Another Reason to Want a Publisher

This week's story was inspired in part by my friend Jeff's sojourn in DocBook ligature hell earlier this year. An excerpt:

Since I was obsessing about the way the page looked, I decided it would be nice to turn on whatever magic DocBook has available to make printed pages look nice. After all, if DocBook is good enough for O'Reilly, it ought to be good enough for me. I'd already noticed that DocBook was making my quotes curve (as long as you use the hideously verbose <quote></quote> tags). Then I looked into getting my apostrophes to curve.

Hello? Tap tap. Is this thing on?

Turns out the number one rule of the DocBook Club is you don’t talk about the DocBook Club. There’s plenty of mailing lists and stuff, but there are no answers. Eventually, it seemed to me the actual answer is "insert the Unicode symbol for them yourself".

Wow, that's seriously fucking stupid. Not even [Microsoft] Word is that stupid... and I thought Word had the market cornered on stupid.

Geek rants--hilarious! Visit jra's thoughts to read more about font decoration and why SGML sucks.

Is there anybody out there? Take the 512 survey

http://snout.org/512.survey

It is entirely possible that I'm just talking to myself here, and a grand total of only five people in the whole world are reading this blog. Or maybe the rest of you don't like taking surveys. I'm hoping it's the latter, and I can persuade you to send some feedback my way.

This survey is real short, I promise--a flash survey, ha ha! Sorry. SRSLY. Just two multiple-choice questions and a single, optional text field. Won't take you more than two minutes to complete. C'mon, help a brother out?

http://snout.org/512.survey

Audio: "Amélioré" (French translation of "Better")

A special bonus podcast for all you Francophiles. Thanks to my friend Pauline for lending her voice to this project!

(She may also have corrected one or two words from Jeff's original translation. Dude, how would I know?)

Music: "FoDorchestrastrings" by queeniemusic, licensed under Creative Commons from ccMixter.

"World Trader"

WORLD TRADER
By Curtis C. Chen

I was in the North Tower on September 11, 2001. I saw the first plane turning toward us, and I heard it when it hit, shattering glass and steel and concrete. That was the last sound I heard with my own ears.

There were fifty-six passengers on that flight, five of them hijackers. I couldn't control my power then—didn't even know I had it—and I traded through every single one of them, in a split second, before my brutish survival instinct deposited me in Leonard Spitzer, riding a subway train headed uptown.

Leonard didn't make it to work that day. Leonard wailed like a banshee until the transit cops pulled him off the train. NYPD threw Leonard in a cell and forgot to process him for two days, which was just as well, because I needed that long to get my shit together.

I still have some guilt. I wonder if I could have pulled myself together faster, if I could have separated those hijackers' memories from the tangle of sixty different people's thoughts crowding my head, if I could have warned someone and maybe stopped the second or third plane. I suspect no one would have believed me anyway.

It's taken me the better part of eight years to figure out how to control my ability. This is how it works: when I trade with someone, our minds swap bodies. But there's a residue, an echo, left behind by each original mind. If the new mind isn't strong enough, it can be overpowered by the original reasserting itself. Obviously that hasn't ever happened to me, but I've had to fight pretty hard in some cases.

At this point, I'm strong enough that I don't ever have to fully vacate any of the bodies I trade out of. My own echo can assimilate any new mind it encounters. The person I'm trading with doesn't die; no, no, that would be cruel. They just get merged into my existing personality, and I maintain control. Well, a copy of me, but we are, literally, of one mind.

I used to manage salespeople for a living. It is so much easier to work with others when you know they share your beliefs and goals. We all have slightly different perspectives, naturally, based on our unique experiences and acquired expertise, but we all want the same thing in the end. I don't have to make speeches or try to motivate anyone. I know my echoes will follow orders without question.

The only downside is that they don't inherit the ability to trade themselves into other minds. It would be so much easier if I didn't have to keep flying back and forth across the oceans, re-seeding cells in key locations as they get destroyed or compromised. But we're getting close, I'm sure of it. Bin Laden can't hide forever.

This latest message from Istanbul was cryptic, but their insistence on seeing me in person means it must be important. I can't wait for them to show me what they've found.

Audio: "World Trader"

This week's unusual reading voice is partly for dramatic effect, but mostly because I caught some kind of virus at PAX and have been sick for the past few days.

Music: instrumental stems from "Creepy Doll" by Jonathan Coulton, licensed under Creative Commons.

Source Materials

"Newbody Does It Better"

NEWBODY DOES IT BETTER
By Curtis C. Chen

Two men in a bar.

"Why don't you like talking to Lisa?"

"Come on, man."

"No, really, tell me why you don't like talking to my wife."

"Dude. It's not your wife. It's a computer simulation running inside a robot."

"Newbody."

"Whatever."

"It's not a simulation. It's her mind—all the same thoughts, feelings, and memories—just running on a different substrate."

"Wow. Is that straight out of the brochure?"

"This is a common misconception. We don't make a copy, we perform a transfer."

"Are we going to have this argument, too? It's information. There isn't some magical brain energy that gets siphoned off and deposited into the newbody. You scan someone's skull for activity patterns and program the newbody's main computer to replay those patterns. Hell, that's not even a copy. That's mimicry."

"Look, I can't talk about it in detail, but—we know it works. One hundred percent, no doubt, it's a perfect transfer."

"And I should just take your word for it?"

"You'll just have to trust me. It's a big deal. We've been working on this problem for a long time, but we're not ready to tell the public yet."

"Wait. You said 'problem.'"

"No. Sorry. Poor choice of words. It's... an issue we have to resolve."

"What's going on?"

"You are not getting a story out of this."

"Wouldn't dream of it. Come on. Off the record."

"I can't."

"Will this big secret convince me that Lisa is not a robot?"

Laughter. "If this doesn't, then nothing will."

"Jeff. You can trust me."

A pause. "We can't talk in here."

***

Two men in a taxicab.

"I swear. On the graves of all my forefathers, I swear. I will die before repeating any of this."

A deep breath. "Okay. You're right about how we initialize the newbrains. We scan the biological brain to reverse-engineer the physical neuron structure. Once we have that information, we manufacture the newbrain, imprint it, and power up the newbody."

"I'm not hearing any secrets so far."

"You were wrong about one thing. We can be certain that the newbrain is an exact duplicate of the original. We know when it works, because the old brain stops functioning."

A pause. "What?"

"When we power up the newbrain, the old, biological, human brain stops working."

"Because you destroy the old body."

"No. This is what I'm telling you. The old brain just dies. Immediately. We don't know how—"

"Wait. Wait! What do you mean, it dies? You're just making a copy of some energy patterns!"

"We're duplicating a mind at the quantum level. Apparently the universe won't allow two identical minds to exist simultaneously, and the newbrain supersedes the old one because it's more durable. This is our current theory, anyway."

"Christ. If you're right, then you could kidnap someone—anyone—just by scanning them and imprinting a newbrain somewhere? Fuck, you wouldn't even need a body!"

"Yeah. You see why you can't tell anyone?"

"I think I'm going to be sick."

"Well, you did have a lot to drink."

"That's fucking hilarious."

Audio: "Newbody Does It Better"

This is probably as close to a fully produced audio drama as you'll get out of me while this is still a one-man show. Editing is fun, but searching for appropriate sound effects is a real time sink.

And believe me, if I could have found a cheap way to legally include the Marvin Hamlisch tune as intro/outro music, I would have. (Sixty seconds of a karaoke track might qualify as fair use, but I'm not pushing my luck.)

Music: Instrumental stems from "The Future Soon" by Jonathan Coulton, licensed under Creative Commons.

SFX: 'Two Cars Passing By' from PacDV free sound effects.