by ROUNAK PURI
"Can't you do anything?" I asked little Jenny.
"Not with out hurting both of them, plus technically the CPU isn't officially here. ", explained Joe.1
Rockwood and Zola fought.
"I think They need space to say good by" said Little Jenny.
Zola kneed Rockwood between the legs and he fell backwards.
"All flesh from the balls up, always your weakness Rockwood" said Zola.7
The cyber sphere around them became more pink as the owner took over. Zola stood still as did Rockwood. Rockwood was in trouble.
"My collar just told me Rockwoods blood chip reservers are low. He's fighting too hard" said Kayla.
I realised the goggles would just showing me a visualisation.
"We've got to help we need to do something" I said.
"What cyborgs are running 100 times faster than we can. What can we do?" said Joe.
"This" I said.
While Rockwood was still lying proper up on the ground hand in the air defending himself from Zola. I rushed up to Zola and kissed her "I love you" I said.
Zola looked at me in shock and suddenly I jumped away. ,
"Really?" said the distracted Zola.
"Get her" I said to Rockwood.8
Rockwood moved to conjur a huge hack. Suddenly Rockwood's green glow filled the sphere, her pink disappeared.
"Game over" said Joe as Zola was knocked over backwards.
It looked like Rockwood had won.
Zola burst into tears and fell to the ground. In the distance, I heard the sound of thousands of zombie cyborgs exploding one after another. It was going to rain mince meat for a week.1
I went over to Rockwood.
"You guessed I was lying" I said.
"Yes, well I doubted you for a billionth of a second, but I deserved it" admitted Rockwood.
I went over to Zola. Her implants stopped glowing. It was all over and she was defeated.
"You don't understand, I desperately love you" said Zola.
"Believe me I know what that's like and I'm sure being desperately in love with you would be a wonderful thing. The problem is I'm not, I'm not in love with you. I'm sure you'll find your perfect love one day, I can say that because despite all the weirdness I found mine. You can live for ever, your bound to find someone some day who will be yours and I'm sure even an age gap of 50,000 years won't matter." I said. I guess I must have caught the cyborg monolog bug.
"but, we haven't even tried" said Zola.
"You see I can't love you Zola, because I love someone else, truly madly deeply."6
Zola burst into tears.
I turned toLoop.6
"But who do I love? Believe me I've been asking that question for a long time now. Do I love living in the woods, being wild running free with my marine." I said looking at Loop. "Or do I go with the sophisticate slave about town. A cyborg's pet." I said looking at Rockwood. "It should be a simple question - A future with a thousand problems vs going back to nature. The artificial vs the natural, so many options. So I flipped a coin, then I flipped it again. I kept flipping it until I got to the answer I realised I wanted." I said.2
I walked up to Rockwood "It was you. I know this is dumb. I know your a lier and a cyborg and I can think of a thousand reasons to say no but the fact is I'm hooked."14
I had a couple of more fancy lines but Rockwood just grabbed me and kissed me. I felt we just connected. Like two bits of lego which can't fit to anything else.8
"See" said Kayla to Joe, "I said he could do a 31".
"Come on, cybernetic lips that's so cheating" said Joe in his defence. Kayla took Joe and kissed him.1
"Can I marry you when I grow up" said little Jenny looking up to the surprised Loop. Even the unicorn whinnied which had no translation.20
When we finally finished, which for a 31 kiss is generally when you've run out of air. Rockwood pulled his ring out.
"I think this should be where it should belong," said Rockwood.
I looked at his ring it was beautiful.
"OK, but this time no secrets" I said.
"That might take some time but OK" said Rockwood.
Both little Jenny, Joe and Kayla seemed to be very keen on that.
"I'll guess I'll be off" said Loop.
"I'm sorry." I said to Loop "I genuinely didn't know how I felt. You deserve someone who loves you - I'm just not sure that someone is me."
Loop hugged me, much to Rockwood's annoyance.
"If you ever get tired of having a collar around your neck give me a call" said Loop.1
"You look after her" Loop added to Rockwood.
As we went to little Jenny's Osprey.
"You look after your self." I said to Loop.
"We will be OK. We have enough meat loaf to last a life time" said Loop looking out at the army of dead zombie cyborgs. Wow I thougth this is what is like to be on the dumpee rather than the dumped side, surprisingly non awful.
"We should go back home I have a few secrets to share" said Rockwood.5
Chapter 95/Resistance/The secrets of the harem or Halt and Catch Fire
We flew back to Rockwood hall. I know what your thinking - dumb ass idea. You would be right, I would have to wear a collar and heels and everything, but this wasn't about having it all. This was about having it right. Yeh I would have to do the thing I found least easy to do, compromise. The upside was he would have to compromise too. If we couldn't make it work then I felt he would be good enough to set me free. You see your only a slave when you have no alternative. If I could leave when ever I wanted I wasn't a slave. I could choose to have a ring - around my finger or around my neck - It wasn't that different. It showed I belonged to someone EXCEPT the only difference was he belonged to me too. Strange how these little things make all the difference.1
It's like surveillance cameras - when they can watch me and I can't watch them it's spooky surveillance. If the same security guy is standing right there and I can see him as much as he can see me well that's not surveillance it's just looking out for each other which is what turns a spooky empty street into a busy happening night spot. It was the same with the ring. When the ownership is one way it's slavery, when it's mutual it's kinda like love. OK I'm getting too philosophical. What you wanted to know is what was Rockwood's big secret he had done so much to protect. That's OK so did I.
Little Jenny insisted the Loop come with us to Rockwood hall. I felt it was mean but after we all agreed he could leave when done he was curious enough to chance everything.
I had to be smuggled into the hall. I sat in a trolley being wheeled out of the pod bay while Gort wheeled me up to the 77th floor which was the start of hareme central. Joe and Kayla took over and after the door to the hereme closed behind us, he knocked. I came out. We passed some pretty strict security.1
"Laura Croft would have a good time breaking into here" I said looking at the traps and weapons we went through.4
Finally the death trap closed behind us and we were in a large cloak room. Joe went over to set of holes in the floor. He put his sexy high heels in and they came out in flats. Kayla followed him. "Joe your in flats" I said.
"So are you" said Joe pulling a teeshirt with a chemical symbol on it 'Ah' 'element of surprise' it said. The teeshirt was large it hung down over his hips. Before I could say 'that's not slave regulation' a couple more hareme slaves came in. One was clearly over filling his slave unitard and the second one was a beautiful slave girl with a short goatee beard.
"There is a problem over in JCD they said when you get back could you fix it" said the slave girl with short goatee beard.
"Ok Leon, I'll be there after the meeting." said Joe casually.
"you know this is maximising my WTF out quotient" I said.
"It's get's worse" promised Kayla.
We walked round a corner and entered a large office space. There was table after table of slave 'girls' sitting at screens. The mess before them of some of them was terrible. Sitting at before many screens
was a slave girl, some time slouched, sometime peering intensively at each screen. Some played video games some stared at technical manuals. Except they weren't really slave girls. Some had pulled their hair back in a ponytail some, more were fat, most didn't were any make up quite a few had beards or some form of facial hair.2
"I'm guessing about now you're as freaked out as I was first time." said Joe.
"You could say that. What's going on? Did they close down Paul Rue?" I said.
Kayla walked next to me giggling.
"You see it turns out that the machines have a special revenge set up on all their creators. In punishment for all the errors programmers ever made, the machines decided that all captured slave programmers would be passed off as girls" said Kayla. "it kind of beat killing them all."8
"Hi Kayla" said a blonde harem 'girl' in a high pitched voice working away at some deep programming task.
"Looks like some of you got into being a girl more than others" I said.
"No I'm Leela , I am an actual girl. I worked at Google for years" said the slave girl. I got the feeling that machines hadn't thought this whole 'dress programmers as girls thing'.
"Oh sorry, So the harem is a secret software house. Has Rockwood got some ideas for killer apps he wanted coding" I asked.
"Under the new mechanical order all programming is done by the machines. If you want to do some programming in secret you need humans. Rockwood has been building a few special projects for a years" said Joe.
I looked at Joe this explained the whole darts team thing.
"So Rockwood doesn't 'do' you boys and girls," I said.
Joe looked confused "No. He comes down for briefings and stuff."
Kayla "he's been 'do'-less for a while now. Until he saw you" said Kayla.
"But you still wear slave stuff" I pointed out.
"Zola tried to set off a fire to the office once. We still have to wear collars, I went out to seek Kayla quite a lot so I had to look 'presentable'."W
e walked past table after table. There were white-boards with complex formulas written on them. I looked around and imagined that this is what the web development team at Vouge on-line looked like.
"I know you were part of the Seattle Resistance worked on that virus I got" I said.
"Yeh my idea was to make a collar virus which would spread and simultaneously disable the pain and auto destruct mechanism." started Joe "but the code on the collar is bad. All it ever did was fire off the self destruct pin. We were having real good advances then found our code forked on Git Hub. It had been hijacked on orders from the Alpha. They had forked an early version and just accepted the casualties as collateral damage. I was down in the valley stopping them sending it out, it when I got nabbed. That night when I saw your symptoms, I rushed straight back here. I was already infected from a black message your collar had sent. It was a pretty nightmarish few days but we managed to contain it and release a counter virus. Rockwood was petrified as patient zero that your collar would be the first to auto destruct. He cleaned out and rebooted your collar himself." said Joe as we entered a room.
"He never told me" I said.
"Well he had he would have had to admit to being able to do this kind of thing" outside the harem you can have your collar stream scanned by the commission of Public Safety.
We walked past the row after row of programmers hacking away and came into a room at the far side of the work pool.
In the centre of the room was a glass box an inside glowed huge amount of symbols. Around the room were a number of stations showing complex digital displays.
"What's this?" I asked.
"This is a 3D view of the code. That black dot at the end is a Halt and Catch Fire instruction, should bring any machine to it's knees. This is the end. The end of the robot overlords." said Joe.
"So why don't you release the virus?" I asked.
"Oh, we have done and it's not a virus it's part of the operating system, it's more of a feature" said Rockwood joining us.
"Strange I didn't notice the end of the robot overlords. I guess I didn't get the invite" I said.
"Don't take my word for it." said Rockwood.
"Do we have to watch this again?" whined Joe.
"We'll skip to the good bit" said Rockwood.
Rockwood waved his hand at a piece of wall which turned into a large screen. On it showed a picture of a white well fed man in blonde dreadlocks.
"This is one of the original human computer prophets. He was called Jarren Lanier. He created the word 'virtual reality' you might have heard of him." said Rockwood.
I shook my head.
The recording of Jarren Lanier started on the screen. "Historically computers have got more reliable but they have got faster at the same rate. As a consequence the mean time between failure - the time between when you have to reboot a computer - has remained about constant and there is no evidence to think this will change in the near future. If artificial intelligence ever takes over all humans have to do is wait until enough machines need rebooting and then just refuse to do so."
"So you're saying all humanity has to do it wait until the computers crash? "
"That's the plan." said Joe.
"Not doing something isn't' a plan" I complained.
"Sure it is." said Joe.
"How can you say that...Hang on the internet never crashed, so some things don't need rebooting" I said.
We passed a number of simulations on screens showing the robots all crashing.
"Oh the internet crashes all the time but it had a network of people rebooting it all the time to. Remember me and the Osprey crashed the first day we went out. Mr Jones needed rebooting the day you first met him." Rockwood said smiling "the machines crashing is inevitable. It might take 10,000 years but it would happen, so I decided to give nature a helping hand,"
"OK so when are you going to launch this weapon?" I asked.
"It's already launched" said Joe proudly.
"Remind me again, So why do I see machines walking about ?"
"It's based on a counting bug present in the system. It's like the millennium bug, it's counting down to Armageddon we just have to wait" said Joe.
"Well I will have to get the resistance to get all the slaves not to reboot their masters so how long have we got until the super-crash happens." "just under 20" said Joe.
"20 days that's pushing it close but we can do it"
"Not 20 days no" said Joe.
"Twenty weeks?" I asked
"No but closer" said Kayla.
I fretted "Twenty months?"
"just a little bigger" joe sid.
"20 years? Really? I've seen faster parcel delivery from a company run by turtles and snails" I said
"You sound disappointed" said Rockwood.
"You could say that" I said.
Joe jumped in"That's the simplest target - the stuff we built here is simply synchronising all the count downs together but the problem is the collaborators and the cyborgs. If we did it today the collaborators and flesh cyborgs, would simply reboot the A.I and robots. We need to wait until the cyborgs either die or migrate to digital form. The longer we wait the more collaborators become mini A.I's in about 17 years the number of human collaborators and cyborgs will be close enough to zero. Plus the animal cyborg's will be mostly dead at that point. Now we have this back stop we can look at alternatives I'm hoping to build a picture or pattern which will trigger a crash which needs rebooting."
"You guys are big on delayed gratification aren't you?" said I " How do you know this will all work?"
"Remember that proof I was working on? The one I solved when I got you to do some mathematical modelling for me? That proves it." said Rockwood.
I turned around sharply at the sound of his voice.
"So this is what you've been protecting? All along? This is the secret of the harem" I said to Rockwood.
"Sure. We can't let anything out. Zola and others suspect I'm up to something. That's why they sent spies
like Kijo over. Unfortunately if anyone ever speaks then we would all be killed and humanities last hope of recovery would be lost. Letting you know is a huge risk. If I let you out of the harem you might inadvertently make humanity extinct. If I die or ever get convicted of anything everyone here will be killed. We have collars set up so of anyone says anything about what's going on then they will die. Joe put his life in his hands every time he went out to see Kayla and you. "
"It's a risk we all willing to take. We are humanities best last hope" said Joe.
"The collars also have a auto destruct message in case we are ever caught or stolen" said Kayla.+
"But why - why did you do all this?" I said to Rockwood "You helped the New Mechanical Order take over. Why help humans take back over. This makes no sense"
I guess I was just really sensitive to any new lie. Rockwood had turned lying into a science and I didn't want to leave any inconsistency.
"Well if you want to make sense we have to go and talk to someone else " said Rockwood going to a door.
****
Chapter 96/Resistance/but wait there's more
I walked beside Rockwood into a room. It was simple a table, a couple of sofas. Between the sofas was a coffee table. Standing proudly on the table was a large plate piled in doughnuts. Beyond the table reclining was a man only thin with white hair and a face so worn with woe and age that it seemed like the all the ages of man kind were written on it. He stood up and shook my hand.8
"Good to see you again Jenny" said the man. He looked dreadfully familiar.
"Again?" I said.
"You said I, rather inadvisably, could be a brides maid at your wedding." said the old man. I recognised his eyes, they were young, bright, the same eyes as little Jenny.
"Your little Jenny, your the CPU?" I said.
"I said you were smart. The very same" said the CPU's new avatar "you can call me Jimmy."
He looked familiar. I'm sure I had met him before. His clothes were tattered,shoes worn. Then delight at seeing little Jenny again, changed to caution.1
"I recognize you know you were there when I was captured." I said, " I sat next to you before being interviewed."