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Dummy
Area: talk.bizarre Date: 13 Aug 93 13:18:11 From: nikolai kingsley To: all Subj: when i'm three hundred and fifty-four (sits down in creaking armchair before the fireplace; warms hands briefly at the glowing orange, sits back and sips coffee from Walter Wetsdale mug) Ahh. Well, this would have been around ... uh, hang on, let me check the dates ... twenty-one ninety-five, yeah. The NoSanNoOs started their purge in twenty-two oh-four, right? Right. It was just before that. I was living on Millimillenary, helped Waddell set up his ice-cream parlour there. You might have heard of it ... nah, probably not. Anyway. Well, uh, you remember all those edicts against artificial intelligence? Stupid question, that's what the purge was about. Anyway, there was this parts warehouse on, ah, shit, where was it ... Tsifayos? Tsialos? One of them. Tsifayos. You know how the NoSanNoOs like to keep things in bunches - one world devoted to growing bananas, one for mining copper, one for - yeah, that was the one we got to name. Copperla. I thought it was a dumb joke, but then again, I didn't get to name it, did I? I would have named it after another Cocteau Twins song, myself ... where was I? Oh yeah, Tsifayos. This warehouse, right, it had bits for everything. Well, everything legal at the time. No weapons. It had nanocomputer parts, starship impellers, TCI converters, gravitic nodes, machinery of every description from each civilised world in the Dominion at the time. Everything. All laid out in flat single-storey buildings, each the size of a small continent. The southern hemisphere, anyway. The northern half was being colonised by them, Tsialos, you know, the ones that look like six-legged Afghan hounds with no eyes and an attitude (actually, I could tell you a couple of stories about them). The whole thing was run by the planet's NAPAISub, of course, since - what? I don't know, I don't usually pronounce it - I spell it out, En Ay Pee Ay Eye Sub. Sounds silly otherwise. AS I was saying, it was in charge, of stock inventories and stuff like that. It had these automated trolley things for getting stuff out of the warehouses and into ships. There was this, sort of like a dummy - it was a humanoid-shaped, uh, front-end I suppose you'd call it - looked like a person from the waist up. Almost. There was no way you'd mistake it for a real person, but it had eyes and a mouth. I guess it was just coincidence that it looked human. This dummy was for dealing with the races that needed something to talk to. Well. NAPAISub - what? It's the local planetary controller. It's like a net-node off the main AI. There's one for each planet. WELL, the NAPAISub itself was something shaped like a shoe-box, the size of three datsuns stacked on top of each other, but no-one ever saw this bit, it was hidden somewhere on top of one of the warehouses. The bit that everyone dealt with was this automated dummy front-end thing. the NAPAISub associated itself with this dummy, until it thought that it WAS the dummy. It started personalising the dummy; it got a baseball cap from somewhere - one of those dark blue canvas cloth cap things - How? If you recall, at the time the Moridani had just started releasing those terrorist machines, the ones that looked like Parkry, innocent, short four-legged alien administrators until they got into a crowded street with more than five Bythians, and then they turned into maniacal blade-throwing berserk lawnmowers. They'd explode and destroy half a street full of monitoring gear, which i'd have to replace. So I spent a lot of time shuttling between Tsifayos and Millimillenary, replacing security scanners and food dispensers. I got to meet this NAPAISub dummy a couple of times. Then the Moridani did that thing with the gravitic net, isolated the NAPAISubs in that part of the Dominion for about a week. The barges were still running, doing their circuits from Bythe to Fer, to Millimillenary, to Triple-S, and eventually to Tsifayos, so I just stayed with it. NAPAI was out of touch with some of the Subs for a while, and anyway, when I got there, this personalised dummy was going through the parts warehouses. It said it wanted to build a mate. (giggles) |
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