The Nyctalope

            I had a slow wi-fi connection all day on Monday. I had better luck with the signal from the espresso place across the street than from the donut shop beneath me. Coffeetime was totally down in the afternoon.

            I went through a recording that I made from July 20, 2017 to see which songs I could make videos from. I screwed up my own song that morning but some of the French songs are okay.

            In the late afternoon I took a bike ride. It was quite warm out and I was overdressed with my leather jacket on my hoody on a button shirt on a tank top. I only went as far as Yonge Street this time. Before going south I put my hoody in my backpack. I headed home along Queen and stopped at Loblaws. I took some money from the bank machine and before locking my bike I took my button shirt off so I just had my leather jacket on top of my undershirt. Loblaws didn’t have any black sable grapes so I rode to No Frills in Parkdale where I bought five bags. I also got a loaf of bread, a bottle of mouthwash and some deodorant. In the express line the guy ahead of me only had a twelve pack of bottled water but I guess he found it too heavy so he set it down where the peppers were and left a three-meter space between himself and the customer in front of him until he could put it on the belt.

            In the early afternoon I weighed 90.1 kilos but after my bike ride I was back down to 89.4.

            I made gravy from steak drippings. I boiled a small potato and a carrot and heated up a steak for dinner. I watched an episode of Star Trek Discovery.

            Spoiler alert!
            In this story Admiral Cornwell boards the fugitive Discovery in a mission unknown to Star Fleet. She says something has gone wrong with the black ops Star Fleet unit called Section 31. The Discovery approaches the planet where Section 31 has its headquarters. They are attacked by mines that seem to anticipate their every evasive manoeuvre. The viewer can see that it is Lieutenant Airiam that is controlling them. I had thought that Airiam was a robot but she is really a cybernetically enhanced human. Most of her human body had been destroyed in a shuttle accident when she was on her honeymoon. The crew make it through the mines by flying in a random manner that cannot be anticipated.

            They are confronted by a communication from Admiral Pitar who says they are all traitors and will be arrested.

            Burnham, Airiam and the security officer Commander Nhan beam down to the Section 31 base where they find everyone has been dead for two weeks. Saru figures out that the message from Pitar had been a hologram and so had the video of Spock killing people to escape the psychiatric facility. We learn that the Section 31 base and Airiam have been taken over by a computer system that is trying to destroy all sentient life. It wants to download all of the information on artificial intelligence that Discovery had gotten from the sphere. Airiam begins to fight Burnham and Nhan and she is winning but Burnham temporarily locks her in an airlock. Airiam is able to communicate how she can be defeated at the same time as she is attacking her friends. She tells Burnham to open the airlock. Burnham resists but finally does so and kills Airiam.

            Throughout this episode Airiam had been uploading her memories to Discovery so they would not be lost when the computer fully controlled her. A lot of these memories were of her close friendship with the other members of the crew. But she had never been shown as having any kind of friendship with anyone in these two seasons. This is one of the flaws of Discovery. Star Trek TNG established the friendships between the members of the crew from the start of the series and so they all made sense. Very few of the bridge crew on Discovery besides Tilly, Stametz and Saru are shown to be more than two-dimensional.

            The first cyborg hero in literature was The Nyctalope in the French pulp novels by Jean de La Hire, first published in 1911. He had an artificial heart and enhanced night vision.