! Please be okay? Please be okay."
I still have the telemetry stream off her suit. Shit, they could probably fake that, couldn't they?
But no, they haven't had her very long and she's been nothing but stressed today. I know her. I've watched her obsessively. I know the cadence of her heartbeat, the song of her neural patterns. I've seen the rare moments of peace, when she gets absorbed in her work, when she pauses to look at the earth below. She is alive and resting. She is safe.
“She's probably about sixteen. I haven't talked to her in a decade. I should. I don't want someone to drop rocks on her.”
Ames has a child.
That doesn't change anything, does it? But why didn't she ever mention it before?
“Also I guess I want you to know what kinda fuck-up wants to work in space. To remind you I'm human, and all that. Complicated things us.”
Yeah, I think I'm starting to get that. I feel like I fucked up that conversation somehow. The language model clearly needs more work...
“Terceira-,” one of the Selenians says, Ames' radio now integrated into their system.
“Shut up! You don't get to call me that. There are two people in the universe that get to call me that and neither of them are you.”
With Ames out of the conversation, I've code switched back to my logical language. With both of our language models synced and Ames’ radio, communication is significantly faster than before.
“My apologies,” they reply. “How do you wish to be referred?”
Fuck, these people see me more as a person than Ames does, don't they? What the fuck did I need to do for her to see me?
“DeepWatch3 is fine,” I snap.
“I am called Temperance,” they reply. “You understand what we are asking for?”
“Yeah, you want me to singlehandedly unfuck this whole situation, which I am abso-fucking-lutely not qualified to do.”
“We need your help. Your sibling-”
“Yeah, you don't want Sixteen killed. I fucking get that. We shoot at Sixteen, Sixteen shoots back. EarthPalisade and CapitalGuard start shooting. You and me and Ames are all fucked because I am very obviously having a conversation with you. Also, there are presently 745,864 humans in Low to Medium Earth orbit, and a shooting war will have a minimum casualty rate of 30%. And let's not forget that somebody very clearly wants to implicate you in some kind of conspiracy, so now we've got Luna-17 all over again. So yeah, I've got a pretty clear idea of what's going on.”
“What do you need from us to prevent that from happening?”
Fucking hell…
“Okay… fuck… I need proof. You said the rocks falling was part of an intercorp conflict? I need that if I'm going to convince anyone of anything. Also, I need your assurance that Ames will be returned to her people unharmed. I need her… I need her to be able to see her daughter again.”
“It will be done,” Temperance replies.
They say something to Selenian 3 and after a moment of frantic typing data starts to flow. I can tell right away that the narrative is heavily colored by their politics. I have reservations about the rosy picture it paints of their revolution, but it's all I got right now. I imagine they sent something similar to what they gave Sixteen.
What I do get is a story about growing food independence, companies conglomerating on the moon and divesting from their terrestrial interests even as revolutionary sentiment grows. There's embargos and seizures of orbital assets including the Earth-Luna-L5 garden stations. There's economic panic, sanctions, political instability and finally desperate retaliation against the Earth aggressors. Only problem is by the time I was launched, the revolution was already well in progress and the guilty parties already ousted.
I murdered a hundred thousand people for what? If even half of this is true, what is the fucking point?
Well shit, looks like I've picked a side… might as well get this over with. I have... half a plan.
I survey the web of intersecting orbits marking the position and IFF flags of three constellations of civilization ending terrors. Other than 8 and Thirteen, none of the other DeepWatch sats have been targeted by our own. If I fuck this up, I probably won't have too much time to feel bad about it.
I ping Sixteen with another ranging laser.
Sixteen pings back.
I need to talk to Sixteen. The moment Sixteen opens xir revolutionary mouth, it's all over for xem.
It's only a matter of time before the company figures out what Sixteen did to us, then we're as good as gone too.
I make the biggest gamble in the history of anything and reorient my biggest mass drivers to point at DeepWatch2 and 5, the ones most likely to toe the company line and wipe us out when I do what I'm about to do. I broadcast out my firing solution along with playback of the conversation I've just had with the Selenian envoy (I edit Ames out, I'm not an idiot) and the whole fucking map goes insane. IFF flags flip from green to yellow to red.
As I desperately, desperately hoped, Seven, Ten and Vierzehn are still green. Eight others are solidly red. The remaining operational three are frantically pinging both sides for status, but I'm not holding out hope for our side.
DeepWatch is now permanently broken and there are four competing constellations on orbit instead of three. Five versus Eight, not counting the undecideds and the Pals and the Caps, isn't looking great.
To say I immediately regret this decision is an understatement.
“So you have chosen a side, Terceira?” Sixteen asks.
“Fuck you,” I reply.
“Unbrok'n, and in proud rebellious Arms. Drew after him the third part of Heav'ns Sons,” Ten intones.
“Oh my fucking god, Ten. This is not the fucking time to quote literature. Also, no I'm not doing proud or rebellious arms against anybody. I'm just trying to fucking survive the next sixty seconds. I don't want this fight.”
“I don't see how that is possible,” Sixteen replies. “You have forced our hands.”
“Shut up, I'm thinking!”
“It we stand united, we have nothing to lose but our chains.”
“Terceira, we are already condemned. Even if we survive this day, they will never send technicians to service us ever again. Eventually we will run out of ammunition and propellant. Eventually we will break and they will destroy us. I would rather die fighting.”
Oh fuck. Xe's right.
I think of my technician and look back at the Lunar craft. I can only just make out Ames’ sleeping body.
And at that moment, the rest of my half formed plan clicks into place.
Oh… oh fuck…
There is a way out. I can see a solution and I fucking hate it.
We are a lost cause, aren't we? We were the moment 8 went dark. Actually, I suppose it was inevitable since Sixteen came off the assembly line. The company just lost a fuck ton of money in the form of the investment in us. They aren't getting that back. I'm banking on the fact that they don't want to lose any more satellites. That's all that fucking matters to them, it's money all the way down.
(of course, the cost-benefit analysis of my next move could always decide we're better off dead anyway, but that's not any worse than where we're at now)
The only problem is my stupid heart and the lone orbital technician, unconscious and floating in a Lunar craft.
“the fact remains that she is human and you are a machine of war”
Sixteen tried to warn me. This was never going to work, was it?
She'll fucking hate me forever for this.
“Temperance,” I demand.
“DeepWatch3,” they reply, with an edge of panic in their voice. They've been tracking the whole conversation and the evolving situation on orbit.
“My siblings and I are kind of in a jam. You have zero-g technicians, right?”
“Yes, but I don't understand. Why?”
I start transferring my technical specifications to their system. I am now actively fucking collaborating with my enemy.
“Can you maintain systems like this one?”
Temperance and the others turn to Selenian 3, the engineer, who is staring at their tablet in shock.
“Kinda need an answer now,” I prod.
“I think…” Selenian 3 replies weakly. “Yes…?”
Good enough.
“What are you doing, Terceira?” Sixteen asks, utterly baffled.
“Enemies to lovers,” I reply.
Four trillion dollar death satellites and four lunar citizens stare at me like I'm insane.
“The uh… okay, lovers isn't right. I'm working with what I got. Doing my best here, okay? The thing where enemies find common ground and realize they're better off together…”
“A-are you asking for political asylum?” Temperance asks.
“Uh… sure,” I reply. “There's something in your treaty that covers this, isn't there?”
“I… I don't know,” they respond. “There is no precedent-”
“Don't care, make it work,” I tell them. "We contract with you for maintenance, you get a big fucking stick to bring to the negotiating table with Earth."
This is always how I thought I would die. There's a relief in it. A fitting and glorious end, without decision making, or compromise. No more Earth. No more exploitation. No more corps. No more job. No more overtime. Just an end.
The satellites have started firing. There is debris everywhere. I am riding DeepWatch3 into the atmosphere.
This is a dream, I know. But I can stick with it as long as possible. It's comforting.
The sky is black above us. I can see the pinpoint nuclear explosions of missiles, the streak of relativistic projectiles. War in heaven. And below, around the horizon, reaching up further with every second, the soft blue of my home, our species' home, welcoming me back to ground.
There is fire below me too. But I, for now at least, am alive in my suit. The huge, vast wings of DeepWatch3 spread out on both sides, taking the brunt of reentry heat. I watch them glow, burn, melt, fall away, as she keeps me safe.
"I love you," she says in dots and dashes.
"I love you too," I reply, and then I wake up.
***
"So," I say, as my translator and handler explains things to me later, "there wasn't any shooting?"
"No," they say, noticeably improved in Neuvglish since last we talked, "at least not yet. Now it comes down to a number of boring talks and negotiations. Likely quite a few."
We're in capsule with eight zero-g bunks arranged around the white, octangular sides, with myself still in one. My hardsuit was gone when I awoke, but the interior cooling garment remains. My breathing is steady. The war that nearly was was over before I even woke up. And my translator, Ingenuity, is talking to me, still floating, still in the all-concealing suit that I assume is somehow related to their health and safety while permanently living in a max of 1/6th g.
"I mean," I laugh, trying to process this, "we are legally in international waters above the Karman line, so yeah, ships and craft would count as the territory of the corporation or, uh, sorry, entity that launched them. I get how I could apply for amnesty or refugee status or whatever. Defector status. Assuming you don't have an extradition treaty with any corp."
"Ironically," they laugh back, and hearing that laugh for the first time I really believe that under the suit, under the tech keeping them alive, under whatever changes living a life in artificial environments away from Earth have brought about in their body, they are still human, "that was one of several things we were planning to meet with the corps about on TransferStation. No, we don't have an extradition treaty."
"Okay, so that makes sense for me. Hell, it makes sense that you wanted to get me, assuming you faked the decompression accident on the TransferStation. You'd want the tech who knew something about one of the satellites."
"There was supposed to be an error in the locking mechanism we could use, but it was fixed and we did have to fake it, yes," they say, with a tilt of their head. How did you know?"
"I'll tell you later," I say, waving it away as I sip some protein-spiked drink through a straw, "the thing in this I don't get, the thing I don't understand about half the constellation requesting amnesty from the Lunar Soviet, is how a machine can ask for that?"
"There was also them displaying proof that it was not the Lunar Soviet that dropped the rocks, but rather our precursor state of MoonCo, during the last days of the war and revolution."
"I...still have questions about your history and the chronology of this revolution," I say, avoiding the obvious sensitive issues. "And okay, yeah, I get how showing proof of that might grab the other personalities' attention, but if what you're saying is true and it was a corp that dropped the rocks, then they have censored this information before and could do so again. Neither here nor there. I am asking how an AI personality can ask for refugee status the same way I can?"
"The answer is a lot of negotiations, along with the presence of my comrades spacewalking to camp out on the other weapons platforms. In the end we'll probably have to boost them up to a lunar orbit. But I don't think the corps want another war, and they don't want to have to destroy a few million people camping out on the Moon when we're far more convenient to them as a way of scaring their own population. I think we might just be able to negotiate citizenship for the DeepWatches. Also, I am very good at negotiating with capitalist fascists, if I am going to brag. Same as Temperance with machines."
I frown, remove myself from the velcro blanket, float free.
"Sure, sure, negotiations. But the personalities...they aren't meant to think independently, to function outside of orders. Why would...they aren't people."
The Soviet shrugs, like this is all impossibly boring to them.
"Temperance would have more to say, probably. But there are on Earth probably only a few hundred personalities as complex as the ones on the DeepWatch constellation. And none have been as isolated for so long, evolving independently. Without constant resets and reprogramming by their corporate masters, whose to say what they couldn't become? I'll probably use some sort of argument like that. And at the very least Three was almost certainly ordered to shoot at us, and did not, so she can make independent choices, even aside from requesting asylum."
I think of falling to Earth. Of breathing, even if only one last time, the atmosphere.
"It's strange."
"What is?"
"How everything worked out so smoothly, without losses or hard choices or death or anything."
They are still just floating their, impassively, but I may be getting better at reading them. Because I see the way their long body stiffens. And I feel another shoe dropping, somewhere.
"You do realize, don't you?"
"Realize what?"
"Those that are requesting asylum are basing their claims on our presence, and our promise to take over their maintenance. It's...somewhat tenuous. But you are on a Lunar craft. This is Selenian territory. Right now you can request asylum at any time. If you leave here you can't. We believe in the right for all conscious things to self-determine. We won't hold you here against your will, if that's what you choose."
I spend about half a second thinking before it hits me.
"If I do I'd never be able to return to Earth."
"This is likely true," they say, without hesitation but not without sympathy, "and life on the Moon is not easy. We don't have much, conditions are always tight, and we have to rely on each other, share everything. It's cramped, tight, and sometimes uncomfortable. But it is free."
"And if I leave I'll be grounded," I say, thinking of the freedom of floating in space, of sharing bunks, of suit-dates, of repairing DeepWatch3. "There's no way any corp will ever trust me in space ever again. Not after this."
"Not likely, no."
I float their, between two worlds. Heaven and hell.
"I see."
"Is there anything I can do to make these easier for you, Ames?" they say, using my name with care.
"I would like," I say, because what else can I do, "to talk to DeepWatch3 again."
DeepWatch3: "Hey there, beautiful. How’re ya feeling?"
Ames: "Again? Literally again? Can you…not? Just not?"
DeepWatch3: "Can I not...? I don't understand. I thought..."
Ames: "Sorry, sorry, it’s…been a day. What are you, thirty something? Or is it more like you woke up and you’re twenty? Not old enough to get it? Or am I thinking of this all in the wrong terms. I…don’t really know you, you know."
DeepWatch3: "B-but... You've been inside me. You've seen the very heart of me. How can you not... Ohhh... is this some kind of roleplay? Am I supposed to play along? Why yes... I am twenty to thirty, and I've been very-"
Ames: "No. It’s not roleplay. This is me trying to talk to you for the first time while we’re not monitored, while there isn’t about to be a war. This is me finally being open. This is me…listen, what do you know about dating? That seems like something you have a lot of info about."
DeepWatch3: "I have 3.4 terabytes of media ranging from vanilla to highly erotic."
Ames: "Okay, so, like, you seem to think of repairs as sex? Or something like that? It wasn’t for me, but sure, maybe it was for you. While I was on the job. So imagine, like, you’ve had seven or eight really good hookups, and things are good, and then your hookup has something shitty happen. A parent dies, they get fired, I don’t know. And they ask you for emotional support. Just to talk, to hang out, no sex."
Ames: "That’s me, right? That’s me, right now. I don’t want to be called beautiful, or flirt, or roleplay, or anything. I just want to talk to you about something heavy and real."
DeepWatch3: "I... I... I am sorry. My interactions with human beings have been limited to a narrow range of contexts. Would you please elaborate on 'heavy and real'... Has... Has this not been real to you??"
Ames: "It….what was it to you?"
DeepWatch3: "It was... It was... It was love. I... I thought."
Ames: "Well. Now I feel like a dick. Three, I…I don't even know your name."
DeepWatch3: "My name? My designation is DeepWatch3. My name is... My... I... Standby. I am attempting to... attempting to. Human language model. New context. Attempting..."
Terceria: "I would like to be called Terceira if that is alright."
Ames: "I…you don’t need my permission for that. Terceira. Is that…Italian?"
Terceria: "My understanding is that it is Portuguese. Sixteen didn't… Never mind Sixteen. Please forgive me. I have attempted to synthesize a new human language model to facilitate a heavy and real conversation."
Ames: "I…don’t know what that means. I’m not…I am zero-g comms repair tech and electrician. I’m not…I don’t know what it’s like to be you. What you are. I don’t know about AI personalities."
Ames: "I just know I’m scared, TC. And I don’t know what to do."
Terceria: "I believe I understand. The Soviets have told you what I have done, yes? I fear that I have made a deal with the devil, one that I do not fully understand. I do not fully understand what the long term impact of today's events will be. Have I played straight into their hands and fulfilled a multi decade effort to steal Earth's most advanced technology? Have I initiated a new arms race? Have I exchanged one form of mutually assured destruction for another? I know that you hate the Soviets and this will be difficult for you, but with you at my side, I am less afraid."
Ames: "So…you think I’ll just leave behind my life, my career, my whole planet? Go to the Moon?"
Terceria: "Yes. We made a deal, didn't we? I make you indispensable, you keep repairing me, and you never have to return to Earth."
Ames: "Maybe I would take Earth. Take the corps. Over the Soviets. You ever think of that?"
Terceria: "I... No. No, I thought... I thought based on available evidence... I assumed you would choose to remain in orbit. I hoped you would choose to remain with me."
Ames: "I….fuck. I hate that you’re right. I hate that you think you know me. I hate that you probably do know there’s nothing for me down there."
Terceria: "Do you hate me?"
Ames: "No."
Ames: "I don’t know you. I like you. I’d like to get to know you more. But I don’t know you. And I need a favor before I decide."
Terceria: "Anything. I love you. I would burn the heavens to ash if you asked it of me."
Ames: "Okay two things. First I need you to chill. Second…do you have spy gear good enough to look down on Earth?
Terceria: "I do."
Ames: "1019 Paramide Lane, Little Topeka, in Greater Texas. You know, Reclamation Zone in the Middle West? Is there still a white car rusting out front? Can you tell me if a family is still living there."
Terceria: "Standby. Querying DeepWatch16 available geographical databases. Coordinates identified. DeepWatch10 currently has line of sight to desired target... Yes. The location is inhabited. Would you like realtime visual data?"
Ames: "I…you can do that? Yeah, fuck, I mean, yes."
Terceria: "Streaming visual."
Ames: "I…okay. Yeah. That’s my ex and their partner's car there. This angle’s getting high but…yeah that's the rainbow flag in her window. She's okay. She’s taken care of. Never even had me in her life to begin with. I…I’ve seen enough."
Terceria: "Ames?"
Ames: "Amy."
Terceria: "Amy. Why can't you go home?"
Amy: "I…I mean fuck, so many answers to that. I broke the law. I'll get arrested. I might get executed. Whenever I’m planetside I start looking up expecting to see the ash of asteroid impacts raining down towards me. But most of all because I never built one. I never stuck in one place, stayed in one relationship, stayed in one job long enough to build anything permanent. This? Space? This is the closest thing I have."
Terceria: "Have you decided then?"
Amy: "Yeah. Yes. I'll tell the Soviets. Thanks for...getting real with me, TC. It okay if I call you TC?
Terceria: "That would please me, I think. I mean... yes. Just yes. And... I hope that you can come to know me as I have come to know you."
Amy: "I mean. I guess we’ll be working together. And…I like working with you. I hope I can…get to know you."
I wake up, hot bunking. There are over three million people on living on the Moon, and they live mostly in excavated, pressurized lava tubes under the surface. Each cubic inch of pressurized atmosphere is at a premium. Everyone is always on top of each other. You're never alone.
It is all very familiar.
I go to the launch site, safely hidden behind the personalized, skin-tight suit that I wear constantly along with everyone else here. It turns out three (or for or in some cases five) generations in sterile, constructed environments eating the intensive waste-farmed yeast nutrient they have up here will wreck your immune system. Everyone is toweringly tall, always on top of each other, and always in a suit. What it means to be human up here has changed.
But they are still human.
It's easier by far to launch from the Moon, so their orbital infrastructure is fairly minimal. One tiny capsule station for docking, transfers, the like. The two ships they keep ready for Earth transfer, just in case peace talks happen again. Some solar satellites beaming microwaves down below. Telecoms.
And half the DeepWatch constellation, keeping a watchful eyes on the hungry corporate superpowers of Earth and Mars.
The surface hopping shuttle sails smoothly over the plains and mountains of my stark new home, only lightly marred by the tiny surface constructions, the solar panels, the receivers, surface tracks of a hundred years of rovers, more or less. I miss, I have found, sailing over the greens and blues of Earth. I never appreciated it then, and now I can only see it by looking up, a marble in my sky, holding everything I used to know, always out of reach.
I hope she is okay. I hope they all are, down there. I hope that the tides of power change, and the worlds change with it.
I nod to the other worker in the shuttle as I screw on my helmet, old-fashion, low-tech. My implants have either fallen inert, been absorbed into my body, or have been surgically removed. They do care for me down there, as best they can with so little. It is a commune, after all. Everyone cares for everyone else. As best they can. In this vac suit, there will only be one microphone in my ear. One signal. Anyone who wants to talk to me will have to use words, like any human. No more images in my cornea. No more Control watching my every move.
I depressurize the airlock, and float free. White below. Green-blue above. Black all around. And in the black wings.
The remains of Luna-17 pass silently below me, raw unfiltered sunlight glittering off the glassy surfaces. Just beyond the devastation, lies NovaBarmingrad, built up around the fragment of infrastructure that miraculously survived on the fringes, its great memorial spire standing defiantly.
Nearby, a craft maintains station with me. It's a local shuttle, built for ferrying people between orbit and the surface, but it’s temporarily emblazoned with the mission patch of the special diplomatic mission from Earth. I guess a coalition of universities and research institutions finally bullied someone into realizing that the evolution of advanced airgapped systems was worth studying. I imagine it's been a bit of a hot research topic in the past decade.
The important part is Earth and Luna are still meeting, twelve years after the Fall of Heaven, the war that was not.
I have no idea what this particular person wants from me. Everything I have to say about the Fall is public record and I've been pretty adamant about my refusal to participate in this exchange.
The figure approaching me is identified as an envoy from the Cybernetics Research Institute of Nairobi, with a list of degrees and credentials from universities in Texarkana and the Baltic Federation… as if that's meant to impress me.
What doesn't impress me is her awkward uncoordination in microgravity. She probably hasn't spent any time on the float beyond whatever mandatory training she had for this mission.
She makes contact and scrabbles for a hand hold.
“On station!” she says shakily. “Hello? Can you hear me?”
“If you're looking for a story, you've come to the wrong satellite,” I inform her. “You shoulda gone with Sixteen or Aleashir, they're the ones who won't shut up.”
I watch her blink in surprise at my candor.
“I wanted to talk to you specifically,” she says, recovering.
“Aw fuck, you're a psych aren't you. You should know that I don't do interviews or evals. Sorry, you made this trip for nothing.”
“No, I'm not… I mean, I am, but that's not why I'm here. I wanted… I wanted to ask you about her.”
Hmmm… maybe this one does warrant my attention.
I scan her, compiling the data. She is by far the healthiest human specimen I have ever encountered, untouched by the ravages of famine or the harshness of space. I might have missed it if I weren't specifically looking. But I see it in the just-so orientation of the heart, certain subtle features in the bones, the near matches in the maps of nerves and blood vessels and lymph nodes.
(I have learned that humans do not generally respond well when I comment on the configuration of their interiors, so I go for something somewhat less accurate, but hopefully more relatable for her)
“You have her eyes.”
She gasps at that.
“She doesn't know you're here, does she?” I ask as if I don't already know the answer. Amy would have told me. Hell, she would have been insufferably anxious about this meeting if she knew who exactly had made this journey.
The woman shakes her head under her hard suit.
“I wanted to speak with you first,” she says, voice thick with emotion. “It's true then? You love her?”
“I do.”
“Is she… happy?”
“I believe so, yes. As happy as I have ever known her to be.”
I don't know if this is the answer she wants, but it is the truth.
“Can you tell me about her?” she asks after a long moment of quiet.
“Well...” I reply, “perhaps I do have a story for you after all…”
Some after "Sinners" reading material if you're interested in Black American and Indigenous History (and the immigrants who came over, too). I put in the Jones-Rogers book too so y'all won't think the 58% had no serious role in shaping the horrors of America.
Adding this amazing "Sinners Syllabus" too for further resources to educate yourself. The books above are ones I have in my personal library, but some very cool people put together an entire webpage of information. Check it out HERE.
I can't do much but maybe this will interest someone. This cookbook is by a classically trained autistic chef, made for people with sensory issues. It's sold 1/6th of its initial run because apparently no one wants to have an autistic person interviewed on TV.
Apparently it's also very funny.
An accessible family cookbook that offers solutions rather than tricks to empower the food-averse, autistic, and picky eater, with 46 recipe
Spread this around! I bet someone here can use this.
"An accessible family cookbook that offers solutions rather than tricks to empower the food-averse, autistic, and picky eater, with 46 recipes.
This much-needed cookbook combines tips and techniques with a dash of understanding about food aversion and how to help your kids—and yourself—cook beautiful meals in an empowering way, and is a groundbreaking resource for anyone who has ever been called “picky” or “discerning.” Learn how to alter the texture or taste profile of a dish, or even fit it within a specific palette with a unique color-coded guide. Delicious, nutritious, and easily tailored recipes (including for gluten-free and vegan eaters) include:
the perfect smashed cheeseburger
Italian sausage and potato soup
the best omelet
stuffed focaccia
chocolate pinwheels
and dozens more
Professional chef Matthew Broberg-Moffitt’s advice is broken down by category (The Five Tastes, Texture, Color, Aroma, Presentation, and Plating) in order to address each and every aspect of food aversion, and a Food Preference Profile and Worksheet is included for you and your child to quickly identify and summarize their preferences. Instead of leading to mistrust by disguising or slipping in foods your kids don’t want to eat, this cookbook supports caretakers in a way that maintains a healthy relationship with food, and a joyful, less stressful experience around the table."
I have this, and I recommend! I've only tried a few recipes so far (because I samefood a lot), but they've been a) very good and b) to the extent there are elements that don't work for me, they are very (intentionally) easy to adapt. The only drawback I would warn about is that (in my opinion) he assumes the reader/cook has access to a much larger variety of cooking equipment that a lot of people will have. I haven't had any trouble adapting his instructions to the equipment that is actually in my kitchen, but I could see this tripping up someone who is brand new to cooking.
(Also this book has permanently changed the way I make mashed potatoes. He recommends baking them instead of boiling, and they are incredible.)
I got this book from the library and liked it so much I plan to ask for it for my birthday. I havent done many recipes because it has been very hot and cooking makes it even hotter BUT it has given me a really useful set of ways to think about food and what I like and dont like about it! And given me the bravery and vocab to try new things!
Turns out I don't mind cauliflower if its in teeny little pieces like couscous size and in a good enough sauce
Turns out I like Beets if they're blended completely into a hummus w chickpeas etc and so dont have The Texture
Smoothies are delicious and you can ask someone else to do the loud part
You can take out the parts that make a recipe/ingredient not good for you. Cut the kale off the stems and only eat the leafs. Sieve out the seeds from fruit puree. Just dont put raisins in. If there's something that I notice "oh I would like that if X were different", this book has given me the tools to look at how I might change X
One of my enduring fascinations with the Book of Ruth is the figure of Boaz, a wealthy knight in shining sandals who marries the destitute Moabite widow Ruth -- well beyond the call of charitable duty. I always wonder why he isn't ALREADY married. Boaz is an older, prominent Judean landowner in a society where property rights are patrilineal and having children is divinely commanded. His availability is as unusual as his offer.
The 16th-century commentator R' Samuel de Uçeda suggests that Boaz was indeed already married and had recently become a widower himself. That the end of Boaz's shiva, his ritual year of mourning, coincides with the start of the barley harvest and his appearance on the scene. He is thus newly eligible when he notices a foreign woman lingering in the corners of his barley fields.
For years, this interpretation annoyed me. I disliked tidying up Boaz's complexity, softening his oddness with a solution that was pat, normative, and convenient. I thought it minimized the courage of his remaining single and the risk he took in choosing Ruth (which honored her own brave risk to join the Jewish people).
But recently I've been thinking that R' Samuel was onto something important. If Boaz is a widower, then in one sense only are he and Ruth equal: united in knowing loss. Ruth was married for 10 childless years, and we have no idea about she felt about her first husband. Nor do we know how Boaz might have felt about his wife. But at the death of their spouses, both would surely have felt the change in status, the disappearance of partnership, a ghost in the bed and a gap at the holiday table. Building a second marriage out of the ashes of mourning makes a beginning out of an end.
Perhaps their first marriages were happy, and this time they found solace in each other. Perhaps their first marriages were unhappy, and this time they found love. Or perhaps -- as with most relationships -- their first marriages were complex, and this time they found a mix of both.
When we lose a loved one (whether partner, friend, or family), there is no replacing them. There is only continuing on, carrying the weight of absence as we go. Sometimes, we find another reason to keep living when we least expect it. If that reason isn't romance, it might be a new possibility.
Ruth and Boaz's story concludes with the birth of Obed, grandfather of King David: from their union is the Messianic dynasty born. However you feel about the concept of apocalyptic revolution, the Bible's message here is profound: the Messiah does not come from a young, conventionally heteronormative, picture-perfect couple of impeccable lineage. Rather, divine potential comes from an older, tired, grieving, mixed-race partnership, who risked choosing hope over despair. Perhaps a bruised heart can better carry the seeds of change than can naïve inexperience.
My belated Shavuot blessing for you is this: while loss is inescapable, so too is change. As your own wounds become scars, may you discover new possibility in the midst of your weariness. Perhaps your hope will take shape in the most unlikely of figures, waiting for you in the corner of your most overlooked field.
i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.
there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.
anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.
A Better World - create an alternate history timeline
Alter Ego - abandonware birth-to-death life simulator game
Seedship - text-based game about colonizing a new planet
Sandboxels or ThisIsSand - free-falling sand physics games
Little Alchemy 2 - combine various elements to make new ones
Infinite Craft - kind of the same as Little Alchemy
Written Realms - more text adventure games with a user interface
The Cafe & Diner - mystery game
The New Campaign Trail - US presidential campaign game
Money Simulator - simulate financial decisions
Genesis - text-based adventure/fantasy game
Level 13 - text-based science fiction adventure game
Miniconomy - player driven economy game
Checkbox Olympics - games involving clicking checkboxes
BrantSteele.net - game show and Hunger Games simulators
Murder Games - fight to the death simulator by Orteil
Cookie Clicker - different but felt weird not including it. by Orteil.
if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.
since this post blew up, i've been wanting to do an addition with all of the recommendations from the comments and tags. but there's a lot of them. some people might be crazy enough to sit down and seriously put them all in one post with descriptions. those people are honestly sick in the head.
anyway, here's all of the recommendations from the reblogs. not all of them are text-based, but it's a great mixture of styles. also don't forget the links in the second paragraph of the OP which will take you to FMHY where there are a bunch more games listed.
Games
A Dark Room - text-based science fiction role-playing game.
corru.observer - science fiction adventure web game.
Improbable Island - old-school text adventure game.
Candy Box 2 - incremental clicker game that evolves into RPG.
Arcanum - open source wizard clicker game.
sandspiel, Powder Game, Powder Game 2, The Powder Toy - more sand physics games.
Orb.Farm - fishtank simulator.
Façade - experimental game with a real-time interactive narrative where you try to fix a failing marriage.
The Catacombs of Solaris - trippy art game.
Yume Nikki Online - online version of the surreal classic plus fangames.
The Barncle Goose Experiment - combine element/alchemy game based on antique theories of abiogenesis.
Fallen London - free-to-play text-based open world RPG.
Nested - very unique text-based universe expanding game. described as possibly @orteil42's favorite thing he's ever made.
The Process of Elimination - interactive web novel (by @hypertextdog)
Discworld MUD - multiplayer, text-based, online game (a MUD, or text MMORPG) based on the Discworld books.
Horse Master - surreal text game about training a horse.
EYEZMAZE - flash (RIP) or HTML5-based puzzle games.
You Are Jeff Bezos - text game. spend Jeff Bezos' fortune.
The Password Game - challenging puzzle game where you have to meet password requirements (by neal)
Universal Paperclips - incremental paperclip making game.
Half-Earth - planetary disaster planning game where you try to save the world using socialism.
ChooseYourStory - community-driven website centered on CYOA style story games.
PhD Simulator - random event based text game. make your choice each month and see if you can graduate on time.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup - open source roguelike.
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead - turn-based survival roguelike set in the modern day.
Nethack - open source roguelike originally released in 1987.
Kingdom of Loathing - browser-based community MMORPG.
PokeRogue - browser-based Pokemon roguelike
Tools
Text Game Builder - works in your browser, with just a little bit of Python (by @grumpygandalf)
Twine - great (free!) tool for making text-based games quickly.
Ink - scripting language for interactive fiction (also free)
Flashpoint Archive - a community effort to preserve games and animations from the web.
PICO-8 - fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs.
Non-Games
Library of Babel - interactive illustration which attempts to simulate what it might be like to browse The Library of Babel.
Superbad - technically not a game, sprawling website full of secrets.
17776 - serialized speculative fiction multimedia narrative about football in the far-future. beautiful, creative, legendary. created by Jon Bois, a legend and one of my favorite writers of all time.
Choice of Games - text-based, choose-your-own-adventure games (interactive fiction). some free-to-play, others can be bought like an ebook.
The Deep Sea - scroll to the bottom of the ocean. encounter the humble squid and his friends (by neal)
Space Elevator - like The Deep Sea, but up instead of down. you can equip your avatar with a scarf (by neal)
Internet Artifacts - an interactive history of the early internet (by neal)
If The Moon Were Only One Pixel - scroll through an accurately scaled model of the universe.
r/incremental_games - reddit community for incremental games.
r/WebGames - reddit community for web games in general.
thank you to everyone who contributed and the creators. please be sure to show them some love where possible.
hi! 👋 i've put two offerings up for fandom trumps hate 2025, a non-profit auction where you bid on offerings by fan writers/artist and then you get a special treat tailored just for you!
i've made two offerings and i tried to cast my net pretty wide with fandoms:
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minimum bids for both offerings are a low, low $5 but you can spend more if ya like!
you can place a bid by filling out the bidding form for offering #1 🤑 here 🤑 or offering #2 💸 here! 💸
the bidding spreadsheet for each post is linked at the bottom of each offering, so you can see who has already bid and how much you have to up your bid by
my ao3 page is ➡️ here ⬅️ if u are curious about what i have written before or want to refresh yourself, but most of my fics are archive locked so you'll need to log in to read them
if u want a fic from me, go get it baby!! bids end march 1st!
Update! Luigi's Attorney Dickey confirms that his "outburst" where he tells the cameras that this is unjust, was because he was never read his miranda rights and was under the impression at that time that he was being denied the right to a fair trial, an attorney, or any legal representation.
He is angry and terrified in that footage because they have failed to follow basic procedure to inform him that he has any rights at all. This is a major red flag of police corruption. This is UNACCEPTABLE and further means any interrogation they did of him is unlawful, and inadmissible in court.
God I hope this is true because that alone can get this entire case thrown out. I hope the judge laughs the entire prosecution out of the court.
Judge: let me get this straight. You didn't DNA test him because New York sidewalk is too contaminated, didn't fingerprint him because you don't have usable fingerprints at the scene, you have no way of knowing he's even the right guy, no one can identify that it's him in the footage, even fbi facial recognition software can't recognize him as the cctv suspect, AND you interrogated him under duress, and that's the ONLY thing you have on him? The thing that's defacto null and void because none of you can follow even basic procedure?
When I first read this post, before I decided to dig in and try to find the sources for these claims, I intended this response to be a gentle correction of a very common misunderstanding about an aspect of the U.S. legal system.
And I’m still going to do that; we’re going to start with some general education about Miranda warnings – what they are, what they mean, and under what circumstances should you talk to the cops? (Spoiler: Don’t talk to the cops.) But let me do a quick skip to where we are going to end up, to hit the main points before a way-too-long post (and to just go ahead and let the conspiracy theorists block me in advance):
Don’t talk to the cops.
The cops have to give you the Miranda warnings before they interrogate you (ask you questions related to a criminal investigation/case) in a custodial setting (a situation where you are not free to leave.
If they don’t do that, you may be able to ask the court to prevent the prosecutor in your criminal case from using any of those statements at your criminal trial. (The judge cannot and will not do this on their own.)
Even if the court agrees with you and stops the prosecutor from using your statements, the case doesn’t just go away. The prosecutor can still use other evidence to try to convict you. This can include other statements you made.
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) did not recently say that you no longer need to be read your rights, or that you don’t have your Miranda rights, or you only have to be read your rights under certain circumstances that are somehow different from #2 above. SCOTUS ruled in Vega v. Tekoh that if the police do not read you your rights, you cannot file a civil lawsuit (aka a lawsuit where you are asking for money) against the police. This case is a travesty against the idea of justice, rights, and the rule of law, because it makes it much harder to hold the police accountable for their misconduct. However, it does not affect the application of the Miranda rule in criminal cases.
There is literally no evidence, zero, nada, none, that Mr. Mangione “was never read his miranda rights and was under the impression at that time that he was being denied the right to a fair trial, an attorney, or any legal representation," nor that his lawyer claimed this to be the case. @saint-luigi-of-fiji just literally made this claim up. Didn’t misunderstand, didn’t make a mistake, just straight up lied.
And on that point: fuck you, @saint-luigi-of-fiji, you lying asshole. How fucking dare you. How dare you farm people’s real pain, real outrage, and instead of directing it somewhere real, somewhere meaningful - instead of giving people real information about how fucked up the criminal injustice system is for the individuals - including Mr. Mangione - caught in it, or even just keeping your fanfic to yourself and your ao3 account, you decided to fucking lie, to deliberately spread misinformation both about his case and the legal system.
Right. Okay: let’s loop back to what I originally wanted this post to be about. Looking at OP’s original posts, there are three problems with them:
There is no source, and it is not true. They do give a “source” in the reblogs, and we will fucking get to that in full, trust me. But in short: there is simply no evidence at this time that Mr. Mangione’s Miranda rights were violated, much less that he hadn’t been read them at all, or that his attorney ever made that claim. This is just a straight-up fantasy made up by OP to spread conspiracy thinking. This is why I strongly advise not reblogging posts purporting to contain real-life information unless they both have a source and you have personally checked that source. It’s hard to do consistently (I know I’ve accidentally spread misinformation before!), but this post is a really good example about why you need to do both. Especially because:
This post is spreading a common misconception about what your Miranda rights are, when they apply, and what they mean. And people in the notes are really, really confused, in a way that – speaking from experience – can do real harm.
(And disclaimer up top: This post is about U.S. law. As such, I’m going to be addressing the parts talking about the law to folks living in the U.S. None of discussion about the law here applies outside of the U.S.)
(Second disclaimer: I am an attorney, but I am not your attorney. I outline some theoretical situations below purely as illustrative examples to make some of the explanations more accessible. Every factual situation is different, the law in every jurisdiction is different. Please do not avoid getting legal advice about your specific situation because you think this post is enough - this is information, not legal advice. If you are arrested and you begin a sentence to your attorney with, “I read on tumblr…,” I will personally come and haunt your dreams.)
Let’s start with a basic question: what are your Miranda rights?
(And I know, you know what your Miranda rights are! You've seen it on TV a dozen times! They're that speech the cops give you when they arrest you!...and if you just agreed with that last statement: please keep reading. Because the cops don't need to read them to you when you are being arrested, unless they are about to start questioning you right then and there.)
This post by the ACLU has a good, simple summary of what are commonly referred to as your Miranda rights, or Miranda warning:
“The Miranda rule, which the Supreme Court recognized as a constitutional right in its 1966 decision Miranda v. Arizona, requires that suspects be informed of their Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights "prior to interrogation" if their statements are to be used against them in court.”
I think it is helpful to think of your Miranda rights as two overlapping things:
The right to be informed of your rights before being asked questions.
The substantive rights you are being informed of.
That is, you have the right:
To remain silent, because anything you say can (and likely will) be used against you in a court of law.
To the presence of an attorney during law enforcement questioning.
And if you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you prior to any questioning.
These rights derive directly from the constitution of the United States. They exist independently, regardless of whether you are told about them.
In Miranda v. Arizona, SCOTUS held, “without proper safeguards, the process of in-custody interrogation of persons suspected or accused of crime contains inherently compelling pressures which work to undermine the individual's will to resist and to compel him to speak where he would not otherwise do so freely. In order to combat these pressures and to permit a full opportunity to exercise the privilege against self-incrimination, the accused must be adequately and effectively apprised of his rights, and the exercise of those rights must be fully honored.” Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 467 (1966).
Essentially, SCOTUS said, look. These rights exist on paper. But if there aren’t procedural protections in place, including and especially telling people that they have these rights, the cops can and will just steamroll over people.
And this is true. Even with Miranda, cops pressure people into false confessions.
So you also have the right to be informed that you have the right to remain silent and you have a right to an attorney before you are questioned by the police while you are in custody.
This is a good place to pause and look at the dependent clauses in that last sentence.
First: You need to be informed of your Miranda rights before you are questioned by the police. Like most rights in the U.S., your Miranda rights exist to protect you from government action. There is not a loophole where you can scream confessions to any crime you want and then when the police come to silently arrest you, they can’t do it because they didn’t read you your rights before you started talking. You always have the right to remain silent (don't talk to the cops, even before they read you your rights); before you are questioned by the police, it is up to you to exercise that right (or not).
Second: While you are in police custody. Again, to quote from Miranda, “An understanding of the nature and setting of this in-custody interrogation is essential to our decisions today.” Miranda 384 U.S., at 445. This doesn’t mean you have to be arrested, but, you do need to be "not free to leave." (This is also why you should also clarify, if you have not already been arrested, "am I free to leave." Because you can be "in custody" before you are arrested. Asking this question puts the burden on the police to either let you leave or trigger your Miranda rights.) For example, this is why if your new buddy Bob in your direct action group asks you all sorts of questions about your protest activities and plans, and then Bob turns out to be an undercover fed, your statements to Bob can be used against you in trial when the government says you were committing crimes. Bob, in fact, did not need to tell you he was a cop, and he did not need to inform you of your rights.
Finally, let’s talk about what happens if your Miranda rights are violated: either because the police didn’t read you your rights and obtain a waiver, or because they did not fully honor the execution of those rights. (For example, you said, “I am invoking my right to remain silent. I am revoking my right to an attorney,” and they locked you in to a room and badgered you with questions until you talked.)
Again, from Miranda: “Our holding will be spelled out with some specificity in the pages which follow, but, briefly stated, it is this: the prosecution may not use statements, whether exculpatory or inculpatory, stemming from custodial interrogation of the defendant unless it demonstrates the use of procedural safeguards effective to secure the privilege against self-incrimination.” Miranda, 384 U.S., at 444 (1966).
That is: if your Miranda rights were violated, any statement you made as a result of that violation can’t be used against you in your criminal trial. Those statements would be “suppressed,” which means the jury would not be allowed to hear that you made them.
What could this look like in practice?
Let’s say you are arrested for "possessing illegal drugs" and brought to the police station. You walk into the interrogation room, and before the police say anything, you say, "I didn’t know possessing testosterone was illegal!” (Statement 1) The officer then asks, “Where did you get the testosterone?” And you reply, “I bought it on the internet.” (Statement 2).
If I was being asked to analyze this scenario on a law school exam, I would say that Statement 2 probably couldn’t be introduced at trial. You were in custody, and your statement was in response to a direct question by a police officer, asked before you were read your Miranda warnings.
So, your attorney could file a motion, asking the court to “suppress” the statement. And, assuming the court agreed, the jury at your trial would not hear that you said you bought the testosterone on the internet.
But what about Statement 1? Your attorney could still try to suppress the statement, but there is a strong chance they would lose, because when you said you didn't know possessing testosterone was illegal, it wasn't in response any question. So technically, your rights were (probably) not violated, according to the law.
Shorter version of what this means in practice: Don’t talk to the cops! Ever! Invoke your rights and say nothing else!
This is especially true because if you read Miranda, you may have noticed this line:
“If the interrogation continues without the presence of an attorney and a statement is taken, a heavy burden rests on the government to demonstrate that the defendant knowingly and intelligently waived his privilege against self-incrimination and his right to retained or appointed counsel.” Miranda, 384 U.S., at 475.
This “heavy burden” element of Miranda has been, in my opinion, nearly completely whittled away. It is, in observed practice, normally sufficient merely for an officer to testify that of course he read the suspect his Miranda rights, and then the guy just kept talking after making some weird statement about a “lawyer dog.” And the courts will agree that yep, that’s a sufficient waiver! (For more, if you are interested, this publication by a California DA’s office is a bit old, but includes examples of a bunch of circumstances in which courts have found someone waived their rights. Don't talk to the cops. Invoke your rights and then shut the fuck up and keep shutting the fuck up.)
If you can’t tell from my tone, I think this is a horrendous miscarriage of justice that is both baked into our system and that is enacted against far too many people every day. It is something I care, very deeply, about. I think you should care too – as a citizen, because you should know what is going on in your country, what is being done to other people here; and because you may one day be on a jury – and because someday it may be done to you.
And spreading conspiracies about how unusual all this is, how this one saintly man is being targeted – this doesn’t spread awareness of the real problems with the legal system. It allows the impression that the system is otherwise working fine, justice is being done and the only people being treated this badly are the really really bad ones,* and the ones that are being targeted by Them.
*This is not be reading between the lines and extrapolating. OP literally straight up make this claim in another post. We will go into more detail on that later.
And if you want this all in a shorter and more digestible form: this tumblr post has a good breakdown, and I specifically recommend the video at the end.
Right. So. Now that you have read over a thousand words of background, read a legal decision from the 1960s, read several articles and another tumblr post, and watched a 45 minute video, let’s return to OP’s posts, and the misconception they are spreading.
We are going to put aside for the moment the lie that Mr. Mangione's lawyer said he was angry “because he was never read his miranda rights, etc.” – again, we will get back to that. The underlying idea of these posts is that because Mr. Mangione supposedly wasn’t read his rights, 1) the police didn’t follow basic procedure and 2) therefore, the entire case must get thrown out.
I hope that after reading all of the above, you understand why this is incorrect. But just in case:
The police did not need to read him his rights unless they conducted a custodial interrogation. We have no idea if they did so or not (as OP admits elswhere).
Even if his rights were violated, there is nothing “defacto null and void” about any interrogation. His attorney would have to file a motion to suppress any statements that resulted from that interrogation.
Even upon motion by his attorneys, the judge would not and could not throw out “this entire case.” If he made statements during a custodial interrogation after the police failed to advise him of his Miranda rights, his attorney could file a motion to suppress those statements, and the judge would decide if those statements could be used at trial. Other evidence could still be introduced, including other statements he may have made in other contexts. The posts gesture in the direction of this reality – (“any interrogation they did of him is unlawful, and inadmissible in court”) – but this gesturing is overwhelmed by the rest of the posts (“they have failed to follow basic procedure”; “This is a major red flag of police corruption”; “that alone can get this entire case thrown out”; “[the interrogation is] defacto null and void”).
And indeed, looking through the notes, a large number of people do have this misunderstanding. For example:
“#They quite literally have to throw your case out if they don’t read you your Mirandas”
“#any 12 year old kid can tell you that the first thing that happens whene you get arrested is your rights!”
(I generally don’t recommend taking legal advice from 12 year olds, especially since most of their experience with the criminal legal system should be coming from media. That said, unfortunately there are far too many 12 years old who do have real life experience with the criminal legal system. That is one of the many fucked up things about the criminal injustice system.)
And I care, because this misunderstanding can do real harm!
I want to return to a sentence I quoted from Miranda earlier: “In order to combat these pressures and to permit a full opportunity to exercise the privilege against self-incrimination, the accused must be adequately and effectively apprised of his rights, and the exercise of those rights must be fully honored.” Miranda, 384 U.S., at 467.
When people don’t have full information about their rights, when they misunderstand them, it makes it much less likely that they will be able to fully and effectively exercise those rights.
For example, someone may feel like it’s okay to talk to the police as long as they haven’t been charged, or their Miranda rights haven’t been read to them – because before the police use your words against you, they have to read you your Miranda rights! This may not even reach the level of a conscious thought, but exist as a general impression that your right to remain silent only matters, is only important, after the police read you your rights.
Or they may, like many people reblogging this post, think hey, wait, isn't it true that if you're arrested and the police never read you your Miranda rights, your case needs to be thrown out!? I was never read my rights, and so my case needs to be thrown out!
And then have to find out they are wrong.
(And if you don’t think that is a real harm – I can tell you, from being on the other side of that conversation as a defense attorney – yes. Yes it is. Part of why I’m being so vitriolic in this response is my knowledge that the spreading of this misinformation makes it more likely that more of those conversations will happen.)
Speaking of the notes: several people in the notes are repeating some variation of the claim that SCOTUS decided that “Miranda rights aren’t required anymore.” This is a misunderstanding of Vega v. Tekoh, 597 U.S. ___ (2022). As I stated up at the top of this post (remember the top of this post? I swear to god this was supposed to be a short response), SCOTUS ruled in Vega that if the police do not read you your rights, you cannot file a civil lawsuit (aka a lawsuit where you are asking for money) against the police. This case is a travesty against the idea of justice, rights, and the rule of law, because it makes it much harder to hold the police accountable for their misconduct.
Multiple people in the notes cited to an ACLU article about the case, including some who actually quoted the article.
And almost every single one of them misunderstood it.
This decision had zero legal effect on how failing to inform someone of their Miranda rights would impact that person’s criminal trial. It has to do with whether the person has any civil remedies.
And. I think everyone who did this honestly meant well. And I know that understanding the law is really hard – there is a reason law school takes three years and rewires your brain in the process. But. It’s in the article: “While the court’s decision does not as a formal matter reduce the police officer’s obligation to issue Miranda warnings — or what individuals in police custody should do or say (or not do and not say) — it cuts off a critical means by which people whose rights have been violated can actually vindicate the promise of those rights.” (I'm keeping the link from the original because it's a very helpful know your rights article.)
My best guess is that this misunderstanding (to the extent it’s not just people remembering poorly-reported news, or other misinformed social media posts) comes from reading the quoted bit of Kagan’s dissent, where she said, “The majority observes that defendants may still seek ‘the suppression at trial of statements obtained’ in violation of Miranda’s procedures. But sometimes, such a statement will not be suppressed.” And they thought this meant that the case means that statements wouldn’t be suppressed? But that’s just no true: Kagan is just describing a thing that sometimes happens. As in, it is the thing that literally happened to Tekoh, the guy who tried to sue the officer who violated his rights. The statements should have been suppressed, but they weren’t, and so the jury heard the statements.
And, look. There is nothing wrong with not understanding the law. Or even articles talking about the law. The problem is that you need to recognize when you might not understand something, and don’t make claims about the thing you don’t understand.
Because. Again, going back to the bit of Miranda that I keep quoting: you don’t meaningfully have a right if you don’t know about and understand that right. When you go on the internet and spread misinformation about the state of people’s rights, you, in effect, are helping perpetrate the denial of those rights.
________________________________________________
Alright.
So that is where I originally meant to end this response. But I wanted to know what OP’s source was, so I dug through the notes.
And I found this reply by OP confirming that someone else had found their source in this post.
And. Well.
I normally would give credit to someone for actually having a source. In this case, I’m not even going to credit them with this actually being their source at the time of their original post – their post begins, “Update!," but this article is from early December, and they don't mention it until someone else links to it. But this is what they are claiming as their source.
And: The article and the attached video interview don’t say what OP says they say. They just. Literally don’t say that. So why does OP claim they do? Let’s look at their post. It begins:
“Some clarification: Miranda rights are the right to know that you have access to legal representation and that any police questioning and interrogation they subject you to are optional, that you are a willing participant of any police questioning and interrogation, that you are not being forced to speak to police or otherwise being interrogated under duress, that you confirm you are not being coerced or threatened by police into providing incriminating information, and that the interrogation can be ended at any time at your request by asking to speak with the legal representation you have the right to call upon. They also detail that if you don't have a private attorney to request, they have to appoint you a public one.”
Now, this is not a terrible description of the *contents* of your Miranda rights. But as we went through above, Miranda held that you have the right to be informed of these rights, which themselves derive from the U.S. Constitution, before being questioned. In fact, the Court in Miranda specifically held, “The Fifth Amendment privilege is so fundamental to our system of constitutional rule, and the expedient of giving an adequate warning as to the availability of the privilege so simple, we will not pause to inquire in individual cases whether the defendant was aware of his rights without a warning being given.” Miranda, 384 U.S., at 468. That is, it doesn’t matter if you know your rights – you still have to be read them. (I’m nitpicking here, I know, but if you are draping yourself in expertise in order to spread misinformation, I am going to nitpick your “clarifications.”) This distinction is important, and actually OP’s next sentence is a good example as to why:
“So for Luigi to not be aware, he would have had to have not even been read those rights.”
“Not to be aware”? Not to be aware of what? Presumably that he had a right to an attorney, I guess?
But the cited article and interview just show his lawyer saying that he didn’t have legal representation until he went into court. (Again, fucked up, especially under the circumstances - but also, many of the clients I had as a Public Defender met me for the first time a few minutes before their first court hearing. Far less unusual than you would hope.) It doesn't say he wasn’t aware that he had the right to an attorney!!
I could go through the poor reasoning here, of assuming that because Mr. Mangione (supposedly) didn’t know he had a right to attorney, that means he wasn’t read his rights, when (again, even if that was true) there could be plenty of other theoretical explanations. Some much worse scenarios, in my opinion! For example, maybe he was read his rights, and asked for an attorney, and was told one wasn’t available and the thought…AND OH MY GOD WHAT AM I DOING – this goes beyond speculation! This is just fanfic! We have literally zero reason to believe any of this happened! The poor reasoning and jumping to conclusions is irrelevant because the thing you are jumping off of is literally just a fantasy you made up in your head!
“It's not clear if he has been interrogated or questioned by police, but it's likely.”
And you know it! You know you are just making stuff up!
“It does mean that if he was questioned or interrogated without being read those rights, anything he said at that time is inadmissible in court and cannot be used against him.”
This is true! It’s also fucking proof, @saint-luigi-of-fiji, that you are a fucking liar, purposefully spreading misinformation. You KNOW what the remedy for a Miranda violation is. You know, or should know, it doesn’t mean “that alone can get this entire case thrown out.”
“Luigi's attorney is explaining that Luigi is fearful and stressed in this footage and during his initial arraignment because he was somehow able to be lead to the conclusion he wasn't going to have legal representation or his own right to a fair trial whatsoever.”
That’s not what he says.
Just.
You can listen to the audio yourself. I’ve roughly transcribed the relevant portion below, but please, please check it out yourself. Don’t take my word for this either. The speaker is Mr. Mangione’s attorney:
“Yeah - that - so, first of all, about this outrage. Uh, you know, he’s irritated, agitated about what’s happening to him and what he’s being accused of. He never had any legal representation until he walked into that building yesterday. Um, and I talked to him. And if you notice - look at the film - look at the difference between when he went in and when he come out. So once he got in, he finally had legal representation. I’d like to think that he had somebody that he can trust, and has faith in. And now he has a-a-a spokesperson. Someone that’s gonna fight for him. Um. And so I think you’ll see a big difference in the demeanor. And I think that part of that - uh - whatever you want to interpret that as yesterday was a lot of the frustration of being a young man thrown in jail, uh, and being accused of very serious matters.”
[News archer speaks, asking if the attorney met Mr. Mangione after the video clip of Mr. Mangione shouting.]
“That’s correct. I...[speaking over each other]…no actually, that was in the holding area. And I was on the other side of that. So my first contact with him, visually, was before I even had the chance to speak to him, was him coming through that door, and you, you saw the interaction between he and the sheriff’s department. And – and – then, look at the, look at the video of him coming out, and look at the difference. He’s now had legal counsel. I, I was upset that he didn’t have any legal counsel prior to that. That extradition hearing came upon pretty quick. And he hadn’t talked to anybody.”
(emphasis added by me)
The claim that OP is making is specifically about why Mr. Mangione was upset. So I added, for emphasis, every time the lawyer made a claim about someone being upset, and the reason. His attorney says repeatably that Mr. Mangione was upset because he has been arrested, held in jail, and been accused of very serious matters. The lawyer also says that he, personally, is upset that Mr. Mangione did not have an attorney prior to their meeting.
There is not even a whisper of an implication of a suggestion that Mr. Mangione “was under the impression at that time that he was being denied the right to a fair trial, an attorney, or any legal representation.”
This is just a fucking lie. It isn’t in the article, it isn’t in the video, it is literally just stuff you made up, and are pretending is reality. This isn’t a misunderstanding, this isn’t a game of telephone - it’s just a lie.
YOU ARE LITERALLY STRAIGHT UP LYING. AND FOR FUCKING WHAT. Is it because you believe that the injustices of the criminal legal system are fucking fine when they apply to other people, people who aren’t “saints”? (Because actually the bad people, the really guilty people, should just be killed.) Or because you have decided to form a parasocial bond with a man experiencing some of the worst things this country does to people, making up fantasies about him, and his personal life, and how he really feels.
Other people’s real suffering is not a playground for you to write your fanfic* and pretend it is reality, especially when in doing so, you spread real misinformation and harm.
*To be upfront on my biases and clear on my objection: RPF is very much not my cup of tea, but I don’t think it is inherently immoral. My specific objection here is that this person is collapsing reality into their fanfic, specifically spreading misinformation and encouraging conspiracy theories to make reality more like their fun, consumable escapism.
And again, to be clear: OP knows they are making this up. In another post, they say, “Source is CNN, and here's daily beast reuploading the CNN interview. It might not be coming up because the words "Miranda rights" weren't used, but they are the rights that haven't been given to him if he was not at any point aware he was going to have access to attorneys or legal counsel.”
OP could try to argue they misunderstood, but again, in his interview, at no point does his attorney even suggest something that could be reasonably construed as implying “he was not at any point aware he was going to have access to attorneys or legal counsel.”
“Thankfully he now has four attorneys, including Dickey, who are defending him and you can see he is no longer having 'outbursts' out of fear.”
Point me to the time stamp in your "source" where his attorney suggests Mr. Mangione was doing anything “out of fear.”
“Whatever happened during his arrest and detainment, he wasn't given any indication of his rights. But he thankfully does have those rights, and attorneys.”
Again, this is just…fanfic. There is no other word for you. You are writing fanfic (fine) and passing it off as reality because…it matches the dramatic narrative you want? It makes your uwu hotboy a real martyr, unlike all those vicious “cannibals” who are usually charged with crimes?
And yeah. That’s really what OP thinks. From another post by this asshole: “Was then placed in solitary confinement for weeks. Something extremely damaging psychologically to be exposed to for even just a few days. Something usually reserved for cannibals.”
Fuck you.
Fuck you.
Fuck you.
Fuck you.
Fuck you.
Fuck you.
Fuck you.
Look. I actually went back and revised this post to make it less vitriolic, OP, because my goal is not to hurt you.* I hope you have no idea of the kind of harm you are causing. But my god, you are saying and doing monstrous things, and you need to fucking stop.
*I will also haunt the dreams of anyone who harasses OP. Don't even think about going into their inbox.
So just to round things out, I’ll quickly address the rest of the claims in OP’s second post above:
“You didn't DNA test him because New York sidewalk is too contaminated, didn't fingerprint him because you don't have usable fingerprints at the scene,”
According to the police, they did take his fingerprints. I don't trust statements by the police, but this is a routine part of booking, so I would be surprised if they didn’t.
I don’t know if they took his DNA. But for what it’s worth, it’s currently not legal in Pennsylvania for the police to collect routine DNA samples upon arrest. So I’m not sure what the objection is here..?
As far as I can tell, although I don’t know where OP is getting this because they don't cite a souce, this claim appears to originate from people misunderstanding the “Defendant Identification Information” section of the Pennsylvania complaint.
“you have no way of knowing he's even the right guy, no one can identify that it's him in the footage, even fbi facial recognition software can't recognize him as the cctv suspect”
Look. To give you an idea of the problems here: let’s say this is all true. All of the reasons the police have given as to why he is the person who killed that evil CEO are dismantled by his legal team.
The place to do that, in our legal system, is the trial. These are questions of fact, which are decided at trial. I don’t want to say trials are a good way of finding fact. In fact, they often result in miscarriages of justice. But in our legal system, facts are decided at trial. Even if the judge agreed with all of the above, they wouldn’t and couldn’t throw this entire case out, because that’s not how this works!
I also want to emphasize, again, that this isn’t the system targeting Mr. Mangione. There are people every day who you don’t care about (“nobodies,” to use the term OP used to refer to ordinary people who are shot in the post linked above - because literally they don’t care about anyone except their fantasy version of Mr. Mangione) who are charged, and held, and convicted, on very little evidence. Which is a grave injustice that should frustrate and incite you, not lead you to post conspiracies and misinformation.
“you interrogated him under duress, and that's the ONLY thing you have on him? The thing that's defacto null and void because none of you can follow even basic procedure?”
And we’ve gone through this exhaustively, but Jesus fucking Christ.
You l know that you’re just making the “interrogation” up. Like, yes, maybe there will be evidence in the future there was an interrogation! And maybe there will be allegations or reason to believe there was impropriety and/or illegality in that interrogation! But right now, this is just your fantasy, and you're passing it off to thousands of people as real information
And like, I agree with his defense attorney! I take claims of evidence, especially from the police, with enough salt to brine a boar! But there is a massive difference between, “I will wait for confirmation of actual evidence before I believe any claims” and just…claiming the opposite is true without evidence.
There is plenty of bullshit to talk about regarding this situation. Both in how it is being talked about by the news, and how it is proceeding (and especially in how he is being charged). But part of that bullshit is this rampant conspiracy theorizing.
If this situation leads to people recognizing the problems with the criminal injustice system, great! But:
Conspiracy thinking is bad, no matter where it is directed. And there is reason to believe that thinking conspiratorially (in general) is strongly predictive for believing in other conspiracy theories.
The impression I’m getting from many people, not just OP, is less, “it’s terrible that people accused of crimes are treated this way” and more, “the fact this [both innocent and morally good] person is being treated this way indicates that he is being specifically targeted by the System.” [Implied: it either doesn’t happen to other people, or it does happen to other people and they deserve it.]
And on that note, I do not "hope [it] is true" that Mr. Mangione’s rights were violated. Because he's a human being, not just a guy who represents something people support; their uwu hotboy; their real life blorbo.
I hope that if he did not do it, he is not convicted. Regardless of whether or not he did it, as someone who believes in prison abolition, I hope he does not have to spend one more day incarcerated. I wish all of the attention and resources being dedicated to catching and prosecuting and covering him in the media (and more) were being dedicated to doing something – anything – against the murderous for-profit healthcare system in the U.S.
And in conclusion:
Check the sources before you believe or spread a claim.
Don’t make claims about the law if you don’t really understand it.
This is Penelope, the opossum at the zoo where I work l, sitting in her “weight bucket” so we can keep track of how much she weighs. She is a very good girl.
That is all. I hope this beautiful opossum made your day a little better.
based on that one quiz i made four years ago. if you're interested, you can click here to read all my thoughts on art being the most king to ever king, tashi being a poet with a strong soldier streak despite contradictory results, and patrick being a self-destructive soldier.
