Soul Bound

1        Soul Bound

1.2      Taking Control

1.2.6    An Assumed Role

1.2.6.12 Area one: crafting

The meadow was dotted with bushes, outcrops of craggy white rock and tents where different groups were showing off the mythoi they helped design or had crafted from the designs of others.

Heather: {Assume anything you say or do here will be recorded by someone, so try not to draw attention to yourself. I’m here as an Alderney, so if someone asks, all you know is that I offered you a lift, and stick to talking with me in chat. Oh, and if you buy anything, use CFF or the local currency.}

Nadine: {An Alderney?}

Heather: {Yep. I made the hat-and-wings design available in the MythOS clan area. There should be at least one Alderney present at each launch. It’s become a courtesy title for ‘lead engineer’.}

Nadine put a bit of mock horror into her voice: {You’re cloning yourself!}

Heather giggled: {We do our best. See ya later, alligator!}

And off she shot, leaving Nadine to extricate herself from the cargo pod and thank their Phoenix for carrying them so well on the journey. The phoenix preened itself in appreciation of the praise, and several other birds looked her way approvingly. Did that now mean Nadine had gained reputation with them, or was Sister Claire considered a separate user?

She set off to explore.

Salat Asr, Friday June 9th, 2045

The first tent she came to was a stall selling T-shirts with messages on. “Shanzhai Spirit”, “You’re an Ardy-Pi”, “Hack the 0x01K-os System”, “Datocracy Jammer”, “I, for one, welcome our noodle overlords” and many others whose meaning was lost on her. It also offered a print-while-you-wait service, for those who wanted to write their own message, and a wide variety of masks and other anti-biometric clothing hacks. She gathered she wasn’t the only person here who wanted to stick a defiant finger up at society’s pervasive surveillance.

Taped to the side of the tent was a map, showing that the event was a bit more structured than she’d thought:

Balkan Mythoi Launchfest

Area One - Crafting

Build your own, and see what others have built.

Area Two - Needs

What would help those abandoned by society to thrive?

Area Three - Stories

How should mythoi look and behave, in order to fit in?

Area Four - Economics

What not to do, and when not to do it.

7pm - Keynote speech by Namib

She was currently on the edge of Crafting, which was by far the largest of the four areas. Needs was near the road, where she could see a church steeple in the distance; Stories was centered on a restaurant next to a performance arena; and Economics was off by the start of a slope where a wide gap in the trees led uphill. Given that Heather would want to be there for the keynote, she’d have time to visit all of them.

But how on earth had an event this size been put together so fast? It had only been days since she’d come up with the idea. Admittedly she hadn’t recently checked the number of users registered on The Burrow. How much had it grown? No, that couldn’t be the reason. It must be just the prospect of getting free bots, and unemployment causing people to not have much else to do.

She could ask, except she had to avoid drawing attention to herself - better to just keep an ear open and see what she could pick up. She decided to view only a bit of the Crafting area then move on, and return to do the rest of it later. She could handle technical details, in small doses, but it was really more Heather’s thing than hers.

Nadine wandered past tents of many styles and designs, heading towards the beat of music playing a short distance away, and came across a most peculiar sight. A large touch-sensitive stage had been set out, on which a pair of creatures were dancing to a song by Ne-Yo. Each had a long tail and six legs, leading up to a toad-like head with an obscene prehensile tongue. One also had jagged horns. As squares lit up on the stage and they tried to place their limbs accurately upon them in time to the music, a screen projected onto the wall of a tent before them showed steadily increasing scores.

She's a monster (she's a monster)

Beautiful monster (beautiful monster)

Beautiful monster (beautiful monster yeah)

But I don't mind (I don't mind)

And I need her (and I need her)

Said I need her (said I need her)

Beautiful monster (whoa)

But I don't mind (I don't mind I don't I don't mind)

No I don't mind

Each had people standing near, cheering their favourite on. She moved closer, hoping to discover what was going on, and one of the bystanders noticed her interest.

Frieda: “Hey Sister. I’m Frieda. Look, we’re winning!”

Frieda was a thin girl wearing a blue wig, heavy eye makeup and a dog collar. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old, but looked like she was trying to pass for twenty. She had an Aura Psyence bluejay which she alternated between sucking on, and waving around held between two fingers.

Nadine replied carefully, in her Sister Claire voice: “This is a game?”

Frieda moved close, into Nadine’s personal space, as though talking in a loud dance club: “Nuh-uh. This isn’t for fun. This is a dance off! There’s two proposed designs for the Bukavac. We’re testing which one is more dexterous and easier to control. They’re aquatic. Should be a big help for fishermen with tangled nets. C’mon, I’ll introduce you to Rand.”

The song ended, and a different pair of creatures moved onto the stage, ready for the next heat. Frieda grabbed Nadine’s hand and pulled her towards a nearby tent. The tent was very large, and flew a flag with the CraftySquId logo on it. Nadine let herself be drawn in, rather than stumble from the high boots Heather had made her wear. Her first impression was of the secret body stash of an obsessively well organised vampire; an impression intentionally enhanced by decorations and atmospheric lighting. Dozens of people lay flat on the floor in neat rows, totally immobile.

A beaming man at the door greeted them: “Welcome to the Slumber Yard, sponsored by Soul Bound’s best crafting guild. Please walk only on the black paths. Would you like to borrow a tiara?”

Frieda waved the man off and walked rapidly down the main aisle before branching left and stopping by a blue mat on which lay a taller teenager with low-fringed black hair, a lip piercing, and a collar and eye makeup that matched Frieda’s. She impatiently waved a bluejay wielding hand in front of the goggles of the tiara that the taller teenager wore.

The teenager carefully removed the tiara, then sat up.

Frieda boomed loudly: “We won the heat. Good dancing!” before hauling them to their feet, then added “I found a newbie. Doesn’t even have a badge yet. Wants to know what’s going on. Right, Sister?”

Rand: “Pleased to meet you. We’re from Zadar, on the coast. Friedy’s the designer who proposed adding the horns to the aquatic mythoi. Her dad used to get paid not to be a fisherman, so she knows boats. I’m the gamer who saw the announcement on The Burrow and told her about them.”

Nadine: “I am warmed by your welcome. I am Sister Claire, visiting from northern Italy, and was kindly offered a lift to ‘an event of interest’ by someone passing, so I know very little. I certainly wasn’t expecting it to be quite this large. How did all of ‘this’ happen?” and she waved her arms to indicate everything around them.

They started making their way out of the Slumber Yard, careful not to disturb the others still fully immersed in velife.

Rand: “It’s evolution in action. Designs vary. Good designs get copied, then are mutated by radioactive elements like Friedy here, producing new variations and so you iterate. But anyone can claim they’re working on a great design. What matters is paws on the ground, so you can see it in real action and get people, or at least most people, to agree which is great and which is late.”

Nadine had a hard time following the jargon - memish was almost a language of its own. When did she get old? No, hang on, she didn’t want an answer to that.

Rand handed his borrowed tiara back to the greeter, who intoned, like it was received wisdom engraved in stone: “Rough Consensus And Running Code.”

Rand, nodded his head: “Yeah, right, that.”

Frieda: “I think she meant in general.”

Rand: “The event today, or the whole mythoi thing?”

Nadine: “Um, both? What do they mean to you? Is it fad? Will it be big?”

Frieda: “The mythoi are great. You know that cooking-dance chick? Well, she got kidnapped in some game or other. Her friends started a site to help her. Some people on that site want to build drones and other robots. But not just any robots. Robots that don’t steal jobs. Only there’s a theme to them. They gotta look like some creature out of old stories. I wanted to make a Jawa. Got told Star Wars isn’t old enough. Redonkulous! Even my granda wasn’t born when that came out.”

Rand: “Aaaanyway, they put out a call for places willing to beta mythoi designs, which got forwarded on all the makespace lists, the guys who run the Balkan hackfests volunteered to coordinate, pinned this as the location, mailshotted the peeps the metric picked, and zoned out the drone lanes.”

Frieda: “I didn’t give up though. Saw the global launch yesterday. Good, good, good. So I wiki’ed Balkan myths and scooted the links. Aquatics didn’t look right. Some tangles too hard to undo. Need a jagged edge to cut ‘em. Made the horns point backwards. They don’t catch, don’t unbalance.”

Rand: “It passed the safety and regression tests last night, and Alpo fabbed it for us this morning while I was driving Friedy up here on my dad’s old Harley livewire.”

Nadine: “You made that, in less than a day? Bless you, that’s astounding.”

Frieda looked at her like she was ignorant: “Nobody makes anything nowadays. People tell machines what they want and the machines make the things.”

Rand wrapped his arms around his partner: “Friedy is really good at thinking up the right things to have the machines make for her; designs that others will want to use." then added in the earnest voice of one struggling to retain hope, "If her addition ends up committed to a popular code tree, that’ll look good on her résumé. Might even get her a job, one day.”