Legend of The Winter Soldier
View allAll Photos Tagged cryogenic
This wood frog is from Pennsylvania, but some frogs live far into the frigid North. The North American wood frog ranges well into the Alaskan tundra, inside the Arctic Circle. During winter, they must find ways to deal with the cold temperatures – some species dig deep underground to escape killing frost, but some practice-controlled freezing. They produce excess sugars or starches to prevent damage to sensitive tissues while the remaining water in their bodies turns to ice. The North American wood frog can survive with 65 percent of the water in its body frozen! Some think it could be a way to solve human cryogenics – wake me up when things get less crazy!
Today, I'm focusing on "the styles". My inspiration for this image is Ralph Lentjes, @ralphlentjes. I attempted to replicate one of his pictures without using his prompt, so I wrote my own, hopefully with good results. I panned right to include the mountains (replaced "Lady on the beach" against "mountain"), did some upscaling, and minimal post-processing in Photoshop. The intriguing part of this is that I have added my own styles to this exact prompt. These images will be presented separately. This is Style raw.
Midjourney prompt in the tags
Here is version 1 of the style prompt with the exact same prompt as in image ➡️ flic.kr/p/2pnzcwM. We achieve a completely different result. Wait for version 2 and 3.
the style is:
--style iRTYSnBDfZ60WziTDeYB-iRTYSnBDfZ60WziTDeYB-3fFHdSOfS0m-2U4Pq7hSzGNuo
Midjourney prompt in the tags.
Here ist the version 2 ➡️ flic.kr/p/2pnF2EL
Sure, you can only dance with the ladies who are also in the hall. It was like that a few days before the Republic's birthday in 2020. The last offer was made by Depol's BR232-561, which was rented and used by Dolata in those days. She brought a loaded train from Gniewkow, destined for unloading in Kalisz. At the (ad)vantage point in the northwest of Jawor, the volume grew louder as the missile approached.
No freezing (but from your dimension cryogenic limbo).
The tempurature in the cabin lowers as Bio.N.C.A and Flit power down for the night and go into short-term hibernation to travel into deep space.
They have been chosen for a mission to the asteroid Mines just outside of Earth’s protective magnetosphere where robots are sent in lue of humans due to the high radiation.
The girls are excited as they will have a chance to spacewalk for the first time.
--
CREDITS
*Bolson / Tattoo - Fram
~Isil~ Cryostasis Escape Pod
r2 A/D/E kozue[gold] Maitreya @ Collabor88
.Shi : Quixotic
Location // Space Somewhere outside of Earth
Timeline 2133 - The Future
Well now I’ve started on a short hike through the archives and turned left at the Iceland folders, I’m going to keep on going a little bit further. Next stop Haifoss and a slightly longer hike to the bottom of the canyon. Until a couple of weeks before Lee and I returned to Iceland we didn’t know it was possible to get down here without a set of climbing ropes, crampons and hard hats. Hadn’t even considered the possibility of it in fact. We weren't even trying to find out whether we could - we were quite content at the prospect of taking photos from the top of the ridge on the opposite side of this huge waterfall. But then, and with remarkably fortuitous timing, one of our YouTube regulars took a workshop group down to the base and photographed it from the river. Suddenly an hour or two at most morphed into a half day or more of potential, and any last thoughts of trying to shoehorn a diversion to Gulfoss into the itinerary were abandoned. Gulfoss would be inundated with visitors anyway, and we’d rather avoid the Selfiegrammers. Haifoss was for the hardcore only, with the road marked as off limits to anything other than four wheel drive vehicles - not that this stopped a few intrepid souls from bouncing and bumping along the last section of rutted road in their Fiat Pandas. Good luck with the insurance excess Girls and Boys!
The hike itself wasn’t too difficult at all - at least the downhill half of it wasn’t. Easy to follow, yet most of the small number of people who’d come this far stayed at the top and peered down into the abyss while we trooped virtuously into the bowels of the landscape. And fortune favours the self righteous when it brings you to a view like this. Ok, there may be one or two rocks in the river that we would happily see being removed, but nobody from the Icelandic Landscape Photographers’ Guild has seen fit to try and drive a JCB down here just yet, so we’ll just have to live with them I suppose. Mother Nature is usually pretty consistent, but I don’t suppose she can be perfect all the time. Maybe I should have worked on the other shot from down here that never saw the light of day instead. Yes, I might have to put some words together for that one too. In fact I’ve just reworked both of them so it’s bound to happen eventually.
This picture of Haifoss isn’t one of the more than twenty pre-prepared and as yet unposted stories from our Iceland adventures, all of which were written and ready more than two years ago. I was mired down in a book project in the hopes that my children might find it gathering dust on a shelf one day in the future after I’m gone. Nobody else is ever going to look at them very much, and they certainly don’t show the slightest interest at present. They keep on complaining about the joys and woes of bringing up a child as if I’ve somehow forgotten what it was like. I mean they only have one benign little toddler each, and I’ve reminded them enough times before that when they were the ages that little Sennen and Alfie are now, I was dealing with both of them, separated by two and a half years and more often than not one of us parents pleading for a ceasefire. And anyone who’s had more than one child knows that when the second baby comes along it’s more like nine more of them just got added to the family rather than one. Boom! There goes the silence…..
Apologies - I’ve digressed, and you can probably already tell that this particular yarn failed to make the coffee table volume which resides beside me on the office desk where nobody else ever sits. Lee bought a copy - I suspect he’s the only other person who’s ever looked at it. He’d see this image in the introductory page alongside a passage of blurb that explains why I like Iceland so much, but no story. And I think it deserves a story. That’s why we’re here now, at the bottom of the one hundred and twenty-eight metre single drop monster, covered in spray and gazing at rainbows. It always impresses me that these huge waterfalls can produce their own microclimates, complete with fairytale rainbows hanging across the scene. A dramatic world in miniature that few will ever find because of the effort required to get here at all. Playing with a curious mixture of focus stacking and time blending because I wanted that rush of texture in the foreground flow, but I’m greedy and I was also after the hanging sheets in the waterfall set against the stubborn brown walls of the canyon.
And yes, I did hike down here in my wellies. All the better to get into the water with, unless I wanted to attempt to cryogenically preserve my feet for the next twenty-thousand years. It seems I’m content to do that with quite a lot of these pictures, so why not add feet to the archive? Perhaps not. And do you know what? I just had a look at the folders where I keep the raw files, and thirty-five groups of images haven’t even been touched at all. Thirty-five! Even I’m shocked by that. Ok, some of them are probably never going to make it into the editing suite, but that’s a lot of images from the biggest landscape photography trip we’ve ever made, just lying around completely ignored for more than three years. I’d forgotten many of them. About time I started re-acquainting myself I think.
Here is version 4 of the style prompt with the exact same prompt as in image ➡️ flic.kr/p/2pnzcwM and ➡️ flic.kr/p/2pntAkY and ➡️ flic.kr/p/2pnF2EL and ➡️ flic.kr/p/2pnFEvz. We achieve a completely different result. This is the last version.
Here is the style: --style 2IUghwS4sK9r5wG2PuIkL7uI1dxeEeW2ADK-2IUghwS4sK9r5wG2PuIkL7uI1dxeEeW2ADK-2IUghwS4sK9r5wG2PuIkL7uI0hYWGIhCTWU-2IUghwS4sK9r5wG2PuIkKdBDAtVNDmuZYHK-2IUghwS4sK9r5wG2PuIkKdBDAaKmYQWRpO8-2IUghwS4sK9r5wG2PuIkKdB6Q04GnmwHzIA-5I9BX3z56
➡️ The styles and the style tuner are not yet available for version 6
Midjourney writes:
"These features are not yet supported, but should come over the coming month:
Pan,
Zoom,
Vary (region),
/tune,
/describe (a new v6 version)"
You can find out how to create your own styles here:
https://docs.midjourney.com/docs/style-tuner
Here is version 3 of the style prompt with the exact same prompt as in image ➡️ flic.kr/p/2pnzcwM and ➡️ flic.kr/p/2pntAkY and ➡️ flic.kr/p/2pnF2EL. We achieve a completely different result. I have prepared another version. It will come soon.
the style is:
--style Or3gcaCpntmjC-Or3gcaCpntmjC-Or3gcaCpntmjC-Or3gcaCpntmjC-Or3gcaCpntmjC-Or3gcaCpntmjC-Or3gcaCpntmjC-Or3gcaCpntmjC-iRTYSnBDfZ60WziTDeYB-iRTYSnBDfZ60WziTDeYB-3fFHdSOfS0m-2U4Pq7hSzGNuo
Note: Why is one of these styles repeated several times and why is one only repeated twice or why is there a style at all? Because this gives it a boost.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank isteeves Irene Steeves for her wonderful style. Look here ➡️ flic.kr/p/2pn8o39
You can use each style several times or individually. Separate the styles with a minus sign.
Midjourney Prompt in tags.
Here is version 2 of the style prompt with the exact same prompt as in image ➡️ flic.kr/p/2pnzcwM and ➡️ flic.kr/p/2pntAkY. We achieve a completely different result. Wait for version 3.
the style is:
--style iRTYSnBDfZ60WziTDeYB-3fFHdSOfS0m-2U4Pq7hSzGNuo
Note: Why is one of this style not repeated or why repeat a style at all like in the picture flic.kr/p/2pntAkY? Because this gives it a boost. You can use each style several times or individually. Separate the styles with a minus sign.
Midjourney Prompt in tags.
Cyber Fair Event March 5//25
by ACCESS
More info about credits follow my blog
Pic taken in world at Eldamar - taxi :)
A look inside the window of a scanning tunnelling microscope - a scientific instrument which allows for atomic-scale imaging and electronic characterisation of materials. The inventors of this microscope, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, won a Nobel Prize for their work in 1986. Today, it is widely used in research labs all over the world.
The image shows a stainless steel ultra-high vacuum chamber which is cooled by cryogenic liquids - allowing for a highly controlled environment for measurements. The long rod in the lower part of the image is used to move samples within the vacuum chamber. Through the main window a small cylindrical probe which raster scans across the surface to produce images can be seen pointing upwards, while a sample of interest mounted on a rectangular plate points downwards. The view into the microscope capable of precise imaging offers a "window to the nanoscale."
[[[[[[[[[[POWER RESTORED---STARTING PROGRAM---RUNNING PROTOCOLS 9999999---ASSUMING SUDO CONTROL]]]]]]]]]]
---------Welcome back, you have been in cryogenic slumber for the past 99999999 days. Confirmation is needed to unlock SUBJECT 5 from chamber. PERMISSION GRANTED. //////Unlocking////// Please be careful exiting the cryo chamber. You may experience dizziness and/or nausea. You also may feel hungry for you been asleep for 99999999 days. Also, refrain from touching anything that does not belong to you please. Enjoy your stay at the AREA 99999999 Laboratories.----------
*Deep gasps of breath*
Where am I?
As this heavy westbound manifest slowly works it's way up Mullan Pass, the swing helpers crawl into sight, cut in about two thirds back, and are working hard to provide the extra horses to get over the Divide while putting on quite the show.
This colourful collection of EMD variants was not one of MRL's regular helper sets. All four were taken off the head end of a Powder River Basin coal train at Helena earlier in the day. I'm not sure if this was caused by extra tonnage on the day, maintenance issues on a regular set, or just common practice.
Of note are the Lamb Weston cryogenic reefers around the helpers, the one farthest back featuring a big H1 BNSF logo on its side. Lamb Weston is a major potato grower and processor with its operations focused in the Pacific Northwest. Most of its farmland is in the Columbia River Basin and it has a large processing plant in Pasco, WA. So either these contained potatoes sourced from the midwest, or more likely, were returning from distribution centres, perhaps somewhere in the south east.
Once in awhile I get a notion to pop nature's treasures into a bit of water and place everything in the freezer. Generally I am pleased with the results.
However, when I took a more careful look at this interesting leaf, I discovered I had frozen a small bug as well. I didn't plan on putting that little critter through cryogenics. Oops!
Each year I assemble a set of cryogenic leaves that form holes in their surrounding snow or ice. This is my 2022 version.
Animations from Vae Victis' 'Mortanius' Necromancer AO.
+ FULL animation override with over 30 animations (sits, stands, fly, walks etc).
ABNORMALITY [ends Oct. 21st]
BeSpoke's 'Ghoul Nyx' Bento Mesh Head
+ rigged to fit both female & male bodies
+ EVO X
+ 6 available tones (shown in 'Cryogenic')
NIGHTSHADE [ends Oct. 23rd]
The 'Hades' Underworld Horns by Vae Victis & CURELESS
+ unrigged and resizable.
+ 18 textures
@ ACCESS [ends Nov. 8th]
'Amadeus' Rose Window Monocle by Vae Victis
+ unrigged
+ Multiple colors
MAD PEA's MASQUERADE OF MURDER HUNT [ends Nov. 2nd]
I love this time of the year for it's ice melt, revealing beautiful patterns and leaves. Puddles are great!
This picture was captured in the very first days with my newly purchased LX100 and became a part of getting acquainted with it. I never really had proper gear for macro photography and my new camera actually has some quite good capabilities for this kind of photography. Now I look forward to do some exploration.
J. R. Simplot invested in a fleet of cryogenic reefers in the late 1980’s to move frozen commodities. These cars were cooled by liquid carbon dioxide that was slowly released inside the car, creating a cooling effect similar to the effect that occurs when operating a fire extinguisher. Because there is no way to reliably control the temperature, these cars were limited to frozen food use only, and did not replace mechanical reefers. I have read that the economics of CO2 made these cars fall from favor, and they were retired. Here a one-month-old example is in a train at Fogelsville, Pennsylvania.
At last the fog season has started in Dubai!
Shot from the 73th floor rooftop of the Cayan Tower in Dubai Marina.
92 Mpix panorama shot with the Nikon D810 & Nikkor 24mm PC-E Tilt Shift.
My website: www.danielcheongphotography.com
Please visit my Facebook Page
I recon Austin Powers from the swinging 1960s needs to be thawed out again, defrosted from his cryogenic tube and ordered to save the Earth 🌍 again, but this time it's not Dr. Evil, it's Mr. Evil Covid instead, this seems a good idea to me considering the epidemic & global warming and general mess we all are living with .... etc.
well I do have a vivid imagination .... 😂 😹 ....
"Oh behave"
"Groovy baby"
Love & amp; Peace 💟
For the making of this image I took a small empty water bottle, then cut off the neck section.
Then I took a shiny plastic rose and inserted this into the bottle, topped off with some water and popped it into the freezer.
The next day I used a glove an scissors to cut through the plastic bottle to reveal a frozen tube all frosty, I rubbed the outside to reveal the encased shiny captive delight.
I then placed this tube in the sunlight and began some differing macro shots, then after some alterations and enhancing on the computer .... there we have it my frozen image.
I could see a sort of pareidolia face appearing inside the icy image, being inside a tube it reminded me somewhat of "Austin Powers" before being defrosted after being cryogeniclly frozen since the swinging sixties.
From the film: International Man of Mystery.
Thank you so much everyone who took the time to view, comment or favour my image, it's really appreciated! 😊
Early morning fog shot from the 76th floor of Burj Khalifa in Dubai.
My website: www.danielcheongphotography.com
Please visit my Facebook Page
Pacific Fiction ...
Faithful to the heritage of conceptual art, fascinated by land art and especially by Robert Smithson, influenced by Olafur Eliasson’s teaching at the Institut für Raumexperimente in Berlin, Julian Charrière sets in motion research processes that give rise to performances, photographic records, films and installations.
His materials, including decaying organic matter, cryogenically frozen plants, sediment and salt bricks reflect particular times and spaces, both as tangible traces of what he calls a ‘geology of history’ and as explorations of humanity’s interdependent relationship with our environment.
Pacific Fiction – Study for Monument is one of a set of works created by Charrière following his exploration of the Marshall Islands and the Bikini atoll, part of his research into former nuclear testing sites as dystopian places par excellence.
The United States test-fired nearly seventy nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands from 1946 to 1958, including Castle Bravo, the single most powerful H-bomb, which wiped two islands from the map.
Pacific Fiction, a pyramid of coconuts encased in lead, can be read as the model for a future memorial. The coconuts refer to the etymology of the Bikini atoll, which takes its name from the local Melanesian name ‘Pikinni’, ‘pik’ meaning ‘surface’ and ‘ni’ meaning ‘coconut palm’. The lead is used for its physical property of withstanding radiation. While the pile of coconuts echoes a stock of cannon balls, the work’s pyramid shape and its subtitle, Study for Monument, also conjure up images of a tomb, Egyptian pyramids, the architecture of the bunkers on the Bikini atoll shoreline, and the angular iron monoliths that slumber in the depths of the Pacific.
Deutsch
Pazifische Fiktion ...
Getreu dem Erbe der Konzeptkunst, fasziniert von der Land Art und insbesondere von Robert Smithson, beeinflusst von der Lehre Olafur Eliassons am Institut für Raumexperimente in Berlin, setzt Julian Charrière Forschungsprozesse in Gang, aus denen Performances, fotografische Aufzeichnungen, Filme und Installationen hervorgehen.
Seine Materialien, darunter verrottende organische Materie, kryogenisch gefrorene Pflanzen, Sedimente und Salzziegel, spiegeln bestimmte Zeiten und Räume wider, sowohl als greifbare Spuren dessen, was er eine "Geologie der Geschichte" nennt, als auch als Erkundungen der wechselseitigen Beziehung zwischen dem Menschen und seiner Umwelt.
Pacific Fiction - Study for Monument gehört zu einer Reihe von Werken, die Charrière im Anschluss an seine Erkundung der Marshallinseln und des Bikini-Atolls geschaffen hat, die Teil seiner Recherchen über ehemalige Atomtestgelände als dystopische Orte par excellence sind.
Die Vereinigten Staaten haben von 1946 bis 1958 auf den Marshallinseln fast siebzig Atombomben getestet, darunter Castle Bravo, die stärkste H-Bombe, die zwei Inseln von der Landkarte tilgte.
Pacific Fiction, eine mit Blei ummantelte Pyramide aus Kokosnüssen, kann als Modell für ein künftiges Mahnmal gelesen werden. Die Kokosnüsse beziehen sich auf die Etymologie des Bikini-Atolls, das seinen Namen von der lokalen melanesischen Bezeichnung "Pikinni" ableitet, wobei "pik" für "Oberfläche" und "ni" für "Kokospalme" steht. Das Blei wird wegen seiner physikalischen Eigenschaft, Strahlung zu widerstehen, verwendet. Während der Haufen Kokosnüsse an einen Vorrat an Kanonenkugeln erinnert, rufen die ursprüngliche Pyramidenform des Werks und sein Untertitel Study for Monument auch Bilder eines Grabes, ägyptischer Pyramiden, der Architektur der Bunker auf dem Bikini-Atoll und der kantigen Eisenmonolithen hervor, die in den Tiefen des Pazifiks schlummern.
_V0A7026_pa
Morning blue hour with a thick layer of fog surrounding Burj Khalifa.
My website: www.danielcheongphotography.com
Please visit my Facebook Page
First of all a Happy New Year to you all my friends on Flickr. I know I have been absent quite a long time, but Flickr will always remain very special for me as it's where my photography journey started in 2006.
The fog season is back in Dubai and I have quite a few fog shot which I will post soon.
long stories shortened... (discarded and abandoned and intertwined short stories) well..actually they are chunks and fragmets and notes of stories that never made it
____________________________________________
a young PhD math candidate writing his dissertation on an obscure arab mathematician from the middle ages who specialized in cycles and periods in infinite series and develops a process to determine prime number density in a large number space. (which is all and good) except this makes it an excellent tool to decrypting military grade encryption, which is based on the computational difficulty of factoring large numbers into their prime components
the arab mathematician was ultimately censured by the religious mullahs for developing tools to rationalize the infinite, which is of course the nature of Allah and for man to attempt to place Allah into a human scale is blasphemy
so the arab mathematician disappears and the young phd candidate finds that his dissertation has been suspended pending review but cant get any information on who is reviewing it
finally another young mathematician approaches him and starts a long discussion on math and the nature of numbers and the mathematicians love of the underlying structure of reality that math represents. the phd candidate is leary of this mathematician cause he wont answer what he does or where he went to school or how he knows so many cutting edge fields in math
eventually, the young mathematician offers the phd candidate a position with the NSA, National Security Agency, (where all the big crypto and high math goes on) but explains that if he accepts that he will essentially disappear from his current world. his work will be classified, he will not be able to publish in academic journals or speak in public, or talk about his work to his friends on the outside, but the compensation is that he
would be able to work unfettered with the greatest math minds in the country, totally funded, free to explore any field or fancy he thought. after a few moments of thought, the phd accepts.
then the story will go back to the arab mathematician who is also approached my a young beared mullah, who offers him a position within his group of thinkers who do ponder and explore the nature of nature reality and Allah through mathematics, but that by joining them he would need to disappear from the world, after a few minutes of thought, he too accepts...
--
Daniel sipped his 6th coffee (colloidal suspension for caffeine transport) while his batch jobs on ramanet, the Indian supergrid, finished their checksum verification. His chin, a bit stubbly, itched. His eyes, a bit red, were sore. The goa trance shoutcast feed had mushed into a fast cadence drone. The flat screen monitor warped and bulged with the oscillating fan blowing on Daniel's face
'O' glamorous larval life of a PhD student...' he jotted and doodle-circled on his notepad.
Daniel cracked his neck and jutted his jaw, stretching out the accumulation of kinks, as RamaNet finished the final integrity check on his dataset. this two hour round of processing on the Indian supergrid would cost about $130 out of his precious grant fund, but you couldnt beat the bargain. 120 minutes times 150,000 PCs in the RamaNet processing collective = 1,080,000,000 seconds or 18,000,000 minutes or 300,000 hours or 12500 days or 34.25 years of processing time for the price of a video game. Calculation was commoditized now. You uploaded your pre-fromatted dataset to RamaNet. the data was packeted and sent to out to 150,000 Indians who lent a few percents of never-to-be missed CPU cycles off their systems for background processing. when their alotted package was completed it was sent back to RamaNet for re-assembly into something coherent for the buyer. in return the Indians got a rebate on their net access charges or access to premier bollywood galleries or credit towards their own processing charges. a good deal all the way around. Daniel's dataset, an anthology of complex proofs from a long-dead arab mathematician, was queued with amateur weather forecast modeling, home-brewed digital CGI for indie movies, chaos theory-based currency trading algorithms, etc. the really high end, confidential jobs, like protein folding analysis or big pharm drug trials were more likely handled by the huge western collectives of several million collaborative systems, usually high-performance machines in dedicated corporate server farms. the cost there was out of Daniel's range, but you got a faster return and better promises of encryption for your buck.
Daniel scratched his scalp and flexed his fingers. 'two months from today i will be a doctor of mathematics...and no job. damnit. i need to find something fast.' Daniel calculated in his mind how quickly the student loans repayments would kick in and completely wipe him out. RamaNet would have done it in nanoseconds, ha! he laughed to himself. Daniel had avoided the rounds of job interviews and recommendations that passed his way. he was too absorbed in his research to look ahead, and perhaps a bit intimidated by the idea of the job hunt flea market. flexing his CV, getting a monkey suit, trying to explain his research to recruiters, who were often the same finger-counting business majors in college that made his skin crawl. Daniel always felt a bit embarrassed when he announced he was math PhD candidate. folks would immediately glaze over,
tsk tsk out a 'that's interesting', and swiftly change the subject. something will come up, he mantra'd to himself over and over, something will come up. stick with ali, there is something real in there, just a bit deeper. the real problem was his thesis advisor. dr. fuentes was not returning his calls, his secretary was not taking appointments from Daniel. he had submitted his finished draft of his thesis two weeks ago, but hadnt heard back since, except for a cryptic email saying that the review committee was having some issues with his paper and that Daniel would be hearing from him shortly. Daniel was rerunning his calculations on RamaNet to assuage the gnawing doubt that he completely botched some component of his argument and that the review committee was debating some manner of telling him to redo the entire effort. no PhD and no job. that would ice the cake. Daniel started calculating his body mass and general aerodynamic resistance relative to the height of the school cathedral to figure out if he had time to reach a terminal velocity before impact...only a failed math PhD would attempt to determine at what speed his body would smack concrete, he morbidly thought to himself.
ali ja'far muhammed ibn abdullah al-farisi slipped meditatively on his cup of water, thinking about his proof. he dipped a finger in the cup and held up a droplet of water under his fingertip, watching the sunlight prisimatically splay out on the mouth of the cup. 'praise be Allah and his wonderous bounty' he mumured to himself.
the elders had been in conference all day over his proof. though the heavy doors to their chamber were closed, he would occasionally hear muffled but distinctly angry shouts. ali sat on a divan in the anteroom, served numerous cups of tea by an obviously nervous secretary. ali knew there was deep resistance to his research, but for the life of him he couldnt figure out why. he was a simple mathematician. he came up with some unique observations. he wanted to share them with his peers...
_____________________________________________________
Overview: biotech researcher discovers a new life-extension technology and is murdered. He is cryogenically frozen for 150 years. When he is
revived he must stop a dark corporate conspiracy – and find his murderer.
Summer 2015 - Hot genius free-lance biotech researcher unravels the key component of a radical life-extension gene therapy that will ensure 300 years of robust life to its recipients. The researcher is murdered shortly after he hides the critical component. His distraught friend has him cryogenically frozen. 150 years later, the researcher is revived by the same major bio-med corporation for which he had originally been working.
Quickly he realizes that their motives are less than altruistic: his modification of the gene therapy is needed to resolve an unforeseen debilitation now creeping up in the recipients of the life-extension process. The recipients, now nearing 125 years off added life, are decompensating into psychotics. The researcher at first tries to remember and reconstruct what he did with the hidden critical component, but stops in disgust when he learns that in the past 150 years the life-extension therapy has been reserved solely for the ultra-affluent and has created an extreme and cruel global gerontocratic elite. He voices his disgust to his corporate minders, who cease being beneficent and show their true colors as trying to gain control of this critical technology in order to control the elites.
In the process of dealing with the corporation, he learns about his murder and begins investigating.As he comes closer to the identity of his murderer, he uncovers a wider conspiracy and is the target of more murder attempts.
He was killed by a friend in 2015. The friend was the CEO of a small bio-gen firm that the researcher was doing the LET work for. The CEO, a biz-head with a genetics academic background, took the researcher’s work and exploited it as his own, in the process growing his small firm into a bio-med powerhouse and him into one of the world’s wealthiest individuals.
The CEO also was the first recipient of the LET and is now 190 years old, but doesn’t look a day over 45. Smart, urbane, ruthless, the CEO used his wealth and position to start the cabal of Ultras. It is a faction of the top 50 smartest and wealthiest people in the world who have ‘ascended from the world’ (faked their demise) and control the global economy with their vast coordinated wealth. Perhaps they will call themselves ‘The Ascended’. We need to decide how the cabal lives. Are they sequestered on a luxurious island compound, or do they live in the open, surgically re-sculpted after each faked death, or do they live in the open.
Also we need to figure out what the world will look and feel like in 150 years.
As the ultras decompensate into psychosis, the CEO orders the researcher to be revived in order to find a cure. The CEO had the researcher’s lab notes decrypted and figured that the he was close if not successful in finding the missing component to stabilize the LET.
Tiberius Syndrome: the decline into cruel psychosis experienced by the ultras, named after the roman emperor Tiberius’ degenerate behavior after he sequestered himself on Capri.
The ironic twist might be that there is no cure, no stabilization. The psychosis is not the result of the LET alone, but also due in part to the unfettered ego/wills of the ultras. Absolute power corrupts…
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a brazilian hacking syndicate was subcontracted by a st petersberg crew to run interference on a hit on SWIFT, the global currency clearinghouse notification network. The UniFavela clan was going to run a multi-flank raid. They specialized in fast propagating virii and had created a custom mail-in virus that exploited a few microsoft vulnerabilities that they had discovered and kept mum. Their target was a Latin American PR spokesman listed on the corporate web site for press queries. The PR flak would be just the sleepy guard on the wall for their virus to slip past. 30 minutes after opening an inocuous spoofed email from a French e-trade publication requesting clarification on the SWIFT-Indentrus partnership. the virus would port scan and map its entire site LAN, salmoning its way up the router paths till it found the deep waters of the main corporate campus network in Brussels. Shortly, the internal LAN at Brussels would be suffering switch and router buffer overflows and traffic would gasp, ack, and sputter. UniFavela would then towel whip out a vanilla DDOS on the main company web site, any INTERNIC-registered addresses, and any other system in the IP block reserved for SWIFT that had previously port scanned as interesting, or ,even, as nothing. Mongols charging the village gates and tossing flaming torches on thatched roofs. IT Operations would be running to and fro, trying to figure out the internal bandwidth crunch and if there was a bleedout causing the external net problems.
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The Post-Human Story of Minos:
the CEO of a powerful commercial combine is bore an illegitimate son by his indiscreet wife in retaliation for his own dalliances. the son has a hideous deformity but is fantastically brilliant - brilliant enough for the father overcome his own repulsion of the child - as a bastard and a freak. the father sequesters the child in an elaborate virtual domain. the child, a hacker savant, is used to breach competitor nets. but as his power in the digital realm expands, the child transforms into the tyrant-monster. using the nets, he lashes out at people who have caused him pain, then evolves into enjoying the taste of terror and fear. He becomes the Minotaur.
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'there was a mad scramble amongst all the big spook governments, dark side corporations, and the privacy maccabees once it was determined that quantum computation had left the tidal pool of academia, grown legs and air-breathing lungs, and was headed for the nat sec intel highlands. all previous encryption models were rendered obsolete, and worse, exposed. QC became an undefiable xray spotlight, laying bare any encrypted secret with a ease of opening a mathematical candy wrapper. And for a while it swung the advantage back to the state in the digital Boer War against the freecon partisans.'
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The Oort, to the Intras, looked as one people. Extra-stellar hillbillies, ekeing out a subsistance existence on extracted organics from the frozen crud comets and other planetesimals of the Oort Cloud that slung around the solar system in a 1K AU circuit. To the Oort there was no Oort. Each station, each kampong was distinct and seperate. Seperate dialects, traditions, norms, goals. Some were scientific collectives, some were tired mining operations, some were intense sectarian cults - they shared little between themselves beyond necessary trade links for scarce commodities.
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A young prince is disgraced in an internal court scandal and sent into a quasi-exile on a worthless mission. On his travels he builds the wisdom and learns the skills necessary to be a just and effective leader.
His exile was a gambit by his patriarch to remove Genji from the arena of pointless court intrigues and develop him as a real leader. The patriarch dispatched a team of loyal praetorians to discreetly follow and protect Genji on his odyssey.
Genji was sent as an emissary to the Oort system. He must pass through the Martian-Saturnine corridor, populated with industrial trading guilds and their private militias.
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Genealogy becomes paramount in a closed culture; hierarchy by heredity. Reference the roman patrician class’ death-grip obsession with lineage, or the medieval Japanese imperial court’s strict intra-elite caste system.
But in an era of extreme genetic engineering, how can bloodlines retain their importance? Perhaps this is the wrong question. Perhaps in an era of extreme genetic engineering, authentic bloodlines can only retain their importance. The longevity of an unchanged gene line demonstrates success in evolutionary competition. Over time however, the fitness of a rigidly enforced and ‘sequestered’ gene line will degrade. Consider the hemophilia of the European royal strata.
I would not want the imperial court of the inner system to be pure blue bloods, eschewing genetic manipulation. Rather I would have them take the opposite tack – and embrace genetic engineering in the pursuit of perfecting particular socially valued or distinctive attributes; a roman nose, elongated refined fingers, even the possession of certain ‘noble’ afflictions (for ex., the aforementioned hemophilia as a sign of noble lineage).
The elites should pursue genealogy with the same passion and gusto as horse breeders; studs and mares and percentages of bloodlines, enforced and suppressed gene expressions, surrogates, and gene modes des saisons.
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a bum finds a the wallet and keys of a man who jumped from a bridge
he goes to his townhouse to find something to eat or steal
is impressed and overwhelmed with the man's townhouse
showers, eats, gets cleaned up, finds some clothes
is ready to leave when he helps a woman wrestling with groceries at her door
she thanks him, but looks stunned.
‘are you the man in #560? umm..i have lived here for 3 years and have never actually seen you. you seem to leave so early in the morning and get
home so late and keep to yourself.’
they spend 30 minutes talking, having a generally warm friendly encounter.
‘well, I am so glad to have finally met you. Hope to see you soon.’ As she closes her door, the bum turns to leave but pauses and thinks for a moment, then goes back into the man's townhouse
he pours through the man's papers and keepsakes and learns that the man has no family that he speaks with, no friends, lives off a well-endowed trust fund
and
the bum moves in and takes over the mans identity
he brings warmth and sincerity to the man's identity
what makes a hermit tick? what lengths do they go to to remove themselves from society? does it become a game to avoid contact, trying to become a shadow, a phantom? does society dissolve away as a mental force in their thoughts, atrophy away or does it become an amputated impression?
what divsion line stands between a hermit and convict in solitary? the hermit, by and large, chooses their isolation, the convict has it enforced upon them. at what point does the human need for society or socialization collapse? is there anything left that we can inspect and evaluate? a hermit, however, is able to maintain walls against the Great Other, which would imply that they are seeking refuge from the world. a schizo or an autistic will be physically surrounded by others but unable or incapable of making contact.
when does the will to contact die? what is left over? do humans require contact to retain our humanity? can you love and sacrifice in a vacuum?
what defines humanity? oooh, a big question...
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genetic engineering will continue to deconstruct the human species
there will be catastrophic disasters: gene sequence specific viruses engineered to attack 'types' of people. Der Genkampf
petroleum will be replaced- hydrogen-powered locomotion and green power (in the wealthy states). the poor states will continue to be held hostage to oil politics
(cultures and civilizations do not move forward uneringly. they spasticly jerk forward and fro, in clumps andgrains, never ever as a lemming death drive.)
developed economies will be netized. a new state structure will be needed to manage and dsitribute resources. the corporate structure, the commercial backbone of the capitalist democracy, will replace the republic. it is flexible to markets and political forces, insistent on accountability, it provides a sufficient compromise between individual representation and republican government. they will begin their political evolution as projects in community development. assurances of an educated workforce by charter education. assurances of uninterrupted utilities by running their own power/water etc. net-based marketplaces create corporate agoras. employees are in fact de facto citizens of the corporation. citizenship, or regular employment, will be a reward for merit, stock shares will count towards suffrage.
great corporate collectives will arise. housing, education, security...all the needs of the middle class will be absorbed in the corporate state. the tradtional state will cede roles and responsibilities to the corporate state as their resources dwindle. a few isolated violent reactions (military or legal)by the republics against the corporate states, but they will fail over time. against, or more so, in conjunction with the homogenized corporatsists wil be the diasporae, non-corporates will glom to other modes of networked alignment, ethnic allegiance will become stronger over time - as the chinese, indian, and jewish disporaestrengthen as a formula for a successful competition against/with the corporates.
the american state, succored by its overwhelming techo-military supremancy, loses its mission, its vision - substitutes will to dominate for will to excel - and falls into the deep narcotic, insulated slumber of the unassailable. GE, nano, and the banknote net weaken the mythic cohesion of the american spirit. we are no longer united by common experience (mass-mediated or otherwise) the promise of science to make us stronger, smarter, near immortal is held like a manifest destiny or a divine IOU for services rendered to humanity.