Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
mubs has exhorted me to write something. I had some free time this weekend and nothing in particular better to do, so I sat and tried to do exactly that.
Sadly, I couldn't come up with much of any interest.
This is as far as I got. Not very.
Normally I wouldn't share something like this (it's got naughty words. You've been warned.), but today seems to have been a slow time, and two minutes of reading won't kill anyone.
Again, I don't know why I'm posting this. Just something to do. Also, the formatting is a little odd. phpBB doesn't seem to have a TAB character, and there are some line breaks in weird places. I didn't do it.
Nice night. A little foggy outside, but that's for the better, anyway.
Day after a new moon, too. Also in my favor. One last drag on the cigarette and it's off to work. It's all clear, from everything I can sense.
The ground's pretty warm. Even Washington gets enough sun in August to make the earth beneath my feet something between 28 and 35 degrees. That's good enough for me. There's a few rabbits and squirrels and deer and other small critters within a half-mile of me, and several of my senses tell me that the meat boys with guns on the other side of the wall are just about as far away from me as they're going to get. They sound like a goddamn herd of elephants, each and every one a stomp-clatter-rustle-stomp on audio, an indescribable cacophony to sonar and air-current sensors. Then again, everyone is.
Once I stomp the cancer stick out, it's time to start PAYING
ATTENTION. so I ramp up the sample time on each of my twenty senses. The butt on my boot is a pleasant 142 degrees, I note. I hear an owl swooping on a field mouse, 800 meters away. My chromatograph tells me the asphalt I'm standing on isn't good for my meat parts. No shit. The electric field on the fucking fence is screwing with some of my handier inputs. That annoys me on general principle. The talent on the other side is using ceramic weapons. Hard to get a read on those - but their body armor's mostly plastics. I can smell it. One of them's got an FM reciever tuned to "Kevin Smoov into the Morning" on KMSN.
It'll be a fun night in Redmond.
The price was certainly right. One hundred million Eurodollars, half up front. A nice, quiet place in a third world country, with the government of my choice. All on them. But, I told them, I'd do this one for much, much less. Twenty minutes of negotiations later, I had the opportunity thousands of people would sacrifice a major internal organ for.
"The Modern Howard Hughes" they said, referring to the man who survived more assassination attempts than Adolph Fucking Hitler.
Poison pies. Car bombs. ATF raids on the mansion... not to mention the time his body-guards shot him. Not that anyone's supposed to know about that one. The air strike was the last straw. Forty of the best and brightest engineers in the world killed, and nothing even got close to the damn bunker. He lives in the bunker now. Supposed to be double-thick layers of lead and reinforced concrete, fifty feet thick. He makes his own AIR for chrissakes. Nobody but him down there. There's supposed to be secret ways in, but security is so solid that their campus is blanked on spy satellites. He owns the software that runs them.
He doesn't own my software. My firmware to be more precise, and that's exactly what I am. I was meat. Now I'm not. Not entirely. Thirty
two RISC processors, on eight parallel circuits, each running at 72GHz, run most of my essential functions, embedded in two-dozen places along my nervous system.
At one time, I didn't think I'd ever understand it. Now that I have it, minute details of their existance are fully within my grasp. I have to.
Every motion I ever make is optimized. My machine heart beats in time to the requirements of my "Organic Management" subsystem. Nanofiber muscles absorb energy in any form provided. I feel the world around me, the ebb and flow of a telecommunication ocean. I see colors that no other human has ever seen. So I have a simplified digestive system and a few new holes in my head? It's worth it. I gave up those major organs. Now I get my chance.
There are three of us in the world right now, the fruits of eleven years of R&D in government labs so secret that the engineers working there didn't even know who was funding them. Of course, the first time the goddamn presidential administration changes measurably, our funding dropped to nil and they just dumped our sedated asses on street corners. Somehow, I don't think any of us are still derelicts.
I call up Callas' Tosca on my internal audio channels. "Vissi d'Arte" blares in at 110 virtual decibels as I hit the free-fire zone around the fencing. It's burned to bare earth a kilometer from the outermost fence. There are watchtowers, too, and enough different sensor arrays to even give my kit a jolt.
The watchtowers don't bother me a bit.
Micronuclear devices are exactly the sort of thing that make the leaders of first-world nations piss themselves in their sleep. The football-shaped Pakistani grenades that qualify me as a nuclear power must be keeping at least a couple of spooks in every nation in the Northern hemisphere employed. Some joker stencilled "Throw Very Hard" on outside casing of this one. Nuclear grenades are suicide weapons, of course. For most people. Two kilos is just a bit too much to toss
around like a frisbee. Anybody thinking otherwise need only look to the glassy shores of the Ganges. Still, I manage just fine to clear the 900 meters between me and the fences.
I hit the dirt the instant before I'm blinded. Internal clocks show that .0753 seconds elapsed while most of my critical systems rebooted.
Sadly, I couldn't come up with much of any interest.
This is as far as I got. Not very.
Normally I wouldn't share something like this (it's got naughty words. You've been warned.), but today seems to have been a slow time, and two minutes of reading won't kill anyone.
Again, I don't know why I'm posting this. Just something to do. Also, the formatting is a little odd. phpBB doesn't seem to have a TAB character, and there are some line breaks in weird places. I didn't do it.
Nice night. A little foggy outside, but that's for the better, anyway.
Day after a new moon, too. Also in my favor. One last drag on the cigarette and it's off to work. It's all clear, from everything I can sense.
The ground's pretty warm. Even Washington gets enough sun in August to make the earth beneath my feet something between 28 and 35 degrees. That's good enough for me. There's a few rabbits and squirrels and deer and other small critters within a half-mile of me, and several of my senses tell me that the meat boys with guns on the other side of the wall are just about as far away from me as they're going to get. They sound like a goddamn herd of elephants, each and every one a stomp-clatter-rustle-stomp on audio, an indescribable cacophony to sonar and air-current sensors. Then again, everyone is.
Once I stomp the cancer stick out, it's time to start PAYING
ATTENTION. so I ramp up the sample time on each of my twenty senses. The butt on my boot is a pleasant 142 degrees, I note. I hear an owl swooping on a field mouse, 800 meters away. My chromatograph tells me the asphalt I'm standing on isn't good for my meat parts. No shit. The electric field on the fucking fence is screwing with some of my handier inputs. That annoys me on general principle. The talent on the other side is using ceramic weapons. Hard to get a read on those - but their body armor's mostly plastics. I can smell it. One of them's got an FM reciever tuned to "Kevin Smoov into the Morning" on KMSN.
It'll be a fun night in Redmond.
The price was certainly right. One hundred million Eurodollars, half up front. A nice, quiet place in a third world country, with the government of my choice. All on them. But, I told them, I'd do this one for much, much less. Twenty minutes of negotiations later, I had the opportunity thousands of people would sacrifice a major internal organ for.
"The Modern Howard Hughes" they said, referring to the man who survived more assassination attempts than Adolph Fucking Hitler.
Poison pies. Car bombs. ATF raids on the mansion... not to mention the time his body-guards shot him. Not that anyone's supposed to know about that one. The air strike was the last straw. Forty of the best and brightest engineers in the world killed, and nothing even got close to the damn bunker. He lives in the bunker now. Supposed to be double-thick layers of lead and reinforced concrete, fifty feet thick. He makes his own AIR for chrissakes. Nobody but him down there. There's supposed to be secret ways in, but security is so solid that their campus is blanked on spy satellites. He owns the software that runs them.
He doesn't own my software. My firmware to be more precise, and that's exactly what I am. I was meat. Now I'm not. Not entirely. Thirty
two RISC processors, on eight parallel circuits, each running at 72GHz, run most of my essential functions, embedded in two-dozen places along my nervous system.
At one time, I didn't think I'd ever understand it. Now that I have it, minute details of their existance are fully within my grasp. I have to.
Every motion I ever make is optimized. My machine heart beats in time to the requirements of my "Organic Management" subsystem. Nanofiber muscles absorb energy in any form provided. I feel the world around me, the ebb and flow of a telecommunication ocean. I see colors that no other human has ever seen. So I have a simplified digestive system and a few new holes in my head? It's worth it. I gave up those major organs. Now I get my chance.
There are three of us in the world right now, the fruits of eleven years of R&D in government labs so secret that the engineers working there didn't even know who was funding them. Of course, the first time the goddamn presidential administration changes measurably, our funding dropped to nil and they just dumped our sedated asses on street corners. Somehow, I don't think any of us are still derelicts.
I call up Callas' Tosca on my internal audio channels. "Vissi d'Arte" blares in at 110 virtual decibels as I hit the free-fire zone around the fencing. It's burned to bare earth a kilometer from the outermost fence. There are watchtowers, too, and enough different sensor arrays to even give my kit a jolt.
The watchtowers don't bother me a bit.
Micronuclear devices are exactly the sort of thing that make the leaders of first-world nations piss themselves in their sleep. The football-shaped Pakistani grenades that qualify me as a nuclear power must be keeping at least a couple of spooks in every nation in the Northern hemisphere employed. Some joker stencilled "Throw Very Hard" on outside casing of this one. Nuclear grenades are suicide weapons, of course. For most people. Two kilos is just a bit too much to toss
around like a frisbee. Anybody thinking otherwise need only look to the glassy shores of the Ganges. Still, I manage just fine to clear the 900 meters between me and the fences.
I hit the dirt the instant before I'm blinded. Internal clocks show that .0753 seconds elapsed while most of my critical systems rebooted.
.
