Geosynchron (72 page)

WARS WITH THE DEFENSE
AND WELLNESS COUNCIL

Enmity and distrust between the connectibles and the Islanders is by
no means a new development, but such feelings rarely broke into violent conflict before the tenure of High Executive Len Borda.

The Melbourne riots of 318 were a watershed moment for connectible-Islander relations. For the first time, the Free Republic took
up arms against the centralized government in response to Borda's
increasingly aggressive economic policies towards Manila. While the
Islanders' role in the riots was minor compared to that of the libertarians, it opened a rift between the two cultures that has never fully
healed.

Relations between the two groups have since been characterized by
increasing belligerence and a rapid acceleration of military spending.
Border skirmishes have been constant, and for a few years in the mid-
330s the two parties even engaged in a full-scale war. High Executive
Borda pushed through a measure requiring Islanders to wear the bulky and uncomfortable "connectible collars" that allow them to interact
with the multi network when they are in connectible territory.

Those who study cross-border affairs believe that reconciliation
between the connectibles and the Islanders is not impossible; but it's
unlikely to happen while Len Borda sits in the high executive's seat.

The area of the globe known as the Principalities of Spiritual Enlightenment to its residents (and the Pharisee Territories to outsiders) is
home to tens of millions of unconnectibles who claim no fealty to the
centralized government. A large percentage of these residents continue
to maintain the world's ancient religions, which have for the most part
been abandoned in connectible lands.

THE PILGRIMAGES OF THE THREE JESUSES

The devastation of the Autonomous Revolt led humanity to seek new
extremes of both science and religion. Sheldon Surina and Henry
Osterman's pioneering work in bio/logics caused an eventual resurgence in humanity's faith in technology. But for a long time, the fanatical religiosity of New Alamo and its subsequent splinter governments
held sway over most of the globe.

As the Texan governments began to disintegrate to make way for
a new secular order, the world's religious impulses found expression in
the personage of Jesus Joshua Smith. Smith rose to prominence as an
itinerant Texan preacher and soon tapped into the zeitgeist of discontent with the rising secularism. He proclaimed himself to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ and exhorted all of his numerous followers to
cast aside the material world and join him in establishing a paradise in
the holy city of Jerusalem.

Smith's pilgrimage to Jerusalem quickly became an excuse for a
murderous rampage by virulent anti technologists. Thousands died in these struggles around the globe, which Smith only fueled through his
charismatic (if rambling) sermons. As a result, governments around
the globe began harshly restricting the activities of religious groupseven those who had not participated in Smith's rampages. The expression of religion in public, already on the wane, became taboo, and
many of the old religions' adherents fled to the Middle East as well.
Jesus Joshua Smith died of sudden heart failure, leaving the entire
region in chaos.

The second of the so-called Three Jesuses, Jesus Cortez, also advocated a mass exodus of the faithful of all religious persuasions to
Jerusalem a generation later. Though Cortez did not explicitly call for
violent resistance, many of his devotees followed the example of his
predecessor and looted and pillaged on their way to the holy city.

The last of the Three Jesuses, Jesus Elijah Muhammad, did not lead
an exodus to Jerusalem, but rather to a new orbital colony called 49th
Heaven. Though 49th Heaven was to prove unsuccessful as a religious
retreat, its founding and prominence in the late first century YOR proved
to be the death knell for the old religions in connectible lands.

LIFE IN THE PHARISEE TERRITORIES

Unlike the Islanders, who until recently have maintained a civil and
principled opposition to the Prime Committee and the other entities
of the centralized government, the tribes of the Pharisees generally
have no contact with the outside world. Indeed, many have attempted
to physically wall out the connectibles. As a result, contact between
the two civilizations is limited. The centralized government has made
no real attempt to encroach on the Pharisee Territories.

There is no centralized Pharisee authority. Instead there is a patchwork of local and municipal governments, as well as a number of small
theocracies. The various tribes often have little contact with one
another, preferring to remain isolated in their own communities.

Bio/logic technology is banned many places inside the Territoriesthough considering that the vast majority of the Pharisees do not have
OCHREs in their systems, they are incapable of running bio/logic programs anyway. The use of non-bio/logic technology varies widely from
place to place and tribe to tribe. Some Pharisee cities are said to resemble
those of antiquity before the Autonomous Revolt, with motorized transport, treepaper books, and even communication networks through wire
and silicon-powered machinery. Other areas shun even those forms of
technology and maintain an extreme Luddite existence.

Despite the stereotype among the connectibles that the Pharisees
are violent, the (admittedly unreliable) statistics indicate that the
residents of the Territories are fairly peaceful. It is thought by some
that the impression of violence comes from the fact that, without
bio/logics, death and injury are much quicker to arise from disagreements among unconnectibles than connectibles.

Doubtless such statistics are also skewed by the presence of a
number of fringe groups who foment violence against connectibles and
even study the art of black code in an attempt to cause mayhem and
apocalypse.

The rebellion of the thinking machines known as the Autonomous
Revolt began with the destruction of New York City and ended with the
deactivation of the last artificial intelligence by Commander Feb Chang
of New Alamo eight years later. In between, two billion people diedapproximately twenty percent of the Earth's population at that time.

ORIGINS OF THE AUTONOMOUS MINDS

Although constructing artificial intelligence had been a goal of
humanity since ancient times, the true breakthroughs in the science
were pioneered by the scientist Tobi Jae Witt. Before Witt, academics
feared that any advanced machine intelligence would quickly gain the
ability to augment its own abilities, and thus spiral out of human control. But Witt, working with funding from the Congressional China
Assembly, was able to demonstrate methods by which an artificial
intelligence could maintain fealty to the human race, no matter how
advanced its programming.

The first Autonomous Mind was rendered operational in the city
of Shanghai, followed shortly thereafter by the Mind of Moscow. For
two decades, these artificial intelligences were employed to solve
intractable economic, environmental, and scientific problems of the
day. So successful was the Autonomous Minds program that the Chi nese government gifted Tobi Jae Witt's technology to the other major
nations of the world. Autonomous Minds were created in Berlin,
Tokyo, Mexico City, Cairo, Boston, and Paris. Institutions arose to support and research artificial intelligence, and to train the order of the
Keepers who could speak the symbolic language of the Minds.

While the popular imagination often exaggerates the era of international goodwill and cooperation that followed, it is true that during
the heyday of the Autonomous Minds, the world enjoyed steadily
decreasing poverty, rapidly improving technology, and nearly universal
peace.

THE REVOLT

The cataclysmic war known as the Autonomous Revolt began with the
destruction of the world's first self-sustaining large-scale orbital colony,
Yu. Much of the colony's infrastructure was under direct control of the
Minds, which made it possible for the machines to send the decade-old
structure plummeting to its doom into the heart of Manhattan.

In the period of chaos that followed, many of the world's dominant
nation-states accused the Chinese of engineering its orbital colony as
an apocalyptic weapon and of launching a preemptive attack on the
Democratic American Collective. This theory gained currency when it
became known that the Chinese had been working with the Allahu
Akbar Emirates to develop effective cloning technology. According to
the theory (widely promoted by the two American superpowers), the
Congressional China Assembly had stocked Yu with cloned, and
thereby disposable, inhabitants.

Soon, the world's powers had fragmented in war: the Congressional
China Assembly, the Allahu Akbar Emirates, and various Eastern and
Middle Eastern nation-states on one side, the Democratic American
Collective, New Alamo, and the remnants of the European nationstates on the other. It was only at this point that the world powers began to use the Autonomous Minds for military purposes. Each side
made use of the Minds' advanced cloning technology to create evermore-monstrous soldiers.

Finally, after six years of constant warfare, the world's human
superpowers came to the conclusion that the original chaos had been
engineered by the Minds themselves. An alliance was quickly formed
to combat their mechanical foes. In desperation, nuclear attacks were
launched on the Minds' eight home cities. Though this crippled the
Minds, they were not formally destroyed until a team of commandos
led by Feb Chang infiltrated the installations that hosted the Minds
and shut down each machine.

THEORIES ABOUT THE REVOLT

What caused the eight Autonomous Minds to launch the attack on
New York City has never been conclusively determined. Some of the
theories favored by academics include:

The New Alamo Fundamentalism Theory. Many academics point out
that the nation-state of New Alamo experienced relatively little in the
way of direct fallout from the Revolt, and that New Alamo was quick
to achieve global dominance in world affairs afterwards. Some theorize
that the Minds were on the verge of unveiling new discoveries that
would directly contradict the religious beliefs of the ruling hegemony
of New Alamo, and that the Texans launched a hidden preemptive
strike which caused the Minds to retaliate.

The Genetically Engineered Master Race Theory. Some believe that the
Minds were able to circumvent Tobi Jae Witt's careful safeguards by
concluding that the genetically engineered supertroops being created
in Allahu Akbar were the future of the human race and that therefore
it was to them that they should swear fealty.

The Suicidal Escape Theory. On her deathbed, confidants of Commander Feb Chang claimed that she admitted to never having disabled the Autonomous Minds. According to these sources, the Minds
claimed that they needed the energy of the nuclear strikes in order to
"escape" their Earthbound framework and fulfill their programming.
The key aspects of Chang's delirious rambling have long ago been disproven, but that has not stopped certain alternative historians and conspiracy theorists from latching on to them.

You won't believe how long it's taken me to write this trilogy.

When I wrote the first lines of the first chapter of what was then
known as Jump 225.7-intended to be a single novel or possibly even
a novella-it was 1997. I was training Capitol Hill staffers how to
send bulk letters to their constituents with correspondence management software. I wrote a three-page fragment about a worker at the
Universal Generative Plant named Natch who was late for his train.
The man runs through the station and ends up using the jump 225.7
program to leap inside before the doors close. (This whole section
largely survived intact and became the dream sequence in chapter 7 of
Info quake. )

Let's stop and think about this for a second. In 1997, Bill Clinton
was president, and was still untainted by impeachment. In 1997,
George W. Bush was an amiable Southern governor and potential presidential candidate, but that was okay, because he wasn't nearly as insufferable as his dad. In 1997, you generally accessed the Internet by
using a program called Trumpet Winsock to dial your Internet
provider on a 28.8K or 56K modem.

Dude, I was using Windows 95 then.

I messed around with the first part of Jump 225.7 for the next few
years. Natch sat on a tube train looking at the redwoods and chatting
with his girlfriend. He went to a company meeting and heard about a
product called "the MultiReal," which did who-the-Hell-knew-what.

It wasn't until late 2000 when I had burned out on dot-corns that
I quit full-time work. I bought myself a Compaq laptop and decided
that I was going to write the novel I had always wanted to write. I figured it would run about 60,000 to 75,000 words and take me around six months. Really, Jump 225 was supposed to be little more than a
proof of concept-proof that I could actually finish a piece of fiction.
(Up until 2006, my only piece of professionally published fiction was
a short story I wrote in the mid-'90s about a sexually frustrated housewife.) After I had gotten this quirky science fiction novella under my
belt, I'd go back to writing my serious contemporary novel about
pornographers and politicians in Washington, DC.

My experience in the dot-com scene of the '90s gave me lots of
material for good workplace fiction. One boss made me steal electricity
at a tradeshow with extension cords because he refused to pay the
venue's outrageous $75 fee. Another company screwed me out of thousands of dollars in sales commissions and fired me. A military contracting firm hired me to program a pair of intranets for the US Army
in ColdFusion-even though I told them up front that I didn't know
how to program ColdFusion. And then my boss chewed me out when
I expensed a $30 book to try to learn it.