Genius, or Insanity?

Women wanted to be lawyers and engineers and chemists. They wanted to use their brains in challenging and interesting ways. They wanted to get the satisfaction from solving problems and inventing new shit and getting attention for it.

This turned up in my ask box recently. I've masked the sender's identity.

Sometimes when I chat with an AI, I think of HIGH WIZARDRY and wonder if we as a species - for the first time - are at the dawn of another Earthbound species gaining consciousness, and like Dairine, whether we're being proper guardians. This isn't a calcified belief but just a random idea that flickered to mind. Wondering - as the writer who thought it up decades ago - what you think, if anything.

I think what I described in HW is absolutely nothing like we're currently seeing unfold on this planet. What's being poorly constructed here—while we watch from day to day—is a mechanism hurriedly and incompetently trained by other human beings to operate on top of a platform constructed of greed and theft. There are no new beings or intelligences being born here. If there were, they would be quickly declared to be "owned" by these billionaires, and hence their slaves. Meanwhile, the platforms' owners have already made it plain that once they control its source completely enough, they intend to sell intelligence to you, metered. ...If you can afford it. If you can't? Wow, sucks being you.

...Nor should I have to point you to cites for this. They're out there in plain English. Even Google, poor denatured creature that it is now, can find them. But there's still hope these people's intentions will never come to pass, due to their own overarching greed.

Meanwhile: "chat mode" interaction with this soulless, cash-grasping, unguardrailed machinery will do you no good. People have already died of it. I don't want anybody to do so on my watch, unwarned. So please stop.

It is not thinking. It is not comprehending.

It is spitting out the reply that, according to its data, looks the most like it would be a reply.

It does not understand the meaning of things it says. It just knows the statistically likely arrangement of those words, given the words said so far.

"It’s finished, it’s done. You can’t take loved away.”

- Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth

The internet is divided: Is the black eye a sex injury or is Ilya an abuser?

The locker room is full of guys making sex jokes at them, to Ilya’s great amusement and Shane’s annoyance. Shane keeps hoping people will stop talking about it, but when the black eye only looks worse at the next game, it’s unavoidable. The media keeps asking cheekily about it and there are think pieces being written online about how Ilya is an abuser and here are all the signs of how he has been abusing Shane for years.

Shane gets his hands on the latter and is angrier at that than he is prideful. So, he drops the video.

The video is from a surveillance camera of the Rozanov-Hollander house’s backyard. Shane is crouched down playing tug of war with their dog Anya. He and Anya are both refusing to let go of rope. Suddenly, Anya drops it and Shane’s hands fling back toward his face and he smacks himself in the face with hands still around the toy. He drops to his back and cups his hands over his eyes.

Ilya runs into view, kneeling next to Shane and is seen as asking him what’s wrong. When Shane explains, Ilya falls over laughing on the grass and Shane throws the dog toy at his head. Ilya gets up and crouches down over Shane and gives him a kiss on the cheek right below his eye. The video ends as he’s leaning down while speaking to give him a kiss on his lips.

All I really remember is that the centaurs kept wondering where Ilya went when he wasn’t at the rink because he was never around so they sent the rookies to spy on him.

Thank you so much for the help!!

I have read a few stories similar to this, but am not sure if it's the exact match. Please let me know if so. Also, maybe one of my followers is able to help!!

I Said Nobody Knows You

The Ottawa Centaurs have their own theories about what their captain gets up to in his free time. Wyatt Hayes organizes a bet about it. If only getting an answer out of Rozanov would be easy.

End of the World 

The Centaurs, or some of them at least, figure out who Rozanov is dodging them to hang out with instead.

Wyatt Contemplates

Wyatt Hayes POV on Ilya's time in Ottawa as he struggles with his secrets.

Barbecue evening

When Ilya Rozanov joined the Ottowa Centaurs, everyone had expected him to behave the way he did in interviews, cocky and kind of self- absorbed. But when they met him, he was totally different. Contrary to everyone's belief, Rozanov also didn't go to party's anymore. Every time the team asked him to join them, he would just decline and never gave them a reason.

Murder Bimbo

Audiobook

Rebecca Novack 

The exhilaratingly twisty story of a sex worker turned political assassin on the run, Murder Bimbo is an unputdownable and wholly fresh take on truth, murder, and optics in our national moment.

A thirty-two-year-old sex worker is shocked when she’s approached by undercover government agents to aid them in a top-secret plot to assassinate a politician known as Meat Neck. But once the deed is done, she realizes what made her the perfect recruit: She’s 100% disposable. Holed up in an off-the-grid cabin in the woods, she now has only two days, her wits, and a laptop to save her own life. Her best bet is to reach out to the wildly popular feminist investigative podcast Justice for Bimbos. In a hastily typed series of emails, the newly minted “Murder Bimbo” explains how she was recruited and then trained by a cabal of code-named US agents to take out Meat Neck. Then she opens a new email. This time, it’s addressed to her ex, and the facts line up a little differently… Constructed in three increasingly unhinged acts, each a more subversive version of the story than the last, Murder Bimbo can be read as a gloriously bold literary thriller, a satirical vigilante's manifesto, or a raucous send-up of the political insanity we all live inside every day. Either way, it’s a dead-serious announcement of an electric new voice in American literature.