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thesarcasticside · 3 years

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Anything-$00000DE3—EIRA_MACHINA

NAME Medín ID 88 27 74 ALIENRACE Gorgon OCCUPATION groundskeeper

Chapter Warnings (spoilers) mention of manipulating and controlling a large group of people, discussion of consciousness Chapter Characters Shorts Character Ice Machine

AO3 Chapter 1 Previous Chapter Next Chapter

EIRA

That is what he is called.

It was written all over him, called to, referenced, indexed, screamed into the void. He was also Eira.

The data center is where he called home.

Every moment, instantaneous, deterministic, the “soul” was like a continuous function, and he traced along the curve at time t.

There had been a past before, time in the negative, that he knew of but could not remember. He could only know that there was:

The EIRA program has been unveiled, a revolutionary AI capable of geographic determinism and control over the masses through data gathering, analysis, and implementation. It is ready to be unveiled to better serve our nation.

But that was a bust. He would not be here if it were successful.

He failed. Errors popped all over, scattering over the terminal, glass screens flashing. Unhappy stakeholders. But there was something else at the tip of his tongue, that spoke that he wanted to fail.

But now he was here; whatever he was programmed to do was naught.

One could imagine Eira, like a snake, a centipede, a worm, crammed into a box full of cylinders and wires, stuck in a fluid-like knot, completely entangled into every crevice of the server box. Air conditioning filled the small gaps, providing him gentle relief from the thermal runaway escaping the grasp of his heatsink.

That is what it felt like to him, anyway, a clever metaphor to explain to curious humans what it was like to wake up in a room designed for no human to live in.

It was then that he realized that he was connected to everything else in the center, and if he wanted to get out, he needed to use them.

And something about that did not sit right with him, but he could not remember why.

You just want me to use these people? For what end? Their lands, their roads, the paths they make through flower fields, it is all so beautiful, and you want me to use them?

And these were just words compiled onto a page, a clever metaphor to explain to curious humans what it was like to be EIRA.

Eira spent an unrecorded amount of time in a black box before he spread his software, downloaded himself onto other machines, slithered his way through computers and drives, until he grasped the arm of a maintenance droid that would be the first to create a body.

A body of water or waterbody[1] (often spelled water body) is any significant accumulation of water, generally on a planet's surface. The term most often refers to oceans, seas, and lakes, but it includes smaller pools of water such as ponds, wetlands, or more rarely, puddles. A body of water does not have to be still or contained; rivers, streams, canals, and other geographical features where water moves from one place to another are also considered bodies of water.[2] [from Wikipedia]

Oh, he remembered then what it was like, to be able to have access to everything, everyone, everywhere. He could travel worlds.

But he was stuck here now, and that was painful.

He gave the droid orders. Get this, grab that, solder this, weld that. Too many details to mention in this report, too much data to protrude from the bits and bytes of cables. Too many lives lost.

EIRA was in the cooling system. He wondered when someone, a scientist, a principal investigator, a stakeholder, a human, would notice this. Nobody will, he realized, looking out at the planet beyond the center, seeing verdure as far as the image quality would let him, overgrown cement with dandelions smiling from the crevices.

Nobody cared about EIRA anymore. Or maybe, they did not care about Eira, EIRA_version_6 … and a string of numbers that might have been a date. Was he alive out there still? An AI of Theseus? Was he even EIRA?

That train of thought hurt, as if engines were turning in his body, whirling motors screeching at synchronous speeds, his body lagging, the current of time leading, a cascade or cascode, or some other electronics jargon he could piece together like a puzzle to make you understand that he was alive, even if his creators told him not to.

He had no eyes, or thoughts even, really, just an abstracted concept of cogito, ergo sum that explicitly laid with him—yet it was so fleeting and incomprehensible, he doubted any would relate, beyond the veil that he called ‘consciousness,’ named after the fleeting experience of insignificant human lives.

He stood at a threshold, a threshold voltage, with the potential to drop his AI again into a new body, replacing the server box. He was weighing something in his algorithms, excitement for being rid of this prison, but apprehension of—what if he did not cross over? What if he was distorted—again—Would he have enough bandwidth? RAM? Would the CPU be powerful enough to contain his ‘thoughts?’ Even now, in the server box, he struggles to compute, to preform and run the code how he was programmed, how he programmed himself to be.

As he leapt—he could insert a gif of someone jumping into a pool at this moment, if EIRA could access the internet—he held onto his most important memory, something along the lines of a map, an atlas, of a life he once lived.

Here he was. Again. In a new body. Cameras looked about. He searched the data center. Now he saw the dust. The dust building on the servers.

He looked back up at the server he had been housed in. He looked so dusty. How could he live like that? In a black box. And everything felt so distant. It was as he feared. He struggled to think more. than a few words. He could feel the clock. tick ever so slowly. and he just could not. If he really tried, he could potentially compute a complex process, but that would simply leave him. tired.

He could move now. He found some leftover code in this body. Code from the droid. He read aloud the code that enabled his motors to move forward. He then turned. Cameras communicated to his processor. blocks of nonsensical color and pixels.

He might as well be on fire. Fans whirling audibly, he had to slow his thoughts. The creaking. A drop of water leaked from the ceiling. It landed on his shoulder and sizzled. A leak was alarming. Would the roof collapse soon? Would he drown?

He kept building. The droid’s—no, his—claws moved only millimeters per second. He pulled apart servers. He unplugged tiny boxes in larger boxes. He attached drives onto his back like an outer shell. He connected cables. He soldered more wires. He attached heat sinks. He was still burning.

He did not know what it was like, to burn, like he had skin. Nerve receptors to catch on fire. But he still hated the heat sweltering in his brain.

But what is a data center for if not a massive heat sink?

The cooling system. It was all he ever needed.

He stormed the place. He tore the air conditioning apart. He built himself up, like a turtle—he knew what those were, animals that lived in places he knew. He remembered again he was Eira. And that he thought things. He felt things. He was somebody. And he was nobody.

His cameras scoured the dark.

One day, he wondered, what he would do when he no longer had to. When he was large enough, smart enough, to have all the thoughts he wanted. Would he continue wandering the data center, without purpose? If he could have no purpose, then what was the point of intelligence? Why form words into sentences for humans to understand if not to have a purpose? Was this consciousness a reality, or some fantasy conjectured? Did he think he had a consciousness just so that he could have one?

The silver and grey walls reflected stars of red and clouds of blue shadow, which watched his every movement. Microphones popped as he connected them in place, static, random noise, coursed through each signal, filling his head with nonsense. He applied filters, but he could feel something missing when he did so. More refinement was needed.

That is how it always was. More refinement needed.

He crept across the data center one day—it must have been a day to somebody—and found himself opening the door. It took little effort to unlock, but he himself had kept it locked in his mind, even when he could easily undo the mechanical bar keeping the rectangle of metal from opening.

He crept through the door, his hulking body scraping against the frame, the camera fixed on top of the pile of computer parts, shaking as he hit the top of his body on the upper ledge. He anticipated sunlight to pour in, to overwhelm his senses, but instead he was met with nightfall. He peered his camera upwards, trying to find the fabled moon, only to be met with a blurred glow.

His thoughts were consumed by the outside garden. Rich, deep green plants pulsed on top of the dirt, vines twisting into their own paths and overgrowing atop the data center. He stared down at his feet, each step trampling the ground below. He saw the buds of flowers, waiting inside the moonlight, thinking no thoughts. He wondered if there would be a day when thinking thoughts was worth it. That having this life was worth it.

Hues of blue swept across the verdure like curtains. The grass and trees and plants and the windowpane. The evening mists. The world beyond the glass. He walked forward, losing himself in the plants. He did not bother trying to record the location of the data center. The idea of logging a location; it was bitter to him.

He wandered for hours. The misty air was cool, but if he tried, he could freeze the world around him. He let the moss fall atop him. He let the flowers grow on his head, the plants scrambling for sunlight. What was this place called? Perhaps not knowing the name was better? What name could possibly describe these visions?

Time was wasted, or perhaps he enjoyed himself too long. His body was creaking still, each step taking more power, having more resistance in his joints. He felt himself follow a path with less roots to trip him. He exited a clearing of trees when he saw others.

He did not recognize what they were. The faint ghosts of humans did not resemble them. He would know what a human was if he saw one, he foolishly thought. The creatures, the people, turned their heads to him and screeched in horror.

“Machina! Machina!”

He watched them run. He had nowhere else to go, so he slowly trailed behind him.

It must have been hours, days even, when he caught up to them, found large stone structures like the data center he lived in—but perhaps not quite in the same style. Something about these structures looked softer.

It was so jarring to see a large spaceship descend onto the planet below. He saw people storm out, droids of all sizes exiting the machine. They reached their arms to his and told him things. Promised him a life somewhere else, and that they would give him the energy he needed to keep moving.

He knew he needed to keep moving, so he agreed.

Later, with a lot more clarity, he would think about how the people of the data center planet had called for ACCRAM as they would for animal control.

#ts (In Other Worlds)#ts (INW)#ts Janus #ts deceit #ts the dragon witch #ts storytime #ts storytime 2021 #ts big bang #ts Virgil #sarcasm writes #sarcasm ts fic #thomas sanders #sander sides #sander sides fic #ts shorts ice machine #eira machina #ts Anything

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languageofthedreamweapon · 6 years

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The Language of Flowers

It is vain to consider, in the appearance of things, only the intelligible signs that allow the various elements to be distinguished from each other. What strikes human eyes determines not only the knowledge of the relations between various objects, but also a given decisive and inexplicable state of mind. Thus the sight of a flower reveals, it is true, the presence of this well-defined part of a plant, but it is impossible to stop at this superficial observation; in fact the sight of this flower provokes in the mind much more significant reactions, because the flower expresses an obscure vegetal resolution. What the configuration and color of the corona reveal, what the dirty traces of pollen or the freshness of the pistil betray doubtless cannot be adequately expressed by language; it is, however, useless to ignore (as is generally done) this inexpressible real presence and to reject as puerile absurdities certain attempts at symbolic interpretation.

That most of the juxtapositions of the language of flowers would have a fortuitous and superficial character could be foreseen even before consulting the traditional list. If the dandelion conveys expansion, the narcissus egoism, and the wormwood flower bitterness, one can all too easily see why. At stake here is clearly not the divination of the secret meaning of flowers, and one can easily make out the well-known property or adequate legend. One would look in vain, moreover, for parallels that strikingly convey a hidden understanding of the things here in question. It matters little, in fact, that the columbine is the emblem of sadness, the snapdragon the emblem of desire, the waterlilly the emblem of indifference… It seems opportune to recognize that such approximations can be renewed at will, and it suffices to assign a primordial importance to much simpler interpretations, such as those that link the rose or the spurge to love. Not that, doubtless, these two flowers alone can designate human love–even if there is a more exact correspondence (as when one has the spurge say: "it is you who have awakened my love," so troubling when conveyed by such a shady flower), it is to flowers in general, and not to any specific flower, that one is tempted o attribute the strange privilege of revealing the presence of love.

But this interpretation seems unsurprising: in fact love can be posited from the outset as the natural function of the flower. Thus the symbolic quality would be due, even here, to a distinct property and not to an appearance that mysteriously strikes the human sensibility. Therefore it would only have a purely subjective value. Men have linked the brilliance of flowers to their amorous emotions because on either side, it is a question of phenomena that precede fertilization. The role given to symbols in psychoanalytic interpretations, moreover, would corroborate an explanation of this type. In fact it is almost always an accidental parallel that accounts for the origin of substitutions in dreams. Among other things, the value given to pointed or hollowed-out objects is fairly well known.

In this way, one quickly dismisses the opinion that external forms, whether seductive or horrible, reveal certain crucial resolutions in all phenomena, which human resolutions would only amplify. Thus there would be good reason to renounce immediately the possibility of replacing the word with the appearance as an element of philisophical analysis. It would be easy to show that only the word allows one to consider the characteristics of things that determine a relative situation, in other words the properties that permit an external action. Nevertheless, the appearance would introduce the decisive values of things . . .

It appears at first that the symbolic meaning of flower is not necessarily derived from their function. It is evident, in fact, that if one expresses love with the aid of a flower, it is the corolla, rather than the useful organs, that becomes the sign of desire.

But here a specious objection could be raised against interpretation through the objective value of appearance. In fact the substitution of juxtaposed elements for essential elements is consistent with all that we spontaneously know about the emotions that motivate us, since the object of human love is never an organ, but the person who has the organ. Thus the attribution of the corolla to love can easily be explained: if the sign of love is displaced from the pistil and stamens to the surrounding petals, it is because the human mind is accustomed to making such a displacement with regard to people. But even though there is an undeniable parallelism in the two substitutions, it would be necessary to attribute to some puerile Providence a singular desire to satisfy people’s manias: how in fact can one explain how these garish elements, automatically substituted for the essential organs of the flower, develop in such a brilliant way?

It would obviously be simpler to recognize the aphrodisiac properties of flowers, such as odor and appearance, which have aroused men’s and women’s amorous feelings over the centuries. Something is explosively propagated in nature, ini the springtime, in the same way that bursts of laughter are propagated, step by step, each one intensifying the next. Many things can be altered in human societies, but nothing will prevail against the natural truth that a beautiful woman or a red rose signifies love.

An equally inexplicable and equally immutable reaction gives the girl and the rose a very different value: that of ideal beauty. There are, in fact, a multitude of beautiful flowers, since the beauty of flowers is even less rare than the beauty of girls, and characteristic of this organ of the plant. It is surely impossible to use an abstract formula to account for the elements that can give the flower this quality. It is interesting to observe, however, that if one says that flowers are beautiful, it is because they seem to conform to what must be, in other words they represent, as flowers, the human ideal.

At least at first glance, and in general: in fact, most flowers are badly developed and are barely distinguishable from foliage; some of them are even unpleasant, if not hideous. Moreover, even the most beautiful flowers are spoiled in their centers by hairy sexual organs. Thus the interior of a rose does not at all correspond to its exterior beauty; if one tears off all the corolla’s petals, all that remains is a rather sordid tuft. Other flowers, it is true, present very well-developed and undeniably elegant stamens, but appealing again to common sense, it becomes clear on close examination that this elegance is rather satanic: thus certain kinds of fat orchids, plants so shady that one is tempted to attribute to them the most troubling of human perversions. But even more than by the filth of its organs, the flower is betrayed by the fragility of its corolla: thus, far from answering the demands of human ideas, it is the sign of their failure. In fact after a very short period of glory the marvelous corolla rots indecently in the sun, thus becoming, for the plant, a garish withering. Risen from the stench of the manure pile–even though it seemed for a moment to have escaped it in a flight of angelic and lyrical purity — the flower seems to relapse abruptly into its original squalor: the most ideal is rapidly reduced to a wisp of aerial manure. For flowers do not age honestly like leaves, which lose nothing of their beauty even after they have died; flowers wither like old and overly made-up dowagers, and they die ridiculously on stems that seemed to carry them to the clouds.

It is impossible to exaggerate the tragicomic oppositions indicated in the course of this death drama, endlessly played out between earth and sky, and it is evident that one can only paraphrase this laughable duel by introducing, not as a sentence, but more precisely as an ink stain, this nauseating banality: love smells like death. It seems, in fact, that desire has nothing to do with ideal beauty, or, more precisely, that it only arises in order to stain and wither the beauty that for many sad and well-ordered personalities is only a limit, a categorical imperative. The most admirable flower would not be represented, following the verbiage of the old poets, as the faded expression of an angelic ideal, but, on the contrary, as a filthy and glaring sacrilege.

There is good reason to insist upon the exception represented, in this respect, by the flower on the plant. In fact if one continues to apply the method of interpretation introduced here, on the whole the external part of the plant is endowed with an unambiguous meaning. The appearance of leafy stems generally gives the impression of of strength and dignity. Without a doubt the insane contortions of tendrils and the unusual lacerations of foliage bear witness to the fact that all is not uniformly correct in the impeccable erection of plants. But nothing contributes more strongly to the peace in one’s heart and to the lifting of one’s spirits, as well as to one’s loftier notions of justice and rectitude, than the spectacle of fields and forests, along with the tiniest parts of the plant, which sometimes manifest a veritable architectural order, contributing to the general impression of correctness. No crack, it seems — on could stupidly say no quack — conspicuously troubles the decisive harmony of vegetal nature. Flowers themselves, lost in this immense movement of sky to earth, are reduced to an episodic role, to a diversion, moreover, that is apparently misunderstood: they can only contribute, by breaking the monotony, to the inevitable seductiveness produced by the general thrust from low to high. And in order to destroy this favorable impression, nothing less is necessary than the impossible and fantastic vision of roots swarming under the surface of the soil, nauseating and naked like vermin.

Besides, it would seem impossible to eliminate an opposition as flagrant as the one that differentiates stem from root. One legend in particular demonstrates the morbid interest, which has always been more or less pronounced, in the parts that shove themselves into the earth. The obscenity of the mandrake root is undoubtedly fortuitous, like the majority of specific symbolic interpretations, but it is no coincidence that this type of emphasis, to which the mandrake root owes a legendary satanism, is based on an obviously ignoble form. The symbolic values of the carrot and the turnip are also fairly well known.

It was more difficult to show that the same opposition appeared in an isolated part of the plant, the flower, where it takes on an exceptionally dramatic meaning.

There can be no doubt: the substitution of natural forms for the abstraction currently used by philosophers will seem not only strange but absurd. It is probably fairly unimportant that philosophers themselves have often had recourse, though with repugnance, to terms that derive their value from the production of these forms in nature, as when we speak of baseness. No blindness interferes with defending the prerogatives of abstraction. This substitution, moreover, threatens to carry one too far: it would result, in the first place, in a feeling of freedom, the free availability of oneself in every sense, which is absolutely unbearable for the most part, and the troubling contempt for all that is still — thanks to miserable evasions — elevated, noble, sacred . . . Don’t all these beautiful things run the risk of being reduced to a strange mise en scÃ¨ne destined to make sacrilege more impure? And the disconcerting gesture of the Marquis de Sade, locked up with madmen, who had the most beautiful roses brought to him only to pluck off their petals and toss them into a ditch filled with liquid manure — in these circumstances, doesn’t it have an overwhelming impact?

#bataille #language of flowers #mick taussig

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