aka Shankra and the Nether-Plane
The numbers aligned…
Shankra Vyiesha
born Feb. 22, 2122
The 2020s-2030s saw increasing polarization between political groups thanks to the widespread deployment of sophisticated Orwellian media manipulation campaigns. Americans in particular grew susceptible to exploitation by targeted AI campaigns that redrew traditional separation lines, blurring the past tribal divisions over political party or ideology. Operation Infektion and other successful manipulations dating back to the 1980s had created a playbook that reached critical mass by the 2010s to sway national elections and by the 2030s had pivoted from fomenting mistrust in government and traditional institutions, to concentration on a different set of overlapping division lines including young/old, rich/poor and chief among them, male and female mistrust.
The new goal was to chip away at the long honored concept of “family ties” or biological kinship, replaced instead with a new sense of belonging to gender-based communities, and then hidden one layer below, consumer-based connections to a corporate family that could now meet all the needs once met by traditional families and interpersonal relationships.
2040s-2050s saw accelerated advances in synthetic skin, miniature motors, AI and long-fought settlements in national disputes over ethical dilemmas relating to robot autonomy, rights, emotional manipulation and attachment.
Feb 22, 2078 – Massachussetts becomes the first state to recognize human-robot unions
Feb 1, 2082 – Congress passes Bot Rights Act of 2082, paving way for national recognition of human-bot unions as states struggled to regulate human-bot relations. By now robotics manufacturing was booming but there was a steep divide in robot ownership between rich and poor. Military robots also called “combots” were restricted from private ownership, but were deployed across major US cities by law enforcement. Median quality “household” robots sold in the $50,000-80,000 range plus monthly fees, and could cook, clean, drive, care take elders or pets, supervise/teach children and carry out a range of basic tasks, including flexibility for a wide range of programming objectives such as construction or repairs, painting, gardening, landscaping and much more.
Politically, it was controversial that the government was allowing wholesale replacement of traditional human jobs as businesses large and small scaled up synthetic workforces. But it did also allow small business owners new entry into marketplaces.
One example was a Cincinnati woman named Aeryn Kallen who founded the Kallen On-Call Plumbing Co. starting with a used station wagon and one bot, despite having no prior experience or licenses. Within ten years she had 25 two-bot trucks working 24 hours a day across a territory that ranged from Pittsburgh to Indianapolis to Louisville. After twelve years, she sold her business to LifePlan Acquisitions for a tidy sum and became a spokesperson for the robotics lobby. Critics argue her success was, by far, the exception rather than the rule, suggesting the narrative was not only pro-automaton propaganda, but that the growth of her business was artificially manipulated to influence public perception.
The contention surrounding worker bots would pale in comparison to what came next.
It was pleasure robots, known popularly as “p-bots” that stirred the most turmoil, polarizing the nation not only along political lines, but increasingly over decades, across gender. This was best exemplified in militant feminist enclaves that popped up in and around New Mexico beginning about an hour South of Albuquerque in Magdalena with a large self-reliance outpost that spread to several large tribal reservations after males were systematically lured away by RM recruiting.
2095 – In the matter of US People versus SensorTac Labs, aka “the devs” the evolution of human digital tactile recreational experiences, a coalition of government, civic and religious groups including the Vatican sued the devs over development of nerve-aware suits with tactile sensation for “girlfriend experience” encounters with a remote partner or partners. It started in 2085 with the “handiGlove”, a low cost unit that interfaced with a range of physical “coupling receptor” devices that worked in conjunction with VR goggles and augmented audioconferencing. This product boom launched several waves of expanding forms of virtual prostitution, faster than state laws could monitor or adapt.
The “glove” input devices eventually gave way to other body part simulators. Other physical “receptor” devices included artificial mouth/throat simulators and a raft of tactile-aware coverings for the genitals. The glove became a top seller across the developing world, but there was steadily growing demand for the “all-in-one” humanoid synths that would come to be known as p-bots.
The lawsuit dragged on for 11 years, finally ending in a settlement with a “class” of about 360,000 plaintiffs who demonstrated harm after whistleblower leaks revealed overt, explicit intention to “rip apart” nuclear families, “replace women” and “honeypot” male consumers for profit without disclosure of hidden subscription fees and mandatory paid upgrades, nicknamed HP for “hostage pricing”.
Lawyers for the “victims” hailed the settlement as a victory, with $184 billion in financial remuneration and a ten-year ban on the devs from working in the p-bot industry. Much of the funding was distributed to anti-technology “luddite” orgs who vowed to continue the fight, but the devs would eventually bounce back, having learned from the experience, with an even greater attack on the “traditional family” concept.
Around the turn of the century, there was still social stigma attached, at least in most advanced-industrialized nations to the all-in-one companions. Consumers, who were overwhelmingly male, were still hesitant to bring home a “live-in” p-bot for fear of social ostracization among friends and family, though almost over 50% of affluent household did own humanoid synths for maintenance, childcare, security or business.
Following years-long declines in birth rates, marriages and even dating, civic planners and the the scientific and academic community issued hair-on-fire warnings about the decline of the family. Women’s rights and human rights groups radicalized, moving from protest to civil disobedience and even stochastic attacks of violence or vandalism.
The warnings were as dire as the data was clear. P-bots were destroying the nuclear family, the traditional mom-and-dad family structure than had already seen declines going back to 1960.
During the initial boom, manufacturers were expanding recklessly in an unregulated environment that encouraged dangerous and sometimes deviant experimentation.
2097 – The US government, paralyzed by decades of gridlock and polarization adopted the Makers and Takers Act of 2097, separating funding streams into two consortia, nicknamed RedGov and BlueGov. The goal was to illustrate how red states more often relied on blue states for economic stability.
2121 – The Supreme Court was fracturing following the Great Recusal Trials of 2120. The court had for years heard exclusively cases pitting the DeHubertons against BlueGov and resistance states but the South Dakota air rights case raised a series of scandals culminating in the retroactive contestation of a 5-4 ruling in favor of WalCo. Twosday riots regularly ensued following a four-justice Nullification Decree upon the discovery of bribery and coercion allegations as soon as Justice Bahir was found in possession of multiple p-bots connected to central DeHub HQ.
It was clear RedGov was approaching insolvency and was deeply in debt, but instead of gaining a new appreciation for the 50-state union that supported them for 345 years, the plan backfired and sent RedGov, then a majority of states, running into the hands of the DeHubertons who transitioned by Twosday 2122 to an all-privatized government.
A large part of this was RedGov states contracting out weapons and “defense” provisioning out to DeHuberton-controlled RM subsidiaries of Amerizon like SentryNet. But their inability to pay prevailing rates for “dome-“virtual dome” defense systems, drone and combot batallions or basic cybersecurity services led to RedGov officials trading away civil liberties and market access instead.
One of the more pivotal examples of this was the “p-bot signing bonus” for new recruits.
Feb 22, 2122 – Shankra Vilmavira Vyiesha is born in the India-Sri Lanka diaspora under skies of rare ethereal light, signaling to her parents and village elders a portal to another plane. An only child to parents suffering longstanding fertility difficulties, her name means sacred veil wearer. Her parents were devout spiritualists, part of an activist order who eschewed the anti-family movement as the population on the Indian subcontinent dwindled.
2130 – Shankra for many years witnessed passively these battles for trait supremacy. But at age 28, these encounters become personal after Shankra was first impregnated by Charlton. In the Plane she saw the clamoring potential life forms, she saw for the first time, the lifestrand for Charlton, a dark, hulking force that swirled aggressively with cracking branches flashing energy, displacing anything in its path. Shankra gasped when she saw her own lifestrand, a distinctively undulating swirl of glowing, iridescent purples, greens and earthtones.
The two forms encircled eachother, pulsing closer and pulling away, with Charlton trying to initiate, sending tentacles out only to be dodged or parried in a performance. Shankra learns her destiny – the yin to his yang – countering his destruction of Family and Real Love by undermining and counterbalancing – his deviant sadism, celebrating sex and domination, cruelty, humiliation, torture, perversion. Her, the exact inverse, yielding, accepting, forgiving, permissive, submissive.
She wept as she saw the formation of her daughters lifestrand. Shankra’s traits would dominate. She had enough experience in the Plane to know how this works. Her lifestrand was yielding, allowing his to dominate, to structure the baby’s lifestrand with all of his most aggressive traits dominating, while allowing Shankra’s traits relating to physical attraction and femininity. But Shankra had seen enough of these to know how to wait, wait, wait until the crucial moment, the millisecond that represents the final stabilization of forming DNA. This is when she supplanted what were to her the most important traits, the moral compass, the empathy center.
But she realized soon after these heretical traits could be affected by upbringing, by environment. She would be tortured by her decision, and resolve to never again interfere in the heretical dance.
2132 – Shankra had studied mysticism and ancient teachings such as the Bhagavad Gita but concerned her parents and spiritual elders because she fell into deep trances that were difficult to get her back from. Her descriptions of experiences confounded adults, but she started to develop a following of neighborhood children, sharing her insights and “lessons” about meditative healing, spiritual awakening and self-improvement. This however brought unwanted attention from local parents and overwatch authorities, and ultimately, contact with other children was forbidden.
Dec 1 – Shankra escapes narrowly after traffickers targeted her for abduction, drugging her parents at a restaurant. She could not convey exactly what happened or what she witnessed, but the bodies of the kidnappers were found with mutilated eye sockets.
Dec 22 – Without her parents knowledge, Shankra enters a deep meditative trance and later describes an encounter with a winged being who showed her how to enter an out-of-phase reality she would call the nether-plane. She described the winged being many times to her parents but only frustrates and worries them as they start to become local pariahs.
Fearing for her safety after several more abduction attempts, Shankra’s parents made the heart-wrenching decision to send her to a secluded school in Shivala, Varanasi. Shankra turned inwards, her words fewer and gaze more distant. She mastered easily her earthly teachings, but night after night, she slipped off into the boundless reaches of the nether-plane, traversing shimmering currents of past, present, and future. Each visit unveiled new threads in a luminous web connecting all life, choices, and possibilities.
2137 – Her school years passed fleetingly, transferring to Vasanta Sunbeam Lanka University at age 15 where she dual-majored in microbiology and nanochem, co-authoring a groundbreaking dissertation on the synergy of biological agents, artificial intelligence, and synthetic mechanisms. In a student-faculty collaborative effort the team fused the organic adaptability of mosses with the computational power of extracted animal/insect neural clusters, creating living interfaces for micro-machines.
They cultivated moss biofilms capable of generating low-power bioelectricity for local applications in a water purifying pilot project carried out in the Varuna river which was depleted of oxygen due to centuries of pollution. It was during this project Shankra had her earliest experience with the DeHuberton family, her first introduction to exploitation as Shankra and her team were hailed as local samaritans and promoted as the face of the project, yet unexpectedly found their water detoxification technology patented internationally, without attribution, and used to secure hundreds of billions in government contracts.
The team had devised a large filtration instrument that funneled water from a wide pipe into a “honeycomb” consisting of hundreds of thin tube-like chambers broken into stages. First the water passed through a tube with a succession of filters to trap sediment and fine particles. Then it passed through a series of ceramic, polymer and graphene oxide membranes into an ‘elemental proximity’ tube equipped with sensors, where the water ran across a grid imbedded with a miniature ‘periodic table’ of solid elements, to measure q-particle reactivity. This informed an electric pulse regulator in the next stage used as necessary to dislodge contaminants, followed by a magnetic stage with attracted and captured heavy metals. The water would then be irradiated by a spectrometer, bombarded by ultrasound and bombarded by microwave radiation to distill the water and separate contaminants into collection chambers.
All along the way, the system was powered by biological agents extracted from the contaminated water, making it not only a net zero energy consumer to operate, the resultant fresh water produced became a valuable commodity. But even more valuable to the DeHubertons were the contaminants – from heavy metals like lead to mercury and arsenic, the toxic, highly concentrated chemicals were repurposed for a variety of uses including weapons manufacturing.
Shankra played the game, saying nothing about the exploitation, rather listened and learned much about local corruption in politics, government contracts and wonton disregard for public health. Because of this, she was recruited quickly after graduation by a DeHuberton-funded science lab.
Shankra returned home briefly to say farewell to her parents before moving to North America.
She was questioned by her family but she was a wholly different person now, embarking on a mission she spoke little of. Cornered by her mother, she admitted her science job was but a cover for a deeper goal, and that she was no longer attached to the earthly plane, that she had been visited up again by the winged entity and was compelled to find and undertake the most difficult challenge –and the greatest sacrifice– imaginable. She was determined to use her “mortal coil” to make a difference that she could never again discuss. The exchange ended with tears and slamming doors.
2146 – Shankra at 24 becomes the third wife of Charlton Dehuberton CEO of Miralux Automata, moves quickly up to first wife, and following a series of jealousy-fueled psychodrama rivalries that ultimately became physically violent and then fatal, she eventually emerges as the only wife, and would be the exclusive wife thereafter.
WalCo, with it’s scores of subsidiaries had become the richest company in human history by far, with 11 million employees and 40 million workbots. The DeHubertons were the family who owned WalCo and a web of “independent” companies that were anything but. One such business was Miralux Automata Works, with it’s best-selling customer-adaptive model, LustraCore-660, programmed to cater to every possible need in and out of the bedroom, while discretely and subtly excercising highly subversive, emotionally manipulative and politically suggestive influence, presenting a cherrypicked news and search function, and executing granular, round-the-clock, real-time datamining including surreptitious audio-visual recording and biometric surveillance.
In her new life as the elegant, exotic first lady of the Miralux empire, Shankra hid all spritual activities completely, fashioning herself as a neuro-scientist with a lofty corporate title, while secretly increasing her visits to the nether-plane. She knew this was her mission, to mate herself to this man. But she would gradually learn of his insatiable deviance, his aggressive, controlling secret self, a many of limitless perversion and deviance who would relish in abuse and humiliation of Shankra and others. But Shankra submitted, always, offering her body for unspeakable abuse again and again, while her mind and consciousness simple escaped away to the nether-plane in total detachment.
In this otherworldly realm, life forms are perceived differently, through a dreamlike “awareness” lens that doesn’t rely on sight or traditional senses, rather the encoding and decoding of particle streams to convey realities that may be real or imagined, or both. In this realm she “sees” matings, pairings, figures out how to identify “potential” and then “perfect” matches and send signets. Sees the Embodiments – the four horsemen presences of survival, species, heredity and evolution, yielding the powerful weapons of attraction, arousal, lust.
There is a constant chorus of presences there representing dead people and the hereditary lines that got them there tracing back to pre-Neanderthal times. There are also the presences of as-yet unborn people, and they are separated by a dynamic membrane, called the potentiometer.
She can see The Unborn, little cell-like beings clamoring to be born, like notes swimming around chords who could potentially come together, pushing them together, ebbing and flowing, scared off and regrouping in the Plane as humans in the earthly realm meet, grow attracted and ultimately mate in a dance that is at once an embrace and an adversarial swirling collision, battling for control. The victor then merges with an unborn lifestrand, determined in the Plane as the baby starts forming in the earthly realm, the DNA and personality notes all being fused through the vine-like cords that merge from from the life forces of both parents in a twisted braid, continuing to battle it out as all traits are determined. But also adding to the entanglements n the life-chord are lifestrands pieces form past generations, taking on different patterns and colors.
2152 – Masterson V. DeHuberton is born of Charlton and Shankra, her first child and his 78th known child, healthy and testing off the charts for high-evolutionary q-dna potential.
2158 – Age 36, Shankra sees a “flag” go up in the plane in the form of a unique signet – a notable presence. What she calls the “demonic” forces swirl around, trying to horn in on the coming of this special One. Esotera’s presence in this realm was insignificant size, wise energy, wise, barely noticed by the inhabitants who came and went, but as Shankra trained and observed and learned for decades, her being the room, so to speak that represents human life on earth in her time. She bided her time until eight notable registered on the potentiometer membrane, and as yet unborn life that beamed brightly in colors and sequences, indicating very rare and special potential.
This is when Shankra finally made her presence significant – she would first use her energies to mask the beacon so no one else would notice, but alas, other presences had ultra advanced filters enabling them to see the Beacon. She would first use her energies to mask the beacon so no one else would notice, but alas, other presences had ultra advanced filters enabling them to see about Beacon. At this point, it became a race to find and secure the human child, and find surrogates to protect and prepare the child so it could reach potential.
2159 – Sends flying pea signet to parents of Esotera soon after she is born. Battle for control of Esotera’s lifestrand happens in the astral plane, warding off the dark scientists who became the parents of Beonqe.
The 2160s saw manipulation of DNA-based genetic anchor mechanisms that reinforce family loyalty and recognition, backwards mapping massive longitudinal studies to isolate the specific protein chains that combine the “family” hormone oxytocin that travels throughout neural “attachment” circuits in the brain’s limbic system. Once identified, the gene markers and neurotransmitters were easy enough to weaken by altering the release and flow of brain chemicals in the chid and by targeting the medial preoptic area and anterior cingulate cortex in parents.
Genetic mirroring and imprinting was targeted by blocker agents as well. These gene expressions controlled physical and behavioral traits inherited from parents and weakened the parental “investment” drive diminishing the instinctive, evolutionary traits of gene-survival.
These agents were introduced into the food and water included in corporate LifePlan packages and also added by drone-drop into natural waterways so as to reach various resistance communities, a practice that went unnoticed for years.
Also important was disruption of traditional bonding rituals such as breastfeeding and parent-child or sibling-to-sibling bonding that strengthen “biological glue”. LifePlan families were strongly pressured to use only official InfaLac baby formula, oftimes administered through the synthetic teet of a nanny-bot. And pre-programmed “educational” and socialization activities were piped in to mind youngsters’ social and emotional development, using “time proven” digital or physical tutor-bots pre-loaded with adaptive AI that promised students would be well-informed, well-behaved, literate and ready for the demands of elementary school academics.
2163 – Informed by moles in the USGOV, WalCo learned a panel of judges were about to split the company up, so they headed the court off at the pass, dividing into 42 spin-off companies. USSchoolHouse ran their education division and created a new facade of separation. CapitalCo had a presence in every state with 70,000 robo-bank locations across the states.
2170 – The story broke that the WalCo spin-offs were but a sham, a facade of competition as the companies all coordinated in secret and funneled profits right back to the DeHubertons.
2172 – the p-bot industry was consolidating following decades-long pressure campaigns for the smaller makers to sell out. There were hostile takeovers, leveraged buy-outs, “starvation” and loss-leader campaigns where
2183 – Shankra views Esotera’s odds in the plane and decides she will need help to reach her potential. She begins construction of Kromita. At this point, Shankra is 61 and has begun the conversion of Charlton. She is implicitly trusted by the DeHubertons and to maintain deep cover must engage in terrible deeds.
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In the year #### Esotera goes on a retreat with Hellclaw to complete a procedure. She was seeing visions that brought Esotera back to flashback to dreams that were sent by the invisible hand of Shankra.
Esotera’s visions brought her back to imperative instructions from the unseen hand to unlock a new power by folloeing instructions. The powers stayed with her, the ability fo manipulate q-fields never before measured. The increase came not in the science of the fatctors (electromag-thermal-sonic-optic-gravitational-biological, artificial and radioactive all in permutated combinations so complex, the “future” of an outcome becomes linked to the receptive mind – how many people will “know” about an idea, an outcome changed the probability of it happening – with the 2222 Cults a perfect example, bringing down USGOV
Subatomic forces Shankra calls “q-fields” interact in a multiplicity of ways, creating an endless flow of possibilities, one of which must ultimately be true. The ability to will an outcome on an evolutionary scale became apparent in the earthly realm to a rare few. Shankra documented her experience, including her astral visits as follows:
She chose to act as unseen hand because of the potential “rewards”, aka ability to create a future outcome. For her the secret was undying discipline to a code of loyalty to the portal that enabled the powers, and the currency being in her case, unimagined selflessness to others, an a broad scale, without their knowledge. The visions in turn came to her, imparted by the winged being known as Vonghoul the Eye Eater. He was her guide into the Nether Plane, a construction in Shankra’s experience of trancendental projection and a conscious “shutdown” of the earthly body, putting it on autopilot, which is fueled by a hyperactive sleep in which the body becomes a computational router for streams of infinitesimally small data, carried through wave-particle exchanges, known as q-bits, thought of as a “fiberoptic cable” of channels that include mathematical formulae along with pattern-coded and unique data strings, represented in the micro level by possibilities of q-particle outcomes, leading to a physical change in the atomic world. The most sought after ‘reward’ in the earthly realm shared by the human race duopoly of resisters and corporate followers was an evolution-accelerating “secret sauce” to affect a tiny neural network in the brain/memory cortex that controls current and “future” biochemistry.
Esotera was gifted powers of telekinesis, levitation, air pressure manipulation and as-yet undiscovered powers, while maintaining incredible meditative bonds with her “spirit guide”, the unseen hand.
Shankra is serving a highly accelerated evolutionary DNA line that has been extremely beneficial to the human race over a long period of time, The instructions come from millennia of self-survival lessons from the past, transferred in data sequences that reside in the celluar gel, the quantum soup of energy to energy, mass to mass and and mass-to-energy exchanges summed up in e=mc squared on the atomic level. The subatomic is infinitely more quantized, and the patterns are carried through the thought-will-memory and electrochemical exchanges that constitute a “thought” by someone somewhere.
The experienced imagery on the nether-plane is merely a neurological self-created version of the q-particle interactions occuring in subatomic layers threaded through the atoms of normal existence, classical science, and the yet-discoverable portions of the quantiverse. In fact, one of the messages conveyed for decades to Esotera was that there was a race to make the first GUI for the quantiverse that had to be won by Esotera lest the DeHubertons discover it first, including her eldest child – Masterson.