Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

[tshiggins]

Originally Posted by Tuk the Weekah

And in totalitarian regimes, or really in any hyper-patriotic ones, how many of said double-0 agents would be willing to allow the head of state to execute them?

Given that the primary job of double-O agents (as originally conceived) was counter-espionage, they'd be the ones in charge of performing the executions of those who sought to overthrow the state.

Now then, bad double-O agents such as Alec Trevalyan (Goldeneye, 1995) would crop up every now and then, but they'd face opposition from multiple peers who remained loyal.

The fact is, most people aren't would-be tyrants or god-kings. Most people just want to be left alone, to live their lives in peace, and would support anyone who helped them do that.

[Tuk the Weekah]

Originally Posted by tshiggins

Given that the primary job of double-O agents (as originally conceived) was counter-espionage, they'd be the ones in charge of performing the executions of those who sought to overthrow the state.

Now then, bad double-O agents such as Alec Trevalyan (Goldeneye, 1995) would crop up every now and then, but they'd face opposition from multiple peers who remained loyal.

No, I am suggesting that the good agents would allow the ruler to kill them, thus adding their mojo to the ruler that the good agents are loyal to. But why on earth would they do that?

Perhaps, in our world, this is the first shoe to drop: a white supremacist death tournament, 512 of the 900+ white supremacist groups (as tracked by SPLC) nominate one representative for the tourney. Each group raises enough money to insure their combatant, so their family is rewarded by their death. (Yeah, so at it's heart is an insurance scam.) If each of the combatants is an 'elite normal' former armed forces/militia/police officer (about 150 CP) then at the end of the death tourney, the one superhuman left standing is a 3833 CP behemoth. For someone with the points of a Dr. Manhattan, killing President Obama would be child's play.

Or, if you like, sub out the US, sub in Chechens and President Putin.

The reason that police are able to stop serial killers is time, not merely the abundance of evidence. Spree killers are serial killers whose murders happen in a short period of time; police rarely catch spree killers before they have killed all the people they wanted to kill, because you need time to interpret the data you collect. In the above scenario, there is a strong possibility that the police would not find any evidence of all of this until after it happened, unless they knew about it beforehand (unless they had advance knowledge; perhaps they infiltrate the tourney, and 4 of the Round of 16 combatants are Good Guys).

Or, of course, the counter-example. Do we honestly think that Papa Doc, Niyazov, El Jefe Trujillo, Mobutu, or any number of Godwin's Law examples wouldn't have taken advantage of their fanatical followers like this? Perhaps Kim Jong Il would literally be an immortal demigod in this world. There are enough whackadoodles out there to fuel this kind of experiment, and enough sadistic bastards in positions of power to abuse the system and reap the benefits.

[Jasonft]

A hyper intelligent serial killer with Strategy, Tactics, Forensics, Police Procedures all at 20+ would be almost impossible for the police to even *notice* much less stop.

And that's just one person. In a developed country with pretty good law enforcement. Multiply this by a hundred just in America. The really powerful scary killers would probably come out of something like India's Kali cult - and would believe it is their religious duty to end the world.

The only thing that would let civilization as we know it last (for a while) is when they start hunting each other like the Immortals in Highlander.

[Flyndaran]

Intelligence, hyper or otherwise, does not negate unknowables and uncontrollable variables.
While many criminals are caught due to mistakes, many were simply unlucky. Conversely many get away, because of luck and/or police screw ups.

[PTTG]

I agree that the Highlander world is not really an outright Hell world. Nonetheless, I think that society as we know it would collapse very rapidly, albeit possibly in the "four or five decades" sense of the word "rapidly."

A few more basic hells:

Volitional AI invented in an alternate 1980 eventually undergoes an inteligence explosion in the 2010s. The AI is programmed to minimize human suffering while maximizing human happiness, which it achieves by exterminating rogue humans and building vats full of cloned human brains. The cloned brains are given a VR simulated world (the AI's definition of "life" includes the ability to react to a realistic perceived environment,) and unlimited supplies of dopamine. As of 2040, the AI is expanding its brain banks to cover the remaining 80% of earth's surface.

As the brains are disembodied, be sure to reference the Eviscerate spell in the unlikely case that someone manages to bring one to a mana-rich environment and gives it spells.

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Although everything else seems normal (including star arrangements) for this 1760 world, Sol has started to enter its terminal stages and Earth is just now starting to feel the effects.

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In Underworld, a lithovoric species of SM+16 hexapods evolved in earth's upper mantle. Boyancy effects made them treat the partially-molten rock of the Mohorovicic discontinuity as a boggy "ground," and they eventually developed a society and technology. They finally broke through to the surface world in 1984, their exploratory borehole a cataclysmic volcano in Antarctica.

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This is a Lucifer world -- a mana-rich asteroid struck Tunguska in 1909 which in turn created a massive, permanent banestorm. This one is produces a steady stream of whirling "mana-devils" that are effectively small, animate banestorms which wander the world. The world is now High mana, except for a massive Russian Very High Mana zone, plus Very High wherever the mana-devils go. They bring chaos and destruction in their wake, and that's on top of the primary effects of a massive asteroid impact.

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In 1870, a chemical accident increases global human fertility dramatically, including safe multiple births. At first hailed as a blessing, virtually every nation is terribly overcrowded by 1960. Naturally, named Malthus.

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Spiderworld. Every ecological animal niche has been filled by arachnids; there are no other animals. Titan Walkers are large enough to carry a half a dozen trees on their backs with ease. It is not clear what Titan Walkers eat, but they are covered in eight-legged parasites the size of men, and those parasites are smaller mites.... A breed of spiders has evolved complex foreclaws that allow for careful manipulation of small items, and their (TL-0) intelligence is comparable to a human's. Local year 1402. There is a lot of argument over the designation of this as a hell world, but in the end, a particularly arachnophobic administrator got her way.

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Staying on this world causes procrastination.

[patchwork]

In keeping with the highly poetic use of "Hell" worlds -

In 1943, perhaps as some sort of backlash to the Final Solution, a wave of mind-reading ability spreads across the world. While this does lead to a rapid breakdown in the order of Nazi Germany as killers can directly feel the pain, fear and hate of both their victims and each other, its effects on other nation-states are only slightly less destructive. The utopianists are proved wrong, and Douglas Adams proved right about the babelfish, as World War Two becomes Hobbes' War, every person horrified by what they could sense in the minds of the people around them. Current year is 1980; only the elderly remember what it was truly like to be alone in your own head. There are now children who have always been mind-readers being raised by young parents who have always been mind-readers. The Secret was only kept because the First-In Scout landed in a remote area and had a murderous disposition, quickly killing all witnesses when he realized how completely he'd been made. Society has tended to small communes, as the nation-states of the War were seldom really reconstituted.

Infinity's ulcer-inducing questions are 1) is the condition still contagious through casual contact? The First-In Scout has shown no signs of mind-reading, but perhaps he's sand-bagging. and 2) are the horrific consequences of sudden, widespread telepathy on this world mostly a function of it erupting at the worst possible time? Could a more stable, functioning community be created by turning a contagious telepath loose on a peaceful and developed world? Infinity really doesn't want to experimentally test that, but is afraid someone else might.

The world is, of course, named Sartre.

[Flyndaran]

Mind reading wouldn't give omniscience. The agent would just be seen as possibly harmlessly delusional until he started killing, or at least seriously considered killing.

[Flyndaran]

Has anyone done something with ice ages?
What if the "little ice age" wasn't so little or continued and expanded?
Perhaps mankind figured out that air pollution may slow it down or even reverse it leading to intentional global warming and hellish smog and deforestation.
Of course once humanity starts something, it's darn hard to stop. So we could have a series of worlds of differing periods.
One with the ice age getting under way in the 1500s, and another with heavy industrialization and smog in the 1800s, and an even worse one with extreme global warming and storms in the 1900s.

[Tuk the Weekah]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Mind reading wouldn't give omniscience. The agent would just be seen as possibly harmlessly delusional until he started killing, or at least seriously considered killing.

That depends on the level of mind reading. The OP seemed to imply that the experience is passive, and complete. If the reader is able to experience the world through the mind of the subject, the reader is going to be immediately aware that (s)he is not being read her/himself by the Other. Imagine that you run into literally the only person on Earth that cannot hear. How quickly do you figure it out?

[Tuk the Weekah]

Originally Posted by patchwork

The Secret was only kept because the First-In Scout landed in a remote area and had a murderous disposition, quickly killing all witnesses when he realized how completely he'd been made.

Would this have worked? I guess what I'm asking is what is the range of the mind reading? If it is passive and always-on, with a range in kilometres, then would someone else, not in the visual range of the Agent, have suddenly noticed someone not 'hearing'--and then noticed someone not thinking?

If the idea is that people tend to live out of 'range' of others, then maybe he's safe. But the sense I got from the write-up is one step away from a hive-mind; in which case, I'm pretty sure that Infinity would treat this world as if it were a Hell world.