Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

• Wed, 14:50: Boiling chicken carcasses for stock and writing about SQL Server. Just another day. At least there's @headandtheheart on the radio.
• Wed, 15:44: Inside the ATM https://t.co/c9NxT74h
• Wed, 16:08: At the dentist to get a crown fitted.
• Wed, 18:23: ZDNet UK blog post: How to both upgrade and dual boot Windows 8 http://t.co/JN9NIrNn #zdnetuk
• Wed, 19:13: Recent Reads: The Silver Moon Elm. MaryJanice Davidson commits further YA paranormal, with weredragons, werespiders and alternate universes.
• Wed, 19:52: RT @jasonWSJ: WSJ says "journalist" is 5th-worst job, ahead of only lumberjack, soldier, dairy farmer and oil rig worker. Basically, the ...
• Wed, 19:56: Why is it when the dentist does something relatively painless like fitting a crown, your mouth still feels like he's been using jackhammers?
• Wed, 20:00: @Mark_Billen Hello! and ta! to @ABridgwater
• Wed, 20:19: @karolinashaw Should I be pinging you about 1E at MMS?
• Wed, 20:46: Listening to the roar and rush of the Orient Express under steam as it heads through the cutting back to Victoria. #steamenginetime

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Spring is here, and that means many more mainline steam excursions powering down the line from Victoria to all points west. Today was a special treat, as the recently re-certified for mainline running BR Standard Class 7 No 70000 Britannia was hauling The Cathedrals Express to Bath.

The weather was good too, with the April showers holding off for a while. The book is in, I'd just finished a big feature, and I had a little time spare - so I grabbed my camera and walked down to the footbridge at the end of the street. I wasn't the only one there - a young family had come along to see the steam trains too, wanting to see Thomas go past. Britannia's a bit bigger than Thomas The Tank Engine, but it was good to see children wanting to see history go past in a cloud of steam and smoke.

With a whistle from Wandsworth, and a cloud of steam over the Wandle bridges, Britannia came round the curve into the Putney cutting...







Another whistle blast as the special rushed through Putney station and then silence. Just the gentle rumble of a 747 heading into Heathrow, and the rattle of a Wimbledon-bound tube.

Putney, London
April 2012

A while back I wrote the start of a story that could best be described as a mashup of Eastenders and Hans Moravec. I've dug it out the ruins, and pieced it together to remind me to look at it again. Post-humans in Walford...

The bush robot was knocking on the locked door of The King's Head again. Jack had left it some potato-peel potcheen a while back, but it hadn't been enough to satisfy the thirsty arms of the City.

"Back in Kernow the damn piskies would work for bread and milk. What does that fucking robot want? Dry roasted peanuts? Best bitter?"

The ragged folk at the bar looked round at the shimmering glass robot, and, as one, turned back to their drinks. No use thinking about the outside, not while there was a fire and rough booze. They'd have to head home soon enough.

Jack adjusted the wick on the oil lamp. There hadn't been any electricity for a month, not since the National Grid had been possessed by the Hungry Ghosts. The way things were going there probably wouldn't be any city left in another month. The robots were scavenging anything organic for fuel, and carting rubble off to the West End. Charlie claimed they were building rockets in Hyde Park.

"Concrete rockets. Moulded out of whatever those machines make from our homes."

He'd vanished last week. The note he'd left at The King's Head had said he was off looking for fuel cells. He'd have done anything to get some ice in his whisky.

Charlie'd not been the first to go. The Peabody brothers had taken an old Cortina and a couple of sawn-offs south of the river. They said it would be safer in Kent. But they never called back. They'd been followed by a handful of folk who remembered safe childhood summers in Clacton and Frinton. Their convoy of battered Transits had been swallowed up by a patch of rogue assemblers somewhere on the A12. No one had the courage to leave now - it was too dangerous out there. Out there lurked things, things that would forcibly upgrade you, or just use you as fuel and raw materials. It was hard to tell which was the worse option.

Now there were just a few people left, huddling in a maze of terraces and squares. Not long ago these streets had been the homes of artists and civil servants. Back then the roads bustled with cars, and the tube trains hummed their way in and out of the centre of the city. Now the cars were wrecks, scavenged for copper, steel and silicon by swarms of the City's bush robots, and the last tube had been delayed somewhere under Aldwych for the last three months.

Midnight, and the robot was gone at last. But that didn't mean that they could go home. Sure, Jack had his HERF gun, and the capacitors were charged and ready for whatever rogue machines might try to break through the oak doors. If it wasn't machines, Jack would still be ready, a posse of yardies had left a cache of machine pistols in a nearby lock-up, and he kept a couple under the counter. It hadn't taken long for things to fall apart in London. It was less than six months since the quantum oracle at the LSE went live, decided it was one of the Great Old Ones and ate the minds of all the traders who'd been hooked up to the new neural-interface terminals. Transhuman is as transhuman does, and the uploaded souls lived on in the many worlds of the oracle's quantum processors.

Now the streets weren't safe, the City robots were always looking for new souls to add to the eternal possibles that roiled through the heart of the hungry machine. You were unlikely to be assimilated if you kept them fuelled with organics and stayed indoors at night - or were prepared to give them a dose of home-made EMPs.

It was time for yet another lock-in at the pub.

Now to work out what happens next, and why. I suspect someone or something needs to be rescued from something in the Gigeresque heart of what used to be the Lloyds Building...