JulesNew book: M.R. Carey's "Infinity Gate". Part one of a duology. Humanity accidentally discovers parallel dimensions, AI threatens everything. Some things always stay the same, I guess.
"She was a genius, but only in a small way. Her greatest discovery was made almost completely by accident, and it had been made before by others in a great many elsewheres. In fact Hadiz’s contribution to history is marked throughout by things done casually or without intention."
Why of course. A woman who's a genius scientist, period? Now, we can't have THAT. Just a genius in a small way! Making discoveries by accident! Unlike the male geniuses-in-a-big-way!
"Campus Cross was a small side project jointly owned by the Catholic Church and by three billionaires who had all separately decided that the world was now so badly screwed that their individual fortunes might not be enough to unscrew it."
I am kind of staring speechless at this concept.
Okay. We are going to need the "science. It does NOT work like this, folks" speech.
Hadiz is introduced as a "particle physicist" whose work requires "no mind or muscle other than her own". Which is a stretch even for a theoretician, but apparently she has a lab? There's no way you can run a modern research lab without assistants and grad students. It's not the 1500s anymore, folks.
This conversation is about an AI tool:
“Do you always use feminine pronouns when discussing strings of code?” Hadiz asked, by way of avoiding the invitation. She preferred to solve her problems under her own steam and indebted to no one. “I tell you, it’s hard not to with Rupshe. She skirts the edge of sentience.” “And do you think women do that too, Andris?”
Good one, Hadiz! 😂👍🏼
"Physicists divide the forces and effects that govern the universe into two separate categories, called scalar and vector."
Dude. If gravity were indeed a scalar or vector field, unifying all four forces would be A LOT easier!
Free worldbuilding tip: you CAN indeed have your great discovery happen off-screen and never give any details.
It's preferable to this lazy level of nonsensical technobabble.
"Hadiz put scalar and vector values together in the same box and shook them until their labels fell off. [...] She was hoping that if the dark energy boson wandered by it would be confused enough to stick around while she took its picture."
What.
"they had given the AI a personality – incurious, content, eager to please. Then they had frozen its understanding at the level of a three-year-old child by means of end-stopped programming pathways and brute-force overwrites. Keeping the Registry as stupid as a post was a large part of their work on a day-to-day basis."
Having been around three-year-olds, the idea of them being stupid as posts is laughable and insulting 🙄
"Destruction, mutual and assured, rained down on the just, the unjust, and every poor bastard in between. And here was Hadiz with the answer, the purest silver bullet that ever was. You didn’t need to fight resource wars if you could Step into another world. So what if you’d poisoned your air, your water, your soil? You could just grab some more from the dimension next door."
Ah yes, the colonizer mindset towards parallel universes.
“Teaching materials are drawn down from Central Curriculum. They come in a form that’s optimised for two-stage filtering, by the school AI and then by the students’ animas. [...] And if the teacher was required to do that filtering for every student, they would have no time left to teach.”
What, exactly, does teaching even mean if not figuring out what materials are relevant, helpful, engaging for and with your students?!
"What did he say? Paz asked Dulcie. A prayer, Dulcie said. Christ Jesus lift me when I fall, and trip those who cast me down. Who is Christ Jesus? If I had to guess, a god or goddess who protects the weak against the strong."
Jesus Christ, working-class goddess protector of the weak. I like it. 💙