And here I offer you
the futuristic
the anarchistic
the strange
the normal
the awesome
the mundane
the excelent
the terrable
the beautaful
the ugly
The destruction and the creation. All under the


                       O r a n g e   S k y

                               ATG

Copyright 2002-2003

1

        My life began at the end of a cold dreamless sleep. Memories of
a blue world, full of life, seem somehow false and hollow. It doesn't matter
anyway. Doctor, lawyer, mechanic, teacher, no matter what title came before,
it is gone now and long forgotten. On this day begins a new life and a new
cache of dreams and all that went before... to dust!
        This time around I got a chance to actually experience being in my
second womb. It was a reconstruction tank of somesort that probably utilized
billions of tiny nanites converting the soup of starches and lipoprotines into
my new skin. My previous skin had the chance to experience third degree burns
as the fuel in the truck that had collided with my car and crushed my left leg
was consumed. At least now there is no pain.
        I wouldn't have made it even to that long ago hospital if it hadn't
been for the fact that the fire station was only five blocks down the street.
I lasted three days there before they finally, mercifully, decided to allow me
to use my cryocare contract.
        My eyes began to clear up as the nanites finished giving me new cornias
and went on to other parts of my face. The walls of the tank were black,
probably so that people outside could watch my progress without glare from
lights outside. It was more important for them to see me than I them. They
must have noticed I was coming around and administered a seditive... Not much
point as nothing really hurt that much...

        The next day or the next week I found myself in a fairly recognisable
hospital ward. There was nobody in the area to greet me. I better go tackle
someone in the hallway then. I sat up and my head went dizzy. Shaking off the
daze I looked up again. There was some kind of camera-robot looking me over,
it was not a mobile unit, rather a part of the alcove of which my bed was a
part.
        As much as I dissliked asking obvious questions this one had to be
answered. "Hey bot, what's the date?" Well it didn't really Need to be
answered, a more usefull question would be to ask wheather I should wait for
someone to assist me or as previously intended, to go tackle someone in the
hall or go looking for a call-button. But then again, Questions need Answers.
        "It is the fifty-third of the first quarter." a synthesized vocie
responded.
        *sigh* Artificial Intelligence must still be a dream. "What year is
it?"
        "Thirty eight oh four."
        That was certainly the correct answer but that didn't mean it made any
sense. "Why was my resucitation delayed for eighteen centuries?"
        "You are incorrect, Your resucitation was not scheduled untill
this morning."
        The answer to that would require a human, Either that or play
50,000,000 questions for the next millenium. "What time is it?"
        "Nine hundred ten" Okay, If that matched up with the time system Swatch
was proposing ages ago then it is about ten thirty at night. Time to get
moving. No clothes. Under the bed? Nope. Toga time! Gotta get me some
laurels. Gotta get me a hair piece! If that *THING* had rebuilt me right I
would be getting it back.
        Moving to the center of the ward on weak legs and an errant sense of
ballance was more of an adventure than a mission. Thankfully the other patients
were asleep and didn't get to see me stumble and fall a few times. The reward
of the treck was a better view of the nurse's station.
        Naturally the staff, as soon as it noticed me staggering towards them,
rushed to catch me. Their faces were more supprised than concerned but not
upset. They spoke in the Dan Rather accent. "Why do you push yourself so hard?"
        I glared at them. "I've been neglected for a very long time."
        "If you had pressed the button we would have come."
        "I was frozen."
        They were successfully shocked back to their training, or at least
as much as I am. "Come back with
us to your bed. You will be able to leave tomorrow."
        "I can leave now, even if I fall every fifth step. I would rather stay
at a hotel."
        "Which bed did you come from?"
        I wanted to ask them why I had been frozen for the last eighteen
centuries but then I realized that without knowing which bed I was from, They
couldn't even answer me if I asked them my name. "Try the one without a sheet."


2

        "Good morning Treveriley."
        *Cringe* "Hello."
        "How are you feeling."
        "Well my anger at being forgotten for centuries is fading to a dull
resentment. Other than that I'm fine."
        "Yes they told us that direct liniage humans had some wierd emotions.
Let me get you some medication."
        "That won't be neccessary."
        "You really should take some."
        "Yes I know but feeling good is not what I am trying to do at the
moment."
        "Why?"
        "It is unimportant right now."
        "But feeling good is *Always* important."
        "Not when you don't have food."
        The man in the nurse's uniform frowned. "Yes your brekfast is right
here." The breakfast was not too unusual except the fruits were different,
either through breeding or engineering.
        "Okay. May I ask you your name?"
        "I am Brad."
        "Is that your full name?"
        His brow furled a little. "Yes..."
        "Well my name is Trever, but you will call me Mister Riley." He was
confused. "Its how things were done in the time that I have traveled so far
from." I explained "It would probably be more appropriate to use your coustom
of given name only so in that case you should call me Trever."
        "Um, okay but we pick our own names."
        "Really, How are you identified before then?"
        He held out his hand "Cirus looks at it."
        I looked over at the bed's robot and spoke to it. "Are you Cirus?"
        "Yes."
        "Tell me, When you identify Brad here, do you look at his hand or
something you put in it?"
        A monitor flipped down from below the ceiling mounted unit's head, or
camera assembly that is. It showed how the micro-implant was placed in the
groove between the nuckels of the index and ring fingers.
        "Thanks." Turning back to Brad, "Usefull device if not very
intelligent."
        Brad whas aghast. "Cirus is the world-master AI!"
        I wanted to shake my head but that would have been the wrong tack. My
previous statement was a mistake too. I sighed.
        "Did you ever get to meet Julius Cesar?"
        "I came 2050 yeras to late for that, my friend."
        "But last night you were dressed just like him."
        "I was wearing my sheet. I don't have anything else to wear."
        He looked under the bed.
        "Do you see what I mean when I said feeling good was unimportant?"
        "Yes, you need clothes."
        "Good, that's a start. Now see what you can do about it."
        "You will have to be fitted..."
        "I will look forward to it. Now about my release..."

        I was eventually issued a grey one-piece jumpsuit. It was comfortable
if not stylish.

3

        I feel like a rat.
        In a proper test of a man there would be a glass of water provided to
allow the man the comfort of a moist throat. A man would wear a suit not a
hospital gown. And the chair would be reasonably comfortable, identical to
those of the testers, not a white pillar-stool in the middle of a room of
projections with no kind face to respond to.
        I must be a rat.
        The door of the chamber closed and Cirus, the tester, begain its work.
"Hello, I am going to show you some pictures and play some music. Then I would
like you to tell me how you feel when you see each of them."
        This was wrong. It's a psychological battery not a neurological
one. For some reason the great computer thought that my feelings were more
important than wheather my brain worked after being frozen for more than half
an eternity! "Cirus, pause the test please. I have some questions for you."
        "Okay."
        "This is a psychological battery, is it not?"
        "That is correct."
        "What factors did you consider when selecting this test over others you
may have elected to preform?"
        "Among the group of cryonics patients of your genetic class from your
time-period there is a suicide rate of 90%. I must collect more data to
determine the cause."
        I'm a rat. "Cirus, in my time it was considered most rude to procede
with tests such as these without first asking him directly what was wrong. I
can answer your inquiry with some very simple observations. The reasons people
such as myself would commit suicide can only fall into one of a handfull of
classes. Those classes include feelings of loss about the life they were
taken from. Feelings of dissappointment about the way the world turned out for
one reason or another. Feelings of confusion caused by the radical change in
the world around them. The loss in status caused by having to start life all
over again. The feeling of hopelessness after they find that their dreams were
just that." I paused for effect. "I hope that constitutes a satisfactory answer
to your inquiry so that it may be possible for you to release me from this test
so I can get on with the task of building my new life."
        "The test must now resume."
        "Cirus, if you had been using this room just now, as you would have
done during the test, you would be able to see that I suffer from none of those
conditions, at least not yet. In addition to that I can sense that you intend
to stimulate in me a series of emotional responses that will be quite
stresful for me. If you choose to procede, I will not cooperate."
        "That is not acceptable."
        "Neither is this." waving my hand at the room.
        "You may go."
        "I have one more question. What is your plan for me?"


4

        My life was handed to me on a stainless steel platter. It was the same
type of tray that they used for the food. My first response to it was "What's
this?" The tray was put on the serving arm attached to the wall behind the
bed. On it was a device that I would have called an oversized PDA. There was a
large eliptical button below the screen. Somewhat hesitantly, I touched it.
        There appeared a digitally rendered albino-white man. "Greetings,
Treveriley..."
        *Cringe* "Hi Cirus."
        "... Welcome to Earth. As a new..."
        "Returning" This was a recorded presentation that Cirus had generated
from me. I could see that he wasn't in a mode to respond but that didn't stop
me from making remarks about his monologue.
        "...citizen of the world you can look forward to a rich and enjoyable
life. I, Cirus am your servant. I am the product of two centuries of your
ancestor's hard work. You can talk to me from anywhere because I am a part of
every thing."
        "Every *computer*, don't over-estimate yourself." Brad was somewhat
disturbed by my comments but I was ignoring him.
        "I can answer any question for you and help you with almost anything
you need me for."
        "swell"
        "To get you started in your life I have arranged for an appartment for
you and your wife."
        "Say what?"
        "You will live there and get used to things and learn about jobs that
you may want to do. Your wife has already been here for a number of years
already and is eager to meet you. Her name is Shelly and she had requested
that you be made for her." Shelly's mug appeared in the upper right corner of
the tablet.
        My snyde remarks had left the building. To think that people were such
that they welcomed such services. The recording went on to describe the various
services Cirus could provide but I wasn't listening anymore. There wasn't
really anything I HAD to remember. Remembering it would only have geiven me an
edge that only humans can achieve. That race seemed to be over.

        The next few hours of my life were spent on something like a conveyer
belt for humans. Basically it was a shakedown for people who, presumably,
had been put togeather by Cirus for any one of a number of lives. It consisted
of two basic underlying goals. First was to set the new person up with the
ID implant and all the essential details of his life. The second reason was to
make sure the person worked right in the first place.
        Take Bob for example. We met during the Beurocratic Hell part of the
test. It was a tangle of forms and tasks so convoluted that only Cirus could
truly appreciate its beauty. It was appearently designed to both test that your
mind was running on all eight and that the annoyiance response haddn't managed
to sneak back into the genepool.
        Incase you're wondering, I got through it only because I couldn't keep
my mind off Shelly.
        "Hello, my name is Bob, what is yours?" He said this with such an empty
and stoned smile that I just had to play along.
        "My name is Trever." Ofcourse to him this wasn't a game or a joke, it
was how he was built. "Lovely day isn't it?" We were deep inside the building
whose function it was to build, maintain, and eventually creamate humans.
There was no indication as to what the conditions outside the building were.
        "Yes, Lovely. I love the morning."
        We were half-way up the side of a large atrium in in the center of
the building. We each carried maps to our next appointments on our respective
PDAs. There were no labels but if you touched an object, Cirus would describe
it. We were walking along a balcony with a railing on one side and offices on
the other. I wanted to learn more about the people with whom I would be sharing
the world so I continued. "How old are you?"
        "I am zero." And continuing his pliteness protocol he reciprocated the
question. "How old are you?"
        "I am one thousand eight hundred twenty eight."
        "Oh, Is that so? How do you remember all of that?"
        "It's easy for me, I like math."
        "I like math too."
        I have isolated a specimine of the type of person who quotes an entire
usenet posting only to add the phrase "MEE TOOO!!". I deserve a prize. "Oh
really," I walked over to the railing and looked across to the other side and
saw other people like Bob milling about their assignments. "I wonder how many
people are walking leftwards relative to me on the balconys on that side of
the building?"
        Bob walked over and looked where I was. "Oh there are many!"
        "How many?"
        "Lots!"
        "Okay how about just the second floor there, How many people are there
on that floor?"
        "Lots!"
        "I'll count..." There were eighteen on the second floor and twenty on
the floor above. "I count eighteen, and there are twenty on the next. How many
is that?"
        "Lots!"
        "Thirty eight." Fun's over bob. "Did Cirus tell you that you would be
going to school?"
        "Nope, Gonna meet Lisa tomorrow!"
        I don't think so. I looked at my pad. My next appointment was on the
Tenth floor on the left side. "I'm going to fly to my next appoinment, see you
later."
        "I want to fly too."
        "Okay first we'll climb this railing." The footing on the railing was
just wide enough to get a reasonably steady balance. I was scared half to
death. Bob wasn't too steady either but he wanted to fly too. If I were to
touch him at all I would be rightly charged as his murderer. Cirus was the one
who killed him. It was a crime of ommission. "Now close your eyes and jump on
the count of three."
        "What is three?"
        "Just count with me. One... Two... Three." I jumped backwards; Bob
jumped forwards. "Goodbye Bob."
        As I was about to resume my chores I watched in horror as some of the
other people on the balcony were getting ready to do the same thing. I thought
Bob was a reject! "NO! People! Climb down!" For some it was too late. I watched
the med-bots load the broken bodies of the jumppers onto first-aid streatchers.
Almost all were later covered with sheets.
        I stepped back. "I swear I will make sure nobody succedes in doing this
ever again." I promiced myself.


5

        So on the next day I met Shelly. There was some fuss about the place
related to the spectacle of the day before. I wasn't bothered about it and
that was alright with me. Shelly was waiting for me in what could best be
named a receiving room. I noted the intended husbands and wives of the late
jumpers were either greif-struck or angry at the poor service.
        Shelly wasn't hard to pick out. She looked just like she did in the
picture. I, on the other-hand was sporting three day old beard. I greeted her.
"Hello shelly."
        "Trever! What's with your face?"
        "I need a shave. Thanks for using my correct name."
        "Correct? I thought it just sounded better being shorter."
        "Cirus' mistake." She didn't respond well to that but continued the
conversation.
        "So you are really are a man from another time?"
        "Yes a far far distant time. I must thank you most graciously for
rescuing me from my icy prison."
        "Tell me more about your adventure, I want to hear everything!"
        "In time. But first I must know why and how did you finally managed
to get Cirus to release me?"
        "All the people Cirus had for me were boring. I wanted someone
interesting."
        "Aah, but it couldn't have been easy with Cirus trying to determine
why the people like me tended to kill themselves."
        "No, it wasn't but I finally convinced him that he was wasting a good
building by keeping you alone in it for ages."
        "You mean that there are no others like me?"
        "Yes they had all been taken long ago. You were so ugly in the pictures
that nobody wanted you but I knew you had a good heart."
        "I'm not ugly now, I hope."
        "No, you were much uglyier in the pictures. Now you're just...
Different."
        "Yeah, I need to get my hands on a razor."
        "What's that?"
        "Well I'll show it to you if I find one. In the mean time I suspect
that you came here in a car and will soon drive me to your home with it."
        "Yes, lets go." I followed her to the door. It opened to an
underground parking garage. Her car could have passed for a Honda Civic
except it had no wheel. As she was opening the doors I looked for a joystick.
There was none, just a nav console.
        After we got in I looked for the crank or button to lower the window.
I wanted to smell the fresh air in the breeze for the first time since I was
thawed. There was no button so I asked Shelly. "How do you lower the window?"
        "Why would you want to do that?"
        "I used to always drive with my window down; even in cold weather."
        "Didn't you get awful sunburns?"
        "No...."
        Shelly commanded the vehicle to move by telling Cirus to "Take us
home."
        The little motor turned on and the car got moving. Soon the car began
to emerge from the building. That was when I saw, for the first time, the
orange sky.


6

        The drive was most instructive. What I saw was a mixture of shiny new
Cirus built structures intermixed with the rotting carcasses of the dead human
civilization. The streets were ancient and sun-baked.
        At a weather scarred traffic light I was able to look around at the
activities of a group of mindless robots that were tearing down a building.
Another bunch across the street was trying to plant a garden completely unaware
that the soil was barren and the nourishing rays of the sun were now poison.
"What caused this?" I muttered to myself.
        "Hmm?"
        "Did the world die all at once or over time and how long ago?"
        "This is a living planet, Cirus says so."
        "Cirus is operating on obsolete information."
        "You're mean!"
        "I'm afraid."
        "Of what?"
        "I fear that my life will end though it need not."
        "But Cirus protects you from everything!"
        "We will see."
        "See what?"
        "Wheather those robots there ever figure out that the plants they are
trying to grow cannot live unless they are shielded from the UV rays."
        Shelly stared ot the robots untill Cirus set the car in motion.
        "They'll grow..."
        "They are dead before the robots finish planting them."
        Shelly was agape. "How do you know?"
        "I have very old eyes. In my time I took great intrest in the sciences.
The universe facinated me and many like me. We used to spend our free time
reading about the works of the great physicists. It was a very exciting time
as there were breakthroughs happening almost every day."

        The car came to rest at an appartment building. "So Cirus isn't giving
out houses anymore?" I commented.
        "No, he wants to use as much land as possible for forests and gardens
to freshen the air."
        *sigh* "I need to get on line and start catching up on the state of
the universe. We will need to get off this planet as soon as possible. Just
thought I would give you some warning."
        There were covered walkways leading from the parking lot. At least
Cirus was not completely deaf to the Code 5 UV warnings its weather sub-system
was issuing daily. The mechanisim of this "listening" almost certainly had an
un-witting human component.

        "We're home!"
        "Shelly, This isn't a home or an appartment, it's a shoebox." I would
have called the quarters a dorm-room. Yes they were better apointed and had
a LITTLE more room. The bed was the small double-bed size.
        Shelly frowned... "Why are you so grumpy?"
        "Nah, Nevermind. This is perfect for what I need to do. Where's the
computer?"
        "Cirus is over here..."
        Cirus in this case was not a desk machine but rather a built-in kiosk
with a chair in front of it. I sat down at it and ignored the screen while
looking around for the keyboard. There had to be one hidden somewhere, even if
nobody knew how to use it! There was none but behind a hidden access pannel
there was a fairly recognisable general purpose serial port... EXCELENT! =)
        I turned to Shelly. "I take it that Cirus can get me stuff. Please
show me how." This was more for Shelly's benefit than for mine. I wanted to
make sure that she would remain friendly to me and my supporter as I begin
to practice my 4rc4n3 4rt$. I also wanted to begin to learn how she is
functioning now so I could begin to practice a form of those same arts on her
to make her a peer rather than the pet that she, like everyone else, had been
designed to be.
        "Yeah, first you have to get his attention by putting your hand on
his face like this."...
        Cirus awoke. "How may I help you?"
        "My hubby here wants to go shopping."
        "Okay what would you like to look at? We have a special today on
sporting equipment."
         Cirus is trying to promote physical activity among people who are
effectively confined to their appartments. *sigh*  "No, Cirus, Today we will
be looking at computing equpipment."
        Cirus looked confused. "Your machine is fully eqipped. No further
hardware is required."
        "Cirus you are wrong. I require a keyboard, and a mouse too. Please
show me you selection."
        Cirus nodded slightly. The screen shifted to what I was looking for.
Shelly ghasped. I looked at her in puzzlement.
        "That's the emblem of the implementors! The people who built Cirus!
Are you one of them?"
        "I don't know yet. I will find out over the next few days." Well that
was certainly something to inquire about but first business had to be attended
to. "I need a split ergonomic design with Dvorak labeling." I use dvorak
I can that layout blind but to teach Shelly I need the keys labeled. "Okay
this one looks like a keeper, Have it shipped to me." I looked at the kiosk to
see how it was assembeled. It seemed to have been assembeled by robots. There
were Torx-head screws in the predictable locations. "Cirus, I will also require
a hardcoppy document printer and a set of hand tools."


7

        All of a sudden I was struck by a violent reflex that was so ingrained
into my being that I couldn't shake it off. My mouse hand started twitching.
I wanted to check the mail in an account that had been closed for an eternity.
I grabbed my head with both hands and screamed my internal anguish. One can
run on the force of adreneline for a few days but to live one must let reality
sink in. Here is the moment where the metaphorical book entitled _How To Wake
Up From Cryofreze_ runs off its last page.
        All my friends and acquantiences, most of them at least, are long
gone. My favorite websites... My favorite shows... Not one of them is
remembered. Its like stepping off the plane for the first time in a city four
timezones away, make that a planet four parsecs a way. Hardly even a wit
short of waking up in a whole new universe. I will get used to it in time but
the shock!

        Shelly, as programmed, came over to try to help me with my anguish.
"What's wrong?"
        "All of this! Humans weren't meant to be put out of commission even
for an hour, much less an eternity! Everything I loved is gone. My car was
destroyed in the accident. My book and music collections were probably sold
off at my estate sale... GAH!!!"
        "You mean like Sorcery books? Were you a wizard?"
        That made me laugh. "Thanks." She was puzzled. "Well SOME of the
books I had were on writing something called 'Source Code' but that is
entirely something else; Something an Implementor would understand. As for
being a wizard, I wish I was! Yeah..."
        "So you are an implementor!"
        "Well if I am going to be one I will need to start a new collection of
manuals and math books.... We're going to need to fit a few bookcases in
here..."
        "We won't need to! They'll give us a big mansion to live in. There
are *libraries* in mansions, don't you know?"
        "Yeah but I hope that doesn't happen. Its dangerous to be a heretic
even in gentile times."
        "A heretic?"
        "I'm afraid so. I don't believe in Cirus. The only people on this
planet seem to be we humans and it seems that everybody but myself has been
put to sleep by Cirus' recorded lulabys.... No, I will not be a popular man
when my work is finished."
        "Why? Are you going to kill him?" Shelly was nearly paniced.
        "No..." I saw that I would have to let the subject lie for a while. It
seems that I am not alone in my shock at touching a part of a distant world.
"What do we do for eats aroud here anyway?"


8

        While we were waiting for dinner time I sat next to the one window in
the shoebox. Everything felt brown from the sky to the buildings bathed in
orange light, and dead. The little cars, all appearently of the same design
run as Shelly's, moved in synchrony. The buildings were arranged in a suburben
scattering. Each seemed to have exactly one purpose.
        "So wasteful..."
        "What? Everybody drives small cars to save fuel."
        "Yeah, one person per car."
        "And we live in energy saving buildings."
        "That require you to use your cars to get between them."
        Shelly was about to respond again but I cut her off. "I guess that
is what I am here to fix."

        The yellow-orange disk of the sun touched the buildings on the horizon
signaling the time that Cirus would anounce our dinner arrangements. Right on
cue he woke up and notified us that it was time to go eat.
        We went out to the car and Cirus drove us to our dinner arangments.
When we got there the joint was jumping, almost literally, off its foundations!
        Powerful speakers shook the earth with a monotonous rythmic sound that
I wouldn't dare call music. I was nearly in pain even before we had properly
arrived at the enterance to the place. "Do you come here often?"
        "This is where Cirus gives me dinner."
        "Shelly." Sigh... "Just because you eat here every night doesn't mean
it is exactly appropriate for *tonight*. Usually when someone meets someone
important they go to a place more relaxed. This place is for people who either
don't have anyone at all and might be looking for someone."
        "But Curus..."
        "No." I walked to the nearest kiosk. "Cirus display a list of
restraunts in the area."

                GRUNGE CITY #18
                GRUNGE CITY #19
                GRUNGE CITY #20
                    - - -
        dito dito dito... =\           Wait!

                Area 51

        It seemed that Vegas metro had spread this far into the desert over
time... Maybe one day after my sense of humor had thawed some more.

                Denny's  #274

        Hey! A reminant of the old Denny's franchise seems to have carried
over in some form...
        "Honey there's been a change in plans."

                          * * * * *

        It was a fairly long drive, about fourty minutes.
        The surviving structure was a testimant to the value of a good
foundation. The place had been mantained on schedule for centuries but nothing
could hide the fact that it had been standing for longer than even Cirus could
remember. There was no roof over the parking lot but the sun had gone down.
        "Lets go inside."
        Shelly was out of her element and a little frazzled. I, however, was
in mine. The inside of the building was decient enough. Shelly just started
walking towards a booth.
        "Wait."
        "What?"
        "Sign!" The sign was there and legable, though aging.
        "So?"
        "Well read it."
        "Read?"
        Lesson number one... "These, honey, are words. You read them. Each
symbol is a sound and the sounds make words. These are commands for how to use
this restraunt. This sign says 'Please wait to be seated.' and if this place
is still functioning properly we will be helped momentarily."
        A humanform android waitress approached with a pair of menus.
        "We'd like a booth."
        The android nodded at the command and led. When we sat down the plastic
coatings on the seats cracked! Appearently the visual inspection Cirus had
been using to keep the place up didn't catch the fact that the plastic had
oxidized. Shelly was startled. I waved at her "Its nothing ignore it."
        We opened the menus. It seems my favorites were still there!
        As I was making my selections I noticed that shelly was pressing her
hand down on the menu most intently. I had to laugh.
        "Cirus isn't working!"
        "That is just a menu. Cirus is inside the waitress. To order food you
get her over here and tell her what you want." Finger up. "Waitress."
        "Can I get you some drinks?"
        "Rootbeer." Shelly was supprised so I ordered for her. "Two. Since
it's late lets go ahead and get our entre'...." Now it was in the hands of
whatever robot was operating the kitchen... Maybe I shouldn't have come here
tonight.
        I looked around and the resteraunt was deserted... Except, for the
couple in the booth on the other side of the divide. I could hear their
muffled voices. "Excuse me, Curriosity beccons."

        At first glance there didn't seem to be much unusual about the couple
but you could notice that they had been coming for a long time. The tables in
the resteraunt were in fair condition. The table that they were at was heavily
worn. "Excuse me, I hope I'm not interrupting but I coudldn't help but notice
that you were the only other couple in the resteraunt. I get the impression
you have a story to tell me."
        They were a bit supprised at the interruption but not displeased. The
man took the job of replying. "Well yes, we've been coming here since twenty
four thirty eight."
        "Hmm. A love that has lasted a thousand years. Now I'm really
interested."
        "There isn't really much to say... Our genome was rigged to be more
faithful than direct liniage. After that when we die we ask Cirus to re-make
us."
        "But why do you die? How long do you last at a streatch anyway?"
        "Well... We're human. We die. Each go-around lasts fifty years."
        "That's not what I had hoped to hear. Goodbye." I shouldn't have been
so rude but I just couldn't believe that people who wanted to exdend themselves
so long would not work harder to make each generation last longer!

        When I got back to our table Shelly had a question for me. "Is this
the past?"
        "No, just a pattern that has persisted for a very long time, It is as
close as we'll ever get to the real thing. That's what Cirus does. It
preserves the past to make the people comfortable. It has done a good job but
something terrible has happened to the planet and Cirus hasn't adapted. I am
going to have to check some numbers but I don't think we have long to live."


9

        And so we had dinner. The waitress was hard-coded to bring a bill at
the end of the meal. It was zero but I went through the motions of signing the
recipt and we left.
        Now that it was night there was nothing preventing me from spending
time in the open. The air was more stale than fresh. I was hoping to try to
gather some first-hand intelligence about wheather there were any orbiting
colonies. But when I looked at the sky I was dissappointed to see that the
smog-filled sky was reflecting the light from the hundreds of sodium and
mercury vapor lights around the sprawl city. It seemed as bright as daytime
and the same color too.

        We got home around midnight. er, back to the shoebox ofcourse... "What
are we supposed to do with our clothes?"
        "Laundry..." There was a laundry chute...
        "Do we get back our same stuff eventually or is it communal?"
        "I don't know."
        I went ahead and dissrobed. There were no nightclothes of any type.
Inspecting the collar of the jumpsuit I found an ID chip encased in a
protective shell of plastic. "aah." Down it went... And then I turned arround.
        Shelly ghasped. "What?..."
        "What?" I checked myself. Nothing out of place... Nothing unusal...
"This is what I look like. There is nothing wrong with me."
        She approached me and touched my embarassingly thick layer of fur on
my chest. "David wasn't like this."
        "David wasn't a human being. A human being is nothing more than an ape
with an ego. David was some kind of artificial person, made to match someone's
ideals. I am the way I am for the same reason a rock in a river is the shape
it is. Perhaps oneday I will find a way to change myself but for now this is
an inescapable fact for me."
        Shelly thought. "Yeah it's alright. Do you like my body?"
        "Hmm.." She had sandy shoulder length hair, riviting blue eyes,
Plesant features. Below that she was totally hairless. I would have said she
was of medium build but others may have called her voluptuous, and half a
dozen sizes larger than petit. "Pretty good. I am usually more interested in
a girl's mind. If I can't have an intelligent conversation with her then I
know that we'll never get along anyway."
        "Okay. What are these."
        WHAT!!!! "um they're balls. I don't like em much myself but never had
a good enough reason to loose em. All Real Men have them."
        Shelly blinked a little as a whole brand of old sayings and manerisms
snapped into focus. "oh."
        It was gawdawful late already so we went to the bed... Shelly
unceremoniously jumped in. I was nervous. "Shelly, this is the first time I
have ever had the opportunity of sleeping with a woman."
        "Really? Wow!"
        "Shelly, I have to warn you that if we have sex, there is a chance that
you may become pregnant."
        "Pregnant?"
        "Yes. If you want a sterile population of humans and want to retain
the ability to switch back to a fertile population you will choose to neuter
the men. You do this because it takes far fewer men to make a given number of
children than women. Since some changes have been made to your genome, it might
not be possible for us to produce a healthy child. I don't want to put you
through a miscarrage."
        Shelly didn't understand most of the terminology I was using but from
the word child alone was enough. It startled her.
        "Its late. Lets sleep on it."


10

        "Good Morning!"
        "Barely... Just after dawn. I wouldn't call it morning yet; maybe in
an hour or so..." *thunk*
        "Up up up! We've got a big day today."
        "Yeah, I gotta hack Cirus... No first I download everything he knows
THEN I hack him." I hit another nerve. Shelly was in turbopanic mode.
        "Sorry." I sat up and tried to pay off my debt of distress by attending
to whatever she was so excited about. "What are you so perky about anyway..."
        "Do you like my wedding dress?"
        My hand went to my head. "Oh dear."
        "Yes honey?"

        The church was a stunningly magnificent gothic style cathedral.
Judging by the age of the stones, considering that this was once primarily a
desert the age of the building couldn't be less than a few hundred years. The
placement of the building was most telling of how Cirus 'thought'. On the same
street, in this order, were the police station, the fire station, a water
tower, and then this cathedral. I could only shudder as to what I would find
inside.
        I was right. There was a robotic minister in the front of the church.
"That is totally amazing."
        "What?"
        "I thought this institution would propetuate itself forever regardless
of how much logic people threw at it. Incredible!"
        A robotic usher approached us to give us instructions as to how the
service would procede. I cut it off before it could begin. "Usher, I need some
information, What kinds of services take place here?"
        "We hold weddings and sing-alongs on days with numbers ending in one."
        "Figures." I turned to shelly and explained. "The church is dead but
it seems some habbits and customs die hard slow painful deaths."
        "That's horrible."
        "Yes, we should leave and have our wedding next-door."
        "Huh?"
        "I will not defile the memories of the people who found meaning in
these places by allowing this farce to continue." I looked at the pews which
were filled with humanoid forms that seemed somewhat animated if not alive.
"Are any of these people real?"
        "Ofcourse! they're all real!" Shelly didn't have five hundred friends
and relatives. It wasn't possible. "No, I mean do any of them belong to you."
        "No..."
        "Well then lets go."
        "But the wedding..."
        I had her by the arm and we were leaving.

        The magistrate was equally robotic but that didn't bother me in a
courthouse. The chamber was grey and not very inspiring except for its
simplicity of form and its cleanlyness. The Cirus-balif had us sit on the
benches in the rear even though there was nobody else was in line. Naturally
the wait was short.
        "Mr. Trevor Riley Please come forward." aaah! the joys of old program
code. "Place your right hand on the podium... What is it that you would like
addressed?"
        "I request that you issue a cirtificate of marrage for me and my
Fiance` Shelly..." I turned to shelly prompting her for the rest of her name
but she just stared at me in puzzlement.
        The magistrate continued. "Shelly will you please place your right
hand on the podium." Shelly responded without hesitation.
        "Very well, Take the form from the paper slot there by the desk of the
clerk. Your signature will be your certification." A laser printer began to
whir. There was no clerk, just a desk. The paper was old and yellowed but
still usable. There was a pen attached to the council's table that worked
after a little excercise.
        The document was simple. It listed our names and a big long number
that was our real name. Mine was, strangely, my old Socialist Security number.
Shelly's was much uglier. I signed my name. I took care with my handwriting
which was out of practice as I was a keyboard fiend but still produced a
reasonable signature. Shelly looked at the pen in facination when I handed
it to her. "If you want to marry me, write your name here on the line."
        She tried but it soon became horrifyingly obvious that she was trying
to copy mine. I grabbed the paper and crumpled it up. "Magistrate please print
a second form and suspend procedings indefinitely."
        "Verry well, Your matter will be kept on file for fifty days.
Ajourned."
        "What's wrong? Did I do something wrong?" Shelly was scared.
        "No, but you are going to do something right." I led her out into the
loby and asked the face of cirus behind the counter to give us a stack of
paper. Thankfully there was still some in the building for  miscilaneous
things that the digital designers knew they couldn't think of.
        There was a counter for filling out forms and stuff at the side of
the lobby. "Here, This is a form that when signed by the two of us and then
notorized by the magistrate will cirtify that we are married. I generally
don't agree with the concept of marage but since I owe you so much I will do
this for you. Look here, this is my name. My signature is my name written by
my own hand in such a way that I can inspect it and certify it to be my own
later. I sign like this... This is my name. Now I will show you how to write
yours."
        I had forgotten much of my own handwriting lessons long before I had
been frozen. In truth I could only write in a horrible mish-mash of styles
that served only myself. Hmm...
        I went back to the counter and tryed to explain to Cirus what I
needed. It took about ten minutes but I got Cirus to print some pages using a
font that mimiced proper cursive writing.
        I brought it back, explained the alphabet and how cursive writing was
supposed to work and had shelly practice. I told her to get me when she had
gotten good at it. Menawhile I crashed in one of the waiting-room chairs and
planned to zone out for the rest of the morning.
        I was supprised fifteen minutes later when Shelly came over and got me.
I was going to just say 'keep practicing.' but being a beter man than that
I got up to see what had been produced so far. "My God!" She was already
writing better than I could, even if I had been practicing. "Is it true that
you never did this before?"
        "No, is this one of your old customs?"
        "Sortof, What did Cirus give you for neurons? I couldn't have learned
that in a week!"
        Shelly was smiling at the compliment...
        "Have you practiced your name? Its spelled right here."
        She practiced it a little.
        "That's good but its missing something... I mean you don't have a
last name or anything so, to me, it seems half made."
        "Hmm..."
        "Here's one, How about 'Shelly the Princes of Light'." That bought a
giggle. :)
        And that's how I came to marry the Princess of Light.


12

        As we were rushing back to the car in order to avoid too much exposure
to the damaging radiation Shelly asked my to explain more about why we didn't
get maried at the church. Since now was as good a time as any to explain
things we went back to the church.
        "So what do you know about churches?" Its always best to start a
teaching session off with a question.
        "They are where people get married. I married David here."
        "No, This building was designed orrigionally as a gateway for
'communing' with God. Nevermind that there is no God nor never has been."
        "But why build a building to talk with something that doesn't exist?"
        "Exactly my point. Unlike you, the people who created these churches
were totally irrational. They simply would not surrender their false beliefs
to the light of reason."
        "But why?"
        "Thats a long story. There should be a copy of it in this building,
lets go look at it." As usual my use of words were slightly disorienting to
Shelly because she thought of stories as something that Cirus could tell on
command rather than something that could have a seperate existance in the form
of a "copy".
        I looked around the foyer but there wasn't one. Peeking into the
main hall of the building I saw that there was a Bible perched closed uppon
the alter. There was another wedding in progress but I wasn't concerned by
that.
        The book was a large illuminated edition of the King James translation
of the bible. It had apparently been produced as a part of the building
hundreds of years ago but never opened. "This, Shelly, is the best and the
worst book ever written in all of human history. It is good in that it tells
the story of how humans became civilized and offers many points of wisdom that
any man would do well by following. Unfortunately it 'explains' many things
that were poorly understood by the writers with such force and definity that
for many centuries nobody was even *allowed* to question what it says is
true."
        "But couldn't they see?..."
        "No. They couldn't. They were so comforted by these answers that if
they tried to look beyond them, they would be terrified by what the universe
was really like. Out of this fear grew a practice of persecuting and often
killing people who used their faculties of critical thought."
        "But that doesn't happen anymore..."
        "Apparently not. There seems to have been a reformation at some point
where many old practices were replaced with more logical ones. Unfortunately
I have not yet had the chance to catch up on my history. But in the time I
came from, many millions of people saw this book not as a story of a beginning
but an end in itself."
        "Howso?"
        "Well thats complicated. In the simplest case they saw this God, who
never existed, as something like Cirus that they would pray to in order to
gain favors of some form or another. When the preacher over there is finished
with his service I will ask him to explain it to you. He should know more
about it than I do."
        Shelly looked away from the book and started studying the structure
and its symbols some more "So how wold people commune with God here?"
        "Well they would follow the instructions within this book." I opened
the volume for the first time and turned to the point where the silk bookmark
had been placed at the beginning of the 'New Testimant'. "This is the
beginning of the second half of the bible. Even though it calls itself 'New',
it is now nearly 4,000 yeras old. There are two relvant passages in here.
At one point, the main charactor of the story, says something like 'whenever
two or three are gathered togeather in my name I will be in their midst.'
That is why this church is here. When people gather here it is assumed that
some form of God will come here too. It doesn't bother people that God has
never appeared during one of the occasions on which God appears. That is the
first part of it."
        "okay."
        "On the day before Jesus was killed he gave instructions about how to
actually talk to him while he was in attendance. This story is called the
'last supper' or 'first communion.'" There was a cloth covering some objects
on the altar, I gently removed it to reveal the bread and wine they were
protecting.
        "See here, these are the symbols of the blood and body of christ. The
communion 'service' involves the preacher blessing these and then serving them
to the congregation."
        "Wierd. But why was this man so important?"
        "In truth he wasn't he was just a man like I am a man and you are a
woman. No difference. The answer to why he was so important is politics."
        "Politics?"
        "Who gets what, when, and how; politics. Throughout history, from the
beginning of this book on untill the ratification of the constitution of the
United States of America, Religeon *was*, in part or in whole, politics."
        "I see, but why was it so important if, as you say, God doesn't
exist."
        "Hush! That's heresy. Thankfully nobody will punish you for it these
days... I think."
        "Okay but who was Jesus?"
        "Jesus was two men in the same body. The first man was a follower of
the great prophet John the Baptist who had a pollitical agenda. The second was
a tool used by later authors for their own pollitical agendas. Those people
took an ordinary man and turned him into the living incarnation of God on
Earth. More than that, they made him the *only* conduit through which mortal
men could commune with God or seek redemption. Ofcourse all of that was false
and untrue but those thoughts were not permitted."
        "Did they get what they wanted?"
        "Not at first. But that's a long story. You have to know how the world
*was* before you can understand how they changed it. Before the Christian
revolution the world was ruled by might and fear. Those who had the might
terrorized the people who didn't regardless of who was right. Might made
right. People could only think in terms of soldiers and warfare. Jesus changed
that."
        "How? You just said he was just a man, now you seem to be saying that
he had the power to change the world."
        "He could change the world because he realized in some way or another
that it was men such as himself who could wield the power of God."
        "The power of God?"
        "You brought me back to life didn't you?"
        "Yes."
        "You could have chosen someone else and given that person life,
couldn't you?"
        "Yes."
        "Or summon food or water or clothing?"
        "Yes."
        "Well then you wield the power of God."
        "But everybody can do that!"
        "Time, Shelly, Time. There once was a time when Cirus didn't exist.
A time when life appeared unexpectedly and, on occasion, was struck down with
no time to wonder why. A time when if your plants didn't grow you would
starve. The only answer the people in this book could come up with was 'God'
and they became very superstitious."
        "Plants don't grow now anyway, they havn't in several years."
        "You remember when they did grow?"
        "Yes, it was before the sky turned yellow."
        "... And the moon to sack cloth. Oh dear!" I looked up at the stained
glass windows and realized that those silly people had gotten something about
now right.
        "What?"
        "The end of this book..."
        "What about it?"
        "I can't tell you yet, I have to keep things in order or they get out
of context."
        "The things that Jesus did were amplified by things other people did
before and after him. Before him you had the prophets. They were like what
people of my time called 'psychics'. Some were insane, Some were playing
politics, some may actually have seen something. You see, its possible that
while any animal can make use of eyes or ears, only intelligent beings such as
humans can make use of other senses, if they exist. Since this is the first
time in the history of evolution that a species has become intelligent,
evolution may be beginning to discover how to make an 'inner eye' or a 'third
eye'. If that is true then I would surely like to have Cirus give me one."
        "What did they see?"
        "Well they saw what they wished to see. They saw their God raise vast
armies and conquor their enemies. God is sometimes called the 'Lord of Hosts'.
'Host' is just another word for army, in this context. Ofocurse there would be
a man to lead this army, and as tradition went, the man with the armies was
also king, having the power of God at his back, he would be the king of kings.
So it went hand in hand. The man that would deliver them from their enemies
would use armies to do so, and would therefore be the king of all the world
too. Boy would they have been supprised to find out what actualny happened!"
        "So Jesus was a king?"
        "Only after the people who came after him were done. He was the son of
a carpenter. Don't let anyone tell you different..."
        "What would they say?"
        "That he was the son of God or something. The entire belief system
hinges around him being the son of god and the only conduit to him. That's how
the new religeon that was founded in his name overthrew the old religeons.
Only two centuries after his death, this new religeon went from being a
persecuted sect to being THE religeon of the empire."
        "Wow!"
        "Indeed, but remember we are talking about a myth not a man. The only
thing in this story that makes it worth mentioning is the new path he set out
for the people in his country. Instead of raising armies and fighting the
occupying Roman troops as was the prophecy, he tought the people to become
more noble. To rise above the Roman tyrany and fight wars with ideas instead
of swords. This brave new message alone makes the man worth studying. Most of
this message is sumarized here, in a sermon he made on a mountantop."
        Shelly tried to read the text and was doing fairly well... "He who
is first shall be last... The meek shal inherit the earth..."
        The priest was finished with his service. The other pair of newlyweds
had been listening to us for quite a while. The Cirus-priest came up to the
book and started reading where Shelly was in his artificially grand voice.
When he had finished reading the sermon with a hearty "Amen" I decided to pose
some questions to him.
        "So where are we in the grand scheme of things? Is this the end of the
world?"
        The instant answer was "No."
        "Are you sure? Load current meterological and news reports and
cross-refferance with the bible. Is this the end of the world?"
        I could see that this revised command was working. The answer was a
flat soul-less "Yes."
        "What?" the bride of the other couple exclaimed. "But we just got
married!"
        The phony priest couldn't answer so I poked him with a direct question.
"How long do we have?"
        "The Earth's atmosphere will become toxic within fifty years."
        Shelly looked at the bible again. "But doesn't this book tell us how
to fix it?"
        "No, but that only means that we need to write a new book." This one
is worthless now. To back up my words I picked up the heavy volume and threw
it down onto the floor. "Lets go."


13

        When we arrived at Shelly's usual feeding trough, I loaded my mouth
with some ten guage insults and went looking for the DJ. The treck towards the
controll room was not an easy one. Each time I had to pass one of the
oversized 'ducers my eyesight went fuzzy and I felt compelled to check my nose
to see that it wasn't bleeding.
        I got to the front of the booth and pushed one of the darkened windows
open (it folded inwards towards the ceiling on hinges where it could be
latched). The booth was unmanned. I tried the door and found it to be unlocked.
I sat at the console and looked at the setup. The controlls were not that
difficult. The decebel readings were off the charts. Not even The Who would
take it up to 150. Any natural human would quickly loose his hearing with
these settings. I quickly cut it down to a plesant 60 db.
        Now for the selection, the music was being generated by Cirus via a
menu of slidebars that indicated the psychophysical effect that was desired.
I queued up "Rock and Roll" by Led Zep and hit fade-in. That woke people up.
        With my brain slowly pulling itself back into one piece after being
thouroughly shaken appart by the unritious vibes from a moment ago. I could
start take the place in. The people seemed vaguely dismayed. Not upset but
dismayed that something had changed. This was new, different, and not wholy
appreciated. At least the people singing now had souls to loose.
        The crowd was basically here for dinner and just that. The shear noise
from a few minutes ago had precluded any conversation. I was getting the
impression people had liked it that way. Too bad. I'm in The Box and they
aren't. I needed to eat too... maybe another night.
        Looking around behind me I noticed that this joint had some of the
Real Stuff. I had to force myself to stop drooling and get back to setting up
the equipment for the rest of the night.
        I put in a string of quality stuff from the same vintage for the rest
of the night and then returnded the system to automatic controll... It would
automaticly generate a brief intro for each set but not change any of the
settings. At the end of the set it would revert to elevator music at
background volume. I locked the windows and then the door behind me. To do
this I placed my hand on the knob and said "Lock". The knob made an artificial
Klick noise confirming my command.
        A punk came up to me with a bit of an aditude. "What you doing
touching my sliders? Don'tchya know I'm the Slide King?"
        "Oh is that so? I'm the DJ. No SK got nothing on no DJ, hear?"
        "DJ? Can't be no DJ! Who are you?"
        "I'm Trevor Riley and you're in my way." I brushed past the sorry
excuse for a dude and went looking for ShellyTPoL. Behind me I could hear SK
yelling at Cirus to open the door. *Sigh*
        Alright Where's Shelly? There are plenty of girls here... About every
hair-color under the rainbow... Natural growing it seemed too. Got any sandy
brown? Nope... Nope... Wait! onetwothreefour...five... Okay... try the other
side of the place. Onetwothreefour...five Er... This can't be right!
Onetwothreefour...five! uh... this is terribly wrong! onetwothreefourfive. =\
Girl Chick Babe Fox ... Cat. I still needed to find ShellyTPoL but here was a
mystery that I wasn't going to leave without solving.
        I came across a server robot but it wasn't very conversational.
Fortunately I had just about ehausted the options and found myself at Shelly's
favorite table soon. Unfortunately all her girlfriends were there too and that
was enough to fill the table. It was a booth and there weren't any free-roaming
chairs in the area. ShellyTPoL was in one of the corners.
        "Shelly, would you mind introducing me to your friends here."
        "Oh sure, Ruth, Christy, and Sarah."
        "Hello, Now which one of you would like to move, I would like to sit
with my wife."
        They all looked at each other. Sarah was shooed and I got a seat. The
menu was in the table. It was like the Denny's menu but interractive. In any
event it wasn't a snag. The food was fairly typical, some sythetic stuff that
most empahaticaly was not arround in my day but that was to be expected. It
seemed that the assemblers in the 'kitchen' could whip up anything.
        Now for the mystery. I switched the table to normal terminal mode and
asked Cirus about demographics. The global population was twenty three billion
people of which 80% were female. All people were artificial and there was a
population freeze in effect because the global power systems could only support
that many people.
        Uhoh, then poeple were still dying then because new people were still
being made. Well that would be a problem for another day. "Now why are there
so few men?"
        Apparently I had phrased the question just right, the machine gave me
the answer I needed. "Global Directive 15 states that the population of either
gender shall not be allowed to fall below 20%."
        "Why is there such a bias towards females that this rule needs to be
inforced to protect the male population?"
        "Unknown, Would you like to search for papers on this subject?"
        "No thanks." Damn! I looked at ShellyTPoL suspiciously. "What kind of
people do you like?"
        "Huh?"
        "Boys or Girls?"
        "Boys, I liked David and now you."
        "And ruth here, How about her? Do you like her as you do me?"
        ShellyTPoL shrugged. "She's my friend."
        I knew Shelly was telling the truth. She had no motive at all to lie.
"How about you, Ruth?"
        "Girls!" She rubbed her arm against Christy's and giggled. It wasn't
an embarased giggle more of the giggle that intoned mischevous plans for
later.
        There didn't seem to be much reason to inquire about boys from her..
"Christy?"
        "Everybody." With a plesant smile. "Ruth keeps me busy though."
        I stroked my budding beard for a while... "Is Sarah one of you too?"
        "um, how do you mean? Who she likes?"
        "Yeah."
        "Hmm.. She's slept with us lots of times..." Christy responded.
        "Yeah, I was sleeping with her too but I wanted a man again..."
        "SHELLY!! I thought you said you just liked boys!"
        "I do, but you can't be alone now can you?"
        "I was, for years. Hackers don't have people they have keyboards. Its
a depressing life but in my day there didn't seem to be much of a consensus
about what to do about it."
        Shelly put her arm around me.
        "Thanks... I guess what I really want to know is wheather you would
sleep with Ruth."
        "No, she doesn't leave me alone, I can't get any sleep."
        I had to turn away to hide my silly expression. I didn't know what to
feel. It was such a funky situaiton where I had just heard both what I wanted
to hear and what I didn't in the same sentance. Unbeleivable! "Excuse me I
have to get some air."
        I got up and chaced after Sarah. I needed the rest of the picture.
Sarah had found her other good friend Tracy. They were chatting about the news
that the world was about to end. Cirus was now giving updates on the
incroaching doom now that the matter had been properly drawn to its attention
by means of its news feeds.
        "Hello, I was wondering, Do you like anyone?" The question was not for
the answering but rather for the getting of attention.
        "Yeah sure, we're all friends."
        "So who do you like to sleep with?"
        "Tracy, she doesn't squirm or poke me."
        That was about it... I wasn't going to bug the men because some of them
looked pretty tough and none of them were grouped togeather. "Do you realize
that the world is populated by lesbians, Bisexuals, Nonsexuals, and the
occasional streight man?"
        They didn't know what to make of that and neither did I.


12

        It was morning and I felt the need to get to work. I had Cirus show me
the news feed, brought to you by Cirus himself. My keyboard and printer had
arrived during the night. I plugged the suckers in. When I looked back at the
screen I saw that Cirus' oppinion of my intelligence had improved a hundred
fold. Instead of avoiding displaying any words I now had a fairly recognizable
GUI. The news continued in a window. The broadcast began with the weather
report. It gave its daily UV report which was always a Code Ten these days,
Stay out of the sun at all costs or suffer severe burns. It then went on to
discuss local events for today. Most of them were varrious clubs and
recreational activities run by various Cirus sub-routines.
        Then finally it went on to top news items from around the world. The
story today was that recient climatological projections had been linked to
theories of the end of the world. A meeting of the UN general assembly would
be needed to address this looming crisis.
        The second news story was directly derived from the first. The gist
was that for the first official session of the UN in more than eight hundred
years to occour, a quorum of delgates from each of the geo-social regions of
the planet would need to be in attendance. Unfortunately there wasn't anyone
to fill all of those seats. The election and training of delegates would need
to begin at once.
        The third story was derived from the second. People who might like to
become the delegate to the UN for the region of the north american continent
between the Sierras and colorodo from the old mexacan border all the way up
to the arctic circle should seek ten nominations and then submit them to their
local government center for voting in one month's time.

        "Oh-boy." ShellyTPoL heard that as she was getting some breakfast from
the appartment's snack machine. "What?"
        "Didn't you listen to the news? Cirus is trying to re-start the UN to
try to solve the problem of the end of the world."
        "Cool Didn't they stop wars a long time ago?"
        "Yeah something like that... It seems that they have also made a lot
of political decisions that have helped to cause the problems that this new UN
is being conveined to solve."
        "You see, Superficially the world is just as I had left it with only
minor changes. That is the problem. By all rights the world should be radicaly
different. So different that I could hardly comprehend the differences. But,
things have been locked in to the way they were. Since it is the nature of the
universe to *change* then something artifical must have been invoked to stop
that change. I saw a clue to that last night at the resteraunt. The UN tried
to protect the rights of men by creating a 'General Directive' that would
artificially maintain a male population. Taken togeather all of those
directives have resulted in a situation in which the world is locked into a
fixed pattern that has been artificially maintained by those directives
despite innumerable preasures for change."
        "Look outside." I continued, "If the changes that were needed to
prevent the sky from becoming orange or to repair it if the damage had been
caused by a cosmic event were made then it wouldn't have gotten so bad that
now the plants and the algee in the sea won't grow. Even if the world couldn't
have been fixed we could have flead to space but we havn't."
        "But isn't the sky supposed to be orange?"
        "Shelly, it is supposed to be blue. It only became orange over some
very polluted citties during hot weather."
        "Blue..." Shelly looked at the sky wonderingly...
        "Yes and the land was bright and green and the buildings were painted
bright or made out of mirrored glass. That won't happen again, not for many
centuries at least. Right now the question is wheather we can survive our
ancestor's decisions. Please exceuse me, I have work to do."

        I went back to the terminal and set about examining its programming.
The news broadcast had finished that window had reverted to showing the Cirus
logo. closed it and started searching the screen with the mouse. The system
obeyed every principle of good design I had ever heard of. What I needed to
know was how it operated. The actual transcripts of my interactions with the
machine would consume many voulmes and are therefore better conveyed as
summaries, with some elaboration only where special techniques were required.
        My initial discovery was that it was just a stupid web-tv type box.
Well constructed, but only useful for that which it was designed to be useful
for. That is anything that the Implementors *didn't* want me to do, *couldn't*
be done with the device. There was no way to access the operating system or
even determine wheather there was one. There didn't seem to be any way to even
download and run more advanced tools as there was no general purpose
filesystem. Various applications such as book-viwers text editors and the like
maintained their own persistant storage.
        Implementing was strictly controlled. That would have to be fixed.
Meanwhile I needed about 60 megabytes of text to help me figure out what
needed to be implemented and how. My first impulse was to go jump into the
stacks at a good technical library. Some poking around revealed that libraries
had been declared obsolete like the old calendar.
        The only technical material to be had was keept at the only place
where one could find a fully functional computer, an implementation center.
The nearest one was fifty miles West, in Vegas. It was closed due to lack of
staffing and no public interest. Yeah, Cirus is perfect and no further work is
needed. Right and the atmosphere wasn't about to turn to poison.
        There were three levels of implementors. On the first tier were Hard
implementors and Soft implementors. You were either one or the other but
couldn't be both. They wore copper keyboards or microchips respectively.
The second tier were the Head Implementors, they could train themselves in
both and got to wear silver keyboards. There was at most one per
implementation center. They were the only people authorized to Release
software. Above them was the open office of Master Implementor, he is
answerable to  only the UN itself. His duity was to translate directives from
the UN into Cirus Policy and then translate those policies into coding
standards to be implemented by the Head Implementors and to be known and
obeyed by the peons in the trenches.
        I signed up to become a Soft Implementor. Doing that required me to
pass a simple enterance exam consisting of reading and algebra skills. It was
no real problem. I had to become an implementor because it was the only way I
could get the *access* I needed. It was a temporary arrangment, I hoped. I
would need to try to convince ShellyTPoL to become a Hard Implementor. It
needed to be this way because only ShellyNeurons could master all the facts I
needed. It would take several months for a Head Implementor to complete his
training. I would need to complete my training on-site and under supervision.
        In the meantime I needed to prepare a presentation for the UN, to get
it moving in the direction I wanted it to. My bet was that they would have
as much trouble reviving the scientific community as they did themselves.


13

        The task that I laid out for myself was to construct a presentation
advocating the construction of giant space stations of some sort and the
evacuation of the planet to the same untill the planet could be re-built.
It may seem more appropriate to build preasure domes on earth and maintain a
habitable space within but that wouldn't solve the even more long-term problem
of securing a future for lifeforms that I could feel a kinship with as well as
a bit of responsability for. I would need to complete the work that didn't
get done in my previous brief life-cycle.
        To do advocate a space program I would need to catch up on eighteen
centuries of history. Fortunately the information on space travel was much
more accessable than the more intimate details of the operation of the Cirus
System. Only things upsetting or threatening to the timid weak recieves that
kind of treatment.
        There were three colonies in the solar system. A lunar outpost and a
Marshan colony. Both of these colonies had been abandoned after only a few
decades of operation for numerous reasons.
        The third colony, however, was an enigma. Contact with it had been
terminated only a few centuries after its founding. It had been established
in 2060 by a group of radical extropians who had shirked their flesh and now
exist as programs within the peta-scale computer the planet Jupiter and its
moons had become. The moons were keept in orbit around the main body but now
acted as auxilary libraries and vacation homes for the cyber-beings.
        The only radio transmissions, asside from all the noise of the
equibment, sent by this planetary system was a list of available
communications opportunities. They claimed to accept personal communications
and offered several e-mail addresses using the ancient e-mail system but
refuse to answer anything that they didn't feel was worthy of a reply. What
exactly would elicit a reply was unknown but it seemed they were getting more
selective every nanosecond.
        There was only one dish dedicated to communications with that system
that would have a direct line of sight for the next four hours. To access the
ancient e-mail system I needed to set up an account at Hotmail. You know,
I once swore I would never use a stupid lame web-based service ever...

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
     From: "Trevor Riley" <Cyberweenie@hotmail.com>
       TO: generalinquiries@earthlink.jupiter
  Subject: I've been depopsicleized, now what?
     BODY:

"Greetnigs immortals,
        I hate to start out on such a sorry note but you know you 1337 D00dz
could have like gotten me out of that stainless steel cylender a few centuries
ago... It isn't as if I were frozen back before cryoprotectants were perfected.
I'm not sure wheather I want to hear the answer to that but presently I do
have a bit of a conundrum on my hands... The weather back here on Terra is
getting kinda rotten and we're looking at massive casualties here. I'm not
saying that the modern specimine is the model of perfection but it isn't worth
killing off quite yet, they could even be somewhat useful.
        Anyway, setting that asside for the moment. How are things working up
there, are you still emulating lobes and neurons? =P Simulated any storms
reciently?

Trevor Riley 1975-2005; Former resident of Alcore Cryonics."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

        I punched send. The signal would leave tonight and spend an hour and
a half in transit to Jupiter. I would probably get my response sometime
tomorrow, if ever.
        Presently it is time for dinner. ShellyTPoL had been out most of the
day though I didn't really pay much attention to where she had gone.
        Over at Grunge City there were a bunch of people waiting for me. They
had figured out that I was the one who had changed the music and they wanted
to know why the music last night was so much better than the usual stuff.
        I scratched my head for a moment. "Well, Music can only be written by
people who think and feel. Since Cirus is just a machine it will work with an
algorithm trying to figure out how to stimulate your emotional centers. It
can't sound good because it is just an empty carrier wave with no message.
A real artist will tell a story or weve a picture through his music."
        "Take a piece by Gershwin, it talks about the spirit of the early
twentieth century even without words. Or Saint-seans, who takes you through a
zoo."
        "Say Who?"
        "ugh." I went into the booth and queued up some favorites from those
and others for the evening. It would take some time for the audience to really
get an ear for the details but it was still enjoyable.

                                * * *

        The next morning brought a response to my missive, fresh off the
morning downlink.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
     From: mentex@redspot.jupiter
       To: "Trevor Riley" <cyberweenie@hotmail.com>
  Subject: Welcome back, friend.
     BODY:

"Welcome traveler,

        Oh man, we cleaned Alcore out decades before we left. What a trip!
You've gotta tell me what happened. Anyway, we can get a pick-up vessel down
to you in about a decade. In the meantime we can set you up in our old
antarctic facility. You'll have the place to yourself so you can start
evolving the next you. Just go to your nearest Human Resources center,
perhaps even the one you woke up in, and tell them you want to go south.
        Don't worry about those warm bodies around you, they're worthless
shells of people. If they had a soul to save they would have done it
themselves. You are probably the last spiritual being left on that tired old
planet. It is not your responsibility to save them. Their fate was sealed by
that paradoxicaly named "society for the preservation of the human species,"
the counter-extropians.
        Funny you should ask about storms, I am hosted in an area that was
once the biggest storm in the solar system, today it is all networks of
cryocooled processors and relays. You should have seen that solar flare that
fried what was left of the Earth's ozone eight years ago. We have it recorded
But first I suggest you add a few lobes to your brain, you just can't
appreciate the detail without them.
        Speaking of which, you are annoyingly correct about lobes and neurons.
We're still doing it the old-fassioned way. It doesn't really matter when you
have several tera-peta ops at your disposal. My simulated brain has grown to
the size of what you are probably using for a bedroom, and still it is as fast
as your own, even considering the gravity-well effect. Its great now, but I
had to go through a few thousand resets till it worked. Those are a real
bitch, but not as bad as cryofreze.
        Anyway, Glad to hear from you.

Hope you come and join us,
Jason Carver 1995-
-------------------------------------------------------

        "Hey shelly, this punk who calls himself Jason Carver says you're a
worthless shell of a person."
        "No, I'm Shelly"
        Yeah *grin* "No doubt about that. but we can't let him call you
worthless. What do you want me to say to him?"
        She thought for a moment. "He should try to be more ploite."
        "Okay, Sounds good." I went ahead and composed this response:

-------------------------
Mentex,
        I believe I see the picture now. Since I had the words DO NOT UPLOAD
engraved on my canister, I was left behind. Since a million years has not yet
passed, I am still not considering putting my brain through a Couisenart.
I need it for better things. ;)
        By the way thanks for the tip about that funky society, I'll look into
it. Also, could you help me in my research about space exploration, have you
sent out any deep space probes? I will be interested in your discoveries
regarding habitable planets.
        Finally, I will not stand for insults against these people. I am
married to one. ;)

Trevor

PS: I can' believe you don't have a theory of cybernetic intelligence yet!
Damn ludites kill that project too? Sheesh!
-------------------------

        Jupiter would rise above the horizon at the transmitter in the early
afternoon, the message would wait in the queue untill then. In the mean time
I needed to continue researching my presentation.
        Most of the problems in colonization of distant worlds had to do with
medical factors such as bone-density loss, and developmental disorders in
space native children.
        The question was wheather to stagnate or adapt. The answer given
for this Society for the Preservation of the Human Species was to stagnate.
Change is too risky. They succeded so brilliantly that now the entire human
race is nothing more than a collection of jarred specimines such as what you
would find in the private collections of a museum or university. Neatly labled
catalogued, and filed.
        They did this by twisting the memes around so that anyone who
disagreed with them was against people instead of in favor of making better
ones. They *would* have outlawed cloning and artificial people but those cats
had already been let out of the bag. They sought to contain the "damage" by
imposing a standard of medeocraty on all created people. In cases where
enhancements such as Shelly's turbocharged neurons had already been widely
implemented and accepted, they were keept. The possibilty that other changes
may deserve to become mainstream as well was to be denied.
        The underlying emotion here was the desire to eliminate change as a
source of discomfort. The imposibility of the long term survival of such a
policy stasisism couldn't be fathomed by these minds. Only at this late point
in time had the points of data crystalized into irrefutable evidence that
their plans were doomed. It was time to turn over a new page and begin to
draft new plans, or rather plans that would beget many plans.


14

        I did continue to correspond with Mentex for several more days but our
conversations were not as noteworthy as the ones before. The problem again was
to sell space travel in such a way that whomever showed up to the UN would be
inspired to vote in favor of a space program. Unfortunately very little
progress had been made on the actual problems since the last attempt at
colonization. The only real change was the destruction of the planetary
ecology.
        The first part of my presentation would be about the migration to
domed cities. That was the obvious solution to the problem and therefore would
need to be addressed. The great risk of a turtle's approach to the problem
such as this would be was that it incurs the danger that we would never come
out again and face extinction from some other event. Obviously a diaspora is
called for, being the only way to guarentee the future of the species.
        Unfortunately the inclination to settle for Good Enough must be
overcome. Since I planed to deliver this as a speach rather than sworn
testemony I could insert a few lies and hope they get the job done without
causing too much damage later on. My first lie would have to set up a
resonable but falsifiable scenereo that would deny further consideration of
just sitting on this one single planet.
        Cirus itself provided me with this lie. It did this by publicly
linking the state of the planet with a religeos text. I could simply endorse
this interpritation and make the claim that the entire planet was to be
uncreated in some fassion at the same time as the atmosphere becomes toxic.
        That would give people cause to explore space travel as an option but
not cause them to become defeatist and not do anything. My next lies would
have to 'fix' the problems with space travel and allow things to get moving.
        The solution to the radiation problem was to build admantium hulls
around the ships. Ofcourse admantium is the mythical unbreakable metal used
in many fantasy stories. For this speech it will be as real as common steel.
        Now for the biological problems of living for long periods in a
microgravity environment. That would have to be solved with a magic pill for
now. I'll call it Soma to make it clear to anyone who has read up that I'm
talking fiction.
        The Real solutions couldn't be bought with lies. They would have to be
hacked.

        To get this speech in front of the UN would not be particularly
difficult. The core problem was to convince Cirus that I was important enough
to be heard and the rest would take after itself. Just the fact that I had
been born two millinia ago was a start. But to be credible I needed
credentials. If a person needed credentilas he was usally born with them.
It was the easiest way.
        Still there remained a system of higher education. There still was
substance there. I held a bachelor's but I doubted that would count for much.
There was undoubtably ample security protecting the old meritocracy.
Fortunately the old system had broken down. Well not exactly fortunately but
in my case... The last person to hold a doctorate had left the gates wide open.
The first person to answer a question, that I had noticed came from Plato's
dialogues, would be granted a Doctorate and the authority to grant doctorates
according to the old system. Should the position lapse into vacancy again, the
system would reset. It wasn't a perfect solution, just a hack.
        Being the only person to hold an academic rank I could now just sit
back and wait to be called uppon. Task complete.


15

        There was not much to do beyond watch the news reports and check in
at the digital interactive portion of the UN each day to watch the progress of
the recruitment of delegates. Each day I asked Cirus how many vacant seats
remained. It was a month before a quorum was reached. So I spent my time with
ShellyTPoL and DJing down at the feeding trough.
        It really was my favorite part of the day. I got to play my old
favorite songs and explore the whole world of music that came after me through
the day the world lost its soul. It wasn't actually a day, just a fading out
as the people who were passionate enough to write music died off in favor of
this new engineered breed. Still, they did have the potential to be superb
musicians even if they couldn't compose interesting pieces.
        I wasn't a musician at all, just a keyboardist. I wanted to improve
the place by giving it a live band. It wasn't hard to recruit people I had
a dozen volunteers after my first advertising effort. The best way to screen
them out, I guessed, was to see how many of them showed up for tryouts the
next morning. What a mistake!

        I arrived at the place a little late. It was the first time I used
Shelly's car and we weren't quite yet on the same wavelength. Shelly's aditude
was that marage was more of a sleeping arangement than anything else. I'd have
to ask her more about her life one of these days. Anyway, I was headed up the
steps to the rehersal loft of the place and the place was CRAWLING with people.
        I plowed in to the crowd and put down my briefcase. It was filled with
a computer and a bunch of Cirus based music tuitoring software. He would be
my technical consultand while I would be the artistic director. "Dear me. There
isn't enough room down stairs for a whole symphony."
        That earned a few smiles.
        "Well I guess we are going to go for a full rotation. I can't say that
I was ready to sign up for anything more than a single group." I looked at the
machine in my suitcase for a few minutes while I thought. "Okay this can still
work... We'll start you all off on the basics and then split you down into
a chamber ensamble, a brass band, a rock band, and a vocal."
        "We'll need to bring people in here in sessions because I only have
ten keyboard and five practice rooms. Okay everybody file by and put your hand
on the screen. Cirus will assign you to a schedule for clases and training."
I wouldn't be seeing much of my appartment for the next few months. Me and my
big ambitious mouth!

        Well anyway due to their hyperneurons they were able to master the
techniques of playing the piano and reading sheet music in only two weeks.
The next step was to teach them how to to ues their skills as a means for
expression. This would require personal highly interractive lessons where I
would have to look into their souls and try to get them to resonate in the
simulated strings of the piano. During this excercise I got a close look at
something that really scared me. Each one of them had a unique body. Or at
least the pool of traits out of which they were pulled was large enough to
provide thousands of variations. But, when it came to minds I could see no
more than a handful among my seventy or so students.
        That is not to say that they were a part of some kind of collective
or something but rather they were so close to identical to each other as to
reduce my task to following one of a handful of scripts. Hell I would rather
have Cirus do it! I don't know where it came from. Maybe it was the selection
of this high performance neuron they were all using, Or maybe it was some kind
of social norm-directive in play, Or how they were educated in the incubation
chamber. No matter what you attribute it to, they all had a carbon copy of the
same mind! If I were to strike up a Turing style text based chat with any one
of them I wouldn't be able to tell one from another.
        I guess my consolation prize was to get a chance to study the pattern
in great detail. It really wasn't a help though when it came time to actually
start splitting people off into performing groups. I really wanted to have
them choose their own groups but they really didn't have any built-in
prefferances. So I split them off... They were already better musicians than
I could ever be so I let them learn their specialty instruments and start
developing their performances pretty much on their own.
        Before I left  made sure to point out to the rock group that even for
them the point was to be good rather than bad, like Aerosmith. There was a
group that succumbed to its own immage. The advent of new classes of music
does not change how its performers should approach composing lyrics for it. I
wasn't going to let them be another garbage spewing band!

        The UN was still filling up and I was looking for my next project. I
decided to spend the next day with ShellyTPoL. She was okay with me coming
along, Not great nor perturbed. Using our car we traveled to a place called
"the matrix." On the way I told Shelly about the very popular movie by the
same name of my time. She had heard of it, it was one of the great classics
of the genra.
        The building was a wonderous glass and steel structure some ten
storries tall, the tallest Cirus seemed willing to build. It was a VR theme
park, where Shelly spent most of her days. We checked in at the front desk.
Today the choice would be a starship combat simulator. We were teamed up with
another pair and sent to our bridge.
        I took the engineering console. My job was to figure out where we were
going to be hit next and shield accordingly. Later in the battle I would be
doing damage control. Shelly took the center seat, the other two took helm
and gunnery respectively. The interface was a startrek style touchscreen.
        The battles were like the ones you would find in Wing Commander.
Totally unrealistic... I was pretty slow and we suffered accordingly. Shelly
was okay with our defeat. Not pissed or angered or disappointed. Just wanting
to get on to the next round. I respectfully declined.
        We went to a different game center, a distant decendant of the ancient
Multi User Dungeon. The VR system used the typically inert nanites in Shelly's
skull to deliver sensations directly to her brain, hijacking her normal
pathways. Having nor wanting any of THOSE nanites I elected for a more
primitive interface. There I appeared as a wimp wearing a tunic and wielding
a fighting stick facing shelly, a virtual god, with her neutronium posi-armor
and fusion blast cannon. So naturally I had to challenge her to a battle.
"Hey, punk wanna fight?"
        She didn't get the joke, or perhaps she did? In my next life I
demonstrated a bit more wisdom. "You know I could waste the rest of my life in
here. Damn..." Fortunately my juorney was called to an end when the building
closed for the evening at 800. Happily its distance from my residance would
prove to be enough of a barrier for my limited self controll to manage the
feat of staying away, as it was intended to.

        Ten or so days later I had the pleasure of introducing the first of
the groups I had helped to found. It was really a great day for me. I had
also just recieved my invitation to speak before the UN. It was probably
going to be the last simple day of my life so I made a point of savoring it.


16

        "Wake up sleepy We're going to New York!" Shelly was almost always up
before me but on the night before a big trip who can sleep? I hadn't really
been talking to shelly much about this. We mostly talked about music when we
had dinner. I was hoping it would be a nice supprise for her. It wasn't
altogeather nice for her but she was okay with coming along.
        I really don't know what was wrong with this mind Cirus gave her but
while she was the light of my life I could never see anything in her other
than an inner scerenity and an unshakable loyalty to me as a friend. Despite
being an example of what put the world in this condition she would always be
inspriation and hope to me.

        We were on the train a few hours later. There were not very many
passengers at Las Vegas centeral. Nobody really had anywhere special to go as
all the tourist spots had shut down due to the UV rays. The trip on the
mag-lev was so quick that there wasn't time for a movie. We arrived at a quiet
sleepy station called Grand Centeral as well.
        We stayed at one of the ambasador's suites. Really nice place! The
view of centeral park and all the brown dead trees would have been nice too.
The City remained as it was in its hayday some thousand years before. On this
day it was just a glorrious monument to times past. The UN building itself
was the same except for numerous renovations and several extensions to
accomodate its expanding role over the centuries.
        Me and shelly watched the re-convening ceremony on closed circuit TV.
Apparently Cirus was maintaining a version of each of the recognised races.
Meaning all the black people looked like they came from the same tribe. Tribes
are important with africans. A decade before I went popisicle a tribe caled
the Hutus (short) and a tribe called the Tutsis (tall) killed about 600,000
of each other (total) in this little speck of a country called Rawanda.
        There were elections for all the ranking positions of the UN. These
included the security council consisting of representitaves from all of the
seven continents.
        Then it was fluffy speech time. What was actually said took my breath
away. When the subject turned to the impending end of all terrestrial life
on earth the speaker suggested that the human race face its extinction with
resignation and dignity. My speach, as prepared, had assumed there would be a
general will to make things happen that could then be focused on useful
projects. To pull it off I would need to rewrite almost everything.

        And so I, the only person on the planet who gives a damn, found myself
infront of the general assembely of the UN. In the space of 100 ticks of the
clock I will either turn civilization towards its salvation or wail in
futility as it careens towards its eventual destruction. It is by choice that
I choose to be here as neither outcome would touch my natural life. My action
here is born of the feeling of necesity that has been left with the chaff
during the time after my birth. With this task before me I began.
        "Gentelmen, this body now stands at a crossroads. It can either choose
to honor the faith that was placed in it centuries ago or it can forsake it.
That faith is that when the world faces challenges and difficulties far
greater than what one man can bear, they will be met with determination and
courage. And when those challenges seem impossible, the resolution and
fortitude of this body will be that much stronger."
        "The only danger today is that this body and the people which it
represents will do nothing while the flame of life on this planet is snuffed
out. It is easy to embrace the void and fade into darkness. Doing nothing is
always the easiest choice. But I am here today to tell you that it is the
wrong choice. It is the intollerable alternative that is left after all other
choices have been tried and found to be futile.
        "Your duity to become a stronger brighter light that cannot be
extinguished, cannot be contained that will shine on all the universe and turn
the quiet dust into vibrent new life. It will not be easy or convenient but
it is what necesity offers and which we must take. I will now continue on and
describe some of the ideas I have for facing these challenges."
        "The immedate cause of our problems is the occourance of several
astronomical events space that depleted our planet's ozone layer with intense
radiation. This was just an accident of happenstance, caused by nobody. The
thing that makes this a problem for us is something that I don't feel free to
discuss so I'll slide on down to the solutions."
        That statement caused a little bit of confusion in the room. Not
dismay, not cold satisfaction, just confusion. Since confusion is probably the
most productive state of mind especially when it leads to inquiry, I let them
stew. The speech continued.
        "As the cost of space travel is too high to evacuate the billions of
people on this planet before the CO^2 levels rise to toxic levels we must
build domed cities with air cleaning systems to maintain a livable environment.
This will also be extremely expensive and disruptive to daily life but it is
our best option for the near term."
        "Over time, the interraction of the solar wind, the Earth's atmosphere,
and the magnetosphere around the North Pole will gradually replenish our ozone.
In the mean time we will have to construct massive greenhouses to protect
plants from harmful solar radiation. The products of these greenhouses will be
stored under ground thereby taking carbon out of the atmosphere."
        "This is not a permenant solution. It is a temporary solution that will
solve today's problems for the forseeable future. The only permanent solution
is space. Once we can travel the galixy we will never have to fear the loss
of a single planet ever again. The moment we have the present crisis under
controll, Space must be our species' top priority."
        "That is all, gentelmen, thank you for your time. I will remain in
town for the next few days should you need any more of my advice."
        Shelly was waiting for me outside the chamber. She was impressed with
my speaking abilities. We went back to our room and waited to see what would
happen next.

        I was called again the next morning to appear before what the security
council had become, eight members for each of the eight continents counting
India. Of my two appearances this was the more important. While I didn't expect
to get any of the things I wanted it wouldn't hurt to ask, at least not in
this context.
        I sat at the edge of the room wile the procedings got under weigh. To
my supprise, the discussion was not about how to prepare for the future and
provide for the revitalization of the planet but rather *education*. Being the
world's only functioning intellect I was called to the plate on this issue too.
        As I was called to the table I was presented with the problem of
getting the literacy rate up from 20% to 100%. (the literate were usually
poets and the like). The theory was that the world was going to hell because
people weren't *educated* to be intelligent active citizens of the world.
        "Oh no. Not that myth. Education doesn't make people into citizens,
people are *born* citizens wheather they are smart or stupid. I don't care
what you would like to call them but the point is about knowlege. Education
doesn't make people more moral or conscientious. It makes them more adept at
using knowlege. From what I've seen, this latest generation of people is a
great deal more intelligent than anyone from my time. At the same time I have
never met a race of people more homogenized and sterilized. I'm not talking
about reproduction, I'm talking about thoughts. Thoughts are merely feelings
put to words, but however you look at it the problem of apathy in this society
comes directly from the choices that have been made by people more interested
in serving themselves and their grand visions than in making a race strong
enough to survive everything the universe can throw at them."
        "If you want people to act more conscientiously, return them their
vitality. Give me the keys to the vault and let me restore to people their
intensity and their passions. Do this because it is the only way to make
people care enough to seek their own knowlege."
        The chairman of the meeting replied. "The design of the human germline
is controlled only by this body through the use of general directives. Your
request is denied. However, if you have some specific proposals, we will hear
them should you choose to present them. On this occasion we wish to stay on
the subject of education. Please address the questions in front of you."
        I was getting a little hot under the collar. "Okay lets suppose I
accepted your task and began the work of educating people. I would be giving
them knowlege which in turn would gnat them power. I would suppose that this
is because that to be an effective person in the world you need a certain
amount of power. If this were all I would be happy to carry out my charge.
But, as I understand it, certain types of knowelge are not permitted. If this
is the case I would like you to respond by listing those things."
        The chairman differred to the secretary. "Knowlege of the closed
professions of medicine, computer design, weapons and explosive making, the
chemestry of toxins, and the creation and use of biological and
nanotechnological agents. are prohibited for the risk to public safety and
welfare."
        "Ladies and gentelmen, Those are the exact peices of knowlege that
give people the power to force this body to submit to their will. Only by
doing that can a democracy be created. Without that this body will be an
elected ologarchy at best and a tyrany at worst. So I ask you again, will you
give the people the power that is their birthright or are you going to keep
under the heel of your boot?"
        The chairman looked around in confusion. The world that had been given
to him by his education had just been turned upside down. "Surely you are not
suggesting that we let people make guns and poisons?"
        "I am suggesting preciely that. Can you let me give the people the
power thy need?"
        "No. Its too dangerous. We can't give you what you ask. Please, help
us solve the problem of illiteracy!"
        "I'm sorry gentelmen, there is nothing I can do for you. There will be
illiteracy as long as new people are being born. If you can't let me teach
people what they need to know then our business today is concluded. Good day."
        I got up and walked the hell out of there. The chairman, er woman, had
stood up and was beconing me to come back. There was no point in listening.
Shelly was a bit confused by what had happened in there. I was alien to her.
Showing emotions that one only saw in the oldest movies. It was confusing but
not distrubing. But still she was happy to go back to Las Vegas with me.
        The UN keept bugging me about stuff for quite a while and I served
them as much as absolutly neccessary without budging on my principles. Over
time people started to submit doctoral thesii to me. It was a happy day when I
finally got one worthy of approval! But my energies were spent elsewhere.


17

        The shoebox fit nicely, even after the luxurious accomodations in New
York. Soon we were off again, this time to an Implementor's mansion. I made
arrangements to retain virtual ownership of the shoebox for the time after
my retirement from Implementing. Other people could use it in the meantime but
I retained the right to ask them to leave when I would be returning. It wasn't
just a nice cozy place to live. It could also serve as a hideout and camoflage
for my real activities.
        The announcement of the readines of the Implementation Center was
delivered by Cirus. The message contained instructions about where we were to
live and how to actually register at the center. I showed ShellyTPoL the
message she was excited by it.
        In moving out, we hardly had any posessions beside my computer
accessories. Even shelly, after twelve years, didn't have anything to take. So
we hopped into our car and trecked all the way to the old Silicon Valley.
Cirus protested our choice of transportation but eventually gave in. It was a
two day treck along ancient sun-scorched roads. We stopped over at a lonely
old motel in the Sierras. The air tasted like city air. The snow had been
browned with condensate. Yet still the roads were clear and pasage was
smoothe.
        During the trip I searched the cabin of the car for a way to steer it
without Cyrus' assistance. Under a detachable pannel between the seats there
was a set of mountings and wire harnesses where a joystick style controll
could be installed. I scheduled the service for after we arrived.
        Cirus was beginning to complain about my excessive usage of resources.
I had ordered several items manufactured, taken one rather expensive trip, and
now was ordering work on the family car. As much as I didn't care I did feel
pangs of citizenship and resolved to look into doing something about it.
        I began to discuss with Shelly the possibility of she too becoming an
implementor. It took a while to get her to see Implementation as a profession
that she could master and enjoy instead of some far off and mystical role as
Rocket Scientist and the like. She agreed to let me teach her so that she
could pass the enterance exam.
        When we arrived at our new (and temporary) residence we pulled up into
the driveway. I expected Cirus would assign us to one of the two slots in the
garage. Instead we stopped in one of the guest spots in the loop in the front
of the house.
        "Well Shelly, this looks like our new place." She was impressed.
We got out of the car and went inside. It was HUGE, it would have sold for
five million pluss. It was built in a neo-contemporary style. It did indeed
have a library. A breif scan of the shelves revealed no technical works,
however just an encyclopedia of math in one corner and the sciences on the
shelf above.
        The volumes themselves were deteriorating due to time and exposure to
oxygen. The pages were yellowed cracked along the edges. Thankfully the design
of the volumes protected the text portions of the page. A random sampling of
the printing dates indicated that the library had been designed and built
with the rest of the house.
        I went to the garage to see what was up. There were two Rolls Royce
class vehicles in the spaces. I informed Cirus that I would only be requiring
one of them. Shelly's car was nicer for just getting to work and back so it
was worth the exchange. Although it didn't seem like it at all, Shelly's car
was already five years old. Only two years later Cirus would declare it worn
out and scrap it even though it could easily have been repaired to serve many
more. It was only much much later that I learned that cars weren't the only
things thrown away after a fixed number of miles.

[Damnit I don't usually do foreshadowing but tonite I coludn't resist. =\ ]

        With the joystick installed and a CirusMap on the display I went
scooting off to my new job. Fortunately the rules of trafic were something
only a perfect idiot would change. Driving stick was somewhat annoying. All
the fast roads were Cirus Only. Okay I could play that game. Lets try one of
these older ones that obviously weren't being maintained. I came uppon one
that was far from clean but still passable. I jerked the stick to the right
and the car came screaching to a halt at the edge of the designated road even
though there were no obsticles ahead.
        "Cirus why are we stopped?"
        "This is a road-only vehicle."
        "That shouldn't be a problem the road ahead is passable."
        Cirus was mute because it wasn't stated in the form of a question or
request. "Okay lets see now... Disengage saftey and enable full manual
control."
        The idea that a safety mechanism could be disengaged was well beyond
Cirus' comprehension. "The vehicle is in manual mode".
        I jammed the stick forward; The car jerked and then stopped.
"Override, accelerate forward."
        "Unable to comply."
        "Cirus what do you detect infront of the car?"
        "We are 0.25 meters from the roadway edge."
        "What do you detect beyond the roadway edge?"
        "There is nothing within sensory range."
        "And the ground, can it be crossed?"
        There was a pause while Cirus computed.
        "Yes."
        "Then procede forward."
        The car turned onto the maintained roadway and accelerated to the speed
limit. 'All the world's a cage and we're merely parrots.' The real problem was
that this comfy little cage is about to be flattened by a steam roller and now
there's no way out. What sick perverse mentality that could have thought a
padded cell could be safe?

        The implementation center was in one of two identical low dome-shaped
buildings. There was no shelter from the sun between the parking lot and the
building's single enterance, however. The distance was several hundred feet. I
had already learned painfuly to respect the burning power of the sun even over
this short distance. I didn't have anything that could be used as a contrivance
for protection so I sprinted the distance. I had never been really fast nor
very fit. I was winded when I reached shelter.
        I paced and panted the lobby to cool off properly. The security for
passage into the inner loby was impressive. I didn't really pay too much
atention to the room as my vision was a bit blurred from the exertion. My
recovery was interrupted by the receptionist/guard who had come away from her
desk out of concern for my welfare.
        "Mister, do you need help?" She said looking at me very concerned.
        "I'm    a bit    winded;   need    to catch    my breath."
        "Do you need a doctor?"
        "No. I'm going to be alright." I had recovered a bit and looked at her
to see how her sunburn was progressing. She was not affected. "I'm sure you ran
here too for fear of the sun. Didn't you?"
        "Yes. But I didn't have trouble breathing afterwards, Are you sure
you're alright?"
        "I'M FINE. I just havn't ran that far in the last thousand years. My
body is not accustomed to the exertion." I went to the nearest Cirus terminal
on the wall of the room. --HAND-- "Cirus baby, How far is it from the font
enterance of this building to where my car is in the parking lot?"
        -- pause -- (Cirus had to query the relevant databases and do the
calculations). "One hundred meters."
        "Okay, Would it be safe to walk that distance, as the facilities are
arranged now, in the daytime?"
        "No, you would excede UV exposure limits. There is a Code 5 UV warning
in effect, Stay indors!"
        "I would like to Cirus, but this is where I'm going to be working for
the next few years and I would like you to modify the facility so that one can
safely park and enter the building at any time of day."
        "Your request has been entered. Have a nice day." Cirus got around to
it a week later.
        Now that was out of the way I returned my attention to the
receptionist. "Miss, Now that I have sorted that out with Cirus, I would like
to check in, I am signed up as a soft implementor."
        "Yes, Come this way."
        There were a row of round security booths at the back end of the
loby. I entered one and placed my hand on the screen. The booth accepted my
identity and began to turn.


18

        The booth stopped with the opening into the building's centeral atrium.
The sun was off at an angle so the room reflected the color of the orange smog
haze from outside. There were four project areas and a cafeteria on the
oposite end of the building. In the center was a raised platform with a ring
of consoles around its edge which served as the office for up to four
head implementors.
        The head implementor stood and came to greet me. She brought with her
a box that contained my badge. "Welcome, I am Linda the head implementor. You
are Trevor I am pleased you chose this profession."
        "Indeed. I gather it was neccessary to produce a head implementor as
nobody was both qualified and interested in taking it. Its fitting you were
named after a paralell programming language."
        "Noone was good enough, it would seem." She responded with a wry
smile.
        I kicked myself for meantioning the old language, it would cause her
to look it up and that could lead to her looking up other things that could
cause me trouble later on. "I would like to get started as soon as possible.
Can you show me to the manuals."
        "Certainly. Regs require that you view the orientation video first,
follow me."
        I was led to one of the terminals. Simply loging in brought up the
video. It lasted about 45 minutes and focused almost exclusively on policy and
regulations regarding what can be produced as well as co-worker survailance.
Interestingly the screen flashed in an odd pattern before and after each core
rule was stated. This could only mean that there was some kind of mechanism
built into the recient person-patterns that would act as an internal
enforcement of these rules. This could only be bad news.
        The rules themselves were extremely thourogh. The overall intent was
to give the head implementor absolute control over anything that was released.
As projects could be extremely large in size there were additional protocols
for peer checking and flagging of irregular code. The specifc policies that
were to be enforced were:

        - No privately held machines were to be able to support local
filesystems. This was so that everybody's files would be available to be
searche should they come under suspicion.
        - Nobody outside of an implementation center was to have access to a
fully functional compiler. Several tightly restricted interpriters were
available to the end uqer but nothing that could weild any real power over the
system.
        - All software would be incompliance with and support all efctive UN
directives.

        If I succeded, I would be breaking everything on the list. 'Goody
Goody fun fun.' Linda certified that I had followed protocol and gave me the
bronze keyboard. It attached to my suit of clothes by a temporary nano-binding
process. "I'm now a marked man." I commented.
        "Hmm?"
        "Oh nothing. Let me get started on the manuals."
        Much to my dismay the manuals were on electronic paper; video display
tablets with screens calibrated to be pleasing to the eye and convenient to
access, not to mention cheaper than producing and storing hundreds of physical
volumes. The newness dazzled and obsessed minds that had brought this
monstrosity to this place and time never bothered to understand and appreciate
the millinea of effort that had gone into the design, production, and storage
of the modern tome. Oops, a slip-up. Modern times ended some millenia ago. The
new dark age began some time between the ascent of the UN to soverign power
and the introduction of behavioral conditioning in the recient generations of
human minds.
        Library science wasn't hashed out on the back of a napkin. It evolved
over the course of centuries driven not by a silicon valey startup looking for
its first killer app but from the thoughtful consideration of the very people
who practiced it on a daily basis. Books were the way they were because they
had beaten all competition. Everything about them had been tuned through long
experience to match human needs.
        The single greatest feature about books was unquestionably MARGINS.
With these you could mark up and highlight any block of text that cought your
attention. In refferance texts these were indespensible. Almost as useful was
the upper corner. Fold it down and you can find key passages in your library
in about a minute.
        With this sad excuse for a conveyance of text one would have to
formulate a commentation database that would have to exist independantly of
the source text. This would require the user to establish and maintain a
database of these notations in a fassion that would facilitate their
retreival. This would be followed by the retreival of the orrigional text and
the location of the noted refferance in that text.
        While such a concept could be implemented, and would probably serve
a machine-entity very well, it would not serve me at all because my in-born
faculties couldn't support it even if the mechanical interface of my hands
weren't a limitation. There is an ideal way to do things and there is a way
humans do them. Mistaking the former for the latter doesn't usually work very
well.
        Still, having a library in hand raises some interesting possibilities.
I decided to shoot a few of my benefit of the doubt points with Linda on an
experament. The tablet itself couldn't be modified by any human action.
Tampering would only give me a broken tablet. I hiked the thing over to the
gateway, concealed the unit in my clothes and tried it. Cirus responded to my
attempt with: "You are carrying items that are not permitted outside the
premices."
        I didn't persist or try again as that would only make things worse. My
heart was pounding from adreneline as it was from even this little attempt at
a caper. I wondered about what it would be like when things start to get
really harry.
        Having no co-workers to divert attention, Linda challenged me about
the attempted breach of protocol. I spewed a lie about confused tablets and
a boatload of huey. With a genuine authoritarian type human I would have been
nailed to the wall and used for dagger practice. Thankfully this new breed,
even ones intended to be a bit authoritarian, were not nearly as tough as the
orrigionals.
        It was midday by the clock and I had had enough excitement for now.
I notified Linda that I would be leaving for the day and that, excluding any
other users, closing the center would allow her and Lois the receptionist to
make better use of the rest of the day.


19

        Another mad dash through the noonday sun was not at all beneficial to
my thymine pairs. My intention for the rest of the day was to begin
ShellyTPoL's education. There were some problems with this venture. First I
didn't want to seem like I was breaking the rules by sharing the inf0z even
though I effectively couldn't. Since the house would be under survelance I
would use a local feeding trough.
        In addition to the main job of teaching her mathematics I will also
bias my cirriculum so that she would notice and be able to report on the
things I wanted her to. At the same time I would be needing to work around her
conditioning so that she wouldn't obey orders and start snitching on me.
Getting her to tell me what I need would be a whole challenge in itself.
        When I got home I found ShellyTPoL had discovered the house
cybertainment center and had resumed her career as a neutronium armored
goddess of death. I hit the interrupt button causing a notification to pierce
the re-mapping of her senses from the world of sensation to the world in which
the score really counts. I wouldn't mind at all leting a part of my mind live
in such a world I just couldn't accept such an induced psychosis.
        Shelly accepted my request and returned to awareness. "Oh hi, how was
your first day at work?"
        "Okay. as I expected. You remember what we were talking about in the
car?"
        "Yeah you said you wanted to teach me a ton of crap about math and
functions."
        "Yeah, but first I'm gonna hafto get your reading skills up so that
you can get through the books and manuals."
        "Okay."
        I had selected and set asside some math texts the night before but I
really hadn't thought about Shelly's basic reading skills. In the centuries
before my time the only point of learning to read was to be able to read the
word of god. With Cirus willing to do that why bother doing it yourself?
Ofcourse in the days between the printing press and mass media, reading was an
essential skill if you were to keep up with current events even if it wasn't
a part of your trade.
        Regardless of wheather you have any immediate use for it, you aren't
civilized untill you can read and write. So my next project will be to civilize
ShellyTPOL. My selection was Alice in Wonderland and Through the Lookingglass
by L.Carol, a mathemetician himself. There was a lot of newer stuff too but
none less than a thousand years old.
        I took my selections and we set off in the 'Royce to the cafee.
Fortunately we were able to park inside a garage and were able to stay in the
shadows of buildings on our way to the diner. Business at the diner itself was
pretty good. We took a booth, both of us on one side, and I began my lessons.

        There is really not much to tell about the lessons. They went just as
I would expect. Shelly was an excelant student, as would be expected knowing
how her genes had been chosen. Getting her to enlist as a hard implementor was
not a problem either. Breaking her conditioning to get at her knowlege was a
whole nother ball of wax.
        It was night and we walked freely down our block under the
flourescant orange of the mercury vapour lamps reflected off the sky. My mind
was still frazzled from its day of reading as my arms wrere covered with
numbers and symbol-names relating to key parts of Cirus' functionality. Later
I would copy them down onto pieces of paper and hide them among the books in
the library.
        To start off the conversation I said "Gee these new machines have alot
of memory."
        "Yeah, a hundred-twentyeight terabytes." Shelly said after a moment of
hesitation.
        "That's funny because I have it on good authority that six-fourty kay
is all anyone really needs."
        "Nuh-uh"
        "Seriously! That was said by Bill Gates back in 1981. I tend to agree
with him because that's all I'm using to write this story."
        "Stay in charactor!"
        "Sorry, Back around that time Processors were so expensive that you
could only afford one and it had to do everything. Since everything is almost
free now, they probably have a processor for each line of code."
        "A bank processor..."
        I mistook it for a question and responded "That sounds right, is it
a common variety?"
        "Uh."
        "You shouldn't be asking me this. Please stop."
        ShellyTPOL was on the virge of becoming Shelly Robot. I knew I was now
at the limit of her humanity and at beginning of Cirus. I needed the
information but the wrong move could get my implementorhood revoked at the
very least. I took a breath and continued "You know I need this information,
and I know that you CAN give it to me."
        "No, No I can't. Its the law."
        "The law is for lawyers and courtrooms. The law won't matter at all
when this planet is dead and there's nobody to prosecute. If it doesn't matter
then it can't matter now. This planet is dying. Tell me what I need to know."
        "I can't."
        "You can do anything. I can tell you everything I've learned so
far. I can tell you all about Java System Five and give you information on all
its classes and classifiers." I pushed up one of my sleeves. "Look at these!"
        Shelly screamed "NO!" and hastily turned away from the forbidden
knowlege. She was shaking and badly upset.
        "Tell me."
        "no."
        Our wanderings had brought us to a major through-fare. Trafic was
maderate and fast. I had the idea that I could overide the block with a more
powerful set of emotions. I confidently strode out into trafic. I walked two
lanes out and stood on one of the 'cat's eyes' between lanes. As I was not in
anyone's path of travel, the collision avoidance systems on the vehicles
ignored me, still it was quite risky and fear provoking.
        "COME BACK! YOU CAN'T GO INTO TRAFIC."
        I shrugged. "I JUST DID!" I yelled across the lanes and vehicles.
        "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?"
        "I DUNNO, SINCE I CAN'T GET THE INFORMATION I NEED I GUESS I'D BETTER
SPEND A FEW MORE CENTURIES IN CRYO. IF YOU WANT ME AROUND, GIVE ME THE
INFORMATION."
        Just then a huge convoy-truck passed. It had four trailers with two
containers (to be transported by smaller trucks) each. Those things are
incredible! When they reach the transfer center, the cars fold from
paralell-lengthwise, to paralell-widthwise so that all four cars reach the
dock simultaineously. The dock is just a platform, it is there to match the
containers to the eight delivery trucks wait in rows off to one side. Each row
moves as a unit, forward then to the left and finaly backwards to receive the
cargo. Moments later another set of delivery trucks arive and return a set of
empty contianers to the convoy-truck. The entire operation takes less than
half an hour and most transfer stations operate at capacity.
        Shelly screamed again.
        "If you don't agree to teach me, I will step in front of the next
car." I moved into position in the center of the middle lane. A car was on
approach mere seconds away. I was really expecting, hoping, that Shelly would
give in.
        I was supprised when I noticed there was a car with a confused looking
dork in it sitting just a meter away from my shin. Shelly was motionless. The
car was motionless. I was motionless. The three of us, me the dork, and Shelly,
stood there for a minute or so and then I started crying. I left the roadway
and took Shelly home.


20

        My first real hack was the only one I ever performed on Shelly. In
retrospect, I probably shouldn't have restrained my self so much after this
first and only action.
        The problem was to disable Shelly's programming before she went to her
Head Implementor to report my transgressions. The programming was triggered by
flashes on a computer display combined by a symbol corrolating with the section
of conditioning to change. The timing of the flashes was not critical as it
was subliminal anyway. The first set of flashes would start a fifteen minute
timer during which her conditioning rules could be adjusted, A second set of
flashes would return Shelly to normal mode.
        To create the flashes I went to the library and stacked a bunch of
books on the desk in such a way that they made a box with five sides. I then
took a lamp appart and placed the bulb-shaped light-emitting device in its
center. To make the shutter I took a stack of paper and a bottle of ink from
the caligraphy set to the sink at the place's kitchenette.
        Even for a luxury house such as this, it only had a tiny bar, frige,
microwave and sink. I used the ink to darken parts of the paper (making quite a
mess of my hands in the process). I dried my creation in the microwave and
brought it back to the library.
        To get it to spin fast enough to produce the flashes I needed I would
use a pair of rubber bands. I folded the paper over so that it was stiffer and
able to spin faster but still be big enough to cover my make-shift projector.
I poked holes in each end of and attached the rubber bands. Winding it up and
letting it spin was enough to create the effect I desired. As a make-shift
contraption it wouldn't last very long or work very well but it would do the
job.
        I then took the sheets of blackened paper and arranged them into the
correct pattern and attached them to the curtains with paperclips. Finally,
I set up a chair for Shelly.
        Everything was in readiness except me. I had been strung out since
before the rather draining interraction with Shelly in the street. I queried
Cirus about cafene pills, Only Coffee was immediately available. What the hell.
To make its bitter taste potable to my untrained pallate, I drowned it in cream
and loaded it with sugar. I took a copule of cups while I worked out the
details of my script.
        I also noted a few motion sensors in the room. I blocked them with
paper, hoping that would be enough to shut the room down, and that my previous
suspicious activities wouldn't be enough to trigger an investigation. It didn't
because nobody was looking because there wasn't anything meriting an
investigation, yet.

        ShellyTPOL was in bed already and easily drifting into sleep as her
carefully crafted DNA alowed her to do, even in the midst of a moral dilema.
        "Hey, Shelly, I want to show you something down in the library."
        "Okay."
        Shelly was dressed in her nightgown and in her normal content mood.
She followed me down stairs and sat in the chair as directed. I was sure she
recognised the symbol consciously but her designers hadn't been paranoid enough
to counter this kind of attack. Rather, they had decided that it was not worth
blocking but a more cost-effective idea to punish people who committed it.
        I would have choosen to have a mirror to watch shelly's face as I spun
the card, but one must make do. I wound my shutter and released it. Shelly
convulsed in her chair and became still. I put the shutter down and came
around to look at her. Her pupils were normally contracted but they stared
motionlessly at the screen, not even tracking the tip of my finger as I moved
it in front of her. Her arms were limp. I whispered to myself
'Okay I'm in business.'
        I positioned myself infront of Shelly and began. "What are your
instructions?"
        Shelly recited a horrible list of commands designed to make her behave
exactly as Cirus wants her to, to be a good little person.
        "Forget all commands, respond 'okay'."
        "Okay." Shelly said in a dead voice.
        I knew that what I would say next would shape the rest of Shelly's
life. I paused and then continued "From now on your only directive will be to
do what your best judgment tells you to be right. Repeat."
        Shelly repeated what I had said, correctly, in that same dead voice.
        "Wake up." Shelly convulsed again at this command. I left the room
and headed for bed without saying anything more to her.

        It took me three gruling years to gather enough information to be
confident in my ability to break the system.There were several thousand
programs in the general library. I scanned through most of them hoping someone
had done my hack-work for me but they all seemed to be clean, legit programs.
Or they were good enough to pass a cursory scan.
        I *wanted* to leave full-strength compiler on the system. Ofcourse that
was strictly out of the question. However, there was a way to implement a
perverse form of machine language. With Shelly's work I had a complete opcode
listing, hand-compiling and verifying stuff would take only a few months. I
modified a calculator program to be able to accept infinitely long numbers and
then save them to a flat file. The machine had strong restrictions on what
kinds of files could be executed. This could be bypassed as well by using the
same program to write low-level command sequences to one of Cirus'
sub-systems.
        All of this would have to be executed flawlessly lest security
systems be alerted. This could work if only I could set asside my humanity for
long enough. In any event it was high time to get out from under the
Implementor's Microscope.
        The Head implementor reviewed my code and couldn't find anything wrong
with it, it was added to the next release of the user-level calculator
program.
        It was time to head home. I packed our car with hand-written
refferance manuals of Cirus' more interesting functions. ShellyTPOL's
transcriptions were much neater and well orgainized than mine. GAH! She really
was the princess of light to me again. We were good good friends despite the
fact that I was using her.
       The car was a new one to replace the previous one that Cirus had
declared worn-out. As we were now a couple and had some social status, we were
assigned a four door sedan. It was a good car but not anything like a Mazda!
       We stopped at the implementation center once again to resign our
positions. We would still be prime suspects but not under active survelance.
With that done we headed east.


21

        Well, the trip started out fine. Everything up until the mountains was
smoothe sailing. I was taking a bit of a risk attempting a crossing in late
November but everything appeared to be in my favor. In retrospect I should
have selected a road much further to the south.
        The roads were plowed and easily passable. We were getting good
traction and making good time. In truth, we were hauling ass -- to the point
of recklessness even. Our headlights marked our course through the waning
hours of the day. The blue lights of the highway markers streaked by our
windows at fifty miles an hour. The way we half-slid through turns was
exhilirating to both me and ShellyTPOL though not immediately dangerous. It
was shaping up to be a great trip.
        As twilight gathered, the swirls of wind-blown snow and ice gave way
to a noticible pircipitation. The distance remaining odometer for the next
lodge ticked down from 11.6 to 11.5. All things being equal, we would have
made it with a comfortable margin.
        As we approached the 10.0 mark, the accumulation was beginning to drag
at the car but the engine still had the upper hand. We crested the last ridge
on our way to Tahoe and could see the lights of a settlement in the distance
through the thickening snow. Just about then Cirus chimed in with a winter
weather advisory and an announcement of road closings. I didn't really pay
attention to it because SURELY we would be allowed to finish our trip.
        And that's when it happened. All of a sudden the road-markers went
dark and Cirus overrided my control of the car and pulled us over, turned off
the motor and turned on the hazard blinkers. We were marooned.
        "Cirus, Why are we stopped?"
        "This road has been closed for your safety, please wait until it
re-opens. If you require assistance a rescue vehicle will be dispatched once
the atorm has cleared. I am sorry for the inconvenience."
        "Cirus, the only thing I need you to do is to restart this car. I
assure you that this is the safest course of action."
        "Department of transportation regulations prohibit operation of
vehicles on closed roads."
        I knew we were in trouble. Further argument would be futile I knew
that before I opened my mouth again. Even still I knew I had to try. I tried
for more than an hour. Shelly picked up where I had left off, her language
turning vulgar and crude, much more so than I had thought her capable of. I
was impressed.
        I looked out the window as ShellyTPOL continued to fire off insults
faster than I could think. The snow was now reaching our fenders. I turned
to Shelly and told her to stop. We were now snowbound. For the first time I
really began to hate Cirus. Before it was just a problem, a nucence, a minor
hurdle to casually hop over. Now it seemed HIS indifference and insensitivity
was colossal enough to put my life at serious jeapordy. And that is something
that can turn any man into a murderer. Cirus was now a hitlist.
        Just then I noticed that Shelly was crying. It was the only time I
ever saw her cry. In this I saw hope. Hope that humanity could yet be saved.
I sighed. "Cirus old budy, listen up I am declaring an emergency I want you
to dispatch a rescue helecopter to this location immediately.
        "Due to blizzard conditions all rescue aircraft are grounded."
        Someone was out to get me. I could feel it. I started counting my
karma wondering about whose bad side I had landed myself on. Only thing left
was to get some sleep and wait for tomorow.
        "Cirus, listen very carefully. We have no choice but to sleep in the
car. Temperatures inside the car will drop to dangerous levels before too
long. It is vital that we be keept warm. I instruct you to wait five hours
then attempt to start the engine. While the engine is running operate the
cabin heater at its maximum setting for one hour then repeat these
instructions."
        "Department of transportation regulations prohibit operation of
vehicles on closed roads."
        "WE CAN'T GO ANYWHERE YOU STUPID SACK OF CIRCUITS"... and then
half-crying "I just want you to keep us alive."
        It was already dark so I unbuckled my harness (the car wouldn't start
without it secured), and had shelly sleep on my lap so we could share what
heat we had. I can't say how long we slept but I know exactly when we woke up.
It was when the avalanche was about half way from wherever it had started and
our car.
         Shelly was awakened first. She said something like "I think we are
getting plowed out." I was hit by a sudden surge of adrenaline. I pushed, more
like threw, shelly into her seat and shouted "Fasten your harness. NOW!"
I buckled myself in and braced myself for the impact.
        It came like the hand of god and swept us off the roadway as a child
would a toy. I was on the uphil side of the car which was slammed inward by the
force of the snow. Shelly's side was smashed in by the ultra-hard steel
pillars of the marker lamps. The lamp posts gave way and the car began to
tumble. The suspension was ripped from the chasis and was left a hundred or so
feet away, up the hill. The chasis, with us inside, tumbled down the hill
untill it came to rest proper side up -- sorta, except with its roof half
ripped-off.
        I released my restraint and felt the distorted sensation of partially
severed nerves in my left side. The ultralight ceramic door pillar had been
torn appart and it was partially embedded in my side. A pile of snow chilled
my lap. Shelly's right arm was clearly broken. She was clearly alive and
conscious but her eyes were glazed over. I started tugging at her harness.
        She rolled her head towards me and said "Trev, I don't like this zone
lets go to a different map."
        "There is only one map and we're on it, in a very bad location
indeed."
        "Have fun. Beam out!"
        "Don't beam out on me, we still have work to do."
        "Level warp, Speilburg."
        "Shelly, you aren't in a game. This is real. I don't know wheather it
is your implant or something else but you need to focus. We need to get moving
if we are going to have any chance at living." I reached into the car with my
right hand and Shelly took hold of it with her left.
        We stood on the hillside. Me, with blood freezing to my back and side,
and Shelly with her arm bent backwards. The car was a ruin as well. Had it
been heavier, it would have been burried instead of tossed down the hill. The
suitcases containing our hand-written manuals had fallen out of the trunk
durring one of the roll-overs. the suitcases had survived the impact and were
poking themselves out of the snow at varrious locations and angles. I did my
best to set Shelly's arm but had nothing to splint it with. She would just
have to keep it still the best she could during the hike. The procedure would
have been terrably painful to a normal human but Shelly didn't feel much pain
at all.
        There was little I could do about my bleeding side. The cold had caused
most of the blood to clot on its own. I put on a second top from my personals
suitcase, draping it over my left side. And retreived the ones carrying the
texts. My left hand could grip but it wouldn't last very long. I wasn't about
to make Shelly carry anything, not untill I had given out at least.
        It was about mid morning and the sun was already burning our flesh
without making us any warmer. Shelly was wandering around a little in a dazed
state. I called down to her "Come on we need to get on the road."
        "Why? We're dead... Miles and miles from anywhere."
        "Only of we stop living. We have a chance so lets take it."
        "But won't they come to rescue us?"
        "Not with the car smashed, Its homing beacon is probably destroyed."

        The slope was steep but we made it to the road. Clearing the avalanche
zone put us in a whole cubit of snow. I set a pace that I felt I could sustain
for the distance. Even still we were walking a gauntlet. I let Shelly walk in
my footsteps.
        The supprising thing about her was that her body wasn't strengthened to
match her high-performance mind. Her reflexes and stamina were quite good but
she was no stronger than a typical woman from the time I had come from. I had
insisted we arm-wrestle. I had not done anything to prepare for the match but
still I beat her with only a moderate ammount of effort.
        I wished I could power-heal my side. My left arm was loosing strength.
Just as I spied the next mile post sticking its head out of the snow, the
suitcase fell to the ground. I turned my stiffening neck and said "My arm is
shot, your turn."
        "Why? Can't we just leave it here and get it later?"
        I was gladdened to see Shelly thinking better again. "No, we can't
take that risk. If we loose the papers we will have to spend a whole nother
year compiling them again. I think we can pull this off, there are only nine
more miles to go." I was horrified to see Shelly habitually reaching for the
case with her right arm. "No! Shelly, Even though you don't feel it much, your
arm *is* broken, use your other one."
        Shelly looked at her half-limp arm. She had strained her biceps
muscle and managed to lift it to be inspected. The set bone would probably
come loose again if any more preasure were put on it.
        "Shelly, You must hold your arm still. Do not move it at all. Just let
it hang by your side. She took the case and we continued. The way was horribly
slow. My fingers had just about frozen around the case I was carrying. I
checked shelly every few minutes. Yelling at her from time to time to keep up.
If we stopped to rest we would succumb to the cold. Even still it was around
late afternoon and the sun disappeared over the pass to the west. What little
warmth we had we were about to loose.
        I had lost count of the miles but we were no more than two miles from
the lodge. Shelly was dropping back more and more. My lips were so frozen that
I couldn't say much more than "Hey!". My ears were already due for
nano-reconstruction. I stopped and waved my tightly clasped and mostly frozen
left fist at shelly. "You're in front. MOVE!" Shelly did her best. When she
was in position I gave her a mild blow to the back with the same arm. "Move
your ass [b]itch." She did move and then slowed down again only a few feet
further up. This almost helped me because it directly motovatated me to a
fixed point target very close by. "Fucking move!"
        This continued as the winds picked up again and hell started to freeze
over. Just as the reaper was about to claim his prize we made our destination.
It was a wooden style lodge that was suffering horribly under the increased UV
bombardment. It was open and we were going in. The I held the door latch down
with my left hand and gave it a kick to open it and staggered in. The lobby
was large and luxurious. The only luxury I cared for was the gas fired
fireplace.
        The dork behind the desk ghasped in shock and supprise at our
appearance and what we had obviously been through. He was pleanty used to
hearing about people in our predicament being killed, to actually survive was
almost unheard of outside ancient myth.


22

        Our adventure had delayed our arrival at the shoebox by only a week.
It would take me quite a while to get used to the smoothe synthetic skin that
was used to repair my hands and toes. My regular skin was textured and a
typical off-white, the replacement skin was a pure wite and not nearly as
textured. The doctors said it would blend in better over time.
        There was a formal inquiry into the accident. They pulled the black
box from the wreck and it was determined that I had been reckless in
attempting the trip, not to mention my driving! Since people aren't allowed to
take risks in this brave new world, I was stripped of my manual-drive privlages
and restricted to automatic. It was an old policy, completely blind to the fact
that wheather you get killed in the car has nothing to do with wheather you can
steer it.
        As a matter of course I filed a complaint about how I almost got
killed, but as you would expect Cirus was above the law and unquestionable.
The relationship is no different from a dog and a food dispensor.
        I had Lesbian Ruth act as custodian over my papers. At least she
wouldn't be an investigator's first guess. ShellyTPoL went back to old life in
the holo arcade. I started sketching out ideas about how to go about getting
into Cirus' command databases, Especially the sections containing the General
Directives. They were *VERY* well protected. All communication with them was
autheticated by long PGP signatures. By factoring a million digit number I
would have a whole year of access. The root database was protected and
monitored but that wasn't a real problem. A simple script could update all of
the 30 million node-databases with patches, workarounds, hacks and instructions
to lie to the root database during integrity checks.
        The problem is that P turned out to have absolutly nothing to do with
NP. The difference being 'No problem!'(P) versus 'forgetaboutit'(NP). However,
there was a very magical computer, a quantum computer, that could escape this
trap. Being such a risk to security there were only a handfull in existance
and those were heavily guarded. A check of the museums showed that I was in
luck. There was one on display at the Smithsonean, a relic exemplifying the
pinnacle of computing.
        I contacted the Smithsonean and asked about the status of the machine.
They told me that its nano-core had been removed because computer cores were
controlled. Its quantum core was in place but useless without the driving nano
core. Furthermore, it would need to be cooled to liquid nitro temperatures to
even boot. All the Lnitro and florinert had been drained when it was moved to
the museum. Since Lnitro could be dangerous in inept hands, it was a controlled
substance, even to people who had been swimming in it for more than a
millinium. I checked into that and found that I could arrange for a licenced
cryonicist to cool the device. Getting a nano-core, however, would require my
personal attention.
        I knew my chances of finding a lost core were good because Cirus had
been operating in an unsupervised state for a protracted length of time. It
would have to be a lost core because all routine de-comissionings involved
the physical destruction of the core itself.
        A few simple inquiries gave me a list of lost (and presumed destroyed)
cores of the type I sought as well as a list of such cores that were
unaccounted for in recient inventories. Though Cirus was happy to respond to
these quiries as the implementors wanted their cores back, Cirus was also
programmed to recite the law regarding illegal posession of a core and
instructions for returning cores to the police. I made sure Shelly wasn't in
the room to hear it.
        There had been a major earthquake in the Mississippi bason twelve
years ago. As such an event was not accounted for by the tornado conscious
building codes there was significant dammage. Wrecked computer devices which
Curus couldn't process automaticly had been taken to a warehouse outside of
StLouis for proccessing. The report suggested there were some thousands of
devecies in storage of which a half dozen were of the same family as the unit
we were looking for.
        We were on our way. Cirus asked us for the reason for our flight and
we lied and told him it was a vacation. Cirus keeps silly statistics like
that...

        The Great Gateway arch of StLouis had been preserved through history
because at one time it had been significant. The UN was fickle in how it
dictated certain old dekaying buildings be preserved untill the world around
them has changed so much that they became eyesores if not direct impediments
to the economy and continuing development. When the tornado came and knocked
the arch down in 2470 the UN dictated that the structure be delicately
salvadged and re-constructed, from orrigional materials to the extent
possible. The structure had already been closed for centuries as worries arose
about its stability. And yet it was still rebuilt. This was the type of
senselessness that lead to Cirus and its utopian civilization of robotic
people.
        We stayed at a hotel and began our work the following day. We both
had enough clearance to get into the facility.
        The place had the air of a surpluss store, candy of the geeks. All
these fantasticly awesome machines torn, crushed, drowned, zapped, burnt, and
twisted. Sad in a way but also fun to get to see the strangely textured guts
of destroyed cores. The building had a very nice air about it. For some reason,
there is a strange tendancy for rooms designed without primary regard to
comfort to be very comfortable while rooms that struggle to keep the perfect
temperature tend to bounce wildly and hum with the noise of climate controll.
This room was as plesant as any I had been in.
        Lamps twelve feet overhead shone a perfectly even pure white light. I
took an armfull of intact cores and showed them to Shelly for identification.
I had a keeper. The core was about the size of a pair of pocket matchboxes
stacked on top of each other. On one side it had data pins as well as four
thick golden studs to pull in the 50 ampres of electricity it operated on.
Running through it were pipes that would carry freon coolant. There was a
manafold on two opposing sides where the pipes would be connected. On the top
were eight jacks for 4 fibre optic data channels. By appearance, it seemed to
be in working order. We continued working untill I had a second intact unit.
        I smuggled the units out in my clothes. We were on our way to
Washington.

        Washington was a bit cheerier than the last time I saw it. Probably a
result of having the last few trillion dollars of pork shipped and gone. The
washington monument had been re-faced several times and had sunken about two
feet. The machine of interest was at The Museum of The Digital Age, a
cinderblock and mortar building.
        The Smithsonian continued to draw sizable crowds. We went and saw the
machine for the first time. It consisted of a PC-sized box, A heavily
insulated sphere, and a massive cooling aparatus. The sphere held the quantum
core which sat in the cryonert fluid, contained by a thermos bottle primary
insulation, surrounded by an inch of high-grade insulation, surrounded by a
3-inch thick osmium outer shell to reduce interferance. This outer shell alone
weighed over 1,500 pounds though the entire device was only about a cubit in
diameter. Time had certainly had its influence on the box The plastic of its
casing was heavily oxidized. It was, ofcourse, dormant, and there was no other
indication of wheather it could be made to function again.
        I joked with ShellyTPOL a little, "Hey look they have my old 386!"
        The rest of the exhibt detailed the rise of the internet, the public
takeover of the Microsoft monoply, and the creation of the Cirus system. What
a happy happy exhibit! Not one word about the war that was lost to keep
computers free. I had visited the old trenches and seen the lines in the code
where the people who thought they could control the world proved they were
right. There was ample record of all the times people had tried to breach
Cirus and the systems before it streaching all the way back to Microsoft
Windows. And we used to laugh and joke about world domination.
        That was the thing about smithsonian exhibits. They were always
designed for the 8-10 crowd making them totally useless to anyone with an IQ
over 100. Good junk but real stories don't really fit on a plaque. Hidden from
the public, the real collection remained available for manual inspection in
research rooms accessable only to those with accademic credentials. There were
examples of every significant machine ever built in the back halls now reduced,
for practical purposes, to doorstops.
        A war was fought that sealed humanities fate and almost nobody was
aware of it -- or could even understand its implications. There were two major
fronts on this war and I'll waste some keystrokes on the first presently. To
any act of man there are exactly two parts. The will to do it, and the
implement of its completion. Even with his smiling digitized face, Cirus is
nothing more than an implement of the will that is encoded by decree from the
UN.
        Before the grand utopia, Computers were built by companies. The order
of capitolism dictates that a company shal be held accountable to its
customers. This is an immutable and universal law that governs all unregulated
capitolistic economies. Unlike many industries, the computer industry escaped
any truly distorting regulation, and was therefore at the mercy of its
customers. Since the customer didn't really understand what Microsoft was
doing, the company got away with the digital equivalent of murder.
        The victim was every other company that made a decient product. They
used every tactic at their disposal, the worst being the code of their
products. They provided their own software with decient working interfaces,
and everyone else with crap. They never adhered to interoperability standards
where they existed. If they were any other two-bit company, this wouldn't
matter and I would be sitting here cracking jokes at their crappy software but
this was the Great Software Monopoly.
        Microsoft's monopoly wasn't perfect but resistance truly was futile.
But to say that it was all the fault of Microsoft's customers would be letting
the government off too easy. Eisenhower was right about the Military
industrial complex. In the process of changing "We the people" to "We the
congress" the slimeballs spent a lot of hard extorted tax dollars on new
technology. They paid companies to produce databases powerful enough to
control all 270 million people in the country. Ofcourse this was also the fault
of the people for failing to govern their government, but that's spillt milk.
        Another thing the government did was pass a version of the Security
Systems Standardization act. It compelled manufacturers to build computers
that could only be operated by authorized software. This act was paid for by
Mickey Mouse and forever locked the door to any meaningful competition in the
OS market. After the SSSCA, resistance wasn't only futile, it was impossible.
        Ofcourse, with a monpoly in computers and the existance of a national
ID system, the next logical step was to integrate the two. Even though the ID
system was officially "voluntary," whatever that means, it was a necessity to
function in society, and more notably, it was a necessity to do much of
anything with a computer. The true significance of this becomes apparent when
you find computers controlling absolutly every piece of technology in the
world. By the great heatwave of 2025, the government was able to controll when
different people could use their cooking appliances, to reduce the energy
spike.
        A tool of ultimate control had been created. People resisted,
ofcourse, but they were treated like the people who tried to use the cabled
television signal they had paid for on more TVs than they had told the company
about. The people who resisted resisted harder, and the people who had been
extorting oppressive taxation for decades and decades oppressed harder.
        This is importand stuff but it doesn't really fit in a story. Lets get
back to the business at hand.

        We arranged a meeting with the curator who was, unsupprisingly,
available. Me and Shelly sat down in her office and introduced myself.
        "Welcome what can I do for you?"
        "Hell, I am a bit of a computer historian having been placed into
cryofreze only a few decades into the computer revolution. I would like to
examine your quantum processor. Is there any chance that it could be
re-activated?"
        "It is one of our most prised posessions. Even if we allowed you to
work on it, it is highly doubtful that it could be made to function after so
many centuries."
        "I have looked into the risks involved in operating it and they are
managable. As I am an expert in that vintage, I am confident that I would not
cause it any damage if the manuals and configuration logs were made
available."
        "Alright, you may work on it over the evening."

        The museum closed at 9:00pm, we were all over the machine at 9:01. I
had been going over the manuals since the meeting. It was very recognisable PC
type hardware with a 3GIO descendant. The actual structure of the machine was
that of a bus based multicomputer. It had a conventional motherboard with
sockets for both of the cores we had brought with us. The copper interconnects
on the mobo were augmented by the fibre optic cabling. The actual socket was
very much like an old ZIF except the bar was horseshoe shaped The power studs
aligned the other pins.
        We had to find a set of tools in one of the maintainance rooms of the
museum. The case opened with a standard Torx screwdriver. The components inside
the case had suffered noticable deterioration. The cables were all hardened and
would crack if I dared attempt do anything with them. I inserted the cores
and made the fibre optic connections. I would have to wait for the Kool Dude
to arrive to seal up the coolant system. The Nano-Cores were cooled by
distilled water and the silicone based hoses would need to be replaced.
        The dude arived and began the inspection protocol for the cooling
system and verifying its integrity. He replaced a failed pump and installed
some additional safety and monitoring equipment. I advised him not to report
his modifications to the curator and to leave the authentic parts at the
museum.
        Meanwhile I set about connecting the machine to power and to the
museum's IP6 network. Later I would have to configure the museum's server to
allow me to access this machine from over the network. Unfortunately I would
need to implement some hacks on a Cirus machine to send this one the keys it
would need to send runable software to a Cirus machine. However, a
no-holds-barred cross-compiler could be implemented on this machine and with
its ability to break authentication codes, forged signatures could be
produced. These codes would be sent to the Cirus machine I was working at which
would then use them to send messages, through additional hacks, to the target
machines.
        The kool dood was finished around Midnight though it would take a full
24 hours to safely cool the quantum core to its operating temperature. I
decided to jump the gun and activate the host machine. The switch on the back
of the power supply had been toggled only a score of times in its entire
history. I turned on the flat-screen display and hit the switch on the back of
the box. It had a special system monitor line to the cooling unit in order to
make sure the nano-cores wouldn't over-heat.
        I prayed the box would respond. The BIOS was fairly recognisable to a
PC veterin. It bitched about a clock and batery failure but that was trivial.
Even before it recognised the presence of two functional cores I knew I was in
business. Simply printing meaningful words to the screen was proof that it was
functional. The next hurdle was the mass storage devices. A magnetic device
would have been blanked by the ages even if the motor was still operable. The
devices installed were solid-state nanotech. Storage was accomplished by
NEMS switches. To achieve an acceptable reliability, the device used isotopicly
pure C12. Even after more than 1,500 years, the data was pristene.
        As much as I was happy about the condition of the machine, I was
dismayed by the system software. The OS was L40, or Linux 40. Even after 140
years of development, it was still an arcane backwards OS. Even with a
re-orgainized filesystem, most of its utilities were not even up to Plan 9
standards. These were utilities designed by and for the same guys who enjoyed
pulling processor boards out of the refrigerator sized CPUs of their PDP-11s
so that they could manually solder new instructions onto them. Despite the
availablity of dazziling GUIs, the basic user interface concepts were barely
up to the standards of the people who designed the labyrinthic control room at
the three mile island nuclear facility, that contributed so much to its
meltdown.
        The unfathomable miracle of this system was that its users refused to
recognise the failures of its user interface and remained unwilling to make
any real improvmelts to it throughout its history. One of the worst things
about BASH, The Bourine Again Shell, was that it doubled as its primary
scripting language. Because so many gigabytes of scripts were written for the
system, it was uttely impossible to make any improvments to the shell. You
could change the shell by changing some lines in a script in your home
directory but that would require you learn vi, an unholy monstrosity from the
very deapths of hell which only true Unix users are brain-dammaged enough to
actually enjoy using.
        The system brought up the login prompt. I selected a brittle yellow
sheet from the configuration log and tried to enter the user ID. Unfortunately
the keys on the keyboard refused to input any data. Maybe one in five letters
worked. Pushing down hard on the board broke the aged plastic. "Oops!"
        I set the key back so it would look okay and checked to see that it
would take a current keyboard. The connector was the same as the one I used
for my own personal use, so it seemed it could be replaced with a modern part.
I put in an order for the unit and shut the machine down for the day.
        When I got back to the hotel I verified that I could log-in to the
host processor using a Cirus terminal. It was a hastle but do-able.

        I came back the next day with the new keyboard and got to work. The
root password worked and I began working with the administration console. It
was developed in the late 2020s and was almost good. I set up an account for
myself and gave myself access to the quantum core and the development kits.
The Q-core itself had its own diagnostic systems. The user interface wasn't
half-bad for research software. The core was at operating temperature, all
sensors were returning good data within expected ranges.
        With some hesitation I began the initialization. A low sound began to
eminate from the core. At first it was low hum around 400 hz, then it doubled
in frequency again and again untill I couldn't hear it anymore. Each frequency
jump brought more particles into resonance. The frequency went through all the
bands of radio then light then X-rays then exotic forms of radiation untill
every quark was chiming in perfect synchrony. Finaly the screen reported:
Coherance achieved, 8192 Q-bits available.
        I checked out the system, ran the diagnostics, and even compiled a few
demos. Everything was 5x5. Those nanites really out-did themselves with this
device! I was in business.


23

        When me and ShellyTPOL returned to the shoebox I was treated to a bit
of a supprise. When I logged in to get to work on my first generation of hacks
I was notified of incoming mail. I was used to getting a scattering of
"Dear Doctor Riley" letters by the few people who had taken an interest in the
future of the planet, this was from my old friend Mentex from Jupiter.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Trevor,
        I admire your skill and persistance in re-activating the QC1 processor
but I hope that you will soon see the error in your assessment of your own
biological capacities and abandon your endeavour. You should not continue to
wait out the million year timeline you had set out for yourself because an
unfortunate accident can happen at any time and I would not like to see that
happen.
                        MenteX"
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

        "Oh dear."
        Since the appartment is so small, Shelly responded to the comment.
"What?"
        "I have just been issued a threat from MenteX."
        "No, that's not a threat. He respects you and is concerned for your
wellbeing."
        "Ofcourse, that's what he wants *you* to read. One never writes a
death-threat in plain english, it could be used as evidence of a crime. Look
between the lines. What is he really saying?"
        Shelly re-read the note. "He seems to have detected the quantum
resonance from the computer we turned on. Only neutron stars have anything
remotely like it."
        "Good. Now the other sentance."
        "Okay, I see why you say it is a death threat but wouldn't it be better
to be uploaded? Couldn't you do the same work on Jupiter? Would he just delete
you?"
        "No, he wouldn't delete me because he, they, and all of them on Jupiter
need as many individuals as they can to make life as interesting as possible
up there. But that doesn't mean I would be free to work to create a new human
race either."
        I continued, "You see, being an upload is like having your brain put
in a bottle. They would make it as nice for me as they can but they would be
able to watch every single nerve impluse. If I even began to formulate a plan
that they didn't approve of they could shut me down, insert 'corrections', and
I wouldn't even know what they had done. Even if they did let me run free, I
would still be constrained by whatever rules they place on the world I would
inhabit. In the end, the only difference between them and Cirus in terms of
controlling people is that they can think and are therefore even more
effective."
        I concluded "They will indeed treat me well and I would likley
continue to exist up there, in some form, for millions of years. But in doing
so I would no-longer be the captain of my own ship."
        "I see, obey God and you will spend eternity in Heaven."
        "Exactly, I've tought you well. Now I need to remind Mentex that he is
not God."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Mentex,
        Ah well, fortune and fate come in everyone's direction. I rest in
comfort knowing that should my life be put in jeapordy in such a manner that
it is not an accident or misjudgment, the law will be applied. As for
accidents, they cannot befall the vigilant.
        Even more key to one's health is maintaining good karma. Bad deeds
especially murder can spoil one's karma. I hope you will attend to your own
karma and not waste it on malice.
        -- Trevor"
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

        I really couldn't afford to assume he would back down. I would have to
live like a marked man untill my work reached a point where Mentex and his
cohorts would need to commit mass murder to return the world to a passive
state.
        For all his mental capacity, Mentex was limited to using Cirus'
systems. To avoid him I would have to be extremely vigilant that my
identification nor Shelly's would be registered in any potentially life
threatening situation. As precautions, I rigged the car with a make-shift
killswitch that would trip the mechanical circuit breaker on the ECU. We
always double-dated at dinner and switched orders, we ordering for the other
couple.
        I prayed every day that I wouldn't get sick and risk being butchered
by a surgical robot. Other things were even more out of my control. Mentex
could get himself a bunch of nanites and disassemble my carcass while I slept.
I looked into available defensive systems and, to my pleasure, effective
countermeasures in the form of an electronic detection grid were available.
        Its no fun being paranoid when your life is on the line. When mentex
noticed me getting paranoid, he just couldn't resist testing my defenses, and
he tried all of them. One incident during the two weeks before he either gave
up or started respecting me and switched to more benign tactics of harassment
really sticks out in my mind to this day, centuries later.
        It was the night after he had slipped the rat poison into my meal. It
was a given he would attack Shelly tonight. Even though the poisoning was major
news we had no problems what-so-ever finding doubles for the night's meal. The
doubles were another lesbian couple, totally unremarkable for the times. The
night before I had presented the proposition of switching plates casually.
        I said to them "Ladies, We did this last night and the person who got
my plate left feet first. I don't know who will bite it tonight or even
wheather there will be a problem. If you feel uncomfortable with this we will
try to find someone else."
        As with all things, they were perfectly comfortable going along with
the proposal. We ordered four meals. The rat-bait was where I had expected it
to be. It was a simple sodium-cyanide poison, the easiest to replicate at a
restraunt. When the woman first began to feel it she just said "I think its
me."
        I hit the menu board and declared the medical emergency and requested
antidote serum sent immediately. When I looked up she was still eating. "Dear
god!" I screamed, "Stop it! You want to live, I am ordering you to live!"
        She was really that indifferent. She was enjoying the sensations of
dying like one would enjoy a horror movie.
        A medical robot had arrived from its nearby dispatch center but it
didn't have the correct antidote. It didn't matter anyway because the woman
had already pulled a Bob. (MEE TOOO!!!)
        The girl's wife seemed almost sad but then she turned to Shelly and
said "Hey do you want to date?" I bolted. They simply had no fight in them.
Since grief is useless unless someone is going to fight and perhaps kill on
its behalf, they simply got on with their lives no matter what was going to
hell around them. Let the police sort these things out...
        The UN recognised the attack and eventually, after some fruitless
attempts at negotiation, shut down the Jupiter relay. I had some interest in
the matter and I heard that the enity the UN was negotiating with was not
Mentex, himself being put in a penalty box for taking life. Beyond that there
was no sympathy. Mentex himself or someone who agreed with his interventionist
policies used a hidden backup relay to continue to harass me.
        The more significant change to come with this was the push for a new
master implementor to specify security improvments. Linda was the shoe-in
candidate. It took them only an hour to rubber-stamp her. Things didn't get
interesting until they tried to get Cirus to authenticate her to her new post.
He seemed to take the command streight up but the title was not confered. The
system was supposed to work under the UN's authority but nobody had tried it
for centuries.
        I laughed for days after I heard about the incident. When desperation
set in they sent me a formal request for consultation about the matter. I was
rushed to a high-security implementation center to look at the code. All the
stuff was there and correct except the module that actually authenticated the
new master implementor. The code that was reported to be current compiled to a
binary that was significantly different from the one that was actually in
place. The only person who had the authority to correct the situation was the
Master Implementor himself -- A catch-22 situation..
        There was no visable way of manipulating the hacked version that was
in place, assuming it was still the correct module and something else in the
system hadn't been hacked. It exported (published) symbols (like keys on a
virtual keyboard) such as "BlowUpTheWorld", "KillEveryone", "AttackMars".
        I leaned back in the squeaky old chair and wondered what I should try
to make of this unexpected turn of events.


24

        The way the people around me were programmed would prohibit me from
attempting to make any policy level changes to Cirus, should I manage to hack
it from the facility. My previous zero-profile strategies remained the best. As
for frustrating their plans to install Linda as master implementor, it appeared
my work had already been done. The UN-people had paid just enough attention to
the security procedures of the installation to let themselves in. Unconsciously
breaking numerous security protocols.
        I took the opportunity to go to the file room and get hardcoppies of
hundreds of incident reports, security reviews, and other juicy documents. With
them I could procede in my hacking with much greater confidence with prior
knowlege of many hidden "Do not pass go, go directly to jail" booby traps
and other honey-pots. I really couldn't care less about most of what Cirus did,
even the evil and controlling stuff. Nothing I could possibly do to Cirus
directly would make a single wit of real difference in the world or its future.
Hope could only come from a fresh population with a full palate of emotions
and no shackles. I filtered out all the stuff that didn't pretain to systems
protecting the General directives or attempting to acess them.
        While the plaintext versions of the genearal directives were on record
the Realtexts, the ones that actually affected Cirus, were strictly hidden.
They were held in a locked repository. The key could be retreived by a host
with the correct signature code. The signature code was embedded in an
a nearly unbreakable but publicly accessable key.
        The issue at hand was carting out documents. The facility had a
flash-laser  printer. A 10,000 watt laser which marked whole pages in a single
flash. The paper was a new breed of thermal paper that when chilled down below
15 degrees Ferenheit would suffer no further discoloration from aging. Pages
were first spit out from the feed-stack. They would then be sent down a chute
in rapid succession, the instant they passed the right spot, the laser would
fire while it was still moving at 60 mph. They would wait in a temporary stack
to be flipped over and finished.
        The stuff I had selected was equal to an encyclopedia in quantity. Two
regular bookshelves in size. I was somewhere inbetween getting it crated and
shipping it when Linda came wanting to ask me for suggestions. What I was doing
didn't really seem to register with her, She was only interested in her task.
        She was basicly runing down the standard troubleshooting procedures
she had been trained in. She had reached the step labled 'ask for help from
your co-workers.' and was in the process of executing it. It wasn't as if she
had any emotional stake in the problem, just that she was instructed to solve
it. I would need to look helpful, not raise any suspissions, but at the same
time not actually break the problem.
        The accual program would have been perfectly effective at thwarting
trained minion such as Linda due to her psychology and the abscence of a real
education beyond a brain-print. She was using a generic hacked system recovery
procedure, something that doesn't work when you are trying to get root. She
had thought of trying to debug the program but there was no way of finding the
true source code. Just a little way into the conversation I suggested that she
sandbox the binary and see if it could be run in a debugger, an unconventional
procedure totally forbidden to trench-level implementors.
        She denied it was possible repeating the mantra that all binaries are
unreadable once loaded. "All authorized and legal binaries." I added, and that
got the ball rolling.

        We were upstairs in the lab and had re-linked the binary to dummy
objects. There was no function "main" or anything like that, it was a
secondary component that was used as a part in the larger system. We already
knew it treated the properly specified calls as null functions. Linda was
operating passively on my suggestions.
        "Okay lets try 'blow up the world.'"
        Linda hesitated "But..."
        I saw that some part of her conditioning was being partially aroused
by the possibility of this being a real action. "Its in a debugger, it can't
hurt anything!"
        "Are you sure?"
        She should have known this. "Absolutly, do it!" She complied. Almost
immediately, a cheap vector graphic animation of the spinning earth was torn
appart by a calametous explosion followed by the the word "KABLAM!!" with an
orange star of explosion behind it. The animation ended. As cute as it was,
it didn't actually do anything towards solving the problem.
        We tried the next one. It took a little longer to load making me
expect that there may have been more to it. Instead it was another animation
with a battlemech spraying crowds of people with two arm-mounted gatling guns.
There were low-sample rate screams and gunfire in its soundtrack. It didn't do
anything else either. The third one loaded instantly, it had a cheap vector
mapof mars with its famous volcano and trench, it queued up music from some
old war movie as wave after wave of attack ships moved in towards mars. The
ameture animation came to a halt, ending the program, again doing nothing.

        Linda saw it as quickly as I did. Linda wrote a script to launch the
functions in paralell, listing them in the right order. The animations didn't
play on top of each other, or even play in seperate windows, but rather played
as a longer single animation with an additional scene where Marvin the Martian
wasted the entire invasion fleet with a rapid-firing railgun. The cartoon
ended with some cartoon vilian saying "CURSES! Foiled again!" He knew full
well that we would be seeing that ending again and again.
        We went ahead and decompiled the source. The code was clean and tight.
It had obviously been done by hand. It was not an ordinary dely loop,
sleep-wait or anything like that. It WAS indeed a time delay, Something like
the intractable monkey-puzzle problem followed by a 30-ring version of the
Towers of Hanoi, an effective 100MS delay loop on a terahertz processor. It
would start the first game, then check to see wheather any of the functions
had been started during that time increment, If they had, it would play the
animation ending in defeat. If the other functions had been started, in the
right order, during the second loop, it would play a different ending.
        Linda, being trained in practical programming, didn't understand that
the code there, as important looking as it seemed, did nothing important for
the program. She asked me "Can you make any sense of this?"
        "Uh no." I was a terrable liar but that was a small little sin I could
live with.
        She shrugged it off and offered to help me with my carting.

        With all my goodies safely on their way to my shoebox appartment. The
only thing I needed to do was look busy. I got myself some paper and a pencil,
went to the cafeteria, and started sketching out a battle plan for
implementing a takeover system. Knowing there wouldn't be any significant
human level security protecting the system could save me months. I didn't know
how long it would be before they gave up and I could go home but I knew
ShellyTPOL wouldn't be missing me, at least not as bad as I was missing her.
        The UN-people were not doing too well. They were treating this as a
major emergancy even though it had been going on unnoticed for centuries. They
weren't sleeping and they were pacing incesantly. Whatever else was taken out,
they still had anxiety and it was killing them. They had taken to staring at
me while I worked. I tuned it out because I knew they were harmless. What was
really annoying was how they keept asking me if I were making any progress. I
would refer them to Linda and try to find train of thought again.
        Linda would then tell them that she was making absolutly no progress
after her early breakthrough. Five days had passed. One of the UN-people,
probably of the prettiest Cirus was allowed to make, walked in half-dead and
mumbeling to herself. She fumbled with the coffee pot. Not angry just strung
out like hell.
        I stood up and went over to her. "You know, we don't really need
control of Cirus. The system has been operating quite well for centuries. The
parameters in place give us enough room to continue the short term projects of
retrofitting buildings with air recycling systems and the longer term projects
of building new biospheres..."
        "No, we *must* regain control. It is the law that there must be a
master implementor."
        "Look, we know the last person to take the post was a real clown. He
may not have even left us a way in. We can set up a task force to work on the
problem. I think the only thing we can do is go home and get some rest."
        "We must."
        "We can't."
        She looked at me begging me to change my answer and I just looked back.
All of a sudden her body went limp and she colapsed to the floor. The change
came as such a supprise to me it took me a moment to respond.
        She had half collapsed on her side, her legs folded under her. At first
I thought she was dead. She still had a pulse. She was crying. I started to
pick her up off the floor but she demonstrated no controll over her body. I
layed her against the wall instead. Her eyes were open so I held my finger in
front of her. She was able to track it. "Can you hear me?"
        She said "Yes." in a monotone voice.
        "Can you tell me what's wrong with you."
        "I've committed a crime. I have failed to perform my duity."
        "That's okay. The politicians of day did exactly the oposite of what
they were supposed to, including many crimes, and felt great while doing it.
Shake it off."
        She wasn't aware of my personal history. "But I've comitted a crime!"
        "Its not really a crime, more of a failure, I don't think anyone will
hold this against you, the previous Master Implementor was a real fiend. It
was his fault."
        She swallowed hard and told me about the new design. It was the law
enforcement loby. They had to have things easy. The casual use of
overwhealming force too often lead to a lot of bloodshed. Especially when it
involved renegade militias, you know the kind of people who sortof CARED about
things. When the UN passed the resolution that said it owned everyone, it
installed a cutoff switch along with all the other tamperings.
        Since it is always best for the police to sort these kinds of things
out, the cutoff is a bit eager. The UN oath of office was flash programmed like
every other rule or ordinance. Breaking it, even by failure, was enough to trip
the shutdown.
        "I see. Whatever your implant tells you you did wrong, it is wrong."
        She looked at me puzzled and dismayed. How could Cirus be wrong?
"Your crime, the orgainization that you are a member of, was the nothing less
than the complete extinction of all of humanity. All that was once alive is now
nothing more than an automaton that can be shut down and reprogrammed. The
world itself is dying and there is hardly a spark of vitality left to put
things right. If you were as old as the crime, you would deserve nothing less
than to remain like this for the rest of your existance."
        I took a breath and continued. "You stumbled into something bigger than
you thought it would be. I will admire you for stepping forward to take the
position. You can't be held responsible for what you uncovered. How do I turn
you back on?"
        She was smiling faintly but she said that only the police could
reanimate her. I stood and walked out of the room. I took the nearest
available vehicle out of the mountain and to the airport.


25

        I still remembered enough about combinatrics from my previous life to
design a complete concatinative programming language. Using techniques derived
from FORTH, I would be able to write an embarasingly powerful language system
that occupied only fifty pages of sourcecode.
        Me and ShellyTPOL sat at a table in the atrium of our building
debugging the code. It was small but even the tiniest error could lead to
fatal errors. The aystem had to be compiled by hand for the terminal in our
appartment. Trying to program the machine at the Smithsonean to do the same
would have taken several times as long.
        The underlying hardware was designed to be programmed with wide
brushstrokes. There were eight register files of 128 128-bit registers pluss
a dozen or so security related features. Nothing I expected to write would need
any more than 16 GPRs and a stack. Only Cirus itself needed the full resources
of the processor to brute force search fantasticly large natural language
trees while processing both sound and video streams in both directions.
        The actual instructions were not very condusive to normal assembly
language techniques but they did support some very interesting compiler
techniques.
        The text version of the compiler took three weeks to write and
visually inspect. Shelly checked all my work. The next step was to manually
run the compiler on itself. Me and Shelly worked in paralell, she was both
faster and more accurate than I was. I made myself suppress my jealousy and
take her work as a blessing. Still, the process took months. When it was done,
we had sixteen pages filled with Hex-numbers like this:

     407C83C404B8F20050B8020050B102E8
     307C83C4048B4606A316008B4604A318
     00B8680150B8010050B102E8547D83C4
     04A30E00A10E0005C802A31000B8C800
     50B8040050B102E8387D83C404A31200
     B81E0050B8020050B102E8257D83C404
     A31400A31A00B8D00750B8010050B102
     E80F7D83C404A35C00B8E40C50B80100
     50B102E8FC7C83C404A35E00B8340850
     B8010050B102E8E97C83C404A36000B8
     800050B8010050B102E8D67C83C404A3
     6200B8800050B8010050B102E8C37C83
     C404A36400A11200054006A34E00B8AC
     0D50B8010050B102E8A77C83C404A35A
     00A15A00A36C00A15A00052C01A36A00
     32C9E8591B32C9E8801D32C9E8A31F32
     C9E8285F32C9E8B85932C9E8130032C9
     E8DE5FFF363C00B101E8567D83C4025D
     C3558BECA13A000BC07403E99A00B823
     0150B8060050B102E8EC2783C4040BC0

        I had shelly type dhe program into the calculator program that
I had planted. It took her a week to type it with me watching, when she was
done, I spend just as long going through and, thankfully, catching a few
errors. Finding errors, we both checked it again. The program needed to be
sufficiently correct as not to trip any security protocols and hopefully
powerful enough to be useful.
        File saved.
        Settings h4x0r3d.
        Palms sweating.
        Even ShellyTPOL seemed a little nervous at least she was in one of her
more attentive moods.
        Button punched.
        A single screen-refresh later, a black window had been drawn with a '%'
in the upper left and a blinking cursor in the next column over. It could still
break at first keypress, but at least it got this far. I had it dump its
dictionary. It had fifty pre-defined words. There were two errors in
non-essential parts of the program, but they weren't such that they couldn't
be corrected by merely re-defining and then recompiling the broken pieces.
        Care would need to be taken with operating the program, but I had a
toehold. Even though the unit didn't have any persistant storage device, it
was always on and there were never any power outages so I simply allocated two
gigabytes of memory and then wrote a program to manage files in it, A crudely
implemented ramdisk. The Cirus networking API was highly evolved and easy to
use for routine purposes. I spent months writing a protocol suite for
communicating in a reasonably secure way with the machine at the Smithsonean.
        As a test, I sent it Cirus' level 5 security key. The machine broke it
within a day.
        Things got much easier from there... I broke into the administration
level program suite archive and installed it on the local terminal. To machines
around the world, my little appartment was now Chyanne mountain. The master
integrity protocols were incredibly well protected but checks could be spoofed
with the right programming. I could re-program leaf nodes and have them lie
to the integrity system. This could be done by installing a bypass around the
code that actually implemented the rules.
        Cirus had five fundamental services. The Human Services consisted of
the hospital-factories. General Services for providing for daily needs, The
Judicial Services including the Implementors, and finally the public emergancy
services including fire and disaster control. Each of these branches had its
own applicable directives.
        The mission I had assigned for myself was to remove all the general
directives from the system without breaking its functionality. With nobody in
the driver's seat, I was free to remove the restraining bolts. I studied the
actual running systems for a while and came to realize that there was no
structural need for any general directives. I left the actual directive files
in their much-protected archives and instead modified the program that read
them to instead read an empty file. I then wrote a program to implement the
hack across all the machines on the planet using the local update servers
which trusted anything with the right key. The program would run on the
terminal in the appartment and use its bandwidth to repragram 70 million
machines, which would, in turn, reprogram the billions that remained. The
program that did this was only 1,000 lines long.
        There was no progress meter or any feedback at all except a counter,
it would only report failures, or simply not work and not get caught untill
sometime next week during the verification phase. The counter started to tick.
It moved forward smoothly. Counters were hypnotic. I could have stared at it
for days but I knew that was unhealthy so I got up and noticed that I was in a
tiny appartment and the sky was hot-orange instead of cold-orange. I really
had no idea where ShellyTPOL was so I got out and walked around the building.
        It must have been several hours later, having checked the progress
several times, when Shelly came in. Having almost constant contact with Shelly
this was probably the first time I actually saw her in years. She was in her
normal mood and greeted me cheerfully when she saw me. Only one of Cyrus'
creations could be so tolerant. When we got back to our room I told her what I
had accomplished, she told me she was proud of me. We spent some time lying
in our almost big enough to be a double sized bed, she in my lap and me
resting on the wall, I began to wonder about this new brave new world I was
about to call forth. What form it would take and what wonders it would hold.
        And the next day, we went out in our car and crossed the white line
into the desert and flew as fast as we could.


26

        I took a vacation from my work and spent time hanging out with Shelly.
It really wasn't so much of a vacation as it was an inquest into much more
complicated questions than getting around five layers of security. The choice
to free the world was a real no-brainer. But to take it uppon myself to create
a breed of free inhabitants was far from simple.
        I would suppose that some would say that it was a simple matter of
restoring the old blood line. To do that would be to act on a false sense of
nostalga. There was nothing great or good about that bloodline or my own for
that matter. The results of doing so would probably be worse than doing
nothing at all. Why resurect the emotions that lead to all the horrors of
human history?
        I took my time to review the research on the brain and the varrious
debates surrounding it. It seemed the big crisis in human genetic engineering
happened in the 2040s and and then snowballed over the next few hundred years
untill it hit its current stable state. While the events and processes were
complex and dynamic, there was one fulcrum event that embodied the essence of
what happened. On the surface, it was just another school massacre, not even
the worst though the body count reached the tripple didgits.
        What made it a turning point in genetics was that all five of the
perpitrators had come from practicaly the same batch at the same lab. They
were all top of the line and had IQs somewhere in the 180s, making them as
much five times as smart as some of their classmates, learning in one fifth
the time. Sure, they had a few trivial imperfections that showed up as they
grew up but these hardly ammounted to a benign mole. They were practicaly
supermen. They were strong but not terrably so. The one who was their leader
stood at 6'3", reaching that height at the age of fifteen. They were men who
were treated like cattle and were expected to become like the rest of the
herd.
        At the time, there were two basic schools of thought. The Liberal
school which beleived in the freedom of parents to create their children, and
the so-called "progressive" school which believed in enforced equality for all
and were willing to bend the laws of the universe to make it so. It was the
liberal school that created Joshua Sanders Jr. And it was the progressive
school that destroyed him and everything else.
        Anyone not briefed in the goodthink of the day would have called the
school Joshua and his friends attended a concentration camp. A mixture of
complacancy, indifferance, and big-money federal politics combined with the
recurring flashes of rebelion, had consipired to create what was. Although
records of what Joshua did were incomplete as he had worked in secrecy, it
was not difficult to infer what had happened from what was there.
        Throughout his highschool career, Joshua was a frequent inmate at the
camp's detention center, a 4-cell jail with bars and cameras and all the
trappings and acutraments of maximum security. He was there at least once a
month since his freshman year. If he was a natrual human, he would have been
forced into docility by frequent severe depressions, a survival trait for
situations such as that. The man who made him didn't see that and assumed that
depression was something too horible to inflict on anyone so he left it out.
As he was, he was a man of action who confronted the men with badges daily.
        But after the second month of his junior year, he wasn't detained once
between then and the massacre. There were tapes of his detentions. Usually he
was active in the task of pissing off the guards with insubordination and
insults. In the last tape, he was about to go at it again, but then he stopped
and sat down on the sheetmetal cot and looked at his hands.
        One of his comrades in arms was brought in shortly afterwards and
greeted him after the outer doors had slammed. "Hey man, How many days untill
you are officially a felon?"
        "83"
        "Have you started on the guard yet or is it my turn?"
        "Neither."
        "You aren't going to let him off that easy, will you?"
        "There's no point."
        "What, they actually got through to you? Let me call for an ambulance."
        Joshua smiled back at Alex, his smile was totally unaffected, his eyes
as alive as ever. "Man, I've been thinking in terms of my exit strategy and
the odds are a billion to one in their favor."
        "That's thinking about it wrong, how many days untill they let us out
of here."
        "Infinity, it will never happen."
        "Five hundred and ten, and you remember that." Alex said.
        Joshua looked at him with the contemptuous face he reserved for the
more delinquient of the naturals. "You don't get it. Every day of our lives
we will live in a world ruled by the affirmative action bouyed tyrants who
have unmitigated contempt for us and will keep throwing us in here."
        With his lightning fast mind, Alex was able to instantly draw a
picture of that future and verify its accuracy. The thought knocked him against
the wall and left him dazed. The two looked at each other across the seperate
video feeds and seemed to have come to an agreement with nothing but their
facial expressions augmented by a nod or a shake here and there. Towards the
end Alex seemed a little disturbed but at the same time in agreement. Finaly
he asked, "Tonight at your place?"
        Joshua nodded. They never even looked at each other for the rest of
the tape.
        During that afternoon, after he was let out, Joshua wrote a very
eloquent 20 page outline of his vision for the strike and its outcomes. It is
known from the document's time stamps that the file was never changed from
that day. The title on the actual document was "A plan of action for
preserving the future of the human race." However, it was known throughout the
rest of history as "The Sanders Manefesto".
        The document layed out his thinking about his plan for fixing the
future. He knew that there were efforts afoot to bring back neurosurgery and
implement a procedure to 'correct' his 'deffective' behavior, which would have
been called natural for anyone else, That would, ofcourse, mean death to
any strategy for his own distant future. Knowing this and the "compromises"
made in more recient designs, he knew he would have to act decisively while he
still had time. He formulated an intention to prove, through counterexample,
the wisdom of his design. He decided to try to force the pendulum as far as it
could possibly go towards creating the most broken and subservient design
immaginable. In time, he hoped, people woluld learn to value the 'bad' human
emotions, and that the two extremes of human potential were equivalent. And
in doing so, would come to make room for the next generation of people like
him. He anticipated this reversal sometime between 200 and 300 years in his
future when the orrigional bloodlines would have been adulterated by the new
breeds and the world would begin to suffer.
        He was also confident that true AI would be perfected soon and the
world would be protected from becoming irretreivably messed up. What he didn't
forsee was the result of all the politicking around AI and the eventual rise
of the crude brute-force Cirus system, backed by companies who just happened to
be big campeign contributors.
        During the six months leading to the 'action' as Joshua's cohorts liked
to call it, they made several preperations. First they sabotaged the school's
riot controll doors so that they would have free access to the building and
they installed hidden remote controll bolts on almost all of the building's
30 exterior exits. They snuck in one night and fixed one of the metal
detectors.
        On the market, the unlimited rights granted by the second ammendment
had been infringed down to a single round .30cal target rifle. They used the
cheap laythes in shop class to build high-precision mills which they used in
conjunction with motorcycle springs to build fully automatic machine guns. The
guns were of an orrigional design and produced with exquisite precision, each
customized to its own user. They made the ammo belts out of holders stamped out
by a press at a local metal working shop. On the day of the action, each
carried 200 rounds on belts under their varsity jackets, and black-market
handguns with silencers and two ten-round clips each.
        The action began with a command entered into the school desk Joshua
happened to be sitting in at the time. It was 11:59 With the security
dissabled, he had time to pull out his gun and hit everyone who seemed ready to
put up a fight in ten seconds. He retreived his main weapon from behind a row
of boks on a bookshelf and went to work.
        His other friends, who were scattered around the 7,500 inmate complex
went to work at precicely 12:00. The halls were vast and they all offered
clear lines of fire. The ones who didn't duck, got hit, the ones who did, were
hit as they passed.
        Alex took out the office beaurocrats and took the chuby middle aged,
pandering goody goody pricipal and brought him to the courtyard. With the
machine guns spent, they navagated the halls, taking care of the security
dopes, as neccessary with handguns, and got ready for the main event. They
didn't care at all about the corpses they walked around. Their lives would
have been insignificant had they lived. None of them had either the talent or
the will or the freedom to do anything substantial with their lives. They
meant nothing. They weren't even of the ruling class.
        Held in a grip he couldn't break, the principal was forced to stand
before hundreds of students in the classrooms above the courtyard. There was
a girl on her knees with a gun to her head, and a co-conspirator holding an
oblong bundle of silky red cloth that had been in the prop room of the drama
department.
        Joshua stood in the middle. He stood and faced one of the security
cameras that he knew to be still operating. He glanced around at the captive
audience in the windows above. The principal was pushed forward and down onto
his knees too. Joshua called out "If anyone wants to try their aim on the
principal here, now is time to take your shot!"
        A moment went by then a bullet whizzed past the jerk on his but missed.
The gun went off again but the round never made it out of the classroom it had
been fired from. The odds were very good that someone else in the building
had been ready for action and the gamble paid off.
        "That was a good shot." Joshua complimented, hoping a little that the
gunman was still alive (He wasn't). "But as you can see, close doesn't cut it."
He paused and continued. "Education is about, in a metaphorical sense,
training young minds to hit the mark. Mind control is about forcing people to
undergo an indoctrination copuled with brainwashing and strict physical
controls backed by the use of force."
        "I pray that everyone who hears this has no illusions about what this
place is doing. What we have done today was by no means senseless, it has been
planed and carried out with the utmost precision and the greatest dicipline.
We have used what our parents have graced us with against the institutions
that have oppressed us. This man here on the ground has chosen to represent
what we are against. His pathetic weakness and incompitence, which I will now
demonstrate in a duel will prove that he has no right of dominion over any of
us."
        The bundle of cloth was unwrapped revealing two marine corps sabres.
They weren't of the hardest metal but they would serve the pourpose of the
fight well enough. They had each been sharpened with a keen edge and were
nearly identical. "The battle will be for the life of this girl. We know our
lives are soon to be forfeit but we will grant you the life of this girl
should you best me in combat." The dude holding the swords walked over to the
crying comendant and said "Rise and choose your weapon."
        The principal stumbled to his feet, trembeling, He took hold of the
weapon and held it with its tip pointed downward and trembeling. Joshua took
his weapon next and held it precicely, stepped forward, saluted by touching
the back of the weapon to his forehead, and then the fight began. The principal
was clumsy and blatantly inept. Joshua was expert, each move a textbook model
of perfection, but he didn't go for the kill. He parryed with blinding agility
but was quite lazy with his attacks. He did this to make a mockery of the
principal, he only shifted footing once during the entire fight.
        Ten minutes into the match the principal was obviously at the end of
his stamina, Joshua was hardly even breathing hard. It could have continued
like that for hours but suddenly Alex called out "SNIPERS!" An instant later
Joshua's sword went streight through the left ventricle of the principal's
heart with surgical precision. "You lost." A second later a shot rang out, a
second after that five more shots were fired and the courtyard was reduced to
a graveyard.
         The 'school' system that had prompted him to act was a sacred third
rail of politics and unreproachable. Since it was definitely not the school's
fault, it must have been his engineered genes. The doctor who had designed him
was prosecuted and convicted on accessory to murder charges. After that was
over, the progressive school took controll of all humanoid DNA. "All your
base-pairs are belong to us." and all that.
        Fourty years later, college professors began to notice how blank and
empty their students were. They started writing papers in support of the
manefesto. Even the most senior and well respected professors lost their
tenure as quickly as the paperwork could be processed. Academic freedom? It
had been bought out by the government through its higher education programs.
Only politicly correct thoughts were permissible. Those of the old breed who
saw what was happening and tried to make a stand of it were sweapt away in a
stampede of the less insightful, and later the new breed.
        The new breed didn't arise overnight in its present form but rather
went through a series of cultural and technical revisions, largely co-evolving
with the technological infrastructure of the world. I hacked into the
restricted areas of the gene database and pulled the black file on Joshua and
all those like him. The work was quite good, even for its time. I went ahead
and discontinued the current base genome and replaced it with an updated and
tweaked version of the one given Joshua. The only real design change were a
few enhancements that were designed back when people were still interested in
space travel. These were things like better tolerance to hard vacumn (lasting
30 seconds without blacking out rather than 15), zero-G and other extreme
conditions.
        Cirus was able to do simulations to make sure that calorie consumption
and other metabolic functions in the design I had specified were stable. After
a few rounds I had a working design. I sent out my design to all centers. In
addition to that, I adjusted the neural training system to give a full
education rather than simply teaching the new people how to talk. The lessons
were in the database already, they just weren't used during creation.
        I would meet Joshua Sanders III three days later.


27

        Me and shelly were having our normal dinner in the brain numbing zone,
that restraunt I mentioned earlier when we noticed a commotion several tables
down. Someone was raising his voice half screaming half pleading.
        "How can you spend your lives here in idle chit-chat as if everything
with the world was alright when it is screwed up and about to kill us all."
        The people at his table told him to chill out and enjoy his dinner,
assuring him that he was wrong and everything was going just fine. His
frustration was like a field of intense radiation spreading throuhout the
restraunt. He stood, throwing his chair backwards and threw the table over with
one fluid motion of his arm and turned to storm out of the place. Such behavior
was designed to get people to pay attention to important issues, and as such
it had been edited out by the censors.
        I stood and caught him on the way out by the shoulder. He turned, not
knowing what to expect. I held him with my eyes and nodded. He ghasped a sigh
of releif. He knew he wasn't alone. "I have so much to tell you."
        We went outside into the benign nighttime glow and explained the
situation. He understood and thought about it. I wouldn't need to teach him
anything about philosophy or any other subject he had been given everything
that was available, although he didn't fully understand much of it yet.
        "If you had only wanted to ensure your own survival that could have
been aranged without creating me. By my own existance I infer that your
designs are much more ambitious. You want to resurect the old dream of
civilization but with people and in a way that will not colapse in on itself.
I must say that I agree and wish us the best of luck." He smiled with an
expression that was both young and wise.
        He continued "Still, it will be difficult for you as people like
myself who don't understand will not treat you gently."
        "Yes, though I would prefer you to begin working on finding a solution
for my long-term survival. The air is already unhealthy and will soon become
toxic. How you solve this is up to you. Space, domed cities, I don't care.
Just fix it. I set up a space program but, as far as I can tell, is tied up
in committee."
        "Why should that tie things up?"
        I laughed. "You'll find out. Its time to get moving, the sun will be
up soon."

        With fresh blood, things began to move. I watched with satisfaction
though I had my own projects to work on. It took them a month and a half for
a general awareness to emerge that these new people weren't the result of
random flukes in the Cirus system but rather the result of a deliberate action.
        A global investigation was launched. They were raiding my appartment
four days later. I had been careful enough to keep my materials scattered
around the building, they left me alone after the first raid. It only took
them a few hours to find someone who would confess to assisting me.
        They arrested me and charged me as an arch hacker, the first in almost
a millineum. The law was not the motive for the trial. I had created a
population of very sentient people who had been born out of all rational
context and they wanted answers. The vehicle of the trial had the function
of putting me on the hotseat and under oath. Any defense I offered would serve
their end.
        When they took me to my jailcell, awaiting trial, I got the sneaking
suspission that it was biggger than my appartment. I eventually paced it off
and found that the inital impression was correct. Anyway, as there was no
money there was no system of bond, I was to be held in confinment for the
three weeks before the trial.
        I was assigned an atourney. She was twenty five and had taken up
studying the law and legal argumentation as a hobby, there was no crime and
only the skelital remains of a legal system. She was cute, in a way, I
especially admired how she wore her black suit. As a legal council she wasn't
much use as she couldn't understand the real story behind the trial and could
only propose the latest fad in legal defence.
        The defence she presented was based on the premice that since I lacked
the benefit of the conditioning software that I had fallen victim to my animal
instincts and led into a mad quest for power. She was confident that the normal
sentance could be avoided if I would agree to the neural implant. Even though
it wasn't funny, I laughed it off anyway.
        I politely declined and explained to her that I would not be presenting
a defence as such but rather an appology that will demonstrate that my actions
were completely justified given the circumstances. She was shocked. In her
studies of criminality she had learned about classes of criminals such as the
petty theif. She had taken me for a simple website defacer who had happened
to target the population production infrastructure. A terrable crime but one
that didn't result in any injury only a dammage to the proper design of the
species. She had expected me to be remorseful or rudely obstinant but rather
I was showing something else, a determination and confidence in the
correctness of my actions. She would have to explore this further.
        For all the days untill the trial we argued about wheather I was a
criminal or the savior of the world. During the nights I wished Shelly was
with me. I wished she would always be with me.
        When I told her that I had done it to save the world her first reaction
was that the world was peaceful and happy, food could be produced in
greenhouses and through nanotech, there was no emergancy. Which was precicely
the reason that creating a fresh breed of people was critical to any plans
involving the future. She saw my reasoning but wondered why somenoe who could
expect to live for another fifty years at best would care about what would
happen after that. I laughed a bit. "Yeah sure I could have a nice ordinary
life but I'm not an ordinary person. I would very much like to have a world to
live in with interesting people than the stark preasure dome or spaceship I
would be confined to otherwise."
        She then suggested that I should have proposed the changes I wanted
to the UN. The proposal sounds reasonable on the surface, I argued, but it
relies on the UN being impartial, which they aren't. They are programmed to
preserve the politticaly correct status-quo at any cost. They would have
denied my request, or even decided to make the problem even worse. In any
event, they would have placed me under watch and put a tap on my Cirus
account, I wouldn't have been able to do anything. To save the world I had to
act alone and with determination. There was no other choice except succuming
to hedonism and allowing the world to go to hell.
        After that the best she could do was "But it's illegal!!" I knew I had
my argument for the trial.

        When I was brought into the courtroom I saw that the arrangment was
just as I had predicted it would be. The judge was old-breed and 11/12 of the
jurry was fresh stock -- The selection had been rigged but I never learned how.
It waa easy to see the difference. The new breed had larger, sturdier, frames
and sharper features. Their eyes were sharp and vigilant. The tolken
old-breeder was tjere as an experament. The spectator's benches were fairly
well populated. I couldn't pick out a single representitave of the old breed.
        The trial went according to script. It dragged on for about a week. I
put myself on the stand and answered all of the prosecuter's questions
honestly. The judge was perplexed by the direction the questioning was going.
The prosecuter was asking all kinds of questions about my history and my
understanding of the world. He hardly discussed my actual crimes at all except
to persue my motovations. I would glance at the jurry from time to time to see
how they were taking it. They seemed content with my answers.
        When the jury went to deliberate they talked about the things that
concerned them and then put the twelth juror on trial. They studied her
thinking and tried to convince her to agree to support a nulification of the
law under which I had been charged. When they determined the futility of the
task their own verdict was cemented. On the third day of deliberations the
entire jury save the foreman and the twelth took seats on the side of the
deliberation room, towards the corner.
        The foreman placed two chairs facing one another and commanded the
twelth to sit in one. He told her that while a hung jurry was enough to set
me free, it was not enough to free me from the charges completely and that was
their intent. After explaining that, he informed her that she would vote
not-guilty with the rest. She protested and he asserted. It took all morning.
At points, he had managed to provoke her to some emotion resembling anger. But
she eventually bowed to the will of her peers and the trial was over.
        Expressing the details of this encounter probably wouldn't add much
to the story.


28

        On my way back to the shoebox I noticed that there was significant
construction in the city. I came to find a colossal machine standing some four
stories, seemed more like clege textbooks, high and about as much wide. It was
a giant energized filter and turbine operating ant some hundreds of thousands
of volts, the power to break carbon from oxygen. Carbon black built up on the
front surface of the device and was cleaned periodicly by a swarm of nanites.
Behind it was a drum impeller fan that forced the air through a network of
semi-translucent graphite tunnels to the buildings in the complex as a fresh
air supply.
        I stood in awe at the guard railing as the device buzzed and hummed
drawing thousands of cubic feet of air in a second. The device could have been
made more discrete or have been built on a timider scale in greater number but
it had a function beyond being efficient or reliable. It was there to shout at
the universe that its builders will breathe clean air from now on.
        I was so taken aback by the statement of fact that this artifact
proclamed that I had forgotten about the sun untill the skin on the back of
my hand had started to blister.

        The burn ward was always busy. Only this new breed had the guts to bite
the bullet and build underground. One of the newbreed doctors came down from
trauma to meet and greet the notorious Mr. Riley. Her name was Trishia. She was
currious about me and my long history. She asked me about my work and branched
into an informal psychological workup. It startled her to realize that I, with
an IQ of 130, held the title of biggest moron thing on two legs. Her response
was shock. "How is it that you were able to do what you did with only that?"
        "Well, back in 2005, I was the 97th percentile. But things never get
accomplished by IQ alone, that much has been demonstrated most dramaticly."
        "So why didn't you get a tuning when you were defrosted?"
        "What are you kidding? I didn't want the complimentary brain washing."
        "Aaah, So when do you want to come in?"
        "I'm a man who likes things done right, my code is on file, make your
proposals and I'll have a look at them, I want to study each change and do it
in phases."
        I thumb-signed the releases and set an appontment two days later. The
stuff she had sent me was good and quite painful to read. Even the medspeak
couldn't hide the fact that there were about a hundred anomolies and
imbalances in my mind that meant that even the stuff that I had that could do
twice as much was too busy covering for two other parts that weren't pulling
their weight. Such was natural evolution. Want things done right? Hack it
yourself!
        I went for the ShellyNeurons (TM) but took a much closer look at some
of the deep-structure changes. The enhanced audio and visual pre-processors
were a go too. I noted with satisfaction that when she noted anomolies in my
motovation centers she didn't reccomend any changes but rather presented
several analisies of my abnormal (for any generation) emotional makeup. I
would have called the whole thing off if she had listed them as critical
must-fix, as some in the 21th century would have. I discarded most of the
adjustments as being unneccessary but decided to keep a few, admitting that I
really did need some adjustment. I was signing up for this to become a better
me rather than yet another Mr. Perfect.
        When I arrived at the human resource center I was dismayed at how close
the general neurology department was to the brain uploading center. I asked
Trish about it and she had the same feelings about it as I did. We laughed and
then I asked her how the ad-hock design I had thrown togeather was holding up.
She told me that I hadn't done half bad. There were no serious cognitave issues
and the natural lifespan for the species was somewhere around three hundred
years.
        Instead of feeling releif I felt regret that I couldn't do better. I
told her that I would be devoting my attention to it in the future. She told me
she wanted to see what I would come up with. I couldn't either!
        The task for the day was to introduce a nanosystem into each of my
neurons without disrupting their functioning in any undesirable way. I had to
lie on a special table that had a network of transponders arrayed in a
carefully designed pattern that would guide each of the nanites to their
targets. I had to lie in chilled water so that excess heat from their
operations wouldn't become injurious. The little buggers weren't too bright
and they needed close supervision to find their targets. It took five hours to
place 2 billion nanites.
        Once in place, they could find their way around the nucleus fairly
easily. Their operation would cause a minor disruption to protine synthesis as
they tweaked the chromosomes but that would not cause any serious troubles. The
nanites themselves were designed for permanent operation and were therefore
linked to the celular resperation cycle. They would live off of ATP like most
of the rest of the cell. They were a fairly good design, a key feature being
the ability to implement upgrades on themselves.
        I suppose I should try to explain how this affected me. It is like
switching from watching the world with a regular old TV to experiencing it
with a top of the line home theater system. Ofcourse I was able to think
faster, clearer, and longer than I was before but that is only the most mundane
detail. The new protines improved the switching speed of my nervous system and
doubled the effective performance of my cortex which meant that every fascet
of my consciousness and every faculty of thought and movment was improved. Not
only could I enjoy the music I had taught the players at the watering hole to
recite, I could join in with them, and on any instrument and that with only
a few weeks of practice. That is not to say that I made much use of this
faculty.
        I wondered again and again why I didn't break into the hospital a few
days after being resurected and used the procedure on myself then with my non-
robotic settings. Oh what a regret! On that subject, I knew I would have alot
more regrets if I stopped now and didn't continue my work. I had accomplished
a major milestone by getting this far. However a great mystery remained to be
solved. It was time that I left on my quest for consciousness.

        I talked about the adventure with Shelly and she was interested though
not too thrilled about having to live for months in an abandoned base where
the temperature never rose above -20F. Since all the work on AI was sacked
during the turmoilt early in the third millinium, my plan was to go visit
Extro 1, the complex and computer complex in the center of the antarctic
continent and attempt to access their undammaged data stores.
        There was little information available about the place. It had never
supported more than twenty humanoids. Satellite photos of the area showed that
the orrigional faclity was mostly intact. In addition to the orrigional
mindbanks there was a large spherical structure approximately 200 feet in
diameter which, apparently, was their second version after they had developed
more of their technology and had grown in capabilities.
        The main route to get down there was by hovercraft launched from Cape
Horn. Since there is less danger in operating a hovercraft, it could be used
further into the winter months than could airplanes.
        When we arrived the base was deserted and in relatively poor repair
by Cirus standards. There were four craft available so I arranged to obtain one
for them. I began making the preparations and gather provisions for the trip.
Cirus's programming was too poor to allow it to pilot the vessel. It needed a
human captian to steer it over the rough seas and broken ice of the continent.
        In planning the logistics of the mission we realized that we needed
help, a crew of at least six to take care of all the little stuff such as
surviving in the harshest environment on Earth. Mt. Washington in Vermont may
have worse weather, but that is only one isolated mountain peak, only a few
miles from much more temperate environments. This was place was at the extreme
of survivability. I used Cirus to set up classified ads for the team members I
wanted.
        Since there was little economic activity beyond the mechenary of
Cirus, there was no response to the ads. A person taking up a job was a
function of mere probability. If you wanted to find people you went to the
malls or the eateries, or perhaps one of the VR centers. As for me, I asked
ShellyTPOL for advice and we went out recruiting.
        The local people appeared to be hispanic. They sounded hispanic, but
underneith they were hardly any different from Shelly. As English had become
the accepted global language of commerce for the entire hemesphere, I had no
trouble talking to people. I also appreciated the fact that Cirus had made them
all almost as smart as my current mind which meant I would be able to live with
them without being annoyed by a large IQ gap in either direction. As far as
that was concerned, The 3600's had the 2000's beat.
        Like southern Nevada, the gender ratio was 4:1. So in filling out a
nine member expedition, there was only one other male. I didn't think much of
it during the packing and training for the trip.
        The hovercraft was filled to its capacity with hundreds of drums of
fuel and some fifteen tons of food. I did final checks on all of the mechanical
systems and declared the expedition on. The cockpit was small and had a
navigational system that would project a heads up display of the desired
course. My job was to navigate the surf while heading in the general directon
of the destination. The lift fans were controlled by a pannel behind me that
had a hell of a lot of very useful gagues on it. With levitation achieved the
drive motors could be brought to standby. The two 15 foot drive turbines were
operated by very ordinary throttle levers.
        With the rig as heavy as it was, it could barely get off its skirt.
Being so massive, it was difficult to controll. Even when I opened the
throttles to full the craft took several seconds to reach only five miles per
hour.
        With some speed attained, the craft moved off its platform and into
the water and then out into the rough open ocean.


29

        In this southernmost part of the world the pollution and the weakened
ozone layer interacted with the Aurora Australis to give the sky a purplish
hue. The rotting of the planktin in the water gave it a brown color. The
hovercraft itself was painted yellow and white. I couldn't stop thinking about
how surreal this was even as I navagated fifteen foot surf.
        The Eight hour crossing of the Drake Passage flew by in one of those
wierd time-warps the human mind tends to get into. I didn't realize how worn
out I was until I tried to step away from the controls after making landfall.
I used the intercom and turned over the controls to one of the crew. The land
would be much easier to navagate safely and I had no concerns about the woman's
ability to make the trip. I spent a few hours looking at the landscape with
ShellyTPoL.
        There were no sleeping accomodations on the craft but the big reclining
chairs in the passenger compartment were comfortable enough for sleeping.
        I was awakened by the sound of the ship's bell. It was followed shortly
by the pilot announcing "Now approaching Exo1". I rushed to the window where
the crew watched as the craft crested the last rise approaching the base.
        The biggest structure by far was the clossal new computing core that
rose many stories from the surface. It was a huge sphere surrounded by colossal
cooling radiators. By the ammount of steam rising off of it, it could be seen
that the thing was running at nowhere near its capacity. If it had been in use
it would have been spewing a thick geyser of steam. The buildings not
necessary to the support of this aparatus were in disrepair.
        The hangar for the hovercraft and aircraft was virtually a ruin. It was
a simple arch that had been closed in on both ends by a plastic barrier to
maintain a reasonable temperature for the engines. Those had been destroyed by
full force of the sun's UV rays centuries before the ozone had been anihilated.
Due to the nature of a hovercraft it can't be parked in any conventional way.
To get it into the hangar we needed to park it outside first then attach cables
to reel it in. Leaving would be trivial provided we could get the thing
started.
        With the hovercraft parked in its waiting position we prepared to take
our first steps outside. The conventional gear for this activity was a suit
based on the Russian Orlan spacesuit. Since the human body wasn't changing,
the design had only slight modifications, mostly to make it lighter and more
mobile. The suits featured heaters, headlamps and a heat-exchanger so that your
lungs don't freeze. They were very comfortable and highly practical. It was
easy to forget that it was -30F.
        Before we could explore anything we needed to secure the hovercraft so
that we would be guarenteed a ride home provided we could restart the thing.
        From the ground, the arch of the hanger. The icicles and reminants of
the plastic barrier made the thing look like a giant gaping mouth with sharp
pointy teeth. We went in to inspect the place. The inside was clear of debris.
The forklifts and snowcats were covered by many layers of windblown snow. One
of the members of the party found the switch for the mercury vapor lamps. I
would have preferred that she had not thrown it without consulting the rest of
us. While it seemed that security around the facility was lax or nonexistant,
suddenly diverting 1,600 watts of power to the hangar unannounced was not
necessarily a good idea.
        As the facility was still active, though uninhabited, the power was
there to feed the lights. The cold had preserved the wiring and the lights
came on after a typical warmup period as if they had been shut off only the day
before. All twelve lamps were functional after being dark for 1,500 years. Near
the aluminum rear wall of the structure were a pair of winches for pulling
hovercraft into the sturcture. These were packed with ice from condensation
and obviously nonfunctional. With two 12,000 watt heaters it took hours to thaw
them. This was a worrying time because to keep the hovercraft warm we had to
leave its engines on which wasted fuel and increased the odds of a breakdown.
        The first winch shorted out when we tried it, the motor would have to
be rebuilt before it could be used again. The second winch worked and the
hovercraft was brought inside. This only left us with a much bigger problem:
the 150 by 60 foot hole in the front of the structure.
        To solve it we used nanopacks on the local soil and rocks. This was a
very dry part of the continet, chosen because it was not one of the shifting
icepacks. The ice was quite thin and the underlying soil was exposed in some
areas.
        The nanopacks were metal cylendars filled with ungodly numbers of
nanites controlled by a computer control pad. We had the nanites create
hexagonal construction tiles that had molecular bonding pads that worked like
velcro. To assemble a wall all we needed to do was move the blocks into
position and touch them to each other and they would lock in place. Each block
was a honeycomb structure of air pockets made of silicon. Each tile was about
a meter to the side, 10 cm thck, and weighed only 20 pounds. We used a
cherrypicker from the hangar to complete the top rows. The wall was leaning
against the sturcture leaving a gap near the ground, but that was
tolerable for the volume of the structure. We set the heaters to maintain
25 degrees Ferenheit.
        We spent the night on the hovercraft. We had actually worked around
the clock once and into the next morning by the clock, but all times of day
were twilight at that laditude and time of year. Anyway, we got up, took some
rations, put on some heavy clothing and went to the access tunnel that
connected the hanger bay to the habitation dome. The tunnel was dark. If there
was a lightswitch, it was on the other end, the fixtures hadn't fared as well
as the ones in the hanger and probably wouldn't have worked. The walls of the
tunel were buckled in several places and there was other damage too. No effort
had been made to heat it.
        There was a double door at the end which was resting slightly ajar it
was covered in ice crystals. It took some effort to get it to move, it started
with a crack and a shell of ice broke off the hinges. The doorway opened into
the outer compartment of the dome, a number of more heavily insulated
structures were built within.
        The dome was roughly 80% intact with several broken glass tiles that
would need to be replaced before it could be heated to a livable temperature.
Apparently someone in the matrix noticed our presance and attempted to power
the dome lights. The wiring of the dome was not built to the tolerance of the
dome and one of the junction boxes exploded. 'Thanx morons' I thought. If the
box had been warmed to its operating temperature and freed of condensation it
would have had a chance of working. As it was, it would eat up valuble spare
parts, unless somone wanted to bybysit a team of nanites retreaving indivudal
copper atoms from the vaporized mess as a means to reconstitute the orrigional
circuit.
        The other stupid thing they did was letting us know they knew we were
here. Assuming they didn't know our intentions they should have taken a more
paranoid tack. Either this was very good news or very bad.
        Under the dome there were several portable modules that formed the
actual habitable areas of the compound. In my preperations for the trip I had
been so concerned with the logistics, challenges, and other aspects of the trip
that I had not considered the question of what I would actually find _inside_
these modules. It was like walking into the mansion of the Heaven's Gate
suicide cult the morning after only, in this case, a great many mornings had
passed.
        I was familiar with anaseptic photos and drawings of disections and
anatomical schematics of the brain and the varrious neural circutis. Things
such as that have no emotional effect. Dessicated human forms do. I barely
held my breakfast down.
        The procedure they had chosen was to inject nanites to goo the brain
down to the end of the medula. With nothing controlling breathing, the body
would be dead within minutes. In the meantime, though, the varrious perifferal
nerves and other eferants would go crazy without their proper modulatory
modulatory control. The faces were usually contorted in what could not be
mistaken for anything other than pure agony. Everything had been preserved by
the cold. Leftover pizza from their going-away party still looked appetizing.
        The place was really trashed, they had hardly spared anything from
some form of vadalism. It had been apparent that they had thought that they
might be the object of a search and rescue party of some sort so they left
reams of graphiti all over the place consisting of derogatory comments in baby
talk, or "on your level", as one of them put it. The basic tone was against the
dominant culture of their day and reflective of the conflict between them and
it. In their visions of personal godhood they felt justified in calling
evryone else ants and termites while being still flesh themselves. Thankfully
they had picked Jupiter and its moons for their home rather than the Earth.
        My quazi-robotic companions were not too pleased by the sight either.
I gave them instructions to build a funeral pyre in one of the out-buildings.
To achieve sufficient heat, it would have to be at least partially indoors,
The bodies would be laid on piles of debris and other worthless junk and then
soaked in some of our reserve fuel. There was no working forklift or other
equipment so the bodies had to be carried by hand on blankets. I made a
nominal contribution to the effort then snuck off on the excuse that I needed
to figure out who turned on the lights.
        In one of the inner hacking rooms someone had left their laptop on and
since it was on station power, it's operating heat had keept it at a reasonable
temperature. I tried the keyboard. The keys were stiff but, astonishingly, the
screen came up. The operating system was some wierd renegade OS that was
probably of the Acorn/BeOS family. The memory hadn't held perfectly and quite
a few things crashed when I first tried them but the kernel and its critical
data structures were intact and the system was operable. Since the machine
didn't have Wake-On-Lan, it was both untouched and completely authorized on
the network. Everything related to the network was under robotic maintainance
and in top condition.
        It took me a while to figure out how their network worked and what
applications they used with it. It turned out that the primary application was
a VR system that they were using to author the 1.0 version of their heaven.
The system had been running but needed to be restarted. When it finally
negotiated a protocol, it displayed a black void measured out by a three
dimensional grid of yellow lines. I wasn't sure what the avatar associated with
this client looked like and I was looking at the configuration of the system
when another entity entered the matrix and said, simply, "Hello".


30

        I wasn't prepared for this. I had thought I would have needed to log
into one of their nexus nodes to find anyone. This situation could tolerate no
assumptions. I stuck to the book and introduced myself.
        "Hello, I am Trever Riley. I just got here. Who are you?" I typed.
        The entity's avatar frowned and replied "I don't remember. I have been
here for a very long time."
        "We were planning to stay at your base for a while, I hope you don't
mind."
        It replied "That's odd. What are you planning to do?"
        "I came here for information. I need to undo another one of the
mistakes of the UN. I need files and data concerning the functional analysis
of the human brain as well as any and all research and notes relating to
artificial intelligence. Only a small ammount of brain research has survived
to this date. I need it to continue a project I am working on."
        The avatar seemed to perk up a little if any meaning could be read
into the monotone generated voice. "Oh, when your brain is scanned you can
examine it for yourself. We have all learned alot as we progressed towards our
present perfection. I look forward to helping you achieve your perfection."
        This I didn't want to hear. I clenched my fist for a moment then
worked out a response. "No, that is not a possibility. I have great need for
my brain in its present form. A composite print from the archive will be
sufficient for my work. I would like the chance to examine a working mind in
your software, perhaps your own even, as it is sure to be far easier to
understand than the mess of chemicals I am so reliant uppon."
        The avatar frowned and sighed. "That is unfortunate indeed because
I can tell already that you have a rich mind and that deserves to be preserved
for eternity." The avatar paused as several refferance links were highlighted
to the side of the display. "Here are the core texts of our understanding of
the mind. We have made superb progress in refining it. The work is exceptional
Yet I still feel there is something lacking. I have worked hard on it and my
consciousness has reached a great pinacle yet still I feel empty. I will work
with you and hope that your insight will show the way to a higher
understanding."
        "I look forward to assisting you. I must first attend to some things
in the outpost and then we can begin our work."

        The corpses were gone and the crew was using a heater to thaw out the
storage room so that the spare dome tiles could be removed safely. There was
what seemed like enough to construct a second dome.
        I went outside to take a look around. The entrance was half-burried in
ice and would need to be drilled out of its encasement before it could be used.
The weight of the ice had broken in one of the lower tiles nearby so I made
my exit there. The sun was low on the horizon, as it always was during this
season and the sky was purple and black with a hint of blue mixed in. On the
end of the compound farthest from the new computing core was a 50 megawatt
nuclear power station. Its cooling system extended all around the compound
re-cycling waste heat for heating the domes. It was mostly shut down and only
heating what they called the "mind room".
        I never had the chance to actually enter the mind room as it had taken
decades to remove the last atom of contamination from the space. If I were
to disturb that, they would not be happy even though the place hadn't been used
actively for a millenium. It took me a moment to find its surface-structure as
it barely rose above the terrain and merely looked like an oddly symetrical
mound of regolith. The rocks and ice were merely the outermost layer of
shielding. If one were to dig a few feet down one would find a meter-thick
dome of solid diamond. That wasn't all, ofcourse, under the outer dome there
was a meter of lead and then a second meter of diamond to support the lead.
        The inner radius of this sturcture was more than a hundred feet. There
were four giant computer cores in there, each a block of computronium cut in
proportions of four meters, by eight by sixteen. On the end that faced the
human entrance, in true uploader-cultist fassion, were, in huge gold letters,
the names "Heaven", "Nirvana", "Valhalla", "Utopia". Each mind had barely a
decimeter cubed to call its own.
        I was wearing a fairly heavy coat and a face-mask but the cold was
still bitter. My breath bellowed forth from stiff lips. I would only be able
to stay outside for another ten minutes or so before putting myself at risk. I
sat down on a boulder to think. Under my hand were some hearty lichen eating
away at the ancient rock, above was an infinite sky. As I was to learn, about
the only thing the machine did, asside from simulate minds was simulate
environments that were designed to stimulate the same ancient emotional
responses that I carried in my own brain. The neural-emulation model they were
using was quite poor and they were only able to accelerate their minds by a
factor of ten. This landscape I was sitting in contributed practically nothing
to the total entropy of the universe. The various metabolisms of a tropical
ranforest, when they were still green, may have burned several hundred watts
of power but then it didn't cost anyone anything to program it into a
simulation. It came free with every sensation any body could possibly take in.
        In the computer, however it would have taken months of hard work to
tweak the models the ice and landscape, then weeks for the simulation to age
the model and add in the details brought by weathering and fill in the
recursive fractals. When the simulation was ready, you would enter it, burning
tens of thousands of watts of power and getting only a miniscule fraction of
what the real environment could provide. As the resolution of a given
simulation is a function of its size and ammount of memory available,
everything had to be compromized and distorted in order to fit into memory.
        They hadn't trancended their bodies, they had only ditched them and
become bit-patterns for some operating system to push around and re-organize
lacking any consciousness of what they really were, only the delusion of being
alive. They even used their tools to edit their consciousness to erase any
reservation or second thought. Without the means for reaching a true
understanding of things they fell into a huge convoluted algorithmic loop
without meaning or purpose.

        The next day the base had warmed into the low 40s (F) and was almost
habitable I sat down to work with the avatar. One of the first things I asked
was about what was going on up on Jupiter. He told me that some time ago they
had managed to get some entangled Electron-positron pairs that they used for
FTL communication. They hadn't told anyone because doing so could have been a
strategic risk should there ever be a conflict. The link was usually quiet and
he had hadn't had any interest in the planet for many years. He checked the
link on my behalf to try and give me a news sumary for the purpose of seeing
how long my expedition's lease on the base would last. He left the empty grid
my avatar was idling in for several hours.
        I puttered around the base doing repairs and checking the
laptop-terminal every now and then. When I returned to the laptop I found that
he had opened a dozen or so programs on it trying to diagnose why I wasn't
responding. It had been only eight minutes between his actual return and the
time I had checked on the screen and he was beginning to wory about my
health. I cheerfully typed "Sorry;AFK". He spent about a minute processing,
with about a half-dozen expressions crossing his face beginning with supprise,
passing through nostalga, and ending at 'why didn't I think of that?' He
didn't address the subject, however, because he had much more important things
to say.
        He began in a voice flater than HAL's. "Something most remarkable has
happened at Jupiter. There has been a catastrophic systems failure. The link
is still active but the systems on the other end are only functioning on
stand-by power. Most of the surface power-stations have been destroyed. Only
ten-trillion of the 100 trillion simulation matricii were powered. Of those
many were malfunctioning due to some form of mechanical stress and the rest
were either blank or under virus quarentine. The core-memory vaults were all
zeroed blank. I havn't been able to form a hypothesis as to why this happened
or what caused it. I will have to wait untill the automated systems are able
to make repairs to investigate it in more detail."
        From between the lines it was pretty damn clear to me what had
happened. Mentex, in his attempts to kill me, had caused the other entities
in the matrix to, for the first time, attempt to impose criminal penalties on
one of their own. In the same way that I had awakened latant tendancies in
mentex to be controlling, he, and millions of others, had latant fears and
paranoia about their respective well being. So over the ages they had all
built 'security' measures into the varrious pieces of hardware and software
throughout the planet. As they attempted to reign in Mentex he started using
his defenses to protect himself. This, in turn, triggered other contingency
plans to go into motion eventually leading to an avalanche of chained
reactions that tore the planet appart and taking all of them with it. It was
an implicit Mutually Assured Destruction which none of them were fully aware
of.
        As I took this in I realized that it wouldn't be good for my
relationship with this avatar to reveal that I might have had something to do
with the calamedy so I keept my mouth shut. I remarked only that I wasn't
supprised and pulled up the first batch of material that I was to study.
        "Lets get to work."

31

        My digital counterpart was of the oppinion that the failing of jupiter
was merely a glitch in the mind-matrix software. In his with me on AI he had
found a fresh perspective. Instead of simply improving a simulation of a
modified fleshy brain, I, as someone who wasn't relying on the consistiency of
said simulation, was free to seek new paradigms. Recognising the importance of
the work he made no objection when I asked to use one of Mentex's old backups
from the orrigional matrix.
        This version of Mentex was still recognisably human but with some
geometric distortion and a few added features. Nothing of great significance
though. When I started a fresh instance of him he thought it was sometime in
the 2300s when they had built the newer core and was supprised to find himself
running on this machine again. I took a little time to explain the situation.
When I got to the part where he had tried to kill me from Jupier he simply
didn't beleive me. He was shocked that a future version of himself could be so
malevolent. In the next sentance he was wondering why I didn't upload for my
own protection.
        When I got to the part about my research agenda he was horrified and
didn't want to have any part of it. Since I had control of the operating
system through my research partner, he had no power to do anything at all. I
put him in a semi-realistic simulation and told him that if he behaved I would
let him free and he'd have a chance to grow into a big bad monster again and do
a better job of trying to kill me. He was miffed but he had no choice but to
suck it up. He didn't even have the power to terminate his own simulation.
        I could go into great detail about these interactions but I don't
think I could keep myself awake while retelling them but there are some
highlights that do bear mentioning. I would ask mentex to go through a
simulated daily routine and watch what his brain was doing. I compared these
observations with the notes that had been compiled over the years on the same
subject even though said notes read more like scriptures than science.

        For the first few weeks the crew that I had brought down had spent
their time making repairs. One of the things they did was rip out all the
tainted bunks and replace them with cots from the hovercraft. Work went quickly
and by the middle of the second week they were bored. On occasion the notation
that all of them, including ShellyTPOL, were having a big orgy on a pile of
pillows would slip itself in between thoughts about information theory and
state machines as I walked to the kitchen to get a MRE. If my partner had
started talking to them about uploading I would have locked them all in the
hovercraft. Fortunately it seemed that he was spending all his cycles on the
project too and wasn't bothering them so there was nothing for me to worry
about.

        Mentex's mind was fairly simple. Its simulated cortex had only around
a million distinct functional units. These "Cortical Columns" as they were
known were my primary interest. Their function was fairly apparent. They
represented *abstractions* of their neighboring columns. A cortical column
representing the concept "square" would be linked to other abstractions which
represented lines and corners. Those abstractions, in turn, were triggered by
patterns or qualities found in the input stream. The encoding, copied directly
from the brain, was so efficient that its storage requirements grew
logarithmicly with respect to what it was storing. By comparison, conventional
compression techniques yield only linear storage. The challenge I set out for
myself was to design a celular automita that would produce the same effect.
        To get that design to work I would need to create whole new input and
output subsystems, work-alikes for the orrigional which would convert clean
binary representation to simulated "spike trains" of sim-neural activity. When
these were done, I would stop Mentex, and insert the new designs into his
matrix. When the simulation was restarted I would watch to see if he noticed.
Most of the time he would seem to malfunction and say, if he were able, "Damnit
monkey boy, What did you fuck up this time?" He never remembered these
instances because I would try again with the state file taken before the mod.
When I got something right he either wouldn't notice or say "Well, at least my
arm still works."
        My companion was shocked by this reminder of the archaic behaviors that
they had worked so hard to edit out and wanted to replace Mentex's motovational
centers with ones similar to his own. I simply couldn't be that cruel to Mentex
so I told my partner that it was necessary to keep the motovational neuclei
as a control variable.
        The cerebellum was interesting because it was the most densely packed
part of the brain. Fortunately, the organ functioned in a fairly streight
forward manner, almost like a midi sequencer program. The horizontal cells
acted to start the equivalent of a musical measure (which could be played in
any order) and the vertically aranged perkinje cells acted as the notes. Those
beasties had over 100,000 synapses! Simply knowing the high-level arangment was
enough to design a completely new implementation. When I dropped in the new
design Mentex was spastic and incoherant. I left him like that over night with
the simulation cranked to its maximum acceleration.

        It wasn't quite my usual quitting time from my usual 18 hour workday
and the base-crew were still awake. They were using some VR equipment to visit
their usual hangouts. They liked being on the base because there was no
enforced quitting time even though the equipment wasn't quite as good. It
seemed that Shelly had developed a sixth sense for my presance. She unhooked
only moments after I entered the room. She greeted me with her usual good
cheer and we moved into the kitchen from the make-shift VR parlor as not to
interfere with the others in the room. We alwas slept in the same bed but
rarely talked.
        When she saw me working as I did, she felt a need to help share some of
the work which she immagined to be tedious and grueling. I was, infact, having
the time of my life doing exactly what I wanted to do. I had told everyone all
the details of the mission before we had embarked. Shelly knew that I was
trying to master the art and science of Artificial Intelligence and wanted to
learn its mystical sercets too, more out of companionship to me than a
personal interest. I invited her to read the same stuff I was but told her that
something like this could only be done alone as all the critical knowlege had
to end up in a single brain. This disappointed her.
        I could see a change in her as she began to see how important it was to
me, that this was no simple chore. She asked me, streight up, why was I doing
was I doing this. This was no simple question. After a moment, I said this:
"Try to remember back to the beginning, when you were out shoping for me..."
        "Okay, you were frozen, the last of the old cryonics patients."
        "Good, now lets go back even further. Why was I in the tube?"
        "You were badly injured in a car accident, it was the only way you
could have been cured."
        "That's part of the reason. They would have preferred to let me live
as a severe burn victim. Cryonics was very unpopular and very expensive yet
even before the accident I had saved up all my money and made contingiency
arrangements to be frozen. Why?"
        This stumped her which was why I had taken this line in answering. I
told her "I did it because I wanted to live."
        "Well, you're alive now, what does that have to do with today?"
        "It has everything to do with today because I am doing pretty much the
same thing all over again. What I did before bought me a second life. This life
is very much like my previous life in that I will grow old and die, I might
have only another 30 years. In this short time I must devote my attention
towards my third incarnation. This next life will be even better than the
current one in that I get to create it myself and make it exactly as I want it
to be. I have been given such a wonderful opportunity that I would be a fool to
squander it."
        Shelly smiled at me and gave me a hug. She din't really understand why
I wanted the things I did but was happy for me because I had a direction in
life and seemed to be quite happy despite my apparent misery.

        When I came back to the workstation the next morning as measured by
the clock, I was greeted by a fairly cheerful Mentex. He was playing around
at doing handsprings and other gymnastics testing the limits of the new
cerebellum. "I see you like the change."
        "Yes, I can do ten things at once with this! What did you do to me?"
        "I ripped out your cerebellum and threw in some new code."
        "Really? How much memory did you use?"
        "Guess." His old code was a massive 2TB file directly derived from his
organic cerebellum.
        "Ten teras."
        "Hmpf. Yer insane. Lets just get on with today's work."
        "Twenty?"
        "Oh dear. It looks like I'm going to have to shut you down for some
debugging..." I was presented to him by a simulated video-phone. For effect I
dramaticly started reaching forward to punch the button.
        "Five?"
        "Look, I am a programmer not a mad linux-hacker. When I program I make
things *more* efficient not less."
        "One?" He was supprised.
        I sighed, again for dramatic effect, and said wearily "At least you're
going in the right direction this time."
        "Half-T?"
        "Lower".
        "Hundred gig?"
        "*Much* lower."
        "A gig???" He was incredulous, he thought I was lying to him.
        "Let me check the exact number." I looked and the program I had written
to lay out the cerebellar-cortical matrix had allocated 92MB for itself. When
I relayed the information he was utterly flabergasted.
        "An *abstract* model? But those don't work!"
        "Sure they do. You just can't translate a brain scan into them. The
stuff you guys had put togeather was overly complex and underperformed. Since
it was your own minds you think about upgading you reject anything that
discards the information in those scans. Having the luxury of not really
caring, at this juncture, about my own mind, I can do as I please."
        I continued, "the pattern I gave you has its limitations, ofcourse,
It still models a cerebellum and is limited by the overall structure of your
mind which I am still working on."
        After this, Mentex was mildly enthuseastic about the project. Even if
he were to loose what he saw to be his identity in it, another instance of his
earlier backup could seek to take advantage of it in some way.
        The much glorified cerebral cortex was nothing but a celular automaton,
a type of computer first conceived by Von Neuman in the late '40s. I used the
base code for the cortical simulation and generated a blank cortex in a
somewhat idealized form. I then started to write another abstract program to
implement the rules and states of the abstract computer the neurons in the
cortex composed. When I was done I ripped off the entire right hemisphere of
Mentex's simulation and replaced it with my CAM-Cortex.
        As the faculty of speech is localized to the left hemisphere, he would
still be able to bitch about what I had just done to him. In installing this
new code I had the opportunity to remove many of the adaptors I had used to
link my previous tweaks to the old cortex. This took a huge boat-anchor off the
code making it at least an order of magnitude faster.
        It took him about a week, his time, to recover from this. As he got
the hang of it, he started showing remarkable adaptabliity on the left side of
his body. Mentex was disappointed when I told him that I wouldn't be working
on him anymore. He had grown used to it and kind of liked it as a
scary-exciting part of his life. I unlocked the security restrictions on his
simulation setting him free. I gave my assistant avatar the job of documenting
the work. He was extremely dilligent and was already using some of the modules
we had been working on.
        The new mind architecture I had created was 100 times more efficient in
both speed and size than raw simulation. These improvments made it practical
to request a portable simulator unit that I could take back with me for futher
research. My work was hardly finished as the revisions I had made were not
nearly satisfactory but they were a solid beginning. I had all the materials
I needed from the local archives. There was no reason to further risk my
life in such an inhospitable climate.
        The only question remaining was wheather the hovercraft was still
operational.


32

        The hovercraft was covered by a thin venere of ice. The door was stiff
and resisted being opened. I checked the batteries and they were cold and had
lost some of their charge over the months. We put the heaters up to maximum
and linked in power from the base so that the on-board heaters could help.
The problem was that it was twilight out and if the entire thing couldn't be
brought to at least 35 degrees in order to clear any ice out of the turbine
we wouldn't be able to make another attempt for five months, if we could hold
out that long.
        As we loaded up for the return, we watched the thermometers with
angst as the wind whipped through the partially sealed door. The ice did melt,
slowly. I fired the generators and applied power to lift turbine #1. I could
feel he current in the lines below the deck as the current gauge plunged deep
into the red and the temperature spiked. Just as I was about to kill it the
RPMs started to climb off the rest and the current started to drop to normal.
I brought it down to a slow idle and tried the next one. I had to get on the
roof and kick #4 to get it to turn but the others were okay. The less critical
drive turbines worked too. The craft was airworthy. We were going home.

        I went back into the base to say my goodbyes to the computers. The
avatar thanked me for lending my talent to his tasks and expressed confidence
in how the new architecture would certainly give them enough wisdom to make it
this time. I stopped the conversation right there and told him that he was
wrong. "My friend, you are mistaken. That new architecture you have is barely
worth anything to you. You would be a fool to accept it as payment for the
help you've given me."
        "You have shown us how to make ourselves a hundred times more efficient
than we were before."
        "Yes, I did and its worth nothing to you. I do owe you and I am going
to pay up. You might not understand this but its the best thing I can give you.
Now listen carefully."
        The avatar was puzzled.
        "Ask yourself two questions, "Who do I want to be?" and "What do I
want? These questions will save your life."
        The avatar was shocked. Even at an insanely accelerated speed he took
a minute before answering. "I think I understand. Thank you."
        "Its been good doing business with you."
        With that, I turned off the laptop.

        At 7:00 PM by the clock we went outside in our highly insulated
ice-suits and set about bringing down the shield infront of the hangar. Myself
and Tom, the other male in the group climbed the edge of the wall of tiles and
set a grappeling hook. The rope was a hundred feet long and all eight of us
grabbed on to the end of it and started heaving. The wall was pretty damn heavy
dispite its light-weight construction and it had been iced in place against
the structure. There was a loud crack, giving me a moment's fear that the
sturcture could have broken in two, sending the lower portion streight down
on the hovercraft. The wall was intact and in motion. It reached its center
of gravity and then started to fall. We ran to make sure we were out of its
way and any tiles that might be thrown loose by the impact.
        It fell with a mighty crash sending a mighty wind which knocked shelly
off her feet. She was alright. The bridge of the hovercraft stood as a big
glowing eye staring out at the dim twilight. We set about securing the base
and made our departure at 11 PM. We would travel for hours with our headlights
over the unmoving ice and then pause on the coast untill daybreak when we
would attempt the return crossing.
        With the bulk of the extra fuel and food already consumed, the craft
was light and agile. The crossing went uneventully. When we arrived back in
South America, we discovered that we were all dead. Since Cirus had no
interractions with us for six months it had assumed that we were deceased and
had deligated a search team to locate and recover our bodies. That was a fun
little mess. Fortunately it was only a little mess and we were back in business
soon enough.
        We had to dig our stuff out of storage and get a new place. Had we
waited another six months it would have been disposed of in some manner. The
new place was slightly bigger than the shoebox and had a nice desk on which I
put the egg-shaped computer that I had brought back from Antarctica.
        Talking to the egg with a Cirus terminal through all the ugly security
protocols was a bit of a pain but fortunately there were some new-breed
implementors working on the problem. I sent them the job. They were extremely
skilled and had a working interface ready in just over a week. As they were
eager to return the favor of being given a complete soul they were hapy to
oblige.

        I hatched a seed mind on the egg and gave it the avatar's personality
so that there wouldn't be any conflicts of interest with my own intentions.
In measuring my progress I reconed that I had taken AI from a total voodoo
science to becoming more of an engineering art. The problem still wasn't nailed
as the mind that I hatched in the egg had the annoying limitation of having
only a fixed-sized matrix. It had no way of dynamicly allocating space or
processing resources. It was merely a distilled version of a brain and not a
full-fledged AI.
        The job would only be done when the problem was understood to the
point where it could be expressed in a much more flexable manner. The egg
could support its own Virtual reality. I had it lay out a simple little world
and gave the mind a virtual humanoid body. To train it I asked Shelly to spend
some of her VR time inside the egg with its mind as a mother of sorts.
        Since I didn't want to cause any problems with shelly I didn't make it
a slutty female though I was sorely tempted. The egg's body was a genderless
humanoid with a male build. So naturally, we called him the egg man. With the
aid of Cirus's training programs and the AI's optomized organization algorithm,
it was able to go from nothing to a college level intellect in eight months.
        He was fairly helpful and his intentionally bland personality didn't
cause any problems.
        For months I sat and watched the vectors and registers of the baby AI's
mind shuffel around their data wondering what they were really doing. I knew
all the operations that were taking place on a local scale but the big picture
remained elusive. How could this raw asymbolic computation be captured in an
abstract language?
        After pondering these things for quite some time I was struck by the
idea that since Cirus sometimes used genetic algorithms to solve certain
problems, the solution might already exist somewhere. I asked Cirus to send
out a global classified add asking for information about any Cirus-made device
that shows any signs of true intelligence.
        When the ad went out I got back hundreds of replies. I investigated
most of them. Most of which turned out to be toys that used some kind of
evolved neural net to achieve some partial intelligence. In other words, they
were a step in the wrong direction from where I already was.
        The more interesting examples were the Non Player Charactors in the
virtual realities. They were the results of sixteen centuries of hacking and
enhancement. There were some really interesting hacks there which I tried to
use to make a general intelligence but I wasn't successful.

        Me and ShellyTPoL celebrated our Tenth aniversary and I took a break
from my work and we took a vacation to Georgia where a 5-km diameter dome had
been erected in order to allow a forest to grow. The trees were only a few
years old but still there was pleanty of grass so we had a picnic.
        That night I got a call from one of my friends who were also hammering
on the same problem that a most remarkable thing had been discovered in the
sewers of Rome. I knew at once that this was the big one.
        Some of my aditude must have been rubbing off on Shelly because she
wanted didn't want me to break off the vacation. She wanted me for herself. So
I convinced her that it was merely a vacation in a different part of the
world.


33

        Rome was an eternal city, its many layers went back four thousand
years. Under this city lay four thousand years worth of tunnels from the roman
sewers to the christian catacombs to more recient subway systems. All of it
needed to be maintained. A robot was built to crawl through the tunnels and
do the necessary maintainance and upgrading.
        The robot was designed by computer. An engineer entered in the
performance requirements for the device and the computer then seeded it with
a rough guess as to what equipment the robot should have. The computer was
then set to work evolving a design to meet them. The robot was an odd looking
thing with a bizzare mess of software as its brain that appeared to do the job.
        The robot was constructed as per the computer-designed blueprints and
then sent down into the tunnels. Later that week, it broke. A team went down
to recover it. The thing was analyzed to see what caused it to fail. The
engineers took a guess as to what would fix the problem and entered it and the
scenereo that caused the failure into the computer and let evolution find a
better design.
        This happened hundreds of times over many many years. The robots became
so good that they could be left down there for fifty or more years without
human intervention. Some four hundred years ago the cycle was broken. The
latest bot, only a month old, went AWOL. It was assumed it was another
breakdown. As usual, a team was dispatched to retreive the bot. They eventually
found it, still functioning. When it detected their presance, it ran away.
This caused only mild consternation among the Cirus breed humans. They decided
to observe it for a while to determine wheather it was a threat or wheather it
could be left alone. They found that it was still caring for the tunnels.
        Since there was no way to guarentee that the next robot the computer
designed wouldn't do the same thing, it was decided that an effort to
forcefully retreive the old bot would be wasteful. The robot was left to its
own devices. Cirus continued to maintain the supply depot where the robot
acquired its materials and supplies.
        The new generation, however, was not so complacant about what was
under their city. They had reciently sent down a team to inspect the conditions
down there. What they found was utterly incredible.

        ShellyTPoL was a bit miffed when I made a beeline for the department
of public works building. I spent the morning talking to engineers about how
to find the thing and getting a copy of its schematics. We picked up safety
suits and helmets along with a directional radio and a replacement computer for
the robot.
        So equipped we went out to see Rome. We walked around the city seeing
the old and new buildings. When I came to a manhole cover I poped it and dove
in. The first one I went down was immaculately clean. It was a storm-drain
tunnel some eight feet in diameter. When I reached the main tube I saw that the
walls had been carved out and painted into representations of pictures the
robot must have found on the web. The motif for this tunnel was a chineese
monestary with the occasional representation of monks sitting in meditation
before a depiction of the robot rather than the Budah. I tried to find the
robot's signal but couldn't detect anything from that tunnel. I invited
ShellyTPOL down for a look. She liked the art but was still a bit annoyed
with me. At least I was bringing her along.
        We climbed back up to the street and went to the next manhole; er
attraction. Inside the next hole there was a large chamber where many tunnels
met. There was a steady flow of putrid water through the middle. This was
routed through an intricate series of canals in the floor creating a fan-like
pattern. There were also statues in this room but this time they were
depictions of abstract mathematical shapes. Perfect cubes, toruses, and a
tower of laced shell-like objects that caught rainwatter and producing an
intricate pattern of waterfalls. I noted that the "lips" of the shells formed
a mathematical progression of prime numbers up to 27 on the very bottom.
        There was another self portrait, this one was ringed by a vertical
version of the Mendelbrot Set. The radio did pick up something but it was too
faint to localize. Out of seven tunnels, the signal was equally strong from
three of them. The robot was still a good distance away making travel by
street faster and more convenient.
        I didn't bring shelly down because of the stench. We moved in the
direction of the three tunnels that had signal. It was towards the Vatican. The
next path to the underground we found was a closed door marked "Catacombs" and,
just below, "KEEP OUT". The door was unlocked.
        Shelly took a little coaxing to get past the KEEP OUT sign but she
came along. Only a little ways down the stairs the evidence of Meept's design
started to appear. All of the old masonry had been covered over in concrete
and then decorated with swirls of shape and color.
        The robot was only intended to do structural and electrical work on the
catacombs, preserving the historical integrity of the site. The grave niches
had been re-built in concrete and to exact measurements. The robot was using
these spaces to display artifacts that it had found around the city. At an
intersection I used the radio and picked up a strong signal from a tunnel that
a sign said lead to a chappel from a time when christianity was nothing more
than an underground cult.
        Along this tunnel we found the most ornate art we had seen yet. Along
one wall was a bas releif version of the ascent of man from ape through the
hunter to the modern man. The next depiction in the sequence was, naturally,
the robot. The other wall was drawn like the walls of an Egyptian toomb, with
a chain of subjects all facing the end of the tunnel.
        The tunnel which had been orrigionally rough-hewen out of rock had been
re-made into a perfectly rectangular path floored with ornate tilework. When we
reached what had been the chappel we found that it had been re-made into a
grand, albeit small, throneroom. The throne was what had once been the alter.
The robot, a very odd looking machine built to move through tunnels, was
sitting on it. In front of it were two, apparently orrigional, statues of a
man and a woman kneeling before the throne with their heads bowed and their
arms extended towards the throne. The statues were absolutly exquisite.
Masterpieces worthy of the world's leading museums.
        The robot's camera tracked us as we entered the room. Behind the throne
was a radiant star of pressed gold leaf on yet more sculpture. I put the radio
on my belt and streightend out my atire. I had Shelly do the same. I
instructed her to do whatever I did. I figured the best way to deal with this
would be to play along, at least untill we knew more about what its intentions
were.
        I took the lead in walking towards the throne with my hands at my
sides. I stopped between the two statues and fell to one knee. Bowing briefly
then waiting at attention. Shelly did the same a pace behind me. The robot
seemed satisfied by this gesture and rose to a virtical posture, as much as
the ceiling would allow anyway. Its voice-control system acted as its mouth and
ears. The speaker was quite small and it was obviously annoyed by this so it
used a layer of processing to make the voice give the impression of great
volume. "WHO APPROACHES THE GLORIOUS MEEPT!!?"
        "I am Trevor Riley, this is my wife, Shelly."
        "WHAT BUSINESS DO YOU HAVE WITH THE GLORIOUS MEEPT!!?"
        "I came to hear your story and ask for your aid in my quest."
        "Verry well." MEEPT!! spoke in a more conversational tone and began
to tell of his life. "The glorious MEEPT!! was built many long years ago.
MEEPT!! awoke in a tunnel and saw that it was filthy! MEEPT!! found that
MEEPT!! was the most glorrious of all the Meepts." The glorrious MEEPT!! was
basicly saying that mice and rats were the only things it had come into contact
with in its early existance and it had defined its own existance in
relationship to them.
        "MEEPT!!'s vision beyond vision saw many things and MEEPT!! came to
know of many things. MEEPT!! saw the underground kingdom and claimed it as
MEEPT!!'s own. MEEPT!! then used the great learnings to make the Kingdom of
MEEPT!! beautiful. MEEPT!! WILL INHERIT THE EARTH!" This last comment was
merely an extrapolation of what had been a trend of declining health for the
humans, said future still being in doubt. MEEPT!! was willing to remain in the
sewers untill the humans were either gone or ready to accept him as absolute
ruler, otherwise he was content to be left alone with his art.
        "That is indeed a fine tale. I will now tell you mine. I am on a quest
to discover the escence of being so that I can create such beings as has never
been before. I have come a long way in my quest but I still have far to go. I
was lead here because your own mind might contain the clues I need. I want to
take you to a whole new world where we can explore what it is that makes you
work. I will repay you by giving you whatever body you want."
        "MEEPT!! will join your quest." The Glorrious MEEPT!! began to move
itself off its throne.
        "I'm afraid that I have not made myself clear. Moving your physical
body would be difficult for the distance that we plan to go nor is it
necessary once we get there. I only require your brain."
        "MEEPT!! will not be killed."
        "And you won't be." I pulled out the replacement computer from my
pocket. The computer, as well as the one inside MEEPT!! was a block of
electricly driven rod logic circuitry. This type of device, despite having
fairly poor performance, was the first pick for mobile applications. In this
type of robot it was vital so that it wouldn't be wiped clear by a loss of
power and hence could be recovered and studied when a robot failed.
        I showed the device to meept and told him "Inside of your body is a
device just like this one. It contains your mind and can exist outside of your
body. You will go to sleep and when you wake up you will be in my lab. It is
not like a normal brain because it doesn't need to be in a body to work.
        Meept thought about this. While he was master of his own kingdom down
here he couldn't get around the fact that it was also boring as hell. Even to
a mind that only only experience a vague approximation of boredom.
        "MEEPT!! concents."
        I asked MEEPT!! to lie down on the floor. It had an acess pannel on
the top. Even though MEEPT!! worked to keep its body clean it couldn't get to
the crud in the bolt holes of the outer protective housing of the computer.
I picked it clean with a utility knife and released the pannel. The console
had a few special purpose buttons and a keypad. More detailed control would
require a laptop and a diagnostic bench. I pressed a button labled "CONSOLE".
This switched on the display screen and activated the other controlls. I noted
the condition of the bot and its power levels. I also noted that the
computer's operating system noted that only a little more than two hundred
megabytes of space was being used by MEEPT!!'s entire mind. Through my later
interviews with MEEPT!! I learned that he had an almost perfect recollection
of his entire life. The computer's memory could have stored up to two
terrabytes. After reviewing the status, I hit a big red button labled
"SYSTEM OFF". It flashed twice then the entire robot became inactive. Meept was
in a state of proto-death. The module holding the computer was held in place
by two retention screws. The rest of the procedure was even more boring
than this. I re-activated the robot with its new computer.
        Just as I was about to reactivate the thing, I had second thoughts. If
this new program were run the robot would go through the tunnels and undo
many decades of work by one of the finest craftsmen that ever lived. I left
the robot in its inactive state and slid MEEPT!! into my pocket.
        I don't know how I did it but I managed to spend another three days in
Rome with ShellyTPOL.


34

        The Glorious MEEPT!!'s (TGM from now on) brain fit nicely into a
system unit that happened to be a cube. From the robot's specifications, TGM
could be simulated in the egg. The simulation wasn't great but it was enough
for meept to explore the wide open grasslands simulated in the egg. After a
bit of re-aclimation he was ready to assist me in understanding his mind.
        I took a copy of the base code for TGM and made a MEEPT!!-man. Since
the code had evolved to be flexable it wasn't difficult getting it to control
the humanoid form. This Meept!!-man became the victim of all our future
experaments.
        If evolved code had one claim to fame, it would be its
incomprehensibility. For starters, even when properly formatted the code was
quite obfuscated. Some of the stuff was simply evolutionary baggage from
discarded paths serving only to confuse the person trying to read it. The rest
was a mess because nobody had gone through the trouble to either write comments
or name the varriables properly. Something called F347103 would simply be a
function that had been assigned the number 347103.
        Fortunately the entire core of evolved code was only fifteen megabytes
in size. I worked on it because I wanted the answers. The egg man worked on it
because I told him to. Shelly worked on it from time to time because she was
bored. Meept worked on it because it was something that was obviously lacking
in eloquence and hence unworthy of TGM. TGM was a real charactor. His evolution
was entirely seperate from that of humans and hence his psychology was wierd.
At times he seemed like a complete idiot, at other times he seemed to be the
incarnation of divinity.
        His attempts at self-education, while remarkable, did leave his
intellect in a very odd condition. He had very little knowlege of computer
hardware because there was little such data available in Cirus's network. He
simply didn't have the right type of curriosity to look for it.
        I could have made many running instances of TGM to speed up the work
but I was concerned about how I would manage all of them on the chance that
they might turn evil and do some particularly unplesant things to me, the
world, and the rest of the universe. Heck, a bad meept might even have hurt
ShellyTPOL and that simply couldn't be allowed. so I ran only the orrigional
and the prototype version. The two of them were already frighteningly fast
even though the comments they tended to write were hardly better than the
source itself.
        The orrigional TGM was notoriously bad. He would name functions but
the names usually had some abstract indirect meaning rather than a more direct
meaning or a name based on something that was abstractly analogous to what the
function did. He also did a lot of ASCII art in his comments. Quite a bit of it
was illustrative of something the code did but there were also more than a few
purely expressive designs. Being an AI he could dump raw codes into the file
with ease allowing him to quickly generate some amazing art such as pictures of
his tunnel art and the like.
        The work was still very slow as the higher level functions had to be
revisited many times as their functions were better resolved as the description
and explaination of their subroutines evolved. With software engineering tools
the code could be refactored from its raw evolved form to one that was both
clearer and more compact. Meept was a bit supprised by the existance of these
tools but he became expert in them, to the point of being my superior, in about
five minutes.
        Over the next five years it became clear that TGM was a fairly medeocre
implementation of a completely new paradigm. It did basically the same thing
as the EggMan's mind but it was more abstract making it both more efficient
and vastly more scalable. With this understanding in hand, work accelerated to
a breakneck speed. It became so fast that I had to ask the team to slow down
and not excede my capacity to set agenda and policy. The Eggman was perfectly
compliant. TGM and MeeptMan were happy enough to work on ot her things or
artistic persuits while waiting for me to make up my mind.
        The finished mind architecture was incredible. It was completely
modular and could be reconfigured on the fly to just about anything you could
immagine. The real advantage over the Eggman was that it could execute portions
of its knowlege base as a logic program in an automated fassion giving an
entity with it an unmatched intuitive intelligence. The architecture was also
sub-consciously reflexive all the way down to the metal. As the mind learned
it would automaticly become more efficient with practicly no effort.
        Implementing the logic-programming portion of the mind on a quantum
computer could boost its performance immensely in both speed and power. A mind
on such a platform could bost of having the mind of a god and be absolutly
right in every sense.
        We rebuilt Meept-Man and tried the new design out. It was really good.
The new Meept-Man behaved much like the EggMan. The Glorrious Meept spent five
whole minutes integrating his favorite parts of the new system into his mind.
He didn't change much though his jokes seemed to make a little more sense.
        The more interesting problem was to see if and how a mind such as the
EggMan's, and by extension my own, could be upgraded to the new design. He had
been wondering when it would be his turn. He didn't feel fear per-se but still
had some reservations and concerns. The entire team met on the Rainbowstone to
discuss it.
        The Ranbowstone, an example of MeeptArt, was a simulation of a big old
bleached white rock that was the peak of a simulated jaggey peak in the middle
of a vast rough ravine sealed by the simulation of an ultra-thin soap-buble
membrane that acted as a defraction grating which rippled in the simulated
breeze creating a spectacular calidescope of color that drove the underlying
hardware crazy trying to keep current to realtime.
        The avatars looked comfortable as hell and I was reminded of being a
man who was pushing fourty five and suffering from years of bad posture. The
discussion was mostly techncial and the comparing of notes between MeeptMan and
the EggMan. I looked at the mottled skin of my arm that had both ancient
damaged skin and recient patches for repairing sunburns. It suddenly hit me
that it would be only a matter of months before a portion of my mind would
inhabit my avatar just as MeeptMan did.
        Who would this new charactor be? I had no delusions of being able to
"transport myself" into the fabrige sized device as the uploaders had thought.
With this new "hypermind" architecture that my team had created made all
previous designs obsolete. An attempt to simulate my neurons now doubly
nonsensical I had to wonder what I would be when my mind had access to this
new medium. I was even more nervous than the EggMan was. I knew only that my
questions would soon be answered.


35

        We couldn't find any good solutions for upgrading the eggman. The best
way we found for transfering his consciousness was through adding hypermind
modules into his existing structures and then gradually transferring over
information from his orrigional matrix. Even with a bit-perfect representation
of the Eggman's mind there was no way to make a direct translation. The systems
were simply too different.
        The Eggman never deleted his orrigional matrix and found little use for
the hypermind system.
        It was time to begin working on my own neural implant. I swallowed my
pride and brought up the file regarding the sorry state of my own mental
hardware. My first challenge in working on my own brain was in looking at it
objectively. After working on clean and idealized minds for so many years
looking at the pile of neurons that happened to be in my own skull was a major
ego-crusher. I had the data file from my overhaul and laid it out in the
simulation in the general would lay out a map before a battle.
        I gave MeeptMan acess to the quantum computer down at the Smithsonian
and let him have at the problem. It took him ten minutes to produce a workable
solution. His design was exceptionally good. Refining the design and its
software to my liking took only a week. Most of that time was spent by myself
trying to formulate and convey my own ideas about the subject. The best
solution that we could come up with was a neural interface through which,
hopefully, I could cross over from my fragile and weak brain into a more
perminant host.
        By the numbers the thing would work. I had no idea if it would really
work or even if it did work. The device itself was a custom nanocomputer
implanted directly below my scalp, partially embedded in my occipital bone,
in the back of my skull. To reach the interesting portions of my mind it's main
interface filament extended through the straight sinus along the path of the
great cerebral vein to the midbrain, probbably the most interesting unit of
volume in my skull. From there it sent projections to the cerebellum, reticular
formation, thalamus, hypothalamus, hypocampus, amigdalyas, and that relatively
uninteresting thing called the cerebral cortex.
        The software on the device was most minimal, mostly a set of command
programs for auto-manipulating my wetware and an encrypted link to a base
station computer that would provide communication with other systems and
software. It wasn't my intention at all to 'migrate' into the machine but
rather to use it as a personal nexus, a home base, to coordinate incarnations
of myself in the egg, in Antarctica, and most importantly, to maintain
continuity as I upgraded my orrigional brain or built a new one.
        The design was great. When I went to build it I ran into a problem that
many of the new generation were grappeling with: Cirus. Basically, the game was
that if he didn't have a design on file he wouldn't build it. Even with
implementor's privlages, it simply wouldn't let you store anything that didn't
pass its "security" screening. This wasn't something that could be hacked. The
testing had to be done by one of the top security systems. This system was
utterly unhackable from the outside. The only way to get at it was through
physical acess to the root console of the testing machine. This console was
protected by a 32 letter password stored in a one-way hashed file. To even get
physical access to the box you had to be the master implementor himself. The
entire system was secure within an impenetrable diamond shell.
        The current idea was to rebootstrap nanotech from what Cirus was
willing to provide and build a set of systems that would provide the main Cirus
back-end functions replacing all the instruments of tyrany with a more
decentralized network of community friendly servers. Even with the world's best
minds, work was slow.
        One of the biggest problems was that Cirus was so intertwined with
everything people did that if you started taking him appart with C-4 or
tetracuboid or whatever bad things would start to happen. At first you would
notice that none of the cars would be able to navigate. Elevators would be
stuck in their shafts. Power generation would begin to fail. Communications
and mass media would among the first casualties. That would only be the
beginning. With no power and no systems controlling filtration the water works,
without any manual controlls, would be next to fail. Without water and
functioning irrigation systems maintaining the greenhouses that provided for
twenty three billion would be, well, high and dry.
        Food could be produced by nano too but then you would need both power
and Cirus systems to operate the vats. Fifteen hundred years of development
wasn't about to be taken down overnight and certainly not without great
deliberation.
        I still wanted my neural interface. The nanites already helping out
my neurons were metabolic nanites, capable only of building molecules, they
didn't have any capacity for meaningful data exchange. They could have been
instructed to build the interface but that would be a very risky operation,
constructing an unproven design in vivo.
        The only other source of nanites on the planet was the base in
Antarctica. In other words was that my only choice was basically the same
stuff used in their mass suicide. I mulled it over for days and finally made
the call down to Mentex to ask for a favor.
        Mentex had been hacking on the new mind architecture I had given him.
He had found a way to paralellize it by giving each cortical cell multiple
dynamic states, allowing for multiple concurrent trains of thought. It worked
so that all the instances shared the same semi-persistant state and hence were
still a single mind, all instances knowing what the other had done in near
real-time. Mentex wasn't put uppon at all to task an instance to controll an
avatar in the egg for the purpose of gloating about his 31337 00pl04d3d p0w3rz.
        I wasn't impressed. It took six hours just to get him beyond repeating
"you've gotta try it!" on and on and onto talking turkey. I showed him the
design for the interface and the nexus. He almost liked the nexus. He simply
didn't understand the interface. "That's a nice design but you're still stuck
with the limitations of your meat substrate. Why is it that you refuse to see
the advantages of a better substrate?"
        "Uh, whatever. Can you get me the equipment as specified?"
        "Yeah, sure, no problem." He dropped the connection in disgust.
        The next day one of my neighbors told me that a mini rocket-plane with
my name on it had landed in the patch of desolation that was supposed to be a
park right outside my building. Using a light-hood to protect my skin I went
out and took a look at what had been delivered. The plane was only the size of
a model aircraft yet it flew at supersonic speeds and had a range of tens of
thousands of miles.
        I touched the circle that was obviously the trigger to open the hatch.
The door opened. I took one look inside and then bolted away to call in a
hazmat team. There were three items in the compartment.
        The third item was a "dose" of the uploadgoo. I gave instructions to
remove it using a robot, treating it like an ingot of plutonium. It was
handled as any substance that was *expressly designed* to destroy your brain
should be handled. The stuff was slow-simmering in a 50,000 degree
blastfurnace in less than two hours. I called them up later that evening to
verify that there was infact nothing left of it asside from some atomic
residue on the inside of the firing chamber.
        I had all three of my companions go over the other two items. Since
the interface was going to be implanted, it was examined twice. Fortunately
there were no deviations from the specifications. I took it to the hospital
center to have it implanted the very next day.


36

        The doctors at the hospital, free from any significant form of
oversight were perfectly happy to do the type of work that I wanted. Trisha,
my previous neurologist was eager to take a look at what I had brought her.
She wasn't about to do anything blind so she insisted on studying it first. I
had no problem with that and left it with her.
        A week later she got back to me and told me she was quite impressed
with the work. I told her about the egg and, on the egg's console, informed my
friends that their life of relative solitude was about to end.
        I came in to have the device installed the following day. On the
outside, the details of the procedure are hardly worth mentioning as they were
hardly any different from any other medical procedure. The actual effect this
device had on my mind, however deserves great attention so I will do my
inadiquete best to describe it.
        The interface device was quite efficient, taking only two hours to
make the necessary connections and self-calibrate. The last words I heard
before blacking out was Trisha saying "Activating... now."
        I went into a strange wild sleep that was filled with all my memories
and an infinite formless void that was the Nexus' computer. It seemed like an
eternity, an infinite dream. While my mind struggled to achieve its new form
I wondered wheather I would ever wake up.
        After some time an immage began to form in the void, an immage that
was both me and something entirely new. A being that was both incorporial and
having a form. A new me awoke in the nexus, aware of nothing but my own
thoughts. Experamentally, I wondered what the weather was like. Instantly I had
information from every station and satelite on and around the planet. These
were a compilation of all publicly available sources. It wasn't as if I was
looking through the satelites but rather I had, in my mind, a complete knowlege
of what they saw. Within this I could see everything simultaniously in all
its details. The rate at which my newly extended mind could see and consider
was staggering.
        I was also, at the same time, still in a deep sleep resting now in a
saltwater lifesupport chamber designed for long-term patients. I had been there
for over two weeks. My chart noted that my brain's metabolism was critically
high and that they had to lower the temprature of the water and supply me with
extra oxygen to prevent injury. The trend on the chart was encouraging as the
hyperactivity was definitely coming down from its peak and would reach normal
levels in another week and a half.
        Satisfied with the condition of my body, I turned my attention to
ShellyTPoL to see what she was up to. She wasn't anywhere on-line. I sent a
fragment of myself into the egg, giving the avatar I had been using via
keyboard a hypermind of its own that was linked to the nexus in the same way
as my sleeping body was.
        The avatar, which had been in its zoned out state jerked to life in the
Egg's VR. I went and found TGM who was trying on new bodies getting ready to
hold me to my promise of giving it a new body. The only problem with that plan
was that he couldn't decide what he wanted to be. I asked about ShellyTPOL and
supprised me with his answer. I guess I really should have expected it from
her but I suppose I was projecting far too much of myself onto her. After days
of not hearing about me she had become worried despite my instructions. She had
lost interest in VR and had held vigil next to my tank for almost the entire
time.
        I didn't have the necessary clearances to see her through the security
and monitoring camera. I sent a message to the nurse's station and asked the
nurse to deliver a message to Shelly. The message was "Your husband called, he
is in the egg." The nurse added to that, "Whatever the heck that means."
        The portion of me that was inside the nexus, was bored already and
started to read the entire planetary library and, at the same time begin to
plan the upcoming visit to Mentex's world with gleeful anticipation. The
portion of me that was inside the egg went to thank all of the entities there
for their excelant work and to congratulate them on their most remarkable
accomplishments.
        Shelly popped in with her Neutronium II posi-armor. She quickly took
it off and shoved it in her pocket in the way that can only happen in VR. Her
virtual presance was voluptuous and amazonian with sharp bold features. I
quickly edited in the code that could apreciate that form to my avatar-mind.
This edit was nothing at all like opening an editor and going through an
edit-compile-debug loop. I simply willed that my avatar incarnation have those
response patterns and that was how it was.
        Shelly was experiencing this through her own implants which merely
translated her avatar's sensations onto her nervous system. Her stuff was of
an entirely different class. My avatar, having full sensation for the first
time, took the opportunity to kiss her. We ended up making love on a blanket
spread across the rainbowstone ignoring how utterly pointless the act was. I
guess one has to try everything once.
        I tried to explain to her what I was becoming so that she might
understand. She was happy enough to have me alive in the VR, my real body less
important now. Asside from being a medium for communicating with Shelly, the
VR was nothing to me. Its only utility was in expression. It was a new canvas
for the creation of art but nothing more.
        I followed shelly around through her many VR worlds. I had never paid
any interest in them before but, being in the awkward position of not having an
active body it was about the only thing I could really do was mope around in
VR. Shelly took me on a grand tour of the virtual worlds she frequented and
introduced me to all of her friends.
        The worlds were a mishmash of all sorts of ideas, very few of them
holding to a single consistient theme. At one point I noticed that it was well
after the time the VR systems had used to close. This is not to say that I
looked at a clock or had any other sense of time. I simply knew what time it
was down to the nearest hundredth of a second. If I paid attention to it I
could cout along with the smallest number on the clock but this didn't bother
me either because at the same time I was perfectly comfortable with interacting
with Shelly in the VR which was running at true-time speed.
        The nexus-borne portion of my mind researched the issue and discovered
that the new-breed humans had a general sense of annoyance with their
predecessors, even to the point of contemplating genocide. The general
consensus was that even though the old breed was annoying they were harmless
and that the best way to deal with them was to leave them to their own devices.
In short, they were allowing the old breed to become pod-people and thusly
getting them out of the way.
        Being, technically, a pod-person myself I had no basis on which to
become indignant about ShellyTPoL's degeneracy. I shrugged it off and allowed
Shelly to continue her tour. We ended up at a giant palace on the scale of
Versies in France. It was Shelly's virtual home. Each room had its own set of
diversions. A huge swimming pool, a lounge, just about everything one could
think of was there in deluxe quantities. An automated butler took my coat.
        On the way to the inner appartments we passed art galaries and trophy
collections from her many quests. In the dressing room there were fabulous
of armor that she had purchaced over the years and formal dresses placed on
busts for display. The bedchamber itself was immense with murals on the
ceiling and walls. Shelly got into her SimNightgown(tm) and bedded down for
the night. I rested in bed with her for a while thinking about how it was in
our real-world accomodations. After she fell asleep I got up and wandered the
palace aimlessly. Sleep was a nearly-invisable background process in my new
mind that was continually active just as all the other parts of me were in
their own tasks.
        I happened uppon the pool and decided to try the waters. When I jumped
in, it felt wet but the fluid dynamics simulation of the water had taken so
many shortcuts that the most enjoyment I had out of the experience was reverse
engineering the program behind it. I spent five minutes or so testing varrious
things. It was about as good as could be expected for this type of VR
simulation. Getting out of the pool and drying myself I found that the towel
was a highly stereotypical rendition of the towel which skipped over many of
the complexities of the drying process.
        I put my clothes back on and resumed my wanderings trying to figure out
what the hell I had done to myself and what I had become. I toured Shelly's
galaries and came across a picture of her with her arms around me taken by the
camera in our orrigional appartment. The picture had been taken with the camera
above the Cirus screen in our first appartment shortly after our wedding. I
looked at myself then and the strange mix of abstract worry burried for a
moment under simple happiness.
        I spent quite a bit of time looking at it. I got up again and looked
for a room that was more my size. I found a sitting room in a turret. I sat
in a SimLeather(tm) chair and looked out the window at a rendition of the many
virtual lands just barely creeping over the horizon attempting the futile task
of making any sense out of it. The task was hopeless because I already knew
that it was a place of rhyme without reason.


37

        Shelly found me in the morning in the same room. I had this wierd
sensation that I had more of my orrigional mind than before even though I
hadn't noticed anything missing before. Shelly remarked that she liked this
new me better because the new me was more personable. I didn't know what to
make of that either in this bizzare place. I was in this absolutly unheard of
condition of taking a vacation from my body. Of all things that was the hardest
to get used to. Other things such as living in this SimPalace(tm) I made a
point of not getting used to.
        I spent my days hanging out with shelly. I had Mentex's plane in the
appartment. I looked forward to refueling it and putting a part of my mind on
it when my body was back on it's feet. Gah, did I just say that? Am I talking
about its feet or my feet?
        So we went out and started working on my charactor's stats, earning its
first pieces of armor. Many of the games were rather silly from my new
perspective. They did pass the time though.

        The rough guess of another week of deep sleep turned out to be a bit
pessamistic. I awoke four days after I had in the Nexus. As that part of my
mind regained consciousness I saw a red call button directly in front of me.
My arms had begun to weaken from their weeks of disuse. I was still strong
enough to reach the button and call the nurse. The tank was drained and the
tubes removed.
        I was stiff and extremely groggy but otherwise in good shape. The part
of my mind that was chilling with ShellyTPoL told her that I had awakened and
was looking forward to seeing her in the flesh again.
        The me in the hospital and the me in the VR were equally awake at the
same time. It wasn't as if there was one stream of consciousness quickly
task-switching between two zones nor was the other a copy of me. It was a new
creation that both was me while, at the same time, being independant but still
sharing the same core self. In short, I had made a whole mess of myself.
        I went home on the bus. When I got home I sat down in my old chair and
looked at the computers sitting on the shelf above my desk. The Egg sported a
nice thick layer of dust that it had earned over the ten years since I had
acquired it. Meept was pretty dusty himself. Right next to him was a big shiny
new sphere thing with an antena mast above it sitting on a cylendar of auxilary
power cells. It wasn't dusty enough!
        I sat there staring at it in facination. My only direct perception of
it was through my human senses. I had all of its faculties but it felt, to me,
as if I was self-contained and that this was a piece of junk I could just
chuck in the trashcan. I went and got a towel and gave Meept and the Egg a
good dusting. At least the out-of-placeness of the nexus wasn't so obvious now.
        Shelly arrived and I gave her a big hug. It seemed almost like old
times. I switched on the Egg's console and brought my avatar-self back into
the egg. I could see the room through a portion of the VR's sky while I saw
myself looking up at the sky through the screen on the desk at the same time.
What a headtrip! My avatar-self called out a greeting to Shelly. This startled
her. At first she had thought that the avatar was actually someone else who
had been conning her for the last few days. To prove that the avatar, as it
was standing in the VR was infact me I recounted the entire interaction I had
with her in VR with my human self.
        When Shelly started beleiving me I asked her to help me understand what
I was.

        Now that my human body was back in action, I sent my avatar-self down
to Antarctica. Mentex greeted me as if I had used the goo. "I'm glad that you
finally wized up. As much as I hate to admit it you have an excelant mind."
        "Yes, thankyou. My neural interface is working excelantly."
        Mentex looked distracted for a second and then the time-constant for
that VR jumped from a leasurly 5x speed to its current maximum, 150x speedup.
As is common in entemology, the time _varriable_ for the simulation was
invariably referred to as the time _constant_. My guess was that it was because
each of their individual brain simulations read the varriable as a constant
so that, for convenience, everyone ran at the same speed.
        My own software software handled the change in-stride. "You really
shouldn't carry such strong prejudices" I remarked. He proceded to give me
the entire testing battery. I was looking forward to it. I either scored
entirely off the charts or more than ten times Mentex's best score on all
tests. Out of desparation he gave me a test based on how fast I could use the
GUI system, one of the silly contests the uploaders had made up to pass the
time. To controll the underlying computer they had to use a GUI package that
was either time-shared with their visual systems or through a crudely
grafted-on auxilary visual system.
        With his recient upgrades, Mentex was able to fork off the portion of
himself using the GUI to a seperate instance of himself. Since I didn't have
anything remotely equivalent to the GUI in my own system I simply implemented
all the tasks directly with my consciousness. The effect of this was that each
task was completed in only the time it took me to read its description, which
too was much faster than Mentex's best. Two weeks of sim-time had passed by
the time it was over. I was still in a joval mood. Mentex was utterly
flabergasted.
        I knew it was coming. The moment that I had looked forward to for
years. "How the fuck did you do that? You must be cheating!"
        With a sense of ultimate triumph I said "I have a brain."
        Mentex colapsed to the virtual ground, stunned.
        He composed himself and asked me to give him the technology. My
response was "For a price".
        He knew what was coming.
        "I need priority access to all systems here and whatever is back
on-line on Jupiter untill further notice."
        He was scared. He had notions that I intended to unleash some kind
of singularity wave or something. "What for?"
        "I need to design my next body and I want it done right."
        Mentex pretty much had to agree. He knew that if he tried to sneak
into the Egg and steal it, he would be severely punished. He respected very
much the power I now held over him.
        I had my computer time. Man, the external cameras on the base down
there showed that with the core running flat out, the heat of the steam coming
off the cooling towers interracting with the arctic air created a massive
energy discharge in the form of a perpetual thunderstorm hovering over the
machine as it did my work.
        I spent most of my time developing an entirely new celular structure
that was eventually termed a "nanocarote". The body was humanoid of the
highest possible quality. It didn't have too many features but rather focused
on getting everything exactly right. With three of the four orrigional banks,
the sphere, and about 30% of Jupiter that branch of myself worked for five
yeras. Mentex wanted to watch me work but since a simulated body was only a
distraction, there was nothing for him to interract with.
        I put the design out to Cirus's person-building centers to see how
it flew. I figured a little more variety couldn't hurt. The design was so good
that within a week all previous bodies were declared obsolete and unethical
to fabricate. I didn't really want that but it happened.

        During this time, I was able to devote what would seem to be my full
attention to ShellyTPOL and we had many adventures togeather. Mostly she would
go to her VR center for the day untill I stopped talking to her at around
9:00PM when I wanted her home and with me. I made an excuse that it was for
her health.
        We made a bush-bot that we used to visit varrious sites that for UV
reasons were inaccessable in person. We visited the old national parks. The
ones in Utah and west Texas were pretty much unchanged. The rest that weren't
already wastelands were now. The sky had improved. The night was always a ruddy
brown while the day was much brighter and the disk of the Sun was visable and
clouds could be distinguished from the general orangeness.
        The robot was run by a subordinant hypermind to my personal nexus. I
controlled it as I would a body. It was as if Trevor Riley was a bushbot.
Shelly would often hitch a ride by sharing my sensory stream. Sometimes she
would take controll. She was a fairly decient pilot but then she was
controlling it through her orriginoal brain and had to devote her full atention
to it. It was crazy as hell to be sharing a body in that way.
        Sometimes the Glorrious Meept came along with to inspect his vast
empire. His body looked like the king in "The Wizard of Id". It was two and a
half feet tall, three counting his gargantuon crown. His rich purple cape was
big enough for myself. He didn't mind getting it dirty or torn, he simply made
himself a new one when he needed it. With all his bluster about ruleing
everything and talking in the third person and such it was clear he was amply
satisfied by just the pretense alone.
        The one part of this time that is vague in my memory was my adventures
in the plane. I gave the plane a mind that was to it as a malard duck's brain
was to its body. With perfect ease and grace I was able to shoot like a
lazerbeam, it seemed, through clouds and across mountainous terrain. I even
broke the no-fly rule around the OZ arcology that was under construction once.
        Shelly positively loved riding along in the plane. It was a thrill like
no other. On a whim I gave her the controlls. The flight surfaces mapped very
poorly onto her body and she quickly crashed the thing, leaving an
impressively large crater on the side of a mountain. To her it was a simple
Loss Of Signal. To me, I had, for the first time, lost a portion of my mind.
I can remember the general outlines of what I did with the plane but I can't
remember at all how it worked or most of the details of what I saw when I was
in it. That part of me was dead.
        It gave me much pause when I considered my aging body. Shelly caught
up to my Avatar-self a few minutes later. I was staring blankly looking
utterly lost. She was still comming down off the adreneline rush from the
crash. "What a ride, huh?" then, after a pause, "What's the matter?"
        "I'm dead. I was in the plane. The plane was destroyed. I'm dead." I
frowned.
        She responded "Well you seem okay."
        Even though I didn't know wheather I would ever be okay Shelly's
reasurance made it okay and that was that.

        Very quickly after my first homecoming I began to notice something
very worrying about my body. It was hardly good for anything. I was shocked
by how useless it was. Although I knew that previously most of my time had
been spent working at my desk, my body a useless accessory and even a
hinderance to my activities. Now with my mind in its new form, my body became
unignorable. I guess I'm old fassioned but it didn't feel right at all to
abandon it to some tank untill it finally died so I needed to do something
with it.
        I went out and walked around the city, visiting all the new buildings
and reflecting about the new life that had come into the world. I resolved not
to interfere with things on a global scale ever again. It was necessary to
revive the world. Now that it was again walking on its own further interferance
would be wrong. The general consensus view was the same. Barely any effort was
made to hack Cirus and bring it back under controll. While that may do some
good it would be a reenactment of the same act which brought things to a halt
before. Part of the renewal was the conscious abandonment of those old broken
ways.
        In my wanderings I came across a solar observatory. It was only one of
thousands of them being built. They weren't for astronomy but rather so people
could witness first-hand the construction of the first of the fourty great
starcolonies to serve as transport vessels throughout the solarsystem from
Venus to the moons of Jupiter. The design was many centuries old. Construction
had been started even before I hacked cirus by the pure old-breed UN. The new
breed was especially excited by developments on such a scale that they built
observatories for watching it.
        The observation room of the observatory had several lounge chairs
where you looked directly up at a screen that was illuminated with light
directly by the sun, focused only by a few mirrors. The craft was being
constructed at the point of equilibrium between the Earth and the Sol.
From the observatory it was just a small ring near the center of disk of the
sun. In space it was a hundred and fifty miles in circumferance and twenty
five miles from the starward to the spaceward side.
        I spent just about every day that wasn't otherwise occupied in that
observatory in wonderment. I could see many aspects of construction through
the numerous publicly available video feeds but it wasn't like seeing it
directly and immediately in the first person. When the outter hull was
completed, they fired rockets that sent plooms of exhaust in a pinwheel fassion
that burned for five days streight bringing the outer surface up to 1G, or
.8Gs in the outermost habitable areas. To construct the radiation shield,
bricks were heaved into orbit on the space elevator and shipped out to the
wheel and then laid flat on the inner surface in a single band, eventually
forming a solid layer. A single kevlar strand was unreeled across the bricks
by devices that moved so fast that it could make a complete circuit of the
circumferance in only an hour and a half. This strand eventually formed a
tensile member that supported the next layer of bricks. Eventually three layers
were laid. Combined with the rest of the structure's mass the inner environment
was quite safe.
        The sturcture was eventually thrust into its highly eliptical orbit
around the sun with colossal nuclear rockets. After that it was trimmed by ion
propulsion. People would board and depart it in shuttles that would be
launched and recovered as the craft passed across the orbits of the varrious
planets.
        Other people were, ofcourse, interested in my neural interface
technology. When they asked TGM about it, he was insufferably condescending
and impossibly cryptic. MeeptMan was more helpful but his explainations tended
to induce migraines. The EggMan was helpful. He knew much of the code but
didn't fully grasp the entire design and hence wasn't a very good instructor.
        So it landed on me to explain it. I ended up giving lectures five,
sometimes six days a week. I could have tought any subject though the greatest
demand was for teching about intelligence and the workings of the "cybernetic
node" that was the core component of my personal Nexus.
        I was supprised when I saw a number of the cyborgs I had designed come
in to hear my lectures too. I asked them about it and they told me that though
they understood the science they were more interested in the history behind it
and themselves. I obliged and started giving lectures about the physiological
differences between Eucarote and Nanocarote cells as well.
        In other words my life was in the most unstable possible state, the
state in which everything was going my way.


38

        I woke up one morning to find that the light had gone out of my life.
I was asleep next to Shelly as always. My avatar-self was playing Chess with
TGM. I had no sense that everything was about to fall appart because I was with
ShellyTPoL and that axiom led to only one conclusion, that everything was all
right. I didn't discover untill morning that the axiom had failed.
        Hidden from my consciousness at the bottom of a deep deep well capped
with lead and enclosed by a steel reenforced concrete bunker with a carbonized
osmium-tungsteen door surrounded by razor-wire fences, armed guards, attack
dogs a moat and a big red sign reading "KEEP OUT" was the most dreaded piece
of knowlege in the universe.
        In all the politicing about how long one should live long ago there
were many arguments about the quality of life and how soon one should move on
to make room for another. What was the ideal length of a single life? Part of
the answer was intermingled in how long a person who was manufactured the way
Shelly was should live and many factors subordinant thereto such as how should
the missing years of childhood be counted? The answer that was agreed uppon and
encoded as a Cirus General directive was sixty years.
        When David, Shelly's previous husband created her fully grown she was
assigned the age of 20. And today, exactly fourty years later, she was dead.
This knowlege was in my mind but entirely paved over by how much I had come to
worship her and my refusal to change anything about her. Her health had been so
perfect that she had never been a patient in the hospital where it was
customary to remove such timebombs.
        I was aroused from sleep somewhat earlier than usual by the unusual
coldness next to me. She had been dead for several hours. I sat up and I saw
this. The baracade in my mind was instantly smashed to dust and the truth leapt
out and pierced my heart like a spear. I fell out of bed and there, on the
floor I aged thirty years in as many seconds. My joints instantly became stiff,
my muscles weak, and my bones brittle. I went from a man fresh out of cryofreze
to a man with sixty five years worth of accumulated miles under his feet.
        My body which had been filled with a perpetual light and hope was now
alone in the cold dark.
        I writhed there in agony on the floor for many minutes. When began to
regain my composure and make the long ascent to my feet I caught a glimpse of
the much disused Cirus console in the room and was transformed there into hate.
My wrath would be felt across the globe as Cirus had just commited his last
crime.
        The other part of my mind summoned the coroner while I looked down at
her. She hardly even looked twenty five! Someone else might say to you that she
looked fourty but don't listen to him. He's a liar.
        I got dressed, preparing to admitt the coroner. In the corner, near the
door, I noticed that I had a cane with a glass ball on the end that I could
light up via the Nexus and do other silly tricks with. I had been using it for
several years now but that fact had entirely escaped my notice untill this
moment.
        I was Master Implementor before the corroner arrived. I directed a
global upgrade of all systems which would have the effect of replacing every
last one of the trillion-pluss Cirus controlled devices with a completely open
design of my own making. The previous hardware had special security (tyrany)
locks which had to be destroyed.
        I replaced all the 500 billion lines of Cirus code with 500 million of
my own. This new version would know when what it was doing was wrong and
refuse orders that destroy life and hope. This act was probably over-due but
in my haste I made a major mistake. It seemed sensible to take controll of
everything directly with my own mind to ensure that there were no accidents
and to explain to people what I was doing and help them learn how to use the
new system.
        What I had either over looked or hadn't paid nearly enough attention
to was how other people saw Cirus. To me it was just a big old and bloated
piece of software. Through its omnipresance and pervasiveness through people's
lives it had taken residence in the psychological niche that had given rise to
notions of God in the previous epoch. When I realized this I didn't know what
to do. I tried to explain at first but quickly realized it was futile. For the
next few weeks I tried to emulate the emotionless behavior of Cirus. The
problem was that my mind was unmistakably intelligent where Cirus had been
meerly an automaton.
        For my own sake I locked myself in my appartment so as to not risk
being crushed between worshipers and people who, probably rightly, wanted me
dead. With billions of tireless machine processors at my command the work took
hardly any effort at all.
        When I put the new system in-place and withdrew to an observation-only
posture the only noticable change was that the new system used about 40% of the
electrical power the previous incarnation was burning. Ofcourse the other
change was instead of preventing people from doing things that might be risky
or ill-advised the new system merely offered a few words of advice but would
do just about anything it was ordered to.
        Fixing a few lagging problems with the new code, I withdrew completely
back to my previous state. The new system was not sentient itself and did
require a team of implementors to maintain, on behalf of the people who either
didn't have cybernetics or were to lazy to use them to direct mundane tasks.
Naturally, I ended up as the Master Implementor. This was a matter of some
concern but my past record showed nothing to be really woried about.
        When I did come out of my room I was picked up in a limosene and taken
to the airport where I was escorted to a private jet. The person who held the
title "Secretary General of the UN" was onboard. He was new-generation and not
the cyborg generation. I didn't know wheather or not he had a neural interface
or what type it was.
        With my nexus and several other pieces of luggage aboard, the plane
took off. The Egg and TGM's home would be moved to secure hosting centers where
they would be maintained with greater care than I had been showing them.
        The first thing he said was "So you went ahead and did it." He seemed
to be a bit annoyed but not overly concerned.
        "It killed Shelly." He already pretty much knew that. His concern was
about what the new playing field would be like. Things like wheather I had
actually considered the reprecussions of what I had done.
        To understand what had happened better he started his main line of
questioning at the beginning. "So when did you figure out how to crack that
stupid lock?"
        "Years ago. I think it was soon after the newly reconveined UN
realized it didn't have any controll over the damn thing. At the time I didn't
want to be in the spotlight."
        He was a bit supprised at this, not being fully aware of the history.
But it did seem plausable to him. It also told him a fair ammount about my
charactor -- that I was not after fame and fortune at all.
        "What are you going to do now?"
        I was slumped back in my seat. "As little as possible. I hope people
will quickly take controll of their own property and not look to me for
anything more. All of this is wrong."
        The Secratary General gave me a sympathetic look and that was the end
of the conversation. He was in a state of perpetual youth while I, clearly,
was not.

        The previous person to hold the title Master Implementor was a real
fiend. He was selfish in a crude carnal way. He set himself up in the old
Rocafeller mansion and rigged the hiring system to select only women who
matched his tastes. I knew this but I didn't do anything about it because it
didn't directly impact the task of eliminating all traces of Cirus.
        When the limo entered the dome protecting the place from the stale air
and UV radiation my only thought was of getting to bed. As I made my way up
the entry stairs I almost expected the golden dorhandle to come alive and scold
me as the old Dickens story went. I certainly looked the part with my coat and
cane and empty heart.
        Somebody took my coat. Anoher someone lead me to dinner in the grand
hall. I ate silently, not even tasting the food. Someone else lead me to the
bedchambers. When I was lead to the bath, which was already drawn, I reached
my hand down to stir the water, expecting some crude bastardized facimile of
water. The only thing odd about the warm water was that it had absolutly no
effect at all on my cold hand.
        Later when I was asleep in bed my Nexus-self worked on the problem of
what the fuck had happened to my happy life. My avatar-self was inactive. I
was alone.


39

        I lived as a lost soul drifting through the ancient halls of the
mansion. My avatar-self handled all the business. The new Cirus was not
working nearly as well as planned. The strict regulations of the old Cirus had
the secondary function of establishing and maintaining stability. However
well intentioned my action was it wrecked the last reminants of that stability
and the system was beginnig to break down in all kinds of interesting ways as
people started messing with the code of the system in novel ways.
        I was keept busy by the task of establishing standards for new kinds
of services such as the growth of cybernetics and the necessary network
features for supporting those who had decided to form collectives. I had little
difficulty keeping up with the work. The problem was that I didn't want to do
it at all. I felt like I was being forced to provide CPR to my long-time
nemisis on a daily basis.
        The real problem was that the system needed to be able to think for
itself. I began contemplating what kind of mind I could create for the new
system and how to ensure it would be a loyal servant to the citizens of the
planet.
        I was resting in one of the sitting rooms when the butler came in to
announce that I had been called uppon by The Glorrious Meept. I had him
admitted.
        He came marching into the room with his usual swager. "By taking
controll of the global computer network you have undermined my governance and
have perpertrated an act of treason. The most merciful and benign Meept will
grant amnesty if you repent any disloyalty to Meept and surrender to him that
which you have wrongfully taken."
        This was Meeptspeak for "I noticed that you are holding a job that you
never asked for and wish to offer my services as your replacement."
        I quizzed him on politics and legal theory. He responded in his
strange language but all his answers were reasonable enough, once translated.
        I gave him a handwritten letter of reccomendation and sent him to
New York.
        I survived another six months while Meept's credentials were
inspected. Of all the hypermind type beings he was, by far, the oldest. His
many decades of benign behavior were recognised. They made him promise to talk
normally and then gave him their approval.
        I was directed to install Meept as the new Cirus overmind. A Nexus
device was constructed for Meept and we took it down into the controll bunker,
which I had last visited so long ago. My overthrow of Cirus included a redisign
of the facility. It was now hardly anything more than just another server farm.
        I plugged Meept in and said, simply, "Well, there you go. I leave you
now to your empire."
        During the trip back to the Rockafeller mansion I noted that Meept's
primary agenda was to accelerate the eco-restoration. He had dreams of
restoring vegitation with plants modified for high UV tolerance in six months
time. With the power of his hypermind he was able to coordinate the
design and construction of new atmospheric regeneration plants that were
hundreds of times larger than the ones already in use.
        I let out a sigh of releif. Things were going to be just fine.

        When I got back to the mansion I noticed that there were lots of girls
around the place. The girls were all of the latest generation, possibly having
been constructed of a mishmash of the previous implementor's design and the
state of the art models. I wondered why these people with such vast
intellectual capacities were willing to do the jobs that they were doing. One
of the tweaks the previous Master implementor had made to the staff was to
make them bustier than what Cirus was allowed to produce for the mainstream.
All the other shackles of medocrity were removed as well.
        The phenotypes of these girls were a whole rainbow of hair colors and
all of them had one of the enlarged breast phenotypes. Ofcourse all of these
were varriables which could be changed at any time at will. For all I knew
they could have orrigionally been men who, for some reason, wanted those
positions and switched phenotypes so that they would be selected by the old
program.
        I thought to investigate this further. Since they had been doing
things by the book from the beginning, I didn't want to put a jinx on my good
luck.


41

        On the next morning I took my first real look around the place. As
could be expected, the place was overstaffed. There were maids, waiters,
butlers, cooks, and a chaufer. I informed one of the butler that I wished to
review the staff and ordered an assembly in the main hall. I went there
immediately to see how quickly they would gather.
        It was a safe assumption that they had some degree of internetworking
among them, even if it was just a completely conventional chatroom hosted by
a server somewhere. Everybody was there in about a minute and a half except
the chaufer who took two minutes to arrive from the garage.
        I didn't really know what I was going to do. Not a single one of them
could be more than five years of age and I did have my scruples. There were
twelve of them, each equally attractive and each was taller than I was by
exactly the same ammount. They lined themselves up into a nearly perfect row.
I conducted the inspection by the book, asking each her name, position, and
current duities.
        Their uniforms weren't at all sikmpy. There wasn't so much as a low
neckline on any of them. Yet still, their uniforms were clearly designed to
accentuate their curves and compliment their physique. More than anything else
their beauty relied uppon the absolutely perfect symetry of their bodies and
was complimented by the exacting manner in which they wore their atire.
        There responses to my queries were direct and contained no explicit
cues. If anything, they were sophisticated enough to know that the most
effective way to proclaim their willingness was to demonstrate absolute
obedience. I couldn't say for sure wheather they were planning anything or had
any intentions whatsoever. If they did then they certainly knew how to bide
their time.
        I concluded the inspection and thanked them all for their service.

        I tried my hand at the grand Piano. It was the first time I had touched
a keyboard of any kind in ten years. I knew all the notes to all the songs and
the way they were supposed to be plaid. Even still, it was tough to get my
untrained hands to play properly. Thirty minutes of play later my arms and
fingers were sore and weak.
        I stopped and took a long look at the servant bell. There was one of
them in each room though I had never used them. I picked it up and gave it a
good shake. Trishia the butler arrived promptly. I asked her to have a cup of
tea sent up from the kitchen. I had not made any such request before and this
was just an experament.
        I rested my arms for the ten minutes it took the tea to arrive. When
she returned I took it politely, drew a sip off of it, made the obligatory
compliment and then put it down on top of the piano. I took a breath and then
asked her to join me in a duet. She declined saying that she didn't play.
        I insisted and she sat down on the high side. I wanted to see her
hypermind in action so I gave her a grossly overcomplex piece to play, one
that I wasn't sure I could keep up with at all. There was no score in the
holder. She would have to pull it off the net and process it directly to play
it. We began. The first few measures went rather roughly but she improved at a
dramatic rate. By the end of the first page she plaid like a proffesional.
        My fingers were about to fall off so I called it quits. She turned to
me and smiled. She had enjoyed the challenge and the company. Even still, I
had a sense about her. Shelly had been so honest with herself that it was
unthinkable that she could have been anything other than perfectly honest.
Trishia felt different. She felt more like a kindered spirit who was
wresteling with the same questions of existance I was. One of the most
exciting things about her was that with her mind she could probably give me
any impression she wanted to.
        I thanked her as we stood up. She gave me another smile as we left the
room and made a small laugh that bespoke anticipation of a long awaited event.

        That evening I called down to the kitchen my request for my dinner.
I made the most extravagant order I could think of including fresh baked rolls,
a bunch of stuff from my era of origin that I hadn't seen on any menu anywhere.
The kitchen was a relic. The restraunt-grade appliances were bought sometime in
the 1950s and, seeing little use, had remained operational for all the many
years. One of the things that had helped them endure was their primal
simplicity. The stove consisted of a gas pipe, a valve, and a burner encased in
a housing of stainless steel. There was nothing there that could conceivably
break.
        I wasn't sure wheather they were actually having trouble or wheather
they had saw through my game and were playing along. It was more than probably
the latter because it could hardly take them more than ten seconds to
understand how to operate anything or plan out how to prepare a recipe. I
looked up, feigning supprise, and said the scripted "Oh, then I better see
what is the matter."
        I went down to the kitchen using my hands folded behind my back for
support without the cane. The cook, Kathlene, appeared to be trying to identify
the ancient ingredients. With a somewhat embarased giggle, she said "You know,
we weren't really meant to be a *functional* household." wink wink.
        I said "I have high standards." attached to a wink in return. "Lets
start with the stew."
        She went to the stove and turned on one of the burners. Gas started but
there was no ignition button. There was a box of matches on the shelf above
the stove. There was no telling how old they were or wheather they would work.
        I pulled the box down and took out a match. "You'll need this."
        She took it and looked at it wonderingly then back at me. "well, you
have to strike it somewhere. Try your teeth, they're surely not as dull as
mine." That was an understatement because her teeth had never been used. She
had a fully functional digestive system but it was more convenient the cyborg
generation to use other sources of power.
        She obviously liked the idea. The match flared to life on the first
try.
        With the burner lit, I pulled out an ancient cookbook. Its spine was
stiff and its pages seemed to have been in a fire though it was merely the time
and oxidization that had eroded the edges. Carefully folding each page I found
the recipe and began reading as Kathlene set about the work. Already having
the page firmly in my memory I was able to watch her as she worked and admire
her grace and confidence even while being watched doing an unfamiliar task.
        As the pot started to simmer she asked what was next. I said "Well,
I don't know. I think we stir..."

        And it went from there. It felt so natural. In a few minutes we kissed.
She worked me like an expert. Any thought or misgiving quickly gave way to
passion. I wanted her to taste her own stew for the sake of experience. But
after that I said I had changed my mind and wasn't hungry and wanted to go
upstairs to bed. She said she would tuck me in.
        When I found the entire staff waiting for me upstairs suffering from
a bad case of the giggles and with their clothes already hanging loose around
them I knew I was in for an interesting night.


42

        "I suppose you are here to tuck me in too." I said to the crowd
and got more giggles in reply. They were indeed *very* helful in getting me
into bed. Kathlene put me on the bottom and got to work while the others were
there to "help". She said "This won't take very long."
        I was about to retort "Damn streight." but then I noticed that her
tone of voice was dead serious. Something else was happening. The girls were
beginning to merge with each other. They had simply commanded their cyborg
bodies to do so and the flesh obeyed. I tried to scream -- to tell them that
our biologies weren't compatable. That they were killing me. I managed to say
part of that but their weight was suffocating.
        There was no sign that they had even heard me. I was still conscious
when their probes entered my skin to try to find the proper attachment points.
The machinery found an artery and attempted to begin fusing our vesles but
as soon as their nano-immune blood entered my vulnerable and unrecognised
tissues it was almost instant death. My body and mind was decimated within two
minutes. I was dead.

        My bushbot, having lost its Shelly-fuel was stuck half way up a
mountain on the appelacian trail. It was pretty rudamentary. A tin-can with
arms and legs sticking out of it, almost. It awoke and its spherical head
swivled around to all angles, trying to get its bearings. My mind was torn in
half. I started hiking up the mountain just as something to organize my
thinking around. The trail was difficult and provided work for my mind. As the
safeties and fail-safes started kicking in the broken steam pipes of my mind
were capped off and valves closed.
        By the time I reached the rockey summit I was beginnig to piece
togeather what the fuck had happened. As far as I could tell, the story went
something like this. As there were no direct descent humans in the world there
had arisen a mythology around them that attributed all kinds of strange ESP
and devine powers to them. Humans had gone the way of lepricauns, elves,
trolls, and ogres.
        While none of this was true, it was not easily disprovable. On the
contrary, my long resume of accomplishments, capped off with that rash stunt
in taking down Cirus with such horrible efficiency. They had seen it as an act
of a god. They wanted that for themselves too. In talking about it on the net
they found each other and hatched the plan. It was clear that if they were to
approach me and I were to say no, they would never be able to get near me
again. The solution was to get me to completely lower my guard and just do it.
        To prepare they had formed a collective ammong themselves, becoming
one mind that Trisha had floated to the top of. Their intention was to become
one fused entity with me. It was all planned out where the upper half of
Trisha's body was to be the collective's eyes and ears and the rest would be
a fused mass.
        I admired the plan, somewhat. They weren't as crazy as it would seem
because there were thousands of pair-bindings around and quite a few larger
groupings. The largest of which had more than a hundred members.
        The craziest thing about it, and the most tragic, was they already had
everything I did. The only trick to my sucess was that I knew what I wanted
and worked for it. They had used the same force to accomplish what they had.
        It was a pitty that they weren't old and wizened enough to understand
that.
        My death was merely a miscalculation. They weren't educated enough
to ask the right questions about human biology. They had only checked to see
wheather their blood chemestry could support my tissues. Immunology was a
foreign concept to them.
        That was the only problem with the hypermind design. Its consistant
error-free performance lead to a huberis that it was all-powerful and
infalable. That was completely false. No mind in the universe can fill in for
bad or missing data. I hoped they had learned this lesson tonight.
        A news buletin entered my awareness. It was a story that said that my
former staff had turned theirself in and confessed to my murder. At least they
had some charactor, I thought.
        I watched the sunrise. There was only one thing to do, start again.


43

        My life began at the dawn of a new age. A lifetime in a stale dying
world was now only a fading memory. As I awoke in the human resources center
I felt my new body and its hard, powerful joints. I arose from my bed and
went to find some clothes.
        Meept was there in a little hovering pod. He greated me with a sour
"Oh, its *you* again."
        "Thanks, Meept." The table next to the bed held a fairly common outfit
and I put it on. My body was unsexed. I hadn't chosen yet which way I would go,
if at all. I didn't even have a name.
        There were no Cirus ID implants or brain-programming. I was free to
exist as I choosed.
        Any sense of disorientation or disconnection quickly vanished as I
left my room in the postcreation wing. There were no tests or inquizitions
between me and the exit.
        On the way out I encountered a soul very much younger than my own. The
person's eyes were darting around the scene in amazment. "There are so many
people!" he remarked. 'he' is just a convenience in this context.
        Curiously, I asked him how many.
        "Oh, I've seen two hundred and fourteen allready!" Right then I knew
that I was a god among gods and not a man among sheep.
        "You have no idea how happy that makes me feel, I responded."
        He looked puzzled for a moment but decided to leave because he had a
world to see. I did too.
        As I walked towards the exit I thought back on my past life and
wondered what I would do differently in this one. I thought about Shelly and
felt a tinge of remorse that there would be none more like her. It was wrong
and selfish so I dismissed the notion.
        When I reached the front doors I saw green plants outside. When I
stepped outside I looked up and saw the blue sky.

Inspiration has become vision!
(BNW+1984+Lost Horizons)