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Post by edcrab on Mar 28, 2011 11:19:55 GMT -8
I'll reward you with hugs if you end the narration with
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Post by Infidel on Mar 28, 2011 11:25:03 GMT -8
hahaha, nice.
Also, looks like the mafia are going to END the church tonight, one of their kills is on Daniant.
Any modifications you'd like to make to your churchkill narration? I think we should use that one.
Just now it's the end of the church, rather than the reveal.
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Post by edcrab on Mar 28, 2011 14:21:00 GMT -8
Edited it up a little bit:
The Gray Street Dentistry Clinic was currently a Church of Reality. They paid no rent and the original owner was long gone… but legally the Church of the Real also managed to pass for a charitable organisation and a religious order. After the Reformed Constitution passed, tangling with the likes of the COTR was political suicide. In the instances where donators were uncontactable or dead or downright imaginary, the authorities let squatters fly. Beyond that, the Church had a surprising number of sympathisers and donators.
To reach those who needed to hear their words the most the Church had to enter the Grid. The use of wetware would’ve been a poisonous hypocrisy, so the evangelists of the church used less high-tech methods to save the souls of the naïve. Rather than the sleek efficiency of a single direct neural interface, the basement of this particular Church was home to an augmented reality terminal.
It was an outsized booth, a coffin made for the world’s fattest, most misshapen man, protecting the modesty of whomever had to step in and put on the giant novelty gloves and headset. Fibre bundles would buzz and vibrate to mimic touch and motors and armatures would resist muscular motion to simulate friction and the physical resistances of the real world. This was seen as more honest than a cable pumping data straight into the sensory nodes of the mind; the user of such a booth would still move, still speak, still feel via their skin and their sinew instead of merely believing that they were interacting with… whatever they might find beyond the real world.
And apparently all they’d found in this instance was ire. Despite the sound-proofing, despite the opaque walls of the booth, the observer in the control room could tell that the High Reverend was inside… shouting, swearing, infuriated. The outside observer deduced that she had run afoul of an unbeliever. Some of the language the Reverend was using was grossly inappropriate for a god-fearing shepherd of men. Perhaps it was righteous exuberance.
Still bristling, the High Reverend stepped out of the terminal’s booth and into the path of a .44 slug.
She gasped and fell back onto the cubicle. The whole thing reverberated like a bizarre percussion instrument, and the Reverend groaned in tandem with it, scrambling to find purchase, unable to stop herself sinking to the ground.
“Why?” she breathed, “We were so… close…”
“I know. I’m not unsympathetic. In fact, I’m even a little impressed.”
“We didn’t do anything to you…”
“I know. I even happen to respect your beliefs. The problem is that too many people do. And, frankly, the idea of any kind of zealot holding a position of power and influence was very… troubling. So it is with a heavy heart that I enact the will of my superiors. No hard feelings.”
“Go fuck yours—”
The revolver thundered a second time.
The observer holstered the pistol and calmly left the Church of Reality, taking a We Can Save You leaflet on his way out.
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Post by edcrab on Mar 29, 2011 15:42:21 GMT -8
This was written with the assumption that the hackers were starting to get their act together! :
“Too little, too late.”
“Oh, shut up,” said TomFour. “You’re not helping in the slightest.”
He’d lost weight and gained body odour… it was like the System of Starcraft launch all over again. Only this time the challenges weren’t likely to be resolved by grinding.
Despite it all… TomFour had never felt so at home in meatspace. Purpose wasn’t something that had ever come easily before; now he had it by the bucketload, enough to spread around and share. People hung on to his every word.
The floorboards were rotten and the wallpaper was peeling away like leprous skin. There was revolution in the air… and a lot of dust, and the smell of dry mould. But mostly revolution.
“If you ever sit back and tell yourself you’re done for, then you’re done for. Start acting like you’re dead and you’ll be dead soon enough.”
His audience stood huddled together in solidarity… and in cold. The power had been switched off an age ago, and they dared use the back-up generator only for essentials, like jacking in when the time was right.
“We outnumber them, we have experience and right on our side.”
Another interruption. “I don’t see how—”
“They fucking kill people, Sid. They. Kill. People. By definition we’re in the right. They went into the fucking church and shot her, you know. Twice.”
Sid lapsed into an awkward silence. Hackers tended to be good at awkward silences. Sid lived up to the stereotype magnificently.
“We’ve spent so long being pushed that we’ve forgotten how to push back. Not anymore.”
No one spoke, but everyone nodded. They knew what he meant.
“They live amongst us. They follow us, trick us, bribe and extort and murder us. They pose as our own, they… act… like us…”
Something went click inside Tom’s head. Sid’s eyes narrowed.
TomFour’s pistol had cleared leather before “Sid” had even laid a hand on his stock. The gun went click in turn. The sawn-off fell out of the other’s jacket and clattered onto the ground, closely followed by the bloodied corpse of the Agent.
“Like I said,” TomFour told the deathly silence of the room, “we’re in the right.”
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Post by edcrab on Mar 30, 2011 16:21:55 GMT -8
“So what do you make of it?”
Reese shrugged. Then he realised that the agent at the other side of the microphone wouldn’t be able to hear him shrugging, and he resorted to admitting that he didn’t know.
“But it’s fascinating,” he added quickly, “I don’t even know how to classify it. It’s… it’s not a program, exactly. It’s too fluid. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“What is it doing?”
Reese clicked his tongue. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was taunting us. It lingers just long enough for us to pick it up and then it… leaves. Faster than we can track it. It’s like the Grid is a brain and it’s a thought, gone in an instant.”
He frowned at his own analogy, and then slowly started to agree with himself. That’s what he’d call it. Crackling from neuron to neuron. The Grid pulsed when it was around, reacted to the slightest presence, breathed and responded and lived.
“It sounds a tad too romanticised for my liking,” he continued, “like trying to put a nice skin on something that’s basically corrupting everything, but it’s probably a more apt description than the others would ever admit.”
Reese winced. He’d been thinking of the Infinite Crew when he said “others”. Not Sign and the higher-ups. He had to stop that.
The other agent paused a moment. “So you’re saying it’s… sapient?”
Reese snorted at the idea, stifling a laugh. “I’m just saying its an anomaly that we’ve never seen before. Nobody’s saying that about it.”
“I would.
>….^%$£@@~
…//
YOU’RE TALKING TO ME RIGHT NOW.
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Post by edcrab on Apr 1, 2011 15:50:12 GMT -8
“What a bunch of kids,” Jessop grimaced.
“Some of them are kids,” said Duentes.
Jessop peeled herself away from the doom-and-gloom of the public forum for a moment. “That almost sounded reproachful to me, Detective.”
“I’m just saying they don’t have the advantages we have.”
“What? Like common sense? Drive? The ability to carry on without pulling some emo stunt and whining about the futility of their situation?”
“I was thinking experience, but I guess that works. They’re not used to this kind of thing, at least not in the real world. It’s understandable that they might dance around the issue, put off doing anything.”
“Or just give up?”
“This is… taking longer to resolve than I expected, I’ll admit. But that might be doing us a favour.”
Jessop pushed away from the terminal and swivelled her chair to face him. Very dramatic. “How, exactly?”
“Sign’s lot aren’t exactly hyperactive right now either. The longer this goes on, the more chance it has of going public. Then all the politicians that OK’d this scheme are in deep, deep shit.”
“If you say so.”
“Yes. I do say so.”
They continued to sort through the files for a while longer.
“What the hell does emo mean?” Duentes eventually interjected, thinking aloud.
“Old genre of music,” said Jessop. “I think.”
“Oh. Could’ve sworn it was one of the Muppets.”
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Post by edcrab on Apr 1, 2011 16:41:13 GMT -8
“There comes a time when the young have to make peace with the establishment. They look in the mirror and realise that they are the establishment. That no matter how many snarky Tweets they make, how many ironic slogans they put on their t-shirts, they’re still part of the same society. The same economy. The same system. And that they’ve lived for decades in security and comfort because of the very society they decry. And they realise… either they’re impotent, useless, pathetic children who failed to affect change in the world they hated so much… or they’ve come to terms with it. That they have become what they hated. I am not a government slave, Mr. Duentes. I am the government. I was ordered by the democratically elected powers-that-be to secure our future. Your future too, if only you’d admit it. And I followed my orders to the letter. This was a tragedy. I don’t relish being the man who has to enforce this programme, having to resort to such methods to save our… energetic youths from themselves. But we’re right on schedule, and the free world will be that much safer. We are putting you on ice, Mr Duentes. You have to sit this one out. Don’t worry… we’ll dig you out of this simulation eventually. And who knows, there might be a cushy government position waiting for you.” -> <- The Infinite City dwindled into nothing, finally killed off by the absence of regulars to donate to its upkeep. The Church of Reality’s fickle following branched off and began their own government-approved faith workshops. The Cyberpimp carried on as he always had. The… anomaly in the grid was never conclusively identified. It remains at large. Some sources put the number of hackers killed during the enactment of Reform Fourteen at anything from twelve to two hundred. Thomas “TomFour” Roberts was amongst them. The hackers recruited by their government to work against their own enjoyed successful careers in the new PHA/LLA Unified Grid Security Department. Greg Reese attempted suicide, failed, and eventually came to terms with his actions. At the age of fifty-eight he replaced Mr. Sign as the UGSD head. In the following years, the Federated Americas came to overtake Japan in the research, development, and security of Artificial Reality Constructs. The European Coalition collapsed, and many of their member states were welcomed into the thriving Federation. Mr. Sign was not recorded in the history books. History would not come to judge him as a hero or as a monster. The part he played was never made public; he was unknown. Which is exactly what he wanted.
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Post by Infidel on Apr 1, 2011 18:28:01 GMT -8
[21:05] <Rawkking_Goodguy> you got any good last words for tomfour [21:05] <Rawkking_Goodguy> I got some in my proboard :3 [21:21] <Infidel> hahahaha [21:21] <Infidel> HOW'D YOU KNOW? [21:22] <Rawkking_Goodguy> must be some kind of future psychic [21:25] <Rawkking_Goodguy> hmm [21:25] <Rawkking_Goodguy> and what happened to duentes? [21:25] <Rawkking_Goodguy> did he get pressed into serving the government [21:25] <Rawkking_Goodguy> or is duentes secretly tomfour or something awesome like that [21:27] <Infidel> edcrab will be pleased to know that someone actually pays attention [21:27] <Infidel> it is funny because his narration for tonight touches on all that
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