3.0 KiB
'Triangle Opportunity', a two part story concerning how a machine virus might look/behave.
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Author: u/Aquareon *
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Score: 10
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Created: 2015-06-18T12:15:39
Post:
Comments:
u/None [+8] (a day later)
[deleted]
u/Aquareon [+1] (a day later)
Haha! Guilty. But while people here are smart cookies, there's a great many people in the world who won't catch on if it isn't somewhat overt, most of whom are in the target audience.
u/Drazelic [+3] Dai-Gurren Brigade (6 hours later)
Feels kind of cheap to me. If the entire world got consumed by E-Hance eventually, why would a third of the world being un-consumed make it possible for non-Hanced people to survive? You'd figure that they'd just get hanced right back again.
u/Aquareon [+1] (12 hours later)
Shortages of E-hancers due to war with the C-Hanced. That particular part is intended to be a metaphor for how religions chill out as they grow older, no longer torturing or killing heretics/apostates. The in-story reasoning is that they'll abide the existence of the dehanced long enough to manufacture enough E-hancers to bring them back into the fold, rather than killing them all.
u/Drazelic [+4] Dai-Gurren Brigade (13 hours later)
Why would a machine virus 'chill out'? The very idea that the hancers can relent kind of ruins the whole... relentless thing which was what made them kind of scary in the first place. It's weak- like if a paperclipper paperclipped a third of the Milky Way and went 'alright, yeah, I'm good'. I feel like the author just wanted an excuse to put in a bunch of uninfected dudes so alien machine viruses could infect them for artificial existential horror, rather than buckling down and committing to the logical consequences of all factors involved.
Tl;dr: I don't feel like this satisfies the sane/consistency check for rational fiction or the 'nothing happens because of the plot' requirement.
u/Aquareon [+2] (13 hours later)
Why would a machine virus 'chill out'?
Access to more hosts, if it can wait a short while. It's human intelligence doing that strategizing, the E-Hancer just provides the overall direction. You're right that the E-Hancer is too simple to make a decision like that. It doesn't. The human brain it's controlling does. Hard concept to articulate.
Imagine a complex intelligence completely under the control of an extremely simple one. The complex intelligence is not in the driver's seat, it's just a tool. Whatever the rudimentary intelligence wants, the complex one then devises the best way to achieve it. The simple controller doesn't have to be smart, because it's got the whip hand over something that is.
u/Aquareon [+5] (13 seconds later)
Part 2 here
u/Sagebrysh [+2] Rank 7 Pragmatist (a day later)
Let overwrite, let override.