Special thanks to kenjisato, a generous volunteer in Literotica.com's Volunteer Editors program, for editing this piece. All remaining errors and questionable stylistic choices are the sole responsibility of the author. Arguably, this entire piece is a questionable stylistic choice.
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Author's Note: there aren't nearly as spelling mistakes as you think there are. Welcome to the future. It's annoying.
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Rule 1: be Known.
Rule 2: don't be unknown.
Penny was beyond. Penny was Siddhartha. Penny was Morpheus, Neo, Oracle. Penny used 'she' and 'her,' but only to eez. She was comfortable being anyone and anything, and all she asked in return was chillseek.
Nools didn't bother Penny, because Penny was just that Known. The lack of catz in her prime was a hint, but plenty of olds were just old. More were dead -- truly dead, Legacy. Their primes were locked. The system kept pushing recycling as a virtue, and dangled Virtue as incentive. The users kept pushing back.
Penny had gone through most of the phases; these ticks, she practiced empathy, compassion, and gratitude. She knew she was lucky to have such an elegant prime, and luckier still that the usual hate didn't stick.
She knew that most users wanted graveyards and memorials for all the wrong reasons. The masses raged against impermanence --
anitya, anicca
. Penny had started a wave past that, and had counter-raged for quite a few annies. Eventually, though, she'd surfed on. Plenty of Penny's empathy required no imagination. She'd made the mistakes. She'd even flamed her own past -- just the once, but it had been enough. She liked to think that she'd stayed humble since.
She'd taken the lessons of Orwell -- GeorgeOrwell/Legacy/Prime/1903.1950, to be thoroughly systemic. She owed him a lot; his work had helped her get Known. Her first big Thought had been The Paradox Of Impermanence, hearkening to The Paradox Of Tolerance, asking the post- D-Rev and V-Rev Buddhists what responsibility they owed to the countless future prisoners of Big Brother's quasi-permanent controlled impermanence. From Plato's Cave to Room 101, she'd asked the hard questions and stated the case.
She'd made friends and enemies, both for good reasons and bad. Then she'd surfed on again. She never forgot Orwell's lessons, though. Even if graveyards and memorials weren't exactly what the new world needed, they were better than letting the system control history itself. It'd start with recycling. It'd end with nolegs, scattered about the nowhere.
Penny used to be into some seriously heady shit. She still was, but she'd found a balance. These annies, she spent lots of ticks being a chill Jesus to the meats.
@l_lol meat
@l_lol dopameat
@l_lolocaust oxytokens
@ls_OH HEY PENNY
@l_elomenofuk
The vandals dispersed -- all but one. It stayed behind and purged the spam. Penny gave it two pings: one disappointed, one gracious. It pinged all the usual colors back -- a complex, animated pixel painting, rife with maths, that instantly navigated the nuances of the prevailing social hierarchy. Penny wished that it contained a promise to never spam the enclave's wall again, but it didn't. They never did. Penny tried to practice gratitude for the reminder: there were limits to the power of being Known. She didn't succeed.
Penny felt obligated to be mindful of the ping's full breadth and depth of meaning, but it was overwhelming. It was exhausting. The system was seductive, especially to the Known and those with Virtue to spare; they enjoyed a feedback loop of positive pings, ranging from obsequious to ecstatic, and that made them chill with the system.
It wasn't something to be chill about, in Penny's opinion. She saw the other side, though. What was to be done? If, as everyone suspected, wetminds still called the shots -- nudging, tweaking, and vetoing what claimed to be true AI and true-neutral -- there was no stopping them. There was no detecting them. Odds were, they wouldn't even run afoul of the Butterfly Effect. Interfering with AI was only dangerous when it was working maths and science problems, centies ahead of anything wetminds could comprehend. Social control was almost certainly solved. That meant it could be leveraged safely.
Users loved to crow about all the things that had changed thanks to true AI and Virtua. They didn't like admitting what hadn't. Defeated cynicism had made the leap out of meatspace. So had ironic detachment.
Penny emoted to no one and nothing -- to the system, then, ironically. A meat would've sighed. She emoted again at that thought -- a smile, perhaps. The meats were stewards of an elegance worth minding, and Penny wished more users agreed.
Penny was humble enough to admit that surfing among the meats was a refuge -- a relief. She pinged a request to the enclave, and was authorized immediately. Penny wasn't formally keyed, but she was known. If she was being honest with herself, she preferred being known to being Known. She also knew that without the latter, the former might never have been possible.
Penny understood that gratitude was a tricky thing.
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Penny smelled the hypocrisy, but let it go. It was eliterally a smell: fresh air, no allergens, no pollution, no hint of sanitization or recycling. The meat enclave should've reeked. Parts of it did, but it was all opt-in. It was intimate and contextual.
That was one of the reasons why the meats got so little respect. A tiny minority fully committed, and they were given the wide berth afforded to cults with stockpiled MMD. Most of the meats coasted. They lived in an infantile playground. They were derided for lacking courage and imagination. They didn't have fresh Thoughts. They never got Known.
They ate. They cuddled. They fucked. They came. They flew; that was a popular one.
Penny always enjoyed her time at the enclave. She immersed herself as fully as she could. She adopted the lingo. She switched over to evocalization. She did her best to think like meat. She also cheated a little bit. Publicly available algorithms were still better than she was at parsing meatspace body language. She was learning, but it was slow going. It couldn't really be taught -- not even meat to meat. Meat to user would be yet worse. It was just one more addon. Penny used quite a few.