We're celebrating Klordny Week, Superboy!

Well, the next update would be the election, and that's tomorrow, so I guess I'd better get off these things I've been sitting on.

October 8
[Aberrant] Mark Anthony Green writes in his journal: "It seems cruel that the Lord told us of Heaven. [Earth] is a satisfying world in many ways...but God dangles Heaven above us like a man teasing his dog." He opines that to attain great power — to erupt as a nova, for instance, or to be elected President — is to become like God, and vows that "If I become like God, I will not tease the people with stories of Heaven. I will teach them to love the world they have."

That's a vague relief, even if it's not clear he'd expected them to act on that love, and even though he considers power the defining attribute of a Godness.

October 9
[Aberrant] Soguk Birlesme, a baseline post-doctoral assisting Dr. Dmitri Kasheyev in his fusion research, writes home to his parents in Thailand about a recent accident at work in whose resolution he got to see Dr. Kasheyev's powers in action.

The previous week, Dr. Kasheyev had returned to the DAIKOKU facility from the inertial containment lab, after "some sort of quarrel" whose nature was a mystery to Soguk. Without Kasheyev's ability to sense subatomic structures, and his ability to solve the relevant equations even more precisely than DAIKOKU's computers, the research had stalled.

On the 8th, Dr. Nakazawa decided to show Kasheyev a test-run of a "plasma configuration we'd had some luck with." Kasheyev didn't think this was wise necessarily, and it turned out he was right: "the plasma tied itself in knots and burned a hole in the containment tube!" The plasma jet wouldn't have hurt Soguk (200,000,000° sounds like a lot, "but the plasma is so thin and dissipates so quickly that it doesn't have time to burn"), but Kasheyev threw himself in its path anyway, and "his whole body glowed" when it struck him.

Neither of them was hurt, but they went to see the doctor anyway. The doctor recommended Soguk take the day off, and he was so light-headed he agreed. The next day, the DAIKOKU staff discussed the accident only in terms of preventing a repeat. Only time will tell what effects the whole thing had.

Sorry I'm late, but I've been tired and demotivated lately.

July 10
[Aberrant] "The Voices of Clytemnestra" (the OpNet identity of Utopian nova Corby Carter) discourse.

It's entirely possible that Clytemnestra is still known as a "blogger" in a world where the Web was replaced by the OpNet. After all, the term "weblog" was invented in 1997, and "blog" was coined in early 1999. That could be just a rounding error of history.

"Objective Clytemnestra" talks about the Washington Post's recent connection of Mark Anthony Green to the Institute for Historical Review (a Holocaust-denial group) and calls Green's response a doctrine of original virtue: "One man, however fiercely he supports the propaganda of another, bears no responsibility for that other man's crimes."

The response in question was a statement of "'regret' for the 'insensitivity' of his youth" and the observation: "The people of the institute are historians; would you have some kind of original sin attach to them from a 20th century war?" (My answer is "Given that they're attempting to whitewash the reputation of that war's nigh-unquestionable villains, yes I fucking would.")

In contrast, "Narrative Clytemnestra" mentions that one Jules Courtnay, an André Corbin fanboy who carried his admiration of the Bender to the point of imitation, was arrested last month for killing his wife (in imitation of Corbin's alleged murder of Slider): "If Corbin's the innocent victim here, Jules has... struck out on his own and started redefining what being André Corbin means. If the sporty, nova-ish guy can't keep up, too bad." Finally, "Emotional Clytemnestra" sums up its opinion of original virtue with a quasi-paraphrase of Nietzsche: "If you wave your pom-poms for the monsters long enough, eventually you get to play on the monster team."

There's a certain irony there. Contrary to his optimistic statements on N-Day, candidate Portman is not 100% sanguine about how all novas will interact with baselines, and "Corb" (as Carter's delightful boot-slaves friends call him) is on his list of those to watch.

It started after N-Day, when Portman's wife Jennifer had to become something of an expert on novas purely in self-defense, as her poli-sci and history students interrupted her classes with nova-, Fireman- and quantum-power-related questions. Her old and new fields of study led her to conclude that hyperintelligent novas, "sphinxes" as she called them, would truly transcend their humanity, and would probably be unable to avoid rearranging human society to their liking. She told Randel about her theory, and they've opposed possible sphinx manipulations as best they can ever since.

They suspect Corb of being an "adder", a tool of the sphinxes, or a "smart egg", an incipient sphinx. The second guess is correct. His 2006 self-publication, Principles for an Ethical Society, lays out in public a proposal for the sort of societal reorganization that a full sphinx would conduct with discretion, and carries encoded in its complicated mathematical proofs a subliminal sales pitch. It also carries a hidden message from its caterpillar to any butterflies that may read it:

I know I am as a child to you. Before you attempt to interfere, please remember that the mass of humanity is much less than a child to you. You may grow lonely for my company in time.

All in all, it carries the feel of early Borgstromancy about it, from the period where RSean/RebeccaS were just starting to weave their spells.