In Soviet Russia, meme do you, pal.

[hirez]

We met in circumstances most efficiently described as 'strange'. I looked up from tinkering with the HF set as you entered. Strangers were rare; you'd either cracked the door-robot's IFF routines or brute-forced it. People who try to brute-force one of those door-robots end up spread over a wide area, and of the three people who're good enough to break their security, one was dead, one was making coffee behind me and I was busy with the wireless.

"To what do I owe this unexpected, yet not unwelcome interruption?" I carefully wrapped my right hand round the Glock taped under the bench. There's no sense in killing someone who can 0-day autonomous security kit. At least not straight away.

You looked around, at least appearing confident.

"You're the one who goes by Hirez, right? People said we should talk. I'm not sure if they expected good talk or bad talk. Some of them were probably looking forward to a bad talk, but I'll be hunting them down later to Have Words. Anyway. Nice to meet you. Cute robot outside. I think I probably confused it."

Comments

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

Nice one.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Ta.

I should probably emit more hardboiled stuff like that, just to get it out of my system. It really does just write itself sometimes.

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

Aye. Although you are then at risk of finding that I've written you up as a Techie NPC when I finally get around to running a Feng Shui game ...

[hirez.livejournal.com]

[FX: Google]

Ach zo. IHNWIJLTS "Sinister eunuch magicians."

It were all Eunuchs round here when I were a lad, etc.

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

[snork]

[kathbad]

*applause*

I appear not to be able to express my approval in any other way - there have been many written and subsequently deleted comments...

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Thank you. And :p

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

Good. Keep going!

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Can I not? The idea of writing a Mary-Sue Technothriller makes me cringe.

However, if you insist, I shall pitch it (in the remote and unlikely possibility I ever get An Agent) and then cheerfully hate you when everyone goes for the idea like a pack of rats.

Unless there was some Strossian (See, he must be good to have a recognisable style already) subversion of the form going on.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

I had assumed that some kind of subversion was more-or-less inevitably going to happen, even if you didn't know right now what it was going to be. It'll turn out to be about clog-dancing or about the uplift of the door-robot species by hyper-intelligent prawns from the planet Hellmanns or about the inevitable future escalation of the Scottish Ice Cream Wars into nanotech and nukes.

Or something, strange and as yet unimagined...

[hirez.livejournal.com]

There's nothing in my head right now, apart from a failure to get to grips with procmail.

Hm. What would be fun? Near future oil-poor countryside? Lots of mostly-autonomous robotics that run off solar power with BSD kernels? (Because what else are you going to Barry up if you can't afford two-star?) Fit-totty street ninja entirely out of its depth in deep countryside? Who's killing off the security geeks and why does a touring humppa band care?

Nah. All rubbish.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

Shame. I rather liked them. But I'm sure something suitable will turn up.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

[After fixing procmail, pizza and coffee]

Um. So, ok. Let's work from the premise that I've read one too many urban dystopias involving drug-addicted ex hackers/squaddies, killer totty and neon-lit whorehouses staffed by cyborgs from $third_world_country. All of which assumes a continuing petrochemical economy and/or Magic Fusion PixieDust.

So. None of that. Well, maybe some killer totty, but no rubbish about them needing to wear skintight PixieFibre armour to better show off mongo bazooms.

A vaguely Wyndham landscape that looks a bit like the lump in the Severn opposite Newnham, only with a couple of handy aircraft breakers and a busy canal (because road transport's gone uneconomic. I'd suspect that the railways would be as broken as ever) might be a nice place to live. An out of the way place where you can tinker with allotment-robots loosely based on the Mars rovers. Semi-autonomous kit that's about as bright as a sheepdog and can deal with pests from slugs up to lurhcing bands of drunken townies. IIRC, the Mars kit runs under QNX, but these'll run OpenBSD just because.

I'm not sure who the villains of the piece would be, which is unfortunate. Blackwater mercs retained by a paranoid Tesco exec determined to stamp out people growing their own food? CAP enforcers bent on a particularly terminal interpretation of Intervention? I guess that would mean killer-totty would pitch up as a bodyguard paid for by the CPRE. (Which lurches into the sub-DNA territory that's a little over familiar.)

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

All seems very promising. Most of the trappings of cyberpunk, but with none of the glamour. A bit Harry Palmer, really.

Is there a McGuffin, posessed or pursued or stumbled across in an old R&D building by our heroes ?

In the future, all the good crops will be patented, and all the unpatented crops will be forbidden. That's what the CAP fiolks are doing poking their noses in. Carrot violations.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Lord knows what glamour there may be in living in a carcinogenic libertarian wank-fantasy, but I shall take your word for it. Ipcress. Yes. Damn fine book.

McGuffin? Not as such. I was randomly thinking that the militant duck-squeezers would get a strop on over fields being tilled by nasty mechanical things filled with horrid chemicals when there could be horses and things:

"Are you going to tramp up and down a field all day behind a pair of farting Clysedales? No, of course you're not, you useless crusty pillock. You're no more a farm labourer than I am, and by the time you've learned enough animal husbandry not to be a fucking menace to the poor bloody livestock under your care, we'd all be dead of starvation. I'm fixing the immediate problem with the skills I have at my disposal, and I suggest you sling your hook before I re-arm the door-robot."

Yes. We're going to be losing orchards over the next few years, and now the Frogs are being told to grub up vinyards because there's too much plonk about. Mind, it would be more likely that Monsanto would aggressively pursue alleged DMCA violations.

Hm. This is less cyberpunk and more AngryFarmerPunk. CyderPunk? Gert orf moi land! Or I'll raygun the lot of you townie buggers!

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

For me, cyperpunk is a bit like pepperoni pizza. It's a cheap thrill, and not a complicated one, but I still like it a lot.

You're right about the Monsanto thing. Also, in a world with less fuel, food would be in much shorter supply & much more expensive. It would be much more worth (a) rustling (b) guarding (with tiny heavily-armed robot sentries, probably).

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Evil dystopian Tescobatsu

Now that I like

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

How far are we from the War Of Supermarkets becoming military, do you think ? After all, There Can Be Only One.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Scottish Ice Cream Wars went biological a long time ago, hence the need to assemble the squirty machines with bactericidal Germolene...

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

Eeew!