Our Cyberpunk World: 3D-Printing the Perfect Blonde (and Your Own Clones)

The article: 3-D printing of human body parts (Business Insider) Technology is overtaking cyberpunk science fiction yet again — and this time biopunk too. In this case, it's a process called bioprinting which uses 3D-printing techology to print living organs, whether to repair or transplant. As the speed 3D printing is advancing today, eventually we'll be able to print entire human bodies. I can see four uses for this:

1. Cloning your replacement body: As a matter of fact, this is how the replacement clones used in the clone-resurrection process are generated. Not vat-grown anymore as in classic cyberpunk, but 3D-printed like the anti-plasma bomb being printed in the background of Shira's opening videoblog post.
2. Organ replacement: what bioprinting is used for today, but naturally more advanced. Eventually the technology will get good and cheap enough that people will be able to replace organs at will, like replacement parts for machines.
3. Designer deformations: What if you're bored with your baseline human appearance? What if you want the latest fashionable deformations? There's pretty much no limit to how much the idle rich can pervert bioprinting technology. Some of them, of course, will make themselves superhuman or outright transhuman. The likes of Neuromancer's Lo-Teks won't be quite so low-tech anymore.
4. Printing the perfect blonde: Forget eugenics. Why wait on genetic engineering, gene doping, and old-fashioned breeding when you can design your human physical ideal in a CAD program and then print it? You can design in pretty much anything you want, including amazing superpowers, without having to rely on the hereditary luck of the draw. You can create bodies more beautiful than anything Nature can design, as living artworks.

Naturally, since in the cyberpunk universe (i.e. Spanner) technology requires the money that the rich are stealing from the poor and hoarding for themselves, like all medical technologies bioprinting will of course be a luxury for the rich, intended to turn them into a transhuman master race eventually able to overthrow even the American Empire's superhuman oligarchs known as the Liberators. For the natural-born newtype superhumans of Team Spanner, this means they have to race against yet another ticking clock and try to convince humanity to save themselves before the Tech Lords make their species obsolete.

Spanner R5 #amediting Update: Why Does the Future Keep Catching Up With Me?

In the Spanner comics script I did for Script Frenzy in 2008, I opened issue 2 with a Dalek-like security robot summarily executing a one-shot character. Then in Chapter 4 R3, I gave Corporate patriarch Dr. Lars Thorwald, chairman of Biotron, a more advanced production version of a prototype robot that uses an iPod as its head and brain.

And now this:

The article: <a href="http://rt.com/usa/207395-robocop-security-silicon-valley/">5-foot-tall 'Robocops' start patrolling Silicon Valley</a> (RT.com). The subject: a security robot now policing the streets of San Francisco — and it looks exactly like the one from the Script Frenzy 2008 version of Spanner #2.

Why does the future keep catching up with me?

One thing about speculative fiction is that an author must keep second-guessing the future. My second guesses involve "friendly fascism", the technology of oppression, the cyberpunk truism that the street makes its own uses for things, and the level of tolerance that masses of ordinary people have for tyranny before their desire to live forces them to revolt (and the eagerness of elites to push that tolerance to its limits). Not superheroes, not psychics, not vampires and werewolves and shapeshifters; those belong to my critique of superhero mythology.

My problem is that I've been delaying Spanner's publication for so long that history has started overtaking my speculation. This problem has become so bad that I actually moved the years in which the series takes place from 2014-16 to 2018-20, simply because 2014 had already arrived and thus was no longer speculative. I picked the 2014 date all the way back in 1994, when I aged Shira down from her original 25 down to the Standard Anime Protagonist Age of 15; now I've aged her back up to 19 while keeping her birthdate of September 9, 1999.

Some events that occurred in the middle of writing and editing Spanner:

1. the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the ensuing invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001-3, coupled with a "USA PATRIOT" Act that almost convinced me that the "future fascism" I'd been setting the series in since 1992 (if not 1989) had already arrived;
2. the death of Steve Jobs in 2011;
3. the "Arab Spring" revolutions and Occupy Wall Street movement, both also in 2011, and both of which failed; and
4. the anti-police-state protests going on as I write this.

On the technology front, progress in aircar, jetpack, hoverboard, and sexbot technology is such that all of them will be in commercial release by 2018. Despite the failure of Google Glass, augmented reality will become common and normal just as tablet computers, which were a pie-in-the-sky technology, have become today. Another new technology I borrowed toward the end of the plotting phase (late 2000s) was the smartphone; later, in the leadup to the NSA surveillance scandal, I gave my hackers and rebels generic smartphones without tracking devices; and now the PiPhone (made from one of those tiny Raspberry Pi computers) has convinced me that, under a Chinese-style phone company/ISP monopoly with massive supercomputers dedicated just to censorship, hackers must kludge up their own smartphones and use secure meshnets for calling without the monopoly's interference.

Even the particular manifestations of the reactionary politics I would later call "the Conservative Revolution" have largely come to pass. Apparently I didn't get dystopian enough to expect the British "panopticon" surveillance policy, the growth of Soviet-style "vote for the ruling-party candidate Or Else" elections in the US, or the return of the Gilded Age capitalist predators who tried in the 1890s to destroy American freedom and are trying yet again. I did throw in a tyrannical megacomputer, but that's almost a cliché of 1960s and '70s science fiction that — surprise! — turns out to have become a reality as well, along with The Terminator's Skynet. It also took me years to realize that the "Conservative Revolution" is really just the ultimate manifestation of the American Civil War that, despite the near universal assumption that it lasted only four years in the 1860s, really started in the seventeenth century (or even the thirteenth, the century of mother country England's Magna Carta) and has never ended.

Yeah, I know, science fiction has a reputation for making predictions that turn out to be not just wrong but impossible. I throw in some impossible things myself, usually to either critique the superhero mythology or pay homage to classic SF. But too much of the SFnal speculation I've put into Spanner since 1992 has already come to pass, and I'm certain a lot more of it will by the time the story begins in 2018.

Now to edit that second-issue opening back into the third chapter of the new Book 2...

Our Cyberpunk World: Introducing James the Robot Bartender

The article: James The Robot Bartender Knows When You Want A Drink (TechBeat)
[project homepage]

In a previous entry of this series I posted about robot wait staff in Japan and China. Now in England there's a new robot bartender who doesn't just mix drinks efficiently, it has the social processing power that allows it to tell when a patron wants a drink. Its name is James, and it's part of a research project that aims at greatly improving robot-human interaction. Still, I'm sure some human bartenders are worrying for the future of humans in their line of work...

The (Re)Making of a "WHAM! Episode": Spanner Chapter 15 R4

Spanner Chapter 14 is completely edited now, with the last two installments posting this week. Now I turn from the difficult to the epic. Chapter 15 will have no flashbacks and scenarios to insert, no backstory reveals to remind you that "everything you know is wrong" (title of a future chapter, by the way). The skeleton of the Revision 1 and 2 narrative will remain intact, including certain pivotal scenes (even if they're not in the same places they were in R2).

However, I'll be changing enough of Chapter 15 for Revision 4 that it'll seem a completely different creature in comparison to the R2 version. In fact, I still find myself throwing in new ideas even as I begin to edit: the central three girls' nude swim to Seattle using dolphin-type flippers in 15.1, the disguised anarchists in 15.2 infiltrating the freelance police COPCO temporarily hired, the video body paint from 10.5 advanced technologically to give Team Bremelo's nudefighters cloaking ability (plus even more new cyberpunk elements added to the originals), Dick Becket actually using his superpowers in rage during 15.5 (his public-domain superhero identity: the Scarab, eighth of his Phantom-type lineage), and so on. I'll be strengthening story elements already present: the concert-style holographic projections of King Patriot's Ego and a 900-foot Jesus America; the hacked copbots actually arresting everybody in range before they start beating each other up; Leila's own newly developing superpowers (which I wrote about over a decade-long span in the Project Notebooks), the end of Amanda's network-reporting career, etc.

My goal for Chapter 15 is the same as that for the aborted Revision 3 version: a genuine "WHAM! Episode" after which nothing will be the same again, either in the in-story politics or the story itself. Of course, looking back, I notice Spanner actually began with a wham (both the Intro and Chapter 1) and is liberally sprinkled with wham throughout; Shira herself is a master of the Wham Line, even if she doesn't use this skill as liberally as she should. But this is the first big one after the "seventh-episode twist" that actually occurred in Chapter 8 (Shira rescuing Leila from suicide, followed by them becoming a couple, kicking off the central relationship line), with the next big "wham" scheduled for Chapters 22 and 23. But what happens in Chapter 15 has repercussions that echo throughout the rest of the series and even threaten to destroy not just the American Empire but the world. The difference between Revision 4 and previous drafts is that, because it allows an editor to separate, combine, and rearrange scenes, yWriter5 makes it easy for me to build a rising narrative and even send it spinning out of control (which it's supposed to do in 15.5).

I will say no more. Instead, I'll go back to editing Chapter 15, with this parting comment: if you've read the Revision 1 or 2 version, the final version will surprise you.

Our Cyberpunk World: Your Brain Can Now Be Hacked

The article: Hackers backdoor the human brain, successfully extract sensitive data (Sebastian Anthony, ExtremeTech)

One technology that has become something of a cyberpunk cliché is the brain-computer interface. Recent developments have focused on sinister police uses. Now black-hat hackers have found a way to keep up with the secret police.

Yes, now the black hats can hack people's brains and even leave malware using BCIs. This will become especially dangerous in virtual reality. The defense is the same as that against interrogators and torturers: awareness, and refusal to give in.

Eventually I suspect enterprising programmers will start developing anti-malware systems for the brain...

Spanner R4 Update: Interlude 3 Complete - Weirder and More Cyberpunk than Ever!

Guest starring the clone-resurrected Walt Disney and Japanese Prime Minister Sony Corporation! With visual shout-outs to left-handed anime bass girls Mio Akiyama and Haruko Haruhara by left-handed bassist Rebel Styles. Sony makes its appearance in the form of a 900-foot Screen Gems logo (Screen Gems being, of course, a Sony division). With these additions, and heavy bromantic vibes between IP Defender Martin Martian and his adoring assistant (and later "widow") R. A. "Legs" Leggett (a villain from Chapters 4, 6, and 11), the brand new Spanner Interlude 3, "One Nation Under Copyright, All Rights Reserved", is now complete, and it's cyberpunk as hell!

Now Rebel wields a mean bass in addition to the illegal mons stored in a pair of terabyte Poké-Ball earrings. It's got five strings, it's connected to first a pair and then an array of sound cannons, and it's illegally not registered to Fender owner Sony. Now the slayer-by-television of half the Conservative Revolutionary Party leadership can more than hold her own against two of the Intellectual Property Industry's deadliest enforcers.

Disney will not get any characterization. He gets a line, but it's the standard ritual stuff you hear from Richard Becket, who is characterized, mainly because he has to deal with tricky, tricky Shira in the main story and gets his ego bruised repeatedly. Oh, and because Dick Becket's an aging superhero with a god complex. As for Sony, it's important because it holds political office like US President Goldman Sachs & Company and UK Prime Minister News Corporation, only it owns a much cooler and scarier logo, the Screen Gems "S From Hell".

Now that the single most cyberpunk of the Interludes in Spanner (at least in Book 1) is finished, my next challenge is Chapter 1. First task at hand: the meeting at Mudlark House, in which several important characters try to hammer out a strategy against the Seattle Public Education Corporation and its owner, a thoroughly corrupted national teachers' union, on the last day before the School Arc begins in Chapter 5.

Spanner R4 Update: Yuri vs. Cyberpunk: Too Much Love! It's Ruining My Beautiful Cynicism!

Last post I mentioned that the yuri element of Spanner is foregrounding itself more in Revision 4 so that I'm less reluctant to throw some shameless sentimentality into the story. There's a lot of emotional intensity in this version, and it's only getting more intense as the story goes on. I'm worrying that all this love is ruining my cynicism! I fear that it's diluting the cyberpunk.

Fear not, faithful readers. The cynicism remains where it still belongs: against institutions, religion, the conventional so-called wisdom, liberal wimpiness, and conservative neophobia. I've become even more cynical about superheroes now that I've made the connection between them and terrorists and realized what they have in common: they substitute individual heroism for mass action, encouraging the people to become passive. The ultimate link between superheroes and terrorists in Spanner is that archvillain Henry Becket, the leader of the Conservative Revolution, is both at the same time; in fact, in him, both are the same — the key to his character, and to the American imperial regime.

So I'm at the same time transgressive and defiantly sentimental when I write the love stories, but cynical where it counts, about the Man. The first vague vision I had in 1996 of combining yuri romance with punk science fiction and political thriller has finally become clear to me in 2012.

Also last post, I bet myself (and you, my readers) that once I stepped out of the house my muse would start assaulting me with story ideas for Chapter 3. Sure enough, she did: new bookend scenes with Leila, a new jailbreak scene linking Chapter 1 and the later Chapter 3 scenes where terrorists pop up. And so once I got home I threw them in. Then I edited the first two sections, now called "The Call" and "Stalking Minty Fresh", cutting and rewording until I put the most content in the fewest words; now they're done. That still leaves four sections to edit and 600 words to cut, though I suspect that once I condense those sections I'll have room for new content I can use for more continuity welding. I'll see if I can finish Chapter 3 R4 tonight.

And so the editing continues...

Is Cyberpunk Dead -- Or Is It Now?

On this Google+ thread about this io9 article about novelists who used to write cyberpunk science fiction but have now turned to dark fantasy, a few FriendFeed friends of mine and I argued over whether cyberpunk is dead. One of them said it's dead. I said it's only dead as science fiction. But then, after all, my position is that we're already living in the cyberpunk universe.

Actually, I've even gone farther: on a NaNoWriMo forum thread, I declared science fiction itself to be dead. More specifically, what we know as science fiction is really a subgenre of fantasy called "technofantasy", which can be further subdivided into "space fantasy", "future fantasy", and so on. Some fantasy subgenres that originated in science fiction have actually left SF altogether and become fantasy genres of their own, most notably steampunk. Properly, Star Wars isn't really science fiction, but a chivalric space fantasy set "long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away".

What the io9 article is saying is that many authors normally associated with cyberpunk have abandoned it for dark fantasy. Some were never really SF to begin with. Rudy Rucker (Ware Tetralogy), for one, has always really done what can rightly be called "science fantasy". John Shirley (Eclipse Trilogy/A Song Called Youth) is mainly a horror author, and his seminal novel that inspired the cyberpunks, City Come a-Walkin', is an urban fantasy, a genre that Walter Jon Williams (HardWired) has also worked in (Metropolitan and its sequels).

William Gibson (Neuromancer) has gone in the opposite direction. His Blue Ant trilogy (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History) is set entirely in the present day, using present-day technologies, and yet feels like the future he wrote about in his seminal 1980s cyberpunk cycle. And yet it's not science fiction at all, except to the bookstore marketing executives who have programmed their corporate databases to associate "William Gibson" with "cyberpunk". Gibson has done what Philip K. Dick failed to do: fuse science fiction with realistic fiction. But he was able to do that because the world caught up with science fiction.

Another example I mentioned in the Google+ thread is the Daemon series by Daniel Suarez. Daemon and Freedom™ are entirely cyberpunk, yet contain no actual science fiction at all, if by "science fiction" we mean technological speculation. Like the Blue Ant trilogy, it's set in the present day.

You can say cyberpunk is dead. But only as science fiction. Those cyberpunk writers who want to stay in the fantasy family of genres turn to dark fantasy and/or urban fantasy, or always considered themselves to be writing in those subgenres in the first place. Those who stick with cyberpunk, like I am, abandon fantasy altogether, even technofantasy, and write realistic fiction: technothrillers, political thrillers, even litfic.

Virtual reality, augmented reality, implanted computers, wearable computers, computer monitors that look exactly like ordinary eyeglasses, exotic drugs, cyberterror both state and outlaw, virtual guerrilla war, corporate headhunting using mercenaries: these were all speculations in cyberpunk SF, but are a reality today, in many cases more so than the cyberpunks could ever have dreamed. Other technologies, like social media, surprised even the cyberpunks, who never saw them coming. Hell, those old SF clichés, jetpacks and aircars, are now in production and coming down in price; hoverboards are now in development. They've left the realm of speculative technofantasy to become our reality today. I myself really have only one speculative technology in Chaos Angel Spanner: video body paint.

So I agree that cyberpunk is indeed dead — as science fiction. Unless you see SF as I do: as the literature of today. Cyberpunk is our reality.

You're probably asking me, "So where's the escapism in Spanner then?" My answer: pop culture. Can the Fashion-Industrial Complex get any more absurd and, well, fantastic? You'd be surprised...

Spanner: The Second Draft Revisions, Part 2

Since last entry, I've been writing a lot of notes longhand on scratch paper in a frenzy of inspiration, and I came up with a lot of ideas I'd either neglected entirely or never came up with in the first place. And some of these are not just very interesting, they fit so well that I'll have to find a place to put them in the second draft of Spanner.

First of all, there's the idea of an AI as the mind of the city, called an "urban intelligence". Sure, this may have been a cyberpunk cliché for a while, way back in the 1980s. In the revision I'm planning for Chapters 15 and 16, Shira and JT find themselves talking with the mind of the city of Seattle when she switches the TV to channel 12 (the local community TV station on cable systems) on a sleepless night after the Great Police Robot Riot of 2014. Since one of Seattle's nicknames is "Emerald City", I'm seriously tempted to play around with Wizard of Oz references. While researching The Wizard of Oz on TV Tropes and the Gutenberg Project, I realized that my beautiful teenage witch character Polly Parker's true identity in dream reality is none other than Princess Ozma. Is Mimi Scott her Dorothy? I already have a "Wicked Witch of the West" in the cult-guru villainess Drusilla Becket, a character whom I developed most intensively during the years I worked on my 2007 NaNoWriMo novel now on hiatus, Bad Company.

Another old cyberpunk cliché I'm going to exploit is the private police agency. Considering how those TEA Party corporatists are determined to privatize government while trying to turn America into a new Soviet Union for giant corporations, this may actually happen. The name of the police corporation is, of course, COPCO. It and the Seattle "urban intelligence" will be going at it big time, with the big showdown occurring in the last few chapters of Book 1.

Before that, I decided to reevaluate the "sexcrime" theme. I'm dropping a lot of the "lolicon" stuff because it now strikes me as too "otaky". For this, I'm mostly substituting the idea of pedophilia as the reference crime. Fornication and adultery? Thoughtcrime? They're not just treasonous, they rape children! From what I've seen, it seems like the most rabid corporatists are also the most fanatical prudes. And so Shira, jailbait superslut (if you believe she's not lying about her age), uses the combination of her body and her age as a dangerous and possibly deadly weapon. Ephebophilia (sexual desire for adolescents) replaces homosexuality as the unforgivable sin conflated with pedophilia (as homosexuality itself once was, and to some people still is). Problem is, teenagers have a horrible tendency to be damn sexy.

As for the "lolis", pedophilia turns out to be the crime that marks a Corporate or a mobster as above the law. If a megacorp boss or gang lord has a loli or catamite, it tells you he's got nothing but contempt for a legal system he believes is beneath him. This is why Shira ends up rescuing 10-year-old Ayla from the Yakuza in book 1 and 7-year-old Lucie from the Russian mob in book 2. Oh, and Rebel Styles is still there, destroying men on video.

And before that, I started working out the "Psycho Schoolgirl Lesbian Yandere Love Dodecahedron" story arc in book 2. Basically, Shira's got a bunch of girls after her who are just about completely nuts, and they go to war against each other for the right to be Shira's One And Only. It's not going to be pretty, but it'll sure be entertaining.

Oh, and the actor who plays Damon on The Vampire Diaries? My muse is currently crushing on him. She wants to cast him as J.T. Sparks. Uh, I love you, dear muse, but considering how extreme this story is, I think you should keep it in fantasy. Of course, that won't stop me from wanting to cast Rutger Hauer and Malcolm McDowell as the villains Henry and Richard Becket...

I haven't really fully recovered from Script Frenzy yet. But I'll resume work on the Spanner second draft as soon as I do.

Our Cyberpunk World: LED Eyelashes

The article: New Beauty Product LED Eyelash

Here's the newest fad in tech-mad Japan: LED fake eyelashes! You can even use it as a weapon.

Here's a demonstration by the inventor, Soomi Park:

Our Cyberpunk World: Robot Rock!

The article: Robot Rock Bands Intend to Replace Human Musicians Forever

Forget that standardized synthpop that John Shirley called "minimono" in his Eclipse/A Song Called Youth trilogy from the last half of the 1980s, the great lost masterpiece of cyberpunk. At least the band in Eclipse, the first part of the trilogy (not to be confused with a certain far more famous, and far less competently written, paranormal romance), allowed itself to be fronted by an old-fashioned rock guitarist. The bands of the real cyberpunk future don't even have human players at all. Their instruments play themselves. You see, they're robot instruments.

The first of these robot bands is being built by a music collective called Expressive Machines Musical Instruments. But keep in mind the whole battle robot subculture that grew up in the '00s. Robot instruments and bands will likely be the Next Big Thing in homebrew robot design.

New Wave was an '80s thing. Rave was '90s. The cyberpunk near-future is already going beyond both. This time, the instruments are playing themselves.

We've sure come a long way from the player piano...

Our Cyberpunk World: Your iPad Is Now a Robot's Head!

The article: A robot lover's robot (iPad not included) (MSNBC Techolog)

Leave it to iRobot, the Roomba people. Their AVA concept robot is not planned for release yet. But it's one of the stars of CES 2011. Unlike their more famous cleaning robots, it's a general purpose robot. Your tablet computer, whether an iPad or an Android-based tablet, serves as its head. Just think of what you can do with an AVA, an augmented reality app like Layar, and your new cyberpunk mirrorshades...

EDIT: And a Kinect.

Our Cyberpunk World: Your New Cyberpunk Mirrorshades

The article: CES 2011: Your new cyberpunk mirrorshades (BoingBoing)

I've been saying since Layar became big on the iPhone last year that the one thing still lacking in 2010 that would make augmented reality popular was the right goggles. Guess what? Now they're here! And with Lady Gaga's paid endorsement!

These new Polaroid-branded sunglasses contain a camera to take pictures with and a display with which to view them. Only one thing is needed to make it useful, and that's AR. Once they converge, what was still future technology when I bookmarked wearcam.org in the early '00s will become a reality at last. You can be sure of one thing: Bruce Sterling will be keeping track of it here.

You can take a look at the announcement at CES 2011 here:

Our Cyberpunk World: Robot Waiters

It's not just in Star Wars or cyberpunk anime anymore. There's an actual restaurant in China with a mechanical wait staff. Just think of it: no wages to pay, no need for tips, no surly human employees. Sure, the restaurant in question may be robot-themed. But knowing American business types, it won't be long till it catches on big time...

Spanner Side Story: The Assassination of Satan Claus

Boy Satan is one of the most absurd Spanner villains that I haven't yet put into a script. Every year he goes a-grinchin' as "Satan Claus", trying to ruin everybody's holiday, at least online. And every year he becomes an irresistible target for Spanner, the mischievous Angel of Chaos, who uses everything from BFGs to tactical nukes in her quest to assassinate him.

Shira Thomas, the heroine of Spanner, tells the tale. One of her taller ones, to be sure. But in virtual reality, anything is possible...

The Assassination of Satan Claus:
A Yule-Wrecking Supervillain Story

The spy looks, talks, and acts like any other spy. If he didn't, he'd lose his job. The United Corporations don't like puny humans putting their grubby hands on their holy holy holy patents. And they patent everything. Normally they send the usual Keystone Gestapo to hunt down any and all violators. But this guy isn't EuroSec. He's from the Ministry of Intelligence. These guys hunt down suspected foreign agents. If he's one of their cyberenhanced elite superspies, I've got a special trick just for him.

He rattles off my name, rank, serial number, all that command and control crap. The Synarchy have a hierarchy fetish that drives us civilians up the wall. He takes his sweet old time before he starts trying to grill me, just to unnerve me. He fails: I keep my calm.

He intones in the typical spyboy monotone, "It seems you have come into possession of something very important that just happens to be ours."

"What, did I steal your boss's mistress? I hear she's got a thing for jailbait supersluts."

"Enough with the stupid jokes, Miss Clayton-Wilder." The Cartel lords may play nasty pranks on mere humans, but their agents are uniformly humorless. "This is a matter of National Security. The penalty for selling our secrets to the enemy is much worse than death."

"Yeah, yeah, I know all your penalties by heart, right down to the legalese detail. Thing is, they won't work. You can fine me, but your funny money's worthless. You can try putting me in one of your quote-unquote 'inescapable' superprisons, but there's no way you can hold an angel of chaos."

"Our prison technology is advanced enough to hold even Satan. But if you have stolen our most classified secrets as we strongly suspect, our revenge against you shall make it look like Satan got off easy."

"Au contraire, mon frère. I stole your precious thingie from Triad couriers your agents whacked. Your secrets? You swiped 'em all from the Chinks. Once again you're claiming something that's not yours. Just Corporatism acting like the troll on the bridge yet again. If you punish anybody, just try to punish the Chinese government you stole it from in the first place. Me, I got deniability, and you people know it."

"We can revoke your—" I interrupt him with a big kiss. He stands there stupidly. Prude.

"Sorry, massa, but I'm losing points right now, so I'm outta here yesterday." I throw a self-destructing one-way portal between us and slip through it. And I'm gone.

Stupid agent. Robots are more effective. Someday I'll use some of their own bots against them. Little do I know he's slipped a HyperTracer™ on me.

But I'm not concerned with that right now. Satan Claus is out grinching again. He's on a search and destroy mission to find any holiday party online and wreck it, leaving a lot of people out mucho moolah. He's hunting down and terminating every Santabot, elfbot, and angelbot he can find. One of my avatars just happens to be a Super Sexy Santabot. I switch to it.

Our Cyberpunk World: Now You See Me, Now You Don't

The article: Invisibility cloaks: Now you see me, but for how much longer?

Invisibility cloaks. Science fiction, right? Even better, fantasy! (see: The Arabian Nights or Harry Potter, etc., etc., etc....)

Think again.

Like the jetpack, aircar, and hoverboard, the invisibility cloak is now a reality. You can't buy them now, of course; the technology's still in the research stage, and the military and police demand first dibs Or Else. However, the cloaking device is more cyberpunk than those other sci-fi cliché technologies. Like teleportation as used in Alfred Bester's 1950s proto-cyberpunk classic Tiger, Tiger a.k.a. The Stars My Destination, cloaking is the wet dream of assassins and terrorists. Just look, for instance, at Spanner Chapter One...

Here's how it works. You're a terrorist, secret police agent, black ops super soldier, or serial killer. You put on an invisibility cloak (or your uniform is a cloak) and switch invisibility on. Now you can kill without anybody knowing you're there; your victim will look like Abu Alhazred being eaten alive in the middle of the souq by the demon Yog Sothoth.

There's three problems. One, no cloaking device will ever be able to hide your fingerprints or footprints. Observant Trackers and CSIs will still be able to see what you left behind and follow the clues all the way back to you. Two, cloaking involves materials that bend light rays, so it will never be perfect; you'll still be visible to the trained eye or special goggles. Third and worst of all, you never know if you yourself are being tracked...

Soon the cyberpunks and other science fiction writers will lose control of this technology. Very soon, it'll be all over the spy, terror, and police thrillers...

Spanner: When Cyberpunk Is Not Science Fiction

Remember steampunk? You've probably heard of it by now, since it's been getting trendy lately. It started out as a retro application of cyberpunk, but it has long since outgrown science fiction and now seems to be spanning the gap between SF and fantasy. Today, steampunk is no longer necessarily science fiction anymore.

The same goes for cyberpunk itself. It used to be the exclusive preserve of science fiction writers who applied the new-wave SF approach pioneered by the likes of Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison the '60s and '70s to the hard-boiled crime fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Jim Thompson — or the other way around, depending. When the first-generation cyberpunks didn't write about hacker antiheroes (William Gibson's Case, Neal Stephenson's Hiro Protagonist), they focused on cyborg assassins and the like.

Today, we're actually living in cyberpunk SF's time frame. The cyberpunk writers, including the first generation, know it. Gibson's recent "Blue Ant" trilogy and Stephenson's Cryptonomicon are set in the present day. To me, it's become clear that, like steampunk, cyberpunk is no longer merely a subgenre of science fiction. Like steampunk, it's outgrown the genre that spawned it. It's an approach that lends itself well to a certain subset of thriller subgenres, including the technothriller and the political thriller. Popular movies such as The Matrix and Minority Report prove that you can build action adventures on the cyberpunk template.

In 1992, the year Snow Crash came out, when I came up with the initial idea for the proposed manga I would later call Chaos Angel Spanner, I set it in 2014 because I intended it to be clearly cyberpunk, and cyberpunk in those distant days before the Web and social media was clearly science fiction. Now it's 2010. Much of what the futurists and SF writers predicted last century has already come to pass, or will in the next few years. 2014 is barely "twenty minutes into the future" these days. Spanner is a contemporary action thriller now. But it remains every bit as cyberpunk as when I came up with the original idea almost two decades ago.

Sure, most of what we call cyberpunk today is still science fiction. But now it's possible to write something that's cyberpunk through and through and yet doesn't belong to the science fiction genre. Something like Gibson's Pattern Recognition. Or Spanner. Since we live in the cyberpunk universe today, it's increasingly absurd to classify cyberpunk as merely a SF subgenre. Today, genre and style no longer coincide. Instead, they overlap. Just like steampunk.

Sexbots 3: Sexbots of the Human Kind

To sum up the previous two posts, real sexbots are nearing mass production, and somebody will hack some into rapebots. There's already speculation about an even more dystopian scenario: in the future, there will be people implanted with some mind-control device that will turn them into human robots, or "meat puppets". I'll eventually post something about specifically that. But right now there's one particular use I'm concerned with. If people can be physically hacked into robots, some of them are bound to become human sexbots.

You know the Man will spin robotization of humans as the ideal way to dispense with criminals without killing them. To the corporations, they'll sell it as the ideal workforce; certainly the prison-industrial complex will try to profit huge from this. But some Corporates and political types will see through the spin...

What is the feminine ideal for the male power luster? Beautiful, insatiable, naked, and utterly obedient to his commands. Stereotypes are always misleading. Most women have at least some sense of dignity. But what the man of power wants is a harem of pliant beauties who worship his every sexual craving and bear his children unquestioningly. Since humans are as unreliable as they are sexy, the way to make them perfectly reliable (not to mention pliable) is to hardwire their brains so that they become soft-fleshed sexbots. Then they'll have no will but his own. He won't have to worry about them leaving him, much less turning feminist, ever again. If he's especially ruthless, he could do the same to his own wife, or even his daughters. Being Corporate, you know he'll get away with it. Turning your wife and daughters into your own personal sexbots could even become all the rage among the overclass, just like in Ira Levin's Stepford...

And of course you'll see rich women doing that to men. Human sexbots made out of dangerous criminals could become a hot commodity among Corporate women.

Sure enough, science fiction has dealt with this, even before The Stepford Wives. But now we're already living in the cyberpunk universe; so much of what we take for granted today was science fiction then. And most of science fiction has dealt with the dark side of technological advance. What makes the dark side so dark is that there are people the dark side strongly appeals to. Nuclear war? Generals masturbate over it. Panoptical surveillance? The voyeur's wet dream. Rapebots and human sexbots? Hentai manga's already running away with this kind of stuff.

You know I'll throw it into Spanner sometime...

Gratuitous Trademark Symbols: Corrected

William Gibson has always loved to drop brand names. Ever since he set the example in the early 1980s, cyberpunk writers have no doubt been faced with the temptation to throw in a whole bunch of gratuitous trademark symbols, just like some of those pretentious postmodernist professors like to do in those essays and theses they publish way too much of in order to not perish.

Me, I gave in to the temptation a few days ago. I suspect I contracted the disease from the old Toren Smith/Adam Warren Dirty Pair comics. I put a lot of ™s and ®s into most of the posted chapters of Spanner. It struck me as pretentiously pomo, something a professor would do. So I removed them.

It's ridiculously easy to make mistakes, even when you think you know what you're doing. What sounds great at first blush turns out to be stupid in retrospect. The problem with going directly into print is that it's extremely difficult to correct your mistakes, requiring changes from printing to printing. That's why editors are so important in publishing; if the editor sucks, or the author has protection from editors, the mistakes can ruin the book. The virtue of self-publishing online, at least at first, is that you can edit your posted chapters at any time (though it's a good idea to let your readers know there's been revisions).

Sometimes I like to try out new things. Sometimes they don't work out. This idea didn't. It probably won't be the last...

Sexbots 2: The Rapebots Are Coming

Last post, I pointed out that, like jetpacks, aircars, and hoverboards, sex robots actually exist in the real world today. But this post is about the possible dark side. And I don't mean all those men who will be turning away from heterosexuality in favor of robosexuality, which will likely hit the economy pretty hard. I mean crime.

Now, take your typical Russian mafia/secret police (same thing) hacker. He tends to be consumed with his tribe's desire for revenge against the non-Russian world. He spends way too much time designing viruses, worms, and botnet assimilants. He gets a sexbot. Once sexbots are mass produced, every gangster will have to have at least one sexbot, partly as a status symbol and partly because gangsters hate women. What does our botnet master do with a sexbot? Well, maybe he keeps one for actual sex. Any extras, though, he hacks into rapebots. And he could hack any sexbot connected to the Internet into a rapebot.

Take a certain yakuza (Koji-kun's father in Spanner) whose favorite manga is the infamous Rapeman. By 2014, sexbots are being mass produced in Japan. He's going to turn a male sexbot into a robot Rapeman no matter what. Then he's going to send his Rapebot after that treacherous gaijin whore who stole his number one son away from him. Little does he know that the gaijin in question, one Shira Thomas, is enough of a hacker that she can use her smartphone to hack his rapebot so that it goes after, say, poor Koji-kun in order to rape him. And yes, she's yaoi fangirl enough to do it.

And then what about the malfunctioning sexbots that innocently rape any human female at hand due to some glitch?

Of course, when you talk about the dark side, you must mention potential military uses. No, not as (robo)sexual partners for lonely soldiers. No, as weapons. What if the US military decided it wanted to use rapebots as a weapon of war, especially against the hated "Wogs" in the Middle East? And some of those sexual combots get even further hacked because some psychopath has developed a fetish for serial killer rapebots? Now put one of those serial killer rapebots in the hands of angry power-seeking narcissist Drusilla Becket, and then you'll really have a cyberpunk story then...

And then how about the microchipped humans who get remotely mind-controlled into sexbots? The principle is the same as the ex-con soldiers mind-controlled by the military, or the "Manchurian candidates" who have long been the special darlings of all the spy agencies.

One of my planned major story threads in Spanner involves Shira's amazing ability to hack combots to do her will against their own masters (or just rip their own heads off). How did she learn this ability? By learning how to hack sexbots, especially the one she gets for Christmas from her adoring Aunt Willa in Book 2.

Black hat sexbot hacking? You know that idea's cyberpunk to the core. In fact, back in 1993 Mike Saenz of Shatter fame created an all-CGI cyberpunk comic book called Donna Matrix featuring a bondage sexbot whose brain is replaced by a combot's, so the idea's already part of the cyberpunk canon...

Next: meat puppets...