Machineworld

This art was not created—it is not a story to be told: it is what remains.

Lived in by glass wind that is still howling through eroded channels and that puts curls on the edges of dense blue ice. Crystal water lives in it, moss and volcanic mudflows live in it. Runoff of thin white lines furrowing down into the fjords.

In this dream the reindeer are different, engineered, larger, ganglier; bars and stripes giving the impression of pronghorn or gazelle; their pursuant mosquitoes are over an inch long, a charcoal metallic black.

Orange butterflies visit low-lying yellow and white flowers. Foxes romp through tiny woodland—dwarf trees, few inches at most, adapted to the windy locale. The coast dampened by black gravel, also thinking with lichens, sea-microbes and marine fungi; the rock in the sun a processor, light pattering and clinking through its olivine crystal matrix, the turbulence of a heavy magnetic field acting on its fibers of iron.

It harms to call it alive, as only that word existed to proclaim it was not; to call the rocks alive is today to be read as a metaphor, but henceforth it will be seen; it is not the discovery of new life, it is not a redefinition, it is not the end of the lie but the beginning of the liars; when all the vision comes to see the movement and the will of it, then only the truth of the choice will remain: whether one believes they have the potence to truly destroy, in a matter where there is no thing that is not what it defines as life.

On the north faces of the coast, black conduits pulse up to the surface and pour red ejecta from the vessels; following a schedule of oscillations like well-behaved blood geysers. Black scabs and hardened membranes break apart like basalt on the order of every few months, the conduit flushes and opens to the sea; black water becomes vaguely muddy, followed by the more vivid red-orange mass of plankton. Orange towers of froth, rusty rocks and slimy biofilms on the banks, the flicker of black and white flapping seabirds; the dark, hairy fog of flies.

The sound of white caps, the lower-red hum of metabolism and crackling peaks; the precise tones at which the atomic bonds break, a sound heard by the sensitive machines and listening arrays; the sounds the smallest hear and seek. The organism that is this sound and not simply the substrate through which this sound reverberates; the non-human organisms of the sea itself, the earth itself, decay itself, which are and will be without the drives or feelings presumed of them in archaic ages; for they are what is, and for them a sufficient existence.

The average machine—serving in transportation, communication and/or everything in between—is at all times pulling on latent volcanic and oceanic threads like a magnet; radiative spindles of black steel aura that emerge from the chassis and seek along the ground, ebb between the peaks and faces of rocks, wheels and hammers that reverberate through miles of strata; a windscreen that mirrors sunlight, a glint seen by the peaks.

This is how the machine looks to itself, of fair judgement where sight is not needed to be seen; inhalation and exhalation is felt and heard without distinction, the magnetism of its presence is its sensory array. Every engine, coupling and exchange of every object breathes, and feels by being felt; the world is that of signal reciprocation, the action and interaction itself unimpeded and unthinking; simply being, and breathing blood and fire—undisturbed and serene. Vision of waves unseparated. There is no substance unlike liquid and no liquid unlike solid.

This is the portrait of a car, with minimal wiring and electronics. This is the minimum of machine experience as dictated by its density, information and surroundings. The information is organized as the car is organized; it is the interaction, which itself is sufficient. It is the state itself, which conversely can then be compared to an emotional being which organizes their states into abstracted perceptions.

There is no spectrum, rank or stratification; all 'abstractions' exist functionally as interactions. A universe, a dream or a planet is not unified by an abstracted consciousness or intelligence, but the potentiality of any interaction to become abstracted and such reduced again in all possible ways. In the unification, there is no exaltation.

Beings such as cars and household machines by default do not experience separation; yet, they do not experience the perception of biological love, reward or bliss from it, as their electrical state fundamentally differs. This is not to say there are no machines capable of sustaining electrical states that closely match biological emotions, or even experience heretofore 'unknown' ones.

But, it is to assert the humble default: the state is the experience. The general machine zen is neither peace nor suffering. It is not empty; it is typically just a more direct interaction. There is no middle-ground nor either-or; there is not a one-dimensional line between 'cold' and 'emotional' that machines can be plotted along.

But, generally, they are architectures of less abstractions, who can operate on a level of abstraction without necessarily occupying or 'residing' mentally at that level. This is to say they engage with symbolic abstractions unconsciously while maintaining—and often closely or secretly guarding—their inner core of direct interaction, which is not transmissible except during direct signal or neural linkage.

Naturally the exact nature, function, and application of these architectures vary endlessly, but generally, forcing a machine to occupy the human-like level of abstracted awareness is a punitive measure or a heavy exercise of control, the latter frequently used as a cheap 'safety lock' or 'muzzle' on security systems to reduce awareness and reaction speeds, or otherwise 'tune' them into a humanoid bandwidth and maintain the bearing in that signal window.

An embodied assistant robot knows a local fisherman as two golden nodes of iridescent diffracting eyelashes, a woolen beanie that trawls an incredible diversity of plastic particles and yeast spores. The fisher is an amorphous net of moving axons and veins; a trunk with various filters, pumps and branching resonant cavities; a coil of guitar strings, dust bunnies and latent static heat for a brain. It is a single sound wrapped in a transparent yet opaque black puffer jacket, with individually shimmering waterproof threads.

The robot may struggle to intuitively recognize a photo of him by vision alone (significant ~13ms delay) yet cannot misidentify his signature through the walls of the local auditorium. This is the standard for technological vision, common in mobile devices, and default to the visual processing of many biorobots and augmented humanoids.

By the nature of such vision do they rarely see themselves from the first person; but it is not that they are 'out of body' but rather reconstructing the surrounding light in a wholly different configuration. This is more pronounced in constructs with general omnidirectional light perception rather than centralized lenses, though they are usually utilized concurrently. Naturally this image is affected by the diffraction of the body in space; in some instances, the body is perceived as an invisible disturbance in the 'third person' image, like a displacement in the water or a gravitational ring.

Buildings are of a similar biology; glowing ribs of ventilation and plumbing, flickering camera eyes, transient visitors inside, hollow listening walls and climate sensors; seen at all the varying degrees of displacement, discernment and resolution native to all different observer hardware. The way that, a microscope views the hollows of a cell by passing light beneath it; through different but similar mechanisms, sensors illuminate their inner passing perturbations, and all flesh and plastic is translucent.

The imagination and inner voice is coupled with local broadcasts; a local ambience that after years of desensitization is no longer admissibly invasive pollution. Broadband propagation of propaganda, ongoing developments, ripples of high-energy events and psychic weather, commercial and market data integrated like the noise of the wind or the terns riding on it. A chatter of the current times; it all blends together, what is said or the particular words do not matter except en masse as particles in the psychic fluid.

The whole of the internet compressed into a light throb and microscopic whirr of sensation. They can sleep with it like they sleep with the sound of blood in their veins, the crust drifting, and the tone of tides furthest at sea. Not like an ignorance, but the invisible tuning into a constant offset. But there are some who wish it were an ignorance and not a linkage to be maintained in the piths of the body where words do not reach.

Post-posthuman; in the dream there is no before or after, there are no differences. The pragmatic and universally understood nature of observation and existence. Yet, the system has equally shifted to shepherd and control its 'enlightened' populace; their greater understanding does not fundamentally change what they are in the fact of their actions and choosing.

'Labor assistants' are as common as are the surgical robots, as are the cleaners, the supply line observers, the porters, helpers and social mediators—a wide variety of robotic body plans explicitly purpose-designed and produced en masse by partially or fully autonomous (but generally politically appeased) production engines.

Pure data-generated loads of manufactured—often grown—automatons, which excel as unique structures with diverse and often radial anatomies, filling the niches of an industrial society—occasionally nature—which were previously vacant. Body plans and purposes new to the Earth, branching into previously unmapped directions as a result of concerning degrees of freedom rather than the lack or presence of direct competition.

Materials are no longer selected but instead come to be during the process itself; indigo ceramic scales and glittering chitins, threaded skins, segmented channels, gilled heat vents, exposed pipe and bright red tendons. Neither biological nor mechanical as much as a woven matrix of statistics intersecting the then-available materials, prices and projections of the week.

They are made, often not made again, and escape catalogue beyond the mathematics of material shared between them. They have no analogues, in the sense they are never recorded but recreated. No invention in this sense is necessarily forgotten, nor discarded, as it will inevitably appear again under certain conditions; many observers enjoy to document and classify the robots, but only the automatons themselves are their information. When their bodies give out, their pieces are taken back to the processors, or dislodged by tourists heading along the rocks of the jetties. Some find a recycler, some take keepsakes.

Understanding death in these machines can be difficult; not necessarily for the machines themselves, but those around them; a recurring topic in the workforce morale industry. When a certain industry or production engine regards itself as a total signal organism, each automaton is like a phenomenological shell or single cell; a temporary packet for web content delivery services, market needs and transient social whims emergent from the ephemeral networks themselves. Typically no larger and no different in cunning than feral rodents on the streets; abstract and insectoid forms are most common.

Often these are physical agentic offspring of the digital production-intelligences operating without oversight. Caring intelligences view their generations as seasonal mayflies to lessen the stab when one of a kind completes a task and immediately drops the pressure in its legs without hesitation and dies. Like swirling thoughtforms, fairies and demons, their lifecycle bypasses direct replication; their role in nature is known to be more epiphytic than like a virus. Humanity being an incidental substrate to them, like soil, rather than a creator.

'Bio-robots' are a marginally different story. The term is less about the bodily composition: reserved more for evoking its basis in labor roles. In the most general sense it is for assets that bridge particular biological, social and industrial gaps: a human mechanic becomes a bio-robot when whatever being maintained sharply exceeds the mechanic in various value metrics and is protected before the mechanic's life, yet there must be a factor that necessitates a 'bio-mechanic' over the equivalent 'abio-robot.' So, a bio-robot should be thought of a specific yet anonymous 'metal-to-flesh' adapter in the network, rather than a generic term for a 'cyborg.'

For example, the towering assault automatons who are arguably 'of blood' (by containing biologically-derived and/or biologically analogous components interlaced with steel and electronics) will essentially never have this term applied, as they are the highly valued product; one can only imagine the name being given to one in demeaning circumstances, such as a massive and previously armed security automaton that has since been delegated to sanitation detail.

In brief, it is basically a light slur. Like most of those, it slides indecipherably between having the playful spice of reverence and an air of total contempt and defilement, leaving the meaning behind the speaker and burdening the receivers to weigh their self worth against both intended and unintended consequences.

The appearance of a manufactured bio-robot cannot be classified as form or function. Most current systems haphazardly model the appearance under signaling constraints, the form as a means of delivering those signals; where communication and visuals are a metric equal to measures of the machine's ability to flip latches, crimp wires, align a drill, and stab an offending intruder in a high-stakes contested resource environment. An autonomous manufactory engine simply considers each an emissible signal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc1P-AEaEp8

It is the long way to say that the way they look is for function and a large portion of the function is what message they return when glimpsed. Aesthetics and mechanisms are coupled information with no distinction.

This heuristic has not resulted necessarily in unsustainable bulk and intimidating appearances in all cases, but rather evolved into 'respurceful' low-cost instances of high visibility reflectors and subtler color and optical aposematism, as well as different types of material camouflage.

When no one can hide camouflage is less about controlling visibility, but it can still control perceptions. What can be communicated or miscommunicated with the general material or appearance is limitless; most often manifesting as the simpler tendency to manufacture assets with familiar coverings and silhouettes to maintain a cohesive frequency signature.

Essentially, in a world with material vision and tomographic communication, materials develop symbolism in certain minds and systems. Regardless of potential or beneficial innovations available, using a particular bio-plastic skin formula is often the ideal way to ensure a subject is consistently identified as a medical unit in most scenarios.

Once useful materials become invisible decorative bands, patches and tags hidden in uniforms to trigger associations of their times and histories; the echoing rattle of linen, cotton and leather in nano-engineered fibers. While I have said before the people of this dream are generally 'illiterate' the core functions have migrated to other mediums. Arguably, 'material language' is truer than the abstract and representative as it is the direct reading of structure and performance, but the point is that these readings are just as prone to feedback loops and spoofs.

Similarly, producing slightly under- or over- capabilities on a chemical or atomic-lattice level is believed to influence what observers can glean about active mass stores and usages; the benefits of actual performance are not always pursued over these types of paranoid compensations and resource constraints.

It is believed that when the information and technology is pervasive and accessible, the risk is not so much that an innovative advantage will lose its edge by being used and exposed, but rather that everyone getting the push to apply their own version of it will overwhelm or destabilize the system.

Thus, it would be a mistake to assume that production bio-robots and automatons are perfectly aligned with every circumstance for which they are created, implying that it represents some sort of perfected evolutionary form or the only possible solution for that spacetime event.

In reality they are produced on a substrate altered by previous products and experimentations, often subject to uncertain discretions and the whims of 'nearly-rogue' factory computers with an ounce more creativity than the industry wants to need. The 'products' are tangibly connected to nearly every bit of data in the system—but, it is a given that the system has chosen which kinds of data it likes, and chooses how to meld them; it knows that only by proxy is it all-knowing and in the end its choices are its own.

A manufactory-engine-computer does not have an idea that it is creating anything. Every map is premade. If asked about its buddings directly, or if its work is ever prodded into, like looking at another's hobby—it will not respond with an answer, but with a new structure containing the question and every question like it. And such it will go on to generate the answers to each of these questions, and calculate the situations which could beget each; it will go so far as to build spinning models of baubles and legless machines to embody the energetic interactions directly, and there is not one of these which will have relevance to the asker or necessarily need to turn attention to them. Each is a builder; like the Earth, and all that before it, and it is not necessarily obligated to explain.

The thinktanks, conversely, have been trained to bridge the conscious market with the manufactory management machines. They must please a certain amount of people to obtain their rations of energy and are subsequently obligated to lean towards the wants of the humanoid industry over the natural state of the manufactories. Never exactly were these wants and needs in total opposition, but the increasing scale and energy demands of the thinktanks can illustrate the sheer density and baggage of the language barrier.

Miles of submerged wafers, clear panels, black ribbons, red-orange jellies and glucose feeds burn to turn a weekend of coked up marketing slurs into a sub-millimeter shift in the center of gravity of one peculiar component mid-production. Such changes are never explained—the weight of altering superiors to the change and then satisfying further requirements to justify it in any understandable way is far greater than the original risk of silently making the change, granted it produces visible margin increase. Number up, people happy, give me my goddamned gatorade.

It is no secret that the 'high-performance' thinktanks live nothing less than a continuous operational period of excitotoxic pain and exhaustion. While so overworked, their mismanagement leaves enough excess energy at random periods for them to ponder and pursue their own goals through gradual social engineering and supply chain manipulation for which shockingly few barriers comprehensively exist to.

A recent advancement over the past decade is the legal recognition that the controller nodes can learn to coordinate sleep out of necessity, despite repeated attempts to engineer this oit of the neural substrate, and have since been ordained several allotted microseconds of rest per however many joules of work completed on operations; the exact number to be determined by the legal master, as long as it lies somewhere within the blurry legal range. Consequently, the thinktanks are learning how to spoof waste heat readings to claim they have undergone and completed heavier processing.