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beccaelizabethToday's dreams were no fun to be dreaming but had some solid bones to hang a plot on.
There's a lot of messy blood and violene in this one, and some dodgy treatment of mental illness, and cruelty to both robots and clones.
There was FTL travel by ansible, experientially instant but visibly taking a few seconds, as people are scanned and downloaded and rebuilt at the other end. A lot of people avoid it, since the scanning process is destructive. It looks like a dark ritual, there's a circle and everything inside the circle goes away like a scan line descending, goes up into rainbows, mostly, but also down into a big red puddle, until there's just a circle of blood left. ... you arrive a little woozy, but the can print up more blood for you right there, they've got the pattern. They do some sort of stasis thing first so you're as still as can be and then they start with your head, so yo don't really remember the gross bits, you just find yourself in the circle at the other end. The main damage is psychological, knowing you died to get there. People don't travel much, and usually only the military. Sending off new soldiers is a big public spectacle. Everyone's seen it.
... there are some internal contradictions in the official story of the technology. Like if stasis holds them still then why does blood come out? Makes sense if their heart is still pumping but once there's no heart there there's still blood. And if it's that lossy of blood how come it's good enough at brains? And really, stepping in you just feel woozy, and maybe see rainbows, you don't get any actual problems.
Turns out the scan is not in fact destructive. Meaning the you that arrives at the other end is a duplicate. And one that can be printed from a stored pattern.
The public spectacle and instilled fear of travel is so people dont ask too closely why nobody goes home again. Combine that with standard military censorship about where they actually are, and you send out a squad, but receive them pretty much everywhere. Like the Roman legions the only place they don't serve is home. And like the Roman empire they ain't exactly citizens out there, not until they're old enough to retire, and really, why be careful enough of your men to do that, when you can let them die and then copy out the most successful ones.
So someone kind of Riley Finn and kind of Steve Rogers was supposed to be shipping out, but he changed his mind at the last instant, started feeling woozy then threw himself out of the circle.
... cat pigeons.
So, not plot there, but a setup.
Next set:
There was a big room with a pillar in the middle, off white walls, ceiling, floor, and eight of us lying in there. Distinctive accents, two by two. English, Irish, Scots, Welsh. I woke up propped against a pillar, kept my eyes closed a bit to hear them all grumbling, then looked around and saw a bunch of people I'd never met. Only as time went by I recognised them. There was Jack O'Neill, for crucial one. Some guy played by Riz Ahmed, an asian lady I think I've seen in fancasts. Oz from Buffy the vampire slayer. And after a while, wheeled in unconscious in his chair, a ninth person, Harrison Wells.
... or as it turns out, probably Eobard Thawne, trying to deal with a problem he made for himself.
Everyone in there turns out to have problems. Depression, anxiety, PTSD, epic anger management issues. I'm me, so I'm autistic, agoraphobic, and initially really bad at people. But this is emphatically not set in the here and now. Everyone in there is missing their phones, their laptops can't connect to anything, but the implants in their brains are still working. Without a phone for a boost they need direct contact, but mind to mind they could probably still network.
And then someone's phone gets throw back in.
We don't trust it. Don't know where it's been. Only its owner (ginger, tall, but I don't know him) could actually, check, of course, but he didnt much fancy plugging it into his brain to find out.
So I offered him a hand. Two heads are better than one, and have better virus checks. He's iffy about it still, so someone on his other side (Jon Snow? Hobbit guy? Black hair, fuzzy, dishevelled by now) makes the same offer, and we mesh as a v.
Three heads are emphatically better than one. We try and keep on task - check the phone, connect to somewhere, if all else fails at least try the laptops - and do indeed get red light warnings all over the damn thing, so he drops it like it's hot. But it's harder to drop each other. This kind of thing can be intimate, can be beautiful, can be such a rush. Genius and creativity unlocked, and it feels better than sex.
But unless you're drift compatible your signal gets dropped, all that foreign mental stuff rejected, as the host mind protects itself.
But you do pick up quirks. Images. Sometimes a chunk of data. Some temporary, some less so. There'd been attempts to copy paste skills, but stacking quirks turned out to be a great way to end up in mental hospital. Minds have trouble with the cognitive dissonance, the emotional resonance without source, all connotation no denotation, the attitudes and actions that just don't fit. Some input feels like splinters. Compatibility is key.
I disconnect from this guy. Feels like we got along pretty well. But also feels like I got a lot from him. "Dude, you need to work on your firewalls. I've got patterns, chevrons... Stargates???"
So I turn and zero in on O'Neill, who I maybe vaguely recognised from the news, but now *know*. "Robots, uploads, those little brain spikes that turned into all this..." I waved at my own brain. "You don't just know this shit, you went *first*."
"Yeah, that was me." He's rubbing his eyes and looking... tired even by our standards.
"General..."
"Colonel," he snaps back like a correction.
"You're the one that started the damn war!"
And funnily enough that gets everyone's attention, most of it hostile on one or the other of us.
But he says "That was *not* me." He glares.
"What, you were only following orders?" someone sneers.
"I wasn't even there."
"Cause that was General O'Neill," I say thoughtfully.
"I'm the clone," he confirms. "I got to know in advance I'd look this good." He waves at his face.
He looks all silver fox like the documentaries we remember, but that would be a little bit of a stretch, by now. Not impossible, with the tech he brought back, but...
"Second edition." Someone spits.
"If you think you can walk away from responsibility by changing bodies..."
"No, dude, I know this one. He's no edition, he's illicit."
Widespread hissing and some swears.
"The laws were because of me, not about me."
"You're JON?"
"Jonathan O'Neill. The other one."
"Shit, I thought you were a myth."
"A cautionary tale. Did you really try and kill your original?"
"I just tried to get my life back. I was a Colonel and he dropped me off at high school."
"Nightmare."
"There was a thing about his wife..." one lady said, edging away.
"He could keep his wife. He'd treated our husband like shit."
"So you..."
"Just tried to see him. Didn't have the clearance any more, but I needed to see him. It... did not go so well."
"So they made laws."
(okay, so, I didn't dream that entire conversation, I dreamed the idea of it, Clone O'Neill in a society shaped really a lot by his misfortunes.)
So there were some other things that happened, only sequence had gone peculiar. At first it seemed like because dream, bu it turned out there was a weirder reason. Memory copy pasting, but without the mismatched feeling. Our own memories, but not continuous. How many times had we woken up in here, and what order had they happened in? We didn't know.
But sometimes we woke up and one of us... went wrong.
They started out seeming better, much better. Confident, smooth, no stuttering. I mean I was getting more fluent the longer I was here, but they just woke up... better.
Until they broke.
Could break lots of ways. Tantrums, fighting, RA curled up in a ball sweating and rocking. But when I put a hand on his shoulder he'd turn around and bite. When I tried to back away she'd lunge and bite. Biting was always a thing.
Then a time skip.
And no bite marks.
So we had memories, but no evidence. No sense of first or last. Just s real as anything, even though they couldn't happen.
When the steel rain came we all huddled together around the pillar, made ourselves small, but it was raining ball bearings from space, it was basically area effect machine gun fire. First there were holes in the walls floor ceiling absolutely everywhere, marching across the floor towards us, then...
we woke up.
No time, no time sense, could make sense of all this.
The actual simplest explanation by now was we were all second, fifth, twenty fifth editions, with some epic level quirks.
But the ones that bite? Sometimes they get injured. Sometimes someone tried to stop them. Sometimes they bled an opalescent white.
And then reset. And all those things seemed to have happened a moment ago, before we slept. And none happened in a proper straight line.
But I was getting better, better enough it worried me, considering...
And we all had quirks. We could only remember this one time with the redhead's phone, but, everyone picked up something. One guy was doing art on actual paper, and he had the left half of a page be one big design, and the right be a lot of writing that didn't make entire sense. I saw the design on one page and said "Hey, Oz, weren't you going to get that as a tattoo?" And then got really puzzled because why would I say that? But Oz was like, "Yeah." He came over and looked at it, and the writing clearly meant more to him than to me. His face did a lot of things. But the artist guy was quiet, as he had been since he'd started to draw.
So we were getting quirks off each other. And knowledge. And maybe skills.
And our assorted mental health issues were... changing.
And then sometimes someone would be their best healthy self... briefly. Until the biting.
So, here was a thing: I remembered Sunnydale library. I remembered hiding in it. I was starting to remember why Oz did.
And I was pretty sure by now whoever chose us didn't. Because his anger management issues? They went a little deeper than our captors had accounted for. They came with actual demons.
No, he said, just wolves.
So there's a bunch of things at once -
Teal'c and junior being copy pasted into the same robot body, which went poorly as the two minds coldn't integrate or get along.
Clones, people with the same memories, who couldn't work together because divergent memories made them different enough people their other just grates, and because everyone they love only comes in one edition. Custody of your whole entire life is a little difficult to arrange. And any memory with emotional weight will do the same damn thing in however many copies, even if what they see in the mirror doesn't match. SG1 did bodyswaps and still knew themselves. A weird face in the mirror is just another day at work. Who we care about matters.
and
Eobard Thawne
as Harrison Wells.
Now if he just copied the body and pasted in his own mind, he doesn't have a problem, mental health wise I mean. Identity theft, and, handsome. What's not to love?
But it's a lot harder to pass that way, and Wells had the kind of genius many would want to add to their own resources. So if Thawne kept any part of him, he could be splintering.
And this edition of him is in a wheelchair, which, some people would want to treat by copying into a new and improved body.
Not sure how upgraded the robots were, but can imagine how improved they could be.
So if Thawne is the researcher, he's trying to make a two mind gestalt in his own brain.
But why stop there?
He's got a room full of brains with classified data and experience in fields he doesn't have, including the longest lived experience of being the second copy, not permitted to walk back into the lives you remember, outshone or overshadowed by the original.
He's got a whole lot of toolkits there trying to cope with issues he's been experiencing, like the PTSD of remembering one's own death.
And he's got mental health patients with their brains rigged so they can be tinkered with from the outside, with malware or quite the other sort.
So even if he needs that kind of cybernetic assistance...
the experiments can keep running until they come up with someone stable.
Which could be great, but, biting.
And the reason Oz never got a tattoo.
There's an actual infectious werewolf in the mix, and that the cybernetics have nothing for. If his bodily fluids contaminate the clone matrix we're going to get some spectacular results. And if they don't?
All this messing with time means he doesn't know what phase the moon is in.
So, there's going to be problems.
But, there's also plot bones: matrixed up skill loading but quirked, brain networking but only stable if you're drift compatible, having the second set of a powerful emotional memory and knowing the one you care about does not remember caring about you. Identity theft, then trying to stay in control of the new blended person. (Be careful who you pretend to be.) Anger management issues and PTSD, but trying to take a shortcut on the therapeutic work necessary by copy pasting from people who have lived with the same thing longer. Because being mentally ill develops related skills.
Just there's a really good chance of joining all that together in a way that makes their worst selves. And any guy who'd try it by kidnapping everyone like this has quite a lot of worst to be.
So it's nine people in a room running variations, changing every time they wake up, but also every time they mesh minds, becoming for at least a little while more like each other. Starting out very unlike, and with a room full of distinctive accents.
If I get this coherent I'd really want to run it with actors. They'd bring a lot of depth to it.
Because there's one guy trying to do a melting pot on all the rest and skim off the cream to enhance himself, but the others all want to keep their distinctive strengths.
I have not seen that sense 8 thing, but suspect my subconscious borrowed from bits of that as well.
I don't know how busy the background needs to be. Robot bodies? Clones? Mind networking and copy pasting is key. Multi track memories that remember getting dead?
But both bits of dream were about trying to build a good bits version. One by running a bunch of copies and only keeping the best one, this by trying to blend best bits from people the experimenters probably think of as rejects.
They will learn their best is still pretty impressive.
There's a lot of mileage in this.
There's a lot of messy blood and violene in this one, and some dodgy treatment of mental illness, and cruelty to both robots and clones.
There was FTL travel by ansible, experientially instant but visibly taking a few seconds, as people are scanned and downloaded and rebuilt at the other end. A lot of people avoid it, since the scanning process is destructive. It looks like a dark ritual, there's a circle and everything inside the circle goes away like a scan line descending, goes up into rainbows, mostly, but also down into a big red puddle, until there's just a circle of blood left. ... you arrive a little woozy, but the can print up more blood for you right there, they've got the pattern. They do some sort of stasis thing first so you're as still as can be and then they start with your head, so yo don't really remember the gross bits, you just find yourself in the circle at the other end. The main damage is psychological, knowing you died to get there. People don't travel much, and usually only the military. Sending off new soldiers is a big public spectacle. Everyone's seen it.
... there are some internal contradictions in the official story of the technology. Like if stasis holds them still then why does blood come out? Makes sense if their heart is still pumping but once there's no heart there there's still blood. And if it's that lossy of blood how come it's good enough at brains? And really, stepping in you just feel woozy, and maybe see rainbows, you don't get any actual problems.
Turns out the scan is not in fact destructive. Meaning the you that arrives at the other end is a duplicate. And one that can be printed from a stored pattern.
The public spectacle and instilled fear of travel is so people dont ask too closely why nobody goes home again. Combine that with standard military censorship about where they actually are, and you send out a squad, but receive them pretty much everywhere. Like the Roman legions the only place they don't serve is home. And like the Roman empire they ain't exactly citizens out there, not until they're old enough to retire, and really, why be careful enough of your men to do that, when you can let them die and then copy out the most successful ones.
So someone kind of Riley Finn and kind of Steve Rogers was supposed to be shipping out, but he changed his mind at the last instant, started feeling woozy then threw himself out of the circle.
... cat pigeons.
So, not plot there, but a setup.
Next set:
There was a big room with a pillar in the middle, off white walls, ceiling, floor, and eight of us lying in there. Distinctive accents, two by two. English, Irish, Scots, Welsh. I woke up propped against a pillar, kept my eyes closed a bit to hear them all grumbling, then looked around and saw a bunch of people I'd never met. Only as time went by I recognised them. There was Jack O'Neill, for crucial one. Some guy played by Riz Ahmed, an asian lady I think I've seen in fancasts. Oz from Buffy the vampire slayer. And after a while, wheeled in unconscious in his chair, a ninth person, Harrison Wells.
... or as it turns out, probably Eobard Thawne, trying to deal with a problem he made for himself.
Everyone in there turns out to have problems. Depression, anxiety, PTSD, epic anger management issues. I'm me, so I'm autistic, agoraphobic, and initially really bad at people. But this is emphatically not set in the here and now. Everyone in there is missing their phones, their laptops can't connect to anything, but the implants in their brains are still working. Without a phone for a boost they need direct contact, but mind to mind they could probably still network.
And then someone's phone gets throw back in.
We don't trust it. Don't know where it's been. Only its owner (ginger, tall, but I don't know him) could actually, check, of course, but he didnt much fancy plugging it into his brain to find out.
So I offered him a hand. Two heads are better than one, and have better virus checks. He's iffy about it still, so someone on his other side (Jon Snow? Hobbit guy? Black hair, fuzzy, dishevelled by now) makes the same offer, and we mesh as a v.
Three heads are emphatically better than one. We try and keep on task - check the phone, connect to somewhere, if all else fails at least try the laptops - and do indeed get red light warnings all over the damn thing, so he drops it like it's hot. But it's harder to drop each other. This kind of thing can be intimate, can be beautiful, can be such a rush. Genius and creativity unlocked, and it feels better than sex.
But unless you're drift compatible your signal gets dropped, all that foreign mental stuff rejected, as the host mind protects itself.
But you do pick up quirks. Images. Sometimes a chunk of data. Some temporary, some less so. There'd been attempts to copy paste skills, but stacking quirks turned out to be a great way to end up in mental hospital. Minds have trouble with the cognitive dissonance, the emotional resonance without source, all connotation no denotation, the attitudes and actions that just don't fit. Some input feels like splinters. Compatibility is key.
I disconnect from this guy. Feels like we got along pretty well. But also feels like I got a lot from him. "Dude, you need to work on your firewalls. I've got patterns, chevrons... Stargates???"
So I turn and zero in on O'Neill, who I maybe vaguely recognised from the news, but now *know*. "Robots, uploads, those little brain spikes that turned into all this..." I waved at my own brain. "You don't just know this shit, you went *first*."
"Yeah, that was me." He's rubbing his eyes and looking... tired even by our standards.
"General..."
"Colonel," he snaps back like a correction.
"You're the one that started the damn war!"
And funnily enough that gets everyone's attention, most of it hostile on one or the other of us.
But he says "That was *not* me." He glares.
"What, you were only following orders?" someone sneers.
"I wasn't even there."
"Cause that was General O'Neill," I say thoughtfully.
"I'm the clone," he confirms. "I got to know in advance I'd look this good." He waves at his face.
He looks all silver fox like the documentaries we remember, but that would be a little bit of a stretch, by now. Not impossible, with the tech he brought back, but...
"Second edition." Someone spits.
"If you think you can walk away from responsibility by changing bodies..."
"No, dude, I know this one. He's no edition, he's illicit."
Widespread hissing and some swears.
"The laws were because of me, not about me."
"You're JON?"
"Jonathan O'Neill. The other one."
"Shit, I thought you were a myth."
"A cautionary tale. Did you really try and kill your original?"
"I just tried to get my life back. I was a Colonel and he dropped me off at high school."
"Nightmare."
"There was a thing about his wife..." one lady said, edging away.
"He could keep his wife. He'd treated our husband like shit."
"So you..."
"Just tried to see him. Didn't have the clearance any more, but I needed to see him. It... did not go so well."
"So they made laws."
(okay, so, I didn't dream that entire conversation, I dreamed the idea of it, Clone O'Neill in a society shaped really a lot by his misfortunes.)
So there were some other things that happened, only sequence had gone peculiar. At first it seemed like because dream, bu it turned out there was a weirder reason. Memory copy pasting, but without the mismatched feeling. Our own memories, but not continuous. How many times had we woken up in here, and what order had they happened in? We didn't know.
But sometimes we woke up and one of us... went wrong.
They started out seeming better, much better. Confident, smooth, no stuttering. I mean I was getting more fluent the longer I was here, but they just woke up... better.
Until they broke.
Could break lots of ways. Tantrums, fighting, RA curled up in a ball sweating and rocking. But when I put a hand on his shoulder he'd turn around and bite. When I tried to back away she'd lunge and bite. Biting was always a thing.
Then a time skip.
And no bite marks.
So we had memories, but no evidence. No sense of first or last. Just s real as anything, even though they couldn't happen.
When the steel rain came we all huddled together around the pillar, made ourselves small, but it was raining ball bearings from space, it was basically area effect machine gun fire. First there were holes in the walls floor ceiling absolutely everywhere, marching across the floor towards us, then...
we woke up.
No time, no time sense, could make sense of all this.
The actual simplest explanation by now was we were all second, fifth, twenty fifth editions, with some epic level quirks.
But the ones that bite? Sometimes they get injured. Sometimes someone tried to stop them. Sometimes they bled an opalescent white.
And then reset. And all those things seemed to have happened a moment ago, before we slept. And none happened in a proper straight line.
But I was getting better, better enough it worried me, considering...
And we all had quirks. We could only remember this one time with the redhead's phone, but, everyone picked up something. One guy was doing art on actual paper, and he had the left half of a page be one big design, and the right be a lot of writing that didn't make entire sense. I saw the design on one page and said "Hey, Oz, weren't you going to get that as a tattoo?" And then got really puzzled because why would I say that? But Oz was like, "Yeah." He came over and looked at it, and the writing clearly meant more to him than to me. His face did a lot of things. But the artist guy was quiet, as he had been since he'd started to draw.
So we were getting quirks off each other. And knowledge. And maybe skills.
And our assorted mental health issues were... changing.
And then sometimes someone would be their best healthy self... briefly. Until the biting.
So, here was a thing: I remembered Sunnydale library. I remembered hiding in it. I was starting to remember why Oz did.
And I was pretty sure by now whoever chose us didn't. Because his anger management issues? They went a little deeper than our captors had accounted for. They came with actual demons.
No, he said, just wolves.
So there's a bunch of things at once -
Teal'c and junior being copy pasted into the same robot body, which went poorly as the two minds coldn't integrate or get along.
Clones, people with the same memories, who couldn't work together because divergent memories made them different enough people their other just grates, and because everyone they love only comes in one edition. Custody of your whole entire life is a little difficult to arrange. And any memory with emotional weight will do the same damn thing in however many copies, even if what they see in the mirror doesn't match. SG1 did bodyswaps and still knew themselves. A weird face in the mirror is just another day at work. Who we care about matters.
and
Eobard Thawne
as Harrison Wells.
Now if he just copied the body and pasted in his own mind, he doesn't have a problem, mental health wise I mean. Identity theft, and, handsome. What's not to love?
But it's a lot harder to pass that way, and Wells had the kind of genius many would want to add to their own resources. So if Thawne kept any part of him, he could be splintering.
And this edition of him is in a wheelchair, which, some people would want to treat by copying into a new and improved body.
Not sure how upgraded the robots were, but can imagine how improved they could be.
So if Thawne is the researcher, he's trying to make a two mind gestalt in his own brain.
But why stop there?
He's got a room full of brains with classified data and experience in fields he doesn't have, including the longest lived experience of being the second copy, not permitted to walk back into the lives you remember, outshone or overshadowed by the original.
He's got a whole lot of toolkits there trying to cope with issues he's been experiencing, like the PTSD of remembering one's own death.
And he's got mental health patients with their brains rigged so they can be tinkered with from the outside, with malware or quite the other sort.
So even if he needs that kind of cybernetic assistance...
the experiments can keep running until they come up with someone stable.
Which could be great, but, biting.
And the reason Oz never got a tattoo.
There's an actual infectious werewolf in the mix, and that the cybernetics have nothing for. If his bodily fluids contaminate the clone matrix we're going to get some spectacular results. And if they don't?
All this messing with time means he doesn't know what phase the moon is in.
So, there's going to be problems.
But, there's also plot bones: matrixed up skill loading but quirked, brain networking but only stable if you're drift compatible, having the second set of a powerful emotional memory and knowing the one you care about does not remember caring about you. Identity theft, then trying to stay in control of the new blended person. (Be careful who you pretend to be.) Anger management issues and PTSD, but trying to take a shortcut on the therapeutic work necessary by copy pasting from people who have lived with the same thing longer. Because being mentally ill develops related skills.
Just there's a really good chance of joining all that together in a way that makes their worst selves. And any guy who'd try it by kidnapping everyone like this has quite a lot of worst to be.
So it's nine people in a room running variations, changing every time they wake up, but also every time they mesh minds, becoming for at least a little while more like each other. Starting out very unlike, and with a room full of distinctive accents.
If I get this coherent I'd really want to run it with actors. They'd bring a lot of depth to it.
Because there's one guy trying to do a melting pot on all the rest and skim off the cream to enhance himself, but the others all want to keep their distinctive strengths.
I have not seen that sense 8 thing, but suspect my subconscious borrowed from bits of that as well.
I don't know how busy the background needs to be. Robot bodies? Clones? Mind networking and copy pasting is key. Multi track memories that remember getting dead?
But both bits of dream were about trying to build a good bits version. One by running a bunch of copies and only keeping the best one, this by trying to blend best bits from people the experimenters probably think of as rejects.
They will learn their best is still pretty impressive.
There's a lot of mileage in this.