Challenge #02698-G141: Annoying to Some
3-5 y/o Human child can ask around 437 questions per day. Can you imagine some scientist who need to babysit curious kid who in one second can ask question about quantum physics and before you can even start to answer the same child ask you why cheese is yellow? – Anon Guest
“One question at a time, please. If you want answers, you must wait to hear the answer.”
“Why?”
“If you do not wait, you do not get an answer.”
This seemed like a fair exchange to the small Human, who pulled themself up to peer over Analyst Gork’s desk. “What'cha doin’?”
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Challenge #02697-G140: A Family Affair
Yes, I hate my brothers
Yes, they destroyed my life
Yes, I will probably kill them at some point in my life
But they are my brothers and I will not let you touch any of them
Because there is nothing more pure than hatred to your own siblings. You can say you hate them but you still love them no matter what. – Anon Guest
Family is complicated, if you let it get that way. Let me begin with explaining mine. I was born on one of the “better” Greater Deregulations. In that women were allowed to leave the house and do things according to their own wants. Allegedly.
That said, infant mortality was high for girls born outside of the bawdy factories. Yeah. I was a ‘priest hole’ baby. That is, a baby girl hidden from the notice of my sire by my mother and her co-mothers. It’s more common than you think. Our collective sire despised girl children and viewed the worth of his masculinity by how many boys he created.
Five brothers knew I was alive. Five brothers knew I existed. One of them told our sire, by accident or design, that I shared their home. I still don’t know what happened to my mother, but I was taken from her in the middle of the night and shipped out to one of the trader stations for a 'baby auction’. Anyone could come and purchase an unwanted child. Nobody asked why there were so many girls there.
[Be sure to visit internutter (dot) org for a link to the rest of this story, and details on how to support this artist. Or visit peakd (dot) com (slash at) internutter for the stories at their freshest]
Challenge #02696-G139: The Whoa Signal
Have you ever wondered what [REDACTED] is? Not many know about it, apparently it is a [REDACTED] that is able to [REDACTED] out of [REDACTED]. But that’s not all; if you’re able to [REDACTED] with it you’ll be able to-
Sorry they’re getting closer, but so am I to finding [REDACTED] full capacity. Meet me at [REDACTED] and we’ll discuss more with less ears in the wall.
[END OF TRANSMISSION] – Anon Guest
Some people should never be handed a puzzle. Some people should definitely not trip over one. I am just one of those ‘some’. Why? Because I go traipsing innocently down that rabbit hole to find the answer no matter how irrelevant it is to my own income, health, or survival. It’s an obsession and I honestly thought I was on top of it until I got that censored message.
I mean, heavily censored. It wasn’t even meant for me, I just happened to be in the intercept path. APB -all points bulletin- or ARM -all receivers message- depending on where you are at the time. I got it on auto-record so I could play with it. The people jamming it had a scrambler censor. One that took random parts of the bad words and rearranged them. If you know what the words are. I didn’t.
That wasn’t going to stop me. I’m a long-haul freighter pilot. Most of the time. When that’s your job, on the endless passage between humdrum and monotony, you need a lot of sanity projects. Arts and crafts, puzzles, your own virtuality sandbox, you know the deal. So of course the next few days found me with sound editing equipment, trying to make words out of sonic guacamole.
[Be sure to visit internutter (dot) org for a link to the rest of this story, and details on how to support this artist. Or visit peakd (dot) com (slash at) internutter for the stories at their freshest]
Challenge #02694-G137: A Deserved Education
One of the Greater Deregulation planets found itself short of breeding stock and extended offers to girl’s schools to come study abroad at their planet. St. Trinians accepted their offer. Greater Deregulation never saw what was coming next. – Anon Guest
[AN: Since I really don’t want to nick anyone else’s IP, for my universe -excepting guest cameos- I shall have to use a St. Trinian’s expy for this tale]
“They can’t be serious,” said Dame Lorx. “An extended offer to add school branches to their territories and foster girls? On a Deregger planet?”
“On a system of Deregger planets,” Lady Fulsom pointed out. “They want to import girls so they can resume their manifest destiny,” here pronounced, deporably distasteful dastardly deeds[1], “and otherwise attempt to outbreed anyone they dislike.”
“If they want incubators, they can damn well make their own,” scoffed Dame Lorx. “They’re going to keep promising to sweeten the pot until some poor deluded souls actually take them up on their offers. We can’t allow that to happen.”
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Challenge #02693-G136: Fighting True Evil
Several politicians within the Galactic Alliance get together to talk about Uplifts and similar beings. They begin a campaign to make it illegal to create them. Why? It should never be legal to create a cogniscent for the express purpose of enslaving and abusing them. All cogniscents have rights after all. They further were trying to get freed the many Uplifts that were currently living as property owned by others instead of being free. – DaniAndShali
True evil, a wise man once wrote, starts with treating people as things. Their un-personhood can either be a matter of philosophy, or as complicated as being created as a product. Since classification as a species is the ability to make more lifeforms with the same physical and mental attributes, the creation of Uplifts skates around laws against creating intelligent species strictly for servitude.
Augments, on the other hand, are trained and programmed to be intelligent only in specific directions. They are created infertile, often cloned, and specifically tailored as assistant creations. They were never made to be slaves. Uplifts are elevated to full cogniscents, and are never rendered infertile by their gengineers. Thus, their own children are used against them as a lever to guarantee subservience. This is considered blackmail, ransom, and illegal.
Unfortunately, those facts do not stop the immoral. Uplifts are always being created somewhere. The morally impoverished will always want power over some creature in their immediate vicinity. Mistreated pets will inevitably strike back. Mistreated people can think forward enough to fear even worse treatment than the current situation.
[Be sure to visit internutter (dot) org for a link to the rest of this story, and details on how to support this artist. Or visit peakd (dot) com (slash at) internutter for the stories at their freshest]