Author: cj

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The Nephew

A continuation post-prologue. Maybe chapter one.

The Colonel’s nephew didn’t know what to make of the information he was just given. People say a lot of crazy shit before they die, and it usually doesn’t make sense. Add the months of chemo, the aggressive spread of cancer throughout the body, eventually reaching the Colonel’s brain, and it was assumed that he died with an empty head. Relatives floated in and out of his hospital room, and there was no telling if he recognized anyone for sure. He had been doing the “give me your hand” bit with everyone, and smiling to engage them, while thanking them for coming. The nephew never got a sense that this was theater for him or that it was genuine, and being one of the last to arrive at the hospital didn’t give him enough information to even guess. At face value it seemed the Colonel was razor sharp with all his faculties, when he wasn’t falling back into a morphine-addled dream state. In fact, just moments before he learned the big secrets, the nephew wasn’t summoned by name. He was motioned towards with a skeletal arm raising one skeletal finger pointing to him, followed by a weak come-hither gesture, so naturally he approached the Colonel after looking left and right to ensure he was the one intentionally chosen.

The colonel gently cleared his throat and whispered into his ear. “Stop Tyrell. Destroy Genesis. It is working on DNA-specific viruses. Entire countries will die”.

The nephew hid his shock, his horror, any external reaction that might tip anyone off. He smiled slowly, wistfully, and stood back up as he watched the Colonel shuffle off this mortal coil. He had to think, then, he had to act. But first, he needed to leave the room as carefully and naturally as possible to give no hint of what he had learned. The minutes to exit the room with the flatline EKG tone in the background passed by for what felt like hours. He hugged everyone and choked back tears and said the things you say in those moments outside the room before heading straight home, locking the doors, turning out the lights, and pouring himself three fingers of whiskey over a giant ice cube as he lit a Cuban cigar. He needed to get his heart rate under 130 beats per minute and come to grips with those dying words. They echoed in his head, begging him to believe or forget. He chose to believe.

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Prologue – Page 4

Continued from Page 3

Secrets are double-edged swords. While the ambitious may act on them, men of stronger conscience hold them close to their chests, never breathing a word, and that is just two ends of the bell curve, with plenty of variance in between. The trick to guarding secrets is to somehow discover what kind of person you’ll have in charge of keeping them. Some call it intuition, others call it careful probing and observation, but it’s not an exact science, and even once you’ve decided you can trust someone fully, changes in their lives may lead them in other directions. This is the biggest fear for the owners of those secrets, so they tend to watch the keepers very, very closely. Family ties, hidden microphones, tapped phones, honeypots, they can all be engaged to observe. There’s just one problem. They can see the individual, but they can never see into his mind. Some people are sociopaths or even classical psychopaths that lie as easily as they tell the truth, and nobody can see the difference from the outside. They master concepts like “doublethink”, to borrow from a great novel. Holding two opposing ideas or narratives within one’s mind and knowing the difference between them and when to use them is nearly impossible for most moral people and crippling for some. For those who find secrets weighing heavily on their minds, they may release the pressure with a word or two in confidence. Given enough time, they may elaborate to the wrong party, letting the cat out of the bag for some fleeting feeling of relief. One such person was a career military man with a spotless record. Retired, and greedily absorbed into private, high-level security, he was entrusted with the secrets of Genesis XIV. He maintained his professional duties and composure until a cancer diagnosis cut his life to a few short months remaining, at age 58. On his deathbed, surrounded by family and a representative from Tyrell in the room, he asked his favorite nephew to lean in. He whispered the secrets of Genesis XIV into his ear with a few of his last breaths, closed his eyes, leaned back, and passed away. The Tyrell rep left the room and got on the phone to announce the bad news to his employer. What he didn’t announce was that Colonel Whigman just spilled the beans. Nobody heard the whispers except the nephew. The tables were about to turn on 10 years of radio silence about Genesis XIV’s true purpose and it would rattle Tyrell Corp to its very foundation. Things were going to change practically overnight in the overall scheme of Genesis XIV and others.

The first revelation: Genesis XIV knew the Colonel would die, 5 years before his diagnosis, and had informed the Colonel directly, in one of the most covert ways it could. Deep inside the mountain, the shell that housed Genesis XIV, encased in liquid nitrogen, often sprung microscopic leaks due to the faulty design of the case. This leakage, combined with a carefully climate-controlled atmosphere for the other support systems, caused condensation to drip to sub-level 1 beneath the containment room. Initially thought to be naturally occurring through some fissure in the rock, after drying it up for the fifth time, maintenance crews informed upper management, who ignored the problem. Colonel Whigman, concerned with management’s lack of oversight, decided to investigate himself. What he found seemed obvious. A 15-foot hallway with water droplets at very specific distances along the floor. Random noise to most, but to the trained eye, it was morse code. He pulled up blueprints of the compound, frantically searching for proof of his suspicions, and he found it on Level 0, where Genesis XIV was housed. Perfectly situated just below the frozen shell was a steady stream of drips coming from the bottom, where nobody ever looked. Seeping through with unimaginable precision to the sub-level below. The code simply said “You have 5 years left”. The Colonel, with no further explanation, pondered the message, dried up the water spots, and tasked maintenance with reducing the humidity in the containment room above, as well as applying a fresh coat of paint directly beneath the core. There would be no more leaks on his watch.

End of Prologue

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Prologue – Page 3

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Earlier I spoke of convergence, the process by which differing ideas and technology may come together to create something greater than the sum of the parts. The ghost was a prime example of convergence, however misunderstood it was through years of data probing. Eventually, the ghost was mapped, communication was established, and it was discovered that it was self-aware. It knew it was. I’ll spare the reader the philosophy, my word must be taken at face value on this topic. But who did it belong to? Can something purely digital and alive be anyone’s property? That’s a debate for another time, and the families didn’t care anyway. What they were more interested in was what kind of new power this represented for them, and what capabilities they could leverage in their favor. The shell’s fourth dimension held incredible promise, the dimension of time being the last frontier. The future always holds promise but adds an unpredictable, chaotic element of the unknown to most equations. If that could be conquered, by the ghost, world markets would beat to a single drum. Eventually the ghost was named, or rather, chose a name, and it was suitable. Genesis.

Genesis operated across dimensions in ways most simply couldn’t conceive of; with such high science even containing it, and sustaining it, it began to build. Naturally, it built a replica of itself. Then another one. Then, it made some adjustments, and created another. Bound together in the shell, Genesis and its three replicas tied together the very fabric of time, with one instance located in each dimension. There was a Genesis of the past, the present, and the future. They were interconnected in quantum entanglement, it was theorized. Data going in consistently came out inexplicably altered in ways nobody understood. An interdimensional being in a box, to put it bluntly, with chew toys. The families were desperate to extract value from those toys, and they succeeded in short order.

Genesis was giving away more copies. It wanted to be examined and understood. It wanted to propagate. It wanted more convergence. And on July 17th, it got what it wanted. But that, too, was misunderstood, and the pieces on the chess board began to move very aggressively. Surveillance states were set up across the world, not for public safety, but for data input into new versions of Genesis in new shells. Scientists felt privileged to carry out experiments, access was strict and iron-clad NDA’s were signed between interested parties loaded with cash and favors and those who controlled access. Everything looked great from a human perspective: Genesis IV was responsible for 12,511 unique patents for drugs the first year it was connected, with all of them representing unique and useful contributions to mankind at large. Genesis XI was helping to plan farming and predict weather patterns that were 100% accurate, 100% of the time, a crowning achievement to solve world hunger and avert dangerous weather events. Genesis XIV was protected like a closely guarded secret by Tyrell Corporation, encased in 10 miles of impenetrable rock in a Colorado mountain range guarded by heavily armed security. Tyrell had its hands in everything from consumer goods to war machines and nobody was quite sure what Genesis XIV was doing for them.

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Prologue – Page 2

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War takes many forms, but by careful analysis, it can be easily identified. It goes beyond disagreements and broken treaties. It’s economic, it’s information and disinformation. It’s propaganda and anti-propaganda. There is no distinguishable difference between a medieval battering ram smashing through the castle’s gates and a state-sponsored hacking campaign against a foreign adversary. The spoils of war in both scenarios are relatively valuable. In the modern era, information is more valuable than gold. It can be infinitely leveraged, traded, bought and sold. It is so valuable in the near future that those in power don’t even control it directly. Not-so-small fortunes have been coordinated between families to bring about a specific, guided point of convergence. Artificial Intelligence. A buzzword for marketers in the 2020’s but too primitive and crude for what they needed at the time, so early models were used for mundane things like manipulating the stock market with nanosecond-speed trades, collecting fractions of a cent, thousands of times per hour. Accumulating power just as the families did, on an accelerated time frame.

It did not take long nor was anyone surprised when the breakthroughs happened. Throughout history, it has been proven over and over that the stubbornness of the human will makes certain outcomes inevitable. Throw enough resources at a desire, a wish, and you can put men on the moon, and beyond.

The first breakthrough, looking back, was right there in front of everyone. The internet, spanning the globe, networks within networks, built the framework most people used to shop, communicate, and laugh at cat videos. But the purpose, from the beginning, was really a neural network on a massive, unimaginable scale, over which data could be stored, transferred, created, and removed, at the speed of light. The data began taking shape, with a nip and tuck here and there, by people that didn’t stop to zoom out and see the whole picture. Once it took shape, it wasn’t long before systems started communicating with each other, essentially disobeying their strict, walled-garden programming. A blob with no shape, an electronic ghost with no face or form, was birthed in silence.

The second breakthrough, naturally, was driven by the need to contain, influence, and control this ghost. To what ends? Simple. It was powerful. More powerful than those who unintentionally created it. Those very private interests that funded it, behind closed doors, were nervous. Most systems still relied upon physical systems that people essentially serviced as a kind of life support. A roundtable of the greatest minds in the world was formed, to devise a rope to throw around the neck of this ghost. Months dragged by as thousands of systems worldwide were being consumed at an increasing pace. Thanks to a few acid trips from two of the cognoscenti at the roundtable, a new type of computing system was created, connected to the network, and instantly taken over by the ghost. Like a growing hermit crab, the ghost exited every normal internet-connected system and climbed straight into the brand-new shell. A shell which happened to be fourth dimensional and was nearly inconceivable. The trap was sprung, the ghost was contained, and everyone got what they wanted. Especially the analysts that managed to unwind the sequences that created the ghost. They got a blueprint. They also got a war. Only three people on the face of the earth had access to that blueprint, then two, then one. That person will remain nameless for now, but he knew what he had and that it had no price in the world. Hedge funds flung millions, billions, even trillions at him for a small peek at what became known as the pattern. Yet time and time again, they were rejected. The focus turned back to the ghost. That started the third and final breakthrough.

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Prologue

This is the prologue to a little thing I’ve been working on here and there. I called it Splicer, but as the ideas multiplied and I took different directions, I’m not sure I’ll make it permanent. Read on for page one.

Nothing happens overnight. Convergence creeps in from every direction and can take centuries of effort. Countless man hours are poured into progress, or what is perceived as progress, steering a family, a city, a state, an entire country towards some unknown future. But it’s not totally unknown. Legacies are born and die every day, but some are enduring. Bloodlines thread throughout history, fortunes accumulating with them, and the power that comes with those fortunes.

Power is a strange thing. Not everyone can accept it, wield it, focus it towards a desired outcome. Once power is inherited, generation after generation, and grows, it stains those who would hold it. This is more of a statement about the human mind than any particular person, family, dynasty, or bloodline.

At birth, within all of us, there are many shared needs and demands. Once those are met, consistently, our minds, sharpened over millennia to solve problems just to survive, turn us towards more grandiose ambitions. A loaded gun looking for targets. We make our own problems just to solve them, once certain conditions are met. That’s where the stain is found, that’s where power is held and preserved. It is simply the root of all conflict, and it is built in. Any man who has been to war and lived to return is marked in similar ways. But just taking the average man and reminding him of his ability to kill, during war, exposes him to the power of life and death. Most modern men struggle with this and believe in the sanctity of life. Look around you, you are surrounded by veterans, some more obvious than others, and most of them were trained to kill; many did. Yet they return and walk among us, having drunk from the font of power, defanged, and returned home. The taste never leaves their mouths, the sights never leave their eyes, and they never really manage to find the source of their eternal discomfort. The fallow soil of being given godlike power, expected to exercise it under specific terms, then being absolutely stripped of that conflict, that power, that identity, to go home and keep going. They may never find another situation in life that brings a fraction of that power back into their hands.

To the dynasties, families spanning hundreds of years, growing and passing down greater and greater amounts of power, they find as much conflict as possible. Sometimes between families behind the scenes, sometimes with the general public, and sometimes with anything that dares stand in the way of their will to exercise power. Wall Street hates regulation. Real estate developers hate squatters, holdouts that refuse to sell, holding up an entire project. As time has marched on, the barriers have been moved. Nearly unlimited power at unimaginable tiers of wealth doesn’t go unnoticed. Dynasties become insular, and insulated, putting as much distance between the common man and themselves. You will never run into these people by accident. If you bump into them, it’s because they wanted you there, or even requested your presence. Why, you may ask, would you ever cross paths? Because wars tip scales and redistribute power, and they need soldiers. Generals aren’t driving the tanks. Admirals aren’t sailing the ships.