Babylon Today | My old story is back

[firestar464]

IDK maybe in the end she's freed from torture and society goes to shit, but then everybody then decides not all is lost and pledges to rebuild, but this time in a more "honest" manner.

[Yuli Ban]

The simulation idea is a good justification, the only other justification I could think of hearkens back to what I know of the original plot a bit, but in a modified form. The Medine forces are doing this out of some warped collective psychopathy that developed as a result of the tumultuous times during the revolution and wars. There could be a plotline where resistance members see Meki's torture as an inspiration to resist. Or alternatively, if it's more realistic that too many proles have it too good as automation is taking off, perhaps there's a weak small resistance organization that wants to free Meki purely out of empathy like how the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front operate in the US today. Far too small to actually accomplish their aims, but just large enough to be a thorn on occasion and branded terrorists for it.

The OG Mother Meki remains as dark as ever, but whatever version of Babylon Today I actually write would not be so dire.

That said, OG Mother Meki is what this forum wants, so I may post it here exclusively.

However I must thank Claude 3. GPT-4 was a piece of crap in comparison, but Claude helped me rationalize a few things I never would have before. Concepts I've been struggling with for FIFTEEN YEARS NOW, trying to capture the core ideas of what Mother Meki is supposed to be ever since 2009, finally are so obvious to me but only with the Machine's help.

You misunderstand on multiple fronts.

The collective psychopathy reminds me of Jakob's response to the Antihumanists of Panamerica, trying to see an extremist ideological point of view that would drive them, when in actuality they were pure Orwellian brutalitarians obsessed only with power and human suffering because they could inflict it.

The extremists keeping Meki in such suffering in Mother Meki and to an extent in Babylon Today, I now realize have the inverse where there is an ideological justification that need not rely on being forged in the crucible of oppression (though a helpful dollop of raw sadism and schadenfreude certainly boosts it).
It's literally built into Marxism-Leninism-Maoism that there quite literally is nothing Meki can do to redeem herself. This referring to the concept of "social origin determines class consciousness". Perhaps proving the horseshoe theory correct. Lenin and Mao both came to the same conclusion that the ruling class, bourgeoisie, and labor aristocracy could not provide meaningful allies to the proletariat and that even those who do side with the revolution will carry the ideological and subconscious trappings of bourgeois thought and thinking that no amount of reeducation can prevent from reemerging.

Your bogstandard socialist and Marxist radical will defend revolutionary leftism. The difference between the left and the right is that the leftists hate the wealthy, the capitalists, the defenders of capital, colonialists, and expoiters. The rightists hate the Jews, the blacks, the weak, and the outcastes. Essentially egalitarianism vs hierarchy (that is where the terms originated in France after all). See, you can stop being a rich man anytime you please. You can't really stop being black.

As I alluded to earlier, once you go extreme-left, far further left than most you'll encounter even at a communist forum or meetup, the idea goes "actually, no, you can't stop being bourgeois. You can stop being materially wealthy, but you can't remove the conditions of your upbringing." (And let me be clear here, to hardline Maoist antirevisionists, everyone on this forum would be seen as an irredeemable class enemy, no matter your convictions)

Hence why nowadays I tend to see Commissar Céleste Defarge and her cadre as particularly intense Maoists who get sidelined by shifting material conditions (i.e. technism) Though I suppose technism/hypercapitalism/fully-automated luxury communism fundamentally altering the material conditions of humanity and eroding the proletariat and bourgeoisie alike into a "katoikidia" class regardless of whether a country is capitalist or socialist is only a matter in Babylon Today, which as I've mentioned is not Mother Meki but actually attempting to be a proper story (and a technistic one at that).

Perhaps the name "Defarge" does inform why the Medine Soviet in particular has it out for Meki to such a psychotic degree. Much the same situation, where the sins of Marquis St. Evrémonde are visited upon Charles Darnay who's sentenced to death for circumstances beyond his control.

Meki is a far more intense version of this, going well beyond Darnay into the realm of actively undermining her father with Terios's help, sabotaging the plutofascist state, unconditional surrender of everything, and total rejection of playing any part of the post-revolutionary vanguard in lieu of letting the actual proles lead the charge of their own liberation (the case in both stories)

Marie-Aurore is what they call a completely utopian fanciful fantasy, a character who literally could only exist in fiction. But I say "who cares?"


"Meki Liberation Front" is a hopeless endeavor as well. I mean if it happens in Babylon Today, sure, (where such a thing would have the same consequences the White Army/Czechoslovakian Legion had for the Romanovs of course), but I needn't know how many times I have to repeat that Mother Meki has the logic of a nightmare.
But even if people did come to Meki's defense, I feel you vastly underestimate what is possible technologically. A totalitarian regime, especially one essentially established just to repress a single person, is in heaven in a post-AGI future as they inflict Hell on another. There's no limit to the potential for repression. Indeed, that's why Meki acts at all— she sees her father and his regime will essentially enslave the world's underclasses until the heat death of the universe, or if merciful, simply exterminate them. When you have BCI tech which such lovely names like "LoveNet" and an omniscient automated police force, there is no hope of revolution or even the ability to conceive of it. Even so much as the most minor of sparks of self preservation and discontent or momentary resistance to a fleeting act of unfairness will earn you a nasty psycho-ZAP and put you on your knees ready to be whisked away to brutal torture for your daring to think against the regime. Meki wanted nothing to do with such a regime and would rather die than be its beneficiary, in both stories.

In Babylon Today, it's not so dire for the world (in that case, it's only Sevillist Eurasia), but Meki essentially had no moral choice in Mother Meki, lest she live with the idea that there is an eternal immortal transhuman brutalitarian elite reigning forever over a defeated Dalit caste of billions of humans left in a permanent reverent stupor and love for their own psychotic repression. Trading places so that this elite is defeated and she is the one left in that stupor is a worthy trade, and part of the sense of tragedy: that she achieves the dream of helping liberate the underclasses and achieving a post-Singularity utopia to which she is forever denied (.... usually.... in the bleakest ones, certainly not the ones where her fortunes change circa the 2120s and 2130s, leading to her becoming a faux empress in 2145 and an emigré to Ælkorus in 2146).

Even though the post-proletariat do not exist under any repressive conditions— actually, rather, the luxury and pleasantry is the point. If society as a whole was so repressive, there'd be no point. Much like how Meki herself necessarily has to be Christlike and very much ideologically aligned with her tormentors to maximize that sense of "satisfying tragedy" and cloying sentimentality. It's just a better concept in my head for this Type I-ascendant supercivilization to almost arbitrarily deny access to itself to a single person, that person being the one most responsible for allowing such universal prosperity amd social justice to flourish at that.



There Is 2015-2017-era Mother Meki (i.e. "The Nightmare of a Nightmare" version) where Meki's extreme social benevolence backfires horribly, and circa 2104 onwards to 2115 sees the Medine Civil War + World War 3 with the totally Orwellian National Bolshevik Eurasia essentially inflicting Meki's fate on the entire continent. But that's certainly an outdated version that'll only ever see the light of day with synthetic media.
The version of the story I'm most into is not the version that I advertised on the forum over the years.

[Yuli Ban]

Actually, let me continue this.
I mention that Meki necessarily MUST be Christlike and benevolent. Of course, since the overall story is ostensibly pro-Communist, that means in a Communist context. Obviously a staunch anti-Communist or even a less-radical socialist would see Meki as at best horribly deluded and groomed by a sinister AGI and at worst one of the most evil characters, someone who feels no pity at the death of an entire class of people including her own family (as much it might've been overdue justice for at least most of her family to perish) and whose extreme subjugation is tragically well-deserved. Sure, circumstances might've been dire for the poor and downtrodden, but she could have at least been more proactive; various flavors of socialist would have no issue with Meki even remaining the sovereign or at least joining/leading the vanguard or republic, and plenty more would at least have desired her pick a side and stand against the more extreme elements. Alas, Mother Meki has always been a bit of a "validation" story since the very beginning, essentially clawing for the most radical elements and asking if they would approve of the titular character and her actions.
Indeed, part of what revealed all of this to me was a series of back-and-forths with Claude 3 asking how various radical figures in history would respond to Meki's story, both as a story and as a real person (hence how I discovered the Bolsheviks' attitude towards social origin in a more tangible way, when I was initially shocked at how, despite the sheer extent of Meki's "Total Surrender," Claude still frankly admitted they'd have had her shot because of the extreme nature of her background and the distrust they'd have as a result)

This ultimately got me thinking about how I got here. Mother Meki/Babylon Today absolutely proves the theory of evolution true to me, because I only started getting very self-aware about the story and its conditions a few months ago (in fact BECAUSE of sharing it with Claude). At more than one point in its history, I was told to avoid making Meki "too nice" or "too perfect", that she'd become too much of a Mary Sue, that the Maquis Rouge are too brutal towards her, that Meki's actions are too unrealistic, that Meki's backstory is too dark, and so on, and yet I kept coming back to certain traits and events playing out regardless, and it wasn't until literally the past January that I realized "Actually, that's all the point. The attempts to make it 'more realistic' were always to its detriment because of what this story essentially is. Even in its 'more realistic' form (Babylon Today) certain aspects HAVE to be maintained."

It's funny to me because I just naturally developed into that direction.

If I told you how Mother Meki started life, you'd never believe me. But you'll have to, because the story that birthed Mother Meki is in fact STILL up online:

https://www.fictionpress.com/s/2729435/1/KashMir

This dinky little faux-anime story right here is where Meki got her start way back in the late summer of 2009. I can't help but adore it nowadays, despite how much I hated it back in the day, but think about it: Meki, this tragicommunist character in a deeply political story dealing with themes of radical politics, sociology, technological Singularity, and social revolution, among many other things, came from a story that could best be described as "Sonic the Hedgehog meets Dragon Ball Z with bits of Teen Titans and The World Ends With You." Now she isn't in this, because I never got around to introducing her because I stopped writing this fic before her introduction, but the gist of it was so adorably simple. Instead of Empress Marie-Aurore AKA Meki, it was Princess Mekhi. Yes, MEKHI (because I took the name from Mekhi Phifer, who I didn't know at all but thought the name sounded neat). She was close friends with the main characters of this story, Kash and Mir (hence KashMir... get it?) They formed something of a shonen-esque action trio. However, Princess Mekhi hated her authoritarian (and overbearing) father, King.... ah, I actually don't remember (I legitimately don't remember. It couldn't have been Ludovic, as I took that from "Ludovico Technique" and I didn't get into A Clockwork Orange until at least a full year after this initial plot bunny). Mekhi was princess of a relatively nearby country named Emmuria, in the year 2099 (hence why Mother Meki to this day still takes place ~2098 into the 22nd century despite the fact I've long accepted that technology circa then will be way too advanced to make any of it believable)

So, one episode in I think the second planned "season" of the story involved/starred a character named Johnny Holiday, essentially an anime James Bond. He was tasked by his agency to work for both the King and a rebel group in the kingdom, as the King was having trouble figuring out who the rat was in his regime giving secrets to the rebels. Holiday had no personal vested interests in either side, but he did meet with the rebel group and did sympathize with the little guys trying to get by. Through some deduction and a plot twist, that episode two-parter ended with the reveal that the rat was none other than Princess Mekhi herself, working to undermine her own throne out of a love for the People and a hatred for her father and his government. The result was the rebels win, the King is killed by an angry mob, and Mekhi rides off into the night to meet with Kash and Mir, now freed from her royal responsibilities to be a full-time hero and happy to see that Emmuria is free.

This had to have been thought of around the time I first published this fic, if not slightly before it, but wasn't part of the plotline that I was writing (hence why I stopped writing— I was coming up with way too many ideas and the version of the story I was publishing was outdated the day I started releasing it). I'm probably leaving out a few nuances, but that was it. It was two episodes long (an "episode" of KashMir was 4 sequential chapters, so about 8,000 words altogether), a two-parter arc, and the consequences of it was that Princess Mekhi lost her tiara and her privileges since the royal regime no longer existed, but that just meant she could stick with the MCs more. It was a pure utilitarian move because I wanted Mekhi to be the third person of a trio, and came up with a convenient justification for her to not have to constantly be in an entirely different country in the middle of some cartoonish princessly goings on when trouble was afoot.

However, I was so enamored by this concept of a rebel princess who opposes her own throne that I couldn't help but run with it. I believe the very second pass through of that concept was more involved: instead of Mekhi just riding into the sunset as the palace crumbled, she was instead imprisoned with the rest of her family for a time and treated pretty harshly by rebels who didn't know better, until they did, and plot twist, she tells her father SHE was the traitor and wants nothing to do with a tyrant like him, THEN riding off into the sunset, thanked by the revolutionaries for her service to their cause and commended for giving everything up.

I believe it was a chance happening, where I don't know what I did, maybe accidentally bump into a classmate as we were trying to leave? But I said "Sorry?" and overheard her saying "Sorry dude, apology NOT accepted." And THAT really got my head going, that was like the final piece of the puzzle where I thought on the way home, "What if Mekhi did all this, but instead of being thanked and freed... the revolutionaries DIDN'T show any thanks? What if they repaid her revolutionary generosity with cold, harsh treatment?" That was so long ago, I'm never going to remember the exact day, but that was November 2009, and that was it; from that point on, "Mother Meki" was a thing as a spinoff to KashMir (And I do think I had respelled her name "Meki" by this time). There were two Mekis, to be fair, one still a part of KashMir (where that second draft version was still the case) and this new one where she had nothing to do with the two heroes (who still did exist in her world but never interacted with her) where her situation shifted around plenty, inspired increasingly by a combination of leftist hard rock and punk songs, reading through my history books, and Glenn Beck's endless doom-mongering about socialism. Still pretty extremely childish though.

But like I was saying earlier, the evolution towards what Meki is now started early when I decided I'm fairly sure in early or mid 2010 that Meki HAD to be an empress. Not a princess or queen. She has to be at the absolute social apex. This of course begs the question of why is she the empress if she's so young and her father is still alive as the emperor? Because Meki also HAS to be young (a cross section of innocence and youth), which necessitated her being genetically modified to be forever young-appearing as well (circa 2009, the "Revolution" happened when she was 20; ever since, it's been volleying between 14 and 18 but settled at 16). And obviously if she's the empress and her father's a tyrannical emperor, that implies... well, nasty things, which necessitated her being abused by her father (originally just ickiness was implied but he had never actually done anything sexual; ever since 2015, it was outright molestation, and ever since 2018, it crossed over into "he was using her for hurtcore"). She HAS to be ideologically aligned with the revolutionaries as well (so no "Meki wants the best for her people but supports counterrevolution when she sees the new vanguard is cruel to her") She HAS to be benevolent and kindly as a person (earlier versions of Meki up to 2016 had her being a royal brat as a child but growing to be more kindly; I excised that so she's just kindly by nature). She HAS to engage in "Total Surrender." As in she does not offer to share power with the revolutionaries, nor does she have her back against the wall and gives power to the proles to save her own skin, nor does she usurp her father and take power for herself only to be stopped before becoming a tyrant, nor does she only give SOME or MOST power and wealth. It must be all capital, all ownership, in its totality, without being coerced, entirely through her own will, preferably without even any immediate revolutionary conditions (the example I love using is "Imagine if Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanova killed her father and mother and then handed over the entire Romanov dynasty and its wealth to Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks circa 1913... somehow" Utterly unrealistic, but fun to imagine). Meki HAS to be Christlike in benevolence, which means unconditional assistance to others (especially those of marginalized backgrounds) and a rejection of self-preservation actions. She HAS to reject any temptation to be restored to any level of privilege, let alone the throne; she rejects the plutocracy and aristocracy in its entirety. It's only if she's ever pushed to making hard, uncomfortable choices that you can find the core beliefs that ultimately run towards Maoism-Third Worldism (and for that matter, she HAS to be impartial in the Total Surrender as a handover to the Proletariat, but clearly preferring the radical socialist groups, of which the Marxist group known as the Maquis Rouge is essentially the only organized one in France/western Greater Eurasia at the time). She HAS to be genetically modified even, to separate her from the rest of humanity in some critical way and exist as a sort of "pure specimen" to excite the reactionaries (hence why she is a Homo eximius, who are deliberately dubbed "Aryans" in the stories).
(Lol, in that context, the Aryan empress deferring to the point of total subjugation and torturous conditions to extremist neo-Bolsheviks reads like a Neo-Nazi fantasy, which is one reason why I've never been comfortable writing this). And she HAS to accept her subjugation, even embrace it: no matter what she suffers, whether it's the extreme inhumanity of Mother Meki or the still brutal fate of Babylon Today, she will always refer to the suffering of the masses through history and the joyousness of seeing the people uplifted through socialism and technism to justify her total and absolute self-denial. These are all ABSOLVT; change any of these aspects, and you no longer have Meki (hence why Mother Meki and Babylon Today have so many different variations; even with all these rules and restrictions, there's still loads of places you can go with it).

This and many other aspects emerged over time entirely without me realizing it until recently, but now that I'm self-aware about the nature of the story, I realize that it was inevitably going to fall into this energy state. By pure evolutionary accident, I came upon the story as it necessarily had to be. Even though I'm now aware of what the story is supposed to be, I feel I can't actually "prune" or "improve" these traits any more than which emerged through time; the story found itself in my head long before now.