I am even more excited for this now that -that- connection has been made. More of the Vocaloids is definitely something I'm perfectly happy with, but that makes it just that much more intriguing.

-Droken

I'm completely missing this one; I'll just have to be surprised.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

Well, you won't have long to wonder, 'cause apart from polishing and final kicks to the tires, we pretty much finished it this morning. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

*gets out the Verbal Wax*

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

Ah! Suddenly the fog clears from my memories.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Good luck Rin and Gumi. Just 8 more years to go (although you don't know that).

If that's a Steyr Model SL, I'm sure there's a story there. On the other hand, it might be a similar design made for the general market.

...gently parted the blonde's hair just above the nape of her neck and connected an interface cable to a jack discreetly installed there.

Do what now? Okay, there's an explanation somewhere down the line, wait for it.

...Nick Valentine...

Oh, nice. I've never played the newer Fallout games, but the bits I've picked up here and there make him sound like a good fit.

"She and Len can reassure each other that they exist then..."

Oh, that has to hurt. It's good that they can survive without being in the same system, but they're so closely connected that it probably feels like losing sensation from half of one's body. It's there, but there's no way to know it. And now I know what the opening was about.

...and I have to go catch a bus. (finished reading, forgot to continue commenting.)

Very interesting, and I really want to see what happens next.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

It is! And there is.

>"She and Len can reassure each other that they exist then..."
>
>Oh, that has to hurt.

It does a bit. We'll be looking more closely at that (among other things) in the next part.

>...and I have to go catch a bus. (finished reading, forgot to
>continue commenting.)

... maybe you can pick it back up? This is nice, like the old days.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Ah, my favourite Vocaloids and you have to hurt them the most.

:)

"If. It isn't operational."

A rules lawyer in the best way.

"I guess I thought if it worked, I'd have at least one friend."

I know the feeling, kid. (If the tech had existed, and I'd been as good a programmer as I thought I was, I'd have tried this myself, somewhere in my teens.)

"Bioroids—biosculpted gynoids..."

And there's the explanation. I suppose I should have seen that coming.

Awareness like an orchestra hit...

Boom.

"...my responsibility is to her now."

Abhi gets it. Excellent.

The Vocaloids continue to have no bad people - just people trying to do their best with the rules they have. I think it's a theme that is well-suited to the kind of adventures they're likely to deal with. This doesn't mean they won't have unlikely problems - just that the things one might expect to happen don't include somebody being inherently evil.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

Nick Valentine is so very Film Noir it almost _hurts_. And yet, he's a damn good character, not just a trope ported into a video game. I kept him around as my companion for quite a while.

There's something so odd about a Vocaloid in tatty old survivors clothes.

>Ordinarily, they'd have had the radio on, or possibly have been making their
>own musical entertainment, but not now; not right after a Call. Rin always had
>to come down from those, or rather climb back up from the letdown afterward,
>and for that she required space. It was a routine both women knew very well by
>now.

It took me a moment to work out what was going on here, but then I remembered a key detail of the Vocaloids, more importantly Rin, and the penny dropped. Given how long it's later mentioned they've been stuck on the wrong side of the planet, it's reassuring to know that the twins can function independently for extended lengths of time, but more than any of the others, it's also clearly a deeply unpleasant experience for them.

>Nick Valentine was acutely aware of this fact. For nothing like the first
>time, he wished that he were equipped to smoke. He wasn't sure why he wished
>that; it was a filthy and dangerous habit for those physically able to
>indulge in it. It was just that at times like this, it seemed like a thing
>he ought to be doing.

*snrk* Oh man, good old Nick. Unable to escape his Noir Detective ways. It's nice to see him showing up in UF. I'm guessing he looks in a little better shape than he did back in Fallout, but is still Clearly A Robot?

>Gumi nodded. "It's hard for her. You know? This trip was supposed to last a
>month. We've been here 13 years, with no end in sight. Whenever I can
>scrounge up enough ECPs, I can rig up the hyperwave and punch a signal
>through the Fog jamming to Japan. She and Len can reassure each other that
>they exist then, but... well. We usually don't have enough power to stay on
>for more than a minute or two, and even if we did, if we pushed it the Fog
>would DF us and we'd be dodging missiles. Again. It's never enough. And this
>life... always on the move, barely earning enough to keep going..." She
>shrugged, making a drawn-out pssshhhh noise. "It's tough."

Dammit, Robot Girls Need Hugs. I'm a little surprised they're still wandering after so long. Stubborness, or just a fact of life in a civilisation hanging on against starvation?

>Nick's job, or rather the job of the department he worked for, was to shut
>down any and all attempts to initialize unauthorized synthetic intelligences
>within United Earth's jurisdiction. Virtually always, that took the form of
>corporations who were trying to circumvent the Turing Institute's
>prescriptive authority, and the bits of United Galactica law that vested
>that authority. UE was obligated by treaty to put a stop to that kind of
>thing, Earth's current state of planetary crisis notwithstanding; hence,
>Section 44.

I had to wonder about that for a moment, but then it occurred to me that A) A lot of corporations likely wouldn't be doing it in ethical ways, and B) Programming SIs is the sort of thing that could accidentally go Skynet quickly if you're not careful, or worse, trying for something sort of like that. And then the presence of Nick made me realise that, on top of that, you've got people like GENOM using them like the Institute did in Fallout, and that never ends well for anyone involved.

>Nick nodded. "I don't know where she got it and I don't know how, but this
>kid's got a copy of Vocaloid 6. The old Vocaloid 6. And as of right now,
>she's almost got it working."

Of course the 'accidentally make Sapient SIs' version of the Vocaloid program would be heavily controlled. I suspect the only properly official copies of the original Vocaloid 6 would be in a vault in Japan, and maybe one on Turing.

Mind you, given what it took to accidentally wake up Miku only a few decades before, you have to applaud Ahbi for managing the Box of Scraps version.

>"So here's the thing. You guys know the law on this as well as I do.
>There's no wiggle room in it. If I enter an AI lab with an unauthorized
>project in progress, and the construct isn't yet operational, I have to shut
>it down, wipe the disks, destroy the equipment. That's why my boys and girls
>have sledgehammers. If. It isn't operational. You get me?"

As always, there are two universal constants about Nick Valentine. One, that he walked right out of a detective novel, and two, he'll always do the right thing.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

On first reading, I was actually thinking of the scruffy shanty town Zefram Cochrane lived in during Star Trek: First Contact.

--
Unable to save the day: File is read-only.

The Fog ships in this time period don't likely have any personalities. That probably doesn't happen until 2059 and whatever that made them decide to leave Earth. The intelligent cores are inside the huge clumps of nanomachines.

Awakened Vocaloids can only be based on an old version of Vocaloid 6 that had that effect patched out.

Pretty much. They showed up earlier than that (2012? Don't feel like searching Featured Documents right now), but the blockade didn't start until 2038.

>
>Vocaloids are all, as established in this story, currently knocking
>around as gynoids,

Well, we know two of them are at the date of the story; it's likely that the rest of the originals are gynoids as well, but it hasn't been established.

> Miku was the first, made sentient by
>growth and chance, this establishes anyone of them can do it,

In my opinion, that was established in the first Vocaloid story.

>basically they're not a 'conflict' cast as far as UF goes, and they're
>all still alive in the modern era.
>

As far as we know, and with technological upgrades.

Peter Eng
--
"One advantage of the hard light projection system is I don't need to take showers."

At the time Gumi and Rin left for their trip, the gynoid bodies they were inhabiting were the only prototypes. We don't have any information right now as to whether the home office carried on the project afterward (although we'll see in the next episode at least one reason why it's unlikely they did).

Anyway, I can say with some confidence that whatever the current status of the "walkaround" project at the home office, Len and Kaito are not gynoids. :)

>> Miku was the first, made sentient by
>>growth and chance, this establishes anyone of them can do it,
>
>In my opinion, that was established in the first Vocaloid story.

Indeed, we see Luka pulling off the same trick; Gumi even make mention of it in this story.

>>basically they're not a 'conflict' cast as far as UF goes

They aren't, in that getting involved in conflicts isn't their job, like it is for a lot of other people in the UF cast. That doesn't necessarily mean it can never find them, or that they'd be helpless if it did, but they are essentially noncombatants.

>>and they're all still alive in the modern era.

They were as of the writing of their Galactipedia entry, and Miku and Luka appeared in the most recent The Federation Lives Forever! (for values of "appearing" that include Luka only being a voice on the telephone), so it's a reasonably safe bet that this is correct.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

The first retroactively-confirmed sightings were in the twenty-teens; their presence became indisputable when their major offensive began in 2038.

>and basically set human progress back a couple of thousand years by
>basically turning every human nation back into an island.

A couple of thousand years might be a bit of an exaggeration—it's not as if all the advanced technology on Earth stopped working—but it certainly did no economic or geopolitical good.

>Communication or transport between anywhere on Earth was stopped by
>them by force

Only by sea and air. Overland transport and hardwired communications were not affected, for the most part. The Fog did not appear to concern themselves much with what went on within the planet's landmasses, only between them, and the farther away from the coast you got, the less directly their influence was felt.

>until they abruptly got up and walked away as quickly
>as they came for no clear reason.

If anything, more quickly, in light of the retrospective realization that people had been spotting them at sea for upwards of 20 years before they attacked.

>All Fog ships are intelligent cores based around huge clumps of
>nanomachines, and are basically all characters from either Kantai
>Collection or Arpeggio of Blue Steel.

They didn't seem particularly intelligent at this time of this story, nor were they characters at that time in any meaningful sense. By the 25th century, that seems to be correct so far.

>In the case of the former,
>they're all antagonistic, but from what you've been hinting at the
>Abyssals were created by humans experimenting on them?

So far, the only character we've seen in UF whose appearance is based on an Abyssal is a ship that was built using a range of poorly understood alien technologies. If there are more of them out there, this would not necessarily be the origin story for all of them.

>Or they take
>the form of experimental ships which were never created?

There were a few Fog ships during the 21st-century war that were based on proposed-but-never-constructed designs from World War II.

>This is their
>first inning but now they're largely reappearing in the OOTR
>storyline.

Yes.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Doubtful; if they did, the reason the Fog left wouldn't be listed as "We don't know."

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

That doesn't seem to be the Vocaloid's style; Or at least not the way G writes them. It would be my impression that IF they had anything to do with it, it is very indirectly related. As in somehow awakening the first few mental models, which then spreads to the rest of the fleet and the resulting debate amongst themselves about what their orders from the admiralty code really mean is what prompts them to retreat.

Of course, this and $6 will get you a venti Mocha at $tarBuck$

Helping other AI's is what the Vocaloids do on screen; in my mind I guess what I was thinking was IF it had happened, (which I doubted) all they did was help another AI get her act together, never realizing how the person they helped went on to Revolutionise the world... and fall in love with Corwin, as all (on screen) world reshapers seem to do.

It occurs to me that, if things got sufficiently bad, they wouldn't be able to launch anyone on those one-way trips offplanet. Apollo-era rockets would be enough, especially if there are galactic passenger liners waiting in high orbit (which would make sense) but Apollo-era rockets still require a pretty hefty industrial capacity.

Also, how screwed you are by losing access to the ocean and to intercontinental trade, depends very much on where you are. The USA is in trouble initially because we went and exported all our manufacturing base to China, but could probably recover with native resources. Japan, on the other hand? Completely screwed.

Keep in mind that by the time of the Fog Interdiction and the Hundred Day War, the nations of United Earth (tm) had access to the galactic stage since late 1999. That's nearly 40 years of access to advanced technologies (if albeit not widely distributed) and even with Earth getting a lockdown on galactic imports, that still leaves enough examples lying around (along with technical specifications and blueprints) that we clever monkeys probably whipped together suitable substitutes of our own. So I don't think we'd have been knocked back to Saturn V boosters for escaping our gravity well, but anything that did get built for that purpose wasn't likely to be returning.

--- Philip

	Philip J. Moyer Contributing Writer, Editor and Artist (and Moderator) -- Eyrie Productions, Unlimited CEO of MTS, High Poobah Of Artwork, and High Priest Of the Church Of Aerianne -- Magnetic Terrapin Studios "Insert Pithy Comment Here" Fandoms -- Fanart -- Fan Meta Discussions

Patience, padawan.

--
Geoff Depew - Darth Mephron
Haberdasher to Androids, Dark Lord of Sith Tech Support.
"And Remember! Google is your Friend!!"

Given that at the moment Rin and Gumi seem to just want to thrive and get back to their family, though, I don't see them traveling back to Turing with Abhi and Teto; as they'd feel that they weren't needed and they'd still be on the wrong side of the Fog blockade even if they did.

edit:
PS: Want MOAR UF-Depew stories, Meph!!!

The original Vocaloids went to Turing in the first story. Abhi and Teto has not left the planet to head for Turing yet.

>Given that at the moment Rin and Gumi seem to just want to thrive and
>get back to their family, though, I don't see them traveling back to
>Turing with Abhi and Teto; as they'd feel that they weren't needed and
>they'd still be on the wrong side of the Fog blockade even if they
>did.

I have to say I think it's highly unlikely that Gumi and Rin is going to go along...unless something completely unexpected happens. Because 13 years away from the others isn't horrible enough. Please don't take that as a recommendation, challenge, or anything else that would make that actually happen, G! Ok?

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"

Edit:Consolidating two separate sentences requires actual checking...which I didn't.

At the end of Mother of Invention, Gumi and Rin are taking Abhi and Teto to where they will leave Earth for Turing. They don't plan to go with them. They're already stranded far from home, there's no sense in making it worse, and anyway, they've been there before.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.