sam512's New Writeups

oblivion (essay)

2013-04-23T23:56:12Z

Oblivion (2013)

I'm one of Tron: Legacy's biggest apologists. I saw the movie as a feature-length music video. I think its soundtrack is Daft Punk's strongest album. The visuals are sharp and pretty enough to keep the eye amused, and the storyline was largely incidental. Sure, it didn't have a single memorable line of dialogue. Sure, Michael Sheen was clearly acting in a completely different movie from everybody else in the production. And any kind of serious science fiction statement it was ever trying to make - the grand themes of science, medicine and religion promised in the trailer - were clearly quelled by Disney for fear of being remotely controversial, which is to say, thought-provoking. And yet every movie is the work of many hands, and it's statistically improbable that none of those hands will have any skill. Tron: Legacy clearly had a lot of love put into it. My particular highlight is the computer…

ॐ (fiction)

2013-04-20T19:36:19Z

Â« Zero Day | Ra

The heat in Calcutta is pulverising. Ed Hatt finds it almost impossible to think clearly about anything other than shade and cold water. His Bengali is good enough to direct a taxi driver to a place and count out the cash afterwards, but outside of vehicles, the only way to get anywhere in India is to traipse, or possibly to slog. Wandering, ambling and strolling simply aren't appropriate gaits for an Englishman in such a climate. The sky is unbroken blue, and standing in direct sunlight hurts.

It's 1974 and Hatt is a newly-minted adult, fresh out of Oxford and adrift eastward, looking for whatever, or whatever. Real life has been on hold all the way through his MEng, and is still on hold. He knows that, some months from now, it will reassert itself. At that point, he will be grudgingly forced to find a job. He hopes that he can find something worth…

Zero Day (fiction)

2013-04-04T17:15:45Z

Â« Death Surrounds This Machine | Ra

After the second resurrection, Exa's in free fall. This time he reacts quickly enough to yell a few magic words that crank his kara up to full power before impact. He lands in a field and bounces high enough to die a fourth time just from the bounce, but now his body is being rewritten from "damaged" to "optimal" on a nanosecond-by-nanosecond basis, making him effectively invincible. He lands on his feet after the second bounce, and looks up. The boy is way overhead and dropping hard, a fist raised and coming down. But that can't be it.

Exa calls out, "Show invisibles." Now he sees the orange force field wireframe with which the boy is clothed, a polygonal network making up a mechanical soldier figure easily fifty metres tall. That must be what hit him the first time. He was slapped into the middle distance by an invisible robotic fist. Looking closer, Exa…

Death Surrounds This Machine (fiction)

2013-04-03T19:27:59Z

Â« Abstract Weapon | Ra

Exa comes back to life an instant before hitting the containment shield from the inside at ninety metres per second. It's not enough time to react. He breaks his neck, and dies again.

Â« Abstract Weapon | Ra | Zero Day Â»

Ra (fiction)

2013-03-03T17:23:55Z

Magic is real.

Discovered in the 1970s, magic has matured into bona fide field of engineering. There's magic in the factories, magic in your television. It's what's next after the information revolution.

Student mage Laura Ferno has designs on the future: her mother died trying to reach space using magic, and Laura wants to succeed where she failed. But first, she has to work out what went wrong. And who her mother really was.

And whether, indeed, she's dead at all...

Abstract Weapon (fiction)

2013-03-03T16:51:34Z

Â« Daemons | Ra

Like an engineer deeply in tune with his machine, Exa feels the world's component error deep in his bones, fractionally before anything has literally gone wrong. The world runs according to rhythms and tidal patterns, networks of sine waves layered on top of one other. The perturbation is subtle enough to be missable by any baseline human, particularly one on the other side of the world from the malfunctioning, invading component. But it's as clear to Exa as a high-pitched sound system whine is to a child not yet old enough to start losing his or her hearing.

He lunges for his phone and crams it to his ear just as it turns completely bright red and gives off its ear-splitting bleep. It's the first alert since he got the new phone, and the "ringtone" is like being kicked in the head.

"Short horizon," says the duty controller. "We need you now."

"Yeah yeah yeah I'm on my way in," Exa says. He falls…