7.5 KiB
The Culture has some objections to virtual hells, and the construct known as 'The Matrix' certainly qualifies...
-
Author: u/PeridexisErrant put aside fear for courage, and death for life*
-
Score: 34
-
Created: 2014-08-19T04:28:07
Post:
Comments:
u/None [+10] (14 hours later)
I find it hard to say much other than: "LOL, the Culture, messing up people's perfectly good genocidal wars by being all enlightened and shit."
EDIT: Upon finishing the story, WAIT HOLY SHIT DID YOU JUST SHIP A CULTURE MIND WITH AGENT SMITH?
u/pedanterrific [+10] (16 hours later)
He was shipped With Muffled Oars, yes.
Edit: sorry, couldn't resist. Anyway! Isn't the later claim by the Mind that Neo and everyone else but Smith were nonsentient subroutines directly contradicted by the third-person-omniscient narrative access we have to Neo's thoughts? There's a section from Neo's point of view, he doesn't sound nonsentient.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
Anyway! Isn't the later claim by the Mind that Neo and everyone else but Smith were nonsentient subroutines directly contradicted by the third-person-omniscient narrative access we have to Neo's thoughts?
Seemingly, but Smith was found on a tiny device, rather than on a whole planet. And you know, that thing about harvesting humans' body heat made no sense at all.
u/pedanterrific [+2] (a day later)
Well, yes, I was really just focusing on the "non-sentient" part.
It does kind of render everything else the Mind says suspect when we have an example of it outright lying to Smith, but I doubt that was the actual intention of the author.
u/Prezombie [+7] (2 days later)
Neat.
It depresses me a little that after several decades and the author's unfairly early death, there's still more canon volumes of The Culture series than fanfics.
The Culture should not be left to die.
u/PeridexisErrant [+1] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (2 days later)
Don't worry, there's plenty more on other sites - though still far less than deserved.
u/TimeLoopedPowerGamer [+9] Utopian Smut Peddler (a day later)
*edit after actually RTFF:
I admit it: I've been nerdbaited. Though not, I think, the way this post was meant to. And it was a success, as I actually read the story.
So. This is The Matrix In Name Only. Dirty pool. Tag that shit AU.
But still, well written. I'm not wrong, though. It wasn't a good tagline. And it clearly tried to play on a widely-held, and mistaken, view of the subject to generate interest.
It would have been far better just to have used a line from the summary:
When powerful alien AIs discover the Matrix, whose side will they be on? And why? [Culture x The Matrix]
But noooo, OP had to sex it up and-
Okay. Fine.
http://i.imgur.com/qmhc10v.jpg
Still, keeping the rest of this here because it remains accurate, and because OP should be ashamed.
The construct known as 'The Matrix' certainly qualifies.
This is not obviously true. The Matrix's functionality, for the VAST majority of "users" (hundreds of thousands, maybe millions -- most likely not billions) is simply an imitation of late 20th century urban life. Boredom is the worst we're ever shown, other than a terrorist (Morpheus) going around killing people. Like Neo does in the lobby scene. And that's hardly the machines' fault.
As we learn in the extended pieces, The Matrix was created after a failed human global genocide of AIs, followed by an overwhelming machine intelligence counterattack. In the aftermath, they potted survivors in a virtual world, for what can easily be seen as literally humanitarian purposes. The Earth was no longer anything but a smoking ruin, but instead of finishing the job, they kept humanity alive and safely contained. According to Agent Smith, they even tried to give them perfect virtual utopias first, beforing settling on the grey, boring Matrix seen in the movies. As for the canon human battery "explanation," that is given during a rushed recruitment drive by a religious zealot who might not know an amp from his ass. It certainly doesn't make any sense from a physics standpoint.
But in any case, the canon Matrix is hardly a virtual hell. It isn't even clear that any crimes are taking place in this world, or that there is any unnecessary human suffering at all. It is bad, really bad, that people are stuck in a system of control like that, but it isn't exactly the most evil thing around, and certainly doesn't compare to Banks' Culture novel virtual hells.
So 7/10 for pithy tag lines, 2/10 for
rational analysisnerdbaiting.
u/MadScientist14159 [+2] WIP: Sodium Hypochlorite (Rational Bleach) Eventually. Maybe. (3 days later)
Actually, the second gen matrix was a simulated hell.
That's where the phasing agents in white suits in the sequels come from.
The current Matrix is the third gen.
u/TimeLoopedPowerGamer [+3] Utopian Smut Peddler (3 days later)
That's where the phasing agents in white suits in the sequels come from.
Don't be silly. They never made a sequel, let alone sequels. Can you imagine how bad those would have been, what with big budget action movie studio pressures, and without the fresh, indie artistic vision of the Wachowskis? Some even say, partially stolen vision, which only makes The Matrix more out there and edgy. But that wouldn't, couldn't be allowed to continue in sequels.
Everyone would know this going in. And yet, everyone would have felt compelled to see them anyway. The Wachowskis themselves would have become part of a system of control, to turn a joyful fanbase into just another series of box office ticket sales.
That would have been the real virtual hell. And only something extreme, like a series of separately released, collaborative animated shorts and short stories by several creative geniuses, working directly from the original Wachowski vision, would have saved anything of the IP after something like that.
Especially if the final sequel was just one big infodump, adding new things to the series that didn't make any fucking sense at all.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+2] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (8 hours later)
Well done. Smith doesn't get enough sympathy for the hell he/it is in.
u/lucraft [+1] (3 hours later)
Very good!
u/Geminii27 [+1] (10 hours later)
I remember seeing something similar on a Star Trek episode, where they got rid of a troublesome AI by surreptitiously transferring it into a complete virtual universe running on a small chunk of hardware. Being Star Trek, of course, they didn't then immediately proceed to wipe the hardware, and I don't think it was rigged to continuously destruction-test the AI.
u/JackStargazer [+7] Primordial Apologist (10 hours later)
Moriarty.
Not even close, they programmed a full on lifetime of randomly generated adventures for him and his ladyfriend, exploring the cosmos as they had originally hoped for.
Considering how sci-fi normally treats AI, it was a welcome change. And certainly better than their first response to him which was 'Turn it off and leave it that way', which he called them out on.
u/SaintPeter74 [+1] (15 hours later)
This was delightful! Thanks for the link!