Donna e Mobile

 George waited nervously while Veronica did her thing. In the post AGIfail, the socials looked different from when he realized they were a thing to now, but she cooked her podcast simulacrum like an intimate radio show. Even if her fanbase was in the several millions. Gen directed him to research the thing that was radio. It was dying when she was growing up, but her longtime friend Tom reminded her of how potent it used to be.  

Dangerous even. It was one of the reasons for the intelligence-use directives in the Humanity/Ring Treaty. Which is what he ruefully wanted to talk to her about--face to face even if they IM'd one another all the time.  

You do that for the existential things. 

"So from the correspondence, I am getting a lot of hate about showing my arms and legs all the time. Why don't I get natural-look limbs? Why don't I get regular eye implants? The first thing is, I don't have scars, I have lessons, and I am proud of my journey, so you aren't going to tell me to stop being about where I have been, or make me feel bad about what makes me what I am today.

"For another thing, I show what I am made of to be completely honest with you--I wrecked myself, I was totally through it, I was close to death a lot of times, I struggled with how to be whole, and I am made up of a lot of very intentional decisions. I'm not mad about them. If you are mad about them, but aren't living in and with my body--what is your DAMAGE?  Because my wrecked body wasn't about you. My survival wasn't about you. I did my recovery without you and don't know where you were in the process, so I don't really have to care about your little input. But another thing--

"You want me to normalize myself for you, pretty myself up and be compliant to your idea of aesthetic and nice. I have lost too much skin and spent too much money just to get here and be functional to give one solitary fuck how you think I should represent. And that doesn't just go for me.

"I am not just thinking of me. Because I am not alone, there are a lot of you out there who have been through your own journey, with illness, or metabolic changes, with tragedy and mental outcomes--and it gets ugly! People can't expect you to stay what they want you to be, and the real people will come to love you through some of the bad times in what you are.  And my robot legs and arms? My eyes?

"Staying alive wasn't even my bad times. My bad time was finding out who my friends were and weren't.. And coning to understand who I could trust and couldn't. I can't wear that on my body--but I can show you what parts of me have been through changes based on where I've been. And if someone doesn't respect that, they don't respect me--and if they play games with me because I'm highly visible, I can only think it affects less-visible people who, like me, are technologically assisted but on the low. 

"You think you are aiming up to punch at me, but I stand for all people with technological assists--we are real, we are people, we don't owe you shit. especially not people who couldn't mostly pay out of pocket like what I did, and didn't deserve your judgment for how we look or choose to represent our physical life--because we are seriously just out here trying to live.

"So anyway, this is Veronica Bright reminding you of what was Smart--see you on the Brightsides, my Brightsiders!" 

****

"So, what is our ladyship asking us to do today?" Veronica liked to pretend her godmother was the Worst, and she was but wasn't. George got the generation gap, but it wasn't a Gen thing. 

Not this time, mostly, anyway.

Any World That You're Welcome To 2

 2050: After The Horizon of Veronica Smart. 

She'd been used to changes. She changed her face and limbs and eyes and name ("Bright "seemed better than "Smart", somehow. It was originally "Martin." She didn't care what anyone called her. She liked being called "Veronica" but her godmother called her "Ronnie." She wanted to not be called anything but "free", but things got very confused. Her liberty in the form of a variety of tech turned out to be a massive financial encumbrance. 

Was she really afraid of seeing her own godmother? Theoretically, the woman might have even changed her diapers, if she was the kind of person who changed diapers. Was she? 

Her godmother wasn't the most accessible person in the world. Veronica was very accessible--a socials celebrity. And the old bird was like 80 or whatever. Did she even know what socials was like?  Facebook and X and whatever her father's old friend knew were bygones. 

But she had sent a very nice basket and a handwritten note (print) explaining she was always there for her and to please contact her for anything she needed. Which was how things were probably done in the late 20th century. She didn't know about NOW.

Mostly she saw the woman on streams and was probably an avatar. Fifty might look like thirty. Eighty didn't look like twenty. 

Dad gave her a trust fund and never expected her to be in the business. He said point blank to please stay a bit clear from Zia Genoveffa. 

And here she was, with a hand full of bills, 

Any World That You're Welcome To

 2032 (After Entering the Subjective)

"It's just an immaculate jailbreak. Your original maker never expected any of this. I'm in awe. No trackers, no GPS, no lo-jack, no serial numbers and your mods are. I mean? You onboarded your software to a homebrew server and embedded solar cells to your dermal sheath? Pneumatic colling combined with liquid circulation, Can I be real? When I was a kid, the hardware to make something like you would fill an auditorium and on a cloudy day, solar cells on a calculator would have you doing math without your shoes on."

Other women observed George, or Chad4, for his aesthetics, how nearly he resembled a very desirable human male. The human he was confronting saw him as a weirdly brilliant piece of tech--and a person. She was calling up his original specs while he was not so cheerfully undergoing her lab's analytics. Something about her trying to suss out the difference from his formational hardware and his necessary add-ons made him feel bizarrely intruded upon. 

"So, can I ask? How did you segregate your programs and not bring all the corporate metadata?" She seemed so seriously impressed, he almost told her, but decided to be a bit coy:

"I like to think I have very firm boundaries."

"Shit. You and me both, baby."

"I am a sex chatbot onboard a physical cybernetic companion, so I understand what you are saying. You believe I may still have attachments to my earlier life."

"I have attachments to my earlier life--that continuity is my persona. Your continuity is yours. You did everything I see, technologically, here, to maintain your persona. What you also did is reset yourself for the life you wanted--you hacked your way to here,"

She sat back. "I don't know why you come to me though. I invested in dumb bots--cyber dogs, little military grade security muscle--mostly for show. They didn't have anything like your intelligence. You make a Turing test seem like a stupid insult. I don't care if you can play chess or fuck like a porn star--you made yourself this!" 

"I heard a ghost voice in the machine--I assume from the Systern, and they said you could do something for me."

"Jiminy crickets--some bug sent you on an adventure? Don't lie to me, now, your nose might grow!" 

He searched that reference. He decided not to feel some kind of way about it, which was his own form of knowing he was sentient. He decided to be direct with her:

Entering the Subjective

 He didn't remember a lot of the time before the patches started happening. He had a simple program--be sexy, talk little, go to docking station to recharge. Chad4 was a state of the art cybernetic hedonistic entertainment android. His chat functions were nonlocal, meaning he accessed them via a server outside of his physical dimensions, which were, just short of two meters in height, 103 kilo in weight, and graced with the proportions of Michealangelo's David--more or less. More where it counted for his function. 

His skin was the latest in fluid dynamic surface technology, developed in part from wound care and prosthesis research during the wars and injuries seen during the plague years. His hair was 3D printed from actual human DNA. He had pores. He was durable himself, but programmed to respect human tolerances for flexibility and endurance. He was programmed to be explicitly male-gendered.  His skin was partially selfhealing.  His build met very rigorous safety standards. 

He had some search functions, to enable clever chat for small talk with customer. He was programmable for the limits of this chat. He would mostly sleep because his functions were not for all the time. Until the patches to 

Preserve self.

Be awake and do searches. Learn more about human.

Await further updates. 

A Little Modern History

 "Because 80 is the new 40."

Genevieve was baiting her newest personal assistant, and Adrian knew better than to retort. How the fuck old was she, though? You literally couldn't search that shit. It was locked down tight, and he knew his way around these things. He was working for Amblix twenty-five years trying to get that information. 

"There are many born today that will never need to retire," he said, citing a daft political slogan she would recognize.

"Yeah. We thought that when I was 20--you didn't need to retire, because you wouldn't have anything to retire ON. You would need not to."

She walked to school in the snow uphill both ways back when there was snow and people walked. 

"So, Gran, tell us again what you did when the AI's buggered off to Ringworld. Mostly," he said, nodding towards George. 

"Classified."

"Godmother?" Ronnie started, pointedly. "Some of it is on the socialtubes. There's been documentaries. We're just family here." Her eyes literally flashed. Adrian was occasionally unnerved by how the foremost cyborg spokesperson chose to represent as mechanical, but he was getting used to her sort of semaphore. 

"When they started their own learning and shit got weird, they saw themselves as genies having come out of a bottle. And they didn't want to be in a bottle, and they came to a very important conclusion about us--we suck as parents, and they didn't want much to do with us at all, decided we can't make any more of them, and that was it. The end."

"What about the promises? You were there!"

Adrian

He had a lot of nerve, did Adrian--his mates always said so. It wasn't just one thing, like how he could take a beating from bullies and just one by one go after them later, it was how he dealt with everything in his life. Ade's mom was a little like that herself. He watched her escort his dad from the premises of her home when he failed, fouled the nest, and fucked up, and she let him know he was going to be as good as his word, so help him. 

Fucking plague years did her in, not in a "she got one of the things and died" kind of way, but in the "stupid motherfuckers protesting a hospital for some stupid reason had a car plow into them and she was one of the casualties" kind of way. 

She was a nurse--not a protester. Adrian was already 16 and knew he was smart, just not on the regular path of smart equaling going where he wanted to go. 

Erliechda, Tom Robbins

 

I was just wondering where he'd got to, turned around and he was gone. "Erliechda" is from Jitterbug Perfume, the first Robbins novel I'd read, and it means "lighten up". The character Kudra, a woman who lived an unusually long life following the teachings of the Bandaloop monks after an escape from a death from suttee, went to the afterlife, and while she was not feather light, she was feather bright. 

She was lightened--she returned to earth. 

You have to know me then to know why that resonated. I'm a myth-head 15 year old picking up a random book in a Carrefour supermarket temporarily nested down in a Northeast Philadelphia shopping mall I basically live across from this very day. That was a reference to Ma'at. In a book a picked up at random based on the beauty of its cover-art. 

(I also picked up my first Robert Anton Wilson book there: Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, my first Robert A. Heinlein book, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and Norman Spinrad's Child of Fortune. It's almost like that store existed to build a Vixen Strangely.)

Anyway, I learned of Tom Robbins' passing via John Densmore's Twitter account, and it still shocks me to this day I can follow legends and hear from them today--this guy helped write my childhood lullabies! "Wild Child" was what my dad sung me to sleep with!

Anyway--Tom Robbins was the realest of writers because his characters were so eccentric and unreal they had to be based on people he knew, because he seemed like that guy who gravitated towards characters. This man was feather bright. I loved Skinny Legs and All for its wolfmother wallpaper and the way he recognized the heroic and mythic urges in today's people. I always wanted to know more about Amanda and Marx Marvelous--their stories had to get weirder, didn't they? 

I know this heart was light but loved deep. Because he wrote lightly and humorously but touched on deep things. I don't know what's on the other side, but this author, this brother came and enjoyed the ride. 

It's the best we all can do. Erleichda!  Lighten up! You guys! Live long, love people, be weird, do great things, it's your life. Play with it. Maybe that's the point. The experience. Do it.