Biorobot and the Hutlands
Biorobot and the Hutlands
More strange vignettes from the Lexicon
Biorobots
Long Ago, or perhaps it was Long Long Ago, humanity split in two. To the stars and the places of the machine went the biorobots, to the gardens and the hidden places went the humans. Today the biorobots are few, nearly none, but the humans are many. This proves the superiority of the human over the biorobot.
†
“They look just like us,” says one human.
“You cut them, they bleed,” murmurs another.
“Look, no machinery,” gasps a third as she cracks open the biorobot skull.
“Yet, they are clearly robot,” says the first, perplexed, as he stirs his finger in the biorobot’s thought matrix.
“So like human brain, even tastes the same,” ventures the second.
“Nothing to be done, we’ll figure out the problem after we get rid of the infestation,” concludes the third.
The three humans all nod, satisfied.
†
“How do you create a biorobot, Mother Engineer?” asks the boy-child holding his cup of beer uncertainly.
“Training, dedication, repetition, condition, control,” pronounces Mother Engineer, “Now drink and be drunk, show you can’t be made a biorobot!”
The boy-child drinks and soon his eyes cross.
†
A lifetime’s dedication, a carousel of duties and obligations, a structured cog, a living cell, part of a greater whole, beyond heaven and hell.
O, glorious biorobot.
To be a biorobot, free from doubt and fear, a mind pure and unable to sin.
O, glorious biorobot.
O, joyful member of the machine.
†
“You zap them, they fry,” murmurs the biorobot.
“Look, full of machinery,” laughs the second as it cracks a human’s skull.
“Broken synapses, burned beyond use, what a waste,” sighs the third.
(LotV)
Commieform, Communal Body
Monstrous amoeboids created to carry the soul-personalities of multiple individuals beyond a single body’s decay barrier.
The ur-biomancer Golny Zaga calls them “biological virtual-life machines.” The ancestrite sage Samo Shemarodashii pronounced anathema on them, saying, “The commieform is a perversion of the lineages of Maker and Builders! Humanity was not made protean, and these horrors must be cast out.” Most ancestrite cultures continue to offer ritual bounties for destroyed commieforms to this day.
Re-life technicians debate whether any of the stored soul-personalities are still viable today. As the solipsist libertarian One Random proclaims, “… the communal existence destroys the individual drive that uplifted the first humans to exceed their animal natures.” Most practicals agree with mechanus Ivar Doctogeniere III, who pointed out, “All this theoretical belly-aching is just talking heads ashamed to admit that our modern technomagics are not powerful enough to repair ka-ba dualities stored in biological matrices and re-embody them once more. We are, quite simply, not the gods our ancestors were!”
(LotV)
Ghoul
A cannibal sentient missing some essential part of common personhood, who must steal and consume it from other sentients. Examples include the Ebéteen biomancer ghouls, the yedayeen, who must consume flesh to rebuild their permanently mutating bodies, and the various flavors of vampire, who require bodily fluids to suppress the dessicating tendencies of their malfunctioning para-symbiotic systems.
(RSDC)
The Hutlands
Pangeography, location
“… it was late in the day and the suns, first and second both, beat us about face and pate as we crested the rim of the debris crater. Below us, westering in the doubled light, an inland coastland of shallow waters and swamps greeted us. The inland seas burped and roiled, where no doubt subsurface gates fed their abundant waters. A fetid place, unsuited to a modern civilization, but the ancients who had placed the feeder gates had thought things through.
Dotting the extensive swampland were tells of carbonized vegetables. Agglomerations of ponderous schuppenbaum, strapping cordaites, and frilly calamites harvested and assembled by servitor colonies obeying some ancient instruction.
We made for the nearest, a prominent structure rising some 60 cubits above the primeval forest. When we descended, we found the forest quite flooded, supporting itself upon root stilts much like a mangrove. Still, the levi-harnesses supported us, and like dandelion seeds we passed through the fecund gloom until our stillstar companion chirped that we had arrived at a tell.
There we found the servitors, rubbery biomechanicals two cubits tall and many-handed like an octopus, setting fire to the crust of wooden huts they had built upon the tell. Later we learned that this was how the tells grew: the servitors built stilt huts, then fired them and aggregated the sooty remnants into a steinkohl foundation for the next round of huts.
Though we stayed in the huts for several weeks, the servitors never bothered us. Perhaps they considered us guests, perhaps an unavoidable infestation.”
Source: Expedition 7, Dead Springtime and the Carpenters.
(LotV)
I Have Not Forgotten
I have not abandoned this substack, but time has played its evil trick! Even as I wrote and drew, what could I do, there were things to see, places to be.
So swift, a June of catching up, a July of finishing off.
Now, sudden, a holiday is over and here is August.
One link:
The core writing for my ridiculously overlarge gamebook, Uranium Butterflies, is now done. I’m adding captions and saving space for an index, but over on the stratometaship, the rest of the 310-page monster is available for your delectation.
