[muse] dreams
Apr. 11th, 2004 11:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coronaviridaeThe Song Demon:
It exists somewhere.
A Garden of Eden, a paradise, supported only by the power of a single song. It has a caretaker--the Song Demon. She is as old and wily as the world itself--many worlds, actually, for the appearance of her garden marks a time of the old world's ending and the new world's beginning. The Song Demon has played a role in the end of hundreds of worlds, bringing them to their rightful end even as her questions select the two people to restart the new world.
The Garden is a thing of legend only--for the most part. That is, until the end of the world itself. It does not appear until the world is already ending--already beginning to spin down and die. Then, only then, does the Song begin to play and the Garden appears. People are drawn inexorably to the Garden, but only two will be allowed to enter: A man, and a woman.
Once inside the Garden, they are subject to the Song Demon--her ranting, her incessant laughter, her singing with the Song--and her questions. She asks only two questions of the chosen pair--'What is honor?' of the man, and 'What is power?' of the woman. If she does not receive satisfactory answers, she ends the world, and the man and woman are chosen to become the Adam and Eve of the new existence.
If she does receive a satisfactory answer--and oh, how frustrating that is for the Song Demon!--then the chosen pair are allowed to eat of the Tree of Life, gaining the wisdom and longevity to repair the dying world. Either way, they become the parents of the new existence.
The Corps:
Humankind is in the midst of a civil war. The Dominion has sold its soul to AI, becoming a race of almost unbeatable cyborgs who rely on AI architectures that give them a thousand times the computational power of the human mind. Their battle plans (not unlike Equilibrium's Gun Katas) have been mathematically selected for the highest likelihood of success. They must win, because they are superior.
Except they lack one thing--their AIs have made them lose touch with their human intuition. A clever, intuitive planner--a true genius of human instinct and intuition--can still defeat them, but such people are few and far between. One was the general who led the pure humans to victory during the last war--but he is dead, killed by an AI assassin, and now humanity is defenseless.
But there's hope. A small school of the general's followers have banded together, to collect the next generation of warriors against the AI. Many of them are children and teenagers, selected because their creativity and imagination were exceptional in school. They are run through an initial battery of tests to plumb the depths of their intuition--and judge their loyalty to the cause, often through cruel questions like, 'Has you ever lost a family member to a Dominion attack?'
From there, they are trained in the use of captured Dominion battle armors, with a caged AI architecture that, while intelligent, is limited so that it cannot interfere with its pilot's intuition.
Among the latest crop of trainees is one boy--the younger brother of the man they were grooming to be the next general. Except--that man betrayed the school to the hands of the Dominion, leading to a raid that led to the deaths, capture, or conversion of all of his classmates, and the near-total destruction of the school. The last time the boy saw his older brother was on that fateful day when the school was betrayed, the Dominion strike team marched in to meet the celebrating traitors. He'd looked his brother in the eyes, and seen the grief and pain that was there--before he turned and attacked the nearest Dominion soldier, and was subsequently cut down.
Now that boy must live with the burden of his infamous heritage, and his peers' scorn and rejection, while trying to learn to be the kind of soldier needed to defeat the Dominion.
I've been having unusual dreams lately.
muse
It exists somewhere.
A Garden of Eden, a paradise, supported only by the power of a single song. It has a caretaker--the Song Demon. She is as old and wily as the world itself--many worlds, actually, for the appearance of her garden marks a time of the old world's ending and the new world's beginning. The Song Demon has played a role in the end of hundreds of worlds, bringing them to their rightful end even as her questions select the two people to restart the new world.
The Garden is a thing of legend only--for the most part. That is, until the end of the world itself. It does not appear until the world is already ending--already beginning to spin down and die. Then, only then, does the Song begin to play and the Garden appears. People are drawn inexorably to the Garden, but only two will be allowed to enter: A man, and a woman.
Once inside the Garden, they are subject to the Song Demon--her ranting, her incessant laughter, her singing with the Song--and her questions. She asks only two questions of the chosen pair--'What is honor?' of the man, and 'What is power?' of the woman. If she does not receive satisfactory answers, she ends the world, and the man and woman are chosen to become the Adam and Eve of the new existence.
If she does receive a satisfactory answer--and oh, how frustrating that is for the Song Demon!--then the chosen pair are allowed to eat of the Tree of Life, gaining the wisdom and longevity to repair the dying world. Either way, they become the parents of the new existence.
The Corps:
Humankind is in the midst of a civil war. The Dominion has sold its soul to AI, becoming a race of almost unbeatable cyborgs who rely on AI architectures that give them a thousand times the computational power of the human mind. Their battle plans (not unlike Equilibrium's Gun Katas) have been mathematically selected for the highest likelihood of success. They must win, because they are superior.
Except they lack one thing--their AIs have made them lose touch with their human intuition. A clever, intuitive planner--a true genius of human instinct and intuition--can still defeat them, but such people are few and far between. One was the general who led the pure humans to victory during the last war--but he is dead, killed by an AI assassin, and now humanity is defenseless.
But there's hope. A small school of the general's followers have banded together, to collect the next generation of warriors against the AI. Many of them are children and teenagers, selected because their creativity and imagination were exceptional in school. They are run through an initial battery of tests to plumb the depths of their intuition--and judge their loyalty to the cause, often through cruel questions like, 'Has you ever lost a family member to a Dominion attack?'
From there, they are trained in the use of captured Dominion battle armors, with a caged AI architecture that, while intelligent, is limited so that it cannot interfere with its pilot's intuition.
Among the latest crop of trainees is one boy--the younger brother of the man they were grooming to be the next general. Except--that man betrayed the school to the hands of the Dominion, leading to a raid that led to the deaths, capture, or conversion of all of his classmates, and the near-total destruction of the school. The last time the boy saw his older brother was on that fateful day when the school was betrayed, the Dominion strike team marched in to meet the celebrating traitors. He'd looked his brother in the eyes, and seen the grief and pain that was there--before he turned and attacked the nearest Dominion soldier, and was subsequently cut down.
Now that boy must live with the burden of his infamous heritage, and his peers' scorn and rejection, while trying to learn to be the kind of soldier needed to defeat the Dominion.
I've been having unusual dreams lately.
muse
