#35: notes
Notes
The gorgeous art that you see was done by the talented widowmangada, who isn't in fandom but took my incoherent email seriously. ♥ Thank you Flora; you're completely amazing.
Huge thanks are in order - to forochel first and foremost, for being part of endless discussions about plotlines and worldbuilding, for calling me a chicken when I didn't finish the story properly, and for being incredibly encouraging and flaily and thorough throughout the whole process. darong was the person who turned to me and said write ittttttt right at the very beginning, and responded to every snippet I sent her with MOAR PLS, so you have her to blame as well. Finally, many ♥s to laiqualaurelote, whose writing in previous collaborations was very much an inspiration at many points (because nobody does noir/cyberpunk quite like her).
The story, as I mentioned in my (considerably shorter) note, was inspired by this picture of Nino, accompanied, in floweranza's picspam, by the caption: He's a shapeshifter living in a steampunk world. Someone write this. Or discuss. Because I am fail like that, I latched on to the word "punk" and unconsciously changed the suffix to "cyber-", and somehow it became He's a cyborg living in a cyberpunk world. :x
This story was hard to write. It started out as cop!Sho receiving Nino as his cybernetic partner and them going undercover together, but along the way Jun was switched in as the cop and Sho became his long-suffering reporting officer. Then forochel said SMUGGLERS and I ran with that instead.
With regards to cyberpunk: I have always loved the genre, and thus spent a lot of time wringing my hands and fretting about how the story was "not cyberpunk enough". I don't know if it is, at this point, but if you're interested to find out more about it, check out the wikipedia article. The title of this story is a reference to this novel by Philip K. Dick.
Research was done, believe it or not! There was no rowing this time (sigh of relief), but I did some cursory reading on wikipedia. (Links for if you're interested.) I can't find the article that talks about robot arms and nanotechnology mimicking human muscles, but it was there somewhere! Even so, I look back on the story and can't help feeling that the science needs more work, but I suppose I'll save that for next time. Most of my ideas about RepliSync technology were also inspired/affirmed by a Cosmos Magazine article about science's progress in altering human memory called Learning to Forget (Issue 29, Oct/Nov 2009), which was given to me as a printout for something else. (Lucky, as Aiba would say.)
During the long period in which this fic was lost in the wilderness, I began writing the story from a vastly different angle, but it couldn't reach the end point I wanted so I left it and went back to what I'd been working on. Since I doubt that snippet will ever be turned into something else, I thought I'd just share it here. (Note that this isn't supposed to properly fit into the timeline of the actual story.)
1. Ohno
Ohno remembers being five and being told that he may never run as fast as the other children, but that he is a clever boy nonetheless and should keep drawing those lovely pictures for his friends.
He runs, anyway, and doesn't catch up. His legs are a map of bruises and scrapes from all the times he's fallen in the simul-field and on the concrete walkways; once he even tumbles down an escalator on the Bridges - that had been terrifying.
When he is thirteen someone comes in to run a series of tests on him that ends with a scan of his brain. Six months later, they offer him a scholarship in cybernetic design. Nobody in his family knows what it means.
"We will teach you to engineer perfection," is what he remembers the lady saying, when she comes to take him away. Ohno wonders if being perfect means having good legs and scoring a hat-trick. She gives his parents brochures and a certificate in exchange for saying yes.
His mother packs him rice crackers and a chocolate bar, and his sister slips a comic book in between the shirts in his suitcase. His father tells him to do the family proud.
He never sees them again.
2. Sho
They say that to be a cybernetic engineer, one needs to be good at drawing.
Sho has no talent in art. His practical sketches are returned to him with remarks like, I will weep the day a cybernetic unit with this anatomical structure is constructed, or, the only thing perfect about this model is its perfect hideousness. He enjoys the classes where they look into cabling processors and programming the units, but everything else is becoming more and more of a challenge that he finds himself less and less willing to tackle, a morass of limbs and eyes and carriage calibration grids that he can never get right.
Ohno's designs, on the other hand, are easily the best in the school - one diagram of a female cybernetic unit with no visible switches or processor extensions receives the comment, pure poetry - the future of cybernetics starts on this page.
It would be a lie to say that Sho is not even a little bit jealous - he is. It's hard to stay jealous of Ohno, though. Sho has known this since they first enrolled, and Ohno had shared his last rice cracker with Sho because he'd "looked hungry and his suitcase was very big".
Ohno is a good guy because he covers for Sho when they're doing something stupid, like hacking into the system database to edit the lunch menu selection and accidentally setting off the emergency evacuation system. Also, he doesn't laugh at Sho's arm. Back home the kids would single him out for not having one; here, their classmates make snide remarks about him having a poorly-constructed replacement. Ohno had taken two weeks to actually notice that Sho's arm is mechanical from shoulder down. Sho is bemusedly grateful for that.
For their fifth-year project he and Ohno turn Ohno's sketch into an actual cybernetic unit called Hisa, a freight craft co-pilot also equipped with self-defense skills. Her movements are still jerky and her demeanour is patently unfriendly, but she integrates perfectly with the ships they test her in and it is clearly evident that she is miles more advanced than any of the other projects in the venue. Ohno and Hisa appear together in a few reknowned journals; Sho gets a transfer offer from the Dean of Aeronautics.
"I'm glad you're taking it," says Ohno, when Sho tells him about it. "You're good at such things. And it's not as if you won't be able to pay for the extra years, now." A cybernetic company is buying the design for Hisa; money will cease to be a problem for them for at least the next half a decade.
"And what will you do?" Sho asks.
"Finish school," says Ohno simply, evidently not having put much thought into his future.
"You should submit the Boy for your final project," Sho tells him, not for the first time.
"I haven't figured him out yet," Ohno replies. "He's not an ordinary sort of boy."
Sho likes the Boy. He peers out of all of Ohno's lecture notes and sometimes even Sho's. The Boy is beautiful, and perfect in a way all the other models can never be - where the rest are tall and powerfully built, units with function and purpose, the Boy is drawn with his shoulders hunched in a constant slouch and an alertness that nobody has been able to bionically replicate. It's something about the eyes, Sho thinks; Ohno makes them look slightly wicked, but also, thoughtful. The Boy doesn't have a name, but Sho can already tell that he will someday be called Ohno's masterpiece.
Sho has long been aware that Ohno is on the brink of accomplishing great things. All he has got to do now is wait for technology to catch up with him.
The gorgeous art that you see was done by the talented widowmangada, who isn't in fandom but took my incoherent email seriously. ♥ Thank you Flora; you're completely amazing.
Huge thanks are in order - to forochel first and foremost, for being part of endless discussions about plotlines and worldbuilding, for calling me a chicken when I didn't finish the story properly, and for being incredibly encouraging and flaily and thorough throughout the whole process. darong was the person who turned to me and said write ittttttt right at the very beginning, and responded to every snippet I sent her with MOAR PLS, so you have her to blame as well. Finally, many ♥s to laiqualaurelote, whose writing in previous collaborations was very much an inspiration at many points (because nobody does noir/cyberpunk quite like her).
The story, as I mentioned in my (considerably shorter) note, was inspired by this picture of Nino, accompanied, in floweranza's picspam, by the caption: He's a shapeshifter living in a steampunk world. Someone write this. Or discuss. Because I am fail like that, I latched on to the word "punk" and unconsciously changed the suffix to "cyber-", and somehow it became He's a cyborg living in a cyberpunk world. :x
This story was hard to write. It started out as cop!Sho receiving Nino as his cybernetic partner and them going undercover together, but along the way Jun was switched in as the cop and Sho became his long-suffering reporting officer. Then forochel said SMUGGLERS and I ran with that instead.
With regards to cyberpunk: I have always loved the genre, and thus spent a lot of time wringing my hands and fretting about how the story was "not cyberpunk enough". I don't know if it is, at this point, but if you're interested to find out more about it, check out the wikipedia article. The title of this story is a reference to this novel by Philip K. Dick.
Research was done, believe it or not! There was no rowing this time (sigh of relief), but I did some cursory reading on wikipedia. (Links for if you're interested.) I can't find the article that talks about robot arms and nanotechnology mimicking human muscles, but it was there somewhere! Even so, I look back on the story and can't help feeling that the science needs more work, but I suppose I'll save that for next time. Most of my ideas about RepliSync technology were also inspired/affirmed by a Cosmos Magazine article about science's progress in altering human memory called Learning to Forget (Issue 29, Oct/Nov 2009), which was given to me as a printout for something else. (Lucky, as Aiba would say.)
During the long period in which this fic was lost in the wilderness, I began writing the story from a vastly different angle, but it couldn't reach the end point I wanted so I left it and went back to what I'd been working on. Since I doubt that snippet will ever be turned into something else, I thought I'd just share it here. (Note that this isn't supposed to properly fit into the timeline of the actual story.)
1. Ohno
Ohno remembers being five and being told that he may never run as fast as the other children, but that he is a clever boy nonetheless and should keep drawing those lovely pictures for his friends.
He runs, anyway, and doesn't catch up. His legs are a map of bruises and scrapes from all the times he's fallen in the simul-field and on the concrete walkways; once he even tumbles down an escalator on the Bridges - that had been terrifying.
When he is thirteen someone comes in to run a series of tests on him that ends with a scan of his brain. Six months later, they offer him a scholarship in cybernetic design. Nobody in his family knows what it means.
"We will teach you to engineer perfection," is what he remembers the lady saying, when she comes to take him away. Ohno wonders if being perfect means having good legs and scoring a hat-trick. She gives his parents brochures and a certificate in exchange for saying yes.
His mother packs him rice crackers and a chocolate bar, and his sister slips a comic book in between the shirts in his suitcase. His father tells him to do the family proud.
He never sees them again.
2. Sho
They say that to be a cybernetic engineer, one needs to be good at drawing.
Sho has no talent in art. His practical sketches are returned to him with remarks like, I will weep the day a cybernetic unit with this anatomical structure is constructed, or, the only thing perfect about this model is its perfect hideousness. He enjoys the classes where they look into cabling processors and programming the units, but everything else is becoming more and more of a challenge that he finds himself less and less willing to tackle, a morass of limbs and eyes and carriage calibration grids that he can never get right.
Ohno's designs, on the other hand, are easily the best in the school - one diagram of a female cybernetic unit with no visible switches or processor extensions receives the comment, pure poetry - the future of cybernetics starts on this page.
It would be a lie to say that Sho is not even a little bit jealous - he is. It's hard to stay jealous of Ohno, though. Sho has known this since they first enrolled, and Ohno had shared his last rice cracker with Sho because he'd "looked hungry and his suitcase was very big".
Ohno is a good guy because he covers for Sho when they're doing something stupid, like hacking into the system database to edit the lunch menu selection and accidentally setting off the emergency evacuation system. Also, he doesn't laugh at Sho's arm. Back home the kids would single him out for not having one; here, their classmates make snide remarks about him having a poorly-constructed replacement. Ohno had taken two weeks to actually notice that Sho's arm is mechanical from shoulder down. Sho is bemusedly grateful for that.
For their fifth-year project he and Ohno turn Ohno's sketch into an actual cybernetic unit called Hisa, a freight craft co-pilot also equipped with self-defense skills. Her movements are still jerky and her demeanour is patently unfriendly, but she integrates perfectly with the ships they test her in and it is clearly evident that she is miles more advanced than any of the other projects in the venue. Ohno and Hisa appear together in a few reknowned journals; Sho gets a transfer offer from the Dean of Aeronautics.
"I'm glad you're taking it," says Ohno, when Sho tells him about it. "You're good at such things. And it's not as if you won't be able to pay for the extra years, now." A cybernetic company is buying the design for Hisa; money will cease to be a problem for them for at least the next half a decade.
"And what will you do?" Sho asks.
"Finish school," says Ohno simply, evidently not having put much thought into his future.
"You should submit the Boy for your final project," Sho tells him, not for the first time.
"I haven't figured him out yet," Ohno replies. "He's not an ordinary sort of boy."
Sho likes the Boy. He peers out of all of Ohno's lecture notes and sometimes even Sho's. The Boy is beautiful, and perfect in a way all the other models can never be - where the rest are tall and powerfully built, units with function and purpose, the Boy is drawn with his shoulders hunched in a constant slouch and an alertness that nobody has been able to bionically replicate. It's something about the eyes, Sho thinks; Ohno makes them look slightly wicked, but also, thoughtful. The Boy doesn't have a name, but Sho can already tell that he will someday be called Ohno's masterpiece.
Sho has long been aware that Ohno is on the brink of accomplishing great things. All he has got to do now is wait for technology to catch up with him.