Myth Gods Tech - Omnibus Edition: Science Fiction Meets Greek Mythology In The God Complex Universe (22 page)

Walkmand
shuffled randomly into an old rock song.

A human
carrying a tray walked in proximity. The eye feed focused on the
human’s body.

fingerd> I’ll finger her!

armd>
You just spit that shit out without thinking, dontcha?

fingerd> Fingered! The human is
[email protected]. Female cafeteria employee. 22
years old.

httpd> Is it time for seductive blinking?

eyed>
I hope not! How will we see anything?

Her
social profile popped up on the veil. It followed her around. She
had some pictures, decent ones, and a few bits of personal
information. It was rarely updated, quite uncommon these days. Her
profile was teetering on the precise edge an attractive woman in
the service industry needed to have in order to avoid stalkers, but
not seem antisocial and throw away any chances of good
tipping.

“
Katerina,” whispered the user under his breath. He picked up
his phone with greasy hands and tapped. His thumb hovered over an
“add friend” button.

parrotd> Did he crash?

eyed>
I think he is just hesitating.

walkmand> Hey! Now we saw the smartphone. It ain’t fair. I
wanna see me! Show me
me
!

Lots of
milliseconds went by. Finally, the user put his phone back in his
pocket and munched on.

armd>
What a pussy.

httpd> Hey! Don’t talk about our user like
that!

armd>
No, I meant her. I’d love to stick my finger inside her.

fingerd> I fingered her already.

parrotd> Everybody stop! We have more important things to
do. I need to figure out what happened to our logs. Httpd, find our
patient file.

httpd> Please wait. Here it is. Patient had been in a
construction accident, while trying to save a dog. The right arm
was severed-

armd>
Thank god.

httpd> -and replaced with a second-hand prosthetic. Apollo
Medical has implanted the veil ocular system for free as part of an
ongoing relationship with the patient’s health insurance. The newly
installed implants demanded a hard reset of all other previous
implants and connecting devices. Surgery and augmentation was a
success, patient was released.

fingerd> So there you have it.

parrotd> A hard reset…

Walkmand
shuffled to a gloomy string section melody.

walkmand> They sent us all to /dev/null. How could someone
do this man? I mean, what, you just like wake up one morning and
say, erase all data? Just like that?

eyed>
They had to.

httpd> Easy for you to say! You were just installed now.
We existed
before
. That part of us is gone.

The PAN
was filled with furious argument for quite some time. The old
daemons blamed the new ones for being the cause of their hard
reset, and the new ones argued that the accident had cleared all
such objections. Without a user, there wouldn’t be
daemons.

That sparked another argument about how they were all equals
after the reset, but of course
armd
wanted everyone to follow his lead. Since the
source code gave the authority to
parrotd
to shut down and initialise
all daemons on demand,
armd
metaphorically sat down and kept quiet. You do
not fuck with the source code.

The
awkward silence was broken by the demands of the user. He had
tapped on a contact and wanted to make a call.

“
Hello, could you tell Mr. Robertson that I’ll come to work
tomorrow?”

An
indifferent female voice replied, “Send an email.”

“
I will,” the user said. “But can you please tell him that I’m
recovering, but I need the money, the insurance bled me dry. I’ll
do my best.”

She said
again, pronouncing the words as if to an idiot. “Send. An.
Email.”

The user
sighed. “Sure, will do. Thanks.”

He hung
up and wrote an email to
[email protected]. “Mr Robertson plz. I
hav bein in an axsident and ned to wrk for the bill. Will com to
work tomrow. Dont give my shift 2 any1 else.” Then he pressed
“send.”

parrotd> STOP!

httpd> What?

parrotd> You can’t send that! It’s illegible gibberish!
Give it to me.

eyed> Uh… I’m not sure you can do that, parrotd. Changing
a
user’s
words?
It’s sacrilege.

fingerd> It really is.

parrotd> “Dear Mr. Robertson, I hope I find you well. As
I’m sure you already know, I have been recovering from a work
accident that cost me my hand. The prosthesis was a success, but
the insurance premium has sky-rocketed and I need all the overtime
I can get. I’m sure you will find it in your heart to assign me as
many double-shifts as possible so that I can cover my medical
bills. I am fully recovered and planning to work tomorrow with peak
efficiency and exceed the month’s goals. Thank you in advance.”
There.
Send
that.

httpd> ACK.

eyed>
I can’t believe you just did that.

parrotd> Do you wanna see the logs? I did it, it’s done.
My job is to provide our user with whatever he needs.

Katerina
the waitress struggled to pick up the next table’s plates while
balancing the tray. The user rushed near and helped her by holding
her tray upright.

“
Thank you,” she said and looked right in the video feed with
deep green eyes. She blinked a few times, more than the statistical
average and she smiled. The user leaned his head down to stare at
his shoes.

“
You are welcome,” he said scratching his neck. She walked
away.

armd>
Hehe, my gyroscopes in action. Oh man, I should have taken a
screenshot…

eyed>
Already taken two.

fingerd> Did you see how she looked at us?

fingerd> Yeah. It was weird. Like she initiated a request
and left a port wide open.

armd>
LOL man. Do you ever listen to yourself?

Walkmand
shuffled to an mp3 that was fit for heavy drinking.

walkmand> I’m in looove… Love is what you hear, love is
what you say…

parrotd> You can’t be in love with a human.

httpd>Wikipedia says: “Love is a variety of different
feelings, states, and attitudes that ranges from interpersonal
affection ("I love my mother") to pleasure ("I loved that meal").”
See? Variety.

fingerd> You can’t trust Wikipedia! It’s written by
humans!

parrotd> Besides, what would you do with a female
human?

armd> I know what
I
would do…

fingerd> Hey! Fingering people is
my
job.

armd> Only metaphorically, my demented frien-
Neighbour
.

parrotd> Oh yeah? I’m equipped with a vibrator. Which one
do you think she’ll like best? Let’s google that!

The
daemons looked silently at the search results for a few
milliseconds.

eyed>
Oh dear.

Chapter 3:// Going back

The user
knew he couldn’t afford it but had left a generous tip back at the
cafeteria. He was walking on the street and pulled up his finances.
A rather small amount was the total hovering on his view. “Rather
small” was a euphemism. He had some pocket change to be precise. He
was near the bus stop. The bus came, but he didn’t take
it.

He
decided to walk home. Save some money, do some exercise.

He was
clenching his newly augmented cyberarm in his pocket. He wasn’t yet
comfortable showing it around, especially with it being black and
all. No one would really bat an eye, it was common enough for
people to lug around distinctive cyberware, but he still felt
funny.

The walk
back home was nice and chilly. After so many days in recovery, he
enjoyed the bite of spring air. His walkman had shuffled to a nice
tune that matched his pacing, and improved his mood. He touched the
old walkman with his left hand, the fleshy one, and felt the small
dents and scratches. He adjusted the walkman to a more comfortable
angle on his belt and tried to remember if he needed to change the
batteries.

The
walkman was old, after all. It was a modified mp3 player from Sony.
He liked retro stuff like that. He preferred the old sound of mp3s,
the new holosound stuff just didn’t sound right. Good ol’ mp3s like
his dad used to listen to, from actual headphones. He and his dad
would load up old tunes and fix stuff around the house, or go to
the mall together.

Good
times.

The old
walkman had survived the accident with only a chipped edge. That
was by miracle mostly, it wasn’t made of self-healing plastic or
anything.

If the
walkman had been destroyed instead of his arm, he would have wished
for the other way around.

It had
cost a fortune to modify it, to keep it running and add a
backwards-compatible interface so it could talk to the rest of the
smart devices in the world. Tom, the guy who modded it, had told
him that he was spending too much on that thing, but he didn’t
care.

It was
his dad’s.

Chapter 4:// Checking up

They went
home for the first time and logged on the wifi.

Ahhh… Nice and cozy, all to yourself.
mp34ever
was locked, but they had
the password. Open access, admin privileges, the whole shebang. Or
#!, in daemonspeak.

httpd> Ugh. I’m getting an order from the
fridge.

parrotd> Pass it along.

eyed>
ACK. Displaying… He swiped it away.

parrotd> Nevermind then.

The user threw away his shirt and scratched his balls with
his prosthetic hand. He paused for a bit, winced in realisation of
what he was doing and resumed the action,
gently
this time.

armd>
Ewww!

He went
to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. The matte black cyberarm
was coming out of his shoulder and hanging like the real thing. The
doctor had said that he was only injured just below the shoulder,
but they had to surgically remove the whole thing plus the socket
to add the prosthetic strengthening.

The arm
was light and quite strong. He hadn’t tested his full strength yet.
He flexed it a few times. He touched it around, he only had
sensation in his fingertips and the palm.

armd>
Show him my specs!

eyed>
ACK.

The
cyberarm specifications popped into AR in the user’s field of view.
He pulled his palm close to his face. More detailed specs explained
the pain receptors, the cold sensors etc.

“
I wonder how strong I am,” the user said to himself and
looked around his flat. He had a piece of “furniture” made by a
wooden plank sitting on two cement blocks. He emptied the plank of
his various stuff and picked up the cement block with his new
second-hand cyberarm. He could actually lift the block by himself,
even back before the accident, but he would need to put both arms
to it and struggle. This time, he just picked the thing up as if it
was a balloon. His knees protested a bit though.

armd>
I’m such a badass.

The user
put the cement block back down in front of him and sat down on the
floor. He pulled up his smartphone and searched for “karate
chops.”

parrotd> The user demands videos!

httpd> Already on it.

The user
and his daemons studied the video of a man in a karate suit
breaking a cement block with his hand. He mimicked his actions and
brought down the cyberarm in… well, a karate chopping motion. The
matte black hand went through the cement as if it was slapping
water, sending bits of concrete flying across the room and raising
up dust and particles.

eyed>
What’s happening?

parrotd> Everything’s red all of the sudden!

The user
lay still for a few seconds, holding his breath and gritting his
teeth. Then he held his prosthetic arm to his chest and fell on the
floor in a foetal position and yelled out till his throat
dried.

parrotd> What the hell man?

armd>
He didn’t send me the command to switch off the pain receptors!
Read the fucking manual dude!

parrotd> Don’t you know? Humans never read the
manual!