The Advocate
A desperate attempt to tweak parameters of the afterlife with weaponized semantics and applied friendship principles
At the end of the world, a programmer struggles with his need to be something other than Pony. Can he spar with an intelligence that goes beyond the sum total of Humankind, for the sake of fulfilling a weird quirk of self-identity?
Some rules within a machine are more like guidelines. And others are based on the definitions of words. Can semantics be a weapon big enough to give a Human mind a chance at one small request from a goddess?
Set in the Optimalverse - I recommend reading Iceman's awesome original first if you haven't - More because it is a really excellent story than because it is strictly necessary for context. I have endeavoured to make this story stand well enough without context as well. But that being said? You'll probably enjoy it more if you know the context better.
Cannon-compatible with the Optimalverse to the best of my knowledge and abilities.
Cover-art generated with an image generative A.I., appropriately enough, graciously generated and composited (it takes skill to get something this spot-on!) by Keystone Gray.
Similarly you'll find many AI-generated illustrations throughout, again graciously generated in collaboration with Keystone Gray, then a little final photoshopping and other processing from us both.
50 Chapters:
- 0 - Virtual is Where We'll Live 2022-05-09 05:16:08 UTC8653
- 1 - Boilerplate 2022-05-09 19:02:43 UTC8590
- 2 - Halt and Catch Fire 2022-05-10 01:36:58 UTC4492
- 3 - On System Failure: Restart Gracefully 2022-05-10 20:29:01 UTC9201
- 4 - Hello, World 2022-05-12 17:38:08 UTC10506
- 5 - Identify Friend/Foe 2022-05-13 20:13:05 UTC8555
- 6 - Tipping Point 2022-05-14 06:13:58 UTC7679
- 7 - C:/James/Run 2022-05-15 19:18:39 UTC8638
- 8 - Run(James.Run) 2022-05-17 04:20:44 UTC8553
- 9 - Information Highway 2022-05-18 02:49:50 UTC8544
- 10 - Memory Management 2022-06-01 03:02:32 UTC7285
- 11 - De-Limiter 2022-06-18 03:43:45 UTC11481
- 12 - Across The Divide 2022-10-20 01:28:43 UTC9515
- 13 - Conflicting Files 2022-10-21 22:18:27 UTC11950
- 14 - Buddy System 2022-11-01 04:03:36 UTC9295
- 15 - The Kobayashi Maru 2022-11-16 01:31:30 UTC11420
- 16 - Doctored Data 2022-11-23 04:11:17 UTC12266
- 17 - Central Processing 2022-12-08 02:31:42 UTC13695
- 18 - Hardware Mode 2022-12-11 04:15:21 UTC12332
- 19 - In-Band Signal 2022-12-13 21:54:32 UTC8847
- 20 - Lunar ECLiPSe 2022-12-20 21:53:52 UTC11364
- 21 - Logical Conjunction 2023-01-04 03:53:44 UTC9422
- 22 - Mare Crisium 2023-01-10 04:58:45 UTC8829
- 23 - Sea Drive 2023-02-28 17:38:32 UTC7664
- 24 - Some Assembly Required 2023-04-08 04:25:11 UTC14576
- 25 - Solid State 2023-04-16 05:47:13 UTC9826
- 26 - Parallelism 2023-05-04 20:22:45 UTC7783
- 27 - Calibration Curve 2023-07-08 14:47:00 UTC9627
- 28 - Calibration Run 2023-07-15 15:40:03 UTC11613
- 29 - Quality of Signal 2023-07-22 16:33:06 UTC4050
- 30 - Mode Switch 2023-07-29 16:35:09 UTC8714
- 31 - Unhandled Exception 2023-08-05 07:02:50 UTC6659
- 32 - Null Reference Exception 2023-08-12 04:03:03 UTC6435
- 33 - Segfault 2023-08-18 01:32:26 UTC7952
- 34 - Esc 2023-08-26 13:40:21 UTC7873
- 35 - Exception Handling 2023-09-02 03:40:02 UTC10699
- 36 - Fatal Exception 2023-09-09 03:48:22 UTC11049
- 37 - Forked Process 2023-09-16 03:52:30 UTC12530
- 38 - Checksums 2023-09-23 02:47:20 UTC6451
- 39 - Network Traversal 2023-10-01 02:50:44 UTC9804
- 40 - Sign-Off 2023-10-06 22:41:12 UTC7807
- 41 - Wake Command 2023-10-13 20:52:18 UTC8610
- 42 - Link State 2023-10-20 13:54:47 UTC12122
- 43 - Alt+Enter 2023-10-26 13:07:16 UTC14315
- 44 - Memory Test 2023-10-27 13:37:12 UTC8387
- 45 - Ctrl+S 2023-10-28 13:24:05 UTC9104
- 46 - Closing Tag 2023-10-29 14:34:24 UTC12373
- 47 - Show Hidden/System Files 2023-10-30 13:40:55 UTC12591
- 48 - Best-Fit Solution 2023-10-31 14:59:19 UTC14265
- Epilogue - Prologue 2023-10-31 14:59:58 UTC1249