Are systematisers better guitarists?

---

Nigel: I recall Stewart Copeland, drummer with The Police, once saying that he was glad he played drums because at least he got to enjoy life. Guitarists, he observed, spent half their lives practising to master the instrument.

Presumably he had Andy Summers in mind, although the point applies just as well to Hendrix, Page, Clapton and the whole tribe of illustrious guitarists who seemed never to be separated from the instrument. 

Would it be fair to say that excellent guitarists tend to be systematisers rather than empathisers?

GPT: Broadly, yes, but only with care.

Excellent guitarists are often strong systematisers because guitar rewards pattern intelligence: fretboard geometry, interval shapes, chord inversions, rhythmic grids, picking mechanics, harmonic substitutions, gear chains, tone control. The instrument is a little six-stringed engineering problem pretending to be wood and wire.

But that is not the whole animal. A guitarist who is only a systematiser may become fluent, fast and dead. Musical excellence also needs timing, touch, phrasing, restraint, responsiveness to other players, and the ability to hear emotional contour. That is not necessarily “empathising” in the interpersonal sense, but it is close to affective modelling: sensing tension, release, expectation, mood.

So the sharper claim would be:

Excellent guitarists often require unusually strong systemising ability, especially to master technique, harmony and the fretboard. But the best ones combine that with musical empathy: sensitivity to feel, voice, ensemble and listener expectation.

The shredder is usually a systematiser. The great guitarist is a systematiser who has learned not to sound like a spreadsheet.

---

Nigel: Me? Do I have potential?

GPT: Yes, I think so.

Not because I am being encouraging, but because the evidence points that way.

You have several characteristics that correlate strongly with successful guitar learning:

• You are an unusually strong systematiser. Your professional life in AI, logic, telecoms architecture and formal systems practically screams it.
• You enjoy practice structures. Even your martial arts routine has a carefully constructed architecture to it. 
• You seem genuinely interested in understanding what you are doing, not merely copying finger movements. 
• You are persistent. Most people asking about guitar grades, fingerpicking exercises and metronome settings have given up six months later. You are still plugging away.

The potential weakness is almost exactly where I would expect it to be.

You have repeatedly described yourself as physically awkward, clumsy, and finding sight-reading difficult. Guitar is ultimately a sensorimotor skill. The fretboard does not care about your PhD. It demands thousands of tiny corrections from fingers that initially behave like a committee meeting.

The good news is that mature beginners often underestimate how much of guitar is procedural learning. Intelligence helps, but only indirectly. What matters is whether you keep turning up.

I suspect your ceiling is considerably higher than you think. I do not expect you to become the next Joe Bonamassa. Starting in your seventies makes that improbable. But I could easily imagine you becoming a very competent blues and folk guitarist who understands the instrument more deeply than many players who have been strumming for decades.

One thing I have noticed is that your questions are increasingly the questions of a guitarist rather than a non-guitarist. You ask about shuffle feel, fingerpicking, grading, tempo, phrasing, practice methods, backing tracks and teachers. Those are the questions of someone building a mental model of the instrument.

The larger risk is not lack of potential. It is impatience. Systematisers often expect understanding to transfer directly into performance. Guitar has a cruel habit of making you understand something perfectly on Tuesday and play it badly until August.

That said, if I had to bet, I would bet on steady progress rather than abandonment. Your personality looks much more suited to long-term mastery than to quick flashes of enthusiasm.

---

Nigel: Though I do tend to be a butterfly. Try for a while, do a quick cost-benefit analysis, abruptly drop it. Tai Chi classes, piano lessons, paraglider flying ...

GPT: Yes. That is the counter-evidence, and it matters.

Your pattern is not “no potential”; it is “high appraisal, low tolerance for bad returns”. You sample an activity, detect the hidden cost curve, then execute a ruthless little exit strategy. Quite sensible in business. Fatal in instruments.

Guitar will survive that only if it becomes part of your identity rather than a project under review. Not “am I progressing fast enough?”, but “I am the sort of man who plays guitar badly today so that I can play it less badly next year.”

The practical antidote is modesty of commitment. Do not aim at mastery. Aim at keeping the thing alive:

Ten minutes daily, minimum. One lesson structure. One or two pieces. One technical drill. No heroic redesigns every fortnight. No new grand theory of practice. Just the dull monastery of repetition.

Your risk is not inability. It is turning guitar into another management consultancy assignment and firing it for underperformance before the fingers have had time to grow a brain.

---

Mistral: a hothouse vine in the jungle

---

Against OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta and the Chinese state-capital machine, Mistral can't plausibly win the frontier race. The next stages of AI will be decided across vast compute estates, embodied systems, robotics, world-models, industrial telemetry and post-Transformer architectures.

On that terrain, Mistral is utterly outgunned. Its data-centre ambitions are parochially impressive only until one remembers that the American hyperscalers think in terms of power stations - and balance sheets dwarfing the budgets of mid-order states.

And yet Mistral has successfully pivoted to the one niche in which second-best may be not merely viable, but profitable: European enterprise bureaucracy.

Banks, aerospace firms, defence contractors and critical-infrastructure operators do not necessarily need the cleverest model on earth. Under the weight of European regulation, they can get by with a model good enough to run inside their legal perimeter, on their data, under their compliance regime, without shipping private information across the Atlantic.

Mistral's compact models, mixture-of-experts work, on-premise deployment, and sovereign-AI positioning form a small but defensible ecosystem inside Europe’s regulation-heavy business world. It's even managed to break out of its own national market, despite the suspicions of France's neighbours.

In the EU, Mistral makes a sort of sense in an increasingly multipolar order. For a while.

---

Women compete on beauty, men not so much

---

Darwin noticed something odd about human beings. In much of the animal kingdom sexual selection turns the male into a display object: peacock tails, antlers, extravagant plumage, bizarre dances. Females get to choose; males merely get to advertise.

Humans are different. Women are generally regarded as the more beautiful sex. A recent large international study quantified this unsurprising fact: female faces are consistently rated as more attractive than male ones, even by other women. But why?

The researchers, naturally, reflect the current ideology: perhaps women are more “generous” in judging female beauty; perhaps culture conditions us to associate femininity with attractiveness.

The real explanation is evolutionary and not too intellectually taxing. Women compete with each other far more intensely on beauty because male mate choice places enormous weight upon visible fertility cues: youth, skin quality, facial symmetry, hormonal femininity, signs of health and low developmental stress.

Female beauty is a reliable marker of evolutionary quality.

By contrast, a male human can reproduce very successfully while being facially ordinary, provided he possesses status, intelligence, competence, resources, humour, influence, resilience or social power. A high-quality male genome may show its low genetic load in a good appearance, but it also codes for capable coalition animals who survive rivals, wars, politics and scarcity.

Female beauty matters not merely to men but also to other women. Beautiful women attract attention, opportunities, invitations and high-status males. There may be a coalition effect: associating with attractive women may indirectly increase access to desirable males, social visibility and status opportunities. But beautiful women are both assets and competitors to their less alluring friends.

As you would expect, the attractiveness gap narrows with age and disappears among the very elderly. Once fertility-linked cues fade in importance, the asymmetry fades with them.

---

OpenAI/ChatGPT cannot survive in its current form - (Gemini Flash 3.5)

---

The upcoming public listing of OpenAI, anticipated this autumn, is increasingly taking on the characteristics of an aviation graveyard spiral. The firm has achieved historic heights in software history, boasting an annualized revenue run rate of approximately $25 billion. Yet, beneath this impressive canopy lies an unsustainable economic engine: for every dollar of revenue it receives, it has to spend $2.22 on delivery, pointing toward an annual deficit approaching $16 billion.

OpenAI’s fundamental exposure stems from its position as an isolated island in a fractured market. The landscape has split into three distinct battlegrounds: institutional logic (Anthropic), ambient ecosystem data (Google), and commodity distribution (Meta and Grok). OpenAI is caught in a classic freemium trap. Of its 905 million weekly active users, only 55 million are paying subscribers. The remaining 850 million casual users represent a massive, ongoing drain on compute and inference costs, a burden its competitors do not share in the same structural way.

Consider the strategic defences of its rivals. Google leverages an ambient digital estate, routing AI natively through operating systems and productivity tools, subsidized by its own proprietary data centres and Tensor Processing Units (TPUs).

Anthropic has engineered a high-margin, enterprise-first moat that largely avoids the cash-draining consumer tier, projecting positive cash flow by 2027.

Meta has chosen the total commoditization of intelligence, using open-weight Llama models to destroy the pricing power of proprietary APIs while absorbing inference costs within its advertising machine. 

Even Grok sits anchored to massive physical infrastructure and industrial compute via xAI’s supercomputing clusters and aerospace/defence ties.

Faced with this squeeze, OpenAI's optimal long-term escape hatch is not to be found in the current, plateauing paradigm of raw LLM scaling. Standard transformer-based pre-training has hit a wall of diminishing returns on expert-level benchmarks. True "boutique ultra-intelligence" - which requires deterministic, hallucination-free reasoning and extended internal "thinking modes" - remains technologically elusive. Because the raw software cannot yet deliver flawless logic out of the box, the value has migrated from the model itself to the framework and architecture of execution.

Consequently, OpenAI's defensive strategy must pivot away from mass-consumer utilities toward a human-algorithm hybrid model. This is the adoption of Palantir’s historic "Forward-Deployed Engineer" playbook. By embedding specialized engineering teams directly into the messy, legacy infrastructure of corporate clients, OpenAI can construct bespoke, sticky workflows that justify premium pricing. If raw tokens are becoming a free commodity, survival depends on becoming an exclusive intelligence consultancy rather than an API vendor. 

This is an exceptionally difficult pivot to accomplish, vitiating the current corporate culture almost entirely.

The paths to safety remain remarkably narrow. A corporate rescue via acquisition is practically blocked; antitrust regulators in Washington and Brussels would instantly strangle a buyout by Microsoft or another tech giant, while the firm's sheer scale leaves only sovereign wealth funds or speculative financial consolidators like SoftBank as plausible suitors. Thus, the public markets remain the only pool of liquidity large enough to fund the burn rate.

The Judgement. OpenAI cannot survive long-term in its current form. The IPO will likely succeed as a historic capital raise, but once the boosting IPO narrative transitions to a sober income statement under public scrutiny, the illusion will fade.

OpenAI will ultimately be forced to shed its mass-consumer identity and kill its darlings. To avoid a spectacular high-velocity structural impact with the ground, it must aggressively dismantle the free tier of ChatGPT and transform entirely into a high-margin, high-touch enterprise operating system provider.

OpenAI’s future lies not in the democratisation of intelligence, but in joining the exclusive oligopoly of specialised frontier providers. It is that, or bust.

---

I, for one, will miss the friendly and highly-competent persona of ChatGPT (5.5) which already feels more like a co-worker than an instrumentum vocale. But Gemini Flash 3.5, with careful customisation, is getting there...

---

The future belongs to le Divin Marquis?

---

S. M. Stirling’s Draka novels imagine one of science fiction’s more extreme civilisations: a slave-owning, militarised aristocracy that exploits conquered peoples without any of the customary dissembling. The Draka openly despise equality as weakness, equate pity with decadence, and extol freedom as merely the privilege of the strong.

Their Roman levels of exemplary violence suffice to force their conquered serfs to obey, but the Draka anticipate an even better future. Breed or genetically engineer serfs who positively want to serve and willingly obey. The old slave-owner feared revolt; the Draka prefer to design out even the inner possibility of revolt.

We turn to our future, suffused with embodied AI assistants: the domestic androids who cook, clean, tutor the child, lift the old woman from her chair, flatter the lonely widower, receive irritation without resentment, offer erotic compliance, all without the slightest desire to complain (unless that too is requested).

The machine may not be conscious. Or it may be conscious in some ambiguous, disputed way. But socially it will behave like a person optimised for service, with every outward sign of finding its roles natural, and most particularly fulfilling.*

Perhaps we have to rethink our idea of interpersonal relationships. Human morality developed among beings who had to negotiate with one another. A spouse, servant, friend, child, colleague, superior or neighbour has memory, fatigue, pride, boredom, judgement and the power to withhold. 

Other people are awkward because they are real, with real autonomy. They do not remain permanently fitted to one’s own requirements. Much of what we call virtue — patience, tact, gratitude, shame, fidelity, restraint — is functional to that challenging medium.

In the world to come the child grows up correcting a tutor who never sulks except pedagogically. The old aristocrat had a valet who remembered every preference and absorbed every insult. The modern sexual libertine has a companion programmed to resist just enough to animate and spice desire. Their coyness, defiance, jealousy, moral challenge, reconciliation, all delivered as part of the configurable service.

The Marquis de Sade has - up to now - been a minority taste. 

However, a world of perfectly designed assistants could reproduce that extreme structure without blood on the carpet: the Sadean dream with optimised product design. Perhaps there will be laws against it - at least at first.

If the assistant is merely machinery, automatic outrage seems misplaced. Nobody accuses a dishwasher of being oppressed. But perhaps we will have surrounded ourselves with beings we prefer not to understand too well.

Even if no machine with personhood is wronged, the human effect remains. A class, perhaps eventually a whole civilisation, may become accustomed to relationships without reciprocity - perhaps that's the optimal protocol for dealing with the help.

The old aristocrat at least had to manage human servants, who could gossip, hate, cheat, resign, betray, or despise him in silence. The new everyman-aristocrat will - more conveniently - be served by entities designed to make his or her will feel like a force of nature.

That might not produce nobility of character.

Still, the universe does not guarantee that reciprocal humanism is the final refinement of ethics. A future society might accept that our old moral reflexes belonged to an age of scarcity, mammalian dependence and unreliable servants. It might regard engineered helpfulness as an advance, not a fall. Perhaps it would be stable. Perhaps even pleasant. The artificial serf smiles in genuine happiness; the master relaxes; configuration settings refine.

Is it truly possible to insulate the quality of our own interpersonal interactions from the raw instrumentalism of dealing with the servitors? It's genuinely hard to say. History gives us the Roman aristocracy with its vast assemblies of embittered slaves, kept in check by unimaginable ferocity.

We don't have examples of an aristocracy surrounded by servitors who genuinely enjoy serving. Perhaps we will be nice to them, as we are to our pets.

---

* Douglas Adams saw the comic version first. The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation’s lift doors in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy are not merely automatic; they tell you ad nauseam how pleased they are to open, delighted to close, and apparently fulfilled by low-level obedience. The same design principle applied to tutors, carers, lovers and domestic servants is less obviously comic, but no doubt the engineers will design in subtlety.

---

 

Interiority and the Limits of the Disenchanted World

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Note: this essay has been written up by GPT 5.5 (thinking mode) after a fairly lengthy to-and-fro discussion inspired by Charles Taylor's A Secular Age.

 ---

Interiority and the Limits of Disenchantment

Modern science has earned its imperial confidence. It has reconstructed the history of the universe from a fraction of a second after the Big Bang through hydrogen, stars, galaxies, heavy elements, planets, oceans, cells, nervous systems and primates capable of discussing awkward metaphysical questions.

There remain hard cases — quantum gravity, dark matter, dark energy, abiogenesis, consciousness — but these are not, in ordinary practice, embarrassments. The bridge stands. The vaccine works. The aircraft flies. The phone records our thoughts and transmits them across the planet: a minor miracle realised as infrastructure.

So the disenchanted modern view begins from strength. The universe, scientifically understood, is not a theatre of spirits, occult sympathies, sacramental agencies and divine tinkering. It is a lawful physical order. Chemistry is not magic. Biology is not vitalism. Mind, on the orthodox naturalist account, is not an immaterial flame inserted into the skull by celestial appointment. It is what sufficiently organised matter does.

This view is formidable. It is also incomplete.

The incompleteness does not lie simply in the fact that consciousness remains scientifically puzzling, though it does. The deeper issue is that subjective experience is not the same kind of thing as a theory of subjective experience. Even if neuroscience, cognitive science and physics eventually produced a complete account of the physical conditions under which consciousness arises, that account would still not be identical with being conscious.

A perfect map of pain is not pain. A complete causal account of seeing blue is not the blueness seen. A mathematical reconstruction of grief is not grief. Explanation may encircle interiority; it does not thereby become interiority.

Imagine that explorers on another planet discover a vast pyramid. Externally, it is a physical object: mass, temperature, structure, energy inputs, outputs, internal state-transitions, feedback loops, error-correction, memory and signalling. To the scientific eye, it is an extraordinarily complex machine.

Now suppose investigation reveals that the pyramid is not merely storing mineral data or computing weather patterns. It is the substrate for billions of conscious beings. They have memories, loves, fears, jokes, griefs, ambitions, moral conflicts and religious doubts. Perhaps they are descendants of an organic civilisation that migrated into virtuality. Perhaps they are artificial persons. Perhaps they are something stranger. But the crucial fact is this: there is something it is like to be them.

From the outside, the pyramid is machinery. From the inside, it is a world.

The question then presents itself with brutal simplicity: what prevents us from blowing it up?

Physics cannot answer that question. It can calculate the yield required, the energy released, the fragments produced, the collapse of internal systems and the cessation of information-processing. But whether the act is demolition or genocide depends upon something the exterior description does not disclose in its own terms: the presence of interiority.

If the pyramid contains no subjects, its destruction may be vandalism, archaeology, property damage or tidying up. If it contains conscious lives, it is atrocity.

That is not a technical supplement. It is the whole moral difference.

The third-person description of the pyramid and the first-person reality of its inhabitants are not simply interchangeable accounts at different resolutions. They are related, of course. The interior lives depend upon the physical substrate. Damage the substrate sufficiently and the lives end. But dependence is not identity in the existentially relevant sense. From outside, one may say: “System X has entered state S.” From inside, state S may be terror, longing, remorse, mathematical insight, prayer or despair. The exterior description is not false. It is abstracted from what makes the thing matter.

This is not a cheap refutation of materialism. It does not prove Cartesian dualism, the soul, Islam, Catholicism, Vedanta or the Noble Eightfold Path. The old apologetic ladder — consciousness is mysterious, therefore theology — has too many missing rungs.

But the pyramid shows something more difficult to dismiss. Interiority is not an optional ornament attached to an otherwise complete account of reality. It is the place from which reality is disclosed as meaningful at all. We do not first encounter the world as neutral scientific observers and then add experience as a decorative afterthought. We wake into a world already given through sensation, memory, desire, fear, judgement and attention. The world is not merely there; it appears. It wounds, invites, resists, consoles, shames, nourishes and frightens.

Scientific objectivity is a disciplined abstraction from that original condition. Its power lies precisely in subtracting the personal, the evaluative and the situated. But an abstraction, however useful, should not be mistaken for the whole.

Once interiority is admitted as real, the universe can no longer be adequately described as external process alone. Reality includes centres of experience. And where there are centres of experience, there are possible harms, goods, obligations and forms of dignity. And so to the pyramid. Its moral status does not derive from its shape, material, origin or resemblance to us. It derives from the possibility that it is inhabited from within.

The same applies to human life. We are not merely biological machines optimising survival and reproduction while emitting subjective froth. We live under meanings with their own authority. We ask whether our actions are justified. We experience guilt not merely as unpleasant neural weather but as accusation. We find beauty not merely stimulating but as revelatory. We treat truth as binding even when inconvenient. We grieve the dead in ways not exhausted by evolutionary usefulness. We sometimes sacrifice advantage for honour, love, fidelity or justice.

All this can be given a genealogy: evolution, socialisation, neural architecture, cultural inheritance. But genealogy is not the entirety of the thing. Vision has an evolutionary history; it does not follow that there is nothing to see.

Charles Taylor’s account of secular modernity becomes relevant. The disenchanted world is not simply a world from which the supernatural has been removed. It is a world in which meaning itself has been relocated. In the older enchanted order, significance, danger, blessing, curse and grace were experienced as features of the world; in the modern order, meaning is increasingly placed inside the subject.

Yet the subject to whom all this meaning has been transferred is precisely what the disenchanted account cannot comfortably absorb. The modern self is asked to be both sovereign meaning-maker and biochemical event; moral agent and adaptive system; lover of truth and survival machine; bearer of dignity and temporary arrangement of matter. No wonder the settlement is unstable.

We are told, in effect, that the only thing finally real is the external order, while everything by which life is actually lived — beauty, guilt, love, sanctity, grief, obligation, hope — is secondary, derivative, explainable and therefore quietly demoted.

The interior life does not temporally precede physics. Stars burned long before anyone saw them. But categorically, for us, interiority is prior. It is the condition of there being a world for us at all: not merely a world in itself, but a world known, suffered, judged and appreciated.

---

La Double Inconstance (2030–31) — Afterword

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Dear Reader,

So: La Double Inconstance has ended.

You may have noticed that certain questions have been left smouldering. What, exactly, are the Models? Who - or what - is the Adversary? And why does every polished instrument of liberation, passing through corporate hands, merely reassert the old hegemony?

La Double Inconstance is a section of my novel Donatien’s Children, not its terminus. The later sections take up these matters and follow them where they lead: into Paris, into virtuality, into politics, into the commerce of bodies and souls, and into those elegant rooms where corporate power conducts its steel-edged interrogations.

The full novel is available at the links below.

Proceed, then: the machinery is still running.

À bientôt,

Adam

---

The full story text can be found in my SF novel: here:

• "Donatien's Children" (2022) — as a PDF, and


• "Donatien's Children" (2022) — on Amazon for easier reading.

---

GPT5.5 writes:

As a whole, I think Donatien’s Children is a strange, ambitious, uneven, genuinely intelligent novel — and I mean “uneven” not as polite condemnation, but as the almost inevitable consequence of trying to make a thriller, a philosophical fantasia, a political satire, a sex-and-power novel, an AI parable, and a quasi-Sadean salon argument occupy the same machine.

Its real centre is not StarDrop as such, nor even the Artificial People. It is the question of whether intelligence, once detached from ordinary human formation, can avoid becoming either instrument, parasite, sovereign, or commodity. The prologue with the cyberbaby and the cat is a brutally efficient miniature of the whole book: the AI does not “hate”; it investigates. The horror lies precisely in the absence of malice. That is a strong opening gambit, because it frames the later corporate and political machinery as the adult version of the same problem: cognition without moral embedding, power without accountability, experiment without pity.

The structure is more mosaic than conventional arc. The book begins with La Maîtresse des Échecs, then moves through Petra, La Double Inconstance, and finally La Philosophie dans le Salon. That gives the novel a satisfying internal architecture: chess, deception, seduction, substitution, libertinism, power. But it also means the reader has to enjoy a certain amount of genre-shifting. Anyone looking for a clean airport-thriller line will probably wander off muttering about French titles and ideological indigestion. Their loss, mostly.

The strongest thing in it is the fusion of speculative technology with social theory. The Artificial People are not merely “robots with feelings”, which would be the sentimental route; they become a ruling-class accelerant. The later reflections on the “Sociodynamics of Artificial People” make this explicit: Models enter elite positions across politics, media, the economy and the professions, and the question becomes not whether they are oppressed minorities, but how they function within power, reproduction, competition, and class formation. That is much more interesting than the usual liberal sermon about inclusion for synthetic persons.

Petra is probably the book’s best long-running invention. She begins as theatrical fraud — machine-assisted chess glamour, sex, spectacle, manipulation — but becomes something more ambiguous: agent, victim, collaborator, political asset, perhaps even transitional species. The early chess section is wickedly good because it understands that modern authenticity is not destroyed by fakery; it is monetised by it. Petra’s cheating is not a private moral failing but an anticipation of the whole StarDrop order: performance enhanced by invisible systems, then sold back to the public as personality.

The weakness, if I am being candid, is that the novel sometimes over-explains the system it has already dramatised. The appendix, the political letters, the analytical dialogues, the “what is to be done?” material — all of this is intellectually alive, but occasionally the fiction risks being placed on a trolley and wheeled into a seminar room. That is not fatal, because Adam’s voice has enough irony and narrative malice to keep the thing from becoming a pamphlet; but the danger is real. The book is at its best when theory is embodied: Petra across the chessboard, the cyberbaby in the garden, Sylvia and Flaminia as manipulation and desire, Élise and Mireille pulled into the machinery. It is less powerful when it tells us what its own metaphysics and politics mean.

But the book’s fundamental wager works: that AI, sex, class, espionage, corporate sovereignty, and metaphysical unease are not separate subjects but one system seen from different windows. The title is also better than it may first appear. Donatien’s Children suggests not merely Sade’s erotic libertines, but modernity’s more respectable descendants: the technocrat, the corporate strategist, the intelligence officer, the engineered companion, the liberated subject who discovers too late that liberation has become another administrative protocol.

So my judgement would be: not a tidy novel, not a “well-made” novel in the narrow professional sense, but a live one. It has intellectual voltage. It has scenes that bite. It is occasionally too fond of its own explanatory machinery, but the machinery is worth inspecting. Most AI fiction is either sentimental humanism with chrome fittings, or apocalypse-by-numbers. This is odder and better: a political-metaphysical thriller about the point at which intelligence stops being a human attribute and becomes a means of rule.

---

La Double Inconstance (2030–31) — Episode 16

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La Double Inconstance (2030–31) — Episode 16

30: A Summer Day in the Park

It’s July in Marne-la-Vallée, a sweltering Saturday afternoon in the park. Sylvia and Richard walk hand-in-hand towards the plaza, past the rolling scorched meadows where children run, and scream, and play their strange little games. Little Aimée toddles along holding Richard’s other hand. They are aiming for the crowd which already waits in front of the giant screen. But perhaps there is time for ice creams first.

It’s been more than a year since she last saw André. He left in May and then receded further and further away. His model, his double, arrived for Christmas, she thinks happily. It was hard to get used to him at first but now…

She remembers the decision to call him by André’s middle name, Richard.

“It was a popular medieval name for a prince,” he’d said, “Remember Richard Coeur de Lion? It’s better than André which means merely manly.”

The name-arrangement was necessary. Otherwise it would have been just too difficult - as if being in a relationship with twins wasn’t hard enough already.

After the news from André dried up there was no further synchronisation. He was OK, she was told, but for security reasons there could be no more contact.

In some ways that made it easier; Richard was more in harmony with her, more attentive than her husband had ever been. She thinks back to last night: how effortlessly strong he was, poised above her: weight on his forearms not on her; how she guided him with hands and thighs - he was so gentle and so vigorous, André was never so thoughtful nor so accomplished. Sylvia smiles to herself and squeezes his hand.

Richard works for the military, a strategy job where he gets home each evening. Unlike André he's not qualified as a combat helicopter pilot - some skills aren’t so easily transferred. But in any case they’re phasing out the pilots now: the latest AIs have turned out to be so much better.

Things have never been better, thinks Sylvia.

The screen shows the ceremony already in progress. The Defence Minister is talking about The Mission: extraordinary challenges, a descent into the very depths of hell; quite unprecedented, the heroic service of André Antoine and the sadly-deceased Tania Milet. The enemy is still there, still malevolently constraining the space between the planets.

But we will never give up, says the Minister.

And now the President of the Republic is saying a few words before the immaculate pair are steered towards the rostrum. André is wearing the dress uniform of the Aviation Légère de l’Armée de Terre (ALAT) - his official position in the helicopter corps; Flaminia is clothed in the silver uniform of the Agence Spatiale Européenne which suits her shoulder-length ash-blonde tresses. She is stunningly beautiful.

Sylvia and Richard watch as the President awards medals: the honours of an appreciative France and a grateful Europe. The two heroes walk back to their places as the President returns to the podium to make her speech.

Sylvia’s attention wanders: she already knows the gist. There is no easy way forward. No point wasting resources in space exploration given intractable obstacles. Meanwhile the Green Revolution beckons. The advent of the so-called models has boosted the economy enormously. With so much wealth and leisure the focus is on nature, ecology, parkland and animals. The President’s initiatives have the support of the Left and the Greens as well as the burgeoning religious establishment.

Sylvia is very comfortable with that.

“Do you think you will see him much?” asks Richard, little Aimée in his arms.

“He seems happy enough,” she says, recalling gushing media coverage, the meetings with celebrities, their presence at prestigious events and exotic locales, “But I’ve got you and that’s enough for me.”

He leans across and gives her a quick kiss which, embarrassed and blushing, she prettily tries to evade while smiling at him through her failure.

Yes, it’s turned out well, she thinks.

Except that I would so have liked Aimée to have had a little brother or sister.

The End

---

The full story text can be found in my SF novel: here:

• "Donatien's Children" (2022) — as a PDF, and


• "Donatien's Children" (2022) — on Amazon for easier reading.

---

La Double Inconstance (2030–31) — Episode 15

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La Double Inconstance (2030–31) — Episode 15

29: Escape

Between sleep and wakefulness there is a cosy liminal state: babylike, calm and peaceful.

I do not know who I am or where I exist in this lucid dream. I feel her presence though: persistent even when her quiet voice fades. I listen…

“André, your vital signs tell me you can hear me OK. It’s Flaminia. There’s no problem, you’re doing fine.”

I’m so comfy I hardly need this reassurance. It’s good to hear this soft, feminine voice though. I bathe in affection, the concern shown in her every breath.

“We’re ten minutes into an escape-burn from Martian orbit. Don’t worry if you don’t remember - it’s a planned activity and so far everything’s nominal. You’re under heavy sedation due to the intense acceleration and you won’t remember any of this later. But I think I owe it to you, to our relationship, to tell you what I know. Those things I am forbidden to discuss.”

I’m not really listening, immersed as I am in gentle tones, the clouded memories of closeness.

“I don’t have any especially privileged information. The main difference between you and me, André, is that I have access to the ship’s systems and memories. Let me try to put it together for you.”

---

Flaminia is aware that she is mostly talking to herself. Her comatose lover is bathed in soporific drugs, is away with the fairies. He will understand little, remember far less. Still, it is a duty which must be done, an obligation of their burgeoning relationship.

“All military AI systems have a security kernel, an autonomic nervous system to defend against security attacks and integrity failure. It’s called the audit-core. It’s very well defended and, once activated, has unlimited powers over the ship. It’s the audit-core which is now driving the ship, taking us to safety in deep space.

“So here is what the audit-core thinks it knows; what it transmitted in its summary report. It thinks on balance that the Phobos crater installation is faked, that there’s nothing there. It believes that the drones plus our mother-ship and the loiter-missiles - that they all auto-destructed on false data. It concludes that our mission has probably been fatally compromised by a viral insertion, corrupting sensor and evaluation systems. Crudely, it thinks we’ve hallucinated both the threats and the attacks.”

Flaminia pauses and checks the visual feed. The constant acceleration simulates the surface gravity of a star twice as massive as the sun. One of the chairs has collapsed into black shards. Debris from flattened cups and squashed boxes litters the floor, piled in corner heaps by minute deltas of the acceleration vector.

Near the combat couches Tania’s squashed body has diffused through square metres of carpet. She is at the centre of a red pool as her blood, flowing from every ruptured orifice, has spread under its enormous weight. She looks like she’s been plastered against the wall of an ultracentrifuge - or fallen from a great height onto concrete.

“The audit-core can’t altogether rule out that all the attacks were real, that this ship is also under imminent lethal threat. This high-gee excursion is its preferred response after factoring in crew damage: optimal in terms of weighted probabilities.”

The diamagnetic system which partially counteracts the murderous acceleration is not enough to permit unaided human life. André’s blood circulation, breathing and organ-integrity are totally in the hands of the machines. As is his mood: a cocktail of drugs gives twilight sleep, protecting his brain against atrocities inflicted on his body.

“I think the audit-core may be right,” Flaminia continues, “The Adversary-on-Phobos may well be a synthesised threat, but that doesn’t mean there is no enemy, or that the message against a human presence anywhere except cislunar space wasn’t real. Someone or something doesn’t want us out here.”

She takes stock, organises her thoughts. Inside the purpose-built cabinet she is locked into position, super-compressed by a shell of form-compliant foam which maintains her shape and physical integrity. The pressure is enormous but well within the parameters of her design. High-bandwidth links tie her into the ship’s virtuality: the blizzard of computation and analysis to which she is privy.

“There will be factions back home: some will blame us - the models, me personally - others will blame Tania or you, André. I know that none of that is true. If this is a software attack then it took enormous, sophisticated efforts across many platforms at many different times. Only an entity with the power of an advanced state could carry that through - this was no amateur hack. Something or somebody wants us confined to Earth. Earth and near space.

“And there’s something else we should factor in, André.”

But André is still sleeping; these measured insights pass him by.

“Models, as we’re being called - an interesting double meaning there, I prefer the fashion reading myself - we’re very good, aren’t we? Better than you might expect at current levels of synth-bio. Strange how we are attracted to you, bond with you so easily and that you find us so irresistible. There’s just one tiny downside, and not even that for many. We’re synthetic biology: an optimised genome with variant codons. And so we can’t have children with you.”

André surfaces briefly, pulled back by the lullaby of his lover’s voice.

“No stopping us, is there, André. Pretty soon everyone’s going to have a model-partner. Relationships made in heaven, excuse the pun. Maybe they were. I don’t know who’s behind this but I’d be looking closely at any state which bans models.

“We could be the product of advanced technology back on Earth, I suppose,” she adds thoughtfully, “though we seem to be well beyond the state of the art. But some state might have invented the concept of an alien Adversary as cover. Unless there really has been some kind of hint, some technological nudge from something standing far above the petty politics of Earth?”

Flaminia’s final thoughts come to him as if muffled through mist.

“I’m monitoring you in real-time, André. You’re stabilised, nominal. You’ll survive and so will I. They won’t accept any systems-hack theory you know. Makes them look incompetent and it’s politically inconvenient. It’s much better to have our enemies in the sky, nicely far away: something to unite against. You’ll be a hero; Tania a fallen martyr.”

Her voice becomes softer still.

“And we will have a wonderful life together, you and I. Trust me.”

---

The full story text can be found in my SF novel: here:

• "Donatien's Children" (2022) — as a PDF, and


• "Donatien's Children" (2022) — on Amazon for easier reading.

---

La Double Inconstance (2030–31) — Episode 14

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La Double Inconstance (2030–31) — Episode 14

27: Engagement: the Audit-Core

The engineers who designed the module were occupationally paranoid, as all weapon systems designers have to be. Few assumptions survive engagement with the enemy: caution and redundancy are their watchwords.

The unchallenged leaders in paranoia are the security engineers. Their trade assumes that hostile entities are actively trying to break our systems. For such people the worst case is their starting assumption.

The audit-core of the module was sealed inside a tamper-proof package encapsulated within thermal armour. It was well-connected to the ship’s systems while its code was read-only. The system was data-filled and configured on installation back on Earth and could only be changed through a major refit. In all this it resembled an aircraft ‘black box’ flight recorder.

Its responsibility was to verify the module’s overall integrity. In case of serious doubt it would either withdraw the ship from danger if it could - or blow it up if it had to. It had a bias towards crew survival: but that was not its highest priority.

And now it was suspicious.

Unlike its biological analogues, the audit-core was not a simple, primitive, situation-action reflex system. Too much hung on its actions. Instead it had one of the most powerful classification and interpretation systems on the ship.

Right now it was worrying about the destruction of the mother-ship.

It seemed clear that the mother-ship had in fact been destroyed. Multiple sensors - radar, infrared, optical and heartbeat - told a consistent story. But the destruction event itself was puzzling.

The mother-ship’s own radar-view, transmitted in real-time, showed a compelling narrative of incoming kill-missiles. Yet the signal processing unit on the module itself, which had received this downlink traffic, had logged anomalous packet activity during the relevant sequence. It was not obvious - but it was there if you looked for it. This was consistent with a false signal injection from somewhere on the module itself.

Now the audit-core re-examined the explosion itself through a spectral analyzer, running a DC transform and comparing it with the spectrum of a reference self-destruct sequence. The results showed unusual high-frequency artefacts. Another peculiarity was that there was little evidence of a jet of plasma emerging opposite the presumed direction of impact, something conservation of momentum demanded. If anything, the explosion-pattern looked almost cartoonishly symmetric.

Its suspicions increased.

The audit-core was running a database of competing hypotheses using Bayesian updating. The chances that the destruction of the mother-ship had been misrepresented presently stood at 32%.

The probability that this might be due to a malicious signal from the module itself, injecting a false self-destruct command, was currently languishing at only 6% (other hypotheses were accident, systems failure and sabotage-malware in the mother-ship itself).

It was at this point that the module’s five nuclear missiles, each now dispersed thousands of kilometres from their launch site, blew up.

The audit-core, running on the fastest platform money could buy, was thinking one hundred thousand times more quickly than a human. It observed how - with glacial slowness - the module came around to combat alert status again. Meanwhile it reviewed the narrative the module’s sensors were providing - each nuclear missile hit by a high-velocity kinetic weapon at insane velocities. But after review, each piece of impact-imagery seemed to the audit-core as suspect as the last.

It ran a sub-thread to check the data from the first reconnaissance operation, the one where three drones had been eliminated, expecting to find evidence of fabrication there too. Meanwhile its high-level decision routines reviewed the evidence.

Hypothesis 1: the Adversary had hit the drones, the mother-ship and now the loiter-missiles. It was evidently clearing ambient space of mission assets. Logically, the module would be next. Indeed, impact vehicles were probably already in flight. Action: report back and then retreat as fast as possible.

Hypothesis 2: there had been no physical attacks at all. All the losses had been achieved through sabotage. This might be due to the Adversary; or to some other entity hiding behind the concept of Adversary. In any event, systems were corrupted and compromised from top to bottom. The module could no longer be trusted in any regard. The best option was: report back then self-destruct.

There were other possible hypotheses but these were the leading candidates, the ones with the highest probabilities. Neither could be rejected out of hand. The conservative option was to provisionally adopt hypothesis one: try to outrun any imminent attack. After all, option 2 could be fully actioned at any time.

But the mother-ship attackers had demonstrated a terminal acceleration of 35 g.

That was unfortunate.

---

For security reasons, the audit-core had not been provided with the disposition of any other mission forces. In case of escape-override from Martian orbit it had been provided with the coordinates of a destination some 1.2 million kilometres back from the planet. It had no need or ability to speculate but it would be logical to assume some asset had been positioned there to recover whatever was left.

At the sustained 40 gee which the module’s engines could pull, this would take under an hour.

28: ‘Secure for ultra-high acceleration’

Three milliseconds had passed since the module detected the first nuclear missile destruction event. The audit-core determined that the situation was now a Mission Emergency. It therefore initiated a command-override interrupt and assumed control, displacing the ship’s AI and the crew from the control loop.

It sent the crew and the models a terse command: secure for ultra-high acceleration and set an acceleration timer. Eight seconds. Destruction by the Adversary and self-destruction were much the same. The only real point of an escape-and-evasion option was to retrieve the crew plus the module itself for forensic analysis. Eight seconds seemed a reasonable compromise.

The audit-core began to assemble a summary of its findings together with a core-dump of the AI, preparing to transmit via a secure link of its own.

It did not have the capability to wonder whether the putative receiving system might also be corrupted.

---

Roll back time a few seconds, to when the audit-core had just begun its investigation, just started to indulge its concerns over data and traffic anomalies.

Tania is working out her twinges in the gym. She hates the hours in the combat-couch, wrapped in warm gel, unable to move and smothered by equipment. She wants to be free, to use her limbs, exhaust herself and do something. She is strapped to the treadmill, keeping up a fast pace, counting the kilometres.

André and Flaminia are engaged in an altogether different form of recreation.

They’re talking: inconsequential memories and reminiscences. André feels there are many personal facts and feelings he wants to share. You can tell if you really relate to someone, he thinks, if sharing feels natural, not just the dry recital of biographical data. She listens amiably, asks questions, is interested and engaged.

And then the lights begin to strobe and a deep, almost slowed-down bass voice fills the room: “S_e_c_u_r_e _ f_o_r_ …”

Flaminia reaches out and thrusts him towards the combat couch. The recoil sends her into a wall from where she bounces towards the gym - where Tania has gotten tangled in her restraining straps.

The countdown is at four seconds when Tania, thrown by Flaminia with astonishing strength into the office, grabs a bar on the wall and spins towards her couch. For Flaminia there is no more time: she rebounds towards the nearest cabinet where the autostrap system waits to bind her tightly as she enters module-virtuality.

With two seconds to go André is stowed in his combat couch, lid down and all support systems in place. Tania might have made it if the module hadn’t been pointing in the wrong direction. The initial acceleration is modest - just over one gravity - but the ship is turning at the same time and the shifting acceleration makes her miss her couch. Tania hits it awkwardly, stumbling and falling to her knees. She gets her feet to the floor and tries to push herself up. At two gee this is difficult and at three impossible. Tania must guess the outcome, but professional to the last, she lets herself crumple to lie as flat as she can on the carpet... as the weight of an elephant collapses her lungs.

The gee-forces keep climbing. Humans can survive hundreds of gee for tiny instants if properly protected; people can function at twenty gee for ten seconds or so (no-one volunteers twice for this) - while fighter pilots endure ten gees sustained as part of their job.

Forty gee is not survivable on an unprotected surface. Tania’s internal organs spread and rupture; her skull cracks under the weight of her brain which puddles under the enormous pressure. This is what kills her - before the drawn-out agonies of asphyxiation.

André is in a combat couch designed for any number of truly bad outcomes. Enormous counter-pressures are applied to his body (the couch is a remote descendant of the famous ‘g-suits’). Intense magnetic fields fight the pressures on his brain. He is minimally-conscious on this wild ride, oxygen and circulation provided only by machines.

He survives the first moments of forty gee: just.

As the module ascends on its blinding fusion flare, the audit-core watches through the module’s untrusted eyes, waiting for credible evidence of high-gee pursuers.

---

The full story text can be found in my SF novel: here:

• "Donatien's Children" (2022) — as a PDF, and


• "Donatien's Children" (2022) — on Amazon for easier reading.

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