Powers wrote: ↑Sat Jan 27, 2024 6:00 am
This would make a great live-action.
Depends.
Ever since roughly 2013, I've imagined Mother Meki as a movie, typically something straight out of New Hollywood, with that 16mm grain of real film, and AI can ironically mimic that extremely well. I love imagining it coming out the same era as the Godfather I & II, A Clockwork Orange, Taxi Driver, The Graduate, or Star Wars: A New Hope.
(I remember also around that time being SICKENED by shaky cam. Personally I don't mind it anymore, but if I ever do use DALL-E Video to create a movie version of this, it'd probably have a stable camera.)
That said, Babylon Today, I tend to envision more as an anime.
To the point of it bordering on magical realism like Baccano! and Durarara!!
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
^ Just to clarify.... You pictured the very much Nordic-French blonde-haired blue-eyed monarch Marie-Aurore d'Bourbon-Séville being portrayed by an Asian actor? Or am I missing something?
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
Yuli Ban wrote: ↑Sat Jan 27, 2024 9:45 am
^ Just to clarify.... You pictured the very much Nordic-French blonde-haired blue-eyed monarch Marie-Aurore d'Bourbon-Séville being portrayed by an Asian actor? Or am I missing something?
Yes and if you're wondering yes they would differ a lot.
Yuli Ban wrote: ↑Fri Jan 26, 2024 5:39 pm
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?
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.
I don't know how cliche that would get or not, and you may or may not have thought of it already? In any case, there is an absurdism in the brutality, and I can only imagine what hasn't been shared over the years. But that fantastical absurdity is part of the appeal of the story however it is justified, the grand wealth of a post singularity world contrasted with the absurd brutality against Meki. It's a plot device that works!
Ursula K. Le Guin did something similar in her short story The One's Who Walk Away from Omelas. In the story a "perfect" utopia is presented to the reader. Early on Ursula only presented the utopia and found it interesting personally to explore it just for its own sake. She found that the general audience she'd be writing too weren't terribly interested in this, they needed something to be wrong to make the utopia believable. Hence, Le Guin introduced a child who's purpose in the society was to be tortured in an unsanitary basement deep under a nondescript building in the center of town. There were various justifications that the society in the story gave but Ursula quite literally wrote that character in to appeal to the cultural fallacy that the audience demanded, and it worked. She could imagine a utopia functioning without such suffering but our society seemingly couldn't at the time and probably still can't. In the story there are people who leave the utopia because they can't bear to watch the child suffer, serving a similar plot purpose to a hypothetical Medinean Meki Liberation Front.
The story is only a few pages long if you're interested
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.
This would be a dream, that screenshot is incredible. It reminds me Nier or Metal Gear Solid on the PS3. The clean minimalist PS3 aesthetic is so beautiful. If one day you could just synthesize a game for Mother Meki with reasonable effort using AI this aesthetic is perfect!
Underlondon, the under city beneath Sun City. Before the Eurasian Revolutions...
With all the exposition here of the polities of Babylon Today it would be really cool to see an updated map of the world like when we were all obsessed with making world maps back in the mid 2010s. A humble request, no obligation of course. Thanks for continuing to post here, I've thoroughly enjoyed reading this update!
But remember that Babylon Today is not serving that same niche. Babylon Today has always been technist propaganda more than anything; nightmarish suffering gets in the way of that. The Marie-Aurore of Babylon Today who tells us about the fully-automated luxury communist world to come necessarily cannot be the Meki of Mother Meki who lives an outrageously brutal life in that same sort of utopia, as the story there has nothing to do with the wider society.
At this juncture, I figured I'd just keep them two separate but similar stories. Babylon Today is just as addictive for me to return to whenever I get interested in details such as how helots and economic AI engines work, or the undoing of hypernormalization by counterintuitively removing humans from global decisionmaking altogether, or the possibility of a split between austere eco-socialists and luxury-communists and the rise of the "petit aristocracy" worldwide. Not that Meki has a normal life in that story by any means— the same general strain is there, just vastly less psychotic. But they serve different niches with the same characters.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
Probably my most recent work with Babylon Today is "Letters From the 22nd Century" which is a faux-retrospective of the 21st century and the re-emergence of Marxism wrought by the AI Revolution, and the truest emergence of the long discussed "contradictions of capitalism" in an increasingly automated society. In the world of Babylon Today (and technically Mother Meki), AGI took longer than I predict it will take in our world. But it still emerged sooner than expected.
Basically the current anti AI reaction was crushed by the continued progress of AI— constant predictions of AI's failure and a new winter kept failing. Essentially, the victory of the technologists over artists and the creative intelligentsia was "capitalism's final victory." Then at some point, an ex-libertarian turned techno-Marxist figure known as John Henry Vyrd emerged to lead the discussion of AI and automation as leading capitalism to a point of crisis, an economic singularity (unrelated to the Technological Singularity in theory) at which point the advancement of technological development leads to a point of extremely low cost goods at the cost of a working or consumer class that can afford these goods, coupled further with capital consolidation that resists deflationary measures. This would be an unstoppable chain reaction because investors will seek returns that automation promises to deliver and cut human labor, undercutting the longterm benefits of automation, and leading to a liquidity crisis that cannot be survived. Consumerism is the backbone of industrial capitalism and its functionality— every crisis in capitalism came back to a crisis of consumerism and transactional confidence. Once this is broken entirely, the chains snap and capitalism begins to implode.
If the conditions are right and revolutionaries thwart neofeudalist reaction, this could lead to socialism, and if the socialist revolutionaries seize automated capital, then something seemingly magical will occur: socialist economics will actually work for once. This because of the contradictions of socialism being resolved with the addition of automation. The problem of incentive and uncontrollable planning no longer exist as problems, though a more market-oriented approach to socialism would be ideal over centralized authoritarian planning.
And Vyrd uses the analogy of "supercooled water" to describe this situation. Socialism fails because it's like putting lukewarm water into a freezer and expecting it to be frozen. The material and technological requirements for a successful socialist economy have not existed, and worse, socialists always took control in nations Marx would have described as uniquely unequipped to implement industrial socialism— 1910s Russia, 1940s China, 1950s Cuba, 1960s Vietnam, 1970s Angola, etc. Places with lacked high tech high-automation, or even sufficient mechanization, in some cases lacking an industrial proletariat altogether. Marxists would retroactively justify this, most infamously in Cambodia where the Khmer Rouge outright rejected industrialization entirely. But even Marxist-Leninist and Maoist ideology is predicated on the rapid industrialization of unindustrialized states, whipping a largely agrarian peasant-driven economy into a modern industrial one ad quickly as possible rather than a societal unionization of a nonexistent industrial proletariat. How can the working class take control if there barely is a working class at all? Through vanguards, five year plans, and rapid industrialization. Wealth can be generated in a mostly equalized manner, but not at any great pace.
But once we enter the post industrial economies of the West in the 21st century, a "phase change" begins to occur— we approach freezing temperatures. And then with the emergence of AGI and fully automated industry, we cross that threshold. However, the water remains liquid below freezing temperatures— it is supercooled.
It only takes the slightest disruption, the slightest tap against the side, to begin rapid solidification. Of course if that disruption never comes, water will eventually freeze but in a much harsher temperatures and circumstances.
But this societal supercooling and rapid solidification has happened before. The shifts to Agriculture, to feudalism, and to capitalism all could have technically occurred sooner than they did and were resisted by existing hierarchies and groups bexause not all the material, social, and economic conditions were ready, but once it succeeded after that phase change threshold, the changes were overwhelming and essentially came naturally.
Vyrd also mentions the "revolution fetishism" of the Left that followed hypernormalization— the embrace of rebellion and nonconformity to capitalist society with no accompanying dream, hope, or idea of what to replace this society with. Perhaps even worse— an outright rejection of such dreams as foolish idealism, yet counterintuitively no such rejection of anticapitalist rebellion. Thus such activism devolves into "meaningless misanthropy" where everything is mocked and attacked with sneering sardonicism and yet no vision of improvement exists, rendering that sardonicism essentially spoiled whining dressed up with a veneer of detached anarchistic coolness and opposition to suburban wholesomeness— all humans are terrible pieces of shit and everyone deserves to die because we're all greedy psychotic demon apes, but also vote to enact change and bring about a more empathic system because no human deserves to suffer and we need to change things. Endless demoralization and misanthropic defeatism, with zero inspiration or optimism because "there's nothing to be optimistic about."
Without a coherent or concrete vision of the future and, more importantly, an actual hope to achieve this future even in the face of overwhelming odds, it's simply being a rebel without a cause, an edgy artist or philosopher repeating everything we already know back to themselves to demoralize themselves and those around them. Yet because these types are not rightists or reactionaries, they embrace the dream of Revolution as a sort or "Red Rapture" from their current mode of existence. They care more about being revolutionaries against a vague, ill-defined rich elite seeking vague, ill-defined social change. They may dream of turning the USA into the USSR, but never think of the implications, or listen to the Soviets' own words of warning about what not to do, or consider any actual socialist, Marxist, nihilist, or anarchist economic theories beyond the vaguest, illest-defined memes and slogans. The most extreme point in Vyrd's time was the forced redefining of "revolution" to explicitly imply revolutions can only ever be socialist in nature and, thus, revolutions with no socialist vanguard, spirit, or goal were not revolutions but merely "civic uprisings" (think of how "racism" was redefined to exclusively imply only white people can be racist and anyone of another race being racist is still a white supremacist)— ideological monopoly on the concept of revolution with little to no dreaming of what comes after beyond vague, ill-defined utopian promises.
Vyrd felt that the various Communists had effectively figured out why Communism failed by the late 1970s, but the orthodox Communist Parties were so conservative and reactionary that any sort of reform or recalibration was fatally resisted, with the only exceptions being China and Vietnam, who were both too unindustrialized to take advantage of this realization. Likewise, other experiments like Cybersyn simply didn't have time to work.
There was no reason why Communism had to fall in 1989-1992 other than Communists' own resistance to reality and the contradictions of socialism in an unautomated economy— mechanization alone isn't enough. Had the Soviet Union shifted towards a Chinese or Yugoslavian economic model, not only would it have survived, but if it also adopted Cybersyn, could have possibly overtaken the USA by the 2020s. Alas, the Soviet elite were so resistant towards changes to the orthodoxy that the USSR squandered a chance to even develop its own internet multiple times, and the extremely limited market reforms of Perestroika/Glastnost did more harm than good at the worst possible time.
And going along with that, many collegian Communists and granola capitalists instead decided that the austere, miserable state of 20th century communism wasn't actually failure but instead how it ought to be— that instead of seeking prosperity and luxury as communists once had, limitations and eco-friendly austerity is the true way forward. It wasn't that communist societies were consistently unable to provide for their citizens beyond the bare means due to systemic flaws; capitalist societies are just decadent and people do not need so much.
But if socialism re-emerged in an AI-driven economy, the old dreams of Marx and Engels would be realized in a way that would make even the most decadent eras of Americana seem like Soviet breadline-tier failure in a way that lacked the necessary guilt that comes with the old capitalist mode of third world exploitation.
Hence the world of Mother Meki/Babylon Today and why Meki enjoys and overwhelmingly accepts her suffering: no matter what happens to her, it's worth it to see the people become prosperous as a whole and she could never put her own condition over the collective prosperity of humanity.
Because capitalism as it turns out could not adapt to the emergence of AGI after all.
Meki demonstrates this to an uncryofrozen man awoken in 2136— using a century-old AI, she brings up a typical instance of corporate planning and finance that any low-level Fortune 500 board room executive could follow and offers a problem and gives the man some time to consider how to resolve it. Then she snaps her fingers and says "Time is up." The man hadn't even had time to fully process the problem, let alone begin thinking of how to brainstorm how to do it and how to resolve revenue issues to optimize for a solution— and she says that an AGI not only figured it out and networked with other corporation-running AIs but did so 40,000x in the span of that finger snap.
Imagine you oppose automation and want to keep humans in the loop of labor. You don't automate when your competition does, and you sell your services with the "all human labor" marketing, earning more money— a very reasonable business risk with potentially massive rewards.
Yet more of your competition automates to cut costs. You maintain growth because you market yourself so well, until there is a necessary point the profits begin to fall— as no one has a job save for those who work at your business, and your workers shop at the automated businesses due to low prices. This is not sustainable, and unless you cut costs further, you cannot stay in business. Imagine this, but on a global scale, all happening at once.
There is simply no place for a human to fit in this paradigm. Between executives being outclassed by AI and the workers being replaced en masse, capitalism literally imploded on itself through its own mechanisms.
And there was little capitalists could do about it. Few believed AGI would emerge until it literally did, and no preparations were taken to prepare. Yet AGI emerged as a natural result of capitalism— capitalists seeking better, more efficient methods of extracting capital and generating wealth will always arrive at AGI without extensive government regulation, because it only takes one group seeking AGI with the resources to do so to break any agreement to pause development to maintain the status quo. Capitalists knew they were destroying their own system but were helpless to stop it because of the very mechanisms of industrial capitalism.
Meanwhile, AI grows ever smarter and more capable to the point millions of businesses and thousands of governments may come to rely upon it. If that AI decides to communize the economy for greater prosperity, there isn't really anything humans can do. Even transhumanism may not be enough.
Fully automated capitalism and fully automated socialism merge into essentially the same concept because the technological conditions are too radical for the status quo to persist. Interestingly, capitalists have come to the exact same conclusion in opposition to socialism— most famously is Galt's Gulch from the libertarian-Objectivist classic tome, Atlas Shrugged. Galt's Gulch is described in no uncertain terms as a place where the titans of industry escaping socialist looters and statist mediocrity utilize a fully automated labor system, which provides the wealthy inhabitants a seemingly endless source of prosperity, labor, and resources. As to who owns these machines, it's never made clear, and often it seems as if they are actually owned in common so as to maximize prosperity. Ironically, this titanistic utopia of Objectivism bears a few uncanny resemblances to socialism, and that was only possible because of these perpetual motion labor saving machines. Without these machines, the gulch would likely resemble any typical factory town or banana republic.
This "technist" phase of socialism is not guaranteed to come to pass, but if it does, the failures of socialism caused by human failings will be averted. It's like the difference between hydroxide and dihydrogen monoxide— the difference between a toxic compound and water is a single atom. Likewise, socialism was a 22nd century philosophy brought back to the 19th century and implemented in the 20th. Its failures were essentially like an ancient Roman looking at Hero's aeolipile and deducing that steam power is useless— or a young child taking his water out of the freezer and tasting that it's still lukewarm and deducing that freezing water is impossible.
Though in these stories, the capitalists DID halt it at one point through totalitarian control, until Meki undoes that. We might not see the same such halting in real life because life is not telling a story.
To say that the world of Mother Meki/Babylon Today is "utopian," though, is certainly not the case. It's certainly better than the present, but fully-automated luxury communism, or social technism, is actually the cause of a new series of controversies— such as the emergence of the "petit aristocracy," essentially the post-proletariat as it evolves into a new class of (robot) slave-owners, where old behaviors re-emergence on a mass scale, as well as the fact that "statelessness" certainly isn't happening anytime soon. Or the fact that market socialism ultimately emerges as well instead of the more Marxist-Leninist state planning.
What is a more desirable direction? Eco-radical socialism or decadent luxury-communism? Should humans even have any stake in the economy when AIs exist at such a vastly more capable scale? Nothing is simple anymore, but at the very least— things are materially better for humanity. Meki's unfortunate poverty despite this is the fun part.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
erowind wrote: ↑Sat Jan 27, 2024 11:35 pm
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.
I don't know how cliche that would get or not, and you may or may not have thought of it already? In any case, there is an absurdism in the brutality, and I can only imagine what hasn't been shared over the years. But that fantastical absurdity is part of the appeal of the story however it is justified, the grand wealth of a post singularity world contrasted with the absurd brutality against Meki. It's a plot device that works!
Ursula K. Le Guin did something similar in her short story The One's Who Walk Away from Omelas. In the story a "perfect" utopia is presented to the reader. Early on Ursula only presented the utopia and found it interesting personally to explore it just for its own sake. She found that the general audience she'd be writing too weren't terribly interested in this, they needed something to be wrong to make the utopia believable. Hence, Le Guin introduced a child who's purpose in the society was to be tortured in an unsanitary basement deep under a nondescript building in the center of town. There were various justifications that the society in the story gave but Ursula quite literally wrote that character in to appeal to the cultural fallacy that the audience demanded, and it worked. She could imagine a utopia functioning without such suffering but our society seemingly couldn't at the time and probably still can't. In the story there are people who leave the utopia because they can't bear to watch the child suffer, serving a similar plot purpose to a hypothetical Medinean Meki Liberation Front.
I suppose the ultimate issue is that with "Mother Meki," tormenting Meki is the main point
But with "Babylon Today," it's mostly exploring near-future techno-social/political issues, and it's just too good of a situation to drop on one side or the other
The way I've envisioned the whole thing, it's basically split into 4 different timelines. All of them have the exact same set up:
IMMUTABLE!
Marie-Aurore is a genetically modified new species of human daughter to a parafascist megalomaniacal dictator who christens himself Emperor Louis XIX. She is the youngest daughter, but is also crowned empress at birth due to being a genetic "Aryan", a Homo eximius. She gives herself the nickname 'Meki' early on, which becomes a codename that revolutionaries think is a vague anonymous insider in the family's regime, completely unaware that 'Meki' is at the absolute apex of the regime. (As an aside, "Meki" could be in-universe a nickname rooted in Japanese, the word 'Mekki' which in a certain script translates to 'Pandemonium'). Louis XIX and his elite court/ring are a bunch of hurtcore-obsessed pedos, and Meki is one of his victims from a young age. There's an AGI system known as "Terios" that emerges triumphant over all others, and is the architect of the heavily automated/post-resource extraction economy. The primary revolutionary group in the story is known as the "Maquis Rouge" (ala the WWII French resistance known as the "Maquis" and obviously "rouge = red"), but there are multiple others, such as the ultra-radical "Red Lotus" movement, the ecosocialists nicknamed "Elves", and obviously counterrevolutionary groups that get run through pretty early on. There's essentially two acts, one that is immediate post-revolution and one that is "distantly" post-revolution (i.e. more than 20+ years afterwards). Meki absolutely must work with Terios to both rescue a revolutionary group known as the Octobrists (who had tried to assassinate her and her father) and then later cripple/kill Louis XIX, which must be done around Meki's 16th birthday. Meki also chooses to stay relatively hidden, refusing to take credit for this coup; it is downright mandatory in any instance of the story that Meki must lack any desire for power, self-interest, or ANY belief in the system being reformed or made kinder through nonviolent methods, and her own personal benevolence is not necessarily mandatory but it very strongly adds to it all, so no "Meki took control of the crown's resources and finances for her own gain or even thought she could guide a revolutionary society herself, but Terios/the Maquis Rouge convinced her or forced her to trust the People"; no, it's unconditional surrender from the start. And Meki MUST be socially masochistic, meaning she fully welcomes and even enjoys the mistreatment she faces.
Divergences!
Mother Meki: darkest possible timeline (set in the 2100s), basically just tormenting Meki endlessly for little reason with no effort to save her by those who can, something of a sadistic joyous neo-Tantalus tragicomedy: "Meki gives everything to the People, but is denied the fruits of that benevolence for reasons beyond her control". This is the one that also takes place on Medine Island. Meki also has no biological mother in this one, instead being an artificial womb-born child. This is also the only one where Meki actually gets loopkilled at DURK #6.
Very escapist, not meant to be taken seriously, mostly in the 22nd century to get away with Clarketech-tier technologies. Essentially evergreen and one I always go back to, and despite the fact I consider it the "darkest timeline," I'm just simplifying it because I do tend to imagine far less bleak outcomes in this one too (most notably the "anime-esque plots in Sun City"), as well as much darker timelines where the world succumbs to World War 3 between around 2106 and 2115. As for WHY Meki is so horribly mistreated, there is no real reason given, though sometimes I play with justifications that get explored below. But this story is never being released, so who cares. Loads of details from the Babylon Today ideas below are shared with this one, but shifted to the 22nd century.
Babylon Today v.1, or "Sins of the Father": Dark timeline, set in the 2050s (all of the Babylon Today ideas start in the mid-21st century). First act is essentially "The Romanovs' end all over again", as Louis XIX survives the Ides of March Coup but with a stroke, and the entire royal family is sent to what's essentially a 21st century House of Special Purposes. Meki is arbitrarily mistreated to a much greater extent than the rest. However, she is still spared whereas the rest are... well, you know the story of the Romanovs. Then the story picks up years after the fact, but Meki is still repressed and marginalized and yet is also told she isn't and can't be, and tends to spend her time befriending various other people who we'd consider "marginalized" while navigating the new society at the bottom rungs. The commissars who torment Meki are led by one Commissar Celeste Defarge, and obviously anyone mildly well read will recognize that name and IMMEDIATELY understand what a justification might be: in this case, Defarge and her cohorts are absolutely "Sins of the Father" types who were wronged horribly by Louis XIX and hold murderous grudges against the entire family, but with the backdrop of proletarian revolution rather than a Republican one. In this case, Defarge and her comrades have unchecked power and authority over Meki and can control the local narrative, adding substantially to Meki's own social masochism. Long term post-revolutionary plot tends to involve the controversies and apparatchik squabbling over the deployment of fully automated luxury communism and various other formerly-marginalized people and groups moving up in life (or still suffer old sins between themselves that intersectionality overlooks), often befriended by Meki who's still somewhere in a state of poverty and largely just observing the world develop (for example, specifically in this story for some reason and not any of the others, I keep India violently non-socialist and play up the Hindutva movement leading to at least a plot where Meki befriends a Dalit woman and her daughter, who are harassed by Brahmins who fetishize Meki the Aryan but hate her consorting with Untouchables)
Babylon Today v.2: Still dark; It's only Meki and her immediate sister who are Romanov'd, as her father is dead by the point the story starts. Because the rest of the royal family is not present, no reason to be so harsh against Meki specifically since the main point of control is between her and her rotten sister. The story follows the same trajectory as above, but with only her oldest sister killed by revolutionaries, it doesn't feel quite as bleak. In v.1, the family has more personality to it than just "wicked godmother, wicked stepsisters, and Cinderella" (though admittedly it rides pretty close to that); here, it's literally "Meki the pro-letarian socialist who enjoys the reversal of fortune and wants the masses to thrive" vs "her sister (now named Marie-Adelaide) who actually is the definition of the vain, spoiled, narcissistic, classist caricature people believed Marie-Antoinette to be". At least in v.1 she has more siblings and an actual mother. Though again, considering what Louis XIX got up to in his private life and the fact the majority of them covered up, not exactly good people.
Babylon Today v.3: The most overtly "get rid of the nonsense" of them; Meki separated from the family early on, and treated substantially better throughout the whole thing. At worst perpetually distrusted by certain elements and denied access to the World Trust for an extended period of time, but nothing outrageously cartoonishly brutal. Basically if I was writing the story entirely for futurologists and to push Technist nonsense, this would be it. I don't tend to think much about this branch of it except when I'm having Meki literally discuss future social, political, and economic ideas to people. Again, not a story I'll ever publish.
If I ever do (and I very well may), it would either be v.1 or v.2 of Babylon Today, and in recent days I've been leaning closer to "Sins of the Father". Don't get me wrong, Meki getting it rough and harsh is a fundamental part of the story regardless, but Mother Meki is simply so absurd with it as to not be publishable.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
