the newest eyrie is out early this year....

[Mamorien]

The teaser is Future Imperfect (and represents a framing sequence that may be dropped from the final release), but the story is going to be Golden Age in whole or part:

The Vocaloid Variations

You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll kiss six creds goodbye.

[Bob Schroeck]

http://www.eyrie-productions.com/UF/GA/ ... tions.html]The Vocaloid Variations is up!
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Mamorien]

Meanwhile, at the Hall of Justice on Mount Weitang, it's The Federation Lives Forever, chapter 14, and Tea Time say "Relax"!

[Black Aeronaut]

Might wanna fix that link up a bit there, Mamorien.

[Mamorien]

Believe me, I'd love to, but it won't actually let me. When I click the "Edit" link, the text doesn't automatically appear in the edit box as usual, so I have to paste it in, and then I can't edit the link itself because the markup buttons are grayed out. I think I may have broken the bbcode.

[Bob Schroeck]

Okay, it's fixable if you use the "raw html" view (the source button next to the Spellcheck button) in the editor, and perform a little cleanup. Which I've done.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Mamorien]

I never did thank you for that cleanup, chief. So thanks. And this is what reminded me to do so now:

Earth, 2052. One pair of traveling musicians, caught on the wrong continent at the wrong time, could really use a break from the monotonous grind of the mid-21st century's slow-motion apocalypse.. and they're about to get it, but not in a way they could have anticipated. Here is The Vocaloid Variations: The Mother of Invention!

[Morganite]

Hmmm.

Spoiler

Welrod seemed to have a rather sudden attack of reasonableness there. No one'd given him a speech or anything.

My theory is that it was an act all along, basically a covert way of saying "Can you get the kid to hurry it up? I've got people breathing down my neck here."

-Morgan.

[mephron]

That pretty much was what was going on with Welrod, along with a quick talk from Nick while the ladies were upstairs doing some Assembly language.

The follow-up is about half-written, with the working title of "The Vocaloid Variations: Music Of The Americas".

[Morganite]

Huh. (I got something right! That never happens!)

I gotta admit that even though I liked the story, the more I think about the legal handling of machine intelligence that's shown, the more ticked off I get.

-Morgan.

[hazard]

That would be because the Earth is a dystopian mess currently going through a slow motion apocalypse.

Really, of all the homeworlds shown in universe Earth kinda gets a constant, crappy deal. After the Fog it's implied it was pretty much under the yoke of GENOM along with much of the rest of known space, and after GENOM fell and it was getting cleaned up (still a work in progress 30 years later due to sheer size among other things) it fell under the yoke of a populist dictatorship despite being the capital of the UFP. And unlike many other planets, could not effectively tell the populist dictatorship to fuck off when said dictatorship took over the galactic government.

[Morganite]

That would be because the Earth is a dystopian mess currently going through a slow motion apocalypse.

Except... not so much? Because the laws in question emanate from Turing and treaties therewith, not from anyone on Earth.

-Morgan.

[Mamorien]

That would be because the Earth is a dystopian mess currently going through a slow motion apocalypse.

Except... not so much? Because the laws in question emanate from Turing and treaties therewith, not from anyone on Earth.

-Morgan.

I wonder how much of that, from a Watsonian perspective, is down to the local version of the Morning War. (And, from a Doylist perspective, what the official excuse was before Mass Effect in general, and the quarians in particular, were incorporated into UF.)

[mephron]

It's established that the sentient constructs laws aren't very fair, really. There are some reasons for it, based on prejudice, including the stories of the Morning War, as well as the Mondasian assaults (yes, the Cybermen are cyborgs, but so mechanical that some people think of them as AIs). Even the efforts of the Cybertronians can only do so much, especially with the reputation of the million-year-long war they had. It's also, in part, because there's people out there - you know, like GENOM - whose primary goal in AI research was to create a slave race, which is the primary goal of the laws against creating AIs without proper supervision.

In short, the laws are unfair, they are brutal, and they were created by politicians whose attitude is that non-protein intellects should not exist, but had to put in something after machine sapients began to manifest spontaneously. The Turing treaties basically put the rules as to how that's done under the academics and researchers of Turing III, which means that people who are a bit better suited to it get to work on the process instead of it being nothing but political animals.

Come the future, they may evolve, but as we saw in the now-missing Day of Infamy (we're going to re-release it someday when we get there, revised for changes) the Federation Council under Clark was willing to actually negate Turing certifications wholesale and make them illegal (and, oh, we are planning on some commentary from Cybertron in the revision), as well as passing anti-miscegenation laws.

[hazard]

Wait, the UFP passed a law in the story line that effectively declared machine intelligence not to be people?

The galaxy is lucky it took only a few years for it to get to a short organic on organic civil war and the IPO power block would've taken a stance against that sort of law because the machine-organic civil war that would've followed otherwise would've rend the known galaxy apart.

[drakensis]

That would be because the Earth is a dystopian mess currently going through a slow motion apocalypse.

Really, of all the homeworlds shown in universe Earth kinda gets a constant, crappy deal. After the Fog it's implied it was pretty much under the yoke of GENOM along with much of the rest of known space, and after GENOM fell and it was getting cleaned up (still a work in progress 30 years later due to sheer size among other things) it fell under the yoke of a populist dictatorship despite being the capital of the UFP. And unlike many other planets, could not effectively tell the populist dictatorship to fuck off when said dictatorship took over the galactic government.

I think there was a pretty big gap between the Fog's departure and GENOM's brief era of galactic domination.

The Fog wound up vanishing in 2059 and the War of Corporate Occupations was in the late 2380s IIRC.

From various glimpses, Earth seems to have remained various independent nation states, albeit not the same ones consistently over the intervening 3 centuries. GENOM's rule was likely a fairly brief interval between Starfleet's defeat at Wolf 359 and any clean-up following GENOM's formal surrender at Zeta Cygni. The Earth Alliance may have resulted from this occupation, with nation-states banding together on the theory that a united government and armed forces would have prevented Earth from getting occupied in the first place.

Checking various posts on EPU, the Alliance was founded 2389 after the collapse of the 'Olympus megastate' and by 2406 all but three nations on Earth were member-states. What, exactly, the Olympus megastate was isn't clear but the source material is Appleseed, where Olympus co-existed with Poseidon (a far-east state encompassing Japan, likely corporate dominated) and Imperial Americana (southern and eastern USA), the Republic of Munma (middle east, theocratic) and a US-Soviet Alliance (your guess is as good as mine). Possibly Olympus headquartered something along the lines of the UN.

Point is that the history of Earth in UF is as dynamic for the next few centuries as it was over the last few.

[mephron]

Wait, the UFP passed a law in the story line that effectively declared machine intelligence not to be people?

The galaxy is lucky it took only a few years for it to get to a short organic on organic civil war and the IPO power block would've taken a stance against that sort of law because the machine-organic civil war that would've followed otherwise would've rend the known galaxy apart.

Yes, they did, in between invalidating all interspecies marriages and making Psi Corps conscription mandatory for all psychics, even those with 'anomalous' abilities. Shortly after this, what really caused the death of President Santiago was discovered, and the messengers taking that information was used by Clark to try to choke Zeta Cygni, Jyurai and Salusia.

The only reason that it didn't go bad faster was the IPO running evacuations to Cybertron (and no member of Starfleet being willing to take on the Autobots), Jyurai (for the psionics) and ZC itself.

It'll come back sometime and you can see what happened. It was officially deprecated because of timeline issues.

[Star Ranger4]

And it was all the Mysterions fault, IIRC.

Though when it first came out we were still all seeing Sutur under every bed.

[drakensis]

Mysterons were one of the pieces Surtr set in motion IIRC

[itsune9tl]

I remember way back when this thread was used to announce new stories from EPU.
Now, it seems to have devolved in to a discussion called The Eyrie rewrite Whine. ...

[Morganite]

My original thought process started with "It seems pretty irresponsible for them to offload responsibility onto Turing like this when for all they know the planet could have been eaten by Galactus or something."

Then it was something like "Wait a minute, why should creating machine intelligence be so much more regulated than creating biological intelligence?" (Eventually, this lead to "If a shady corporation decided to whip up their own idol group, shouldn't the crime be child abuse?")

And eventually the part comes where I can hear my City of Heroes avatar going "Okay, time to start grabbing these jokers and taking their everything."

The galaxy is lucky it took only a few years for it to get to a short organic on organic civil war and the IPO power block would've taken a stance against that sort of law because the machine-organic civil war that would've followed otherwise would've rend the known galaxy apart.

Seems kinda iffy to me. Most of those scenarios seem to require a) a society that builds enormous numbers of sapient machines while being terrible to them, or b) a small number of same that can build the large number themselves (and have no ethical qualms about doing so). Neither seems likely here.

And I think it's safe to say the IPO's stance is pretty clear and being acted upon well before the big break. (See demonstrated handling of: telepaths.)

I remember way back when this thread was used to announce new stories from EPU.

All update threads on this board are "and-discussion-of" threads at least some of the time.

-Morgan.

[hazard]

Seems kinda iffy to me. Most of those scenarios seem to require a) a society that builds enormous numbers of sapient machines while being terrible to them, or b) a small number of same that can build the large number themselves (and have no ethical qualms about doing so). Neither seems likely here.

And I think it's safe to say the IPO's stance is pretty clear and being acted upon well before the big break. (See demonstrated handling of: telepaths.)

Keep in mind that GENOM operated vast numbers of Boomers and treated them pretty terribly, and in the setting and various source materials there's plenty of societies where there's large numbers of sapient machines and/or sapient machines capable of self replication in large numbers.

And then you've got the Cybertronians, who nobody exactly likes the thought of messing with.


But yes, there's a reason I highlighted that when the UFP did that the other many members' answer to this shift in policy was 'fuck no, are you nuts?' and that this was a good thing.

[Bob Schroeck]

Released just a bit more than an hour ago...

The Federation Lives Forever! Chapter 15: "Call Me Lightning"

[Berk]

Oh what a day! What a lovely, lovely day!

[Black Aeronaut]

Oh my god I can't believe he'd been planning the cabbage joke for that long!!! (HInt: Kaitlyn noted the odd name of the electric piano much earlier.)