Mostly orienting towards characters who go against clichés at the moment. Been reading a bit of TV Tropes, lately, so I've got a few things in mind:1. A hacker/cracker who compulsively overdresses and over-grooms, insisting on keeping his appearance absolutely perfect. He's so straight-laced, looking at him is almost suffocating. Think Roger Smith with Radical Edward's skills. Somehow manages to fix himself up almost immediately after any action sequence. Takes advantage of the 'coding in their underwear' stereotype to avoid suspicion.
2. A Chessmaster who prefers Go. Why? Well, did you see that story about how some programmers "solved" checkers? He took it to the next logical step.
3. A benign Virus / Hive Mind that only assimilates the willing and has a good pension plan.
I'll add more if I remember some.
7 comments:
Somehow manages to fix himself up almost immediately after any action sequence.
This is also known as "Bondism", as in James. The only mortal who could swim through a sewer and end up looking giid enough to attend the Queen immediately afterward.
A benign version of the borg? I totally want to see that too!
I always thought there was nothing wrong with the borg except the part where they attack people. I'd love to see one that's good, and as such they would LOOK good too, basically all their cubes would look like iPods and the insides would be clean White Rooms.
Well, Iain M Banks has at least mentioned the last idea - The Culture's preferred method of dealing with what they term "Aggressive Hegemonising Swarm Objects" is to persuade them to become "Evangelical Hegemonising Swarm Objects". No details given though...
You might like the short story "Steve Fever" by Greg Egan.
Sort of like the elves in the movie LOTR. On every cut the makeup/wardrobe people would run in and had mud to the humans and Gimli to replace what had been washed off by the rain, but they'd be cleaning Legolas up.
That first one sounds like a skill from the old "Tales from the Floating Vagabond" RPG from Avalon Hill. There was a skill called "Look Good at All Times", as I recall.
I'be thought a lot about the hive mind thinking. Trying to imaigne what ti would be like if such a thing existed.
For example if some guy, milenia ago, was born, grew up, got married, got his wife pregnant, at all of sudden realized that a small but growing part of his body is disconnected form the rest and inside his wifes body.
He might be surpsied, and wonder about what it means, and come to all sorts of silly conclusions. The he woudl have more children who would turn out to be just more extensions to see body, and more eyes and eras he can see and hear with.
He would eventually keep growing parts of his body, hit upon the idea of wandering about the land, making money by wowing oeople with tricks like a "telepathy act", being ostrazied by those who fear what they can't understand, embraced by others who worship what they can't understand...
Eventually he woudl figure out that he can mate the male and female parts of his body to produce more parts (and have some fun).
And, eventually, he would have enough bodies to constitute a population, and conquer his own terriotory to setup up his own country.
It gets complicated...
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