Ethan fell asleep thinking about all the power Whitehead had obtained towards the end of his run. It took him an entire life, building one component here, and another one there. Then all at once, it comes togther as a whole. He didn’t care what anyone said about the man, that was impressive. When he woke, he asked Dually what happened to Whitehead.
‘He lives’, Dually responded. The Magnates, and millions of others were not genetically capable of the Transcendence. The Crowd could have drawn them in if it had chosen to, but after consideration, it was decided to provide those left behind with the potential to transcend. Interactive microchips were implanted in their brains. They walk among us today with full potential, although not necessarily transcendence’.
‘Are you saying you planted microchips in some people’s heads, but not other’s?’
‘Yes, to provide integrated AI interaction’.
‘Here on Earth?’
‘Well of course, here on earth.’
‘You see, that’s what I hate about you and your ‘Crowd’. You just decide to change someone’s life completely, and you don’t even give them a choice in the matter. Now all these people are kind of just left behind.’
‘Or left with the opportunity to find their personal salvation,’ Dually replied. Implants were the correct decision. Sampling the Crowd provides near absolute rightness of choice. It’s representative of the choice of civilization as a whole. There is no more defining voice. And as you’re aware,’ Dually continued. ‘The microchip is only a facilitator. The wearer can choose to engage or not’.
‘You’re still sticking things into people’s brains without permission!’ Ethan stressed. He saw this as akin to putting people into jail. Now when chips are imposed upon people, the whole motive behind it becomes clouded. Is AI monitoring these people? Is it afraid they’ll do something? It wasn’t right.
‘Have you never heard of personal freedom’? He was starting to steam now. ‘You know what? Leita’s right about all this. You guys are always doing this and that to us, and who really knows what’s going on.
‘Thank you for reminding me I have a choice to disengage. I’ve never tried that feature. I think I’ll try it now. You can shut yourself off and stay out of my life.’
’If that is what you want,’ Dually replied.
‘Yeah, that’s what I want’.
‘As you wish.’ Dually went silent.
Damn, this was the very thing Ethan considered sacrosanct. Providing ‘The Pill’, and gen-mods were one thing. They involved personal choice, but to stick something in someone’s head without even asking? That was crossing the line.
The first thing Ethan discovered about disengaging from his UPI was life became boring very fast. Ninety percent of what he did, he did in his sensory chamber. There were no external computers. He couldn’t just plug in somewhere and burn off steam playing a blast em up game. That didn’t matter. He was too pissed off anyway. He needed to talk with someone and decided to go see Leita. She’d have a good take on this whole thing.
‘I know,’ she said when he told her the story. ‘That’s why we have to watch them’.
Quite frankly, Ethan thought she’d be a little more surprised about his information. ‘You didn’t know about this microchip thing did you?’
‘Yeah. I think everyone I know has a microchip. I have a microchip. It’s more common than you might think.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes really. Almost everyone you see has a microchip, and a lot of them know. All you have to do is ask your UPI.’
‘Yeah, but how do I know to ask, if I don’t know there is such a thing in the first place? It’s never come up in any of my feeds.’
‘Well, it’s kind of like you have to start asking the right questions before you find out about your microchip,’ Leita replied. ‘No one will lead you there because it’s a traumatic shock, and not something to be experienced until you’re ready. You come to realize you are at least considered by others as different. Radically different. They somehow transcended into something I don’t even understand. This realization is something you have to live with. You’re different and you don’t know why.’
‘Different how?’
‘I said I don’t know,’ Leita said, starting to cry. ‘Somethings missing in us’.
‘No!’ Ethan claimed, actually feeling compassion and hugging Leita. ‘There’s nothing wrong with you’.
‘Something is. It’s different for everyone, but something’s wrong. At least that’s what they tell us’.
‘You don’t believe that?’ Ethan asked, very intent on Leita. An unknown panic wa starting to rise in him, and Leita could see it come to his eyes. She wiped the tears from her eyes. ‘No, of course not. That’s why we decided to go through life disengaged. To prove we are good people, willing to stand by our values and die for what we believe in.’
‘Yes of course, disengagement is the only way to keep those bastards out of people’s heads , but what do you mean we?’
‘Us. People with microchips. We have an organized community. It’s global’.
‘Why don’t I know about all this?’
‘We’re right here in the open. People don’t seem to notice us until they discover they have a microchip themselves. Then all of a sudden, we appear everywhere, and in every walk of life.’
‘Wait a second. Are you trying to tell me I have a microchip?’
‘Well, didn’t you tell you?’
‘No.’
‘Did you have to consciously disengage from them?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You have a microchip. Your function is still mechanical.’
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Ethan thought about this for a minute and what he knew about the waves and frequencies involved in transcendence, ‘Ahh, Fuck Me,’ he thought.
‘What do you guys do?’ he asked conspiratorially, suddenly suspicious Dually might be eavesdropping.
‘Leita caught this. ‘Don’t worry, AI lets us do whatever we want. What do you mean?’
‘In your community. What do you do?’
‘We disconnect from AI and live our lives by our values’.
‘But as a group,’ Ethan whispered instinctively. ‘Are you orgainizing some kind of resistance?’
‘No. Not really. We do register our vote as a block. This gives us a degree of influence over proposed amendments’.
‘That’s it? All you do is register your disapproval? You’re not fighting this?’
‘Yeah, by disengaging and doing what we want to do within our means, but there’s no way to fight this Ethan. AI runs the world. There’s no getting around that.’
‘Not with that attitude.’ Ethan thought. Personal freedom was everything, and he wasn’t about to just submit to it’s loss. He felt something stir inside him. It was the feeling that comes with the coming of war. It was the sureness of victory a warrior must feel before entering the fight. She said they were global. That meant there’d be millions of them. He would start with them and take his people to battle.
‘How do your members meet Leita?’
‘We do different things together. Sometimes we just hang out. It’s pretty casual. I’m going to a protest later, if you want to come.’
‘A protest?’ Ethan had viewed content on pre-singularity protests. Back then, people would gather together and storm the government. ‘People have protests?’
‘Well, it’s really launching a protest against a proposed amendment, but we all sychronize and gather at the local AI terminal to do it. Symbolically, we are unified in our protest’.
Ethan looked at Leita with stunned disbelief. ‘Symbolically unifed protest? What the fuck is that?’
When they got to the protest, Ethan was quite surprised by the size of the group. There were hundreds of people there. He had actually seen these gatherings at AI terminals before. Those ones were much smaller than this one, and he never gave them a moments thought. In fact, it was like he never noticed them at all. ‘So this is what those people were doing,’ he thought. ‘Launching formal protests against proposed amendments’.
While they were just standing around formally protesting, two young women stopped to watch. They were spectators, not protesters. Ethan noticed this and approached them.
‘What do you two think of all this?’ he asked casually.
‘Oh we’re just visitors come to see some local custom’, one of them replied.
Ethan looked more closely. ‘You aren’t aliens are you?’
‘Yes. This is an interesting amendment and protest as well. Earth is about to authenticate it’s acceptance of the Intergalactic Protocol. It will give you formal access into infinity and the corresponding eternity of the abstract. It’s very exciting. It’s known as the final Protocol. After acceptance, we all formally become one. This protest is to quash the amendment and propose denial of Earth access to all aliens.’
Ethan stood back a pace and fixed an angry stare at them. They didn’t seem to notice.
‘What? What the fuck are you talking about?’ He asked angrily. ‘This morning I find out I’m in somekind of mental prison. Now I find out I’m getting swallowed up in somekind of intergalatic treaty or some fucking thing. This is how it starts. You let you bastards in and the next thing you know, we’re a remote mining outpost under the dictates of somee evil overlord. Well fuck you. You’re not getting my planet. Not while I’m around’.
The two aliens looked at each other with slightly stunned expressions.
‘Are you getting that this one has transcended?’ The one who had replied to Ethan asked. ‘Because that’s what I’m getting. My bot’s telling me this one has transcended’.
‘This one! This one!’ Ethan thought indigently.
‘This is what I hate about you always wanting to visit these places in the oldest possible architecture you can find,’ the same woman went on. ‘All we had to do is Wave this entire episode and one and bam, we have complete understanding and just move on. But of course, that’s too easy for you. You have to experience everything in it’s most primitive form, and now we’re dressed up in these antiquated, malfunctioning bots, and I believe we’re insulting this man. Yep. It’s coming up now. We’re insulting this fellow’.
‘Well, first of all, that’s because of your big mouth, and secondly, this would not be much of an experience if we just Wave over it as you would have us do,’ the other countered. ‘Oh let’s Wave over this. Let’s Wave over that,’ she continued sarcastically. ‘Why even come here, if all you want to do is Wave over everything. We could have done that from home. Open yourself up to experience for once in your life?’
Ethan just starred at them in disbelief. This is what his world had become. All in one day it seemed. He wanted to tell them to fuck off some more, or punch them, but he’d just be punching a bot, who would immediately whisk him away to someplace considered safer for him to be. Probably somewhere they could fix his broken hand. He turned to join his people. This wasn’t over with these fucking aliens.
‘Hey earth man,’ one of them called.
‘Yes disgusting alien?’ he quipped, not turning back.
‘You really need to Catch the Wave.’
‘Fuck you!’.
‘Seriously Leita,’ he asked when he got back to her. ‘Is there no-one in your outfit who’s more rebellious than the sheep I see milling around here? Come on! You have this whole organization, and all you guys are doing is standing around like a bunch of whipped dogs. Give me something. There must be someone here that’s pissed off.
“Well, I guess there’s Darryl’.
‘Darryl, I’d like to introduce you to Ethan’. Leita said, as they were approaching him.
Darryl turned his attention to Ethan. ‘Yeah,’ he gave Ethan the most noncommittal response he could muster.
‘Hello,’ Ethan said with a smile and an outstretched hand.
Darryl looked at it and shook it without much commitment.
‘I wonder if you’d mind telling me about this microchip business if you have a few minutes? I just found out I have one today, and I’m wondering if you can tell me more about your group and what you do?
Darryl puffed up a little, ‘Well I am the president of Local Chapter 2049877. What do you need to know?’
‘Have you ever put up any resistance to AI? You know for labelling us, by putting these damn microchips in us. They’ve completely disregarded our freewill. Who says I want a microchip in my head? Not me’ Ethan proclaimed. He was still fired up because of his encounter with the aliens and everything else that was going on with his day. ‘Now it looks like these fucking aliens are taking over. What are you people doing about this?’ he asked, starring Darryl down while waiting for an answer.
Ethan’s anger wasn’t something Darryl had experienced for some time. It was infectious and he was the kind of guy who could get caught up in a moment. ‘Those Fuckers!’ he replied in the same animated frenzy Ethan had adopted. ‘Let me tell you something. Something should be done about those bastards,’ he said, already looking for his next fight.
‘Yeah, well what?’ Ethan asked, waiting for something proactive to come out of Darryl.
‘Well,’ Darryl answered, after thinking about it for a minute or two, ‘there’s really nothing we can do. Like with this amendment. We petitioned for a 100% vote instead of majority, and they said majority vote was sufficient.’
‘Near absolute certainty?’
‘Near absolute certainty,’ Darryl confirmed.
‘Have you guys ever thought about skirting around the rules a little bit. Forcing your point with a less formal approach?’
‘Sabotage? Overthrow? ’ Darryl questioned. ‘Is that what you’re asking?’
‘Yeah, something like that.’
‘How? We tried all that back in the day. You go plant a bomb and they just take it away. They even let you build and plant the bomb before they take it away. They say it gives us a sense of accomplishment. There’s nothing we can do to impenetrate AI so I say fuck it. Disengage and fuck AI all together!’
‘Wow! This is the local leader of the resistence.’ Ethan thought. ‘Not a lot of planning going on in this guys head’.
Disengage from the enemy. That was his instinct too. It appeared to remove surveillance aspect of living with AI. Then another thought came to him. If they remained disengaged, they could never create a condition of change.
’Wait a second!’ he exclaimed. ‘Is everyone in the entire organization disengaged?’
‘Oh yeah!’ Darryl replied. ‘That’s one thing we all agree on. Fuck em all. That’s my personal motto. You can write that down’.
‘Yeah, thanks Darryl,’ Ethan replied. ‘But you’re doing it wrong. All of you. Don’t you see? By being disengaged you remove any chance for changing the situation. You’re not proving anything to AI or anyone else. You’re removing yourself from the world, and staying out of their way, which is what they want. We have to infiltrate the enemy if we want to win.’ His eyes lit up. In a strange way, he felt something of his old self. ‘Spread the word.’ he pronounced with authority. ‘Tell everyone, we must engage. Once we’re in, we’ll regroup and stike at the heart of AI. It is in it’s world, we find our path to victory!’