#negative sector

[seat-safety-switch]

I think we all have a guy like Uncle Lou in our lives. Even if your last name is Singh or Zhang, you still know exactly who I am talking about. My Uncle Lou always had an opinion - a loudly voiced opinion - about every driver his base-model Pontiac would encounter throughout his many quests. I believe that the Uncle Lou experience is universal.

So, when we lost him to that strain of Super Diabetes that was going around the Negative Sector last cycle, I felt like I had to do something about it. I’d been working for this artificial intelligence company, and we’d recently figured out the secret to mind uploading. You’d get hooked up to the computer, it sucks out all your thoughts, and you live forever as exactly thirty-eight megabytes of JavaScript. We never figured out why everyone produced exactly the same file size, and all the researchers who tried to read the file soon ended up either committing suicide or quitting.

Anyway, we missed Uncle Lou so much that I snuck his body into the lab late one night and hooked his ass up. It took a few minutes, and then I tucked the entire thing into the file share because I forgot to bring a USB flash drive with me. I’d email it to myself the next morning, I figured, but when I got to work my misdeed had been discovered.

A couple of the eggheads over in the Analysis department were elated, and cheerfully greeted me with high fives at the communal coffee maker. They didn’t know how I did it, but somehow I’d built the best predictive model ever for figuring out who was an idiot on the roads. With this knowledge, every self-driving car could immediately determine which vehicles were likely to pose a threat to its occupants, and bravely avoid them.

I’m not going to return the Nobel Prize or anything, but I do feel a little guilty about it. Also, my Aunt Mabel is super pissed that even in death she didn’t really get away from Uncle Lou’s constant vocal stereotyping of Jeep drivers.

[seat-safety-switch]

Things were getting tough down in the Negative Sector. No, it wasn’t because of the synthwolves, at least not at the moment. For decades, the sometimes-kind people of this community have suffered under the corporate types and their war in the shadows. With strength we persevered, but a new threat was emerging in the gritty alleys wet with neon-soaked puddles from a nonstop rain. I speak, of course, of Y2K cosplayers.

At first, we thought they were some kind of new cybergang, having found some old gear in a warehouse and choosing to wear it to strike fear into our hearts. That was not the case; it would later turn out that these kids were employing manufactories to build entirely new Tamagotchis, G-Shock watches and confusingly oval cellular telephones. Historians were appalled; despite their full-throated warnings that the early 2000s were not an era to ever return to, here was a group of true believers, violently dedicated to their false god of translucent coloured ABS plastic.

What did they want? Copbots didn’t seem to consider the association criminal in any fashion, and would go humming past their gatherings with nary a suspicious rattle of their armour-piercing chainguns. The word got out to other sectors, and those unlucky few who had lived through the Collapse and saw the turn of the millennium for themselves began to make their pilgrimage, to witness in mute horror the Great Wheel of the World turning again to repeat their past mistakes. It didn’t take. If anything, the attention just drove more new members to their group, soon sporting egg-shaped MP3 players and dotcom-themed t-shirts.

I could now no longer leave my apartment without hearing vintage Top 40 hits screamed directly into my brain by ultra-high-frequency directed auditory inducers stolen from corp armouries. The whole community was clad in brightly coloured plastic and lit by strobing purple lights at all hours of the day. Worse, an infectious sense of optimism was forming in the polished-marble streets.

Just when it seemed there was no hope against the encroachment of a bygone era and the destruction of all we had worked for, a saviour emerged. In the historical literature, they called him Gordon Gekko, but at the time we just called him that dude who wears suspenders and quoted 80s movies a lot. After only a few weeks of this, the neighbourhood returned to a filthy, wire-wrapped living nightmare. It was better this way, but nobody could really tell you why.

[guan70-blog]

The Wealth Corner - Where Is It In Your Home And Does It Even Exist?

The Wealth Corner – Where Is It In Your Home And Does It Even Exist?

“Can you tell me where is my Wealth Corner?”

I think this is the most asked question encountered by any feng shui practitioner. If I get $1 every time someone asks me this question, I would be very rich by now. But seriously, where is this fabled Wealth Corner I kept hearing about? Is it even an actual “corner” to begin with? Most likely if you ask 5 different feng shui practitioners where the…

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