Enlarge / You really are your own worst enemy. (credit: Ultra Ultra)

ECHO, from developer Ultra Ultra, doesn’t try to make death itself scarier than your standard survival horror title. The nominally stealth-driven action game instead takes one of the usual coping mechanisms surrounding death and twists it against the player. This makes ECHO, intentionally or not, one of the more unsettling games I've played this year.

But ECHO doesn’t present itself as a Resident Evil-styled horror game. A good 20 minutes of conflict-free dialogue and world-building set the stage, as the game’s two main characters—professional gambler En and a sentient, bounty-hunting spaceship called London—go on and on about genetically engineered “Resourcefuls,” the regal "Palace" where the game takes place, and a couple of other proper nouns I’m probably forgetting. It’s all preamble to En being hunted through the stark white mega-structure filled with humanoid constructs out to kill her.

Pieces of you

Stellar voice acting helps keep these heady concepts from sounding too silly, but what really grounds ECHO is its focus on tangible characters and objects. It’s quickly clear that the primary pair used to be a trio and that En is partially responsible for the death of London’s late partner in crime. En and the ship cope with his loss in different ways, but both involve the peculiar human tendency to pour meaning into objects.

Bethesda, publisher of the upcoming shooting game Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, has issued a formal response to decidedly informal (and largely anonymous) criticisms surrounding the anti-Nazi game. In doing so, however, the company has made the curious decision to try to absolve itself of particularly political overtones.

The game's latest advertising campaign, which launched this week, appropriates President Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan by using the tagline "Make America Nazi-Free Again." This message could be read one of two ways: as an isolated reference to the game's conceit, which makes players battle through an alternate-universe United States overrun by Nazis; or as a pointed comment about high-profile neo-Nazi demonstrations in the USA over the past few months.

The campaign, unsurprisingly, was followed by vitriolic comments from unconfirmed social media accounts. It's a tactic that shouldn't shock anybody who has followed recent, fascinating studies about Russian campaigns of disinformation and political-bubble exploitation that rely on similar social media actions. One of the most visible anonymous complaints directed at Bethesda, carried by "WTF really" retweets, described the ad campaign as an attempt to "tap into hysterical leftist power fantasy." (To clarify: these anti-Wolfenstein posts do not appear to have a clear connection to Russian disinformation campaigns.)

Enlarge / Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai arrives for his confirmation hearing with the Senate Commerce Committee on July 19, 2017 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla )

The US Senate today gave Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai another term on the FCC.

Pai would have had to leave the FCC at the end of 2017 if the Senate hadn't approved President Donald Trump's request to give Pai a new term. Pai, who has proposed deregulating broadband providers and eliminating net neutrality rules, received a new five-year term retroactive to July 1, 2016.

The vote split mostly along party lines, with Republicans supporting Pai's re-nomination and most Democrats in opposition. The tally was 52-41, as not all 100 senators voted. You can see how each senator voted at this Senate webpage.

SAN FRANCISCO—To accompany the new Pixel smartphones announced Wednesday, Google debuted new wireless earbuds, dubbed "Pixel Buds." These are Google's first wireless earbuds that are built to be used with Pixel smartphones, but they also give users access to Google Translate so they can have conversations with people who speak a different language.

Unlike Apple's AirPods, the Pixel Buds have a wire connecting the two earpieces. However, that wire doesn't connect to a smartphone or other device. Pixel Buds will pair via Bluetooth to the new Pixel smartphones—and presumably any other devices that accept Bluetooth wireless earbuds.

All of the Pixel Buds' controls are built in to the right earpiece, which is a common hardware solution on wireless earbuds. You can access Google Assistant by tapping or pressing on the right earbud, and the Assistant will be able to read notifications and messages to you through the Buds.

But the most intriguing feature of the Pixel Buds is the integrated Google Translate feature. Demoed on stage at Google's event today, this feature lets two Pixel Bud wearers chat in their native languages by translating conversations in real time. In the demo, a native English speaker and a native Swedish speaker had a conversation with each other, both using their native languages. Google Translate translated the languages for each user. There was barely any lag time in between the speaker saying a phrase and the Buds' hearing those words and translating them into the appropriate language.

The Pixel Buds will use Google Translate to comprehend conversations in 40 different languages. This is a unique feature that only a company like Google could integrate into wireless earbuds, thanks to the existing Google Translate data and infrastructure.

Pixel Buds have a battery that should last five hours on a single charge, which is average for wireless earbuds. They also come with a charging case that can hold up to 24 hours of battery life. Google's Pixel Buds are available for preorder today for $159.

I watched Blade Runner for the first time this week. Since I have apparently been living in a cave for the past few decades, I thought that Blade Runner was kind of like Tron but with more Harrison Ford, and less neon, and maybe a few more tricky questions about What Is The Nature Of Man.

That is the movie I was expecting.

That is not the movie I saw.

I told a lot of people that I was going to watch Blade Runner for the first time, because I know that people have opinions about Blade Runner. All of them gave me a few watery opinions to keep in mind going in—nothing that would spoil me, but things that would help me understand what they assured me would be a Very Strange Film.

None of them told me the right things, though. So, in case you are like me and have been living in a cave and have never seen Blade Runner before and are considering watching it, I will tell you a little about it.

There are cops, and there are little people.

There is a whole class of slaves. It is illegal for them to escape slavery. The cops are supposed to murder the slaves if they escape, because there is a risk that they will start to think they’re people. But the cops know that the slaves are not people, so it’s okay to murder them. The greatest danger, the thing the cops are supposed to prevent, is that the slaves will try to assimilate into the society that relies on their labor.

Assimilation is designed to be impossible. There are tests. Impossible tests with impossible questions and impossible answers. The tests measure empathy. It is not about having enough empathy, but about having empathy for the correct things. If you do not have enough empathy for the correct things, you will be murdered by a cop who does have empathy for the correct things.

In Blade Runner, an absurdly young Harrison Ford is a hard-boiled, world-weary kind of man named Deckard, and he is given a choice. He can be exactly as small as everyone is, or he can catch some escaped slaves for the police. He decides to catch the escaped slaves.

Except that ‘catch’ means ‘retire,’ and ‘retire’ means ‘murder.’

Deckard feels that he has no choice in this matter. He says it himself, and the person giving him the choice confirms that he is correct: no choice. But of course, there is always a choice. Certainly, the escaped slaves who he is chasing see that there is a choice. He can be power or he can be vulnerable to power. He chooses power. And power means murder.

The first such murder we witness is that of a woman who escaped slavery and came to Earth. She has found herself a job. It’s a degrading job, a job that even the hard-boiled, world-weary Deckard flinches away from watching. But it’s a job. She is participating in society. She is working. She’s doing the things that she has to do in order to be a part of the world that she risked everything to reach.

Deckard comes to her workplace. He finds her there, and he knows what she is, and she runs away from him because she knows what cops do to women like her. He chases her through the street and corners her. He aims his gun at her through a crowd of people. He squints. He takes a second too long to decide whether to shoot. She runs again.

(Nobody tells you about that part, when you tell them you’re about to watch Blade Runner for the first time. They tell you about all the different versions, and they tell you about the ambiguity of the ending, and they tell you about the fact that all the effects are practical effects. But nobody tells you about the part where a cop aims a loaded firearm into a crowd of people and tries to decide whether it’s worth risking their lives in order to murder an escaped slave.)

She runs, and then he corners her again, and then he shoots her. He shoots her in the back while she’s running away from him, running from death with so much panic that she crashes right through a shopfront window. Glass rains down around her, and she is dead. Not a dead person, of course. Because, as we have been told, she is not a person—they are not people. But she is dead, and when death happens in public, people will come to look. A small crowd begins to gather.

And then a police vehicle hovers overhead, and the police vehicle repeats the same two words over and over, in the same tone the crossing light uses to prompt those who can’t see the walk signal: Move on, move on, move on.

So the crowd moves on. The story moves on. And Deckard moves on.

He still has work to do. One down. The rest to go.

He murders other escaped slaves before the end of the film. He finds where they are hiding, and he murders them.

It is important, in the world of the film, to remember that the things he is murdering are not people. That it is their own fault for seeking free lives. That the cops are just doing their jobs.

It is important to remember to have empathy for the right things.

There is one escaped slave who Deckard does not murder. She asks him if he thinks she could escape to the North, and he says no. Whether that is true or not, we as the audience do not get to find out, because she does not escape. She does not escape because he decides to keep her. He is asked to murder her, and instead he decides to keep her for his own.

(Nobody warns you about that part when you tell them you’re about to watch Blade Runner for the first time. They tell you to watch for the origami, and they tell you that you won’t believe the cast, and they tell you about the celebrities who have been asked to take the Voight-Kampff test. But nobody warns you about the part where a cop convinces a slave that she cannot escape unless he is allowed to keep her. Nobody warns you about that part.)

Blade Runner does not ask us to sympathize with Deckard. At least, not in the version I watched, which was the Final Cut. I am told that there are other cuts which were deemed more palatable to theatre audiences at the time of release. Those cuts, I am told, reframe the man who chases a terrified escaped slave through the streets of a futuristic Los Angeles and then puts bullets into her back. They allow us to believe that he is a good guy doing a hard but necessary job, and that the hard but necessary job is hard because he is good. They allow us to believe that it is possible to be a good guy while doing that kind of a job.

This is a thing that it is very tempting to believe. It is a thing that we are accustomed to believing. It is as familiar as coming home.

Most people told me the same thing, when I said that I was going to come out of my cave and watch Blade Runner for the first time. When they were giving me their watery opinions so I’d be prepared for what I was about to see, they all said: “It’s a Very Strange Movie.”

They weren’t wrong. Not exactly. Not in the thing that they meant, which is that it is bizarre. They weren’t wrong about that. It is bizarre. The movie itself is ambiguous and nuanced and asks a lot of the audience. Asks too much of the audience, if you agree with the studio executives who released the original, theatrical cut. It is baffling and beautiful and terrible and tempting. It’s Surrealist Science Fiction Pulp Noir—it has to be weird and unsettling. That’s the genre.

But I would not call the world of Blade Runner strange, because it’s the opposite of strange. It’s familiar. If you subtract the flying cars and the jets of flame shooting out of the top of Los Angeles buildings, it’s not a far-off place. It’s fortunes earned off the backs of slaves, and deciding who gets to count as human. It’s impossible tests with impossible questions and impossible answers. It’s having empathy for the right things if you know what’s good for you. It’s death for those who seek freedom.

It’s a cop shooting a fleeing woman in the middle of the street, and a world where the city is subject to repeated klaxon call: move on, move on, move on.

It’s not so very strange to me.

Hugo and Campbell award finalist Sarah Gailey is an internationally-published writer of fiction and nonfiction. Her work has recently appeared in Mashable, the Boston Globe, and Fireside Fiction. She is a regular contributor for Tor.com and Barnes & Noble. You can find links to her work here. She tweets @gaileyfrey. Her debut novella, River of Teeth, and its sequel Taste of Marrow, are available from Tor.com.

(credit: Image Comics)

Assuming all three remain true to their source material, each will be a very different vision of the future. Ringworld takes place nearly a thousand years from now in a post-scarcity culture. Written in 1970 and the first of a long-running series of books, the titular Ringworld is a vast habitat in space.

In Ringworld, our hero is a bored 200-year old hired by some aliens to investigate this artificial world—a 600 million-mile (950 million km) ribbon orbiting a Sun-like star. It's been awhile since I've read the book but it's easy to see how previous attempts to adapt it for the screen have ended in failure. But with an Amazonian budget and and ever-more capable CGI, now might be the perfect time to try.

Enlarge / Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) speaks during a town hall at Evergreen High School on July 8, 2017 in Seattle, Washington. (credit: Getty Images | Stephen Brashear)

The Democratic opposition to Ajit Pai's re-confirmation was launched today by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), who accused the Federal Communications Commission chairman of abandoning the public interest. Cantwell criticized Pai's in-progress attempt to eliminate net neutrality rules and said he has taken other actions that hurt Americans.

"Since taking over the FCC leadership in January, Chairman Pai has wasted no time in moving the agency away from its key mission to promote the use and deployment of communications in the public interest," Cantwell said in a speech on the Senate floor today, according to a transcript provided by her office. "I'm not going to vote for someone who is going to slow down and clog the Internet," she said later in the speech.

A Senate vote to give Pai another five-year term on the FCC is scheduled for Monday. Republicans hold the Senate majority and support Pai's agenda of deregulating the broadband industry, so he is almost certain to be re-confirmed. President Donald Trump submitted the re-nomination in March.

Enlarge (credit: Shaweesh)

Saudi Arabia's under-secretary for curricula has been fired and exiled to Dagobah after an official Saudi social studies textbook included a photo of Jedi Master Yoda. In the photo, Yoda can be seen sitting next to Saudi Arabia's King Faisal at the 1945 ceremony that created the United Nations. The textbook page began circulating on social media last week.

The photograph was created by Saudi artist Abdullah Al Shehri, who goes by the nickname Shaweesh. He told the BBC that he hadn't meant any disrespect to King Faisal.

"The 2013 artwork, entitled United Nations (Yoda), is part of a series in which symbols of American pop culture—ranging from Captain America to Darth Vader—are superimposed onto archive photos of historical events," the BBC reports.