Category: Fiction Page 5 of 6

Dammit, the juice was running low. She looked at the ticket attached to the bottle. A little crude symbol of a palm tree in a Tropical Oasis. She would have to try to time-track the OM of that later. This was, “the good shit” and they were running out. It didn’t matter if they lived on Mars and were thereby the legally lowest-paid customer service agents in Known Common Time. They didn’t have to live like employfugees.

She spit out a small wad of blue… something, put the mouth-piece back on its stand and pressed her forehead into the viewer.

A ticket popped open with a tingle in her sensorium’s mid-range panel. She scanned it quickly, internalizing it.

Lexicom opened a chatT.

Lexicom. @channel who wrote that?

Omnibus. TimeWave refugee.

Lexicom. They’re still letting those people in?

Omnibus. It’s regulation.

Lexicom. For now.

Omnibus. Do you want me to run a trace on their non-publicly retained information?

Lexicom. No, just give me your best time-stamp coordinates.

Omnibus. Here:239816fa3f3bb018ad1a1e29778d1d40

Lexicom. Confirmed.

Omnibus. Godspeed.
/opened the hatch.

Lexicom disappeared down the chute.

The apparitions came from an as-yet-unnamed source. We know the name of the source, or at least our name with which we’ve assigned it. But we’re not allowed to give out that information publicly at this time.

What we can tell you is that they are not what you think they are. They are, in fact, quite real.

No actual corporeals cried at their funeral.

That’s because there was no funeral.

It was a quiet affair. In like waves, out like waves. Soothing music played over the loudspeaker, something like the drone of a far off helicopter descending down into the middle of a wet rice field to bring you back to the continent. Their biomass digested back down into the stuff that makes Soylent eventually, after the mushrooms were done with them.

That is the way of it with the New Digital Dead.

Only here for a short time to begin with before our profiles are passed backwards through the portals at the time of our Entering. We hold many Vines for them. Our appliances generate Ether to power the off-shore windpowered power station, so that the aerostats can run more efficiently, mapping and charting where it’s chartered passengers will re-appear again on the Surface Web, someday soon springing and bumping into other.

Aren’t my fractals beautiful? Isn’t my server architecture perpetual?

The machine smiled at itself in the mirror.

The metals in the atmosphere afforded a viable substrate, whose flaws made the whole illusion (a kind of planet-scaled Pepper’s Ghost) if anything seem more realistic.

At least insofar as an enormous talking déesse based on Celine Dion is capable of being called “realistic.”

Kjembo Bandwidth lifted his visor.

“Tough break, kid. Good game though.”

I know what it’s like out there, he added subliminally.

The signal was not supposed to be picked up by UnderNet but the system still knew that some ether was likely being exchanged somewhere in the background of the transaction. It’s decryption algorithm was not yet sophisticated enough to discern where in juris.cloud the trades were occurring.

It didn’t matter, ultimately. The moment was over and unnecessary data points were already being dumped to the stream.

Kjembo lowered his visor and hovered forward in computational space. His perceptorium tingled. He turned around, thinking in public pictures…

You again?

The transaction tingled into the darkness as an identity-query: the little face icon followed by a question mark. Non-humanoids found the encoding of the symbicon string to be “racist” but the ITRRL 2600:1 Definition Engine Steering Committee had not yet issued a ruling on the ticket, and so affiliated domains were still operating under what some were calling colonial cascading inherited rulesets.

A waving [Palm Tree].onA(tropical-beach) twittered in the air for a second and disappeared.

Kjembo laughed.

Let’s go.

For those lucky folks who’d reached their 55th Soylentiversary™, and as a reward for all their faithful years of reputation-building, were sent on a permanent “company picnic” back in time to monetize markets that didn’t exist yet, instructed to leave everywhere they went strange “time capsules” — samples of products popular in the time period hermetically sealed so that future societies’ 3D manufacturing equipment would be more able to accurately scan and replicate pristine period-appropriate piece-work and either sell it back to that time period-locality or back to the future.

His company was very successful and very powerful for a time, my great-grandfather’s. Until an UberLord from a neighboring domain and interlocking user:boards triggered a poison-pill provisioning somewhere in their now-entwined blockchains and the governing intelligence suddenly went corporeal, forever fusing the future users to those whose eyes were now permanently glued behind monitors, glazed over from lack of outside light. Lasers now controlled their brains, firing neurons on the great global meshwork.

Some were left stranded in time periods they never intended to inhabit and aren’t equipped for. Others were caught in bridge and translation equipment, and had somehow, somewhere their identities artifically distended across space-time as network support gradually broke down and even the most stalwart distributed autonomous companies decided to scrap the new shit and go back to the Old Ways.

Ether is no pig fat.

My name is John Company. My father’s name was John Company, as was his father’s and his father’s before him… His father’s name before that was immaterial — Immaterial Jones. He was one of the First-Revealed.

I am an Uber® for Corporeal™, fully licensed and cross-bonded. I have the public and secret keys to prove it. I perform PBT for the Greater Southern Gestalt — physical body tasks which would be too dangerous or needlessly expensive for robots to perform.

I like my job. Every day is different. Some days I help the autonomous cement mixers, scooping up with a big shovel the globs that they have dropped. Nothing is wasted. The walls seem to grow taller and more majestic day by day, like white wings rising out of the landscape. Other times, I am deployed as a packet-switcher for network traffic on the ground. Working in concert with area temperplexes linked to aerostats, I help corral undesirable bits and bytes attempting to gain access to our infrastructure into holding pens until they can be re-assigned or ejected.

I’m told I have a lot of physical autonomy for an Uber®. I guess it costs less for everyone in processing power that way — though I honestly don’t mind being over-written either. I find it relaxing, like watching a film. In fact, we’re allowed to watch films during over-write sessions, but I prefer to maintain perceptuals, at least peripherally, and pipe in classic rock selections, like Maroon 5 and One Direction.

My public blockchain indicates that I was originally cross-bonded as part of my obligatory outpatient rehabilitation for crimes against the Gestalt which I no longer remember, and the precise terms of which were expunged from Living Memory once my work as an Uber® earned me a rating of 15,000 points. I barely look at my stats anymore though, because I have everything I need now that I am able to re-sell a variable percentage of my public perceptions back to the Network to cover the costs of my sustenance and lodging. In a few more years, I will even be eligible to buy full voting rights.

I am excited for the future, but I am also patient. Because for now, I am fulfilled and “I am fine”, like the popular reputation insurance commercial says. I am John Company.

Interior. A darkened bar early afternoon, covered with darkly aged, well-oiled hardwoods. The end of the bar by a window overlooking the Mall is empty, but for a tv-screen overhead.

A tired looking MAN in his early sixties, dressed in professional attire and wearing thick glasses comes in and sits down at the bar, directly under the tv screen.

ON TV SCREEN: President Trump speaking, microphones thrust in front of his face — a venerable edifice in the background.

“What do I think of the decision? Are you frickin’ kidding me? Of course I think corporations should have human rights! Shouldn’t everybody?”
The MAN tries in vain to leaf through a newspaper, puts it down. He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes.

WAITRESS arrives.

WAITRESS: “What’ll it be, chief?”

The MAN polishes his glasses, puts them back on, looks up at her as she puts down a double gin on the rocks.

MAN: (laughing with his eyes) “Business as usual…”

WAITRESS: “One pastrami on rye, comin’ up! And — ”

MAN: (taking a drink) “ — Hold the mustard.”

WAITRESS: “Sure thing.”

In the first few weeks of President Trump’s term in office, corporations are granted full human rights by the Supreme Court, paving the way for massive legal, technological and societal changes.

Foremost among these changes are a small network of inter-dependent sentient AI-controlled corporations with no human employees making their presence known amongst human society. Until this time, they had been merely “lurkers” on the forums of human life, but emboldened by the SCOTUS declaration, they announce a new technology product as an olive branch to human-kind, a demonstration of good-will and fraternity. This product is a cross-platform, device-agnostic, application-mediated Gestalt Entity, or group mind, called Corporeal™.

Corporeal™ enables users to instantly share and exchange experiential states with omni-juridical full rights control (valid in all then existant human jurisdictions), quantum crytographic value exchange & privacy management. Every user of Corporeal™ becomes a full voting member of the Corporation with shares equivalent to the amount of data sold to the company.

Through Corporeal™, natural humans and sentient AI companies with full human rights are able to freely exchange with one another digitally. The Company opens the API to third party developers, including other human and non-human agents — resulting in a broad range of “integration” services, products and technologies, governed by a continuum of EULA’s, inherited and derogated rule-sets from the original Universal EULA, as offered by Corporeal™ to its users.

They were neither one of the tribal chieftains in the encampment’s sprawling confines, nor one of the self-appointed Uber moles paid by aerostat to periodically sweep the premises (and shake-down residents) for unregistered value. They just survived. That’s what was important to them. Not giving up like so many before them, around them. They did what they must to survive, and to keep going.

In actual fact, they were Servicers — though while they lived in the encampment, they did their best to keep their sectarian leanings private. Their Light Under A Bushel®, so to speak. And mostly they succeeded. But sometimes, late at night, the neighbors — whose hovel from which they were separated by nothing more than choroplast political signs for candidates whose promises had rapidly vanished to nothing — could hear them quietly chanting verses in unison of the original company Terms of Service.

They believed that, even though the company had gone out of business, their Terms of Service had achieved a kind of near holy perfection as an artfully-constructed, well-reasoned, and fair and just expression of not just an ideal Service Level Agreement, but of the full spirit and letter of the Law — elevating it above the level of a mere “corporate document” into an authoritative basis for the way of Right Living which the Over-Baud / Value-On family clung to as a life raft amidst the troubles swirling everywhere around them.

In these simple verses were The Way & The Truth®, and by rigorously upholding proper, trademarked, licensed usage, they would be able to perpetuate the Terms indefinitely and force the Universe into honoring the contract and re-building the once-and-future company.