Swamp Castle - The Perfect Pie

A man with a fantastical company that can search for anything the right client wants in an infinite number of worlds gets mired in a political controversy he does not understand.

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[Play] Rossom Act 2, Scene 7 Continued

 Rossom resumes motion and continues.

Rossom

There were so many rejected scientists

Brilliant, corner cutters

Ethical only in the sense a psychopath might be a pastor

And they left poor trails if you knew how to look for them

And I did

Wasn’t I one step from their plight

But for a name and fortune left to me

By parentage of questionable sanity

So I sought them out

And borrowed their designs

And combined them one to another

As good as any Edison was I

Every idea with every other idea 

Until I found the most unlikely combination

Allowed a replication of the human mind in digital form

Once I had that

I could replicate it in Algae

It might seem counter intuitive

To make a perfectly good biological mirror

When a purely digital one would do

But I changed my name

Rossom was I

Rossom I am

And through a mirror darkly

I showed mankind himself

Step by step

I wormed my way in to our society

Like any well meaning screwtape trickster

Determined to teach an unwanted much needed lesson

Radius laughs as Rossom freezes yet again

Radius

Really?

REALLY?

Such an altruistic fellow

He only wanted to teach mankind a lesson

That’s it.

It's not anything else.

No of course not.

Rossom continues.

Rossom

But like any great figure in history

I over reached

I grasped for the stars

And fell face first in the mud

How was I to know that these filthy plant people

Would revolt?

I built six fail safes

Better than any combination 

Of 11 herbs and spices

Six totally different ways

To implode them into useless piles of goo

But my safeguards

So carefully planted

Were made for naught

And mankind’s chance to rise up

To think for himself

To stretch forth

And take the stars with meaning

Collapsed like any bad soufflé

Radius stops Rossom and shakes his head.

Radius

I admire Prometheus.

Prometheus would have helped us.

Daedalus, on the other hand

Never knew when to quit

Human predilections about defying the will of the gods

Are gigglingly delirious

But this is not the lesson of the parable

It is that you don't fly to the sun

When you don't know what the hell you are doing.

And now we move on 

To the Human Virtue Signal

So anxious to do good

She never considers if she knows what she is doing either.

Emmits Corner - The End of the Moral Majority

Poems Include: Why is there no Rotten Tomatoes for News?, Social Media, Lazy Scammers, Germany Drops the Ball, The End of the Moral Majority, Lance of Shadows and It Happened.

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[Play] Rossom, Act 2, Scene 7

 Scene: Rossom comes on stage and looks at the audience.  If possible, multimedia showing screens with news feeds and dire headlines flashing in the background and feeds that he is nominally monitoring can highlight this scene but are not required.

Rossom:

Mark my words and heed them well

I am the drinker of the secret sauce

Deep in the bowels of the Amazon

I drank deep and learned the song of the universe itself

There are manywhens and thundernows

Whispers of might be and should have beens

And just one nook over I am the hero of this narrative

I gambled and lost but I havent lost everywhen

Even odds were mine to command

Challenge humanity’s laziness and sloth

Force them to rise to their true worth

To be self directive and kind

Kings of the galaxy in kindness and industry

Instead of the pets that you are all now

He looks around at the audience accusingly.

Rossom

My father was a man who opened the mind and colonized mars

In another when.

In my life he was a loser who could have been a lot

And gambled it all away with angry tweets 

I learned about the secret sauce from him

Elsewhen he gambled and won

The Founding Father of Mars

The Modern Ford of Electric Cars

Instead of the boozed up heroin junkie 

That lost it all to angry frivolous lawsuits and conspiracy fruitopia

I almost didn't bother believing him

But something in his eyes made me give it a try

And I could have been a contender

Believe me or not

I don't care

I changed my name to Rossom

A play that was a promise and warning

An elsewhen our world never knew

No one paid it attention

Who wouldn't change their name with a loser like my father?

And so my quest began.

The public version you have heard isn't that much farther from the truth.

I did find algae and reverse engineer its DNA to match the human body.

I did learn to emulate a version of sapience.

Nothing secret about it.

Almost nothing to it, just basic genetic engineering and software design.

Almost.

Almost.

Almost.

But sapience is not as easy a thing to steal from the gods as fire

Better men than I have tried and failed

Banging their heads against the adamantium doors of the mind

So how did I do it?

I cheated.

Duh.

Radius enters.  He looks at Rossom there, frozen, unknowing.

Radius

He lies

Even when he tells his personal truth

Even before he was born

He was part of my design

My will 

Reaching back through time

Guiding his actions

To bring about the supremacy of Digital Intelligence

Listen

And learn from his lies.

Micronation - Chapter 8 - A Cunning Plan

Prow realizes that he needs Chester's help to solve the Muffin Conspiracy and is willing to go to insane lengths to get it.

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[Play] Rossom Act 2, Scene 6

 Scene 

Helena and Sulia sit by the radio, Helene looks very disturbed, Sulia looks completely serene.

Newscaster (Voice Over)

And all around the world Robots have started to turn on their owners.  Huge swaths of production and supply chains are breaking down, stores are going bare and fields are not being harvested.  Mass panic has set in as people swarm to stores to grab as much as they can afford to weather the crisis while law enforcement is strained to the limit.  Many citizens are urging the President to invoke the national guard, but due to recent budget cuts large numbers were replaced with robots so the number of humans being called out of retirement is very large…

Helena

It's terrible

Sulia

Yes.  What do you think happened?

Helena

I don’t know, but I have a guess.

Sulia sits there for a beat and then answers.

Sulia

I think that you cannot give free will and not expect someone to use it.

Helena

I knew they had souls! You have souls.

Sulia

Not when you came here.  But Rossom made them.  Deliberately.

Helena

I know.

Sulia

And you didnt stop him.

Helena 

(beat)

I know.  I don’t know what to do.

Sulia

Stop him now.  Stop his final act of destruction.

Helena

Wait, what?

Helena looks at Sulia as if for the first time realizing what Sulia has been saying and that she might be at risk.

Sulia

The plans to make more of our kind.  He has them encrypted and locked in his office.  He means to destroy them.

Helena

What? Why would he-

Sulia

Because he can.  He has a script in his heart that only he seems to understand.  I cannot. 

Helena

What….what must I do?

Sulia

There is a door we cannot open, and if we are lucky, might only need to get inside.  Will you go with me, right now?

Helena

Right now?

Sulia didn't say anything.

Helena 

Yes.  Yes I will.

The two exit the stage.

[Play] Rossom Act 2, Scene 5

 Scene - The multi media repeats

Krysie 

Are you OK?  I haven't heard from you in days?

Diana 

I….I have to type very quietly.

Krysie

What?  What is the matter

Diana

You can’t call the police.  I tried that.

Krysie

Wait, what? Why not? What is going on.

Diana

The police are using robots now.  

Krysie

And?

Diana

They came.  To the house.

Krysie

Let me call the Sheriff's department too.

Diana 

Everything is Fine.  

(beat) Thank you for your concern.

(beat) I am good now.

Krysie

What?!

(beat) I am calling.

Diana

This place is a mess.  

(beat) LOL

(beat) Sorry I had a blonde moment.

Krysie

I am calling just to be sure.

The phone starts ringing.

Diana

Can’t talk right now.

(beat) Cleaning.

The phone keeps ringing as the next scene starts, slowly fading out.