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  • Belle (2021)

    Digital Utopianism

    The users in U hide their identities yet their identities are unique and idiosyncratic to them.

    Although U promises that you can become a new person online, the avatar that U automatically generates captures the essence of a person. Even if users use U to escape themselves, their essence is immutable.

    After Suzuzu sings as Belle for the first time with the help of her genius friend, Hiroka, she becomes an online sensation. Her likeness is remixed in various musical styles and outfits. Her song becomes part of a karaoke sim.

    Many wonder about her identity. Who is she? Is she a celebrity? Suzuzu though is a normal girl unused to this kind of attention.

    Branding is not important to her. Nor does she interact with her many fans. She is overwhelmed. She does not mean to portray herself as an elusive diva. Primarily U to Suzuzu is a means to an end; to work through personal problems, to find her voice again.

    Questions

    1. How can we keep our feelings and identity safe while being true to ourselves?
    2. How can the online world positively influence the real world?
    3. How does U preserve identity?

  • Decoded, Mai Jia: Allegories of Genius

    One of the chief difficulties of writing a book about mathematical genius is that the average person views mathematics as calculation or opaque. (Aside: calculation has lost its luster since the advent of the pocket calculator.) After a certain point, in Decoded there is no longer any detail about mathematics. The reason is probably that it is classified, but also that the writer could not probably do it justice or if he tried he would just confuse his audience, although some of us would like to understand the cryptography referenced. Maybe his approach here is the reproduction of a conversational technique that people dealing with difficult matters adopt: he is reporting only what his interviewees can report to him, a non-expert.

    A lot of wild cardinal rules are made about cryptography that seem ridiculous on the face. For example, that a person is either a decoder or encoder. Or that once a person makes a cipher he is used up as a cipher is characteristic and must be unique. All of this is fascinating. The idea behind this might be that the nature of a task, not merely the native abilities of the practitioner, is what determines the result. Once one door is open another is shut.

    Perhaps, making statements of impossibility is mostly a literary device in order to make the character of Rong Jinzhen, a practitioner of two worlds, unbelievable or one-of-a-kind.

    There are many such allegories in the book and other devices used to indicate his genius. Here is his evolution of problem solving at different stages of life:

    • Spelunking into a cave without proper light
    • Performing tasks in darkness
    • Constructing a dark room yet not finding ones way out

    Danger, traps. But due to his daring, he is recognized as a genius.

  • Games I have known: Snood

    Snood is a truly bizarre game. Recently, in the past couple years, it was re-released. It is a game I played some in the distant past.

    The way the game works is that there is a collection of faces that make up a bulk at the top of the screen. For all I know these faces are the snoods. The grid is triangular so the snoods are in offset rows. The arrangement depends on the level. You can have many different arrangements of snoods.

    Snoods are different curious faces of different colors and head shape like square or triangle.

    The faces are coming down at you. This is a precursor emotionally to Majora’s Mask. Not really. It is quite a strange game. When the faces fill up the screen and reach the bottom you lose. You win by clearing out all the faces or snoods. The way you do this is you shoot snoods with snood ammo which are snoods at a distance with a gun that has 180 degree range. By shooting at the wall at an angle, you can bounce the snood much like a beam of reflecting light.

    When you shoot a snood and it reaches any other snood it sticks. This is the way you can lose aside from the snoods descending all at once by a buildup that occurs at the top over time. There is a danger meter on the side.

    When snoods of the same type are altogether, I’m not sure how many, maybe three, they are eliminated and you get points. Any snoods that were hanging on to a group of snoods that were eliminated fall down but they do not harm you. They are also eliminated. This is the way to win.

    The game resembles breakout but the strategy is not to chip away at the wall. You quickly realize that the way to play the game is to make a snood stalactite of snoods that you cannot use and to take away the base so that they all fall at once. If you try the chipping away strategy by making matches you begin to cover up the snoods adjacent to the snoods you are trying to match. Once you have the snood you need and you shoot it, you can hit one of these adjacent snoods and get stuck to them and not touch the snood you were aiming for. The gun is accurate but it is a mouse game and although in easy mode the line of sight extends all the way to the snoods and like a laser reflects off the border, my feeling is that aiming is difficult. It is like billiards. You have to shoot a relatively wide object through a small gap in order to have the right snoods touching.

    The look of the strategy differs from other arcade games where often you are playing in a balanced way like moving right to left taking out enemies. It is similar to tetris in that the accuracy in how you place pieces really matters. In tetris though you are building up rows by carefully fitting pieces together. When you make a bunch of snoods that are meant to fall, you care less about the placement or what snoods they are, only that you get the right snood later on and you have a clear shot towards the base. If you miss that shot, the game is probably over because by piling on snoods they are much closer to reaching the bottom.

    The game in its modern form had a payment model (the last time I played) that was arcade style. You paid for coins, sometimes you won coins too, and then got to play longer. It might have been an arcade game originally but I remember playing it on a Macintosh.

  • SQL & the Wolf

    SQL was out and about when he encountered a wolf.

    “Hello,” the wolf said, “I am lost. Can you help me?”

    A lesser squirrel would have run away.

    “SQL the Squirrel at your service.”

    “Dinner service.”

    “Sir, please don’t eat me.”

    “Why not?”

    “If you eat me, I cannot tell you the way to go.”

    “But I do not know where I am going. My instincts led me here and they will lead me somewhere else. They are my compass. I do not need direction.”

    “But what about the big picture?”
    “Big picture? What is a picture?”

    “Um, the vast wilderness”

    “What about it?”

    “After I am gone, you will to go searching again and again. Compare that to me. I know where the trees are that bear fruit & nuts. Would it not be better if you had a place to stay?”

    “Like where?”

    SQL removed from his waist the smart watch that he used to track his steps. Laying the watch on the ground, he began to manipulate the screen with his tiny hands.

    “You see this dot? This is where we are. According to this map there is a place called Duck Pond 30km from here.”

    “That’s pretty impressive Squirrel. What else can you do?”

    “I can read the news.”

    “What’s that?”

    “I can tell what is happening in the human world. For example, let’s look up Duck Pond.”

    Although he did not have his phone, SQL was fortunate that this part of the forest was part of the mesh network he had setup with the other animals that expressed an interest in the internet.

    “Duck Pond. A migratory site for birds. No road access. Large mallard populations year round.”

    SQL & the wolf, whose name was Wesley, set out in the direction of the pond. They came to a stream that according to the map was a tributary that led to the pond.

    “Just go down this stream and in a few hours you will reach the pond. Goodbye.”

    Wesley looked uncertain. Before SQL left, he said a few things, like about how he would mark this spot with an X so that Wesley could visit again. Or, that the animals of the forest, could really use a guy like him, fast, able to travel far distances. This was new territory for Wesley, trusting someone. But he was curious what the squirrel meant.

  • Games I have known: Castle Mouse 2000

    Castle Mouse 2000 is an old Mac puzzle game. The goal of the game is to scare a mouse into a hole. The game takes place on a small tile grid of around 10 by 10. On this grid are small animal sprites each taking up 1 cell. There is a progression of animals ranging from small to large: mouse, cat, dog, etc., all the way up to lion, bears, and an elephant, probably though I don’t remember all the animals. The animal of one larger size when adjacent to the smaller animal scares that animal in the opposite direction. The elephant can also be scared by the mouse.

    As a puzzle game it is very interesting somewhat similar to the game Rush Hour, the game where you slide blocks out of the way in order to clear a pathway. Though, not quite the same, as you are given a setup and asked to add pieces that will allow the mouse and any other animals to interact in a simulation.

    There must be some rules about blocking and stopping animals. I seem to remember say a cat bordered at some distance by two dogs that would move back and forth like a trap. What if this animal was blocked in its motion by another animal that did not interact with it? If that animal clears the area where the cat moves back and forth, does the cat continue to run in the direction of the opposite dog for eternity? I also remember that when two animals collided at the same cell in the sense that the movement animation would cause them to overlap in that next instant they would bounce backwards the path that they came. I think it is possible that when an animal is blocked it just stops and will not continue to move once its path is cleared. This allows the option of another animal changing the direction of the once moving animal sometime down the line.

    Let me cook up an example of a puzzle with numbers denoting the animals of different sizes, 1 being the smallest, and 0 giving the hole.

    0....1.
5......
.......
......2
.3.....
Place 4

    On this small grid, where the periods are spaces, by placing the 4 underneath the 5, on pressing go, the 4 will be sent down to the 3, the 3 sent to the right, the 2 up and the 1 sent to home, resulting in the following outcome.

    0.....2
5......
.......
.......
4.....3

  • The Intellectual Property Message of Pixar’s Coco

    A world in which the memory of a person imbues that person with strength or after death the inequalities are preserved is one where canonization directly benefits the ego of a soul and goods are transferred to the spirit world in material death ceremonies.

    One metaphysical question is whether the souls in the world of death are existing based on the memory of living people or the historical record? There is no person alive that has a memory of another person that was born over 250 years ago. If this were the case, a person reaching their 125 year would have to remember meeting someone that was 125.

    If it is also the case that a person is imbued with power based only on the reproduction of images of that person and the viewing of that person, then figures in the mass media are extra powerful. However, if it is only through the memory of the person & a personal connection, although the number of people that have heard about a person are great, the actual psychic energy that imbues them with strength is much weaker.

    The custom of remembrance in the mind and memorials both make up the economy of health and wealth in the underworld.

    Scoundrels that have stolen the works of other reap the benefits of this also in the afterlife and deprive those bereft souls of safety and comforts. Even in the afterlife people are consumed by the idea of meeting and paying attention to their idols, entertainers. In the absence of bodily need, entertainment & past times, like singing, dancing & gambling make up the prime activities. Certain activities like running a plant or electrical or water system make no sense in the immaterial world unless the immaterial world is more like a plane of second life and comparable to the material world in the needs of its inhabitants.

    Justice is eventually had for the musician that had his songs stolen as the events were not sealed at death but played out in a drama where that information is passed back to the world of the living, leading to a contestation and rewriting of history in the material world. This feeds back into the immaterial world and futures change. A person who was boosted by idolization is then rebuffed by all his fans.

    A person is remembered by their contribution to humanity and their family & friends. The result of this in the soul world is a society of celebrity. Given a chance to read a well-known author and an unknown one, a person will choose the well-known one even if this monopoly produces suffering from a lack of remembrance. As a networked phenomenon, the unknowns drop out, and the knowns spread through the reproductions of their work. There is suffering in the afterlife, not only from regret by souls, but in that not more is known of the people in the past by the living. This is one conclusion.

    There is a theoretical possibility that a soul has memories of the past world and that his relatives exist at a deeper layer not accessible. Otherwise if all the people existed in the soul world layer 1, a single household might contain a multitude. Although it is possible also that they just live somewhere else. The Greek philosophers only speaking ancient greek have walled off in a replica. If not for the possibility of isolation and travel, the soul world would be a celebrity driven oligarchy, possibly a totalitarian state where food from offerings is doled out to weak and unknown souls for their services, their passive income a fraction, an offering only once in a while or not at all.

    These are some theoretical metaphysical considerations to the problems of memory or attention as a fungible thing that plays a substantial role in an unseen layer of existence.

  • Mech-Cat Frisby Post-Notes

    What are the qualities that give Mech-Cats a soul? Also, what is programmed vs. nurtured?

    1. The mech-cat is a real object. It is not drawing on an unlimited amount of data. It cannot perform an unlimited amount of operations. The brain is finite and so is the system of the mech-cat.
    2. Even so this makes the mech-cat more like an animal or human than a computer. It would be uncanny if a robot could remember every single thing it has ever experienced and recall it instantaneously. What the mech-cat must do is have a high quality source of information from its senses that overwhelms the memory systems so it is forced to extrapolate & synthesize from the data. For example, if you look at some scene and then look away so it is partially in your view, you are taking in a new scene but parts of the old scene are there. Is it the same scene in your mind? Or is it slightly different in your vision? Another example say there is a system that you have studied well and you are asked to reproduce it. While producing it you are not merely copying the old system but doing something else, understanding its operation, entertaining new ideas, even if you were going through the motions of producing normally, for a human it would not turn out the same. If you are merely photocopying it then you get an exact replica but if there is thought put into it the product is different.
    3. What part of the vision system is programmed and which is nurtured? Part of the story is that the mech-cat is programmed to discern between living and non-living things. I think the reason for this is that a human is special. Maybe if their senses are good enough and their programming was good, they would learn without that. But unlike a baby, they are not exactly dependent on people. I believe that life learns what other life is through the early growing process, but since mech-cats are already complete they need this programmed in them.
    4. Another piece of programming is reflexes. I think this is important so even in the example where a robot hand & a human hand are moving, the mech-cat needs to dodge. There is a practical reason too because unlike a living animal it cannot repair it’s own damage. I think in my story anything like the cat being able to recreate its own solar cells or grow muscle is too sophisticated.
    5. This also relates to other programming with self-preservation like with pains. I think for a mechanical being especially for some reason unlike a living creature, it will take longer for them to attain a soul. This is a bit of a cheating concept because I’d say they do have souls yet unlike people it is tough to say whether they are purposeful which is a semi-necessary condition perhaps, but not a sufficient condition for a soul. It is just a recognition that it might take longer for anything to make sense to such a being.
    6. A lot should make sense in terms of its chemical instrumentation. I’m not sure it really understands chemistry, maybe it does, but in a sense this makes the mech-cat a whole lot like humans right off the bat. They are concerned about the same things. They are partners. Humans just like mech-cats want sunshine and clean air. Humans can taste something and understand it is not good because it is bitter. I think only later on would a mech-cat perhaps really understand the why or how of things. I’m sort of imagining a being that can run through some programming and maximize some quality in their environment, but since the environment is very complex and new with a human partner it must adapt its behaviors. Suppose there was a vat of clear liquid and the human was a chemist: he knocks over the liquid and it is a strong acid. It burns a hole in the ground. Perhaps the mech-cat could identify it using its chemical equipment or ask the human on the tablet or any other actions that would lead to an increase in safety. This would be also very important information that would stand out for this particular Mech-Cat.
    7. A big part I think in what makes a soul is the differentiation which cannot be programed exactly. It is differentiation through life which is a semi-random process opposed to say a random number generator in a personality module. A part of this is accomplished in the training center for mech-cats. The testing by humans is one part of this differentiation and the mech-cats themselves the other. What is alive about mech-cats is all the programming they’ve been given which is new to them and how they look and behave to each other. I once read a very interesting story about the many-worlds hypothesis. https://www.tor.com/2020/07/28/hugo-spotlight-ted-chiangs-anxiety-is-the-dizziness-of-freedom-transforms-the-familiar/ It was that there were parallel worlds and it was possible to interact with one of these parallel worlds and at that moment destroy the identical-ness between the worlds by this interaction. So by interacting with yourself to say tell him to take a job whereas in your world you don’t take the job, you can run experiments. But they turn out to be different people. I think reality would be similar for the mech-cats. I think it is beneficial for many mech-cats to be together for a time so that they understand there are differences between them and so that they might have a feeling of camaraderie or being part of a collective. I feel that if there is an AI or a robot of great sophistication like the mech-cat, you have to raise it like a child. The mech-cat has a job but it is still a pet so it shouldn’t have any responsibility. It can be given a certain amount of tasks which might be subroutines that human owners might really want like restrictions like not going into certain areas or scaring off mice, but its learning for these things is pretty minimal because unlike a human it is not expected to create his or her own environment or have to learn everything through language. This might be another useful piece of programming for the mech-cat to have, human language, but I don’t think it is necessary because for a lot of simple things in a household, an animal learns through positive and negative reinforcement, even simple commands. I don’t really know how intelligent this animal is to be. I left the “electronic brain” aspects out because I simply couldn’t think of the right thing. Humans have plasticity, neuronal generation. This one facet is hard to capture with computers because although they take in data, they can easily throw out data and take in new data, whereas making a neuron seems like a much more interesting and indeterminate process. It is possible to simulate a neuron and the plastic part is I suppose a neural network because simulated neurons are very simple functions but in aggregate they can do complex things. The problem here is one of efficiency. A human is able to accomplish so much without using a ton of energy. I believe the mech-cat should have some of both: a silicon computer and something else that is more plastic. In popular sci-fi, AIs sometimes become super-intelligent and runaway from their creators by having computer hardware moved or adding more servers to their network with backups and greater CPU, so in this sense an AI is getting smarter or growing. What I imagine for the mech-cat is some kind of material that can become dense and more intricate on the interior from exertin an electrical signal or adding chemicals on the exterior, and so it is is limited by the cavity in the mech-cat. Maybe it is a different form of memory device; like a brain, it could be an object that strengthens repeated signals and weakens signals that come in less frequently. Since the mech-cat is able to do some chemistry, perhaps it could add to this, and build the structure like a crystal very slowly. Perhaps, also in the body of the mech-cat is a chemical bank that he could add to very slowly and that he could draw on.

    Questions about the solar panels: In order to create a surface that is flexible out of cells, how do you accomplish this? How can you do it so it fits over what are like muscles that stretch and move in a large range of motion, even fold and turn over oneself like skin that is pulled?

  • Grunt: Games I have known

    Grunt was an old platformer for the Mac. I played the shareware version. Thinking back now, I should have purchased a copy as I liked the game so much and it would have made it more playable. As a kid, starting a game over and over from the very beginning and getting to the furthest room possible adds to the challenge, though now it is clear that this is why I never beat the game because that kind of way of playing is somewhat insane. https://www.macintoshrepository.org/3496-grunt

    In the game you play a rotund pig that stands upright and looks a bit like Robin Hood with a cap and tunic. The goal of the game is to explore a large dungeon with many levels and rooms. Each room is a screen size and rooms can have multiple entrances and exits that lead to other parts of the dungeon. You can find keys that open up different doors. One of the charms of this game is the variety of levels. At the beginning levels are simple colored brown and green, but levels and doors near the end are red, blue, steel, and all kinds of psychedelic colors. A door might indicate what type of level lies behind it.

    You gather different ammo arrows and fireballs, maybe something else, and dispatch with enemies that are blocking your way. Ammo is very limited and lives are few. Enemies might be bouncing or pacing on a platform, or they follow you around. Another way of dying is falling or hitting spikes. If you duck, which is an important mechanic for getting under walls while traveling on a moving platform, and you get up under the wall, you also die. This is the main source of sound in the game except for some intro lute music, the sound of a fireball sounding like something getting hit and burning, and the sound of death being a squeal. To begin with you only had 3 lives though you could gain more by finding them.

    Grunt had an interesting movement mechanic. Grunt is a pig with a large oval body standing on two little feet that are always running. Grunt can stand on a very thin platform because his feet are quite small. However he can accelerate quite quickly and had quite a bit of intertia, so if you are on a small platform, say you have just jumped there, you might need to quickly adjust in the opposite direction so you don’t fall off. If you are in air you can actually move slightly in the direction that you are running, so you are accelerating in a direction without there being an obvious force in the opposite direction, like when you walk on a platform. It is such that if you are running quickly, and quickly turn directions on an edge, the inertia attained during running will move you in that direction, but since you turned quickly and started running, you will move then in that direction, making an overall U-turn in air. Therefore if you are under a ceiling which is also a platform, and falling off the edge will bring certain death, you can do this maneuver to run beneath the ceiling and quickly change directions and jump on top of the platform which was just the ceiling. This type of jumping maneuver is the hardest in the game. Another movement was running and sitting, and thus sliding. It was important to gain enough speed while sliding so you didn’t end up underneath a wall. The other very difficult part is to stay on a moving platform. I believe you have to move with the platform to stay on top of it and so if the platform is small you are constantly moving and making slight adjustments, maybe even jumping to avoid an obstacle. This detail might not quite be right, but moving on a moving platform to say do a hurdle is something I remember. There were also elevators.

    Overall, the game was very difficult, with lots of need to conserve ammo and a tantalizingly difficult dungeon with many doors that led to far off regions.

  • From A to Z on the Alphabet Archipelago

    All the letters lived together on islands in the Alphabet Archipelago in the Symbol Sea. Certain groups of letters knew each other very well. A,B,C were close as were X,Y, and Z. The letters lived at different addresses. The island addressing system was binary. A was 1 so he lived at 00001, and B was 2 so he lived at 00010, and so on. The distance between islands was the smallest number of bits that had to be flipped. So for example, A and B were not next to each other but lived 2 spaces apart, C at 00011 was the neighbor between them. The 00000 island was reserved for space.

    The letters actually did not travel often from their islands. Numbers travelled more quickly than letters so the letters had developed a standard of communication. Messages were of the form X:Y where X was a string of bits that were the addresses of islands and Z was a string of bits that was converted into a message. What about punctuation like the : in the message? It was taken from the Symbol Sea. Numbers made up the atmosphere and could be grabbed from the air.

    One night M, was gazing across the Symbol Sea, quiet as an ellipsis, and the reflection of the Moon added to her thoughts. “What if there was an M just like me, an M-prime, but different across the sea looking at the Moon reflecting?” She sent a letter to her friend J.

    J: DO YOU THINK THERE ARE LETTERS JUST LIKE US THAT LIVE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SEA? – M

    M: I DON’T KNOW. LET ME ASK Z. – J

    Some time later Z responded.

    J,M: IF YOU TURN AROUND THAT IS THE WHOLE WORLD. – Z

    M: Z TOLD ME THAT YOU THINK THAT THE WORLD IS REFLECTED BECAUSE YOU ARE M. – J

    This annoyed M. Though by this point as Z pontificated to R about his thoughts, and R told his view to his friends, all the other letters had begun to discuss the matter. E was partial to M’s view whereas S was partial to Z’s.

    E and S started to collaborate, and with the help of a few other letters they invented a ship. One day they showed up on M’s shore. They had made the voyage okay, E traveling to S, and then together to M. Over those several days, the sea was calm full of periods and commas and no roiling exclamations. M wanted to travel across the sea and look for her reflection. In order to settle the matter, E and S agreed on the voyage and that M could borrow their ship, but first they explained the operation of the craft.

    E began, “The ship has two methods of propulsion. It has an adder and a flipper.” The adder was a propeller attached to a windmill whereas the flipper was a set of fins that used currents of exclamation.

    “The way the adder works is through binary addition. For example, if you are at space, 00000, you can use the adder to add 1, to get to 00001, A, and again to get to 00010, B, as the 1 adds to 1 giving the result that carries to the next spot.”

    “The way the flipper works is that you can flip any bit at any position for example M, at your island, you can visit J, if you flip the bit in the 1s place, so we’ll travel from 01011 to 01010, not accounting wind.”

    “Yes, the wind” said S with import.

    S began, “Once we got out to Sea, we discovered that the wind blew our craft to and fro over the symbols. Through careful observation, we discovered that if you are at position 01010 or at J’s island, there is a 1/2 probability of getting blown over to T’s island 10100, and a 1/2 probability of going to E’s island 00101. Curiously, if you are at space 00000, the wind doesn’t seem to have any effect.”

    “What happens if you are at A, 00001, and the wind blows you over to the right or over to the left?” asked M.

    “That’s a very interesting question,” said S “What happens is that the location truncates so you end up at space, so 00001 becomes 00000. If you are blown to the left, a 0 is tacked onto the end, so 00001 becomes 00010. So what the wind does, is that it shifts the entire binary location to the left or right, each with a probability of 1/2, with truncation occurring to digits that go beyond the first bit. As the atmosphere is made of numbers there is a constant inequality, < or >. This difference is the source of the wind.”

    “Every day you can use either the adder or flipper,” said E.

    “And every day the wind blows,” said S.

    M accompanied E and S back to their homes, and then she propelled her way forward, first flipping her way to the different islands of the Alphabet Archipelago, sometimes a lucky shift sending her to her destination and other times closer to space.

    M reasoned that since the letters lived in a 5-bit system, her reflection would live within 10-bits. So if her address was 01011, then her reflection lived at 1101000000. In between lay the Symbol Sea.

    After putting together her supplies and receiving a message from the letters wishing her good luck, she started out.

    M's Log
Each day there is a head or tail wind and an operation.
headwind or tailwind
f11 flip 11th bit
a add 1
00000 Start M' 10110|01101 M 00000 Finish
0 01101
1 00111 a,T
2 0100000011 f10,T
3 101000000110 f11,H
4 1011000001100 f9,H
5 001100000110 f13,T
6 0110000010 f2,T
7 1011000001 f11,T
8 0101100001 a,T
9 10110000 f1,T Almost
10 101110000 f4,H
11 10110000 f5,T
12 1101100000 f10,H
13 1011000000 f10,H

    After 9 days of travel she saw land, but the wind swept her away, and on the 13th day, after circling her destination, she made it to 1101000000 where she made landfall. There lived on the island, the letter, m. M was so happy to meet m! M and m were quick friends. As M explained herself, m made mango lassi, and m told M about all the letters that lived around, and M told m about her friends. Although between their two descriptions, they had some trouble following each other. It was as if you learned the story of a long lost twin, and saw in his or her life similarities to your own, but all the same a difference. m produced some letters.

    “These are from a game of chess that I am playing with p.”

    m: 1. e4

    m showed M the board so that she understood. M exclaimed, “That’s very peculiar. We write that as P-K4.” After comparing the systems of notation, m understood.

    Just then, a letter came. m opened it.

    m: i just saw a vessel coming in your direction, what is it? – z

    “Take a look at this,” m passed the letter to M. M read the letter, it looked mostly the same, though letters were connected in places they were not, more curvy, smaller and connected. She understood its meaning. m wrote z. Together M and m visited other lowercase letters.

    Eventually M went back home. When she arrived, she told all the uppercase letters of her travels and showed them this new way of writing the letters. It was a great discovery and work began on creating new vessels and means of communication. It was agreed between the upper and lower case letters that an extra bit would be used to distinguish between upper and lower case letters. Until this point, both letter systems were using the same way of encoding messages, on each set of islands 00001 were both A and a. So for the lower case letters, their islands did not correspond with their writing. In the new system, 00001 was A and 100001 was a, 00010, B, and 100010, b, and so on. Though mostly, communication stayed the same. Between all the letters the meaning was clear and bonds of friendship were formed from a to Z and z to A.

    ThE eNd

  • Mech-cat Frisby

    I. Frisby woke up in the light cool sun. A bird was chirping in the distance. Frisby got up licked his paws and started walking around the house. First he checked the south window. The shrubs had deposited more leaves. A gentle wind blew across the leaves. The sun shown through and made a shadow.

    It was morning. There was a lot of work to do. Coffee was started. In the living room, Frisby was laying on top of the sofa gazing out the window. His hexagonal skin reflected the sun. Motes of dust played around his still form.

    II. The mountain stands eternal. I just had to get away from the hustle and bustle. I travelled off the mountain path and found beyond an alcove a rock jutting that I could stand on. I took a picture of me standing on it. I examined the alcove. Near the floor was some moss and inside the rocks were darker in color and smooth to the touch.

    III. I’ve come to the same spot. But this time accompanying me is Frisby. Frisby hasn’t aged a day since I got him nearly 20 years ago! What an astounding piece of technology. He will follow my every step and when I’m not looking he will be in front of me having taken a different path to satisfy his curiosity. I’ve taken the photo, the rocks are the same, and so is my cat. I’m the only one that has aged. I’d like to go further, off the beaten path, but I have my limitations.

    IV. Each Mech-cat body allowed a degree of variation in function. Some came with larger battery packs or stronger legs & paws. Although unlike normal cats, they were perfectly symmetric. Any curving movement could be reproduced on the opposite side. The thinking was that if any system failed there would be an identical system on the opposite side ready to take up the function. The mech-cats had to endure any weather that a normal cat could endure and fend for themselves in the wild. Unlike normal cats, their skin was made up of a flexible array of solar panels.

    All mech-cats were solar powered. They did not have fur or any need to eat. Under a microscope one could see their skin was actually a lattice of hexagons. Their skin was smooth like glass but you could grip it and feel the artificial muscle underneath that was warm to the touch. Due to the circulation of fluids that triggered the contractions within muscles, mech-cats had to maintain these circulatory networks by maintaining any even flow of fluids throughout the body. If you cut off the supply of fluids in this part of the mech-cat that existed only beneath the surface and not in the chassis or skeleton, it would cease to function, to move like a normal cat.

    The designers felt each mech-cat should play with other mech-cats in order that they develop a personality and a way to test their overall abilities. Each cat was tested before sale and after it came off the assembly line.

    During this phase mech-cats would play with other mech-cats, run around, and spend plenty of time at the sunny courtyard which was many times brighter than a normal courtyard due to reflecting panels, and was to the mech-cats a supercharging place and shared memory for nascent mech-cats.

    Each mech-cat came with specific directions of how to function before they were ever turned on, not unlike how a kitten is programmed to feel for her mother. Mech-cats were designed to recognize humans. The technicians of the facility wore red uniforms and performed these recognizing tests. A common test was to take a cylindrical object and move it from side to side. A mech-cat should track the object if it is held by a human hand and to not track the object if it is held by a robotic arm.

    Mech-cats differed from cats in behavior in that they did not groom themselves. It is recommended that you wipe down your mech-cat with a lint free rag and a light amount of water after outings. This is due to dust and deposits of minerals from water that accumulate on the surface of the mech-cat. Since mech-cats are solar powered this interferes with its performance. Mech-cats have a finely developed sense of smell for aerosols, paints, and other coatings because these materials if they cover the skin will lead to costly repairs. In its image recognition system, mech-cats can recognize spray paint & other paint cans and avoid them. It can tell the difference between an area where there has been a coating of paint that is still wet and the surrounding area. Besides, only using its sense of smell, it can pick up such differences. With its smell it can also tell the coming of a storm and detect any acids. In this way mech-cats like normal cats do not like water.

    Moreover mech-cats in their mouths have sensors for radiation, radon & other nuclear material, natural gas, carbon monoxide, and other chemicals, noxious and potentially corrosive substances. Part of the reason is to protect the owner from harm. If there is a fire, the mech-cat will alert the owner. In cases of emergency, its normally colored eyes turn different colors; red in the case of fire or into bright flash lights if visibility is low in the smoke, and other colors or blinking patterns in case of other threats. All mech-cats come with three accessories, a lint free rag, a charging pad for cold & non-equatorial climates where the sun is not out for much of the year, and a tablet that it can communicate with and display various information like anything it finds & different maintenance information. It also shows its location and can be used to limit the boundaries of which they can travel & different rules about allowable movement, and different routines. For example, one routine is scaring off mice and another is to surveil and alert the home systems about intruders.

    Mech-cats are stunningly beautiful creatures. They are like moving porcelain, their frame like both glass and muscle. Aside from a safe environment, access to the sun or charging pad, they do not need anything. Left to their own devices, they will categorize anything they find and do a simple chemical analysis to determine if it is harmless. They’ve been known to be quite finicky when it comes to dust and old objects, preferring more plastics, metals, & glass. When it is night, they’ll sometimes hop onto their owners lap as a heating source & also to bond what is probably the most interesting part of their lives. They feel a bit like a warm piece of molten glass, or a gel hot pack.

    V. In case of death of an owner, the owner could plan that his mech-cat take certain actions. In Frisby’s case, he was free to go.

    On his first day, he met some other mech-cats in the park. It was like meeting old classmates. Although all were owned except for him, he could play as hard as he wanted, it made for great pabulum or diversion, in what had been a fairly tame life with lots of stretching outside. They even licked his panels down. There was a sense to head north, following the sun during the summer and to return to the equator by walking along mountain ridges during the winter months, and vis-a-versa for southern hemisphere mech-cats.

    In remembrance, Frisbee found the spot again and spent the day up there, sleeping in the alcove at night. He bounded off the rocks. He would stay in the mountains where the air was clean and sun was bright, and eventually rejoin his brethren in their pursuit of light and play.