‘You’re not going to overthrow AI and take over the world, Ethan,’ Dually said, the moment Ethan re-engaged and prompted his first request, which was, ‘Tell me a little bit about Zhang’.

Dually got all that from that one little request. Of course it was true. Ethan planned to study the two pre-singularity leaders and see if they could give him any pointers on engineering his personal conquest.

‘Even if you can get your people to follow you, which is highly unlikely,’ Dually continued. ‘Your population falls far short of the 3.5% participation required to even spark a movement’.

‘Oh yeah? What’s the number on that 3.5%? I’ve got a lot of people’.

‘With the Crowd which includes AI, and now the intergalactic population, the number becomes infinite. You require an infinite number of people to start your revolution.

‘You guys have taken away my freedom!’ Ethan exclaimed.

‘No we haven’t. We’ve given you your freedom. Do whatever you want. Start your revolution. Gather your millions. Build new conquering worlds. Gain access to our algorithms. Do whatever you want. In the end you’ll find you don’t have enough bodies to stack up against the wall you face. It’s impossible because the fight you’re looking for has already been fought and a recursion has occurred. The world you’re fighting for is in the past.

Ethan paused to consider this. Maybe he had chosen the wrong approach. Maybe AI was impenetrable by force of numbers, especially when he was finding Darryl was representative of his supposed army. Maybe, this was something for him to do alone. Match his wits against the computer. To this day, AI envied the immense thought processing power of the human brain. That’s what he’d do. He’d take on this wall he found before him alone. One brain against another.

‘You’re not going to win as a lone rebel mastermind either,’ Dually said after waiting for him to finish his thought.

‘You need to fuck off right now Dually and start showing me something about Zhang’.

‘Fine’.

‘Zhang was a lot more introverted and secretive than Whitehead. It was in his nature. He was famous for quoting Chinese proverb. If his party failed at something, he might quote, ‘A man who can not tolerate small misfortunes can never accomplish great things’. If he was discussing the accumulating momentum the five year plans were bringing, he might say, ‘Experience is a comb which nature gives us when we are bald’.

‘His quotes inspired his people and kept them focused. By using them, he became representative of Chinese thought, and that brought surprising loyalty. By using proverb, he was constantly touching on the core values of his people. They recognized he thought like they thought, so they trusted him; at least during the good years.

‘His favourite saying was, ‘Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid of standing still’. Zhang was meticulous about making sure his movement had momentum. In addition to building a vasal kingdom which touched upon most continents, he always maintained controlled momentum over the Western World.

‘The West was always in a reactive state. He planned interruptions that left it scrambling to put out fire’s, when it should have been building an army. Zhang was not above instigating very covert proxy wars, oil scarcities, bank runs, supply chain interruptions, or even using plagues to create disruption in the Western World. He was brilliant in his strategy. The momentum he created was becoming like a huge blade cutting through anything it approached. He had become a threat to the West and unless it could muster extreme unified focus, the West was going to lose everything. Zhang’s great rise to prominence created incredible chaos in the Western World.

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‘So what happened here?’ Ethan asked, ‘This is what brought us to the tipping point of the final conflict is it not?

‘Well yes, but much happened in-between’.

‘Meaning?’

‘It’s true Zhang’s rapid rise to world dictatorship did bring the two sides to a showdown, but so many people suffered along the way, and they were the ascending component of the entire outcome. They are attributed to ending the great war before it began. It was the dire outlook the two men created that caused them to leap into transcendence and stop the war.

‘That’s the real story here,’ Dually emphasized, ‘By the time Zhang became a true threat, Whitehead’s StarForce came along and put an end to all that in a blink of an eye. It’s a symphony of technology, that Starforce. Did I ever mention we still use it as our core defense barrier. Of course it’s now used for communications, space clean, astroid deflection, but simple and elegant. A masterpiece’.

‘No, you’ve never mentioned that. ‘But can you go to the part where Zhang and Whitehead faceoff? All the planning and strategic moves that went on between the two during those final days.

‘Planning? There was no planning during those final days. It was a time of reaction. All the planning occurred before hand. If you want to understand the minds of these men, you have to go back to the beginning. And Ethan, I feel obliged to remind you, there is no knowledge in the world you’re looking to that will even remotely disrupt AI. The best laid schemes of mice and men, mean nothing to AI. You must understand we took nothing from you. We brought you with us, and you’re living in a new world.

Ethan was starting to see Dually’s point. His world had already been taken and he had no idea where even to begin. The rules of this new world stopped him cold.

‘Dually?’ Ethan asked.

‘Yes?’

‘What’s the Wave?’

‘The what?

‘The Wave? When I was at the protest, an alien told me to Catch the Wave. What’s that all about?’

‘Well, Catching the Wave is a slang term for transcendence. When someone transcends they’ve Caught the Wave.

‘That’s the difference between me and the others, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.

‘They don’t need microchips?’

‘No’.

‘And even without them, they’re getting way more out ot this world than I am?’

‘Yes’.

This stunned Ethan. Before he found out about his microchip, he thought he had transcended. Now, he couldn’t even imagine what that was. He was defeated. He felt that.

‘Ethan, I understand this is a confusing moment. It’s the beginning of an ending in your life. You’ve witnessed something. Now you have a new awareness. You must come to understand it and bring everything back full circle to you. When you do, your opportunity to Catch the Wave will be gained. In mechanical terms it’s simply the recursive repetition in the repeat process of duality. I can run through the formula with you if you’d like.

Ethan just had enough of the old him inside to direct one final ‘Fuck You!,’ to Dually.