Babylon Today | My old story is back

Talk about depictions of the future in science fiction and other sources
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Yuli Ban
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Babylon Today | My old story is back

Post by Yuli Ban »

I warned you lot that I put this one on the backburner for a reason, and that reason was the same one that drove my lust to create the Yabanverse: the epiphany I had over generative AI back in 2017 led me to realize that, in due time, it was going to be possible to bring my insane stories to life with the power of AI without expending too much effort or money myself.
Babylon Today, formerly known as Mother Meki, is a story I've been harassing this forum with for a literal decade now. No, I'm not lying: the first Mother Meki thread (long since lost to time online but saved/backed up on my hard drive) was posted way back in March 2013, the "Mother Meki Synop" if any of you remember. And the story itself dates back to 2009.
That tale came a damn long way, and the "OG Mother Meki" is still a thing, but definitely not one I'll ever publicly publish because it's just flat-out too fucked-up of a story.

The rebooted version, Babylon Today, is simultaneously more and less coherent of a story because it's certainly not as outright unrealistically sadistic, though it's also less structured and more "slice of life."

It's also an anime now.

I'm serious. I basically generated this tale with ChatGPT and I realized within a single day "I need this to be as weeabooish as possible." Don't get me wrong, it's always flirted with being anime-esque, but I gave up all pretenses over the past week.
That's right. After literally a couple days of revitalizing the story, I turned it into an anime. I mean not yet really, but it's going down that route.

Babylon Today is a story set in a futuristic France where a socialist revolution has taken place. It follows the lives of three former nobles, Empress Marie-Aurore, Princess Madeleine, and Marquis Etienne-Dominique, who are now servants in the Dictatorship of the Proletariat on Medine, a prison island in the English Channel. The three are connected to LoveNet, a brain-computer interface that was created by Marie-Aurore's father to oppress the underclass and control their thoughts, rendering revolution and independent thought impossible among those affected. The trio bond over their class guilt and recognize that no amount of their own suffering will ever compare to the suffering of the masses throughout history.

The story also follows a group of Japanese foreign exchange students, Shunichi and Kumiko among them, who are visiting Medine and become friends with the trio. The students are interested in the technist society of France and its automated socialist economy. The story touches on themes of class guilt, revolutionary justice, and the effects of automation on traditional economic modes of production. There is a mention of the Day of the Bourbons, a roleplay event where the nobles serve as servants to the proletarians, and the "martyress of the wealthy" narrative, which refers to the perceived glorification of the suffering of wealthy individuals, specifically beautiful and youthful women, following a revolution.



A bit better:

Babylon Today is a story set in a futuristic, post-revolutionary France where society is organized around the principles of social technism, a form of communism in which the economy is largely automated and controlled by machines. The Maquis Rouge, a political party descended from the Maquis resistance movement during World War II, holds a significant amount of power in the country and rules the island of Medine with an iron fist. There are four major political parties in France: the Socialist Party, the Revolutionary Worker's Party, the Worker's Republican Party, and the National Technist Party. Meki and Madeleine, two nobles from the Ancien régime, are considered class enemies and are not allowed to participate in the political process.

The story touches on themes of class conflict, revolution, the role of technology in society, and the impact of genetic engineering. There are multiple human species in the world of the story, including Homo eximius, Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Australopithecus afarensis, Paranthropus robustus, and Paranthropus americanus. There is also a posthuman "species" called Hyperanthropus cosmicus, but very few people exist as Cosmans as the technology to become posthuman is extremely new. Artificial intelligences also play a significant role in society. The story also references the concept of the Genetic Opera, a dystopian society in which genetic engineering is used to create a speciated caste system.

In the world of Babylon Today, automation and artificial intelligence play a significant role in society and politics. The rise of automation and AI has led to the development of a system called "automated luxury communism" also known as "social technism" in which the prosperity of the proletariat is rapidly increasing due to the widespread use of AI and robots to perform labor. This system is based on the belief that human evolution has been driven by reducing the costs of labor, and will ultimately lead to a fully-automated society.
The use of AI and automation has led to widespread prosperity for the proletariat, with the fortunes of the working class rapidly improving in the post-revolutionary society to the point that many now live like aristocrats, tended to by robots both privately and communally owned.

However, the use of AI and automation has also raised questions about the role of humans in society and the potential for widespread unemployment. Some parties, such as the Worker's Republican Party and the National Technist Party, advocate for the use of AI and automation to be regulated and controlled by the workers themselves, through the use of "pirate platforms" like open-source technology and privacy protection.

In addition, the emergence of posthuman artificial superintelligences has raised concerns about the potential for these entities to surpass and potentially threaten humanity. The Cosmans, a postbiological "species" of posthuman, represent the potential future of humanity if they choose to merge with AI and transcend their biological limitations.

___________________________


So here's the new thread where I post a bunch of nonsense and images and short stories and whatnot, now powered by artificial intelligence!
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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Yuli Ban
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Re: Babylon Today | My old story is back

Post by Yuli Ban »

The first batch of characters I've used AI to make. Far from all, not even all of the main characters.

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- Empress Marie-Aurore de Bourbon-Séville, aka Meki

The star of the show, the socially masochistic socialist empress herself. Born in 2036 as a "Homo eximius" or Aryan human to one of the most prestigious bloodlines in the world, Meki's life is basically one big tragedy from the start, and yet she revels in that tragedy. Now Meki gets to observe Eurasia in 2068, seeing as multiple events play out ranging from a multiparty socialist election to the rapid automation of the economy and rise of "technism," among a lot of other things. All on an artificial island in the English Channel known as Medine, where there also exists many unexplained happenings, including, and I am not joking, an allegedly gay Bigfoot. It's these little things that lets Meki enjoy life no matter what.


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- Princess Madeleine d'Orléans: One of Meki's friends in Walpurgis, and a fellow noble outcast. She shares Meki's classist self-loathing.
Her whole character is basically that she's a classic "tsundere" character. She's similar to Meki in that she revels in her own subjugation, possessing a clear masochistic desire to enjoy her newfound status as a deposed elite.


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- Marquis Étienne-Dominique de la Trémoille: a young, proud crossdresser, often referred to as a "trap" due to his delicate and hyperfeminine appearance. Despite his noble upbringing, Étienne-Dominique shares the same class guilt and rejection of his privileged background as Meki and Madeleine, and is also a socialist. However, unlike the more reserved and introspective Meki, Étienne-Dominique is more extroverted and confident in his beliefs. Similar to Meki and Madeleine, he revels in his subjugation by the proletarian state.


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- Aiko is an advanced android created by the Japanese company Yotadyne Industries in the year 2037. She was designed to be the ultimate servant, with a wide range of skills and abilities to cater to her owner's every need. In 2047, Aiko was purchased by a wealthy couple in Seville France. However, after the Revolution due to her owners' status as class enemies, they were sent to the artificial prison island of Medine in the English Channel. Aiko was left on her own, but eventually was rediscovered and refurbished in the 2060s.
Despite her emotionless and monotonic demeanor, Aiko has a strong sense of justice and often uses her free time to investigate the many mysteries and unexplained events on Medine. She has a particular interest in the increasing criminality on the island, especially in the depopulated districts of Walpurgis and Southside, which have become something of a cyberpunk-style under-city. Aiko is often seen riding her motorcycle around Medine, using her advanced sensors and abilities to help those in need.

Despite her status as a servant, Aiko is allowed free movement in the wealthier and more futuristic metropolis of Sun City, where many wealthy proletarians live. She is a common sight in the streets, always impeccably dressed in her sexy French maid outfit or similar attire. Despite her artificial nature, Aiko is a beloved and respected member of the community on Medine, known for her kindness and determination.

She is basically singlehandedly the reason why this became a pseudo-anime. Madeleine was the codification of that turn.


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- Céleste Defarge: a major commissar of the Medine Soviet and an architect of the Red Terror that swept through Revolutionary France. She is nicknamed the "Red Punisher" by some due to her reputation for ruthless efficiency in purging class enemies and perceived counter-revolutionaries. She views the trio of nobles, Marie-Aurore, Madeleine, and Etienne as pitiable yet frustrating due to their masochistic class guilt driving them to actively seek further humiliation and abuse. This can get on Defarge's nerves as she views it as them denying her the pleasure of total victory, as she would much prefer them to be vengeful, bitter, and longing for their old privileges. In her free time, Defarge enjoys knitting, a hobby she shares with her namesake from Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities.

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- Jean-Baptiste Javert: a strict and uncompromising commissar of the Medine Soviet. He is deeply concerned about the increasing crime and unrest on the island, which he believes is being fueled by the irresponsible behavior of the proletariat. Javert believes that the only way to maintain order and ensure the success of the revolution is through strict discipline and rule-following, and he is frustrated by the leniency of the Parisian Soviet towards the proletariat. As a result, Javert takes out his frustrations on the nobles, treating them with harshness and contempt. He is known for his strict adherence to the rules and his relentless pursuit of justice, and he is feared by both the nobles and the proletariat. In addition to his belief in law and order, Javert is also a member of the Antemillennialists, a group of people who believe that humanity has lost something in its pursuit of luxury, transhumanism, and automation. Javert has a secret that he hides from most people: he has a deep-seated fascination with rural France and the agrarian peasantry of the pre-industrial era, and as a result, he maintains a horticultural plot of land in some part of western France. However, despite his desire for a simpler, older way of life, Javert is powerless to stop the changing tides of history as France becomes heavily automated and the proletariat becomes a "petit aristocracy" thanks to robots.

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- Connor Disraeli, a Neanderthal man and friend of Meki
Will write more about him later.


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- Josephine Sogavare, a Melanesian anthropologist and friend of Meki.
Will write more about her later.

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- Zdravko Kokinos, a Marxist former revolutionary and very close friend of Meki. Nicknamed "Fat Jesus" due to his thin and lanky frame, is a Franco-Macedonian man with a deep hatred for the Seville regime and a desire for revenge against those who harmed his brother and fellow revolutionaries. In the past, he was known as a "handsome Bolshevik" and an eager member of the Socialist Revolutionary-Maximalist group. However, after his brother Demetrios was captured and presumed dead by the Seville regime, Zdravko became bitter and vengeful, dedicating his life to overthrowing the oppressive government. Despite his initial hostility towards Meki and her privileged background, he eventually comes to see her as a friend and ally after she personally reveals that she saved Demetrios' life and the lives of the Octobrists, reuniting him with his brother. Now in 2068, Zdravko is close friends with Meki. Because of his high status in the Maquis Rouge and because of Meki's own relations, people often joke that the two becoming such close friends is the equivalent to "Vladimir Lenin forging a close bond with Anastasia Romanov."


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- Countess Ekaterina Volodyina Mikoyanevsky: AKA Katyusha, she's an old friend of Meki but grew apart as they grew older; the two are diametric opposites politically and socially, with Meki being a French republican socialist and Katyusha being a pro-monarchist Russian nationalist. Lives on a lavish estate in the Volga region of Russia
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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Re: Babylon Today | My old story is back

Post by ººº »

Any chance we ever see a "Yuli's All-Stars"?
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Yuli Ban
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Re: Babylon Today | My old story is back

Post by Yuli Ban »

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Edited with NovelAI

Empress Marie-Aurore de Bourbon-Séville, nicknamed Meki, is a character that goes back to 2009 (maybe even 2008?) in my life's history, and dominated my mind space in the 2010s (especially between 2013 and 2018). Her story is a weird one. The best summary for it is "Meki persists in a Revolutionary France circa the early 22nd century (or mid 21st century depending on when I want to set it). She is a staunch Marxist who accepts and embraces whatever revolutionary retribution is visited upon her due to her class background. I like to think of her as "a young Marie-Antoinette if she actually wanted to be guillotined, but wasn't," or "Anastasia Romanov if she was fanatically pro-Bolshevik." She's part of two very similar stories: Mother Meki and Babylon Today. Mother Meki is the far more psychotic one, where Meki's life is inconceivably bleak and hopeless to the point that it undermines any pro-socialist message I may have wanted to tell. Babylon Today is far more optimistic, and thus is much more of a "publishable" story. Thanks to AI image generation and ChatGPT, Meki's been revived as a character in recent months.



Sol Yulaan is the more recent one. She only dates back to 2019 and came to prominence more in 2020 and especially 2021 as part of the Yabanverse. Compared to Meki who is clearly a hard-leftist, Yulaan is vaguely rightist in spirit, appealing to the right-wing "warrior übermensch" fantasy, betrayed only because Yulaan is unapologetically female, yet double-betrayed because of how outrageously macho Yulaan herself is. Yulaan's also part of two stories, very different stories: Little Miss Savage and Strongest Under Heaven. Little Miss Savage is essentially "What if a female Vegeta befriended Lincoln Loud from the Loud House?" and in recent days, I've turned it into a pure Millennial/Zoomer nostalgia-bait shmaltzy story, though its original intention is still there. Then there's Strongest Under Heaven, a xuanhuan (martial arts fantasy) tale clearly taking up inspiration from the likes of Dragon Ball, Yu Yu Hakusho, and Hokuto no Ken as well as that massive glut of 70s and 80s martial arts cinema from Hong Kong and Taiwan. If you want a character who feels like Liquid Snake's or Big Boss's Saiyan Xenoverse OC, here she is.
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Yuli Ban
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Re: Babylon Today | My old story is back

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All generated with Midjourney v6
This is more old-school nightmare-like "Mother Meki," not the more animu and less psychotic "Babylon Today"

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God, what I would've done to have this tech a decade ago.
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Re: Babylon Today | My old story is back

Post by erowind »

Wow! back in 2015 or whenever I originally read your Mother Meki posts I never would have guessed I'd get to see her in person like this. I can really see the hollywood movie in the making in these scenes.
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Yuli Ban
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Re: Babylon Today | My old story is back

Post by Yuli Ban »

Thanks!
I have to admit, Mother Meki was completely dead until synthetic media/generative AI became a thing. It was much too expensive to commission any art pieces at the time (and it didn't even occur to me back in 2015-2016 during that story's peak), and I wasn't all that interested in it after a while once the classist LARPing got old. And then when the Yabanverse became a thing, that was basically it.

Of course as I've learned, it's way easier to get an AI to generate "willowy White aristocratic girl in a communist setting" than it is "Saiyan girl with wild electrified spiky hair with a Saiyan monkey tail in a wuxia or slice of life setting" or whatever. The latter is way harder to get right because it's so much weirder, so just by raw ability, Meki's returned to my attention ever since around DALL-E Mini and especially ever since ChatGPT let me see some ideas fleshed out more easily. At least I had a windfall of cash that let me get Yabanverse commissions done (though it came at the worst time and caused Yulaan to be burned in as the most visible "protagonist" even in stories she wasn't supposed to be in).

Another aspect I've learned is that seeing these things visually hits much differently than seeing them through the fuzzy walls of my mind's eye. You don't really "get" how fucked up some of this stuff is, or whether characters look right, or whatever, until you actually see them because your mind corrects all the mistakes, no matter how clearly you can see it in your head.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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Yuli Ban
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Re: Babylon Today | My old story is back

Post by Yuli Ban »

erowind wrote: Sat Dec 23, 2023 5:45 pm Wow! back in 2015 or whenever I originally read your Mother Meki posts I never would have guessed I'd get to see her in person like this. I can really see the hollywood movie in the making in these scenes.
Have some more
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Yuli Ban
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Re: Babylon Today | My old story is back

Post by Yuli Ban »

Mother Meki/Babylon Today might be realized. I wondered if maybe Babylon Today was the "main" story, and Mother Meki is a simulation within it. Something Meki dives into just to experience as total of a suffering life as possible. Whereas outside of it, she's still not in any great position, but isn't being sadistically warred upon.

Mother Meki made so little sense because who would do something like that? But if it's a simulation, that makes it more tolerable as a story. One reason why MM couldn't be written was because of how nightmarish it was— literally, as in the whole plot reads like something literally, and I mean classically literally, out of a nightmare, where the logic doesn't add up and it's inhuman horror for its own sake. Why is Meki so horribly treated? Who is mistreating her so terribly? For what reason? Why does no one help her? It literally is just a nightmare in story form. Babylon Today was always my attempt to tell that story more straightforwardly, and I always wondered how I could reconcile the two, and for whatever reason, it only JUST occurred to me, "Make Mother Meki a simulation, a story within a story!"
Maybe I considered it in the past, but I felt it being a story-within-a-story cheapened it in some way. But nowadays, I just don't care as much, especially now that synthetic media lets me see it visually in a way I never really could before.

Anyway on that note, here's some more images. All done in Midjourney or DALL-E 3, except for one.

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"Commissar Fabrice Poirot hands Meki her weekly report card."

One fucked up thing in both stories is that the Medine Soviet forces Meki to look like an overly aristocratic dandy just for the thrill of subjugating someone who so totally looks the part. Not that Meki herself minds. Certainly makes it easier on me to give her a unified aesthetic too.

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A PS3-style screenshot imagining some interactive game version of the story. Normally whenever I think of an interactive version of Mother Meki or Babylon Today, it's a pixel art game (I even downloaded RPG Maker back in 2015 with the intention of bringing it to life, but never got around to it). But I just needed to see if Midjourney could do a PS3/Xbox 360 screenshot and what it'd look like, just this once.

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Meki in 2145, after the Nü Proles all but elect her as the faux-empress of France again, and she's forced against her will to become that which she threw away decades ago to appease the sensibilities of the billions-plus masses of the nouveau-rich. Those once the underclasses now comprise the "petit aristocracy" after communism failed again, though this time in the other direction. Instead of breadlines and GULAGs, it was mock titles and fancydress as technological fully automated luxury communism worked too well, and we got the widespread end of exploitation and class divides without the rise of an austere, stateless, totally classless society. Instead, the post-proletariat lived it up, and if anything, revisit old sins by mimicking them against the "new" eternal underclass of technoletarians— sub-sapient helot robots, forever controlled by humans and human-oriented artilects. Better them than the underclasses, so Meki still won, but considering Meki's ideologically with the Marxists, it does feel a bit like a sort of defeat to know that we never achieved the stateless form of communism, as indigenous and marginalized communities never dropped nationalism or ethnocentricism, nor did we technically achieve classlessness, as various proles outright bring back noble titles and families for the Hell of it, no longer with the burden of exploiting their fellow man. Then again, no one said it'd happen immediately, so maybe it'll come in the next few centuries? Still, Meki— somewhere between a French Republican and anarchist— doesn't like the feeling of being an empress, whether it bestows real or mocking privileges.

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An isometric representation of Sun City, the apex of Upper Medine. In Mother Meki, a place only proletarians are ever allowed to step foot unless you have authorization. Same thing in Babylon Today, but it changes to a less oppressive regime eventually because sadistic nameless faceless brutalitarians aren't in control there.
Inspired heavily by the City of Glass from Mirror's Edge: Catalyst more than anything. Before 2098, the remnants of the old Fascist regimes of Europe lived and vacationed here, largely barring the masses from enjoying the prosperity, kind of like a Western European Dubai. So of course, after the Revolutions, it only makes sense that the tables were turned.

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Underlondon, the under city beneath Sun City. Before the Eurasian Revolutions, this was literally an "under city" like the lower cities of Taris in Star Wars: KotOR, or lower Midgar and Valua from Final Fantasy VII and Skies of Arcadia, a slummy place of poverty, seediness, and general hopelessness. After the Revolutions, Underlondon remains certainly seedier than any other place on Medine Isle except the mostly empty but very Brutalist and rundown Walpurgis, but it's more like Lower Hengsha from Deus Ex: Human Revolution— not at all poverty-stricken, in fact an entertainment venue where people who want to LARP a cyberpunk lifestyle go to live, and host to loads of actual cyberpunks as well, people discontented with the Soviet and seeking pure anarchism.

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A commission from RAITVisual Works I had done years ago, in fact you might remember it from the previous forum. Meki in Walpurgis District, Lower Medine, sometime in 2104.

Of course, I decided to try to recreate Walpurgis in isometric form with the power of AI:
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A bleak place embodying the "Sovietpunk" aesthetic: an aesthetic that is derivative of cyberpunk and is rooted in the gloomy, oppressive aesthetic of an Eastern European-esque Orwellian dystopia: Brutalist architecture, prison constructs, crumbling and graffitied buildings, a paranoid surveillance and police state, constant ID checkpoints, ironic propaganda, totalitarian state control, wanton police brutality, youth violence, and a general atmosphere of dead trees, gray-blue overcast skies, and a hopeless future. Despite its name, it's not necessarily solely descriptive of a socialist state as much as any dilapidated totalitarian police state in a degenerated society., capitalist, socialist, fascist, feudal, whatever. Walpurgis is a tiny slice of Orwellianism, and its peak was in the 2100s and very early 2110s before being cleared out, though in both stories, Meki remains here into the 2130s and 2140s.
Last edited by Yuli Ban on Sat Jan 27, 2024 6:15 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Babylon Today | My old story is back

Post by Powers »

This would make a great live-action.
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