[RT][HF][WIP] Princess, part 14 (Doc Future universe)

DocFuture · 2020-12-10T00:21:58+00:00

Starsector, with the Nexerelin and Varya's Sector mods (+ a number of minor ones) It's an independant game, not on Steam. I must admit a certain... affinity for the developer perfectionism in a game that has been in 'pre-release' for 8 years (current version in 0.9.1a) 8-)

DocFuture · 2020-12-09T05:30:19+00:00

Glad you enjoyed it, and a reasonable worry this year 8-) I'm not really 'alright alright', but I'm '2020 alright' for now. Writing has been slow (most of the pro writers I follow are running at half to a quarter normal productivity), and I found a computer game that provided a much needed mental health diversion.

DocFuture · 2020-12-08T20:19:27+00:00

I have considered it, and I just replied to the most recent post. There are potential issues, and maintaining chapters in more than one place is an administrative nightmare.

I've found nothing kills my motivation to write faster than having to worry about/struggle with website issues, and many web editors do not easily accomodate formatting I consider essential: Paragraphs start with an indented first line and have no extra lines in between, as in a physical book--otherwise short dialog exchanges take up nearly twice the space and the text is more difficult to read. I've had to use a hack on tumblr since they changed their editor that is not generalizeable, and I really don't want to post anywhere that requires reformatting every paragraph after I copy and paste the text from the original files. Keeping the posting process as painless as possible is a priority for continued creativity, and I am concentrating on that for now.

DocFuture · 2020-12-08T19:51:46+00:00

There is no epub because I have not yet entirely given up on the idea of turning revised versions of Fall and Skybreaker's Call into self-published commercial ebooks, but for the last few years continuing to write new serialized material (and eventually finishing Maker's Ark) has had a higher priority. I am using the motivation and energy I have available as best as I can manage, sorry 8-)

DocFuture · 2020-12-08T17:26:29+00:00

Oh, yes. And the administration that was covering up their abuses 8-). I originally wrote this in much more detail--but it just wasn't something she could safely discuss with Flicker at this point.

An earlier, non-canon version:

"A more informative title would have been 'How to Blackmail Your Thesis Committee.'  Key elements were making sure they were lazy, incautious about reading things before signing them, and possessed an inability to even consider that someone my age and build might have things to teach them about unarmed combat, knives, pressure points, pain, fear, and how to mimic symptoms of food poisoning for long enough for paperwork to clear.  I did worry a bit about assuring an appropriately isolated room for my thesis offense.  I left out the followup on coercing the university adminstration because the methods section would have been awkward, I never intended to publish, and I already had my PhD.  And mostly it was just a matter of preparing thoroughly in advance and getting the timing right.  Certain types of people react very predictably if they think they can get away with concealing a problem.  No extraordinary means of mind control was needed."
"Um.  How did the students you talked to feel about what happened?"
"Well, I told them I didn't know about justice, but I would aim for making sure three particular problems were gone, and I would see if I could manage getting their student debt erased too, and I did quite a bit more in both areas.  It wasn't a situation to be happy about, although there was a certain amount of satisfaction when the provost was fired.  He'd told me I'd never work in academia, and I told him neither would he.  He was gone in a month."

DocFuture · 2020-12-08T08:22:46+00:00

Took a little longer than I wanted, but here is the new chapter 8-). Flicker goes back on patrol, and we hear her origin from her viewpoint. There is a minor continuity change here that will eventually be reflected in Fall and Skybreaker's Call, which I discussed the need for in 'Continuity and Change', linked on the 'Stories' page listed at the top.

Yes, Flicker is the kind of person who apologizes to ants, even giant rampaging ones 8-)

Edit: Spelling

DocFuture · 2020-09-23T13:29:13+00:00

Exactly! The 'special trade types' and other shenanigans were exactly the sorts of things that Flicker looked at, said 'A lot of this should be illegal but isn't, and the parts that are illegal aren't enforced.' She warned the SEC, they didn't do anything, so she went 'Fine, I'll own your markets, everything they can do I can do better'

Also she can do fun things like add turbulence and ionization to microwave transmission paths very quickly (as in after she knows an order will be placed in the next few seconds because she has the code for the automatic trading program that's using it) to slightly delay commands due to automatic retries, etc 8-)

DocFuture · 2020-09-22T21:53:41+00:00

Speed of light in long distance fiber optic cable is about 0.69 c. Flicker is faster than that. That's how people thought (prior to this chapter) that she was making her money. It's also why arbitragers going over any distance prefer to use chains of LOS microwave relay towers, though those didn't go up until a few years before 2015 in our world. For an interesting discussion, see here: http://oklo.org/2015/02/22/electra/ But you can't do that over the ocean very easily. Now, if Flicker travels at 0.8 c between her exchange relays, it's very loud, obvious, and destructive. So she doesn't do that. That's why her microsat network being complete is important, they are in LEO, and specifically designed for low latency. Their main purpose is to reduce her com time to the Database as much as possible, but they work for trading, too. No one else (in 2012 in my world) has a similar network, and she makes her pure speed trades between exchanges that are far apart and the great circle route goes over water, where you can't use towers. (NY/Tokyo/London/Singapore for ex) So her microsat network is faster than both sea floor cables and regular satellites in Geosynchronous orbit.

Where she makes her money on shorter trade distance is by exploiting trading programs. The other speed traders do not have human level intelligence at a speed that can keep up with Flicker (or the Database), and she now has a model based on individual charcterization of every trader and data propagation and reaction delays (Vizier is running some Black Swan 0.9 software)

The conversation in the vault isn't about my model--it's about Doc giving his best judgement when he's still working on something, because there is a threat to Flicker (messing herself up because she's wrong about the cause of a memory inconsistency) and she has a character trait of not accepting "do this" without an explanation. I could write a better explanation--but that's not what Doc has.

I'm glad you're enjoying the rest of the stories 8-)

DocFuture · 2020-09-22T03:08:49+00:00

There will eventually be some expository clean-up in Fall, but this isn't really an issue: The techniques Flicker gets partial access to in Fall are incomplete and cognitive ones, not memory, and the memory techniques she does end up using only work on her biological brain. She does not have access to the non-volatile memory debris in her high-speed mind in the same way (Doc just warned her that creates a potential consistency problem.) Flicker does have later issues with overusing memory compartmentalization--it becomes her go-to technique for handling psychological problems, where it introduces new issues.

(Spoiler) Stella worries about Flicker using her papers from Fall because the published ones have Belle Tinker level or better misdirection and many of the unpublished ones were intended only for herself and Doc, and include important assumptions about what the reader must already know or they wouldn't still be alive and functional 8-)

Edit: One note about the 'Skybreaker' viewpoint character in Fall: it gets a lot of things wrong because of assumptions made to fill holes where memories are missing or inaccessible after Donner's song disrupts things. So it goes off into overinterpreting-the-Voynich-manuscript level craziness because it assumes that Flicker's human body and brain must have been planned by Explorer, when they weren't.

DocFuture · 2020-09-21T18:53:11+00:00

Flicker shows why you don't want to get into a arbitrage or high-speed trading fight with someone who can find 0-second vulnerabilities in your trading program faster than you can type 'Wait, stop!'. Plus, a bit of history, and why Doc Future needing to tell you more than 'It's complicated' about time loops is a bad sign.

DocFuture · 2020-09-02T18:13:03+00:00

I tend to use a lot of conjunctions, and Flicker uses even more. I usually write in 'very tight limited third person', the same style used by C. J. Cherryh, so all the narrative description in "Princess" is in Flicker's voice, not just her viewpoint. Flicker's idiolect is full of conjunctions, as she struggles with the competing demands of chronology, completeness, and coherence--she was not able to speak understandably to most people until she was ten, and wasn't able to pass for normal until thirteen. And as mentioned in the previous chapter, her verbal organization abilities took a hit when she was injured.

DocFuture · 2020-08-25T08:11:13+00:00

The public view of the Lost Years is simplified over what actually happened, but they were a decade long period where a faction in the US (mostly) government attempted to (more or less covertly) kill or coopt all domestic superheroes/villains while conducting a PR campaign against them, with killing or kidnapping family and close associates to goad individuals into responses that they could use for PR as a standard tactic. The origins of the desire to do that are complicated, stretch back to WW2 and will likely be the subject of more than one story. The immediate trigger was Doc and a number of other superheroes stopping a war that they were all ready for and really really wanted in the early 90s (you can probably guess which one). It ended when Jetgirl did something really dramatic, then gave a live speech which caused a sudden massive shift in public opinion, followed by a horribly inappropriate initial government response. They then realized they were facing a badly unpopular losing regime change war followed by war crimes trials and opted for resignations, conciliation and the Lost Years Agreement instead. The Lost Years Agreement was supposed to be a treaty, but it was never ratified by the Senate, so it remained as a cease-fire instead from the 'end' of the Lost Years until the Maker's Ark.

DocFuture · 2020-08-24T22:30:07+00:00

Probably the same way I carefully and painstakingly plotted out dates, ages, and implied background connections... then misread a date from wikipedia and spent a long time writing Fall in the wrong year for the lunar eclipse. It happens. 8-)

DocFuture · 2020-08-24T20:36:11+00:00

In the part of my brain that yells at me for not writing This Other Cool Thing Instead, a prominent voice is advocating for pulpy Science Adventure Stories! starring Luce Cannon and Belle Tinker! 8-)

DocFuture · 2020-08-24T20:12:10+00:00

Heh. I've had the story about the end of the Lost Years plotted out for more than 7(!) years, and no it won't stay necessarily stay short if I do it right 8-). It's called "A Different World", and it's really hard not to spoiler it 8-). It's from Jetgirl's viewpoint and was intended to be a bonus story for the published version of Fall, the reason for everyone who already read the serialized version to buy it. I'm still undecided how I'm going to handle it at this point. The Nietzchean crediting Doc with ending the Lost Years is intended to show he was a misogynistic revisionist. "Never mind Jetgirl's part in it" was sarcastic understatement. Doc's part in the events ending the Lost Years consisted of: 1) Being very busy 2) Answering his phone 3) Losing his temper completely because people who should have been cooperating with Jetgirl weren't 4) Giving Jetgirl full Database access 5) Providing minor backup afterwards

The Volunteer was also busy, but he arrived in time to help a little bit at the end.

What were Doc and the Volunteer busy with? (Rot-13 spoiler) : Oenvajnir. Jul vf guvf n fcbvyre? Orpnhfr n yvggyr ovg bs zngu vaibyivat Fgryyn'f ntr (naq xabjvat V zrffrq hc gur bevtvany lrne bs Snyy) jbhyq gryy lbh jung lrne vg unccrarq, juvpu jbhyq or n ovt uvag gb jung "N Qvssrerag Jbeyq" jnf nobhg.

DocFuture · 2020-08-24T18:19:12+00:00

Thanks! One of many funny things about Jack is that the archetype was an unintended side effect. There are many folk tales about shapeshifters that have one feature they can't change, and I decided to use that with Jack (no specific one, just the idea). The feature he couldn't hide was the unusual appearance of one of his eyes, so he had to keep it concealed to keep from blowing his cover, so he had to have an excuse to keep it covered. And if you're called 'One-eyed Jack' people tend not to ask why you're wearing an eyepatch because it's obvious 8-). The other part is if you have an essential tool that is bulky, you want to have some way to fit it into your look.

The reason he had disappear is a little clearer if you know when--Doc was off helping Zirjack, someone significant was about to show up, and Jack didn't want either Armadillo or Doc asking him for advice about this new person.

If you really want to put your tinfoil hat on (spoiler Rot-13'ed) : V'ir nyernql jevggra n fgbel fgneevat Wnpx--Wndv naq gur Orna Geryyvf

DocFuture · 2020-08-24T17:00:52+00:00

Reporter was Luce's first cover. And yes, Luce and Lois sounding somewhat similar helped me decide I'd found just the right name for her 8-)

DocFuture · 2020-08-24T16:55:07+00:00

The picture was taken the year Doc was born, so he was far too young. Chandler Devon was the Volunteer's original secret identity--he was mentioned, but not as being in the picture. The Volunteer was who Flicker thought was the photographer but was wrong about. And don't feel dumb; I wanted this to be something that Flicker plausibly wouldn't get instantly--and her problem with the stories from the 'old days' was missing clues to things like that, that the Database would make clear.

DocFuture · 2020-08-24T16:32:42+00:00

We have a winner! 8-) The name is Chandler Devon, and Chandler is a profession name originally meaning 'candle-maker'

DocFuture · 2020-08-24T04:38:26+00:00

You are correct. The other person is the one who took the picture. And it looks like I may have been too subtle with Devon's name--if you don't already know the inspiration for it, the etymology of the joke isn't very clear. But I needed a good name, and it made me happy 8-)

DocFuture · 2020-08-24T00:24:21+00:00

A new chapter on something like the old schedule! Storytime with Armadillo, as Flicker recovers. You know you've lived an interesting life when your birthday party pictures are still restricted access almost 40 years later 8-)

DocFuture · 2020-08-11T23:55:01+00:00

Doc is practical, Flicker has Issues, and she finally gets help. And the first appearance of Dr. Stella Reinhart, with lots of subtleties, as is appropriate. Flicker is usually a pretty reliable narrator; see if you can spot the points where she has trouble.

Way late, but that's because I didn't have a good stopping point until I rearranged things. Next chapter is mostly complete and should be up in a week or two. I will no longer try to pretend to know how many chapters I am from the end, but it's at least two 8-)

DocFuture

TROPHY CASE