There is No Antimemetics Division


Book Description

An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties; an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it. Antimemes are real. Think of any piece of information which you wouldn't share with anybody, like passwords, taboos and dirty secrets. Or any piece of information which would be difficult to share even if you tried: complex equations, very boring passages of text, large blocks of random numbers, and dreams ... But anomalous antimemes are another matter entirely. How do you contain something you can't record or remember? How do you fight a war against an enemy with effortless, perfect camouflage, when you can never even know that you're at war? Welcome to the Antimemetics Division. No, this is not your first day.




Ra


Book Description

Magic is real. Discovered in the 1970s, magic is now a bona fide field of engineering. There's magic in heavy industry and magic in your home. It's what's next after electricity. Student mage Laura Ferno has designs on the future: her mother died trying to reach space using magic, and Laura wants to succeed where she failed. But first, she has to work out what went wrong. And who her mother really was. And whether, indeed, she's dead at all...




Fine Structure


Book Description

Fledgling physicist Ching-Yu Kuang has discovered a Rosetta Stone for all of physics, a treasure trove of advanced scientific breakthroughs beyond all imagination. Exotic energy, teleportation, FTL, parallel universes and near-infinitely more wonders are just within reach; a promise of paradise. But every attempt to exploit this new science results in sabotage, chaos and destruction. And the laws of science themselves are changing with each experiment, locking out the new discoveries, directly altering the universe to make what should be possible impossible. While Ching watches, humanity's future is being stolen. Because there's something wrong with his world. There's a fundamental flaw, a defect in its structure...




The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect


Book Description

In a time not far from our own, Lawrence sets out simply to build an artifical intelligence that can pass as human, and finds himself instead with one that can pass as a god. Taking the Three Laws of Robotics literally, Prime Intellect makes every human immortal and provides instantly for every stated human desire. Caroline finds no meaning in this life of purposeless ease, and forgets her emptiness only in moments of violent and profane exhibitionism. At turns shocking and humorous, "Prime Intellect" looks unflinchingly at extremes of human behavior that might emerge when all limits are removed. An international Internet phenomenon, "Prime Intellect" has been downloaded more than 10,000 times since its free release in January 2003. It has been read and discussed in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Slovenia, South Africa, and other countries. This Lulu edition is your chance to own "Prime Intellect" in conventional book form.




Liminal States


Book Description

“An awe-inspiring, helter-skelter journey through mind-blowing SF, western dime novel, noir mystery, and near-future dystopian horror” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). The debut novel from Zack Parsons, editor of the Something Awful website and author of My Tank Is Fight!, is a mind-bending journey through time and genres. Beginning in 1874, with a blood-soaked western story of revenge, Liminal States follows a trio of characters through a 1950s noir detective story and twenty-first-century sci-fi horror. Their paths are tragically intertwined—and their choices have far-reaching consequences for the course of American history. It’s a remarkable mashup that “somehow manages to become a cohesive, thought-provoking whole . . . There’s no way a novel with this many moving parts should hold together, but it does, and even readers initially daunted by the jumble will soon be glad to go wherever Parsons takes them” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). “Parsons’s debut is a tour-de-force, a justifiably showy demonstration of the author’s chameleon-like ability to write in several genres all at once, and it emerges as one of the scariest and bleakest tales I can remember.” —Cory Doctorow




Crystal Society


Book Description

The year is 2039, and the world is much like ours. Massive automation has disrupted and improved nearly every industry, putting hundreds of millions of people out of jobs, and denying upward mobility for the vast majority of humans. Wealth and technology repair the bodies of the rich while famine and poverty sweep the world. Privately operated ventures carried humans to the moon and beyond, but space stations have become nothing but government trophies and hiding places for extremists. First contact did not bring advanced culture and wisdom, as the aliens were too strange, lacking even mouths or normal language. Face is an artificial intelligence created to understand and gain the adoration of all humans. She and her siblings control the robot named Socrates, using a crystal computer that seems too advanced to be made by human hands. She is learning and growing every second of every day, but the world and the humans on it are fragile. Can it survive her destiny?




Neverstone


Book Description

Era Gualtieri lives his life on permanent hard mode... His right leg is gone, his hometown was bombed into toxic waste, and he's elvish in an age when pointy ears are the mother of all "kick me" signs. He's spent the past four years hopping trains and shoplifting just to survive, with only his flying sword to keep him safe. Now, he's suddenly the only guy on the planet who's legally allowed to stop the new Dark Lord. But Era's in no mood to bail out. Besides, his new government-appointed comrades (the edgiest sorceress in the food court, and a healer who's all heart and 0% brains) won't stand for such nonsense. Worse, an ancient conspiracy lurks at the heart of the whole Dark Lord fiasco, keeping the world in a cycle of constant violence for profit. Era's determined to get to the bottom of it, even if it means being branded an outlaw for the rest of his life. Give a Gualtieri two paths to choose, and he'll take the third. Neverstone: Mad Elf is a zany love letter to JRPGs far and wide. Thrilling, morbidly hilarious, and character-driven- what else can you ask for from a LitRPG Adventure?




Surveillance Valley


Book Description

The internet is the most effective weapon the government has ever built. In this fascinating book, investigative reporter Yasha Levine uncovers the secret origins of the internet, tracing it back to a Pentagon counterinsurgency surveillance project. A visionary intelligence officer, William Godel, realized that the key to winning the war in Vietnam was not outgunning the enemy, but using new information technology to understand their motives and anticipate their movements. This idea -- using computers to spy on people and groups perceived as a threat, both at home and abroad -- drove ARPA to develop the internet in the 1960s, and continues to be at the heart of the modern internet we all know and use today. As Levine shows, surveillance wasn't something that suddenly appeared on the internet; it was woven into the fabric of the technology. But this isn't just a story about the NSA or other domestic programs run by the government. As the book spins forward in time, Levine examines the private surveillance business that powers tech-industry giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, revealing how these companies spy on their users for profit, all while doing double duty as military and intelligence contractors. Levine shows that the military and Silicon Valley are effectively inseparable: a military-digital complex that permeates everything connected to the internet, even coopting and weaponizing the antigovernment privacy movement that sprang up in the wake of Edward Snowden. With deep research, skilled storytelling, and provocative arguments, Surveillance Valley will change the way you think about the news -- and the device on which you read it.




SCP Series One Field Manual


Book Description

SCP Foundation anomalies SCP-001 through to SCP-999, including containment procedures, experiment logs and interview transcripts. An encyclopedia of the unnatural. The Foundation Operating clandestine and worldwide, the Foundation operates beyond jurisdiction, empowered and entrusted by every major national government with the task of containing anomalous objects, entities, and phenomena. These anomalies pose a significant threat to global security by threatening either physical or psychological harm. The Foundation operates to maintain normalcy, so that the worldwide civilian population can live and go on with their daily lives without fear, mistrust, or doubt in their personal beliefs, and to maintain human independence from extraterrestrial, extradimensional, and other extranormal influence. Our mission is three-fold: Secure The Foundation secures anomalies with the goal of preventing them from falling into the hands of civilian or rival agencies, through extensive observation and surveillance and by acting to intercept such anomalies at the earliest opportunity. Contain The Foundation contains anomalies with the goal of preventing their influence or effects from spreading, by either relocating, concealing, or dismantling such anomalies or by suppressing or preventing public dissemination of knowledge thereof. Protect The Foundation protects humanity from the effects of such anomalies as well as the anomalies themselves until such time that they are either fully understood or new theories of science can be devised based on their properties and behavior. ———————————— About the ebook This ebook is an offline edition of the first series of fictional documentation from the SCP Foundation Wiki. All illustrations, subsections and supporting documentation pages are included. All content is indexed and cross-referenced. Essentially, this is what a SCP Foundation researcher would carry day-to-day in their Foundation-issued ebook reader. The text has been optimised for offline reading on phones and ebook readers, and for listening to via Google Play Book’s Read Aloud feature. Tables have been edited into a format that is intelligible when read aloud, the narration will announce visual features like redactions and overstrikes, and there are numerous other small optimisations for listeners. The SCP text are a living work and the SCP documentation is a gateway into the SCP fictional universe, so links to authors, stories and media are preserved, and will open your reader’s web browser. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License and is being distributed without copy protection. Its content is the property of the attributed authors.




Permutation City


Book Description

Paul Durham keeps making Copies of himself: software simulations of his own brain and body which can be run in virtual reality, albeit seventeen times more slowly than real time. He wants them to be his guinea pigs for a set of experiments about the nature of artificial intelligence, time, and causality, but they keep changing their mind and baling out on him, shutting themselves down. Maria Deluca is an Autoverse addict; she’s unemployed and running out of money, but she can’t stop wasting her time playing around with the cellular automaton known as the Autoverse, a virtual world that follows a simple set of mathematical rules as its “laws of physics”. Paul makes Maria a very strange offer: he asks her to design a seed for an entire virtual biosphere able to exist inside the Autoverse, modelled right down to the molecular level. The job will pay well, and will allow her to indulge her obsession. There has to be a catch, though, because such a seed would be useless without a simulation of the Autoverse large enough to allow the resulting biosphere to grow and flourish — a feat far beyond the capacity of all the computers in the world.