Bilby: Part Two

The Teleoperable Ovoid Machine known to itself as Bilby was, to put it idiomatically, in somewhat of a pickle. To put it literally, Bilby--a very smart and very lonely little pearl boulder of a robot--was currently trapped within the dreaded Stapledon Box, and it (he?) had only seconds--milliseconds, really--to cogitate on a viable method of escape before an untimely, unpleasant, and wholly unwarranted neural death. You see, Bilby, on its quest for a friend in the empty wastes of the distant future, had been trapped by a Super Human Intelligence, and currently that ShI was employing a pair of electronegativity cutters to slice through Bilby's thick armor, straight toward its pea-sized but fantastically impressive brain, which looped around itself in ways that were both impossible and very effective at generating raw cognitive power.

So. A terrifying enemy, a dangerous predicament, a cliffhanger, revisited and recapped. How could Bilby possibly escape? It was a question that was nagging at him with a particular importance. (To underscore this, note that Bilby had devoted nearly 13.39% of its brain to this problem, which may not sound like much, considering the potential for a fatal encounter, but Bilby had never in its existence devoted so much processing power to a single problem, not even when it tried to understand the appeal of toy trains to middle-aged men--now that had been a thorny issue, and not one that even now it considered satisfactorily apprehended, solved, or in any fundamental way understood.)

Then one of Bilby's photon receptors caught a flicker of movement in the far side of the vast underground chamber in which he was trapped. Had help arrived? Bilby zoomed in and recognized the form as life, and intelligent life, but the creature had stopped in an inky shadow, hunched over, with its big, human-like hands on a pair of hairy knees. It was an Uplifted Neo-Ape, with a glass covering over its expanded brain and spiky cooling fins extending from its back. The fins and covering were to prevent the animal's brain from literally melting. The animal watched Bilby struggle within the Stapledon box, picking at one ear with a casual yet determined demeanor. Bilby wondered what the creature expected to locate in its own ear.

The ShI had been broadcasting its own thoughts and questions this entire time, on every frequency and medium that a robot could send or receive on. Bilby had listened for the first second and then given up, quickly determining that the rampant ShI had nothing of interest or note worth hearing or remembering. Just a lot of nonsense about dark matter, dark energy, the Great God Ulthoth, the Return of the Old Humans, the Jupiter HiveStorm Republic, and on and on. It really was quite in love with the sound/wave/flash of its own cognitive output. Bilby wished it would shut up.

Bilby realized he had about half a nanosecond remaining before the electronegativity cutters penetrated the nano-forged metals and nu-plastics protecting its brain. How long might Bilby surive at that point? A solid question, if not one it had much in answering, for who would it tell and how? No. This was really enough of this. Bilby instigated his self-destruct sequence.

Immediately, the cutters cut off and retreated, and the Super Human Intelligence, like a fog of particulate matter, retreated to the far side of the cavern. It oozed into a grate and disappeared. It was gone. The chamber, with its vast spires of crystalline and semi-organic (and now ossified) computers, was both still and silent.

The Neo-Ape removed its forefinger from deep within the cavern of its right ear. It inspected the resulting waxy material, sniffed.

Bilby formed a vocalizing apparatus, decided on a voice (male, human, gravely) and said, "Hey, you there. With your finger out of your ear, perhaps you could help me out of this box?"

What I am Reading

As usual, I'm reading multiple books at once, if not simultaneously. There's the Travel Book, the Primary Book, the Short Story collection, the Long-Term Difficult Book. These are important, critical catagories. You wouldn't want to caught with one source of intellectual stimuli, right?

-Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin.

I have not gotten too far into this, but that's not really necessary when it comes to Le Guin. You know it's going to be elegant as all hell. In this case, she's writing a sequel to or prequel or remix of Vergil's The Aeneid, but from the POV of Lavinia, who got nary a line in the original. So far, it's a relaxed piece, but as Le Guin is depicting the maturation of a young princess it'd be a surprise to come across much in terms of swordplay, dragon slaying, or bosom heaving. Instead, there's emotional insight, much of which comments on gender parity or its lack. The prose is efficient, elegant, and evocative. So far: an excellent book.

-dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany. 

At the fifty percent mark, I'm thinking that the rumors of dhalgren's impenetrability as a text have been greatly exaggerated. It helps that I have read the majority of Delany's novels prior to tackling dhalgren. I have a familiarity with his style and the necessitites to unpacking it. So, yes--if you started dhalgren on an odd whim, frustration seems like an understandable consequence considering the dense beginning and the surreal or subjective moments that grace the narrative, casting doubt on the reality of the minimal plot.

Indeed, it is an elusive and elliptical text, more so than any of the other works of Delany's that I've read, but the actual happenings of the story--the majority, anyway--are grounded in the quotidian details that Delany deploys so precisely and perfectly. He is not really working to dazzle (jazzercize?) your cognitive facilities as Pynchon does in Gravity's Rainbow. Which is not to say the novel is an easy read, but Delany seems to approach complex thematic material often from the angle of ostensibly simple, and occasionally jagged, prose, which makes his work more accessible although not necessarily any easier to master.

Odd that I have not actually touched on the book's contents. Also, it's quite possible that the novel will (as Jonathan Lethem blurbs on the cover) 'swallow [me] alive,' [me] in this case being an 'astonished reader.'

I would indeed be astonished if a book swallowed me alive.

-Adam Robots by Adam Roberts

I am also reading the new short story collection by Adam Roberts, a man of growing internet infamy, it seems, at least in science fiction circles. There is a lot of talk about him, like, what's up with that guy? and How come he's always Adam Roberts-ing it all over the place?

The stories are perfectly Adam Roberts stories, which means that they're funny, smart, prickly and subversive in ways that are not comforting to those seeking a steaming bowl of comforting genre fare.

Bilby: Part One

The Teleoperable Ovoid Machine known to none but itself as Bilby bobbed through the wasteland on a cushion of Q-bit particles, making a curiously eerie yet dulcet tone like a purring cat that was mostly but not quite content with its lot in life. Bilby was, indeed, an ovoid, and about the size of a respectable boulder, with a pearly, featureless, and somewhat slippery exterior that would’ve reminded your average man of a wet bar of soap, if there were such things as men or moist soaps.

Bilby bobbed along, as happy as an entity like it could be, what with a brain the size of a pea surrounded by a solid armor shell of nano-forged metals and nu-plastics. Size, as the extremely true axiom goes, doesn’t matter, and that was especially true for this brain, being a melding of the best miniaturization and most powerful quantum computing. Bilby, right now, was the smartest being on -the entire planet. In fact, if humanity rose from its ashes to the height of its civilization (October 12th 1927) Bilby would retain that title. No mathematical problem could stump Bilby. No logical puzzle could knot its algorithms. No conundrum could confound its info-synthesizers.

In short, Bilby was a smart little bugger, and that was the problem, for without at least a Level II Civilization—the kind with Dyson Spheres and Space Habitats and Generation Ships!—providing endless and diverting stimuli, Bilby found itself lost, dazed, and, if not confused, then maybe a sensation akin to loneliness. Bilby had circumnavigated Earth, by its count, 8,623 times, and in all that time, it had found nothing of interest—no AI-Cores, no the energy beings, no crystalline entities, not Uplifted Guinea Pigs forming a collective intelligence named Bob.

To ameliorate this ennui, it set out on a quest, what it considered an adventure, much in the way a middle-aged banker considers the purchase of a train set an adventure. But this quest really was an undertaking, not just a mess of narrow gauge track, scale models of locomotives, and a quiet and undeniable shame. Bilby was going to find a friend!

Bilby confronted many dangers and predicaments. It often used its trusty plasma whip to scare off hoards of spiroSlugs, quibchoppers, and even the dreaded and ill-tempered reeltox quadpods. It lost three decades trapped in Old King Feynman’s Labyrinth. It descended into the Necropolis to seek out the last and first of the Transcended Men, but they had died centuries back during the Neural Outrages. To summarize: it struggled and fought and had all sorts of interesting good times, far too many to list here, that’s for sure.

In the ruins of the human city New Utopix--where spires like inverted icicles strained toward the ionosphere and glittered with a billion shards of sun--Bilby locked its considerable wits with a rampant ShI. The Super Human Intelligence’s appearance at first, delighted Bilby, much in the way the acquisition of a new caboose delights a middle-aged banker. Except that the ShI, it turned out, had gone rampant, thanks to a heuristic misery loop that corrupted the nuanced workings of its mind.

The ShI trapped Bilby within a nested Stapledon Box, a wicked tool that immobilized Bilby’s hover-engines and reducing its cognitive functions by a whooping 3.4567 percent, which, believe me, is disastrous for an entity that can quantify its own intelligence to the ten thousandth of a percent.

The ShI was mocking Bilby in a billion voices and a thousand different languages while its electronegativity cutters spun in from the Stapledon Box, through Bilby’s pearly exterior, and toward the armored shell surrounding that pea that comprised the essence of Bilby.

Things didn’t look good….

Welcome to brain fidgets

My name is Adrian.

I am a writer--novels, primarily. Of course, anyone can be a writer. More accurately, I am a writer with commercial aspirations. I am also a librarian. I have a B.A. in English, an MFA in Creative Writing, and an MLS, a Master's in Library Science.

I have sold a short story to the magazine Cemetery Dance, and for two seasons I was a staff writer for the documentary program Auction Adventure on the Fine Living Channel. I also have an upcoming comic story in the magazine Grave Tales.

This blog is where I write about what I read, or view, or maybe post little bits of fiction. It should be a good time.

-art by sean-