EP139: Acephalous Dreams

[Windup]

I had a bit of an issue with the nature of Daes' punishment. If the proper treatment of a rapist is to adjust his brain to make him not a rapist, why would the same not be done for a muderer? It seems that Daes could be "fixed" just as easilly, if not more so, and the only purpose of his execution would be retribution. If this society sees retribution as a legitimate function of punishment then how do we explain a system that would readjust the rapist's brain rather than punish him? It felt to me like an inconsistency.

I had the same problem.  I suppose you could argue "deterrence,"  but that, too, would seem to apply to the rapist as well.  One thing that I did think of was that maybe Daes' earlier refusal to have his misanthropy "adjusted" made him more culpable in the AI-run justice system.  Having chosen to be "defective," he now had to bear the responsibility for remaining that way -- an "assumed risk" sort of situation.  Though that was never made explicit.

[Czhorat]

I had a bit of an issue with the nature of Daes' punishment. If the proper treatment of a rapist is to adjust his brain to make him not a rapist, why would the same not be done for a muderer? It seems that Daes could be "fixed" just as easilly, if not more so, and the only purpose of his execution would be retribution. If this society sees retribution as a legitimate function of punishment then how do we explain a system that would readjust the rapist's brain rather than punish him? It felt to me like an inconsistency.

I had the same problem.  I suppose you could argue "deterrence,"  but that, too, would seem to apply to the rapist as well.  One thing that I did think of was that maybe Daes' earlier refusal to have his misanthropy "adjusted" made him more culpable in the AI-run justice system.  Having chosen to be "defective," he now had to bear the responsibility for remaining that way -- an "assumed risk" sort of situation.  Though that was never made explicit.

The story seems to have hinted at this, but you could have made exactly the same argument about the rapist. He could have had his pedophilia and tendency to abuse power adjusted away rather than rape young boys. It just felt like a slightly sloppy bit of thinking because we needed a death-row convict for the story to work.

[Windup]

I had a bit of an issue with the nature of Daes' punishment. If the proper treatment of a rapist is to adjust his brain to make him not a rapist, why would the same not be done for a muderer? It seems that Daes could be "fixed" just as easilly, if not more so, and the only purpose of his execution would be retribution. If this society sees retribution as a legitimate function of punishment then how do we explain a system that would readjust the rapist's brain rather than punish him? It felt to me like an inconsistency.

I had the same problem.  I suppose you could argue "deterrence,"  but that, too, would seem to apply to the rapist as well.  One thing that I did think of was that maybe Daes' earlier refusal to have his misanthropy "adjusted" made him more culpable in the AI-run justice system.  Having chosen to be "defective," he now had to bear the responsibility for remaining that way -- an "assumed risk" sort of situation.  Though that was never made explicit.

The story seems to have hinted at this, but you could have made exactly the same argument about the rapist. He could have had his pedophilia and tendency to abuse power adjusted away rather than rape young boys. It just felt like a slightly sloppy bit of thinking because we needed a death-row convict for the story to work.

I had the impression that Daes was somehow made aware of his problem and had formally refused to have it fixed, though I couldn't swear to that without listening to the whole story again.  Whereas the priest apparently kept his pedophelia to himself. 

Since the AI can apparently read a human memory flawlessly, there's no danger of a false accusation.  The AI can see the act from both the perpetrator's point of view and the victim's, and apparently has ways to resolve the variances caused by different minds observing the same act.  Imaigine how that would affect both civil and criminal law.  One of many interesting questions closed off by the story's need for a death-row inmate.

[Thaurismunths]

I had a bit of an issue with the nature of Daes' punishment. If the proper treatment of a rapist is to adjust his brain to make him not a rapist, why would the same not be done for a muderer? It seems that Daes could be "fixed" just as easilly, if not more so, and the only purpose of his execution would be retribution. If this society sees retribution as a legitimate function of punishment then how do we explain a system that would readjust the rapist's brain rather than punish him? It felt to me like an inconsistency.

I believe it was for the same reason we have a death penalty: Some society believes can be rehabilitated, or at the very least their crimes are not worthy of a capital punishment. Others have committed crimes too heinius to be given the chance for rehabilitation, or have proven themselves incapable of rehabilitation. With out getting in to too much speculation about the AI's abilities I believe that Daes was being executed as punishment for his crime rather than because of Geronimid's inability to adjust his personality.

As another aside, I'm not sure why Geronimid couldn't have built some kind of biological construct to house the node. It seems well within the capabilities we saw from the AI.

It was never mentioned that Geronimid could create advanced biological organisms. The cyborg was just a cyborg, not a manufactured human. The AI could have created a computer body for the node to inhabit but it was pretty explicitly stated that Geronimid had every intention of stunting the Csorian's progress so that humans would be on equal footing when the species encountered one another.

[ajames]

Thanks Hazimel [and eytanz] for making me realize there is more to this story than I got on the first listen.  I remembered the golem's name as Hera, so I obviously missed the impregnable Hestia/birthing spider angle.  I finally got around to looking up acephalous, too, which is Greek for "headless", and an acephalous society is one without hierarchies or leaders.

[sirana]

All in all a solid little story with interesting ideas, but I didn't really like the way things turned out.
I was really hooked with the plot of the convicted getting "a new life" (even though it is in no way a new concept) and the implication of the world (theocracy and AIs and such), but the part that played out on the lonely planet fell flat for me.
I generally like my characters to be entrenched in (or at least relating to) their society, so a story on a quarantined planet is a difficult sell. And both powerful AIs and Alien minds are incredibly difficult to do right. In this story they didn't feel that much different from the human protagonist and that makes it weak in my view.
Also, Geronimid lands a shuttle on planet when he before was afraid to establish a direct comlink? Not really plausible.

[Czhorat]

All in all a solid little story with interesting ideas, but I didn't really like the way things turned out.
I was really hooked with the plot of the convicted getting "a new life" (even though it is in no way a new concept) and the implication of the world (theocracy and AIs and such), but the part that played out on the lonely planet fell flat for me.

Good point. It also didn't help that the actual resolution won't come for ten thousand years or so. I think that part of the problem that space opera faces is that it's easy to lose the kind of human scale in which we can identify with the protagonist and his relationship with the world around him.

[Thaurismunths]

Also, Geronimid lands a shuttle on planet when he before was afraid to establish a direct comlink? Not really plausible.

I don't remember this part. When did he land a shuttle?

[eytanz]

At the end, to collect his golem.

I think the reasoning is that the aliens were too primitive to control the picotech to the degree where they could be a threat.

[Thaurismunths]

At the end, to collect his golem.

I think the reasoning is that the aliens were too primitive to control the picotech to the degree where they could be a threat.

Oh, yes. That's when she saw the spider with Daes' mark on it.
I believe you're right. The Csorians had already chosen their host species and were no longer a threat to the AI systems.

[contra]

Yet again I liked the story.

And reading this made be think about it in different ways; and pick up on things I did not the first time.

When the issue is pointed out to him, and that it would have been fixed; I took him saying that he had decided not go get himself 'fixed' to be an admission of culpability for anything that it may cause.  Almost like the police saying threats have been made against your life... and you do nothing about it and reject the help you are offered; then after something happens you decide to sue the police for not stopping it.  No; you refused the help when it was brought up for you. 
I think it is the same in this story.  It was noticed a lot earlier in his life; he just chose not to get it fixed.  That is how they can jusfity execution; it was pre meditated to an extrene degree, he didn't try to stop it, showed no remorse for his crime and so on.

As for the AI's abilities well they never are explored; so we can't specilate on them.  I doubt they can create life to the degree that would be required for the alien hive. 

[Roney]

Great story.  The last two weeks' have been two of the best that Escape Pod has run, for my tastes.

There are details of Polity society that I think answer some of the questions people have about elements of the plot -- they were hinted at in the story but were easy to miss in audio.

Although the Polity is really big, you won't be able to lose yourself in it if you're on the run.  All travel off-planet goes through the runcibles (teleportation devices) and is controlled by the AIs.  (Try to take any contraband through a runcible and the AI will simply edit it out of the transfer: you will end up at your destination but the contraband won't.)  After committing a serious crime, you're stuck on the planet you're on.  And so much of daily life is mediated by AIs that you'd have to camp out in the woods to avoid detection.  It's not intended to be a police state, but the pervasive AI involvement has near-total surveillance as a side-effect.

I imagine that this makes premeditated murder extremely rare.  Most people premeditating murder will look at the 100% chance of being caught and think again.  Most human-on-human deaths are probably accidental or crimes of passion.  Destruction of the priest's head may also have been important in landing Deas with a death sentence -- I can't remember how well resurrection/reconstruction works in the Polity but the story certainly made quite a big deal of dropping the head into the volcano.  It may be that death is only given for "murder with no possibility of resurrection".

As such, I concur with Thaurismunths that Daes was not chosen by Geronamid at random.  I've got no idea how big a sector is, but presumably a Sector AI is looking after many billions of humans, so death sentences for crimes of passion may indeed be churned out every minute.  But a cold-blooded killer with the moral sense to know that what he's doing is wrong, and the common sense to know that he'll be caught afterwards, with the deep sense of grievance to go through with it anyway?  That's probably not something that passes through the courts every day.

And this is why it seems quite important to me that we see both the abuse and the revenge in unflinching detail.  If the author waves it away with a line like "Daes was on death row for murdering the bully who'd abused him as a boy", the reader understands that there was a run-of-the-mill murder and the character has a de rigeur unhappy childhood.  But the reader needs to be more emotionally involved, to know the details that make this abuse personal and the murder unique.  We need to feel that Daes didn't overreact to the rape, and that he wasn't insane or overcome with rage when he killed.  This murderer is special.

At least, that's my strong impression from the way the story was structured.  What I haven't quite been able to figure out is why Geronamid needed someone like Daes.  The two obvious choices are that it's something in the way Daes's personality would inform/constrain the Csorians' reactions in dealing with Geronamid, or something in the way that he would influence their multi-thousand-year exile on the planet.  If there are clues in the text, I missed them.  Shame, I'll just have to listen again.

Also, Geronimid lands a shuttle on planet when he before was afraid to establish a direct comlink? Not really plausible.

I'm not sure that it was afraid.  As the Csorians understood quickly enough, simply introducing an extra link in the chain didn't prevent Geronamid from having to make contact with the infected link at some point.  It doesn't work very well as a firewall.  I think the elaborate setup was a bluff to see how aggressively the Csorians would fight to subvert the AI: a way of giving them enough rope to hang themselves with.  Asher's AIs tend to be devious like that, and never let on everything that they know.

[deflective]

many layers to this story and there's some good comments.

i've been imagining the religious discussions that take place in spider society after a couple thousand years of picotech accelerated evolution.

evo spider: look, we don't need any mysterious forces. there are perfectly natural explanations for our existence.
id spider:   you're telling me that the delicate balance of our silk glands were created by accident? without intelligent design?
evo spider: i'm saying that there's no reason to believe that they were created at all, only emerged. what would be the purpose of creating us and then leaving us alone?
id spider:   we are being judged! there comes a time of great reckoning when the creator will make himself known and those who are found worthy will be raised up to sit beside him while others are left behind.
evo spider: ...

ironically, the critically minded approach the complexity needed by picotech more rapidly. with the ultimate reward being your consciousness snuffed out and replaced with an alien intelligence.

[eytanz]

ironically, the critically minded approach the complexity needed by picotech more rapidly. with the ultimate reward being your consciousness snuffed out and replaced with an alien intelligence.

I don't think that's how it's supposed to work. It's not the individuals will suddenly get their personality replaced when they get "smart enough". Rather, it'll probably be that when baby spiders will be born that have the necessary mental capacity, they will be born with the imprinted personality. So it's not so much that the reward is "you get your conciousness snuffed out" but more that if you're smart enough and find an equally smart mate, you're likely to have bizzare alien kids.

[deflective]

aye eytanz, i was a little trite.

but i definitely got the impression that the picotech was designed to recreate the society as a whole. it needed enough bodies of sufficient complexity to do it all at once but only had the two at hand; so it set about to create those bodies at which point it would reactivate its initial directive.

[Windup]

So it's not so much that the reward is "you get your conciousness snuffed out" but more that if you're smart enough and find an equally smart mate, you're likely to have bizzare alien kids.

Heck, "bizzare alien kids" is the near-universal fate of human parents, "smart enough" or not!!

[Windup]

I imagine that this makes premeditated murder extremely rare.  Most people premeditating murder will look at the 100% chance of being caught and think again.  Most human-on-human deaths are probably accidental or crimes of passion.  Destruction of the priest's head may also have been important in landing Deas with a death sentence -- I can't remember how well resurrection/reconstruction works in the Polity but the story certainly made quite a big deal of dropping the head into the volcano.  It may be that death is only given for "murder with no possibility of resurrection".

As such, I concur with Thaurismunths that Daes was not chosen by Geronamid at random.  I've got no idea how big a sector is, but presumably a Sector AI is looking after many billions of humans, so death sentences for crimes of passion may indeed be churned out every minute.  But a cold-blooded killer with the moral sense to know that what he's doing is wrong, and the common sense to know that he'll be caught afterwards, with the deep sense of grievance to go through with it anyway?  That's probably not something that passes through the courts every day.

And this is why it seems quite important to me that we see both the abuse and the revenge in unflinching detail.  If the author waves it away with a line like "Daes was on death row for murdering the bully who'd abused him as a boy", the reader understands that there was a run-of-the-mill murder and the character has a de rigeur unhappy childhood.  But the reader needs to be more emotionally involved, to know the details that make this abuse personal and the murder unique.  We need to feel that Daes didn't overreact to the rape, and that he wasn't insane or overcome with rage when he killed.  This murderer is special.

Actually, if the story had drilled in on that set of questions, and the AI's role in the justice system, I think it could have been a great story.  It's just that the author let all that drop, for no apparent reason, and moved on to a largely-disconnected story of the archived alien intelligences. That left me very disatisfied with the story.

[Jhite]

All in all a solid little story with interesting ideas, but I didn't really like the way things turned out.
I was really hooked with the plot of the convicted getting "a new life" (even though it is in no way a new concept) and the implication of the world (theocracy and AIs and such), but the part that played out on the lonely planet fell flat for me.

Good point. It also didn't help that the actual resolution won't come for ten thousand years or so. I think that part of the problem that space opera faces is that it's easy to lose the kind of human scale in which we can identify with the protagonist and his relationship with the world around him.

Need a good example of this.  Try reading the Dune series.  Read Brian Herbert first and then his father (reading them in time order.) and wonder what the heck happened everyone you read nearly ten thousand pages about.

[DDog]

My favorite part of this story was the use of "picotech" instead of the ubiquitous nanotechnology. The rest didn't really grab me. Elements of cool things that weren't developed in favor of instead doing "character" development that still left all four of them flat.

[Myrealana]

I really enjoyed this story, but I couldn't help thinking that the flashback rape sections was gratuitous, added for some sort of "shock" value rather than any thematic purpose. Yes, it added a bit to understanding Daes and his motivations for the murder, but it just didn't contribute that much that wasn't already established by the beginning of the story. This is especially the case since once things got going, Daes himself sort of got sidelined by his programming, so his past seemed to be less important anyway.

But other than that, really great story, set in an interesting world. I'll have to check out the novels set out in the same universe.

This is what I would have said, had you not already done so.

The first time I started listening, I turned the story off at that point, and almost didn't finish it. It took me a good week to decide I was curious enough about the end to start at the end of the rape scene and go forward, hoping that it wouldn't get that bad again.

[robertmarkbram]

I loved the aliens and AI aspect of the story - two races with their own champions fighting to survive.

The entire character, plot and history tied in with the Daes character didn't fit with the other elements. Maybe I missed something, but I failed to see how the sexual violence or even Daes as a criminal on death row added anything to the story. It didn't make me care for him, it didn't add poignancy or irony to the story. Daes was just some sucker who got caught up in machinations greater than himself - and his back story seemed to push ugly tendrils into an otherwise tight story.

[Czhorat]

I loved the aliens and AI aspect of the story - two races with their own champions fighting to survive.

The entire character, plot and history tied in with the Daes character didn't fit with the other elements. Maybe I missed something, but I failed to see how the sexual violence or even Daes as a criminal on death row added anything to the story. It didn't make me care for him, it didn't add poignancy or irony to the story. Daes was just some sucker who got caught up in machinations greater than himself - and his back story seemed to push ugly tendrils into an otherwise tight story.

Agreed, but I found Daes's story the more interesting of the two. Here's a damaged, broken human being lashing out against someone he once saw as an authority figure despite the fact that he knows he'll be caught and executed without a chance of escape or even redemption. The story of the AI and the Csorians (I think that's how it's spelled) was just too big to have any real emotional resonance with me. As things stood, the resolution won't happen for tens of millenia. It's just too remote for me to really feel engaged, and the AI was too superpowerful and remote to be anything but a driver of the plot.

[robertmarkbram]

I loved the aliens and AI aspect of the story - two races with their own champions fighting to survive.

The entire character, plot and history tied in with the Daes character didn't fit with the other elements. Maybe I missed something, but I failed to see how the sexual violence or even Daes as a criminal on death row added anything to the story. It didn't make me care for him, it didn't add poignancy or irony to the story. Daes was just some sucker who got caught up in machinations greater than himself - and his back story seemed to push ugly tendrils into an otherwise tight story.

Agreed, but I found Daes's story the more interesting of the two. Here's a damaged, broken human being lashing out against someone he once saw as an authority figure despite the fact that he knows he'll be caught and executed without a chance of escape or even redemption. The story of the AI and the Csorians (I think that's how it's spelled) was just too big to have any real emotional resonance with me. As things stood, the resolution won't happen for tens of millenia. It's just too remote for me to really feel engaged, and the AI was too superpowerful and remote to be anything but a driver of the plot.

As I read your reply, it occurred to me that maybe the idea was to contrast two vastly different machinations against each other? We see the short hot flare of Daes life and story be the seed that got taken over and obliterated by the much larger plot of AI and the Csorians.

Either way, I guess my interest in the story was the opposite to yours.

[jimscreechy]

This story completely blew me away.  Fantastic.

[Tango Alpha Delta]

(My apologies for coming late and bringing my own novel... I hope some of you gain something from this mini-thesis paper):

I enjoyed this story, I think it had interesting notions of how predatory natures figure into questions of survival. It almost seems as if the main character wasn't chosen by accident, but the story seemed to spin it as if he was just what became available on short notice.

I agree; in fact, I think the whole story revolves around the morality of depredation.  Those who said they didn't see why the brutal descriptions were necessary to the story may have missed this point.  The rapist priest was a predator, and as Hera said in the grav car, if Daes had turned him in, he could have been "adjusted" not to be that way.  There were several references to the need for the Csorian node to convert candidate species into predators for what sounded like practical reasons, and to answer eytanz's earlier comment:

And I see why it made sense for things to happen like they did. I just don't understand why things had to be told the way they do.

... I felt the portrayal of the rape in detail was meant to force us to draw parallels between what was done to young Daes by Anton, and what was done to convict Daes by the Csorian, all with Geronamid as the nearly-but-not-quite omnipotent "protector" above all, there to intercede where possible on behalf of the underdog.

Touching on the idea of "justifiable homicide", questions of guilt and innocence, predator and prey, are always more complicated than simple cause and effect.  There is a distinct chain in this story; the unspoken cause of Anton's predatory behavior (logic of the internal universe of the story tells me there has to BE a cause) ... leading to Daes' all-consuming plan for revenge that hinged on being the predator (remember, he was counting on forfeiting his life as part of the natural course of things, even though he had legal recourse) ... which led to Geronamid's selection of him as host for the Csorian node ... which was necessary (from Geronamid's point of view) to draw out the "zipped" civilization and divert it from conquest of humanity into the directed evolution of the spider creatures.  Note the significance of Daes being consumed by THAT depredation, just as he was consumed by Anton's earlier offenses.

In that light, the descriptions of the rape and the murder were necessary to show that morality of an act has more to do with POV and the circumstances than with any hard and fast rule of "right and wrong".  When you start sliding up the scale from unjustified depravity (the rape) through "justified homicide" (which eytanz and Thaurismunths aptly illustrated is almost a matter of personal preference) to the "natural urge to survive" of the Csorian civilization.

I wonder, even though Hera kept saying it was all an accident of timing, whether Geronamid was looking for someone like Daes, who had survived a previous invasive trauma and stayed sane enough to avoid detection by the System.  That kind of calculation is another example of cold, predatory logic.