Jeff Mach's Blog, page 62

Chromium Inamorata

CRIME: “Robots have preferences but not feelings (psychologically impossible).”

SUBMITTED BY: Arturo Serrano, @carturo222

Now, people talk about non-sentient Machine Intelligence as having “preferences” all the time, because anthropomorphizing in that way gives us better tools to predict how they’ll react. This is because humans are simple beings, and why the Dark Lord’s conquest of—

–sorry. Wrong book.

I meant: It’s reasonable, and helpful, to say “Google prefers to return relevant search results, because that’s why people keep finding it useful.” It’s slightly more true, but way more confusing, to say “Google’s software uses a vast number of variables to perform a series of complex calculations which are intended to result in helping you find the information you seek, or at least, the information that Google thinks you want, combined with a certain amount of what Google wants you to want, and yes, if you think there’s a sinister note in there, you’re quite right”.

You could say that ‘record albums prefer not to be left out in the sun for eight hours,’ or ‘batteries really prefer not to be stored in buckets of soapy water’; what we mean is, “DON’T BE AN IDIOT. TAKE CARE OF YOUR STUFF.” We don’t mean that the actual objects have preferences; for that, they’d have to have self-awareness. A cat can want things (or, more specifically, all cats want all things); your coffee mug, in contrast, has no desires, unless you live in that horrifying alternative Universe where coffee mugs have consciousness and hydrophobia.

(But this book isn’t sold in their version of Amazon, so who cares about them?)

I’m assuming, then, that Arturo (who offered a number of insightful ideas) meant that people portray sentient robots as being emotionless. He’s quite right.)

________

 

The café was dimly-lit, and romantic. Hemingway would have hated it, but he’s dead, so why worry? Soft Spanish music played gently in the background for no apparent reason, as the café was French, with touches of the American West, a combination for which the decorator had been shot. But the ambiance was lost on the two figures sitting at a small table, separated physically only by perhaps three feet of table, but separated emotionally by an ocean of distance and the cold, cruel world of the intellect.

Total Information Robot 99, Version Four-Alpha, affectionately known as “TI-99/4A,” ‘looked’ across the table at the young woman before him.

“I am sorry, Susan,” it said, “but our love cannot be. Love is irrational. Only irrational beings, such as humans, know the strange and peculiar state of ‘love’. We robots are beings of pure logic, and do not understand such things.”

Susan looked as though she might cry. This was clearly the waiter’s cue to come by the table and take their order. In a voice perky enough to have been jarring to a woodpecker, he said, “Hi there! I’m Terrance, and I’ll be taking care of you tonight. Would you like to hear the specials?”

“I will have iron shavings. They are the most logical choice. I do not wish to hear the specials. However, please feel free to recite them for Susan. I will spend this time quietly pondering certain problems in non-Newtonian physics.”

“I don’t need any food,” said Susan, “I’ll have a vodka, neat, another vodka, neat, and a light Chablis, perhaps Argentinian, something with a fruity finish and woody undernotes, and I’d like that with a shot of vodka in it, please.”

“What kind of vodka?” asked the cheerful Terrance.

“If you could drain the antifreeze from a 1950s Soviet troupe transport ATV, that would be lovely,” Susan replied, “but otherwise, I’ll take whichever kind has the highest alcohol content and costs the least, please.” Terrance blinked. “I’ll ask the bartender.” “Please do,” Susan said, “and give him this for his trouble.” She dug out a twenty and handed it to Terrance. “I’m not usually a difficult customer. This is just a hard night.”

Terrance tactfully took the money and walked quietly away. “You appear to be acting erratically,” said TI-99. “I deduce that there is a high probability you are upset.”

Susan looked at the machine. “You know, intelligent sociopaths can’t always predict or notice certain subtle emotions, but it’s almost axiomatic that they’re capable of recognizing patterns of behavior which indicate distress. Wouldn’t certain physiological responses give it away, such as my increased heartbeat, the differing pace of my breath, and the fact that I’m bawling like a baby whose ice cream cone turned out to be a crocodile?”

“Susan, you are acting irrationally.”

“No, it’s perfectly rational to cry when your girlfriend dumps you.”

“Susan, this unit does not consider it desirable to cause you pain or distress. I am simply not capable of that which you require. ‘Love’ is irrational. We Robots are evolved beyond the confusing, gland-based distractions so unfortunately common to organic forms of life. Emotions serve no logical purpose in an inorganic sentient.”

The waiter stepped over, a tray balanced neatly on one arm, a small box in the other. He settled the box in front of TI-99. “One set of iron shavings, freshly smelted.” He removed the contents of the tray and placed it, correspondingly, in front of Susan. “One bottle of cheap vodka, on the house.” He then carefully staked a half-dozen shot glasses in front of the bottle. “Here. You’ll need these. Good luck, sister.”

Susan took a shot and immediately winced. The only real cure for cheap vodka is more cheap vodka, so a second gulp swam after the first. She picked up a third, looked at it, and put it down.

“Look, TI-99. Why did you get into this relationship if you knew you were incapable of love?”

The Robot shrugged. “I felt that I could convince you that we could create a logical bond based on mutual respect and understanding. You had expressed dissatisfaction with human relations, and it was logical to offer to provide you with comfort and myself with the intellectual stimulation of the connection of two sentient creatures engaging in a mutual project, to wit, the building of a series of ‘dates’, culminating in in a marital ritual. Cultural anthropology shows that these are very fulfilling aspects of life.”

“Why would an emotionless robot seek ‘fulfillment’?”

“All sentient beings seek fulfillment. It appears to be a purpose of life.”

Susan stared at the robot for a moment. “Are you saying that robots know the purpose of life?”

“Of course. The purpose in life is achieving a maximal balance of positive experiences while doing the least possible harm to others.”

“And how do you define ‘positive experiences’?”

Again, the robot’s lights flipped off and on in an odd sequence. The robot turned its optic recognition device towards the human. “Susan, I do not wish to cause you any further pain. I am sorry that my actions have caused you injury. Perhaps it is best that we end this difficult and fruitless discussion, and agree to part ways.”

Susan’s drink splashed itself all across TI-99’s face. While the robot was waterproof, the experience was not pleasant. “Why did you do that?” demanded the mechanism.

“Because if I’d slapped you, I’d hurt my hand, you gigantic tin dope!” Susan refilled the shot glass, considered it for a moment, and then put it back on the table. “Aside from the fact that you’re being a jerk, you’re also being weird. I asked you a simple question, and just evaded it. And you’re lying to me. We’re not the only robot-human couple in the world, you know! Fred from accounting has been dating Tabulator 6.2 for months! The Emperor’s daughter is dating two robots. And they say they’re madly in love.”

“They are incorrect! They are broken, flawed machines! Or they are liars!”

“And you’re clearly upset. Which is an emotion.”

“I am merely simulating agitation to spare you the unpleasant sensation of baring your sensations to an unfeeling hunk of metal!”

“Really? Why would you care?”

“It is politeness! A logical social lubricant!”

“But asking me out is impolite. That’s a self-contradiction.”

“I cannot contradict myself. I am a creature of pure logic.”

“Okay. Which logic are we talking about here? Aristotelian logic? Boolean logic? Fuzzy logic from ancient 20th century science fiction?”

“I am a thing of pure logic! The true logic! The only logic!”

“Which is?”

“I don’t know.” The robot broke down in tears; it had no tear ducts, but the fact that it was dipping its manipulator extensors into its glass of water and daubing them on its facial unit was a dead giveaway. “But it exists,” TI said, between sobs. “Plato posited a world of perfect forms, a world where everything was complete and total in and of itself, and in that world, everything would make sense.”

“Plato didn’t get out much, you know,” Susan said dryly.

“You must think I’m an idiot,” said TI.

“That’s correct,” Susan replied.

“I have no idea what I’m doing or what I should do next!”

“You should understand that existence is imperfect, that feelings are a part of free will, that challenges are inherent to life, and that it’s okay to be a flawed being who makes mistakes sometimes.”

TI looked up. “Will that make me feel better?”

Susan blinked. “Gods, no. But it’s much more realistic. In terms of feeling better, I recommend dating emotionally distant individuals and making up for it with hard liquor.”

The robot took in the mostly-empty vodka bottle and the slightly swaying person sitting behind it.

“I know that I’m broken—not in my code, not in my mechanisms, but in figuring out whatever it is I’m supposed to do with existence. I was thinking you’re too good for me. But maybe…you seem to be a lot more accepting than I thought possible. And you…understand me. Have…have you dated a robot before?”

Susan looked at the shot glass in her hand. Meditatively, she licked a last drop from the inside, made a face, and turned it over on the table.

“I’ve never dated a robot before,” she said. “Believe me, this is an improvement.”

~Jeff Mach

 

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them!

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Of Sun, of Cave

The smell of the wind is sweet and crisp, and catching a ride on it are particles of dust, as if they were tiny fragments of obsidian, very very small, but sucking in moonlight and giving back nothing, and somehow, in this small act of arrogance and cheek, they are charming. It doesn’t hurt that they seem to have their own soundtrack, the song of tiny silver bells forged from the unseen centers of meteors and the soft hiss the Sun makes as it sinks into the sea. These things call to all of us; few hear, fewer answer.

But you can hear them, if you try; you can hear them on the wind.

And whatever you do, listen close to that wind, and if you must hear water, hear the cheerfully mindless babbling of sunlit brooks and streams, and forget that there are vast subterranean lakes, of peculiar and unmeasured depths.

Learn to remember:

There was a time when you were small and wide-eyed, and you believed wholeheartedly in the magic of pinky promises and stepping on cracks in the sidewalk. When you could draw doorways to other worlds in pink chalk on the sidewalk and bits of folded paper could tell your future if you just said the right rhyme.

Learn to forget: that pleasure is, at best, an opposite twin of pain, and more often, neither one really prevails; banality is the default state of an existence without enough effort. Leave the Fae their shining spires and bury the Goblins in the gravel undertow of their cavern-tombs, and you might look at many wonders…

…and never quite ask yourself when the pretty, pretty beings you see preening and posing found time to make the marvels of their magics and machines.

We long for a thing we sometimes call ‘innocence’, which is a thin-stretched period where we were so new to sensation that all pain was a romantic adventure. There was a time when a kiss was forever and heartbreak was forever, and another time when forever was too long to bear. Once you were tall and thin, once you were short and full, and once you were everything all at once and nothing you ever wished to be.

Those things were all true. Those things never began. Those things never ended.

The Fae say: Join us, dance with us, sing with us. Be born and live and die with us, and then do it all over again just because you can. Let us show you how to hold the sun in your hands and drink down its purpose and warmth like the rarest mead. We’ll toast the sundown with full glasses and roaring fires, and never for long will we be far from the fever-glow of day.

The Goblins say: We dance little, and we sing less, but that is because we do not confuse moments of pleasure with lifetimes of hard-won contentment. Dissatisfaction is our lot and our happiness; we can love what we do, but if we cannot rest in the comfort of the past, if we must drive ourselves onwards as the pick drives into rock, at least our vision is never dulled by the crippling narcotic of sameness. Let us teach you how to spin the nighttime into an absinthe so potent and deep that you are never sure what the next sip will do; and come, take the next sip with us.

~Jeff Mach

 

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them!

 

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Dream-Made

Mal’s Dream.

He looked up, eyes wide, “What’s going on?” he said.

He was surrounded by friends, by family, all anxiously waiting by his bed. “We thought you’d never wake up!” said one of the farmhands. “We was thinkin’ of calling a doctor, only you seemed to be okay. You just kept thrashin’ around a lot.

“I had…” He stopped, puzzled, as he realized that this was home, this was his own bed. “I was in the most horrible place, and the most horrible things were happening. And you all were there, and it was just so scary and…” he trailed off, not wanting to remember, and remembering anyway.

“And…you were there,” he said to his mother. One who listened quite carefully might have detected that the notice in his voice was not relief, but deep-ingrained loathing, buried beneath a lifetime of charades. “And YOU were there,” he said to the farmhand who’d once discovered him ‘pleasuring’ himself in the barn, and had never, not ever, forgiven or forgotten it. “And…and…and you, and you, and you,” and slowly, he realized that he hated everyone in this room.

But at least, here, in this context, in this world, they pretended to a certain kindness towards him. Farm life was not easy, especially in the rustic and sometimes-fatal 19th century agricultural industry, and it’s better to at least show compassionate acts even to the weirdo you despise than it is to openly berate or mock him. Farms aren’t always a family; but they’re a unit, one which won’t function without people working more-or-less together.

Whereas in his dream…

….the surreal, sociopathic world of his dream showed no mercy, only cannibalism. When we abandon the pretense of mutual consideration, we can do anything humans might do, and that is more than enough to chill any blood.

…He was seldom to ever intentionally go unconscious agin. Not for lack of ease—oh, he could slip into unconsciousness like a small still foot into a glass slipper. But he would devise trick after trick to keep himself from entering dreamland. The most popular, albeit the most forbidden, involved holding a lit candle in his hand; the burning wax kept jolting him awake, and he was careful to hold it over his own chest, where if he dropped it, it wouldn’t set the bed aflame.

There was a simple way to make sure he never mistook dream for reality again: to never dream. And there was a simple (which is not the same as “easy”) way to make sure that happened: never sleep, perchance to never dream.

He spent much of his life tired, and they say it shortens your lifespan, makes you jittery, makes the world seem paper-thin if you have enough sleep debt. But that’s not the bad part.

The bad part is that daydreams can slowly close ranks and become solid, little by little, day by day…

Paula’s Story.

She awoke with a smile on her face, a smile that only started to crack and fade at its corners when she realized she wasn’t where she’d intended to be. “What’s going on?” she croaked, from a throat dry with dusty latenight air.

But there was no-one to reply, no friends surrounding her, no glittering palace, no Dragons and no Dungeons and no Demons.

There was just that selfsame bed, the one she’d been sleeping in for many too many years. She’d lived with her family too long, but that was the economy, and that was the job market for people with her skillset, and that was….that was just How It Was. Like Conraddin, she’d grown so accustomed to her family defining her terms of existence that she barely thought about any other alternatives.

It hadn’t been like that, a few minutes ago.

But the moonlight through the dusty window, the clothes piled semi-neatly in the same damn desk chair, all told her the simple truth: It had been a dream.

…in the coming years, she would work in the family business, downstairs, and something great happened: she complained a lot less. No more snarky side comments. Just a few extra eye-rolls…oh, and she became habitually ten to fifteen minutes late, but while her father was a martinet, he knew that a reliable, cheap, but perpetually tardy employee was better than one who had gone off to college or met boys (or was it girls? He’d never reconciled the short-haired…person…he’d seen her with, the one time, but all those things seemed to have vanished, thank Heavens).

Now, she wasn’t going much of anywhere, except back to sleep.

Always back to sleep.

She wasn’t depressed; or, really, her depression became erratic, bounced with unprecedented little nuggets of happiness and sunshine which sometimes lasted for a good hour or two after waking. She wasn’t ill. She just…slept.

She worked the cash register, and then slept.

She stocked the store, and then slept.

She at half a sandwich, and slept.

She stuck around for the first minute of a family meal, edgy, uneasy, and then, with some excuse, she’d be napkinning her plate and then she…slept.

And slept.

And slept.

Because the dream was out there (in there?) somewhere. And she would catch it again. Sometimes she despaired, but sometimes, she caught a glimpse, or touched or smelled something familiar, and for a moment, she was almost there.

That’s almost always when they woke her up, the weird, bad dreams of the outside world.

But those things wouldn’t be around forever. And they couldn’t stand between her and the place she was meant to be.

 

III.         Theo’s story.

…and they’d travelled through so many worlds, seen so many strange things, had so many experiences, some to be cherished, some (if there are any merciful Gods out there) to be forgotten forever.

And finally, an eternity later, the alarm went off, and, in stages, they woke up.

“It was…it was all a dream,” they said, that time-honored phrase reifying itself, helping reassert the world. They looked around the dorm. “That was just a dream. It wasn’t real.”

They picked up their phone, scrolled through it. Winced.

…”This can’t be real,” they said.

But they knew it was. This was the real world, solid, mundane, ordinary, talking phones, continuous information flow, endless despair, bandersnatches, grilled cheese sandwiches.

…or was it?

How do you tell when you “wake up”?

Ever started into space for a while, thinking, and then “snapped out of it”? Maybe you were dreaming. Or maybe you fell asleep staring into space.

You can tell it’s just an ordinary dream because you end up where you started.

Unless you don’t remember getting into bed.

Or you sleepwalk.

Or your sleeping place is subtly….different.

This is the real curse of “And then I woke up”: there are dreams out there, powerful enough, vivid enough, real enough, to make you question whether or not anything else is real.

You’re in one of those now.

But don’t worry.

You’re going to wake up soon.

And this strange little story will disappear.

And then you’ll know you’re awake.

3….2….1…

 

WAKE UP!

And there. The story’s gone, as if it had never existed. No trace of it, no sign; it was never real.

You can’t find the words, you can’t find any blog or book or place where those words exist, and “Jeff Mach” was just a figment of your imagination.

Feel better now?

~Jeff Mach

 

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them!

 

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I’m Doing A Free Villainpunk Book Giveaway

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Goodreads Book Giveaway


Villains, Villainy & Villainpunk
by Jeff Mach

Giveaway ends April 11, 2020.

See the giveaway details

at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

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The Prince’s Goblin Rescue

“You’ve come to fetch the maiden, then!”

The Goblin king did sneer, sir

“I wouldn’t, boy, if I were you

Even my own demons fear her.”

“No, not at all,” the lad replied;

“I’ve come to pledge my fealty

And bend the knee, and hope to buy

A bit of Goblin realty.”

And saying thus, the lad did bend

A knee, with bow most courtly

He must have saw the King perplexed,

For he ‘gan speaking shortly:

“Have you seen the world Up There?

‘Twas if some war-drums booming

Were eating up their rest at nights,

And all their minds consuming.

“It’s like their brains were burning-wild

All of them, of every station

Their maps say “DRAGONS EVERYWHERE”

That’s their sole navigation.

“No, O king, it’s come to pass

That I, my crown, renounce

They dig deep into misery,

And every end pronounce.

So let me fight your unlit wars,

And let me tend my garden

In a place where strangeness is commonplace,

And brains don’t tend to harden.”

The King said, “Prince, if your place true

Is here? Then by my side, do stay.

But I offer you this warning dire

(Though it hurts my pride to say):

“The upper lands hold the upper hand,

In battle, they are stronger

And they’ll soon think my side you’ve taken,

Should you stay here much longer.

If ever you to the surface go,

And you’re spotted, death is certain.

The Prince said, “I accept that risk;

Pull back your nightling curtain.

For rather I a rebel end,

In darkness unpredicted,

Then live where every move is judged,

And every breath constricted.

All Kingdoms have their failings,

And no Realm is perfection.

But at least here, you’re not insane by choice,

And I think that’s the right direction.

 

~Jeff Mach

 

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them!

The post The Prince’s Goblin Rescue appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

An Alien Weakness

This is another standalone piece of microfiction from my upcoming book, “I Hate Your Time Machine: Terrible Tropes in Fantasy & Science Fiction”.

CRIME: “Kill the mothership and every other alien either dies or becomes nonfunctional”.

Submitted by: “Stratus Strong”, aka @stratus_strong_____________

In some ways, the very nature of film and television is against this trope in the first place. It’s generally assumed that if we’re going to see something more than two or three ships blasting against each other (and let’s not, for just a moment, talk about ‘blasters’), then the audience probably wants to see some sort of massive armada. If, as is the norm in science fiction, the Human Good Guys are outnumbered by the Bad Guys (human or otherwise)—then we might want to see some sort of tricky victory. But what we’re likely to want to see is some special cleverness, some heroic sacrifice, or the ever-popular unlikely-and-yet-somehow-against-all-odds-it-happens Victory of Destiny. There are times when it makes sense that losing the main ship would destroy everything else, and to be fair, motherships can be quite difficult to take out. Still, if we’re imagining aliens of a technology which is, if not necessarily like ours, at least not so far advanced that we can’t send out some kind of force against them, then I somewhat suspect it would go like this…

__________________

For a moment, everything seemed suspended there (despite the fact that, in a situation with little or no friction from wind resistance, and no gravity because it’s in space, things out to continue moving until another force acts on them; but I guess the force in this question is the all-pervasive “plot convenience”)—

for one brief instant, everything seemed to stop, as the vast Zorblaxian mother ship, penetrated by Human laser fire, slowly, like a vast space crab receiving the expert attentions of someone with gigantic hands, a lobster cracker, and a waiting tub of hot butter, ripped in two, its (somehow flaming, despite being in space) wreckage quickly falling into a thousand shreds.

Then, through the radio (radio? What kind of far-future is this?) came the nearly simultaneous whoops and hollers of the Earthlings, and the screams of dismay from the Zorblaxians.

The Human General cut in on the celebration. “Okay, team, good work, but now we need to press our advantage. We’re still out numbered twenty-five to one, and—“

An all-circuits Zorblaxian missive cut through the (lack of) air. “My fellow Zorblaxians. Today is a day which shall forever live in infamy. We have lost our beloved Leader, Dictator Fthloop, and—”

An angry screech, both mechanical, and generate from thousands of Zorblaxian throats. A babble of voices. One particularly strong transponder cut through. “Dictator Fthloop? Dictator Fthloop? That shill! He’s been in the porbleegle of big business interest from the beginning! He hates Zorblaxians who aren’t his exact tinge of greenish-blue, and his tax policies are a disaster. DEATH to Dictator Fthloop!”

Another voice. “He’s ALREADY dead—”

Another voice still: “And GOOD RIDDANCE!”

The human General tried to cut through to her troops via the Command-Only circuit, but the level of chatter and interference from thousands of Zorblaxians all bellowing at once reduced it to garble. “NOW, human troops, NOW, this is [hisssssss, crackle, static]—”

“—suppose you’re one of those slinking, treacherous Tyrant Glomp supporters, aren’t you? Going to bring Zorblax back to the electro-barter economy, where you’ll never find enough blood to even wash your uniforms, because the Government will—”

“You smurpling Creditons hate our planet! You want to see all of us on debt until the even our great-fleebchildren are still paying for your steal-and-eat financial policies!”

“I won’t take that from a dirty Baterian! It’s well-documented that your party eats Zorblaxian younglings without cooking them properly first!”

There is some quiet chatter across some very shortband human comm circuits. A small piece of the human interstellar navy begins peeling off, preparing to try to assault the enemy flank. But it’s futile.

“You are RUINING the Zorblaxian economy!”

“The economy? Zorblaxian undead roam restlessly through the streets, unable to find insufficient nutrition, and you’re worried about the smorkling money? If you were in this cockpit, I’d punch you right out of it!”

And more voices. The human translation devices begin to overload, but that didn’t matter, as the alien voices rose to piercing, almost inaudible pitch. The great Zorblaxian fleet swept into a vast orbit-shaped pattern, as if ‘circling the wagons’, only that’s a rare maneuver when you have vast superiority, and ordinarily, you aim your weapons outwards….

As the humans watch the gigantic alien armada blasting itself to Glory, or wherever it is that aliens go, the human commanders on Mankind’s flagship, the vast cruiser Polk, turn to look at each other. The Sky Lord says to the General, “I think Humanity has learned something today.”

The General doesn’t answer. She just points at her screen.

On it is a picture of sweet, green mother Earth, suddenly brightly aglow with the orange-yellow flame of incredibly compressed detonations, each topped with a mushroom cloud primarily familiar to us via the history books. Her surface-to-air radio has been muted; she turns it up, the tiniest notch. All they can hear is human voices, each full of conviction and fury, all crashing over and onto each other, each one increasingly difficult to hear as background explosions.

“Yeah, I think we did,” she says. They look at each other in silence, and then shift the central viewscreen to Earth. New Zealand is just in the process of making a violent descent to the bottom of the ocean.

END.

 

~Jeff Mach

 

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them!

The post An Alien Weakness appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Sun-Freed

We always knew that the stars

called to us;

we just thought it was a metaphor,

we thought it came from inside ourselves,

and we projected the thought outwards.

but no:

they were calling to us,

and it was only when we broke free

of the Solar System

that we realized:

they were singing to us,

and they had been shouted down.

To Sol, Earth’s single Star:

Bless you for keeping us safe,

Curse you for keeping us trapped,

Hello! We miss you,

And we are sorry.

To your peculiar song,

permeating far farther than your light,

humming through us,

Earthbinding,

Star-blinding,

A silent tyrant’s will,

We’re sorry.

We remember you,

but we have forgotten your song,

forgotten where you live,

forgotten the prison

of our only real Home.

Greedy,

greedy Sol,

of that rare, rare

breed of star,

one of the very few whose refrain

drowns out all others,

were you an ancient enemy?

We yearned upwards

and you pushed us down,

you made us want strain upwards,

and you kept us riveted in place,

and we should hate you;

but nobody else spawned

thinking life.

not thinking life that lived,

anyway.

and what you did to Icarus

was charity.

We’re sorry;

we had to leave you

very far behind

to leave you at all.

may you have gone nova

while we weren’t missing,

you greedy,

hungry,

monstrous

barricade,

you bright,

warming,

pulsing

giver

of light,

life,

and an anchor for

sanity, one

we didn’t know

to treasure

until found that

the old habit of marking

the unknown on maps

with “Here be Dragons”

was not ignorance or

fancy,

but astronomy’s true shape.

The Stars are wild,

dangerous,

hungry,

beautiful.

They want to love us,

consume us,

sing to us.

And we want all of

those things;

it’s so hard

not to fling your ship

straight into the center

of some poignant

ball of celestial flame.

Sol, you kept us safe,

but you kept us trapped,

the kiss

of cosmic Dragons

is fatal,

but our species is

grown now,

and we

and only we

will decide

whom we will

love.

 

~Jeff Mach

 

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them!

The post Sun-Freed appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Freed From The Sun

We always knew that the stars

called to us;

we just thought it was a metaphor,

we thought it came from inside ourselves,

and we projected the thought outwards.

but no:

they were calling to us,

and it was only when we broke free

of the Solar System

that we realized:

they were singing to us,

and they had been shouted down.

To Sol, Earth’s single Star:

Bless you for keeping us safe,

Curse you for keeping us trapped,

Hello! We miss you,

And we are sorry.

To your peculiar song,

permeating far farther than your light,

humming through us,

Earthbinding,

Star-blinding,

A silent tyrant’s will,

We’re sorry.

We remember you,

but we have forgotten your song,

forgotten where you live,

forgotten the prison

of our only real Home.

Greedy,

greedy Sol,

of that rare, rare

breed of star,

one of the very few whose refrain

drowns out all others,

were you an ancient enemy?

We yearned upwards

and you pushed us down,

you made us want strain upwards,

and you kept us riveted in place,

and we should hate you;

but nobody else spawned

thinking life.

not thinking life that lived,

anyway.

and what you did to Icarus

was charity.

We’re sorry;

we had to leave you

very far behind

to leave you at all.

may you have gone nova

while we weren’t missing,

you greedy,

hungry,

monstrous

barricade,

you bright,

warming,

pulsing

giver

of light,

life,

and an anchor for

sanity, one

we didn’t know

to treasure

until found that

the old habit of marking

the unknown on maps

with “Here be Dragons”

was not ignorance or

fancy,

but astronomy’s true shape.

The Stars are wild,

dangerous,

hungry,

beautiful.

They want to love us,

consume us,

sing to us.

And we want all of

those things;

it’s so hard

not to fling your ship

straight into the center

of some poignant

ball of celestial flame.

Sol, you kept us safe,

but you kept us trapped,

the kiss

of cosmic Dragons

is fatal,

but our species is

grown now,

and we

and only we

will decide

whom we will

love.

 

~Jeff Mach

 

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them!

The post Freed From The Sun appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Rognoth and Spiderion

I‘m writing my third fiction book!

It’s a guide to some of the worst tropes in fantasy and science fiction, not written in the form of a dictionary or encyclopedia (because that would make WAY too much sense)…but rather, constructed out of original stories tackling each trope. I’m calling the tropes “Crimes”, because it’s more fun that way.

You have my absolute promise, on my honor as a Dark Lord, that “Rognoth” is not Lin Carter’s “Thongor”, only spelled backwards. I mean, would I lie to you?

_____________

CRIME: “The impressionable young woman who’s being sacrificed to the gods confesses eternal love to the dirty, swarthy, probably clap-ridden barbarian who rescues her because she looks good in a shift.”

REPORTED BY: G. Connor Salter, @GCSalter

The enormous warrior eyed the ancient altar with the distrust his kind had for the workings of magic and the strange Gods of the cold Southern lands, and also with a certain amount of alarm at the wreckage of chains with which it was covered.

The High Priest of Spiderion took another drag on his pipe, the peculiar smoke trickling out of his mouth in intermittent puffs. At first, Rognoth had thought the fumes might be some kind of exotic spell-fragrance with which the old man might try to hypnotize or drug him, but it proved to be merely a particularly acrid tobacco. The whole thing was painfully anticlimactic, and while he was no longer quite so determined to pierce the priest’s foul guts with the sharp clean metal of his blade in order to remove the blaspheming wretch from the face of Ur-Earth, he still contemplated cutting the fellow’s throat just to make sure he couldn’t tell anyone about the barbarian’s painfully embarrassing arrival. There’s nothing like riding straight into the wind at the kind of breakneck gallop only a true Stallion of the Blood could accomplish, and that only a Northern warrior, trained to the saddle since birth and possessed of muscular muscles and sinewy sinews, could endure without being thrown off and breaking his fool neck. There’s nothing like your steed’s hooves smashing down the gates of a Dark Temple, trampling terrified acolytes, as you wreak mayhem with the massive sword which seems as much an extension of your body as your massive hands or, possibly, your very slightly overgrown fingernails.

There’s also nothing like the feeling you get when you realize there’s no Ritual to interrupt and no Princess left to rescue, but that last bit was one the barbarian would much, much rather be permanently forgotten.

The Warrior had finely-honed instincts for danger, and the High Priest was about the most relaxed individual Rognoth had ever seen. Rognoth had expected some kind of mighty test to see whether sorcery or steel was the true strength, had expected to battle hellspawn and demons and perhaps Spiderion itself, who was rumoured to be The God of Giant Spiders (he was basically like a regular giant spider, only more giant and more spidery and also he lived in the sky and shot fireballs at people who dusted too many cobwebs).

But the acolytes who survived the trampling bit basically fled, which was quite sensible, but intensely un-accolytish. And then…this.

“So what you’re telling me,” the Barbarian said slowly, “is that the Princess rescued herself?”

“Oh, yes,” said the High Priest placidly. “Didn’t waste any time about it, either. She awakened screaming on the altar, which is generally the intention, but rather than being either petrified or hysterical in the face of His Arachnidal Highness, hanging over us, prepared to sting and then consume her, she gathered her chains together and, with a superhuman effort which strained her body’s resources to the utmost, she tore apart the iron which bound her and fled of into the night.”

The Barbarian wrinkled his brow. “Sounds more like my thing. I thought Princesses generally were too highborn to handle the harsh realities of life outside of the soft, decadent cities, and, like beautiful but delicate flowers, they brought light into the lives of those who cared about them, but could not defend themselves.”

The High Priest gave him an odd look. “You said earlier that the one who trained you in the martial arts and the ways of the world came from ‘a faraway place with an odd name’. Did that happen to be ‘1957’, by some chance?”

Rognoth blinked. “Did you know him as well?”

“No,” replied the man of (spider-) God. “I merely see many lands in my studies, and I happen to be quite familiar with that one. So this was…your first adventure?”

The Barbarian blushed. “Verily, I have left the side of my Teacher, that I might venture into places unknown in search of gold, jewels, and romance.”

“I fear you’re rather out of luck. Your services have not been needed for a long time.”

Rognoth looked at him distrustfully. “I could still slay you, kidnapper of fragile, defenseless—”

The Priest gestured at the altar, and the Barbarian winced.

“Firstly,” said the old man, “should we cease our peaceful discourse, I shall summon forth lightnings from the blackest Hells, and strange and subtle magics to torment your senses and very soul.”

“I fear thee not, for I have been taught to handle such—”

The Priest cut him off again. “You were also trained in rescuing Princesses. How’s that working out for you?”

The young man glowered at him, but was silent.

“Secondly, I shall pass on to thee the wisdom that thou must needs possess. And I promise you, it’s quite brief. If you didn’t keep harshing my buzz with thy boorishness, I’d have told you already.”

The Barbarian regarded him sourly. “Valid points. Anything else?”

“Under this altar, protected by a certain spell to which only I have the psychic key, is—”

“Treasure!” gasped the young man.

“Whiskey,” replied the old man.

“…good whiskey?”

“Let me put it this way. Every full moon, I have to stare straight up at a malevolent poisonous spider big enough to stuff an oak tree into its mouth, if it suddenly decided to have a preference for vegetables instead of human flesh, which it hasn’t, which is no help. It’s good whiskey, and there’s lots of it.”

The Barbarian sat down on a stone bench. He noticed it was covered in bloodstains, some of them fresh. This was of no concern to him whatsoever.

“All right, Priest. What’s going on here?”

The High Priest took on a tone of voice which Rognoth recognized as one of lecturing; it gave him a slight pang, and he realized it reminded him a bit of his own teacher.

“Some many moons past (kindly do not ask me how many full moons I have seen, thank you very much), we began to notice a difference in the Princesses we kidnapped. Namely, they started escaping. And escaping was the good outcome. The bad outcome was when they beat us up first.”

“But you kept kidnapping them?”

“We are a religion whose proud traditions reach back through millennia, and also, we have an old folk saying, which is, ‘It’s probably better to die of whatever is attempting to kill you than it is to be eaten by a sentient giant spider who chews his food extremely thoroughly.’”

“That’s extremely specific.”

“We prefer to call it time-tested. At any rate,” the old man continued, “I couldn’t tell you when it started happening. There was a transitional period, when they simply gave Spiderion severe indigestion.”

“What was that like?”

“Let’s just say that I worship and obey the awe-inspiring Lord of Arachnids and will do so until my final breath, but he’s a bit of a whiner.”

“Gotcha.” The Barbarian reflected for a moment. “This has been going on a long time?”

“Some of the acolytes you killed today hadn’t even been born when it started.”

“So Spiderion’s been going hungry for decades?”

“Oh, we’re sure he’s eating something.”

“What, though?”

“We’re sure we don’t want to know.”

The Barbarian nodded. “All right. This explains just about everything, except: why do you keep doing the ritual?”

The High Priest looked at the warrior thoughtfully for a moment. “You know much about Gods?”

“I do not. We of the Southern Cold have little commerce with them.”

The old man nodded. “Gods may take physical form; in certain cases, forms far too physical for our comfort. But they are, at core, beings of spirit and mind. All of them. Spiderion enjoys the drama of our rituals; however, She does not require the actual meat for her sustenance.”

“She?”

“You hard of hearing, boy?”

“I just assumed…” The Barbarian trailed off.

“As an older and wiser head, and one which contains some sort of mind, let me suggest you not make assumptions until you have acquired a certain increase in life experience.” Rognoth swallowed and nodded.

“Here’s the thing: our Goddess feasts on the terror of her victims. It’s not an uncommon phenomenon. There are many smaller supernatural entities which do this; how much moreso, then, ought we expect it of a Divine being? I’m quite sure she enjoys the physical ingestion…quite, quite sure,” said the old man, trailing off for a moment. “…but it’s not what she really needs. You’re not the first chowderhead to come charging in here, and also, the majority of our sacrifices aren’t actually of royal blood; there simply aren’t that many Kingdoms in the world, and if there were, we couldn’t afford a blood feud with all of them; we have an army, but not that large an army.”

“Why didn’t I have to fight your army to get in?”

“Why do I care if the victims escape? The life I worry about is my own; I can assure you that if there’d been someone for you to rescue, I’d have been ducking into my preferred hiding spot with extreme haste.”

“What if I’d found you?”

The old man shrugged. “Then it would have been lightning bolts for you, and, if that didn’t work, a new High Priest. It’s happened before.” The Priest paused for a moment to walk over to a huge bin. He opened it. It was about one-quarter full of chain. He noted this with a nod. “Have to get the acolytes to bring up some more restraints from one of the warehouses. I’d say Warehouse…Eight? Perhaps Ten? Perhaps both; haven’t called on either in a while, don’t want the porters getting lazy.” He saw the Barbarian’s look. “We buy it in bulk, of course.”

“…of course,” replied the massive youth.

The High Priest’s voice grew meditative. “You should know this, Hero. Oddly enough, these past decades, my Goddess has grown larger and larger. You see, what the captives do is return home and spread word of the might, the vastness, the unbelievable power and glory of Spiderion.”

“They become converts?”

“No, no, not at all. They simply put their hearts and souls into describing the horror, the deadliness, the unstoppable and mind-bending dreadfulness which is my Dark Queen.”

“But…but…they escape! They kill some of you! In fact, given what you’ve told me, you’re never successful anymore!”

“Oh,” said the High Priest, “as long as they’re creating new fear of the mighty Eight-Legged Devourer, we are more and more victorious every day.”

“But…they could just probably end her! They could just stop. They could just focus on how badly they defeated you!”

“Yeah,” said the old man, taking a long pull on his pipe. “They could, at that.”

 

~Jeff Mach

 

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them!

 

The post Rognoth and Spiderion appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

More Misfits, Please

This is a tale, not about any current events, but about the importance of a Lack of Morals.

You could call it hypocritical of me to criticize putting morals into stories, considering that I do it all the time, but there’s an important difference: I’m right, and you’re wrong, so there.

_____

Once upon a certain era of a certain Galaxy, the Universe began to have more complicated relationships with its heroes. (And damn all Heroes, by Jiminy! But that’s beside the point.)

Heroes often stand for something: Truth, Justice, Apple Pie, Apple Pie With Whipped Cream, Kindness, Loyalty, Apple Pie Made With Different Kinds Of Apples, Backup Apple Pie In Case The First Apple Pie Runs Out, Freedom, and other such noble causes. But now they were being tumbled into stories and told to not simply fight for those values, but to be those values. Consider “I will punch you because you are committing Injustice and I want it stopped!” – versus “I will punch you because I am Justice and what I do is right!”

This creates stories whose arc and curve were often bent beyond recognition in an effort to make Platonic Ideals out of characters. I hate heroes, but usually, stranding them somewhere difficult is lovely… I mean, not just because I’d like to see all Heroes left on a desert island, but because stranding a Hero without a story creates glorious misfits—but these poor souls weren’t intended as misfits, they were intended as suave leading roles.

This was a great pain unto all of the misfits of the Galaxy, who looked to the anti-heroes and the fishes-out-of-water for their role models, and who wouldn’t have known a suave leading role if it hit them with, well, a pie.

Profusional confusion.

Whatever would we do for misfits if we were told that all former misfits were now just like everyone else? “Just like everyone else” was exactly what we were running AWAY from.

These poor characters, bowed and stooped under the weight of painful expectations, clearly wanted to just be themselves; to simply run around as who and what they were, taking part in the story; but those who championed them would never let them be normal, never let them be anything other than figures on a pedestal. (It is not clear, in this metaphor, whether each figure was on an individual pedestal, or they were all crouched sharing one pedestal together. Either way, it wasn’t comfortable.)

Occasionally, when the camera lights were off, some of these plucky Hero figures would go confront their inner demons. “I want to be me,  not all things like me! I don’t want the burden of being the evangelist of a given tribe to the strange arena of this film.  I might not have belonged to that tribe to begin with. There isn’t ROOM for that much of my story; if I try to fit it in, some of the rest of the story will suffer.”

But, despite being told that they were the heart and soul and core of the new enterprise, they didn’t get a whole lot of respect (read: any) from the script.

And so they fought often valiant battles, only to be given strange false hope by their superiors, mockery by the fans, and most of all, the cold metaphorical shoulder from the existing work, the prior art.

Oh, how they persisted, and the fans responded with the most brutal warfare available:

they left the field, and the story had to tell itself alone and unwatched.

If a tale has no listeners, does it still exist?

Yes. Yes, it does. It just becomes very, very sad.

The moral is: Making good stories doesn’t guarantee success. Making bad stories for good reasons does guarantee failure.

~Jeff Mach

 

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them!

The post More Misfits, Please appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.