Challenge #02785-G228: Helper’s Eye View
Created as helpers/aides. They are infertile, so how do they regard their charges? They are not slave or servant, even though they look after their charge. Remember Julie and Nanny, but how does the process work both from the Augment’s view and the charges. – Bonding
I am Borf. I am good dog. This is Len, they are my pup. My pup is bigger than me, and has been since I was a pup. That is the way of it. I do the things Len can not. I was made for them. We are happy. All is good.
I remember for Len. I remember mealtime, bathtime, sleep time. I remember good food and bad food and sometimes food. I help with domestic mathematics and decisions for Len’s future. Good dog.
Len helps me remember too. Len remembers fun and birthdays and clothes and makes tricky detailed carvings with sharp things. Len remembers to be careful with the sharp things. Len helps with the medicine when I make a mistake. Len is good pup.
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Challenge #02784-G227: An Edge Case
A: hey man are you ok?
B: …. yeah sorry, feeling a little burned out
A: ah, I see. Hey do you want some coffee after this? – Anon Guest
Humans are resilient. Humans are robust. Humans are strong. Humans are also living beings with limits. There is only so much stress, devastation, and chaos that even a Human can handle.
Learning this was something of a hurdle after Humanity was accepted into the Alliance.
Witness Human Doe, who has apparently reached a limit and, as a result, has retreated to something resembling a catatonic state. They had sat for a meal and beverage break over an hour ago, and were still sitting there. Their meal was untouched. Their hot beverage had gone tepid. They were just… sitting. Staring, apparently, at nothing. Face blank.
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Challenge #02783-G226: Untranslatable
I wanted to sing, but it didn’t work translated to gal-simple. So I tried a mental translators, but then I learn that it most only scan the left side of the brain for the sentence structures. Singing comes from the right side. – Anon Guest
[AN: There’s growing evidence that the left-brain/right-brain stuff isn’t as real as we once thought. However, there are other things that say it’s real in very specific directions.]
Sometimes, you just got to sing. Sometimes, those listening do not understand the language being sung. This has lead to some true travesties in the past. Fortunately, technology exists to bridge the language gap.
Unfortunately, language is complicated. Songs are even more complicated as meter, rhyme, allegory, and allusion all blend together into something in which the literal translation is worse than unrelated to the original work. Some experimentation has occurred in the area of scanning the brain waves of the singer to try and get metaphorically closer to the meat of the meaning.
Initial results were… not that great. Especially in Humans. Redundancies built upon a brain structure initially designed to find food and co-ordinate a body and little else were not made for complicated linguistics. In Deathworlders especially, this meant different areas for (a) the language itself, (b) the tonal inflections within or surrounding the language, and © any meaning within both. There were more than that, but those were the bare minimum. It was a disaster.
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Challenge #02782-G225: Under Starry Skies
This is a prompt that’s actually a mix of 3 stories, the one of the super-soldiers, the one of the dream berries, and the one of the seed collector. Here are the prompts for reference.
https://peakd.com/fiction/@internutter/challenge-02677-g120-a-mind-of-their-own
https://peakd.com/fiction/@internutter/challenge-02509-f319-berry-small-problem
https://steemit.com/fiction/@internutter/challenge-02525-f335-useful-obsession
The person had collected more seeds than any human ever had before. It was their hobby, it was their obsession, and with it they had saved many lives from preventing mass-starvation due to crop losses. An elderly havenworlder who had been obscenely wealthy had no family left, but had always admired this human, so while most of their wealth went to charities, they granted the human a boon. They, in their will, left the human an uninhabited planet. It was a havenworld, though only level one or two at best. The plantings from Rushes-o Station could be expanded to this world.
Unfortunately, there were those that did not like this idea, especially when they found that dream-berries, along with other such plants, were going to be amongst the plantings. But another group had heard of the grumbling. Another group who knew what it was to have their backs against the wall. They had been created for war, and were learning to live in peace. The had no desire to be living aboard ships, but a chance to living on a beautiful world amongst growing crops? And yet still allow their skills to be needed to protect that world from those that would ravage it? It sounded like a near paradise to them.
This was a paradise world where people could buy seeds from the collector to save their worlds, or to start collections for their own. A place where medics could buy dream-berries and other medicinal crops to help those in need, and a place known to be well-guarded by soldiers who wanted to live in peace, but were designed at the very genetic level for war. It was a wonderful place to live. – Anon Guest
The Arcas didn’t do very well in indoor spaces. They therefore did not like space travel. Once settled in their appointed planet, they said, they intended to stay. Which was what lead, in a roundabout fashion, to The Deal.
Rushes-o Station was too big, and at the same time, too small to contain Human Liam’s enormous collection of flora. Further, they were now wealthy enough to purchase and maintain their own planet. A nice safe nigh-Havenworld in a goldilocks zone with plenty of easy-access minerals. All Human Liam needed was someone to guard it.
Liam, chief supplier of the Dreamjuice that kept the Arcas at least calm for transit, had a great need of a protecting force to stop various polities from stealing or destroying any of the plants kept there. The existence of the plants necessitated biological maintenance in the form of insects and avians. There would be very little room for shelter that was not focussed on plant maintenance. Liam needed a special kind of force for that.
The Arcas were few, but they were effective. As far as being a deterrent force was concerned, they were fast, motivated, and brutally efficient. They had also spent twenty minutes at the landing site just staring at the sky and the creatures within it.
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Challenge #02781-G224: Dear Employee…
If you really want to make a politician sweat write them a handwritten letter. I do this, (a) It’s rare, and they are obliged to answer. But first of course they have to find someone who can read longhand, neat, correctly spelt, longhand. Which of course forces them to focus on the contents. – Nonny the Mouse.
[AN: I’m sure I did something to this point somewhere before…]
People want to make politicians think. The problem with this is that the politicians don’t want to do that. In valiant efforts to gain their attention, various methods were attempted. Back before electronic media, the way to go was a neatly-written letter of complaint.
That was decades ago. Since the time when handwriting was the primary means of communication, those in places of power have set up barriers between themselves and any thought-provoking letter of complaint.
This is now. In an office for sorting the mail for an administrator of shenanigans, one sorter of mail comes across an anomaly. The envelope and stamp are in place, so it had to be mail, but the rest was… unintelligible. The ink on the front was loops and curves, interspersed with slashes and dots. Someone in the mailing system must have understood it, but this particular sorter did not. They passed it on to the Unreadables Office.
[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]