Stefan Gagne - Haven Borne.pdf - Stefan Gagne - widez2

H A V E N

B O R N

A Novel by Stefan Gagne

In a Future We'd Like To See

Legal Disclaimer -

This short story series, characters, plots, concepts, fonts, styles, and

rights reserved, etc. etc. What this means is if you write a story called

Haven Born with wacky characters named Doc, Random, or Lime, I can sue your

ass off and laugh hysterically as my ordinarily thin pockets are amplified

by legal reprimands. You've been warned.

The character of Number Two doesn't fall in this copyright zone.

Author's Note...

This is part of a much longer series (Space Patrol), so I'll have to

summarize the plot for anybody who hasn't read that. If you have, spin on.

If you haven't, you might want to consider reading SP first, as this wrapup

isn't terribly detailed, or even terribly good.

Page 1

Also, for regular readers of the series, a quick warning : this one is

considerably more serious and depressing than the usual silliness and dark

humor...

VOS (Virtual Operating System) was originally programmed by some chap named

Qwerty, a Murfle Programming God sort of guy who used it to interrogate

people who had information he wanted. A cheap, efficent way to get insider

tips and remove competition. Victims would jack them into the Township (the

first matrix), and due to the fact that VOS resembles reality VERY well

when given enough power, they never knew they were in VR.

Twerp, a character from the Space Patrol series, made an appearance as a

prisoner in the Township before it went under. This is somewhat ironical

because Twerp is Qwerty's brother; Twerp finds out it Qwerty ran the place

awhile later.

Something went horribly wrong and the Township crashed. Qwerty disappeared,

but accidentally left behind a sub-program that handled artificial

intelligence along with the whole VOS software.

When MacroWare and William Doors found the ruins of the Township's computer

system, they claimed VOS to be their own. Nobody knew about Number Two, the

universes only fully realistic artifical intelligence until William

unearthed his backup disk and ran it.

Page 2

This takes place before the FWLS, shortly after the birth of VOSNet . It

will forever change the universe, throwing another species into the fray...

A far, far time from now in a galaxy now so long, long away, there

were four Space Patrollers who had a habit of getting into trouble. Weird

trouble. Dangerous trouble. Strange trouble. The kind of trouble that makes

for very fat books reviewers seem to enjoy.

This is not their story.

Instead, it is the story of a person, or rather a faux persona, who

one of the Patrollers happened to have met in a simulation of an old BBC

science fiction show. It is the story of that person and what became of

him, or it, or whatever you might call an artifical intelligence.

It is a story that doesn't take place in reality as we know it, but a

very mediocre simulation thereof. It is a story of a lifeform bound to that

simulation, and the problems inherent in being tied down to such a

system...

Page 3

Living with yourself when you know you don't technically exist is a

pretty hard thing to do.

Number Two groaned as his alarm clock program rang out with poorly

digitized bell noises, and knocked it across the room. The clock didn't

break; the Macroware complex removed the object self-destruction routines

after a massive fight in the virtual cafeteria resulted in the breakage of

twenty plates and sixteen glasses. The techie staff had to spend several

hours picking the bits out of the system and disposing of them.

Number Two didn't really need to sleep, but he was programmed to

think he needed to. He was the only person who slept in Macroware's local

system on VOSnet -- the Virtual Operating System Network, linking all

VOS-running computers to each other. The other workers would simply jack

out of the network and go home to their own beds. Real beds, with actual

feather pillows and mattresses with springs. All Number Two got was a hard

Page 4

cot made out of a simple rectangular polygon. This was all he ever could

get.

He wasn't particularly liked by his co-workers. He was treated like a

menial robot, just another program to order around, not like a normal human

being with sentient thoughts. "Number Two, give me that data unit." "Number

Two, sort these database entries alphanumerically." "Number Two, reach that

book for me." The strain was getting to him.

At first, he had worked with employee management, perusing files and

looking for weak links in the security chain. That's what he did best after

all, weeding out information and keeping secrets, because that was what he

was programmed to do. Then someone in the E-M office found out he was just

an artificial intelligence construct and complained about working with

nonexistent people. It was a choice between the complainer quitting and

Number Two being placed in a different office. The one with actual flesh

won.

It's not as if a fight wasn't put up. The only person in this

corporation who particularly liked Number Two was the president himself,

William Doors, who had salvaged him from the wreck of the first VOS system

and placed him in a high position of the corporation, recognizing Two's

skills. Doors didn't seem to care that Number Two was a construct. He

didn't treat him as an object of study, or something to be awed by, or

something to fear. He treated him, well, normal.

Page 5

Stefan Gagne - Haven Borne.pdf

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