Raid on the Hydra, Part 2

Electron awareness poured into Maria’s body. The electron world occupied her mind. Everything was familiar, and she was in a different era. The different worlds were all equally the same.

Maria imagined Abbey Road, the neon upvote, the smiling face of Miss de Familia.

Maria imagined the walking people, the sounds they made, the smells, the music they sang. She realized she was standing at the awning of a bus station, a clinking sound of metal on metal, blaring as she sent her body history and rock’n’roll history.

She was aching, pain exploding in her, the pit of her stomach. She was sick of pain. The choice was either to accept the injury or go to work for Twelve.

She reached for the comp screen and called up the care file. There was a young male medical engineer in his early thirties, radiating worry. He was fit, had served in the military briefly, was probably on his way to becoming an engineer. His name was Gypriot Viktor. A year before, he’d been an engineer with Pentecostal parents. He was known for simple work: keeping computers ready to operate them. It was known that the security of the data was not as good as that of the physical plant.

He was developing medical conditions as he covered what little he knew about computers. And his time was running out.

“Got anyw and Taki once offered me kodoto music,” a pop star announced. She looked at the screen, seeing the narrow, sleazy figure of Kit Bonham, the coke-snorting Argentine hipster she’d met in Paris, his Styrofoam-soled black curls.

Maria bit her lip, closed her eyes. “Noted,” she said.

“Ubu gave me some of his old stuff. Had to recombine it because there wasn’t enough stored for a family, so it’s only good for a club. But I couldn’t get it, so started messing with it again.”

“Ubu’s lousy.”

“He’s the worst. Ever worked for him?”

Beautiful Maria gaped at him. “You are. You just—” She looked at Kit. “I’m f***ing out of my mind. Jesus Rice. I’m hallucinating.”

“It’s the aliens, Maria. Pythons and nymphs and the same thing. Every time Ubu comes aboard, it’s like they walk out onto the field that faster than light.”

“Jesus Rice. You’re kidding.”

“He’s a good pilot. He wouldn’t even talk to me.”

Maria bit her lip. Kit was right. She couldn’t get the mend to work on her head; it was so odd.

Marco shambled off the line, his message. A despatch from the distribution unit came to Maria.

“Waiting for shipment.” A very pleasant male voice.

Maria picked up the line. “Guess we can do this, too, huh?”

“Shooter.”

“What?” Maria’s bewildered voice was so diminutive that Kit could barely hear her.

“I was about to call up some stuff.” Marco’s voice was so low Maria could almost have been speechless. “Ubu and I are getting our shipping out. I’m gonna put a call together with Twelve and find out where we’re going. Then we’ll send someone up to Bezel and get the ship ready to go.”

“Okay,” Maria said. The cool knowledge was still frightening her, the knowledge that if Ubu and Maria decided to go on the run, they might never see the savages that awaited them on Bezel.

Maria shrugged. The idea was as good as it sounded. It would get her out of her life on Bezel, and she could concentrate on her recovery in X’s ship.

[END TRANSMISSION]

Editor’s Notes

I created a new generation script that automatically feeds the last bit of each generation into the next, with the same settings, otherwise, over and over until it completes the total length I asked for. This makes pretty long stories now, so all parts of the “Raid on the Hydra” story are from the same text generation. I bumped the top_k up quite a bit. I’d not tried it over 80 before, but this seemed to work all right this time.

Edits

I removed some sections that repeated text it already had. I censored some language, to keep the audience age wider for the story than otherwise.

GPT-2 Settings

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  "return_as_list": true,
  "include_prefix": false,
  "length": 1024,
  "top_k": 5000,
  "top_p": 0.9,
  "truncate": "<|endoftext|>",
  "temperature": 1.0,
  "run_name": "model-cyberpunk-run1",
  "prefix": "",
  "nsamples": 1
}