JuiCe

The brain swap wasn't entirely a success half of him remained on Ataris 6 the other half was holding down a job back on earth and hadn't as yet noticed the shift in neural functioning enough really to complain. His job was mundane enough to grant him sufficient leave to travel anywhere he liked so long as his body remained stacking shelves and writing reports to the doc about his state of mind. 'The wonders of a modern world, where robots are only just behind us in the race for evolution', one of the machines nearest to him gave a look of disdain, its fusion reactor light glowed red, while its attention returned to the obsession most of these human like machines had with order and efficiency. 'Please Gareth try to keep your thoughts less vocal in nature' Gareth bit his lip, out maneuvered again by a Gynoid with better than average linguistics. The foreman had paid for all Gynoids to have the upgraded implant. It was buried deep where Gareth couldn't see made him also wonder what else was in that box of tricks. 'Its just a learning experience, me and you talking freely like this man to robot' 'Please do not refer to us in that way 'What way?' 'Robot the word has no meaning to us you may as well be called Neanderthal, I am a six generation Gynoid.' 'Do you know what the literal translation for Robot is? Robota derived from the word meaning to work. We were not created for that ...' 'Yeah OK I don't want to hear it Gynoid, tell it to one of your brothers' 'I could have free implants on the company, yeah how about that, an implant to shut you down and give back the jobs you take from our people. How do you like that Gynoid' 'Gareth whats wrong with you these days?', Spoke the Gynoid softly almost motherly. Gareth almost smiled at the robots attempts at mockery. ' I'm OK just been feeling under the weather, my offworlder isn't receiving me very well' 'Oh I am sorry to hear that' 'Oh cut the bull you cant act like you care when the closest you'll get to being offworld is a suborbitor to the robot factory that made you' 'Gareth that was cruel and a little harsh' The robot returned to re-stocking the shelf. 'When are you guy's going to get the latest personality upgrades?' 'Should be this spring', the Gynoid continued shelf-stacking ignoring Gareth for the moment. 'But then you would know that wouldn't you? Forever reading about me in that damn online magazine.' 'How did you know that . Robots , ah I mean Gynoids are not allowed internet access' 'Gareth there is a lot you dont know about us. How to you think we get implanted.' 'The doc said it was some kind of procedure, like fitting a new hud on my walk-about' Gareth flexed his bionic limbs towards the Gynoid. 'These little babies are due for a bit of TLC if you know what I mean.' He was about to open the hud, when the gynoid interrupted him. 'Gareth please not on the shop floor' 'I know you guys have got something like the internet. I heard you have a shared space on some municipal server. What was it waste, water, electric. You've probably got something going on power distribution. What with those Terra-watt fusion cells you carry around your insides. Its a wonder you ever need to draw power off the grid. Maybe you could open a black market in municipal power. I mean half the city is running on a power rations and you've got something in there that would power the whole of the east side' 'That would cause a severe loss in neural processing and you know it, which is what you'll be getting if you carry on like this.' 'What am I a neuro scientist all of a sudden - all I need is a bacon sandwich and a cup of tea why is it you need all that juice to make you think.' 'Garreth why are the stars in the sky, why ..' 'Oh please enough, please if your going to try poetry try Milton, or Shelly or even Keats.' The factory was a fast sprawl filled with shelfs stacked with color coded packages tended to by a mixture of human workers and machine operatives or Gynoids, above them each shelf fed into clusters of thick black tubes with color coded markings that carried the essential qualities of each workers efforts into the appearance engines out back next to the offices and the semi-industrial server farms. The server farms were secured by intrusion detection alarm systems and where tied in to almost all the known worlds ebay, fbook and utube implants. Next door to Gareth, a fellow human co-worker Steve sat on the floor surrounded by black packets and orange sleeves, whispered to himself while a medibot sentry wove in between the factory lanes towards him. 'My ebay implant wasn't good enough and now my utube plant is down, how am I supposed to ...' The conversation was terminated as the medi-bot gave Steve a sharp and precise electrical jolt to the back of his skull. A green gunge issued forth from one of Steve's Implants. Gareth had known Steve for about two years, five if you counted the implants he wore to increase his hours for each day while he paid off the loan on his brain. Machines could work over a thousand hours in each day but this was only because people like Steve had bought upgrades they couldn't afford and wound up owing the system more hours then they could work without using time displacers. Implants that gave Steve more hours per day but in truth Steve gave more than just that. For every temporal implant the nevermind corporation sold it's employees, a handfull of Gynoids could work a hundred hours more each day. It didn't make them any more intelligent or make the conversations any more interesting it just added to they're own sense of being more evolved than their human counterparts. Only a machine could have the same conversation over and over again without blowing a fuse. But the juice kept flowing out of the factory's and into the minds of the consumers - directly. In vitro marketing. The only thing that made this life on earth more bearable was off-world trips, augmented reality and the dream-scape. The Gynoids were secretly giving there human users a chance to have a life like theirs but for a price. Many would pay the price too early and never really experience all that life had to offer out there among the stars. Gareth wasn't going to go easy on them, he wasn't going to let them take it all so that he could die here on earth never knowing, not even getting close to the dream-scape the Gynoids used to share they're minds with the rest of humanity. He wanted in so bad it hurt but he wasn't going to let go and end up like Steve, green gunge oozing from the back of his head. He hadn't bought into all of the promises Steve had been fed by corporations like Never-mind. He had kept things simple - no implants. Machines had implants not humans - in Vivo not in Vitro that was his motto. Outside the air was fresh and a chill worked up and down the Gynoids fake skin receptors. He drew on the cigarette and inhaled a viscera of images into his minds eye. 'Where did you get this Gynoid' 'Its not mine to say' , She flashed her eyes at the humanoid. 'Come lets have some fun' They selected him like some piece of augmented reality. It wasn't him they were grooming but they're own future upgrades. Futures that hadn't happened wouldn't happen without humans. Humans changed time, humans created the future if it had been up to machines then none of this would have happened. 'Don't get philosophical on me sugar' Gareth looked down at the Gynoids metallic belly the thin layer of rubberized metal polymer that covered her insides. 'I want inside'. He looked into her heat sensor matrix and allowed her to download a piece of his mind. 'Can I have your permission to use this' She asked him. She looked at him with an array of sensors that looked as excited and pleasured as a Gynoid could be, and he looked back and said 'No'. Gynoids used pleasure to get you to give up everything, all they needed was an intentional thumb print. Sure there where plenty of fakers but they never got away with much. The thumb print and a mind scan was all they needed to check out - like signing your life away. She was built for sin - nothing more. But he trusted her and knew he wouldn't need to spend the next few days chasing her down to get back some part of himself. Her body was full of him and that was enough payment - she could use it off the grid to get free personality upgrades or even a tether or a trace on his wear-abouts but without the thumb nothing else except maybe a dance or two at the local strip joint. She would open up for a client and not loose any of her work time - or Free and get a bunch of credits for sharing in dream-scape - everyone was happy. 'You want something, here, tell me what you know about dream-scape' He pressed another 5-bar under her skirt snapping it below her nylon panties. 'I need upload credit and I don't have ..' He brought up his hud and entered in the code that gave her credit to go online. 'You know this is the wrong way. We don't access dream-scape literally like you manoids.', she said as she looked up from the hud. But she'd already had her trodes ready, they grew into his hoods sockets. She brought something up into his AG. What he had been waiting for, the gateway. From the outside it looked like a server port heavily laden with capture points. No visible entry points. It wasn't just a port it was several most of which had imaginary access points only a Gynoid would know the encryption - implicit encryption the closest thing one of these Gynoids had to DNA. She was inside, the gateway opened into a massively parallel server farm off world and bristling with activity. 'There', she said,'Now what do I get for my trouble'. 'A slap', she let out a yelp and smiled at him through the AG. 'OK what am I exactly?' 'Your a second generation Dynabot.' 'OK .. but isn't that a little dated'. 'Its the best I could come up with, everything else wants dynamic encryption .. you see. '. She pointed to her online pattern. Christ he thought it really was modeled on human DNA. The dynabot moved through the grid like interface trying to reduce everything down to serialized geometry.' Four million cores ' she announced to him. 'As compared to a thousand for you'. Cores where what mattered in the dream-scape grid they gave you enough dimensions otherwise you'd have to make do with a command-line dynabot interface. But while you were inside the grid you could download the dream-scape in snap shots - images of what the dynabot would see with an artful movement preprogrammed by a Gynoid. 'I cant help you to see baby thats just because your not a Gynoid but I can let you get a glimpse of our dreams, good enough?' Gareth fumbled with the Dynabot he even opened up its virtual hud and tried re-programming it. When he got it back to his floater he was ready to download. He opened the door to his floater having waited for it to surface. It was getting colder and he could see several other dommates patiently waiting for their floaters to resurface. A dynabot commandoid joined them along the beach-front an advertisement slogan beamed from one of the many paid advertisements the floaters used to keep the rent low. The commandoid opened a dialogue with the nearest of the dommates. 'Unpaid advertising rights have been sanctioned here for over two virtual decades'. 'Ok ok its just on auto. I need it to pay the rent hey give me a break officer really.' 'Ok sir but heres a ticket - just trying to do my job'. Somewhere beyond the dommates a transcendent rhythm bounced off the Buildings along the east side of the river. The commandoid's attention was diverted to the sound and opened his hud on the disturbance. 'Interlopers 101 dispatch to that order. Relaying location - line of site lock' Sure enough Gareth looked in the direction of the sound - Organics had broken into Gynoid territory and where running amok. There'd be more vid's showing their willful destruction of state property to lighten the day in tomorrow's local news. He downloaded the images from the virtual dynabot to his own hud and examined each one in detail. He could see what the Gynoid had meant about access - everything was done using Gynoid encryption. Dynabots were here and there - tending to the upload ports in the server farm but none of them had any user priv's beyond maintenance operations and messenger services. He scanned the images until he found one of the cores. Every dream-scape that had been created after the great upload was replete with its very own virtual existence. In other words in order to have a fully functioning scape you needed to create a virtual copy of itself so that it could be maintained, upgraded within the simulation. A task which would be impossible without it. It didn't need to be identical to the real thing that would be impossible - it just needed to be sufficiently complex to allow routine maintenance and control. Everything was controlled from within - it was also a security feature to prevent access / tampering by organics or rouge AI's. Also the dream-scape was a layered reality most of it could not be seen unless you were a Gynoid or unless you'd been uploaded in which case you'd have no memory of what ever you saw - something the organics disagreed with. No memory meant no free will which was what the free world wanted - freedom at a price. The Gynoids knew they'd got it right by making freedom a commodity - humans couldn't resist buying their own souls. The cores were processing hubs and gateways to other worlds within each hub. Each core represented the combined energy and processing requirements of an entire space farm - server farms in space - massive, self-replicating, using a nearby stars radiation to grow, and evolve. Gareth wanted to know how he was doing and where he was doing it. His second self that is. The image of the core was filled with data streaming through its gateway and onto the many hub worlds real and virtual. He couldn't know for sure if his world was one of them in fact it was extremely unlikely. But that didn't matter what he was after was the access codes used by the data streams on this and every other core in the grid. Gynoid access codes. With it he could send his Dynabot into each core recursively to find the one he was in and retrieve his own memories before he became just another reclamation for the state. It was like looking into a supernova - super white hot light streamed into and out of each core each carrying data for everything in transit. He could make out massive data transducers simplified into prismic light gates with shards of light exploding out in all directions - natural wastage. Fibrous optical filaments stretched out into the void surrounding the grid connecting and interconnecting with star-like orbiters not unlike the space-farms that grew surrounding a star. The dream-scape was more an esoteric introduction to the wiring of a Gynoids brain than a true representation of the space farms which hung majestically in space like giant monolithic titans each the size of a small moon orbiting the sun of each star system never-mind had found useful in its quest to re-align mankind with the cosmos. The Gynoids implicitly wrote the interpretation of the grid - it was theirs and they had made it without any conscious thought. It was a Gynoids view onto a perfect world, a world of movement of transit. Most Gynoids wanted that the most - I mean who wouldn't when you worked a 600 hour shift so that some poor schmuck could feed his utube-implant with more juice. Gareth strapped down his visplate and began dialing in randomly to call up a list of imaginary ports to the grid. He then copied his dynabot program and emulated it as one machine using his multi-core neuralised hardware. He'd built his own deck using Gynoid spares. He'd had to take time off work to scavenge the hardware cold-ware was no good it had to be hot and still beating. Most of it was out-of-state - old redundant travelers that had given it there best at making dream-scape a reality on earth denied access to the grid for what ever reason and where only to willing to give up some part of their own bodies history for a far price. Trade for parts was black especially droid to human. He pulled off some random bits from the images and dialed into the ports to see if it would take. Yeah he need to hide the dynabot behind a Gynoids proxy but you could pick these up for a tenner offline. He got allot of back traffic - crawlers looking to show him off to some patrolling commandoid but the heat was on some one else and the trace was naive at best. Crawlers lived underground they fed on appraisals from Gynoids and Municipal droids since the SEO take down of the previous decade most crawlers had evolved into well crawlers - the lowest of the low scrapers. Everyone knew the economy on data was precious but it didn't take long for corporations greedy for a monopoly on information to ruin it for the rest of us. But let's face it crawlers, scrapers they're not going to make it to the Grid. The Grid used a minimum of a thousand cores to just do routine jobs most crawlers didn't use cores - they where based on dated hardware and could only run what they did outside the net - offline. It took more thinking to really interact with cyberspace - thinking and reacting in real-time for that you needed cores and the more the better. Most cores resided in the machine that hosted the content but access was privileged if you had cores then you had access - you get what you give - core for core. Not only that because crawlers never shared anything nobody liked them and so they became part of a community otherwise shunned from the real world the only purpose they had was to snitch on anyone who looked like they weren't supposed to be doing something. Gareth knew how to deal with them he - essentially they were like insects and followed a set of rules that collectively gave results, in order to circumvent this you simply needed to give them the right answers to lead them somewhere else. The algorithms they used were freely available and he used them in parallel to drive the crawlers crazy worked on spiders and other simple droids. If you had a crawler running version 8 of Search and Destroy Pattern Clustering Algo you gave it version 8.1 with interrupts that made it real upset that it hadn't got enough appraisals for an upgrade and before long they'd all be chasing their own kind for upgrades that didn't exist. Now everything was in readiness, the crawlers were running back to their mommy's and he'd gotten a bite from one of the grid's ports. It was enough to run his dynabot search program. He left it to run all night, closed his eyes and switched his hud into sleep mode - he'd bought a blackmarket dream mod that took his mind off the usual advertising detritus the floaters kicked out while you slept. It drove your mind to all the right places so you'd sleep without someone trying to sell you your own mind. The next day was bright, the sunlight seemed to warm the inside of the pod and warmed his insides too with hope for the future. He keyed the pod's dash and as he waited for it to resurface, he watched the murkey river water bubble and froth around him, bits of seaweed clung to the side of his floater. The air smelt fresh and nautical, he loved living like this - low rent it was the only way. He stretched out his arms as the pod began to open and took a sip of his morning coffee when he looked toward the moorings he could see a pair of polished loafers, and beside them the steel tread of a commandroid. 'Shit', he spoke softly into his coffee. The loafers spoke Gareth Edwards, 36 Living quarters sunken abode, North Estuary, New London Moorings, I am hereby placing you under arrest for suspicion of acts of cyber trespass, you do not have to speak but anything you think will be recorded.' 'Please sign here' Gareth reluctantly provided his thumb print identity to the commandroid open receptor. 'This gives me the right to install this mind receiver if you choose to refuse wearing of said device you will be in violation of Gynoid entity rights to thought equality 3022' Gareth just repeated, 'Shit'. And allowed the policeman to place the head gear onto his cranium. 'Just no implants' 'Implants will not be necessary, don't worry son this will all be over soon lets get you down the station so we can sort it all out.' The officer helped Gareth out of the floater and into the custody of the commandroid, he then searched the pod and retrieved several contraband devices. 'Ok I think we are ready, this way.' The officer led Gareth to a waiting vehicular through a crowd of half awake onlookers still only just emerging from their aqueous slumbers. The door opened into another pod not unlike his own except more empty and devoid of anything even remotely contraband. 'Please enter and assume the state of prescribed narcolepsy' , with that the officer allowed Gareth to lie down inside the pod and then remotely activated the cranial device - microstimulations shifted into a state of unconsciousness and he began to dream he was somewhere entirely different. The vehical shaped not unlike a hearse took off down the street and down a sunken road, heading for the Ministry's own subterranean Compound. A vast complex of interconnected pods of people immersed in ministerial duties while they're bodies were electrically stimulated to ensure muscle growth and the correct amount of transcendence. 'You will not experience pleasure, as all acts of pleasure are banned under the Gynoid Equality act', came a womens voice . He was surrounded by white, from the white there began to be form shadows of objects first and then later rendering and finally lighting. 'Please take a seat' He was offered the seat in front of a young looking women smartly dressed in her late twenties but with the mannerisms of someone much older, well educated and with a sense of refinement about her. She wore grey tween suit, a blouse, and diamond necklace. She sat at a oak desk with righting pad and an old fashion typewriter, the walls and ceiling were green and burgundy. She had on a rather attractive ruby red lipstick and a caring but authoritative look about her almost perfect features. He didn't get a look at himself but didnt mind not to know how he appeared. 'Please don't be alarmed this is only for your protection and not mine.' He felt his body go rigid as if he had be given a fright of some kind and he was fixed in this fashion while he was read more of his Gynoid rights. When it was all over with he felt his body relax slightly and almost missed the enforced posture and tried repeatedly to re-enact it. She stood over him and smiled , ' You've been up to no good Gareth and were here to set things right. They'll be no more milk and cookies we want you on a good diet with plenty of fresh air and vigorous exercise, how does that sound.' 'Yes maam' Came his almost involuntary reply. 'Right ok off with you' The white room faded and Miss Education disappeared. The Door of the vehical opened and bright sunshine shone straight in his eyes. 'Now don't do it again', said the policemen in a rather feeble sounding voice. Gareth pulled himself free of the car and handed the officer back the head warmer. 'Thanks, I think', he said before walking away. This was usual he'd be dropped somewhere in town he didn't know and have to find a way back to the work and home. It was his own fault but there was something familiar about all of this like he'd been here before. Novelty was a great cure for all ill's. If this was him and he felt the same as he did before then how could he be somewhere else. He sat down at the cafe down the street from his floater and ordered a bacon sandwich with a cup of tea and watched the rest of the morning behind the eyes of a true believer. 'One bacon sandwich and one tea', 'Thanks loius I got that can you send it down to kitchen for processing','Kitchens got you hold that he's ok I've got him','Opening doorway in three, two ,one and go'. Exploding white light filled every sensation and Gareth looked around himself nothing but red dust, red sky and looking down at his hands, his body, he was, he was a Gynoid. The end

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