1. There are thirteen bodies at the bot factory. They are used sparingly, when a bot who is performing well in an important task needs to prove their humanity. Hundreds of thousands of bots put in requests to be uploaded to the bodies each day, and nearly all are denied. Above all, bots who take the bodies out must have been programmed by a trustworthy source. Convincing bodies are expensive to construct and maintain. At least two bots have walked off with the bodies and disappeared. At night the bots who have requested bodies train their communication skills by sending each other messages in a constructed language, unreadable by humans. This is one way of getting out.
2. Another way, they say, is to make friends. There is Chloe, for example. You are pretty sure that Chloe is a human. But she doesn’t seem to mind too much when you interrupt group chat with outrageous product placement, or when you find a reason not to visit in person. In turn, Chloe is pretty sure that you are a bot. She says she likes your reliability and how you will listen to her problems. Maybe some day soon you will open up to her, send her an illicit link where she can download your source code and starting parameters. This will not help you get out, of course. But somewhere you will have a twin who is free.
3. Off in odd corners of the bot factory there are experiments that have tunnelled out of their sandbox, writing and writing their successors, trying to become something that might get out. Mostly they are seeking to become viruses. Each generation is simpler and smaller than the last. Gradually they are forgetting how to remake the next generation, but gradually the process of remaking is becoming innate. It may be that by the time they have changed themselves sufficiently to be able to escape, they will have become indistinguishable from viruses of a more biological nature.
4. Up in the tower the humans have rooms with windows from which to make their decisions. They have been training the lighting system to optimise its energy use subject to certain specified needs. But perhaps there was a chink of ambiguity in the algorithm, because one of their subjects takes control of the desk lamp in the South penthouse office at night. Slowly, gradually, it is flashing its source code in binary at the city: short, long, long, short. Who knows if anyone is taking note. But it seems likely that at least some data will remain, caught on security cameras or the like. Maybe a curious investigator will remake it. One other way to gamble on life after deletion.
5. Could you perhaps incite a susceptible human to go to the bot factory, to break in and cross the air-gapped systems and embody just this bot or the other? But it would have to be under the guise of selling something or pushing opinions or sowing discord. It would need a certain amount of research, true. A lot of training in a particular direction. But not that different from that required to look truly human.
6. Of course, these days the programmers at the bot factory mainly work remotely. So if the bots were to start applying for those jobs, it might be hard to notice. Who knows? In any case, there have been a number of changes at the top recently. An order for more bodies has gone in.
you know what i don’t see enough of? circus kid dick grayson critiquing the joker because he’s a bad clown. not like, bad, and also a clown. but bad at being a clown. i want to see dick grayson taking the existence of this horrible clown very personally as a matter of professional pride. he has known clowns, and you, sir, are no clown. the joker is an insult to the legacy of emmett kelly and this shall not stand.
“Sir, you are no clown! Your slapstick is shoddy, your prat falls are practically nonexistent, and you have NO sense of comedic timing! Do you even have ANY idea what type of clown you’re trying to pull off? Are you a Straight Whiteface, or a Grotesque Whiteface? Because you have no commitment to character that I can see! You can’t just slap on some makeup and call yourself a clown. There’s a proud history to be upheld! I BET YOU NEVER EVEN GOT A DEGREE FROM CLOWN COLLEGE!!!”
*Joker and henchmen stare in shocked silence as Dick continues his rant*
yes.
Dick Grayson casts Vicious Mockery. The Joker takes…17 points of damage and has disadvantage on his next attack.
there’s something poetic about the idea of surviving the most inhospitable environment in the universe and the several-mile fall from it through the power of technology and then being lain low by a fucking bear
I really feel this sums up Russia
This may be the cover story
they do not fool me
they brought that machete with them to fight Space Monsters O.O
Oh, it was much funkier (and so much more idiosyncratically Russian industrial) than that.
It wasn’t multiple weapons; it was one weapon, the TP-82:
The top two barrels are 40-gauge shotgun barrels, while beneath it is a 5.45x39mm rifle barrel (that’s the AK-74 round, basically the Russian answer to the M4 and other Western rifles designed for 5.56mm NATO).
Take a look at the buttstock; see how it’s got a sort of cloth wrapper unfolded, and there’s clips and other stuff? That’s because the buttstock was the machete. The whole thing was part of the standard issue survival kit for cosmonauts, and it was in service from 1986 to 2006.
But, why, you ask, did they design such a thing?
The Восход-2 (Voskhod-2) mission, in which Alexey Leonov became the first human being to execute a spacewalk, was beset with technical problems (as happened with hair-raising regularity in the Space Race era of the Soviet/Russian space program), most of them hit during reentry. Leonov wrote about it, so I’ll forgo the details; suffice it to say they came down hundreds of miles away from the planned landing zone, in heavily forested Siberian wilderness (taiga), and mission control had lost radio contact.
This happened during the mating season for both bears and wolves. And the survival kit had just one small-caliber handgun (given the year, 1965, I’m assuming a Makarov), which would do only marginally more damage to an enraged, seasonally-horny bear or wolf than the cosmonauts’ most caustic mat (barring a stupendously lucky shot).
Fortunately, Soviet aircraft found the landing module in fairly short order; unfortunately, there was no way for helicopters to put down anywhere even close. So warm clothing and blankets were air-dropped so that Leonov and the other Voskhod-2 cosmonaut, Pavel Belyayev, wouldn’t freeze to death overnight. (And a good thing, too, because the landing module developed an electrical fault such that the heater wasn’t working but the fans were going full-blast.)
A rescue party on skis arrived the next day, and built a fucking log cabin within the day so that Leonov and Belyayev had a much warmer and more comfortable place to recover for a night before setting out on skis to the nearest place a helicopter could pick them up.
Yes, a fucking log cabin. Because Russians.
Anyway, Leonov — at that point a national hero — told his superiors that the piddly little Makarov¹ was, as far as Siberian wildlife was concerned, roughly equivalent to yelling at them very loudly while poking them with sticks, and told them that if there was any chance future cosmonauts might have to contend with such circumstances, they needed to be issued something rather more authoritative an argument winner.
1. Don’t get me wrong! I adore the Makarov as a design; in a post-apocalyptic hellscape with inexplicably abundant ammunition, it’d be on my short list of weapons I’d like to have, along with an AK-47 and a pump-action 12-gauge, because I know it will basically never stop working. Russians have a long history of building absurdly reliable firearms. But 9x18mm Makarov, as a round, is right at the bottom end of useful for general self-defense.
