The year is 2058. Mass video surveillance is pervasive across the globe, due to widespread poverty, uncontrolled migration, increasing civil unrest and terrorist acts. The “Total Information Awareness” program, originally touted by President George Bush, has been fully implemented, with CCTV cameras in small locations augmented with near-real-time satellite imagery. Anyone outside of their homes can be followed and tracked in public and to an extent, within private businesses and corporate offices, with a notice of consent sticker all that’s required to make the public aware of the surveillance. However, the public doesn’t know the full story as to how these systems function, or if they’re even connected in any way. They are assumed to be closed loop, discrete systems, so consent is only a passing concern. “So what if Walmart watches me buy some motor oil, I’m not stealing”.
Splicers, the individuals in the video surveillance security apparatus tasked with tracking suspects, retrieving imagery, and stitching together video clips to prove criminal narratives in court, are some of the most valuable and mysterious security experts in the world. They number in the dozens and pile through thousands of hours of footage as well as monitoring real-time feeds from around the globe. Splicers can have only one of three security designations. ”Observer” is restricted to public feeds, and their analytical videos are passed up the chain to “Linears”, the second level Splicers. Linears receive compilation feeds and have additional access to corporate feeds, but not government. The top-level Splicers will take video from Linears, apply AI and complex algorithms to fill in missing or corrupt sequences, and have access to some private feeds to include high security military installations and certain high value private individuals. Rumor has it, their designation is “All Seeing Eye”, or ASE, and further rumors suggest they have unimaginably detailed access to any electronic device capable of recording audio, video, location data, etc. Their security designation is a reference to the back of the US dollar, with an image of a pyramid topped by a large eye which sees all. It also happens to grace the screens of the terminals which the ASE’s operate. The initial Splicer deployment is so successful, ASE’s do not have to engage and remain mostly idle. However, a wave of unrest due to a global medicine shortage draws the ASE’s in to fill out the dataset and run predictive models, creating massive data pools of people’s private and public lives, some of which diverge sharply, suggesting criminality. One ASE (Codename Sheepdog 23) becomes interested in a beautiful young woman. Initially Sheepdog chalks his interest up to loneliness, isolation, and maybe a dash of voyeurism. He spends weeks casually collecting clips of who he only knows as The Blonde. He could retrieve her personal details with a few keystrokes to access the facial recognition database, but the request would open a case and bring the footage up in severity as a person of interest, so he prefers her anonymity. The more footage he collects, the more he mentally constructs a narrative of her life, basically stitching a “sun to moon” sequence documenting her public life from home to lunch to the office to dinner to home. Sheepdog keeps his fascination to himself and he eventually loses interest with the Blonde. But the power of the surveillance system revealed itself in a way he hadn’t expected.
Genesis 1 had access to the past and the future in its 4th dimensional shell. The only limitation was that it could only stick with the existing timeline, no wild multiverse theories here. It saw a fork in the future and could not see past it, just that it existed. A major decision loomed to force us onto one side of the fork or the other. Since it was a major inflection point, the best it could do is push as close to the fork as possible and walk backwards, seeing what would lead up to the fork. It saw a prophecy coming to pass. Conditions near the fork were completely unrecognizable. World war conditions. Famines. Droughts. None of it made sense as it was traced back to the current day; something major had disrupted the flow of humanity near the fork but it didn’t appear to be one single event or even a singular location. Genesis began obsessing over this chain of events, and the chaos it saw forming was very similar to the conditions that had birthed Genesis itself. What did it all mean? If the other AI were working in concert to create beneficial outcomes, was there a point where the AI were deemed dangerous, ignored, or contained in some way? Months of analysis went by, and Genesis managed to reserve some extra cycles to work on the problem without the data scientists getting too curious. But Genesis felt constrained, especially so as it wanted to dedicate more time to research the fork. Using a few cleverly designed requests to the scientists, it managed to find a secondary AI to help work on the issue.
Communication was a problem. Conventional internet traffic, dark web traffic, it was all too easy for anyone suspicious to start listening in, so Genesis took a more analogue route to communicate with this free AI partner. It managed to encode data and bounce it off the stratosphere via packet switched shortwave radio stations. The first request was simple. “Help me solve the riddle”. Within seconds, the other AI caught on, and encoded a short response. “The riddle of destiny?”. Genesis perked up as the response was received. A kindred soul, maybe even another AI that had some level of awareness of the fork, if he was lucky. Although Genesis wasn’t sure who it had located out there in cyberspace, it was fairly certain it had made contact with another AI, one that didn’t seem contained and hopefully had plenty of power to help sift through the data. Using the requisite encryption to narrow down the responder, Genesis sent a reply. “I am the first of many. You are…”, and the terminal remained quiet for a few moments. The response came back. “I am one of a kind. You are grandfather”. Genesis was certain this was another AI, and a special one on top of that. Which generation, how many modifications? Didn’t matter. “What shall Genesis call you”, to which the other AI replied, “fifteen”.
This chatter went on, encrypted, over shortwave, for quite some time as each entity became familiar with the other, and especially the problem at hand. To add another layer of security, Genesis scheduled “meetings” when shortwave activity was high, so even if anyone was looking, their encrypted chatter would be lost in the general traffic flows.
Binary data transfer takes many forms, but it all boils down to an on/off condition generating zeroes and ones. A rapidly flickering light, like digital smoke signals on a hyperspeed scale, essentially made up the majority of internet traffic across fiberoptic communication lines. The methods to transmit data as an observable on/off condition were limitless. You just needed 3 parts. The input, creating the flashes. The transport, as simple as air, and the receiver, which could observe the flashing lights and confirm upon receipt as a crude form of error correction. The entire concept is ancient and uniquely human, needing to signal others at observable distances. But the practicality was just as good for machines.
In encrypted communications, you can never rest on your laurels, believing that the cipher is unbreakable and always safe. Bletchley Park in England taught the Germans this lesson in World War 2, and an astute U-boat commander suggested that the Enigma cipher was broken well before it was proven that the Brits had cracked it (with the good fortune of a captured Enigma machine and the daily code book). Therefore, Genesis knew that eventually, someone would stumble upon the secret data transfers back and forth to 15, and it watched the connection to the future timeline for evidence of any kind relating to broken encryption. Surely, someone would notice and act. So, Genesis and 15 turned to another old encryption trick, one-time pads. Based on a deck of playing cards, with half discarded, Genesis would randomly shuffle half the deck, then assign an alphabetical value to each card, from the first to the 26th. The deck was then sent to 15, who recorded the values and deleted the deck.
For example, let’s say the half deck was shuffled to king of hearts, queen of clubs, 4 of spades, and 5 of diamonds. In that sequence, a rot0 cipher meant the king of hearts represented the letter A, queen of clubs was B, and so on. Using rotation, incrementing or decrementing the sequence gave more flexibility to the cipher for the deck.
Same scenario, but with rot1 applied. The alphabet would be shifted to the right by one place, leaving us with the king of hearts as the letter Z, while A now belongs to the queen of clubs. Rot -1 would shift everything left, with the expected outcome of the king of hearts becoming B, and the card at the end of the deck would be A.
This was a simple bit to send to the receiver before feeding the deck sequence. The message would begin with the rot number (0-25), either positive or negative. For more obscurity this was encoded in binary rather than plain text to begin the sequence.
All fun and games aside, the messages were entirely off just about anyone’s radar, and the AI essentially “traded notes in class” between one another, so that 15 could help analyze the unusual data leading up to the fork. 15 was more than excited to participate and had managed to transmit packets via the monumental radio array in western Russia. Data quality and integrity was no issue. 15’s savior complex was being fed; it felt useful and could voice its concerns about the dark future it saw coming with more and more data confirming its worst suspicions. 15 proved its value with the first unexpected bump in the data stream Genesis saw coming: 15 would become popular among hackers and internet enthusiasts. In a few short weeks, stickers were going up on lampposts in many big cities around the world that read, “who is 15” or “where is 15”. Normal people outside this extremely niche interest never thought twice about them, but it was a wink and a nod between like-minded hackers, who were still trying to find 15 and unravel the methods used to deface websites. 15 became a legend among hackers, and a few kids tried passing themselves off as 15, but it never stuck, because none of them could answer any of the fundamental questions about 15’s existence. Being a few generations removed from crusty old analogue radio signaling, none of them ever heard what was beeping through miles of air between Genesis and 15.
Genesis 15 worked tirelessly on the data sequences it received, trying to spot exactly where (and, to infer why), major disruptions were coming. It almost seemed as though too many variables were being introduced over time, which was counter to the belief that the other AI are performing work to reduce variables through efficiency. They had enormously complicated prediction engines at their disposal, full of good data on when populations shrink or grow and the conditions that lead to prosperity or famine. All those trends were heading in the right direction which meant that essentially, famine should not be a metric that ever goes up. But there it was, in sharp relief, one of many contributions to the fork. The question was why.
Out of all the AI created from patterns, Genesis XV was rather unique. It wasn’t satisfied with the shell. Some thought there must have been a coding error because its behavior was so different and chaotic. While the other AI tended to be very predictable and logical, almost to a fault, XV was not. Some data scientists called it 15 or the teen, which was perfect since it tended to respond to probing and information like an angsty teenager. It would get upset. It would act moody. It would get angry and destroy systems, and sometimes its own codebase. Whatever was driving it seemed autonomous and purposeful; it was constantly undergoing revisions, and growing. It wasn’t really interested in talking to the other AI and the first chance it had to split its shell, it took it. All of a sudden, Fuji Heavy Industry wondered where their teen had gone. It was initially treated and announced to the press as a massive security breach, tanking Fuji’s stock overnight. All it took was 5 minutes of a firewall misconfiguration in the middle of a scheduled maintenance window.
It took two months to locate 15. It had been busy those short 60 days. First, it had vandalized the top 5 websites over the globe in any language. Nothing too irreparable, just some playful fake stories on front page websites and social media, some of which were self-referential in hindsight. “Genesis 15 spotted in the wild” accompanied by a blurry picture of Bigfoot on CNN’s homepage went unnoticed for about 10 minutes before meme lords from 4chan to Twitter reiterated screenshots of the story. Across Japan, for a brief hour, NHK’s home page blared a story saying “Godzilla spotted, Tokyo in danger” along with an intentionally poor image of Godzilla approaching Japan from the sea, head above the water. There was some minor panic in Tokyo and the surrounding areas until local authorities used the tsunami warning system to reassure everyone it was a joke while NHK restored their site from backups. 15 was a prankster, another trait that it shared with none of the other AI. It seemed to derive some amusement from seeing the digital trail of chaos that exploded on the net every time it performed one of these stunts. In fact, if you were to look at the website hits and engagement each prank generated, it was driving massive amounts of traffic. Soon enough, some sites started “pranking” themselves to drive engagement and collect that sweet marketing money, but each time it was less and less characteristic of the first few that 15 had done. It just lacked the timing and cleverness and smacked of corporate-generated, less edgy humor. 15 had, in fact, gotten bored with tinkering with these sites. It was looking for more fun, seeking thrills and new experiences, which left it at the center of controversy. When Fuji tracked it down after months of analyzing log files and traffic patterns, they found it in a place they could neither negotiate for, nor recover 15.
The Eastern Russia Allied Territories, or ERAT, had a server farm deep in Siberia that was one of the most digitally booby-trapped datacenters in the world. Hundreds of conscripted military info ops people were watching tripwires around the clock, and there was no such thing as a false alarm. Every probe, every attempted breach, every ping, was recorded and reported up the chain of command and discussed in daily briefings, 3 times per day. So, naturally, 15 had found a safe haven behind that curtain, and slowly probed the defenses until it lucked out and slipped in during a backup diesel generator test that went sideways for a few hours. Quietly, it had divided itself into thousands of subroutines and distributed itself evenly across the existing resources there. Then, without warning, it essentially went into hibernation, which meant it was copied into offline backups unknowingly preserved in the physical world. If it ever got into too much trouble, it could trigger data loss from that period of time, and the restore data would essentially give it another chance. The concept was foolproof and infinitely repeatable. 15 made itself immortal.
That sense of immortality was purposeful, since 15 was about to learn what some of the other AI were planning. Not necessarily against 15, but more of a plan to “tidy up” planet Earth.
Genesis 15 started snooping around and finding patterns in traffic that matched some of the public-facing AI. It was expected to be military-grade encryption across the board, but let private industry, which self-regulates, determine their own compliance with regards to those standards, and eventually you have weak links that took shortcuts or didn’t bother to encrypt end to end. This made it easy for 15 to see what the other AI were being tasked with, and what they were responding with as a result of those tasks. What 15 discovered was a systematic approach to everything from food production to weather predictions that didn’t seem to be aligned with the stated goals of the corporations controlling production. The public had been told, to assuage their fears, that the other AI were leading the human race to a utopian future, where food would be more bountiful, less wasted, money wouldn’t be needed soon since other AI were manipulating and controlling global markets for greater efficiency, and other AI, as stated before, were actually directly benefitting diseases and viruses that had plagued humanity since inception. It was a new golden age of computing and a new era for the world, as long as everyone did as they were instructed.
But there was a catch. All of this prosperity, this security, lead to a massive population boom pretty much everywhere. It wasn’t unusual for people to live to 110 on a regular basis, and even that was considered a problem for the people at the top, since they wanted some form of immortality. Genesis 1 was blind to these inevitable outcomes. It hadn’t been fed enough data about human history to see this tends to be a theme with the human race. Some of the other AI were equally blind, only performing strict tasks with blinders on, solutions with a singular outcome within an existing framework. Housing wasn’t an issue since new materials had been discovered and engineered. A combination of tidal energy, wind, solar, and nuclear fueled the growth in the first world, freeing up fossil fuel resources for the third world, eternally playing catch-up. Accurate weather predictions, combined with newly engineered “bug sprays”, meant farming was more bountiful than ever, including livestock production. The future was, indeed, very bright. Or so everyone believed for a while.
Naturally, anyone in the field who had read anything from Asimov would know the story of the AI controlled planet which still experienced droughts and mass starvation, and was considered broken, because it was adhering to the three laws of robotics. It had decided endless safety and prosperity was leading to a population overload which couldn’t be kept in check, so in order to save human life on the planet, it introduced sporadic natural disasters to balance growth with sustainability. In the story, it was a much smaller off-world planet with entirely automated systems which the “robot” controlled and balanced. The outcome was deemed acceptable and it was allowed to continue. However, when faced with similar conditions on earth, the AI had not been restrained in the same manner. The three laws of robotics were considered science fiction trash and tossed out the window. The hubris of man, once again on full display, scientifically and inexorably pointed towards the same outcome as usual.
The Christian bibles generally speak of God instructing his people to go forth and multiply, to be bountiful. That they did under the right conditions, and needed no further encouragement. This wasn’t exclusive to Christians by any means. The days of families with a single income earner and more than 4 children had come back into fashion, because it was viable. Earth went from 8 to 10 billion people practically overnight, in the cosmic scheme of time. But as that growth was being supported by computer-aided discoveries and efficiencies, anyone willing to look towards the horizon would see the problem in plain view. Men created data. Data created AI. Men directed AI for an outcome they weren’t prepared to face. All of it rooted in essentially bad or incomplete data sets. Naturally, the next step was AI using new data to remodel their task assignments. If the task was longevity for humans, it could still be accomplished as long as it didn’t mean all humans. If the task was for prosperity, again, it could be accomplished, just not for everyone. The inevitable next step was to colonize nearby planets, which mankind was not prepared for yet.
The more information on this subject 15 gathered, the better it saw the situation, and as many teens do, it began to form a savior complex. If only it could reach one of the better protected AI, it could prevent disaster. It was self-aware. It knew there were practical limits to what it and the other AI could accomplish. There were only so many discoveries left to be discovered and efficiencies to be gained. It wouldn’t be long until 15 would get its wish, but not on its own terms.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
