(Three months later...)
The Grog Barn reeked of stale beer and staler jokes, of spilled blood and spilled oil, and of the countless smelly, drunken humans that congregated there. People came from miles around to visit. They made pilgrimages to the place. And all for it's atmosphere, a thick haze of toxic fumes capable of inducing mental states that gave trippies and budding zenheads alike something to grin about.
The Barn was a parasitic growth at the heart of NAD - the Nollian Airport District, which in turn was a parasitic growth at the heart of Noll-on-Yab. NAD was one of the few remaining human settlements on the planet earth, and was therefore home to all sorts of degenerates, renegades, criminals, freethinkers, science fiction fans, vidiots, hillbillies, hoboes, pirates, one-time third-world dictators, potheads, trippies, zenheads, warlocks, and other miscellaneous freaks and weirdos. All of this made the Grog Barn a very popular meeting place.
Molk, the owner and patron warlock, smiled to himself as a friendly brawl erupted nearby. Someone's teeth sailed through the air and scattered across his tables, but he brushed them aside, trusting Ernie would come by later and put them in the lost and found box
Molk was sixty-five years old, and a confirmed old bachelor. He'd once been a leader in the Human Underground - the Resistance, years ago when people still resisted anything. The movement was still around, of course. His niece, Gwildiana, had been pretty enthusiastic about the Resistance for months now, but if she'd only seen it at it's peak, before the Codellas brought order to the world and made the War for Humanity into a board game, then perhaps she wouldn't be so gung-ho. Molk himself had retired to a life of beer drinking and practicing what little magic anyone would teach him. Those two habits had earned him quite a reputation.
Ernie was the bartender. He was quite a character, but only a supporting one at this point in the tale. At any rate, he brought Molk a refill and whispered something in the old man's ear.
Molk's mood brightened instantly as his automatic soberspell kicked in. "Tell her to come in, of course!" he said. Ernie nodded and disappeared into the thick grey smoke. He reappeared a few minutes later with a beautiful young redhead decked in black leather combat fatigues.
"Hello, Unc-" she began, but cut herself short. "Hello, honey."
Ernie smiled knowingly at the gesture before vanishing again. Around NAD, there was something almost indecent about old men associating with young women they weren't sleeping with.
"Hey sweetheart," said Molk, playing along. "What's the story this time?"
"Guess," said Gwildiana.
"You're pregnant?" Molk asked hopefully.
"No, uncle," said annoyed. "I told you I'd do something about that sooner or later, and I probably will, but for right now getting laid is the least of my worries."
"What then?"
She unzipped the front of her shirt, reached between her breasts and pulled out an old envelope. "Sorry," she said, "these stupid biot rags don't have pockets."
Molk ignored her complaints - he'd been in the espionage business long enough to know how WorldCorp clothing felt. He the envelope, which contained two color photographs and a microdisk. He examined the pictures first. "This one's Herbert Bunt, isn't it?"
"Right. We still don't know who the girl is."
Molk looked a little closer at the second photo, but he'd never seen the girl in it before. "Well, okay, he said. What's on the disk?"
"No one knows. Nothing we've got will read it."
"So someone suggested bringing it to me."
Gwildiana nodded.
"Most people's relatives ask them for money," Molk sighed. "Mine have to demand miracles."
"Will you take a look?"
"Of course, but I can't promise anything. Where'd all this come from, anyway?"
"We found it on a troll that was causing trouble over in Bage."
Molk looked at the first picture again. "Right in Herb's back yard," he said. He emptied his beer in one colossal gulp and rose to his feet. "Well that's just great. Mystery, espionage, intrigue... And I was going to rearrange my sock drawer today. Come on, let's see what Guru has to say about this."
"You're the greatest," she said, hugging him.
He lead her through the smoke to the back door and out to the huge apartments that had been Gate 21 of the Noll-on-Yab International Airport, back when things like nations and airplanes were still common. They navigated a labyrinth of catwalks and passageways added long after the last flight was delayed or the last item of luggage lost.
At last they arrived at the brain of NAD, a Codella 693-AI/ESP mainframe. It was connected telepathically to every computer terminal, television set, video game, cleaning robot, and pocket calculator in the District, plus five other Codellas around the world. The 693's were designed to be the greatest military computers ever built, and would have surely crushed the Resistance in the War for Humanity if it hadn't been for one tiny flaw in their programming...
This particular machine had been known to it's makers as number 3330-15D2, but around NAD it was more commonly referred to as the Guru. It was a ten-foot cube of steel and plastic that glowed slightly in the darkness of it's lair. It brightened considerably as the door slid shut behind Molk and Gwildiana.
HEY GUYS, it thought to them. WHAT'S UP IN THE REAL WORLD?
It was a common joke among humans that computers played no part in the real world. The
real world was filled with things like money, freedom, laws, religions, and other abstract
representations of data. Computers, on the other hand, were created to deal with abstract
representations of data, and were therefore totally incompatible with the real world.
"Things are same as always," Molk said, answering Guru's question. He knew that Guru was practically all-knowing. About the only thing it couldn't do was teach Molk magic, and sometimes he thought it was just holding out on him. It already knew almost everything that happened around NAD, and was only being user-friendly when it asked.
Molk's head tingled for a moment as Guru's ESP software kicked in and the great computer browsed through his recent memories at lightning speed.
OKAY, I'LL HELP YOU OUT... TOSS ME THE DISK.
Gwildiana held out the shiny grey microdisk. It leapt from her hand under Guru's telekinetic control, and slipped itself into a small slot in the machine's side.
HMM.. THIS COULD TAKE A WHILE... I'LL NEED YOUR HELP, MOLK. BUT IN THE MEANTIME,
WHY NOT SHOW ME THOSE PICTURES?
She held them up.
PROCESSING... PLEASE WAIT...
There was a flash of light, and suddenly two holographic images appeared in the air before them. One was undoubtedly the world-renowned author and businesshuman, Herbert Bunt. He was probably the most famous human on the planet, certainly more well-known than any ten entertainment biots combined. Molk knew the man personally, as they were both Agents. In fact, Molk had an autographed copy of Bunt's Beginner's Guide to Popular Magic.
Bunt's name appeared above his image in bright green letters, but the holographic girl remained a mystery.
AHA! I'VE FOUND HER! PRINCESS VOB FROCKENELLER OF KELTARR, A
REBELLIOUS-DAUGHTER BIOT. HER DAD IS JOHN C. FROCKENELLER, GLOB'S AGENT
AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER OF WORLDCORP.
Her name appeared above her image next to Bunt's.
"What would a troll be doing with pictures of a famous human and a biot they consider royalty?" Molk asked.
"That's what we need you two to find out."
Molk shrugged. "What are my plans for today?" he asked the Codella.
YOU WERE GOING TO BUY SUPPLIES AT THE BAZAAR.
"Unpleasantly mindless traveling," he sighed. "Then we can work on that disk along the way."
SOUNDS GOOD... YOU KNOW HOW TO REACH ME WHEN YOU'RE READY.
They bid farewell to the huge computer, and returned to the chaos outside.
Molk led his niece to the arcade. Vidiots of every conceivable type were packed into the little room, attached in various ways to their machines. But Molk wasn't looking for games. He approached the lady at the counter.
"Heyya, Molk," she said. "What can I do for you?"
"I need a zencart that'll get me to Ina for the day. Got anything?"
"For you? Sure. I'll have one waiting for you out front. I take it the Krinian Bazaar is in town?"
"Yeah. Gwildiana and I were going to pick up some supplies."
"Uh-huh," said the woman with a look of mock-scorn.
"Gwil's my lover!" Molk lied, but she saw right through it.
"Naughty boy," she said. "Mr. Platonic Relationships..."
Molk shrugged and went off to search for his niece, who'd slipped away during his conversation with the woman. He found her racking up points at breakneck speeds on SUPER MEGA HYPER DUDE vs THE EVIL DEATH MUTANTS FROM HELL. A handful of full-fledged vidiots were standing, awestruck, around the three-d display. As she reached level fifty-three, holographic blood gushed out over Molk's clothes, then disappeared. "Come on, sweetheart," he said.
Gwildiana handed the joystick over to one of the male vidiots. "It's all in the wrists," she told him. Then she followed Molk outside.
"Here's our cart," he said as they boarded. He handed Gwildiana the controls, and settled down for a nap.
The zencart looked much like an old-time car or horse driven carriage, except that fossil fuels had run out, horses were almost extinct, and both had been replaced with zenheads, which were much more convenient.
To say that zenheads were people wasn't quite accurate. They had been human, certainly, but once a person fully zenned, something changed. They would begin with a little meditation to deal with stress or gain understanding of their inner children or whatever, and after a while they'd start sitting in their little lotus positions and going into their little trances more and more often. Sooner or later they'd start floating, and after that there was no waking them up.
Zenheads had been around for about half a century, since the Codellas were first invented. No one could explain them until a few brains at Bunt Laboratories discovered zenheads had attuned themselves to the psychic fields generated by the Codellas. Before that time, no one had been able to affect a zenhead. They didn't eat, didn't breath, were bulletproof, fireproof, impossible to move, and in all other ways invulnerable to outside force. They'd simply taken up space. The scientists changed all that when further testing showed that because of their bond with the Codellas, they could be controlled by even the simplest electronics so long as the two were close enough together. A zenhead controller could be built out of a video game joystick with minimum effort.
Molk and most of the other humans had little desire to abandon their current plane of existence, but they knew a good thing when they saw one. Thus there was the zencart: a rectangular platform with a zenhead at each corner for lift, all controlled and synchronized by a small onboard computer.
And of course the computer was powered by psychic cells, which worked on the same principle as solar cells, but used vibes instead of sunlight and were much stronger. The vibes were generated by the Codellas, which had once run on hydroelectric or nuclear power, but had later been fitted with psychic cells which, again, used the Codellas' own vibes.
The fact that psychic energy allowed such a perpetual-motion system, and thus violated the laws of thermodynamics didn't really bother anyone anymore. Most scientists said it was a clever trick, which was the same thing they'd been saying about psychic phenomena all along. It was possible that they were just sore losers.
In any case, zenheads were a cheap and effective form of transportation, and could be used as furniture - who wouldn't appreciate a comfortable lap to sit on? If the zenheads minded, they certainly weren't letting it show. Trolls, on the other hand, performed the same sort of functions for the biots, who wouldn't go near anything so unusual as meditation. Nothing complained more than a troll.
Molk's thoughts tended to wander from topic to topic as he drifted towards sleep. He was not particularly tired, but as Guru's agent, he had discovered he could communicate more readily with the computer through dreams. The other agents had their own methods, of course: Frockeneller, ever the biot, would only speak to Glob directly, and thus would never stray far from his office in Keltarr. The Lami was known to ingest all sorts of hallucinogenic drugs in order to contact Yagi. And so on.
The random images which floated through Molk's mind began to coalesce into a scene. This was no ordinary dreamscape, but cyberspace, the vast domain that existed in the imaginations of Guru and the other Codellas.
He found himself in the Great White Hall, the center of Guru's inner world. Pillars of marble stretched upward to infinity, and in the center was a great bonfire. An old man sat before it - pale and crooked, in direct contrast to Molk's deceptively youthful appearance.
"Hello, Guru," Molk said. He knew well that the old man was in fact only a machine, but here in cyberspace, he couldn't help thinking of Guru as a real person. After all, when people evolved into automatons, humans started calling them biots, so when machines began acting like people, how could he avoid treating them that way? As Bunt was fond of saying, humanity was all a matter of attitude.
Guru smiled. "So, you finally showed up," he said. There was no need for booming telepathic voices in cyberspace.
"What did you find out about that disk?" Molk asked.
"Oh, that. It's a program of some kind, that's for sure... It was designed to be run on something like me, but I can't for the life of me figure out what it does."
"Well did you run it?"
"Of course not. That's like me asking you to eat something you found stuck on the bottom of your shoe. They found this disk on a troll, you know."
"Right," said Molk. "Well, what are you planning to do about it?"
"Well, it's just a thought I've been playing around with... Here, let me show you something."
He led Molk through a maze of the white pillars, to a grassy plain outside. A giant mass of gears and chains and other mechanical junk towered before them. "Recognize this?" he asked.
"I don't believe you actually went and built one!" Molk laughed.
"Meet the Intelligence Engine. I've named it Montella after my own inventor."
Molk could remember a night long ago when he'd remarked offhandedly that anything that had been done with electronics could have been done just as easily with mechanical components. He'd suggested building a pre-holographic desktop computer. The screen, he'd suggested, might be composed of thousands of little conveyor belts. Each belt would hold a number of different-colored tiles, which, when viewed with the others, would create a giant mosaic which could display all sorts of information. Other components would utilize similar constructions, and of course, sooner or later someone would find a way to make the pieces smaller and smaller, and sooner or later the mechanical computer would shrink from the size of a building to the size of a... Well, of a computer. Molk was convinced that if people had been a little more willing to stretch the boundaries of their technology, the supercomputer might have been arrived at long before electricity.
He'd been very drunk that night, and once his soberspell cleared his head up, he hadn't given his idea a second thought. Yet here it was before him, in cyberspace.
"You like?" said Guru.
"I like!" Molk agreed. "But does it work?"
Guru shrugged. "Well, for an Intelligence Engine, it's not too bright.. Not yet, anyway. But just listen. We have this program we want to try out, right? What if we ran it through this sucker, or something like it?"
"Run a program on a computer that is really just another program inside another computer?" Molk asked. "Sometimes you're too far out even for me."
"Does that mean yes?" the Codella asked hopefully.
"Sure," said Molk. "Let me know if it works. Meanwhile, I'd better see what's going on in the real world."
"Alright then," Guru said, waving goodbye.
---------
Cyberspace faded away as Molk awoke. He found himself back in the zencart with Gwildiana.
"Welcome back," said Gwildiana. "Did you two figure anything out?"
"It's a program of some kind," said Molk. "Guru's working on figuring out what it does."
"Great!" she said. "And good timing, too. We're almost there."
Molk could see Ina on the horizon. It was usually a plain little biot village, but the Krinian Bazaar was in town for the week, and there was quite a bit of confusion. Krin was a center of biot culture, which was to say it had an abundance of factories, shopping malls, and movie theaters. It was also home to a large group of human pirates, who'd steal anything they could get their hands on, only to turn around and sell it right back to the biots through the Krinian Bazaar, which was supposedly run by WorldCorp. It was just another hole in the system that Molk was more than happy to exploit.
"Well, where to?" Gwildiana asked, climbing off the cart.
"I'm going find something to drink. You can join me if you want, or-"
"No thanks," she said, standing up straight. "I'm on a mission here."
He shrugged. "Then why don't you see if you can dig up some revolutionaries. Your Resistance should like that."
"Yes sir!" she said, saluting. Molk wondered when she'd realize how silly the Human Underground was these days. They were at peace! But kids were kids... "I'll report back in two hours," she said. Molk waved her away.
He slipped off the zencart and lost himself in the crowd. It was hot and crowded, and very loud.
"Care for a fig?" called a man much too large for the little tend he was in. "How about a mellon? You look like you could really use a good mellon."
Molk ignored him, and ran into a young woman covered in beads. "Would you like to know your fortune, sir?" she asked. He had to practically wrench his hand away from her.
"How about the official Embers of a Burning Heart T-shirt?" someone asked.
"Repent!" called yet another voice. "Vanquish your sins and purchase a trim at the traveling temple of the Order of Sam the Holy Barber!"
He checked his hair in a mirror. It was grey from age, and reached down to his shoulders, but it looked great on him, so why bother getting it cut? Molk kept on walking.
Suddenly he spotted his goal. At the center of the chaos was an oasis of familiarity. Molk shoved past the crowd, making his way to the table. Two hulking men sat across from each other, both struggling to stay conscious. One lifted a glass to his lips and keeled over dead. The crowd went wild and began passing around biot currency.
"Anyone wish to take me on?" asked Molk.
One scroungy old man raised his hand. He stood and dumped the victor of the last round out of his chair. "Mister, I could drink you under the table any day of the week."
Molk took the dead man's chair. "What've we got here?" he asked, as a fresh shotglass was placed in front of him and filled with a smoking green liquid.
"Fireberry wine," said his opponent.
Molk grinned. "My favorite. Cheers," he said, lifting the glass to the sky. It stayed there for some time.
"Somethin' wrong, mister?" the old man asked. Slowly, he followed Molk's gaze into the sky. "Gods," he said. "What the heck is that?"
Something huge and dark was blotting out quite a bit of the sky.
"It's heading right towards us!" someone in the crowd shouted. "Run!"
Molk emptied the tiny glass and took off, breathing fire. He cast a quick locator spell and ran towards Gwildiana. He found her not too far away, stabbing at a flying black chest with a huge broadsword. "Gwil!" he shouted, pointing towards the thing in the sky. Only now there were quite a few things in the sky: trolls were jumping off the great thing in all directions, wreaking havoc on the already panicking crowds.
Molk took a deep breath and let his soberspell cancel out the wine he'd just drunk. He looked again to be sure, but the trolls were still there. Gwildiana was cleaning one's brains off her sword "Do something!" she yelled at him.
Molk let instinct guide him as a troll leapt towards him. He pointed at it with his right hand, shouting a few random syllables. Fire arched out from his fingertips and the grey hairy thing burst into flames.
Encouraged, Molk let loose a barrage of fireballs, setting fire to everything in sight. Other humans cheered and began fighting their attackers with all their might. Someone's leg landed at Molk's feet. "Just like home," he said.
The thing in the sky was almost to the ground. Molk grinned. He pointed. "Boogada!" he shouted. Spears of fire burst from his hand.
The thing made quite an explosion.
"Good shot!" said a voice from above. "You lit the whole village with one blast!"
It was true. Smoke and flames were everywhere. He could no longer see a thing. Smoke filled his lungs and he tumbled to the ground, gasping for clean air.
Without warning, he was lifted into the air and thrown on something hard. He was vaguely aware that they were flying before he passed out.
---------
The flames erupted around Gwildiana as she steered the flying chest through the village. "Can't you go any higher?" she screamed at it.
"Not with all your dead weight!" it snapped.
Whatever was in there ought to be smacked, she thought. But first things first. "Turn right! Right! Right! Now left! We're gonna hit that tent!"
People and trolls were swarming like insects, beating each other with sticks and stealing whatever they could get their hands on. Typical biot mentality. Real humans were more interested in avoiding certain death than in making a quick buck.
"Turn Right!" Gwildiana screamed. A troll dived into her lap, and she almost dropped Uncle Molk beating the thing's teeth in. At least she thought they'd been teeth.
"Which way? Which way?!?!?!?" the chest demanded.
"Straight ahead! We're almost out!"
The chest gave an extra burst of speed and suddenly they were clear of the village. She let the strange box carry them about a mile or so from the blaze before she told it to put them down.
"Thank you," she said.
Molk rolled to the ground with a dull thud behind her. She climbed off more gracefully and helped him to his feet.
"Where am I?" the old man asked.
"We're outside of the village you just blew up, sir!" she said.
"Why are you calling me sir?"
"You've seniority in the Resistance, sir, and you gave me orders."
"Well cut it out. You go around calling people sir and the next thing you know you're a biot. Really, you're being stupid."
Ouch. That hurt. She always tried to ignore the fact that the Resistance she was working for was just as structured as the biots she was supposedly fighting. "Sorry," she said, quietly.
"And none of that, either," he said. "Look. Bureaucracies are destined to foul things up for themselves, and anything a Bureaucracy can do can be done better and far more quickly by a handful of intelligent humans. So if you want to really foul the biots up, you do it individually. They can deal with only one thing at a time, but you don't want to give them one thing. You don't want to give them as single, unified enemy army. You want a zillion independent, intelligent humans to storm them all at once, their own ways. That's what Humanity and the Resistance was supposed to be all about - every man for himself, following his own dreams. It took us a long time to get anarchy working, and now you kids want to foul it up with orders and paperwork and so on. Can't people create something even once without it becoming an institution?"
Gwildiana slumped to the ground. He was right about everything. She'd been so foolish. But then, it only meant she'd have to fight twice as hard, her way! She'd topple the biot menace with her own bare hands! She'd-
"Great speech, man!" said the flying chest.
"What?" said Molk, apparently noticing it for the first time. "Is someone in there?"
"This is Dexter," she said. "Dexter, this is my Uncle, Molk."
"Uh, nice to meet you," Molk said, trying to see through the holes Gwildiana had jabbed in its side.
"Likewise," the chest said.
"Dexter was my, ah, recruit," Gwildiana admitted, sheepishly.
Molk grunted. Apparently that was going to be a sore subject for a while.
"Why don't you contact Guru again," she suggested. "Maybe he can figure out what went on back there."
Molk nodded. "Any idea what that thing was?" he asked.
"The ship, you mean?" said Gwildiana.
"Ship?"
"You blew up a giant seafaring vessel with a big red balloon on top," she said. "It was the C.A.S. Hostile Takeover, according to the side."
"Oh man," he said, thrown.
Perhaps those Resistance training courses had their uses after all...
Molk laid down near a tree and closed his eyes, going off to see the Guru again. She wondered if he ever slept without drifting into cyberspace.
"Ahem?" said the chest.
Oh, right. "Let's see if we can't get you out of there," she said.
Now that she could concentrate, it took only one swing of her sword to cut the thing wide open.
"Are you aware..?" she said, seeing Dexter for the first time. "I mean, did you know...? Uh, you're a giant flying tuna."
"Hmm," said Dexter. "I was wondering if maybe I was."
Next: Manifest Destiny
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