Chapter One- Alaric B.
It was 7:63 AM. Alex's nighttime life support computer woke him up with the usual cheerful "Good Morning, Full Name Unknown!" Alex's proper name was Alaric B., after the supercomputer, Alaric Beta, that supplied most of the computer chips embedded in his brain, but the name Alex Brown tended to get fewer stares from hotel receptionists. With a sigh, Alex strapped on his secondary life-support canister. He didn't want to get up yet, he had been having a very nice Digi-Dream®, with terrific 4-D graphics, surround sound, and the new standardized REM patterns. The canister began to make its mechanical breathing noises, so reminiscent of Darth Vader from the ancient videodisks of Star Wars that his uncle, an enthusiastic antique collector, had acquired at an auction last year footnote (not that conventional years meant much anymore with 8 days in a week and anywhere from 25 to 120 days in a month). Groaning, he heaved himself out of bed and made his way to the bathroom. Here, he undid his secondary canister and swiftly replaced it with his primary one, a small metal plate. The plate supplied his bloodstream with the gaseous mercury-glycerin solution that his cybernetic lungs needed to survive. A digit changed in the plasma-screen clock set into the bathroom mirror, and a soft warning began to blip. Grimacing, he ran out of the bathroom, changed into his uniform at almost inhuman speed, and dashed out of his front door, pausing only to grab a waiting Nutri-Matic thermos, and to utter a hurried good-bye to his mother. Rushing outside, he groaned as the fading echoes of a starting engine reached him. He had missed the shuttle to school for the third time this week. Alex was thirteen, and though he didn't know it, he was soon to have much more pressing problems than being late to school. Problems with solutions that could affect the entire fabric of time and space.
Chapter Two- Late to schoolAlex sat dejectedly in the back seat of his father's SUV Jumbo. At fifteen feet tall, twenty yards long, and fifteen wide, the car was a tad larger than absolutely necessary, but at least it wasn't the largest one out there. As he sat in passenger seat 42, staring out the window, he reflected on how badly the planet was doing. He did this a lot, and he had long since come to the conclusion that humans might as well not have evolved in the first place grammar? for all the good they did. He watched, bored, as a pig flew past the window. This species of pig was widely regarded as the greatest breakthrough in the science of cloning and gene-splicing. Some people chose to see it as final, irrefutable proof that the apocalypse was coming. Others praised the progress that had been made in the scientific and said that the biologists ought to be awarded a Nobel Prize. The Apocalypse crowd won out, though, and the scientists were lynched by an angry mob of paranoid jerks on depressant medication. Still, the flying pigs had multiplied out of control, and the world had not yet spontaneously imploded. The following scandal had led to the outlawing of any form of genetic experiments for about five months, until the senate got wind of a mycologist who had been locked up for trying to breed a new form of mushroom. Footnote
When Alex arrived at school, he was forced to sit through the same recorded reprimand from the sim-principle that he had on Monday for being late. The school's central server had a lecture and punishment for every occasion; vandalism, truancy, tardiness, not paying attention, etc. The lectures changed every week; apparently the artificial intelligence that wrote them wasn't smart enough to consider the possibility that anyone might need to here one more than once a week. The upside (for the students) of having sim-schools was that artificial intelligence didn't consider allot of things. For example, the fact that listening to one of these fifteen minute lectures caused the rule-breaker in question to miss half of the first cyberlesson of the day, which in Alex's case happened to be math. Alex started listening again just in time to here the sim-principle dismiss him. He took a late pass from a slot at the base of the hologram projector, placing it on the laser printer for an authorization stamp.
He walked down a plain, windowless steel hallway to a door marked with his name. Opening his door, he stepped into the small cyber cubical. Unclipping his life support plate, he held his breath as he turned a valve on the wall. In seconds, the room was filled with the special gases he needed to survive. Exhaling deeply, he clipped his plate onto the accommodating grove on the wall to recharge. Sitting down at his desk, he glanced down at the touch-sensitive LCD/HD/plasma screen shining through the semi- transparent laminated wood surface. It read: Good Morning Alaric B: LATE PASS? He tapped the "Yes" button and placed the plastic card on the scanner. The screen flashed: "PASS ACCEPTED" and several things happened in quick succession. The steel walls slid back, revealing enormous full-wall sized monitors. The front wall panels rearranged themselves, and soon Alex was sitting in a room that resembled a miniature IMAX theater. The monitors turned on, switching to VR frequency, and suddenly they each displayed a different angle that a classroom could be viewed at, creating the illusion that he was sitting in a classroom. A pixel-generated computer-graphic teacher was at the front of the virtual room, droning on about the "Advanced Theory of Trigonometry" not that Alex was paying attention. He didn't have to. His brain's computer components automatically recorded everything he saw or heard, shifting them into auxiliary backup memory. All he had to do during a test was to access these "files" and "Vuala!" Instant A+. He slumped down in his seat, and a sharp pain shot through his cybernetic lung, triggering a flashback to the reason that he needed 24-hour life support. A flashback to that faithful evening in February…
Chapter Three- Flashbacks.
February 3, 2993
Alex was eight years old, and his family was going on a tour of Son-Tech Computers and Gaming, SO. headquarters, where his father worked as a programmer. SOTE-COG was, at the time, one of the largest manufacturers of Virtual Reality technology in the country. Alex and his mother listened with half-interest as his father, Michal Brown, explained the importance of nanotechnology in VR goggles, and soon Alex began to tire of the constant computer talk. As they passed through a hallway covered in computer-graphic circuit breakers, his father mentioned that they might like to see his office. Grateful for a break from the monotony of walking down hallways, they agreed. It turned out that his office was just around the corner, so they reached it fairly quickly. It was shaped like a SOTE-COG computer, and as they stepped through the holographic mouse that served as an entrance, an alarm rang. Immediately, the hologram projector switched its projection rate to solid light particles, and hidden vacuums compressed the air molecules, causing them to bond more sufficiently, until the entire doorway was sealed. transparent and mouse shaped, but sealed. His parents were still stuck on the outside, leaving him trapped in a room that was rapidly the corner informed him that the lock-down was due to a fatal case of Electronic Plague.
Electronic Plague, or EP, was a type of virus that had developed only in recent years, when computer-networking technology had taken a great leap forward. When a computer is given a task that requires so much memory, data, hard disk space, etc., that the computer has no room for it, it will wipe all other programming, applications, and other space consuming items off of its hard drive, and devote all of its circuits to solving the task. If this is still not enough, than it will commission all of the surrounding electrical components, be they supercomputer or pocket calculator, overhauling there entire being, molding there purpose to the sole problem of the task in questions until more electrical components can b found and accesed by wireless transmitters. and more, and still more, and so on until it had finally amassed enough memory to either solve the problem or self-destruct.
The computer in the office was shaking. Already, its circuits were overwhelmed by whatever task had caused the EP. Normally, it would have transferred the data to another computer, but the quarantine prevented this. All connectors to the outside world were broken, and every wireless transmitter had been automatically shut off. Ancient programming text was flickering across the screen. For a split second, the monitor displayed the stylized SOTE-COG logo, then it reached absolute overload. What happened next was the technological equivalent of a supernova. The computer was blasted apart, and Alex very nearly was too. His ribcage was crushed by debris, and his head was blown open. Bones cracked like twigs, and vital pieces of his brain were blasted into oblivion. Later, the head techies said that a combination of the fried circuits, the vacuum in the room, and unstable plasma in the monitor caused the explosion. Not a healthy combination.
Later, in a medical clinic in Jupiter city, a team of medical experts repaired Alex's body. They coated his ribs in plasti-bind, and replaced his lungs. Small pieces of rubber took the places of the chips of missing bone. They also rebuilt his mind, replacing the scorched brain tissue with donated cerebrum, and reconstructing the missing pieces with artificial intelligence components taken from the cannibalized remains of the once-great supercomputer, Alaric Beta. Finally, they encased the whole thing in a plexi-glass skull covered in synthetic skin.
then, they turned on the defribulator.
Chapter Four- TITLE?Alex was yanked back to the present by the bell. Looking around, Alex saw that the images on the plasma screens were fading, changing, and re-arranging themselves to display the Virtual cafeteria. Sighing, he reached under his seat and pulled out his Nutri-Matic thermos. he was about to open it when the 1812 overture started playing in his pocket. He pulled out his iPod, flipping the camera cover shut, and selected the "incoming call" icon on the screen. The words: "Receiving video transmission" flashed once, and the 3-D image of a spider began scuttling across the screen. Alex deleted the message before it could tell him that he could "win a free chance to win a free raffle ticket to a free ticket on a sim-cruise liner making a vague attempt to move the cursor in the general direction of the spider and clicking. Tele-vid marketers. A three-way combination between telemarketers, criminals, and spammers. Alex added the Telephone-Proxy number to his "Blocked calls list, shut down the iPod, and added water to the dehydrated meatball sandwich contained in the Nutri-Matic thermos. Once again, his mother had forgotten to pack him a beverage, so he purchased some Artificially flavored Dairy-style milk from the vending machine in the corner for three federons and sat down to eat.
(4-D currency conversions: one federon 50¢, ten federons to a Demacron, 50 demacrons to a Nu-dollar, one nu-dollar equals $100)
It was International Peace Day, so Alex got out of school right after lunch. He took the school shuttle home, a mistake, as it happened. The shuttle ran out of sim-oil three blocks from his stop. Sim-oil was an unstable, and highly dangerous mixture. It was simulated from nitrous oxide, mixed with spent liquid plutonium and a special solution to prevent irradiation of the vehicle in question. It was intended to act as a substitute for oil to conserve the last remaining amounts of actual oil on the planet, a futile attempt, as it turned out, because oil factories always needed actual oil to function. The problem was that sim-oil used of extremely quickly, and one could never be sure how many tanks to fit on a car. The autopilot re-activated the simulator repeatedly, but to no avail, the shuttle stayed still as rock. It tried boosting the tank valves, with the result that the stabilizers disengaged, and the hover drive cut out, causing the shuttle to plummet three feet to the ground. Picking himself off the floor, Alex gasped and wheezed. A chip had come off the plate on his belt. He couldn't breath for about ten seconds, until it was finished self-repairing. Rather than wait fifteen minutes for a tow truck to show up, Alex decided to walk the three megablocks to his apartment building. Still panting slightly, he exited the bus, declining the Autopilot's offer to send for a cab.
Chapter Five- Computer Work
It took less time than he anticipated to reach his house, only five minutes, so he had time to finish upgrading the integrated circuits of his laptop. He was building it from scratch, as an attempt to win a scholarship to a series of advanced technology seminars over the summer. Alex was no stranger to the world of computer fabrication, this would be his third major project. It was something of an irony, in fact; he designed and built computers, and yet it was a computer that very nearly terminated his life. There was just something about it that attracted him. The challenge of programming, the careful, flawless integration of multiple components into one seamless sculpture of chips and circuits, and the thrill of successfully fabricating software. It appealed to both the computer in him and the human. It was as much an art form as it was a science. There was a certain irony about it; his utter demise was almost caused by a computer, and yet he built them for a hobby. This had occurred to him before, but he had no reason to hold a grudge against technology. The E-Plague no longer existed, SOTE-COG had more than paid for the trauma, injury, and medical lawsuits they had files, and now the company was permanently closed, due to the subsequent bankruptcy.
Frowning, Alex toyed with a knot of fiber-optic holo cables. There was something disrupting the transmissions between the multi media disk drive and the hard disk. He toggled a key on his handheld CPDA, consulting the data readout on the tiny LCD screen. Alex removed a strand altogether, retwisting the insubstantial holograms around a new guiding wire. He tied it in a complicated knot, reinserting it into the bunch. That's when ten thousand volts of pure electricity diverted from the lithium battery, straight into him.
Then, he picked himself up off the floor, dusted himself off, and waited for his lung to stop hyperventilating, and kept on working on the problem with the fiber optic cables. Because he had so many bits and pieces of rubber shock absorbent in his bones from the accident that shocks like these, though common due to short-circuiting in his brain, caused him no pain, and no physical damage. This was another reason that enjoyed working with computers. A no-risk hobby.
Chapter 5.3-