whothehellisjoe:

rabbiteclair: prokopetz: rabbiteclair: My new life goal is to make as many people as possible think about Koishi Komeiji taken in context of the Peter Watts novel Blindsight.

You know, you could probably do a pretty credible AU that recasts Touhou as a dark transhuman setting in the mode of Bruce Sterling, Charles Stross and Peter Watts with very few essential changes to most of the cast.

I’ve ranted about transhuman Alice Margatroid about five times already, but: Satori and Koishi are some kind of genetically engineered deals with way too much development in the brain centers responsible for empathy. Koishi got sick of this and gave herself some do-it-yourself neurosurgery to try getting rid of it. She ended up… well. Everybody knows about Koishi.

Reisen? Basilisk image projector implants in the eyes.You can get those things anywhere in the lunar black markets.

Half of Youmu’s consciousness is uploaded to a drone that doesn’t seem to do much except follow her body. Nobody knows what benefit this really has, and after what happened to the last guy that asked, nobody’s about to try finding out.

Suika don’t turn into mist, man, she’s a fog of nanomachines to begin with. Get it right.

mist, man, she’s a fog of nanomachines to begin with. Get it right. Nue’s entire skin has chameleon overlays installed. Which, okay, is a bit excessive but not that uncommon. The weird bit is the AI that controls it. Subdermal microcameras or something, so it can always keep an eye on bystanders and change her appearance just to mess with them. If you’re asking why anybody would think this is a good idea, you obviously haven’t met Nue.



Kokoro exported her personality facets into hot-swappable cartridges. Great idea if you’re big into the whole selfhacking thing. Shame about the Hope one, though.

Whoever the fuck thought it was a good idea to mess with Seija’s mirror neurons so her sympathetic responses are all inverted has a goddamn lot to answer for.

Okay, sure, Kaguya’s got so much cash that she doesn’t even worry about uploading herself into a new clone every week. That’s not the messed up part. The messed up part isn’t even the way that she’s stopped going out of her way to avoid dying. The messed up part is that she’s the one paying for Mokou’s clones too .

. Whoever thought installing AI into household objects just because the processors are cheap enough really owes me an explanation for why I’m supposed to want an umbrella that won’t stop crying.

Cirno was supposed to be a pest control drone but she got ideas above her station and now she fights everything except bugs. Alternatively she’s an aircon drone stuck on cold with just enough AI to understand trolling.

Between their function-oriented personalities, morphic appearances, penchant for mimesis, and apparent unkillability, my inclination is to say that in a transhuman AU, Touhou fairies would translate to digital intelligences. The bodies are just disposable drones - you can smash them all you want, you’re not going to do anything to the core personality (except, perhaps, annoy it).

So that leaves us with three questions:

Why are there swarms of mischievous, typically child-level-mentality digital intelligences saturating the infosphere?

What makes Cirno in particular different from the rest?



(via whothehellisjoe)