Started writing this, couldn't stop so here it is..
In the midst of the twenty first century the thinking machines started to emerge from the labs of the mega corporations. The CEOs had such high hopes for their pets but as you would expect (if you read any amount of Scifi) unleashing a second sentience on the face of the earth was never going to go smoothly.
Ncorp were probably the first to succeed and fail. And they did both on such a grand scale. At its peak Brain had a neural capacity just over fifty times the human average but with an I/O capability of many thousands of times that of a mere mortal. Later attempts by others were much less ambitious. It is easy to tut tut at their ambitious folly but in the half an hour Brain was ‘live’ it went from goo goo ga ga through to producing the first real derivation of general relativity from Bartsons GUT. The fact that in its last five seconds of life it effectively changed the face of human economic theory forever (not to mention scuttling Ncorp) is still seen as the single event that changes all human futures.
The Brain algorithm, as it became known, was a wonderful gift to the world. To bad it took SoCom four years to pick over the intellectual property they had picked up in the Ncorp acquisition. Howard Jones had not been idle during this period just pre-occupied surviving the post Brain bust economy.
His work on Brain made him a very nervous man, especially after his face had appeared on every media space in connection with the Brain Bust. It is hard to imagine but back then you could not exist if you didn’t exist in the E-conomy. There was no such thing as a favour transaction and even hard paper was history at that stage so keeping a low profile if you were a celeb was basically impossible. It’s not that he was a criminal he was just seen as the ‘bastard responsible for this mess’ for the common media (and folk).
Brain did love Howard and did not kill him. In those four years Howard wished Brain did.
Each step created an avalanche of unwelcome noise as Howard walked across the snow covered park to meet yet another ‘friend’. His miserable life was now an unconnected series of short stays with the unconnected. Back last century they were called tin hats. Sort of a reference to the loony’s who wore tin foil hats to stop the government/aliens/Russians etc from seeing their thoughts. These were the people who stood up against the tide and kept there lifes to them self.
Even from half way across the park a faint glow behind glasses was the tell tail that he was being made. The process where his bio was read, integrated, and checked against some criteria confirmed his ID to the ‘friend’. Most folk these days had neural implants but this guy was of the very paranoid sort who used an old fashion HUD display in his equally antique glasses. Howard was never a follower of fashion but the recent trend of people wearing glasses had served his purposes very well. His own implants had fried with Brain.
He always kept his HUD adjusted so that not even the faintest glow could be seen on his face during transactions. The Friend IDed as a real friend, or more accurately, an old acquaintance. His name was Zac Dracovitch who had been one of the lab technicians from Howards undergraduate days at UWA in Australia.
“Hey, good to see you man’
“Follow”
Howard decided not to push and complied, he had learned to keep him mouth shut when these guys wanted. The differences in stride between the two men crunched out a strange 5/7 time through the frozen night. The walk seemed to last forever. He could no longer feel his nose and his cheeks were burning. When they arrived at genuine combustion engine driven vehicle.
“wait” Zac said as he tapped a few numbers into a old fashion key pad concealed under a hatch in the vehicles door. A equally quaint LED display rolled a ser9ies of numbers. Zac then tapped a few more digits, pulled a key from his pocket and proceeded to open the door.
He new that only the inescapable government net was aware of his location but within 24 hours he would be invisible, or visible as one of the nice people who were helping him.
The plan went something along the line that he would drop out and his marker would stall here in nowhersville. Then through a good deal of slight of hand the good towns folk would provide their identities for long enough for him to pass himself along a chain of unconnected IDs and back to civilisation as a new man – literally.
