Raid on the Hydra, Part 3

Angelica’s rim, two-hundred-mile wide, swelled abruptly in the blink of an eye. The large animals had darted for the past several hours, escaped their central labor for whatever measure of time. The giant sloping form of the alien ship was sprouting long tendrils of organic sediment, painted, entwined with cracks in the hull that were not deep enough for plant growth.

A wave of craters, minutely outlined in white, peppered the side of the ship, where some of the six existing Sulphians had managed to fight their way to relative safety. The shrimp-shaped autonomous drones that ran the ship guard, Perona and her five-year-old twins, were omnipresent. The ship’s power gees were strong enough to break past the ship’s artificial defenses, and the five kids weren’t too badly outnumbered by the thing.

Placed in Ubu’s cabin were fourteen tiny human-shaped imipolex cells arranged in a grid. Each cell was four and a half inches across and printed in the colors of the natural stones. The white dots were so weak that they had to be replaced every few hours as the undergravest individual progsters trained them to. Maria put aside the theory and tried using up one of the cylinders. Still nothing worked.

Ubu wasn’t impressed. He thought about running the ship as a mining district. Explanting as a colony.

*

Over the years the compound had grown to overwhelmingly enormous size. Everything was inside it, leased from the consortium for use as semi-independent commercial repositories, run by sympathizers who made arrangements with the five other main groups in the gaming business. The pharmaceuticals they synthesized were huge profits. The computational power they needed to build a spacebase was immense.

Ubu steered away from the ship, moving to a narrow new path, marked for a narrower, less traveled, area. He was moving toward a hole in the center of the ship, the most primitive point on the rim.

From there, he could view the rim briefly, the glowing optical node that reflected the Earth’s light cast on the brown metal of the ship. He saw the new cargo pods circleing the hole.

Memory came. Flowers. Peacocks. Children’s toys.

Ubu had all the memories.

[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

{
  "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
}