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Most of these changes weren’t outwardly visible though.
When they were – that's when you had an Exotic.
Uptrivi-Lenki was the textbook example.
All of these changes had come about naturally though, through the adaptability and changeability of the human substance, and so they were all members of the human family. They had grown from the tree of humanity that had been planted by the Former.
messa pensive 8.jpg ... looking like this woman, perhaps ... Remember me her name : Missolia ? Messolina ? :doh:Oh Yes, Messaline !:D
 

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Two SF stories at the same time, noemi and First Contact. What have we done to deserve such riches? And both authors have created a wonderfully believable alter-world. Congratulations to both malins and Marcella.
Well there are of course more stories set in roman, or medieval fantasy / inquisition scenes but it's not like we're being the absolute trailblazers here...
... the advantage of roman settings of course is you don't have to explain that there are and why there are slaves, crucifixions, etc, you can just go in medias res :D while in an SF or pure fantasy setting you do... but making that up is often so much fun.

In this story I think I have some very radical breaks in style ... the perspective of Noemi as the sacrifice on the barbarian planet has a very different tone to it than the cold environment of the research station where she was created, and the introspective brooding of Instructor Lys. And then I have another break of style now that I'm trying to switch to Traan as the guy who goes out and actually tries to do something . (nobody seems to bat an eye though at the fact that right away he's blowing most of the life savings of Lys on an alien escort girl ? ) -- honestly the most difficult thing for me, as I'm writing as a non-native speaker, is some kind of colloquial or everyday dialogue. In general dialogue is a weakness. I can get away with writing fairytale kings or queens or nobles because if they sound a bit Teutonic that can just be part of the setting. In that sense something like 'Every Shadow...' is easer to write ... though the characters are more difficult.
Another thing... I'm inventing a lot of terms here, for the SF setting. Does this get in the way too much? I just want to throw in some evidence that their philosophy, politics, and everyday units of measurement, etc are different (for example anything with explicit reference to Earth makes no sense).
 
Well there are of course more stories set in roman, or medieval fantasy / inquisition scenes but it's not like we're being the absolute trailblazers here...
... the advantage of roman settings of course is you don't have to explain that there are and why there are slaves, crucifixions, etc, you can just go in medias res :D while in an SF or pure fantasy setting you do... but making that up is often so much fun.

In this story I think I have some very radical breaks in style ... the perspective of Noemi as the sacrifice on the barbarian planet has a very different tone to it than the cold environment of the research station where she was created, and the introspective brooding of Instructor Lys. And then I have another break of style now that I'm trying to switch to Traan as the guy who goes out and actually tries to do something . (nobody seems to bat an eye though at the fact that right away he's blowing most of the life savings of Lys on an alien escort girl ? ) -- honestly the most difficult thing for me, as I'm writing as a non-native speaker, is some kind of colloquial or everyday dialogue. In general dialogue is a weakness. I can get away with writing fairytale kings or queens or nobles because if they sound a bit Teutonic that can just be part of the setting. In that sense something like 'Every Shadow...' is easer to write ... though the characters are more difficult.
Another thing... I'm inventing a lot of terms here, for the SF setting. Does this get in the way too much? I just want to throw in some evidence that their philosophy, politics, and everyday units of measurement, etc are different (for example anything with explicit reference to Earth makes no sense).
Most things on earth make no sense either... Carry on!!!
 
to quickly reach the "Septième ciel"?
Is that a thing in French too? I Think I've heard the term, to be 'on cloud nine', in English...


Now that is quite the bestiary :D However... the Pantocracy considers some things to be 'Anathema', that must be destroyed, they are quite fascist about that...
What one had to fear, hate and destroy, that were the descendants of artificially created or altered other-men
so any change that needs genetic engineering etc. is something they can't tolerate (obviously what's being done on the research station is coming close to violating these rules) ...
All of these changes had come about naturally .... they were all members of the human family. They had grown from the tree of humanity that had been planted by the Former.
... they make it a religious commandment to accept all humans that have developed 'naturally' and to hate and hunt down those who they call 'unnatural' ... (this has a lot of problems, though what they don't have is what we call 'racism' today -- that is forgotten and replaced by new hates)

View attachment 588466 ... looking like this woman, perhaps ... Remember me her name : Missolia ? Messolina ? :doh:Oh Yes, Messaline !:D
Hmmm... you can guess now how very, very far away in the future this is... will they remember a Messaline?

Imperial days that is, artificial days timed to fit with the biological rhythm of the human body, that ... hadn’t changed very much, ever since people had left the ... planet they had originally emigrated from.
... so their 'day' is still about 24 hours. Because that's our internal rhythm. It can go a bit longer or shorter but for 'normal humans' not much. (I can say their day is actually closer to 24 hr 50 min)
a pod was dropped from the station every nine imperial days, after a centicycle thirty of them would have accumulated,
So... every nine of their days, times thirty -- means a 'centicycle' is 270 of their days, or maybe 280 of ours.

A 'millicycle' is then roughly 28 of our days or close to our month.

A 'cycle' of course has to be 100 times the centicycle, so 27.000 of their days, or 28.000 of ours, which is something like 76 years, or roughly, the 'cycle' of a natural human life, not so far from the idea of the Bible, 'The days of our years are threescore years and ten, and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years,'.

-- so that is their measurement of time, it coincides with the sleep/wake cycle as of course ours does, the millicycle roughly with the menstrual cycle as our month does, the centicycle actually - about the time of a pregnancy, as measured from the last menstrual period, and the full cycle - a decent life time. Note that having women's cycles coincide with their timekeeping is not a contradiction against the Pantocracy being a severe patriarchy ... it just underscores that in their idea, the 'the purpose of a woman' as the Director says, is of course to bear children for the dominant men ;)
long before a ship had first set out to the stars ... somehow they had endured and passed through a hectocycle of history
So, very very roughly it is 100 'cycles' after humans went to space ... or 7600 years. Of course we haven't sent a ship to the stars yet but it's obvious we can't go on living on this Earth for thousans of years as we do now, as otherwise we would destroy ourselves. So the time this is set in, is very roughly... 2018 + maybe some hundred years + 7000 years or so - so it sometime between maybe 9500 AD and 10.000 AD.

Maybe the year 9595 :p:p:p:p


Remember me her name : Missolia ? Messolina ? :doh:Oh Yes, Messaline !:D
So will people remember the name 'Messaline' in the year 9595?

Well, they seem to remember (in a twisted way) some of the Greek words, some of the Latin, and they also remember and worhsip the Mongols, because when they build a gigantic 'mother-ship', that's literally 'The Mother of Conquerors' i.e. it 'births' and sends out destroyer ships... they call it 'Sorgaqtani Beki'.

So if Messaline becomes as famous as the most famous Romans, Greeks, and Mongols... they might remember her even in the year 10.000 ;)
 
In general dialogue is a weakness.

I found nothing wrong with your dialogue.

a lot of terms here, for the SF setting. Does this get in the way too much?

I enjoy SF terms, and although your clue after a centicycle thirty of them would have accumulated,


allowed me to calculate a 'cycle' as you have now done, I didn't bother because it didn't affect the thrust of the story. I think the concept of the 'cycle' as defined above is brilliant-----menstruation; pregnancy; life time.

(nobody seems to bat an eye though at the fact that right away he's blowing most of the life savings of Lys on an alien escort girl ? )

It is extremely odd, but I imagine it has a purpose? A honey trap in the plot? An excuse for malins to write some sexy coupling?
 
(10)

“Does this dress clash with my stripes, honey?”

“Covers up too much of them. Just go naked!”

“But I can’t go out like that!”

“I thought you didn’t want to go out tonight?”

“Can’t I change my mind?”

“Where did you even get this?” - of course the dress came off as the last few had before.
“Spending all my credits on skimpy nothings that don’t even look any good on you!”
“Well, assume the position! I’m in the mood for giving you some .... extra stripes!”

She knew of course where those stripes would be going!

Traan stepped back to take in her figure, as she presented herself, hands against the wall, back arched.

From her feet up to just over the knee, her skin was a dark brown hue, a bit darker than that of Lys. There was something almost purplish to it. Except for a series of small pale dots sprinkled up her calf that looked almost like a seam. And her big toes that were pale also. A pattern of thin stripes started above the knees, alternating light and dark, with the stripes getting broader until, about an inch below the crease of the buttocks, there was one last dark stripe about two fingers wide. Her butt-cheeks, that quivered nicely under the firm smack of his hand, were pale, quite rosy though by now. Along her spine she was dark again, with light spots following the rhythm of the vertebrae, and from that broad dark centerline, stripes fanned out that curved over to the front. Her arms were patterned like her legs – dark up to the elbows, then alternating stripes.

A collection of tools that came with the suite was spread out on the hovering table, none of them too severe, as she needed to be as good as new after six days of recovery.

Crops and floggers, rods and canes, ropes, cords, whips and paddles, clamps and ballgags and assorted gadgets widgets and doodads where he didn’t even know where they went or what they might be good (or bad) for.

Traan snapped his fingers and the table obediently sidled up to him so he could make a pick.

He chose a supple, flexible cane, a bit shorter than one might expect, probably so that it wouldn’t hit too savagely – after all if the girl was still marked when the next customer booked her, the proprietors would have to give a steep discount and then they’d send a repo man after him!

Thwack, Ow!
“What do you say?”
“Thank you!”
“And don’t forget to count if you ever want this to end! Twenty strikes!”

Thwack! “Thank you Sir! I’m sorry! Ummm… two?”

Thwack! “Keep your hands away! We’ll have to start over, miss!”

Thwack! “Owwiieeeee!” – “Owie!?! That’s not acceptable as a response! Also it sounds silly! And you forgot to count! We start over!”

Thwack! “ow! One!”

Thwack! “What did I say about the hands?”

“Oh please sir tie me up! I just can’t help it!”

He walked around her, striking the palm of his hand with the cane.
“Now you’re asking me for favors? What do I get in return?”

Running the cane over her cheeks, watching her shudder, then up the insides of her thighs, as she set her feet apart a little bit further, giddy with anticipation.

“I’ll… take ... ten more?”

“Fine with me!”

.

They’d been playing this game for a while. A game within a game.

She’s very good, he thought.
Worth her credits.
Of course he knows that she’s done things like this a hundred times, that she can take a lot more probably, and that she could very well keep her hands where he told her to.
But that’s not what the game is about.

She plays the innocence so well, of the naughty girl who’s getting punished for the very first time, who always got away before but now someone’s putting her in her place and that someone is of course him. That’s half of what you pay for, that she can be convincingly innocent and inexperienced.

You buy level 1 at Joy, it’s a bit sordid. Walk into the cubicle, pull the chain, a bell rings somewhere, wait until the girl gets dumped in through the chute and you have your way with her. The lighting dim and diffuse so you can’t even say later on exactly what she looked like, and that’s how they want it to be.

At level 2 you can sort of stagger home without completely hating yourself if you have any conscience. He’d usually booked level 3.

This level of service though, and when you’ve booked for three days, it comes with a narrative. Truth is, you might want to think you can, but you’re not going to be fucking non-stop for three days and nights especially once you’re past fifty decicycles.

The story can be simple and silly but it’s something to build on. A make-believe relationship for those days.

And of course he’d made up a story himself, right the very first moment he’d stepped into the facility. About being some miner who dug up rock trilobites and got lucky. That’s what she thought he was, and the lie was believable enough for her.

For the game they’d agreed to play though, he’d be an interstellar smuggler, which was of course what he’d been before he’d gotten banished to the orbital station, so he was pretending to lie when he was telling the truth – and that she didn’t know. Except of course he’d hugely exaggerate the scale of his deeds. Afer all they hadn’t even bothered to send him to Realignment!

She, of course, would be his girl, faithfully waiting while he was adventuring through the galaxy, but when he came back he’d find she’d been wasting his money, blowing through his credits for trifles and luxuries, flirting with other men and all that, so she’d been naughty, and needed punishing. Until she cried, then he'd forgive her and they'd make love. Maybe that was the other half of what you payed for, that it actually felt like making love.

And by the time they were through with that she’d make something else up that she’d ‘forgotten to confess’ and they’d start over.

They would get tired of course sometimes and then there’d be rest, and talking.

It wasn’t hard to notice that she would cautiously take the lead, testing out topics, and if there was something the client was comfortable with she’d let it go in that direction. She was used to serving high class, superconnected buyers, Prime citizens, so she’d be much more well-versed in conversation than he was. Actually the discussions he’d had with Lys helped him quite a bit; Lys who was obsessed with First Empire legends, and somehow girls in general seemed to be crazy for lore from the First Empire, he thought.

But there was a game within the game here too… she was in control, guiding the session but very carefully creating for him the illusion that it was him at the wheel. That was her skill. And that was what she thought was going on.

What she didn’t know of course was that he’d walked in with a crazy plan of his own.

So peel away another layer of the onion and he was in control again.

And he was going to make it up as he went along, fake it till you make it, and all that. He was pretty much betting everything on one card, and you could think of a thousand ways how it could go wrong. He’d just focus on the way it could go right. Then it would.

Obvious decisions only need a single good reason, if you come up with too many arguments for or against you’re just trying to convince yourself to not do anything and stay in your rut. That was his philosophy, though he wouldn’t call it that, philosophy was something people like Lys would be splitting their heads over.

Traan himself, he’d see himself as more of a straightforward guy.

When he got his hands on a new piece of equipment, he’d chuck away the manual and get right to work.

Lixuari came with her own personalized ‘Instructions for Use’ that had been loaded into his pad upon conformation of his booking. Of course he’d skipped the fine print, but did skim the ‘Quickstart Guide for First Time Users’, until his pad had buzzed to inform him, ’Cherished customer, your product is now available’.

The first bullet point on the checklist was, ‘How to verify the authenticity of your purchase’ which told him to look for her tamper-proof holo-tattooed inventory number, and make sure it was the same he was billed for, ‘to rule out any delivery errors or tampering with the product’.

He’d decided to skip that as there was no comparable girl on the planet anyway.

What he did remember from Quickstart was that whipping her and such, was all fine and well so long as she didn’t say ‘scrambled eggs’.

He’d forgotten though what she’d do to signal discomfort when she was gagged; that was what he was going to do if he got another silly ‘Owie’.

He summoned the floating table again, and picked up a length of rope, and once her wrists were firmly secured against the rings let into the wall he picked a nice flogger and they went at it again.
 
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Well there are of course more stories set in roman, or medieval fantasy / inquisition scenes but it's not like we're being the absolute trailblazers here...
... the advantage of roman settings of course is you don't have to explain that there are and why there are slaves, crucifixions, etc, you can just go in medias res :D while in an SF or pure fantasy setting you do... but making that up is often so much fun.

In this story I think I have some very radical breaks in style ... the perspective of Noemi as the sacrifice on the barbarian planet has a very different tone to it than the cold environment of the research station where she was created, and the introspective brooding of Instructor Lys. And then I have another break of style now that I'm trying to switch to Traan as the guy who goes out and actually tries to do something . (nobody seems to bat an eye though at the fact that right away he's blowing most of the life savings of Lys on an alien escort girl ? ) -- honestly the most difficult thing for me, as I'm writing as a non-native speaker, is some kind of colloquial or everyday dialogue. In general dialogue is a weakness. I can get away with writing fairytale kings or queens or nobles because if they sound a bit Teutonic that can just be part of the setting. In that sense something like 'Every Shadow...' is easer to write ... though the characters are more difficult.
Another thing... I'm inventing a lot of terms here, for the SF setting. Does this get in the way too much? I just want to throw in some evidence that their philosophy, politics, and everyday units of measurement, etc are different (for example anything with explicit reference to Earth makes no sense).

I like it. You have a lovely prose style Malins and you explore interesting themes. The dialog seems fine to me, an advantage of an SF setting is that any oddities of style can be seen as part of the exotic setting. These are different worlds.
Same with new/different terms. I've been reading this sort of thing for a long time and it doesn't bother me, others may feel differently.
 
Hum, in my opinion, it's always useful and even essential to read them ! ... For example , if you wish to use of Messa, understand well her working before ... :D
Well sometimes it would be useful if we all came with a 'User's manual' but it had better not be some badly machine-translated gobbledygook :)
In fact, making something like that can be a humorous exercise ;)
 
She felt sometimes these sayings were an antidote, a reprieve from the onslaught of lies.
As the lighting turned on with the opening of the door, her eyes fell upon the display.

‘We look at the world once in childhood. The rest is memory.’

BTW the quote she has on her display is taken from a poem by someone named Louise Glück; whichever linguistic analysis went over the fragments left that randomly escaped oblivion didn't care too much about shifting between two ancient, dead languages and someone decided 'Glück' i.e. happiness was the name of the poem, or the book, - not the author.

Louise Glück,

the poet from whom I scavenged that line,
that would appear on a screen of inspirational quotes thousands of years later,
has received the 2020 Nobel prize in literature.
 
Well sometimes it would be useful if we all came with a 'User's manual' but it had better not be some badly machine-translated gobbledygook :)
In fact, making something like that can be a humorous exercise
The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon* in action!

In a conversation the other day, I mentioned Georges Perec's novel La Vie mode d'emploi ( Life: a user's manual ). And it springs to mind again here........

*There aren't many psychological effects named after far-left militant groups.......
 
Wow, what an amazing development so far… 3 characters I’m heavily invested in, a depth of story, is there any chance there might be a continuation?

This is a real gem standing proudly amongst some of the finest stories I’ve read on crux so far…

so keen to read more please, @malins , if you can revisit?
 
I’ve been fantasising a huge variety of scenarios based off a third or fourth Foundation ever since reading Asimov’s foundation series as a kid. My Dad was an SF nut so I got into it early.

My tattoo is based on a 2nd+ Foundation setting and the bdsm element is referenced in it as well, due to the planet regressing to medieval I’m witnessing the spacecraft arrival from a dungeon … No crux though…

I’ll be sure to check your other thread.
 
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