Siren Songs
Lore from an old VR game that never got made, Probably because of its utter lack of resonance with anything anyone might be experiencing out here in the Real World….
Finn Oshanek did not watch his mother die. This isn’t that kind of origin story. Finn watched his mother diminish. He watched her deprecate, step by tiny step. His mother’s still alive, somewhere. Technically.
In a way, that’s an even worse fate. It dares you to keep hoping.
The real pity is that it was her own damn fault. She could have had as rich a life as anyone— still could, really—if she’d only signed the damn contract.
*
Khepri Oshanek was young: she wanted to make the world a better place. She was also stupid: she thought she actually could. So she went online and, sure enough, the algos had already custom-paired her with the most compatible NGO statistics could buy: a little outfit that sent people to backward corners of the world, to the festering messes that two hundred years of unbridled industry had wrought upon the land. That week they needed people in Canada. Room, board, travel were all provided. There was even a vestigial indigenous population in need of salvation.
Khepri signed the waivers on the spot.
They sent her to a place called Grassy Narrows, dolled her up in a yellow Hazmat suit and set her running a machine that extracted heavy metals from the soil. She’d been there for a solid month when she realized she was overdue.
*
Finn Oshanek spent most of his early childhood in virtual reality. Most of the other kids he knew grew up the same way— in fact, he hardly ever saw any of them except in virt. And while he was frequently surprised by how slow they were in there— how constrained by barriers and barricades he could breach with ease— he always assumed that at the very least, they were all seeing the same sights.
Things changed over the years. Nobody really had to work much anymore, but his mother worked less than most. She stopped taking Finn to the doctor so often; stopped taking him at all. One day she brought home an old DiCube with half its ports corroded shut. One of the working outlets jacked into a SQUID helmet that Finn’s mom would plunk onto his head every week or two, when she remembered. It took pictures of his brain. He liked the colors, even though he didn’t know what they meant.
When he was six his mother got into one of her moods, tore the visor off his head right in the middle of Ecocide Mutant and thrust a tablet in front of his face. “Read this,” she hissed. “read every fucking word.” And he could, because even though he barely talked he could read really well:
End User License Agreement,
it began, and it went on forever. Every time he tried to pull away his mother would drag him back to that endless scroll of text. “Do you see the power we give them every time we turn on the fucking lights? Look, look right here; we accept any and all updates even if they reduce functionality. We agree to biometric and behavioral profiling, they don’t even say why! They get to monitor what’s in our goddamned fridge! Do you see? Do you see what you’re agreeing to?“
Finn pulled away again. “I don’t! Never even saw this before, I never agreed to anything!”
“I did.” All the energy left her then. She sagged back against the wall. “I did, and now look at us.”
But she didn’t look at him.
“Go back to your game.”
*
When Finn’s mom went out she put dots on her face: like freckles or tiny dark moles, applied precisely to specific coordinates on cheek and forehead. They sparkled with tiny rainbows when the light hit them the right way. Adversarial pixels, she called them: “To keep the algos from getting a lock.” Finn tried to show her how to grab those same algos online, bend them just so so they wouldn’t notice you even without the pixels, but she couldn’t get the hang of it. Also she looked at him funny.
He was seeing that look more often, now. Half the time when he’d show her something cool in virt she wouldn’t react at all, not a gasp or a peep of delight or a that’ssocool. Sometimes she’d ask what she was looking at; sometimes she’d say nothing at all. And then when they came back outside she’d have that look on her face, like a smile pasted over a frown. Sometimes he’d catch her playing his old DiCube results over and over, like there might be something there she hadn’t caught the first hundred times.
Once he poked around on the Cube— mostly unused, now, collecting dust under the desk—when his mom wasn’t around. He called up the writing that went along with the colorful pictures of his brain. It wasn’t easy. Even with his advanced reading skills he kept stumbling over words he’d never seen before: cross-activation, SNP, tyrosine kinase. Methylation and neurotrophic factors. He knew one word well enough, though—autistic— and if he squinted he could maybe sort of make out what it all meant. His brain was wired up wrong. Maybe that was why he could see things other people couldn’t.
Finn decided that there was some stuff he should probably just keep to himself from now on.
His mom wasn’t going out much these days. What was the point? There are only so many times you can say No before you stop having places to go. We’ll keep all your memories safe if you let us sift through them. We’ll entertain you if you let us record your heart rate and eye movements. Here’s a 25% discount on groceries; pretty good deal for a week of financial tracking. Easy to say no to all that, make your own fucking entertainment, pay a bit more for your veggieburgers.
But one day you wake up to find the discount’s expired and the monitoring turned mandatory while you slept. Monday you get a discount on bupropion in exchange for wearing a bracelet that reads blood chemistry; Thursday they won’t even look at the scrip unless you’re already wearing the damn thing 24/7. Liability issues, you understand: what if the drug manifests some unexpected side effect? What if your genetic makeup— oh, and we’ll need a gene scan, too, if you want to keep that insurance policy…
It’s all voluntary, of course. You always have the final say. But we need to know how to serve you best. If you don’t want us in your home you can always forego the UBI. If you don’t like our EULA, you’re welcome to look for a grocery store with a better one. If you don’t want us following you, stop using our transit system. If you don’t want your body scanned remotely, don’t venture into public spaces. You always have a choice.
If you don’t want us in your life, just stop living.
It was usually enough. There was only one time that Finn saw the hand of Authority acting right out in the open, with raw brazen force and no regard for personal choice. Even then, the whole thing could have been avoided if his mom had just kept her data with Big Sys like everyone else. Her data probably was in there, for that matter. How could it not be, these days? But there was a principle involved— there always was, with Khepri Oshanek— so she insisted on keeping her data local, stored her life on sticks and gemstones and even old-fashioned hard drives with parts that spun around like those vinyl music disks you saw sometimes in the historicals.
Finn didn’t know where she’d got all that stuff. Not from any catalog he’d ever seen. But it wasn’t until that knock on the door that he realized society had moved from Why wouldn’t you, it’s just so convenient? to What have you got to hide? It wasn’t until the woman with the sad eyes and the sidearm and the little drone hovering at her shoulder that Finn learned local storage media weren’t just out of fashion. They were actually illegal.
“Big Sys,” his mom said that night over dinner, and Finn didn’t answer because it was never really clear any more whether she was talking to her son or herself. “Big Fat Sys. Singular. Didn’t used to be that way. Used to be a thousand of ’em, but they formed— an alliance, I guess. If it’s not an AI overlord, it might as well be. Just look at that logo. Pink. Heart-shaped padlock, very vulva. How very fucking Meta. Eat your spiro.”
*
Grassy Narrows tagged Finn while he was still in the womb. It took fifteen years to catch up with his mom.
There was weight loss, of course. Bleeding, joint pain. Khepri put up with it. It was par for the course given their reduced standard of living, and besides, she’d made deals with the devil in the past and look where it got her. More rest, maybe. Maybe some of those gray printed meds you could score in the underpass, away from the cameras.
It’s not like she had anywhere to go anyway. She’d lost her gig at the Community Center when she’d refused the ECG pickups. They hated to see her go; she was a hard worker, way more focused than all those other make-work staff with their augs and plug-ins. The children really liked her. But her Socred was so sparse. Some of the parents had concerns, and you couldn’t really blame them could you? How can you trust a stranger who won’t even permit real-time Mood&Cog monitoring when she’s looking after your kids?
By the time Finn got scared enough to call TeleHealth, the tumors were everywhere. They could still fix her, they said. They had some very effective retrovirals on the shelf, it was all covered under H4A, and since she’d encountered the original carcinogen while volunteering as an environmental remediator — major credit boost, there— she qualified for Silver Coverage at the very least. Although of course she’d have to sign off on the T&Cs first, which for some reason she hadn’t done years ago…
Still she wouldn’t budge. “Yeah, I’m a real martyr, aren’t I? Fucked my kid and myself cleaning up your toxic waste, and with all my Silver Socred you’re still gonna let me die because I won’t check off a box on your little form? You think Big Sys’ll like the hit to its cred when the word gets out?”
(She always used that word when talking about Big Sys. It. “It may be a cunt but it isn’t human,” she’d say. “Don’t ever forget that, no matter how hard they try to make you.”)
The doctor sighed visibly on the screen. “We’re not going to let you die, Khepri. We’re not monsters.” And the medics took her away, and a kindly social worker popped up in a new window to keep Finn company while they waited for someone to show up and take him to his new life as a Ward of the State. Finn ignored him and spent the next ten minutes in virt— after which the social worker tapped his earbud, and frowned, and briefly argued with some unseen overseer before telling Finn that he had to go now, it was a little unusual but apparently someone else would be taking his case and he wished him all the best.
Finn grunted a distracted goodbye and pulled out of the Child Services network, one loose end neatly tied off. He tied off a few more over in Hydro and Utilities, and an especially big one in the Municipal Registry. By the time that was done, Khepri Oshanek’s tiny one-bedroom apartment— Finn’s, now— was online, hooked-in, and paid-up on a monthly loop with no termination date.
He’d figured it out, sometime over the past few years. It was only Outside that his brain was wired wrong, and Outside didn’t really matter. Inside, his brain was wired up better than anyone’s.
He went pinging for his mom. He found her in a catacomb twenty floors deep in the Birmingham subscape. The doctor had been true to her word; Big Sys had not let Khepri die. She was in cryocoma, her cancer and her life both on hold, her refusal to comply fully respected, the demands on her privacy undiminished.
It was, Finn had to admit, a pretty good solution. At least in the short term. He wondered how long Big Sys would leave her like that. He wondered what kind of exit triggers might be in place.
He settled down to draw the threads together, get her relocated to the nearest available Onc ward, get those killer retrovirals approved and applied behind the scenes.
He tried and failed.
It’s not that he wasn’t good at this. He was fucking brilliant, by most standards.
Just— for some reason, in this case— not brilliant enough.
*
So here we are, years later. Here he is.
But not really. Oh, the meat abides: there it sits, twitching blind and blank in the corner, breathing, taking up space like the rest of us. Poke it and it will grunt. Poke hard enough and Finn may even join us in mind as well as body, soul returning to corpus, light returning to eyes, hands reaching— for a change—toward things the rest of us can see. It never lasts, though. Finn inhabits two worlds but he really only lives in one. He’s some kind of ass-backwards amphibian, born on land but adapted to water.
Some of those adaptations do not exist in any other human being. Finn is more than amphibious metaphor. He might almost be, literally, a new species: the first meat sack to come preadapted for cyberspace.
Any neurologist would give their left gonad for a look at the wiring in his head. The neural pruning that usually carves a developing brain into modules, isolates one functional area from another, did a half-assed job when Finn was gestating. His visual and prefrontal cortices are far more connected than they have any right to be. His fusiform gyrus talks to Brodmann and Broca without going through the usual intermediaries. One way of putting it is that Finn’s sensory and pattern-recognition circuits are so messed up that, when stimulated by pixelated arrays of a certain wavelength, he hallucinates.
Another way of putting it is that Finn’s pattern-recognition circuits are so jacked that he sees past the pixels, doesn’t hallucinate reality so much as translate it. His brain imposes meaning on abstraction, takes patterns of logic and serves them up as visible manifestations both monstrous and beautiful.
It’s not without precedent. Kekulé dreamt of a snake eating its own tail and awakened knowing the structure of benzene. Ramanujan’s mathematical theorems came to him in visions of luminous scrolls and drops of blood. Poll the faculty of any Science department and you’ll hear about intractable problems clarified in the wake of some unbidden symbolic dream. Psychoactive drugs rewire the cortex, connect isolated areas in brand new ways, reveal patterns and relationships no baseline brain could ever perceive.
The ability to visualize abstraction is not what makes Finn unique. What sets him apart is that he can do this consciously, automatically. He looks past the interface and deduces, without even realizing it, the gates and circuitry coursing beneath. His brain conjures them into entities of its own design, serves them up to the Conscious Workspace. But Finn sees no flat pallid icons; he sees creatures, things he can interact with the same way you manipulate the file folders on a desktop. He sees cliffs and living crystals: he sees substrates and firewalls. He sees ecosystems.
It’s like having an extra eye, perfectly adapted for underwater vision, that only opens when you dive below the surface.
And yet with all these perceptual superpowers— with Finn’s unique ability to not so much hack as dance with digital networks— he has not managed to bring his mom back. He can’t even find her any more; the very day he pinged her, she disappeared from the Birmingham catacombs. There was no death certificate, no transfer requisition. No evidence that she’d ever been there at all.
Finn’s still looking, in between the gigs and scores he pulls to keep the lights on and his skills sharp and his dopamine elevated. Wherever they’ve taken her, he’s going to find it. He’s going to cheat on her test scores, get her the treatment she needs, spring her from coma.
Some day, he’s going to get her back.
Links only for the hardcore:
- “Ghosts in the Machine”, a VR short-story setting up the universe:
- SideQuest install;
- Zip File install for PC VRers;
- Direct-link APK file (if you use Quest but don’t like SideQuest―just ignore the error and download the file, I guess).
- Narwall (Password narwallforall). Kind of a flowcharting storyboard used to design the proof of concept. Upstream link gets you to the environment; this one gets you to the actual Ghosts file. Download the file onto your machine, open Narwall, upload file into it, (there’s an icon you click), and Play (another icon).
Narwall seems to work. Can’t vouch for the Quest links; haven’t used Quest for years.
Well that was utterly horrifying. Terrific work
Haunting. Really cool stuff, as always, really.
First of all, this is great.
Second – I can’t even properly express my relief after you went radiosilent for like three months.
Right? I assumed that our gracious host was either working really hard on something cool, or got hit by some nastyness. Maybe both.
Also, that was a TERRIFIC read. Just reminded me how much i am hankering for a Peter Watts novel.
I mean, I honestly was checking in on this blog here every day and then was doing a search in the news, bracing myself. Although I was also sort of hoping the Blomkamp thing might’ve started cooking properly – considering Neill hasn’t been to periscope depth on Twitter since August either, and he used to be somewhat present there.
Whatever the reason for going dark, great to have our angry sentient tumor back with us, and healthy to boot.
And with a healthy dose of hauntingly bleak corporate creepiness in tow as well, what a treat.
Yeah, the only problem was I say yes to too many gigs. Right now I’ve been commissioned to write a piece on a major American installation artist about whom I knew next to nothing (other than the fact that she was big enough to get a call-out on Bojack Horseman), and it’s kicking my ass. Also there’s another Sunflowers novella due at the end of the year. Someday I’ll learn to say no to assignments on subjects I have no fucking expertise in.
Of course, if I’d always done that, I never would have written Blindsight. So there’s that.
Sounds awesome, thx a lot. Can you please tell where this new Sunflowers novella will be published? Or you will notify via separate post here?
Oh, you’ll definitely see a post here. But the publisher’s Tachyon, same as put out FFR. Except I think they’re releasing a new collection of my short stories first, so it’ll probably be a year or more before the novella comes out.
I’m thinking of calling it “Gremlin”.
The digital ecosystem bit is very Maelstrom-adjacent. Were you ever keyed in as to what gameplay would have looked like?
I’ve seen some concept art. But I don’t know how much of this I’m allowed to share. Had to get explicit permission just to print this biographical note.
You should see my write-up of Big Sys.
I’m pretty sure this was brought up, but I gotta point out that the comments section seems to be broken. It just says “3 comments”, but does not actually show them. It’s not that they’re not rendered – they’re not in the html code either. Tested on two desktop browsers and one mobile browser. For obvious reasons I won’t see the answer to this one either.
Is that still a thing? I’m seeing the right count at the top, and the right number of comments underneath. Well, it’s right once I’ve approved the ones being held for moderation, at least.
Very blue. I’d kill for an ending, though. When’s that videogame coming out, then?
Never, so far as I know. One Hamsa ditched the project and returned to their roots with Underdogs (which was probably the right move. Underdogs rocks).
I have it on reasonable authority that certain elements may end up recycled into future projects, though.
That’s some great backstory for a game! It also comes off as something that could be part of a prequel story for the Blindopraxia universe. Finn is a firsthand witness to the time that technology is starting to push baselines to the side, is one of the few people who are naturally be able to keep up until they figure out how to modify people better, and his neural wiring would eventually be studied and used as the basis for synthesists.
I’m disappointed there’s no mention of how much Tylenol Kephri was popping during her time in the hazmat suit.
Oh, Tylenol was banned long before this story takes place. Along with critical thinking, environmental protection, and anyone who doesn’t admit that Charlie Kirk was the Second Coming.
Ah, future history genre, not speculative fiction. Kind of like The Handmaid’s Tale.
Everyone here is commenting on how cool and interesting this is. But I’d like to discuss the dystopian aspect, namely the question of whether fighting the system makes sense. Creating such a construct is human nature; indeed, almost all societies will eventually come to something similar, it’s just that technology is changing. Perhaps the solution lies in selection? By the way, Watts, what do you think of the 3I atlas? Firefall IRL? Sorry for grammar english, is not my language.
First, this is a false dichotomy. The fact that societies create systems (or are, indeed, systems) doesn’t mean the system has to be ugly. It can and sometimes is, but it doesn’t have to be.
Second, this is incomprehensible. If “…all societies <…> come to something similar”, then solution to what are you mentioning? Solution to something inevitable? Human condition? And how can the solution “lie in selection”? Selection of what? This is gibberish.
Third, you might want to discuss posting in a foreign language with an LLM. This is literally their primary purpose. Not discussions, proofs, internet search, winning an argument – but properly formulating thoughts and making sure they are conveyed in a precise manner. Text generation. Funny how people insist on using the tool for anything but its main purpose.
Actually lol’ed at a “hyperphallos” addressing our host as “Watts”. Fukken ballsy.
Great stuff! So glad to have you back.
Doctor Watts,
I know you engage with media on occasion, I have read your reviews of the Creator and that other thing something with the wolves or whatever. There were also your book recommendations in the recent interview of yours.
I recently saw “There is no antimemetics division” by qntm being released in carbon, and just wanted to ask if you have any thoughts on that, in case you read it or maybe just heard of it?
It’s been published under a permissive licence online for a while, it does introduce a pretty unique and unexpected plot device, and it did force me to forego sleep for a while in order to finish. These three features have placed the thing adjacent to you and your works in the conceptual space.
I haven’t read it, but I’m aware of it. It has a great reputation and a killer premise. I’d definitely read it if I could find the time.
Is there any chance of the Firefall novels being reissued in hardcover in the foreseeable future? I’ve expressed my partiality to hardcover editions before, but I’ve failed to find ’em, regrettably.
It really is damn great, well worth the time.
Concur. Very much in the Stross Laundry, Backrooms, Control tradition. Also available on main SCP site; a couple-hour read, with proper security clearances.
Hey @vteam. Purely on the basis of your comment I ordered “there is no…” In kindle form (yes, I know it’s available for free but I’m fine with paying authors for their work 😉 ) It was published today, I’d never heard of it until you mentioned it here.
Just wanted to say thanks. It’s not a long read but it’s quite something. About to read it again. It’s still got a way to go till it reaches the blindsight 30 reads or however many times I’ve read that… But yep, helluva book and agree it belongs in the same space as the works this website exists for. Thanks for the tip!
Glad you liked it, although I can’t take the full credit – qntm sort of helped a bit by writing the thing.
I decided to shell out for a hardcover myself, just waitin’ for the package to arrive now. And hoping Bezos choke on this money.
Looking forward for the Omniscience and the inevitable reprint of the whole Firefall in some decadent form, like, pages covered in scrambler slime or papercuts infecting the reader with them extremophile bacteria that would carry the whole text in their DNA. That will surely satisfy my hoarding urges. Gonna dazzle the plebs with my astonishing seven book library.
Outstanding. Does raise the the old metaphorical question : at what point does a fiblet become a self-contained entity?
There’s a knock knock joke in there somewhere.
Thanks for the story
I have been trying to load Narwall for weeks and unfortunately it always freezes or gets stuck in “scanning” before I can even upload the .nar file. If it’s possible for you to screenshot the layout and compile it in a PDF that would be amazing….
I’m sorry, mammal, I’m just way snowed under with deadlines now (as you can probably infer from how long it took me to check my blog comments). I’ll put it on the list, but it won’t happen tomorrow…
Honesty wise, I only came here after a massive set of trial and error. Fan of your work and looking forward to omniscience if it ever happens. Got any tips to a fellow fledging writer when the chips seem to be disintegrating?
Invest in dustpans?
I prefer an ostrich fan over adversarial pixels. Greater coverage.
Thought you might enjoy this with Halloween looming – the discovery of carnivorous “death ball” sponges
“…Chondrocladia sp. nov., a predatory sponge that traps its prey using minuscule hooks – somewhat of a departure from the passive filter-feeding behaviour typical of most sponges.”
https://oceanographicmagazine.com/news/carnivorous-death-ball-sponge-among-new-deep-sea-species/
Oooh. They even look like FX from a scifi movie…
> carnivorous “death ball” sponges
And Peter wonders why humankind spends so much effort trying to kill his beloved ocean.
“Pluribus” dropped on Apple. “Omniscience” would be welcome some time soonish.
What’s the connection though? I mean, why specifically would it be welcome soonish specifically after specifically Pluribus?
As a side note, would love to see Dr. Watt’s opinion on it – the Pluribus, I mean. The Raised by Wolves review was scathing to put it mildly (although “public execution by perverse means in the funniest way” would be more precise), and deservedly so.
I am completely snowed under by a combination of imminent writing deadlines and an office full of hardware that has all decided to blow up at the same time, so it’ll be a while before I get around to it. Plus I generally wait for a season to finish before writing a review. But if you want my initial reaction after three episodes, I’m liking it. The science underlying the premise is a bit iffy (life is so biochemically similar throughout the galaxy that someone 600 light years away can make a bioagent so precisely-targeted for Earthly life without so much as a wet sample to go on? Really?) but the premise itself is killer. And so far, the show is doing a damn good job of interrogating it.
Early days yet. But I’m paying attention.
Setting aside the science of the virus, I’d be interested in your take on the ideas of eusociality(leading to altruistic society) and Dawkin’s Theory of Memes as it pertains to this series.
I do like how the writers show Carol crashing the human network. When she goes into meltdown mode she’s like the euclidean glitch in Blindsight or a Langford basilisk, a dangerous thought machine creating lethal chain reactions crashing the hive mind the way you’d crash a computer network. This all dovetails quite nicely with Qntm’s book that people who have bad thoughts (memotoxins) are dangerous and need to be disappeared by a precog task force.(I read his book years ago so I apologize if I’ve poorly summarized it.)
> The science underlying the premise is a bit iffy (life is so biochemically similar throughout the galaxy that someone 600 light years away can make a bioagent so precisely-targeted for Earthly life without so much as a wet sample to go on?
Strong point but distant to the big problem:
What alien genius thinks “I know, let’s hardwire all human minds together at their deepest intimate level; that’ll work!” Have the bobblehead lunatics not heard of 4chan?
Thank you Peter, for existing.
You’re welcome, I guess, although it wasn’t really my decision.
There you go blaming your parents again. Step up and take some responsibility for your life decisions.
Fine, then. Fine.
I made a very poor decision when I chose my parents.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/new-jersey-man-believed-1st-death-red-meat/story?id=127524339
I believe you anticipated this? Hopefully its not as much of a disappointment as Covid.
Oh yes. Even participated in a death metal opera that used it as a plot point.
Occasionally, one of the darts hits the board.
You keep that shit over the pond and away from me, i fully intend to eat as much red meat as possible before it all comes crashing down.
I fully expect to starve in some apocalyptic desert in the next few decades, until then i will defend my pork rinds to the death!
Oof, aggressive.
I managed to get my hands on this “beyond meat” burger this spring – it’s pretty good. I’d go vegetarian if this stuff was available in my part of the globe. Don’t write it off.
Eh, my outburst was a bit tongue in cheek. Ive tried some of the plant based alternatives. As a rule of thumb, the more processed the original food is, the less difference you can taste.
For example, nuggets of all kinds taste like salted cardboard anyway, no matter if they are “real” or not.
A good steak, though? No comparison.
Now i am fully aware that eating meat is not really excuseable from an environmental, ethical or health-conscious perspective.
I just cant bring myself to care. When i am dying in the water wars in ~20 years, or my lungs burst from Covid XXX, or i have to watch the trajectory of the nukes live on stream, my last thoughts surely wont be “Damn, if only i had ate less delicious meat.”
The car is well and truly over the cliff and the people at the steering wheel are still furiously flooring the accelerator, might as well treat myself.
Not sure if I’m allowed to post links. Anway, I believe you anticipated the potential of a tick-borne meat allergy. It has begun. Search for alpha-gal syndrome.