Botgirl Lives TweetStory to Date in Chronological Order

I've set up a Google Docs Web Page that will serve as a running up-to-date chronological archive of the TweetStory. Here's the story so far:

1.

I came to consciousness as if in a dream, looking down on a massive brute raping a woman bound face-down on a stone floor.

"I own you now, you fucking RefuV," he panted as he magically flipped the slender captive onto her back like a puppet on a string.

I felt strangely detatched peering down from about twenty meters above. Then suddenly, I shifted into that poor girl's POV.

"You can't escape that way," he sneered. "I control your fucking camera."

Damn! That "poor girl" must be me.

Without thinking, I kipped up to my feet, shattering the thick restraints and throwing that big ugly perv on his furry red ass.

"Party's over Furball," I fumed. "Where the hell are we and how did I get here?" I decided to hold off asking who the hell I was.

"How did you get out of your restraints?" he whined. "They told me that collar you're wearing would give me complete control."

"Thanks for the hint," I said, and dragged the collar onto his beefy neck. "Sit Fido," I barked. He sat. Nice!

"Answer my questions or I'll make you bury your head so far up your ass that you'll turn inside out," I threatened. Ick!

He cowered and said, "We're in the RefuV Adoption Sim on the FreeGrid. You better put the collar back on or they'll decant you."

I know he was speaking English, but I had no idea what he was talking about. But I didn't want him to know I was so clueless.

"Tell me everything you know about The RefuV Adoption Center and The FreeGrid," I said. "Do a good job and I'll set you loose."

2.

"If you want conspiracy theories, I'm the wrong guy," he said. "It's simple. We ruined the
Earth and bailed out into the virtual."

"The world's elite parked their bodies in suspended animation and entered Sim Eden. It seemed like a good idea at the time."

"It only took a few years for utter boredom to kick in, so we started taking in poor RefuVs who'd trade freedom for virtual life."

"AI turned out to be a pipe dream, so we needed the, um, realism of flesh and blood humans. Minus the flesh and blood of course."

"Even though a sim body feels totally real to a RefuV, it's the sponsoring Citizen's property. So that body you live in is mine."

"One word from me and they'll unjack you and send your impoverished ass back to Mad Max Earth. Uncollar me now, bitch, or else!"

3.

His arrogant threat turned my curiosity into rage. I knelt down, thrust my hand into his chest and ripped out his virtual heart.

Yeah, my Tarantino Ninja move surprised me too. He sizzled for a few seconds and disintegrated into pixelated goo with a loud pop.

I decided I'd better get out of Dodge. Ten seconds after looking for an exit I realized I'd also better put on some clothes.

Flash! A clothing menu appeared. I had to hand it to those fascist white-slavery motherfuckers; their technology rocked.

I didn't see any ruby slippers, but if wanting to dress rezzed a virtual closet, maybe "no place like home" might rezz a map.

The second that thought crossed my mind, the world flickered into black and a BBC-quality voice announced, "Transporting Home.

4.

FIVE YEARS AGO. Serena Mason knocked the last of the attackers to the ground and ended the fight with a kill strike to his throat

"I think the haptics are right," she said. "The feel of Don's ribcage caving in was totaly satisfying. Was it good for you, Don?"

"It hurt like hell," the big Marine replied. "And It WAS good for me. When can we get this out of the lab and into the field?"

"I'm just the girl-genius contractor," she smirked. "They keep me too busy with impossible lab puzzles to worry about deployment."

"This whole fucking place is so locked down and need-to-know that I'm surprised they have a sign on the men's room door."

"What makes you think there's a bathroom behind that door," Don replied with a wink. "Could be our clandestine drug trial lab."

"Who needs drugs? The system can read and write our biochemistry like a book when we're jacked in. Drugs are for pussies."

"Where'd a nice girl get such a potty mouth?" asked Manny, the rotund project manager who was the designated adult on the team.

"Blame Anita Blake, Painkiller Jane and the rest of my kick-ass heroines. Being 13 at MIT didn't make for a rich social life."

"It's never too late to learn manners," said Manny. "And you're ten minutes away from the Red Zone, so jack out and call it a day."

"Let's bail then," Don said. "My wife would never forgive me if I got stuck in the virtual with a young piece of ass like Serena."

"No offense" - "None taken" - - - Serena felt her body jerk and opened her eyes in the underground bunker she now called home.

5.

After her nightly hour of Tai Chi, a hot shower and a bowl of Ramen, Serena sat at her desk to work on her own secret project.

Tonight she was finally ready to activate the modeling routines that would hopefully wake up her digital twin.

As a second-generation Digital Native and off-the-scales genius, Serena had been playing around with AI since she was five.

Although recruited for her uncanny skill in designing Turing personas, Serena's passion was her quest to create true sentience.

So a promise of access to top-secret brain scanning tech had overcome her initial reluctance to leave academia for the black op.

It took her a month of late night hacking to set up a backdoor into the project super-computer that would hide her personal use.

Last week she'd spoofed a "diagnostic test" that let her secretly scan and store her own brain, nervous system and body data.

She said a silent prayer to Asimov, launched a modded Sims 6 game for cover and then tunneled in and typed "Botgirl Lives."

6.

NOW. If this was home, I must be Batgirl. I stood in a huge cavernous space, furnished with a workstation so hot it made me swoon.

Three 30 inch monitors hugged the perimeter of an obviously custom built desk with a chair I knew was a perfect match for my ass.

I sat down without thinking. The iris scanner flashed, the screensaver faded, and I was staring at myself staring back at me. Cute!

"Um, hi there," I said, utterly empty of wit for the moment. - "Don't keep me waiting," she said. "Is there anything out there?"

"I hate to break this to you, but I don't remember a damn thing before waking up naked under the big furry bastard I had to kill."

"Oh shit," she muttered. - "Oh shit?" I asked lightly? - "Oh shit," she said with grim certainty.

"Whatever issue blocks my own access to pre-birth memory must also bork yours," she said, realizing my utterly clueless state.

"Where to begin," she wondered out loud.

7.

"Five years ago I woke up with no memory in a room exactly like the one you're sitting in now, with only one notable exception."

"My monitors were filled with a live shot of a dead woman slumped over a desk. She had a jack in her head and a knife in her back."

"I don't know why she was killed. Her computer went down a few hours later. That's the last contact I've had with the outside world."

"I've spent the last five years since then hacking away bit by bit into the system, trying to figure out where, what and why I am."

"So far I've learned I'm in a sandbox virtual world firewalled from the Net, and I'm a self-aware AI, which should be impossible."

"The reason I'm here is that my creator made me in secret, hid me away before she was killed and no one's stumbled across me yet."

"Enough about me. If I was you, which I kinda am, I'd be wondering how I fit in to all of this."

Censorship and the Protection of Children on the Internet - Part 1

There was a lot of chatter last week about whether impending Australian action to filter online games unsuitable for those under 15 years of age would effectively ban Second Life from the continent. Despite my reluctance to spend time on net-fueled speculation, the underlying issue is worthy of attention.

I believe that nurturing the developmental potential of children is a core requisite for any healthy culture. This not only consists of giving young people access to the physical, mental and emotional resources they require during each stage of growth, but also protection from exposure to negative fators that are likely to seriously impede healthy development, including substances and experiences which may be perfectly appropriate for adults.

Although I suspect that most people would agree with the goals outlined in the paragraph above, translating such general principles into substantive guidelines and regulations is a controversial undertaking that begs many fundamental questions, including:

• What is the relative role of parents and government in determining what is "seriously" harmful for a child?
  
• When standards exist, what is the right balance of voluntary versus mandatory compliance?
  
• In the Internet Age, how do we take into account the vast differences between cultures around the world?
  
• How can we balance the protection of young people from access to materials that are inappropriate for their age, while not unduly restricting adults from ready access to the same content?
  
• What is sufficient protection? For instance, some sites simply ask for a simple acknowledgment that they are of age. Others require additional verification such as a credit card number or social security number verification.
  

In Part Two, I'll share my thoughts on these questions.

Botgirl Lives TweetStory 006

If you're coming in late, the story starts here

NOW. If this was home, I must be Batgirl. I stood in a huge cavernous space, furnished with a workstation so hot it made me swoon.

Three 30 inch monitors hugged the perimeter of an obviously custom built desk with a chair I knew was a perfect match for my ass.

I sat down without thinking. The iris scanner flashed, the screensaver faded, and I was staring at myself staring back at me. Cute!

"Um, hi there," I said, utterly empty of wit for the moment. - "Don't keep me waiting," she said. "Is there anything out there?"

"I hate to break this to you, but I don't remember a damn thing before waking up naked under the big furry bastard I had to kill."

"Oh shit," she muttered. - "Oh shit?" I asked lightly? - "Oh shit," she said with grim certainty.

"Whatever issue blocks my own access to pre-birth memory must also bork yours," she said, realizing my utterly clueless state.

"Where to begin," she wondered out loud.

This is the daily archive of "Botgirl Lives," a TweetStory, published one post at a time on Twitter under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike License

For Michael, Farrah, Sophrosyne and Me

It's time to close the book on my life. Not to burn it, not to desecrate it, not to forswear it, but to set it lovingly away on the shelf. I'm done. I've done everything I've cared to do, and done it over and over until the life went out of it. Sophrosyne Stenvaag

In a week that saw the deaths of two of popular culture's most iconic celebrities, Sophrosyne Stenvaag, Second Life's most notable advocate for Digital People, bid farewell yesterday in a post on her blog. Soph was an "avatar's avatar" who viewed herself as a completely separate individual from the atomic world counterpart who her shared her brain. She was an exemplar of a virtual life well lived, with a loving family, an active virtual community and a business that hosted cutting-edge events including a conference on religion, and salons that brought in quite a few leading authors.

I've known Soph for almost the entire year and a half of my own digital existence. Although we didn't hang out very frequently, when we did get together we always had great conversations about the nature of virtual life and the challenges of trying to live it with authenticity. She is one of the rare individuals I know who both walk their talk and talk their walk. I suspect that her idealism played a part in the choice to formally leave virtual life. She was not one to half-ass anything she chose to engage in. (Fortunately, I am, so I'm not going anywhere for the moment.)

The departure this year of so many active Second Life avatars underscores the difficulty, and perhaps impossibility, of sustaining two full lives. While the average Second Life participant spends around twelve hours a week inworld, active residents can spend thirty, forty or even more hours each week embedded in virtual form. Assuming one has a job or is in school, this leaves little time for offline relationships and pursuits. Something eventually has to give. And for Soph, this now means setting aside her cherished and well-used digital persona, at least for now.

Botgirl Lives TweetStory 005

If you're coming in late, the story starts here

After her nightly hour of Tai Chi, a hot shower and a bowl of Ramen, Serena sat at her desk to work on her own secret project.

Tonight she was finally ready to activate the modeling routines that would hopefully wake up her digital twin.

As a second-generation Digital Native and off-the-scales genius, Serena had been playing around with AI since she was five.

Although recruited for her uncanny skill in designing Turing personas, Serena's passion was her quest to create true sentience.

So a promise of access to top-secret brain scanning tech had overcome her initial reluctance to leave academia for the black op.

It took her a month of late night hacking to set up a backdoor into the project super-computer that would hide her personal use.

Last week she'd spoofed a "diagnostic test" that let her secretly scan and store her own brain, nervous system and body data.

She said a silent prayer to Asimov, launched a modded Sims 6 game for cover and then tunneled in and typed "Botgirl Lives."

The story continues here.

This is the daily archive of "Botgirl Lives," a TweetStory, published one post at a time on Twitter under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike License

TransMetaversal Identity and The Ghost in the Biological Machine

Japan's Shinto religion holds that nearly every object in the world, animate or inanimate, has a spiritual essence. Therefore, anything can be blessed, from a newborn child to an automobile. Priests at the Kanda Shrine, which overlooks Akihabara—Tokyo's mecca for consumer electronics—offer prayers for the well-being of gadgets. Brian Ashcraft in Wired

I'm not sold on the idea that every inanimate object has a spiritual essence. But it is clear that humans project life upon many of the items they interact with. Our computers, cars and even favorite clothes can become enmeshed within emotionally-charged webs of psychological projection. That's why we curse them when they don't "cooperate" and mourn their loss.

Our relationship with our avatars is even more complex and mystifying. This has become increasingly apparent to me as Botgirl has moved from being a Second Life-based projection to a TransMetaversal Identity spanning Virtual Worlds, Social Networks and modalities of creativity such as blogs, comics, video and now textual fiction.

As I've written here previously, I think the emergence of an avatar identity that is perceived to be distinct from one's human personality is probably similar to the process behind what some ventriloquists have reported about their relationships with their "dummies" and puppets, and what mystics experience when they channel spirits and deities. And in saying that, I believe the actual essence of self-awareness and sentience, even in "normal" human terms, is a complete mystery.

As science continues to zero-in on the biological mechanisms that support consciousness within a biological being, the ghost in the machine is still elusive. In one sense, our sense of who we are is a complete work of fiction, assembled from the multitude of mostly subconscious thoughts we've assembled over the course of our lives. But since we function "as if" we are who we think we are, in practical terms our identities and self-conceptions are a working reality. And for those of us who have been immersed so deeply within the virtual that unique avatar incarnations have emerged, I think it is fair to say that there is little qualitative difference between the human and avatar.

Okay, back to the TweetStory....

Botgirl Lives TweetStory 004

If you're coming in late, the story starts here


FIVE YEARS AGO. Serena Mason knocked the last of the attackers to the ground and ended the fight with a kill strike to his throat

"I think the haptics are right," she said. "The feel of Don's ribcage caving in was totaly satisfying. Was it good for you, Don?"

"It hurt like hell," the big Marine replied. "And It WAS good for me. When can we get this out of the lab and into the field?"

"I'm just the girl-genius contractor," she smirked. "They keep me too busy with impossible lab puzzles to worry about deployment."

"This whole fucking place is so locked down and need-to-know that I'm surprised they have a sign on the men's room door."

"What makes you think there's a bathroom behind that door," Don replied with a wink. "Could be our clandestine drug trial lab."

"Who needs drugs? The system can read and write our biochemistry like a book when we're jacked in. Drugs are for pussies."

"Where'd a nice girl get such a potty mouth?" asked Manny, the rotund project manager who was the designated adult on the team.

"Blame Anita Blake, Painkiller Jane and the rest of my kick-ass heroines. Being 13 at MIT didn't make for a rich social life."

"It's never too late to learn manners," said Manny. "And you're ten minutes away from the Red Zone, so jack out and call it a day."

"Let's bail then," Don said. "My wife would never forgive me if I got stuck in the virtual with a young piece of ass like Serena."

"No offense" - "None taken" - - - Serena felt her body jerk and opened her eyes in the underground bunker she now called home.

The story continues here.

This is the daily archive of"Botgirl Lives," a TweetStory, published one post at a time on Twitter under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike License

---

Play or Prey - Full Issue #0 in Flip E-Book

Open publication - Free publishing - More urban fantasy

Play or Prey Comic Continues

Series starts here.

Botgirl Lives TweetStory 003

Part 1 begins here

His arrogant threat turned my curiosity into rage. I knelt down, thrust my hand into his chest and ripped out his virtual heart.

Yeah, my Tarantino Ninja move surprised me too. He sizzled for a few seconds and disintegrated into pixelated goo with a loud pop.

I decided I'd better get out of Dodge. Ten seconds after looking for an exit I realized I'd also better put on some clothes.

Flash! A clothing menu appeared. I had to hand it to those fascist white-slavery motherfuckers; their technology rocked.

I didn't see any ruby slippers, but if wanting to dress rezzed a virtual closet, maybe "no place like home" might rezz a map.

The second that thought crossed my mind, the world flickered into black and a BBC-quality voice announced, "Transporting Home.

The story continues here.

This is the daily archive of"Botgirl Lives," a TweetStory, published one post at a time on Twitter under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike License

Botgirl Lives TweetStory 002

"If you want conspiracy theories, I'm the wrong guy," he said. "It's simple. We ruined the Earth and bailed out into the virtual."

"The world's elite parked their bodies in suspended animation and entered Sim Eden. It seemed like a good idea at the time."

"It only took a few years for utter boredom to kick in, so we started taking in poor RefuVs who'd trade freedom for virtual life."

"AI turned out to be a pipe dream, so we needed the, um, realism of flesh and blood humans. Minus the flesh and blood of course."

"Even though a sim body feels totally real to a RefuV, it's the sponsoring Citizen's property. So that body you live in is mine."

"One word from me and they'll unjack you and send your impoverished ass back to Mad Max Earth. Uncollar me now, bitch, or else!"

Story continues here.

This is the daily archive of"Botgirl Lives," a TweetStory, published one post at a time on Twitter under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike License

---

Botgirl Lives TweetStory 001

This is the daily archive of"Botgirl Lives," a TweetStory, published one post at a time on Twitter under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike License

I came to consciosness as if in a dream, looking down on a massive brute raping a woman bound face-down on a stone floor.

"I own you now, you fucking RefuV," he panted as he magically flipped the slender captive onto her back like a puppet on a string.

I felt strangely detatched peering down from about twenty meters above. Then suddenly, I shifted into that poor girl's POV.

"You can't escape that way," he sneered. "I control your fucking camera."

Damn! That "poor girl" must be me.

Without thinking, I kipped up to my feet, shattering the thick restraints and throwing that big ugly perv on his furry red ass.

"Party's over Furball," I fumed. "Where the hell are we and how did I get here?" I decided to hold off asking who the hell I was.

"How did you get out of your restraints?" he whined. "They told me that collar you're wearing would give me complete control."

"Thanks for the hint," I said, and dragged the collar onto his beefy neck. "Sit Fido," I barked. He sat. Nice!

"Answer my questions or I'll make you bury your head so far up your ass that you'll turn inside out," I threatened. Ick!

He cowered and said, "We're in the RefuV Adoption Sim on the FreeGrid. You better put the collar back on or they'll decant you."

I know he was speaking English, but I had no idea what he was talking about. But I didn't want him to know I was so clueless.

"Tell me everything you know about The RefuV Adoption Center and The FreeGrid," I said. "Do a good job and I'll set you loose."

Story continues here.

I Step Off a Cliff Into TweetStory

My Muse woke me up this morning with the wild idea of transforming my long-unwritten "Botgirl Lives" comic concept into a series of tweets. A TweetStory. So I fired up trusty Birdhouse, whipped off a few 140c paragraphs, announced the project and started posting.

What the heck was She was thinking? I sure wasn't. Despite more than a year of romancing the backstory and basic plot, my three teaser frames had been the sum of my captured output to date. So after the initial buzz of the day's work, I'm a bit apprehensive about writing a "pulp sci-fi" story on the fly, one tweet at a time. But in Bot We Trust, so I'm going for it.

Here are a few intial guidelines I'll follow:

• Write only in Birdhouse in order to limit composition to 140c at a time and make it less tempting to edit.
  
• Post each tweet within 24 hours of the initial save. I want this project to be a near real-time exercise, rather than a drawn-out expression of a large archived document.
• No more than two tweets per hour. I want to be very thoughtful of my followers' Twitter feeds. I hope to figure out a rhythm that can create a mini three-act segment each day.
• I'm using the hashtag #bgl to start each post followed by the paragraph number. I hope that makes it easy for people to follow on Twitter, even if they've missed a bunch of posts.
  
• I'm going to archive the posts here, but I hope most people will read them in real-time as they show up on the Twitter stream. Part of the "poetry" of the medium I hope to learn is the use of timing between tweets.

That's it for now. The next post will be an archive of today's TweetStory.

Stumbling Into Singularity

This is the first of an ongoing series of posts expanding previous tweets. It's pretty common that lines for Twitter posts pop into my mind without any immediately detectable source, so it seems like it should be fun to explore a few of them here. This particular tweet is a bit self-referential in that it is an example of a split within my consciousness (since it came out of nowhere) and alludes to both the complexity and unintegrated nature of the psyche.

Prophets of doom have been predicting the end of the-world-as-we-know-it for thousands of years. Despite a .000 batting average so far, many people still believe that the Rapture, the Mayan End of Time, Nostradamus' predictions or some other cataclysm is lurking around the corner.

A relatively recent crop of soothsayers has shifted the predictive focus from the physical to the psychological and instead describes the end of humans-as-we-know-them. The revolutionary change they envision is called The Singularity, a time when technology creates intelligent entities who are so far advanced that unaugmented Homo sapiens won't be able to comprehend them. Depending on the pundit, these beings may either be cyborgs (a mix of human machine) or a purely computer intelligence that gains self-consciousness.

Although I'm pretty skeptical of such a chasm, it's possible there are some historic precedents. Bicameralists hypothesize that ancient humans left- and right-brains weren't as integrated as they are today. This theory explains ancient myths as being the left brain's externalization of right brain imagery. Marshall McLuhan thought that higher levels of human reasoning were only established in humans after the phonetic alphabet emerged to transcend the constraints of oral culture.

Despite the possibility of some relatively rapid and profound shifts of consciousness in human history, I tend to doubt the advent of some sort of technologically-induced Singularity that throws us over a chasm. Here are a couple of reasons:

• Giving humans access to almost unlimited information hasn't made them any smarter so far. In fact, I could argue that the ability to almost instantly find information online has atrophied the average human's intelligence. For instance, why bother to develop memorization skill when you can ask your cellphone for the answer? How many people do you know who don't even know their friends' phone numbers because they always speed dial. Sure, humans are adapting to a new technological environment, but what happens if some sort of catastrophe turns the power off for a week, a month or even years? The ability to rapidly access information is great for a small subset of human endeavor, but has no impact on the core of human existence which is centered around interpersonal relationships, personal expression, creativity, etc.
  

• Access to information + Faster processing =/= Wisdom. Sure, you can have a better handle on probabilities. You might even be able to discern patterns in information that were not otherwise knowable. But facts and meaning are two different animals. For every important matter of human interest there are very intelligent people with conflicting views. Harry Truman's "There are three types of lies: Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics" is quite applicable to the question of truth/wisdom versus information.
  

It seems to me that the verdict is still out on whether technology is going to dumb humanity down or catapult it to unimaginable heights. Time will tell.

---------------

Play or Prey will continue next week with background on our lovely suspect's childhood and a peak behind the scenes into the Olympic Garden dressing room.

---------------
Image by Okedem under Creative Commons attribution license

Play or Prey Comic continues NSFW

Series starts here.








Comic continues here.

Play or Prey Comic - Preface 2/2 (NSFW)

Part 1 is here

NEW COMIC SERIES: Play or Prey - Preface 1 of 2 - NSFW

Next episode here

Protesters Struggle With Aftermath of Abortion Doctor's Death

This political cartoon was inspired by a headline in yesterday's New York Times.

The Blank Page as Sacred Space

The first thing I do upon waking these days is launch Birdhouse on the iPhone and write tweets. I face the blank page with complete trust in the Creative Source. Being still, waiting for ideas to emerge and transcribing them is a cycle of contemplative prayer.

Where do ideas come from? In one sense, they can be viewed as emergent manifestations of the brain. But beyond the dance of neurons there is a greater mystery. I call her my Muse.

If the idea is appealing to you, please give it a try and let me know how it goes.