Okay, I'm back in another quarter, but I've found some time to get further in the script, I'll update it when (if) I feel like I get to a good stopping point on this one scene I'm working on.
I just wanted to poke my head out to reply to the feedback I've gotten, and to start by saying that I'm gonna split the difference between the 'rampaging Boomer' plot and the 'soul harvesting' plot.
Basically, the Saber's first few nights out are fighting rampaging non-Combat Boomers - who have gone all maniac-on-the-floor because they're being covertly 'updated' with Mason's attempts at human-emulating 'engrams' as a sort of in-field beta testing. Of course the engrams haven't been sufficiently 'neutered' and the vague memories they have of being something else, plus the shock of being dumped into an alien body, one whose subconscious and autonomic systems are hella different than human ones, causes them to go berserk - and to, via the loose hiveminds between various Boomers on a similar job, drag non 'updated' Boomers with them. Cue rampages, the ADP, Knight-Sabers-Sanjo, etc. I think this gives me excuses for necessary fight scenes, showing off the hardsuits before the Sabers have to go up against harder targets like Combat or Battle Boomers, deployed as part of GENOM's security to suppress any no-good-sneakin'-around the Sabers might do. Something like that.
Feedback, then:
Regarding the ADP: For the time being I’m going to punt the question of their virtue till later. I said elsewhere that I’d like to play around with establishing a series of sorts, and so episode 1 would be 50-ish minutes immediately after Mason’s death, introducing Leon and Daley as they’re assigned to track down the Sabers - with the episode involving the Sabers helping them uncover corruption within their own ranks and establishing a truce between the cops and these otherwise-sketchy vigilantes. I think that’s reasonable enough.
Regarding Boomer rampages: Again, punting that down the road. They have a definite cause in this movie, but I still don’t feel comfortable using rampages as a shorthand plot-igniter. It feels like in most BGC fanfiction the rampage-of-the-day is how the author’s super-cool new OC gets introduced to the Sabers, so just having them do it on the regular might make sense with the lore and all if you twist things just right. I mean, car crashes aside I couldn’t help but think of how the NRA uses the fear caused by mass shootings in the Glorious People’s Republic of Amerikastan to make people buy more guns to make themselves safe from paranoid whackos who also have lots of guns - fear is good for business on a consumer level. (No word on whether or not Japan has legalized civilian guns in this cyberpunk future, because I honestly don’t know enough about their politics to predict such a thing.) So it’s not inconceivable that it’s a regular event. I’ll draw the line at Combat Boomers being the ones who go crazy most of the time, though. Give excuses to have other types go nuts, do some worldbuilding on the side. And in any case, like I said, I see rampages as a crutch one has to be careful not to lean on too much.
I mean, I think that having Boomer brains (ie neuromorphic computers) be explicitly human-imitating-but-not-quite-there-yet, or perhaps not even human at all to fit a non-humanoid body, a) makes more sense in the context of manufacture (the last thing you want is for that brain to ‘wake up’ and demand shorter hours and wages, and it’s not like human brains are universally the best for every situation anyway) even IF we assume (as many scientists now do) that any brain-like thing with enough neurocomplexity will eventually become conscious (at least one theory links electromagnetic activity in some neurons cascading over to trigger action potentials in neurons that aren’t directly connected - literally brain-waves stimulating independent activity - is what causes all that meat to ‘wake up’). Also, b) there’s a more interesting situation going on in the case of Boomers being still unable to cross the uncanny valley, where humanity has to stretch those mirror neurons to understand what’s going on inside their cybertronic pals who literally don’t think the way we do.
But also, c) even if the Boomers aren’t ‘waking up’, they still are a symbol of a particular kind of societal failure. I mean, Keynes figured we’d all be working fifteen-hour weeks by now, and uh, we really aren’t. Automation as a process doesn’t have to be about ‘the robots took our jobs’, it could even be a good thing because it frees most of us from doing drudgery and produces things of material value with minimal labor cost, we could all be living in a leisure utopia with Boomers hanging around to maintain our society - but that’s not what happens in BGC because we still hold onto the idea that our work, no matter how insignificant it is in the bigger picture, is what defines us relative to others. (Okay, maybe that thesis is undermined by the fact that so many humans would have to be robot-fixers, watching the machines for mistakes and correcting them, but still.) So one idea I’d like to play with is the perversity of a system where Work is Life but no one can actually FIND meaningful work in mainstream society - what happens then? The pre-eminence of organized crime in a sort of parallel economy? What kind of jobs would people invent just for busywork’s sake? What would it be like knowing that a Boomer could do your office-slave job better and cheaper than you and that you’re only around for PR’s sake? What happens when the vast majority of the human race is no longer needed by the people who rule them? You can ask these questions, but then you can’t say that the Boomers are human too, but are just slaves or whatever. I think that kind of undermines the point.
(Then again, that assumes that Boomers are always cheaper than humans barring outright slavery. Which, yeah, maybe. Electricity to recharge a battery is probably cheaper than food, and if Quincy is explicitly running GENOM to Take Over The World he might have to be a loss-leader of sorts and sell Boomers cheap just to undercut the Puny Humans.)
But this might all be really stupid and insufficiently cyberpunk. It would take awhile for these sorts of themes to be explored in the hypothetical series, anyway. Moving on...
I just wanted to poke my head out to reply to the feedback I've gotten, and to start by saying that I'm gonna split the difference between the 'rampaging Boomer' plot and the 'soul harvesting' plot.
Basically, the Saber's first few nights out are fighting rampaging non-Combat Boomers - who have gone all maniac-on-the-floor because they're being covertly 'updated' with Mason's attempts at human-emulating 'engrams' as a sort of in-field beta testing. Of course the engrams haven't been sufficiently 'neutered' and the vague memories they have of being something else, plus the shock of being dumped into an alien body, one whose subconscious and autonomic systems are hella different than human ones, causes them to go berserk - and to, via the loose hiveminds between various Boomers on a similar job, drag non 'updated' Boomers with them. Cue rampages, the ADP, Knight-Sabers-Sanjo, etc. I think this gives me excuses for necessary fight scenes, showing off the hardsuits before the Sabers have to go up against harder targets like Combat or Battle Boomers, deployed as part of GENOM's security to suppress any no-good-sneakin'-around the Sabers might do. Something like that.
Feedback, then:
Regarding the ADP: For the time being I’m going to punt the question of their virtue till later. I said elsewhere that I’d like to play around with establishing a series of sorts, and so episode 1 would be 50-ish minutes immediately after Mason’s death, introducing Leon and Daley as they’re assigned to track down the Sabers - with the episode involving the Sabers helping them uncover corruption within their own ranks and establishing a truce between the cops and these otherwise-sketchy vigilantes. I think that’s reasonable enough.
Regarding Boomer rampages: Again, punting that down the road. They have a definite cause in this movie, but I still don’t feel comfortable using rampages as a shorthand plot-igniter. It feels like in most BGC fanfiction the rampage-of-the-day is how the author’s super-cool new OC gets introduced to the Sabers, so just having them do it on the regular might make sense with the lore and all if you twist things just right. I mean, car crashes aside I couldn’t help but think of how the NRA uses the fear caused by mass shootings in the Glorious People’s Republic of Amerikastan to make people buy more guns to make themselves safe from paranoid whackos who also have lots of guns - fear is good for business on a consumer level. (No word on whether or not Japan has legalized civilian guns in this cyberpunk future, because I honestly don’t know enough about their politics to predict such a thing.) So it’s not inconceivable that it’s a regular event. I’ll draw the line at Combat Boomers being the ones who go crazy most of the time, though. Give excuses to have other types go nuts, do some worldbuilding on the side. And in any case, like I said, I see rampages as a crutch one has to be careful not to lean on too much.
Quote:i'm going to throw my two nuyen in on this i guess. One thing to also remember is that the reason that we keep getting "Rogue" boomers is that the AI's that drive the cyberoid frames is becoming sentient/sapient. The Boomers are arguably victims here as wellI’m getting a little sick of the ‘the robots are WAKING UP!’ / ‘Robots are so human they’re like slaves’ shtick. It was done well in Blade Runner, but there they were pretty much explicitly clones.
I mean, I think that having Boomer brains (ie neuromorphic computers) be explicitly human-imitating-but-not-quite-there-yet, or perhaps not even human at all to fit a non-humanoid body, a) makes more sense in the context of manufacture (the last thing you want is for that brain to ‘wake up’ and demand shorter hours and wages, and it’s not like human brains are universally the best for every situation anyway) even IF we assume (as many scientists now do) that any brain-like thing with enough neurocomplexity will eventually become conscious (at least one theory links electromagnetic activity in some neurons cascading over to trigger action potentials in neurons that aren’t directly connected - literally brain-waves stimulating independent activity - is what causes all that meat to ‘wake up’). Also, b) there’s a more interesting situation going on in the case of Boomers being still unable to cross the uncanny valley, where humanity has to stretch those mirror neurons to understand what’s going on inside their cybertronic pals who literally don’t think the way we do.
But also, c) even if the Boomers aren’t ‘waking up’, they still are a symbol of a particular kind of societal failure. I mean, Keynes figured we’d all be working fifteen-hour weeks by now, and uh, we really aren’t. Automation as a process doesn’t have to be about ‘the robots took our jobs’, it could even be a good thing because it frees most of us from doing drudgery and produces things of material value with minimal labor cost, we could all be living in a leisure utopia with Boomers hanging around to maintain our society - but that’s not what happens in BGC because we still hold onto the idea that our work, no matter how insignificant it is in the bigger picture, is what defines us relative to others. (Okay, maybe that thesis is undermined by the fact that so many humans would have to be robot-fixers, watching the machines for mistakes and correcting them, but still.) So one idea I’d like to play with is the perversity of a system where Work is Life but no one can actually FIND meaningful work in mainstream society - what happens then? The pre-eminence of organized crime in a sort of parallel economy? What kind of jobs would people invent just for busywork’s sake? What would it be like knowing that a Boomer could do your office-slave job better and cheaper than you and that you’re only around for PR’s sake? What happens when the vast majority of the human race is no longer needed by the people who rule them? You can ask these questions, but then you can’t say that the Boomers are human too, but are just slaves or whatever. I think that kind of undermines the point.
(Then again, that assumes that Boomers are always cheaper than humans barring outright slavery. Which, yeah, maybe. Electricity to recharge a battery is probably cheaper than food, and if Quincy is explicitly running GENOM to Take Over The World he might have to be a loss-leader of sorts and sell Boomers cheap just to undercut the Puny Humans.)
But this might all be really stupid and insufficiently cyberpunk. It would take awhile for these sorts of themes to be explored in the hypothetical series, anyway. Moving on...