thejakeformerlyknownasprince:

[If you want angst, then here’s my own hypothesis about how morphing is likely to affect the user long-term.]

• They’re forty-six years old.  Technically Rachel’s forty-seven, and Marco three days out from forty-five.  They’re businesspeople.  They’re parents.  They’re adults.  They have knee replacements and 401k accounts.
• They are still, Marco points out, too young to be dealing with this shit.  Too young by half.
• Jake was just trying to figure out how to break the news, when Marco called.  All mockery and self-deprecation on the surface, all graves and church doors and plagues on houses, Marco took almost an hour to spit it out.  Melanoma.  Metastasis.  Fuck you.
• It’s a new technology, Ax explains to them, almost apologetically.  The first-ever generation of andalite morphers is only about seventy to eighty human years old, and with a two-century lifespan no one can say for sure how the ones who aren’t nothlits or dead already will turn out.  It’s a new technology, and one never intended for human use.  No one could have foreseen this.
• This being Cassie’s doctor calling her to come back in for additional testing, STAT, after that mid-year checkup just because she has been feeling tired all the time.
• This being the anger in Rachel’s voice as she demanded: “What do you mean, swollen lymph nodes?”
• This being doctors shrugging, sighing, apologizing.
• This being the way that the tumors grow back faster and larger, if you morph to try and fix them.
• Cassie goes home.  She hugs each of her children, tells them why she’s retiring effective tomorrow, and smiles through tears when all three of them take leaves of absence as well.  They spend a crazy, stressful, unforgettable eighteen months wandering the world.  They fetch up in a hospice center outside Lagos.  They say goodbye.  They love each other.  Cassie’s a little vague around the edges, when the drugs start kicking in, which is what she blames for not only ordering Ronnie to remarry but compiling a whole list of suggestions for replacement spouses that range from the practical to the absurd.
• Jake says “screw you” when the President suggests that he retire as well.  He gets up.  He goes to work.  He teaches this last batch of recruits how to keep themselves and their friends and the civilians alive.  He teaches his successor how to be patient with mistakes and unforgiving with carelessness, how to offer out praise when it’s deserved and not shirk on criticism.
• He calls his former students, every single one of them, one by one.  Over half manage to align schedules long enough to join him for a beer, or a walk, or a couple hours sitting around a boring hospital room.  They tell him about their kids and their battle scars.  They offer the strictly-classified versions of missions that leave Jake laughing hard enough to fall off his chair, or holding their hands in his as they cry.
• Ray has cancer.  So does Idara.  Kuan-yu and Skye and Devina too.  They keep each other company, they bitch about chemo together, they rack up new battle scars along surgical lines.
• It’s an act of forgiveness for himself, to learn about the legacy he’s leaving behind.  One which has nothing to do with the statue in D.C. or the Medal of Honor in the footlocker at home.
• Tobias doesn’t say anything at all.  He doesn’t respond to Cassie’s requests to at least swing by and see what her mom has to say.  He doesn’t share much of anything when Ax, when Loren, when his grandparents all swing by to see how he’s doing.  He and Rachel talk all day about ordinary things.  They don’t plan on planning it, but somehow or other they never get around to making wills or even having a proper discussion with their daughter about what it all means.
• Tobias disappears, one day, as if he was never there.  The others all search, of course, but they’re not really surprised to find nothing.  The woods are vast.  The body is small.  He’d be happier, to know his meat and bones helped keep a fellow predator alive for one more desperate day.
• Rachel’s already one of the biggest and baddest fighters in the National Guard.  But after this she goes off the rails, morphing and fighting and morphing and fighting, rushing from one mission to the next, never staying in her failing human body for a second longer than necessary.  Six months later, she gets her wish: she dies in battle against a group of Neo-Humanist terrorists outside of Peoria.
• Jordan thinks that she hates her sister, just a little, as she half-carries her sobbing niece out of their second funeral in less than a year.
• The cells of the human body divide, Ax explains.  He wants it to mean something.  They divide, and they warp, and they distort.  They form new shapes, take on new configurations, they pass through singularities and achieve impossibilities.
• Eventually, given time, they get a little too good at dividing.  At warping.  At making themselves, out of control.
• Ax risks court-martial for punching a commander in the face for suggesting that this all the proof they need that humans were never meant to morph.  Punching.  Such a human gesture.  He had a tail right there, and yet… And yet he did what Marco would have done.
• Marco’s fans raise two and a half billion dollars for research.  They donate eight livers, none of which Marco ends up using when he could instead give them away.  They start a foundation in his name.  They donate time, DNA, wristbands, bone marrow.  It’s silly, he thinks, that all it took was putting a face on this disease for half the planet to start emptying their pockets toward its end.
• Jake learns to swallow poison and shave his head.  Cassie learns to retract her life down to that which is most precious and essential.  Marco learns what it is to live without even the possibility of morphing, after they custom-build him a new body and help him move in forever.  Jordan learns how to treasure her niece, treasure her memories, treasure her own time.
• Ax brings them up constantly, even decades after they’re all gone.  Be better, he insists to his arisths and officers and researchers.  Do better.  For them.  They ended a war for us.  They changed how we think about ourselves, and the universe in which we live.  Respect them, by respecting the aliens we’ve never met.  Honor them, by learning to give our technology away.  Remember them, by building a better future in their name. 

itaveli:

yall know what i love? that kind of black cats that look like some cat-shaped blops of darkness

perfection

gallusrostromegalus:

glumshoe:

glumshoe:

In this image, the robot clearly has the upper hand and the better deal. Its french cuff and four stacked sleeve buttons suggest extreme debonair formality, but it has discarded the traditional black suit jacket for a soft gray plaid, suggesting a tasteful and confident personality that the human cannot hope to rival. The design of its hand is sleek and powerful, and the strength of its grip is second only to the strength of its will – this is not an android to be trifled with. It could have skin if it wanted to, but why bother? Fucking power move.

This stock photo depicts the same android human exchanging a formal post-coital handshake after swapping clothes and sealing the fate of the planet. 

Here, the human has the upper hand in the deal, or at least thinks they do. They grip the robot’s hand with unnecessary firmness, testing to see just how strong to the pliable plastic pseudoskin really is. There is malice and jealousy in this handshake. The human needs to prove their superiority and continued relevance in the modern world. This is a benign robot designed for gentle, delicate tasks and affability, but its design is tacky and awkward, like Sonny from the I, Robot movie (soft, realistic eyes in a squishy featureless face.is a bad aesthetic choice).

The human is holding this robot’s hand like it’s a gun. He means to use it as a weapon – perhaps he is hiring it as an assassin in his plot to take over the world. 

This is the assassinbot’s “twin” who has been sent to protect the would-be assassination victim (pictured on left). Both bots are equally committed to their mission, and the showdown will end with them tearing each other apart while the would-be victim looks on in horror. They are each damaged irreparably, but the human splices them together, not realizing that their “brains” are spread throughout their bodies. The resulting robot is a strange fusion of both personalities and spends the rest of the story accepting itself as a new individual with free will and complicated motivations. 

The android is actually on the right in this picture. The hand on the left belongs to its human creator, who is proud of her humaniform “child” but has chosen to use an obviously artificial prosthetic in place of a more realistic one so that she can proudly display her work as the world’s greatest roboticist. 

This image shows the newest and most realistic android meeting his own earliest prototype. It is a surreal moment for both robots. The tacky 2000′s “futuristic” design of the left robot seems incredibly dated next to the one on the right. It’s almost embarrassing for the humaniform android, like looking at a baby picture… some strange combination of meeting your wizened ancestor and your own infant self. 

This is a businessman realizing that he can pay his employees $0.00 if he fires them and automates everything. He is eventually eaten by poor people. The robot cites the Zeroeth Law and lets it happen, looking on expressionlessly. 

Almost forgot one of my favorites! This image depicts a husband and the robot whose positronic brain contains the uploaded memories of his dead wife. At first, things were rough. The man was haunted, angry, resentful. He wanted to mourn his wife in peace. She had not told him that she’d had her memories saved shortly before she died, and he’d only found out when this horrible mechanical monster showed up at the funeral calling itself Janet. He’d been stuck with the metal abomination for weeks, repulsed to his core but unable to bring himself to destroy it or send it away. My prince, it had called him, in a flat, artificial mockery of Janet’s voice. He hated it. He hated it even more than the bastard who’d run her down.

But then he’d caught that… that awful machine in the basement, pouring over photo albums and old documents and SD cards. It’d had her emails opened up on the old desktop. Something in him had snapped then, seeing those brutish steel fingers wrapped around their wedding album. He’d raged, screaming and kicking and throwing whatever shit he could get his hands on. The goddamn machine seemed to be the only thing he couldn’t break, and when he finally collapsed to the floor, sobbing, it had caught him gently in its arms and brushed the tears from his face with its cold metal fingers.

They sat like that for several minutes, like some kind of fucked up Madonna and Child. Then, in the silent darkness of the destroyed basement, the robot had spoken: “I think I know why they had me killed.”

Those words had cut through his stupor like razor wire through warm butter. They? It had been a hit and run!

As it turned out, nothing brings people together like solving a murder and unveiling a dark corporate conspiracy.

Janet had been a sharp woman during her organic life, but her computerized afterlife only enhanced her intelligence and cutting wit. It was… kind of hot, actually. Holding the robot’s steel frame would never be as comfortable as spooning Janet’s soft warm body, but that powerful scaffolding had its own weird charm. Things had changed, certainly, but apart from their sex life, it wasn’t so different after all. The new chapter of their relationship had opened on a strange note and they were determined to make the best of it, come what may.

Ship this is the most intriguing and entertaining sci-fi I’ve read all year.  When’s your novella coming out?

dee-wood:

jinxtimesinfinity:

askragtatter:

anonymous-bosch:

the-sky-traveler:

my brother is teaching his cat how to high five by giving her a treat every time she successfully taps her hand to his hand, which is all well and good, but now she thinks that she is entitled to food every time she high fives someone.  i can’t eat in the same room as her anymore because she’ll just bap my hand rapid fire and then go nyoom straight in for my pizza like no Kelly that’s illegal go finish ur own dinner

“No Kelly, that’s illegal.”

So, a while back, I was using clicker-training to teach my cat Taz tricks. She learned very quickly and it was a good experience all around, but we had to hide the clicker.

Taz had learned that the clicker meant she got treats. So she would find it, carry it up to people, step on it to make it click, and then SCREAM AT THEM to give her the treats she was clearly owed because the clicker had made a sound.

Cats

Pavlov is rolling over laughing in his grave.

stimman3000:

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