Recurrence E-Book

Alexander Skytte Jensen

• Herausgeber: BoD - Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 286

Beschreibung

At the end of the 21st century earth has been wrecked by climate catastrophe. The Hegemon dominates the dying world with his once-human machine abominations. Magnus, a cybernetically augmented rebel commander, leads the fight against the regime until he is sent back fifty years in time to the world as it was before. A technological singularity looms close, with AI and robots impacting global conflicts. Forewarned of his grim future-past he races across the world to prevent the rise of the Hegemon. Grappling with identity, destiny and sacrifice, will he help chart a brighter future for mankind?

Leseprobe

Acknowledgments:

Thanks to Johan for reading through the story and providing valuable insights.

Nicholas for sparring with me while writing and helping me through difficult chapters.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 1

Year 2094

He ran towards cover, dodging the incessant machine-spewed gunfire, moving back into the temporary safety afforded by a solid brick wall. Magnus contemplated his next move, as the Zyborg moved closer with its automated carnage. Many of his men laid bloodied, strewn across the concrete battlefield, most of them corpses, but some of them still moving in agonized spasms. He could not let this grim image affect his resolve, so he let his mind recede into a place of cold calculation and mental discipline.

“Circle around the target.” Magnus subvocalized to his men, as they moved swiftly around the Zyborg moving towards their middle. The Zyborg stood tall, a half-machine, half-man hybrid, a cyborg abomination invented by the techno-Hegemon. He ordered his squad of fellow rebels to fire, initially having no impact at all on the cyborg, its energized exoskeleton dissolving all projectiles touching its metallic skin. Magnus stood up from cover, stared into the bionic eyes of the thing for a full second, before he threw an electromagnetic pulse grenade towards it. After a moment of sustained fire from the squad, the Zyborg exploded in a bloody eruption of wires, circuits, metal and internal organs. The roar of battle slowly died down, leaving only a quiet sizzle of partly ignited, smoking parts and red vapor exuding from boiled blood. Moving closer to the disembodied pile of metal and flesh, he stood both repulsed and awed of the contraption disassembled before him. This was the first time he and his squad had managed to take one down.

This time he had lost only half of his men combating one of the human-machine beings, but he still felt it a high price to pay, even for such a significant victory over the Hegemony forces. “Salvage as much of the Zyborg as possible and regroup at Central,” Magnus ordered. He was not a commander who valued motivational speeches, even in victory. If a soldier can not find motivation enough in the fight against tyranny and injustice itself, he is not fit for his army. But most of the soldiers were men like himself, having family taken from them at an early age, willing to stoically accept the sacrifices required for success.

Prior to his birth his father had been killed in a Zyborg demolition of an oil rig he had worked at. His mother was taken from him at the age of 14, leaving him to fend for himself in the neo-slums of the Central European Sector. Since then, he has worked to do whatever possible to destroy the Hegemony. He had grown from an urchin hacker, disrupting the surveillance systems of the Hegemony, to a military commander with forces obedient to his every command. From his early experiences joining small hacker-enclaves in the Sector slums he gained the know-how that together with his impassioned dedication swayed most towards his cause. “Take me to Central, '' Magnus said. "Take the remains and we’ll see if we can find anything useful within.”

Arriving at the Central rebel headquarters, he stepped out of the vehicle, greeted by the glaring sun and the roaring cheer of the army standing outside. He did not stop to salute them as he moved swiftly inside the compound.

He found himself standing in front of a bathroom mirror. Despite having been in numerous battles, the medical technology of the time had prevented any scars taking permanent place on his body. He still looked young, in his late 30s, even after two decades of warfare. That was one good thing the Hegemony ensured, universal access to state of the art healthcare, making everyone look like 20-year olds for most of their lives until recyclement. But forfeiting your life to the system is a big price to pay for the sake of not getting wrinkles.

Magnus had learned to stand up to authority during his younger years, challenging gangs for access to food from the public matter-compilers. It was also back then he first got blood on his hands, realizing the brutality of his world. Specifically after losing his first friend after a hack gone awry. It had been a long while since the days he was fighting for survival every day. In some ways he still was, just on a larger scale with more people dying around him. People dying because of him.

A knock on the bathroom door stirred Magnus from his contemplation. “They are asking for you in the lab.” some nondescript soldier called outside the door. He washed his hands and face in cold water and walked out.

“What did you find?” Magnus asked, greeting the biomech engineer from the entrance to the lab.

“Quite a lot, actually, ” the engineer answered, “the Zyborgs were designed to be virtually invincible, so the Hegemon apparently never bothered to install any significant safeguards against anyone downloading from them once cracked open.”

“What if it is a trap, tricking us to download some trojan malware, infecting and crippling our base systems? It could be that he meant us to defeat that thing for this very purpose.”

“If it was a trap the software team would have sprung it by now. And reviewing the data recovered from the remaining memory components, the content seems too ruinous to the Hegemon's cause to be given so freely.”

“What do you mean?”

“This data not only consists of Zyborg movements, communications and resource allocations, long term plans for decades into the future are present here. What we have learned within these files can be instrumental in finally destroying the hegemony. The fundamental fact about the Zyborgs is that they form a kind of hive-mind with the Hegemon, dispersing his cognition over a hundred individual Zyborgs. This means that we now have insight into the inner workings of the Hegemons mind.”

“This changes everything.” Magnus mumbled as he tapped lightly on his skull-embedded brain-computer interface. “Send it all directly to me.”

As the data started pouring into his mind, he motioned the engineer to leave the room as he sat himself down to review the information. Through his implants he had full audio-visual access to the data, seeing images, videos and text shown vividly on his retinal display.

The Zyborgs were designed in a time where the ecologies of the planet had started to deteriorate to a point of no return after a century of environmental political indifference. When the Hegemon was just a man he worked as a neuroscientist researching and developing brain-computer interfaces. With the enormous computing power available at the time, the main issue was finding a way for people to access the abundance of processing cycles as intuitively as possible. The university’s access to many classical as well as quantum computers, combined with his willingness to test prototypes on himself, gave him an essential edge over his peers. Through much experimentation he managed to develop a man-machine interface technology so far ahead of his time, it gave him direct access to enough computing power to start a personal technological singularity. The expanded ability of his mind to process information much faster and in parallel augmented his intelligence exponentially. Not long after the singularity, he projected the time where the planet would no longer be able to sustain humanity. He calculated that there was no way for him to change this outcome through political means quickly enough, with the global government's dogmatic resistance to the paramount need for radical change. Ultimately he decided to focus all of his computer-augmented cognition on developing the military technology he’d need to initiate the necessary change with force.

The culmination of the Hegemon’s efforts was the Zyborg. The Hegemon knew that while he could augment himself radically to improve his abilities, he alone could not manage the excesses of the entire planet. He also found that while he could start many thought processes at the same time, his organic brain’s bandwidth for making decisions was limited. Robots could be mass-produced, but would not be able to make the quick intuition-based decisions his biological mind afforded, when it came to dealing with the ambiguities and complexities of human interaction. He had no intention of sending a killer-robot army into all cities, and risking starting a new world war causing even more harm than if he had chosen inaction. For this to work, he had to take the side of the people, appearing to be fighting against the oppressive corporations and impotent politicians. He would fight the people who’d exploited the planet's resources for their own individual short term gain to the detriment of the world's future.

What provided the ultimate solution for him was the very interface technology that had enabled him to advance to this point. He started selling versions of his interface tech, branded as “Brain Stimulators”, that could improve people's lives by increasing their cognitive efficiency. Most of the world's most forward tech entrepreneurs were willing to pay large amounts to get an advantage over their competitors. By implanting versions of these interfaces into other people, he was able to upload crude copies of his personality and cognition, replacing most of their own cognition through a backdoor in the device. Being wirelessly connected to these instances of his own personality, they served him as a biological parallel processing zombie-computing platform. The sales from the stimulators as well as the direct access to the bank accounts of his “zombies” gave him ample funding for his investment in weapons technologies. Magnus was struck by the lack of any morality or remorse, all for the Hegemon's environmental cause.

From this point, all he had to do was replace most of their biological bodies with his military inventions, imbuing each Zyborg with the power of armies. The Hegemon divided the planet into a hundred sectors, a sector for each Zyborg to manage. The purpose of the Zyborgs was to seek and suppress or destroy any activity or event that could possibly have a damaging effect on the climate or the natural environments of the planet. A Zyborg would march towards an oil pipeline or a gas station and start dismantling everything, ignoring any civilians, but opening fire against anyone standing in the way.

Initially, the public was divided when these ecological cyborgs started marching into the cities of the world. Some labeled them robo-terrorists, others saw them as eco-heroes, fulfilling the wet dreams of many environmental organizations that had been powerless in the past. Nevertheless, the militaries of the world were called to deal with the threat of the cyborg “eco-terrorists”. Since all of the military weaponry of the time was in some way computerized, the Hegemon managed to access, decrypt and disable most of it using his superior processing capabilities. This deterred some governments from attacking, but some made the decision to arm hundred thousands of zealous soldiers with steel-swords and refurbished crossbows. The Hegemon sent one Zyborg to the battle, armed with a longsword. After most of the men were slaughtered, the rest surrendered and no governments were left to challenge his now established de-facto Zyborg Hegemony.

The public opinion generally swayed in the Hegemon’s favor, with the governments being blamed for sending soldiers to a meaningless slaughter, when the Hegemon had worked for a non-violent solution. Posters could be found plastered on walls everywhere in cities, displaying the superheroic sword-wielding Zyborg battling the incompetent armies of the decrepit governments. Following this, the Hegemon made his first public appearance, using his “hero” Zyborg as his image appearing in the media. Through the Zyborg he declared that the existing governments would be left to manage their societies as they had done before, he had no intention of becoming a dictator. But no longer would any action causing further harm to the planet be tolerated, the ecological preservation of the planet would be his burden.

Magnus slowly rose from his chair and walked to the window. Much of this history had been unknown to him, since the majority of information available surrounding the beginning of the Hegemony had been removed from all public records. What he had learned put the Hegemon in a somewhat positive light, as a benevolent demi-god rescuing humanity from self-destruction through his Zyborg incarnations. But emperors and dictators always started out seeking to safeguard and improve the world, by forcibly imposing their “superior” cultures on it or “cleansing” it by eradicating certain harmful elements of society, becoming progressively more depraved as their reigns near their inevitable violent ends. And it was clear that the Hegemon's care for humanity’s survival in the abstract did not translate to him actually caring about people. Enough history for now, I need to uncover the Hegemon’s recent plans.

He increased the processing speed of his brain-computer, skipping through the parts where the world economies collapsed, following the Zyborgs decimation of most of the global industrial infrastructure, the mass-starvation that conveniently solved the impending overpopulation problems and the Hegemons invention of the food compilers which both ended world hunger and somehow drastically reduced global fertility rates.

Finally Magnus began getting closer to more current information. He saw the logs from the first time he and his rebel allies started to become more than a nuisance to the Hegemony, when the Hegemon chose the strategy of cutting off power to all matter compilers in areas supporting the rebels. And when that did not work, sending his Zyborgs and consequently starting the first big military skirmish since the last war with the old world nations. When the news of the slaughter spread to the world, the public opinion was not on his side. After that skirmish I got my first thousand recruits, eager to sacrifice themselves for the people they had lost. From this followed a long stretch of progressively larger battles as Magnus’s growing tactical experience was matched by the Hegemon’s increased brutality. Magnus skipped further forwards.

Ah, this is interesting. The Hegemon had apparently since the beginning started poaching researchers; top physicists, biologists and engineers from the whole planet, assigning them to work in secret R&D facilities. So he didn’t invent all his new revolutionizing technologies by himself, he still relied on regular meat-brains to make creative discoveries and do hard science.

One project especially stood apart, “Project Tempus”, assigned the highest priority of all projects. This project was about some kind of military technology, for the purpose of “preemptively dealing with the rebel threat”. A bit late for a pre-emptive strike on us, I’d think. But the file had received updates very recently, suggesting work on it was still underway. Much of its description was very vague, but it did hold the position of the facility the project was being developed in. I have what I came for.

***

Riding with a team of his most experienced veterans, Magnus inspected the scorched-earth landscape zooming past him, utterly devoid of anything alive. What had caused the place to look like this was not relevant, only the fact that there was no cover for them to hide from satellite imaging, making him discard any plans for a covert operation. But speed would be more important than subtlety. From the data he found that it would take the closest Zyborg more than fifty minutes to reach the place in time, and they would only need thirty to extract some scientists, demolish the facility and possibly snag whatever high-tech military hardware they could find.

Next to Magnus sat Sifar, his closest officer who had been with him since the beginning. They were not close in an outward emotional sense, but close in an unspoken way stemming from having survived and fought back-to-back for many years. Sifar spoke few words, just enough to communicate accurately and concisely what he wanted to say. Beneath his quiet demeanor hid a fervent and intense dedication to the cause, which only surfaced on the battlefield when the tide of battle was at its highest.

“Five minutes to arrival.” Sifar said while looking out of a window in the vehicle. Magnus gazed outside from his side of the car. Some distance away he could eye an oddly placed square building with a single door in its middle. Getting closer, he observed through his ocular magnification implants that the door was made of wood, an odd material choice for guarding one of the most important science facilities of the Hegemony. Considering his earlier experience with breaching the Hegemon’s security, the Hegemon must really be profoundly confident that no one in the world is capable of outsmarting him.

“You shouldn’t have downloaded that data yourself.” Sifar said suddenly.

“You know I prefer not to risk the lives of others doing what I can do better myself.” Magnus replied.

“If the data was contaminated this whole operation would be compromised.”

“We wouldn’t be here if it were not for that data. And without it we might be caught off guard by whatever weapons tech he’s developing here.”

“It may still be a trap, getting us out to this place.”

“I don’t believe that, after what I’ve learned.”

Sifar looked silently towards Magnus for some time and proceeded to look out of the window. “We’re here.”

After exiting the vehicle, Magnus and Sifar briefly exchanged looks before Magnus started giving orders to the men. Magnus sent two to the door, who swiftly burst it open at his command and entered the building.

“The room is clear.” one of them said. Passing inside behind them, Magnus went into the small room within the building, entirely unfurnished with nothing but a double door at the center leading into what he assumed to be an elevator. “I am going down.” he said, motioning two of his men and Sifar to squeeze into the elevator with him. He could have sent another team in before him to secure the place, but he always preferred to be part of the front line. He did not want to sit far away in the safety of some hidden facility making plans and giving orders, detached from the many lives he's risking to achieve his goals. He was not like the Hegemon.

As opposed to the simple building, the inside of the elevator looked pristine and advanced. It moved down smoothly and swiftly, evidence of frequent maintenance and use. It had only two buttons; up and down, indicating that the facility only had one main level. This should make searching the place a bit easier. It was difficult to guess how fast or far they were moving downwards, but the ride took several minutes to complete. The humming sound from the elevator moving began slowing down until it reached a full stop. The doors opened.

Magnus exited the elevator, closely followed by Sifar and the men. They entered a wide hallway continuing to a great distance to one side, so far that the end of the hallway couldn’t be seen, and the other side ending close-by in a wall featuring a metal double door. The empty corridor was ambiently lit by lights not visible anywhere on the walls or ceiling. Magnus ordered the men to advance towards the door as he walked down the hall suspiciously inspecting his surroundings.

“Get the doors open,” he ordered. The men approached the doors, pulling rigorously at the handles.

“They’re locked.”

“Then prepare the explosives to breach the entrance.”

While they prepared to blow the doors off, Sifar walked next to Magnus, who was standing squarely in the middle of the hall focusing his eyes on where the lines of the corridor converged in the far distance, the lines forming an almost perfect cross from the corners of the walls to the middle of his view.

“No sign of any people here.” Sifar casually stated as he angled himself looking in the same direction as Magnus. Magnus glanced coldly at Sifar for a moment, and returned his gaze back to the captivating lines of the room.

“It is not a trap.” Magnus responded.

“What, then?”

“Something else. I do not think we are in any immediate danger, but something about this place is a bit off. Whatever it is, I think we will find our questions answered on the other side of this door.” Sifar responded with another of his characteristically subdued and neutral expressions, eliciting a slight frown fromMagnus.

“The explosives are ready.” the men announced from over by the door. Magnus turned around angling himself towards the double doors, which had been adorned with strips of explosive materials and wires down their sides.

“Get behind me.” Magnus ordered calmly. He interfaced his digitally integrated mind wirelessly with the receivers embedded in the explosives while staring intently at the doors. With his brain connected through the nerves of his body to his hands and muscles, he gestured almost ritualistically in order to instruct the explosives to go off with exactly the right magnitude and direction. He braced himself as the men moved behind him. Briefly he felt a slight sense of hesitation, which he quickly cast aside. Here comes the moment of truth.

By a quick upwards flick of his wrist, like a powerful wizard casting a spell, the doors burst open, showering the floor with metal shards of varying sizes. The booming sound of the explosion echoed down the long hallway and faded, leaving only the crackling sounds of the smoking debris. Magnus stepped through the smoldering doorway, confidently striding towards whatever awaited them on the other side.

They entered a large hexagonal chamber with what appeared to be computer work stations near four of the walls, with Magnus and his retinue standing in the doorway of the fifth wall. The room was dark, making it difficult to discern how far up the ceiling went. Around the center stood several tall black rectangular metal cases equidistantly spaced in a circle surrounding an empty pit in the middle of the room. These cases were stuffed with circuitry and blinking LEDs, wires bursting out, buzzing and beeping ceaselessly. Tangled wires from the cases rose up towards the darkened ceiling towards some indistinct figures.

Suddenly lights started to come on from the ceiling and around the room.

“Zyborgs! They’re hanging from the ceiling!” a soldier yelled.

“Get into cover, behind the work stations!” Magnus commanded.

Sifar and Magnus took cover behind the same station, the other men finding cover on the other side of the entrance.

“They are not attacking.” Sifar observed by peeking out from their cover. The Zyborgs hang unmoving from wires extending from the ceiling, eyes wide open, with hundreds of wires connecting them to the electronic cases.

“They appear to be dormant. They are not of the same kind we know from the battlefield. No defences or weapons system's visible.”

After some tense moments had passed, Magnus carefully arose from behind the cover, testing for any response.

“Even though we are normally familiar with Zyborgs as deadly enemies, their primary purpose is functioning as very sophisticated biological computers for the Hegemon. I think these are actually just computers managing whatever technology this facility is hiding.”

Magnus stepped around the station and walked toward the center pit. The soldiers on the other side of the room stayed behind their cover, still vigilant of the biomechanical beings passively hanging above. Sifar followed Magnus without hesitation, keeping a close distance to him.

“What all that Zyborg computing power is being used for, whatever it may be, it seems to converge on this place in the middle of the room.”

“I advise against interfacing directly with it.” Sifar interjected as he nimbly moved beside Magnus, almost blocking his path towards the pit.

“Don’t worry, I’ve not grown that careless. But I will have to move a bit closer to figure out what it is.” Sifar moved warily out of the way.

Magnus approached one of the cases and began to carefully inspect its contents. The wires were connected in a seemingly chaotic arrangement, without symmetry, flowing from component to component like plastic waves. Comparable to the roots of a tree-system, organically growing, but all diverging from central points, possibly power sources or something else important. I've never seen anything like this. The Hegemon’s technology had deviated so far from the rest of the world that it almost seemed alien.

Using his hands, Magnus tried to poke and pull some circuitry around that hid a device which seemed to be the focus of a significant number of wires, more so than any other point in the entire casing. After some prying he was finally able to reveal the device in its entirety. This is different from the rest. A standard wireless transceiver, connected to this unfathomable mess. Why would something like this be here? Realizing its standard design, he impulsively tried to see if he could connect to it. Prompted by this, a light embedded in the transceiver turned on and Magnus's entire field of vision started to turn bright white.

***

Gradually, a room started to come into focus. Not the same room which Magnus was in before, but an entirely different place. He couldn’t move his body, but it was like he was looking through someone else's head that looked slowly about the strange room.

The room was of a familiar shape, hexagonal like the facility, but it was mostly empty and a lot brighter. When the brightness didn’t fade Magnus started to realize it was daylight that filled the room. Most of the walls were made of glass from floor to ceiling, and through it he saw the sky. He could not see the horizon, so he reasoned he must be somewhere at a high altitude.

Suddenly his view started to pan slowly toward the glass walls. When close enough he could finally see the line of the horizon and began to see water and small waves in the far distance. Water seemed to surround the building entirely, the building a kilometer high tower in the middle of the ocean.

When he came close to the glass, a reflection of the body he was looking out from started to appear. The body was in a special kind of wheelchair, with wires going everywhere of similar design to the technology he discovered in the science facility. The wires and several tubes as well were connected to the body of what looked like a very ancient looking old man that he could hear having trouble breathing through a kind of respirator. The man’s body was a mix of almost entirely dried up wrinkled skin, almost as thin as his bones, and tubes transporting yellow, red and brown liquids going in and out of his body at a dozen different places. Instead of having legs, the lower part of his torso was directly merged with the wheelchair and its electronics, with nothing biological visible from the navel and downwards. Looking up, Magnus saw that one of the arms had no flesh, but was metallic with mechanical actuators at the joints that whirred at a low frequency.

Lastly Magnus gazed towards the man’s face, whose surface was wrinkled beyond comprehension, each wrinkle making deep crevasses into his pale skin. The man’s gray eyes pointed slightly upwards and looked unfocused, like he was in deep reflection. Suddenly they moved rapidly, fixing themselves in the direction of Magnus's gaze, as if the man was looking directly back into his eyes.

After a few moments of eye contact the man began to shudder, his whole body convulsing and shaking as wires started to light up, the liquid in his tubes flowing quicker and foam and spittle rapidly starting to spurt from his mouth. Magnus started to lose focus and everything became blurred. His mind raced ahead of him, making him feel like he was solving a complex problem, processing a thousand thoughts at once. But he did not know what the thoughts were, as if they were not his own, hidden from him but still residing in his consciousness. What is happening to me? Magnus suddenly heard a roaring voice in his head. I WAS SO CLOSE. The man’s shudder subsided until his body appeared entirely still. He was dead.

The thoughts stopped immediately and his vision began to brighten, as before, while the room transformed into white nothingness.

Chapter 2

Year: 2044

Karl stared expectantly into what was slowly being assembled in front of him in his molecular 3D printer. Inside it was something that looked like half a brain, with only the bottom half showing as it was being printed, layer by layer. Beside the fact that brains normally do not appear outside of human skulls, another peculiarity was its shape. It was square. This shape was the most space efficient for fitting inside the casing embedded within an older quantum computer Karl had found in a storage room last week.

A lot of older and more recent tech could be found lying around on the many floors of the Education Collective, or EduCol, free for students to make use of. That, together with a universal 3D printer available in each student apartment, gave almost unlimited possibilities for prototyping and creating new technology. Other than banning guns and hazardous materials, the university gave students freedom to be responsible with the tools they were handed by the university. And Karl used them to their limit.

Printing a brain might seem like complicated business, but there really isn't much more to it than finding a cheap blueprint online made by a reputable neuroscience wiz and downloading it to the printer. And if need be you could just catch a neuroscientist in the hallway and get the rundown you needed. The hard part is developing the software to run on the neural network inside of the organic brain tissue. Luckily Karl was a half decent coder, and his ex-girlfriend Eliza had left detailed notes on simulating AI run on neural nets lying around in his apartment, as she was storming out during their final fight. He looked out a window at the sunny but windy Scandinavian sea surrounding the university island of Anholt lost in thought.

“Hey Karl, open up will ya!” someone outside of Karl's door yelled, after knocking a couple of times.

“Yea, what's up Kenneth?” Karl responded as he opened the door slightly, having recognized the voice.

“The lecture on anthropomorphic robotics by that 15 year old PhD we talked about earlier is starting in 20 minutes. Do you want to join me and get some good seats?”

“I have some things I have to finish up, I'll come join you when it starts. “

“You'll probably end up standing in the back, that girl usually pulls quite a crowd. But see you there.”

“See ya.” Karl responded as he quickly closed the door.

Walking back towards the printer he couldn't help but stop by his kitchen, where half a bottle of whisky stood open on the table. After a good swig of the amber liqueur, he resumed his walk toward the cube brain he was assembling, the bottle still gripped in his hands.

Ah damn, another 40 or so minutes before it's ready. Well, at least I can prepare the software to be loaded onto the neural network when it's done. Then when I get back, it should have had time to adapt and run on the organic net for a while. Karl took another deep swig of the whisky.

Alternating between hammering in blocks of code and drinking from his bottle, he was starting to feel a lot better than earlier. Generally most mornings were spent being miserable until the percentage of alcohol in Karl's bloodstream reached its mind-numbing optimum during the afternoons. Of course it was a kind of art, to balance drinking heavily and maintaining a level of sobriety necessary to do things like walking straight or writing lines of bug-free code.

After a blur of time passing, getting the code to compile without too many of the worst bugs, Karl's mind started to emerge from its code-flow, the buzz from the booze starting to impair his concentration. Shit, I'm gonna be late for the presentation. Looking at the clock, he realized half an hour had gone by since Kenneth had gone. The cube brain was done printing, so Karl proceeded to install it in the computer case, interface it with the EduCol server and start uploading his compiled source code to the brain neural net. Okay this upload is gonna take a while. Might as well head out.

Stumbling out of the apartment, Karl tried to maintain a steady and straight walk towards the local auditorium. Failing to do that, he occasionally collided with the walls of the hallway which he ended up using to support him as he walked toward his destination. He got out of the living quarter section of EduCol and into the large open sem-outdoor area. He saw that the afternoon sun was low but not yet setting through the large glass facade. Most of the area was park-like with many trees and bushes, the rest was study areas with small mobs of students congregating around them. Karl briefly considered taking the longer way around, but he was late enough as it was. Walking as soberly as he could, he tried to get through as quickly as possible. A couple of the other students smiled slyly at him as he went by, but other than that, he seemed to get through unscathed.

“Out for a stroll, Karl?”

“Eh, yea.“ Karl replied and stopped. That was the study facilitator Gustav, one of the remaining cogs of the administrative bureaucracy of EduCol. An obsolete role in Karl's opinion, but still one that afforded an amount of power over the students. The fact that he held a position in the Scandinavian Council did not improve the situation.

“You seem intoxicated.” Gustav stated.

“Might have had a drink or two. Is that not allowed anymore? “ After the second student revolution some years back, most educational institutions had become a lot more lax in their control of student behavior.