Finished only this morning, another title by Jenny Erpenbeck, The Book of Words, a 150-page novella detailing a woman’s recollections of childhood, which take on a progressively more menacing and unnerving cast as they go on. Compared to Go Went Gone, it’s perhaps more stylistically refined — beautifully well-written — though meanwhile a little less to my taste than the later novel. The translation, again by Susan Bernofsky, seems excellent.

---

On Saturday I read The Other Girl by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer. This is a very slim volume, with the body of the text not amounting to fifty pages, so it didn’t take long to traverse it. At the bookshop in Chepstow that morning I’d first picked up a different Fitzcarraldo title, and had then wondered if there were any of their several volumes of Ernaux’s memoirs & essays on the shelves: as it happened, there was only this one. The book is in the form of a letter by Ernaux to the sister she never met. Ginette Duchesne had died aged 6, in 1938, of diphtheria. Annie was born two years later. As she recalls it, her parents never directly talked to her about her sister, and she describes overhearing her mother talk about ‘the other girl’ only once. Nor did Ernaux ever question her parents about Ginette, whose unspoken absence nevertheless continued to haunt them all:

...you and I were fated to be only children. Their desire to have just one child, which they made very clear (we couldn’t do for two what we are doing for one), meant it was either you or me, but not both... It took almost thirty years [...] for it to hit me: I was born because you died, and I replaced you.

It’s a powerful little book. At times reading it felt uncomfortably like intruding on a series of private moments. On the strength it I’m now keen to read Ernaux’s The Years, though I don’t know if I’ll want to venture much further into her bibliography than that.

---

No new music arrived this week. Instead I can mention a couple of recent acquisitions overlooked in previous posts: Grasshopper (1982) by J.J. Cale, and Quiet (1996) by John Scofield. After Naturally, Troubadour and Travel-Log, Grasshopper is my fourth J.J. Cale album on vinyl. I don’t think it’s unfair to say it’s neither one of the best nor the worst of his records: even so, mid-tier J.J. is well worth my time & attention. ‘City Girls’ was the lead single from it, and perhaps its most memorable tune.

Reading on-line about John Scofield’s album A Go Go, which I bought last month, I saw it had followed a very different release, Quiet, on which the guitarist had played only acoustically, accompanied by drums, bass, and a seven piece horn section, augmented on a couple of numbers by Wayne Shorter on the tenor sax. I obtained a reasonably inexpensive second-hand CD copy via ebay. It’s a subtle and low-key collection of good tunes in elaborate arrangements, all beautifully played. It may not be among Scofield’s best-regarded albums, but it hits a sweet spot for me. Opener ‘After the Fact’ establishes the mood very nicely.

---

After finishing a bottle of Ardbeg last month, I opened something very different on Wednesday evening in the shape of ‘The Targe 30 year-old Highland Single Grain scotch whisky’. When I bought it at Lidl the year before last it was originally earmarked as a gift for someone else. Plans changed, and I kept it instead in reserve for myself. Its time to shine has now finally arrived. My one prior experience of a single grain whisky (sampled decades ago), hadn’t thrilled me, but, on the grounds that it’s all too seldom I can afford to try anything that has languished in a cask for thirty years, I’d been curious to try this one anyway. It’s a light & clean sort of dram, with initial impressions of mellow sweetness in which I discerned notes of coconut crumb and vanilla. Unsurprisingly there is woodiness too, with a typical whisky sourness eventually also asserting itself. It’s very smooth and affable with no murky depths: an interesting change of scenery I think I’ll enjoy.

Agosto | Preguntas sin respuesta

¿Quién me está lastimando?

Me siento triste.

Tengo una batalla interna entre lo que quiero y lo que no quiero. Tengo los ojos llenos de lágrimas. Tenía mucho tiempo que no lloraba, y mucho menos por situaciones así.

Por eso no me gusta sentir.

Siento que cuando lo hago, saco lo peor de mí.

Pero ¿Qué es la vida sin un poco de dolor?

Y entonces aparece la pregunta que no sé contestar:

¿Qué es realmente lo que me lastima?

¿Mi cabeza? ¿La realidad? ¿Quién me lastima? ¿O me lastimo yo misma?

¿Por qué idealizo a la gente? ¿Por qué me cuesta tanto hacer preguntas? ¿Por qué no me doy mi lugar?

¿Por qué, por qué, por qué...?

Por eso me alejo.

Por eso prefiero no sentir nada. Por eso me cierro.

Porque sé que cuando siento, siento demasiado.

No puedo controlar mis emociones. Mis ojos no dejan de llorar y ya no quiero sentirme así.

A veces incluso creo que me lo merezco.

Pero, realmente, ¿Qué mal he hecho yo para merecerlo?

No creo que ninguno.

¿O exagero la realidad?

¿Cómo puedo vivir en la realidad cuando tengo que lidiar con mis miedos y mis deseos?

¿Y qué deseo?

Libertad. Independencia. Amor. Conocer el mundo. Viajar.

Básicamente creo que todo eso es lo mismo.

Pero entonces, ¿Qué tiene de único? ¿Qué tiene de diferente?

Tengo miedo de morir sin amar de verdad.

Tengo miedo de no hacer lo que quiero porque mi cabeza no me lo permita.

Tengo miedo de no vivir.

De no vivir mientras pueda.

Porque si algo sé es que la vida no es eterna.

Entonces, ¿por qué desperdiciar el tiempo?

¿Por qué dar las cosas por sentadas?

¿Por qué conformarse?

Me da miedo ser conformista.

Me da miedo sentir tanto.

Porque cuando uno siente mucho por las personas, también les da el poder de lastimarnos.

Así me pasó.

Con mi mejor amiga.

Ella también me duele.

A veces no entiendo por qué la perdí.

Y tengo miedo.

Tengo miedo de no ser amable conmigo.

De reprocharme tanto.

De sentir que merezco sufrir.

De pensar que las personas son superiores a mí.

¿Por qué no soy amable conmigo?

¿Por qué no pienso de mí lo mismo que pienso de los demás?

Siempre trato de ver lo mejor de todos.

¿Por qué no puedo hacer lo mismo conmigo misma?

¿Por qué siempre veo mis defectos?

Es como verme en un espejo y estar buscando constantemente un error.

Pero ¿por qué?

Quizá esa sea la pregunta que queda cuando todas las demás se han agotado.

No sé quién me está lastimando.

No sé si es la realidad, mi cabeza, las personas que quiero o la forma en que he aprendido a quererlas.

Pero esta noche, por primera vez en mucho tiempo, estoy llorando.

Y quizá no tenga que encontrar una respuesta todavía.

Quizá por ahora solo necesito dejar de preguntarme qué está mal conmigo.

Quizá necesito aprender a mirarme sin buscar un error.

A Quick Win.

I won this club-based CC (Correspondence Chess) game this morning with a Queen-Rook combination Checkmate on my 25th move. We started play on 08 August, so that means only 17 days transpired from the game's opening move until its conclusion. For me, that's a very quick game. I prefer playing with at least 3 days allowed per move. I have some games now in progress where my opponents and I are allowed 14 days per move.

Anyway, the position of pieces at game's end is shown above, and our full move record follows: 1. d4 d5 2. Nc3 Nf6 3. Nf3 Nc6 4. e3 Bf5 5. Bb5 Qd7 6. Ne5 Nxe5 7. Bxd7+ Nexd7 8. O-O e6 9. Re1 O-O-O 10. a4 Kb8 11. b4 Bxb4 12. Bb2 e5 13. a5 Bxc3 14. Bxc3 exd4 15. Bxd4 Rhg8 16. Rb1 c5 17. Bc3 Ne4 18. Bb2 g6 19. Qxd5 Ndf6 20. Be5+ Kc8 21. Qxb7# 1-0

And the adventure continues.

This short essay published on The Marshall Review, marks the beginning of a larger project: defining the discipline of publication architecture. It doesn’t explain the method – that comes later – but it sets out the central idea that a publication is an intellectual structure, not a stream of content. The role of the Publication Architect is to design that structure so meaning can accumulate over time.

https://rvw.ie/h1the-publication-architect-brwhy-structure-matters-more-than-content-h1

The Publication Architect:
Why Structure Matters More Than Content

In an age drowning in content, the real work is architectural: building the conceptual structure within which individual pieces can speak to one another and generate meaning over time.

Everyone talks about content.

Publishers want it. Readers consume it. Algorithms demand an endless supply of it. The modern information economy treats content as the primary unit of value, as though the right words, images, or ideas possess an independent power capable of carrying themselves through the world. Yet content alone rarely explains why some publications endure while others vanish.

The difference may be structural.

A pile of bricks is not a building. A collection of musical notes is not a symphony. And a collection of articles is not necessarily a publication. Something else is required. There must be a framework within which individual pieces acquire meaning through their relationship to one another.

This is the work of the Publication Architect.

The term does not describe a writer, editor, designer, or publisher, though it may include elements of all four roles. A Publication Architect is concerned primarily with the structure that allows a publication to become more than the sum of its parts.

An editor improves individual articles. A Publication Architect asks how those articles speak to one another across months or years. A designer shapes visual experience. A Publication Architect shapes intellectual experience. A publisher distributes content. A Publication Architect creates the conceptual environment within which that content can live, grow, and develop.

The role becomes especially important in an age of digital abundance. Information is no longer scarce. Attention is. Every day, an endless stream of countless words is published online; most of them disconnected from any larger purpose. They appear briefly, compete for attention, and are gone.

The stream is lacking coherence.

Readers do not merely seek information. They seek orientation. They want to understand how one idea connects to another, how today's article relates to yesterday's, how individual observations contribute to a larger conversation. Structure provides orientation.

The most influential publications in history were never defined solely by their content. They were defined by the way the content was organized and revealed. Their editors and founders understood that a publication is not merely a container for ideas, but an intellectual construction, an architecture that guides the reader through them.

Perhaps this is why structure often outlasts content.

Individual articles age. Facts change. Debates shift. Yet a well-constructed publication can continue generating meaning long after many of its original pieces have faded. The architecture remains capable of accommodating new material while preserving continuity with the past.

The future of publishing may therefore depend less on producing more content than on designing the structures that allow meaning to accumulate. A Publication Architect is concerned not with volume but with continuity; with building the intellectual pathways through which readers can move, return, and deepen their understanding over time.

Content furnishes the rooms. Architecture determines whether anyone can find their way through them.

David Marshall Dublin

Author's Note A Publication Architect designs the conceptual structure that allows a publication to generate meaning over time.

Boundless Abundance

Some years back I wrote a short story about humanity discovering the ability to duplicate matter. It focused on the issue of unbounded garbage production that would result from such a technology. I couldn't find the original copy so I instead decided to recreate it. Enjoy!

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Historians would later argue over exactly when the Resource Crisis began, largely because almost every date they proposed could be defended. Copper prices had been climbing since the twenties. Lithium shortages had forced several governments to ration battery production. Rare-earth export controls had become instruments of diplomacy and coercion, while drought and fertilizer shortages periodically drove food prices high enough to topple governments. By 2029, abandoned mines once considered economically worthless were reopening across Europe and North America, and companies were seriously discussing the extraction of metals from landfills. Then came 2030, when several shortages arrived close enough together to reinforce one another. Semiconductor production stalled for want of specialized metals. Grid expansion slowed just as electricity demand reached record levels. A series of poor harvests drove fertilizer prices upward. Oil briefly passed three hundred dollars a barrel. Governments imposed export restrictions to protect domestic supplies, which produced retaliatory restrictions elsewhere, and within months the intricate international machinery that transformed ores, chemicals, energy and labor into modern civilization began seizing like an engine without lubricant.

The wars were small, at first: a disputed cobalt deposit, a naval confrontation over seabed minerals, sabotage at a desalination plant, fighting along the border between two states that had peacefully shared a river for almost a century. None of these conflicts became the world war people feared, but by the end of 2030 there were eleven separate military confrontations in which access to some physical resource was either the acknowledged cause or the barely concealed one. It was during this period that an extraordinary collection of governments, universities, corporations and private foundations began pouring money into a research facility on Jan Mayen, a bleak Norwegian island in the Arctic Ocean whose principal advantages were isolation, political stability and the fact that almost nobody wanted to go there. The official explanation involved high-energy materials research. The actual project consumed more than two hundred billion dollars in eighteen months.

The first successful duplication occurred on November 17, 2031, and the object was a platinum cylinder weighing 4.2 grams. There was nothing visually dramatic about the event. No flash illuminated the laboratory and no thunder shook the building; a second cylinder simply appeared inside a sealed chamber beside the first, possessing the same dimensions, isotopic composition, microscopic scratches and internal crystalline imperfections. For seventeen minutes the scientists assumed an instrument had malfunctioned. Then they weighed both cylinders, and by sunrise they had repeated the experiment thirty-one more times. The mechanism remained only partially understood. Matter placed inside a precisely configured field could somehow serve as a template around which identical matter assembled, while the enormous energy requirement expected by every conventional physical theory simply failed to materialize. The Jan Mayen researchers eventually proposed that the machine was drawing energy, or something analogous to energy, from a domain adjacent to ordinary spacetime. Journalists would later simplify this into the phrase “dark matter between dimensions,” a description physicists despised and everyone else adopted. The important thing was that it worked.

During 2032, duplication remained among the most closely guarded secrets on Earth. The machines were enormous, unreliable and fantastically expensive, but the economics were already absurd. A single flawless crystal could become ten. A milligram of an experimental pharmaceutical compound could become kilograms. Components whose manufacture required months of precision machining could be reproduced in seconds. Space agencies quietly received engine components whose production records did not exist. Hospitals participating in supposedly unrelated clinical trials suddenly stopped reporting shortages of several rare medicines. Semiconductor manufacturers associated with the project experienced mysterious improvements in output. The scientists begged the governments involved to proceed cautiously, and the governments agreed, until someone leaked a photograph.

On May 4, 2033, a Swedish newspaper published an image showing forty-seven identical iridium components arranged on a table at Jan Mayen. Metadata attached to the original file led investigators to other documents, and within seventy-two hours the world's greatest secret became the world's greatest scandal. People understood the implications immediately. There were demonstrations outside government ministries, not because people feared the technology, but because they wanted it. Why, protesters asked, were children still dying because their parents could not afford medicine if medicine could simply be copied? Why were countries fighting over metals that could be created without mines? Why did anyone need to go hungry? Why were houses expensive? Why were governments sitting on a machine that appeared to have abolished scarcity? Late that year, under enormous political pressure, the Jan Mayen consortium acknowledged what it had created. An international nonprofit organization, the Material Abundance Foundation, was established to control duplication facilities and license their use according to humanitarian need. Its first public projects were carefully selected: insulin, antibiotics, rare surgical equipment, water purification membranes, high-performance electrical transformers and components for fusion experiments. For several months, humanity behaved responsibly.

China broke the monopoly first. Whether Chinese researchers independently reconstructed the underlying physics, obtained technical information from someone inside the Jan Mayen project, or combined fragments of leaked research with an already advanced domestic program was never conclusively established. What mattered was that in February 2034, a Chinese industrial consortium demonstrated a working duplicator at a research complex outside Chengdu. It was less efficient than the Jan Mayen machines and considerably larger, but it worked, and the knowledge required to construct it was no longer confined to a single institution. The United States demonstrated its own system four months later. India followed before the end of the year. Japan, South Korea, France, Germany and several multinational corporations announced successful systems during 2035, while simplified designs circulated through academic networks and industrial espionage made secrecy increasingly meaningless. The technology had crossed the threshold that governments feared most: duplication could now be used to manufacture the components required to manufacture more duplicators. Control became impossible.

The price of platinum collapsed first, followed by gold, lithium, cobalt, nickel, titanium, tungsten and almost every other commodity whose value derived primarily from physical scarcity. Mining companies vanished with astonishing speed. Oil prices followed when duplicators proved capable of reproducing synthetic hydrocarbons, although electricity itself became so inexpensive once reactor components, solar panels, transmission equipment and grid-scale batteries could be replicated that burning fuel increasingly seemed quaint. The economic dislocation was violent but remarkably brief, because the same technology destroying old industries was simultaneously creating abundance on a scale no economic system had previously contemplated. By 2035, the physical cost of manufacturing had approached zero. Design still mattered. Transportation still mattered. Land mattered because coordinates could not be duplicated. Human attention mattered. Experiences mattered. Reputation, creativity, expertise, entertainment and access mattered. But once somebody had constructed one functioning example of a physical object, producing the second was nearly free.

A company might spend six billion dollars designing a new aircraft and six dollars manufacturing it. An architect could spend years creating a beautiful house, after which ten million identical houses could be produced for approximately the cost of moving them to ten million building sites. Prefabricated hospitals appeared across Africa and South Asia. Desalination facilities multiplied along coastlines. Agricultural machinery became effectively free. Greenhouses covered deserts. Bridges that poorer governments had postponed for generations appeared within months. Poverty, at least as humanity had historically understood the term, began to disappear, and people bought things in astonishing quantities. At first this seemed charming. A teenager who wanted twelve pairs of shoes could have twelve pairs of shoes. A family could replace a broken refrigerator rather than repair it. Furniture became fashion. Nobody handed clothes down to younger siblings because clothing was essentially free. Restaurants stopped washing many utensils because producing new ones was cheaper. Hotels replaced mattresses monthly. Airlines periodically discarded entire cabin interiors. Consumer electronics became almost absurdly ephemeral; companies sometimes released hardware revisions every few weeks because manufacturing costs no longer justified waiting for annual product cycles, and perfectly functional devices were discarded by the billions when slightly thinner, faster or more fashionable replacements appeared. The old economic instinct toward conservation had depended upon scarcity, and scarcity was gone.

By 2036, municipal waste systems were collapsing, but physical volume was only the most visible manifestation of the problem. Rivers accumulated plastics faster than cleanup systems could remove them. Synthetic fabrics shed microscopic fibers in quantities that dwarfed twentieth-century pollution. Heavy metals leached from mountains of abandoned electronics. Cheap chemical production produced an explosion of paints, solvents, fertilizers, refrigerants and industrial compounds, many of which were released casually because replacing contaminated equipment or soil was cheaper than cleaning it. Atmospheric pollution briefly increased despite the collapse of fossil-fuel combustion, driven instead by construction dust, chemical aerosols, incineration and industrial processes operating at scales that would previously have been economically impossible. For a few years, environmental engineering experienced its own golden age. Governments duplicated filtration membranes by the square kilometer, deployed autonomous machines to collect plastics from oceans, capped contaminated soil beneath impermeable barriers, and installed enormous atmospheric scrubbers around cities. Rivers that had been polluted for generations were cleaned. Toxic industrial sites were excavated wholesale and replaced with pristine soil. Entire wetlands were reconstructed from carefully catalogued biological templates. The irony was difficult to miss: duplication was simultaneously creating unprecedented pollution and making environmental restoration astonishingly cheap.

Restoration, however, could remove contaminants from ecosystems only by putting them somewhere else. Governments tried recycling incentives and then recycling mandates, but recycling had become economically irrational. Why expend energy and labor recovering aluminum when unlimited flawless aluminum could be duplicated from a single block? Why refurbish a computer when the new model cost almost nothing? Why dismantle a washing machine for parts when every part could be reproduced independently? Recycling gradually transformed from an economic activity into a subsidized waste-management service, and even enormous subsidies could not keep pace with the material entering the system. Landfills filled in months, then weeks. The first “superdump” opened in the Australian interior in 2037. China excavated enormous disposal pits in the Gobi. The United States designated portions of Nevada for continental waste storage. Old open-pit mines became convenient receptacles, filled to their rims and covered with soil, only for new pits to be excavated beside them.

For a time, burial appeared to offer a permanent solution, and the idea was almost embarrassingly straightforward. There was no reason a landfill had to remain a landfill. Waste could be compressed into enormously dense foundations, covered beneath layers of crushed rock and duplicated soil, landscaped, and eventually built upon. A dump could become a hill; a sufficiently large dump could become a plateau. Coastal nations proposed using waste to create new land, while several governments envisioned entire artificial islands resting on compacted material that earlier generations would have considered garbage. Humanity had always reshaped the surface of the Earth, proponents argued. Duplication merely allowed it to do so faster. The problem appeared when geophysicists stopped calculating in cubic kilometers and began calculating in kilograms. Traditional waste had merely moved matter from one location on Earth to another. Duplicated waste was different. Every discarded automobile, building, appliance and kilometer of synthetic fabric represented mass that had not previously existed on Earth at all. Burial therefore did not simply rearrange the planet. It made the planet heavier.

At first the numbers were reassuring. Earth weighed approximately six sextillion tonnes. Humanity could manufacture on a scale beyond anything its ancestors had imagined and still add only an infinitesimal fraction to the planet's mass. But production was not increasing linearly. Each duplicator could create components for more duplicators, which supplied societies whose appetite for material goods was itself increasing as the psychological memory of scarcity disappeared. When researchers projected those growth curves across centuries rather than years, the results stopped being funny. Under conservative assumptions, humanity would eventually add enough mass to produce measurable changes in surface gravity. More aggressive projections showed consequences for Earth's moment of inertia and rotational dynamics as artificial landmasses accumulated unevenly across its surface. The most extreme scenarios suggested that centuries of uncontrolled duplication could measurably perturb the Earth-Moon system and, over sufficiently long periods, alter Earth's orbit. Nobody could say exactly when those thresholds would be crossed because nobody could predict consumption centuries into the future, but the conclusion was impossible to escape: Earth could not be humanity's garbage container forever, because humanity was no longer merely filling the container. It was manufacturing more container.

By 2038, consumer culture had meanwhile mutated into something earlier generations would have found pathological. Houses were no longer renovated; they were replaced. Some wealthy families changed homes seasonally, having the previous structure disassembled by autonomous machinery and carried away. Cars became disposable fashion accessories. Passenger aircraft were retired after three years. Cruise ships lasted five. Furniture sometimes lasted weeks. The average citizen of a wealthy country disposed of more physical mass in a year than a twentieth-century citizen had consumed in a lifetime, while rapidly rising living standards elsewhere meant billions more people were joining the same system. Humanity needed somewhere to put a civilization's waste that was not Earth, and fortunately duplication had also solved energy.

The Kilimanjaro Mass Driver was completed in 2039, an electromagnetic launch system climbing from equatorial Africa into a tethered orbital complex, followed by related facilities in Indonesia and Ecuador. Waste was compressed into standardized blocks, accelerated beyond Earth and placed on trajectories toward the Sun. The initial quantities were modest, but the system scaled beautifully: duplicate the launchers, duplicate the power systems, duplicate the orbital tugs, duplicate everything except the land beneath them. The solution was hailed as elegant. The Sun contained 99.8 percent of the mass of the solar system, and against something so incomprehensibly large, humanity's garbage was nothing. For a while, that was true.

The forties became the golden age of abundance. Cheap spacecraft opened the solar system. A lunar city intended for twelve thousand residents grew to two million because there was no meaningful reason not to expand it. Mars received oceans of machinery. Venus acquired floating research settlements. Asteroid mining, briefly predicted to become the next great industry, was rendered economically pointless almost before it began; humans no longer went to the asteroids for resources, but because they could. The first generation born after duplication found stories about scarcity almost incomprehensible. Teachers had to explain why people once repaired appliances. Museums displayed grocery coupons, ration cards and gasoline cans. Children laughed at videos showing people waiting overnight to purchase newly released telephones. Economists increasingly divided history into two eras, Scarcity and Abundance, and by the middle of the century the distinction seemed as fundamental as agriculture or industrialization.

By 2059, the Solar Waste Authority was launching billions of tonnes of material into the Sun every year, and the waste itself had changed. It was no longer primarily household garbage. Entire industrial complexes were disposable. Orbital habitats were replaced when superior designs became available. In 2057, Singapore Orbital Three, population 84,000, was evacuated after twenty-two years of service because its replacement offered fourteen percent more usable interior volume. Recycling the old station would have taken eighteen months, so they threw it into the Sun. The first warnings came from solar physicists. The additional mass remained microscopic relative to the Sun itself and by conventional astrophysical models should have been irrelevant, but the material entering the Sun was not behaving conventionally. Decades of duplicated matter carried subtle energetic properties associated with the extradimensional mechanism that had created it, and those effects accumulated inside the solar plasma, altering magnetic circulation in ways nobody had predicted.

Solar storms intensified. In 2061, a flare destroyed thirty percent of Earth's orbital infrastructure. In 2062, another produced auroras visible at the equator and induced currents that melted sections of the Eurasian electrical grid. In 2063 came the Carrington Event, named with grim irony after its comparatively harmless nineteenth-century predecessor. Satellites burned, lunar communications failed, hundreds of orbital habitats lost power, Earth's upper atmosphere expanded under the bombardment and dragged thousands of objects from orbit, while radiation levels across several Martian settlements exceeded emergency limits. Humanity stopped feeding the Sun, but the garbage remained. Engineers proposed destroying matter through controlled conversion, but every method either failed or produced dangerous quantities of energy. Governments attempted mandatory durability standards and limits on duplication, provoking furious public opposition. People who had spent thirty years regarding material abundance as a basic human right did not appreciate being told they could have only one new automobile per year, while industries whose entire business models depended upon perpetual redesign fought the restrictions just as fiercely.

The eventual solution seemed beautifully simple: space was enormous. A stream of autonomous tugs began carrying compressed waste beyond Neptune, accelerating it onto trajectories that would take it permanently away from the inhabited solar system. There would be no pollution, no contaminated planet, no angry voters and no dangerous interaction with the Sun. Compared with the complexities of atmospheric chemistry or stellar magnetism, throwing something into interstellar darkness seemed almost foolproof. By 2080, tens of billions of tonnes were leaving the system annually; by 2120, quadrillions were. The designers had anticipated that the waste streams would disperse through interstellar space, but because launches followed efficient trajectories and civilization produced far more waste than anyone had imagined possible, the material remained loosely concentrated. Its collective gravity became measurable, and engineers adjusted subsequent trajectories to take advantage of it. If the garbage was already attracting garbage, why fight it?

Thus began the Accretion Program. For more than a century, humanity deliberately aimed its unwanted matter toward a growing artificial body several thousand astronomical units from the Sun. Nobody regarded it as dangerous. It was impossibly distant, and its mass was still trivial by astronomical standards, until on September 3, 2185, observatories throughout the solar system detected neutrinos from the object. Hours later, the Waste Aggregate ignited. Humanity had built a star. There were celebrations, and it was difficult not to celebrate; nothing comparable had ever been accomplished. A species that two centuries earlier had struggled to place people on its own moon had manufactured enough matter to initiate stellar fusion. The new star was faint but clearly visible from Earth, a reddish point that had not existed in any ancestral sky. People named it Prometheus. Astronomers preferred WA-1.

The garbage continued because there was nowhere else for it to go, and Prometheus appeared capable of absorbing essentially unlimited quantities. New launch corridors were established. Waste from Mars, the Belt, the Jovian settlements and hundreds of orbital habitats streamed outward toward humanity's artificial star. By 2268, Prometheus had become one of the strangest objects ever observed. Its mass was increasing faster than that of any naturally forming star known to science. Its internal chemistry was absurd, containing concentrations of heavy elements that should never have existed inside a young star. More troublingly, much of its substance consisted of duplicated matter, carrying the same poorly understood extradimensional properties that had destabilized the Sun two centuries earlier. Models of its future lifespan varied wildly; some predicted millions of years, while others predicted centuries. The garbage continued.

Human civilization expanded farther. Colonies spread through the Oort Cloud and eventually to nearby stars, carrying duplicators with them because nobody seriously contemplated abandoning the technology that had ended poverty, cured resource wars, opened space and given ordinary human beings material lives once reserved for emperors. Prometheus grew behind them, and by 2654 it was dying. The phrase made little sense to the public. Stars were supposed to live for billions of years, but Prometheus had never really been a star. It was a gravitational landfill containing centuries of duplicated alloys, polymers, ceramics, hydrocarbons, radioactive isotopes, abandoned spacecraft, obsolete habitats, demolished cities, unwanted furniture, trillions of discarded machines and quantities of exotic matter that had never existed in nature. Its core convulsed, fusion migrated through unstable layers, its brightness oscillated, and great plumes of material erupted millions of kilometers into space before collapsing back upon themselves.

Humanity finally stopped sending it garbage, although by then this was approximately as useful as turning off a faucet after flooding a continent. There were proposals to dismantle Prometheus, which revealed how completely duplication had distorted human intuition. Engineers seriously discussed constructing planetary-scale engines and removing pieces of the star. Others proposed feeding it carefully selected matter to stabilize its fusion cycle. Nothing worked, and Prometheus continued collapsing. The last stage took longer than civilizations once lasted. By 2900, humanity had accepted that the artificial star would eventually undergo catastrophic gravitational collapse. By 3000, evacuation programs were underway throughout the original solar system. Earth was treated increasingly as a historical preserve rather than the center of civilization. Great archives were copied and transported outward, ecosystems were reconstructed on distant worlds, and humans debated whether abandoning Earth constituted an act of cowardice or maturity. Yet billions remained, because Earth was Earth.

In 3111, Prometheus collapsed. For several hours it became brighter than anything humanity had ever placed in the sky, and then the light vanished. At its center was a black hole. The immediate danger was not that the black hole would somehow vacuum up the solar system; gravity did not work that way, and humanity had learned enough physics to know it. The catastrophe was subtler and much worse. Prometheus had accumulated such extraordinary mass, and its long interaction with the strange physics of duplicated matter had altered its trajectory so substantially, that the newly formed black hole was already gravitationally bound to the Sun. The two objects began falling toward one another, and there was no meaningful way to stop them.

The final evacuation lasted generations. Most of humanity escaped, scattering outward toward colonies whose duplicators ensured that no settlement would ever lack food, medicine, machinery or shelter. Some refused to leave Earth. Others remained deliberately on Mars, Luna and the old orbital cities, arguing that a civilization should have witnesses at its own funeral. Eventually the black hole passed through the outer solar system. Planetary orbits distorted. Neptune was expelled first, Uranus followed, and Jupiter's moons scattered. Earth experienced years in which seasons arrived at the wrong times and constellations visibly shifted as the planet's orbit stretched into a fatal ellipse. Then the Sun and Prometheus met.

Humanity watched from other stars, although the images took years to arrive. In the final recordings, the Sun elongated into an incandescent stream around the darkness humanity had made, spilling across millions of kilometers before disappearing beyond the event horizon. The planets followed according to the mathematics of their ruined orbits. Earth survived longer than expected, circling the growing black hole through several increasingly eccentric revolutions before finally vanishing into it. Fourteen billion human beings watched the delayed transmission. There was no monument to Earth afterward because monuments had become strangely unfashionable.

There was, however, a small museum on a planet orbiting Tau Ceti. Its oldest exhibit was protected behind several layers of transparent material and guarded continuously, although the object itself was worthless. It was a platinum cylinder weighing 4.2 grams. Beside it sat another, perfectly identical. The placard explained that nobody knew which one was the original.

NRJ (nrj.ie) joins Field Notes and Radar Signals as observational streams into Marshall on Policy.

Accumulated briefings in Marshall on Policy are transferred to and elaborated on Brief Me. From January 2027 onwards The ConTXT will place the content of Brief Me in context with current events.

For the last several years, I have been an online musician of the indie type. I have gotten so much marketing (even this morning) about image, brand, yada, yada. Have you ever looked up what brand means?

“What is a brand name, Google?”

What a Brand Is vs. What It Is Not

Many people confuse a brand with design elements.

• Not a brand: A logo, a color palette, a website design, or a slogan. According to theAmerican Marketing Association, these are visual assets and marketing tools, not the brand itself. 
• The actual brand: As defined onWikipedia, a brand is the intangible collection of memories, emotions, and expectations a customer associates with a seller. It is what people say about you when you are not in the room.

Core Components of a Brand * Customer Experience: Every interaction a person has with your company—from answering a phone call to unboxing a product. * Identity and Personality: The distinct human traits and values assigned to a business (for example, rugged and bold, or sleek and modern). * Promise: The unspoken guarantee of quality, consistency, and value a customer expects every time they choose you. 

Why Brands Matter

• Differentiation: They help people instantly tell your product apart from cheaper or generic competitors.
• Trust and Loyalty: Strong emotional connections make customers stick with a company over time.
• Economic Value: Recognized brands command higher prices and build long-term financial worth.

Blunt talk with Kelly K. 

Listen, I’ll be blunt. If you happen to be thinking about this stuff while writing a song, you are thinking about the wrong stuff unless your song is about brands. Then send it my way. If you are advertising your music using “consistency, trust, loyalty, value” as guideposts, what the hell are you doing? Art isn’t economical, even cheap art. We do it because we love it, I thought. But marketers out there want me to feel like an entrepreneur, and I most certainly am not that, pardon your French. I am a music contractor, that’s all. That’s all I want, and I got it.

The big consistency lie.

Many of these marketers will harp on “consistency.” They don’t know the meaning of the word. They are looking for quick bucks with you. Ever think about who needs consistency? Corporations love it.  But does any kind of art? Even the most consistently cool artists like Miles Davis invented a new genre every decade or so. That is not consistent. He was hell on promoters, tour managers, and women. He was a nightmare in many regards. Very turbulent. One of the best. Never consistent. 

Bob Dylan doesn’t have a consistent bone in his body. He does whatever the hell he wants. 70’s Dylan is my favorite. But it is very much different than other decades in his career. To call Bob Dylan consistent is a bold-faced lie. He can’t even find a consistent guitar player.

Those have been among my favorite musicians in my whole life. Not consistent, so I haven’t worried about that in years.

But you know who was consistent? Elvis.

Elvis Presley couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag. 

“What Elvis songs did Elvis write, Google?”

Elvis Presley did not write his own music, but he is credited as a genuine co-writer on just two tracks: "That's Someone You Never Forget" and "You'll Be Gone." 

The Truth About Elvis's Credits

• Real Co-Writes: Elvis helped conceptualize or write lyrics for "That's Someone You Never Forget" (with Red West) and "You'll Be Gone" (with Red West and Charlie Hodge). 
• Fake Credits for Hits: Early hits like "Heartbreak Hotel," "Don't Be Cruel," and "All Shook Up" list Elvis as a co-writer, but he did not actually write them. His manager, Colonel Tom Parker, demanded writer credits and royalties for Elvis as a condition of him recording the tracks. 
• His Own View: Elvis openly admitted this practice, stating in interviews that he got credit just for recording a song which "makes me look smarter than I am." 

Ladies and germs, Elvis is a true brand name. Not only did he have some kind of factory going for crappy old hits, he had a very capitalist manager. His manager is still known to some as a marketing “genius”, (gag a maggot) .. Enter: “The Colonel” Tom Parker.

Tom Parker, Music, Brands.

Tom Parker had a mysterious background involving immigration, citizenship, and traveling. He was an illegal Dutch immigrant. Many think this played a significant role in explaining later actions. Why he was scared to leave the country. Even why he was sued by the Elvis estate after Elvis died. But there’s no doubt, he came up with clever cash delivery vehicles. 

Once such method involved buttons. He had buttons that say “I love Elvis” made. He also had buttons that say “I hate Elvis” made. He knew how to market Elvis to folks who hated him and profit from them. See, Tom Parker was a music version of a micro-targeter. In fact, I venture to say, he would have loved micro-targeting. I wonder if he helped invent micro-targeting in some thought process kind of way. Micro-targeting is data-driven, but the concept behind it is a lot like those buttons.

If you don’t want to write songs and swing your hips and you want to hire a manager you are going to fire and even sue for robbing you later on, by all means, call yourself a brand. But if you want to write songs and relate to folks, brands do not do that. People do.

Maybe we’re all terribly lonely, anyone ever thought of that? And it’s by design?

Being lonely makes us consumers, the crowd, the target audience, and it makes us predictable. This is all wonderful stuff for brands with a data contractor. They have tons to dig up from our private lives and throw in our face, guaranteeing a response. They have recognition and years of being in business despite not being the same businesses years ago. Some folks won’t even hang out with folks who like different “brands” of music, politics, church, even food, or home goods. One person didn’t talk to me anymore because I ate at a chain owned by MAGA’s. Fried chicken, I am going to MAGA’s for fried chicken. If there’s any one thing I trust them for, it is that. I think MAGA’s making southern fried chicken is a good use of MAGA skills. Why would I not support that? Plus, I live in Texas. I couldn’t even get power to the house if I boycotted every MAGA, silly asses.

The way they do it.

A demographic is a specific group of people or a set of statistical characteristics used to describe a human population. 

What Tom Parker and everyone in business and politics want is demographics. These folks want to know what their average customer looks like, what color they are, what church they go to, the sexes are a biggie, where they live, and age too. Demographics are a marketing tool that helps you know where you are doing good and where you could focus. Politicians and businesses alike will customize their message depending on who you are. They essentially say one thing to white women and another thing to black men. Now, keep in mind, I don’t think this is wrong. I don’t necessarily think white women and black men need the same message. Having said that, it is entirely possible they don’t need the same politician, either. If we are talking music especially. Those two crowds are not listening to the same stations. But it’d sure be easier to sell them both songs if they did. Politics is like that.

The point is out there about musicians and brand now. Let’s bring it home.

What do you think being a musician is?

The best way I can tell you to figure out what you want in music is to figure out what someone you like did, and do that your own way. Much like writing a tune might inspire another, careers in music do this too. We used to have apprenticeships to guarantee music for folks when we die, but recording and other factors tore down taking other younger folks in and showing them around on nice stuff. This is a shame. I am very grateful to all the “boomers” who worked with me and showed me anything. I’d be crap without that, and better with more of it.

To me, being a musician is that. It’s teaching. To you? It might be industry. It might be escape. It could be simply something to do. Only one of those things out of anything I can think of is a “Brand Name.”  So while marketers are keen to tell you about brands, they are hoping to resonate with your frustration, not your aspirations.  So many musicians seem weary and frustrated; they think industry is a way to get more people. What musicians do not realize is this mentality makes them vulnerable to micro-targeting. 

It’s not about music, it’s about being lonesome.

If you are lonely, you are vulnerable. It doesn’t matter how smart, how talented, how chipper. It matters how lonely. That is their invitation.

Maybe avoid marketers and work on the lonesome issue? Just a thought.

Thanks.

Kelly Kintner

The Horse’s Mouth Magazine

While I was landing, I looked over at San Jose from the airplane, and I felt a similar pang of sadness. Every time I’ve come back here, it has felt less strong, and I guess I feel like a lot of it is probably because of my memories here with my ex and her family. And every time I have faced it, it has been more and more quiet. I also think part of me just doesn’t really like this city too much, but I’m glad that things are getting easier. It’s also a little bit weird because for the first time, a friend is not available to hang out, usually I hang out with two specific friends when I come up here for two days, and both of them are gone for business trips. I’m going to be interested seeing what I do with my time.

5.

Une scène terrible. Ma mère en travers d’une porte, empêchant mon père de sortir. Elle crie elle pleure. J’ai peur, je me cache sous la table. Mon père partait souvent, parfois pendant des semaines, il se rendait dans des villages loin, dans la forêt pour je ne sais quelles activités. Ma mère, dans un lit, son abondante chevelure brune aux reflets cuivrés répandue autour de son visage comme une auréole de sainte. On ne doit pas faire de bruit. Maman est en dépression.

Le père de ma grand mère était mort. Sa grande maison brûlée. Pillées les récoltes, les hangars détruits. Décidément, ma famille ne retrouverait jamais ni ses terres ni ses biens. C’était fini, terminé. Hanoï tombée, le Viêt Nam était virtuellement coupé en deux, un accord de coopération militaire fut signé entre la France et ce qui subsistait de l’Indochine.

La famille dépendait à présent essentiellement de l’argent continuant par bonheur à arriver de la métropole.

#nguolai

Inbetweeners Part 3- The Grey Room

The Grey Room is where the player characters first spawn at the beginning of the Inbetweener's Campaign after they are resurrected by the Interloper. Here is the description given of the room in the original document:

“The room is a perfect square, its walls made of smooth, cold stone that seems to absorb light and sound, making everything feel slightly muted. There are no visible light sources but you are able to see, as if the entire room is cast in twilight. In the center of the room is a large iron chest with no top.

Each of the four walls has a single door, each distinctly different from the others:

Northern Door: This door is made of dark, weathered wood, bound with heavy iron bands that are rusted with age. The door has a faint green hue to it.

Eastern Door: The eastern door stands out with its intricate design of interwoven silver and gold, forming a complex pattern of celestial symbols and stars. It seems almost to shimmer in the dim light, and there is a palpable sense of magic emanating from it. A faint, melodic hum can be heard when you get close, like the distant sound of a lullaby. This door has a vibrant, almost blinding red hue.

Southern Door: This door is the simplest of all, made of plain, sturdy oak. It has no adornments except for a large, iron ring handle. There are noticeable scratches and dents, suggesting it has been used frequently. A faint smell of earth and dampness wafts from it, giving the impression that it might lead to an underground passage or a cellar. The door has a faint green hue

Western Door: The door made of crystal is a breathtaking marvel, almost seeming to be a piece of art rather than a mere entryway. It stands tall and proud, crafted entirely from a single, immense slab of clear crystal that catches and refracts the dim light in the room, casting a myriad of colors and dancing reflections across the grey walls and floor. This door has a rich, violet hue. “

We will get into what the color hues mean in a separate post on the doors. The Grey Room at first seems like a nondescript tutorial room, but it is much much more. It is the heart of the Interloper's sandbox. He is able to control its size, and can make it as small as a shoebox or more massive than a mountain. When the players deliver the Interloper various specimens or items they collect, something appears in the room to take it. Sometimes a slot opens in the wall, other times a robotic or biotic hand comes down from the ceiling. Sometimes it is just a hole in liminal space. The Interloper has almost complete control in this room, and is only threatened if a force like the Protectors of the Weave arrives with specialized tech that dampens his powers.

The doors in the Grey Room branch out to the various “rooms” the players explore, so it serves as a sort of base camp for the players. They would frequently return to it to rest, regroup, heal, etc. It also served as a storage space. Since the Interloper could expand it at will, there was theoretically no limit to how much loot players could bring back to the Grey Room. Initially this was of great interest to them, but later on they began to realize with how they traveled material wealth wasn't really all that necessary. Players also used it for various projects. Setting up experimental gardens, cultivating spell components, trapping prisoners, etc. One more interesting use was a dilemma they faced where Bee People were threatened by druids seeking to wipe them out as they are abominations. The goal was to force the players to make a morally grey choice. Either kill druids and rangers intent on protecting nature or allow them to slaughter innocent Bee People. The players opted for a third option, they took the Beeple into the Grey Room, their entire hive, to then transport them somewhere safe.

One plot hole you might ask about though is, how did the players get other sentient beings into the Grey Room? Only the players themselves travel nonlinearly, so a door that takes them to the Grey Room should presumably take anyone else to just whatever is normally on the other side of that door. Well, the Interloper thought of that and gave the players amulets to get new “participants” or “specimens” to wear so that they could be brought back to the Grey Room. For example, the players ended up in a mage's study, and knocked him unconscious, put an amulet on him and took him to the Grey Room to be studied. However, the players got clever, and realized they could pass an amulet back and forth to quickly get hundreds of sentient beings through a portal to the Grey Room. So add refugee camp to the list.

The Interloper himself doesn't physically exist in the Grey Room, but appears to be “above” it, creating a stair case for guests to go visit him directly. However, he wasn't really above it, but rather all around and through it, suffusing it. The Interloper in a way IS the Grey Room, or at least it is an extension of his will. Many great scenes and interactions in the campaign happened in the Grey Room. Eventually a fifth door appeared in the Grey Room leading to a new series of rooms... we will get to that in another post.

Initially the Grey Room was attached to four doors. One door took the players to a tavern cellar. Another to a hallway that was occasionally patrolled by a half dragon mercenary. The third led directly to Zariel's War Room (terrifying that level 1 players could immediately access a space with a CR 26 devil lord and her high powered minions). The last door only worked if a holy symbol was held up to it, and then it took them to the temple of that diety/faith. The players used this to visit the Temple of Torm, where they were connected with the Shadow of Torm, a darker organization that served Torm in morally grey areas by killing fiends and undead. The players organized an ambush in the Grey Room where the top members of the Shadow of Torm ambushed and killed Zariel. Unfortuntaely for them, they were unaware the Interloper had made a deal with Zariel and gave her the immortality parasite, so in the end the leader of the Shadow of Torm was killed instead. His ghost haunted the Grey Room for some time after that.

The ultimate fate of the Grey Room was that it had to be abandon after the invasion by the Protectors of the Weave. When the players freed the Interloper they were temporarily imprisoned in the Grey Room along with the Interloper, Arakanos, the Jailer (reconstituted), the Dragon abomination, Grandma Nettles, and countless creations the Interloper made out of dead or destroyed Protectors of the Weave soldiers and golems. The Protectors had failed to overwhelm and kill the Interloper so instead chose to keep him trapped in the Grey Room so he'd diminish over time. If it hadn't been for the players he would've remained trapped there indefinitely. When the Interloper was freed, he created countless Grey Rooms across the multiverse, metastizing himself so he would not be as easy to excise the next time.

The players would encounter the Grey Room one more time in a dungeon crafted by the Lady of Pain called the Lady's Gauntlet, but this wasn't the real Grey Room but rather a copy of it.

The clock tower is the detail that sticks. In the hills of Guian New Area, in China's south-western province of Guizhou, there is a cluster of buildings done up in a kind of continental European pastiche: red roofs, arcaded facades, a multi-arched bridge, and a tower with a clock on it. When AFP visited in July 2026 the whole confection was emitting a low, permanent hum. It is not a resort or a theme park. It is Huawei's largest data centre, and the hum is the sound of several hundred megawatts of cooling and compute doing whatever it is that compute does.

Outside it, on the road, street vendors were selling lunch to data centre workers beneath a banner exhorting everyone to promote high-quality development. A shopkeeper named Shu Peihua told the news agency what the change had felt like from ground level. It used to be a barren mountain, Shu said, but since the area has developed, transportation has become more convenient, trade has picked up, business opportunities have emerged. Another resident, Li Xixiu, put it more plainly still: the centres had really boosted the economy of this entire area, and the villagers in the neighbourhood now find jobs nearby, where before they had to go to other places.

Hold on to those two statements, because they are true. They are also, in the way that ground-level truths often are, an incomplete account of what has happened to Guizhou. In the same report, researchers at Taiwan's Research Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology laid a different set of numbers beside them. Guizhou has averaged 7.4 per cent annual GDP growth over the past decade. Its wage growth over the same period was second to last in the country. And the province, having borrowed heavily to build the roads, substations and fibre that make it attractive to a hyperscaler, now carries one of the highest debt burdens in China.

That is the puzzle. A place where the growth arrived and the prosperity did not.

What the Ledger Actually Says

The DSET analysis is worth reading slowly, because it separates two things that boosters routinely fuse. Data centres, the researchers found, drive heavy investment in land and equipment, but their impact on boosting local per capita income remains limited. Investment is not income. Capital formation is not a wage. A billion yuan of servers sitting in a shed in Guian counts towards provincial output in exactly the way that a billion yuan of anything else does, and it counts whether or not a single additional person in Guizhou is better paid as a result.

The debt side is starker. By 2024, according to DSET's figures, Guizhou ranked thirtieth among China's provincial-level jurisdictions on debt-to-revenue and twenty-seventh on debt-to-GDP. There are thirty-one of them. This is not a province that dabbled at the edges of the borrowing economy; it went in at the deep end and stayed. The South China Morning Post has reported that Guizhou's outstanding government debt in 2023 amounted to around 72 per cent of provincial GDP, well above the 60 per cent threshold the central government treats as prudent, after years of hefty infrastructure spending on projects that did not all deliver what local officials hoped.

Andrew Stokols of Singapore Management University offered AFP the general version of the finding. Data centres, he said, do not necessarily create a huge spillover effect on local jobs, and immediate benefits have been elusive, in China and elsewhere.

Elsewhere is the operative word. The Guizhou story reads as if it were about Chinese state planning, provincial competition and the peculiarities of local government financing vehicles, and in part it is. But strip away the Chinese institutional furniture and what remains is a much more general fact about a particular kind of asset: enormously expensive to build, almost costless in labour to run, and structurally disinclined to share.

How a Poor Province Became a Server Farm

Guizhou did not stumble into this. It went looking.

The province is mountainous, landlocked, historically among China's poorest, and for most of the reform era its principal export was people. Karst topography makes farming hard and heavy industry harder. What it has is altitude, a cool and stable climate, geological stability, cheap land and a lot of hydropower. In 2016 Beijing designated Guizhou as the country's first national big data comprehensive pilot zone. Guiyang, the provincial capital, began hosting an annual international big data expo. Apple's Chinese iCloud operation was routed through a facility in Guian built with the state-backed operator Guizhou-Cloud Big Data. Tencent went in. So did Huawei, at scale.

In 2021 the strategy got a name, and in February 2022 it got a budget. Eastern Data, Western Computing, or 东数西算, is the National Development and Reform Commission's programme to build eight national computing hubs and ten national data centre clusters, siting the compute-heavy, latency-tolerant workloads of China's digital economy in the energy-rich, land-rich, underpopulated west while the east keeps the customers. The hubs sit in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, the Yangtze River Delta, the Greater Bay Area, the Chengdu-Chongqing corridor, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Gansu and Guizhou. The NDRC's own projection was that the hubs and clusters would drive roughly 400 billion yuan of investment a year.

The logic is not stupid. AI training is brutally energy-hungry and largely indifferent to a few dozen milliseconds of latency. China has ordered that data centres draw 80 per cent of their power from renewable sources by the end of the decade, and the west is where the wind and the sun and the water are. Simeng Deng of Rystad Energy told AFP that the facilities help absorb the surplus of renewable power generation, which is a real service: western China curtails a great deal of clean electricity it cannot move east fast enough. China is on course to nearly double its data centre capacity within five years.

There is a wrinkle in the clean-power story that deserves stating. Guizhou is a hydropower province, but it is also a coal province. Its grid leans hard on thermal generation, and leans harder when the reservoirs are low. Between 2020 and 2024 the clean share of Guizhou's generation actually fell by five percentage points, one of the steepest declines in China, as fossil output grew faster than total generation. The 80 per cent renewable target is a target, not a description. And the curtailed wind and solar that western data centres are meant to soak up is curtailed partly because transmission out of the west is inadequate, which is the same infrastructure gap that made siting compute there attractive in the first place. The policy is elegantly circular: build the load where the power is stranded, because the power is stranded.

For a province like Guizhou, the pitch to Beijing and to the market was straightforward. We have the power. We have the land. We will build the rest. And it did build the rest, with borrowed money, which is the part of the sentence that ended up mattering most.

The Machine That Employs Almost Nobody

The single most useful piece of evidence on what a hyperscale facility does to the place around it was published this month, and it is not about China at all.

In a working paper dated 7 August 2026, Dany Bahar of Brown University and Greg C. Wright of the University of California, Merced set out to test the spillover claim directly. Their opening line is the thesis: a hyperscale data centre can cost more than a billion dollars while employing only a few dozen people. Using a registry of 341 hyperscale facilities in the United States, assembled from a Pacific Northwest National Laboratory atlas, operator announcements, subsidy records and state filings, they asked whether that investment propagates outward through the three classic channels economists expect: a deeper shared labour pool, denser supplier linkages, and firm clustering with knowledge spillovers.

Their method is elegant. Because operators screen sites for power, land and fibre, the places that get a data centre are systematically unlike the places that do not, which wrecks naive before-and-after comparisons. So Bahar and Wright compare the immediate vicinity of a completed facility against the surrounding area at the same site, and separately compare 341 built campuses against 84 hyperscale projects that were publicly announced and never constructed. Satellite imagery does the dating: land clearing and night-time lights mark the moment construction begins.

At the parcel, the effect is enormous and unmistakable. Night-time lights rise by 38 per cent within the first kilometre when construction starts. Vegetation clears. The place is visibly transformed. And then, moving outward, the signal decays to approximately nothing by five kilometres. Announced projects that were never built show no comparable change, which is the control working exactly as intended.

Beyond the fence line, the findings are a sustained deflation. Advertised salaries do not rise; the authors can rule out any increase above 5.5 per cent. New firm registrations and business applications do not rise, with upper bounds of 1.6 and 5.7 per cent. Supplier job postings rise by 5.9 per cent, but the confidence interval runs from a 15 per cent decline to a 32 per cent increase, which is a polite way of saying the data cannot tell. County-level data-processing employment rises 26 per cent and establishments 27 per cent, but that category includes the facility itself, and related industries show no consistent response. Compute-using firms are indeed found near data centres, but 69 per cent of them were already there before the nearest facility opened. Nearby rents may rise a few per cent, imprecisely. Multifamily permitting does not rise. Net migration does not rise. Foot traffic and commercial spending show no robust change. Residential electricity prices, in their US sample, do not rise either.

The summary sentence is one that ought to be pinned above every county planning committee and every provincial development office on earth: at this scale, the sites are transformed, but there is little evidence of a new local cluster.

That is Guizhou's 7.4 per cent GDP growth and its second-from-bottom wage growth, derived independently, on the other side of the Pacific, from satellites and job adverts.

Two Kinds of Job, and the Gap Between Them

The employment arithmetic is not hidden. It is simply presented in a way that encourages people to add the wrong numbers together.

A hyperscale build is a construction event of genuine magnitude. Industry staffing analyses drawing on the Uptime Institute's 2024 Global Data Center Survey put a 100 megawatt campus at roughly 850 construction workers across an eighteen-month build. These are the industry's own numbers, published by recruiters who profit from the boom, which makes their shape more telling rather than less. That is real money moving through a local economy: rented rooms, diesel, lunch, aggregate, portaloos. It is also, by design, temporary. When the last commissioning engineer drives away, a fully built 100 megawatt hyperscale campus typically retains somewhere between one hundred and two hundred permanent on-site staff.

The gap between those two figures is where the political trouble lives. A community is shown the construction number, experiences the construction number, and then is left with the operations number, which is smaller by an order of magnitude and often filled by specialists who commute or relocate rather than by the people who used to work the mountain.

Guizhou has a particular reason to feel that gap keenly. For three decades the province's most reliable export was working-age adults, sent to the factory belts of Guangdong and Zhejiang, leaving behind the phenomenon that Chinese social policy calls left-behind children. Li Xixiu's observation that villagers can now find work nearby is, in that context, an enormous statement. It is also one that depends on which phase of the project you are standing in. Construction employment for a build-out of dozens of facilities can run for years, and while it runs, it looks like a structural change to the local labour market. It is not one.

Ireland offers the cleanest illustration in the world, because the Irish state publishes both sides. The Central Statistics Office found that data centres consumed 22 per cent of all metered electricity in the Republic in 2024, and 23 per cent in 2025. The Department of Enterprise's own assessment, which dates from 2018, put direct employment at roughly 1,800 people, with a further 1,900 a year in related construction, the latter figure supplied by the Construction Industry Federation. Slightly less than a quarter of a national grid, in exchange for a direct workforce that would fit comfortably into a mid-sized secondary school. The jobs number is eight years older than the electricity number, which tells its own story about what gets counted. The Commission for Regulation of Utilities has rewritten connection policy to favour applicants who bring their own dispatchable generation or storage and can offer demand flexibility. Ireland is not hostile to the industry. It simply ran out of grid before it ran out of enthusiasm.

Loudoun County, and Why Guizhou Cannot Copy It

There is one place where the bargain has unambiguously worked for residents, and it is worth understanding precisely why, because the reason does not travel.

Loudoun County, Virginia, hosts the densest concentration of data centres on the planet. Its fiscal 2027 budget anticipates roughly 417 million dollars in real property tax from data centre buildings and about 879 million dollars in personal property tax on the servers and equipment inside them, nearly 1.3 billion dollars in total, or 45 per cent of the county's nearly 2.9 billion dollars in tax revenue, from a county of about 440,000 people. Industry-adjacent analysis by Mangum Economics for the Northern Virginia Technology Council estimates that without that revenue, residential property tax rates would have to rise by 91 per cent, nearly double, costing a typical homeowner some 5,800 dollars a year. The average completed facility employs about 50 people.

Loudoun is not a story about labour spillovers. Bahar and Wright would predict, correctly, that the wage effects there are muted. Loudoun is a story about a fiscal linkage: a local government with the legal power to tax the equipment inside the building, annually, at high value, and to spend the proceeds on its own schools and roads.

Almost nowhere else has arranged things that way. In the United States, at least thirty-five states now offer tax incentives aimed specifically at data centres, with cumulative awards approaching twenty billion dollars by the authors' tally from the Good Jobs First subsidy tracker. Good Jobs First's own analysis of eleven data centre megadeals found an average public cost of about 1.95 million dollars per permanent job, with the largest single per-job subsidy, 6.4 million dollars, awarded by North Carolina to Apple. The organisation's recommendation was that all state and local subsidies combined be capped at 50,000 dollars per permanent job. Set against 1.95 million, that recommendation reads less like policy advice than like an intervention.

Guizhou's structural problem is that it has neither Loudoun's tax handle nor the option of declining the deal. Chinese local governments do not levy a meaningful recurring property tax. Their revenue historically came from land sales and from off-balance-sheet borrowing through local government financing vehicles, which build the roads and substations and repay the loans out of the growth the roads and substations are supposed to produce. When a province competes for a hyperscaler by discounting power, discounting land and building the grid connection itself, it has converted the fiscal linkage from an asset into a liability before the first rack is energised. The investment lands. The debt service lands. The wage bill, being tiny, lands somewhere between the two and barely registers.

An Enclave With Better Cooling

Development economists have a name for this shape, and it is much older than the cloud.

Albert Hirschman argued in 1958 that the developmental value of an industry lies not in its size but in its linkages: backward, to the suppliers it pulls into existence, and forward, to the industries that add value to its output. In a 1977 essay on staple exports he generalised the scheme, adding the fiscal linkage, meaning the public revenue an industry generates, and the consumption linkage, meaning the local demand created by the wages it pays. An enclave economy is what you get when all four are weak. The classic cases are extractive: a capital-intensive mine or oil field employing very few people relative to its contribution to output, importing its equipment, exporting its product, and touching the surrounding economy mainly through a fenced perimeter and a haul road. UNCTAD's work on extractive industries describes exactly this combination, capital-intensive, labour-light, linkage-poor, as the reason resource wealth so often fails to convert into local development.

A hyperscale data centre is an unusually pure specimen. Its backward linkages are global: the GPUs come from a handful of foundries, the transformers and chillers from specialist manufacturers, the network gear from a shortlist. Bahar and Wright's inconclusive supplier estimates are what you would expect from an industry that buys almost nothing locally except concrete, security and landscaping. Its forward linkages are, by construction, non-local: the entire premise of Eastern Data, Western Computing is that the value-added services consuming the compute stay two thousand kilometres east. Its consumption linkage is capped by a payroll of dozens. And its fiscal linkage is the one variable that policy can actually set, which is precisely why competition between jurisdictions tends to bid it towards zero.

This is not an argument that data centres are bad. It is an argument that they are a particular category of thing, and that the category has a well-documented behaviour which the promotional literature systematically ignores. Guizhou did not misunderstand data centres. It understood them as a growth engine, which they are, and hoped they would also be a development engine, which they largely are not.

The Racks That Nobody Rented

The second Guizhou problem is that a good deal of the capital did not even deliver the compute.

In March 2025, MIT Technology Review reported that of the more than five hundred data centre projects announced across China in 2023 and 2024, at least 150 had been completed by the end of 2024, and that local publications were reporting up to 80 per cent of new computing capacity sitting idle. GPU rental prices collapsed accordingly: an eight-GPU Nvidia H100 server that had commanded around 180,000 yuan a month fell to about 75,000.

The DSET researchers Angela Glowacki and Cartus Bo-Xiang You, writing for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's Strategist in May 2026, mapped the same problem onto the western build specifically. By 2024, 633 hyperscale and large data centres had been built and made operational under Eastern Data, Western Computing, lifting national computing capacity to 268 exaflops. Some western facilities, they wrote, sit empty, with utilisation rates as low as 20 to 30 per cent, a far cry from the original policy goal of more than 60 per cent. Beijing has since restated that all data centres should run at no less than 60 per cent utilisation, and that no new large or super-large facilities should be built in cities where existing ones operate below 50 per cent.

The reasons are mundane and instructive. Remote regions lacked the fibre-optic cables needed to move large volumes of data in real time, forcing operators to spend more on transmission than the model assumed. Renewable curtailment in the western region still exceeds 30 per cent, which undercuts the cheap-clean-power premise. Many facilities were built on the assumption that state-owned enterprises and government agencies would buy the compute, and that demand did not fully arrive. Inter-governmental competition produced speculative overbuilding, and more than a hundred state-backed projects have been scrapped in the past eighteen months against eleven cancellations in the whole of 2023.

Guian, to be fair, is at the better end of this distribution. Local reporting in August 2026 put first-half electricity consumption growth in the new area at 33.7 per cent year on year, on a total of 3.12 billion kilowatt-hours through late June, with big data operations alone consuming 1.93 billion of that, up 52.2 per cent. Guian is busy. But an idle rack and a busy rack impose the same debt service, and a province cannot know which it has bought until several years after it has paid.

Who Actually Pays the Bill

If the benefits are concentrated at the parcel and diffuse to nothing by five kilometres, the costs run in the opposite direction. They start at the parcel and travel.

A 2026 arXiv preprint by Danbo Chen, Zijun Zhou, Yongyang Cai, Jiahong Qin, Ani Katchova and Lei Chen models this directly, coupling language-model analysis of corporate compute plans with energy-system modelling. It projects that electricity consumption by the six largest AI firms will rise from roughly 118 terawatt hours in 2024 to between 239 and 295 terawatt hours by 2030, about one per cent of global power demand, with more than 90 per cent of new capacity landing in North America, Western Europe and Asia-Pacific. Crucially, the burden is not evenly distributed. The authors construct a Power Stress Index and find values above 0.25 in Oregon, Virginia and Ireland, while diversified grids in Texas and Japan absorb the load more comfortably. Their conclusion is that AI infrastructure has become a structural component of power-system dynamics rather than a marginal load, which means it now has to be planned for rather than merely connected.

Water follows the same logic. A preprint by Yuelin Han, Pengfei Li, Adam Wierman and Shaolei Ren, revised in March 2026, estimates that if 2024 water-use intensity persists, US data centres could collectively require between 697 and 1,451 million gallons per day by 2030, comparable to New York City's entire supply. Even assuming aggressive efficiency gains of 10 per cent a year, the range is 227 to 604 million gallons daily. Associated public water infrastructure costs reach roughly ten billion dollars, rising to fifty-eight billion under high-growth scenarios. Their central observation is the one that matters here: these impacts are highly concentrated on communities hosting data centres. The compute is national. The reservoir is not.

Memphis has become the American shorthand for what concentration looks like when it goes wrong. The NAACP, the Southern Environmental Law Center and Earthjustice sued xAI in April 2026 over the operation of 27 unpermitted methane gas turbines in Southaven, Mississippi, effectively a power plant assembled to feed the Colossus 2 facility. This is an airshed where Shelby County in Tennessee and DeSoto County in Mississippi have both received an F grade for ozone from the American Lung Association. The plaintiffs include residents of the Whitehaven and Boxtown neighbourhoods of South Memphis, downwind. The Department of Justice has since intervened on xAI's side. The turbine count, meanwhile, never stopped rising. The plaintiffs went back to court on 6 May 2026 seeking an emergency order to halt operations, and the installations continued regardless: by mid-July, correspondence between xAI's environmental consultant and Mississippi regulators, obtained by Reuters through a public records request, documented 59 unpermitted turbines, at least 57 of them at Southaven, roughly double the number the company had publicly acknowledged. The resolution took the most direct form available: Mississippi's Permit Board had already approved a permanent 1.2 gigawatt plant of 41 turbines on the same ground in March 2026, a month before the suit was filed, and on 31 July xAI agreed a schedule to strip the temporary machines out of the Stanton Road site, beginning in August 2026 and finishing by July 2027. The fight over unpermitted temporary turbines has been settled by making the power station permanent and lawful in the same airshed, breathed by the same people, which is the tell that it was never really about permits. Whatever the litigation concludes, the geography of the dispute is the point: the model is trained everywhere and the generation sits in one postcode, with permission now to stay there.

What Happens When You Ask

There is a final piece of the research picture, and it is a strange one, which is what makes it interesting.

In a preprint first posted in November 2025, Zhifeng Wu, Yuelin Han and Shaolei Ren asked whether large language models could stand in for community consultation on data centre projects. They built a framework that polls AI agents, prompted with local demographic and geographic context, on how they would respond to a proposed facility, and compared the output against real human survey data. The agents identified water usage and utility bills as the dominant concerns and tax revenue as the principal perceived benefit. Responses varied meaningfully depending on which model was used and where the hypothetical project sat. And, notably, the synthetic responses aligned substantially with findings from actual human surveys. The authors propose it as an efficient early-stage instrument for folding neighbourhood perspectives into siting decisions before the plans harden.

You can read that finding two ways, and both are uncomfortable. The optimistic reading is that we now have a cheap way to anticipate what a community will object to, months before the first hearing, at a stage when the design can still change. The bleak reading is that the industry has arrived at a technique for simulating consent, and that the reason such a technique is attractive is that the genuine article is expensive, slow and increasingly likely to say no.

The Guizhou villagers quoted by AFP were not polled, synthetically or otherwise. They were asked a question by a passing reporter and answered it honestly, which is a different exercise from being consulted before a decision. Nothing in the Eastern Data, Western Computing framework required anyone in Guian to be asked whether the mountain should become a campus, and it is worth being clear that this is not solely a feature of the Chinese system. Across the United States, the same decision is routinely taken under non-disclosure agreements and by-right zoning, and communities learn what has been approved after the approval.

Note also what the agents converged on. Water. Bills. Tax revenue. Not wages. Not careers. Not the long-run transformation of the local labour market. Even a synthetic public, prompted to reason about a data centre, does not appear to expect it to be a jobs programme. The expectation gap that Guizhou is living through is largely one that promoters created and that residents, given a moment to think, do not fully share.

What Shu Peihua Is Describing

So return to the shopkeeper on the road outside Huawei's clock tower, because nothing in the preceding sections makes what Shu Peihua said untrue.

The road is real. In a karst province where a mountain village might once have been two hours from a trunk route, a dual carriageway built to carry transformers and chilled water plant is a permanent improvement to the lives of everyone along it. The universities are real; a local vendor told AFP that two had been established since the facilities went in. The customers are real, and so is Li Xixiu's point that people find work nearby now instead of boarding a train to Guangdong. Guizhou has been one of the great exporters of migrant labour in modern China, with all the social cost that implies, and a family that stays together because a parent can get a security job or a canteen job or a fit-out job forty minutes from home has received something that does not show up in a wage-growth ranking.

What the evidence says is narrower and harder. It says that these gains are the consumption linkage of a construction boom plus the ordinary agglomeration of a new-town development, and that they are front-loaded. It says the operational phase which follows will not employ many people, will not raise local salaries measurably, will not spawn a cluster of firms that were not already coming, and will not, on the American evidence, move rents, migration or retail spending much either. It says the electricity, water and land are consumed locally while the value of what they produce is realised somewhere with better weather and higher salaries. And in Guizhou's case, it says the province financed the entry ticket with debt that now ranks second-worst in the country relative to revenue, against assets that may be running at 20 to 30 per cent utilisation.

None of that argues for refusing the data centre. It argues for pricing it honestly, and for noticing which linkage is doing the work. The fiscal one is the only channel a host can reliably control, and it is the one that inter-jurisdictional competition destroys first. There are policy shapes that hold onto it: recurring taxation of the equipment rather than one-off land revenue, as in Loudoun; subsidies capped per permanent job, as Good Jobs First proposes; published utilisation and load data so that a province can tell a productive asset from a monument; large-load tariffs that make the operator, not the household, pay for the substation; and sunset clauses that return the abatement when the promised employment does not materialise.

The alternative is what the resource curse literature has been documenting for sixty years in copper and oil, now rendered in reinforced concrete and immersion cooling. Something enormous arrives. The output figures move. The mountain gets a road, and then the road gets quiet, and the ledger that recorded the growth turns out never to have been the ledger that measured the prosperity.

Shu Peihua is right that it used to be a barren mountain. The question Guizhou has yet to answer, and that a hundred counties from Virginia to Kildare are asking in their own accents, is what a mountain becomes when the thing built on it needs the mountain far more than the mountain needs it.

References and Sources

1. China goes rural with data centres in quest to power AI – AFP, via The Star, 19 August 2026
2. Abundant electricity isn't enough: China's overbuilt AI computing power is underused – Angela Glowacki and Cartus Bo-Xiang You, The Strategist, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 6 May 2026
3. The Local Economic Impact of Data Centers – Dany Bahar and Greg C. Wright, working paper, 7 August 2026
4. Concentrated siting of AI data centers drives regional power-system stress under rising global compute demand – Danbo Chen, Zijun Zhou, Yongyang Cai, Jiahong Qin, Ani Katchova and Lei Chen, arXiv preprint 2604.06198
5. Small Bottle, Big Pipe: Quantifying and Addressing the Impact of Data Centers on Public Water Systems – Yuelin Han, Pengfei Li, Adam Wierman and Shaolei Ren, arXiv preprint 2603.02705
6. What AI Speaks for Your Community: Polling AI Agents for Public Opinion on Data Center Projects – Zhifeng Wu, Yuelin Han and Shaolei Ren, arXiv preprint 2511.22037
7. China built hundreds of AI data centers to catch the AI boom. Now many stand unused. – MIT Technology Review, 26 March 2025
8. Western regions to gain computing power – China Daily, 17 March 2022
9. Big data key to high-tech development – China Daily, 30 May 2023
10. China's debt-ridden Guizhou faces reckoning after years of splashing out on pricey projects – South China Morning Post
11. AI and Data Centers Surge in Guian as First-Half Electricity Demand Jumps 33 Percent – ChinaTechNews, 20 August 2026
12. Chinese government plans data center capacity reseller network amid overbuild concerns – Data Center Dynamics
13. Data Centres Metered Electricity Consumption 2025, Key Findings – Central Statistics Office, Ireland
14. Government Statement on the Role of Data Centres in Ireland's Enterprise Strategy – Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Ireland, June 2018
15. CRU Publishes its Decision on New Electricity Connection Policy for Data Centres – Commission for Regulation of Utilities, Ireland
16. Loudoun County, Virginia: The Heart of the Data-Center Boom – Judge Glock, City Journal, 26 April 2026
17. The Impact of Data Centers on Virginia's State and Local Economies, 6th Biennial Report – Mangum Economics for the Northern Virginia Technology Council, February 2026
18. Money Lost to the Cloud: How Data Centers Benefit from State and Local Government Subsidies – Good Jobs First
19. A Generalized Linkage Approach to Development, with Special Reference to Staples – Albert O. Hirschman, 1977, reprinted in The Essential Hirschman, Princeton University Press
20. Extractive Industries: Optimizing Value Retention in Host Countries – United Nations Conference on Trade and Development
21. Illegal Pollution from Data Center Power Plants Shouldn't Harm Our Communities. We're Suing xAI. – Earthjustice
22. Pollution from Musk's unpermitted xAI power project hits hardest in Black communities – Disha Raychaudhuri and Valerie Volcovici, Reuters, via The Star, 14 July 2026
23. State sets dates to retire temporary xAI turbines but allows some to go past original deadline – Mississippi Today, 31 July 2026
24. China's north cleans up its power mix as the south lags – Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, 19 March 2025
25. How Many Jobs Does a Data Center Create? – Data Center Geeks, compiling the Uptime Institute 2024 Global Data Center Survey

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

Shame on the publishers who didn't catch it. Is seeing the underlying foundation and patterning really that challenging? It was bad enough when very talented authors chose to make virtual copy-and-paste books, but this...this...

It sends me into a rage. An actual rage. Fucking hell!

How do people stomach reading this fancied up slop?! That is NOT how a thesaurus is used!

No wonder AI companies are buying up rare books and texts, scanning, then destroying them. It's not just to train. Give it a few generations and no one will have any understanding of the soul or artistry of the written word.

My writing is far from perfect, but it's not garnished AI bullshit.

A bestseller should not be this heavy-handed with its AI usage. That book is far from tool level usage. It has a smattering of human touch in it, but little more than that.

I am so sick of picking up “bestsellers” only to be presented with lazy AI butchery.

Hi blog friends! Hope this update finds you well. For your viewing pleasure – the word “Hi” fashioned out of some stepping stones in the dirt adjacent to some neighborhood businesses that always used to keep the prettiest roses out in front of their shops – which have become vacant since we last passed by 22 months ago.

It’s new power wheelchair adjustment time for me and the process has been bittersweet. It’s been kicking my arse, but I’m navigating through it. So far, my confidence has been shaken only twice – once due to a run in with a loose office rug inside an elevator, and again because of a small but very boss hill that slopes down in two directions at the same time. Crossing my fingers that the new center mount footplate I’m having installed soon will make a huge difference. In the meantime, I’ve learned that you shouldn’t be afraid to cite ADA violations to anyone, because chances are if they’re violating the ADA, they’re going against other important building and fire codes as well.

BTW, the loose rug in the elevator was Carpet Lady’s idea. Ever since she took over management duties here, she’s installed loose rugs inside the elevator and in front of just about every doorway and ruggable area in this place. We’ve had words about her doing this a few times. She also has a penchant for bringing in heavy planters filled with plants and “cute things” from Hobby Lobby. All these things are a wheelchair users nemesis, and they have been mine. Plus, it’s junking up our place and making it look unsightly as well.

Cute Snail coloring pages are still available for anyone who would like them. They’re easy print PDF and keepsake worthy if you’re into that sort of thing. According to my shop views, people who stop by are really liking the fall pages. Cute Snail Magical, Colorful, Bright, Spec-tacular Fall, Cute Snail Beautiful, Bright Spec-tacular Fall and Cute Snails On Rainbow Log Fresh Starts, Fall Leaves have the most views so far.

How are you doing? Let me know in the comments or via message, text or email. If it helps – which breakfast food takes the crown for you? Sweet Warm Cinnamon roll OR crunchy buttered toast? I like both. But buttered toast dipped in oatmeal or cinnamon rolls topped with butter are the shizzle!

Until next time!

❤️ Juliet

Starcraft Co. 16- New Friends

The crisis was no longer confined to Terran space. While the UIC staggered from one emergency to another, reports began arriving from beyond the frontier suggesting that the Protoss were experiencing a convulsion of their own. Terran knowledge of Protoss civilization remained fragmentary. Humans had encountered them often enough to know they were technologically superior, intensely religious, divided into numerous tribes and scattered across a broad region of space, but sustained diplomatic contact was rare. Most Protoss enclaves seemed content to ignore Terran affairs unless humanity wandered somewhere it was not welcome. The largest exception was the Ara tribe, one of the oldest and most advanced Protoss societies known to Terran intelligence. Their homeworld was Aiur, and even the UIC's best analysts knew surprisingly little about what happened there. That changed when an Ara distress transmission began broadcasting across Terran frequencies.

The message repeated in several human languages. It identified the sender, provided coordinates and requested military assistance from any force capable of reaching Aiur quickly enough to intervene. Nothing like it had ever happened before. Protoss did not ask Terrans for help. They rarely asked Terrans for anything. The transmission caused enough confusion inside the UIC that several departments initially assumed it was a trap. By the time intelligence confirmed its authenticity, StarCraft Co. had already received the unfiltered recording through one of the private channels it maintained outside government networks. The commander listened to it twice before asking for everything the company knew about Aiur. The answer arrived piecemeal. The Ara tribe was fighting an internal rebellion led by a fanatical sect whose exact ideology Terran intelligence did not understand. Whatever theological dispute had started the conflict, the rebels had crossed one boundary that even outsiders recognized as extraordinary: they had somehow acquired control over Zerg. Ara communications repeatedly described the practice as blasphemy. Zerg organisms fought alongside Protoss zealots and dragoons, responding to commands rather than attacking indiscriminately. Whether the rebel Protoss had independently discovered methods similar to those used by the Terran renegades or were actually cooperating with them remained unknown.

The parallels were too strong to ignore. Renegade Terrans bred Zerg, enthralled dormant swarms and created elite strains. Rebel Protoss now fielded controlled Zerg armies during an internal coup. Two major civilizations were experiencing rebellions at almost the same time, and both rebellions had somehow learned how to make the Zerg obey. The commander forwarded that observation to StarCraft Co.'s intelligence staff and deliberately did not send it to the UIC. Relations with General Voss remained functional, but New Carthage had altered something. StarCraft Co. was increasingly reluctant to assume that information placed inside the UIC bureaucracy would remain useful, secret or even find its way to the right person. The situation on Aiur was desperate. Most of the Ara fleet was away from the planet when the rebellion began. Under normal circumstances that would have mattered little. Protoss warp infrastructure allowed forces to move across enormous distances with astonishing speed. The rebels understood that better than anyone. Their opening operation had disabled the warp matrix linking the Ara capital with the wider Protoss network. The capital was now isolated. Rebel forces surrounded it from several directions while Zerg swarms filled the approaches. The Ara defenders remained technologically formidable but badly outnumbered, and their fleet was still days away by conventional movement. The distress call had not been issued because the Protoss suddenly desired friendship with humanity. It had been issued because they expected the capital to fall before their own people could reach it.

StarCraft Co. had its own problem. New Carthage had consumed enormous quantities of ammunition and damaged much of the company's heavy equipment. Other UIC contracts were already drawing away ships and infantry. There was no conventional army available to send to Aiur without abandoning obligations elsewhere. Under normal circumstances, the commander would have declined the request. Instead, he opened a file labeled COMMANDO. The project had begun quietly after Khamsin. StarCraft Co. had accumulated an enormous quantity of biological and neurological research from the renegade laboratories, most of it related to Zerg genetics, regeneration, neural control and the physical enhancement of living organisms. The company had officially handed copies to the UIC. It had not handed over the only copies. StarCraft Co.'s research division had spent months studying what could be applied safely to Terran soldiers without turning them into anything resembling the abominations discovered at Delos. The result was still experimental.

Commandos were not infested humans. That distinction had been absolute from the beginning. No living Zerg tissue was incorporated into their bodies, and anything capable of independent biological replication had been prohibited. Instead, StarCraft Co. scientists had used insights taken from the renegade programs to redesign conventional augmentation. Improved musculature. Faster neural transmission. Reinforced connective tissue. Aggressively optimized clotting and healing responses. Sensory enhancement. Combat stimulants tailored to individual metabolism rather than mass-produced for ordinary marines. Their armor had been designed around the same principle: lighter than standard powered infantry armor, but stronger, more responsive and integrated tightly enough with the wearer that movement approached instinct. The weapons were similarly excessive. Each commando carried a customized Gauss weapon that would have been unpleasant for an ordinary marine to fire continuously. Larger ammunition, higher muzzle velocity, smarter targeting and integrated fire-control systems allowed a single soldier to deliver firepower approaching that of an entire conventional fireteam. Their training was equally expensive. StarCraft Co. had selected experienced veterans rather than recruits and subjected them to months of tactical, physical and psychological conditioning. Twenty-four had reached operational readiness. They had never fought a real battle. The commander looked at the situation on Aiur and decided they were about to.

The Ara representative who answered StarCraft Co.'s transmission seemed initially confused by the offer. The Protoss had requested armies. StarCraft Co. was proposing twenty-four soldiers and a small medical team. The translation system rendered several seconds of Protoss speech before settling on, “This number is insufficient.” “Probably,” the commander replied. “It's what we can send.” The Protoss considered that. Behind him, the commander could hear distant impacts through the open transmission. “You believe these warriors can alter the outcome?” “I believe they'll get through your siege lines.” “And once they do?” “They'll find out whether they're worth what I paid for them.” The Protoss stared at him for a moment. “Terrans remain difficult to understand.” “That feeling is mutual.” Coordinates arrived thirty seconds later.

StarCraft Co. used a small transport group for the insertion. Anything larger risked attracting rebel spacecraft or drawing attention from whatever Zerg fliers controlled the upper atmosphere. The commandos boarded two dropships accompanied by medics and enough ammunition to fight far beyond what twenty-four soldiers should reasonably have required. Science vessels provided navigational and sensor support only until the ships reached the outer system; the commander wanted the experimental unit tested with minimal conventional assistance. If commandos required an army to keep them alive, the project had failed. Aiur looked nothing like any Terran world the soldiers had seen. Vast crystalline formations rose from forests beneath a violet sky. Protoss structures appeared almost grown rather than built, their surfaces glowing with internal energy. Even through combat displays, the planet conveyed age. This was not another fringe colony erected from prefabricated modules forty years earlier. Civilization had existed here while human ancestors were still learning to write. The battle below had scarred it anyway. The rebel Protoss controlled most of the territory surrounding the capital. Zerg creep stretched through forests and across valleys around their positions, biological growth pressing against elegant Protoss structures that looked fundamentally incompatible with it. The capital itself remained visible in the distance, surrounded by flashes from ongoing weapons fire. Rebel Scouts patrolled the most obvious approach vectors. Mutalisks moved among them. StarCraft Co. avoided both.

The dropships penetrated from the dark side of a mountain range, descending through a deep ravine that shielded them from most sensors. Their landing site was a narrow plateau high above one of the secondary rebel positions. The cliff had not been fortified because there was no obvious way for a substantial ground force to reach it. Twenty-four commandos did not constitute a substantial ground force. They disembarked in silence. The first rebel auxiliary base was less than two kilometers away. Sensor readings identified a handful of photon cannons, several dozen zealots and perhaps twenty dragoons. Under ordinary circumstances, StarCraft Co. would have approached with siege tanks and spent an hour dismantling the position safely. The commander wanted data. “Take it.” The commandos moved.

The first zealot died before the Protoss understood they were under attack. Three commandos fired simultaneously, overwhelming his shields and tearing through armor almost instantly. The second managed to charge, covering the distance with terrifying speed. The commando he targeted sidestepped. An ordinary marine would have been cut in half. The commando fired into the zealot's side at arm's length while another soldier hit him from behind. The Protoss warrior collapsed before completing his turn. Then the base reacted. Dragoons opened fire from the far side of the plateau. Photon cannons tracked toward the attackers. Zealots charged from two buildings at once. The commandos spread automatically. There was no need for anyone to tell them not to mass against Protoss weapons. Six soldiers concentrated on the nearest photon cannon while the others moved between crystalline structures. Shields failed beneath sustained high-velocity fire. One commando took a dragoon blast directly against his chest armor and was thrown several meters. His suit absorbed enough of the impact that he stood again before the medic reached him. The rebels had numbers. They had shields. They had Protoss weapons. They still couldn't keep up. Commandos moved too quickly between firing positions. Their weapons stripped shields faster than ordinary Gauss rifles should have been capable of doing. Zealots who committed to charges found their targets retreating while other commandos fired into their backs. Dragoons tried concentrating fire only to discover that the Terrans had already repositioned. The engagement lasted six minutes. Forty-seven rebel Protoss died. StarCraft Co. lost no one. The commander replayed the helmet footage once. “Keep moving.”

The route toward the capital ran through a series of valleys controlled by separate rebel formations. The rebels had not expected any force to appear behind their forward line, and their deployment reflected it. Most heavy units faced inward toward the besieged Ara positions. Auxiliary sites relied on zealots, dragoons and small numbers of photon cannons. The rebellion's more sophisticated weapons were apparently concentrated around the capital itself or elsewhere on Aiur. That made the commandos devastating. The second position received enough warning to form a defensive line. It didn't matter. Commandos attacked from three directions simultaneously. One team drew the dragoons forward while another climbed a ridge the Protoss had apparently considered impassable. The third moved under cover toward the photon cannons. By the time the rebels realized they were being flanked, their detection network was already collapsing.

The third position had Zerg. Zerglings came first, and the commandos killed them almost contemptuously. StarCraft Co.'s ordinary veteran marines had already become exceptionally efficient at dealing with zerglings. Commandos were faster, more accurate and equipped with weapons that tore through carapace almost regardless of angle. They fought in pairs, one moving while the other fired, never allowing the swarm to fix on a stationary target. Zerglings that would have overwhelmed ordinary infantry found themselves chasing soldiers almost capable of matching their bursts of speed. Hydralisks changed the engagement. Their spine fire remained dangerous even to enhanced armor. One commando took a projectile through the thigh and went down. The nearest medic moved toward him, but the wounded soldier had already applied an automatic seal and resumed firing from the ground. Another spine struck a commando's shoulder and failed to penetrate completely. She broke the protruding shaft away and continued advancing. The commander watched the physiological telemetry with increasing interest. The enhancements worked. More importantly, the soldiers remained soldiers. They weren't berserk. They weren't losing cognitive function. Heart rates were elevated but controlled. Coordination remained intact. The horrors at Delos had demonstrated how easily biological enhancement could become biological destruction. StarCraft Co. had produced something fundamentally different. The commandos eliminated the hydralisk group and continued toward the capital.

The siege intensified as they moved deeper. Rebel bases became larger. Zerg concentrations became denser. Mutalisks began appearing frequently enough that the teams could no longer simply avoid them. The commandos adapted. Whenever fliers approached, soldiers spread across wide areas and concentrated fire on individual targets. Their enhanced weapons made infantry anti-air fire considerably more dangerous than the mutalisks expected. The first swarm lost half its number during the initial pass and broke away. The second tried attacking from multiple directions and encountered the same problem. Individual commandos were simply too lethal for the usual method of tearing apart clustered marines. The fourth rebel base almost stopped them. It occupied a narrow valley directly along the most practical route toward the Ara capital. Nearly a hundred zealots and dragoons defended it, supplemented by several photon-cannon clusters and hundreds of Zerg occupying creep fields beyond the Protoss positions. The commandos did not have artillery, Goliaths or science-vessel support. For the first time, the commander considered redirecting them.

The commando leader proposed something else. “Let them fight each other.” The rebels controlled the Zerg, but not perfectly. StarCraft Co. had seen that repeatedly. Control required signals, handlers or infrastructure. The commandos spent forty minutes observing the position until they identified three Protoss structures associated with the nearby swarm. Ghosts would have been ideal. They didn't have ghosts. So commandos did it themselves. Six moved through the outer Zerg lines using terrain and speed rather than cloaking. They killed the Protoss operators within seconds, destroyed the control structures and withdrew. The effect was not instantaneous. Then something changed. Zerglings nearest the Protoss line stopped facing outward. A hydralisk fired into a zealot. The rebellion's control dissolved unevenly. Some Zerg continued attacking StarCraft Co. Others turned against the closest living targets. Mutalisks descended on Protoss positions. Zealots and dragoons suddenly found themselves fighting the creatures that had been guarding their flanks. The commandos waited three minutes. Then attacked everyone.

The valley became chaos. Rebel Protoss fought uncontrolled Zerg while StarCraft Co. systematically destroyed whichever side gained an advantage. Dragoons concentrating on hydralisks exposed themselves to Terran fire. Zerglings charging Protoss positions presented their flanks to commandos on the ridges. Photon cannons tried tracking too many targets at once. Twenty-four soldiers walked through the middle of a battle involving hundreds. When it ended, eighteen commandos remained fully combat capable. Four were wounded but mobile. Two required medevac once the capital was reached. The road ahead was open.

The Ara defenders finally made direct contact when the commandos reached the outer districts of the capital. The first Protoss patrol nearly fired on them before recognizing the Terran identification codes previously transmitted through the distress channel. The commandos were escorted behind Ara lines through streets that had been transformed into defensive works. The capital was magnificent even while under siege. Towers of crystalline material rose hundreds of meters into the twilight, their surfaces alive with currents of blue energy. Walkways crossed enormous open spaces without visible support. Structures seemed to curve in ways Terran engineering would have considered unnecessarily difficult simply because the Protoss could make them. Much of it was burning. The Ara had been pushed into a shrinking defensive perimeter around the warp nexus and central administrative district. Thousands of zealots and dragoons remained, along with scattered templar and a handful of heavier units. They were badly outnumbered. Rebel Protoss occupied the surrounding districts while Zerg controlled many of the approaches.

The Ara commander who met the StarCraft Co. team was visibly unimpressed by their number. “This is the army you promised?” The commando leader looked behind him. “No.” The Protoss waited. “This is all of it.” The translator required several seconds to render the response. Eventually the Ara commander said, “Then your species is either exceptionally courageous or exceptionally foolish.” “Been told both.” The commandos had brought something more valuable than numbers. Experience. The Ara had fought Zerg before, but their defensive doctrine treated the current siege primarily as a Protoss civil conflict with Zerg auxiliaries. StarCraft Co. looked at the battlefield differently. They had spent fourteen missions discovering exactly how controlled Zerg behaved, what broke their coordination and which threats mattered most.

The first recommendation surprised the Ara: stop defending everywhere. The capital's forces were distributed along an enormous perimeter, trying to preserve districts that had little strategic value. StarCraft Co. recommended abandoning several sectors deliberately, concentrating defenses around narrower approaches and allowing the Zerg to enter prepared killing zones. The Ara commander resisted until the commandos showed him recordings from Kestral and New Carthage. The second recommendation was simpler: kill the control infrastructure first. The Ara had been focusing on rebel warriors because Protoss instinctively regarded them as the greater threat. StarCraft Co. argued that the Zerg were the rebels' numerical advantage. Break their control and the siege could begin consuming itself.

The counterattack began twelve hours after the commandos entered the city. Ara forces deliberately withdrew from three outer districts. Rebel zealots advanced into the apparent gaps. Zerg followed. Then the defenders closed behind them. Protoss weapons hit the trapped formations from several elevations while StarCraft Co. commandos targeted control units and handlers. Zerglings lost coordination first. Some continued charging forward. Others attacked rebel Protoss trapped beside them. The defenders advanced. Sector by sector, the same method repeated. Commandos moved ahead of Ara formations, identifying Zerg-control systems and destroying them. Protoss zealots then attacked the resulting disorder while dragoons provided heavy fire from behind. High templar became particularly devastating once StarCraft Co. began directing them toward dense biological formations rather than scattered rebel infantry. Psionic storms tore through hydralisk masses and zergling swarms with efficiency that made the commandos reconsider several assumptions about Protoss battlefield doctrine.

The Protoss learned too. Ara warriors had initially regarded Terran infantry as fragile ranged auxiliaries. Then they watched a commando squad eliminate a force of zealots twice its size. They watched wounded soldiers continue fighting after injuries that should have incapacitated ordinary humans. They saw Terran medics stabilize casualties almost immediately and return some to combat within minutes. Respect developed rapidly when everyone was being shot at by the same people. The decisive battle came at the western transit nexus. Rebel forces had massed there to block the Ara advance toward one of the remaining warp-control facilities. Hundreds of Zerg occupied the open plazas around the structure while zealots and dragoons held the elevated approaches. Several high templar fought with the rebels.

StarCraft Co. and the Ara attacked together. The commandos went after the templar. Ara zealots engaged the rebel front. Dragoons traded fire across the plaza. The Zerg surged into the center. For several minutes the battle became almost impossible to distinguish by species. Protoss fought Protoss. Zerg attacked Ara positions until control nodes were destroyed, then turned on nearby rebels. Commandos moved between both, their weapons selecting targets almost continuously. One rebel high templar began forming a psionic storm over an Ara infantry concentration. A commando shot him through the head before it formed. Another pair of templar merged. The resulting archon charged directly toward the Terran unit. The commandos scattered. They had learned that lesson on Erebus. Rather than pour ineffective rifle fire into its shields, they led it toward an Ara dragoon formation. The Protoss understood immediately. A dozen dragoons concentrated on the archon while commandos fired from the opposite side. The shields collapsed. The archon died.

The western nexus fell. With it came access to one of the systems controlling the disabled warp matrix. Ara engineers went to work. The rebels understood what that meant, and every remaining force around the capital attacked. This was the siege's final moment. Zerglings flooded through streets already filled with corpses. Hydralisks fired from ruined buildings. Mutalisks filled the air above the city while rebel Scouts attacked Ara positions from higher altitude. Zealots charged behind the swarms. The Ara defenders formed around the warp complex. Twenty-four commandos had landed on Aiur. Seventeen were still capable of fighting. They took the center.

The battle lasted almost two hours. The commandos fought until ammunition became the limiting factor. Ara warriors began bringing them captured Terran-compatible supplies from weapons caches maintained by the rebels. Medics worked beside Protoss healers using technologies neither side understood. Commandos rotated out of firing positions only when weapons overheated. The Zerg reached the warp complex twice. The first time Ara zealots drove them back. The second time StarCraft Co. did. A group of hydralisks broke through a damaged eastern structure and reached the engineering teams working on the matrix. Seven commandos intercepted them at close range. Three were wounded. None withdrew. The last hydralisk died less than ten meters from the engineers.

Then the sky changed. The warp matrix came online. Nobody on the battlefield mistook what happened next for anything else. Blue light appeared above the capital in dozens of places simultaneously. Protoss reinforcements began arriving. Dragoons materialized first. Then zealots. Then reavers. Scouts appeared above the city. More warp signatures opened beyond them. The rebel assault faltered. The Ara fleet had arrived. What had been a siege became an extermination. Fresh Protoss forces poured through restored warp routes while the exhausted defenders surged outward. Rebel positions that had spent days grinding down the capital were attacked from both directions. Zerg swarms still under control were isolated and destroyed. Those whose control structures failed turned on anything nearby. The commandos stopped advancing. For the first time since landing, they were no longer necessary. The Ara could finish their own war.

The final casualty count surprised even StarCraft Co.'s research division. Of the twenty-four commandos deployed, five were dead. Eleven had sustained significant wounds. Eight remained physically capable of continued operations at the end of the mission. Every surviving commando had killed numbers of enemy combatants that would have seemed absurd for ordinary infantry. The project was a success. A frighteningly expensive one. Each commando represented more money in augmentation, training and equipment than an entire marine squad. Losing five in one operation hurt. The data gathered on Aiur nevertheless showed that the concept worked. A force small enough to fit inside two dropships had penetrated an army, destroyed multiple rebel positions, crossed Zerg-held territory and materially altered the outcome of a planetary civil war. StarCraft Co. began planning the next generation before the survivors left Aiur.

The political consequences were even larger. The Ara leadership requested a formal meeting with the commander shortly after the capital was secured. This time there was no translation through a battlefield channel. StarCraft Co. representatives were escorted into a chamber overlooking the restored city, where senior Ara officials waited beneath crystalline structures older than most Terran nations. The Protoss speaker addressed them in Terran Standard. “We called into darkness,” he said. “Your people answered.” The commander glanced around the chamber. “Seemed like you needed help.” The Protoss expression was difficult to read. “We did.” There was a long pause. “Our people will remember this.” The commander had dealt with corporate executives, generals, pirates, frightened scientists and government bureaucrats. Protoss gratitude felt different. “What exactly does that mean?” “It means that when StarCraft Co. calls upon the Ara, the call will be answered.” That was worth more than money. The commander understood it immediately. The Ara tribe possessed technology humanity barely understood, military forces capable of crossing interstellar distances through warp networks and influence among Protoss groups StarCraft Co. had never encountered. A favor from them was not something to spend casually. “Then we'll try not to waste it.” The Protoss speaker inclined his head. “Nor will we forget how few you sent.” There might have been humor in that. The commander decided to assume there was.

No UIC representative attended the meeting. None had been invited. That was deliberate. StarCraft Co. informed General Voss only that the Ara capital had survived and that the immediate threat had been neutralized. The report mentioned cooperation with local Protoss forces and omitted the private diplomatic understanding entirely. Voss seemed surprised. “You established direct contact with the Ara leadership?” “They asked for help.” “And you provided it.” “Yes.” “With twenty-four personnel.” “Yes.” Voss stared at him for several seconds. “I'm beginning to dislike your after-action reports.” “Why?” “They keep making the rest of us look bad.” The commander could have answered several ways. He chose the civil one. “Then stop giving us so much material.” Voss actually laughed. But the joke landed differently than it once would have.

StarCraft Co. had started as three mercenaries clearing zerglings from a scientist's basement. Now it possessed a growing fleet, experimental supersoldiers, private intelligence networks, captured alien technology, an unprecedented UIC retainer and a personal debt from one of the most powerful Protoss tribes in known space. More importantly, the commander now understood that the crisis was larger than Terran politics. Human renegades were breeding and controlling Zerg. Protoss rebels were doing the same. Neither rebellion appeared accidental. Whatever was happening had crossed species, governments and borders. The commandos had saved Aiur, but they had also confirmed something far more troubling.

Someone was teaching the galaxy how to use the Zerg.